Personal object tagging practices

Two remarkable forms of “object tagging” encountered recently at ENSCI two weeks ago:

1. Tagging for temporary storage

ENSCI is a design school in Paris. The kind of place where students need stuff for their practices, which means that they have storage facilities (small boxes made of steel). Besides, students are encouraged to take one semester abroad, off the school OR to make an internship in a design studio. This situation often leads to what you can see on the picture below: there’s plenty of packages and student’s boxes distributed in the different rooms of the school building. Some leave bike frames, others leave their old tent. And some students have the delicate practice of tagging their belongings with their names/email/telephone/reason for being elsewhere/time of return.

2. Tagging to give names for one’s artifacts

Another curious example consists in this series of artifacts owned by one of the students I taught to last week. Each object (apart from the glasses) have a dedicated name indicated by the colored adhesive tags. The heart-shaped mirror is called “Pocahontas”, the Black-Berry cell phone is called “Johnnie” (it’s a “she”) and the deck of cards is called “Suce-Vieille” (which is hard to translate literally in English, it means something like “Blowing Old”). The owner of these objects told me that it was important to give a name to objects which are close to her. Definitely uncommon with tiny objects like this but much likely in the case of cars, vaccum cleaners or roomba bots recently.

Why do I blog this? Preparing a speech about the people’s practices in the house of the future, I am convinced that these two observations have something to say about our interactions with objects. Whenever you chat with people with similar practices, you end up discussing very important matter concerning how they project meaning in their personal artifacts. Working on a conference project about robots definitely makes me think about such elements.

Facebook and spatial implications in Menlo Park

I’m generally not that interested in social networking sites per se… but this article in the WSJ sent on the Dr. Fish list caught my attention. It basically addresses the implication of Facebook upcoming move from Palo Alto (University avenue) to Menlo park on a new campus, which it is taking over from Sun Microsystems.

What’s interesting in this article is simply the whole set of questions that is raised by this move. Some excerpts I found intriguing:

“The proposals will tackle how to refine the perimeter of the fortress-like campus, how to handle traffic as Facebook boosts staffing as well as how to build up housing and services such as stores in an area that currently doesn’t even have a major grocery market.
(…)
At a city hall news conference Feb. 8 to announce Facebook’s arrival, Mayor Richard Cline acknowledged there were debates to come. “We’re going to talk about what we can do, what we can’t do, we’re going to talk about traffic, we’re going to talk about transit, we’re going to talk about tax money and we’re going to talk about public benefit,” he said. “We’re going to have a fight and it’s going to be loud.”
(…)
Facebook doesn’t require city approval to move in this summer, since it is taking over an existing (albeit largely empty) campus
(…)
Part of Facebook’s interest in the community stems from its desire to replicate the college neighborhood feel it had in Palo Alto as a start-up. That won’t be easy on the former Sun campus, which was once dubbed Sun Quentin by employees—a reference to the San Quentin prison—because it is separated by a major highway from the rest of the city.
(…)
“The real issue is density. If the intent is to increase density substantially, the problem is that the infrastructure for it just doesn’t exist.”“

Why do I blog this? This is just fascinating, especially when thinking of Facebook as a dual entity: a huge on-line community on one side and a company on the other side. I am wondering on how the culture developed by such a company influence the spatial/environmental/social decisions it will take in a place like this.

Bloom.io: “Pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration”

Bloom.io seems to be an interesting platform and their tag-line is just fantastic.

“Our mission to bring you a new type of visual discovery experience is already underway. We’re building a series of bite-sized applications that bring the richness of game interactions and the design values of motion graphics to the depth and breadth of social network activity, locative tools, and streaming media services.  These new ‘visual instruments’ will help you explore your digital life more fluidly and see patterns and rhythms in the online services you care about. And they’re coming to a tablet, media console, or modern web browser near you!“

via blog.bloom.io

Why do I blog this? it seems to be an interesting platform for what Fabien calls “sketching with data. The motivation from Bloom’s team is quite relevant too:

““The ways in which people interact with computation are changing swiftly as we move into more casual relationships with our digital services on tablets, big screens, and across social networks. We believe we have some compelling answers about how digital experiences will evolve into these new contexts. Please, follow along with us and explore these playful, dynamic instruments of discovery together.“

Urban tragedy: a street sign that lost its performativity

This street sign, which indicates that it’s not allowed to park your car along this sidewalk recently went through a very intriguing process: it used to be several inches on the right, next to the curb (a careful observer would see a tiny black dot on the sidewalk). Being there, it was conveniently placed to prevent cars to be parked on the sidewalk. Few weeks ago, the signage has been moved next to the wall… It plays a limited role in preventing cars to park there.

The signage used to have both a meaning AND an affordance (preventing cars to park there)… it now has only a meaning… that people generally do not follow because they park their cars there in the evening.

To put it differently, these street signage lost its performativity; the capacity of an artifact (or language) to intervene in the course of human events.

Back Track : mark it, go anywhere, get back

People talk a lot about location-based services these days. GPS car navigation system is quite mainstream for a while, geosocial services such as Foursquare or Facebook places are more and more adopted, and media attention is still focusing on the promises of location-based marketing (even though users in Europe seem to be wary about them).

However, there is less focus on more niche products based on similar technologies. My neighbor recently lent me one of these curious location-based service. It’s called “BackTrack” and can be defined as a “personal location finder”. It’s advertised with the following elements:

“BackTrack utilizes GPS technology in its most basic format, BackTrack has only two buttons and stores up to three locations – just mark it and forget it until it’s time to return. At the end of the day, select your location and the BackTrack displays direction and distance to travel. Use it to find your car in a crowded parking lot, your treestand or the trailhead, even to rendezvous with your group.“

Or, as described in a very succinct way: “AS EASY AS 1-2-3 Mark it – Go Anywhere – Get Back”. The idea is quite good and the interface is very basic (2 buttons, very limited information on the display), which makes it quite easy to use. However, getting GPS signals is sometimes very difficult in the narrow streets of Paris and Geneva (where I tested it). Using it “on the way back” to your reference point, the experience is curious, as you do not necessary take the same route: you then walk, look at the display and check how to move around with the compass. It was not that efficient to find my way back to my hotel in Paris but I enjoyed having these sort of “location-awareness” information. It told me how far how I was from my apartment in Geneva when spending one week in Paris. Not very useful indeed but surely evocative and close to what I expect to encounter in the 21st Century. Accessing this kind of information without specific ideas in mind about how it can be useful, that was intriguing.

Besides, what’s interesting here is that the idea is very close to a project I blogged about last year, called “Address necklace by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar:

““Address is a handmade electronic jewelry piece. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewelry is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many kilometers you are from that location, using a GPS component built into the pendant. As you take Address around the world with you, it serves as a personal connection to that place, making the world a little smaller or maybe a little bigger.““

The Address necklace is of course different, more poetic and evocative than the use cases mentioned for BackTrack (“at the mall and stadium parking lots, at the outdoor festival, the park, for travel or you next outdoor adventure“)… and you can set the location only one time (which makes it very precious and important).

Why do I blog this? Testing the Long Tail of location-based services is always interesting to sense what sort of insights these devices can bring us. It also helps to show that there are different ways to use such technologies.

Reading notes from “Player One” by Douglas Coupland

A few quotes from “Player One” by Douglas Coupland that I enjoyed (combined with an exploration of how I can export note from a Kindle app on an iPad):

About artifacts and objects

Encountered at “Location 92″ (Oh btw, given that I read the Kindle version of the book, I exported the note from kindle.amazon.com and got this weird new term that people in the future may refer to as the new version of pages):

“some kind of sin-detecting hand-held gadget lurking in his shirt pocket, lying in wait for Karen to undo more buttons or pick her nose or perform any other silly act that was formerly considered private, a silly act that will ultimately appear on a gag-photo website alongside JPEGs of baseball team portraits in which one member is actively vomiting, or on a movie site where teenagers, utterly unaware of the notion of cause and effect, jump from suburban rooftops onto trampolines, whereupon they die.“

Location 869:

“he can’t believe the crap people used to put in their bodies in the twentieth century.“

Location 3336 (it’s awkward to think about the equivalent in a paper book: page 3336 feels like a vacation to a country with a devalued, say when you trade 10 millions against 5$):

“Dark-Age High Tech Technical sophistication is relative. In the eleventh century, people who made steps leading up to their hovel doors were probably mocked as being high tech early adopters.“

Location ? (for some reasons I cannot get an excerpt’s location when other people also highlighted it as relevant for their own purposes):

“Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money.“

About space and place

Location 1065:

“An airport isn’t even a real place. It’s a pit stop, an in-between area, a “nowhere,” a technicality — a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of transcontinental jet flight. Airports are where you go right after you’ve died and before you get shipped off to wherever you’re going next. They’re the present tense crystallized into aluminum, concrete, and bad lighting.“

About “the future”

Location 1076:

“The future is not the same thing as Eternity. Eternity is everything and nothing. In the future, things that were already happening keep going on, but without you.“

Location 1901:

“the thing about the future is that it’s full of things happening, whereas the present so often feels stale and dead. We dread the future but it’s what we have.“

Location 1262:

“a clump of business cards so old they lacked area codes in front of the phone numbers. Even amidst the confusion, this absence of area codes struck Rachel as remarkable. Sometimes the events that mark the change from one era to another are so slow that they are invisible while they happen.“

What we are as human

Location 1827:

“I think we’re everything: our brain’s wiring, the things our mothers ate when they were pregnant, the TV show we watched last night, the friend who betrayed us in grade ten, the way our parents punished us. These days we have PET scans, MRIs, gene mapping, and massive research into psychopharmacology — so many ways of explaining the human condition. Personality is more like a . . . a potato salad composed of your history plus all of your body’s quirks, good and bad.“

Location 2001:

“Look at you all. You’re a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism. No seasons in your lives — merely industrial production cycles that rule you far better than any tyrant. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well all be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be.“

Why do I blog this? As usual with Coupland’s book, the vocabulary and the insights brought by his writing are compelling and strikingly pertinent to discuss current socio-technical trends. I find it useful to keep them up my sleeve just in case I need to exemplify certain topics in my presentation/teaching.

My flash code has been contaminated by a fat virus

Encountered in Paris yesterday morning.

(Intentional) Derelict 2D code in the city with an interesting caption (which perhaps explains the fact that the code is not readable with your usual QR code reader).

The diversity of platforms to read digital texts

Why do I blog this? Working on a chapter in my book about recurring failures of technologies, I quickly created this diagram that shows the different iterations of platforms to read digital texts/content. The point was to show the large diversity of systems, as opposed to the unique “e-book reader” (reading books on photoframe!?). Of course, it’s quickly made so I just mapped the different technical objects that enable people to access digital texts/content (based on various form factors, devices). I also avoided overloading the diagram by only adding seminal devices (lots of Apple devices in there) and some recent versions. I certainly missed other platforms.

Screen multiplicity in a Swiss train

Sitting on a Swiss train the other day, I became fascinated by this air pilot playing with his laptop PC and his tablet.

But it became even more fascinating when the guy fired up his iPhone:

Why do I blog this? Fascination towards compulsive usage of technologies. This is definitely an extreme user with peculiar practices, but it was fascinating to see how he combinbed certain sorts of interactions/app usage to certain parameters (screen size, presence of a keyboard, etc.). It was also curious to see how the mobile context (a train with a limited personal space) was not so problematic to accomodate the use of three displays at the same time.

From “Learning from Las Vegas” to design research

During my Christmas vacations, I finally had some time to read “Learning from Las Vegas” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Working on a course about field research, I was particularly interested by the way the authors framed the importance of observation in design. Two quotes struck me as important:

The first one is:

“Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and to begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is to question how we look at things.

There is a perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can look downward to go upward. And withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgments more sensitive. There is a way of learning from everything.” p.3

I quite enjoyed this one, especially when considering the whole debate about the so-called inability of user research to lead to “disruptive innovations”.

The second one is:

“Analysis of one of the architectural variables in isolation from the others is a respectable scientific and humanistic activity, so long as all are resynthesized in design. Analysis of existing American urbanism is a socially desirable activity to the extent that it teaches us architects to be more understanding and less authoritarian in the plans we make for both inner-city renewal and new development.” p.6

The implications are important here as well, the idea that design is about synthesis is interesting.

Why do I blog this? Being involved in a week-long workshop about field research for design, I try to find some relevant angles for the students. These two quotes (which of course badly summarizes the whole book by Venturi and Brown) are intriguing and useful for my work. It’s also interesting to see what can be translated from architecture to other design domains.