Tangible Interactions in Motion: Another Update
Making progress…
Check out the newest version here »
Next steps: Voice over, sound track, sound effects, more scenes, and 3D…
Add comment April 24th, 2008
MDP + GPJ = Oracle
A different possibility for a relationship between a commercial enterprise and an academic institution.
I made the above poster for graduation night. It documents the relationship between George P. Johnson and the Media Design Program, using the Acura Oracle as a center point. The poster was displayed on the wall, next to the Oracle in the lobby of our studio.
(I just noticed that the version posted is not the final version, I will switch it soon)
Add comment April 24th, 2008
Acura Oracles: Videos
I realize I have not posted any videos of the Acura Oracle Symbol Generator application yet, so here you are:
Acura Oracles - Several Users »
Acura Oracles - Low Angle »
Add comment April 7th, 2008
Tangible Interactions in Motion: Update
Here’s a more recent cut of the Tangible Interactions in Motion piece. I’ve decided to cut several scenes, and simplify the remaining ones for the sake of completing a version before the end of term. After term is over I plan to pursue completing the piece towards my original vision, (including the addition of a soundtrack).
Tangible Interactions in Motion [click to play] »
Add comment April 7th, 2008
Emergence
I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, last night.
Emergence gives an introduction to self-organizing, bottom-up, emergent systems, and draws parallels between the workings of an ant colony and the human brain. The term emergent refers to the higher-level complexities that arise out of the inter-workings of many simple, lower-level components (an individual ant is relatively stupid, and follows a modest set of rules, but when combined in thousands, the complex building, foraging, and maintenance behaviors of a colony emerge).
I found the book great for my purposes: a light introduction illustrated through disparate examples, used as a supporting text in my trans-disciplinary studio Beautiful Networks. Great for designers. I found some well founded, rather scathing, reviews by the scientific community online. There is a notable absence of entropy and other earlier science. Johnson does write for hip, modern magazines after all, (Wired, Discover, Slate). I got much of this absent material in class discussion and lecture. For me, the book was valuable in its illustrations.
A few quotes:
“A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectives—capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group. Because those patterns are fed back to the community, small shifts in behavior can quickly escalate into larger movements: upscale shops dominate the main boulevards, while the working class remains clustered invisibly in the alleys and side streets; the artists live on the Left Bank, the investment bankers in the Eight Arrondissement.”
“[C]ities can achieve a kind of homeostasis through the interactions generated by lively sidewalks; urban planning that attempted to keep people off the streets was effectively destroying the lifeblood of the urban system. Without the open, feedback-heavy connections of street culture, cities quickly became dangerous and anarchic places.”
“A game where anything can happen is by definition not a game.”
“[A] new kind of hybrid has appeared—a fusion of artist, programmer, and complexity theorist—creating interactive projects that challenge the mind and thumb at the same time.”
Add comment April 2nd, 2008
Your Personal Economy
What qualities make something yours?
I would argue that one of those qualities is a sense of that something being in its proper place. It might not be neatly arranged on a shelf, or folded and tucked in a drawer, but more of less you assign your things a certain place. They are there you put them. They belong somewhere, and you keep a vague mental-map of these places. Although it may not seem like much effort, keeping this mental-map effects the way you use your things.
You are invested in your things. You have spend some amount of time or capital to acquire them. For this reason you don’t just leave your stuff scattered just anywhere, or else you’d constantly be losing capital. So you keep track of your things. But, imagine a world of networked objects, where computers have become ubiquitous and can be found in any kind of stuff. In this world things can track their locations, and even their interactions. In this world, you don’t have to worry about where your things are, they can keep track of themselves.
When you no longer have to worry about where your things are, you can start to think about your belongings not as stuff with a proper place, but as resources with potential applications. Your things begin to look much more like assets within a miniature economy of your stuff. Now, you can start to concern yourself with the more important questions “how you will use it?” Instead of “where is it?” When your belonging take on the cognitive load of lower management, you can devote more of you effort to executive decisions.
This concept of things having a proper place (usually your home) changes. Things begin to carry their sense of proper place with them. They are “freed” from the confines of your closet, where they were probably sitting for the majority of their existence anyway. When you start to think of the way you use your hammer, does it sound something like “I keep it in my toolbox, and use if about once a month.” That means you don’t use it 29 days out of the month. Why not set it free amongst the apartment building, or the neighborhood? Why not netflix-out your personal library? Why no make better use of your stuff?
In this way, ownership becomes much more of a verb than a noun, as your inventory of things cycle around the neighborhood. The locations of your things begins to look like a scattered web instead of a concentrated lump.
Add comment April 2nd, 2008
King of Your Things
If, in the near-future, you don’t have to worry about your things, how will that make you feel?
To start, I wonder who nowadays doesn’t have to worry about where his things are.
The President. George W. Bush doesn’t have to worry about keeping track of his things. He has a battalion of aids, assistants, and secret service agents bounding around and worrying about his stuff for him. They do this so he can focus on his job, not on managing his personal effects. So, can your self-sufficient stuff make you feel presidential? Would you want to feel that like the president? I know many people certainly don’t want to feel like George W… maybe JFK…
I started thinking about whether or not this will become a new phenomenon. It won’t. There have always been those who didn’t have to worry about their things. They’re called Kings. The difference between kings and their relationship with their things and the near-future us and our relationship with our things is that kings had throngs of servants. What will be handled entirely by my messenger bag and its network, 2000 years ago
Don’t be a slave to your stuff… be the King of Your Things!
With this mindset, look inside your closet and see your kingdom. It’s just waiting to be ruled. Again, this returns to my fascination with your schema of yourself as a miniature economy. All of your belonging are assets on your distinctive balance sheet (or in your personal kingdom). All of your actions are also assets.
Everything you do is valuable, it’s all a matter of making it into something tangible.
Add comment March 25th, 2008
Tangible Celebrity
In a world of ubiquitous computing, where very object is networked, where is the line of privacy drawn?
There is no clear answer, which has many concerned about wide-spread violations of individual rights. This is an interesting discussion that many are having. However, what I find more interesting, and less discussed, is how the concept of celebrity will function in this same world?
Have you ever carved your initials into a tree? Smudged them in wet concrete? Tagged them on a city wall? Have you ever stuck a push-pin into each state you’ve visited on the map? Ever signed a guestbook? Ever googled yourself?
People are obsessed with seeing the extent of their influence. Becoming more exposed isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. What about those whose livelihood is directly correlated to their exposure. What about celebrities?
What happens when celebrity can be quantified? What happens when it can be bought, sold, traded?
Does everyone become a celebrity?
Think of memorabilia. I think there are a lot of opportunities here…
Add comment March 24th, 2008
Making My Things Know Where They Are
When your things can keep track of themselves, how does that change your relationship with them?
To find out, I’ve RFID tagged my most immediate things and am in the process of making them keep track of themselves by setting up RFID readers in my three most frequented locations: my studio desk, my room desk, and the studio video workstation.
In my self-aware inventory is my:
Jacket
Messenger Bag
Laptop
Coffee Mug
Hard Drive (1tb)
Hard Drive (500gb)
Sketchbook
New Ecology of Things Book
Making Things Talk Book
Keys
One of the two most shocking things that have emerged from this project so far is that everyone of my objects has its own Gmail account, Twitter account, and social network account complete with profile page and picture on interangible.ning.com. They have literally become, to use Julian Bleecker’s term, blogjects—as they each have their own blog within the social network.
The second is that anyone—literally anyone with internet access—can know where my things are. All you have to do is follow them on their Twitter feed: each object Tweets where it is when it changes locations. If you want to follow my stuff, just sign up for Twitter and follow these accounts (note: they all end in an underscore “_”)
jacket_
messanger_bag_
laptop_
coffee_mug_
hard_drive_1tb_
hard_drive_500_
sketchbook_
net_book_
make_book_
keys_
This system is what is possible today, where the networking is somewhat of a novelty. But coming is an evolution towards Bruce Sterling’s spime—a networked, self-historical object that is considered normal and standard. What might that be like…
Add comment March 23rd, 2008
Do You Own Your Actions?
I recently read an article by the New York Times about a data-mining company called Phorm. They have created a tool capable of tracking every single online action of a given consumer, by gathering data from his/her ISP. This type of “market research” is nothing new (other companies like Front Porch, NebuAd, Adzilla and Project Rialto do much the same thing), but what is exceptional about Phorm is the success that they have had in Britain. Now soliciting companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, they are raising concerns with a number of privacy groups.
The obvious question raised to me is: do you own your actions?
You should want to, because they are obviously valuable. In my mindset of running your life like your own miniature-economy, your actions are prime assets. If you are able to track your own actions, you should be selling them to advertisers. You shouldn’t be giving something of value away for free, especially without knowing it.
Read a Privacy Impact Assessment conducted by the privacy consultancy firm 80/20:
Privacy Impact Assessment — Phorm
Add comment March 21st, 2008