Project 10 to the 100 – Google crowd-sourced 150,000 "ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible." They've boiled then down to 16 'Big Ideas' and now are going to decide (they are taking votes but it doesn't seem that is the actual decision mechanism) which one to fund. But the process looks random, the results appear ill-defined, and the next steps are murky. I'm not harshing on Google here; this is the process we see in most engagements, moving from insights to opportunities to actual next steps. It's very challenging to do what. Google has done here and make this a public-facing activity, without the benefit of people sitting together in a room developing a shared understanding. We also don't have as much of a stake in what Google does as we would in our own business; we're the public, not members of the team.
Tuesday September 29th 2009, 10:02 pm by Steve Portigal
Richard Eoin Nash, Social Publisher – What “social” means is that there’s going to be more information about books, more scope to interact with the books (your own commenting & annotating and reading others’), more scope to interact with the author, more scope to interact with one another. (This latter item, to get semi-techy for a sec, is something that the broad horizontal book social networks—Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari—do well, though, so we’re likely to focus on using their APIs rather than asking people to build their own bookshelves anew.)
“Social” is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.
L-Prize – Lighting Competition – I've written before in frustration about money spent to push the CFL at us instead of spending money solving the product problem. The DOE is sponsoring the L-Prize to create a low-energy bulb. "The competition also includes a rigorous evaluation process for proposed products, designed to detect and address product weaknesses before market introduction, to avoid problems with long-term market acceptance."
Princeton tests of Kindles for textbooks doesn’t go well for Kindle – “Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”
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“For some people,” she explained, “electronic reading can never replace the functionality and ‘feel’ of reading off paper.”
Friday September 25th 2009, 2:42 pm by Dan Soltzberg
In our recent Reading Ahead research, we heard a lot from people about the physicality of books: how significant their tactile qualities and the kinesthetic experiences they afford are to the reading experience. So it’s interesting to see Microsoft going in a book-like direction with their Courier tablet device, here at Gizmodo.
While not explicitly geared towards reading, the Courier experience shown in the video below leverages some of the kinesthetics of book use, such as page turning (at least a digital approximation) and annotation.
What seems particularly promising here is development towards a synthesis of digital and analog gestural languages.
Related: One Hour Design Challenge – Enter our Reading Ahead-based design competition in partnership with Core77 (the submission period ends Oct. 14)
An error from a previous edition has been corrected – A rather aspirational piece on the power of digital books to support corrections after publication. Although we've got this with news already and the argument presented about the amount of fact-checking doesn't seem to be relevant – even if you have the ability to post new corrections technically doesn't mean you have the human resource to find those corrections.
Core-Toons: The Trapper-Kindle – While intended as humor, this is also the sort of design concepts we love, as they take an observation, or an insight about people and visualize a solution. We asked Core77's community to make the book more sensual, and here's a great example! Looking forward to more great design ideas for Reading Ahead!
Tuesday September 22nd 2009, 1:23 pm by Dan Soltzberg
Last night, I was making plans with someone I’d never seen. We were on the phone and got to the familiar, “what do you look like so I can find you” part of the conversation. She jokingly said she should just snap a picture with her phone and email me, then described herself. After we hung up, I thought, yeah, sending a picture really makes a lot of sense in this situation, doesn’t it, so I decided to do it. While I was snapping a picture to send her (which took me a few minutes because I’m just vain enough to keep trying ’till I got one I liked), she friended me on Facebook, thus providing me with a picture of herself.
It was another of these striking moments where I find myself smack in the midst of a piece of “behavioral extinction,” as an older way of doing something – in this case, describing oneself to someone – cedes ground to new, technology-enabled practices.
As always, the questions: what is lost, what is gained, how does this change in the experience change us and the ways we think?
Friday September 18th 2009, 9:05 am by Steve Portigal
Although it took her 30 years to act on her idea, nurse Jeanne Hahne is developing ClearVision, which despite the cliched name, is an accurate label for a medical face mask with a window so patients can see the mouth (and thus the smile) of their cheerful healthcare professional. Although intended to “ease patient anxiety”, early anecdotes point to the unexpected benefit of improved communication between colleagues.
(originally posted on Core77)
Wednesday September 16th 2009, 10:02 pm by Steve Portigal
Backpacker Classics: A list of books that backpackers carry – I have garnered this list from my own experience of buying books from travellers, various lists on the web (one at Amazon) and an enormous thread about which books people would leave on a bus. In no particular order here goes:
Jack Kerouac. On the Road
Joseph Heller. Catch 22
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(via BoingBoing)
Wednesday September 16th 2009, 5:19 pm by Dan Soltzberg
Although the principal conceit of Apple’s latest Mac vs. PC ad is, as always, “PCs suck,” the ad does a nice job pointing to the difference between innovative thinking and the mere creation of features.
While the cupholder suit that appears at the ad’s end is presented as a joke, many companies do have an unfortunate habit of burdening their products with clunky, grafted-on features as they try to push their ideas into new territory.
Compare the cupholder suit to Apple’s breakaway MagSafe cord, which the ad references. While there’s some debate over how well the Magsafe cord actually does what it’s supposed to, it at least intends to address a real issue that computer manufacturers had previously ignored (people’s cords get tripped on, yanked out).
Discovering that aspect of the user experience – however Apple may have done this – and recognizing it as one worthy of design intervention is the real innovation here.
Tuesday September 15th 2009, 10:02 pm by Steve Portigal
Sleep Dealer – Alex Rivera's 2008 film turns his Why Cybraceros? political-commentary 5-minute short into a feature film about an immigrant labor solution where impoverished Mexican workers use implants to remotely control robots in other countries, performing crappy dangerous jobs no one one in those countries wants to do. But they stay in Mexico to be exploited, rather than coming over the border.
It's a powerful idea and the movie's history from agit-prop to entertainment meshes nicely with some of the points I made about science fiction recently in interactions magazine, in We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World.
Cybracero Systems – The ultimate in remote control. Workers doing whatever you need, from our state of the art facility in Tijuana, Mexico.
Why Cybraceros? (archive.org copy of original site) – As agriculture has become a larger and larger industry in America, it has become harder and harder to find American workers willing to do the most basic farm tasks. Picking, pruning, cutting, and handling farm produce are all simple, but delicate tasks. Work that requires such attention to detail remains a challenge for farm technologists, and as of yet, cannot be automated. As the American work force grows increasinglysophisticated, it is even harder to find the hand labor to do these grueling tasks.
Under the Cybracero program American farm labor will be accomplished on American soil, but no Mexican workers will need to leave Mexico. Only the labor of Mexicans will cross the border, Mexican workers will no longer have to.
Using high speed internet connections, directly to Mexico, American farms and Mexican laborers will be directly connected. These workers will then be able to remotely control robotic farm workers, known as Cybraceros, from their village in Mexico.
Tuesday September 15th 2009, 10:45 am by Steve Portigal
As a followup to yesterday’s KISS post a reader emailed me to suggest some makeup brands that KISS shouldn’t endorse. Of course, the band did do their own makeup product, back in 1978.
It’s not until you look back to their heyday that you really realize how far the brand has collapsed. While it’s still a goofy commercialization of a rock band, the KISS Your Face Makeup Kit enables us to imitate the band’s look, while the ad also shows kids miming to KISS songs with tennis rackets. The ad and the product tell a story that is authentic to how people were experiencing the brand. Skip to 2009 and you have to ask just what relevance (or resonance) does KISS as M&Ms have?
Steve Portigal (center) and friends miming to KISS songs with badminton rackets, Burlington, ON, 1978 (without the use of KISS Your Face Makeup Kit)
Monday September 14th 2009, 4:09 pm by Steve Portigal
When you’ve already really, really, really sold out a long, long, long time ago (see previous posts about KISS Kondoms and Kasket and KISS Coffeehouse for just a few examples), where do you go next? Perhaps KISS is such a wholly inauthentic brand (note brand not band - this has long ceased to be about the music) that they are therefore actually authentic in their own Seussian-logic-justified way. They were always cartoons, now they are candy-coated cartoons.
Thought exercise: Is there a product or brand that KISS shouldn’t endorse/brand/co-brand? Or wouldn’t?
Sunday September 13th 2009, 10:02 pm by Steve Portigal
PC Makers Abandoning a Sales Pitch Built on Complex Specs – Ludicrous article claiming that all of a sudden, computers will be sold based on what they can accomplish, with a focus on aesthetics and design, and with models aimed at specific customer segments. How is any of this at all new? Much of this has been going on – to varying degrees of success – for well over a decade. And there's no indication that these "new" efforts will be any more well executed than they have in the past.
