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.

Websites Missing Steve Jobs

Huge corporate websites rarely feel human and emotional, nor aware of other corporations. Steve Jobs inspired the landing pages of Apple and Google to momentarily feel so.  Google linking directly to Apple, Apple momentarily being Steve.  

Digital Meets Physical Mashups: New Dawn of Sharing

     

After a long posting hiatus, semi-back.  To paraphrase Bre Pattis, "You need to have more than one parent for your digital designs."  I was happily surprised when a series of individuals on Flickr created derivative art from one of my photos.  It was rather amazing to see the creative diversity stimulated from a basic image.  But moreso, there was something special about the social nature of seeing a thread of peoples' derivatives from the same source, and something special about the personal acknowledgements of inspiration. 

 

Similarly, in a fun talk about the future of digital things, Bre shared some anecdotes about the digital to physical mashups (and memes) that he's been noticing on Thingiverse, a place where people can submit and share their 3D designs.  A simple gangsta spawned the Thingiverse community to create  rabbitsta,  yodasta,  ColbertSta,  bobbleheadsta,  chessta -- basically any head imaginable stuck on top the gangsta body to create new sta's. 

Jumping a bit to a slightly different translation of digital meets physical.  Along the theme of thoughts about how we are evolving our culture of sharing, it was interesting to see the story of Jonathan's Card unfold.  It was an experiment in collective sharing of physical goods and virtual currency.  Jonathan made his Starbucks card available for anyone to use or add to for coffee.  Like all things digital and shared on the Internet, unpredictable mashups happened. There was general evidence of generousity as people kept the balance positive, adding and spending $8K within a month. Then came an unexpected mashup, as one individual wrote a script that took and transfered money off Jonathan's card onto his own card (with the intent for the funds to then be donated to a charity, Save the Children).  Unfortunately, the end result was Jonathan's card got shut down, but I suspect experiments in sharing across digital to physical will continue to crop up.      

Fabricating Ourselves

When 3D printing meets Kinect meets humans' love for Polaroid portraits, we witness how Insta-selves could be a future common crowdpleaser.

With custom software developed using openKinect and openFrameworks, Be Your Own Souvenir by Blablablab let people pose and generate action-figures of themselves.  Three kinect sensors captured 360 degree scans of each person.  Meshlab used the combined input pointclouds to create a Poisson reconstruction (cleaned via Blender and Skeinforge) before sent to print. 

Also using Kinect, the Fabricate Yourself project by Karl D.D. Willis captured peoples' forms and turned them into peices of a giant jigsaw puzzle (related paper on interactive fabrication).  

With the price point of 3D printers going down, imagine we'll be seeing more varients on these tangible representations of self.  To my friends designing that mega candy store, I think 3D printing of visitors into candy statues would be a hit. 

Tableau: Wanting Digital to Be Physical (and Rustically Hip)

Tableau is a nightstand that bridges the physical and digital.  It drops photos it sees from its Twitter feed into its drawer for its owner. Similarly, images placed in its drawer are posted to its Twitter (scanner/printer discreetly inside).

Tableau's maker, John Krestner, calls it an anti-computer experience. Seems like many people and projects are craving rustic wood and the physical charm of pre-internet days. (Not so oddly mirroring the vintage aesthetic currently trendy in brooklyn bars). Phtopl.us is another tangible interface project that favors physical photos and wooden devices.  The Photo Plus machine plays back digital audio stories about physical photos (simply tagged using unique QR codes to recognize each photo). 

Jumping back to Krestner, he may have a market when he commercializes some of his supermachanical projects.  Made of leather rather than wood, check out his beautiful Proverbial Wallets that provide tactile feedback on our electronic money transaction and balances.

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.

 

Microcontracted Life

During a moment of eye-wandering on the subway, noticed an ad for Agent Anything offering any errand, anytime, anywhere (in new york).  Despite the ad and useful matchmaking between busy people with $ and flexible college students without $, Agent Anything's current mission list is rather scant. Perhaps Craigslist already made that market simple enough. Or perhaps the site needs more personal profiles and ratings like the many services popping up to facilitate selling bits and pieces of one's life. From Fiverr marketing things you can do for 5 bucks, to Snapgoods renting your stuff, and Airbnb renting your home, will we soon be able to easily contract out every under-used piece of us? Similar to Kickstarter, Etsy, and Kiva, there is also a refreshingly human feel to some of these 1:1 life marketplaces.  Given its easy to overcook for one, a friend of mine is even building a service, "Kitchen Surfing", where people can find and share home-cooked meals and dinner tables.  E.g. I'm cooking fancy pasta in my east village apartment at 7pm and have room/extras for 2 more.

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

 

Globe Genie and Virtual Travel

Near the top of my wish list of devices that I want someone to invent soon is the human transport beam.  As a taste of how awesome that could be, Globe Genie is a simple virtual version.  Hitting a Shuffle button moves you to a different Google Street View around the world.  The shuffle doesn't favor big city tourist destinations, often landing on mundane open roads and suburbs.  On the opposite end of the travel speed spectrum, this Google Map road trip was another experiment in virtual travel (they inched along roads across states by pressing the arrow key forward).  Both projects spark thoughts about the extent and limits of our virtually travelable world (e.g. sight-seeing temporal moments as current) and the regions still unaccessible, even with virtual transport beams. 

Reshaping the World: Shaun White Skateboarding Game

As it does every year, this year's games for change festival left me reinvigorated and eager to build out ideas.  "Good" design is a constant theme for this field that's faced with creating appropriately engaging experiences about tough topics, often with small budgets.  Embracing narrative techniques from other media and creating ambiguity + meaningful choice was advice echoed by many designers. 

Among the many thoughts I'm still mentally digesting is the question of when its effective to design social impact games that are not literal.  Commonly, a game about the environment has players interacting with digital assets that simulate and look like the environment; a game about global conflict puts players in the shoes of archetype political sides.  When is it more compelling to play with the underlying dynamic (e.g. resource management) in a different way? 

With that train of thought, the recent Ubisoft Shaun White Skateboarding game caught my eye (nice write up over at Kotaku). The game world starts in a city controlled by the "Minestry", everything safely regulated, no fun weirdness (the world skaters see and want to change).  In this generic world, by skateboarding the players can express themselves, influence, and physically reshape the world around them.  360 flips and other tricks make stores more colorful, people lose their suits, rails connect to reach rooftops, chunks of the street transform into bowls.  By remolding the world into a skatepark, players eventually overthrow the MInistry.  Subbing out skateboards, players discover their influence tool, test it to greater degrees of sophistication, and see their ability to produce a different world.  

Re-interpreting Code: Twitter to Embroider & Html to Create Music

  Code is often invisible and (perhaps with the exception of programmers) rarely perceived as beautiful.  Pa++ern and Codeorgan create playful interactions with code, and remind us that codes are human constructed symbol systems that can be re-purposed and evolve over time.  Pa++ern is a programming language for embroidery that can be sent over Twitter.  The code is purposely short, an entire program can fit in the 140 character limit of Twitter.  Moreover, aside from the embroidery generated, the language is designed to make the appearance of the program itself looked pleasing.  On the audio end of things, codeorgan is a Flash app that turns any web page into music. An algorithm translates the text within a URL page into a musical composition.  All my websites sound different; not sure how to interpret that.  

Inspired by our Social, Emotional Web

I have a minor graphic novel addiction.  Aside from a growing bookshelf, a growing amount of minutes are being sucked into illustration blogs.  The increasingly social and emotional public trails left on the web have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of artists -- from lovely visual interpretations of missed connections posts to a museum of humorous takes on celebrity twitters.  It was also on Twitter that a loose collection of Brits with mutual love for the Magnetic Fields decided to add to the images out there by illustrating all 69 love songs.

Chatfe: Equalizing the Chance for Interest Based Conversation?

Is it more awesome to be a guy or a girl online?  If ideal experience means ease of attracting strangers into conversation, the above graphs (left = guy, right = girl) of a small experiment on Skype suggests that I should be happy I'm female.  But if ideal experience means connecting with someone new for a substantive conversation, maybe its not so great for either (notably most of the dots on the right graph are from the opposite sex). 

Last night, the guys who started Chatfe opened with that idea as they talked about what influenced their user interface design.  Aiming almost to be "the opposite of a social network", the platform serendipitously matches like-minded individuals for conversations.  Instead of making a profile pretty, playing the numbers game of building your network, and updating one-liners, the focus is on adding topics to conversation queues and indicating windows of available talk time.  If two users' topics and time match, after checking that each side is indeed human, the system calls both party's phones to have the conversation.  The voice-centric design (aside from mitigating potential creepy behavior) experiments with the hypothesis that the nature of the conversations will be different from those mediated by text.  Chatfe is in Beta, so whether/how their bar chart will look different from the ones above will soon get a chance to be tested.

Mixed Reality Golf: Enhancing Big Urban Games with Mobile Devices

Dropped in for playing/testing of a new iPhone game at Conflux this weekend. Created by co-founders of Come Out and Play, Gigaputt turned the East Village into our virtual golf course.  Laid over real-world maps, avenues were transformed into fairways as we picked out our clubs, followed our wayward balls, and raced to complete holes.  While I've been seeing many location-based apps in development, the type of interaction designed is typically still pretty solitary: announcing "hey i'm here", rating a venue as liked or disliked, or tagging with a personal photo.  As a multi-player game, Gigaputt engaged us with changing our surroundings and reacting to each other (not to mention the confused strangers on the street).  It was also nice not carrying around heavy golf clubs, and the hint of that matrix-like downloadable supplement brings ideas for other kinds of possibilities.    

While not networked, on the theme of augmenting physical surfaces with digital info, recent demos like Pattie Maes' (MIT Media Lab Fluid Interface Group) talk at TED on sixthsense, again points to a near future of designing experiences that go beyond twitter-like data seeding and that moves towards enabling behaviors with data as the enhancer and natural biproduct.  (A few more fun interfaces to browse like an interactive mirror and public lasergames here.) 

Playing with the Google Logo

Since its simple font and primary color days, Google's logo now experiences regular visual morphs.  This playfulness creates attention and conversation around what folks probably don't normally actively discuss, company logos.   Notably, for those following the recent series of mysteries surrounding abducted Ls and Os, the plot has now been revealed (a birthday tribute to H.G. Wells).