Last: November 2003
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December 21, 2003
obligatory christmas special
At this time of year, it's tradition to have a review of the year (in one word: mnyeh), and an extraordinarily long quiz to fill pages.
So, here's the anti-mega Christmas quiz: 58 London things. How many landmarks and littlemarks can you recognise? Like all good broadsheet quizzes, it's unfeasibly hard, so gather the family round a roasting PowerBook and spend Boxing Day with an A-Z.
Anyway, have a good Christmas. I'm spending the remaining days mincing pies and mulling wine. I won't have much Internet access, but I am going to try and do my bit and spend some time updating and adding to Openguides London. It's a great resource, so think about adding content, or even starting up something similar in another city.
See you on the other side...
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December 14, 2003
mulling
I'm not normally a Christmassy elf, but something this year has changed; I think trips to Germany and Denmark showed a more civilised kind of festivity. My celebrations seem to centre on mince pies and hot alcohol.
The purist in me hates heating alcohol - every molecule is sacred - and I have an aversion to traditional English spices like cloves, but with a cold wind blowing, nothing hits the spot like a drop of hot wine. And port. And rum.
Here in Britain we tend towards a bad sangria boiled with a twig that may be cinammon thrown in. I prefer a slightly Victorian take on mulling - mulled porter ale, which I enjoyed at Borough Market last weekend.
The German Glühwein is similar to our mulled wine, though often lemon juice is added, but my favourite is the Scandinavian Glögg - adding port, and maybe vodka, brandy or aquavit into the mix. I was often served this fortified with a tot or two of rum, which means this is turning into an Arctic Circle Iced Tea... I still have to try the Austro-German white wine and rum version, Krambambuli.
Two big rules for mulling: never boil the liquid, and keep the alcohol percentage up.
Skol! Prost! Na zdraví! Kippis! Santé! Slainte! Salute! Cheers! (hey, it's too cold and dark to be writing about mobile phones)
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December 07, 2003
leisure
Recently I tried to write a short description of what I spend my time doing (along with a reverse-chronological list of employers if you get my drift), and I found it really hard.
Sure, the standard tick list of cinema / reading (although recently someone asked me "do you read?", at which I laughed, but to be honest there aren't many people I know who do read on a regular basis) / art / theatre, opera and dance (which just affirms my middle class providence with a hint of fruit), but, hell, what do people do these days? Sport is an option for some, but watching rather than doing smacks of dressing up tv watching.
How do I describe the things I'm interested in? Walking - but not in a straight line and not anywhere particularly beautiful, cartography, psychogeography, dabble in programming, and this Internet thing. I get the feeling that previously some of these hobbies would be taken as noble pursuits, but amateur science, and a search for knowledge, isn't taken seriously in culture today. This is also coupled with the fact that professionals, rightly or wrongly, tend to decry or pooh-pooh amateurs taking an interest in their field of expertise.
So, how do you describe things like "the Internet"? How do you describe interests in things outside your mindset?
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December 01, 2003
what you feel is what you get [grid::brand]
This is deliberately not thought through. I don't agree with it all. Please argue at length.
I've been doing the obvious navel gazing recently of trying to figure out exactly what I do - which recently people have called interaction design.
This is the thesis:
Interaction design engineers experiences that do not exist without a person or people being present and participating, or, in other words, what you feel is what you get.
Interaction design makes itself felt when changing even slightly the difference between what you know and what you experience. The manifestation of this tends to be an emotion.
Interaction designers need a knowledge of psychology, cognitive science, sociology and ethnography (culture), plus extra crafts for whichever media they design for.
Interaction design has many movements, including usability, information architecture, some installation art, some architecture, color theory (also see FOAC), stage design and experience design. They are movements (styles?) rather than disciplines because success cannot be quantitatively measured - they use and work with the psychological and cultural baggage of the person interacting. They also consume and reuse each other's work to further their own movement.
Branding is also a movement of interaction design, wanting to create precise emotional feelings through long-term interaction with a virtual entity. The experience of a brand is different for every person.
Unanswered questions:
Should you be able to tell who designed something when you experience it?
Do you want to experience something you use every minute or hourly?
Do usability and information architecture purposefully remove the experience?
Is it possible to craft interactions for specific purposes if everyone's experience of the interaction is different?
Background:
I recently saw a talk by Olafur Eliasson, creator of the Weather Project and other beautiful pieces of installation art (it's really really really really worth watching the archived webcast, and some of the ideas here are badly paraphrased from this talk). Most of his work relies on a viewer being present for the art to happen - and indeed, he doesn't describe himself as an artist, he researches and creates experiences. His work is art rather than craft/design/science because he is not interested in the reaction to the work, and does not alter the work to subsequent responses.
Now, he is always creating physical pieces of work, but is the aesthetic primarily in the work or in the interaction? He hopes it is the latter, in contrast to, say, an Old Master painting, where the aesthetic piece exists in physical form, and exists even if no one is viewing it (aside - this is why I think that the Weather Project is less successful that his other work, in that it exists as a physical piece firstly, but to be honest it would be hard to do anything else in the turbine hall space).
A useful counterpoint to some of this:
heyblog: Intersections
(this is a vague tangental part of the grid blog project, today considering brand)
