Slow data and the pleasure of automated nostalgia
January 28th, 2009 § 3 Comments
I’ve been playing around with Daytum a bit today, and its reminded me how playful and delightful personal data can be. I’ve often thought about getting Nike + or other personal training systems, but I think I prefer whimisical, story-telling data more than the hard-core productivity data. The Dopplr annual report is lovely because it encourages reflection and narrativisation, rather than instant action.
I think time is the crucial factor here. Systems that give you real-time data cause you to stress, as the assumption is that you need to act on the information NOW! The Dopplr annual report and Daytum encourage a slower, more reflective accumulation of data that you can make sense of retrospectively. The call to action is not ‘What are you doing?’ but rather ‘Remember when?’.
Facebook is far too in-the-now for me – it’s great if you’re there all the time, but its emphasis being contemporaneous is tiring. Twitter I can just about cope with, partly because natural eddies of conversation and reflection pop up all the time, and the strict format means its easier to follow. I hate automated updates in twitter, and have offended at least one friend by calling them out for spamming their feed with automatic blog or picture updates.
I’m much more interested in automated nostalgia than automated presence – data feeds that gradually acrue in your wake, rather than constantly dragging your focus on to the next five minutes. Then the next five minutes. Then the next five minutes… There are a million ways to interpret our data histories, and many of them depend on a period of reflection and absorption, rather than Just In Time decision-making.
Nicholas Feltron’s gorgeous Feltron Annual Report for 2007 is a particularly fine example of the formula – we might express it as Data+Time=Story. In this case, beautiful design helps. I commissioned Live/Work to do a research project on personal data when I was at the BBC in around 2007, and they came up with a similar idea as a way for the BBC to represent each license-fee payer’s use of BBC resources. It was a handsome, bound book with beautiful visualisations of the content and your use of it. Unfortunately, it seems the project went nowhere after I left the beeb.
Even earlier, when I was commissioning Digital Art projects in Huddersfield, we gave Lucy Kimbell some early research funding for a project that became The Lix Index. Lucy was way ahead of the personal data/spime curve, and created a slightly tongue-in-cheek art project that applied business management and financial data models to her personal life, career, and social network. The various data sets she covered included orgasms and bad dreams. That’s a good example of the kind of data that you can only really share in slow way. If you want to tell me in real time on twitter about your orgasms or bad dreams that’s great, but, if its allright with you, I’ll wait for the book version.
More Widgets!
January 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
I’m very pleased to say we’ve launched our latest C4 Education project – Routes – which is a massive cross-platform-video-game-arg-thingy (we’re gonna need a bigger category…) looking at genetic science and the impact its going to have on 21st Century life. Its all good, but my favourite bit at the moment is the lovely Breeder, a delightful multiplayer mini-game in which you have to try and breed with other creatures to reach a desired end-state. Although most people I know who have played it just spend all their time cruising for people they know and breeding with them. I sure that’s educational in some way, though…
And to encourage Breeder activity all over the web, you can install a widget of your breeder on whatever flavour SNS you prefer. I’m off to my long-neglected Facebook account to give it a bit of Breeder love.
Battlefront Widget-y goodness
January 12th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
We’ve recently launched some rather lovely widgets for our Battlefront project. You can embed a widget for any campaign you want to support, such as the marvellous Alexander Rose above. We’re also experimenting with widgets on another project, where we’re experimenting with using them on Myspace and Bebo. Alter Ego gives you tools tocreate badges about different aspects of your personality, whilst Dictum asks you questions about your opinions and morality.
I’m interested how these will propogate, or not. The Battlefront widget has already generated over 17,000 views, despite just a handful of installations (its only been up a week or so).
2009 is going to be Really Interesting
January 9th, 2009 § 4 Comments
A lovely package arrived in the post yesterday, containing the above newspaper. Its produced by Russell Davies and Ben Terrett, under the aegis of the Really Interesting Group, the new sort-of-organisation they’ve started to do projects for fun, money, or both.
The newspaper is a collection of blog posts, tweets and pictures that Ben and Russell liked in 2008. It’s surprising the difference it makes to see web content laid out in print. Some things work much better in print – Dan Hill’s epic The Street As Platform blog post is something I’ve been meaning to read for ages, but never managed to when online. Offline, it was perfect for the commute to Hove from London last night. Images work very well, as they have the chance to play with scale – Matt Jones’ image of a rocket at NASA gets the centrespread, whilst Chris Heathcote’s photos of food are displayed as a grid over another double-page spread. Tweets are printed along the top of each page, above the main content, a brilliant analogue for their ‘running-commentary’ status. The exception is the entire twitter stream from @marsphoenix, printed over 4 pages with just three tweets highlighted in red – the one saying ‘i’ve landed!’, the one saying ‘we’ve found ice!’ and the very last binary code tweet. There’s something very elegaic about this sequence – it resembles the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
On the last page, Ben And Russell say that “2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world. Its going to be exciting”. I agree. I started work this week feeling really optimistic and ambitious, despite the newspaper that day being one of the most depressing i’d ever read. There’s something about the recession that clears the decks, exposes the charlatans, and creates more space for people to do stuff they love, care about or want to change. I’m really, really excited, about what will happen this year, and about discovering the new, exciting, and Really Interesting things that will be produced.
