GPS 9000

Anticipating the less-than-lovely side of ubiquitous computing scenarios, this photo is the end point of a circuitous GPS navigation FAIL on the way to relatives for Thanksgiving dinner last week. Looks like we’re driving into the river there. After what we went through, it wouldn’t surprise me if the GPS lady sent us right on into the ol’ Housatonic.

We made it unscathed but a bit dizzy from the miscues and miscommunications that were the result of an entangled navigation assemblage of people, roads, cellular telephony and satellite location practices. Along the route from northern New Jersey to somewhere in the woods of Connecticut we ended up departing from what seemed like the correct route along a major highway, but were told to exit by the lady in the GPS box, which I did with a little bit of raised eyebrows from the cohabitants of the car, including myself. I was skeptical initially, thinking that the GPS had been misprogrammed to another set of relatives whose home was somewhere around there. So, there was that, which implied a bit of skepticism tossed at the vehicle’s copilot, which caused some tension, on top of everything else. The GPS lady sent us down a couple of surface streets that constituted a short diversion around and then immediately back onto the same highway, in the same direction, toward the same goal.

This same “bug” (or whatever..) happened again further along, with the GPS lady taking us off route, onto some surface streets to make a long U-turn and then (conveniently and fortuitously) into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts, which allowed for a bathroom break. GPS lady then told us to get back onto the same highway.

This is either real HAL 9000 style Ubicomp, a test by “the man” to see how much people will blindly listen to their GPS ladies and do ridiculous things, or a case-in-point as to how sucky these things are to begin with. By this point, we were fairly skeptical about the ability of the GPS to navigate, and the conversations turned to things like — maybe the maps need to be updated and questions about Amazon’s return policy. Things like that. Meanwhile, alternative mechanisms were deployed to further entangle the navigation process — iPhones were fingered, alternative routes suggested, questions were raised about the fitness of one biway over another roughly parallel highway, calls were made to discuss alternatives and readjust anticipated arrival times, conversations on phone calls were taken as Gospel directions when they were really questions to the person on the other end (who couldn’t be heard except by the caller — as in “Take a left at the bridge.”, which really was “Take a left at the bridge?” and so a left was taken at the bridge, etc.) Confusion ensued (big time) as navigation became a group activity, which seems entirely a bad idea under even the most pleasant of circumstances. In summary — the same old sort of people-practices that have always gone into navigation and mobility practices, despite the GPS lady and her fancy tricks.

Why do I blog this?Another in a series of observations about the failure of technical instruments like GPS’s were meant to ameliorate, with a bit of cynacism towards the Ubicomp pink pony dream. Despite the dream and vision of fancy-futures, the entanglement of humans and non-humans into a knotted cooperative does not look like the advertising literature and product descriptions.

Mobile Defense and Chinatown Cobbler

Curious strategy for preventing bumper dings — a bumper for the bumper, you might say. It’s the Mobile De-fender. (Get it? De Fender?) You will see material like this for preventing a lower category of bump, such as a “light tap” from negotiating a tricky parallel parking job, or even the deliberate tap to inch a car up a bit to fit better in the spot. As I was the victim of an a**hole who just steady backed up way more then he had to, willfully unaware that we were behind him, lights on and about 5 meters clear of him, steaming his ridiculous enormous 80’s Cadillac while we were waiting for him to vacate his spot, probably tipsy from a pitcher of beer at the Pizzaria we were going for family dinner, I can empathize with the necessity of additional rubberized armaments to prevent these kinds of minor dings. Fortunately, there was no noticeable damage — I think bumpers are pretty well designed these days to take a 3-5 mile per hour kiss.

Related somehow is this cobbler seen in Chinatown in New York City, working on fixing some woman’s busted heel or something. How is it related to the rubber bumper bumper? I noticed his materials — recycled rubber from a full tire (on the left, along the wall running into the frame) and a scrap of rubber from a tire on the right bottom. A resourceful, resource-reusing cobbler here. Bravo, I guess.

Why do I blog this? Observations of curious human improvisational practices for preventing abuse and renewing the use of their various mobile artifacts.

A Story In Fragments

There’s a story here. The bottle smashed on the ground is a lovely blue-green glass with a Sake label of some sort on it, probably from the pocket-sized Sake specialty store 10 meters or so back down the block. I don’t know if the smashed bottle, and the janky protective garbage bag over the driver’s side window here have anything to do with one another, but I wonder..

Why do I blog this?Thinking about how fragments of past experiences leave lingering traces to be interpreted and pondered over. Nothing forensic. Just materialized historic traces.

Ubicomp is like a 5 year old wishing for a pink pony

Complete Ubicomp fail. I mean..they can’t even get this most simple of scenarios straightened out and they want to put my refrigerator and toaster oven on the network? WTF. Seriously. Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will be so much more simpler and seamless and bug-free, I want to punch someone in the eye. They sound like a 5 year old who whines that they want a pink pony for their birthday. Ferchrissake. Just think even once about all the existing hassles that pink pony wishers have brought into the world and be happy that you can still breath the air around you.

Okay. Fancy hotel with all the bells and whistles. Sensor in the bathroom because some over competent architect/engineer or other member of a hubris-heavy discipline assumes I can’t find a light switch because I’m stupid/drunk/tired. Sensor detects my buffoonish/loaded/sleepy body in the bathroom and turns the light on for me. End of “use case.” Only, this sensor just cuts the light on whenever it pleases. In the middle of the night.

Solution: Door closure.

Result: Less sleep and a resentful blog post.

Why do I blog this? Observations about why Ubicomp is done better in sci-fi movies than in real life.

Dead objects preserved

Observed on a walk-about San Francisco, curious antique objects and their preservation, or lack of. I stumbled across this diorama-like recreation at an unused entranceway to the San Francisco Chronicle building (at least, I think that’s what this building was.) It was Herb Caen’s office frozen in time, with his old typewriter preserved under glass.

Nearby I found this old somewhat vandalized fire alarm call box and wondered if these are still active and in use, or if they’ve been taken over by the near ubiquity of mobile phones to call in emergencies.

Why do I blog this? No nonsense observations about objects that become deactivated and their continuing role as socialized intermediaries that continue to relate to distant cousins, in this case, the mobile phone as emergency callbox, and the keyboard — or, more generally, networked computer.

What does $5 get you, anyway?

Slideshow from The Five Dollar Comparison on Flickr

In the silty ash of this latest economic meltdown, I’m wondering — what does a fin (or its equivalent in the other legal mechanisms of value exchange) get you these days, anyway?

Good question. Really good, when you think that someday soon, with reductions in manufacturing and materials costs, secondary sales markets and other factors will make the cost of owning a phone around that $5 mark. Half the world’s population already owns a mobile phone. It is a very real possibility that some of the world’s remaining 3.3 billion may also participate in mobile communications practices. What does that world look like? How do fundamental aspects of human social life change when personal communication is accessible to almost anyone? Certainly we can only speculate, maybe do some informed speculation.

Recently studio chum Rhys Newman presented “The Five Dollar Comparison” during a Nokia Design roadshow to introduce the question and ask people to participate in discussing the $5 question. We’re doing it simply, without big name thinkers and prognosticators. Just people, taking pictures of things they bought for about $5. Photographs are shared in the fivedollarcomparison group on Flickr. It’s a far ranging, exciting conversation through images, telling stories about how $5 can get you an English speaking taxi driver for door-to-door service in Kabul, or $5 will get you a delicious bowl of pork ramen in Shibuya, or a porter to carry your 25 kilo load for half a day up the Inca Trail in Peru, or a thick fancy Sunday newspaper in Venice Beach.

Photo by svanes

Personal communications for $5. Sounds noble in the age of iPhones and Google Phones and overpriced double-billed phone plans — toys for people with jobs and maybe a bit of a fear of not having the latest and greatest that their friends have. Or, maybe just good business sense in a world where the Nokia 1100, the number one selling phone in the world, has sold 200 million units — the biggest single consumer electronics device out there in the world. Count them. It’s true. No joke.

Access to a way to project oneself across town, or across the world. It puts into question the meaning of distance and time; changes how authority and trust are managed; changes who participates, where conversations start and how communities are formed. Somewhere a phone will mean the possibility to begin interest-bearing savings. Somewhere else, a phone will mean finding out where work for the day might, rather than guessing and perhaps losing a day’s wages. Somewhere else again, phones will become disposable, one-off objects that, hopefully, do not clutter the mountains of waste already choking us.

This is where we’re starting. Asking a question to start a conversation about five dollars. There is no one answer. There may just likely be 3.3 billion answers, each as personal as the communications a five dollar phone affords.

Discussions around the consequenes of a truly connected planet have been going on for some time and the fivedollarcomparison.org is a small step to broaden the discussion and explore how the impact might vary across cultures and contexts by asking this simple question: what can you buy for five dollars?

Participate. Let us know what kind of object or service you can buy for $5 dollars wherever you are, and wherever you go. Email your submissions to add@fivedollarcomparison.org or adding them to the add@fivedollarcomparison.org or adding them to the fivedollarcomparison group on Flickr Please read through the guidelines on fivedollarcomparison.org/participate.

Studio mates Raphael Grignani and Jan Chipchase have some thoughts on this topic, too.

Drift Deck (Analog Edition) Card Art

The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be — you see a fire hydrant, or you come across a pigeon lady. The action is meant to be performed when the object is seen, or when you come across the described situation. For example — take a photograph, or make the next right turn. The cards also contain writerly extras, quotes and inspired words meant to supplement your wandering about the city.

More project details here.

Institute for the Future: Blended Realities Fall Technology Exchange

While I’m still in Helsinki I’m projecting myself into the near future, thinking about this upcoming seasonal “Fall Technology Horizons Exchange” with the Institute for the Future, November 18 and 19. I’ll be on a small panel with the lovely Kati London of Botanicalls fame and with whom I shared an all-too brief stage at DLD in Munich last February.

Our panel topic is described thus: By giving plants, trees and other inanimate objects online identity, people are bringing awareness and sentience to the objects around us. What happens when trees, plants, and things we carry acquire online presence and can communicate with us and with each other? How do you respond when your wallet pings you?

Good stuff.

The full event is on physical-digital hybridity, under the title “Blended Reality: Reports from the Digital/Physical Future.”

Get ready to immerse yourself in a new blended world, a place where people
weave together digital and physical environments as they go about their daily
lives. It’s a world where the virtual and the physical are seamlessly integrated,
and Cyberspace is not a place you go to but rather a layer tightly integrated into
the world around us.

Self Explanatory: Street Level User Interface

I found this quite pervasive practice in Helsinki of giving restaurants a big hunk of didactic anchorage through these geographic names of cities or entire geographical regions. No guessing what sort of dish and style of food — even anticipating for you the decor you might find inside or style of service. It’s all implied in the name of the place.

Why do I blog this? Things observed — street level user interfaces. The readable, legible city without any need for data services or ubiquitous computing modules. Quite nice.

Design Fiction / Science Fiction

Spied about while meeting-and-greeting Helsinki colleagues at Nokia House, some materials that I couldn’t help but recognize in the context of the early morning writing I’ve been trying to do, refining the last three presentations I’ve given last month on “Design Fiction.”

There’s a curious practice here that I don’t think is entirely new, but there are some exciting directions from whence the idea has circulated, drawing me back to the relationship between the science of fact and the science of fiction, and then to the old science-technology-studies principles, and Latour, who taught me to not have anything to do with clearly delineated boundaries between much of anything, particularly any kind of science. This is where it starts.

I can imagine a practice that can comfortably work in between and even be comfortable swapping properties between fact and fiction for the purposes of telling a story that is a materialization of an idea, or one’s imagination. It’s like science fiction made real, without the weight and burden of the whole truth.

Why science fiction? Because it’s a literary genre that can comfortably stretch the now out toward a possible near future world better than other ways of story telling. (I’m perfectly happy to accept that there are others — the symmetry though between the hubris of science fact and the imaginative whimsy of science fiction is too hard to resist.) That practice is some derivation of design probably.

Why design? Because so far it seems to be less inclined to be as disciplined as the other practices I’ve tried, it has a vocabulary that includes the word “people”, it can work with vernacular, everyday, even mundane practices quite well, it implies working with one’s hands and head and even risking a nicked finger, etc.

While a restless graduate student at the University of Washington I worked at a place called the Human Interface Technology Lab, or HITLab. The lab was working quite hard on virtual reality (VR), another (again) of a kind of immersive, 3D environment that, today, one might experience as something like Second Life. The technology had a basic instrumental archetype canonized in a pair of $250,000 machines (one for each eyeball) called, appropriately, the RealityEngine. With video head mount that looked like a scuba-mask, one could experience a kind of digital virtual world environment that was exciting for what it suggested for the future, but very rough and sparse in its execution. As I was new to the new HITLab (still in temporary trailers on a muddly slope by the campus’ steam plant), I went through the informal socialization rituals of acquainting myself to the other members of the team — and to the idioms by which the lab shared its collective imaginary about what exactly was going on here, and what was VR. Anything that touches the word “reality” needs some pretty fleet-footed references to help describe what’s going on, and a good set of anchor points so one can do the indexical language trick of “it’s like that thing in..” For the HITLab, the closest we got to a shared technical manual was William Gibson’s
“Neuromancer” which I was encouraged to read closely before I got too far involved and risked the chance of being left out of the conversations that equated what we were making with Gibson’s “Cyberspace Deck”, amongst other science fiction props. I mean — that’s what we said. There was no irony. It was the reference point. I’m serious. I mean..this is from a paper that Randy Walser from Autodesk wrote at the time:

In William Gibson’s stories starting with Neuromancer, people use an instrument called a “deck” to “jack” into cyberspace. The instrument that Gibson describes is small enough to fit in a drawer, and directly stimulates the human nervous system. While Gibson’s vision is beyond the reach of today’s technology, it is nonetheless possible, today, to achieve many of the effects to which Gibson alludes. A number of companies and organizations are actively developing the essential elements of a cyberspace deck (though not everyone has adopted the term “deck”). These groups include NASA, University of North Carolina, University of Washington, Artificial Reality Corp., VPL Research, and Autodesk, along with numerous others who are starting new R&D programs.

(PDF: http://tr.im/zoj)

There’s nothing wrong with this — it’s all good stuff. It’s a way of creating that shared imaginary that knits the social formations together. Latour would remind us that this is the socialization practices — this is an instance of the “how” and the “why” of technology. Technology is precisely the socialization of ideas.

It’s refreshing when you come across some good fiction — science or otherwise — positioned to be read, referred back to or just as a kind of badge to mark the contours of that shape and influence. Nothing literal — just literary, the edges of design fiction practices.

Refinement in Degrees

A scale of design models in these check boxes suggests refinement from basic form to mechanical, color, materials and so forth — stopping at full appearance. Appearance absent functionality, which can only be inferred based on what it is a model of. In the world of mobile phones, the functionality is implicit — making calls and so a design prototype need not concern itself with use and operation.

Or does it?

What are the ways design can dig below the appearance, into actual use in order to better understand the contexts and vernacular aspects of people and their practices? Can it be done rapidly — quick enough to place things in context so that the freshness of the idea from its inception is decanted into the “model”? What about fictionalizing that experience — making props, instead of prototypes?

Stifo@Sandberg Moving Movie Industry

I participated with a talk at this conference called Moving Movie Industry for the Sandberg Institute at the lovely new Amsterdam Central Library was a one day series of lectures related to this notion that the movie industry is “moving” onto some new and interesting territory. There were several very intriguing talks, which you can probably glean from the list below.

The people participating at the conference were some heroes already, and some new people who i finally get to meet face-to-face so I can knot them into my network without feeling like a stalker. For example Geert Lovink the well-known media theorist and activist who just introduced Blender Foundation and showed some of the amazing films created with free, open-source 3D rendering software. It was also nice to hear from Floris Kaayk, who is the creator of the effective documentary Metalosis Maligna, about what happens when metal implants begin to take over your body. He also showed another documentary called The Order Electrus about an species of insects made entirely of electronics components. It’s a nice piece of Design Fiction, in my mind — an imaginative and visually evocative story about a possible future in a world of discarded industrial wastelands. Anne Helmond gave a funny and insightful talk about people and their relationship to their blogs, with some curious examples of people apologizing to their blog (not the audience who reads, but the blog itself — the software or something.) Bruce Sterling gave a talk about the future and ways we imagine it, which had my rapt attention as it helped me think through some of the early Design Fiction material, particularly on this topic of models by which we schematize possible futures worlds. I also enjoyed the talk by the Guerrilla Games guy Jan-Bart van Beek who talked about some of the production techniques and issues for their visceral, carnal hyper violent Kill Zone game. He showed one video of this Hummer commercial by Joseph Kosinski called “Selector” which used video game visual idioms to present the Hummer — a hideous vehicle for knot-headed buffoons with 8th grade mentality — as if it were a configurable vehicle from a video game. Which is about the only thing that piece of crap should be, ever. If even that. But, this selection along with a few others were intriguing as they were described for the way cinema and video game visual idioms cross back and forth (swap properties) perhaps on their way to establishing new visual languages.

The talk I gave changed from the title I originally submitted, which was to be something more related to real-world-analytics-meets-mobile-contexts, but when I looked more closely at the original conference description, I realize how badly I had misinterpreted the “moving” aspect as “mobile”, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk about movies on mobiles, which I think is pretty much the most uninteresting thing in the world. So, I did the third draft of Design Fiction (after Design Engaged at the beginning of the month, and SHiFT 2008 a week or so ago) which hopefully I’ll finish writing this weekend.

Where: Theater van ’t Woord
Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam
Oosterdokskade 143
1011 DL Amsterdam

Time: 9.30 hours – 17.00 hours

Entreance: Free

Reservations via conference@sandberg.nl
(obligated due to limited amount of seats)

Program:
09.30 – Registration & coffee
09.50 – Welcome by Mieke Gerritzen & Hans Maarten van den Brink

10.00 – Bruce Sterling (USA ) - Science fiction writer Keynote
10.40 – Julian Bleecker (USA) - Near Future Laboratory Mobile Means Mobile

11.20 – Short coffee break

11.30 – Jan-Bart van Beek (NL) – Guerrilla Games 1 Million Manhours : Making Killzone 2
12.10 – Steffen Pauws (NL) - Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven How TV Watching Will Become An Experience

12.50 – Lunch break

13.30 – Matt Hanson (UK) – Film Futurist Swarm of Angels
14.10 – Ton Roosendaal (NL) – Blender Free and Open Content media production with Open Source, presentation of a successful case study
14.50 – Floris Kaayk (NL) - Film director / artist Metalosis Maligna

15.05 – Short coffee break

15.15 – Luna Maurer / Roel Wouters (NL) - Designers Jubilator
15.30 – Geert Lovink (NL) - Institute for Network Cultures VideoVortex: The Politics and Aesthetics of Online Video Platforms
16.10 – Anne Helmond (NL) - Blogger Blogging, Software Standards and Template Culture
16.40 – Drinks & snacks

Moderator Koert van Mensvoort

iCal Interface Fail

You’d think that scheduling would be one of the easier problems to work out, but clearly there are these simple little constant fails. Here’s a scheduling event for a conference call I will have in a couple of weeks. The call will likely happen when I’m in Helsinki, but the invite is for some other time zone. But, I

A New Logic Analyzer and the HMC6352 I2C Compass

Two things that’ve been sitting on my bench for a good spell — this HMC6352 magnetic compass with an I2C interface, and the Saleae “Logic” logic analyzer. I figured I could combine the two together, showing how I used the Logic to check out the operation of the HMC6352.

First, the HMC6352 is a pretty easy to use magnetic compass with 0.5 degree accuracy. It’s all wrapped up nicely with a pretty normal I2C interface to a bunch of registers on the device, and command-driven queries for reading the compass heading.

The Saleae “Logic” logic analyzer is pretty sweet for debugging I2C as I’ve mentioned in the past. This one is nice and compact, with a reasonable bunch of logic lines for doing simple analysis. I played with this one for a number of projects over the last few months — mostly I2C projects, which is where most of my interface work is these days. But, the “Logic” will also work with a bunch of stock “analyzers” for RS232 and SPI as well, making it pretty versatile for many situations.

The analyzer is a pretty compact package — 1.6″ square and only .36″ high. So, basically miniature for a logic analyzer. It comes with a 9 conductor umbilical along with E-Z-Hook XKM probes that you can use or not, depending on how you’re hooking up to things.

The Logic has a pretty easy-to-use bit of front-end software to handle all the set-up and UI work for the teeny-tiny hardware. It’s a UI that is unlike what you might expect from a bit of Windows-based software. It’s very gooey, using some subtle screen effects and UI elements that, for this OSX guy, are not what I think of when I think of XP. Which is good. It makes using the UI not feel like I’m being forced to drink a Rusty Nail or something for breakfast.

The analyzer samples much quicker than I normally have need for and does so without any problems. I’m usually down in the low range — .2 MHz and 1 M samples is usually plenty for what I’m doing. But, if you need a wider range of samples or a higher sample rate, the analyzer will go all the way up to 24 MHz. Those 9 conductors are 8 data lines plus one ground, so you can analyzer an 8-bit wide bus if you wanted at 24 MHz.

So, I put the Saleae Logic on the HMC6352 circuit to give it a shot. First, the HMC6352 set-up.

Although the HMC6352 has a wide voltage range, I was playing around with a level shifter circuit that was already hooked up to an Arduino on the bench, so I went ahead and just kept that circuit as is. So, the basic set-up is my Arduino I2C lines (SDA and SCL) going through a bi-directional level shifter shifts 3.3V <--> 5V, and then to the HMC6352 SDA and SCL lines. I use yellow wire for SCL and blue wire for SDA.

I ended up using the Saleae Logic to dig a bit deeper into the communication between my microcontroller (an Atmega168 sitting on an Arduino) and the HMC6352 as a way to test out the logic analyzer.

First I wanted to just probe the I2C communication. The basic transaction my Arduino code was doing was to send an “A” to the HMC6352. According to the specification sheet, writing an “A” to the device causes it to return two bytes of data — the high-order and low-order bytes of a 16 bit value indicating the compass’ heading. Easy enough. Here’s the Arduino doing just that. First, it sets up the write to the I2C device at address 0×21. Then it writes an “A” which, in the ASCII table, is the value 0×41. (N.B. The spec sheet says the HMC6352 is at address 0×42 but — and don’t ask me why — sometimes the address specified has to be right-shifted one bit in order to “take”. I mean I sort of know why, but I don’t know why this is the case sometimes — a r/w bit thing or something. Too much to bother with, but a good way to make good use of a logic analyzer when you’re stuck wondering why your device doesn’t seem to be listening to you. I learned this the long way and only had a fancy DSO to try and debug it.)

There it is in the top picture. A simple write to the device at address 0×21 with all the ACKs, meaning whatever is out there, heard us and is acknowledging receipt of the write. And, it looks like we get two bytes of data back — a 0×03 and a 0×64. The first byte will be the high-order byte and the second byte is the low-order byte. 0×0364 is 868, which we normalize by dividing by 10, to get 86.8 degrees. Done. I’m pretty sure that’s that. Finally, the measurement features are pretty cool — useful for confirming clock speeds or verifying a bit train. There’s a good use of a simple, pretty inexpensive ($150) logic analyzer that’ll certainly save you $150 worth of your time many times over. Plus, the small size and convenience of USB make it easy enough to fit on your bench and store away or travel around with when it’s not in use. My only quibble is that it’s only for Windows, but that’s a minor one. I don’t really play too hard in the OS religious wars. I run whatever makes my life easier at whatever moment. So, a $200-ish Windows chassis in the laboratory that just runs a few apps like some CAD software and things like my Propeller coding environment, .NET development, software for test equipment like this and AVR Studio 4 — it just helps me get things done rather than being adamantine about which OS religion I’ll adhere to and, then, not getting anything done except spending time porting things from one OS to another or complaining about how much a Windows license costs or whatever.

Wow. Okay. Off my high horse. Check this logic analyzer out. I can recommend it after using it for a few months.

#include 

// http://wiring.org.co/reference/libraries/Wire/index.html
// On the Arduino board, Analog In 4 is SDA, Analog In 5 is SCL
// The Wire class handles the TWI transactions, abstracting the nitty-gritty to make
// prototyping easy.
// This sketch has a HMC6352 attached to the I2C bus, through a bi-directional
// level-shifter circuit.
int address = 0x42 >> 1;
 int reading;
void setup()
{

  Serial.begin(9600);

  CLKPR = (1<
								

									Posted at 11pm on 10/24/08 | no comments | Filed Under: Arduino,  Atmel,  Hardware,  How To,  software read on
								
							

Books for the Épistémè of Fail

What do you read when reality turns itself on its head? The financial seers in the form of the genius ex-mathematics and high-energy physics Ph.D.s — the “Quants” as they’re known on The Street — failed at their assigned task of turning the many-body problem and squirrely statistics into a clear course into the up-and-to-the-right linear, inevitable accumulation of wealth future. So, now what?

Back to basics. How has “reality” — the way the world works — been measured historically? Where did all this reliance on numbers (instead of cat entrails, tea leaves, a healthy dose of psilocybian or a good-old crystal ball) come from and why do we believe it works? For that, I’ll be turning to “The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600″ by Alfred W. Crosby. I was actually suggested this book during Manuel Lima’s presentation at SHiFT 2008, where he discussed Visual Complexity — the site and the motivations behind data visualization. (More about this in a future post.)

Why an historical treatment of quantification? Because I need to know more about this shift from qualitative ways of knowing the world. Quantification, perhaps more than most other ways of knowing, undergirds so much of the various assemblages and apparatuses — business, bureaucracy, technoscience, etc — that shape the worlds around us. Knowing its legacy throughout time can’t hurt, especially when thinking about small, subtle new ways of making the world.

And just to continue this general theme of “back to basics”, I thought it couldn’t hurt to have a copy of “The American Practical Navigator” by Nathaniel Bowditch tucked away in my emergency “go bag” (along with running shoes, a few power bars, keys to the rendezvous beach house south of LA, two liters of water, and a couple grand in cash.) Way finding, like reality, needs a good re-think.

If it wasn’t more gratuitous than pragmatic, I’d add Zizek’s “The Sublime Object of Ideology” so long as we’re trying to figure out why we do what we do, even if we know it’s the stupidest thing in the world.

Paper Maps

36 hours in Berlin right SHiFT 2008 and there’s only time for one or two things to do, really. Despite geek sensibilities, it turns out a paper map serves better than a digital one. This janky one from the hotel, flimsy and easily smudged and tattered, was actually spot-on perfect. Every street we needed to find, and U Bahn was easily navigated to. (Although, not by virtue of my lousy sense of direction.) Using a paper map makes me think — when will the still-Jurassic digital maps at lease orient themselves according to compass direction?

(I will add my friend Nicolas Nova’s map he also received while in Berlin just after I left, while we’re on the topic of paper and maps..I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me sharing this fantastic specimen.)

Tourist highlight of the 36 hours was the Stassi Museum, my curiosity peeked especially after viewing “The Lives of Others”. The history in here is fascinating, and in German. I was fortunate to have a native German speaker with me, and one who lived through this period as well. Between the drama in the exhibitions and the real-life experiences, it was well worth the time. (Curiously the museum is not well indicated in the surrounding neighborhoods. We had to ask a couple of well-liquored gents knocking back a few in a box-bar about bit enough to fit a keg and a television in.)

Here’s Markus Meckel’s desk where I’m sure zillions of horrific deeds were executed. Check out the accoutrements of tyranny here — an enormous safe (you can see the door), a shredder (on the left of the chair), a chair, a switchboard phone thing, phone and desk. Despite the tyranical history, I was awestruck by the furniture. It was so evocative of the period in a way that brought the stillness to life. You have to check out the other photos — there’s spy gear, more room furnishings (including the side room with a bed, I guess for late nights or trysts or something) and some amazing swivel chairs.

More photos from the museum exhibits are in my Berlin Flickr set.

Manhole Compass

A functionally-decorative manhole cover that emulates the features of a compass rose for those who care not to navigate by dead-reckoning, rather feature or landmark-reckoning. I know these are all over the place, the image of it summoned up a recent conversation about how much built-in navigation cities should provide. The pro-argument being that it helps tourists to get around a city when they don’t have the vernacular, experienced wayfinding abilities of a native or someone who has had time to acclimate and grow accustom to the nuances of what is where. The con-argument is that these sorts of waypoints and navigation aids makes cities over mapped, removing the unexpected encounter that can only happen when you’re lost, or eroding the experience and feeling of becoming “native” and used to a city’s ways on ones own.

I can see something in each perspective, although I would generally prefer to leave a little more to chance when navigating a city. This photo is of me in Tokyo, 2005 after I managed to get a Tokyo map uploaded to my Garmin GPS. I had absolutely 0% navi experience in Tokyo and was pretty sure I’d get completely lost, which I did on an occasion or two, but was able to rely on the GPS to get me back on track. (There were no navigation features, just top-down POV and compass.) I’m certain it changed the experience, but there was not a whole lot left to rely upon besides my own wits and my trusty Tokyo City Bilingual Atlas.

Spime Wine

Okay, I know I’m probably the last one on the planet to spot a bottle of barcoded wine, but, like..I spotted whole cases. Indulge me and pretend this is, whatever..years ago when this first started happening. Maybe I need to get my wine-on more often or something. I was overjoyed with the observation. (Everyone around me just kind of rolled their eyes and patted me on the back in mock congratulations. I insisted the moment was special.)

Icon Mania

Look at this thing! Seen at the lobby of the Arts Hotel in Lisbon, this beautiful matrix of familiar and also baffling icons indicating the services or rules or functions of the various parts of the hotel assemblage. There are some I understand — but the one with the svelte Martini glass hovering over a sleeping person? What’s that, anyway? You can dream of getting a load on? You can get drunk and pass out comfortably on our exclusive bed linens? And the two people sitting opposite each other with a floating box above them? And — what!? — an Internet Explorer icon? Like..um..I guess that’s for the business center or something. Any ideas?

Precious Mobility

More observations of preciousness with our digital devices. This cover came with the laptop and was used during shipping but the owner decided to keep it to prevent the display from becoming damaged or smudged.

Why do I blog this? Is there an intersection between design for mobility that makes this unnecessary? So that we can have our devices be as significant and important as a wallet, say, but okay to slip from our hands and drop on the floor? Does the technology change by becoming more rugged? Or does the interaction change so that we’re not using large, precious, susceptible elements like this sort of display? Is there a different kind of connected, mobile, networked device that is computational but allows us to have our bits of connected flow, sharing and composition without large mechanical keyboards and delicate big, bright, heavy, power-hungry displays?

Zip In, Reach Over, Zip Out

Seen just south of San Jose, California, another curious pragmatic interface that allows me to use my speedy, trusty debit card to complete a transaction without cash, but with a little dose of poor interaction design. After swiping my card, for security purposes (presumably) I must enter my postal zip code. So I can “Zip In, Zip Out.” This is all good stuff. If I were a thief who was a bit of a bungler, I might have swiped someone’s card and attempt to use it, but be stymied if I didn’t have the foresight to get their zip code, such as would likely be found on their drivers license, which is probably also in the wallet I just stole, or found, or whatever. So, I may have a consequential hurdle to charging up a $50 or $60 tank of gas. But the bigger hurdle might be searching for the obvious place to enter the zip code which is, of course, on the panel over around the little articulation in the otherwise flat-front of the pump. Now, this is nit-picky. Anyone would figure this out, that the entry point for numbers and such all is over on the number pad. But, I mean..why is it there and not as any considered design would place it — below or at least beside the display? And why, in a “Zip In, Zip Out” interaction should a “wait just a moment..” wait..wait..wait..clock appear at all? Even if it does take time to transact and validate, some other sort of graphic idiom that suggests zippiness seems like it would be more in keeping with the principle of fast service here.

Sigh.

Why do I blog this? Another in the continuing stream of design observations of failures, successes and imperfections to be considered.

Flat Tires and Thoughtless Acts

Do flat tires make the unlocked bicycle in the top photo less likely to be stolen? Does the fact that the owner of the bicycle in the bottom photo locked their bike make it more likely to be stripped nearly bare for its handlebars, rear tire and transmission, seat, brake cables, brake clampy-things-that-clamp-the-front-rims-to-stop-the-bike? And then, having created a rough-shod atmosphere of general decline and environment of come-what-may, does the bicycle locking post become more suited as an improvised, “thoughtless acts” style trash recepticle, seeing as it has not fulfilled its job of deterring theft and mitigating destruction?

Just asking.

Merit Badges for Things

I was awed for some reason today by this power brick for a Lenova ThinkPad thingie. The assemblage of certifications, warrants and authentication badges almost defines how large the brick can be. What this made me think of is the thicket of contested hurdles objects and devices must vault over in order to become certificated, first-class citizens in the world. Each of these indications are backed, I’m fairly sure, by thick volumes of rules, parameters, minimums and maximums and costs for laboratory verifications, all part of the knotted assemblages of social-political-technical blessings that make a thing into a Thing.

Why do I blog this? Been reading and listening to quite a good bit of Latour these days. Stumbled across this from Peter Ryan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto while looking for Latour’s statements about visualization.

Apologies

An intriguing juxtaposition between machine and this unusually emotional sticker, desolé drew me in. At first, looking at this scene in the Underground City of Montreal network — a hybrid space that occupies many square blocks underneath the city and consisting of mostly retail spaces interconnected with tunnels and escalators and subway train stops — I was drawn to the sprout of infrastructure awkwardly placed in the midst of an area where people approach a ticket booth to purchase tickets or make inquiries and so forth.

This box was just sprouting like a weed in the middle there, clearly the result of either a system upgrade which required some additional infrastructure, or perhaps it was always there of necessity and was built around. Either way, it’s undesigned because it takes into account only the functioning of the infrastructure and not people and the ways they participate in the network of underground flows. Sure, it’s absolutely instrumental and utilitarian, but there is where the design component leaves the solution. Without thinking about people, you have a bunch of boxes and wires that makes the engineers proud, but forces the machines, as in this instance, who participate as social objects always and never just as instrumentalities, to plead to the people who must walk around it — sorry. I’m really sorry that I have been introduced as a nasty, sharp edged box right in the midst of your path. I can only imagine the flows here during a busy morning or evening commute!

With this post, I introduce a new category — Undesign — to capture the observations I come across in which instrumentality and the lack of people-thinking is so clearly the guiding principle of the object or activity that I need to annotate and continue to work through my thinking about design and people and their relationships.

Touch Keyboard

A curious touch keyboard interface that was a bit confusing. This was found at a Department of Motor Vehicles location here in California this morning. The keyboard was there in this kiosk so I could type in my car’s license plate and be issued a renewed vehicle registration certificate. The geometry of the keyboard’s outline is evocative of a standard QWERTY layout, tapered toward the bottom as it is. And I hunted as if it were a QWERTY but, obviously, it’s not — the keys are alphabetically organized in rows by columns.

Why would Nicolas blog this? A curious reorientation of a keyboard meant to evoke what the standard keyboard look like, but without making assumptions about peoples’ knowledge of it’s standard key layout. An interesting design decision here. What elements from keyboards suggest their use (the geometry of the keyboard’s outline) and when can you ignore attributes for the sake of usability? What makes something usable? What assumptions can you make about familiarity and knowledges of use for things that are pervasive and whose use is implied in the design?

Design for Cardinality

Interface fail. Evidently, the ordering of the apartments inside here is different from the screwed-on doorbells so one of the tenants improvised a new user interface. Hysterical.

The implied cardinality here of apartments — top to bottom? alphabetical? — must have been poorly communicated. But the question is — why not take the more robust and fault-tolerant solution to swap the order of the paper signs taped to the inside of the door’s glass? A passing prankster might find a small bit of amusement in putting up a new post-it, perhaps with “C” and “D” instead of “A” and “B”..(ahem..)

Why would Nicolas blog this? To consider when cardinal ordering schemas do or do not imply specific interface templates. Is it a design principle that letters lower in the cardinal alphabetical “scale” go on top? Or, do they go on the bottom, as in the heuristic that basement, underground apartments always have letters, such as the dingy Apt. B, next to the boiler room?

Design Fiction @ Design Engaged 2008

Design Engaged 2008 winds down with a series of quite enjoyable “wrap-up” presentations from some real-world adventures amongst four groups who went out into the field yesterday after the last of the presentations on Saturday. Thanks to everyone and especially Andrew, Boris, Mouna, and Jenn for their hard work and especially for the invitation! Now we wait for Ben’s wrap-up presentation with some discussion.

In the meantime, I’ll quickly post the slides from my really, really early-days presentation called “Design Fiction” where I look at various kinds of prototyping as kinds of prop-making whereby objects are speculations and “conversation pieces” helping to craft and author stories about what the world could be like. This work reaches back to my dissertation, or a chapter of it, where I investigate the role that special-effects play, particularly in sci-fi film, in heping create a convincing story. It goes deeper though — there’s a precedent for film props to be quite slippery in their cultural power, with the props serving as conduits between the “laboratory” and the “set” as locales of meaning-making.

Design is a kind of authoring practice (but different in important ways that have yet to be worked out in my mind from writing words on paper — writing is not the same as what design does when working with material, and the histories and specifics of the practices are quite distinct), crafting material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material to create social objects and experiences can be seen as a kind of practice close to writing fiction. This is a presentation about the relationship between design, science fiction and the material elements that help tell visual stories about the future — props and special effects. The questions here are this: How does design participate in shaping possible near future worlds? How does the integration of story telling, technology, art and design provide opportunities to re-imagine how the world may be in the future?

What are the ways we imagine and represent the near future? How can we use design and designed artifacts of various sorts to shift our representations of the future to encompass multiple futures? How can design become the prop-making craft for hopefully more habitable, sustainable near-future worlds?

Ticket Vending Machines

A peculiar analog ticket dispenser machine found in Montreal. Rather than printing tickets on-demand, a whole bunch of physical, paper tickets are pre-stocked in the machine and, like buying candy bars from a vending machine, you select your route and the machine drops a ticket down for you.

I’m curious why this exists. Was it a re-purposed vending machine? Or a sense that pre-printing was perhaps prone to failure?

I think this is quite fantastic and a curious reversal of common technophilic trends, where you might expect a machine to be linked to a larger network of databases and algorithms and printing machines. It’s post-optimal in this way; running against trends that assume just-in-time is the appropriate optimization strategy.

Precious

Observed: Curious handling of a precious device. Or, maybe less precious. We often see other mobile technologies, like phones handled loosely. What will allow more sophisticated mobile technologies to become less precious, yet still durable?