Category: design-and-ideas

Every decision is made with Caffeine

Caffeine under a microscope

Simon said something to me as I left his flat the other day…

Almost every major decision in history is made under the influence of Caffeine…

Its a interesting drug caffeine. Some can’t live without it and some have different levels of allergic reaction to it, as I found out the other day. No I’m not allergic but since my brush with death I’ve keeping an eye on my caffeine intake. Mainly no Coffee at home or work.

I remember seeing caffeine under a high powered microscope ages ago when looking at different drugs under a microscope. But recently I saw the above picture from DIYcouture. Its a pretty amazing drug and you can see the reaction in the shape of the drug.

 

Creating a site for a vivid lounge

New Vivid site

I had it with bloody Facebook… But what I can’t understand is why on earth some businesses rely on it for there business.

Vivid Lounge is one such business.

They do have the domain name vividloungeuk.com (thankfully) but as you can see nothing is there. They do on the other hand have a Facebook page with regular updates. Now I understand running a business is a lot of hard work this is why I decided to do something about it by offering them a website to replace the blank page.

I decided to use Squarespace originally because its pretty quick, solid, smart and I heard good things about it. Using pictures and content from the Facebook I was quickly able to create something useful. Unfortunately Squarespace doesn’t allow you share the site unless you pay the minimum fee. As usual my tweets are copied into facebook and Oli said something quite useful.

I debated doing this for places I likes that didn’t have functional websites. This is too true http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

Then a recent follow up he mentioned http://en.wordpress.com/restaurants/. WordPress for restaurants.

It looks ideal but maybe too complex for vivid lounge at this moment but could be useful for future plans

 

 

The streaming consciousness

How Lifestreaming Is Shaping Web Culture

I can’t believe Stowe Boyd doesn’t get a single mention in this article about streams…

So although the web has changed out of all recognition in two decades, our underlying metaphor for it probably hasn’t changed that much. And this has the downside that we’re effectively blind to what is actually happening, which is that we are moving from a world of sites and visits to one that is increasingly dominated by streams. The guy who articulates this best is a Yale computer scientist named David Gelernter.

The title of his latest essay on the subject – “The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It” – conveys the basic idea. “The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream,” he writes. “This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the ‘flatland known as the desktop’ (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a representation of time.

Shame because he’s been thinking about this stuff a whole lot longer than most…

Working from the Northern Quarter Fridays

Coffee from North Tea Power

I blogged about how I started working out of the northern quarter quite sometime ago, the massive benefits and the Coffee shop clashes. A lot of people have taken this as “Ian is off on Fridays.” Which is so far from the truth…

A while ago I started using Project Hamster to record roughly how much time I was spending on projects (as I tend to have quite a few projects on the go at the same time, who doesn’t?)

Anyhow, I had a look at the aggregated results recently when sending to my manager (this is not the official way bbc rd does time tracking by the way, just me).

Project hamster results

It turns out Fridays are one of my most productive days, even more that Mondays and Thursdays.

Now I know what some of you will be thinking, yes its all manual reporting and I could lie, but why? Its as simple as this. When working from the northern quarter I tend to spend much more time just working away on my laptop. Its no chance this is when I spend the most time writing papers and the like too.

The second thing you might notice is I don’t work 8hour a day. Project hamster checks every 20mins to see if I’m actually active on the machine, so if I get called into a meeting or go for lunch, it will automatically stop. Generally when working from the Northern Quarter, I get less distributed or distracted.

This can be a good and bad thing. You can see the lack of disruption as a good thing but actually its the bouncing around of ideas at work which can be good, for example running into someone at the kitchen and talking for a while. Of course Project Hamster will time out and say I’m up to nothing. And actually its worth pointing out that all meetings (official/adhoc) are not included because its still time when not working actively working on the computer. As you can imagine I’m quite a social person and those adhoc chats over tea do add up.

Its not that I work better in the northern quarter, its that I work differently!

Lifehacker has another great post about working out of coffee shops. Here’s the key parts for myself…

A change of environment stimulates creativity. Even in the most awesome of offices we can fall into a routine, and a routine is the enemy of creativity. Changing your environment, even just for a day, brings new types of input and stimulation, which in turn stimulates creativity and inspiration.

Agreed… I’m not saying Media City isn’t inspiring and full of creativity. But its my norm and if I have to look at that wallpaper again I’ll scream 🙂 Of course I’m joking…

Fewer distractions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but working from a bustling coffee shop can be less distracting than working from a quiet office. Being surrounded by awesome team and officemates means being interrupted for water cooler chats and work questions. Being interrupted kills productivity. The coffee shop environment combines the benefit of anonymity with the dull buzz of exciting activity. Unlike working at home, with the ever-present black hole of solitude and procrastination, a coffee shop provides the opportunity of human interaction, on your terms.

The evidence is all in the data. I actually have lots of less important meetings on Fridays but their under my terms. Meaning I can get lots done in the time between.

Community and meeting new people. Meeting new people always provides me with new ideas, a different perspective at existing problems, or an interesting connection to a new person doing something awesome that inspires me. Today alone I met a top Skillshare teacher whose class I will now take, a sleep consultant, a publicist who offered to help with a project, and a wine consultant who recommended some bars.

One thing I wish I could record is the little meetings and chats I have. Some go nowhere and some go real deep. But generally meeting in the northern quarter means I can get a measure of someone and then refer them to a proper media city meeting or not. And of course there’s those chance encounters which you just can’t qualify an amount of value.

End of the day its not for everyone, but it works for me. Its surprising because I do love my height adjustable desk and fancy media city chair. FYG and North Tea power’s tables are too low and I do sometimes feel the discomfort setting in. But I tend to not notice because I’m just working or talking with someone great. If I had to work from the northern quarter 4 days a week and one day in Media City, I know I would be saying the opposite.

This is all summed up in the lifehacker post,

The experience of working out of coffee shops was so positive that even after we moved into our new home, I made sure to get in a few “coffee shop days” each month. For carpal tunnel related reasons alone, I would not recommend working out of coffee shops every day…

Lucidipedia, mydreamscape done correctly

All is a dream

For many years I had wonder when someone was going to create a place for dreams which is tasteful and about the culture of dreaming.

There was Remcloud.com which opened with much fanfare. Although still running, feels spammy and pretty crappy. All the other places I’ve seen have been more about dream dictionaries or forums about dreams. Mydreamscape was meant to be a tasteful, cleverly crafted and a social network about the culture of dreams.

Well I think someone has finally done it… lucidipedia.com feels like a serious site and seems to have some very good tutorials and tips to help you dream and remember them. There’s even an online dream diary section which seems to tick all the right boxes with dataportability and sharing features.

So I guess there is only one way to discover how good it is, yes dive in and try it out…

Pacemaker is Paradigm shifting?

pacemaker_sonar_june_2007_07

I was explaining to someone over twitter about the Pacemaker device since I was using it at the Future Media North Christmas Party. They were interested in buying some dj kit and was seeking advice from myself and Simon Lumb.

I know the pacemaker device (as its now called) isn’t coming back because frankly there wasn’t enough demand but that shouldn’t affect how ground breaking of a device it was/is. I would go almost as far as to say it was a paradigm shift in djing and mixing. No other device before it had attempted to cater for a niche like djs before and with something so bold.

I was thinking about this when my sister laid claim to my all but dormant BlackBerry Playbook which the pacemaker guys got me. Even the pacemaker guys will be first to admit the tablet isn’t a great platform for djing. Maybe I could push them to say the original vision was compromised when moving to the tablet, but its a compromise which has kept them in the game.

pacemaker_sonar_june_2007_06

The Pacemaker device was mind blowing, I would suggest almost paradigm shifting.

Everything up to that moment was aping vinyl and then some guys came along and built something which was so radical I can only suggest it was like a paradigm shift in djing. There hasn’t been such a major shift in the way you dj since direct drive turntables.
Not only that the mission was always the democratisation of djing, such a fine and impressive goal.

Of course thats my view, many would disagree? One of the best quotes I heard before I ordered my own over 5 years ago.

“I wanted a PlayStation Portable for music” – Jonas Norberg

The Pacemaker in use

Never forgotten and I still use my every few weeks, in fact because of it I now buy more music legally than I had before (at least till when I was buying vinyl). What I’m wondering is if this might be a good time to do some crowd funding? A kickstarter would be easy for these guys because they have a good track record and certainly know what there doing to a certain point. I don’t know if I would pay through the nose again for a pacemaker but I’m seriously thinking about buying another one on ebay just in-case my one goes wrong in some way.

Implicit data is the anti-matter of big data

Dylan [Two thumbs up for Photographers]

Almost everything we’ve focused on recently has been the explicit actions and feedback of people. But as pointed out in Perceptive Media, the rich stuff is the implicit actions and feedback. This is also the stuff which advertisers would cream in their pants for… And it sometimes feels too intimate for us to ever let it be collected… However that has never stopped anyone.

This obviously scares a lot of people including myself but I think the future is about the implicit.

I wrote a blog following a audio piece about how 2012 was the year of big data. But the fundamentally all that data is explicit data not implicit. Something I also made clear during a panel in London at last years Trans-media festival.

In a recently interview Valve’s Gabe Newell talked about the Steam Box’s future. Steam is a very interesting gaming ecosystem and recently Valve’s been moving to Linux after Microsoft said Windows 8 must work the way they said it does. Anyhow the important thing is Gabe’s discussion regarding implicit forms of data

Speaking of controllers, what kind of creative inputs are you working on?
Valve has already confessed its dissatisfaction with existing controllers and the kinds of inputs available. Kinect? Motion?

We’ve struggled for a long time to try to think of ways to use motion input and we really haven’t [found any]. Wii Sports is still kind of the pinnacle of that. We look at that, and for us at least, as a games developer, we can’t see how it makes games fundamentally better. On the controller side, the stuff we’re thinking of is kind of super boring stuff all around latency and precision. There’s no magic there, everybody understands when you say “I want something that’s more precise and is less laggy.” We think that, unlike motion input where we kind of struggled to come up with ideas, [there’s potential in] biometrics. We have lots of ideas.

I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method. Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth — so to trying to talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying “oh we’re going to stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up.” Maybe there are other ways to think of that. There’s more engagement when you’re using larger skeletal muscles, but whenever we go down [that path] we sort of come away unconvinced. Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important.

I’ve recently upgraded my phone to run Google now and its so weird…

When talking about it, people say show me and I have nothing to show them except the weather and maybe a couple of calendar things like someone birthday or a appointment I have upcoming. But when waking up this morning, the phone had tons of information about getting to work. Every time I would look at the screen another option was available to me (as time passed). The lack of ability to dig up stuff and look back at stuff is really interesting, as google now is simply that… Now!

Interestingly like google now, I discovered when showing people the first perceptive media prototype, futurebroadcasts.com. I would need to use my own machine because it relies on your implicit data for parts of the play. Meaning I couldn’t just load it up on another persons machine (or at least reliably), and expect it to work the same way.

I already said its the difference which in the future will be more interesting than the similarities, and I stick to that.

I know how people love quotes… So here’s one… Implicit data is the anti-matter of big data…

The trends, forecasts, etc will all be displaced (change) once we know implicit data’s place in the over all sum. We’ll throw our hands in the air and shout, well of course! How silly of us to make judgements with an incomplete sum… The early adopters are already homing in on this fact.

Context is queen?

I wanted my grandmothers pokerface....

I’m hearing a lot of talk about how 2013 is The year responsive design starts to get weird… or rather how its going to be all about responsive design (what happened to adaptive designing who knows)

Think it’s hard to adapt your content to mobile, tablet, and desktop? Just wait until you have to ask how this will also look on the smart TV. Or the refrigerator door. Or on the bathroom mirror.

Or on a user’s eye.

They’re all coming…if they aren’t already here. It doesn’t take much imagination or deep reading of the tech press to know that in 2013 more and more devices will connect to the internet and become another way for people to consume internets.

We’ll see the first versions of Google’s Project Glass in 2013. A set of smart glasses will put the internet on a user’s eyes for the first time. Reaction to early sneak peeks is a mix of mockery and amazement, mostly depending on your propensity for tech lust. We don’t know much about them, other than some tantalizing video, but Google is making them, so it’s a safe bet that Chrome For Your Eyes will be in there. And that means some news organization in 2013 is going to ask: “How does this look jammed right into a user’s eyeballs?”

Stop! Nieman labs is forgetting something major! And I could argue they are still thinking in a publishing/broadcasting mindset

Yes the C word, Context…

Ironically this is something Robert Scoble actually gets in his blog post, The coming automatic, freaky, contextual world and why we’re writing a book about it.

A TV guide that shows you stuff to watch. Automatically. Based on who you are. A contextual system that watches Gmail and Google Calendar and tells you stuff that it learns. A photo app that sends photos to each other automatically if you photograph them together. And then there’s the Google Glasses (AKA Project Glass) that will tell you stuff about your world before you knew you needed to know. There is a new toy coming this Christmas that will entertain your kids and change depending on the context they are in (it will know it’s a rainy day, for instance, and will change their behavior accordingly)

Context is whats missing and in the mindset of pushing content around (broadcast and publishing) and into peoples faces, responsive design sounds like a good idea. Soon as you add context to the mix, it doesn’t sound so great. Actually it sounds damm right annoying or even intrusive? I do understand its the best we got right now, but as sensors become more common, we’ll finally be able to understand context and hopefully be able to build perceptive systems.

We already demonstrated, sensors don’t have to be cameras, gyroscopes, etc. The referral, operating system, screen resolution, cookies, etc all are bits of data which can (some maybe less that others) be used to understand the context.

I can come up with many scenarios where the responsive part gets in the way, unless you are also considering the context. In a few years time, we’ll look back at this period of time and laugh, wondering what the heck were we thinking…

I’m with Scoble on this one… Context and Content are the Queen and King.

Perceptive Media in Wired UK’s Top Tech for 2013

Perceptive Media in Wired Magazine

Someone from the BBC’s Future Media PR pointed out to me that I was in the latest issue of Wired UK. The whole thing isn’t online yet but I’ve made a manual copy (thanks to Laura Sharpe for buying the ipad version on my behalf)… Till its up online

Advertising Displays, Television and consoles are hooking up with recognition software to second-guess our hidden desires. By Ed White

Televisions, computers and retail displays are increasingly watching us as much as we’re watching them. They are likely to be the catalyst for a shift from mass to personalised media. Broadcastsers, game developers and tech companies have long dreamt of knowing who’s watching, and then making content relevant to each viewer.

Cheap cameras and sensors are making “perceptive media” a reality. First was Microsoft, whose Xbox gaming peripheral Kinect, launched in 2010, has put a perceptive-media device into more that 18 million homes worldwide. By linking people to their Xbox Live identity using facial recognition, it has made the gaming experience more tailored. But perceptive media is wider than gaming. Over two years, Japan Railways’ East Japan Water Business has installed about 500 intelligent vending machines that recognise customers’ age and gender via sensors and suggest drinks accordingly. Intel’s Audience Impression Metrics suite (Aim) users data captured by cameras on displays in shops to suggest products. Kraft and Adidas are early adopters. The software will also monitor responses to improve brands’ marketing.

But the real winner will be the entertainment industry. Samsung and Lenovo announced at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show that their new TVs will recognise a viewer by using a camera incorporated into the set, and bring up their favourite programmes; Intel is working on a set-top box with similar  capabilities. Face tracking software is also making our screens more intuitive. Japanese broadcaster NHK is experimenting with emotion-recongnition software which can suggest, say a more exciting TV show if it detects boredom. But where perceptive media gets really exciting is in using viewer data to change narratives in real time. US-based video game company Valve software is experimenting with biofeedback systems, measuring physiological signals such as heart rate and pupil dilation in players of Portal 2 and Alien Swarm. If the zombies aren’t making you sweat, the AI director can send in more. And television may follow, believes Ian Forrester senior producer at BBC R&D. Sensors in your TV would pick up who’s in the room and subtly change the programmes’s details, live: for example the soundtrack could be based on your Spotify favorites.

If that sounds Big Brother-ish, that’s because it is. Perceptive media’s biggest hurdle will be privacy. But advocates such as Daniel Stein, founder CEO of San Francisco based digital agency EVB, say that if brands can prove the value of data sharing, they’ll win people over. Here’s looking at you.

Ed White is a senior writer and consultant at contagious communications, a London-based marketing consultancy

 

Perceptive media in wired magazine