Imagine my surprise reading today’s Grauniad finding George Monbiot coming out as a fan of airships, and more broadly – of advanced technological solutions (“like most greens I’m prepared to try almost anything, as long as it works.” – really George? Shall we go properly nuclear then?)
I’ve long been Col. Blimp in arguments with m’colleague Cheathco on the future of global transport. George’ll be hot for space elevators next, then I’ll really have to find a new schtick, or make him my best mate.
Once I’d calmed down from the initial flush of general airship lust though – the point that stuck with me from the article was this:
“Paradoxically, the other major constraint could be an environmental one. Airships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials. A new generation of solar panels relies on gallium and indium, whose global supplies appear close to exhaustion(8). The price of platinum, which is used in catalytic converters, has tripled over the past five years(9). Beyond a few natural gas fields in Texas, economically viable supplies of helium are rare; even there they might be exhausted in 50 years at current rates of use, or much faster if airships take off(10,11). If there is a God, he isn’t green.”
And that’s the worrying thing – this really seems like a game of what resource will run out – the cheap energy to do the R&D into The Gordelpus, the rare materials to make The Gordelpus, or the sociopolitical will to make The Gordelpus.
It’s like the early stages of a resource-trading game like Settlers of Catan.
If we can just get enough of the vital stuff, we’ll have a runaway advantage later in the play. Which bets shall we make with which resources in order to get that runaway multiplier before it’s too late in the game?
I guess I am with George after all – making some audacious bets mid-game looks pretty good right now.
It’s how we roll.
P.s.: “The Gordelpus” is Olaf Stapledon’s quasi-nuclear magical/religious/scientific endless-power mcguffin of the First Men in his awe-inspiring Last and First Men.
A century after the founding of the first World State a rumour began to be heard in China about the supreme secret of scientific religion, the awful mystery of Gordelpus, by means of which it should he possible to utilize the energy locked up in the opposition of proton and electron. Long ago discovered by a Chinese physicist and saint, this invaluable knowledge was now reputed to have been preserved ever since among the elite of science, and to be ready for publication as soon as the world seemed fit to possess it. The new sect of Energists claimed that the young Discoverer was himself an incarnation of Buddha, and that, since the world was still unfit for the supreme revelation, he had entrusted his secret to the Scientists.
“The triumph of non-labour, however, does not entail an absence of effort but an even more profound redefinition of what ‘production’ might mean, and it is here too that skateboarding strikes at the heart of the business city. At first sight, skateboarders’ labour produces no ‘products’ beyond the moves skaters make, a ‘commodity’ exchangeable only by means of performative action. Furthermore, skateboarders, like students, offer a potential labour force but they deny this by undertaking seemingly meaningless productions, and so appear to waste effort and time. But that ‘principle of economy’ which sees a ‘waste’ of energy as abnormal is itself a reduction of life to mere survival. Skateboarding, in contrast, undertakes a release of energy that either creates or modifies space, espousing play, art and festival.”
I’m not entirely sure, but I think the colour-infill of the letters is crazy nu-rave reflecto stuff. I might change that… Unless people really like it!
Next week is mainly going to be the scary prospect of me speaking my brains at the West Coast until they’re sick of it.
First up, on Tuesday, I’m closing-out the Adaptive Path MX conference in a double-feature with Scott Hirsch. I’m hoping everyone will dig the short rock opera about social software we’ve come up with.
Tom’s been fascinated by this area for a long time I know, and the launch of FireEagle has added practical experience of creating services within the domain, so he’s really going to strap rocket-boosters to the session.
Jen Pahlka of Web2.0Expo asked me some questions about the talk/discussion that give some more flavour of what territory we’re going to try and cover. It’s going to be grounded in work on Dopplr and FireEagle, but hoping the discussion will wander off into questions of near-future EveryWare.
But, hopefully after a restorative burrito, I’ll have the energy for one last gig at SF IxDA, where I’ll be talking about the Howies Machine amongst other things referencing my old favourite theme of design and play.
A full week! Hopefully see you somewhere along the way.
As you might be aware – Flickr launched video, and amongst much praise for it’s simple, clear implementation there’s been quite a lot of hoo-ha from us wonderful, grateful users, some of whom are afraid the addition of video will lower the tone of the service to that of others, that allow you a tube, if you will.
Part of the differentiating design of Flickr video is that only clips of a maximum 90 seconds duration are possible. In fact, Flickr themselves refer to them as ‘long photos’.
So – this led me to wonder if another differentiating design constraint could be set: what if all videos looped automatically as default?
Wouldn’t they then really be long photos?
I’d love to be able to loop the clip posted above, so that you can just see the little door-closing system they’ve erected at Flat White over and over to your hearts content.
A loop would be a captured action or situation rather than a narrative, where the duration of the loop is set but the loop goes on forever so you can study the layers, the detail, the figure and the ground in the same way you can a photo.
A bottled system not a short story.
Think about all the tiny clips you’ve played again and again on the internet just to see one aspect, one moment, act out – a goal or a dramatic chipmunk.
Not stories, but toy moments.
Think about those moving photos imagined in cheesy science fiction films or Harry Potter movies.
Tiny loops of video perhaps are the real long photos…
Of course, this was meant to be something punchy, level-headed and action-packed as a promotion for their upcoming MX event, where people want to hear about the business-like practicalities and opportunities of ‘design thinking’ etc.
Instead they got something that Peter accurately described as ‘DVD-extras’, and I’m pretty comfortable with that.
For me, at least, and YMMV of course – crispy, crunchy blue-shirt and chinos bullet-points don’t do it. Design, invention and making comes out of play, punning and rambling on – generative, diverging and looping and splicing.
I’m very glad that Ryan decided to do the interview in IM, rather than emailing me questions that I could respond to as if in an exam. It’s a fun mess, that I’m glad to say Peter returned to and found a seed of something to advance further himself: the influence that our new ability of visualising shared behaviours has on our old ability as a social species to flock.
I’m hoping that my talk at MX will have a little more discipline to it, but still have enough DVD extras there for people to pick out and run with. If you register for MX, then use the discount code AP have given me: “MXMJ”, you’ll get 15% off the
registration price…
A couple of weeks ago I was luck enough to sit in on one of Adam’s classes at ITP.
The subjects that week were ‘crossroads’ as places of special consideration in culture and architecture, and from there to their (near) future place in everyware-augmented cities.
Candy Chang’s “Sidewalk Psychiatry” (via BB) made me think of the recently-late Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza...*
I wonder if as a memorial to Weizenbaum, Eliza’s ambiguous-but-probing questions could be engraved into the sidewalks at the crossroads of a city…
“I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It’s easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar – being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.”
We’re making progress on the machine but we’re definitely in that place where the last 5% of doing everything – sticking everything together and making sure it all works is taking longer than we’d like. Some triumphs of tinkering this weekend however…
Rama, Heuristically programmed Algorithmic Computer: 9000 model, Stargates, 1:4:3, Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1, Space elevators, Clarke’s 3rd Law (how many times has a technologist or designer invoked that in a talk or meeting?), and of course, The Nine Billion Names of God.
Like many, Clarke’s work rewired my brain from a young age, and he’s got my thanks for that.
Shirky vs eno: raw notes, usual disclaimers apply – not a transcript by any means.
ICA
Monday 17th march, 7pm
Eno: Emergence of social communities through networks
1988 : joined the well
Felt like a fulfilment of mcluhan idea of the global village
Persistent on a mixture of honour and shame – which is what keeps small communities together.
93-95 internet had started to grow and it was obvious it wasn?t a 60s social experiment.
Large scale online games: not idealistic global villages -they need different sorts of tools and rules to run successfully. Not anarchistic or simplistic – but nothing like business as usual.
What is the difference between a trad business like ford cars and wikipedia?
Clay: The biggest difference is that large actions generally entail large transaction costs. Scale of decisions pushes you to add some kind of structure. Till recently this was always certainly hierarchically. Internet and social tools reduce coord costs so radically that groups can form and disband easily, but still produce action. Contribution of individuals can be lightweight and distributed.
Most people do almost nothing, and a very few people do an awful lot. Power law. The value of those minimal contributions, can be aggregated to a great effect.
The search for how to structure very large networks that are building value (e.g. Wikipedia, linux) that we are living through is the experimental wing of political philosophy.
Eno: We are poorly informed by our current news media structures (cf. Nick Davies book) PR culture means opinion is careful moulded by power and distributed by a hungry and resource-starved mainstream rolling news media.
Other sources of opinion are needed – the networks.
There?s a phrase of yours I like: ?replacing planning with co-ordination?
Clay: When ever you get a mobile phone you replace plans with co-ordination. What this does for p2p comms is now coming to groups. Great example: HSBC protests on facebook (clay mentioned this on STW)
Eno: a lot of the book is about how a quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Enabled new situations to catalyse.
Clay: what?s changed is not the tools. Society doesn?t change because of tools, but when attitudes and behaviours change. The tools plus increased social density and comfort – means early adopter techniques have become mainstream social behaviour. The public can now take the sort of actions that they were locked out of just a few years before.
Eno: we?re in England and so we?re pretty cynical compared to people from the west coast. Coming from the most surveilled society in the western world. Can?t believe that governments are going tolerate these changes in power balance that online communities create.
If the co-ordination is mostly through the internet- it?s inconceivable to me that governments are not spending billions on figuring out how to control this. Doesn?t this co-ordination online make us vulnerable?
Clay: Well – I?m not from the west coast I?m from NYC, so my levels of cynicism is somewhere between Mountain View and Brixton.
Yours is a nightmarish scenario, but the thing holding it at bay is that the internet is the first thing that merits the name ?media? because it is genuinely general purpose and flexible. The choice that governments have therefore is connect or disconnect. Too much of what the government is doing is on the same network. The danger is that certain wealthy and controlling regimes will perfect some kind of point control to remove undesirable information from the public sphere before there is casual awareness (cf. The chinese firewall)
(Starts ref: the Leipzig / Minsk ice-cream protest story from ?here comes everybody? – information cascades)
Friday March 14th 2008, 1:54 pm
Filed under: Television
Chances are if we’ve been to the pub together over the last 15 years, I will have mentioned Alternative-3, amongst the canon of great media proto-ARGs that include Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds, Ghostwatch, etc.
I re-watched it on the plane over to the USA, and my addled-brain couldn’t help but retcon the whole thing into the LOST universe.
It was made of course, when the DHARMA initiative is intended to have made their orientation movies, which helps.
But the plot within it is worthy of Abrams, Lindelhof, et al.
And I was suprised that I found some parts genuinely sinister/scary still.
SxSW is over for another year, and I’m still recovering from seemingly having eaten the Cloverfield monster, BBQ’d and served with yellow sauce.
I was down to give one talk about ‘supercolliders’ – people who are maestros of social networks, and tried to keep it from being a Dopplr sales pitch as much as possible, but talked about some of the philosophical underpinnings of why we’d chosen some of the directions we had in the design.
“[maybe we’re talking about] two types of social apps: The first class being services where the distribution of information is informed by pre-defined relationships – you receive photos I uploaded because we had previously declared each other as friends. And the second class of services are ones where the flow of information is what defines relationships – we are friends because we regularly send each other photos we?ve uploaded. The general consensus of the panelists was that the first, more ?traditional?, model is proving increasingly ill-suited to support the activities of these extra-social, collision-prone users.”
Then I got drafted onto a panel about international cultures of mobile device usage. It was something I had to come at on the hoof, but the conversation flowed pretty freely. However I’m sure that both myself and the audience we wishing I was Jan Chipchase or Younghee...
As per usual I managed to miss nearly everything that people said was interesting, including the Steven Johnson / Henry Jenkins and Jane McGonigal keynotes (although I suspect the latter would have been choir-preachin’) – anyway – Dan Hon has awesome notes of eveything I wanted to see.
But – one thing that I think was an interesting trend were the ‘fringe’ mini-conferences that sprang up.
For instance a semi-private one that saw moo, etsy and threadless getting together to share plans and pain; and another open one put on by getsatisfaction for users of their software. Dopplr is starting to really use getsatisfaction more fully for support and product development so this was extremely useful (and great fun)
Nice to see that when the caravanserai hits town, some people are ready to make great, novel uses of it.
On my way to Austin for SxSW. I got drafted by Souris, and very excited to be on a panel with her, Jen Bekman, and Ben Cerveny.
Souris and Jen as networking-ninjas will be relating their experience of engaging in social networks for fun and profit, while Ben and myself will be talking about social tools and how ‘supercolliders’ hack and transform them.
Looking forward to it.
Best of all, Silvio crafted these magnificent Mii’s for all of us!
Saw Seymour Powell speak this afternoon. Basically, they gave a great presentation of ideas that aren’t that foreign to anyone practising interaction or product design, but as such still depressingly exotic to marketing, advertising and brand people… And let’s face it – you kind of automatically win if you end with “and here’s the spaceship we designed”...
in a very grand ballroom…
let?s just say that advertising people do their conferences very differently…
masterclass – from seymourpowell
intro by chris thomas -theme of conference is ?ideas with consequence?
design effectiveness
design council study – basket of companies that privilege design outperforms FTSE
effective design – is there any other kind?
it?s not art
david sainsbury – innovation = successful exploitation of new ideas.
brand – a series of promises that do not change over time (bernstein)
Voyage of the dawntreader – what is a star – - what it is, not what it?s made of.
Aston Martin example – ?power, beauty, soul?
?they?ve made a dreadful mistake but putting it on the dashboard.. I don’t want to be told!? (show, don’t tell)
?you don?t own it, it lives in the heart of the consumer?
brands taken and refracted and distorted by forces outside the brand
communications are become more and more fragmented
the product is where the brand keeps it?s promises – where the rubber hits the road.
?audi tt doesn’t need an ad – it is the ad? -john hegarty
the product is an ad that runs every time you pick it up.
even at the end of it?s life – when you discard it.
the brand can be redefined by the product (for good or for ill)
skoda – 10 years refining the product to redefine the brand.
is land-rover a brand or a product?
the dna of the brand is the vehicle, the product
design as a job of reasserting authority for a brand.
brands are far to important to entrust to brand managers
1.7 years is the average tenure of a brand manager
product cycles are typically 2-8years…
emotional ergonomics – you love to use it.
3d dimensional brands
phases of creativity: idea >belief > embodiment
old saw: ?a brief is a collection of the client?s prejudices? is true.
we don?t listen – we watch.
if you listen to focus groups you get post-rationlisation, not insight.
emergent behaviour comes from watching, and if you watch that you find the future.
if 72% of consumer decisions are made at point of sales then how come 72% of the budget isn’t spent there?
change.
?unless we build a receiver into the client, they can?t be read for the violence of the new?
push/pull activity – push from tech, pull from marketing.
poor comms between both usually.
over-ambition can be the death of innovation – the search for the big idea, the category killer
usually great innovation is more about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and orginal way
often innovation theory triumphs over practice – management goobledegook and voodoo. buzzword bingo.
embodying it doesn’t usually fall to the innovation consultants…
innovation sheep-dip – flawed but p.c. idea that everyone can be creative. some people are just more creative than others…. training isn?t always the answer.
good design is cheap, brilliant design is free.
process: gets you the unexpected but relevant solution
?crucible? events – melting point for alloying the points of view of marketing and technical.
embodying an idea is so important – sketching and drawing is crucial.
redesigning the steam iron for tefal
two small headaches from user observation – why do I have to fill it through a tiny hole, why is it always falling off
c.f. shelf-demonstrable
stand somewhere else to solve the problem from where you are used to – to get to the unexpected but relevant solution
new paradigms of product – how do you create them?
when we see something we don?t quite understand – your brain rifles through all the categories it knows and tries to find a match
businesses need to be a zoom lens to see the very small things that might disrupt the vision.
occupy yourself with the parts without losing sight of the whole.
businesses should ask ?why not? more than ?why?
– george bernard shaw quote
?how far do you want to dream?
shows virgin galactic video
they give extremely good talk – the confidence and passion is something to behold…
