02 1st, 2009
It’s worth watching this 1984 presentation by Steve Jobs. Aside from the enjoyment of seeing anyone that deeply proud of his work and excited to watch the audience’s reaction to it, there is the real drama there.
Everything that makes Steve’s keynotes so incredibly good today was already in place 25 years ago: the stunning moves into far-advanced technological territory; the purity and simplicity of the product design; the passion for powerful application controls, direct object manipulation and delightful user experience… even today, this video is exciting and awe-inspiring. Not to mention historic.
Steve Jobs Demos Apple Macintosh, 1984
[Thanks to @CharlieKalech for the tip.]
The Me vs. We culture awareness is taking off in a big way (ideas are like that…).
- serial-solidarity: it’s always easier to design something for sole use rather than shared use (although there is a big buzz about youtube, etc.). What this means that we see more and more people in the same place, doing the same things but apart. […]
- invisible technologies: pocketable is a step towards more important miniaturization: we’re going to not see a lot of technologies; because they disappear in the infrastructure. And when technologies disappear, the emphasis on social cues to make then explicit is even more and important.
[from Nicolas Nova’s notes of Jan Chipchase’s presentation at LIFT Asia 08]
What Jan refers to here as “serial solidarity” seems to me to be closely related to what psychologists and teachers call “parallel play” in young children — the developmental stage in which children play alongside, but not truly with, one another. (I was an elementary school teacher in a former life, remember?)
Too Much “Me”?
So let’s ask the threatening question: what is the effect on a child’s development when the play environment encourages staying “back” in a less mature stage of relationship? Are people hard-wired enough to just grow to the next stage of truly shared group interaction, anyway? Or will more and more kids grow up to be emotionally (and severely) immature?
Think, for example, of kids playing Nintendo DS games head-to-head via WiFi. On the one hand, there is a shared game, and vocalized communication (usually). On the other hand, each child sees a different view, and is essentially playing against electronic characters as he always does. Is this a group experience? Or a parallel play experience?
Too Much “We”?
On the flip side, one of my big concerns with the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) system is that it appears to be totally centered on a “We” model — every application is used collaboratively. Via the WiFi capability, users move in and out of work spaces, adding or contributing to the projects.
Perhaps collaborative work is good. Maybe it’s even great. Maybe it’s even the ideal educational environment. But has anyone tried it out in the field/classroom? When I asked the OLPC development team directly, they looked blank.
It scares me to think that the most vulnerable children on earth — the kids who will be receiving the OLPC units — are guinea pigs for a totally untested, not very thought-out new educational system.
Let’s be honest… these children aren’t going to have a wonderfully-trained teacher in a well-equipped classroom, access to books and toys, even daily access to mainstream media. The vast majority of their education will be the OLPC laptop collaborative environment.
What happens if you always learn and create projects collaboratively? Do you develop the skills and experience to independently plan and execute a project from start to finish? If not — here’s the threatening question — then are your skills employable? Do you have the abilities required to get a job in your local piece of the global economy?
As far as I can tell, no one asked these questions before shipping out OLPC laptops to kids who desperately need the boost to employability. As individuals who design products, we can lose sight of the true societal responsibility and global impact we all have in our work. Even when we’re working for the greater good, it’s easy to get lost in the rosy words, and forget that it all boils down to our impact on individual lives.
What if there were no stop signs… and a major corporation was charged with inventing one?
If you’ve ever worked on the design side of the desk… don’t miss this great YouTube video!
I said a few days ago that “Experience is Everything”. This isn’t what I meant, though.
I’m currently building up a rough manifesto (what point is there to a slick one? the word manifesto feels so rough…) on the subject of thought and how it is influenced by experience, in particular, how our thought and relationship processes are influenced by increasing time spent in virtual spaces online. It’s a subject that is close to my heart and passion, and I’ve been working up to this with increasing momentum for nearly a year.
How does the above video link tie in? My idea of “Experience is Everything” is that the experience is influenced by every aspect of the sensed environment, not just the digital input. The Prometeus video (”Experience is the New Reality”) looks at experience as moving away from the physical senses towards the digital domain.
By the way, I love the voiceover on the video, but wonder about the very odd difficulty with “Tyranosaurus Rex”. Note the closing credit:
Voice: Philip K. Dick Avatar
Date: 6th April 2061
Place: Unknown
What’s all that about?
[via Alphachimp]
A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That’s right: just holding your body in the right position means you’ll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you’re quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose. […]
Dijkstra’s team believes that the effect may be due to the way memories are stored in the brain: one theory of memory suggests that memories are composed of linked sensory fragments — odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions. Simply activating one or more of those fragments makes the entire memory more likely to be retrieved. In any case, if you’re trying to recall a particular incident in your life, putting your body in the right position might help you remember it faster and more accurately. The key appears to be your body position when the memory occurred.
[via Cognitive Daily — one of my new blog loves]
This is a really fascinating topic, and the first time I’ve seen it studied methodically.
What is the long term impact of our growing involvement in virtual life and digital communication?
If you see all movies in the same general context (on your iPod or computer screen), rather than surrounding them with a trip to a theatre, candy, theatre seats…
If your reading material consists of Word and eBook files, without the sizes, fonts and thickness of books…
If your letters are all emails or instant messages, without stamps, handwriting or envelopes…
If your conversations are all via SMS, with no body language or tonal cues beyond emoticons…
…and if all that happens within a very limited number of positions and locations (on the sofa, on a train, in the kitchen, at the desk), then what impact does that have on your personal internal journal of your life?
Is that why we need our cell phones to journal our [digital] lives, with automatic uploads of pictures to Flickr, video to YouTube, status to Facebook, and stream of consciousness to Twitter? Is it because we might experience life as a giant blur of digital events that in retrospect are difficult to tease apart from one another… or even difficult to call up as memories?
What does it take to make a digital experience memorable in the way a fully physical experience is? I doubt that color or even sound are enough. New trends in haptic and scent generation might help… but I suspect that the real trick is to tie the digital experience to the surrounding environment (or at least to a discrete digital environment) — tying the mobile ad to the location, to the store, to the time of day, to the people in the room, for example.
A whole new meaning for Location Based Services.
If operator hardware sales behavior started to threaten a device manufacturer’s own revenue stream, would the manufacturer continue to be cautious about not offending carrier sensibilities? Or would they throw the first punch by offering service themselves?
It’s not so farfetched, is it?
Related and perhaps illuminating business cases:
- Helio / SK Telecom
- Vertu / Nokia / Ovi / Nokia-Siemens Network
- iPhone / iTouch / iTunes /.Mac
- Google / Android / YouTube / Flickr
Thanks to David Eisen for the tip.
“It was Disability Awareness day and the folks at Fenway did a lot of great things for kids with challenges. Here is one who sang and when he got nervous the Fenway Faithful helped him out.”
I guess some crowds have some wisdom
While I do link to YouTube videos, or sites that embed them, I do not embed them directly in my blog. Why not? YouTube uses the end of each video to promote links other videos and advertisements, and does not give me any control over what is displayed there.
Same goes for Google Ads, by the way. I’d rather have no advertising at all than find myself advertising products or services I don’t believe in, don’t support, or am offended by.
I was on one site (the homepage of a Jewish organization), and was sad to see Google Ads for missionary messianic Christian cults showing up in the sidebar. Cults are savvy enough to choose keywords that will show up in searches for Jewish content. On another occasion, a religious venture capitalist was unwittingly posting links to pornographic videos (the links being embedded in the closing frame of a humorous YouTube video); I wonder how many people activated one of those links intending to navigate to the main page of the humorous video?
Surely the site owners in both of these cases were not aware of what was creeping through the cracks, but that isn’t good enough. Not for me.
Many people will say, “Who cares? It’s just advertising. You don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe the ads are fine.” Sorry; I do know. I do care. I believe I need to take responsibility.
