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Less than a year after my last trip to London, I’m headed back to the UK - to Sheffield - to give the opening keynote at DRS2008 (Design Research Society conference), offering my perspectives on disciplinarity and rigour. If you’re attending the conference, drop me a note so I’ll know to look for you.
I’m also bookending the time in Sheffield with a few days in London before and after. It’d be great to meet up with firms and folks interested in culture, design, and innovation (etc.). I could probably throw together a little presentation or discussion starter for your team. Get in touch if you’d like me to stop by.
Steve in Trafalgar Square, 1990, photo by Richard Wintle
Steve in Trafalgar Square, 2007, photo by Avi Soudack
See more pictures from my London trip in 2007 here.
An interesting, critical review of the H659 Harmony (Logitech) universal remote (a somewhat older model). Interesting because usability guru Donald Norman had hailed it as an example of good design. And because Logitech recently launched a new range of Harmony universal remote controls that are supposed to solve all our remote control annoyances. Let's hope Logitech took a serious look at the e-mail that the aforementioned reviewer sent to Logitech's helpdesk. But I don't think that's the case, considering the answer he got:
"I'm sorry you're not happy. Let us know if you have any more problems"
By the way: don't forget to take a look at the reactions to the review where we find this little gem:
i think your a loser,becuase you are complaining about simple little things. there is nuthin wrong with shfiting the remote in your hands. you are just lazy the harmony remote works great.
Apart from the spelling particularities, I find this to be one of the most beautiful occurrences of someone not being able to see the user perspective.
On Wednesday 2 July Nicolas Nova (LIFT lab) moderated a session at the World Congress of Architecture in Turin, Italy, entitled “From ubiquitous technology to human context - Technology applied to architecture and design: does it solve problems or create needs?”.
Speakers were Adam Greenfield (Head of Design Direction, Nokia), Jeffrey Huang (Director, Media and Design Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland) and Younghee Jung (senior design manager, Nokia).
Videos: About ten minutes into the session, I realised that no provisions had been made by the organisers to videotape the presentations, so I started recording everything myself, from a small handheld Nokia N95. Obviously image quality is not so great but the sound is quite good. I uploaded everything on Google Video: Adam Greenfield, Jeffrey Huang and Younghee Jung.
Two apologies: first to Nicolas for not having taped his session too - as I said, I realised too late that the organisers were not doing it themselves - but luckily Nicolas has posted a summary and his slides on his own blog. The second apology goes to Younghee, whose presentation is only half recorded, because the N95 battery died.
The session unfortunately ended a bit in chaos. As it had started late, it also ran a bit over time and people from the next session started filling up the seminar room and at one point hackled the last speaker - Younghee Jung - to finish things up. A fragile Younghee - during her talk she shared a personal event with the audience that was very close to her emotionally - suddenly had to summarise 30 slides in 2 minutes and this is luckily not on video. Perhaps she can send us her presentation still.
While in London i went to see a few photography exhibitions. And yes! i realize i wrote a couple of days ago that i'd focus on the RCA show this week but i can't keep that promise, i'm starting to bore myself. Now one of those photo shows is called freshfacedandwildeyed and it marks the launch of an annual exhibition presenting the most striking work by visual arts graduates from BA and MA courses across the UK. There were 25 photographers selected. Some of them had all my attention:
Dewars being filled. Cryonics facility, Phoenix, Arizona
Murray Ballard's Cryonics series explores the practice of preserving dead people or animals by freezing them at extremely low temperatures, in the hope that science will be able to revive them in the future. The photographer traveled to a cryonics lab in Phoenix, Arizona, documenting the facility, the technology used, the scientists working there, met with some prospective patients in the UK, etc. All along, questioning whether he was dedicating his time to a world of 'farcical fantasies' or of 'genuine and innovative scientific experimentation.'
Chinese Opera
Boris Austin's Solidified Memories series aims to balance the glossy surface of China promoted by the Olympics and made of swanky stadium and gorgeous swimming pool with what he saw in the north eastern city of Dalian, China's 'most habitable city'. He discovered a neighbourhood which remains a world away from the much publicized urban regeneration accompanying the Games. Not that we're surprised of that fact....
Jan Stradtmann commented on the urbanistic consequences of the Olympics of 2012. In The Manor Garden Allotments series, he documents the small garden plots which had to be eliminated in order "regenerate" the site for the 2012 Olympics in London. He took pictures of the 'victims' of the planning of the Olympics as if he'd just arrived on a crime scene. Photographing the huts shortly before their elimination transformed them into symbols of an injustice to come.
Steve Schofield's portraits of science-fiction costumers in their homes in Britain, investigate how, through a sub-cultural world of fandom, like-minded people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday.
Michal Honkys went back to his hometown, Ostrava (Czech Republic) to see what was left of a city which had been pride of the Communist era.
Last day in Ahmedabad - our rickshaw driver shouting over the drone of the 2-stroke, and she stops to pull in the scarf. We collectively exhale.
Consider the same situation in the future perfect world – where the passengers of the rickshaw can conduct a visual search, use real time video pattern matching to discover related content such as videos of choking motorcyclists (oh you had to follow that link didn't you?) pulled from the ‘tube and stats of actual incidents worldwide. You’re right – this kind of system is far more likely to highlight advertising for where to buy that lovely er, choker, or those fine pink shoes.
In a world of (revenue generating) user generated content – whether knowing about the probability and consequences of an accident the viewer is more likely to simply record the accident waiting to happen. Throw in some form of autonomous vehicles, no-doubt sponsored by You-Tube and you have 21st century paparazzi.
I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people — the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication.
This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.
Here the visualization of the complexity of the community comes not from data gathered by the users or by devices or software, but from data already and automatically gathered about the users’ behaviour using some specific software over a network. In this way we can visualize the commitment of every participants to the collective activity and the history of the system.
[...]version control systems for source code such as Subversion or Concurrent Versions System. A commit in the context of these version control systems refers to submitting the latest changes of the source code to the repository, and making these changes part of the head revision of the repository. Thus, when other users do an UPDATE or a checkout from the repository, they will receive the latest committed version, unless they specify they wish to retrieve a previous version of the source code in the repository. Version control systems also have similar functionality to SQL databases in that they allow rolling back to previous versions easily. In this context, a commit with version control systems is not as dangerous as it allows easy rollback, even after the commit has been done.
Code_swarm can be used therefore for those communities that use this software in order to self-organize. Moreover, the code has been released openly and freely under a GPL v3 license on Google Code. Therefore we can use it on our projects too, in order to visualize the life/history of Open P2P Communities: we can modify its source code in order to run it for every community and its specific tools for communication and self-organization.
With the means to identify people and objects around you - with or without their knowledge, a framework to discover, access and extrapolate that data, and a personally carried tool through which to do all of this on the fly and without ever pulling up a web page - how long before the practice of digitally tagging angels and devils kicks off?
When you're queuing for coffee and with a smile the server hands over your order and quietly refuses your money; or ditto with a scowl refuses to serve. For every culture: a heroine or hero; a scapegoat.
An angel of sorts from Naka Meguro (above) and Los Angeles (below).
Which site will be the most popular for tagging errant drivers - with videos to match?
The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven't been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest.
Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.
The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to 'produce' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.
The mapping of tap water creates separate territories within the city. Could these areas be the biological counterpart of gated communities?
The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.
Filling the bottles in the City...
That's what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to "buy" bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.
You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?
With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.
Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario...
Younghee Jung » smalltalk on toilets
Download the small PowerPoint file for some really great shots of toilets around the world, with just a bit of explanatory text. This was for a 3-minute talk; very tantalizing stuff. More stories!
In this video for Core77, Steve Portigal takes us into his company bathroom, uncovering examples of bad design and its consequences.
From signage to artifact and back, people are forever mistaking their cues for how to behave, how to use products and systems, and how different, often-conflicting indicators cause our expectations and realities to collide. This 2-minute video is a priceless example. What’s in your bathroom?
The Science Museum in London currently has on display The Science of Survival . The exhibition provides visitors with a glimpse of the world in 2050 and "explores how we will all survive on a changing planet. " Four characters from the future - Buz, Eco, Tek and Dug guide participants through the interactive exhibition and give advice on how to tackle the challenges of 2050. The exhibition is divided into five sections: Eating, Drinking, Moving, Enjoying and Building, which take a look at what we need to do to survive climate change and resource shortages. All of the decisions visitors make along the journey are included at the end in the Future City so that people can see how their priorities and choices have a major impact on our world of tomorrow.
My new mates at Exyzt have built and opened the new Southwark Lido as part of the London Architecture Festival. Exyzt and Gaelle Gabillet are the scenographer-builders of City Eco Lab with me in St Etienne in November. Do go and say hello to them in Southwark. And whilst you're at it, do also check out Saturday's Continuous Picnic. This day-long event celebrates local food and the city and is organised by Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, who, with David Barrie got us all started on urban agriculture three years ago as we started to plan Dott 07. It's nice to see these young folk doing so well up in the big city.
