edublogs

Addictive beautiful touchpad animated art

I'm in the process of contracting, planning and soft-launching a beautiful web arts platform in my work with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public along with the talented guys at ISO, which will provide a really meaningful and inspiring space, we hope, to learn about and publish one's own art, digital media and films. More on that soon, although you can catch a sneaky peak at our session, The Digital Express, in the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

It means that my eye is increasingly heightened on all things design and artistic, and this has just distracted me, Morgane and Catriona for most of the latter's tea-time. It's one reason to let your two-year-old onto that MacBook Air touchpad. Go on. You know you want to.

Dopplr's Matts on designing sites that no-one has to visit

Over on 38minutes, the creative community I helped create for Scottish and Northern Irish webpreneurs, I've been blogging a lot about what makes online services, communities, apps and APIs attract, retain and turn into some kind of value the interactions of the people out there.

The last post I wrote was a summary of some gems of wisdom in the two Matts (Biddulph and Jones) behind travellers' site Dopplr.com, lifted from the transcript of their talk at last year's dConstruct conference (you can listen along, too). Here are my own highlights that potential 4iP developers and those working on web-based services for young people might bear in mind as they develop their ideas and products:

On a web of data

"Find one bit of catalytic information that you can inject into a bunch of other arenas."

"Flickr is a mainframe. It's a big, giant machine that stores loads of stuff, and by storing lots of stuff in the same place, we get economies of scale out of it.

"And from there, we come to pretty much where we are now, which is having seen the power of combining massive amounts of information from many sources—the enormous, sort of easy group-forming power, the zero-coordination power of things like tagging, and linking, and all these things used properly—is we get to this realization of the original vision of the web, which is the web is not just a sort of teletext or view data system.

"It's a web of data. It was designed as that right from the start. And everyone's dear friend Tom Coates talks in wonderful detail about the way that we are now starting to design not just for our web sites, not just for that little bit you're seeing in your browser, but for the re-use of data, and realizing that data crosses the boundaries of sites. And sites open up access to that data and allow the easy recombination of it with other sites, are themselves benefiting from it.

"And to quote another of our—this is a friend's quote, a talk, by the way—another of our respected friends, Matt Webb. He's been talking recently about movement as a paradigm for the way the web is going. "So the web, when we started out, the web was a physical thing. You went to a site, you hang out on a forum. We had destinations, and people tried to build portals, places that could be almost physical sort of arcologies—places you could go and put your online life.

"And then we moved from this web page era into the era of web applications—the sort of the power-lifter, the Internet as magnifier of your individual capabilities—gives you superpowers and power-ups, and lets you do things over great distances, access knowledge that you can't immediately access from your physical environment.

"And that's the stuff that's evolving now. But as we are able to move from site to site, we get away from the arcology—the individual approach to sites. We are moving around sites, as is our data. And something that Matt said in a presentation recently, which I think is a really wonderful concept, is that your web service is a finite-state machine that executes on your users."

On distributable media

"A guy called Martin Lindstrom said, "The genius of a coke bottle is when it smashes into a thousand pieces, you still know it's a coke bottle.""

On delighters

"...Delighter is a world that I learnt from a guy who used to run the W Hotels in New York and in San Diego. And he used to say that delighter is a term evolved from the hotel industry or the hospitality industry. Where you put something into somebody's experience or into a room, but you do it in such a way that it creates nothing but absolute joy and delight.

"And the example that he used, which stuck with me for ages, was the rubber duck. If you go into a hotel room and there's a rubber duck already in there. You will go, "Oh, rubber duck. Cool." If you go into the hotel room on your second night there when you had been shopping all day and it's been raining. And you are naked and you really want to bat, and there's a rubber duck. You will be incredibly delighted. At least that's the theory. So we are always trying to find the rubber duck that we can put into the experience where we can.

"And one of the things that I really like about the logo is that, almost entirely dependably, people don't notice that the colors are changing until like two or three months in. And they go, "Oh! The colors are changing. Why are the colors changing?" And you set up all your vanity alerts on Dopplr on surmise and things like that. And they go, "Oh, just nice, the colors are changing" and, "Why are the colors changing?"

"So then we go and talk to them and say, "Hey, this is why the colors are changing. It reflects what you are doing around the world. And these are city colors that are referring to where you are around the world. They go, "Ah, that's really nice. I really like that."

"And then apparently another month later they go, "And you did it in the favicon.""

On the language of 'Friends'

"But the thing that's kind of bubbling up in my mind is that soon, we may have to kind of say this: that a lot of the reasons that we are tying up ourselves in knots is because of language. Because so much is tied on to the notion of friendship, the intimacy, the kind of transitiveness of friendship, what you're able to share, and what you wouldn't with certain people. And then how does that move to friends of friends?

"And all of the things that he was talking about—I mean, very fantastic things to be able to do with information. But using that word "friend" just kind of takes it to something in our monkey brain, kind of just goes, "Oh, I need to collect a dollhouse of friends, or I need to be very careful about how I handle this."

"So I'm kind of thinking very carefully about this at the moment. One of the things that we started off at Dopplr—when we started off Dopplr, we tried to keep to it—is that we never use the word "friend." We always talk about the informational relationship. We talk about the kind of switchboard pipe that you're connecting to somebody that you trust.

"And we talk about the information that's going, and we talk about the level of trust, and we talk about what's going to happen, but we don't judge whether that is your friend, your bank manager, your boss, your archenemy, whoever it is. And it just makes life a hell of a lot easier."

Really. Seriously. If you're making any kind of online platform in the coming months go and read/listen to it all. I'll be asking questions later... ;-)

Other posts you might like:

• Adam Gee on the challenges of commissioning web-only platforms and content
• Matt Locke's Commissioning for attention

Pic from dConstruct 2008

Conference overload antidote

I've spoken at nearly 3000 people, and with hundreds more over the last month of conferences, workshops and socials. I'm off to be a Godfather for a few days having found an antidote to all this conferencing:

Stephen Heppell: the gaps are where the good stuff is

virtual, actual, temporal, agile, dissolved, playful, effective, delightful, better: this is my rundown of Stephen Heppell's talk at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow, complete with mistakes, editorial and personal views. David captures things differently over here, and managed to get the Q&A session tapped in.

Bits of our world need to be seen in a context. The Dubai indoor ski slope is not, as Westerners would say, a crime against global warming. In the context of Dubai water costs more than oil, so creating an expensive indoor area to keep the snow from melting is actually most sensible in the long-term. The context is sometimes frustrating - London Grid for Learning blocks Heppell's website because it concerns 'Criminal Skills' (his boat's called Cracker...). Filtering and blocking, home and abroad, is often a contextual issue, and new disruptive mobile technologies are changing that context.

Today's context is different from a few years ago. Information is free (and those who block it are putting their nation at a disadvantage), but the thing that is becoming scarce is the ability to learn, to exploit this information and knowledge to come up with ingenius ideas, creative offshoots and fill in the gaps in our lives.

We don't watch television so much any more, without also taking part in the online communities around the shows (C4's work in this sector is world-beating).

The inbetweenies
So, in the past we used to have me/you, broadcast/viewer, teacher/learner, but all the interesting stuff in 2008 is happening between these space. The people and projects in this space are the "inbetweenies", working outside the hierarchical historical norms in this superb learning space. Clay Shirky alludes to this, too, when he says that the innovation in organisations often happens in the 'gaps' in the organisation and it is the connectors who bridge these gaps who are often seen as 'creative'.

There's even a technology for this space: nearly now technologies. These are asynchronous technologies, but where we expect an answer in the near future (when I started blogging I'd expect an answer in a week, but now have an expectation that the first comments will appear within minutes. Things have changed. Twitter leaves me wanting almost instant nearly now communication, but where I have the option to come back later if I want.)

Stephen reckons that the new media companies are different in leadership, too, from traditional companies, in that they don't lead users. I think this is a little simplistic, not quite right, although there is a change. But Caterina Fake greeted the first 10,000 Flickrers in person. Every MySpacer's first friend it the company boss. MySpace leads users towards content every day through its homepage. Google Ads lead users into transactions they didn't even know they wanted.

Getting away from the learner's cell
All this is going on, the edges are becoming fuzzier the world over, except in most school buildings. They are designed on a spreadsheet, where spreadsheet cells represent the classrooms, cells in themselves in more than one sense.

In the online community work that Stephen and colleagues did at Ultralab, amongst all the things I've heard from him before about being seductive and engaging, 24/7, the term 'mixed age' made me think about how most Glow groups for students may, perhaps, fall into the traditional cell format: age, stage, subject or project. I hope that teachers in schools get together to help create some mixed age groupings, composite Glow classes if you will. I know some parents aren't so happy when their offspring are placed in physical composite classes, but perhaps Glow offers the advantages - potentially - of composite classes that I experienced at school, but in a more intense and long-term basis for all students, not just those in small schools.

Above all, I hope that the students take it on themselves to fuzz up those edges a bit further.

Design permeating learning: what inspires you?

Design features in almost every aspect of what we do, they way we live, how we interact with other people and how we interact with information. But, arguably, the only place we study design in Scottish secondary schools is in the technology class or workshop. That's changing, and as part of a new nascent project between a few public sector groups and private industry, I've created a new design category on the blog (a few posts in the archive to reclassify now, too) and have put my initial thoughts to what design has inspired me recently.

First, there are a raft of TED Talks which talk about the importance of design. My top eight would have to include:

• Saul Griffith: Hardware solutions to everyday problems
• Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy
• Ross Lovegrove: The power and beauty of organic design
• Paul Bennett: Design is in the details
• Moshe Safdie: What makes a building unique?
• Jonathan Harris: The web's secret stories
• John Maeda: Simplicity patterns
• David Kelley: The future of design is human-centered

What is it that I like about them? They are about all areas of design, first of all, from the web to daily objects, from the buildings we live in to the iPod that plays our music. They're well presented. They are good design in themselves as presentations.

But talks are not the only sources I would seek out in trying to help design permeate further into our curricula. Some of the most inspiring design pieces for me have been books, namely Simplicity, Smile In The Mind, The Laws of Simplicity, The Art of Looking Sideways, Zag, Words Fail Me, Whatever You Think Think The Opposite...

What design videos, books or objects, photos or places you've been to, have inspired you to do things a bit differently. I'm guessing that the design focus frequently blogged out by Christian, Krysia, Stuart and Dan might lead to a few great suggestions to help us find even more focus on what we're thinking about.