Props

I uploaded a few of the rough renders I did for the props I designed for the Productivity Vision Video. I modeled them all in Rhino, rendered in Max. And then had them milled out of acrylic at a local shop out here.

This is the clear desk monitor that one of the office workers uses:

A keyboard/slate device:

More here.

There’s a pen and the cell phone (which has some detail) on a harddrive that just crashed. Once I can recover it, I’ll post those too.

I also loaded a hi-res version of the video to YouTube.

Filed under: architecture, technology, work

Modus Ponens

Last Friday, the video that I’d worked on with my team (the Envisioning Team in Office Labs) had its first public showing.

Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, showed the video at a conference at the Wharton School of Business. His speech, and the video, can be viewed here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/Officesoftwareplusservices/vision.mspx

Our team also built the pan and zoom software for his presentation. Soon there will be a hi-res public version of the video. Eventually, I expect a version of the presentation software available too. Although in the meantime, Office Labs has built pan and zoom plug-ins for PowerPoint and OneNote, which you can download for free. (At some point, I’d like to post some images of the designs and rough renders I made for the hardware props in the video.)

Like many things, there’s a lag time between when things happen inside Microsoft and when they’re released to the public. Of course, the issues of productization and IP are complicated and some betas are too ugly to release into the wild. There’s also the intense criticism MS projects receive from the public. Reading the comments on the last Envisioning video on YouTube (which nobody should do) is intimidating. I guess it’s no worse than an architecture crit.

Microsoft, however, is getting better and better at opening its doors. The latency on the video was only a couple months.

There were a couple of projects that Stephen Elop mentioned in his speech that are public, but haven’t been made into products. I thought I’d call out two of them, both from Microsoft Research. Even though these videos are kind of old and the technology simple, there are some really smart ideas in there: the interactive applications/implications are (imho) pretty exciting.

Here’s NanoTouch (I played Unreal Tournament on this device and it was sweet.) :

And Secondlight:

These projects represent a very small part of the many, many projects at Microsoft. Part of what I do is try and find connections between things, ask how our daily life might be affected by certain technological shifts, and listen to how people are already creating their own ways of working. It’s a fallible process, certainly, but there’s a lot of value in the questions themselves.

Addendum: Looks like NYTimes covered the same projects at Techfest! (thanks, vrex)

Filed under: programming, work

Really Simple

A few days ago, I gave a little presentation at work on how I use my RSS feeds. Most of it was stuff I’ve learned from T-Bone. Today, T shot me a tweet asking if I had written any of it down. Which I had not. So I thought I’d try.

First, most of this is going to be old hat for people who read this blog. Most of you probably have better solutions that me or are using software that I’m still late-to-the-party for. Anyway, here goes:

Several years ago, I was completely ignorant of RSS and readers. I had sites– blogs, news sites, social networking sites (Friendster!), etc. that I was interested in. Many, I would check daily for new updates. Then T introduced me to Google Reader, an RSS feed reader. With a feed reader (there are many out there– I use feedly these days), I read updates to websites as if they were emails in an inbox. This means I can check all those sites in one place and only when there’s new stuff! (Switching browsing modes to a push-pull strategy).

But RSS isn’t just the content of blogs. All manner of things come in the RSS flavor. For example, any search in Craigslist (and Ebay too, although it’s harder to find) can be saved out as a feed. This is how I found my apartment here in Seattle. I went to Craigslist, searched for Fremont / apartments  / 1+ Bedrooms / price range / dogs and stored the resulting RSS in my reader. Whenever a new listing appeared, it showed up directly in my reader, I didn’t have to check Craiglist. I stored several searches in different neighborhoods and called them as soon as listings came up. I got the house I’m renting now, because I “was the first to call”.

I still use this technique for shopping. I’ll create some search feeds on Ebay and Amazon of stuff I want at a price I want, if there’s a hit, I see it in my feed reader. Easy! And you can do it with jobs, services, and *ahem* dates, if you’re into that.

Another type of site that offers feeds that I keep track of are social networking sites. I’m not a huge fan of facebook, but I do like the updates. So I grab the updates as a feed. For my closer friends, I track their twitter updates, flickr photos, delicious links, locations (with dopplr), etc etc. Delicious is a nice site because, like Craigslist, every page has a feed. You can follow tags, people, people networks– combinations of those. Using a feed reader, I can finally unify the content that all these disparate social networks are supposed to connect me to anyway. I can also know if someone sends me a link in delicious or comments on my photos… those are feeds too. Now I don’t actually have to go to the site to know what’s happening, all that information comes to me.

But what if you want something different than what a given feed can offer? Say you like Slashdot, but the feed has a ton of posts that you’re never going to read. It would be great if you could filter them. Luckily you can use something like Yahoo Pipes or MS Popfly. These web services take RSS (and things that aren’t RSS, but can be converted) and let you use a graphical programming language to manipulate a data stream into an RSS feed that you can be happy with. (T has a great little tutorial on Pipes.)

The last thing I do with feeds is package up my own. I use Swurl, which isn’t great, but it does the trick. Now I’ve got a feed with my blog posts, tweets, delicious links, netflix queue etc– basically everything I’m spamming out on to the interwebs. I put that feed back into my reader. Now when I want to search for something I’ve forgotten or should know, I search my reader instead of a Search Engine or Delicious. My reader has all of my stuff and all the stuff of the people and places that I care about.

These days I’m trying to do some of the same sort of things– taking streams and modifying them– with Twitter’s version of a reader: TweetDeck. The flow is surprisingly similar in places. We’ll see how it turns out…

Filed under: culture, programming, technology, web, work

Zugswang

I’m back from a 3 day business trip to the Herman Miller Headquarters in Michigan. It was really fun. We talked with them about their design process, saw some interesting work they’re doing at the architectural scale, and toured their factory, designed by Cradle to Cradle’s  infamous William McDonough.

I also got a chance to meet and chat with Chuck Hoberman about parametric design. I did not know he’d moved to buildings.

All in all, it was a fantastic visit and hopefully soon I can talk more about what will come out of it.

More pictures from the visit are here. (I’m a pretty poor photographer and I use flickr for storage more than gallery…apologies for the blurry pics!)

Filed under: architecture, culture, work

The 4 R’s: Search

Total Recall

So T delicioused me this article. It is thought provoking. And since delicious doesn’t allow for multiple comments or conversations, I’ll just have to discuss it here. This is going to continue an earlier post series.

We’ll try to concentrate searching and remembering, two tasks that we do all the time, offline and away from computers. But first I want to clarify a few things brought up in the article.

So here’s Philipp Keller’s primary polemic:

One common task while browsing the web is making sure you will be able to recall a valuable information you are just looking at. This article aims to prove that social bookmarking as in delicious, simpy, magnolia et al. is the wrong tool for that task.

I’m in “total” agreement. If you’re using delicious as your main tool for recall, you’re probably using the wrong tool. That said, is Keller seriously using delicious to remember stuff? He thinks delicious is the right tool for “Sharing Links” and Using “bookmarks to get things done”, but poor for remembering. Are those first two things really less important than recall?

Until I started using twitter, and the “share” option in my feed reader, my delicious feed was basically my micro-blog. I delicious stuff all the time with no clear intention of returning to it. Shit, I’ll delicious a link that I know someone else might be interested in just to have a conversation with them about it, even if I’ve never actually read anything on that link. (I may not have read Moby Dick, but I sure as hell delicioused it.)

Delicious is “social-bookmarking” or alternatively “url lifecasting” and as I’ve mentioned before it’s real power is in conversation and narrative. Delicious needs to buttress up these areas quickly or I’m going to export all my links to somewhere else and stream from there. Two features in particular drive me nutty:

1.) Why can’t I respond to someone’s description of a link? To have a conversation around a link that someone sent to me, I have to send it back with another “for:” attached.

2.) Why doesn’t a delicious post have a unique url? (This is such a pain in the butthole.) Then at least I could generate a twitter feed of all of my delicious posts or something like Feynman’s Turtles, delicious all the way down.

Granted, delicious also has poor tagging and search mechanisms. But even if these features somehow appeared in the next version of delicious, I wouldn’t think that it’s suddenly a memory aid. Why? Because I don’t want to “remember” by URL. Social bookmarking is great, but it’s not a perfect tool for “memory augmentation”. All it remembers are URL’s and tags; two fairly abstract methods of notation and organization. These only cover a small part of the things and methods by which I remember.

When you’re asked to search for the answer to a question, the question itself might fall into a range of categories. One extreme of that range is that the question is completely random, like trivia… like “who wrote ‘Fermata‘”, for example? Offline you’d probably go to a dictionary or encyclopedia. Online you’d probably go to your search engine of choice. This isn’t the same as remembering because you never knew the answer in the first place.

The other extreme is that you already know you’ve seen the answer, you just can’t remember where or how. The answer is buried somewhere in your collected detritus of bookmarks, files, emails, pdfs, or whatever. I would like to search my own stuff.

The category right in the middle is where I don’t know the answer, but I’m pretty sure my friends do, so I’d like to search through their stuff. Of course, these all exist on a range, so sometimes I might want to search a particular friend and their social network, etc. The closest thing I have to this is when feedly (which I like, but is still a seriously buggy work in progress) will show my feed reader matches for any google search that I do. I wish the delicious plugin did the same. But again, a search engine search doesn’t look at my “local” files, emails, or documents and when I need to remember something, it seems silly that I also have to remember the format of the content as well.

A tough recall scenario will go something like this. I need the answer that was a result of a conversation I had over the phone, that continued in twitter, that spanned a couple blog posts, that was mentioned obliquely in the description of a delicious url someone sent to me, that I annottated onto a pdf doc. These are remembered piecemeal, of course, which means I repeat a search for each bucket.

Keller thinks that one reason for the problem is because delicious tears links from context of the original page. This is 50% true. Contextual search/recall is what we need but the context isn’t just the page. The context is the series of thoughts and conversations that led me to the content, and also, where I think they fit in to what I already know. Why isn’t my all my data organized according to conversations or topics that I’m interested in? If it were, then I could grab things with even “less” context. For example, Internet Explorer webslices let me grab just a piece of a page. Sadly, MS tied these awkwardly to IE bookmarks. (I hope they get it right soon…those need to be feeds. Great idea, we hardly knew ye.) I would like to be able to grab slices of conversations, slices of videos, a piece of a song, or a section of a diagram. These snippets could be mashed-up into some other thoughts that might have little to do with their origin.

So what’s missing here? Well, I need a personal database or personal file system. (Live Mesh is an interesting start to the very basics of a personal file system. So far, I like it.) Then I can pipe all the pieces of my life stream (delicious, flickr, blogs, reader stats etc) as well as all of my emails and documents and conversations into a place where things I “know” are at hand and accessible. Then I can finally mine my own data. Which will allow for me to organize what I’ve seen but haven’t learned; an infinite stream of procrastination, ty CS18 & Professor Donald. Some of those promises I’ll make good on; others I never will. So having thousands of delicious links with no tags is fine. Not reading them is awesome. (Right now, I’ll usually only return to the most recent few hundred to find things anyway.) At the very least this personal data/file system lets me view my content in flows which match my life: a twitter comment sparked a delicious link sparked a blog post which was a conversation that I wrote a research paper about.

Anyway, there’s a lot more here to talk about. I can’t help but think of this recent obituary in the NY Times.

Filed under: technology, work

The Four R’s: Intro

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.

I’ll start with reading.

Filed under: technology, work

Digression

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):

Filed under: technology, work

Westward and then Northward Ho

I’ve decided to take a job in Seattle with Microsoft. No the small mom and pop software business. But the big one. I working for a group called Office Labs which does interface prototypes and videos like this one:

Although the video is really polished, I tend to like things that are a little more raw and unusual. Luckily, they also have a few really exciting projects in the works that have great potential. I can’t talk about them yet. But soon I might be able to give you glimpses.

Filed under: technology, work