Finished a draft of an essay the other night. The title?

Considerations of ontological questions when approaching design for mutualistic communities

ouch.

Recently I attended an intensive two-day workshop in Potsdam, Germany for an open-source PCB layout & manufacturing software program.

From the website:

"Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers and artists to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product. We are aiming to create a software in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, that allows the designer/artist/researcher/hobbyist to document their Arduino-based prototype and create a PCB layout for manufacturing"

Though I haven't done much PCB design work, I could immediately see the value for an environment such as K3. The students work here is mostly of a time sensitive nature. Month long projects to bring concepts into working and tested prototypes does not leave any time to take that extra step of converting breadboards into a more reliable PCB. While presenting my experiences with phys. comp. in Malmö I tried to convey a sense of the necessity to take into account short deadlines for working time.

Collaborating in brainstorming sessions with the people present, and socializing around tables of beer was truly inspiring as well. The entire Arduino team was there, minus David Cuartielles, who is in Seoul for a couple months. Tom Igoe from ITP, New York, was particularly enthusiastic. We were in the the interface development group, and he so well articulates fresh ideas while remaining open to everyone else that it provides a great comforting lead to work around.

The designers there are all used to working over long distances, but a dynamic of stumbling upon unexpected ideas arises when people (both familiar to each other and newly introduced) are able to share a place. Congrats to Andre Knörig for bringing everyone together.

Fritzing has bunch of funding right now, but thanks to regulations, they have to use it by the end of the year. They are currently hiring in a lot of positions. Take a look here: job offers!

I taught a workshop in PD and GEM to students at K3 today. Overall things went really well. A number of students were quite excited about the idea of customizing a piece of software to suit personal requirements, whether it be the interface or the actual functions.

It's apparent that programming isn't for everybody, but I would say that PD offers a substantially wider point of entry than a more traditional programming language, such as C++ or Java. It also makes great use of visual metaphor in it's user interface. It's subtle and simple, but it just makes sense. The data-flow model registers in a deeply intuitive place.

Not unexpectedly, often the amount of numbers and the level of abstraction is dissuading. PD allows for complete control and manipulation of digital media, which requires understanding that the media is only a representation for the numbers. To work with it at a very low level means working with those numbers. So regardless of metaphorical syntax or GUIs, one must enter a certain frame of mind when approaching the manipulation of media content.

I can completely understand how some people are put off by this. I have a hard time dealing with a program like Flash. Not because of the code or the GUI, but because so often you flip back and forth between a scripting window (one frame of mind) and the canvas (a different kind of state of mind or metaphor). It always takes me a few extra moments to gear up again.

But onwards and upwards. Some of the students from today will be presenting VJ and video installation work at KIKK at Inkonst this Saturday. I will also be developing a visual installation for the front hall.

Roger Anderson and I used a quite tangible method for the deconstruction of an ACM article recently.

It works terrifically when trying to understand the organization of a paper, and the little writing tricks and methods used by the authors.

So the workshop on VJing with PD is all booked up for next monday. 

I'll be introducing Ben Bogart's PixelTango and some PD concepts.  Long live open-source, etc., etc. 

Well, it all begins tomorrow.

Officially the first day of class for me, I'll be attending my Philosophy of Science lecture with Per-Linde (who happens to be my thesis advisor for the year). The course sounds interesting, and luckily enough the primary course literature is Dourish's Where the Action Is. I happen to just be finishing the book, but I certainly won't mind going through it again. The central theme of emboddied interaction will be prevelent in my proceeding thesis work. Nonetheless I'm pleased that I won't be under pressure to complete a lot of requisite reading, as there are still a number of other books I want to get through.

I also begin teaching tomorrow morning. This will be my first course taught at K3 - an intro lecture to physical computing, as part of the Body & Technology course. No nerves about it, and it's exciting to share the wonderful world of arduino with some fresh faces. The lecture wil be purely inspirational, and the real fun will begin Wednesday morning with an introduction to digital I/O.

I have to remember to get my plans in order for Fritzing next week. I'll be attending the experts workshop on behalf of K3's arduino lab. I'm excited about the initiative and the trip to Berlin, but it's just another element in my schedule at the moment.

Throw in moving a friend, the possibility of teaching a PD VJ workshop in a week, performing some sort of VJ or video installation at the Living Labs opening party at Inkonst, and all the rest of regular life... well, my organization needs to be tiptop.

It's not that all of this is too much to handle. I'm really enjoying all of this new work and the new challenges with it... it's just that there's no standard, no ISO for communicating and organizaing and arranging with all the respective parties involved. Every faction and sub-faction imposes its own method to keep track of themselves. Website, RSS, google calendar, email, mailing lists, facebook, nothing at all, word of mouth. So how do I consolidate all of this?

Google has been good to me, and the calendar is nice. But I really need something mobile. Last year I got a little sick of my Palm TX. By itself, it's terrific, but it isn't the most fluent device for syncing, and I hate the idea of needing it and a phone and a sketchbook and a laptop and a whatever else. For a while I went back to notes only, and that worked out for a while, but the collaborative aspect of my current undertakings doesn't really respect my ugly shorthand.

I hear good things about the iPhone, but aside from my student budget, it's not in europe yet. It would be nice to convince everybody to use some sort standard feed. I'm quite impressed with Google Calendar's collaborative calendar, not to mention Google Docs. But everybody needs to be on the same page. The redundancy of transcribing scheduled events and todo lists from one app to another is painful for how unecessary it is. Digital should be setup to translate to digital without me. But here I am.

I think I'll try to look more into Google Calendar and attempt some solidarity amongst peers.

A couple of days ago I had my first visit to Inkonst, a not-for-profit cultuel centre in Malmö. Situated in a retrofitted warehouse in central Malmö, Inkost is comprised of a club, theater, bar, restaurant, and office.

Per-Anders Hillgren from K3 was nice enough to give me a tour, introducing me to the facilities and staff. He's there working with the Living Labs initiative.

Likely thoughout the year I'll utilize the Living Labs as a place to stage quick projects and experiments in connection with my thesis work and personal projects. The Living Lab concept is one that allows for an array of experimental work to be carried out and developed in a live and real world situation.

Due to Living Labs having a number of high profile partners, such as Ericsson, TAT, SVT, and so on, the LL connection seems to be a good one to mention when speaking with other businesses. I had a meeting yesterday with a company to discuss collaboration possibilities for my thesis work, and they immediate seemed interested at the opportunity to have this ongoing venue for testing available.

A game for the dark where everbody wins.

Design Methods: Personas, mock-ups, video mock-ups, rapid-prototyping, usability testing, interviews

Tools: Resin prototypes, 3D software, video editing software

Players are equipped with a ToeStepper on each foot. The ToeStepper device has a target point, which glows in a colour. Players are are assigned to teams according to their current colour. By hitting the other players target point, you change their colours and they join your team.

ToeStepper is an open ended gameplay experience. There are no defined "winning" or "losing" players, as teams are constantly shifting and created in an ad hoc fashion.

Four examples of a working prototype were developed in the range of 2,5 weeks.

Social Media Sites & Broad Consequential Social Actability

Social Media

In December of 2006 Time Magazine declared the person of the year You. That is, the plural You of global Internet users, participators, and content producers. This was offered as recognition of the increasing power and sway which individuals as a mass have to influence the content of online media. It was recognition of individuals as content producers, in particular bloggers.

This use of the plural You is also indicative of the social manifestation of “Web 2.0”, the trend towards open, standardized, and pliable media publication and distribution methods, such as RSS feeds and freely available APIs. Users are empowered to create and distribute an ever-flowing stream of content with a relatively low threshold of technological savvy.

However, mere publication and availability of content alone does not necessarily translate into consequential effects or meaningful experiences for consumers. Within the vastness of information, very little of it could be considered appealing to masses, and is often a republication of content from another sor published without the actual consideration of consumption

While content published by sites proliferated in Mcluhanistic fashion from traditional mass media organize content from aneditorial perspective, they less often link to or publish user generated content such as blogs, podcasts, or videos. Thesesites utilize technology such as RSS publishing, but are generally an “out only” source.

A social media site, however, is partially or entirely comprised of either user submitted or user generated content. Often, the design of these sites resemble and act similarly to individual blogchronologically listing summaries of articles on a main page with links to the user who submitted tstory, an associated comment page, and other meta data. A popular feature is the use of a mechanismtracking the number of users who express explicit interest in piece of content (as opposed to just a page view count). A social media site could be contrasted to the traditional content model to be seeas an “in and out” medium, or possibly a “through” medium, and not “out only”. Social media sites would have difficulty being “out only” as generally the content is rarely produced locally.

Social Actability

Online forums and commenting features are not particularly new as a means of creating online content and empowering users with a voice, but they are good design examples of online social actability: “The extent to which a digital design empowers you to act . . .“ (Löwgren, 2002). It is giving the user a means in which to react and to set the course for other
actions.

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Download the full article here.

Tools: Illustrator (using scripting thanks to Bernard Kerr from Yahoo for the recommendation), Photoshop, After Effects

Here's an experimental visualization for a new Sony Ericsson Walkman equalizer.

Play the video with music below to see it in action.

This was not a deep exploration of equalizer visualizations and was inspired by a Japanese poster. A number of the Sony Ericsson models have button layouts that would really lend themselves to this, though.

A question one faces when designing an equalizer is whether to include strong metaphoric representation. I think that it's unecessary to include anything as trite as guitar strings or something physically heavy (A stack of elephants or something). Visually heavy lines seem to work just fine, for instance.

My design definitely needs some working on, but this was just a weekend experiment. Music seems to exist in an abstract part of our brains, similar to our appreciation of visual design. Maybe this creates an affordance to stay within the abstract realms. But we can definitely do better than granularized bar segments bouncing up and down.