You are currently browsing Tristan Shook's articles.
Here is a video from designer Timo Arnall that visualizes the information infrastructure of a city. Each dashed circle represents a wireless network. They emanate from office building hot spots, routers in apartments, and pocketed mobile phones. It forms a net over the urban space.
We don’t often see how pervasive technology is in out lives. It is easy to measure the advance of technology by iterations of devices, but perhaps equally important has been how we have been able to conquer the space between.
Here are two articles for you today, both in some sense about Gilligan’s Island.
The first comes from Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale. It’s about why Americans spend so much of their free time doing things that are not real. When examining our lives much of what we choose to spend our time doing – when not acting on behalf of our basic needs for survival – engages our imagination, like watching Gilligan’s Island.
The second is about the future of free time as described by Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, two people who spend much of their free time thinking about how we spend ours. They suggest that technology is leading us toward a future where our free time is more productive than watching your average episode of Gilligan’s Island.
Two questions to consider:
1. How can your organization tap into the “cognitive surplus” of millions of people?
2. What will happen when our entertainment becomes more active and productive and less passive and imaginative?
The Art of Game Design is a primer for anyone interested in designing video games, but also an invaluable resource for anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about how people interact with the world around them, whether it is environments, products, advertising, or interfaces.
Experiences without feedback are frustrating and confusing. At many crosswalks in the United States, pedestrians can push a button that will make the DON’T WALK sign change to a WALK sign so they can cross the street safely. But it can’t change right away, since that would cause traffic accidents. So the poor pedestrian often has to wait up to a minute to see whether pressing the button had any effect. As a result, you see all kinds of strange button-pressing behavior: some people push the button and hold it for several seconds, others push it several times in a row, just to be safe. And the whole experience is accompanied by a sense of uncertainty — pedestrians can often be seen nervously studying the lights and DON’T WALK sign to see if it is going to change, because they might not have pushed the button correctly.
What a delight it was to visit the United Kingdom, and find that in some areas the crosswalk buttons give immediate feedback in the form of an illuminated WAIT sign that comes on when the button has been pushed, and turns off when the WALK period has ended! The addition of some simple feedback turned an experience where a pedestrian feels frustrated into one where they can feel confident and in control.
“I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.” Michael Chabon
Until recently, the most accessible and practical means of cataloguing memories was through photography. Pictures became the medium through which we told stories about our past and thus became our most cherished possessions.
The irony is that the amateur, point-and-click photographer in all of us is not very good at taking pictures. Our natural impulse is archival rather than expressive. Our subjects are often posed and detached from the experience, as if they are taking break from the moment to stand and smile. Only a rare photographer can capture the depth of emotion that happens in a given moment and tell a story that exists outside of the frame.
Thus, pictures are a starting point for memories, a prompt for thinking about our past. Our strongest memories are actually associated with our “chemical” senses, taste and smell. Our sense of smell is overlooked, but the human olfactory sense is controlled by the limbic system, the part of the brain also responsible for emotion, memory, pleasure, and motivation.
This is the Scenter, a project of the Kawamura-Ganjavian architecture and design studio. It stores smells in tiny cartridges and releases them when the bellows are squeezed.
We tend not to notice our sense of smell except in cases when an odor is surprisingly strong, pleasantly or unpleasantly so. But there are also moments when a scent is so familiar, so close, that you feel as if you are experiencing something again.
The Scenter is a remarkable achievement then: a sensory device that can capture a tremendous part of our daily experience where technology of the pixilated sort cannot.
Quirky, the product development community, has launched again after a redesign of their website. If you’re unfamiliar with the site, the premise is simple: every day we are faced with situations where a doodad or widget would make our lives easier. We are not inventors but we could be, if we worked together.
Quirky brings together a community of every day inventors to come up with new ideas for products, work together to bring these ideas to life, and finally manufacture the product for sale.
The ideas that emerge from the community are usually simple solutions to every day problems: how to better clean up the cords on your desk, slice a melon, or organize your pens. But what is innovative is the glimpse it gives into a potential future of product development, one in which the innovation process is inextricably tied to actual consumers.
It works now on a small scale to produce tangible results, but how far off are we from having the ability as amateur inventors and enthusiasts of changing entire industries with crowdsourced ideas?
Check out Local Motors, the first open source car company, recently featured in a Wired story about the upcoming DIY revolution in product design. Their “Rally Fighter” has reached production and can be had for $50k. The car was designed by the 10 person company with help from a large online community of car builders and enthusiasts who helped materialize the concept art of graphic artist Sangho Kim.
As the costs of small batch manufacturing come down industries will need to adapt to a burgeoning market of local/guild producers to stay relevant to consumer needs.
Social networking sites are providing new datasets for understanding how people behave. One of the most fascinating (and entertaining) uses of this information is by the online matchmaking site OKCupid.
On the back end of their site is a mother lode of data about the desires and peccadilloes of its members, which they use at their blog to quantify the rules of online love and attraction.
Their latest post, “Your Looks and Your Inbox” ends with predictable results (the good-looking have a better shot at getting responses from the opposite sex), but in getting there gives great insight into how each gender views attractiveness in the other and what their expectations are for a mate. The entire blog is worth a look.
As the recession has halted a number of suburban housing developments, grocers have lost a prime market for expansion. So instead, big supermarket chains are venturing into vast uncharted cities like Washington DC to open new stores.
The result is more “urban format” stores that take on the design challenge of fitting seamlessly into dense, pedestrian heavy locations.
“The Georgetown Safeway is a good example of how that company’s approach has changed. The store is under construction on the site of an older 45,000 square foot Safeway store with parking in front. The new 65,000 square foot store, geared to what Safeway calls the urban “lifestyle” market, is raised up a level with parking below. Small retail shops line the street and hide the parking.”
- From New Urban News
As far as I can tell the two most common Twitter complaints from non-adopters are as follows: 1.) “What’s the point?” and 2.) “I don’t have anything to say.”
I agree with both to some extent. Most updates on the site tend toward the banal. However, what’s fascinating about Twitter is not what Twitterers (Twits? Twitfolk?) are writing about, but the fact they are indeed writing.
As it turns out, we are in the middle of a writing renaissance. The internet has had an effect on authorship that, with regard to bringing the written word to a mass audience, surpasses that of the printing press.
“Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year.” (SEED Magazine)
William Safire worried that the immediacy of online communication was obfuscating the English language, turning thoughtful sentences into collections of emoticons and nonsense abbreviations. While this might be true in the present, the sheer volume of new writers populating the internet with their writing is likely to produce better work in the long run. The computer, the internet – what we once imagined to be the death of the written word may be its savior.
In 1990, at age 70, Charles Bukowski began writing on a Macintosh Ilsi computer. The beat writer, never afraid of a little experimentation, took to it quickly:
“There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can’t make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real.”
