cityofsound

"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, plus some notes on architectural exhibitions

The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.

The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)

While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.

Recent work at Monocle.com

Been working on a new wave of material for Monocle.com. Over the last week, we published a few features which relate to stories in issue 02. For each issue, we try to take a some stories online, twisting in a new direction, or providing further context. For instance, issue 02's Andrea Lenardin Madden profile expands into a little feature about her collaboration with the Sprinkles cupcake empire.

So, related to our lead story on Norway, we were extremely privileged to be granted an interview with HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. He doesn't often do them, and proved to be an extremely engaging interviewee. Progressive, intelligent, diplomatic yet involved - everything a modern monarch should be.

Additionally, we'll cover material which isn't mentioned in the magazine. Regular readers here might enjoy the brief documentary on Swiss robot bricklayers - yes, really - in which we discuss mass customisation, digital fabrication and architecture, talking to the profs at DFAB, ETH Zürich.

Back to issue 02, where we created our ideal broadcaster (other than Monocle of course): the 'Nordic News Network'. So, we got architect and designer Anders Nord to render a quick fly-through of the imaginary studio set, and we also quickly worked up an identity and soundtrack. Behold NNN.

See also our first infographic work - rather straightforward but clean, I think, and presenting new data on projected freshwater resources worldwide to 2050 (again, a link from the Norway story.)

Oh, and I hope you saw the lovely Kuntzel+Deygas work we posted up previously, such as these title sequences, music videos, character animations etc. There's more there, and much more to come of course. We're simultaneously working on reworking the site - and a million other things - particularly for subscriber-only material.

In other news, I managed to slip a QR code into our manga for issue 03 - fun! Sneak preview:

Hopefully a lot more of that kind of action to follow. Next week, off to Osaka and Tokyo with Tyler to explore this and more.

Vacancy now closed: Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast

UPDATE: Vacancy now closed.

Please excuse the work-related post, but we're hiring. Do pass this on to anyone/anywhere you think might be interested.

Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast
    
Monocle.com is the broadcast arm of Monocle, producing high-quality audio and video related to subjects covered in the magazine. The website, and corresponding mobile channels, aim to 'raise the bar' for internet-based video, both in terms of editorial and production values.
    
Monocle is looking for a highly motivated, skilled all-rounder to join our core team in London, helping with the creation of both the website and the new broadcast-led formats it carries.
    
Main responsibilities:

• Planning and executing the logistics of broadcasts, and broadcast acquisitions.
  
• Creation of audio/video material for Monocle.com and its related interactive channels.
  
• Editing and encoding of Monocle broadcast content.

Required experience: 

• Experience of creating and producing high quality audio-video material.
  
• Experience with Final Cut Pro, within a Mac-based digital video environment.
  
• Basic video production skills (handling cameras, mics etc.).
  
• Basic skills in Photoshop, Illustrator etc.
  
• An in-depth understanding of contemporary web content and internet-based and mobile platforms.
  
• Good understanding of international current affairs, business, culture, design, as covered in Monocle.
  
• Languages an advantage.

Reporting to Director of Web & Broadcast (that's me), and working as part of Monocle's core team at our London HQ in Marylebone.
     
All applications and enquiries to dh [at] monocle [dot] com. Thanks.

Convergent thought on the iPhone

Having previously argued that convergence is something tech companies seem to show huge appetite for yet consumers seem to show little appetite for, I'll now happily admit I may be wrong. I finally see a convergent device that makes sense, that would appear to appeal to me almost completely. It just seemed that Apple had to make it, that's all. If they can actually launch the thing - on time, in sufficient numbers, globally - and it lives up to even half the promise of their near-perfect presentation, then convergence becomes a pragmatic, useful, beautiful reality.

Apple iPhone

NB: In a stunningly mistimed announcement - the absolute opposite of a slow news day for the mobile market - it should also be noted that Nokia has announced the N800 and N76 smartphone/mobile computers. Their deal with Vox is also worth noting. The latter is interesting, strategically, but I can't see it making the front pages tomorrow, somehow.

Local repair cultures

Jan Chipchase has posted a fantastic summary of what he calls local repair cultures, as seen on his research travels across Chengdu, Delhi, Ulan Bataar,  Ho Chi Minh, Lhasa, Kampala and Soweto. Jan describes the highly innovative practices involved in acquiring, modifying and repairing mobile phones in the bustling street markets of these cities.

The activities can be simple to complex, ranging from "swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice." The techniques are sometimes documented in reverse-engineered manuals, but generally move more rapidly through physical, social networks: "It's often easier to peer over the shoulder of a neighbour than open the manual itself"

These repair cultures appear intensify in pace and scale even more than traditional consumer electronics repair cultures around TVs, DVDs etc., largely due to the number of mobile components available and the importance of the device itself in contemporary life.

There's an entire ecosystem - from training to wholesalers - articulated in Jan's post, accompanied by his wonderful pictures (for example, those above). What immediately springs to mind is a question that jumped out at Jan too:

"Why do these informal repair cultures exist at all? What is so different between London and Lhasa or Helsinki and Ho Chi Minh?"

Jan's self-answer is clearly part way there at least:

"The informal repair services that are offered are quite simply driven by necessity - highly price sensitive customers cannot afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee - having been bought through grey market channels, been sent as gifts from friends and relatives abroad, or were locally bought used, second or third+ ownership. In many cases these users cannot afford to be without their mobile phone, not in the social sense of being out of touch (which is valid enough), but in many instances because their livelihoods depend on it. On the supply side there is a ready pool of sufficiently skilled labour, ready access to tools, components and above all knowledge."

And yet I wonder whether there is more to it still, which veers closer to culture and history rather than simply economics.

New Musical Experiences

Below, the written-up and expanded notes for a talk I gave at a seminar called 'The Future of Music' at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki. This followed a talk by John Kieffer, in his last speaking engagement as Head of Music for the British Council (his talk is progressed in this subsequent article by John in his current position at AEA).

I've written more or less what I spoke about, although it's developed into more of a 'paper' than was originally intended and is now more cityofsound than BBC. The audience was music educators, music technologists, musicians, researchers and cultural policy makers. This talk, like many I give, was concerned with describing an emerging terrain for the largely unfamiliar, and as such could work as a primer for aspects of this area in general - yet I also tried to make some points to move discussion in general along.

Here's the presentation (in Powerpoint format) if you want to accompany the text with original image-laden slides [16mb].

Many thanks to Gustav Djupsjöbacka, Timo Cantell & Jonna Hurskainen of Sibelius Academy for inviting me.

Modelling embodied experience

Matt Jones notes the efficacy of Flash Lite for prototyping - as recently demonstrated to him by the team at Fjord:

"If you don’t polish the visual aspects, keeping it at a 'wireframe'-like level of detail - then you almost have an ‘animatic’ of the experience that you can put in the hands of a prospective end-user; which also you can quickly pull apart, reconfigure and test again. This should result in iterative improvements to the design which you can then take to the next level - coding."

(And ta for the addition of 'animatic' to my vocabulary - useful. Welcome back, Mr Jones.)

Further, Matt notes that the need to situate the prototype on the device. Seems a basic point at first, but given that the prototyping tool (the PC) is not the eventual home of the application (the mobile), one can see the temptation to demonstrate applications on that laptop, rather than in situ.

"The handset is (a hand-borne) device that projects into your world, and the service you are designing with it, rather than the experience of even say a 12″ laptop, where you project yourself through the proscenium of the screen into that user-illusion. The interactions with the device, the UI and the service are both embodied and situated - whether it’s the embodied muscle memory one employs while thumbing frequently used commands on the device, the socially situated context of use of mobile devices or the plain fact that they are most often used while multitasking one’s way through a visually and aurally distracting world. These factors have a profound effect on our interactions with the device interface - in other words - it’s different when it’s in your hands.

One of the greatest things in London right now is the Herzog and De Meuron exhibition at Tate Modern, in which the firm cover tables with all the cruft and modelling built up throughout their design process. It's a gloriously messy opening-up of multiple thought processes - and beautifully illustrates how often architects have to iterate models of their buildings - simulacra in cardboard, glass, resin, JPGs, MDF etc. It's almost as if they try to dream the building into life by building thousands of approaches and approximations of it. Imagine the near-shattering sense of anticipation being realised that architects and clients get when finally walking into a building - they're unable to physically experience exactly what their design has wrought until the damn thing is built. In fact, they can't immerse themselves in the weight of actual experience at all until that point. Powerful minds can project incredibly rich suggestions of what it might feel like, but you don't know. It's not embodied.

In building digital experiences, we don't have to remain too long in the abstracted modeling world - we can move to the situated, embodied world very quickly indeed. Rapidly getting prototypes on to the phone means evaluation and iteration can have a finer grain from the start. (This doesn't quite articulate all the contexts of use that the device-application combo might inhabit, as the next challenge is to 'dream into life' all the possible contexts a mobile device might end up in - this is a Walking City!. But still, an aspect of 'the building' becomes genuinely tangible early on, and in a fluid medium which minimises the cost of incremental change.)

As soon as Matt started at Nokia, he was talking about the importance of physicality in the use of mobile devices - but now the work that Nokia and Fjord are doing suggest that that's not just a mightily important factor for the end result, but about the power of getting ideas physically in situ as high up the design process as possible.

Blackbeltjones: Prototyping mobile applications with Flash Lite

Designing for shuffling

Following on from the previous post on contextual information we could infer from increasingly smart, self-aware social informational products - or, how devices learn - is a pointer to Matt Webb's great observations on using the Shuffle here and here. I particularly like his thoughts on navigation in this screenless, backgrounded, 'blinking' context.

"Or maybe a better interface would be this: The shuffle should have two slider controls: volume and more/less like this. Don't like a track? Hit Less Like This and the next track is more randomised. Like a track? Hit More Like This are the next track is more likely to be from the same genre--hit it again and it's more likely to be from the same artist, the same album, share a BPM."

There are several axes we might want to enable, ultimately. The classic ones Webb describes - artist, genre, holding the album container inviolate or fluid etc. But also the ones in this old chestnut about music's rich facets.

This was more in the context of building navigation in a web context, but some of these axes may be worth considering too. More research required on context of use around music (unless you know of some already?). Is it all artist, album, genre? Or mood, function, utility, musical structure etc. I suspect it's more the latter than we tend to think, but have focused on the former due to the organisational characteristics of the music industry and, well, the fact it's easier.

Anyway, given we have an axis of sorts to navigate through, how might we present - in a non-visual, gestural sense - choice to the user, which doesn't massively impinge on their otherwise-engaged thought processes?

Perhaps an audio preview might be a way of doing it? An audible signal indicating you're about to enter preview mode, and then a 3-second burst of the three tracks which match the closest across various axes. Click back and forth - or rock the device back and forth, or tug up and down - to shuffle quickly through them and hit play to select?

Bit like how we used to - or still do - drop the needle randomly in the middle of a track on a piece of vinyl for a second or so, to 'hear a glimpse' of what the track was like, almost bouncing the needle progressively through some broadly representative grooves (the physical record provides a great sense of duration of track of course, as well as boundaries in between and sequence in context of album. Top interface Mr Emile Berliner!) ... We can effortlessly preview a side of vinyl very quickly, with tangible physical and aural feedback, before selecting a track. It's very gestural. While it does provide information around duration, sequence and position in the context of a larger whole, it doesn't provide information about genre, artist, mood etc - which it didn't have to, given its characteristics. But might be something to look at in the the context of Matt's interesting thoughts - it may be still too much to ask for heavily backgrounded use, but then this is where predetermined choice, yet still based on active learning from user behaviour and therefore with implied agency, could be useful. Hmmm.

It's akin to Fabio Sergio's ever-smart and ever-prescient comments about navigation through rich media on mobile phones. We can't be asking people to actively navigate through virtual space while they actively concentrating are navigating themselves through physical space. These kind of casual, instinctive, gestural interactions would seem more in tune with music listening on mobile devices than the complex, rich agency afforded by browsing a 2-foot GUI on a large screen with keyboard etc.

Interconnected: There are two buttons ...
Interconnected: 40gig iPod has been ousted

How devices learn

A few quick things on music experiences in the contexts of mobile devices coming up. Or, if you prefer, "My Life with an iPod shuffle". Or, "Shuffling Towards Bedlam" (sorry). First, this:

Giles Turnbull at O'Reilly Developer Weblogs takes me to task for geeking out over the iPod Shuffle's lack of a clock, and therefore its inability to truly glean useful contextual information which could help users navigate through their music ...

"I don't agree with Dan Hill when he calls the lack of built-in clock shortsighted on Apple's part. Of course the company wants to keep costs down, but it also wants to produce a "just enough" music player for Celia and millions of people like her. People who don't care that the Shuffle has no clock, about Audioscrobbler, or about their Recently Played playlist keeping track of what they listen to while iPodding. All they want is the comforting sound of the music. Everything else is geekspeak to them; just noise."

I know where Giles is coming from - indeed, Audioscrobbler etc, whilst quite brilliant, are hopelessly bleeding edge and technically-demanding services compared to what the average music listener may desire. But I think he's misinterpreted the general thrust of my argument around these devices. I absolutely share his belief that the iPod Shuffle is a fantastic device, and ideal for a huge range of 'average listeners', for whom the digital music space is hugely 'overspecced' and over-complex. Perhaps check some of the previous discussion around shuffle in general, and in particular the comments speculating about the number of CDs that 'most people' might possess. I suspect that this is the real context of popular music - people with less than 10 CDs in their collection. That's the general thrust of Giles's article too, and he makes a darn good point.

So of course 'normal people' don't care that the iPod Shuffle has no clock. But I do believe that the clock could be an essential part of a smart device's tech nonetheless. It's more that people may care about the services that the clock enables. I believe we need to find more interesting and useful ways of providing usable, enlgihtening, enjoyable interfaces which provide real people with real insight and real agency when it comes to sorting through an increasingly large music collection. When the 'jukebox in the sky' subscription-based model (Napster, Rhapsody etc) overtakes the iTMS model - as I think it probably will - users need ways of getting to the music that matches their mood or function quicker, easier and more enjoyably than ever. The 'personal music collection' ceases to have meaning in this commoditised and impersonal context of millions of tracks a click away - and we end up in a space somewhere between the backgrounded serendipity-led mode of radio listening (most-people) and the active engagement of current digital music models (people-like-us).

Either way, learning from listeners' personal context is one way of providing agency and ease-of-use, and it would be worth thinking about the basic technical aggregators of that contextual information (to infer meaning from time, location, mood, backgrounded/foregrounded etc). [Tom Coates also makes this point about keeping this valuable contextual data. As I did, he finds it odd that Apple don't appear to get this.]

So no, real users/listeners don't care about the clock - but they do care about the music they're listening to. But they surely won't care enough to want to sort through millions of potential tracks themselves - and certainly won't care enough to rate them all by hand. I suggest that most people have tended prefer the self-limiting, deliberately-backgrounded basic selection mode enabled by a small CD collection or favourite radio station (nb. this doesn't mean they don't love music or find it incredibly important in their lives). Devices and services which learn from user behaviour could provide a richly variegated middle-ground between the very different models of how most people listen to music and how digital music service users listen to music.

O'Reilly: Doing the iPod Shuffle

Adapting cameraphones

Nico sends an interrupt to a mobile-related Economist article on a 'street finds its own use for things' level. Good stuff:

"Such novel applications are possible, says Mr Woodside, because the devices are not just cameras, but are also phones with wireless internet connectivity. Furthermore, modern mobile-phone operating systems, including the Symbian software that powers many Nokia handsets, allow users to download and run small pieces of software on the phones. Indeed, one of the motivations for adopting the Symbian software was to encourage just this kind of innovation, says Mika Setala of Nokia ...

"It might not be what the mobile operators had in mind when they launched their picture-messaging services, but it does at least generate traffic and revenue for them. Nico MacDonald, a design and technology strategist with Spy, a consultancy based in London, notes that technologies often thrive when people start using them for purposes beyond those for which they were originally intended. With camera-phones, that process would appear to be well under way."

The Economist: Phones with eyes [subscription reqd.]
Nico Macdonald: Technology adaptation discussed in The Economist TQ