Where chairs go to die (Lewisham)
February 19, 2013
December 9, 2012
December 9, 2012
November 23, 2012
November 1, 2012
Why trolling Amazon is like skateboarding
In August this year I created a piece of prose that was featured in the Washington Post, The Guardian and Huffington Post, alongside dozens of other news media outlets from all over the planet.
It was such a throwaway scribble, and via such a throwaway medium, that I didn’t notice the plaudits until the next time I read it, weeks later, and discovered that over 3000 people had liked it, dozens had commented on it, and some had shared links to quotes in the press.
The prose in question was an Amazon review. A spoof Amazon review for a product so silly that I felt obliged to lampoon it.
After the second US presidential debate, I found myself back on Amazon, reviewing binders (along with scores of other armchair satirists). These reviews garnered a similar amount of positive feedback, but also a degree of negative attention which had been absent from my earlier submission. That’s not surprising: Expressing a view on a single politician or party can be interpreted as partisan, although in my case I genuinely have no personal stake or interest in either of these parties…
“Partisan political statements or political statements of any nature should not be a part of http://Amazon.com. If allowed to continue, then it shows that Amazon supports these views and you will begin to lose loyal customers”
I’m assuming that this was a disgruntled Republican. The assertion though that private product forums are not spaces for open public debate immediately brought to mind the issues of “enclosure of the commons” that Slavoj Žižek writes about in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
In No Logo Naomi Klein explains the effects of this idea on our lives, describing the privatisation of once-public spaces: the (public) town square increasingly being replaced as the centre of social life by the ubiquitous (private) mall; the corporate sponsorship of colleges replacing classical academic freedom with a nuanced context that prescribes the limits of discussion.
I’ve seen the web develop from a constellation of independently-run boards and forums into a much more contained environment, wherein the majority of discussion takes place on a handful of privately-owned commercial platforms; Facebook alone is reported to account for 1 in 5 web page views in the US, and parallels can clearly be drawn between the privatisation of the web and the privatisation of public life.
Naomi Klein also describes skateboarding as a reaction to that dwindling of public space in cities - as an adaptation to a new landscape of concrete and car parks, and I see in the popular takeover of spaces like Amazon something similar: People wresting back ownership of languishing commercial property and turning it into somewhere to play.
September 21, 2012
I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day's tree felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks.
The best trolols happening in regards to sexist pens on Amazon. LOVE IT!
September 11, 2012
A brief expression of discontent
The axiom that “content is king” gets thrown around a lot in digital media recently, and certainly its sentiment is indisputable. As is often the case though, I have an issue with the underlying semantic, which betrays what I think is a flaw in the way we design media.
What started me thinking about this was an article on paidcontent.org describing some of Bit.ly founder John Borthwick’s thoughts about post-device “content” creation. Borthwick’s aim is really to expose and denounce a platform-oriented mindset that exists the publishing industry, but it made me think about my attitudes towards content and common practice within the digital/media/creative world, and to form an opinion about this which will change the way I work in the future.
The first thing that occurred to me after considering Borthwick’s comments is that referring to your client’s ideas, information or message as “content” is really to subordinate them to the mode of delivery, i.e. being content is a consequence of being contained.
It’s the general rule whenever I’ve worked on a project over the past decade, be it a website, app or installation, that I start by designing the container in relative ignorance of what the content actually is. Normally this is because all the streams of work happen in parallel, and the content doesn’t yet exist or hasn’t been curated. There is a rough idea about what the thing needs to say, so we drop in some Lorem Ipsum and away we go. Somewhere down the line I’ll get some sample content to show the client and make sure they’re happy with how it looks, but usually this has been chosen rather judiciously with that end in mind.
And on completion of these projects it’s not uncommon to hear that the client’s content doesn’t fit the agreed spec. The implication here is that “we built our container properly and they got their content wrong”, which, I don’t need to point out, should be an inconceivable position for a designer to take.
That’s a fine illustration of what happens when we start off designing a container, and forget that we’re designing information. In fact apart from designing information, the other main body of the digital designer’s work is designing functionality and that yields an interesting parallel.
Jacob Nielsen recently pointed out that mobile web designers could derive a lot of good practice from apps. His assertion was directed more at the focused approach apps take to delivering a small subset of functionality or information, but a more fundamentally important derivative from app design might be to consider what I see as the principal difference between designing functionality and designing information: you can not possibly design functionality without first knowing exactly what that functionality is.
If we can make the practice of information design work more like that, then we’ll be doing our jobs better. And a good place to start is by realising that content isn’t content, it’s why we’re all here in the first place.
June 16, 2012
The gloves are off: AR in the real world
With Google’s announcement of a possible project Glass release later this year, it looks like we’re genuinely on the cusp of a phase-shift away from the familiar Cartesian-pointer/photographic model of HCI, and into an age of immersive augmented reality in the everyday.
Now I’m as enthusiastic as the next man about the prospect of a world without keyboards, but alternative interfaces like Glass, Kinekt and Siri aren’t without their own intrinsic user experience problems, which could in turn have some interesting cultural effects.
“Natural UI” (today this effectively means Microsoft Kinekt), consumerised as game technology, has already been hacked into service from medicine to AI, and it’s likely that in the future some kind of natural UI based on a combination of spacial sensing, voice input and HUD would be a good basis for wearable, almost passive, mobile HCI.
But given that “hands-free” mobile users still mostly find it necessary to hold their phone handset in conspicuous sight (as a demonstration of sanity), are we really ready to take the plunge and add inexplicable physical gestures into the mix?
Maybe because I’m British, I’m naturally a little horrified at the concept of swiping, swatting and barking my way through a virtual world visible only in my mind. In order for this to be acceptable, I need a recognisable mechanism to differentiate myself - whose unprompted verbal outbursts and uncontrollable arm movements represent negotiation of a sophisticated augmented reality - from those passersby of comparable demeanour which is more likely the result of psychiatric problems or drug misuse.
What’s required is a visible proxy, equivalent to holding my phone in plain view. Closed-loop systems like g-speak, heirs to the vocabulary of VR, use a wearable sensor-array (typically a glove) to provide spatial data to the interface, and this neatly bypasses the problem of recognition. But in the same way as the iphone case gives our identikit mobile phone a subtle identity of its own, the desire for individuality and cultural alignment would cut through into our wearable UI, even more pertinently in this scenario since the glove becomes a constant part of our wardrobe.
With Kinekt-type systems though, which measure gestures of the human form and in which our hands are left naked, will we still require a token to display our intent? And what will it look like?
April 11, 2012
Location-based servicing
Foursquare’s sinister underside has been highlighted in the press lately owing to the sensational publicity and subsequent synaptic takedown of the app Girls Around Me.
I’ve been chastised previously for describing Foursquare’s attitude to privacy as effectively “if you use this your privacy is forfeit”. I don’t think that’s a criticism, it’s how Foursquare has to function, and the reason it exists. Describing things in terms of a bad Girls Around Me vs. a good Foursquare is a bit simplistic, when the former (former) service is simply aggregating content that’s already open and available to all Foursquare users.
And while Foursquare can turn its guns on (and its API off) an entity like Girls Around Me, there is still plenty of scope for grass-roots misappropriation of their service, as I discovered today.
I usually ignore messages from people I don’t know on twitter, but I noticed that this was a reply, and wondered to what it was in reply; as it turned out, a tweet from Foursquare checking me in at a hotel in Manchester. Looking at the other @mentions from the user, they were mostly in reply to Foursquare check-ins in the city.
Now, as above, I don’t pay much attention to spam @mentions and I’m pretty new to innovations in the sex industry (ahem) so this may be an old trick that I’ve only just experienced, but the overt and graphic nature in this instance really illustrates the point that when we publish our space time coordinates on the internet and into multiple channels, we’re facilitating interaction of all kinds that we may or may not find palatable, whether it’s from an explicitly predatory platform like Girls Around Me or from the more impromptu advances of a Mancunian hooker.
In marketing terms, I think this shows amazing initiative. Think about who @EbonyForex is targeting: Firstly men. Secondly men in Manchester. Thirdly men in hotels - therefore away from home, therefore more likely to be alone, more likely to be bored, etc., thus narrowing the focus of her limited marketing communications capacity to target a smaller audience of more likely prospects and begin a quality dialogue progressing to acquisition.
Maybe I’ll give her a call and see what her conversion rates are.
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This.
