technogoggles

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

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.

Designing data...

"... with a view to informing decisions and taking action." Maps are perhaps the oldest and best forms of visualising data.

Met up with Danny Dorling last night, Professor Danny Dorling to you, master of maps which actually kind of underplays the incredibly important role he has in defining social policy, especially in the UK.  Anyway, aside from some mutually supportive moan on why you just can't win trying to be a new dad and all this modern man business is a cynical attempt by feminists to allow us to believe we're empowering ourselves when [tailed off into drunken half-baked rubbish...] we discussed World Mapper, one of the most fantastic map resources on the web and a product of Danny and his team which they're due to complete very soon.

Map of those living on less than $1 a day

And each of the maps has fantastic  notation:

The first Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who live on the equivalent of US$1 a day, or less. In 2002, an estimated 17% of the world population lived on this amount. They lived on less than or equal to what, to be precise, US$1.08 would have bought in the United States in 1993.

In over twenty territories more than a third of the population lives on less than US$1 a day. All but two of these territories are in Africa.

The largest population living on US$1 a day is in Southern Asia, most of whom live in India.

It's a fairly exhaustive attempt to map the key data that defines 'us' in the world and in the process get you to think!  [Maps are such a great stimulus for visually representing data.  It's probably no surprise that so many information architects / designers  are map freaks]. 

The main issue for World Mapper and the people behind it, is how to make better use of a resource which is probably, according to Danny, the last of it's kind because, going forward there will be such an abundance and a variety of data that mapping it will be so much more difficult.

So how to make better use of it?  If you have an idea either Danny or myself would love to know.  There's no API, though to be honest it's difficult to know what this could allow anyway, the real value is in the imagery but there is a partial RSS feed.  The data itself is available to use in xls format [and someone could do a job in making this machine readable...] as are the images, released on an attribution, non-commercial share-alike license though the website is far more ambiguous about this [it isn't creative commons because that could inhibit some major media exercise with partners etc].  Thoughts on how this could be more useful...

Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before

An attention economy

The attention economy, originally uploaded by JamesB.

Too much noise. Secondary signs - the clock, 'the orange jacket' - become filters.  How simple would it be to create  a physical IA here that was navigable? What can offline learn from online?

And relatedly, how can you create a measure for the 'negative externalities' associated with excessive advertising to argue against urban spam?   There's a weight of anecdotal evidence but all that does is act as a cue for clients to want yet more "hard hitting" work (sigh).  There's market failure right there but you don't see a way for media standards bodies to intervene for the greater good and part of me would object if they did - as you'd lose a lot of creativity in [guerilla / ambient] media planning.

Friction

Oily Bird, originally uploaded by olivander.

 

I'm struggling with the mantra of digital strategists like Seth Godin who argues that we need to make things as simple as possible for people:

We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. If a marketer brings us a new idea, it's either ignored or it's a problem. A problem because we have to do something with the idea. Buy the new suit, trade in for the new car, install a new IT solution or change the way we feel about an issue.

The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.

In other words you keep things lubricated, you reduce the friction of the 'social', you make things easy and value the ease with which you can engender a relationship.  Compare this to the "ethics of inconvenience" put forward by Will Davies, who argues the need for an understanding of friction as social value...

I spoke at this conference earlier this year, discussing what digital technology offered the voluntary sector. One of the things I raised as an anxiety was an advert in the paper from that morning, in which Oxfam were claiming that 'One click. That's the difference between life and death for millions of people' (part of their current I'm In campaign). On the one hand this is a fairly transparent and innocent attempt to ride the wave of the Make Poverty History campaign which ended last year, but on the other, it's just a pack of lies. My medicine is a bit shakey, but I'm fairly convinced that One click is not the difference between life and death for even one person, let alone millions. The dilemma these charities face is how much to see the internet as a way of lowering barriers to entry, and how much to see it as a potential dilution of the issues at stake. And the problem is that barriers to entry tend to be constitutive of the value of action. The fact that it is a pain in the arse to write a letter, attend a meeting, dress up as batman and climb a monument, run for parliament or wage a decades long campaign for recognition, is why these actions are both admirable and effective.

I find both arguments persuasive.  My gripe is not just with the ethics of saving-the-world endeavour being promoted as easy and simplistic but the glut of things that stem from it being easy to join making the attention economy such an issue in the process.  Take Flickr.  Every day I'm offered the opportunity to join a new flickr group - I've already got more groups than I possibly know and rarely use any of them - and am told I'm a new contact for blah blah, who it transpires has 3457 contacts.  And of course it's not just flickr, it's the whole of social media where quantity equates with value. So much so that it undermines the social 'media / 'software' it is predicated on.  In an online world the ease of being social undermines the value of relationships and consequently, over time, you put less effort in and you value the experience / contact / object less.  Consequently, diminishing, if not negative, returns set in [and probably lower than the Dunbar number of 150 which has been identified for a community to be cohesive as you and your contacts do not constitute a community in this sense, more a cohort or sub-set within the community].   

So if it is time we started appreciating quality rather than quality of relationships, friction rather than ease, how do we sell that into people?  How do we make 'social media' that values less rather than more? What does a strategy for 'marketing friction' to create lasting value between people and brands / issues look like? It's clearly not what Oxfam are doing, so who is?

Navigating Risk

I've taken a few cabs lately and all have had the tom tom.  I can see why they'd want to employ such a relatively cheap device to reduce the 'risk' of their knowledge being exposed.  But what has sat nav technology done to the kudos of the taxi driver in exposing their uncertainty?  What has it done to 'the knowledge', the cornerstone of their reputation and business?  Are knowledge tests now redundant?

I also find it interesting how people, particularly women travelling alone, are using cameraphones to take images of cab drivers / driver licenses when taking a cab home to mitigate the risk of attack or abuse. 

What other social uses does the cameraphone and the 'image' have in discreet social situtions to help us stay safe?  Occasions / need states anyone?  I've seen people use them when they've been in an accident - but that doesn't require the upload of the image to a remote server necessarily, it can stay 'local' to the phone itself.   I guess things like tickets, reference numbers, identifiers of all sorts when moving about would be handy to capture in case you lost them and your phone.   With 3G providers desperately looking for need states and 'killer apps' it may be worthwhile looking at social risk as much as social pleasure [entertainment] to sell their services. 

Designing for everyday use

Now we're in an age of ubiquitous connectivity [or near ubiquitous] and PCs are more about being intermediaries in a social network, why are we still stuck with machines that take little account of the context of use? 

Forget the plethora of web 2.0 services that spring up by the hour to take care of every conceivable need.  What about the brick itself!  How many times have you needed to check an email / IM / blog whatever whilst getting your breakfast, feeding the kids, or doing the gardening that won't result in ruination? How inappropriate is a delicate laptop for these situations?  I mean we can create a $100 laptop for people in developing countries to resource and a hole manner of supplmentary digital lifestyle add-ons without a real purpose but we can't think of more radical and yet mundane use cases closer to home.



I'd forsake chip speed, looks, screen size for a tough machine that could withstand knocks, crumbs, jam, soil.. everyday life shit. I'm not one of those early adpoters that fetishes over design. No, I don't fetishise my machine so much as the desire to communicate... so come on Mr. Ives et al let's have some thought to the 'commonal' everyday situation as use case not a ultra modern geekified desk.
 
addendum - just seen Intel's ruggedized PC.  Why India?  Why not Surbiton or Swansea?  The rugged need isn't exclusive to 'poor people in developing countries'.

ID

ID cards  get the go ahead today - with  the news that they will be compulsory for people applying for passports in the UK in 2010.  The furore over our civil liberties aside being able to define 'us' on a card seems so archaic when we're now a 'mulitiplicity'.   When we now not only 'philosophically' seen as a myriad of identities, constructed discursively and materially [e.g. 'cyborgs'] but also the way we construct our own identities in practice through our relationships with materials and humans and language. 

This 'multiplicity' of selves is, of course, difficult to 'police'.  You can't have malleable entities and then hope to manage them under the Rule of Law.  It would lead to all manner of difficulty.  But will the URI - the unique identifier - for you that these cards effectively 'are'  be  'strong' enough to  encapsulate the multiplicity?  In other words will it be embedded in the architecture of the internet-of-things sufficiently to really threaten your liberties in your ability to construct yourself malleably?   This may not seem such a  big deal but for me this poses the 'real' threat of  our liberty on a day-to-day level.  Will we be one of the things in the internet-of-things?    Suddenly the utopia around this overarching architecture turns dystopian.