Archive for November, 2005

After an excel­lent launch party Sat­ur­day, we launched the exhi­bi­tion site for Tech­ni­cal Break­down — and now it works. The exhi­bi­tion itself invites the inhab­i­tants of Copen­hagen to meet exper­i­men­tal con­tem­po­rary art on a street level. The lis­ten­ing posts are placed on busy loca­tions fre­quently vis­ited by a large num­ber of peo­ple. Accom­pa­ny­ing the lis­ten­ing posts is the site which has all the back­ground info, sam­ples of each of the sound works — and a fifth online-only lis­ten­ing post.

Go have a look — and con­sider tak­ing a look at the real lis­ten­ing posts through­out the city. Take the time to stop and listen.

Now this guy has a point (or an expe­ri­ence sim­i­lar to mine):

Now, the biggest issue is this: At home, in no place, there is some­thing that keeps my Next Actions. I have absolutely no trusted system. 

For the past cou­ple years, I’ve been strug­gling to turn my home into a home — instead of the office sur­rounded by kitchen and couches it seems to be right now. This of course is dif­fi­cult if you keep chang­ing offices and end up hav­ing a lot of gear hang­ing around. But still, I’m try­ing not to work much from home which means I kind of like not star­ing into my com­puter all the time. Which is where most of my GTD stuff lives. Being on a lap­top defi­nately makes things eas­ier and basi­cally a cheap lap­top (if you’re not using one con­stantly any­way) might just be worth it, con­sid­er­ing how much more struc­ture on every­thing GTD provides. 

I’m bad at using the con­text options of my cur­rent GTD sys­tem, PyGTD, so often I end up at the office, being sur­prised that I over­looked some @Home task. And again; I don’t always want to be too close to my com­puter when at home — or bring it when going for a sat­ur­day walk etc. So I’m think­ing of either doing some online export-stuff and out­putting that on a lit­tle screen in the kitchen (get stuff done by look­ing at your list, don’t worry about cap­tur­ing, just scrib­ble on lit­tle notes and input them when back at the office mon­day morn­ing or some­thing) — or actu­ally find­ing a dif­fer­ent sys­tem for when at home…trouble is; how do you avoid man­u­ally hav­ing to do a lot of sync­ing? Sug­ges­tions and expe­ri­ences are oh so very welcome…

Ste­fan Andrén (SE), Senior Designer, Nike­Lab, USA is talk­ing on “a designer’s way to break habits” — or rather doing a Nike show­case, putting a lot of fancy prod­ucts on the big screen, show­ing some video commercials.

He’s sum­ma­riz­ing the con­cepts behind the devel­op­ment but some­how it just turns into mar­ket­ing speak. Maybe it’s because he’s got so many pretty pic­tures to show… Funny thing: If you suc­ceed in com­mu­ni­cat­ing your devel­op­ment prin­ci­ples through your adver­tis­ing mate­r­ial (which I usu­ally enjoy), you might end up mak­ing a con­nec­tion in people’s heads between ‘talk­ing abstract’ (‘abstract’ being one of Nike’s con­cepts for a spe­cific prod­uct line, oh the meta…) and cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing speak. Maybe it’s just me — fast paced, action packed lifestyle com­mer­cials doesn’t do it for me…

Easter egg in Gran Tur­ismo 4 (fea­tur­ing a Nike vir­tual car): Look for morse code at the front right wheel.

Just a quick note: Why is it ‘inno­va­tion’ always has to be made look inno­v­a­tive by adding flashy ele­ments to the web­site? Move on, 1999 won’t be back any­time soon.

And: The intro­duc­tionary speaker men­tioned the cam­eras stream­ing the con­fer­ence live — but links to the streams are nowhere to be found on the Next2005 web­site. You have to go to Inno­va­tion Lab for that. Which is ok, but why not put it some­where on the con­fer­ence site?

Seated at Next2005. First up is Dr. Dr. Nor­bert Stre­itz from Ambi­ente who started by stat­ing that in the future we might not value not being avail­able. Since then he has — so far — mostly been in overview mode; not very spe­cific, not very visionary.

Per­va­sive com­put­ing challenge:

Design­ing for an under­stand­ing of a trans­par­ent inter­face, pri­vacy concerns.

Ques­tion: Do we still need office build­ings (Dr. Dr. thinks yes)? “Coop­er­a­tive build­ings”. No longer the place for indi­vid­ual activ­i­ties, but for planned social/group activ­i­ties. “Smart envi­ron­ments”; atten­tive, adap­tive, active.

Roomware^TM: iLand — an inter­ac­tive land­scape for cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion. 2nd gen. for Wilkhahn (office fur­ni­ture mak­ers). Beach: Soft­ware for inter­ac­tive walls. Ver­sion with audio aug­men­ta­tion — room laughs. And so on. This is turn­ing into a Fraun­hofer prod­uct show.

Smart envi­ron­ments: System-oriented / People-oriented. “Smart spaces make peo­ple smarter”. Refrig­er­a­tor order­ing stuff not being con­sumed because of cir­cum­stances out­side its knowl­edge vs. ‘people-empowerment’ through system-to.person information.

Smart­ness trade-off: sen­sor data for decision-making, tai­lor­ing etc. vs. con­trol over data.

Now he’s back in overview mode, men­tion­ing part­ners, going through a large num­ber of interesting-looking projects that he haven’t got time to com­ment on prop­erly. He is, how­ever, throw­ing in com­ments about lack of time for explain­ing. There is actu­ally a way to get around that, you know…

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion through envi­ron­ments: Pat­terns, ambi­ent mes­sag­ing. Con­nect­ing Remote Sites: Com­mu­ni­ca­tion mood etc. across remote locations. 

Classy reports on the bril­liance of the site posted in AUX’s press release for the sound exhi­bi­tion Tech­ni­cal Break­down (start­ing this Sat­ur­day), aux.dk/tekniskuheld.

While we’re not unaware of the poten­tial tongue-in-cheek-ness of a pos­si­ble site error in con­nec­tion with this very project (and any errors we might make, hell we’re excused no mat­ter what), I have to admit that it’s just a funny result of the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the groups prepar­ing the exhi­bi­tion — I’m one of the groups and didn’t get the site ready on time.

There you have it. Open com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Site to launch soon. I’ll let you know. For now, head over to AUX for more information.

Efter billedet på Poli­tiken at dømme bliver han næppe hæn­gende længe.…

I’ll be com­bin­ing to favourites of mine tomor­row: Blog­ging and fancy prod­uct wathc­ing — I’ll be blog­ging from Next05, hope­fully being able to post a lot of pho­tos and per­haps a bit of video.

For tredje år i træk sam­les ver­dens mest per­spek­tivrige it-prototyper til en Trend­shop, hvor der vises frem af det mest langsynede og trend­sk­abende fra afs­nit for pro­duk­tudvikling og –forskn­ing ver­den over 

Update: Nyholm is arrang­ing a post-conference din­ner, start­ing with drinks at the Oak Room.

Shortly after hav­ing done my last vlog post I wanted to test the gear and see how it behaved in low-light con­di­tions, shoot­ing from a mov­ing car. I doc­u­mented the setup over at Flickr — in short it’s lug­gage elas­tics around a head­rest using a mini-tripod.

If I had a car I would prob­a­bly just use it for dri­ving around the city at night, lis­ten­ing to records. So that’s what I did for my test.

cphbynight.mov — 4:48

Rough cut, pretty bor­ing — didn’t even miss the exit and go to Swe­den by mis­take. No action there… So just shar­ing the ‘results’. Image qual­ity is decent (have much more video but that’s pretty much the same), the mount worked like a charm and I’m slowly falling in love with the dif­fer­ent sounds of dri­ving a car mix­ing in with the music from a cheap car stereo. Aut­o­fo­cus is defi­nately a con­cern with chang­ing light conditions.