5 things I’m thinking about
July 12th, 2010 § 8 Comments
Following Alice and Dan, here’s my contribution to the ‘blog 5 things you’re thinking about’ meme:
1- Attention Patterns
I’ve been getting very obsessed with the patterns of attention around content and stories lately. For example, the huge spikes of synchronous attention we see around live events like Reality TV, breaking news stories or sporting events; or the binge-like, asynchronous patterns of attention around cult drama, as people time-shift their viewing with PVRs, VOD or box-sets. Then there’s the katamari-damacy style rolling balls of attention that mobile apps and social games get- huge, distributed balls of attention made up from tiny slivers of our lives. Are these patterns maturing now? Can we design projects based on these models, or are these patterns still unstable? I’m *way* more interested in attention patterns than I am in any particular platform or device.
2 – The Next 30%
There’s a big push in developed economies to get everyone online, as the first two waves (early adopting geeks, and people who use online tools in the workplace) are already well served. I’m interested to see what needs and uses of the internet will emerge over the next few years as new users come online. Will apps and gestural interfaces become more used than open web browsers? Will Facebook become the default experience of the Internet for most people? Will mobile be the most common route to access information networks? Or the set-top box? Or will new brands (ie Tesco) reposition themselves as gateways to information goods as well as ‘real world’ services?
3 – Recession Culture
I was in Art School in Glasgow from 90-94, during the last serious recession. It was an amazing moment of cultural invention, with musicians developing the strands of late-80s grunge, hip-hop and rave culture; indie film in rude health in the US and UK; and artists becoming entrepreneurs and putting on shows in derelict warehouses all over the UK. All this was driven by a DIY ethic that was the only real response to huge public spending cuts and poor employment opportunities. The current university-age generation are facing the same issues, and I’m perversely optimistic that we’ll see similar strange cultural shoots emerging, well outside of the reality-show-driven culture that has dominated the last 10 years. It may sound impossible now to imagine anything breaking through the hegemony of X-Factor and BGT, but I’m calling Peak Cowell around about* now*, and believe the influence of these global culture engines will slowly diminish. We need a few new culture-amplification engines to kickstart (see what I did there?) some of these new shoots, and a few new leaders in the shape of 90s pioneers like Damien Hirst, James Lavelle, Warp records, Richard Linklater and others, but I can see it happening already. And we didn’t even have the transformational power of the web back then, so this should be *really* interesting…
4 – The Underground Olympics
Related to the point above- if you want to reset the cultural barometer, you need something that is even bigger than Cowell to flick the switch. The Olympics is just such an event, and is important not just for it’s huge umbrella of activity and attention, but for the mutant strains that will emerge in its shadow. The art scene around the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow that produced Douglas Gordon, David Shrigley, Christine Borland and many others got its initial kick in opposition to the 1990 Glasgow Year of Culture, so I expect to see similar ground-level initiatives kicking against the 2012 Olympics. If the LOCOG team are smart, they’ll encourage it to happen. If they’re *really* smart, they’ll deliberately provoke it.
5 – Games Getting Boring
By this, I don’t mean games actually getting boring themselves, I mean the hype passing, and everybody finally getting used to the fact that games are a complex, successful and mature part of contemporary media culture. We’re at the top of the hype cycle at the moment, because some people are amazed that *shock!* just about everyone plays games, *shock!* some of them make a hell of a lot of money, and *shock!* they don’t have to involve sitting alone in a room pretending to shoot things. So I’m looking forward to the moment when the investors move on, some people lose a hell of a lot of money, and the mainstream press starts writing snarky “so what was all *that* about then?” post-hype articles. Because I remember the first dotcom crash, and it was just after that when things got really interesting, and the seeds of the current social web were born. Imagine that moment, but with *games*. I’m getting excited just thinking about it…
Hmmm. These have all ended up being a bit more big and wooly than I expected. But I think that’s because I sense the conditions are right for some interesting new trends, and I’m trying to see beyond the big changes in politics, culture etc that are currently right in front of our eyes. It’s more fun to try and look in the cracks, shadows and edges, even if you end up being wrong.
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.
Icapture – watching you, watching ads
October 28th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Russell Davies has been writing some excellent stuff lately about the widening gap between designers’ beautiful, optimistic visions for spimes and augmented reality, and the increasingly noisy way that advertising is colonising public space. Davies points out that whilst design thinkers see a future which is (to use Matt Jones and Tom Coates‘ phrase) ‘Polite, Pertinent and Pretty‘; the reality is likely to be rude, irrelevant, and messy:
“And, what’s worse, we’re going to see the same mess writ even larger – all over our cities. If we thought urban spam was bad. Wait until it’s animated, live and augmented, skinned onto our buildings and beamed into our spex”
But its not just enough that our attention is being hijacked by intrusive commercial messages – they’re starting to look back at us as well. TruMedia’s iCapture system places a webcam in advertising displays that captures images of people looking at the ads. They then use a facial recognition system to create a demographic analysis of the people watching the ads for reporting back to the client. Here’s how it works:
The system currently anonymises all data, and doesn’t keep any of the images after extracting the data, but still – sends a shiver down your spine, doesn’t it?
Moving house
September 3rd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
A long overdue shift and upgrade of test.org.uk is taking place. It’ll take me a while to update all the old posts, and it’ll kill probably every existing link, but needs must.
It’ll all be a bit off kilter for a while. But this looks better, doesn’t it?
candles
February 15th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Matt Webb on making things
July 31st, 2006 § Leave a Comment
Matt Webb expands on some of the themes of his We Love Technology presentation, talking about how actually making things provides an expanded field for interaction design innovation, but also how bloody hard it is:
“The grain of a thing is usually hidden, and I use the term in reference to Manuel de Landa at Tate Modern in 2004, on carpenters: not sanding against the grain is not a social construction. you can, but it’ll look terrible. you’re in a partnership with the microstructure of the wood.
What is the grain? We don’t know! How should we respond to it? We don’t even know that we should know!
Thinking through making is about revealing the unknown unknowns.
Sometimes revealing the unknown unknowns points to opportunities, and that’s where innovation comes in.”
Amen to all that. It feels like we’ve been talking about interaction design for ages, without realising that we’re only using a tiny fraction of the letters of the alphabet. Interaction design so far has been one long Oulipo experiment – interesting, occassionally beautiful, but deliberately constrained.
