ConnectingTheDots

Digitally Mediated Snail Mail

 A few months ago, I tried a snail mail to email experiment.  It stemmed from a backyard bbq conversation on how with cell phone texts, email was becoming snail mail, which quickly tangented to how amazing it is that letters addressed only to "Santa Claus" can get to the right designated spot.  Out of curiosity I mailed a letter to a friend with only his email as the address and only my email as the return address to see if the letter could get to him.  Given the company has only one office and one person with his name/email, theoretically it would be really easy to deliver the letter to the correct location. The only obstacle is automation and a human caring enough to intercept and solve the easy mystery of the wayward note. So far it's still in the land of lost letters.

Would getting a letter have made my friend happy, more happy than getting the same sentiment in an email from me?  On that thought, have noticed a few recent projects that hint at a nostalgia for snail mail, and traces of the human touch. Ironically, in these projects you first use the internet to send digital directions that's then passed to a complete stranger to create snail mail for your friend. Somehow the interluding human creates a magic touch that pixels, likewise generated from you, still don't provide. The lovely Snail Mail My Email project let people email letters to be handwritten and mailed to the recipient.  The month long project attracted so many people that the founder ended up recruiting 200+ volunteers who eventually handwrote and mailed over 10K letters.  At another new site, people can digitally send themselves snail mail care packages.  The happiness-creating site Quarterly Co lets you sign up to receive physical items in the mail every 3 months curated by a personality of your choice; a twist on following a tastemaker's twitter/blog/interweb post of favorite things.

Many to One Design

 I've started collecting quotes (originals potentially accepted).  One by Ze Frank has stuck in my head recently, “We have a lot of 1:1 design, which is essentially the way we communicate. We have a lot of 1:M design, which is most of the design industry. We’re starting to see M:M design, which is a lot of the collaboratively creative projects. What I’d like to see more of is M:1 design where a lot of us come together and we try to solve one particular problem in a single person’s life, like: Make Mike less lonely! ...many of us have similar problems - so says The Google - but the devil’s in the details and I think it would be inspiring to see a whole bunch of talented designers try to deal with the minutia of a single person’s interest - not designing for the middle but one very particular point…  it would be inspiring to see all those lenses focus their attention on a single thing that at first glance might seem ordinary…"  In the realm of advertising and entertainment, a few reality tv-esque projects have broadcasted and put individuals' life decisions at the whim of crowd twitter suggestions (Dating Brian, David on Demand).  Closer to many-to-one design that aims for thoughtful answers is LifeEdited.  TreeHugger founder Graham Hill is challenging the public to help him radically reduce his footprint and live happily with less space (420 sf apartment) and less stuff.  So far, I like this transformer tablebed, which runs up and down on four pipes spending the day up at the ceiling.

 

Agreed: The World is Full of Interesting Things

For some inspiration,Tom Uglow has a compilation of creativity.

100 + examples of projects that pushed at evolving audio, visuals, physicality, and more. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One link to many links through his google doc the creative internet

 

Be Extraordinary

The new year has me cleaning out my cluttered iPhone of underused apps.  One of my favorites from 2009 that will remain on screen 1 is The Extraordinaries.   Fusing crowdsourcing with volunteering and mobile life, the app (and website) enables people to easily take on miny missions for organizations, causes, and people they care about helping in their spare time.  Ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, while traveling or waiting in line, users can complete concrete micro-tasks like tagging a museum's digital archive.  35K+ micro-tasks have been completed for 50 organizations.  Most are image tagging, mapping, or photo collecting related, but imagine folks will continue to explore other creative customized uses.

Netflix Challenge Prize vs. Human Computational Games to Improve Relevance

 The nail biting "end" to the epic Netflix Challenge has been widely covered over the last few days. Cited as an example of prize economics and the crowdsourcing of innovation, the contest drew over 50,000 contestants.  Catching particular attention was the characteristics of the top teams and how they were formed (BellKor--a cross-company, international group of statisticians, machine learning experts, and computer engineers--and the Ensemble--a last minute merger of other former teams). Similar to the instances of collective intelligence that have occured in pop culture (e.g. highlighted in Convergence Culture with fans of Survivor), communities formed to closely collaborate on Netflix's complicated and apparently tantalizing problem. 

The Netflix Challenge had a big prize, clear question, and clear end goal for contestants.  In contrast, human computational games usually have small incentives and indirect end goals, but have also been applied to improve the search for relevance.  One of the first popular human computational game was the ESP game, where people tackled image recognition.  Leveraging the same premise (the >200m hours/day spent on games could be used to solve tricky problems), Microsoft Research wondered how a game could be used to answer the question: "Given a web page, what queries will effectively find this web page?" 

What they came up with was Page Hunt.  Players are shown a random web page, and must guess the query that would find the page in the top few results on a search engine (LIve Search).  If their query word(s) ran and matched the top URL results, players got points.  Microsoft in turn got data elicited from players, providing metadata to improve algorithms for pages, for query alterations/refinement, and for identifying ranking issues. 

For example, using bixtext matching to learn from their game data, they found top scoring query alterations (iht=International Herald Tribune, jlo=Jennifer Lopex, capital city airport = Kentucky Airport, etc).  Another resulting finding was that as the length of URL(in characters) increases, the page becomes harder to find.  

The Netflix Challenge attracted brainiacs to persist for nearly three years.  As perhaps a hint that shorter, smaller incentives can also spur productive mass activity, Page Hunt was fun enough (designed with time limitations, points + bonus points, leaderboard, and taboo queries/constraints) that 47% of sessions were from people who played twice or more, and 16% from those who played five times or more.  A research paper on that experiment to use games to improve search here. 

Making Twitter Meaningful

The viral Twouble with Twitters has gotten some acknowledging laughs.  Funny men Jon Stewart and Colbert have also recently joked about the seemingly useless time suck and stream of information.  But as Twitter grows, so has the number of people experimenting with how to build on top of the simple interface -- creating applications to help filter and facilitate community meaning making. 

For me, some of the more interesting uses of Twitter have been for friend/crowd-sourcing human answers, rapid reporting around an event/emergency, and directing attention towards causes.   Squidoo recently release TwttrStrm to help folks gather answers to one spot.  An example of what that might look like is the summary of Hacking Education Twitters (pulling hashtag #HackEdu).  Focusing on a particular niche, ExecTweets is a new site aggregating tweets from business executives.  And more like a general Twitter search engine, Tweefind pulls tweets about certain keywords according to popularity rank (akin to Google page rank).

Will also be interesting to watch as folks get more creative about designing a "need to follow." In LA, Kogi, a hybrid Korean BBQ/Taco truck, has put a twist to its Twittering.  If you want their taco, to find the van you must follow their Twitter.

ARGs for Collective Innovation: Ruby's Bequest Raising Up 1000 Voices

While slowly attracting participants with hints of whats to come and with virtual coins to begin seeding content, today Ruby's Bequest fully launched with a challenge to players to find 1000 voices to answer the question -- "what are your hopes, your fears about the future of caring."  The new ARG from the Institute for the Future hopes to stimulate some collective wisdom to solve the mystery of who Ruby Woods is, and in doing so, perhaps also about the future of a public good. 

ARGs have been used as successful marketing tools (The Beast for the movie A.I., Art of the Heist for Audi A3, I Love Bees for Halo 2).  In engaging players, these MMP multi-platform, blended reality games have demonstrated the potential collective intelligence and collaborative action that can emerge through game play (interesting essay on the deployment of I Love Bees).  A few recent examples have experimented with the notion that ARGs may also be effective for harnessing collective innovation on societal issues.  Last October, Traces of Hope (sponsored by the British Red Cross) explored the world of a Ugandan refugee and Superstruct (another IFTF ARG) sought to brainstorm solutions to five super-threat scenarios in 2019.   

WePC : Crowdsourcing Ideas and Opinions for the Future PC

   

Picking the brains of consumers and American-Idol-style public voting is an increasingly popular strategy for market research and for "community engagement" (see previous Starbucks post).  ASUS and Intel have teamed up on WePC.com to let the public share what their ideal computer would be like.  Visitors can upload, comment, and vote on proposals (ads for and links to buy ASUS computers are interspersed inbetween). 

A few have included sketches (at varying levels of sophistication) to explain holographic displays, water proofing, etc.  I like the proposal that already has 212 votes, the Future Proof PC.  Quoting dtoid_TheBez,"I would really like to see a pc that is close to future proof.  While this idea may be impossible, having to replace a laptop every 2-5 years can get quite expensive."   

Beyond Ambient Awareness: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr Updates as Game Engines?

Will have to wait a few weeks longer to try PhotoGrab.  The new Facebook game challenges players to match small snippets of photos with the full pictures or build their own photo puzzle games.  WordStream, another game in development from start-up Shufflebrain, will use players' Facebook and Twitter status updates (and test if friends really pay attention and remember what each other are up to).

Akin to how tools like Blogger enabled a legion of less html-savy web readers to also be web writers, there has been a recent burst of tools that may encourage less code-savy game players to become game builders.  (Some especially interesting projects are trying to use game design for fun education -- see Alice, Scratch, Gamestar Mechanic, Popfly, Playcrafter, Little Big Planet; for some theory see Papert, Gee).

Shufflebrain's new games will let people create their own games out of social content.  As quoted in CNET, "They're really a cross between games and Web 2.0."  For those seeking something beyond ambient awareness, there may soon be more opportunities to get creative about making personal content even more social. 

Design Probes

Wireless stick-on sensors as body adornment, dresses that allow physiology and environments to interact usings patterns and colors, electronic tatoos that visualize emotional shifts -- perhaps coming soon to a store near you?  Philips' design probes are meant to shake up their innovation process and generate insights into whether some  "far future" trends might become mainstream.   

Recently, quite a few major companies have opened their nacent R&D ideas up to the public for feedback. Starbucks, ever so good at getting press (even for barista trainings), launched My Starbucks Idea.  Philips' feedback mechanism is less buzz provoking (not a digg-like social network) but its survey does ask the public to rate the appeal and relevance of its design research.

Fold It! Competing to Design Cures

Can a competitive game played by thousands of people help discover novel proteins beyond what is currently possible with computation-only approaches?  An interesting project out of The University of Washington, Fold It!, is experimenting with that premise.  The game casts molecular folding problems as a massively distributed 3D puzzle game that enables players to discover the solutions to current open scientific problems -- such as cures for cancer or AIDS.  The idea that well-designed games are fun/addicting/competitive/collaborative and thus potentially powerful tools to create impact is gaining traction.  Like Free Rice, it borrows techniques from casual games (Fold It's  game design has an even tighter connection between content and outcome).    

Orphaned Cameras

Given my proclivity to lose electronics, appreciate this blog seeking to reunite orphaned cameras and photos with their owners.   

Kluster: Crowdsourcing for Innovation

Kluster, already receiving much buzz, is one of the latest websites harnessing the wisdom of the masses.  Unlike digg, wikipedia, or youtube, aside from allowing participants to post and vote, from the get go this social network is translating collaborative user-generated sparks into real dollars and products.  Anyone can post ideas or invest watts in (hopefully) winning ideas that are financially rewarded by businesses seeking crowd sourced solutions. 

There are various recent examples of sites forging a more direct connection between longtail producers and funders (Kiva), customers (Etsy), or collaborators (Netsquared mashup challenge).  Kluster's "advanced algorithm" for decision making, hipster language, and clean interface may differentiate it from other sites similarly seeking to facilitate community generated solutions for big industry (see also InnoCentive and Cambrian House).  Will be curious to see whether it produces new taste tests vs. breakthrough drugs.  Let 1000 flowers bloom.

Games for a Purpose

Work has me thinking a lot about games and the value of user participation/user-generated content.  While re-researching the work of Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, a friend pointed me to a dated, but good presentation about Human Computation that summarizes some of his projects and his general approach to constructing "games for a purpose".   

Getting people to enjoy helping/working for free is an oversimplification, but it is part of the brilliance of von Ahn's ideas.  He approaches the issue of improving computer weaknesses in novel way -- by creating games that people like and that simultaneously gather human-processed information to solve tasks that are trivial for humans but continue to challenge computer programs. For example, in the ESP Game, when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords.  These keywords can then be used to improve the accuracy of image search. (Other examples include Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge.)  What surprised me the most was the number of people who found these games "fun" (or at least spent a good deal of time on them) and the simple game design components that achieved that funness factor.

The short presentation starts with an eye-opening statistic.  In 2003, 9 billion human hours were spent playing Solitaire.  In comparison, it took 7 million human hours to build the Empire State Building, and 20 million to build the Panama Canal.   All this has my mind churning about similar purposeful, but opportunistic endeavors.