ConnectingTheDots

"Occupy" Wall Street

As with most recent scaled protests, Occupy Wall Street has a virtual presence. The simple wearethe99percent tumblr highlights and aggregates stories of individuals in the movement.  Moving beyond story sharing, some are also leveraging web-based networks to organize direct actions. Applying grassroots mapping and adapting an online balloon mapping kit, a few folks recently organized a collaborative aerial mapping of downtown occupy wall street. Reflecting a more distributed form of organizing, on youtube this guy is asking folks to keep wall street occupied, and to continue communicating with wall street when not protesting on site, by sending back junk mail.  His youtube call for action has a healthy thread of comments, perhaps similar to the face-to-face comraderie created on the streets. 

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. 

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

 

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.  

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.) 

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. 

Akoha: Seeding Kindness with Social Games

When I first heard about Akoha, I loved the idea.  I eagerly signed up to be a Beta tester and was excited when my set of mission cards arrived in the mail.  Still love the idea, but have been thinking about why instead of being part of the leaderboard, I've only played one card. 

Akoha is a MMP, mixed reality game.  The game centers around accumulating Karma points via real world missions of kindness (for example +125 for "Thank Someone", +100 for "Make Someone Smile", +200 for "Donate an Hour of Your Time") linked to coded cards.  This player probably reflects the ideal user experience and impact Akoha was aiming for.  

What made the game sticky and immersive for her, but not for me?   The primary adjective Akoha uses to describe its game is "social."  Theres two key dimensions to that: the social behaviors required to play the game and the social network of "friends" players accumulate during gameplay.  For me, that second aspect of social was too challenging to help motivate the first.  I felt like a lone player in the social game.  While there were many players in Canada, there were few players in New York.  To play I had to recruit friends or strangers (most missions required physical proximity to complete) - which is also part of the beauty in seeding kindness.  However, when "the work" of finding playmates > the reward of playing it's more difficult to get to the sweet spot (critical mass of friends and missions played to feel the impact, the addictive part of play). 

Since then Akoha has added a dynamic Community Map showing where players and missions are happening.  It's still a little clunky (requires several zoom-ins to find specific locations of interest) and could be more efficient in visualizing search interests, but tools like it are a step towards creating a means to finding friends, feeling connected to the larger community, and seeing impact.  (Looking at other social, location-oriented games like foursquare, one could also imagine interesting ways an Akoha mobile app could encourage play.)

The reward and reputation system also impacts stickyness -- motivates embedding play into everyday social experiences vs. singular novelty play moments (especially for those with busy lives).  What do "Karma points" mean to players?  Is simply accumulating "Karma points" compelling?  Found this interesting thread of user feedback about wanting more of an addictive factor.  The users had quite a few good design suggestions (e.g. adding levels, mastery identities, mission combos, time-based rewards, currency that tied to real world donations).

If the thousands of cards played are any hint, I do think games like Akoha have huge potential.  Influencing behaviors and tapping beyond existing social networks are powerful dynamics, especially for improving global causes.  Bridging the digital and "real" world is also a challenge we are just beginning to tackle.  All said, I'll be staying in the Akoha game and learning from how well people play it forward. 

Smart Grid Augmented Reality

Still feeling the novelty value, finally printed out the GE Solar Panel Marker and tilted around a mini hologram of big technology in my hands.  The marker once pointed at a webcam unfolds a green scene of wind turbines or solar panels.  Limited interactivity beyond viewing at different angles (my blowing didn't succeed in triggering much wind power).  Even more fun is watching the reactions of others trying it.  For the extra curious, they share the FLARTtoolkit source code.

A few other companies have also used webcam based AR in their ads, like the Mini Cabrio (black and white magazine ad displaying a 3D model car).

 

Quest to Learn Opens: Games-based School

Helping to spread the word about a project I've been involved with, Quest to Learn. 

Inspired by the media-rich environment that kids are now engaged with outside of school (according to a recent Pew report 97% of teens now play digital games) and the underlying design principles of games, the school was created to reimagine and foster the type of learning that is possible today.

It's not a school where kids will sit around playing commercial videogames, rather its a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.  A key focus is on the ability of games and other forms of digital media to model the complexity and promise of "systems" - the type of thinking skills now required to succeed in today's global environment.  Read this "Day in the Life" of a student narrative and visit Quest's website for a more complete picture.

The school is currently looking for both teachers and students (in New York).

Fan & Feedback Networks for Your Imagination

From ffffound to Behance Network to Wordpress to Flickr, I clicked across the sketch trail of a concept tinkerer.  From the comment threads, it seems he has quite a few fans asking where they can buy the depicted mobile devices with double screens and immediate overlay translation and internet search. He says he has no plans to monetize his ideas (already occupied as a graphic designer), but some folks still gave advice and encouragement.  Very Open Source in spirit. 

There are a number of sites aggregating jolts of inspiration and its fascinating to observe how potential fans and feedback can emerge for napkin ideas.  Related, here's a nice video visualization of Python's evolution (part of an experiment called code_swarm visualizing the collaborative creation of open source applications).

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."   

Untethered: Deprogramming and Reprogramming Objects

Normal logic = We control the actions of objects.  Perhaps a more interesting train of thought to follow is: How do objects cause people to behave in certain ways?  Or how might familiar objects evolve to behave in different ways?  The Untethered exhibit at Eyebeam plays with those questions (e.g. a blendie that is activated by human blender sounds, a photocopier that reads astronomy).

A related talk last night on Performing Machines featured some of the work of Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Douglas Repetto, and Adrianne Wortzel.  "Trash" and "trashed" objects were used in new ways to make sounds, movements, and group dynamics.

While de-furred Elmos synchronized to perform a battle salute were eyecatching, it was the concepts of renewed and extended use reflected in Scrapyard Challenge and One Day We Will Be Mysterious that cycled in my mind after the discussion.