cityofsound

Teeny Tiny

Porn spam in the in-box this morning.

Message 1: from Jane; Subject: Teeny Tiny Women

Messages 2&3: from Sexy.Sabrina; Subject also: Teeny Tiny Women

Message 4: from Christina; Subject: Teeny Tiny Women NAKED

Messages 5: from Kinky_Karen; Subject also: Teeny Tiny Women NAKED

Not sure what I've done to deserve that, but the world sure is a strange and wondrous place.

Universal Adaptive Machines

Really interesting comments from Tom Coates on Adaptive Design talk I gave the other day. Go read them.

In short, I agree with Tom! I think, due to the audience and context, that my talk focused a bit too much on implications for 'design as a discipline'. And maybe I neglected one of my key messages - learn from the Internet. As Tom suggests, there is a fully-functioning Adaptive Design 'ecology' already out there. Tom's idea of this as 'a universal computing machine' (perhaps in the Turing sense) is a really interesting way of thinking that through (Matt Jones has talked around this too, and as "wombling").

In my presentation I did touch on this - that the design decisions behind the Internet, and the various apps that work in that context are just that - design decisions. Suboptimal, interoperable, component-based decisions, but super-interesting examples of a different way of thinking about design - different to how design traditionally manifests itself (in education, in theory, in practice). As Tom says, when talking variously of Blogger, HTML, RSS, email, Blogdex, IM etc.:

"Each one of these is a component. Each one of which is something that a user decides (or decides not to) use in assembling the magic "machine that makes things happen" (ie. their person computing space). So maybe that's what we should be concentrating on - single use (or simple use) applications or sites that do something very well, can be removed or replaced from the processing chain of information. Maybe that's adaptive design."

Absolutely. And Tom almost suggests that we needn't worry too much about "the architecture" as it's already there. But I still think that designers need to wise-up to the power of those interoperable, suboptimal systems. To stop finishing things off for the user, and use the architecture of IP etc. and/or create similar forms of architecture - create these small, single-use components rather than the equivalent of rapidly-redendant grand projets, bloated with creeping featuritis and over-complex rigidity.

Update: Andrew Otwell has taken the idea of coded components and modular blocks and run with it. Andy exhibits exactly the kind of thinking that all designers could benefit from - comfortable with coded components, modules, architecture, the behaviour of systems over time (rather than - or as well as - the traditional concerns of form, aesthetics etc.), and ultimately creating systems which are truly aware of the wider context surrounding them - most significantly, the adaptive ecology the Internet provides.

Beyond Couch Potatoes

This might be pertinent. Yet to read.

"Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from the perspective of seeing and treating humans primarily as consumers. In personally meaningful activities, the possibility for humans to be and to act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of "high-tech scribes," but rather to all interested individuals and groups."

Beyond Couch Potatoes: From Consumers to Designers and Active Consumers

Apple's Swiss army knife

Aka Steven Johnson on interfaces. Comments lead to Anil Dash's essay on Microcontent Client.

Feel of a place

Great stuff from Matt. And Chris Heathcote. This feel of a place idea is maybe similar, though more accessible, to the structure of feeling idea I mentioned a while ago.

"Chris Heathcote wants to encode psychogeography in RDF, with a lazyweb idea he calls FOAP: Feel Of A Place. Full-circle then, from SBJ's "Cities are great at answering search queries" analogies for the evolution of the web that he suggests in "Emergence". So are our cities to be rendered obvious through technology - reduced to digital mappings of the nearest McDonalds pushed to our 3g phones?"

Find out more:
"FOAP springs eternal" or software and psychogeography

Eulogy

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Morning News is one of the best sites out there.

And this recent Mix Tape for Dead Girl is a simply beautiful, heartbreaking piece of writing.

Berlin city guide

Excellent idea from Andrew Otwell:

"Do you have a favorite restaurant, comic book store, or shoe store in Berlin? Got any suggestions for good art galleries or museums? Do you have any tips for dealing with the German bureaucracy or a tip on where to get your computer fixed? Maybe a good dner stand? If so, would you like to contribute to an online guide to Berlin?"

A collaborative guide to Berlin

Jack

I'm really quite diplomatic here. Really. I am.

But this latest drivel from The Guardian's Online editor, Jack Schofield, is just too much. I've been reading The Guardian's coverage of this stuff since it was a weekly half-page feature called 'Computer Guardian' in the mid-1980s (of course, I don't read any actual newspapers anymore (except at the weekend), but still vaguely follow that one online, specially when that nice Mr. Hammersley's writing, or The Fiver). But throughout all that time - almost 20 years - Jack Schofield's 'take' on the various Mac platforms - and anything approaching the Apple ethos - has been unfailingly, consistently, unwaveringly negative. To say the least. Actually, one could go beyond that to further mark it up as asinine. (Diplomatic, see?). Here's the latest, discussing a psychologist's assessment of the design of the latest iMac in a Wired article:

"Clearly there's now a major industry devoted to explaining why 2.5% of the computer-buying population is still willing to pay well over the odds for very slow computers that severly limit your range of choices and lock you in to a single dictatorial supplier. Maybe Miller should have looked at infantilism instead..."

Not surprisingly, that garnered a few comments on The Guardian's Onlineblog. Matt Frownland has a good overview.

Don't fight the power law

Matt Webb on power laws. Interesting.

"This is important because it means there's no typical size of a city, no typical popularity of a website, no typical size of a community. And that means trying to automatically cluster a social space is really very hard."

Adaptive Design Presentation

Here's the .ppt I presented at the AIGA Experience Design forum at the Design Council, London t'other night, around the subject of Adaptive Design. Though it's hardly rocket science - merely an introduction to the general area of adaptation, linked to some recent memes - I was pleasantly surprised by the response. Many good questions (which I barely began to answer) and some good thoughts fizzing around the room by the end of the evening.

Towards Designing For Adaptation (.ppt) (1.1mb)

I'm worried that the slides won't mean much without my accompanying speech (even then!), so I've transferred my scribbled 'script' into the presentation. For those of you with access to Powerpoint, you'll be able to read my rough notes accompanying the slides by going into 'Notes page' via the View menu.

I do aim to write up something more coherent, and hopefully a little more meaningful (no point in setting the bar too low ;) around these ideas soon (perhaps it'll provide a good excuse with which to escape from the family at Christmas).

Additionally, here's a bunch of links I used to research the talk, where possible relating to sections in the presentation. Not complete, but a start:

Background/Scope/Definition
Tom Moran's Everyday Adaptive Design presentation at DIS2002 (.ppt)
My notes on above
Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn
Steven Johnson's Emergence
Norman Potter's What Is A Designer

Examples of Adaptive Design
BBCi Homepage
Freegorifero.com on above
Blackbeltjones.com ditto
v-2 ditto
Games
The Sims
GTA
OS
Symbian

Themes
Layers of change
Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn
Peter Merholz on similarity to JJG's elements
Peter Morville has adapted similar Brand ideas to IA
Fabio Sergio IA quote, which can be related to layers
Imperfection
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Suboptimal
Matt Jones on suboptimal
Mark Pilgrim on RSS 2.0
Tom Coates on suboptimal
Clay Shirky: In Praise of Evolvable Systems
Cascading Recombinance
Space to Evolve
v2: Make room, make room!
New Rationalism
my notes on New Rationalism

Inspiration
JC Herz: Gaming and the Art of Innovation
Neil Gershenfeld
Gershenfeld: Emergent Engineering
Janine Benyus: Innovations Inspired By Nature

In the discussion after, I was pointed to a piece called "Worse Is Better" by Richard Gabriel - a key programming-oriented essay on the design of what we'd now call 'suboptimal' systems. Yet to read, but looks extremely relevant.

Since the talk, I got round to reading Adam Greenfield's excellent interview with Nathan Shedroff. I thought Adam's conclusion as to where 'our discipline' needs to go was relevant here:

"(It ideally) allows for human variability, admits to open-endedness, and never falls into the trap of suggesting that even after we've done everything we can as designers, people aren't going to do with our designs precisely what they will."

v-2: Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview (part two of two)

I also briefly mentioned my bumbling reference to "cascading recombinance" to the phrase's originator, Matt Webb. He pointed out the similarity to another quotation I'd mentioned, Janine Benyus' "life creates conditions conducive to life, in everything that it does".