En des termes simples et accessibles aux néophytes

Looks like we’re just a few days away from seeing Everyware into French. (Here’s a nice view of the cover.)

This is a real point of pride for me, having spent so many happy moments of my life immersed in the Francophone world in one way or another. Many thanks to FYP éditions’ Phil Adams, my translator Cyril Fiévet, and to Daniel Kaplan, who was so instrumental in making this happen. I can’t wait.

And for those of you on the other side of the Pacific, maybe on a peninsula of some sort? Stand by: I hope to have similar news for you in the not too distant future.

On happiness, “better” and the ludic

A point of clarification I want to make, in response to Jane McGonigal’s and Raph Koster’s presentations at ETech, Joe McCarthy’s take on the daylight between Jane’s position and mine, and even, obliquely, a question Cory Doctorow asked during my own session (essentially, “is enchantment a more acceptable interface metaphor if you’re trying to construct a ludic experience?”):

When I told Cory that I was “not a fun guy,” I was playing to character, and having a little fun at my own expense. (The laughter from that wonderful amen corner should have been your clue that I was speaking in something other than entirely earnest.) I don’t literally have anything against fun, enjoyment and playfulness - if anything, the source of my resistance is probably that I hold them in higher esteem than most of those who claim to be speaking and acting in their name. Here’s why:

I believe that there’s already abundant material and ground for happiness, enjoyment and fun to be found out there in the world as it is. I don’t want “suggestions” toward same forcefed to me programmatically, at the level of system architecture or design.

I do not believe that products and services should aim at making my life “better,” because with very few exceptions, I just don’t trust designers (manufacturers, providers, marketers…) to understand what “better” means to me. My vision of the good life sure doesn’t resemble that being offered me by Verizon or Ford or Blizzard - or Prada, or even, gasp, Apple - and I’m willing to bet that yours doesn’t much look any of those either, when all is said and done.

I especially am not interested in products and services that aim to stimulate “playful” or (ugh) childlike states. I’m perfectly capable of finding those for myself, thanks so much - if anything, a little too easily. I’d so much rather that designers-understood-broadly concentrated on producing useful tools, and on making sure those tools didn’t occasion hassle or misery in use.

Let me assemble these components into a meaningful experience “at runtime,” as it were, instead of ramming your idea of fun down my throat. (I think Matt Webb would call this “Generation C” behavior, but I think it’s worthwhile whether he’d recognize it as same or not.) What I’m looking for from designers is tactful acceptance that I intend to use their product to serve my own (now ludic, now serious) ends, rather than a positive assertion that they’ve a priori understood what makes something fun.

But the latter seems to be what were getting at the moment, and will be getting more of for the foreseeable future. And I think this is a shame, because fun - in my book, anyway - is much, much too important to be left to the designers.

Tires’ smoke & down, back in EDT

Back from San Diego and ETech 2007, with quite a lot to consolidate.

- The talks, honestly, I didn’t get all that much out of, for the most part. The expected exceptions to this rule were Jane McGonigal’s session and Mike Kuniavsky’s keynote - both of which I disagreed with, in interesting ways - and Matt Webb, who was in shirt-foldingly top form.

In the department of things I didn’t necessarily see coming, Quinn Norton’s talk on bodyhacking, “You Are The Platform,” was far and away the best talk I saw. It was so good that I actually stopped Twittering for long enough to take fairly extensive notes, which I’ll try to get up later on today.

- I guess I’m just not a big Werewolf fan. But danah’s mighty good at mediating a round.

- Joe McCarthy, nice to meet you at long last. I owe Arwen O’Reilly and David Crow apologies for allowing myself to be distracted, and therefore missing the chance to catch up with you. Next time?

- I understand why conferences need to give their sponsors program slots, I do. But when will sponsors figure out that raw and uninflected product pitches just don’t fly, and are in fact counterproductive? If you’re gonna do it, at least situate your product in the context of an ongoing discussion people might find interesting, like the Trampoline kids did.

- I was little short of astonished by the arrogant cluelessness of Jeff Hawkins’ talk on new approaches to artificial intelligence. Within seconds of taking the stage, he had patronized Jane McGonigal, and it was all downhill from there. Verbatim quote: “I and several other people now feel like we understand the way the human brain works.” (That “several” just kills me.)

I don’t mind in the slightest if Hawkins’s approach to machine pattern recognition and inference succeeds at notoriously difficult tasks, nor would I be bothered if he made a second fortune with it. That’s all fine. Just don’t describe it as having anything to do with the way the brain works.

- My favorite moments of the conference were the hour in which Matt Biddulph convoked a gathering of Dopplristas over G&Ts, etc., and a pilgrimage up to Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, in the company of Mr. Cronin, Mr. Coates and Mr. Cerveny. I’m not 100% a Kahn partisan, but the Salk is something truly special, especially when it frames a sun just beginning to sink into the Pacific: spirit literally made concrete.

- Pics of most all the above are now up.

Completely unacceptable

This pisses me off to no end. There’s free speech, and then there’s threats of physical violence. (If you don’t get why even sophomoric Photoshoppings have to be taken seriously as same in the context of a continued campaign of harrassment and intimidation, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.)

I’ll have more to say later on, but for now, I just want to express how saddened I am that this happened to Kathy, and that she won’t be here. H/t to Kelly Goto for giving me the original heads up via Twitter.

Off to San Diego for ETech

Up bright and early tom’w to jetBlue my way to San Diego for O’Reilly’s 2007 Emerging Technology Conference, where I’ll be giving a talk called “Toward a new animism.”

That title should probably be sporting a question mark. This is because, as will swiftly become evident, I actually think animism - or any form of magic - is a really crappy paradigm for human-informatic interaction. You’ll have to tune in on Tuesday to find out why.

Of course, the real reason for going is the usual one: I’m more than usually looking forward to seeing an Alice, an Andrew, a Ben, a danah, a Mike, at least one Tom, and multiple Matts. Catch you other side of the continent.

Concordophilia

Ordinarily, where high-modernist culture of the mid- to late 1960s is concerned, most people who are Anglophiles are not also Francophiles.

The preferences involved seem like diametric opposites, hailing from some different region of the color wheel. You’re not supposed to be able to carry tastes for Serge Gainsbourg and the Yardbirds, “The Prisoner” and Alphaville, VC-10s and Caravelles, or E-Types and Déesses at one and the same time (though simultaneous and unweighted appreciation for Archigram and les situs is notably sustainable).

There are boundary objects, negotiations between; Petula Clark, of all people, comes to mind. There’s the daring European option, foregoing much if not all of the following and driving deep into Verner Panton, Superstudio, or various forms of ostalgie. And where would we be without those Italian scoots, for that matter?

But these are cop-outs, options for amateurs, ways of missing the point. They don’t satisfy a more complicated love, one which never wants to choose between British and French cultural production of that moment in time. So what’s a poor boy to do, when he admires both? My friends, I give you Concordophilia: simultaneously snotty and insouciant, equal parts Carnaby and Cardin.

If, like me, you’ve struggled with this tension for years, be assured: now there’s a diagnosis and a name for what you have - and an accurate diagnosis can so often be the first step to living happily with a condition. I suspect the support groups won’t be too long in forming.

Exemplary

I want to show you the Vitsœ Web site, because it’s one of the few I’ve seen in a long career of looking at same that so perfectly harmonizes what it is and what it does.

Vitsœ basically sells one thing, Dieter Rams’s 606 Universal shelving system, and they sell it well. The site communicates the product’s qualities, virtues and potentially surprising stringencies with a high degree of clarity, while allowing customers to speak their satisfaction in their own voices. It’s clearly just one component of a long-term relationship designed to unfold across multiple channels, going so far as to promote a healthy-sounding market in used pieces. And while it evinces a pleasing sense of attention to detail, it nevertheless achieves what it does with a absolute minimum of fuss, allowing the product to stand on its own. In so many of these ways, it meshes perfectly with the 606 system itself.

One of the reasons I’m no longer interested in commercial Web development is that clients so rarely seem to want this kind of refinement. So many of them want their sites to be heavy-handed experiences, rather than the kind of practical and effective tool exemplified by Vitsœ. (Maybe it’s that they mistrust their own products and services, doubt their ability to thrive on their own merits? After all, not every product can be a Dieter Rams.)

After a while, though, I find the parade of bells and whistles depressing, both as designer and as user. Less is still more. Tact is also an experience. Show me what you’ve got, and let it go.

Ponderous majesty

Check out Vidiot’s crisp pictures of the A380’s maiden visit to NYC earlier this week. Totally bummed I missed it - but somewhat consoled by these great shots.

Stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery

Reading the highly, highly recommended Sense of the City over morning coffee a few months back, I came across a passage about a typology of space devised by a Canadian Angeleno geographer named Steven Flusty.

Flusty had identified a range of “characteristics…introduced into urban spaces to make them repellent to the public,” and he gave each of the five situations he listed particularly evocative names:

- stealthy spaces “cannot be found”
- slippery spaces “cannot be reached”
- crusty spaces “cannot be accessed”
- prickly spaces “cannot be occupied comfortably”
- jittery spaces “cannot be utilized unobserved”

This taxonomy of urban form is one I think we all intuitively recognize, but it’s important that Flusty has gone ahead and given it such precision, such vivid specificity. (It has applications beyond the spatial, too: see, for example, this uncompromising specimen of prickly packaging, Bangkok-style, provided by Jan Chipchase.)

If you want a preview of my upcoming Cooper Union talk, consider the ways in which the presence of ambient informatics in the urban environment can enhance its stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery qualities - or militate against them.

Posters for my 09 April talk at Cooper Union

Courtesy of the unstoppable Mike Essl, these here are the obverse and reverse of the poster he designed for my 09 April talk at Cooper Union, in glorious PDF.

Feel free to print up a stack, hand them out on street corners, drop ‘em from low-flying aircraft, and otherwise do with them what thou wilt.