Last Friday we had an unconference style workshop afternoon at our office (liveblog in Dutch, as was most of the content). Come one come all, and quite a bit of people did show up ((Not to mention the number of people who flaked.)). We had a very varied program and we got the impression that it was valuable and inspiring for most people, not to mention a lot of fun.

The format was focused on sharing knowledge and talking about cool stuff that you had recently done. Twenty minutes per presentation, sort of like TED.

Besides the knowledge intensive keynotes, there were also some more active workshops, one on improvisational dance and another one on BMX biking. During a more geeky unconference the physical stuff is mostly neglected about as much as geeks tend to neglect their bodies. These two activities proved to be big hits with this crowd. I’ll let the pictures of the BMX workshop testify, and maybe it’s just as well that there aren’t any pictures from the improdance workshop.

Reports and video of every workshop will be posted (in Dutch) to the Studio4Stagioni site and we will definitely repeat an event like this somewhere in the fall.

Next Friday we’re holding an unconference style workshop afternoon in our office (Dutch event description). We’d thought this a nice idea to share knowledge between ourselves, but thought, why not make it open to our friends and acquaintances as well.

There’s a video promoting the event:

Workshop 13 juni from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

Interactive sessions of 20-30 minutes from 1:30 till end of day concluded with a barbecue. We think this could be fun and if you think the same, come join us.

Geekyoto

Last week I attended Geekyoto in London (and visited some friends). I just had time to typeout my notes of the day with short blurbs on each presentation and pointers where I can find them. Great event where I learned a lot and took away quite a bit of inspiration.

Video’s of each presentation should become available in the near future and I would recommend watching it.

Christian Nold

Nold did a talk on local experience maps to visualize the impact of the environment on people. One very cool demo where he would map the galvanic skin response people have over locations on isomaps.

Alex Haw - Atmoss

Surveillance as an anti-architectural tool and surveillance as it relates to the body.

They made a map of all the area in a space which was covered by security cams and then got rid of all the rest (because that obviously does not matter). Showed some stuff about work space positions and efficient use of space. Also tackled domesticity and the dilemma between exhibition and privacy. Privacy could just as well be served not by building opaque walls but by putting shields in front of people’s eyes where you control up to what resolution you are visible to whom.

Also showed some work visualizing database cells into physical locations, one for the Deutsche Borse. And another one for a faculty of architecture where activity within the building would be mapped to a lightscape in a central space with fiberoptic lamps (this blogpost has pictures).

Moixa

Efficient re-usable energy. Green energy is not yet mass market. The battle between AC and DC. Pretty much everything you use locally uses a small DC current but we need to generate large amounts of AC to transport over long distances. Not efficient.

Demo of the USBcell battery which is a battery form factor chargable from a powered USB port on any pc. That way you don’t need to mess around with chargers anymore and most people have a charger device handy most of the time.

Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman

компютри втора употреба

During sabbath Jewish people need to observe some strange rules. They cannot change the state of anything electrical. So to work around this they have timer lights and water reboilers. Sabbath is a time when people come together and they are more focused on

They checked what the environmental impact of the sabbath is and found out that it actually saves energy. You could observe an environmentally friendly sabbath by inviting friends over, no TV, no phones, no computers, just chat and walk.

Gavin Starks - AMEE

What if all the energy data of the world was available? AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform where they collect the energy footprint of everything in the world.

Mentions this blessay by Stephen Fry.

75% of change does not require new technology
25% of change has no cost

Vincenzo diMaria - Saint Martins ID

Showed a design prototype of a trinacria box for sun dried tomatoes from Sicily for some sort of agro-tourism.

Bruno Taylor - Saint Martins ID

Talked about the nature of play in a changing public realm and why there is no play on streets right now and adult supervision most of the time. Are we creating a future of socially inept individuals? The YouTube video with the bus stop swing he mentioned.

There’s a tension between vandalism and playful behaviour. Children come at the bottom of the user hierarchy on the street level while they should be considered first.

Richard Sandford - Futurelab

Picture by Rachel Clarke

Beyondcurrenthorions.org.uk

How do we make better futures? Challenged us to think about alternative futures and to believe that we can make a difference in it. What we imagine is what gets built. Events are not predestined and an uncertain future may be a good one because we get to change things. Future literacy consists of knowledge, awareness and confidence and it should be embedded at the school level.

He also mentioned the notion of the extended present of about 200 years which stretches out from your grand parents to you and then from you on to your grand children.

Wattson

Picture by Mark Simpkins

Also saw a design demo of the Wattson device and Holmes web interface from DIY Kyoto. (explanation). It was more or less a product pitch but for a very relevant and well designed product.

Edward Scotcher

The image of Africa as tremendously behind is no longer accurate. It is a place where mobile phones, internet cafés and WiFi are all around. Traditional forms of media are not trusted and web2.0’s market for information has a large potential to create transparency.

Personal site is Moamba.net
He mentions White African blog article.

Ushahidi and Sokwanele are two Google Maps initiatives to map actual events and increase awareness in regions in Africa. As time goes on only more people will have access.

Bryony Worthington - Sandbag

Politics broke the system of emissions trading and she wants to fix it. The system has removed the individual’s ability to make a difference. She wants to remove permits from the system, destroy unused ones and lower caps alltogether.

Sandbag.org.uk is an initiative to bring emissions trading into the pubblic domain

James Smith

Can software save the planet? He makes socially responsible software like Carbon Diet and Do the green thing.

Jeremy Gould and Mitch Sava

Government Barcamp crossovers. Break up policy issues into Symptoms, Actions, Objectives, Issues, Outcomes and invite collaboration.

Mentions Polywonk

How do we show support to let politicians make the right decisions with confidence?

Ben Saunders

Final talk by Ben Saunders about arctic expeditions very inspiring with great stories and pictures illustrating some of the most difficult conditions on the planet.

“Nobody else is the authority on your potential.”

Picture by kokeshi

(Thanks Cristiano for your tireless photography.)

Kars Alfrink - Play in public space

Play in the city

‘the street finds its own uses for things’
-William Gibson

Skateboarding started in empty pools

Flash mobs are mass gatherings coordinated by internet en cell phones. Friction between players and outsiders is fun.

Play is a widespread cultural phenomenon. Play is a generative process which is the foundation of creative processes.

LED throwies concept. non destructive grafiti. play with the object you have with you.
instructables for mario question blocks. and photographs of the blocks in the street.

processing power changes games.
data intensity vs. processing intensity
processing intensity is better

explore the model and possibility space of a game, the exploration is fun

games can communicate arguments just like other media. procedural rhetoric arguments.
September 12. news game.

introduction of processing power will introduce procedural rhetoric to street games

ufo findings of 1967 in england

make a possible future feelable

goes on to very nicely visualize a game based on camera surveillance in the public space.

Jyri Engeström - Nodal Points

(My notes in parentheses, as always.)

How mobility is changing the social web

1. Social objects
2. Social peripheral vision
3. Nodal points

Is there something more meaningful than one-dimensional pseudo-apps poking.

Social network theory does not explain what connects some particular people and not others.
Another tradition of theory explains why so many YASNS fail.
Knorr-Cetina etc. academic literature on sociality.

Same talk about social objects which shoudl be the foundation of your social network. A common thing to gather around which is of interest to multiple people.

Good webservices allow people to create social objects that add value.

Mobil edevices make it possible to caputre slices of reality that people couldn’t capture before. Flickr has solved the cain of pain in photgraphy. Mobile phones and mobile camera’s and text messages have greatly decreased the friction for people to participate. Video phones are doing hte same thing for video.

iPhone 2.0 has the same potential as the microscope had on the natural sciences. A new species and a new world which people were not aware existed before. Really usable and really programmable mobile devices may cause a similar breakthrough.
Barcodes and RFIDS enable connecting physical objects.

Define your verbs as a site and claim the interaction that way.
Person x verb x object
Assess new sites with new startups and new objects.

Theories:
Actions - Alexei N .Leontiev
Speech acts - John R. Searle
Communicatve acts - Jürgen Habermas
Utterances - Conversation Analysis

How to use this social theory in designing services.

Actions leave traces on the web. Som eactions are voluntary, others are auat-generated. Facebook newsfeed is a social peripheral vision.
Seeing what will happen next.

(e.g. Facebook friends feed: you see a picture at a certain party and next you see that two of your friends have broken up.)

No awareness of other people’s intentions make for bad decisions.
Gaming and 3D worlds have taken SPV to a much higher level out of necessity.
Kids growing up with these games are going to expect the same UI conventions while they are doing the same work they do.
Object lockers and activity aggregators.
Google has a tremendous scaleof aggregation. Exposes new questions.

Pattern recognition. There are lot of patterns in the information. Nodal points is from Idoru. Getting all data on somebody and being able to detect somebody’s future.
Q: What shoudl i be aware of that’s happening around me?
Feeding content back to you on mobile. How do we know which information to give back at what time? Minimize disturbanec, maximize utility.

Portals move from Pagerank to ‘Facerank’. Your proximity towards others with social proximity, physical proximity, shared taste, shared objects. Ultimate personal attunement. How is this algorithm going to work?
Algorithmize: social capital, want, need, know, talk.

1. What is your object?
2. What are your verbs?
3. What are your nodal points?

Q: How do you evade the need for commercial parties to control your experience, keep you in and squeeze you.
Users should be able to hack ontop of the data. Customize their view and be able to take their content and do with it whatever they want. And also federated models for interop.
(Horror scenario: When Google applies the interaction design of Las Vegas to our social experience.)

Q: Are activity streams the nodal points?
We.re getting infromation overflow. (LIke Friendfeed etc.) A nodeal point serves out the stuff relevant right then.

Q: What is Jaiku doing right now?
Jaiku in Death Valley. Developing Jaiku on App Engine port tok priority and after that new exciting features will be rolled out. And also working on real social features in Google.

Adam Greenfield - The city is here for you to use

(Live blogged notes. My notes in parentheses.)

North American cities are broken. Web development user experience is algorithmic. Wants to have better experiences for ubiquitous computing.

Influences:
?
Christopher Alexander
Bernard Rudofsky

The city arises from the bottom up. Worried about the city disappearing in large scale urban development. The repeating module of doom. Franchise cookie cutter city organization.

Junk space, privatized commons and non place. No order, no logic. Privatized commons.

Public spaces get wrapped up in commerciality and private law applies. No freedom of speech and assembly.

Public space is deliberately being made unpleasant. Stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly, and jittery. Surveillance, hard to get there, hard to stay there.

People withdraw from the city into their mobile devices. Technology gets blamed for it but they afordit but the environemnt itself sends us into the warm embrace of personal devices.

We’ve lost something and everybody feels it. Nostalgia is for suckers. Do not lamment about how things used to be better.

Rediscover the city in all its fun, organic ways relevant to the current age.

Ubiquitous: embedded, wireless, imperceeptible, multiple, postGUIU, depolyed in everyday life, vastly expanded user base

These technologies are going to engage literally everybody. Massive effects for interfaces and for scalabality. Everywary is already affecting the way that the city works.

Networked processors show up at every scale. At the scale of the body, at the scale of the room, street, city. biotelemetry transported from your body is captured and it becomes a social object. It has a lot to do with representation, and how we are in the world, a lot to do with culture and fashion.

(Body media)

Networked processors in the street. Traffic light countdown. Next tram coming up. Simple additions which improve the quality of life in the city for many many people.

Information about the city can e visualized differently. Sociality, poltiics and class can be visualized from transportation and other map represetations. Th einformation can be made available on demand. Why doesn’t TomTom do more of this?

Information processing dissolves in behaviour. The octopus in Hong Kong people found out that you do not need to touch your RFID card. You can put your bag over it in any way you want. Discovered interaction collectively by the people. THe complete transaction happens in a third of a second. A stations throughput can be increased tremendously and by extension the city.

Outputs at the building envelope in response to data. Architecture that is impossible without computation. Circulation and public trasnportation can be regulated based on real time demands. Mobility is a utiltiy. Cities which understand this are cities which are going to gain immensely.

(How to sell this? Dependent on computational sensing.)

Quaryable objects and objects in the city having open APIs. Build mashups from the information.

A city that responds to the bhaviour of its residents and other users in something like real time.

(Build Arduino sensers and actuators on an XMPP server.)

Constantly evolving and opens up the social space again.

Metropolitan life.
What is mapped is what can be sensed and sensed cheaply. (Important if you want to play with it yourself.) Sense of time and place which are different much longer and wider than would be possible without mobile communication.
The Big Now, to see what is happening everywhere right now.
The Long Here, objcets have a history, antecedents and a provenance
Differntial permissioning without effective recourse in real time. What do you do when access is denied? Code is law.
Rights of use and enjoyment. THese rights are an artefact of when it was impractical to track this use accurately. Under the new circumstances you can be billed for your actual use.
Technology is tailored to each city with its history and geography. Thre aren’t one sie fits all solutions. Congestion charge works well.

(Congestion charge is not in effect yet in NL because of widespread stupidity.)

How do you cope with exploits and attacks of the system. emergent behaviour which is unpredictable.

a HOWTO for the real-time city:
need a practicle, livable, humane and possible city

1. build beautiful seams with apis in hardware and software
2. underspecify as designers, cannot predict everything, otherwise they will be brittle and won’t be an utility
3. You should go from flâneur to consumer to user, somebody who engages and makes his own personal experience of the city.

Ambient informatics will help us make better choices but awareness cuts both ways. Entirely new behaviours will emerge. (Little Brother style subversion.) Are we going to get passive consumerism, or genuine read write urbanism?

The answer is up to us as designers, consumers and citizens.

This weekend the Amsterdam Software Social will organize a summer barbecue to socialize and celebrate. Tipit.to and friends are sponsoring the drinks, so this should be a very fun event.

Register at the site and have fun. I myself unfortunately won’t make it but many of the other usual suspects (and I hope some new faces) will be present.

This job as cultural attachéfurniture Videnovfurniture Elhovomebelimebeli to Brian Grazer seems like a dream to me. Anyway until I am in the position to hire such a person for myself.

It seems the position is already filled by people probably more qualified than myself, but maybe some other notable person is looking for a similar curator.

What makes me think I’m qualified? I’m curious and I read voraciously, I speak a smattering of languages, have competencies and interests in the alpha, beta and gamma sciences, can learn complicated stuff and explain it simply and clearly, am quite capable with a computer and most new media and I don’t mind going out and getting physically into people’s faces for that contact or deal.

Per assignment contract also negotiable. Interested parties can contact me on alper at this domain.

A week or so ago it was brought to my attention that this weblog Four Starters.com is not reachable by users of the Firefox 3 browser. It seems that Firefox3 uses the stopbadware.org blocklists and people who try to visit our site get to see this:

Stopbadware is designed to stop spammers and other evildoers online, but in doing so it is causing a lot of collateral damage and blocking a site such as ours which has been mostly spamfree for most of the time.
This is a situation where the cure is worse than the pain. An arbitrary and unmotivated verdict is being cast without our awareness and there is very little we can do about it. Kafka could not have written this as well and even though rules of due process have been greatly relaxed in the USA, we didn’t expect the same low standards to be applied to our website.

We have a number of issues with the stopbadware.org process:

1. We are blocked arbitrarily, in the reports posted on stopbadware.org not once does it mention which parts of our website were in question and what they were guilty of. Stopbadware lists Google as the reason we are blocked and Google says it gets the lists from Stopbadware, so we are in an infinite loop. Suppose I have a very big content filled site, how am I supposed to find the offending links without decent reports?
   And if those reports are a work in progress, how about not blocking sites until you have your operation in order? We think we have fixed the problem as far as Four Starters is concerned, but without detailed violation descriptions, we won’t know for sure. I have written a detailed complaint to the stopbadware Google Group.
2. Having fixed any violations we could find ourselves, we have asked our site to be reviewed for reinclusion but this has taken days already without any word. Getting on this blacklist seems extremely easy, but getting out is somewhat more difficult. We are annoyed that Four Starters is unreachable (our traffic is in the basement), but imagine that this is your business’s website that’s in the doghouse.
3. Blocking is also unilateral without notification to us (we had to hear it from people sending us the screenshot) and without possibility for appeal. Seeing as getting off the list is so difficult and slow, the possibility of appeal should reasonably be an option.
4. Blocking a site does not solve any real problem. For phishing sites it may be somewhat reasonable, but in our case the report does not even say that we host badware, no it says that we link to sites which may host badware. Blocking us on that ground seems like shooting a nuke at a butterfly.
   If people do not want to read our site, give them the choice. Firefox does no such thing and cedes the entire site to the spammers.
5. Lastly I do not recognize that badware is a problem, at least not for people who are visiting our site. Most people reading Four Starters have a Mac or Linux based system and/or are computer savvy enough never to go to the bad parts of the internet. So we are being punished because a large part of the internet is stupid. Again this does not strike me to be a sound principle to run a blacklisting operation.

Stopbadware tries to reach a noble goal but currently it is striking out too broadly and in doing so it is doing more harm than good. Furthermore it does this based on an authority which I do not recognize using a process which is broken. If arbitrarily gagging sites is what it takes to fight spam, then maybe it’s not worth it.

I hope that in the following days our ban is lifted and you can read what I have written here.

I have an idea for a really cool service that I don’t see myself developing anytime soon. Though if there are some funders and mobile hackers who want to collaborate I would be willing to go for it.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.