Last: May 2005
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June 27, 2005
web affordances
We're at a strange stage of web development where programmers have a far better grasp or view of what's possible and available for many web services that normal users. Web services (program to program) have clear apis, documented holes, bugs and changes. The people using the website version of web services have nothing like this.
A case in point is Bloglines, my aggregator of choice (I fell off the wagon - on schedule - more on this later). There are two hidden inbuilt rules that change how you use the service once you know of them:
1. feeds that disappear disappear
This one is pretty criminal to users: if a feed is not where it should be for 3 days, it automagically unsubscribes everyone from the feed. Without any notification. Bloglines is one of my outboard brains, my memory. If I've trusted Bloglines to remember what I want to see on the web, it should remember. Maybe flag the feed, or move it to a sinbin, but at least make the change visible. I have no idea who I've been unsubscribed from - I know my own feed was down for more than 3 days when crackers and a server move coincided. Who knows whom you've been unsubscribed from without warning. Export those blogrolls now.
2. 200 is your limit
Each feed carries a maximum of 200 entries. If I've been away for a couple of weeks, Engadget, The Guardian and similar feeds have easily hit this. It used to be, I think, that Bloglines always had the latest 200 - now, weirdly, it has the first 200 until you hit the limit (they store far more than 200 for bookmarks/Keep New, but the entry does eventually disappear, but the Keep New stays as a blank entry). I personally want the latest 200 - or there not to be a limit. After all, they're serving others with later entries - why can't they be appended to mine?
In computer games, I'm very much a player that really just tries to feel the limits, poke at how it all works and see what I can do. I shouldn't have to do this for web services.
(I don't know if this is covered anywhere in the help - and after all, normal users shouldn't have to read the manual. Personally I'd love for the user flows and business logic to be published, though.)
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June 22, 2005
google maps redux
New google maps functionality - satellite images of the whole world. We're now an inch away from being able to do global map hacks.
However:
As you can see, in Helsinki we're frustrated by two different levels of information available. I found this when trying to buy a similar satellite image - the higher resolution sweep only caught the western (posher?) side, which means we're curtailed in plotting anything useful. I just want something that shows vague roads, some context.
As we move around, the situation gets worse:
Outer Helsinki isn't even covered.
We're also hampered by perspective problems up here:
Oh well, slowly slowly, there's a mapping revolution going on.
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June 19, 2005
as we continue on
Loads of half-finished posts. Will try to finish those still relevent. One of them will refer to Tropicana, a theatre/dance/experience in London. It's only on til the 25th, and I highly recommend anyone in London to go and see it. Even if you hate theatre, or really dance, I'm sure you'll find something fun in it - even just going into the vaults around London Bridge station is worth the entrance fee. After this the Shunt Vaults host Ether Frolics.
Reboot was pretty great, really, and Copenhagen is gradually unpacking for me. Managed to get the mystical klippenkarte from a machine at the airport - however I still managed to buy a few kid's tickets before I realised they weren't one-way tickets into the centre. Two things about Copenhagen I meant to mention last time - firstly, Denmark is poker crazy. Loads of shop windows reference it, sell books, cards, anything to do with it. Secondly, being a bicycle-centric culture (and not pedestrian friendly at all), they have strange hand signals when going over pedestrian crossings. It's a hand up movement, as if swearing allegiance to something. I think it's meant to mean "I'm sorry for nearly running you pedestrian scum over". But I'm not sure.
Went to the new Carlsberg visitor centre after the conference. Carlsberg is rightly pooh-poohed in the UK - the UK stuff is tasteless, as British tastes demand. The local brew is better, and at least tastes of hops and, well, beer. Maybe I have a soft spot for the stuff, as I apparently was first drunk on Carlsberg's rather strong Elephant beer. And my first hangover. I was rather young at the time, so can't remember the precise details. The visitor centre was pretty good as these things go. Sure, loads of video displays trying to justify why doing things in big metal silos is better than casks, and by hand, but at least it's in the original buildings, and lots of the original equipment around. There's a new microbrewery, Jacobsen, dispensing 4 new beers - I thought the dark lager was rather fine. Made me want to open a brewery. Sigh.
The newer Danish local trains are far better than anything I've seen in the UK. I was pretty impressed both with the use of space and the information design.
Food this time was more low-key, but still great. The two mini fast food chains, The Taco Shop and Sticks-n-Sushi were both very good, and I'd happily have them open branches in Helsinki.
Got to the opening of the Copyshop, and hilariously close to meeting Angermann2. Also got to Tivoli, and went on the Dragen (twice), but the queues for the new rollercoaster were too long. Next time.
Also got to an exhibition of Korean contemporary art at the Charlottenborg art gallery. Every time I've been to this venue I've been really impressed by the exhibition - well curated, well designed, and showing artists that are normally out of traditional contemporary art circles. I'll (hopefully) write more about this later. But if you're in Copenhagen, go.
Since then, I've been trying to recuperate sleep. A quick game of minigolf, a party literally down the road (and thanks to Sampo and Liisa) - I managed to win an iPod cozy. You can't beat the English at a raffle.
Long days at the moment. Hopefully going to get up north and experience some midnight sun.
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June 09, 2005
back to cph
On my way to Copenhagen for Reboot - I'm giving a very slightly remixed version of the Tangible Computing talk from Etcon. Well, I took a slide out that only Matt understands.
Looking forward to the talks by Regine and Ulla in particular.
If you're there, say hi.
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June 01, 2005
cold turkey
I need to get quite a lot of things done, and want to do even more. As an experiment, I'm giving up on RSS for the moment; no bloglines for a while. Please throw anything interesting at me via delicious, IM or email.
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design research and design rant
Just spent a few days in Copenhagen for the 1st Nordic Design Research Conference.
An aside: I still find Copenhagen baffling, especially in terms of public transport. There's almost no interconnect between transport modes, I haven't managed to find somewhere to buy a klippenkarte on any visit, there really needs to be a few more bridges built in strategic places, and bus stops closer together, and, when defeated, I resorted to a taxi, they turn out not to know where anywhere is - and refuse to use their onboard navigation system. No wonder everyone cycles.
Another aside: the food was fantastic. Admittedly I was rather louche, and I'm slightly embarrassed by my gastronomy. See more here and here for the full slightly gory details.
Later I'll pull out a few things I saw which inspired me at the conference, but first you'll have to endure yet another rant about design, designers, and academics.
I was hoping to get an idea of what design research is - it's always been a bit nebulous to me, and it's pretty much at the opposite end of design to my background (engineer, self taught design). Certainly the design research at the conference tended towards qualitative, whereas HCI tends towards quantitative.
My biggest beef, as with pretty much all academic conferences, was that it was design researchers talking to design researchers. There were 2 or 3 commercial designers at the conference, a few more design undergraduates, but mainly academics. I try and go to these conferences to burst the membrane between academics and practitioners - and there are certainly a few people and ideas that I am glad to have seen and are directly useful to my work. But there remains a general distain in academia to sully their work with commercial concerns, especially when it opposes their viewpoint, research subject or methodology.
Let me note that there were far more useful projects at NDRC than many academic conferences I've been to. Rapid prototyping and manufacturing is H-O-T-T, and may be somewhere where academic research is still outpacing commercial reality. I particularly liked Tavs Jørgensen's binary tools project, exploring the role of newer media in pottery. There was also a paper (PDF) exploring a bit how people responded to being part of a product customisation process. On an embodied interaction and tangible computing tip, this paper (PDF) on inspirational patterns for embodied interaction may be good - need to read it more carefully (and, can we stop referring to Alexander's A Pattern Language - it's not highly regarded in urban planning circles, especially due to its incredible cultural situatedness). This (PDF) is a great paper looking at laban movement notation and tangible working, and how the movements in between actions may be more important than the actions themselves. Per Kristav's work (PDF) on culture probes for Ikea was also very interesting.
Malcolm McCullogh rocked, as normal. His work pushes design forward, as I think design research should do, rather than just analysing the outcome. No hints about a new book, though.
The proceedings of the conference are here. Still need to digest the parallel sessions I missed.
I have a plea for people to stop thinking "what is this design thing, anyway?". There were many discussions of where design sits between art and crafts - even between artist and usability tester - with little consideration that a designer, well, designs. Within constraints. To brief. Maybe with user testing, maybe without. People I spoke to generally didn't see this - a designer at college is normally far more of an artist than an engineer. There was also general consensus that things like engineering and programming weren't creative endeavours, which is just wrong. It's just easier to test the output (if still opaque as to whether it is well designed and constructed or not).
It's also pretty obvious that traditional interaction design has been consumed by other design practices - especially product design and architecture, not that they've necessarily learnt from more pure interaction design practice and HCI. Interaction design often has harder intangibility problems than, say, product design. I like the term experience design, even if I don't believe you can design complete holistic experiences in most aspects of life (theatre, cinema, restaurants and theme parks excluded).
Maybe I'll break my own rule and elucidate more later.
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heads up
If you happen to be in Helsinki, then don't miss the wonderful Ben Cerveny speaking at Korjaamo tomorrow (Thursday 2nd June). Details here.
Dammit, on minigolf night as well...
