Low-fi data visualization
I applied for Enquiring Minds - Picnic Network - on September 16 at 4.03pm. 7 hours and 57 minutes before the official deadline of September 17. I was accepted with other 24 researchers. The Lab paid 799.99$ for my roundtrip ticket. In Logan Airport, I was scanned into a puffer machine to check if I was carrying explosives. No traces of RDX, PETN, TNT, Semtex, nor NG. 50 percent of Americans think that a USA city will be attacked by terrorists armed with a nuclear device in the next 10 years. And 81 percent of Americans agree that the financial crisis poses a greater threat to the quality of life than does the threat of terrorism.
I landed at Schiphol Airport at 8.25am on September 23. I spent 3 days at Picnic Network. 82 hours overall in the city. I Amsterdam. I had no real picnics. Any of my total 6 sandwiches - 2132 calories were shared with native Dutch ants Polyergus rufescens, Camponotus ligniperda or Myrmica sulcinodis. On the other hand, I exchanged 4 business cards. But I have lost 1 of them. So this makes 3 business cards. Someone would say Picnic Notwork.
I counted 8,534 different people in total. From 104 countries in the world. Creatives, artists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, lawyers, format developers, agencies, cross media content production creatives, advertisers, programmers, investor, writers, filmmakers, journalists, and technology-and service-providers. I just talked with 18 of them. I sat down on 21 different chairs. I spent 18 hours and 26 minutes listening to talks. I officially talked for 5 minutes and 23 seconds. Unofficially for 2 hours and 17 minutes. Consumed 243 W with my laptop. This report is technically my entrance ticket. 1245 euros. 1506 words. Around 83 cents for each word.
Nice to meet you
Hello. My name is David Boardman, I am Interaction/Strategic Designer at MIT Mobile Experience Lab (Design Laboratory). The MIT Mobile Experience Lab focuses on radically reinventing and creatively designing connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology to improve peopleʻs lives through meaningful experiences. With a multidisciplinary team, we research and design new technologies along with their impact in societies, spaces and communities. Basically, we make things. We talk with people.
My research is about next-generation mobile applications, wearables and, generally, innovative ways of human-computer interaction. Besides this, I waste half of my time on Facebook or chatting on Skype. Sometimes instead of wasting time on Skype, I simply chat on Facebook.
Enquiring Minds
On Wednesday morning, I took one of the efficient Amsterdam tramway and got off in front of Westerpark after 8 stops. “Here we are”, I thought, seeing a huge and round building covered with fancy black hearts.
Picnic Network is a recipe based on a simple but sapient combination of ingredients. Get some spoons of northern Europe efficiency and add some drops of Dutch extravaganza. Mix together with a multicultural blend, chop in some brilliant minds and cook all into a ex-gasometre building. The result is a well-organized conference lasting 3 days, with some very interesting talks balanced by other boring ones.
My first Picnic event was at Western Union Room, where I met the other 24 *enquiring minds* together with the event organizers: Anne and Sabine. Everyone gave a short presentation about personal research directions, and the meeting closed up with some coffees and discussions between participants. It was interesting to listen to other perspectives although I would have preferred to have more time to know better the other researchers..
As for the chronicles, it should be remarked how a copy of Internet Explorer installed on the podium computer tried several times to hijack the researchers’ presentations. And finally to crash the coffee machine. Without success, I should say.
Devices cannot tell lies
Probably my favorite talk at Picnic ‘08 was held by Genevieve Bell, anthropologist at Intel Research. She gave a stimulating point of view on how we behave when using computer-mediated communications.
The assumption is simple and not that surprising: we are social animals and we use to build an enormous amount of lies in our everyday life. And we can obtain also pleasure and satisfaction when doing it online. Lying on the age, origin, gender, occupation and marital status is not only a way to preserve our privacy but also to play with new identities, experiment ourselves in unexplored roles and costumes.
This imply that lying is part of our normal social imprinting. It is a way to affirm our external identities and to preserve the core of our personalities. Out of the common sense of sin, lies are a fundamental part of our common life experience. They enrich our relations with unpredictability. Fabricating lies is a sort of storytelling activity. The result is a narration that when mixed up to our sincere realities generates the subjective Truth.
Despite to these deep aspects, technologies seem to have been built so far ignoring completely some of the most inner elements of our personalities. Technologies seem in fact to plot against us. They appear to be always ready to spread around our secrets. Instead of helping us to maintain memory and priorities between our real reality and the invented one, they reveal the naked truth and provoke situations that can have serious consequences in our social relations.
At 2.47pm I was at coordinate 45,2324E and 17.44533N, listening to Radiohead on Last.FM while the accelerometer of my phone was measuring an elevated motion activity. But my comment on Twitter at 2.48pm was declaring that I was having a nap at 45.8793E and 17.5402N. And the SMS at 2.51pm notified my girlfriend that I was driving back home. Now, which is the truth?
Pervasive computing means pervasive presence of technologies in our lives. In every moment of our lives we create and spread around a huge amount of personal data. We leave after ourselves long trails that gossip about us, our favorite places, our tastes. And sometimes the contents of our social interactions.
New technologies don’t seem to respect our common cultural practices: although lies are a consistent part of our big social game, new technologies impose us to rethink our communication processes. They force us to declare the truth none less than the truth. They assume that we can be as rationalist as a workstation.
I am strongly convinced that companies that manage innovation and that redesign our ways of communication need much more support from people like Genevieve instead of mere technologists. We don’t need more New Songdo ubiquitous cities, built top-down with a techno-centric perspective. We need hardware and software that can be our allied. Our confident, if you want.
This aspect becomes increasingly a priority, as a growing number of mobile devices mount a GPS antenna and social networks are now exploiting the possibilities given by location-based features (not simply GPS, but accurate IP geolocation coming with the next W3C implementation).Furthermore, as also Mr.Nabaztag extensively affirmed, all the objects that surround us will be tomorrow communicating on the Internet thanks to the IPv6 protocol.
Although I am not at all between those who imagine future apocalyptic scenarios, I think that we certainly need to privilege multidisciplinary teams in the design processes of our next technologies rather than assigning all the responsibilities to technicians. The priority should definitely shift to the user experience instead of the technology celebration.
Future of Interactive TV?
Mike Fries, tycoon of UPC VOD television, won the prize for the most unhappy interview during Picnic ’08.
He just looked like a dinosaur. A desperate attempt to reaffirm the establishment of the traditional media companies facing the challenge of Internet, UGC, copyrights and viral diffusion of contents. “Stealing our contents”, “manage excessive bandwidth use” and “we know what consumers want” express the desperate countermeasures that the established media industry will oppose to emerging practices in the near future.
Surprisingly nobody threw rotten tomatoes to Mike Fries. Probably for respect to Kara Swisher.
If Africa is surprising, then you’re not paying enough attention
Brilliant talk. I should admit that I was surprised. Which means that I don’t pay enough attention to what is happening in Africa, as Ethan Zuckerman would say. It’s true and I am glad that Picnic gave this opportunity to the audience to listen to a talk plus participate to a special event. In particular, Zuckerman showed several case histories to explain how the common media usage is often reinvented in Africa to support bottom-up dynamics. For instance, Ushahidi - citizen reporting during Kenya election crisis and Mpesa - a system enabling micro-payments with mobile phones, caught my interest as brilliant examples of technology adaptation in context where the common needs are slightly different. Worth to be mentioned is also Block & Track, a vehicle anti-theft system that a 18 year-old self-taught tinkerer from Mombasa invented starting from a simple mobile-phone to control and protect his car.
Since that I came back in Boston after Picnic, I became a frequent visitor of WhiteAfrican.com and especially of Afrigadget.com.
Love!
I keep thinking to the metaphor of Eskil Steenberg regarding the mouse that he saw being flattened by a truck and the claimed responsibility of Picnic spectators about what happened. I am probably too insensitive. Honestly I couldn’t get the meaning and I suppose that half of the audience that left the conference room right after the metaphor is still meditating about what Eskil said.
Average 328 Mus musculus born each day in a city district. 47 of them don’t survive after the first week. 9 of the remaining are going to be killed by human vehicles during their lives which last from 12 to 18 weeks. Which means average 872 Kilograms against 28 grams.
