technogoggles

Instruction Manual

Came across this  Thames and Hudson sketchbook  or doodlebook in Foyles.  I like the tacit  understanding that it's hard to know where to start  to sketch, that a blank canvas requires you  think not unlike the paradox of choice when faced with near unlimited possibilities to consume.  But sometimes you just want to be given a brief, a task, a defined thing to do [crossword puzzle etc.], a curated set of things from which to choose or work from. From there creative things can happen. Anyway, a simple way to redefine a practice and a product by simply changing the proposition from a noun to a verb, from a description to an instruction.

Post Its' and Pimps

Went to the games exhibition at the Science Museum yesterday.  Tremendous stuff.  Aside from making me nostalgic for the nascent gameplay of Pong and Space Invaders I discovered the art of Ocean Quigley, designer of The Sims aesthetic who had some really moving pieces that reminded me of some of the artwork around existentialism and the novels influenced by that movement, where the bodies were often 'blank', bodies as vessels and yet more moving and affecting because there was nothing else to the form.  Freaky.  Odd.

The other was the work of  Koichi Sugiyama who unbeknown to me introduced classical music into gameplay.  Listening to some of his work was wonderful and you can see how some of the more ambient soundscapes in new games is influenced by this work.  Compare that to Roy Hubbard's Warhawk for the N64, a brilliant early piece of new wave in games [see this top ten games tunes from the time].  I'd never thought much about the importance of audio in gameplay but hearing the history and then playing some of the games on display made me realise how utterly central it is to the experience, it sets the whole tone for how you interact, your mood. So, well worth going for these two things alone. 

But then tucked away at the end of the exhibition is a great piece on the making of GTA IV, complete with Post-Its representing different narrative threads interspersed with sketches of pimps and their cars.  Wonderful stuff.  Didn't have time to see what the different colours represented and how the post-its mapped out to my knowledge of the game which would have been good.  Haven't seen anything like this since the Pixar exhibition, again at the Science Museum, and the making of amongst other things, Toy Story and the characterisation and storyboarding behind that which was so full of insight around the way in which the toys themselves would 'behave', how their materiality affected their character.  No such character craft in GTA where the  effort and thought seems to reside in the 'environmental' factors and geography where the action is played out.

The geography is just fab... so envious.  I'd love to try and create some sort of psychogeography of GTA, mapping our navigation, movement, the cues we use from abstracted navigational signifiers [roads, signposts, the 'map' in game itself!] etc. loosely based as they are around Miami, San Fransisco or New York and our experience of navigating the space through our senses.  Someone must have tried to do that already... or at the very least done work on the geography of gaming 'environments'?

Mend it like...

Nice piece in the guardian yesterday about "repair culture" dying out.  The desire for high end premium goods worth repairing has been stripped by the huge market in cheap white goods that have become almost as disposable as bic razors, albeit with a slightly longer life span and trickier to dispose of which in itself opens up markets for 'waste management' services when councils and contractors refuse to take certain rubbish from your door. 

Repair Shop by yboxochoc's

According to the article Dyson has more-or-less singlehandedly kept the repair industry alive as it's the only product that people bother to repair now [and i suspect Dualit too] because of their high replacement value, though computers and related peripherals don't seem to obey the same economic principles probably because the diagnostics and repair work requires a laboratory environment!  But on the whole for white goods the disparity between labour costs and replacement costs has declined, whereas of course in the developing world [hate that term] you have cheaper labour re-making, recycling, breathing life into broken stuff; the disparity between product and labour costs is still wide enough for repair to be cost effective.  What struck me about this article though is how ironic it is that in an age where waste and environmental concerns are so critical and so mainstream, that we're still chucking old stuff away; no business models have come around to cater for 'repair' and we're still being seduced by 'the upgrade', new technology when more often than not existing stuff works just fine for the task at hand.  And nowhere is this more evident than in computing and computing peripherals inc. mobile telephony.  Nerds are responsible for perpetuating a waste culture that should now be an anachronism.  Marketers are of course talented in creating perceived needs and must-haves - witness the evangelical response to Apple's iPhone.  So how could repair be re-invented?  How could it point the way to a culture of innovation and creativity?

• What happened to designing for a products death?  Life cycle management doesn't seem to exist in consumables and white goods.  Disassembling goods should be something we could all do.  Make the organs of the product re-usable.
• Why not then have the repairman as the technical re-maker, a high end craftsman creating original pieces of industrial consumables to compete with the dualits and dysons. How great would that be? Personalised, unique maker-style stuff with its own story! 
• Or the repairshop as a retail end of a warranty service.  Generic labour-only 'warranty' and covering x branded goods could be the basis for a service.  You get stuff fixed, and advice on how to fix stuff in return for an annual fee and all you do is pick up the tab for the replacement parts and such a business could itself stimulate a business in making generic, copied parts.
• DIY fix-it sheds with trained mechanics and electricians to help you fix your stuff and in the process learn how to hack stuff anew.

Only in Shoreditch or Crouch End or Stoke Newington of course, but then most Springwise style Business 2.0 ideas seem to have this geographically bounded cohort as their target audience. 

Problem solving

Skimming Block, originally uploaded by superlocal.

I love the Far East.  I love the way they just get on and make stuff and then make more stuff to solve the problems of the initial stuff.  There's no prevaricating, they just keep making instead of legislating, which is what we're so good at in Europe.  Here we have a skimming block for RFID [which is embedded in credit cards over there and probably soon to be here].   
Makes me think of Matt Webb's recent post on the excellent Pulse Laser blog about the rise of distributed manufacture in Japan and the use of interchangeable parts to make a complete product, rather than it being manufactured by one organisation.  This skimming block works the same way but for situations or experiences of the individual person -  in that rather than solving the problem for all in the 'host' technology [so working with all RFID chip users] you have interchangeable solutions for the range of technologies employed by the user.
In some scenario planning work I did whilst at the BBC one of the stories had the rise of technical 'plumbers' to solve problems you had with interoperability, or rebellious technology.  Workarounds necessary for the myriad of different socio-technical relations that emerged in the digital age.  That service and the sorts of products as this,above, seem increasingly plausible  cf. the discourse of the future which had all our 'technology' as pure, whole and inter-operable. But is the UK economy set up for that or are those products and services going to be imported or offshored?

Neighbourgood

Went to the Neighbourgoods Market in Woodstock, a rather run down area to the North East of  Cape Town today.  The market is a curated food and design market, which runs every Saturday and whilst it's a bit stereotypically 'organic' [white, wealthy, educated, urban, lefty liberal, crocs wearing...], it's such a vibrant interesting environment that it works incredibly well. And I say 'curated' because the stall holders are vetted for their community and artisan credentials; this isn't Huddersfield.  The two blokes behind "What if the World" gallery in Cape Town started the Market earlier this year. Their gallery hosts local artists and nothing costs more than R1000 [about 80 quid] and it's proved to be popular.  The market follows a similar philosophy of supporting emergent talent but food and design talent rather than 'art'.  It was packed. Markets are just so social. You get to see the provenance [because generally the person who made it sells it] and the variety of goods on offer make it a real sensual, rummage type of experience [as opposed to the goal orientated supermarket shop] and a very viscereal kind of retail. It's involving both in what it puports to offer [organic, designed, 'unique', community spirited, bloody righteous, whatever..] and the experience you have which is 'hands on' and social, both in the way you relate to the products and how you relate to other people in the communal eating / drinking areas.

I've been researching craft markets for a while now and the thing that I notice when I'm listening in on conversations is how fantastic people find the experience.  The experience.  Not really the products so much, good and full of stories as they are, and yet it's nothing spectacular, there's no entertainment or special effects. You're just mingling, socialising with strangers and creativity and in that sense markets are an antidote to the very functional retail experience that shopping has largely become.  They're also a source of cultural capital a means to find new produce, new things to talk about and recommend in much the same way that we rely on peers or experts or recommendation systems to help us manage choice and find new books or music or video. So markets seem support a similar function, here the market itself acts as an arbiter of choice and not just the individual and their peers who are browsing.

I'm sure markets will continue to thrive as food miles, local produce [and identity and provenance] become more of an issue, though I suspect they'll remain distinctive in their cultural capital [this is after all  about 'creativity' and the best markets will be those that manage to foster the most creative telents] and will remain out of the mainstream, a bit part in the repertoire shopping behaviour of the swollen middle classes, but a more influential bit part.

Anyway, top notch cupcakes and fab tees by local artists :)

And whilst on the subject of Craft I need help to think of another term to describe handmade goods, because Craft signifies staid, old  fashioned and  well, a bit  cardigans and  Auntie's woolly jumpers. The Japanese have Zakka, which I like.  Others?  I'll find something at my next market visit to give away  to the best term, as decided by me :)

Other crafty links I've marked can be found via http://del.icio.us/mashedpotatoe/craft

Happy New Year... from the Republic of Hout Bay.

Things are actors too

Simon has linked to a couple of papers on materiality in social research that he has written [in partnership with Simon Blyth of Unilever] that are well worth reading.  Most stuff around Actor Network Theory [ANT] doesn't seem that helpful to the average researcher doing research, in fact most Social Science 'theory' seems elitist and irrelevant to me.  But whilst ANT and particularly Bruno Latour's  work is [in my opinion] probably the best thing to happen to Social Science in the last fifty years it hasn't made a huge impact in terms of telling stories about the world to inform better design.  Simon's papers' are of the few I've seen that try to make materiality matter to a wider audience.  Why? 

Well, I think we tend to anthropomorphisise materiality and / or consign non-human things to the status of second class citizens.  This is mostly as a result of the belief in 'agency' residing only with 'us' when actually the ability to have effects resides in everything, but only as a result of a coming together with other 'things', what ANT is all about; networks of association.  And being drilled in a humanist reading of life that's hard to take.  We like to think of ourselves as special :) 

That said many of the people writing around design and experience design in particular seem to be influenced by "materiality".  Terms like 'affordance' seem to spring up in conversations I have with people in design, so there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it's important.   But in terms of doing the background to inform design it's tough to know where to start.  My old superviser once said to me - when I was struggling to get to grips with how to research materiality - that ANT was basically about being as granular in ethnographic work as possible and not taking anything as a given.  That helped.   

Sketching revenue generation for distributed media

Not the snappiest of titles and this isn't the most lucid of posts, it's more a half-baked brain dump. Never-mind.  So, of late I've been trying to articulate what the new media landscape looks like and how it 'works', to a largely lay audience.  It's hard to convey complex things simply which is perhaps why I've found it a useful experience - it's forced me to think.  I often use drawings to get a point across and below are two [god-awful] and polarised examples from a recent chat I had which will look very familiar.

Broadcast:

Here:

• The value is intrinsic to the media itself e.g. a TV programme and there's a simple general revenue model for it to work [subscription or ads - based on viewing figures proxied by time of day etc.]
• The rights framework is built with that in mind, the rights holders paid for their bit of the media etc. and if the distributor cannot control supply through the medium e.g. decoder then the media must be controlled e.g. DRM
  
• The primary constraint here is limited supply.  The legal and political framework only allow for a small number of 'broadcasters' and to get involved in that is expensive and risky and consequently the barriers to entry are high.
• Any 'sociality' around the media is defined by either 'locally' produced feedback loops around say the [cliched] water cooler or, more abstractly, as a feedback loop through the media, in say TV guides or reviews.

Networked:

Here the:

• Media value is increasingly defined through the 'sociality' of the media itself, that is the 'links' that serve to define it in the ecosystem, rather than in the asset itself.
• Consequently value is distributed with the media [which is the case in the broadcast model only in the broadcast model that was pretty much everyone or everyone divided by x]
• The feedback loops are key in defining the value of the media and these loops are not constrained by space or place but play out through them - so you get feedback in the form of recommendation systems that are very public.
• Nor are these feedback loops constrained by time and the physical limitations in the broadcast model.  The loops are 'immediate' and are on the whole very 'transferable', contained within URLs or even in chat histories via AIM etc.   
• Neither are the feedback loops defined by formal hierarchy - informal [digg] mixes with formal, organised feedback [metacritic] as defined by the status of the reviewer.
• Advertising is the main means through which to generate revenue but this revenue may not fall to the media creator / owner as the media is copied, distributed and published elsewhere.
• Policing this environment is virtually impossible although community driven 'social  policing'  through  individual reporting can be highly effective.

Of course trhese are two polarised ideals and the reality [at present, before IPTV] is we live with a mix - with some media being bigger than others, or at least more social or popular.  But what I'm getting at is that value is driven by the 'ghost-like' relations of links, by the 'communicative morass' rather than the media itself.  Blogs, AIM have their own place in that mix that can be defined by speed and fixity.  Blog and link aggregators are the nodes, akin to the FTSE, there to be gamed and played once measured.   AIM, txt, the more intricate, 'local' and immediate narrative that is often ephermeral, disappearing as quickly as it came but no less important for that.  Services like Twitter and Dodgeball only serve to facilitate and play on this communicative need.  And as more metadata, links, and  narratives come into existence so media must adapt to play out with them in the form of feedback loops.

However, many people I speak to who are involved in media production are still fixated on the media itself, which of course has to be brilliant but  is just part of the 'design' for creating successful genuinely 'new media' that pays.  The audience are now more integral than ever to the proposition and how it plays out.  Steven B Johnson sums this up in Emergence from 1991:

"The most significant thing for the web.. is not its capacity to stream high-quality video images or booming surround sound; indeed, it's quite possible that the actual content of the convergence will arrive via some other transmission platform.  Instead, the web will contribute the metadata that enables these clusters to self-organize. it will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behaviour, and instead of those patterns being restricted to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, consumers will be able to tap into that pool themselves to create communal maps of all the entertainment and data available online." [Steven Berlin Johnson 1991 Emergence p220].

All pretty basic stuff now but quiet prescient all the same and ahead of its time.  In talking through the implications of this nascent ecosystem to indies etc. they inevitably want to know how they can evolve to remain relevant to audiences that are increasingly getting recommendations and media itself [youtube, torrent files etc] from the web.  The basic question for such companies is: "how can we retain or maintain revenue from media when it's massively distributed?". I'm not sure that anyone who owns IP in the digital age knows the answer to this.  But I'm not sure that there is an answer.  Media that is IP protected will struggle to be social in a networked ecosystem.  And if it ain't social then you're going to have problems getting it noticed and making money from it.  No, you have to move from a model whereby the media itself is intrinsically of value to a model where you use the social to develop new business models.  Easy stuf, for example:

• Translate. Get people to pay for transferring one media into another.  Just like printing has become a winner for static media e.g. moo for flickr and blurb for blogs, so ring-tones and paid for podcasts etc. have worked for exploiting traditional media.
• Relate. Start to create metadata around the media which can be used to drive discovery [e.g. delicious] and consequently ad revenue.  Then own that data.

Works within the existing framework, exploiting essentially dead media, like any artefact or product.  Packaged dead media in the form of formats like Wife Swap and Super Nanny are still the most lucrative [because they are 'transportable' and 'transferable' assets] but it is precisely their 'dead' nature that limits their potential in the networked digital world of the future. Going forward networked digital distribution allows is to give media life - to make it  inherently social by developing feedback loops or 'ripples' and therefore creating more opportunities to spin off into other [older] media [translation], or initiate subscription for extra functionality around a service and of course drive advertising into new areas.  To produce more social media, you need to get people [both end consumers and developers / producers] involved in creating or augmenting media in the first place and to play with the variety of things that influence the media such as links, metadata and narrative.

Enough waffle, I'm going to try and knock this into something meaningful soon.

You have 42 new texts...

Early novice engaged twitter behaviour and networking giving way to background, lower level use.  Particularly noticed scale limits: 25 people is my ceiling.  Phone notifications off after quiet walk in the woods was disturbed by busy aviary like twitter from pocket.  I had 42 new texts in the space of 30 minutes.  That's when continuous partial attention becomes proper attention and bugs me.  Still, I'm intrigued by the comms structure across different mediums and the affordances of those mediums - AIM can ping away at will but phone not good at background media [though obviously that is a huge generalisation and I'm ignoring context  etc. and should be whipped].  Twitter is one of the few instances where you can see how the narrative, fragmented and distributed such as it is, plays out differently across space and time and medium.   And in that sense actually 'doing' social media like twitter is far better than reading about it [and tends to be my recommendation to clients which kind of puts me out of further work]. 

However, that said I'm going back to read Dourish and 'Where the Action Is' and enjoying him far more this time around.  Had not given him credit for cutting through vast swathes of impenetrable social theory whilst remaining lucid and relevant and only occasionally disappearing up his derrière.  I'm particularly enjoying reading the book with reference to Wittgenstein's "Language Games"; the construction of meaning through shared 'interaction', through 'doing' rather than a pure expression of some inner mental state. Of course when you take up using a new social media like twitter and the 'rules' take a while to play out, there's a lot of negotiation and in many ways that's the most fun 'bit'.  The imperfection makes it perfect, at least for a while. 

The man who has not turntable

GO WAY THE MAN WHO HAS NOT TURN TABLE, originally uploaded by superlocal.

"GO AWAY THE MAN WHO HAS NOT TURN TABLE"

Know your audience. Speak to them clearly and directly. And patronise your non-audience as this will make your core audience feel good about themselves. Don't worry about grammar.