Haunted by Technology

Here is a confession. I hit my head all the time. Now, some of you may be thinking that this explains things! But I'm actually quite serious. It's like I tend to think my height just stops at eye level, somehow, and then blammo--I crack my head on something. In fact, once during a tech rehearsal I followed a fellow actor, who I had always assumed was taller than I was, through a steel doorway. He made it through without ducking, and I ended up on the ground with an egg on my head.

I have a similar feeling when I am interacting with computer technology, particularly with a mobile device--like the rest of my body disappears and I am just my eyes and my hands. I wonder if this is a common feeling; given concerns I've heard expressed by others in various yoga and movement classes I've attended over the years, I'd wager that our body awareness, collectively, is fairly non-existent throughout most of our daily lives. By body awareness I don't mean consciousness in the sense of shame or judgmental attitudes towards our own bodies, but a connectedness to how our bodies are actually occupying physical space.

The question of how we occupy physical space seems to be the burning question of the last year. And more particularly, how does our use of social media contribute to our occupation of various spaces? What common threads might exist between phenomena like geocaching and the social justice gatherings happening across the US and in scattered locations abroad, beyond the use of GPS technology? How do these forms relate to earlier cultural memes of youthful unrest, for example, Happenings and performance art? What similar strategies are employed? What ideological differences might arise if we were to look closely at the performative practices of today's occupiers and last generation's performance artists, especially as they relate to the body as a medium of expression? To what extent are media descriptions of this expression of today's zeitgeist haunted by the ghosts of earlier movements, and does the use of mobile technology by occupiers heighten or diminish feelings of cultural deja vu?

"Parallax," A Mind-Bending Game Where You Leap Between Parallel Worlds

"Parallax," A Mind-Bending Game Where You Leap Between Parallel Worlds:

I aged out of playing modern video games way back when GoldenEye was popular and I couldn't keep the mazelike game environment straight in my head. So I'd be pretty much screwed if I attempted to play Parallax, an "interdimensional puzzle platformer" that superimposes two 3-D mazes on top of each other and forces you to phase-shift between them in order to find your way out. (That sizzling sound you hear is my brain melting.)

With a concept that's difficult to explain, designing it was even harder.

Parallax's gameplay is simple: Move your first-person avatar from point A to point B across a series of suspended paths and platforms. The twist is that your route is studded with circular portals that connect to a parallel universe with another obstacle course of paths and platforms, all occupying the same space. The only way to get from point A to point B is to exploit these portals, which connect both universes in a kind of meta-maze. Oh, and sometimes the paths, platforms, and portals are all moving, so the ways that physical space intersects with itself becomes difficult to predict. (Still sizzling? Yep.)

For a game whose concept is that difficult to explain, designing it was even harder. How do you present the player with two separate-but-superimposed gameworlds in a way that gives them a shred of hope of solving the puzzles? Creators Zi Ye and Jesse Burstyn found a simple answer: Make one world white, and the other black. Parallax's ultra-monochrome visual palette elegantly distinguishes between the mirror worlds while providing a stark, simple interface for solving the puzzles. (No need for distracting photorealistic ornamentation on walls or floors--Parallax is already demanding enough from your frontal cortex as is.) Ye and Burstyn are hoping to release Parallax by the end of the year for Mac and PC.

[Via Ars Technica]

After Trying To "Kill Math," An Ex-Apple Designer Aims To Kill Reading

After Trying To "Kill Math," An Ex-Apple Designer Aims To Kill Reading:

If you thought I was hard on Microsoft's "Future of Productivity" video, read interface designer Bret Victor's take on it (money quote: "Are we going to accept an Interface Of The Future that's less expressive than a sandwich?"). Victor, a former designer at Apple, is a guy who thinks big about UIs and builds working prototypes of his ideas--like his "Kill Math" project, which replaces abstruse differential equations with intuitive interactive visualizations. His latest creation, called Tangle, is an attempt to redesign the "interface" commonly known as the written word--and reinvent the experience of reading text online.

[A screenshot of a reactive document: When you drag the cursor on the chart at the bottom, all the figures change. The math has been programmed into the interaction, so that all of these formulas are alive. Click to view interactive version.]

"Imagine if every claim you read came with an explorable analysis."

Victor calls his concept "reactive documents," and the basic idea is that digital text should leverage the inherent interactivity of the web--turning written arguments into "apps" that the reader can manipulate and test, instead of just consume. But instead of doing this with fancy infographics or chrome, Victor uses Javascript to embed interactivity into plain-text sentences, phrases, even individual words. In his prototype "Ten Brighter Ideas", Victor turns 10 written arguments for energy conservation into "explorable explanations." For example, mousing over an assertion about "turning off the lights" launches a written premise: "Suppose 20% of US households always turned off lights in unoccupied rooms." The statistic "20%" looks like a normal hyperlink, but clicking it invokes a tiny sparkline-like slider that the reader can move back and forth, increasing or decreasing the numerical value--which then changes every other written assertion following from that premise, live and interactively.

The appeal of Victor's system is hard to explain--it makes much more sense if you just try it out--but the thinking behind it is visionary. "Imagine a world where we expect every claim to be accompanied by an explorable analysis, and every statistic to be linked to a primary source," he writes. With "reactive documents," critical reading--and by extension, critical thinking--becomes an interactive process. We don't just read a document; we can also use it, exploring the limits of and connections between ideas by physically manipulating the properties of the information behind them.

And since the whole point of fusing interaction design, programming, and writing in this way is to make communication more transparent, Victor created the open-source Javascript library called Tangle so that anybody (well, anybody with basic coding knowledge) can create or tweak their own "reactive documents." And making or reading one doesn't have anything to do with pretty fonts, fancy animations, or proprietary algorithms. In Victor's vision, the millennia-old "interface" of the written word remains unchanged. It's simply enhanced--because "digital documents aren't subject to the constraints of paper."

Will the future of writing and reading online be forged by writer/programmers and reader/users inspired by visions like Victor's? I'm not sure, but after seeing "reactive documents" in action, I'm already wishing that every op-ed writer and journalist at the New York Times would start using Tangle. Hey, they've got an R&D lab over there--maybe they should think about collaborating with Victor before he wins a MacArthur genius grant.

The New “I” In Journalism

Another look at objectivity/subjectivity and personal pronouns in blogs and other news articles:

The New “I” In Journalism:

Is integration of the personal narrative helpful or harmful in reporting?

A Video Series Teaching Web Design To Anyone Who's Afraid Of Code

A Video Series Teaching Web Design To Anyone Who's Afraid Of Code: Anyone who has ever tried to build a website for the first time knows that awful feeling when confronted with lines of HTML, CSS, and PHP, languages as foreign as any known to man. Well, never fear. Two graphic designers have begun releasing a series of video tutorials called "[url=http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/]Don't Fear the Internet[/url]" that explains how to perform the basics of web design without having to become an actual web designer.

The videos, created by [url=http://jessicahische.is/awesome/]Jessica Hische[/url] (also the designer behind the “[url=http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663033/infographic-designers-should-you-work-for-free]Should I Work for Free[/url]” flowchart and [url=http://www.dailydropcap.com/]Daily Drop Cap[/url]) with her boyfriend [url=http://strangenative.com/]Russ Maschmeyer[/url], aren’t intended to be comprehensive guides. Instead, the process reflects a refreshing, stitched-together DIY sensibility. The two of them designed the title cards and interstitials in Illustrator (typeset in Brandon Grotesque by [url=http://www.hvdfonts.com/]Hannes von Döhren[/url]), cut and pasted the audio using GarageBand, and slapped it all together in iMovie.

[video]http://service.twistage.com/plugins/player.swf?v=03ea13bc09c5e[/video]

But the real “fear removal” work is done by analogy, and specifically, how coding is like food. In the video above, Hische calls HTML “hamburger text markup language,” and then uses the analogy of a hamburger to illustrate how HTML tags actually work--i.e., the opening and closing tags are like the beginning and ending of lunch hour. “We like metaphors in general,” Maschmeyer told Co.Design. “Code can be scary. Food is comforting. We think it balances well.” And they keep it loose, peppering the script with deliberately cheesy lines and pictures of cats--the idea is that if they learned how to do it and they seem to be having fun with it, how hard can it be?

The series contains six videos so far--each one takes about 2-3 weeks to make from start to finish--and more are on the way. But even though serious developers won’t find much in here that they don’t already know, Maschmeyer says the real audience is for people like he and Hische used to be--creative types looking for real-world analogies and common language to explain how to design online.

See all the videos [url=http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/]here[/url]. Please note that the site does not allow embedding because the authors want the videos seen in their original context.

Geek Show! Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer Hit the Road

Geek Show! Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer Hit the Road: Newlyweds Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are taking their love on the road. The author and Dresden Dolls singer will be touring the West Coast starting in October.

Review: M83, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

I was first introduced to M83 in 2004, through the sublime Donnie-Darko-meets-Just-Like-Heaven video for “Don't Save Us From the Flames,” the lead single from M83's 2005 disc Before the Dawn Heals Us. M83, the electronic project of French born, L.A.-based Anthony Gonzales, releases a new double-album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, on October 18, from Mute. Here are my thoughts on the album.

First off, there are no songs on these discs that I enjoy quite as much as “Don't Save Us From the Flames,” or “Colours” from his 2008 album Saturdays = Youth. Overall, however, the album given its length, is surprisingly consistent in quality. Dawn had three or four songs that I loved, and many that I found unlistenable. Saturdays was more enjoyable overall than Dawn, but there were still some songs, notably those that seemed reminiscent of Cocteau Twins, that I skipped over. (I have a supremely low tolerance for the Cocteau Twins; the mere fact that Massive Attack managed to make Liz Fraser's voice palatable is one of the reasons I still consider Mezzanine to be the greatest musical achievement of the 21^st century.)

Gonzales has said that his inspiration for the album was the Smashing Pumpkins' 1995 double-disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I have to say that I can hear that influence in the scope and ambition of the album, but not necessarily in the music. A large part of it has to do with Gonzales's voice; Billy Corgan has a very distinctive vocal delivery, and to my ears Gonzales sounds more like early solo Peter Gabriel, and at moments like a Berlin-trilogy era Bowie than the Pumpkins singer. At moments I can hear strains of some of the Pumpkins's tunes, but oddly enough not those from Mellon Collie—bits and pieces of “Disarm,” “Annie-Dog,” the cover of “Landslide,” and overall I'd say the album has the same overwhelming warped feeling as “Real Love,” as if analog equipment were overheating somewhere. [Incidentally, I took some of my children to see the final installment of Harry Potter at a drive-in theater this summer. At one point, the soundtrack became very warped sounding, as if Brian Eno had suddenly wrested control of the score. Then the projector overheated, the film restarted, and it was back to the average, boring Harry Potter soundtrack.] Maybe part of the reason I can't hear Mellon Collie is that to me, the standout track on that album was “1979” which had a blissed-out repetitive vibe much different than the rest of the Pumpkins's excess. Here everything feels over-the-top. There are only two tracks that seem to differ from the M83 formula in the slightest way. The first is “Year One, One UFO” which sounds a bit like someone mistakenly popped on a Clannad disc until it gives way to M83's frantic guitars in its closing moments. The second, which you can sample below, is “New Map” which gives way in the end to a sort of Sufjan Stevens style jam. Gonzales said that the inspiration for Saturdays = Youth was the films of John Hughes. Stevens wrote about Illinois, and the Smashing Pumpkins's rose out of Chicago. Maybe that city is the real inspiration. 

Revenant Victorians

One of the stories that caught my eye this week was Eric Schmidt's pronouncement that the UK should return to the Victorian era attitude of bringing art and science together. The google CEO made his comments in a speech that was part of a media festival in Edinburgh, and you can read about it here.  It's an interesting argument, and worth a lot more time than I'm going to spend on it here; I'll need to revisit it in a later post.

I mention it mainly because I had already been thinking about Victorian England's great social projects, in the wake of all the hubbub over property tax caps and the like. All of it seems to me to amount to a whole lot of noise that boils down to one thing: people like to have a say about where their money goes. Simple, right? I mean, that whole American revolution thing was about taxation without representation supposedly. So in essence we elect leaders, who we pay, to budget for us collectively, and then we complain about it, fire them, and elect new leaders who we then complain about. It seems dysfunctional.

Was it always dysfunctional? I doubt it. Like most systems, it was developed in response to the conditions of the time, using the technology of the time to develop ideas and project solutions. Given the technological infrastructure and educational levels within the population when the US was founded, I'm sure it made a great deal of sense to have a representative democracy. But clinging to this system now seems about as logical to me as insisting that everyone ride horseback and churn their own butter.

This brings me back to the Victorians, in particular, to Bentham and Mayhew, and the idea that the educated should prepare exhaustive studies of the needs of the citizens. To me this fits comfortably in the mindset of a representative democracy, and the hierarchical structure of most of our social organizations still bear the stamp and flavor of these origins. It is based on an informational system that was conditioned by the prevailing technological (the cost of printing presses) and the social (high cost of education, high population density of illiterate, etc.) of the day that necessitated a largely unidirectional flow of information. But those technological and social conditions have been superceded in our own time, which leaves the possibility of a new system that might have a more functional cycle than the present ill fit between system and technology allows.

What got me thinking about this in the first place was thinking about the tax-exempt status of churches. If churches are teaching about social responsibility (as most of the churches I've ever gone to do) then it seems that they should shoulder some of the tax burden. But then it occurred to me that churches already do spend a great deal of their funds on social projects. But then again it might be the case that church organizations are duplicating some of the administrative costs that government organizations administering social programs also face. If churches contributed tax money to government programs, wouldn't that remove some of the redundancy, so that more money would be going directly to the recipients of the social programs? But then again, there rises the specter of programs considered immoral by certain  religious organizations–wouldn't it be wrong to force them to contribute to such programs?

That's when it hit me. Rather than force religious organizations to behave more like government institutions, government institutions could adopt some of the methodologies of religious (and other non-profit) institutions. How so? Here's my example. If I want to give a sum of money to a church, I can attach a stipulation that the funds be applied to a certain project, or go to a certain budget. The same would occur if I were to donate money to a university. Why couldn't that approach be utilized in funding government services? (I know, I know, insert your favorite old bake sale bumper sticker here.) Such an approach would never have worked when the government began collecting taxes, because the information infrastructure did not exist to support it. Imagine today, however. When I go online to file my taxes, there is no technological reason why I could not be presented with a screen with drop down boxes that allows me to set a certain percentage of the funds to go to Budget Item A, a certain amount to go to Budget Item B. Imagine–a direct voice telling the government exactly what programs people are willing to spend money on, and which they aren't. Wouldn't this create more of a sense of a shared vision, or at the very least point out with a much greater degree of accuracy where the conflicts were and how they might be resolved?

It's a crazy idea, but nevertheless, I'm working on some visuals for it.

But enough seriousness, right? I've also been working on a new album, which isn't ready yet, and a new single, which is called "Thief of Hearts."

Trade School: OurGoods

I know that this type of instruction happens all the time in rural communities, but we never hear about it. We need some kind of network to facilitate.


Trade School: OurGoods:

From tradeschool.ourgoods.org

Shot and edited by Alex Mallis

Trade School is a series of classes where people barter for instruction. It has become a creative and forward-moving community that has gathered twice in New York City and has upcoming events in Milan, Virginia and London.

The story of Trade School as told on their website:

“So, from February 25th to March 1st, 2010, we ran Trade School at GrandOpening in the Lower East Side. Over the course of 35 days, more than 800 people participated in 76 single session classes. Classes ran for 1, 2, or 3 hours and ranged from scrabble strategy to composting, from grant writing to ghost hunting. In exchange for instruction, teachers received everything from running shoes to mixed CDs.”

With Trade School, the focus is the design of the system and
figuring out how people interact with that system and get engaged. The experience they have created is truly an innovative form of education. The idea of bartering
is not a new one, but by mixing it with education and a community of
people who are passionate about learning and teaching, the result is a truly
unique hybrid: an open and novel way for sharing ideas and exchanging
knowledge.

Roo Rallly

I've never attended a strike or picket before, but I have the feeling this one was a little unusual. It was an informational picket protesting SUNY Central's decision to create an administrative alliance between SUNY Canton and SUNY Potsdam, with SUNY Canton's president, Joe Kennedy taking an early retirement and SUNY Potsdam's president, Fritz Schwaller, overseeing both campuses. The picket was organized by UUP on the SUNY Canton Roselle Plaza to show solidarity and support for President Kennedy.

Marchers included UUP members–faculty and staff from SUNY Canton–and a number of students. It was certainly not the image I had in my mind of union action. Union members and students rallying in support of administration? It was also somewhat amusing that a number of the faculty marchers were former police officers. And that design students were working with university police for surveillance purposes (in addition to creating some of the signs and documenting the event for media purposes.)

As far as rallies go, it was pretty peaceful. The most trouble that arose was in coming up with rhyming chants–they were so close yet so far! In class afterwards, about half of the students admitted they were unaware of the rally or the issues being addressed by it. I'm not sure how cognizant college students are in general about college presidents; I remember not even realizing that Patti McGill Petersen served food to us in Dana dining hall during a severe winter storm back in the day and as a student I couldn't even have told you what she looked like.

I overheard a particularly telling comment near the end of the rally. One older gentleman walked over to some staff members and said, "You all are probably too young to remember this, but back in the Sixties we used to do this all the time." There were some chuckles, and then another gentleman replied, "Back then they would have had Molotov cocktails. Now they have cappucinos!" Indeed.

How To Build A New House In A Day

How To Build A New House In A Day: No plans Saturday? Then why not build a house?

WikiHouse is an online, open-source construction kit that lets people design and build a new crib in just 24 hours. Yeah, yeah, we know. It sounds ridiculous -- like the premise for some bad reality show. (Can the Joneses build their dream home in a day? Will they survive the frame install? Will Mr. Jones disown Junior over his lousy drywall job?) But this is no joke. Designers tap Google SketchUp, a cinchy 3-D modeling program, to design and edit building templates (sorta' like sewing patterns for architecture). The templates are made available to the masses through Creative Commons. The user then downloads a pattern, cuts out the parts in plywood using a CNC milling machine, and starts hammering away.



“Its aim is to make it possible for almost anyone, regardless of their formal skills, to freely download and build structures which are affordable and suited to their needs,” WikiHouse’s website says.

Sounds promising. And if the designs are really as easy and inexpensive as the site says, you could see this sort of insta-architecture having astronomical value in poor, rural areas and developing countries. Open-source blueprints are already a huge aspect of nonprofit architecture.



But here’s one way WikiHouse is not affordable: You need a CNC miller. Machine shops have them. Universities have them. Sometimes hobbyists have them. Regular Joes do not. That could change as the technology grows cheaper. Nick Lerodiaconou of 00:/, the London design studio behind WikiHouse, points out that the Internet's full of handy how-to guides for cobbling together home-made CNC machines at bargain prices. (Here's one you can make for less than $100, though by the looks of it, I wouldn’t trust it to grind out your kid’s bedroom.)



In any case, WikiHouse is clearly still in trial mode. The only building that the designers have whipped up so far is a small prototype. It "took approximately 24-hours to complete from the start of CNC-milling to the last piece of plywood going up (including a 2-hour car-ride in between to ferry the components to our office in the back of a Volvo estate!)," Lerodiaconou says. "The assembly itself (just building the thing) took about 2 hours one evening and was carried out by 2-3 people, with a few others pitching in to help raise it."

00:/ will build the first official WikiHouse at the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 in South Korea next month. From there, the designers hope to create a fully habitable WikiHouse (complete with sealing, insulation, finishes, and so on) and start a smattering of communal labs to explore the potential of open-source housing elsewhere in the world. "The driving question beneath something like WikiHouse is whether technology can meaningfully lower the threshold for design and fabrication, and thus democratize making in the same way that the home printer democratized the printing press, or YouTube democratized broadcasting," Lerodiaconou says. "Obviously what we're doing right now is an experiment, but the indications from this project, and lots of projects others are doing, is that it is possible. And it is a very-near future reality."

[Hat tip to Architect's Newspaper]

'New media' cultural challenges discussed at SLU Aug. 30

Students in New Media Journalism--this looks like an interesting talk. If you can make it to SLU on Tuesday at 7, this would be a great topic for your blogs!


'New media' cultural challenges discussed at SLU Aug. 30

What Makes Steve Jobs So Great?

Big news of the day: Steve Jobs resigns (again?):

What Makes Steve Jobs So Great?: In the wake of Steve Jobs's resignation, let's consider the greatest decision he ever made. It didn't happen in a garage in Cupertino, sweating with Steve Wozniak as they dreamed up a computer for the common man. Or in a conference room, as managers told him that no one would ever pay $500 for a portable music player. Or in another conference room, as new managers told him no one would ever pay $400 for a cellphone. Rather it was in an almost forgotten annex on the Apple campus.

Jobs had just recently come back to the company, after a 12-year lay off working for two of his own start-ups: NeXT, which made ultra high-end computers, and Pixar. He was taking a tour of Apple, becoming reacquainted with what the company had become in the years since he'd left. It must have been a sobering, even ugly sight: Apple was dying at the hands of Microsoft, IBM, Dell, and a litany of competitors who were doing what Apple did, only cheaper, with faster processors.

Jobs is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live.

In a small building across the road from Apple's main building, he found a solitary designer who was ready to quit after just a year on the job, languishing amid a stack of prototypes. Among them was monolithic monitor with a teardrop swoop, which manged to integrate all of a computer's guts into a single package. And in that room Jobs saw what middle managers did not. He saw the future. And almost immediately he told the designer, Jonathan Ive, that from here on out they'd be working side-by-side on a new line of computers.

Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live, and it was Apple's great fortune that he also happened to be the company's founder.

Those computers that Ive and Jobs worked on became, of course, the iMac--a piece of hardware designed with an unprecedented user focus, all the way to the handle on top, which made it easy to pull out of the box. ("That's the great thing about handles," Ive told Fast Company in 1999. "You know what they're used for.") And while it seems condescending to say that Jobs's greatest moment was finding someone else who was great, it's not. That single moment in the basement with Ive tells you a great deal about what made Steve Jobs the most influential innovator of our time. It shows you the ability to see a company from the outside, rather than inside as a line manager. He didn't see the proto iMac as a liability or a boondoggle. He saw something that was simply better than what had preceded it, and he was willing to gamble based on that instinct. That required an ability to think first and foremost as someone who lives with technology rather than produces it.



People often say that Jobs is a great explainer of technology--a charismatic, plainspoken salesman who is able to bend those around him into a "reality distortion field." But charisma can be bent to all sorts of purposes. Those purposes may very well be asinine. So what gives his plain-speaking such force? He always talks about how wonderous it will be to use something, to actually live with it and hold it in your hands. If you listen to Steve Jobs's presentations over the years, he comes across not as the creator of a product so much as its very first fan--the first person to digest its possibilities.

Of course, when Steve Jobs has fancied himself the chief creator, disastrous failures often ensued. His instincts were often wrong. For example, his much ballyhooed Apple Cube, which was in fact a successor to the NeXT cube he'd developed during his Apple hiatus, was an $1,800 dud. He was also openly disdainful of the internet in the late 1990s. And before his hiatus from Apple, in 1985, his meddling and micro-management had gotten out of control. But the years away reportedly helped him begin ceding more responsibilities to others, and become less of a technology freak and more of a user-experience savant. A reporter who asked Jobs about the market research that went into the iPad was famously told, "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." Which isn't to say that he doesn't think like a consumer--he just thinks like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past. He is a focus group of one, the ideal Apple customer, two years out.

People often reduce Jobs's success a ruthless perfectionism which sometimes led him to scrap a product simply because it didn't feel right, or because some minor feature like a power button or a home screen seemed buggy and unresolved. (Famously, he tore through two prototypes of the iPhone in 2007 before the third passed muster; he also berated Jon Ive early on over the details of the USB port in the first iMac.) But that doesn't get to it ether. A myopic focus on details can readily destroy as much value as it creates: Just think about the number of times you've sat through a meeting with a boss who harped on details, killing a project before you ever had a chance to explain what it could be.

[The Mac Bashful, a proto tablet computer that Jobs asked Frog Design to mock up in 1983.]

[The forgotten Mac Professional]

It's almost certain that Jobs has killed far more great ideas than he ever let live. But the ones he let live outweighed all the rest--there are 313 patents under his name covering everything from packaging to user interfaces. And these ideas outweighed all the rest simply because his focus was, continually, on what it would be like to come at some new product raw, with no coaching or presentation but simply as a dumb, weird new thing that someone you know might have said was "pretty cool." Again, that's ability to see past internal debates, and to look at a potential product with the fresh eyes of a user rather than a creator.

When Steve Jobs has fancied himself the chief creator, disastrous failures often ensued.

One of the most obvious examples of this hides in plain sight, and is a fundamental part of every Apple product. All throughout the 1970s to the 1990s, if you ever opened up a new gadget the first thing you were ever faced with was figuring how the damn thing worked. To solve that, you'd have to wade through piles of instruction manuals written in an engineer's alien English. But a funny thing happened with the iMac: Every year after, Apple's instruction manuals grew thinner and thinner, until finally, today, there are barely any instruction manuals at all. The assumption is that you'll be able to tear open the box and immediately start playing with your new toy. Just watch a three year old playing with an iPad. You're seeing a toddler intuit the workings of one of the most advanced pieces of engineering on the planet. At almost no time in history has that ever been possible. It certainly wasn't when the first home computers were introduced, or the first TV remotes, or the first radios.

And that brings up one of the decisive factors that Steve Jobs couldn't control: Timing. He was born just in time to become a founding father of the personal computer movement. But he was also still young enough that in 1997, his own sense of what a computer could be could finally bear fruit. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, computers were being sold on their speed, and their capabilities and features. This marked the birthing period for computers, when their capabilities were just being limned. But by 2000, the features and speed of a computer had largely become commoditized--it no longer mattered how fast a computer was, when basic issues of usability and integration became so pressing. Just think back to your Windows machine of the time: What did speed matter if you didn't even know what all the menus meant, or if you were hit with some weird bug that flashed pop-ups at you everytime you clicked your mouse?

Before 1997, Jobs was ahead of his time: The computers he made were overpriced for the market, because he thought that usability was more important than capability. But as computers reached maturity and became a feature in every home, his obsessions became more relevant to the market. And in fact, many of Apple's recent signature products, such as the iPad or the iPhone, were based on products first conceived of in the 1990s or even the 1980's--they had to bide their time.



All of this isn't to say that Steve Jobs has been Apple's sole arbiter of success: He purportedly has a great eye for talent. Moreover, he has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than just product introductions: Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation. That should ensure Apple's continued success for as long as a decade. But it's not totally clear that anyone else could hope possess his same talent for being able to look at Apple's product's from the outside view of a user. Tim Cook, his anointed successor, proved his worth by totally revamping Apple's production processes and supply chain. That talent is vital to running the business, and has increased Apple's profits by untold billions. But being able to break apart the nuances of sourcing is the precise opposite of being a usability genius: Cook's career has largely been spent focusing on precisely those things the consumer never sees.

Does Cook have an in-house product critic, who could stand in Jobs's place? Will Tim Cook have as close a working relationship with Ive as Jobs did? And did Steve Jobs create an entire organization that shared his balance of concerns--for the back-end yes, but for usuability first and foremost? The biggest risk is that Apple has taken for granted that its superior design should demand a price premium. That might lull them into thinking that Apple is great, rather than its products. But Apple, all along, has only been as good as its last "insanely great" thing.

Coming Soon: Superman's Memory Crystals

From Fast Company:

Coming Soon: Superman's Memory Crystals: While the self-replicating properties of these crystals are still an unknown, real-life scientists are trying to unlock the data storage capabilities of glass. The process has resulted in a storage capacity of 50 GB (the equivalent of a Blu-ray disc) on a slice of glass about the size of a mobile phone screen.

Report: Tablet Sales to Cut Magazine Paper Use 20 Percent by 2015

From Folio:

Report: Tablet Sales to Cut Magazine Paper Use 20 Percent by 2015: Even paper-focused companies are predicting a major fall for the printed page in the coming years.

Newspaper Club: RIG

From Design Envy:

Newspaper Club: RIG:

From newspaperclub.com

A project by London’s RIG provides everyday users with a means of designing, producing and delivering newspapers directly from their browser, a mischievous appropriation of the industrial infrastructure left sitting around. Russell Davies said it best: “We've broken your business. Now we want your machines.”

There are two broad phases in the ways that computers and designers have come to work together. In the first phase, designers were using computers to make things; e.g., setting type that would then be integrated into a magazine. It was a few years later that designers started using computers to make things for computers.

But now here we are in 2011, and RIG has made Newspaper Club, using computers to build online services that let users make stuff. Real stuff, with ink that comes off on your hands. Newspapers. They smell good.

From flickr.com

When you hit “print,” this is where your pixels go.

From blog.newspaperclub.com

Iain Tait's Wedding Newspaper, made with Newspaper Club and delivered to the wedding.

I envy anyone who designs anything that produces this kind of feedback.

From blog.newspaperclub.com

The Long Good Read is a newspaper by Dan Catt at the Guardian. The newspaper fetches all of the articles over a certain word count from the Guardian and uses articles from the Guardian Zeitgeist to pick the best articles of the day.

From blog.newspaperclub.com

Great Gran by Toby Morris uses the newspaper format for his comic.

From newspaperclub.com

Not complaining, but it was easier to figure out how to set up the images for a Newspaper Club newspaper than it was for this blog.

From newspaperclub.com/

I put this Design Envy blog newspaper together in about 10–15 minutes.

RIG’s Newspaper Club is one of the most extraordinary pieces of
design I’ve ever seen. In the end, it’s software, I suppose, not so very
different from the web app I’m using to compose this blog post.

The
difference between this software and Newspaper Club’s is that
instead of posting to the web, their software posts to greasy industrial
machinery, pallets of rolled paper, and a series of ropes and knives
and trucks, I think there are trucks involved somewhere down the line.
There must be.

Their software posts to full-on printed
newspapers that can be run in batches from one to a couple hundred
thousand. These can then be delivered to homes, classes, demonstrations,
weddings, whoever needs the news.

All this from a
bespoke chunk of code and design, built lovingly by a few good people in
East London. Their space itself must have once held some archaic
building-size machinery. Now it’s code.

The idea is
delightful. Industries (like the UK newspaper industry) age and die, but
it takes geniuses to realize that what they leave behind isn’t trash,
but treasure.

Newspaper printers simply don’t print
like they used to, so the hours on the plant go idle. Newspaper Club
keeps costs minimal by using those spare cycles to allow people to print
whatever news fits to print. Of course, it’s unlikely to have anything
to do with, you know, News.

Most often, it’s
quirky, personal, super-local deeply loving artifacts, like wedding
newspapers or comics. Small transmissions from one person to a few more.
It seems only fitting and fair that this happens in the paper wake of
the stumbling British press, broken by the criminal violations of
people’s privacy.

Those personal messages Murdoch was
spying on are still likely to be printed on his newspaper stock in his
newspaper’s ink. But not by NewsCorp anymore, and not for money.

A
lot of the genius here is in the design of the interface to allow users
to do all this. It’s great—not perfect yet, but great—and I don’t
recall Quark XPress being any good at all. I found this far more fun to
use than any Adobe product, and it didn’t hang my computer when I was
using it.

I was able to generate the Design Envy blog newspaper in about 10–15 minutes, and I hope that it’s a few weeks in the future, and you’re holding it in your hands. Maybe you’re drinking coffee somewhere, reading about this thing I’m jealous of, that these guys made this possible and with a spirit that’s equal parts generous, mischievous, hopeful and funny. That’s news. Good news, even.

Sent from my iPhone

Our Social Nature: The Surprising Science of Smiles

From Wired:

Our Social Nature: The Surprising Science of Smiles: The new book Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics, published Aug. 8, explores the nuances and effects of an expression we use often, but rarely think about. Wired.com spoke with author Marianne LaFrance, an experimental psychologist at Yale University, about why we smile, how we do it and the rise of the emoticon.

Supermassive Black Hole

Supermassive Black Hole: Thing of the day is Adobe's announcement of Muse, a tool that promises to enable designers to create and publish fully-featured web sites without having to muck around with all that nasty code; if you know your way around InDesign then you should be able to create your site with ease. Is it the dawn of a glorious new age? Or is it going to result in a rash of poorly coded sites that ignore the basics of good web design? We're going to be keeping a close eye on it; you can do the same by heading to the address below.

http://www.museprerelease.com/