cityofsound

Robert Miles Kemp (Postopolis! LA)

Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.

Monocle: design notes

It’s a year or so after launch of Monocle and things are going very well, both in print and online, so it's time for me to move on. Having worked with Tyler Brûlé and the rest of the Monocle team to breathe life into the project, creating the first volume of the magazine and iterations of the website and steering it through its first successful year of operation, I decided to leave, and departed at the end of March 2008. The project is up and running, with good solid foundations. Thus, others can run the daily business from here on in.

With that, I thought I’d pause to reflect on some of the design and strategy choices I made with Monocle.com and share them here. I’ve often tried to be ‘transparent’ about the work done on projects here, in the hope that it stimulates useful thought or conversation in other projects elsewhere, and partly to facilitate my own reflections on work. None of what follows is rocket science, and it’s not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics. That would be in the accounts of different projects. But if you’re interested in the honest craft of website work, almost deliberately old-fashioned ‘classical’ web design - and how to ally this with innovation in magazine publishing - the following should provide a decent account of several of the key decisions in this particular project.

During the course of an insanely busy year there are many other key decisions that just occurred and aren't noted here - most of them, in fact. And of course some that are confidential. Nor is this particularly structured. Nonetheless, it contains early sketches, outlines of strategic thinking and some insights into decision-making, tool choices and design practice. I hope you find what follows to be useful or interesting.

Context
As someone put it, Monocle was probably the most blogged about magazine last year. It was written about offline a lot too, but I won’t dwell on the magazine specifically here, except where it relates to the design and production of the digital services. (For a bookended account, Monocle's editor Andrew Tuck wrote about the launch and Tyler and Andrew were both recently interviewed a year on.)

Many were too quick to judge perhaps,  but others were less so and considered responses emerged throughout the year. Reception varied wildly, as one expects, but leaving aside the reception for the magazine and brand overall, the website itself often received much critical acclaim, for which many thanks. The likes of Eye, Print, BusinessWeek, MagCulture and Design Week all suggested we were onto something with our integration of print and web specifically. I’ve mentioned the Eye article before, but the Print piece by Andrew Blum was particularly sharp in identifying the Monocle.com difference. While the new media commentators often mistakenly looked for a 2.0 platform play, Blum noted our attempt to bring quality back to the table, trying to use a new platform to reinvigorate broadcast journalism itself. Similarly BusinessWeek spotted that the “web component (is) more like TV than print”. It actually feels somewhere between the two, but that was the intention.

Perhaps more importantly, the user figures have grown healthily throughout the year. Unique users and time spent on the site are all doing fine, but I knew from the BBC that getting the broadcasts into iTunes would be the thing that really extended the viewership of the programmes, our primary purpose. When we added BBC radio podcasts to iTunes they really thrived, and sure enough, since November 2007, viewing figures have been doubling month on month for Monocle’s movies, driven by iTunes’ ease-of-use. We’re now shifting terabytes of editorial each week. If you have audio or video material, the value of iTunes at this point cannot be stressed enough. It’ll be interesting to see how that platform develops.

Best of all, we hit number 1 in the iTunes News & Politics chart just before Christmas 2007. It’s hardly the most rigorously calculated chart in existence, but still an achievement, I think, to have the likes of the rather more well-funded and well-established Economist, Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Sky trailing in your wake through December, even temporarily (with the first four there having an average age of over 100 years or so, and our brand barely 10 months old at that point.)

So for an entirely new non-mainstream brand, with a no-celebrity policy allied to serious global coverage of subjects that are often little known before we cover them, I’m very happy with the favourable response from readers and viewers. We’ve covered e-Sports in South Korea, the animated title sequences of Kuntzel+Deygas, Narcotecture in Afghanistan, Tezuka architects’ Fuji kindergarten, Lexus’ brand issues, Paula Scher on Brand America, the train from Istanbul to Van, the CEO of Lego, the Tällberg Forum, the 2007 Salone industrial design fair and Frankfurt Motor Show, slow food in Turin, our top urban design solutions, mayoral summits in New York, photojournalism from Murmansk, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Abkhazia, and much more besides, Plus, we got name-checked by Lupe Fiasco.

The city is conceived of radial opposites

In the previous piece about Brisbane's traffic systems, I deployed a David Malouf quote that seemed to indicate that the city's trams were a part of an imagined urban infrastructure, resonating long after their demise, as if citizens still perceived the city to be marked up with ghosted tramlines. Here it is again:

"The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/The Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few; and this sense of radial opposites has persisted, though the actual tramlines have long since been replaced with 'invisible' (as it were) bus routes. The old tramline system is now the invisible principle that holds the city together and gives it a shape in people's minds." [David Malouf, 'A First Place: The Mapping of the World', Southerly, vol.45, no.1, 1985. Found in The Third Metropolis by William Hatherell]

I decided to draw this out, interested as to how that might be rendered. Taking a poetic rather than literal interpretation of the tram lines, as seemed appropriate to Malouf's idea, those radial opposites across Brisbane can be imagined like this:

What I find appealing about this is that three of the four radial opposites do appear to be like a series of sutures, binding the city together across the zig-zag scar of the Brisbane river - somewhat as Malouf described, an invisible principle that "holds the city together".

New Monocle; one Eye satisfied

Surfacing briefly to note a couple of things. Monocle issue 05 is out now; a double-issue for summer, focusing on improving the quality of life in cities.

I'm personally pleased as it's the first issue of the magazine that I've helped shape a bit, albeit no more than subtle nudges and suggestions here and there. I'm particularly proud that there's a fine article on security in cities by Jonathan Raban; we've been in touch since I reviewed a talk he gave at the LRB Bookshop a few years ago, and I'm a huge fan, as regular readers will know. I also suggested Charles Landry to write about the practical side of shaping cities, and contributed a few items for our 'top 25' urban design ideas. It's a cracking issue, I reckon, so get thee to a newsstand, or subscribe online. Well done to Andrew Tuck and the team.

Speaking of which, we produced a few related broadcasts at Monocle.com around this issue. First up, a short news report on the recent C40 convention in New York. The C40 is a kind of 'G8 for cities' and features most of the world's city bosses in one place. That in itself is an interesting thing - and lends credence to the 'global federalism/city states' ideas discussed here and elsewhere. Indeed, my future mayor, Sydney's Clover Moore, even mentions the city states thing in our film. This year, of course, the subject of the convention was climate change, and it's interesting to observe mayors articulate the role they see for their cities in affecting change globally.

Our other two videos are more illustration-led, featuring some of the gorgeous illustration you see in the magazine (some of which is actually drawn by a Japanese monk, but that's another story). We've a rendering of Monocle's 'Perfect High Street', which is a retail-led exploration of the urban precinct idea, and a great collection of urban design solutions, from the scale of park bench up to entire precincts, via wi-fi and trams.

We also have the sound of the Tokyo Airport Limousine Lady, having acquired the audio from the Airport Limousine bus service. I like this item, small as it is, as it complements our earlier Afghan radio piece - both are the sound of other places, presented without fanfare or unnecessary levels of context. They speak for themselves. Check our 'Premiere' programme brand for more. On that front, watch out for some amazing ident sequences from South Korean TV soon.

Thanks to our team of Gillian Dobias and Aleksander Solum in producing these pieces.

Back to the magazine, where Monocle drew up a list of the 20 most liveable cities in the world. London's not in, of course, but many of my favourite places are. The 'winning city' is Munich, followed by Copenhagen, Zürich, Tokyo, Vienna, Helsinki, Sydney, Stockholm, Honolulu, Madrid, Melbourne, Montreal, Barcelona, Kyoto, Vancouver, Auckland, Singapore, Hamburg, Paris and Geneva.

You may have seen some press about it. We tied up with the International Herald Tribune over this, with both print and online version of the IHT carrying Monocle articles and videos respectively (e.g.). I think that's quite a neat way of spreading the message, and it's worked well for both titles. It was the fruit of several day trips to their Paris offices in the last couple of months. Thanks to Nick Stout and the team there.

Finally, it was good to see Monocle in the latest Eye magazine, one of my favourite publications. In one article, Rick Poynor lays into the magazine (somewhat unfairly I think, but hey). Whereas Monocle.com gets a more positive write-up in a good article summarising a state of play in contemporary website design, with the majority of comments tending towards the positive. I'm pleased that Erik Spiekermann finds it "a clever Web equivalent of a magazine I haven't quite made up my mind about", and John O'Reilly enjoys the "genial content spread" (!) though finds "the design more forbidding in its horizontal logic" (?). Brendan Dawes doesn't appreciate it much though, saying "it looks like a straight export from Quark or InDesign files slapped on the Web." In response to that, I can only say that I wish it were that easy.

Most of all, though, I'm delighted with the comments from Anne Burdick and particularly Adrian Shaughnessy, a man whose opinion I trust. Burdick writes

"At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I find it immensely satisfying and refreshing to encounter a clear and intelligent editorial point of view online. Monocle's consistent quality runs throughout the design, the reporting, and the use of media. Whether or not the "international jet set" mentality suits your tastes, it is a well thought-out experiment in the relationship between print and Web, a kind of TV-print hybrid with text and videos perfectly suited in size and substance to Web viewing and reading."

Adrian Shaughnessy writes:

"If the aim of 21st-century publishing is summed up in the dreary phrase 'cross platform', then Monocle hits the target. But the magazine is eclipsed by the website, which is a triumph of confident and unclichéd design. It boasts broadcast quality video and audio, and functions as a genuine expansion of the magazine and not the usual online dumping ground."

While the idea isn't to "eclipse" anything as such - except lazy thinking elsewhere - many thanks to both for those comments in the Eye article. Shared kudos to the team of Richard Spencer Powell, Ken Leung, Maurus Fraser and Paul Finn working with me on that interface between magazine, web and broadcast. Ditto Rufus Leonard, our excellent developers.

It's funny for me, as I've been focused on the editorial side - commissioning and producing those pieces mentioned above - and simultaneously on the design and build of Monocle.com v2, which has just emerged, rather than the v1 they're referring to. (Hence my ability to deep-link to magazine articles above.) Either way, Shaughnessy and Burdick managed to nail exactly what we're trying to do with Monocle.com. What the next release tries to do is keep the best elements of the hastily-built v1 whilst extending it significantly, giving it a bespoke yet scalable architecture yet retaining its clarity. Stay tuned for more on this, and check out the new site in the meantime. Then it's straight into v2.5, which ties up some loose ends and extends the navigation with a few key aggregation points around place and keyword - and then v3, more programmes etc. But all via a few big life-changes first ...

Postopolis!: Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here.

In which Eric Rodenbeck returns to New York, with a little bit of history to clear up. He starts by revealing how he got kicked out of Cooper Union a few years ago, saying he just couldn't make those "grand architectural gestures" that seemed to be part of the deal. (Laura Kurgan, who follows later, assures him he wouldn't get thrown out of any architecture school these days.) Not that it matters either way, as Rodenbeck is a founder of Stamen, one of the more interesting new media companies around. Based in San Francisco, Stamen work with flows of data, ideally massive amounts of data in real-time. They introduce a mapping and information design sensibility to this, and construct meaning from these flows.

Central to their approach is their belief that, as Rodenbeck puts it, "data visualisation is a medium - not a technology". That is, it has conventions, gestures, constraints, techniques, even jokes. Rodenbeck runs through a few of these, including the percentage of pie chart that resembles Pacman. By this point, he's warming to his theme, an irrepressible New Yorker unfurling words and concepts as if he were his own real-time data flow. Fortunately, he assembles meaning from himself in real-time too.

So their medium is data; live, fast and deep data. Rodenbeck runs through a few early projects, such as Mappr, in which they deconstruct the Flickr photo-sharing site along an axis of location. Around 40% of the tags describing photos on Flickr are location-based, so it's a rich set. They realise that a visualisation of place can effectively draw itself, if they place photos onto a map based on the tag description. Sure enough Route 66 emerges, based on photos tagged 'Route 66'. There are a few anomalies but these are interesting in themselves. He also runs us quickly through their work with Digg Labs, which is wonderfully visually and also exposes the horror of most content at Digg, as well as their interesting Oakland crime maps [technical note here].

A favourite project of mine is Cabspotting, derived vast amounts of GPS data from cabs in San Francisco. The tracking system knew where the cabs were, whether they'd picked up and dropped off, and the time inbetween these events. Thus, it could draw a map of San Francisco, without having a map of San Francisco to reference. Rodenbeck shows a movie of 4 hours of taxi activity, with white lines indicating high speed traffic – principally on the airport run and over the bridges – and a downtown full of red lines, indicating slower progress and more pickups. The topography of the city emerges from the data beautifully. At one point, Rodenbeck seems to merge with the data himself here.

As the movie speeds up, Rodenbeck notes that it almost has "a capillery action"; that the city had same kind of mechanisms in it that, say, a heart would. This is fascinating, and links to the numerous analogies of the city as body (Ackroyd's London etc.). But it really just gives a sense of the malleability of this medium; that you can choose to map it in different ways, for different effect.

Rodenbeck also suggests that "broken isn't always bad", in terms of this data. As with the Route 66 anomalies previously, the Bay Bridge from SF to Oakland tells an interesting story based on erroneous data. The bridge is on two decks, which most conventional maps wouldn't tell you. However, as GPS receivers work less well on the lower deck, the map indicates fainter lines there; both decks of the bridge are visible. To Rodenbeck, these "seams of data", combined with places where data was missing, can be mined to show you more of the real, physical world than a conventional map would.

Finally, we see Stamen's latest project, with the real estate company Trulia – Trulia Hindsight [more here]. This quite wonderful visualisation had only been launched a few days before, so it was great to see Rodenbeck demonstrate it. It's based on the data gold mine of the real-estate company's vast amount of data from all properties sales in the United States, mapped to location and over time back to the early 20th century.

Again, with the biological metaphors. We look at San Francisco and Las Vegas growing over time – the latter rapidly – and Rodenbeck notes the similarity to mould (recall Julia Solis talking about landscapes of mould first thing that morning?). Las Vegas actually looks more like a rash suddenly flaring up (which is perhaps an appropriate representation.)

He says it needs a new vocabulary accordingly, and claims to be struggling for words to describe these patterns of data. The biological metaphors seem entirely apposite, to my mind, though Rodenbeck also suggests the terminology of film-making. Seeing a zoomed-in Levittown New Jersey, neighbourhood suddenly flare out of the map is "like a jump cut in a movie relative to a slow pan", perhaps.

It's an absolutely stunning tool for watching the development of cities, whether zoomed right out to watch a city expand its boundaries, or zoomed right in to see individual streets emerge in grids, or follow the topography of the landscape, as in San Francisco. They've collected some great examples of visualisation emerging from Trulia Hindsight here. (It's getting a lot of traffic at the moment, so be patient. Plus Flash 9 is best for this I think. I could play with this for hours, though I'm not entirely sure what business Trulia hope to derive from it, other than via brand extension. It's close to what I was getting at with my proposed Google Earth extension a while back, though that was based on historical maps rather than other data. In a sense, the data is better, having its own integrity and purpose, not having been collected or designed to draw maps – and thus portrays a more impressionistic sense of the city, which allows more room for interpretation.)

There's a brief discussion of the pros and cons of Flash 9 versus Processing – ultimately they both have their qualities and uses, and Stamen use both accordingly. Truliia's system is built on the Modest Maps framework, by Mike Migurski, Stamen's CTO.

I asked about whether they'd explored some integration with physical architecture. Rodenbeck replies that they're beginning to explore things in that area. Strikes me that there's huge potential for those who understand 'data viz' as a medium, in terms of working with both cities and buildings, given how these live, deep, fast flows of data are beginning to emerge from those things. I personally think making this behaviour visible, but in interesting expressive or impressionistic fashion, may be incredibly powerful. Laura Kurgan asked about the graphical choices made in their Oakland crime maps, and opened up a whole area of debate about representation, particularly of people (which she'd return to in her talk later.) Rodenbeck noted that you can choose to denote, say, prostitution and murder in different ways, visually, implying the difference in their 'seriousness' as a crime. Tricky stuff that, but surely one of the most important aspects to think through.

There's a character and flavour to this work which entirely backs up Rodenbeck's assertion that this is a medium of its own. Janet Abrams, responding to a review of her book with Peter Hall, 'Else/Where Mapping' in the excellent 'Urban Design Review: Spring 2007' says that "I truly hope that mappings become recognised as expressive media artifacts, rather than just useful instruments, and that their intent is more than just simply inform, but also to intrigue and convey ... hopefully they will produce emotional reactions as well as intellectual ones." In the best work of Stamen, and others, across this fertile, emerging terrain we're beginning to see 'artifacts' which delight, amaze, shock and inform. With Trulia and Cabspotting, we're seeing products which are entirely of their medium – data visualisation – and it was a particular delight to share the excitement which Rodenbeck and other pioneers in this field are experiencing.

(Thanks also to Eric for putting up with his presentation being cropped by the projector. For further reading, there's a write-up of talk Stamen did in London recently, by Rod McLaren.)

Postopolis!: Tobias Frere-Jones

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here.

Tobias Frere-Jones, with his partner Jonathan Hoefler, are amongst the world's leading typographers. With lovely coincidence, City of Sound's logo is set in the fabulous Gotham typeface that he and Hoefler designed; it adorns the outside the Storefront gallery as Frere-Jones speaks. Gotham was derived from their extensive research into New York lettering and signage. I've written about it many times.

I introduced Frere-Jones by noting how New York, unlike its fellow world cities London and Tokyo, appears to have a richer set of lettering still on display, on the street. I draw this from my own observations, the work of Frere-Jones & Hoefler, but also from recently reading the excellent small pamphlet 'Letters from New York 2', published by the Society of Scribes. This has a great illustrated essay by Paul Shaw - 'Looking for Letters in New York: A Tale of Surprise and Dismay'. Highly recommended.

I suggested that the lettering on our streets is a rich information layer, conveying the history and character of the city itself. And Frere-Jones has done as much as anyone to document, research, decode and then create with this lettering. He speaks clearly, with an everyday poetry, about these key signifiers around us, and with the energy and pride of a native New Yorker.

The presentation is essentially a series of fantastic photos of lettering in situ. Starting with the initial inspiration of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, on 8th Avenue and 42nd Street, Frere-Jones relates how this "engineer-made lettering", which is in a sense "non designed", has a character, richness, skill and vitality lacking in much contemporary signage.

He says that the "shapes of our letters are just as important as the shapes of our buildings, or the accent in our voices ... (They're) just as important, in terms of recognising the city."

The image of the Gansevoort Market sign, and that of Primary School 142, or of the 356 Madison Street housing projects from 1948 are particularly lovely, and with the Port Authority signs, you can see the DNA of Gotham emerging. There's another sign – the Tunnel Garage one below – of which Frere-Jones says he barely has the vocabulary to describe the Gs. But they're wonderful.

Frere-Jones says he set himself "the task of visiting every block in Manhattan and recording every piece of surviving lettering still there". And since 2002, he's made it from Battery Park up to 14th St., producing 4000 photos or so. We see a tiny fragment of these, and seeing the entire set must be a terrifying and beautiful thing.

A favourite sign is that of the Manhattan Railway Co., which ran the elevated trains in New York. Frere-Jones notes that the last El was torn down 50 years ago, yet the lettering is still there - on Division St. It's a visual reminder of history, of the previous city. The lettering is sometimes the only survivor, everything else changes around it. "Particularly with numbers", he says. "The number of the building is the only thing that doesn't change."

I love his description of the type downtown, the bold san serifs you see there. He calls it a "mercantile brashness" that you find all through TriBeCa and surrounding. Frere-Jones notes that these "dignified elegant" designs form "an appropriate way to express pride in an institution" that you rarely see. I asked him where, as a practising designer, this sensibility was now? Where is the muscular, confident civic pride, helping make concrete this powerful abstraction of New York City? Has that been displaced into other areas, or simply disappeared? We don't arrive at a clear conclusion on this, other than the economic and cultural conditions changing so radically that signwriting and lettering, as a way of conveying messages to the public, simply doesn't exist anymore. Also, Paul Shaw pins the International Style movement, and what followed, as having little time for lettering on its buildings. More's the pity. Frere-Jones wishes that letters still had that role - of talking to the public - and still had that importance in the everyday city. But knows that it's not going to happen.

To me, those san serifs are the visual equivalent of those bullhorns outside. They are New York. It can veer dangerously close to nostalgia here, which Frere-Jones clearly doesn't do. By infusing their history to create something new, which has such a clean, practical and elegant aesthetic that I feel I can confidently select it for the quintessentially 21stC media form of a weblog, he absolutely sidesteps any notion of wallowing in the city's fading glories.

We see a few ghost signs too, which leads to what he calls "the sad part of the presentation", running through "examples of lettering that are no longer with us". His value here is as historian, documenting change in the city, but I like that he does this as a by-product of his practise, rather than simply for nostalgic reasons.

He suggest the only place that this quality of lettering is still practised is on trucks you see around the place, and shows a few photos of these vivid signs and designs. Ditto the curiously attractive "Chinatown geometric" vernacular forms around Canal St.

He'd love to take on the street signs of New York. Studies of street signs in the city from turn of century to 1950, indicate a rather quaint solution, but something that worked much better than current ones. They were clearly produced with the knowledge of sign painter applied to how these look and work.

He's also working on getting this awe-inspiring photographic database online, but that'll take some time. As will getting above 14th street. For now, he shows us a fabulous example of how to fuse careful, historical research, with a genuine love of the city, and then fold that into a creative practise. It's a great talk.

With Tobias's permission, I've posted up a few of his example images here, some of which were from the talk and some of which weren't.

Music for 10:00AM in the library room

Amidst the haul of great things I picked up on a recent trip to Japan, these four CDs, two in each set. I'm quite keen on compilations which are designed for a certain space or time, and these aim to do just that (relates vaguely to a piece I wrote five years ago on different facets around music).

First up, the Grand Gallery label, with music designed for different times of day. The selections are generally the kind of jazz-house-latin-lite that seems effortlessly popular in Japan - a beautiful sheen to it, as with the package design.

The second is a series based on rooms, here aimed at the dining room and the library (there was another room too, which I can't have been as interested in). Music here is older jazz and very good. For cool kids, clearly.

(But what happens if you play the 10:00AM CD in the dining room?)

Cover art emerges in iTunes. Possibly.

As noted here a while back, the covers of vinyl records or home-made mix tapes have a lot of value that has been discarded in the drive towards digital music services such as iTunes, Rhapsody and so on. As well as visual representation, basic elements of contextual information - aka metadata - which were effortlessly conveyed via cover art, are generally missing. Definitely a case of one step forward and two steps back, with unknown consequences for music.

In my New Musical Experiences piece I noted a couple of potential solutions - which were stop gaps at best - including an interface for browsing music via their sleeves, known as Cover Flow. This at least created some connection between visual and aural experiences, though it did little to resolve the omission of more structural metadata. Development appeared to stop a while ago, and as of last night we know why. It's perhaps one of the key additions to iTunes 7. Here's a pic from the Apple website illustrating the ideal:

John Coulthart and Colin Buttimer note what this means and generally welcome its inclusion. However, iTunes is optimised to use the album artwork at the iTunes Music Store to populate the cover art in your collection - which of course means Apple gets to see all your music, by the way, though they explicitly say they chuck that data away - and the iTunes catalogue has such a proportionately small set of recorded music that many collections won't be helped by this at all. Anybody whose tastes hover one iota either side of the mainstream won't be helped, due to the strategy and business issues around the music marketplace mitigating directed against the user so heavily. Additionally, there are all the basic issues around matching names of albums from your collection to Apple's. Put simply, chances are that your album's artwork won't be in iTunes. (You can add it yourself, which is good, but not even I bother to do that.) So for many, the experience is often going to look like this:

Hmm. Applications like Synergy handle this better, by using Amazon.com's cover art database as its provider, leading to far higher hit rate - ultimately meaning that album art can be pulled back into the music listening experience. Good, even at a pathetically small size.

[Update: However, when it works, it is truly folding something of value back into the music playback experience. iTunes is currently thrashing away, playing matchmaker with several thousand albums in my library and its Music Store database. Slowly but surely it's adding a visual context back into music playback, as many of us had requested, at least for some small percentage of the albums I've ripped. Cover Flow provides something of the more 'gestural' interface I'd suggested too. Now, if they'd just build the mini projector ...]

Sadly, there's little on the structural metadata front, save a new (?) addition, 'Album artist', which is possibly intended to help with compilations or DJ mixes. Unclear, and again it illustrates how difficult it is to convey the richly textured context that physical products intrinsically handle well. Something like Kieran Hebden's DJ Kicks set is clear enough on the shelves - it's compiled by Hebden, aka Four Tet, featuring numerous artists across different tracks, including remixes by DJs of tracks by other artists and so on. To map this thoroughly into iTunes is still tricky and I can't see many users doing it. Ditto the mysterious 'grouping' option. (There are far more difficult 'edge cases' than these - as discussed.) However, the annoying and disruptive gap that used to be audible in such mix albums - also live albums or music which isn't song-based - has now been fixed in iTunes 7, with the ugly term 'Gapless album'. It still generally requires user intervention, which most won't do. However, at least the option is there and this is another major tidy-up (though does it work on iPods too?). Further metadata issues could only be dealt with by a more concerted engagement with supportive environments such as Musicbrainz (whose brilliantly-coiffeured founder, Robert Kaye, is sitting behind me, incidentally, working with us at BBC Radio & Music Interactive this week.)

There are quite a few other small additions to iTunes 7 too, such as remembering playback points and a general tidy up of the Music Store interface. So despite the flaws and oversights, it's good to see Apple beginning to at least address issues that have been present since v1 of iTunes. Keep on it.

Of course, all the news will mainly be about the movie download service, though I can't get too excited about this yet. It's too expensive, the resolution is too small, the DRM aspects will serve against the user, and fundamentally, business strategy issues mean the content offering is so small and uninspiring - really, who cares? Technically, it's a step forward, but without content, that's all it is. Kudos to Apple if it gets the 'watch movies on TV' iTV service going, though - despite my snitty description there, it'll actually be a huge step forward if they can bring a smooth user experience to an area that market-driven development has shot through with interoperability issues. Good luck to 'em.

Zozo

Just after posting on curated graphical skylines, Reluct.com informs me of Zozo, a new Japanese online shopping mall with 50+ 'concept stores' and an interface conceit based around a fake urban skyline.

From A-to-Bee

Interesting story filed in the 'Navigation/Wayfinding' section of the BBC News site today. (Sorry, that should read "the 'Science/Nature' section of the BBC News site". I forgot to remove my filter.)

On bumblebees. And their extraordinary facility for wayfinding.

"What we are showing is that it is eminently possible for bumblebees to forage more than five kilometres from the nest," said co-author Dr Mark O'Neill, from the University of Oxford ... It is not entirely clear how the insects navigate but their vision seems to help keep them on course and recognise landmarks. "We believe there will be a difference, because they use vision, especially the horizon edge for guidance. So a cluttered environment is liable to be more problematic and challenging to the bees than a green field environment," said Dr O'Neill."

"The insects' "maps" also include odours, but these are limited to less than 2m (7ft). For example, when a bee has emptied the nectar in a flower, it leaves chemical "post-it notes" to tell others where it has been. The countryside has a more varied scent composition than the urban landscape, and researchers are now plotting bee routes to see which kinds of environment the insects prefer. "We are trying to find out more about how bees forage, or look for their food," explained Dr O'Neill. "We're particularly interested to see if they find certain environments easier to navigate."

Interesting stuff. Full story.

Coincidentally, I picked up a couple of books for the office recently, neither of which appear to mention bees but perhaps ought to. The first, entitled 'Wayfinding' (Rotovision) has been out a while, and looks OK if a little mundane. The second - and perhaps I'm being seduced by the sheer quality of Lars Müller publications here - looks far more interesting, and is called 'Wayshowing' by Per Mollerup.

It's utterly beautiful and looks to pull of the trick off being thorough, imaginative and practical. For example, Mollerup's introduction includes a couple of definitions of 'sign':

"The first meaning covers the sign outside the butcher's shop, the directional signs in the airport, the traffic signs in the street, and so on. The other meaning uses the word 'sign' to stand for any phenomenon that has a meaning. That usage is related to Umberto Eco's definition of a sign as anything that human beings can use to lie. In this meaning, the word 'sign' is used more or less synonymously with with such words as 'mark', 'symbol' and 'signal'. A letter, a whistle signal, a red beret, a hand waving, and a Nike swoosh are all signs. But so are the signs outside the butcher's shop and any other sign in the narrow meaning described previously. The broad meaning includes the narrow meaning, not the other way round"

By widening the scope, 'Wayshowing' is deliciously ambitious. Yet it's full of practical examples, models and photographs, and it looks like I'll be drawing from it for years. As to the title:

"Wayfinding' is a term that many designers and manufacturers of signs and signage systems like to use. They claim that they work with wayfinding. Perhaps they do, but they haven't found a way to precise language. In their work as sign writers, they should be occupied with 'wayshowing'. Wayshowing relates to wayfinding as writing relates to reading and as speaking relates to hearing. The purpose of wayshowing is to facilitate wayfinding. Wayshowing is the means. Wayfinding is the end. Wayshowing is a new terms developed by the author of this book to clarify this distinction."

Some page spreads and a handy link below.

Wayshowing, by Per Mollerup [Amazon UK|US]