Adam Little @ CIID

My bookmarks for October 8th through October 15th:

• Interview: The cellphone anthropologist - opinion - 11 June 2008 - New Scientist
  Another interview with Jan Chipchase

Jan Chipchase: Our cell phones, ourselves from the TED conference

I have been subscribing to the Future Perfect blog for quite some time now and I am beginning to enjoy it more and more. Future Perfect is about “the collision of people, society and technology” and is written by Jan Chipchase, a principal researcher for Nokia Design. His job essentially involves traveling all over the (mainly developing) world and observing how people use their mobile phones then supplying this data to designers at Nokia who use it to create new products and services. His most interesting research focuses around Sente (a home-brewed method for transferring cash via mobile phone in Uganda), street hackers in Africa and Asia who, amongst other things, outfit phones to run multiple SIM cards (thus saving the user money by allowing them to call call contacts across different service providers) and the ways that illiterate people interface with their phones. However Future Perfect does not delve into these topics in any detail. It only hints at the work done with Nokia and makes subtle observations about everyday life, cultural nuances and the influence of technology for people across the world. In fact, maybe it is best summarized on his website here:

Pushing technologies on society without thinking through their consequences is at least naive, at worst dangerous, though typically it, and IMHO the people that do it are just boring. Future perfect is a pause for reflection in our planet’s seemingly headlong rush to churn out more, faster, smaller and cheaper.

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Exercise #2 from the Computational Design workshop syllabus:

In Exercise #2 we will focus on interaction. It will be a 2-day exercise evolving around the
idea of ‘people s actions as data’ [2]. A single, generic, multi-purpose, data-generating
object will be the center of attention. The participants will learn the basics of the processing development environment, programming fundamentals, thinking interaction and the translation of data into dynamic form. Due to the restriction of only having a single data-source, we expect the participants to also develop a way of exchanging knowledge gained, be it verbally or in software code. The result of the exercise will be a physical, interactive application.

Using Processing as the development environment and the Nintendo Wii controller as an input device, I focused on writing an application that was simple and engaging and I worried less about what I could achieve through programming. The result was an interactive application which gave a user the impression they were watching me eat food in my kitchen and that they could physically fling me from side to side by moving the Nintendo Wii controller. What emerged was a sort of game to see who could make me sit up straight and eat my food.

Jakob discussing his results. Photo by David a. Mellis.

Exercise #1 from the Computational Design workshop syllabus:

The introduction is followed by a one-day, hands-off exercise, ‘people as instruction processors’ [1]. the students will be asked to write down three instructions-sets. These
instructions will then be dictated to three other participants. The other participants will
process the instruction by drawing on a piece of paper with a red, green or blue marker.
The exercise aims at introducing the participants to programming as an everyday exercise,
a translation from intention into language into action. The result will be a set of very analog procedural drawings.

The final results of this exercise were rather inconsiquential but the exercise itself served as a good tool to begin thinking about procedures and how they apply to programming. And eventhough it was only a small portion of our workshop, displaying and encouraging the visitors to execute these instruction-sets during our exhibition helped give a better understanding to some of the thought-processes used to create the other projects on display.

Exercise 3 - People As Data and 12 posters

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My bookmarks for October 3rd through October 7th:

• plainview : software : the barbarian group
  Plainview is a full-screen web browser for MacOSX
• Hackers and Painters
  MUST READ!
• RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS - Google Code
  Download Processing files to make your own visualizations of the House of Cards data
• Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?
  On Jan Chipchase, from the New York Times

As planned, tomorrow is our first exhibit of work. From the course syllabus

The course will end in an exhibition of selected results from all three exercises. Exercise #1 will be presented as a hands-on piece where visitors can try the execution of the code themselves. The results can be put up on the wall by using a ring-binder-mechanism. Exercise #2 will be presented in an arrangement of several computers, running different applications, while receiving the same data from one single object, placed in front of them. Exercise #3 will be framed in picture frames and hung up on the wall.

Photos to arrive afterwards.