My work life and “the-opposite-of-work” life as one MS employee put it (ugz) are not very distinct. But I’ve been wary of posting too much of the thoughts I’ve been having about technology to the blog, since now those thoughts are what I get paid for.
I find, however, that blogging is a great way to flesh out poorly formed ideas (and yes, most of my thoughts are poorly formed) into more mature thoughts (although I realize that anyone who reads this suffers through my writing).
So: I want to write a series of technology related posts. Instead talking about new gadgets like multi-gesture devices or new software. the posts will be based on the “Four R’s”. You already know the three R’s: Reading, wRiting, and ‘Rithmetic. I’m going to add seaRch into that basket. There might be one more around conversation or collection, but I’m not sure yet.
So why talk about technology in these basic terms? Well, for starters, I work in the business division, we’re interested in how people get stuff done. And most of what they have to get done falls into one of the R groups. Also, I think talking about technology in terms of how we accomplish tasks is a great way to start understanding underlying desires when we want to do something. Finally, Microsoft pretty much set the bar for two of these R’s with Word and Excel. For anyone who actually deals with words and numbers, however, these two programs have sometimes been the source of much pain and suffering.
The R’s are by no means exhaustive and probably need some revision to include conversation and collection… although I think collection falls into Search and conversation might have a fair amount of overlap with reading/writing, espeically since so much communication these days is asynchronous.
I’ve mentioned before how sad I think bloggy criticism/puditry is, so I’ll try to keep that to a minimum and talk about at least one positive example, suggest new ideas or even (gasp) make something to demonstrate a point.
My brother sent me a link to an article on Naomi Yotsumoto, a young Japanese table tennis player who wears outfits of her own design. She’s in the Olympics playing TT for Japan.
She’s a pretty talented player and also pretty, which are great reasons to watch her. Ping pong could use a little more style in the uniform department. I’m glad she’s taking this on.
Ping pong, as I read in the NY Times last Sunday, is on its way out–its popularity has slowly decreased over the years and there’s a little worry that we might not see it in a few Olympics down the road.
I used to play on the team at Dartmouth and for a few shameless semesters filled in as the team captain. My borther and I both have fond memories of going to the “Church of Ping Pong” when we were in highschool in Western Mass. There was old church (in Bathesda I think) with a gymnasium where some really awesome players would gather to play in the evenings. Like old boxing clubs where a shabby outpost might indicate a lonesome enclave of quality play by a washed-up old star, there are ping pong clubs like this all over the United States. I went to one in Windsor (and even played in a tournament there.) I found another one when I lived in NYC in Manhattan on the upper west side. I got to hit a few (literally) with a former olympic player. I’ve been told there’s a club somewhere here in Seattle but I’ll have to find it.
Aside: How did Romans do decimal points? (bars and commas? Maybe that’s why the empire fell…)
I just finished reading this graphic novel called Tekkon Kinkreet last night and I want to post that instead of usability. So here’s my beef with “usability”.
It’s a natural part of the design process to question assumptions and even break rules. Far too often I see usability clamping down on a design long before it’s anything interesting to make usable. Many years ago, my former boss, Steve Gano, surprised me in a discussion we were having about how to visualize some scientific data in a flash interactive. I called up some of Tufte’s rules and he responded by handing me a stack of books with diagrams, graphs, maps, and visualizations that didn’t fit Tufte’s model, but were beautiful and legible all the same.
“Usability” is often treated as if it’s an absolute concept, a certain UI is inherently more usable than another. But in fact usability is based on a number of subjective and relative factors. People constantly come up with new ways to use things and new things to use.
Anyhoo, I finished Tekkon Kinkreet last night and I enjoyed it a lot.
The book is a loose coming-of age story of two street kids named “Black” and “White”. Black is slowly becoming an angst-y teenager prone to outbursts, moroseness and violence. And White is a prototypical giddy Japanese kid, whimsical, hopeful, and also prone to violence. They live in a carnival city populated with garbage, bums, yakuza, and corporate sleezebags. And it’s all drawn in a very beautiful artoonist style.
The story itself is fairly simple, but it manages to avoid being juvenile, a problem that most graphic novels never solve. (Another solution might be to relish puerility. Lost Girls, which I also read over the weekend, does this with aplomb. It was so bad it belonged in MOBA, a distinction which might mean that the book has gone full circle to come round to genius. Anyway, if you ever wanted to see an “erotic” graphic novel that looked like it was drawn by a 12 year old girl with color pencils, you should check it out.)
Back to Tekkon Kinkreet. The storyline is simple, while the characters and drawing style are pretty unusual. The clothes in the novel are odd animal suits or strange leotards. And, although much of the story takes place perched up on roofs or telephone wires, the buildings have an odd circus quality to them, leading one to believe that the setting is sometime in a fantastical, perhaps mildly dystopian, future.
Once I finished the book, I checked to see when it was published: 1994!
Honestly, this is more evidence that comics are one of the last remaining forms of worthwhile pulp and, as such, are strong indicators of trends in visual production (art, movies, etc) in the future. At my last visit to the comic store, I realize that there were lots of books here that if I didn’t buy, I would never see again. With a few exceptions, they aren’t in libraries or online. It’s a pity, really.
Unbeknownst (is that even a word?) to me, another chunk of the videos my group has done have been released to the public. (Luckily, they’re published to YouTube where the flaming can go on indefinitely. Yay!) They’re pretty old and they’re beginning to show their age. But I thought you might like to have a look…especially since right now, we’re working on a brand new one!
Here they are (the Health Care vid I showed a couple months ago is included):
The blogosphere has probably contributed more to the culture of complaint than most other forms of media. I feel guilty for participating in it. What I’ll try and do instead is complain real quick and then talk about stuff I like.
So, continuing off the last post, what’s not to like about wearables and usability ? First off, let’s define terms.
A wearable is short for wearable computer. Generally, the term refers to electronics (sensors, input devices, displays, etc) that have been integrated into a garment that can be worn. A simple example would be the calculator watch. I think of it loosely as the intersection between fashion and technology. Wearables might also include prosthetics, but I’d like to keep them separate for now.
Usability is a term best defined by its wikipedia entry because wikipedia not only shows the popularity of edits to the entry but also the resulting blandness of its definition. Ostensibly, usability is both a rule-set and a metric for good “user-centered” design.
So wearables, computers and clothes–two of my favorite things–should be awesome, right? Let’s start with the fact that technology and fashion were never separate entities. Why does the term need to exist? Often I see it butressing some “toaster dress” looking thing which does a disservice to the technology and doesn’t look pleasant to wear either. I have a whole book of “art projects”, many of which are wearables, done by architecture students. I am completely guilty of this bs too. There’s a point where sticking an RFID tag inside a sock (or whatever) and having it connect to a social sock network seems like a good idea that will distract your critics from realizing that nobody wants to be sock friends. But since “social networking”, “RFID” and “Wearables” are all cool words you’ll be ok.
I’m not sure who I spoke to who to, (I think it was M), who told me about meeting with some VC’s. VC’s invest something like 90% in technology (software) and biotech. The split for one firm, as I recall, was 60% software, 30% biotech, and 10% for all the other products and startups out there (including M’s). Since we’re in a bubble, the VC’s were particularly sensitive to tech jargon: to get funding just describe your company as the “youtube of blank” or the “facebook of blank“. While this word game might have value, at some point it’s too superficial to actually generate good ideas.
Anyway, sorry for the digression. The idea of wearables is that they provide a better UI for many computing tasks than the traditional computer. But clothes have a very limited interface; with some exceptions, they aren’t like tools. On the other hand, clothes are great place to embed sensors, to gather data about a persons body, like heart rate, temperature, posture, focus, etc. And since much of what we’re looking for in the future is a more contextual UI, we’ll need to know context from more clues than just a pressure sensitive keyboard. The other place where wearables might be successful is if they dropped the usefulness idea all together. Hussein Chalayan has made some very beautiful, useless works.
(Go to 0:40)
(Go to 8:05)
If usefulness isn’t a concern, but how awesome a wearable looks is, there’s also the question of which “technology” you use. Just like every science fiction novel could be mapped to a particular kind of science (Ender’s Game/child psychology; Dune/Political Science; etc), a looser view of what’s “tech” could lead to something “fierce”, like these Barney-esque works by Lucy and Bart.
I’d like to see disposables (the sustainable kind) make their way back into the technology we hold closest to our body. I want a cell phone that I can throw away when it’s not new. (Sounds like heresy, but it’s what we do anyway…only those phones aren’t biodegradable) If there was a bluetooth headset integrated into my french cuffs, with a dongle in the cufflink, that I could dispose of as easily as a shirt I’d be happy. Or a display that washed off in the shower. (I think they might be doing something like this with makeup….)
Anyway, I’m tired so, Part II: Usability will have to come later this week.
I’ve had a glut of sci-fi recently. K and I have been listening to Gibson’s Spook Country on audio book over dinner. So far the most notable thing is how deep the narrators voice is…
Last weekend, I went to Elliot Bay books and basically hung out in the chess, design, and sci-fi sections respectively.
I bought a chess book. Not a famous one. A book for beginners, really.
I couldn’t afford the design book, New Retail, a Phaidon book on new retail spaces. Although, I wanted it and I might have been able to have the company pay for it. It has some pretty futuristic interiors, but with drawings, so I can see how they space plan. This is for work…
Also, I did buy two sci-fi novels. Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, recommended by T– Since I enjoyed Gun with Occasional Music (a hardboiled noir set in a biogenetic menagerie of a future) so much. I haven’t started this one yet.
And Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. I had just finished a collection of Nebula winning short stories, poetry, and criticism from 2006. Vinge had this great short story: the poorly titled The Cookie Monsters which told the tale of a few “enslaved” AI’s becoming self aware, but realizing they had no cultural memory except for a single, very limited “cookie”. I really enjoyed it; it had shades of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction. Unfortunately, the book, which I am about a fifth of the way through, hasn’t got it’s hooks into me. Since it’s set in the near future, much like my job, you’d think there’d be something there.
Something about the book is irking me. I hestitate to complain– One, because I’m not sure I could write a better novel. (However, writing a sci-fi story is something I’d really like to try.) And two, because complaint and criticism are blog cliches.
Anyway, I started this posted wanting to complain about two things both can be expressed as single words, and both deserve to be put in quotes since I don’t take them seriously:
Hello! I am recent graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at MIT, now a UX Designer at Microsoft. I write about design, architecture, technology and whatever else strikes my fancy.
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