Recently in Events Category

Related articles

• How Instagram Has Stayed Nimble As They Approach 10 Million Users (techcrunch.com)
• Inkstagram (with a K) Builds Hashtag Albums for Instagram (readwriteweb.com)
• Instagram wannabes... (gigaom.com)
• Instagram CEO: we're not afraid of Facebook (zdnet.com)

Interesting couple of talks to round off the post-lunch session. Dan Hon walked us through the exploration of new forms of storytelling that have been going on online. Some are facilitated by a coder and writer combo. The development of new tools has lead to new forms of storytelling, from alternate reality games (ARGs) (Hon cites one associated with A.I. he got sucked into in 2001) to people using Twitter and its ilk to create fictional personas and narratives.

However, he suggests that there are significant issues around discovery and participation right now. In particular, as entertainment and information objects make a digital transition, we often lose the context of their design. Book covers become 200 pixel wide icons. TV becomes 640 pixel wide boxes on screen. Everything's being reduced to icons, to small versions of the physical object it used to be. We lose context.

We need to explore building products that facilitate these new forms of narrative and gaming rather than constantly adapting existing forms and tools.

Meanwhile Kars Alfrink was thinking the other way around - how we bring our understanding of games back into the physical work. In a sense the games of politics are already manifest in our world: there are towns split between countries as a legacy of history. There are fictional and real examples of cities which exist alongside one another without interaction) -  The City and The City and  Berlin in the post-war cold war era. Areas of London where gang confrontations happen alongside couples eating and drinking at a bistro. In extremes, this leads to riots.

Rules are fundamental to this. The riots highlighted the existence of two different cities in the same place - with different rules. What if we could make those rules more tangible? Simulation fever - the stress of two completing rules sets (games versus reality) He's not tailing about gamification - by rewarding reciprocity, we suggest there's not inherent value in it. Mary did a good post about this earlier. Games can bring societies together - like chess in the park - or they can create monocultures. (I suspects FPSes would count here).

Pervasive urban games are part of the routine. Visible Cities - a chase game, with checkpoints in "other cities". You're not allowed to interact with people in "different cities".

Rules as memes. Bookcrossing is a simple ruleset that promotes behaviour. Werewolf amongst geeky circles. Games as social practice. Nomic - a move is to suggest a new rule. Life is roughly a massively parallel game of Nomic. Can we create a game that takes these implicit rules and makes them explicit?

He also talked about the challenge of producing quiet data. The Kindle blends in when placed on a table, while the iPad shouts for attention. Sometimes quieter is more productive.

Perspective - a PhD is just a tiny nipple outside the boundaries of our human knowledge of the universe. Startups are just the same, a small new thing in this whole ecosystem.

Double-hander presentation from Bryan and Stephanie Rieger:

Printing brought us the idea that knowledge could be controlled, attributed, finished. And that lead to people wanting to claim and protect their ideas - hence patents. Processes allow us to duplicate what've learned. Once you can duplicate, then you can scale it, and then you can make money...

The power of the network online is more powerful than any individual, and so we're starting to see the idea of ownership of an idea break down. Ideas self-replicate and grow. It takes on almost biological characteristics. Once something is out there, it leaves our control.

And now we have the net and social networks in out pockets at all time. This amplifies these effects - and accelerates change.

The balance of power is shifting. We can't expect people to interact with our protects in linear, controlled ways. They no longer have to wait for us to create experiences. Instapaper and Flipboard take away your navigation and ads and give people a better reading experience.

It's counter-intuitive to present people with incomplete, draft products, but people like to ability to adapt what you present. People are not homogenous, and don't want homogenous products.

It takes time to figure out the social contexts and requirements around new technologies (took ages with the car). You go through periods of stability, rapid change, then a new period of stability. These used to be quite long. Now? Interlocking mini s-curves. Constant change. And the result is generation gaps. People only a few years apart in age are having very different experiences of technology.

The more complexity you build into a system, the more reliant you get on other actors in the ecosystem. Compare self-ground coffee and a French Press with Nespresso system. Simple can be better, because it gives you more ability to customise.

We are creating a new culture, new systems to adapt to a new age.

Are we going to spend the rat of our lives staring at our mobile screens? A babysitter spent the first half hour just texting and ignoring Goto's kids. She bans texting, iPads et al at the dinner table.

We shouldn't be designing for addiction, but to fit in to people's rituals. Do you read a physical newspaper over breakfast or RSS feeds on an iPad? Do you listen to the radio as you commute, or podcasts? Goto is shocked by how little people understand the customers they're providing business services to.

Mood and context change people's experiences - she gives the example of her Mini, and the "fun" of its design, and the way that shapes her whole driving experience.

Challenges:

• get people to stay upright and communicate with others
• understand what machine to human communications should be and how they should work.

The gulf between what people tell you, what they believe about themselves and what they actually do is a problem when researching user needs.

The iPhone home button is comforting because it always takes you back to the home screen, something clearly happens when you use it, and it has a optic experience that make sit feel good. Oh, and you can customise it, if you want.

We've moved up the hierarchy of needs to the point of comfort, beyond merely usable. Sensory engineering has been around since the 1960s, Kansei provides a framework for measuring emotional response to design. I like the idea of "contextual personas" - personas which reflect what people do at different times of day. One of my minor obsessions is that people consume news in different forms at different times in their day, based on their working, commuting and relaxing patterns. This looks like a good way to start exploring those ideas, and understanding the context of how people use what we do.

Fascinating talk.

Don Norman appears to be scene setting - he's talking us through many of the current issues in technology. He's given us a little light Google-bashing, talking about the familiar issues that you are not Google's users (unless you're an advertiser) - you're the product. The nymwars around Google+. The lack of design expertise.

And others - Apple and its rules.  So switch to Android - and you have to design for dozens of different devices, screen sizes and versions of the OS, instead of two.

And now we have tablets. There's no consistent language of what you do to achieve any particular task across devices yet (and Apple is busy disrupting ideas by reversing scrolling in Lion, too).

"It's a great challenge - and we're still learning. Are you ready?"

The distinction between devices is blurring, you can't be focused on a single device type any more. Interfaces are changing and blurring.

Apple licensed music, and made it easy to sell songs at a reasonable price. They made it easy to find music. iTunes is an SAP database - they took that complicated database and made it easy to use. And they made it possible for other people to develop accessories. And they made an "iPod approved" system which meant they could make money from that ecosystem. Amazon has done many of these things with the Kindle. Kindle dominates because it has the easiest system.

Twitter: Built of social clusters of people. Retweets get you from one cluster to another. Twitter provides the tools, and we provide the content (and the usage methodology, too - users came up with @replies and #hashtags). We're curating and editing through these social processes.

"You need to think systems" - as opposed to a single app or website.

Ah, I'm beginning to remember the style of dConstruct from last year - some of these talks are so wide-ranging (if you're being kind) or rambling (if you're not) that they're hard to summarise in a post. Norman is effectively exploring how we need to shift our mindsets from single products to systems, that we build in co-operation with others, be they other companies, or our users.

.

I have been invited to be an official blogger at this month's Next Conference, in Berlin. And given the subject - Data Love - how could I possibly refuse?

Data is a significant part of our business here at RBI, and data journalism is such a very strong trend both in online journalism as a whole, and in the work we're doing out of the Editorial Development team, that the programme just looks choc full of inspirational goodness for me and those I work with.

As usual, I'll be frenetically liveblogging those sessions I attend right here on OM&HB, but those of you who are as deeply data hungry as me could still attend in person…

Tommy Gibbons & Aleks Krotoski chatting during a coffee break at Science Online.

Note the shoes she bought to match her Second Life avatar. :-)

I dropped into one of the unconference sessions, looking at engaging with your readers (of obvious interest to me). The panel did a sterling job of giving a beginner's guide to managing comments and commenters, from different scales (personal blogs to Ars Technica). I thought Ed Yong's comments about building a commenter community around your personal blog were particularly good - and the delurking thread idea is one I intend to nick.

But the audience, once the questions started, took the conversation in an entirely different direction, about the reputation of scientists and (to a degree) to the on-going problem of poor scientific reporting. Now, as a journalist, a profession usually in the top three least trusted professions, I'm not entirely clear why scientists are so concerned, but there's clearly a strong feeling fo disconnect between the scientific community and the general public. There was some attempt in the conversation to shape blogs into the answer to that. However, I think there were two key misconceptions percolating through the discussion. The first was the idea that blogging is inherently publishing to the mainstream - a question was asked that pre-supposed that a science blog that wasn't reaching a non-specialist audience was, in some way, failing. And I disagree strongly with that sentiment. Some of the best blogs I know have small, but highly specialised audiences. A highly specialised science blog is just as valuable as a generalist science communicator  blog - they're just performing different functions.

The second that was a blog is something that "you have to go to" - Ed started to address that point, describing how people share links to interesting articles on Twitter and Facebook (feel free to use the buttons below, folks ;-)) and that creates an ecosystem of content that is pushed outside its traditional content.

To me, this suggests that many within the scientific community are somewhere between three and four years behind the "cutting edge" of social media - much of the focus is still on blogging, and the rise of the social networking systems has yet to have as much of an impact. But I could be wrong in that. It occurs that scientists are used to describing their work in written form - it's an inherent part of the current systems. And perhaps the barrier of entry to blogging is slightly lower here, which means that blogging hasn't been so supplanted by the Twitter/Facebook world. What do you think?