cityofsound

Coffee houses and the information age

A few weeks ago I wrote about coffeehouses in the context of Pepys' Diary and Stephenson's Quicksilver, making a couple hamfisted allusions to them being "nodes in London's information networks" as with their contemporary wifi-ed equivalents. With serendipity (I assume!), The Economist wrote a lengthier, better article on the same subject in their excellent Christmas special, even ending on a firm suggestion as to the appropriate economic model underpinning today's equivalent i.e information wants to be free! Here's a couple of choice quotes:

"Where do you go when you want to know the latest business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with political gossip, find out what others think of a new book, or stay abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments? Today, the answer is obvious: you log on to the internet. Three centuries ago, the answer was just as easy: you went to a coffee-house. There, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could read the latest pamphlets, catch up on news and gossip, attend scientific lectures, strike business deals, or chat with like-minded people about literature or politics. The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today's websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint."

"(Today's) hotspots allow laptop-toting customers to check their e-mail and read the news as they sip their lattes. But history provides a cautionary tale for those hotspot operators that charge for access. Coffee-houses used to charge for coffee, but gave away access to reading materials. Many coffee-shops are now following the same model, which could undermine the prospects for fee-based hotspots. Information, both in the 17th century and today, wants to be free—and coffee-drinking customers, it seems, expect it to be."

The Economist: The internet in a cup
[Also clocked by Ben Hammersley]

Game Zone

The RIBA newsletter taunts me with this new book, which looks right up my strasse: Game Zone, published by the excellent Birkhäuser. If only Christmas hadn't left me so broke.

"The architectural awareness and experience of space, and the creative use can profit greatly from certain aspects of "games" and the related technology. Here the author investigates a fascinating contribution of avant-garde art to the construction of space in the field of electronic games and arcades, beginning with New Babylon, moving through the radical suggestions of the 1960s and 1970s to the commercial and experimental examples of contemporary amusement arcades. Also considered are the virtual worlds of video games which are growing increasingly complex. The book reveals in a critical yet impressive way how important the element of “play” has become in today’s digital architectonic designs. The Italian architect Alberto Iacovoni is one of the founding members of the Studio maO which specialises on architecture and media. He is also a member of the office for urban art laboratory, Stalker."

Birkhäuser: Game Zone [Amazon UK | US]

Bleep!

One of our new recruits at BBC Radio & Music Interactive, Matt Biddulph, pointed me at Warp Records' fabulous digital downloads store, Bleep. Matt pointed out how well engineered and coherent the overall offering was. I of course replied that I really like the way the descender on the 'p' is curved.

Read Mark Stevens on just why the fact that their tracks are "LAME encoded with the —alt-preset standard VBR setting" is a good thing, and more besides.

The city's many-tuned medley

"The soul of Old England was left behind in Trafalgar Square; the bus rolled on through one of the corridors of the new England. Up Charing Cross Road past a cinema house announcing "The Grim Avenger: a thrilling romance of Three Continents"... past a music hall, flaunting across its front the pirouetting of a Russian toe-dancer on a coloured screen, while underneath, flashing for the world to see, letters of bright light proclaiming other attractions; a Cockney Comedian, a Spanish Tango Turn, a Swedish Acrobatic Troupe, American Clog Dancers, an Argentine Stunt Artist, Naughty Fifi the French Comic Chanteuse and Mimi her Eccentric Accompanist, and so on, and so on.

How amazingly international! mused Gombarov, and laughs to himself, as the afterthought struck him: 'And here I am, a Russo-American Jew, looking on!'

Was this chaos or unity? It was chaos, and it had a unity after a fashion. It was the unity of a many-tuned medley, each tune of which maintained its entity, losing it only at the moment of embracing another tune; at best it was a unity of ultra-modern music, shaped out of discords, beaten but not molten into a harmony."

From The Independent on Sunday's excellent Talk Of The Town supplement, this is a fabulous quote - a description of London from the novel Babel by John Cournos, published in 1922. Reminds me why I called this blog what I called this blog.

Pattern-based UI components

Andy Otwell gathers up some interesting component/pattern-based approaches to UI design:

"The idea here is this: many application user interfaces are (or should be) essentially modular groups of widgets or components and containers for grouping components. Given that strict structure, a UI designer can write an XML document that refers to a library of predefined interaction components, style it with a CSS-like stylesheet, and describe its behavior with some code written in a scripting language (like Javascript or Actionscript). Although there are syntax differences between the four models above, the basic idea is the same."

The forthcoming Flash MX, Flex, one looks most interesting, given MX's ability to build applications (which Andy notes the web browser struggles with, limited to POSTs and GETs). The Flash component hierarchy looks useful. Again Andy's smart enough to note the limits of such a tightly component-based, pattern-based architecture, but also the obvious advantages for quickly building reliable, consistent interfaces.

Heyblog: Structured UI Design

Limitless, not predictable

"The industrial changes following the introduction of steam and electrical machinery are trifling and infinitesimal compared with those already following in the wake of mankind's new-found ability to communicate."

John Naughton plays a nice trick on us with the above quote relating to the Internet. Click the link below to find out how:

Memex 1.1: Plus ca change...

Person to person

Diane Coyle on globalisation and mobile telephony:

"The School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley has estimated that 98 per cent of the information generated globally in 2002 - flowing through electronic channels such as TV, telephone, radio and the internet - was accounted for by telephone calls. And in this category, the share of voice mobile calls and text messages is climbing rapidly - growing by 35 per cent between 2001 and 2002 to reach about 13 per cent of the total sum. Although the internet has dominated the discussion and study of new technologies, mobile telephony is the innovation that seems to be spreading like wildfire around the globe. Certainly, visitors to the big cities in developing countries can't have failed to notice the phenomenon. Even rural areas in some countries now have their first ever telecommunications links to the outside world. While the network and services are still provided by corporations, of course, phone calls consist of the direct, person-to-person exchange of information, in contrast to the packaged, broadcast content of TV and radio, or even much of the world wide web."

Coyle makes some balanced points about globalisation and multinationals - refreshing to see in a newspaper. It doesn't necessarily make good copy to present a balanced view in between black and white polar opposites; screaming headlines tend not to be printed in grey. It's also interesting how Coyle highlights the positive aspect of the person-to-person nature of this style of communication (as opposed to "packaged, broadcast" models.) Despite working with the Internet, I hadn't seen that conclusion drawn in the context it actually being the most prevalent, popular communication model across media.

The Independent: Diane Coyle: Globalisation by the people, for the people

Mrs. Eaves a bit tired?

Discussion over at Speak Up RE Mrs. Eaves:

"Verging on overuse, Mrs. Eaves has something that makes us come back for more… for me, it’s the lovely small caps. For others it’s the ligatures, or the roundness, or the old-style numerals. No matter what the reason is, designers keep using Mrs. Eaves, but has it reached, in its short life-span, ad-nauseaum levels? Few typefaces achieve such overuse – which could be a way to measure a typeface’s success – and enter mainstream, few make it out alive though. Is Mrs. Eaves destined to graphic designer’s blacklists of typefaces now that its popularity has grown beyond our little circle? Or will it endure for many, many years as a classic, elegant serif?

I'm a big fan of Mrs. Eaves. Have used it many many times, not least on some sites for David Sylvian (not this current one, but earlier iterations) a few years back. It's lovely. I tried to suggest Tom C used it for Everything In Moderation, but would he listen? Would he? Given Speak Up's discussion about over-use, perhaps he was right. Then again, it's hardly at Ariel, Helvetica, or even Comic Sans levels (related: how to spot the difference between Ariel and Helvetica.)

Speak Up: Does Mrs. Eaves Need a Rest?

Glide House

Oh I like this. Michelle Kaufman's Glide House arrives in two trucks for you to build yourself. Smart, environmentally-sound, adaptive pre-fab:

"The Glide House ... neatly combines clean, sleek design (all storage space runs down a bar on one side of one of the room which can be hidden away by means of gliding wooden doors) with environmentally friendly principles. Depending on the beauty of your views ... the opposite walls can be glass doors to, as Kaufmann puts it: ‘offer maximum views and blur the boundary between interior and exterior’. Alternatively, if you don’t look out on rolling hills and glorious scenery, the design can be tweaked to incorporate a private garden and rather less transparent walls."

Shame it seems landscaped for the country (or rather, California!). I want an urban version for gritty, smelly, congested, dangerous, beautiful old London.

Michelle Kaufman Architecture: Glide House
IDANDA: Glide House
[via douglas.typepad.com]

Affordances

Nice summary of affordances by The Veenster with ref to Mitsubishi:

"An affordance is a design technique that allows people to intuit how to use an interface control by sight alone. For example, a knob affords turning. A switch affords flipping. Little grooves on a wheel afford spinning. This is especially important when designing digitally, since virtually every control in a metaphor. Our knobs aren't knobs, really. They're pictures meant to resemble knob."

Jeffrey Veen: Stop Stealing Gas (and other design techniques)