An interesting assemblage observed recently, certainly influenced by the length of the iPhone charger cable.

Circulation of the widget-meme into *other* touch-interfaces.

(via) Oh, and btw, an highly important tool for 2010: a reminding list of important stuff in case of time-travelling:

Why do I blog this? It’s always curious, as a thought experiment, to think about what one would put in this sort of list. Perhaps asking my students “What pieces of knowledge and artifacts would you like to bring in the past, in case you can time-travel?” would be a good brief (to start off a discussion about what would change accordingly).

Great read tonight: Studying the New Media by Howard Becker (Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2002).

The author focuses here on the studies about the “impact of the media on people”, the sort of stuff you see popping up in the press on a regular basis (be it about tv, video-games, comic-books or the interwebs). Becker shows that these studies have not produced stable results, because they operate with an unrealistic view of people. He describes how inaccurate the “impact” paradigm is and the fact it never produced any solid findings about the good or bad effects of XXX (where XXX stands for arts experience/TV/video-games, etc.):

“The idea that you could isolate a unique influence of such a thing as TV or movies or video games is absurd on the face of it. Social scientists, operating under the best conditions, have enough trou- ble demonstrating causal relations between any two variables—to tell the truth, I don’t think they ever do, just maybe hint at it. Studying the effect of a commu- nication medium which operates in the middle of ordinary social life, with all its complications, is not working under the best conditions, and the demonstration of cause and effect is, practically speaking, impossible.
(…)
The “impact” approach improperly treats the public as an inert mass which doesn’t do anything on its own, but rather just reacts to what is presented to it by powerful (usually commercial) organizations and the representatives of dominant social strata.“

He exemplifies how “the image of an inert, passive mass audience is a gross empirical error” with various cases where other researchers had shown that “ordinary people” aren’t passive: TV-viewing (where “users” explored imaginatively the possibilities of adult relationships), the creation of internet website, or the writing of homosexual pastiches of the Star Trek stories or pornography:

“One of the first uses of any new communication technology has always been to make pornography. Photography was no sooner invented in the mid-nineteenth century than people were using it to make and distribute dirty pictures. (…) I’m talking about the “amateurs” in this field, of whom there have always been a lot. (…) In other words, pornography is a major area of use of digital technology by ordinary folks.“

Why do I blog this? reflecting on past paradigms and approaches I used to be taught.

A basic trick to sit on the snow, seen in Geneva yesterday. Snow season here, quickly replaced by heavy rain tonight.

Naming digital devices such as music players or car-navigation system is always intriguing and it’s often curious to see which terms are employed by people. In a world where artifacts do not necessarily rely on existing technical lineages, companies need to create new terms. Eventually, theses names are not the one that make it to the surface.

Two examples that I like:

The story of a kid who has been “saved by The GPS” (or in French “Le GPS”). GPS which refers to car-navigation assistants that generally use this positioning technology to locate the vehicle. In this case, the name of device emerged from the enabling technique itself.

Another great examples that is commonly used in the swiss press is “Le MP3″, i.e. the music player that allows to play audio files. In this case, the name of the device emerged from the file format itself… even if the artifact play different file format (such as .AAA).

Why do I blog this? Just though about this while reading one of my student’s dissertation draft. Naming conventions are always interesting and it’s curious to follow what terms are picked up by people. This echoes with other trends from the past for which we had obvious examples such as “Frigidaire” (a brand name used as a generic term).

via, this highly curious drawings by Marc Ngui as interpretation of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari:

Why do I blog this? sunday morning venture on the Interwebs often leads me to this sort of inspiring content.

Following Julian, different forms of Obama representations that I refer to as “Obamania” in my Flickr stream.

The “Obama” pizza in Paris:

Street graffiti in Saint Etienne and Geneva:

An ad poster in Paris:

Why do I blog this? these iconic representations are quite interesting in terms of diversity and the meaning it certainly evokes to people. A sort of meme that finds it way onto the urban fabric. Nothing really new here but it’s always curious to spot this.

Raw notes from a presentation by André Gunthert at the Geneva University of Art and Design the other say:

Amateur photography appeared around 1880, after the transition between silver to silver-chloride… which led to photojournalism and scientific photography such as the work of Albert Londe. Curiously, Londe always referred to his work as an “amateur”, although he was the medical photographer at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and perhaps one of the most famous chronophotographer with Étienne-Jules Marey. Gunthert’s claim is that the reason why a photo expert such as Londe referred to him as an amateur was because he lived in a transitional time between the Daguerreotype and the new popular activity of photography. Claiming to be an amateur was a peculiar stance, an avant-garde choice that aimed at showing others that “he was on the other side, a promoter of the new technique”.

The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of the new figure of the amateur, through Kodak’s release of their camera (”You press the button, we do the rest”). To be an amateur at the time would be described today as being a “user” and it’s because of the arrival of this stance that amateurs has been opposed to professionals.

However, it’s only around 2005-2005 that amateurs became a threat to professionals. Gunthert traces this back to the London subway bombings. This event in July of 2005 can be seen as a turning point in global news coverage; especially because the news (BBC) asked survivors/witness to send them images (taken with cameraphones)… simply because they could not go there.

In parallel, Gunthert describes how the Web started to build its own mythology around the amateur (”We the Media” by Dan Gilmor, citizen journalism, the web2.0 slogan by Tim O’Reilly, etc.)… and eventually services such as YouTube in 2005 were explicitly built (and valued) for their capability to be based on “user-generated content”.

To him, the best example of this trend is Be Kind Rewind, a sort of testimony to the notion of Amateur culture. Gunthert describes this movie as the nicest way to depict user-generated content because it shows HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. A sort of YouTube were viewers will act as participant and create their own videos. This kind of expectations of course lead to laws and measures taken by governments in certain countries to help the the cultural industry… because lots of people believed in this myth.

But this vision did not materialize. He described them as self-fulfilling prophecies proposed by web gurus and showed that most of the content on platforms such as YouTube are not creations. There is indeed a great shift from television to platforms like YouTube but it’s mostly an archive of past productions (with tons of copyright infringements). It’s not only an archive but there are also ads and new forms of communication proposed by companies (see the Evian roller babies campaign).

He concluded by stating that most of the interest by researchers/media has been drawn
so far to the production part of usage and that he is more interested in how people use these platforms. YouTube is now the second the web search engine and people access it to look for answers (e.g. how to fold a tent). To Gunthert, we are in 2009 in a situation close to the one people in the 20th century encountered with sound recording devices. At the time, inventors and industrial companies has high expectations about these machines, they were supposed to help produce content and store memories of people. But it did not happen and it was mostly employed to listen to music. Nevertheless this does not mean that people were passive and there are lots of interesting and active practices with regards to sound recording devices.

Why do I blog this? my notes here are a bit messy and incomplete. I tried to translate this roughly into English but I was quite interested by his approach. Of course, some other things could be added about the DIY culture and perhaps my transcription is a bit shaky but I found it intriguing to deconstruct the notion of amateurs and usage.

ON Sci-Fi wire, there is this curious description of how science consultants have been called to work in Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica:

“former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek. He described how the writers would just insert “tech” into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they’d have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

“It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script

La Forge: “Capain, the tech is overteching.”

Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”

La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t
work.”

Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”“

Why do I blog this? Reference for later. This is a model for creating design fictions but I wonder about how to go beyond this. Using this kind of process may lead to a certain vision of the future that is very normative. Charles Stross describes on his blog how he works and it’s more interesting to me:

“I use a somewhat more complex process to develop SF. I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.
(…)
The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don’t tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances. The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating “tech” to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization.“

Seen two weeks ago in Seoul, a cultural peak in what goes in and what goes out

This morning, while preparing my upcoming course, I stumbled across this great chapter about Sensory Anomalies by Michael Naimark. Some excerpt I found relevant below:

“The single biggest difference between first-hand and mediated experiences is whether sensory anomalies exist. There are none in first-hand experience. Such anomalies always have explanations (…) The physical world obeys the laws of science. When we experience anomalies in the physical world, it’s due to human hardware or software issues, such as blindness or psychosis, not because of the environment.
(…)
“Virtual Reality”, in its theoretical construct, is the merging of the feeling of first-hand experience with the freedom from physical-world constraints. (…) the goal is indistinguishability from first-hand experience in the physical world: “just like being there.” Such VR doesn’t exist and may never (at least not without electrodes). So for now, we live with even the best sensory media having some degree of anomalies. These anomalies are not intentional, and entire industries exist to make higher resolution cameras, better synthesized lighting models, and auto-stereoscopic displays.“

In the chapter, Naimark describes several projects that both transcend and exploit sensory anomalies as well as give a series of observations about what happens. It leads him to the following conclusion:

“Sensory anomalies are funny things (…) Metaphor to some is violation to others. “Faithful representation” is a noble engineering goal, but things aren’t quite as clear in art and design. To confuse, or clarify, things further, good metaphor can often be a form of shorthand. If we share similar cultures, backgrounds, or personal experiences, metaphor is a form of abstraction, of compression. So in the end, the degree of faithfulness and the degree of violation depend on what we want to say. “

Why do I blog this? I really love these lines. They very much echo with recent discussions I had with people from the game industry who aim at jumping over the Uncanny Valley. The notion of preferable anomaly seems more appealing to me in terms of opportunities and design constraints.

The image above was taken yesterday at Share GVA, an audiovisual jam session for media artists and technicians that I attended. The whole event ( my picture too, actually) are based on toying with sensory anomalies.

The “Parking Wars” application on Facebook was certainly one my favorite game two years ago. I gave it a shot for 3-4 months and then let it go (although one my friend is a “$28,699,245 (Parker Emeritus)”. Besides it may have been the only application that attracted me to log in on Facebook back in 2006.

The game, designed by Area/Code was actually a facebook app that was meant to promote a television show:

“ In Parking Wars, players earn money by parking — legally or illegally — on their friend’s streets. Players also collect fines by ticketing illegally parked cars on their own street.“

What was fantastic at the time was the fact that this simple games app took advantage of the FB social graphs in curious ways:

• The underlying logic is simple: you need to have friends to park your cars on their street. The point is therefore to maximize the number of friends who play Parking War… which leads player to participate in the network effect through invitations (on top of word-of-mouth).
• The game is asynchronous and turn-based so it’s good to find friends on different time-shift so that you could place/remove your car when they sleep (a moment during which you don’t risk to get any fine).
• When giving a fine you can send messages to other players, the dynamic here is highly interesting as people repurposed it into some weird communication channel that is public but that address a different audience than the Facebook wall
• Competition is stimulated with a peculiar kind of score board: you only see scores from other players within your network (who added the game). This is thus a sort of micro-community where each participants’ score is made explicit.
• The “level design” is also interesting with a “neighbor” feature that enable you to park on adjacent streets, which can be owned by people outside your network.
• The cheating tricks are also social: you can less-active FB users to add the game so that you’re pretty sure they won’t check that you’re illegally parked, you can create a fake FB account or benefit from streets created by people who stopped playing.
• … and I am sure there is more to it from the social POV

Interestingly, my curiosity towards Parking Wars came back up to the surface when chatting with my neighbor Basile Zimmermann who works as research scientist at the University of Geneva. In a recent project, he addressed how Chinese Social Networking Sites re-interpreted design concepts already used by existing platforms such as FB and turned them into something different.

Which is how he showed me a curious application he saw on a Chinese SNS called “开心网 / Kaixin001″ (”Happy Network”) that is a Parking Wars-inspired copy also called “争车位” (”Parking Wars”) which appeared in July 2008:

The layout is similar to the one created by Area/code, some cars are more fancy than others but the main difference lies in the presence of advertisement (as shown by the “LG” brand). As a matter of fact, the ad part was not included in the first few months of this Parking Wars version on the Happy Network and it appeared approximately around March 2009 according to Basile. From what I’m told, the game is evolving too with a system of maps that operates differently from the FB version.

More explanation in his upcoming paper about this topic:
Zimmermann, B. (forthcoming). “Analyzing Social Networking Web Sites: The Design of Happy Network in China” in Global Design History, Adamson, Teasley and Riello eds, Routledge.

Why do I blog this? dual interest here: 1) my fascination towards Parking Wars and its underlying game design mechanism based on social dimensions, 2) the transfer of this meme in another culture.

One hour after being in this tv-enabled taxi in Jeju the other day, I read this quote in Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis:

“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.
(…)
Exploded television. I am the ultra cable company. This is the way of the future. Anything you want on a computer screen, whenever you want it, through a subscription or a micropayment of a few bucks through your credit card. That eel thing? For a buck a time you can download the day’s highlights to your iPod and watch it while you’re in the can.“

Spot on! Korea was indeed a good place to spot different forms of “exploded television” (and certainly a good place to read Ellis). Indeed there are explosions in terms of devices themselves (in-car tv, mobile phone, some urban screens) and services too.

Mobile TV is certainly an interesting instance of exploding television one can notice in Korea, as shown by the pictures above. Mobile TV penetration is slightly over 30% and of course mobile phones are designed with this in mind. Some of them indeed have screen that can be twisted to get a landscape view. It’s now 4 years that the koreans have access to access this (through satellite DMB (S-DMB) and terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) service).

Why do I blog this? connecting the dots and finding curious metaphor for socio-technical trends after a refreshing trip to Korea.

People interested in retro-computing (i.e. the use of early computer hardware and software today), may want to have a look at 101 Project: an independent creative platform to collect memories and archives in order to develop a documentary film. Selected at SIGGRAPH, it is a kind of collective memory incubator that will be first of all part of the film and it will live also apart and after the film as a web platform.

It’s possible to start dropping your memories here.