“I’ve seen the future and I’ve left it behind” – Black Sabbath.
“The future will be better tomorrow” - Attributed to George W. Bush (most likely uttered by Dan Quayle).
Archive for the ‘anticipation’ Category
Thought for a supernaut meets G.W. Bush
Thursday, July 29th, 2010The desire to queue and the queue for desire - returning to the iPhone queues.
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Queue for iPhone 4 in Liverpool, photo by Flickr user: newtc_uk
Today sees the launch of the Apple iPhone 4. As we have come to expect, there are/were queues snaking from the doors of the fruit-themed purveyor of techno-chic’s shops. Indeed, as Wired UK, have pointed out - people turn up and camp overnight to be in the queue. Two years ago, in sunny Palo Alto, California, I observed with fascination the concretisation of a trend - the cultural event of queuing for the new Apple [insert shiny new product here]. At that time it was the release of the iPhone 3G:
The release of a hotly anticipated product, especially one created by apple, now seems to provoke a trend: the hardcore turn up one or more days in advance and camp (literally) outside the shop, others arrive at dawn and join the throng. Media coverage ensues and many wonder what on earth the fuss is about. In conversation with other spectators and with some of those who have queued, it seems to me that the purchase of the device itself is only a part of the motivation - it is also, substantially, about being a part of an event. The experience of queuing for these prized item, and the stories one might attach, appears to have become culturally significant.
Today is no different. The phenomena of the queue remains and it seems it has, if anything, grown into the production of events that appear to hold some sort of cultural significance for a significant minority of the population. As Gene Becker tweeted:
So all the cool kids are standing in line today, it seems. How retro-charming. iPhones are the new Grateful Dead tickets?
Why do I blog this? Its interesting to observe how material things, ostensibly created as ‘tools’, can be invested with so much desire and enchantment that their cultural value becomes tied to a sense of anticipation. What’s the significance of these events? Will people continue to queue for future techno-baubles? I haven’t decided if I need answers to those questions…
A brief history of the future of pervasive media - Talk at the Pervasive Media Studio
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010I will be giving a talk at the Pervasive Media Studio on Friday 14th May entitled ‘A brief history of the future of pervasive media’, which is broadly derived from my PhD research. The talk will be open to the public, so please feel free to come along! Here’s the bumpf:
Pervasive media, and the various forms of computing from which they are derived, stem from a tradition of anticipating future scenarios of technology use. Sam Kinsley’s PhD research concerned the ways in which those involved in pervasive computing research and development imaginatively envision future worlds in which they’re technologies exist.
This lunchtime talk examines the ways in which future people, places and things are imagined in the research and development of pervasive media. Examples taken from prospective pervasive computing research and development in the last twenty years will be explored as emblematic of such future gazing. The aim is to provide a broad means of understanding the rationales by which technological futures are invoked so that pervasive media producers can critically reflect on the role the idea of the future in their work. Such an understanding is important because a history of computing is in large part a history of places and things that were never created - a history of yesterday’s tomorrows.
Remembering the future: PARC 1987 & Microsoft 2006
Thursday, March 18th, 2010I was checking out the very engaging ‘Milestones‘ timeline on the PARC website and came across an image that evoked a sense of deja vu. The other place I had seen something very similar was in a Microsoft ‘Future Vision of Manufacturing‘ video. Here are the images:
The first image depicts the Xerox PARC ‘CoLab‘ collaborative workspace and tools research conducted in the late 1980s. Two people are working on the same sketch from different sides of the screen, which are actually located in different places. The second comes from the aforementioned Microsoft video. Two business men on different sides of the world discuss a wireframe of a proposed car seat, to be manufactured. Interestingly the Microsoft video came about 20 years after the PARC project documented in the first image.
Technology futures are not always novel, what is envisaged can have a significant heritage. Yesterday’s tomorrows can easily become today’s tomorrows with some deft recycling. As Picasso said: ‘good artists copy…’
Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy
Friday, March 12th, 2010This is a sub-section of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, its my attempt to reflect on Mark Weiser’s legacy in the field of ubiquitous computing.
2009 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Mark Weiser, a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser has been identified as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the European Union’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Philips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embedded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish remark ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the ‘Ubicomp’ conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.
Ironic vision of augmented (hyper)reality
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Timo Arnall points out this video, by a masters student(!), that depicts a slightly nightmarish, yet amusingly ironic, vision of a possible future world with augmented reality, whereby you earn money by subjecting yourself to advertising and depend upon instructions from the system for even basic tasks.
The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.
Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda
[via Timo Arnall & Berg]
Social glue, or: What’s the ‘IMAP’ equivalent for social media?
Thursday, February 11th, 2010The launch of Google Buzz has prompted me to raise some things that have been lurking in the back of my mind for some time. These thoughts began when the discussion about the ‘walled garden’ nature of facebook et al. emerged a couple of years ago and lead to the initiation of tentative steps towards interconnection and (that horribly overused word) ‘openness’ in the guise of ‘friend connect‘ and ‘facebook connect‘. Twitter was already sort of ahead of the game with their API, as the glut of applications for ‘tweeting’ attests.
Lots of talk on the interweb’s various locations for commentary centred on the social web, real-time web etc. being based in discrete platforms. This remains somewhat true today. We can certainly connect these services together and form extraordinary information gathering tools in the form of what Howard Rheingold usefully describes as ‘personal information dashboards’, using services such as netvibes and pipes in concert with the various APIs for the platforms we all use. However, this all takes quite a bit of effort at the moment [but! for a good tutorial, please check out Howard's super videos: #1, #2, #3].
However, for the majority of internet users to usefully stick all of these various platforms and applications together there needs to be a much lower threshold of effort to achieve the desired results. Jyri Engstrom, co-founder of Jaiku and one of the big brains apparently behind ‘Buzz’, articulates the argument well here:
Most of the conversation over the last 24h has been centered around predicting if “Buzz will kill” this or that service. This debate starts from the assumption that Buzz and the rest of the social web are mutually exclusive. It’s arguably fair to assume so, considering all the social networks we’ve got so far are silos. To no longer assume everyone has to be using the same branded system to talk to each other is disruptive to the tech biz discourse, which is obsessed with turning everything into a war over which company is “the one”. So much so that the alternative is almost unthinkable. If the new standards succeed, in 2015 we’ll look back and shake our heads like we shake our heads today at the early days of proprietary phone networks and email systems. The thought that you couldn’t call, text or email people just because they happen to be on another phone operator or email client is laughable. Doubly so for the social Web. The reason many of the current commentators miss this point is that they are, in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, “demented with the mania of owning things.” (borrowing that quote from Doc Searls)
What are these ‘new standards’ then? Well, if we’re to take our cue from Google they consist of the development of the various existing data formats for syndication: extensions of Atom and RSS, such as activity streams and mediaRSS. There may well be families and hierarchies of such data formats and I’m sure hundreds, if not thousands, of developers are already working on creating these things. But I’m still left with this question: what if I don’t want my stuff (information, pictures, etc.) always held on servers owned by Google, facebook etc? What if I’m happy for such ’stuff’ to be transient? Which of course such companies don’t want because your ’stuff’ is incredibly valuable and they want to mine it for all its worth. Nevertheless, my half-formed thoughts are: what’s the equivalent to IMAP for social media?
To my mind, the missing ‘glue’ for the social networking ecosystem is the missing service architecture to allow all of us to host our own streams and tie together the various bits of our rapidly growing, perhaps increasingly ‘public’, ‘digital identity’. Social media could easily be distributed, just as blogs and ‘web 1.0′ are. What’s to stop a community creating something like wordpress or drupal for activity/social streams? If the standards suggested by Google really are that versatile then all that is necessary is to create a system that imports/exports using them. Search would be renewed in its importance, but companies/services like twitter could remain successful by facilitating that search functionality and helping users subscribe to one another’s feeds/streams.
A couple of years ago I thought about it in terms of a ‘meta-platform’ or ‘platform for platforms’, but we’ve kind of seen these, in the form of friendfeed and their ilk. Now I think, well, it could all still happen over port 80 with web traffic - it just needs an architecture to allow people to stick things up on their own servers and interconnect. If we take what Jyri says (above) seriously, it seems to me the logical step is to really set the social web ‘free’ and build the elements required to allow people to host their own activity streams. Maybe this is already happening. To build on Jyri’s theme of looking to a future and to paraphrase Alan Kay: “the best way to predict the future is to [build] it”. Go to it!!
Reflecting on Mark Weiser’s legacy ten years on
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
-Mark Weiser, 1991 “The Computer for the 21st Century” Scientific American
The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user… I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp).
-Mark Weiser, 1993 “Some Computer Science issues in Ubiquitous Computing” Communications of the ACM
2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’, his name was Mark Weiser. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser is best known as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing. In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the EU’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Phillips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embeded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Bell and Dourish remark, ‘of the 108 papers comprising the Ubicomp conference proceedings between 2001 and 2004, fully 47% of the papers are oriented towards a proximate (and inevitable) technological future’ and ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the Ubicomp conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.
Ubiquitous Computing video circa. 1991
Thursday, May 28th, 2009“Coined by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), [Ubiquitous Computing] describes a vision of the future. Just as electric motors have disappeared into the background of everyday life, PARC scientists envision a future where mobile computational devices will be similarly transparent. Potentially numbering the 100s per person these devices are nothing like those you use today. They are mobile. They know their location, and they communicate with their environment.”
I have no idea if I’m allowed to put this up but it seems a desperate shame that this video isn’t held in one complete file, easily accessible to the public and to researchers, given the historical significance of the work conducted on ubicomp at PARC by Mark Weiser et al. during hte late 80s early 90s. Please see the original files here: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiMovies.html and read more about Mark Weiser by sticking his name in Google.
Please note that I had to edit out 2 minutes of the more technical stuff to get the video down to under 10mins.
Oblong Industries’ “g-speak” and “diegetic prototypes”
Saturday, April 11th, 2009One of the examples of ubicomp like technology that was referred to the most in my interviews in California last year was the diegetic prototype [see slide 29] gestural interface in the film Minority Report. This was predominantly the brainchild of a chap called John Underkoffler who was the “scientific advisor” on the film, and has since been an advisor on several other films including Iron Man. According to a paper by David Kirby, currently in-press, Underkoffler’s work at the Media Lab was noticed by the production designer and prop master for Minority Report and was brought in as primary science consultant. For Kirby, Underkoffler’s interface is a prime example of a diegetic prototype, a prototype realised in fictional narrative and image to persuade audiences of a technological need, as Kirby suggests of the gestural interface in the film:
These technologies not only appear normal while on screen but they also fit seemlessly into the entire diegetic world. In these cases audiences will accept as true that characters still use these technologies even when they are off-screen… To achieve the sense of an extraordinary techonlogy appearing as ordinary within the diegetic space Underkoffler established the gestural interface as a “self-consistent technological entity” that adhered not only to the rules of hte diegetic world but also to its own internal logic and the constraints of real-world computer technologies.
And, indeed, that diegetic prototype has become a “real-world computer technology”, as demonstrated below.
Oblong Industries’ “g-speak”
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
