Near Future Laboratory » Post-GUI

Design Fiction Chronicles: Urgency and Emergency, Notification and Warning

julian — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:23:47 +0000

Tsunami Evacuation Route on Washington Boulevard at the border — basically 60 degrees North-North-East, directly opposite the coastline in the other direction, but essentially only a few meters above sea-level for a good couple of miles.

Last week, when there was that earthquake in Samoa, we happened to be talking about Tsunamis in the studio — thinking about the ways that the California coast could be gobbled up in an unfortunate, epic disaster. It’s a distinct possibility, and with the Pacific Ocean popping off earthquakes with increasing frequency (or so it seems..), it makes one think about what sort of early warning system could be put in place — and one that would not rely too much on quite fallible technology-based networks. These are the things that typically fail even without a disaster at hand. (For instance, at the Venice Beach Music Festival a few weeks ago, with a relatively smallish contingent of people occupying Abbot-Kinney Boulevard, me and those I was with were hard-pressed to get a cell signal. If you have all of Venice Beach panicking because of an approaching Tsunami, what are the chances AT&T will be able to handle the load? I’d rather not count on them, to be perfectly honest, to help me communicate with family in a disaster.) Perhaps mesh-y networks that do not rely on too much pre-built systems like cellular base stations.

Or, are there more esoteric warning systems, like these rattling cups? Hairs on the back of your neck? A forest of yammering, naddering wild life suddenly falling dead still and quiet? The color of the sky in the morning? Scattering insects all going in the same direction? A sudden feeling that comes from another array of sensors — ones not invented by scientists or technologists or relying on a functioning grid of power, communication and all that?

What are the other “weak signals” of impending disaster, besides the news?

These fictional moments in movie scenes popped into my head while thinking about early warning of impending disaster.

Why do I blog this? Place marks for ideas related to early warning systems and the stories around them. Signals that are not explicit, but suggestive, providing some clues and cues that force one to be more attentive and resilient and resourceful.

Related Dispatches:

Predictably Not Quite Failing Since the *winter holidays here in Los Angeles, which is a strange thing for an East Coast boy, especially as I hear reports of epic dumps of man-killing snow...
A Curious Crosswalk Clarification A curious inscription left by someone to clarify which button expedites which crosswalk signal. Someone has written with an indelible marker “B” and “W” on each button (for Broad...
A Trio Of Posted Things A curious solicitation framework, perhaps done by someone schooled in the layout practices of Ogilvy — attention grabbing image, followed by seductive copy (in French here) and the final...

Companion Species Training Game

julian — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:45:32 +0000

The new-to-me Nintendo DS “Personal Trainer Walking” (heck of a name..) alongside of the Japanese language game whose name I forget and cannot read.

I found out about this Nintendo DS game from Kevin who found out about it from Russell. I literally just got it yesterday, but it’s pretty exciting to see. I can only imagine in my head out the play dynamics unfold, but I’ll be playing with it and have some more thoughts before long.

So far I enjoy the “blind” design of the pedometer part of the concept — not too much display other than this blinking light which changes color when you’ve reached your goal. Simple, direct and not a nagging taunt from a fancy LCD that shows more than you need. You focus on your activities or just being a normal human being without poking and prodding at the device all the time, checking your status in detail, etc. When you’re in the world, be in the world, I say.

This one aspect of the design is quite curious — there is an extra pedometer device for your dog! I mean, I get the idea — people walk their dogs and so this is perfect for you and your dog to get some training together. The language in the users manual / guidebook is very funny, and I’m not sure if this is deliberate or perhaps the sensibilities of a Japanese game design company? I know none of the facts and that does not matter so much to me, but maybe it’s my sensitivities to things that fold together different species into what my advisor calls “transpecies” or “companion species” — species that need each other, or play and interact together in curious ways. (cf The Companion Species Manifesto) Thus, I cracked up when I read these items in the guide:

The meter should only be used by a person or dog. It will not work properly with any other type of animal.

The meter should only be used on a dog when supervised by a person. It should be attached in a location where it is not at risk of being chewed or swallowed.

Great stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing how the DS experience works.

Downside: I’m pre-disappointed that walking is the only physical activity it seems to work with. I ride a bike and want this to count. And there are so many other sorts of physical things that won’t count, I assume.

*shrug*

Russell points out the simplicity of the synchronization ritual, which is fantastic. Point. Press. Watch your pedometer pebble appear from a pipe on the screen and become “alive” on your screen. If you’ve ever tried to synchronize ANYTHING you’ll laugh out loud, as I did. If you’ve ever designed ANYTHING that requires synchronization, take close note of the interaction ritual here. It’s fantastically playful and simple and sensical.

Some related topics: this perpetual Laboratory project, Flavonoid.

Related Dispatches:

Locative Play Ian Bogost’s and his Persuasive Games operation have introduced an iPhone game called JetSet — a curious little gem that situates specific locations as the enforced zone for game...
In The Midst Of Design-Technology In the midst of trying to finish this first run of Flavonoid boards — getting the firmware right, finding little gotchas in the design, little mistakes in the assembly...
Game Week Musings — Offline Gaming? A Near Future for Electronic Play? Trying to come up with some "log line" style idioms to describe the whole vector of near future research I'm doing around game gestures that elongate the scales of...

Design Fiction Chronicles: The Augmented Reality Near Future Imaginary Par Excellance

julian — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:45:26 +0000

A still from John Carpenter’s They Live, set, appropriately enough, in the near neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles.

Well, the recent round of chit-chat about augmented realities and their current canonical motivations, design prototyping and concepts has leveled-up in my own mind. On the 12th floor of the Laboratory complex, we’ve decided to fill up the vacant cubicles and set up some bits of kit, post-it notes, fiducial-filled sheets of paper, and set up our new Bureau of Inquests Into Reality Augmentation & Alteration.

It’s early days, but we’ve found one near past design fiction of a possible augmented reality prototype in John Carpenter’s camp-fantastico film They Live. If you haven’t seen it, you know nothing about Augmented Reality. I’m so serious about that, my hands are shaking. A few years ago, when I was teaching a lecture class that ran four hours and was about as painful as you could imagine to prepare, until I realized it was four hours because it was a film class that was meant to show films – I had They Live pulled from the vaults or whatever for a viewing. I was really surprised that only one or two students had ever seen this film. It’s not superb as a film, but it is superb enough to have a cult status and to be evocative of the things college kids get into if their on the left side of the fence – Naomi Klein-Noam Chomsky-Barbra Krueger style stuff. Good 70s media theory McLuhan-y things. Plus, you get an excruciatingly long, wrestle-y, award winning fist fight featuring Rowdy Roddy Piper.

“They Live” in my mind is the canonical, defining vision of what any sort of Augmented Reality should start with. Sort of presenting an “anti” world — the world made strange so that we see it in a different way. Reconstructed. No Pink Pony scenarios or anything that makes the engineer-accountants get eager, sweaty palms. Weird stuff to invert things and better see the alternative possibilities beyond way-finding, tour-guiding, and informatic overlays of measured data. Something like Julian Oliver’s “Artvertiser” concepts for a reality altering set of binoculars that turns public advertising displays into canvas’ for public art, if you so desire. That is, transforming the landscape with user-generated content or new “preferences” to the world. These worlds that you see in the worst of prototypes – with hideous post-its floating all around the world or something. Pop-ups and arrows pointing out the names of buildings and stuff like that? That, I predict, will be the epic fail of reality augmentation.

A still from the Institute for the Future’s wonderful, somewhat tongue-in-cheek prototype of a possible Augmented Reality experience, delivered at the “Blended Realities” workshop. The prototype world is very informatic, but I think it also pokes a bit of harmless fun at some of the curious/bizzaro conclusions to this, and to where it might go, and how it might inflect quotidian social practices. The glasses are pretty Elvis Costello, tho.

Check out They Live.

Why do I blog this? A strong, avuncular urge to think about other possible augmentations of reality and an allergic reaction to the ways engineer-accountant led designed things turn out.

But wait..there’s always more…this video, found by pheezy on the Twitter and created by Anatoly Zenkov (wow..), is another useful instance of a proper AR experience. I mean..one that makes a lot more sense in that it exhibits the kinds of reality I’ve come to know and love and appreciate and understand from first principles.

Me too (doing some AR stuff)! from Anatoly Zenkov on Vimeo.

…and even more, more..this thing has come in from the Bureau’s phalanx of data scouring agents..an AR-y miniature house maid, done in the fine, Japanese style of Lolita Maid-o!

http://www.geishatokyo.com/jp/ar-figure/figure.html

Related Dispatches:

Design Fiction in the Science Gallery From Bruce’s Beyond the Beyond: Design Fiction in the Science Gallery: “ *Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby carry on for over an hour about their practice of ‘critical design.’...
Generative Urban Design Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer var so = new SWFObject("http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf", "PictoBrowser", "500", "430", "8", "#E0E0E0"); so.addVariable("source", "sets"); so.addVariable("names", "LA Generative Procedural Maps"); so.addVariable("userName", "nearfuturelab"); so.addVariable("userId", "73737423@N00"); so.addVariable("ids", "72157622074827670");...
When Characters Cross: Extradiegetic Imbrication Jack Bauer as interpreted. Seen in a local art supply shop. First off, I’m being tongue-in-cheek with the blog post title, so lower your weapons. And I’ll be brief....

Dog Eared “Distraction”

julian — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:40:05 +0000

Running the blog-the-dog-eared-pages algorithm on Bruce Sterling’s fantastic “Distraction“, I’ve selected these gems. They’re all intriguing speculations about a near future world to be, complete with some insights and implications that trace the now to the then if you think about how such moments, conversations, objects and designed artifacts could come to be in the year 2050. Particularly at this agitated moment amongst the the various and multiple worlds’ and their financial-political-socio-technocultures.

Oscar took the opportunity to learn how to use a Moderator laptop. He had been given one, and he rightly recognized this gesture as a high tribal honor. The Moderator device had a flexible green shell of plasticized straw. It weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn. And its keyboard, instead of the time-honored QWERTYUIOP, boasted a sleek, sensible, and deeply sinister DHIATENSOR.

Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called “technological lock-in.” QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a keyboard — in fact QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists — but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it. It was like English spelling, or American standard measurements, or the ludicrous design of toilets; it was very bad, but it was a social fact of nature. QWERTYUIOP’s universality made it impossible for alternatives to arise and spread.

This is a good one. I’ve been fascinated with the ways a particular configuration or design like this — the keyboard layout — becomes a kind of expressive social object. There are all of these deep histories it seems, depending on who you believe, about all standards which are always social-political-historical compromises that lock-in specific meanings. Sometimes you hear that QWERTY was a way to slow typists down so that the mechanical aspects of pre-digital keyboards would not jam the machines in early typesetting and so forth, as Sterling describes in this passage. I’ve also heard that QWERTY was a way to help early typewriter salespeople sell the typewriter because they could easily type out the word “typewriter” only using the top row of letter keys and impress early would-be purchasers. (QWERTYUIOP gives you each letter of “typewriter”, which is something many people to recognize.) In this passage, Sterling is reminding us of this first point — that things set in place, like someone etching their name in drying concrete and, even if flawed, these become “social facts of nature” leaving the inscriptions of all the considerations that will always flow forth from those early debates and conventions and compromises, which become especially resonant when the “lock-in” is for something that spreads widely becoming a universality. p.382

We love those Regulators like brothers and sisters. We got nothing in common with you. Except that…well, we’re Moderators because we use a Moderator network. And the Regulators use a Regulator interface, with Regulator software and Regulator protocols. I don’t think that a newbie creep like you understands just how political a problem that is.

Protocols, interfaces, software, networks yielding to differentiation at the level of social and political factions is a very curious extrapolation. At the same time, it is a kind of embodiment of the politics of protocols as well-expressed in Alexander Galloway’s fascinating two network books Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization and
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (also with Eugene Thacker).

Without the high-flying theory and Deleuzian barnstorming, Sterling captures the reasonable future world in which the world wide network has fractured in this way between Moderators and Regulators for some reason having to do with social and political differences between these two groups. A near future such as this seems reasonable, international standards bodies notwithstanding. Receding back into the recent past of incompatible networks would be an outcome of the collapsed world Sterling depicts in Distraction, where global networks may be seen as creating exploitable linkages between teetering giant centers. For instance, the interconnectedness of financial institutions that allowed them to become too tightly connected in strategic terms — able to trade amongst each other too easily so that the game of hot potato that led us to today’s crisis finally caught everyone with bad potatos in the end — could be something that is regulated and controlled. In other words, if an outcome is that institutions must insulate themselves in some fashion, or they become categorized as to who they can do business with, a result could be different kinds of network protocols optimized for that specific business. Regulated banks use the Regulator network; Moderate banks use the Moderator network. p.335

But this was not the strange part. The strange part was that brand-new nomad manufacturers were vigorously infiltrating this jungle of ancient junk. They were creating new, functional objects that were not commercial detritus — they were sinister mimics of commercial detritus, created through new, noncommercial methods. Where there had once been expensive, glossy petrochemicals, there was now chopped straw and paper. Where there had once been employees, there were jobless fanatics with cheap equipment, complex networks, and all the time in the world. Devices once expensive and now commercially worthless were being slowly and creepily replaced by near-identical devices that were similarly noncommercial, and yet brand-new.

When “DIY” attains to its logical zenith, fake becomes the new real. I actually can’t wait for this to happen. The pinnacle of knowledge circulation in the networked age. How-to, tutorials, maker culture, sharing of knowledge (or maybe just descriptions and step-by-step procedures) all coming together so that people make their own stuff, from new materials that do not have to be tuned for epic scale levels of manufacturing. You need something, make one or two rather than having 100,000 of them made offshore someplace and shipped at great expense and with enormous carbon footprint. Natural experimentation with alternative materials, features, etc. p.329

Kevin bought four sets of earclips from a blanket vendor. “Here, put these on.”

“Why?” Greta said.

“Trust me, I know my way around a place like this.”

Oscar pinched the clamp onto his left ear. The device emitted a little wordless burbling hum, the sound a contented three-year-old might make. As long as he moved with the crowd, the little murmur simply sat there at his ear, an oddly reassuring presence, like a child’s make-believe friend. However, if he interfered with the crowd flow — if he somehow failed to take a cue — the earcuff grew querulous. Stand in the way long enough, and it would bawl.

Somewhere a system was mapping out the flow of people, and controlling them with these gentle hints. After a few moments Oscar simply forgot about the little murmurs; he was still aware of them, but not consciously. The nonverbal nagging was so childishly insistent that accomodating it became second nature. Soon the four of them were moving to avoid the crowds, well before any approaching crowds could actually appear. Everyone was wearing the earcuffs, so computation was arranging human beings like a breeze blowing butterflies.

The fairground was densely packed with people, but the crowd was unnaturally fluid. All the snack-food stands had short, brisk lines. The toilets were never crowded. Children never got lost.

Just a fascinating extrapolation into the near future of a number of ideas, such as a kind of flash mob concept, where a crowd is optimized to itself, allowing for smooth flows and transfers — a meta surveillance and control system that does not have the nasty baggage that such things normally. Ground traffic control system that helps you get from “A” to “B” in an optimal way, whatever “A” or “B” might be. This is a concept expressed here that is quite intriguing to me, such as strategies for exploring especially urban space, like the analog Near Future Laboratory project, “Drift Deck” and other psychogeography and cartography explorations. p.326-327

There was a long uneasy silence. Then Griego burtst out in a fury. “Don’t get all high-and-mighty with me, Mr. Third-in-His-Class. You think it’s easy running corporate R&D? It was just fine, as long as the guy didn’t have anything. Jesus, nobody ever thought a goddamn sugar engine would work. The goddamn thing is a giant germ in a box! We build cars up here, we don’t build giant germs! Then they pull this crazy stunt and..well, it just makes our life impossible! We’re a classic, metal-bending industry! We have interlocking directorates all throughout the structure, raw materials, fuel, spare parts, the dealerships…We can’t get into the face of our fuel suppliers telling them that we’re replacing them with sugar water! We own our fuel suppliers! It’d be like sawing off our own foot!”

“I understand about interlocking directorates and mutual stock ownership, Ron. I was sitting right next to you in business school, remember? Cut to the chase — what about the battery?”

“Batteries have the highest profit margin of any automobile component. We were making money there. You can’t make real money anywhere else in our business. The Koreans are building auto bodies out of straw and paper! We can’t support an industry when cars are cheaper than grocery carts! What are we gonna tell our unions? This is a great American tradition at stake here! The car defines America: the assembly line, suburbs, drive-ins, hot rods, teenage sex, everything that makes America great! We can’t turn ourselves inside out because some big-brained creep has bult an engine out of bug guts! There wouldn’t be anything left of us! The guy is a menace to society! He had to be stopped.”

“Thank you for that, Ron. Now we’re getting somewhere. So tell me this — why didn’t you just pull his damn funding?”

“If only it were that simple! We’re required by federal fiat to invest in basic R&D. It was part of our federal bailout deal. We’re supposed to have trade protection, and we’re supposed to catch our breath, and jump a generation ahead of our foreign competitors. But if we jump a generation of the damn Koreans, our industry will vanish entirely. People will make cars the way they make pop-up toast. Proles will build cars out of bio-scrap, and compost them in the backyard. We’ll all be doomed.”

So you’re telling me that you’ve achieved a tremendous scientific R&D success, but as a collateral effect, it will eliminate your industry.”

“Yeah. That’s it. Exactly. And I’m sorry, but we just can’t face that. We have stockholders to worry about, we have a labor force. We don’t want to end up like the computer people did. Jesus, there’s no sense to that. It’s total madness, it’s demented. We’d be cutting our own throats.”

Well, this is very much like the collapse of the automotive industry in the US, clearly. I also like this dig at corporate R&D. This idea that things discovered that could turn into something that is to the larger good would be hidden away if it would overturn the existing order. R&D in this way is ultimately conservative. I’m not sure I believe in R&D, for these reasons and others, but that’s a longer post. p.295-297

“But the economy’s out-of-control. Money just doesn’t need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.”

“Well, money isn’t everything, but just try living without it.”

Kevin shrugged. “People lived before money was invented. Money’s not a law of nature. Money’s a medium. You can live without money, if you replace it with the right kind of computation. The proles know that. They’ve tried a million weird stunts to get by, roadblocks, shakedowns, smuggling, scrap metal, road shows…Heaven knows they never had much to work with. But the proles are almost there now. You know how reputation servers work, right?”

“Of course I know about them, but I also know they dont really work.”

“I used to live off reputation servers. Let’s say you’re in the Regulators — they’re a mob that’s very big around here. You show up at a Regulator camp with a trust rep in the high nineties, people will make it their business to look after you. Because they know for a fact that you’re a good guy to have around. You’re polite, you dont rob stuff, they can trust you with their kids, their cars, whatever they got. You’re a certifiable good neighbor. You always pitch in. You always do people favors. You never sell out the gang. It’s a network gift economy.”

“It’s gangster socialism. It’s a nutty scheme, it’s unrealistic. And its fragile. You can always bribe people to boost your ratings, and then money breaks into your little pie-in-the-sky setup. Then you’re right back where you started.
“It can work all right. The problems is that the organized-crime feds are on to the proles, so they netwar their systems and deliberately break them down. They prefer the proles chaotic, because they’re a threat to the status quo. Living without money is just not the American way. But most of Africa lives outside the money economy now — they’re all eating leaf protein out of Dutch machines. Polynesia is like that now. In Europe they’ve got guaranteed annual incomes, they’ve got zero-work people in their Parliaments. Gift networks have always been big in Japan. Russians still think property is theft — those poor guys could never make a money economy work..”

I love this idea of reputation servers — a possible near future for today’s social networks, friend followers, etc. Somehow participation in today’s networks yields a new index of sorts — your trust ranking or something like this. A nice substitute for today’s “credit rating” systems, which are ridiculously opaque, operating on algorithms we who are rated can only guess about. Besides, in the near future, when the role of banks will have possibly whithered to a collapsed prune of their former selves, we may in fact circulate and leverage financial activities within networks of trust that are more peer-to-peer, like this Susu financial practices that is a cornerstone of various expat communities. p.256-257 (See also http://www.theworld.org/node/24945

Related Dispatches:

Design Fiction in the Science Gallery From Bruce’s Beyond the Beyond: Design Fiction in the Science Gallery: “ *Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby carry on for over an hour about their practice of ‘critical design.’...
Design Fiction Chronicles: Found Futures Image Testaments I don’t regularly read Wired, but I will occasionally flip to the “Found” back page which, according to words on the networks, is moving to the inevitable user-supplied content/contest...
Meet The Disabler: Ubicomp Futures Now Dashing off into the ubiquitously connected crisis of effects. Montreal, with two chums in the back seat educating me on the consequences of a world of ubiquity — one...

Workshop on Pervasive Advertising

Julian — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:55:26 +0000

It amazes me how non-relevant this topic is, particularly nowadays when there can be little reason to entice a consumer to engage in letting loose of whatever cash they may have. By the time we get out of the current morass of mistrust, misspending and misguided expectations of a world where all the growth graphs go up and to the right, we should be happy to have a pair of trousers that fit and a spigot with potable water running out of it.

But, the topic of pervasive advertising goes further than that. What could the outcome of a workshop be other than..a world of pervasive advertising. I mean, working out the details is all good, but what about a workshop on a world without advertising? Could that even be possible to have without essentially saying you’re going to quit your job as an engineer/scientist of pervasive stuff?

It just turns out that the vision of a near future of pervasively advertised-to humans just comes out all wrong. It’s only ever annoying and bothersome, or a horrid expression of human-database symbiosis.

There’s really not much more of an end game for pervasive advertising than that of the extrapolation of today’s conditions as in the remarkable design fiction of Spielberg’s visual rendering of P.K. Dick’s “Minority Report”. The assemblage of participants in the world of advertising is optimized for itself, which is well-greased linkages between me, my “interests” (to the extent these translate into commerce) and those who have something to gain in economic terms from selling me my interests. It’s optimized to leverage the pervasively networked, databased world and this can only lead to an intensely uninspired, technically awesome, intrusive and annoying world. It can’t really go any other way than that shown in the various compelling and fascistic interpretations in “Minority Report” of the pervasive advertising future – retinal scanning, holographic “pop-up” adverts, yammering cereal boxes with laminated displays and gesture recognition (to know when I’m trying to tell it to stop yammering, which is guaranteed to fail any number of times, as adroitly shown in Spielberg’s film), fascistic large urban screens, etc.

Yet, this workshop sounds pleasantly inviting. I don’t, though, see how the conditions of possibility for a world of pervasive advertising would lead to anything but the nuisance we experience today, times a billion. Who knows. Maybe today’s economic blight will wipe advertising as we know it off the face of the map for something else. What that is, i have no idea but so long as we think of advertising as a “sure thing” along with death and taxes, it’ll be nothing more than what it is today, except with a few network links and even bigger screens. We’ll still have “pop-ups” only they’ll stand in front of us when we try to get from here to there. We’ll still have messages on otherwise blank walls reminding us to give feedback on that Torx wrench we just bought from Callium Carbide Tools of Peoria last week. I mean..sounds wretched.

$100 for the first person who can come up with a compelling imaginary of a world without advertising, and one that renders viable and with a buzzing economy.

CALL FOR PAPERS

1st Workshop on Pervasive Advertising

In conjunction with Pervasive 2009
May 11, 2009 – Nara, Japan

http://pervasiveadvertising.org

Submission Deadline: February 10, 2009

“The only sure things in life are death, taxes and advertising. Although
pervasive technologies cannot avoid death or lessen the pain from
taxation, advertising is fertile ground for research on pervasive
technologies.”

[[What ninny said this?? What? Did Moses take out a 2 minute spot during the parting of the Red Sea? If this is the principle of pervasive advertising, fatwa on all pervasive advertising workshops! If advertising really is a necessary evil, like death and taxes, lets get to work on making it an obsolete evil thing that has been eradicated, like the Pox and Foot and Mouth disease; get rid of it already. Or get onto something different and inspired and more in keeping with the times. Stop twiddling about with technologized versions of the same old crap. Seriously.]]

======================================================================

Electronic displays have become ubiquitous and replace traditional
posters and billboards. Hence they not only provide a way of showing
dynamically updated content, but also means to react implicitly and
explicitly to the audience in their vicinity. In order to interact with
the target audience, technologies need to be explored capable of
identifying the user or his interests / needs.

[[Well, this is speculative. I see plenty of peeling wheat-paste-ups all over the place. but, okay. Let's assume that J.C. Decaux is well-positioned to introduce digital displays ubiquitously. Do I want to know that they're linked to a database of me? Who is J.C. Decaux anyway? Can I tell him to leave my database alone?]]

The current generation of mobile phones come with high speed Internet
access and built-in location sensing. Those properties make mobile
phones a powerful mediator between the advertiser / advertising platform
and the customer.

[[Good God. That's just wrong. I mean, who wants an ad to pop up on their phone?? I have enough trouble when I get an SMS. Seriously. Who is it? Am I missing something here?]]

Social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn are rapidly
growing. Such platforms include detailed information not only on the
interests of users (based for example on profiles and histories) but
also on their network. This information is placed on the Internet and
shared with friends or even the public.

[[Yeah, but under my own terms. Or should be. Can I opt out of pervasive advertising networks?]]

These technological advances, and others, change the opportunities and
challenges for advertising radically.

[[Not really. It's the same crap, only with a network and a database and real-time data links. Really. Don't fool yourself to think that something innovative is going on here. It's just optimization of an existing schema for knots and linkages between my wallet, my sensibilities and some company some where.]]

Consequently, advertising is becoming one of the major drivers of
pervasive computing technology for many end-users (e.g. mobile ads,
digital signs, context awareness, RFID). Yet we believe that the
attention this topic received in the pervasive computing community does
not equal its immediate impact on society.

Taking a positive view we can envision advertisements that precisely
match a person’s interests and fit the current situation so well that
people enjoy receiving them and see advertising as a pleasant
distraction. On the contrary taking a negative view one could imagine a
world where people cannot escape from advertisement, where we are
continuously tracked and where advertisements reduce the quality of
life. Both views even though very extreme are worthy of further
discussion. Hence we hope to provide a venue for this discussion by
offering this workshop.

[[I'll be looking for the workshop write-up. I'm dubious. No one in my mind has come up with anything other than that which will lead to the "Minority Report" imaginary. Seriously. As pleasant as it is shown in the PowerPoint, it's always enormous screens beaming down to me Coca-Cola ads or encouraging me to buy a watch only someone like Sir Edmund Hillary would wear..you know, those big, multi-face "chronometers" that look like an exercise weight.]]

PAPER SUBMISSION AND PARTICIPATION

We ask potential attendees to submit 2-4 page papers describing their
research interest and particular focus on the workshop topic. The paper
may include the description of ongoing research, results found,
experience gathered, new ideas, future projects or questions on topics
related to pervasive computing and advertising. Each participant is
asked to provide a short paragraph (up to 200 words) on their vision of
advertising in 25 years from now. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

More information can be found at

http://pervasiveadvertising.org

All submissions must be sent electronically to joerg.mueller@uni-muenster.de
The format for submissions is Springer LNCS, the same as that of
Pervasive 09.
Templates can be found at

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

Papers should be no longer than 4 pages. All papers must be submitted in
PDF. At least one author for each accepted paper is expected to attend
the workshop.

Non-archival working notes will be produced containing the papers
presented at the workshop. Selected papers from the workshop may be
considered for expansion and inclusion in a special issue of a journal.

IMPORTANT DATES

* February 10, 2009: Deadline for electronic submission
* March 1, 2009: Author Notification
* May 1, 2009: Submission of camera-ready
* May 11, 2009: Pervasive Advertising Workshop at Pervasive 2009

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Jörg Müller, University of Münster
E-mail: joerg.mueller@uni-muenster.de

Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg-Essen
E-mail: albrecht.schmidt@acm.org

Bo Begole, PARC
E-mail: bo@parc.com

Aaron Quigley, University College Dublin
E-mail: aquigley@ucd.ie

Why do I blog this? I dunno. This stuff kinda bugs me, if you can’t tell. It’s pretty clear that the angle is to create something that has commercial viability, rather than thinking things through for an alternative near future of connecting people, interests, ideas and so forth. On the one hand, it’s exciting and futuristic stuff. On the other hand, it’s not a future that I think has particularly exciting prospects in the category of “habitable”, fun, non-invasive, non-bothersome, non-pop-up-in-your-face futures. And, the advertising thing. I’m serious. If someone can’t paint a picture of a world without advertising..I’m listening. And I got your $100 here.

Related Dispatches:

Showing And Telling: Some Notes On Visualisation and Cognition Reality augmentation instruments, designed with more than a suggestion of the now-canonical handheld device footprint. These are practically those sort of *kids’ toy* editions of adult devices, you know?...
Design Fiction Chronicles: The Augmented Reality Near Future Imaginary Par Excellance A still from John Carpenter’s They Live, set, appropriately enough, in the near neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles. ...
Chat With Holly Willis of Blur + Sharpen Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Design. Closing day for the Future Imaginary exhibition. Where on earth is this? It’s here. My USC chum Holly Willis did a...

Drift Deck

julian — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:38:02 +0000

Drift Deck. For Conflux 2008, NYC
confluxfestival.org/conflux2008/.

For Analog Play (batteries not required.)

(Some production documentation above; click “Notes”.)

The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be — you see a fire hydrant, or you come across a pigeon lady. The action is meant to be performed when the object is seen, or when you come across the described situation. For example — take a photograph, or make the next right turn. The cards also contain writerly extras, quotes and inspired words meant to supplement your wandering about the city.

Processed in collaboration with Dawn Lozzi who did all of the graphic design and production.

For exhibition at the Conflux 2008 Festival, NYC, September 11-14, 2008, and hosted by Center for Architecture located at 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012

The motivation for Drift Deck comes from the Situationist International, which was a small, international group of political and artistic agitators. Formed in 1957, the Situationist International was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations.

Guy Debord, one of the major figures in the Situationist International, developed what he called the “Theory of the Dérive.”

“Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as the “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Psychogeography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.” The dérive is considered by many to be one of the more important of these strategies to move one away from predictable behaviors and paths.

http://is.gd/1Gy1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography

The cards will be available for festival visitors to borrow and return for others to use during the Conflux Festival.

Design and Implications by Julian Bleecker and Dawn Lozzi. Creative Assistance and Support from Nicolas Nova, Pascal Wever, Andrew Gartrell, Simon James, Bella Chu, Pawena Thimaporn, Duncan Burns, Raphael Grignani, Rhys Newman, Tom Arbisi, Mike Kruzeniski and Rob Bellm. Processed for Conflux Festival 2008.

Special Joker Cards featuring compositions by Jane Pinckard, Ben Cerveny, Jane McGonigal, Bruce Sterling, Katie Salen, Ian Bogost and Kevin Slavin. Joker illustrations by Rob Bellm.

Original Proposal

www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/projects/drift-deck/

Part of a long, proud line of land mapping technologies that includes PDPal, Ubicam Backward Facing Camera and Battleship: Google Earth, and WiFiKu.

Related Dispatches:

Conflux Festival 2009 Call Proposals Conflux is having their 6th annual Conflux Festival! The deadline for submissions is soon — August 15th. At last year’s Conflux we brought our “Drift Deck” technology and had...
Drift Deck (Analog Edition) Card Art View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: psychogeography cards) The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards...
High Chair High Chair is a tall chair placed on or near the sidewalk allowing sitters a chance to see the city from nearly above. It’s a middle vantage point, above...

iPhone for Hertzian Space

julian — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:31:21 +0000

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams…The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action. Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.

Formulary for a New Urbanism, Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953, from Situationist International Anthology, Ken Knabb editor.

I’m no theorist of space, architecture, and digital media — there are plenty of bright ones about. What I’m curious about are the material choices available to the design and construction of spaces that are modifiable by their inhabitants. What are the ways that time and space — the key elements for bounding and warping habitats — will be “architected” by the time and location-based activities of digital devices?

"Locative Media" is the term that was (once) used to describe media that is digitally marked with some location correlation. In the most primordial example, a photograph is inscribed with the location from where it was taken. Now, we see these sorts of weak-signals leaking into all kinds of (somewhat anticipated, eagerly accepted) “tagging” of many new and curious forms of digital-social expression. What does it mean to find out that someone is Twittering near me? How does this turn into new “architectural” forms? How do constructed spaces — buildings, walkways, obstacles, protected spaces — shift and re-orient and deconstruct when large-scale locative experiences occur within them? How do manufactured times — work-time, after-hours, dead-time — shift and bias and become occupied and “spent” in new unexpected ways?

The weak-signals of such things were the playful social experiences of early pioneers. Location-specific social networks like Dodgeball, Platial, Plazes — and on, and on — were all working from the well-founded hunch that social practices beyond the trinity of the screen-keyboard-mouse will likely be about the production of a new kind of space, one that is a hybrid of the digital and geographical (if we just start with the “instrumentalized” keystones, the things absent discussion about the social practices that give things meaning.)

These new unexpected, re-mappings of space/time and social networks (I have mine who are nearby, who accidentally come “in range”, who are in entirely different geographies and time-zones) could be an interesting basis for Alison Sant’s notion of the redefined basemap.

Why do I blog this? I’m curious to see how platforms that are aware of location and that support direct participation in the creation of (relatively sophisticated) “apps” (bleech..) and that are somewhat moved away from the fixed, immovable desktop trinity of screen-keyboard-mouse can create new kinds of mechanisms for maintaining and knitting together networks of social relations and the creation of new kinds of knowledge and culture.

Related Dispatches:

William H. Whyte Revisited: An Experiment With An Apparatus for Capturing Other Points of View Times Square and its intriguing public living room. These are the things Whyte was describing in one form or another, and quite directly in his “New York and Tokyo:...
Street Furniture Times Square beach, complete with tourists (as any beach should), found here. Urban Lounge found near Madison Square, New York City. This is probably old hat for current New...
Studio Visit at “dividual” and A Slow Conversation Spent a very cool conversational show-and-tell-y bit of time with dividual’s Dominick Chen and Takumi Endo at their new cozy studio digs. I guess Paul connected us last minute,...

Projects Briefly

julian — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:07:01 +0000

These are project briefs, presented through images the document the hands-on work that goes into the projects’ construction. One of the design principles here is the importance of presenting the projects as craftwork and as materializations; that is, the process within which these projects come to be. These projects are more precisely processes, and the objective is as much learning the various crafts involved — CAD, electronics, software, materials, “theory” — as it is the creation of a “product” of this process that reveals these crafts and elicits new, playful and curious kinds of interaction rituals.
I find the possibility of individual creation of objects that embody their own ideas akin to the ability of today’s more tractable media for expressing one’s ideas, like blogs, or photo sharing and such, to create a renaissance of individual expressive objects. These objects are embodiments of individual ideas, desires, whims, playful sensibilities, opinions and jokes. Although today the possibility of mass individual object creation poses many practical problems, the first practical problem is knowledge. Fifteen years ago when I first explored the area of DIY device design the knowledge and expertise necessary was well-protected and ensconced in a very private vault. Increasingly this knowledge is much more widely available, in part because the process and craftwork of going from an idea to its materialization can be shared. Revealing the “handwork” involved, and the mistakes, lessons-learned and overall “how-to” aspects of the work makes it all the more likely that knowledge circulates.
This work fits within the context of “design fiction” and critical design, a context in which designed objects “articulate” a critique, or help tell a story meant to inspire reflection and consideration of unassailable aspects of consumer, design and product culture. These critical/fictional objects make meaning through embodied critique, as “theory objects.” This context is one where objects should go beyond critique and enter into the realm of responses and alternatives. For this proposed project, these critical provocations are around cartography, modern god’s-eye-view maps, and the inviolable Google Maps. Designed objects of this sort should be functional, instantiated, rhetorical “devices” that speak within larger debates, discussions or stories that circulate around the idioms in which the object circulates. Influences from practicing artists include Tom Sachs, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby and Tom Dixon, the novelists Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick, and the designer and author Denis Wood.

The visual documentation for these projects is provided in an image gallery. You can move through the gallery by clicking thumbnails or the main image, or using the left or right arrow keys. Some images have brief notes, which can be read while hovering over a “Notes” link that appears in the thumbnail drawer if the image has any annotations.

* Flavonoid (2006 — ) is a speculative near-future object that devices to link the physical, 1st world to the digital 2nd world. The object is a whimsical monitoring device that correlates physical action into digital representation. Flavonoid records physical movement through the use of a 3-axis accelerometer. It also records over how much time such movement occurs, so that quick active movement counts as less significant than sustained movement. Finally, in a near-future speculative interaction design, holding the device adds to the significance of the recording ritual, so that the fetish aspect of digital mobile devices is included in the monitoring algorithm.
The product of this monitoring ritual is a digital signature that can be applied to a variety of other devices to create a series of time-motion interaction rituals. For example, as part of this object family is a project called PSX, a new kind of digital games controller. Based on the digital signature of one’s Flavonoid, the PSX game controller allows for a certain amount of “power” that a player’s game avatar, or character, can have. If your Flavonoid digital signature is high, your character will have a corresponding power level in the game. If you’ve been sitting around on the sofa all day, your character will appear lethargic and cranky.
The motivation is to provoke a reconsideration of the divide between “physical” and “digital” worlds. My conceit is that there is that the binary produces an impulse to privilege one over the other in certain arguments. For example, the digital has the advantage of not requiring the kind of physical resources — energy to move information, for example. But this makes it too easy to ignore the fact that digital technology is also quite physical in its use of resources, for example energy to maintain computer data centers where the Internet “is”; or the landfills that overflow with discarded electronic devices; or the material waste left over from often toxic processes that go into fabricating electronic components.

* SlowMessenger (2007 — ) is an instant messaging device that delivers messages exceptionally slowly. Built into the device is a messaging technology that unfolds its content based on an interface that borrows from the traditions of long-form letter writing, hand-carried mail sent through the post. The instant messaging device connects digital information channels — such as the Internets — to physical information channels — such as streets, hands and the friction of human contact.
SlowMessenger works by simply receiving the message from the message sender. Once the message is received, it is gradually displayed, one letter at a time based on two factors. The first is the relative amount of time that the device is held; the second is the amount of time the device is carried while walking. These factors — holding-by-hand and walking-with — are interaction rituals key to the conveyance of intimate messages. In “another era” that is not the “digitally networked era”, “taking the air” and “perambulating” were crucial interaction rituals for maintaining and knitting together “social network” relations. Friends and intimate couples would “walk hand-in-hand” and discuss matters on their minds. In this “other era”, in times when friends were not in proximity, perhaps because one or the other was off to war or at sea, long-form “letters” were composed to substitute for physical proximity and communication. Postal mail was used to maintain communications and “stay in touch” even if “physical touch” was not, in a literal sense, a possibility.
In this “digitally networked era” communications mechanics are designed to take advantage of the efficiencies of electronic networks. In this way, contact is perpetual and ubiquitous, often resulting in nearly meaningless communiques and dispatches. By “slowing down” the instantaneous message, the device saves time by allowing one to avoid inane drivel and focus on a meaningful connection to one special person.

* PSX (2007 — ) is a game controller designer for the Playstation 2. The controller must be “fueled” before play with the use of an attachable Flavonoid device. By carrying Flavonoid with you, you generate fuel for the controller. The controller will “play” only as long as there is fuel available. When the fuel begins to run out, the controller behaves sluggishly and finally gives out completely.
This photo gallery shows the evolution of the concept through the construction and prototyping phase. There are two approaches being explored, using a variety of microcontrollers, design-technologies, prototyping and testing equipment.
The initial concept is to design the controller specifically for Katamari Damacy and the series of Grand Theft Auto video games. These games are ones in which the avatar in the game does a lot of walking and running, seemingly with a nearly infinite reserve of energy. The “theory” embodied in the PSX controller is meant to disrupt the conventional understanding of the relationship between physical activity in 1st Life and virtual-physical-digital activity in 2nd Life digital worlds.

* Worry Wand (2008) is a design-technology-art project that explores two aspects of my practice. The first is understanding the work that links ideas to materializations in the era of “what you model is what you get.” The second is deliberately revealing the process and craftwork that goes into the design, engineering and aesthetics aspects when exploring the links between ideas and materializations.
The object itself is a speculative near-future talisman. It derives from the tradition found in many religious cultures of the prayer bead, or worry bead, also known in Greek culture as a Kombolói.
The speculation designed into the object is that the form of such things can be based upon the act of touch and the calming influences of color. The object changes in response to the degree to which the handler has completed a sequence of prayers, or the degree to which the handler has managed to calm their nerves.
What I show here in this photo gallery is precisely this process of moving from an idea to its materialization over a period of approximately 10 days. Crucial to my preferred process is moving quickly from an idea to its materialization. This is an 10 day extended sketching exercise, but one that moves beyond paper and pen into a more complex materialization. I use digital design tools for 3D modeling to create physical objects with plastic printers, electronics design tools to create circuit boards that can be quickly manufactured in Asia, and the craftwork of constructing functioning electrical prototypes. The objective of this process, and revealing the process, is a strong commitment I have to craftwork, and understanding design, technology and art not reified, obscure social practices, but one’s that involve hands working with material.
These are human social practices that describe a possibility space of other kinds of human social practices. In the design of the Worry Wand is embedded a specific people-practice. The design of new kinds of objects, once the process is revealed, makes it possible to imagine other people turning their ideas into material form, perhaps just once, for themselves, as a kind of individuated self-expression, or more practical way of expressing one’s own ideas.

* PDPal (2001-2004) is an art-technology project that used a Palm PDA (personal digital assistant) application to create a “map” of personal-digital experience based on a set of emotive coordinates — Social, Preposition, Texture, Speed and Weather. Based on how your experience was charted along these axes, your map was delivered. The “map” was a kind of pictogram of the intersection of these coordinates.
PDPal combines a number of concepts in an effort to create a disruptive designed object. The “theoretical concepts center largely on maps and map-making. PDPal attempts to create a different kind of map — one whose coordinates are based on these personal/emotional coordinates, rather than the conventional latitude/longitude or street address coordinates.

In three editions, PDPal was exhibited at:

Eyebeam Atelier, NYC “Beta Launch” show and artists’ residency 2002

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN 2003

Transmediale Festival, Berlin 2003

University of Minnesota Design Institute, “Twin Cities Knowledge Maps” 2003

Times Square, NYC “Creative Time Presents” 2003-2004

Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport 2003

Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Alberta Canada "Database Imaginary".2004

Denis Wood was commissioned to write a short essay inspired by PDPal.

Related Dispatches:
PSX..Analog Edition So, this is my analog version of a playful Playstation 2 controller for the PSX project — the one that slows the analog part of the controller down over...

Undisciplinary Design / People-Practice Crossing into a new practice idiom, especially if it offers the chance to feel the process of learning, is a crucial path toward undisciplinarity. The chance to become part...

In The Midst Of Design-Technology In the midst of trying to finish this first run of Flavonoid boards — getting the firmware right, finding little gotchas in the design, little mistakes in the assembly...

Ambient Self Monitoring

julian — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:12:23 +0000

Found this in Tiger, a designer-y inspired bric-a-brac shop in Copenhagen for 10DKK (about $5USD), a prescient little device that allows you to monitor your UV exposure when outside trying to have fun sailboarding and stuff. What I find curious here is the way the packaging simply avoids the unspoken hazard of this cancer mitigation tool — having fun outside is dangerous. Perhaps the Danes, dark-locked for 8 or 9 months a year, are prone to getting carried away with hours and hours of naked sun bathing during the months of nearly ’round-the-clock sun.

I got three of these things, no joke.

Related Dispatches:
Fake for Real Found in a small toy/novelty store in Jeju, South Korea. Two forms of fakery. On the left, a faux Lego set using all the cues and clues of the...

Design Fiction Chronicles: The Augmented Reality Near Future Imaginary Par Excellance A still from John Carpenter’s They Live, set, appropriately enough, in the near neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles. ...

Ambient Power Consumption Monitoring Picked a couple of these “Ecowatt” devices up while in Tokyo, from Bic Camera. They monitor power consumption of whatever you’ve plugged into it. Here I had my MacBook...

Scale

julian — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:16:05 +0000

Not knowing a heck of a lot about solenoids in practice — I know what they do, and, as an example of the sometimes impracticality of higher-ed, am fairly fluent in the E&M principles at work here. But, when it comes to the practical matter of finding one with the necessary “umph” to articulate a simple controller’s buttons, it’s all guess work.

(Parenthetically, this mechanism is a subcomponent of a larger project called “Air Guitar Hero” which uses a remote glove controller to articulate the solenoids here. Yes. It makes no practical sense. It points to “something” as an experiment, if nothing more than to learn a few things about controlling solenoids and such all. But, mostly it is a design provocation. That’d be the easiest way of describing this whole thing, for those who have asked.)

The first solenoids I used were the smallish ones on top, bought at close-out prices from Electronics Goldmine for about $2 a piece. They couldn’t push the button completely, nor with the surety of purpose the design demanded. They would actuate, but not push the button closed. The best they could do was kind of rattling things around a bit.

Not really knowing precisely how to “engineer” a solution (probably something about determining the closing force of the switch and back-stepping to an appropriate solenoid), I just bought a few different sizes. The first one to arrive was enormous and, had I been a bit more careful, I would’ve realized that the centerline to centerline spacing of a row of four of these would’ve been wider than the center to center distance between the Guitar Hero buttons. Poppa Bear is a Guardian Electric TP12X19-I-24D, push style solenoid, runs at 24 volts. Way too big. So..that one is now a paperweight on my desk.

(Here’s a link to Guardian Electric that has specifications on their other tubular push/pull solenoids.)

The other two were closer, and I ended up using the “Momma Bear” solenoid — a Guardian Electric TP6X12-I-24D, also push style, with a load force of 18-0.06/2.5-0.75 Ounce-Inch. The data sheet is here.

I’m running all of these at 12 volts, which makes them less umph-y, but sufficient for what I’m doing. The solenoids have more push force at the low end of teir travel, so I designed the little supporting bridge there to hold the articulating shaft right on top of the controller button so that most of the force would be committed to pushing the button and not traveling through space.

Speaking of scale, on the left there is the breadboard prototype circuit to drive five solenoids. The right is the PCB with the same circuit (minus a bunch of Arduino icing, just a plain vanilla Atmega168 and crystal). Scaled down, the circuit is much easier to manage and cart around than the relatively fragile breadboard edition, especially cause I’m using janky, untrimmed jumpers to make connections and so forth.

For the curious, here’s the circuit’s schematic and the PCB layout pictures.

Related Dispatches:
Timing Next step, testing the PCB edition of the PSX. I’m back to using a slow, low STK500 to do some debugging. Now that the firmware is fairly well squared...

Refining I’m getting closer to have a second prototype of the PSX project. Strangely, I seem to be building the breadboard prototype (lower image) simultaneous with the PCB prototype (the...

Action-Implications While in Japan and discussing design and the implications it can create around action and thought. Nothing mystical, but maybe..For example, the Zero Waste charger scooting around the Design...