Thackera
Almost everything we design and consume uses too much energy., materials, and effort. 6% of all materials in industrial processes end up in products -- that's a near 100% inefficiency.
Buildings, storage, transportation, debris, packaging -- areas of waste
A PowerBook has a 1 / 4000 ratio of object/ energy + materials needed to create it.
American consumer - takes 1,000,000 pounds of matter that is wasted or caused to be wasted per year.
Goal: close the loops in the flow of stuff
Redesign business processes to a service and flow model, not a product model-- get into the service industry. Durable products emerge as carriers for service/flow, not as ends in themselves.
[the margin on molecules is tiny, the margin on services is big ]
"heavy information" software bloat, "infoporn", fill the bandwidth, info pollution, broadband full of data. Send just because we can?
Examples: Strunck & White, Italo Calvino, Duchamp
Designing Lightness: "See the unseen" with models, examples, imagination. Lightness is not electric golf carts, blonde Scandinavian wood, and museli that the image of light-colored environmentally correct design has led us to imagine.
Visualizing industrial processes and flows makes us not take these for granted.
[ filter information to one person -- person in context. Give me detailed information when I ask for it, but try to make me aware of my context and impact lightly all the time.]
Lightness: service focussed, not thing focussed. Sharing knowledge in new ways. "The space of flows" where physical networks and communication networks interact.
Lightness as an objective leads to services that are collaborative, sharing of knowledge.
Products w/software; products that carry services
Information appliances
Stewart Butterfield
5K website contest
5K of info contains a nearly infinite amount of meaningful possibilities. But the rules of syntax, grammar, social value reduce the 5K down to a much smaller set of real information
Bruce Sterling
Ascetics were in favor of lightness -- enough for needs but not for greeds
Enlightenment - ascended ones are w/out materialism/ material body
Contemporary green thinking - industrial consumption is a form of false consciousness. The green critique is counter cultural, but requires a majority position to act as the imperial corrupt oppressor.
Nature is inherently weighty, gross, muddy, infection, rot. The biosphere has a pressing weightiness.
Ornament is not lightness -- useful things are lighter, but it is the accumulated things, trinkets that carry our memories and values. Minimal structures age badly-- every imperfection shouts out at you. Things without some practical weight and solidity degrade catastrophically.
"genuine lightness must rot" -- and presume a future which doesn't contain our values or goals. Make something last by making it "lightly"
"crypto-theological aesthetic space" -- you can buy it online now.
We want computers to be like jewels or ornament?
Sughatra Mitra
Children and their interaction with the internet -- children who never have seen computers before. Could the internet and computers matter to them?
Most of the architects of the 21st century are born since 1995. Is the current method of education (invented in the Middle Ages) still relevant -- or is there another way?
"Light" learning is applications à skills à theory = craft learning that places more responsibility and effort on the learner than the teacher.
It's possible to teach a child to ask a question years before they are learn to solve it or even to comprehend the answer. Teach particle physics to 5-year olds.
Kiosks for Internet access in public spaces in rural India. Children taught themselves a vocabulary to describe the behavior of the Web.-- repeated accidental discoveries taught them
The hour glass "wait" cursor = "Shiva's Drum"
The arrow cursor = "The needle" or "the bird"
Mitra conducted experiments with a bare bones running computer in a village that was not much changed since 5000 BC. Found that some technology knowledge somehow proceeded him -- "I could do this better if I had a mouse" said one kid.
Next steps -- remote presence, email (which the kids asked for).
Marti Guixe
Parametric design
Tattoo for tourists -- subway map on the palm
Objects for fish
Nutritious dust -- eat by breathing
Corporate sponsored food - eat for free
Alexander Rose / Brian Eno
The Long Now foundation (also Danny Hillis)
The "here" is your immediate neighborhood for most people.
The "now" in NYC means works in progress, as soon as possible, no attention given to permanence.
The "long now" is a generalized sense of genealogy, responsibility played out over thousands of years, and consciousness over a new length of time, over generations and space. An extension of empathy over time: we make our future accidentally now. It's the byproduct of the "perfect present" that we construct.
LN foundation does three projects to demonstrate and work through the limited perspective of the present.
The Clock by Hillis (seen at Doors 5) -- monumental clock that ticks 1 time per year. The "long now" is 20,000 years.
Design principles of the Millennium Clock: longevity, maintainability, evolvability, transparency, scalability.
A mechanical computer that uses binary computation -- see Pattern on the Stone for mechanical computers
One aspect of lightness -- the clock synchs itself to the position of the sun when light hits a sensor at noon. But noon is +- fifteen minutes at different times of the year. Hilllis made a physical "equation of time" a physical shaped piece of metal that calculated the suns position and synched the clock by gravity.
The Rosetta Disk -- what to do with Long Now information. RD is a micro-etching on a nickel disc that can be read with a microscope. Over long periods of time, language becomes the limiting factor in communication. This disc contains 1000 languages encoding the same text: (what was this text?)
To make something valuable enough in the long term that but also to make it not valueable in the short term -- must make it a sacred thing. Have a long-term creative vision that makes things important even when people can't articulate why.
[ model making -- this has the effect of allowing people to carry importance of something in their heads simply, even though they can't articulate the specifics of the importance. A conceptual model will be accepted, ingrained much better than a laundry list of detail, even though the model may be incomplete.]
Elizabeth Dillar
The blurred image -- is it merely a loss of clarity? Foreground vs. background blur is different. Japanese technique of constructing emphasis using only blur is a long-standing one.
Dillar designed a building made of pure atmosphere-- is is necessarily light just because it's dematerialized [no]? the Blur Building is a cloud-like structure floating over a lake in Switzerland.
The building is a machine / computer that reads atmospheric and climatic conditions and reshapes itsefl to the climate.
There's a bar that serves only water at the top of the cloud.
The project was to take visual spectacle and problematize it to redefine spectacle, to create a "dispersed" social space -- each visitor will have a character profile that a smart coat will transmit to sympathetic / similar visitors
Architecture dematerialized and technology materialized/ omnipotent - the sublime as a meeting of technology and nature.
Van Tijen
"traceless art"
Chris Paccione
Bodymedia.com — wearable computers / health monitors
measurement of "wellness" — scale for body
Jane Szita (editor Doors site)
"print made reading light" -- availability of cheap print demystified reading [medieval manuscripts vs. other print]
improve the quality of the experience the web offers so as to take over wasteful printed materials — archives the quality of lightness, usability of paper books.
icons, color codes are heavy versions of language [ see Tufte]
lightness of experience — less is more?
slang — economy of evocative language
jokes proverbs
Webby awards Draisin/ Shlain
patterns and trends in design from the vantage point of lightness
redistribution of weight from the developer to the user
"stickiness" is not light
user-maintained / user-posted content & collaborative content is lighter
Napster — equilibrium of weight
establish patterns that are generative — heuristics for site growth [epinions & photo.net’s extensible data model]
S. Butterfield
no information w/out some kind of physical representation
Kristi van Riet
file sharing for intellectual property
file sharing necessary because people + firms aren’t learning fast enough. If people swap intellectual property indiscriminately, things work better faster and continuously — response time to change can be shorter.
David Garcia and Adam Hyde
[streaming radio & media controlled by end users]
file sharing project — software design for sharing files, building community around taste
sharing of streaming media — real-time/live media
scheduling of live media through a shared scheduling form
can control radio transmitters and put it into the traditional media sphere
computer à video transmitters à TV
steaming media festival 2000
netcongestion.org
independent military resistance to Milosovec in Yugoslavia build a streaming media client for them. Internet provided the most flexible media playback device
access to customized info only for this military group–a custom front-end for filtered content; distribution front-end
Panel day 2
"presence" vs. broadcasting or communicating clear messages of professional quality (which is the traditional way)
webcast+Napster = presence announced by my activity, visibility and participation — social phenomenon is the ability to be present or not in an environment
[design lightness supports degrees of presence in a context]
sharing is intent in this — do you need a "currency" to share? exchange of value in a self-organizing system that rewards presence — epinons ?
copyright/free/open source
participatory design
self-organization of designed objects / contexts
"presence" sitting lightly or variably on resources
Fiona Raby
(Thackera — mobility — network of boring, ponderous, often expensive services {browse web on the phone, check stocks in a taxi only good for gamblers} — not very light yet)
essential quality of mobility is only the networking of the social/cultural context [ IOW, mobility is only relevant w/in a social cultural context ]
support trivial, small, events like Instant Messaging and reminders or notes
the cel structure of the cel network isn’t real or regular, much messier and less abstract, quite elastic
she discovered that cellular structure can be shape content and interactions between people.
phones can tell you something about an anonymous person within your cel nearby — who has a birthday today?
you can learn about people over time from a distance — lets you construct (mentally) characters from the resources around you
playful resources that are based on your place in the city @ a specific time: the lost cat that appears on your phone at a place and time, then gets to know you as you revisit the place -- this restores a sense of place or fixity to a mobile device in a playful and light way
phones that pick up traces for short times — emit traces of your presence
the "Crow" in the phone you can release and will come "home" and will come home eventually — may stop at predefined places and pick up messages to bring back to you at your origin phone — another way of adding "place" to mobility.
models --> user task flows lead to discrete design components that are reusable not only in the design context, but in the user context as well--IOW, good models are pieces that allow user-controlled content (self-organizing content) to work well
Natalie Jeremijenko
Immateriality and information technologies
Heavy/hard can also reveal things -- the "live wire" project which was a wire which flapped around based on network activity through it. This is a sloppy, active, imprecise but useful thing
If information were physical, what would it look like?
"people do smart things with dumb objects, and dumb things with smart objects"
transformation of data to the physical -- merry-go-round horse that moved based on the acceleration curve of the '87 Stock market crash, or seismographic waves
current communities on the internet privlege shared interests--what if they privleged communities of shared resources? Like neighbours, city dwellers?
Imprecision
Sloppy, fuzzy
Seti Screen saver -- shared resources (and interests)
"One Tree" project cloned micropropagated single trees to be planted in the Bay Area. Over 100 years or so they'll have similar biological responses. Although they are strictly identical, they will show differences that aren't based on genetic determinism.
"material authority" the data , the knowledge, attitude of science
Thackera
Service and flow design process model
Look @ new things for inspiration -- like file sharing
Must change work/ economy or else it isn't worth it
If the new economy doesn't improve work practice then why bother?
Beukers
R+D for Lightweight structures for Aerospace department
morphology of materials and structure
currently-decline in natural resources as there is a rise in production
metaphor is "food foam" -- emulsified (air pumped-in) foods that have a small structure (Candy bars, potato chips)
traveling time per day is pretty much the same for everyone regardless of income
tendency towards higher-velocity transport worldwide
reuse the weight of cars — more expensive the car, the more you pay for weight (SUVs) - people believe heavier is safer + more durable, which is not so
textile based material to create structure — like Blackbird bomber, composite resin based material
manta rays
morphology of the structure must be optimized
"structure, that’s what it’s all about"
lightest bridges use a textile technology like spider webs, bundles of fibers (can be steel) in chain stay weave.
inflatable structures, bubbles for buildings, packaging
spider webs
backpacking technology
McCullough
"surface reading" of star fields is misleading, causes vertigo
how light to be?
"machine in the garden" — early experience of America, bucolic views plus the arrival of the locomotive or industry in America
technology is presented as "not nature" and vice versa
"appropriateness has surpassed performance as the key measure of success for design" — Thackera(?) -- [ presence?]
places inform technology design ß à technology design interprets places
environmental predisposition towards spatiality
people can attune to things in the periphery
ubiquitous computing, new "layers" to the city in addition to commerce, governance
fashion
commerce
governance
culture
consciousness
nature
"lean and green" "finding your tribe" --social navigation "recreational statistics" "urban markup language"
the typology of the new space has 30 elements — not an infinite range: includes driving, learning, gardening, attending…
between the overlap of environmental knowing and design value there are types and patterns, between design value and ubicomp there is HCI, between ubicomp and environmental knowing there is __ something?
"if it were a new economy then what constitutes value has to evolve" — MMcC
exchange of value — I give you some of my presence for something else, I become [in]voluntarily present with my personal info.
"the value of being someplace is an extension of the value of making something" — MMcC
"anthropological space" — space defined by what we do where
Winy Maas
architect of the Dutch pavilion Expo 2000
"light urbanism"
is the natural domain adding to the generic sprawl of mediocrity of the existing urban tapestry
could LeCorbu’s towers in green spaces work (at last?)
must reduce the economic value of products — this would solve a lot
reduce the value of infrastructure — so the whole urban package "lasts" about as long as a house c. 25 years. Thus urbanism becomes like landscaping — it can be rotated in neighborhood modules or infrastructure modules
Accommodate change tendencies and change the perception of real-estate as investment strategy
Lisa Strausfeld
creator of immersive info experiences
virtual space made physical
something sad about lightness — escapist, capitulation to physical
information art and ambient information projects — data washes over
engaging visualizations relegated to tools currently — so she wants to do things like Quokka to do data rich sports like America’s cup
Ole Bauman
reconfigure the notion of the spatial environment
"lightness is nor really and implementation issue" [ rather a design strategy]
loss of strong mutual relationships defined by spatiality
disengagement and escape are new tools of powerful people
architecture can take on mandate to create situations for encounters [as can the web]
Hani Rashad
Asymptote design (arch and design firm)
NYSE — created a fully immersive VR environment containing all stock market data
kind of overkill.
Janet Abrams panel
where are the people in all of these data spaces? — Abrams
celebrate the lives of people in the data spaces — NYSE was an absolutely functional tool that did include people
is the NYSE just a bustling full version of a full physical space? It’s really no clearer or simpler.
Density is a problem now, w/financial data–what’s better with the Asymptote VR version?
Rick Robinson (Sapient Chief Experience Officer)
founder of eLab — "experience modeling discipline"
Sapient hires anthropologists, art historians, literary theorists
wants to transform e-companies into social-minded institutions
"Things to Think with"
elephant=heavy what "stands for lightness"
heli-skiing , sublime moments even though gravity is the most prominent thing
Cziksentmalhyi’s "Flow" is the psychology of the optimal experience and a balance of skills and challenge— Robinson studied w/ Czik
if you’re good, but the task is easy, you’re bored
if you’re bad, and the task is hard, it’s frustrating
the perfect place is in the middle — where Flow is ; comfort zone
comfortable skill, feeling of progress, excitement, "deep play"
models are representations of experiences
representation of underlying structure and a model for how people can think of a structure [design a mental model of an experience]
what is the purpose of ethnography? — not an exhaustive representation of an Other. It’s tourist snapshots, souvenirs to "model" the remembered experience
"Deep Play" is a construct about social involvement about socially constructed games — but like a pattern language which can be used in other contexts
so an ethnography is a design in that it is structural thought — modeling things in a light way (Gehry’s sketches for Bilbao were incomplete but solved the problem)
the conversational use of non-grammatical utterances
social cognition — stuff you can do with tools
Flow is a model that shows getting better through your actions + social cognition + technology as access to abstract concepts = Karl Marx (?) [crit. theorist in-joke?]
Gehry’s sketches for Bilbao
Models as theme for the CX presentation — models give control to the user, allow user specification of presence
Ben Ceverny(organic.com)
"Semantic Supercollider"
people missing from the equation implied by the transformative structure — people are there through language
XML represents an attempt to capture data + context
mapping — design as moving through a recombinant system of constraints
build simulations w/data that run ambiently in your environment
improvisation - good models allow your to improvise w/data in real-time — people are good at this manipulation of multiple variables in real-time
mentioned a pattern language as a system of extensible models that create new systems — examples?
Gary van Patter (Scient)
Dir. of Innovation Acceleration Labs
lightness = simplicity, clarity, orchestration, understanding
[one person says] "I disrupt patterns"
[another says ] "I create patterns"
this is a workable team
don’t just give words and details on the web , give more pictures and overviews