Hippo Dignity

I wonder if the complete lack of alarm clocks so far in my South African hotel rooms is in any way related to the intermittent blackouts the country is being plagued by? An alarm clock not guaranteed to ring in the morning is worse than no alarm clock at all. I will try to remember to to ask my hosts in the AM.

I had hoped to do a Rebecca and blog the heck out of Interactions’08, but the fact is, there came a point where all I could do was sit back and let it wash over me. With eight sessions a day for two days straight, there was a lot to think about, and a lot to take notes on.

Plus, as it turns out, the whole thing is going to be available online as streaming Flash movies anyhow. The TED talks have really, I think, changed the game in terms of how a conference’s knowledge can live on as a continuing provocation/education and publicity for what the conference does. It will also, I’m sure, change the game for conference speakers — in the same way that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has admitted to being super-aware that he can no longer reuse a joke onstage without someone in the audience having already heard a bootleg of the first time he told it, streaming video will make regular conference speakers break out of their practiced shtick or risk seeming like hacks. (How you balance the need to build on earlier thought with the demand for novelty is the next problem, I guess.)

So for now I’ll just congratulate the tireless Dave Malouf, Dan Saffer, Joshua Seiden, Liz Bacon, my colleague Robert Reisman, and the rest of the IxDA board, the volunteers, and the faculty and staff at SCAD for a truly extraordinary conference experience. The quality of the dialogue, the intensity of the energy, and experience of the place were all extraordinary. I am so honored to have been a part of this first-ever conference for interaction designers, and I can’t wait for 2009.

(If you can’t wait for the movies to be online later this week, or don’t have 20 minutes to spare to see me race through my deck, Core77 did a bite-sized writeup of my talk and a few other talks as well.)

And as long as I’m talking about online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about television, I’d be remiss to not mention this amazing video, which I was pointed to by my friend Francesca Coppa.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/28/pressure-a-metavid-by-the-california-crew/

It’s a “meta vid,” a fan-made vid about the process of making fan-made vids, back in the days when people did it with two VCRs, a tape deck, and a stopwatch. The level of commitment to the task at hand makes me exhausted just thinking about it!

Along with its celebration of the ingenuity necessary to do something like this in the days before every Mac came with iMovie, it’s also a useful reminder to those of us who go on and on about “user-generated content” and social media sharing on the interwebs that we’re not necessarily creating the wheel here. We may have invented the radial tire, to stretch a metaphor way too far, but we’re not creating the desire to interact with content — we’re just facilitating it. The new behaviors that arise when it doesn’t take three people and a weekend full of diet soda to make a three-minute video — well, those are a whole other ball of wax.

My New Year’s resolution to post to my blog more often was quickly challenged by my ongoing battle royale with the office cold, which has been epic. Thus I didn’t have a chance to post a timely link to Clive Thompson’s terrific piece on the problems with computerized voting machines - luckily, now the NYT archive is free, and Clive handily posted the piece to his blog.

It was a typically Clivean excellent piece - full of great details, good explanations, and terrific quotes. No one who works with computers could have failed to have a chill run up their spine reading this:

When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, “the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all.”

My one disappointment with the piece is that he didn’t mention the other way people are working to ensure that votes are counted correctly — through design. The Design for Democracy project of AIGA, which featured among other contributors the work of my friend and neighbor Mary Quandt, has created best practices for polling place and ballot design, from a visual and information design standpoint. Their work has been accepted as official guidelines by the federal Elections Assistance Committee, and AIGA continues to work with individual states (including, yes, Florida), to make their ballots and polling place instructions easier to read and understand. Reliable voting machines are important, but a butterfly ballot could still screw up even the most technologically perfect election.

So, my timing in posting about changing distribution models turned out to be pretty good after all, because today Steve Jobs announced the iTunes integration deal with Starbucks.

Once again, Maura is right: this is a super-smart deal. First, Apple and Starbucks are aiming for much the same middle-class, style-and-status-conscious audience, and they are both trying to sell that audience music. Second, both the iTunes store and Starbucks have gotten into the business of not just selling music, but packaging up music on their own — the “iTunes exclusives” for ITMS, and the Hear Music label for Starbucks. Integrate the two, and you’ve got a fairly healthy, easy-to-use distribution channel that totally sidesteps the majors — and which will make Starbucks’s Hear Music label only more appealing to the sort of former Top 10 stars the labels hideously call “legacy artists.” (The sort of people who buy legacy artists tend o be older, and also, therefore less likely to be comfortable with tools like BitTorrent.)

New distribution channels, new models, new ways of thinking about selling music. You knew they were going to have to come from outsiders, but I didn’t expect them to come with my double tall soy latte.

ObDisclaimer: GE, NBCU’s parent company, is a client of my employer’s, but my opinions are my own, and not those of anyone I work for or with.

It’s an interesting coincidence that two stories about big changes at media companies happened to hit at just about the same time. Lynn Hirschberg’s profile of Rick Rubin must have been in the works at the NYT magazine for quite literally months — they can’t have known that NBCUniversal would sever its relationship with iTunes at the very same time their story hit the streets. But it’s a sweet coincidence, because both of these stories are, in a way, about the same thing: the failure of the big media conglomerates to know how to deal with the way digital distribution is ripping a hole in their traditional profit model.
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Breaking a too-long radio silence born of work stress…

Anyhow, leading indicator: SMSes in the office.  Intra-office SMSing.  Why?  You may step away from your computer, but you always have your phone with you.

(Other contributory factors: European coworkers, large enough office to make running all over looking for someone a drag, smartphones assigned to all senior managers.  But give it five three years, you’ll be doing it too.)

Our office hosted a discussion on designing for the body tonight , featuring the founders and presidents of two design companies — one that makes sex toys, one that makes body armor. It was an interesting discussion; the similarities of the stories of starting the businesses and the design challenges they faced was actually thought-provoking in itself. And the discussion of how the things we carry, or the things we use on our bodies, become extensions of our selves tied into some other things I’ve been thinking about, and is going to rattle around in my head for a while.

There were samples of both firms’ work out in the studio for us, and later the event attendees, to see. It made for an interesting late afternoon. Luckily, only the body armor was ever tried on.

Bulletproof Boss
Originally uploaded by ianonymous.

(Seriously, I’m told that vest can stop rifle fire.)

So the first big news out of SXSW Interactive this year seems to be that Twitter has hit some sort of adoption tipping point: In Ross Mayfield’s phrase, it’s “tipped the tuna.”

Twitter is a presence publisher: it asks you “what are you doing now?” and you tell it. It, in turn, tells your friends, or the whole world, if you make your posts public. Your friends can receive your Twitter posts via IM, SMS, web, or my preferred method, the Mac-only Twitterific app.

When I’ve been asked to describe Twitter, I call it “Dodgeball for people who don’t go out.” (And the fact that I can use that description tells you something about the tech-nerd quotient of the people asking the question.) Dodgeball is all about the ephemeral moment: we’re here now, come join us. Twitter is a bit more stateful: it could be Dodgeball-esque, but the people on my friends list use mostly for less pressing things — for updates on their moods, to describe a sky, and even for advice and a sort of asynchronous group chat.

However, Twitter is also apparently very useful as a Dodgeball-type app at a conference like SXSW, even though there is a Dodgeball Austin, and I wonder in fact if the long lagtime as Dodgeball has gotten integrated into Google will end up working against it: I’m not sure why it left the space for Twitter to move into.

I tried getting Twitter on my phone, on the Dodgeball model, and had to turn it off: it was making me crazy. I need to know that Clive is at his local New York bar right now: I do not need to be interrupted on the street to know that Emily in LA is packing for a trip. (Sorry, honey.) Having Twitter on my desktop makes a lot more sense — it provides a light-weight, low-cost way to check in with the world outside my workspace.

Liz Lawley, a bigger Twitter fan than I am, says:

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage–personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages–into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

I’m not sure about either brilliant or fascinating there, myself, but I know this much: despite all the other presence indicators available to me, I haven’t turned it off yet. For the rest, I’ll have to see.

Note: I’m michelet on Twitter if you’re interested, or want to add me as a friend. I’m not a hugely active poster, as you might have guessed from the above, but reading my previous “twitters” did remind me I still haven’t posted here about The Coast of Utopia. Maybe when I start procrastinating tomorrow, which I’ve taken off to finish my IA Summit talk…

One advantage of having worked in several different fields is that you know the same old bullshit when you see it.

Jason Kottke pointed out that web conferences still aren’t getting any more diverse, despite the regular rounds of discussion/debate on the topic, and sure enough, started another round of discussion/debate.

It’s so striking to see the same rationalizations come up in different forms in different fields: why don’t we bring in more women to speak/write? Because there aren’t more A-list women speakers/writers in our field. How would women become A-list speakers/writers? Um… by speaking at conferences/publishing with us, of course. But they aren’t as interested as guys in those technical topics, and anyway, we just wouldn’t feel comfortable going out and finding people who are… different from us.

Anil Dash has a smart, smart rundown on why the Old Boy’s Club is a mug’s game in the end: go read it, and save me the time trying to make the basic case that the blinders of privilege will leave you in the end just as sightless as a sharp stick in the eye.

Ironically, I’ll end this by noting I’ve just received my first invitation to speak at a conference - one on industrial design, not web technology. If all goes well, look for me at the IDSA North Eastern District Conference in late April.