How To Break Anything

Mimicry, from "Four-year-old preacher"

Wed, 16 May 2012 04:50:00 -0700

Mimicry, the basic unit of human interaction.

Leaving space for the audience to fill in [storytelling]

Sat, 12 May 2012 09:32:39 -0700

- via http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/lust_dust/

"My editor thinks this comic is inappropriate for newspapers. He might be right. You won't see this one published anywhere else.

One of the tricks I use as a comic writer is the imaginary last scene. In this case, the funny part is what you imagine happening after the comic is over. Your mind fills in the details. If I do my job right, everyone fills in the last scene with whatever works best for them. Some of you imagine something subtle and some of you have a more graphic interpretation. Personally, I see a time-lapse scenario that features bulging eyes and seasons changing. The important thing is that each of you imagines a scene that is customized to your sensibilities."

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Strategic Design in a world of New Modes Of Production

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:21:00 -0700

Rory Sutherland has this wonderful new talk up on TED called "Perspective Is Everything" (here: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_everything.html). He's known for talking about happiness lately, so the talk is framed that way, but what he was getting at to me spoke more to the strategic design of things that people experience and interface with in the world. He had at one point started talking about how this is all he'd really like to see:

It's really a simple diagram for sure, but quite potent in the behavioral economics-ish context of what he leads up to it with. He notes quite rightly that most people designing solutions to problems are concerned with one of the three, maybe some of the smarter stuff considering two. He refers to business environments, with companies trying to solve problems ranging from product revenue to internal management; I see it all the time in "call for concepts" projects (think: Pepsi Refresh, Innocentive, etc.). It probably applies to a whole range of situations in which anyone is trying to solve a problem.

I tend to think of Call For Concepts as one of a few nodes on a spectrum that makes up what I've thought of as New Modes of Production. I drew this on a wall once upon a time when first thinking of it:

You probably can't read it very well even after enlarging and squinting a bit, but suffice to say that there's an interesting range of things from "new brainstorms" to hackathons to startup weekends to kickstarters to incubation labs to startup accelerators, all replacing the traditional model of product R&D. There are three scales at the bottom of the image, and one is getting at one of the variables that distinguish modes from each another: the depth to which that mode considers the problem at hand. For example, hackathons don't get very "deep," tending to focus only on the "technology" part of the chart above; there's an obvious reason for that, but also there's the fact that they're typically done during all-nighters with group partners you may not know very well. So not a lot of time is available to considering any but just one of the three problems. With "call-for-concepts" you may get a combination of two circles, but usually leaning heavily on technology. At the Kickstarter level you start to get more that lean towards the economics side of considering two circles, and that's definitely the case when you get into the startup / accelerator scene.

There are great, well-designed solutions coming out of these modes, of course. These reflect what we've started to call "strategic design." I got to thinking that if these modes of production mapped to a hierarchy according to the "depth" variable, they'd fall under "strategic design," and near the bottom you'd have idea sessions and hackathons and call-for-concepts, places unlikely to consider all three circles (remember that there are two other variables, though!).

Hence the spiral towards the center. That hierarchy would map to points along the spiral - strategic design is the consideration and reconciliation of all three circles.

(By the way. I went from Sutherland's "psychology" to another term "behavior," trying to capture behavior as a complex web of things not easily reduced to individuals. Mark Earls talks about this often, see his thoughts on what Behavioral Economics is missing.)

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"There is no golden past we have fallen from"

Fri, 11 May 2012 06:52:42 -0700

“A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web. So, here at start of 2010, a new decade, will try to write a short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive science/anthropology angle. [...]
There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world and our place in it.”

- via http://www.experientia.com/blog/the-false-question-of-attention-economics-2/

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"Reducing all activity to a cocktail of stage presence and rear-screen projection...even knotty concepts from fields like quantum physics and philology can be made attractive to large groups of people"

Fri, 11 May 2012 06:34:00 -0700

A cleareyed Malcolm Gladwell discusses the American penchant for reducing all activity to a moral lesson that can be imparted through the powerful cocktail of stage presence and rear-screen projection. Drawing a line from Benjamin Franklin to the homilies printed on Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, Mr. Gladwell says that even knotty concepts from fields like quantum physics and philology can be made attractive to large groups of people if the concepts are rendered as anecdotes involving a cabdriver, a small child or an obscure Flemish botanist. “Start with a personal anecdote,” Mr. Gladwell suggests, “and then extrapolate to the 18th-century cocoa trade in Malta.

via slavin.tumblr.com

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"Yes, it’s just a toy...but this isn’t a product. It’s a provocation...it’s also a harbinger of what’s to come."

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:12:31 -0700

from: How A Geek Dad And His 3D Printer Aim To Liberate Legos

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/04/05/how-a-geek-dad-and-his-3d-printer-aim-to-liberate-legos/

“Yes, it’s just a toy. But it’s also a harbinger of what’s to come."

"This isn’t a product. It’s a provocation,” says Levin. “We should be free to invent without having to worry about infringement, royalties, going to jail or being sued and bullied by large industries. We don’t want to see what happened in music and film play out in the area of shapes.”

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Art work revolving around geometric and mathematical equations

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:23:50 -0700

If math is the language of God, this is like marking up the world in low-res so that we can understand it better.

via http://darksilenceinsuburbia.tumblr.com/post/22532112482/julien-salaud-art-work-revolving-around:

"Art work revolving around geometric and mathematical equations is the immediate, natural impressions I perceive…the themes and my personal revelations based on Julien Salaud’s work. (By okmarzo)"

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"Waste was discouraged"

Sun, 06 May 2012 19:53:00 -0700

10: OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE EFFICIENCIES

Before the World Wide Web there was Dialog.

Dialog was pretty futuristic. In the 1970s and '80s it was the closest thing to an electronic library there was, containing the world's scientific, scholarly, and journalistic texts. The only problem was its price, $1 per minute. You could spend a lot of money looking things up. At those prices only serious questions were asked. There was no fooling around, no making frivolous queries--like looking up your name. Waste was discouraged. Since searching was sold as a scarcity, there was little way to master the medium, or to create anything novel.

via kk.org

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This game is using your data against you

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:55:00 -0700

At least Silent Hill was being upfront about it. Not sure the same could be said about the Facebook / Google / Apple / Amazon / Microsofts of the world.

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From: "Unplugging The Computer Metaphor"

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:24:56 -0700

Published on The New Aesthetic | shared via feedly mobile

“A paradigm shift occurred in the 1960s: the cognitive revolution. Since that time it has become respectable to study cognition, although emotion and motivation were still considered suspect by many experimental psychologists. An integral part of the cognitive revolution was the computer metaphor for brain function. Psychological research during the past 40 years has been dominated by an information-processing model of brain function based on the computer metaphor.”

Unplugging the Computer Metaphor | Psychology Today

Technology becomes metaphors; repeat.

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From: "Unplugging the Computer Metaphor"

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:06:58 -0700

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-emotional-brain/200904/unplugging-the-computer-metaphor
"Early experimental psychology was dominated by the behaviorists. In order to define themselves as scientists, and to distinguish themselves from unscientific philosophers and psychoanalysts, they deemed that behavior alone was worthy of study and refused to consider any processes that went on inside the "black box" of the brain.
A paradigm shift occurred in the 1960s: the cognitive revolution. Since that time it has become respectable to study cognition, although emotion and motivation were still considered suspect by many experimental psychologists. An integral part of the cognitive revolution was the computer metaphor for brain function. Psychological research during the past 40 years has been dominated by an information-processing model of brain function based on the computer metaphor."

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"The same costume will be indecent/smart/ridiculous/charming/etc"

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:05:27 -0700

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Progress, serendipity, and chronological proprotionality

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:18:00 -0700

At first glance,

via altnytterfarlig.tumblr.com

and

from "Google’s New Glasses And The War On Serendipity" via new-aesthetic.tumblr.com

seem to be opposing viewpoints, no?

This apparent paradox could be seen as just an illusion of scale, perhaps. As in:

- Large things with major impacts benefit from a reduction in the amount of randomness, which leads to progress

- Small things with minor impacts benefit from an increase in the amount of randomness, which leads to serendipity

Which would be nice, because then all you'd have to do is figure out the difference between large things and small things, sorting based on their scope of impact.

Though unfortunately for our solution here, the historian Frank Gavin calls this the assesment of "chronological proportionality," noting that it's something humans are notoriously terrible at (see: Five Ways To Use History Well).

Not sure I have a better solution for you right away, just something to consider as you too wrestle with notions like progress and serendipity.

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New Aesthetic / No Aesthetic

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:08:00 -0700

John's notes above from the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577298132546958436.html
Might be related to Kurt Anderson's Vanity Fair Article "You Say You Want A Devolution (Prisoners of Style)":
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201
And in that silly way that everything's laterally related, both might be a manifestation of the form that this "New Aesthetic" has taken - a form not so much an "aesthetic" stylistically as it is an "aesthetic" metacognitively or relationally. Which might explain why this aesthetic doesn't "look" like anything (or "sound" like anything, for that matter), in the way that Waters and Anderson are observing.

(...Seems that unfortunately the only way to really get that across is to send you to a link that sends you to another link that sends you to a series of essays all responding to another link still, which itself is commentary on a panel exploring a series of links collected over a year into a tumblr.

Worth it, though, if you ask me.):
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/creators-project-in-response-t...

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Work, play, and seams, illustrated by "Post-Trolling: A Conversation with Art404"

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:08:00 -0700

I've been in a lot of conversations lately about "seamless" and "seamful" things. The below is getting at it too. Lately I've been thinking that if I had to put it in a simple phrase, I'd say something like "things that we think of as 'chores' benefit from being 'seamless,' things we think of as 'experiences' benefit from being 'seamful'."

Or something like that.

It would at least explain why you don't want things like playing a game, texting your mother, or reading a book to be seamful (as in: you'd like to take in as much of the interaction as possible), but you might like the process of organizing information from an email into an excel sheet to be seamless (as in: you'd like to take in as little of the interaction as possible).

Even more simply, this is the difference between work and play.

from Post-Trolling: A Conversation with Art404

Published on The Rhizome Frontpage RSS

Simages, 2011

artnotfound: We're obsessed with automation, both as something scary and beautiful. Simages starts to point at that. We created this lovely, "ideal" living situation and then let it run automatically, only to watch the Sims lives crumble as they run on autopilot. Dirty dishes begin to pile up, the family stops talking to each other and they lose the things that make them a "perfect" family.

As we move to a more automated culture, we're making our lives easier while changing the perceived value of time management. We're working on an app that will automatically text your mother every night. Both as a practical way of automating love, and as a comment on how technology is changing time management. By exploring the limits of automation, we can have a better understanding of what it means to us and what the best path to take is. We can make an "informed" choice, so to speak.

louisdoulas: Time, seems to have become more combative, or least its passing more 'apparent' today. Have you ever used Steve Lambert's Self-Control app?

I think productivity and what it challenges and defines seems to be more and more of a preoccupation for this generation of cultural producers. These notions of leisure: recreation in contrast to 'productivity' and the strive for this supposed balance is something we think automation would hope to make easier, such as the app you're working on. But of course we can see this becoming problematic, this gesture of an automated text to one's mother.

artnotfound: It's post-trolling, an ironic and almost sinister gesture that reveals something really telling. It definitely makes texting your mother manually more meaningful if you have the option to do it automatically.

(That last bit about meaning is particularly interesting!: The more invisible you can make the seamless things, the more beautiful you can make the seams.)

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Artificial Empathy (as opposed to artificial intelligence), via "Robot Love"

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:08:55 -0700

(See also BERG's futures thinking on artificial empathy vs artificial intelligence, and Be As Smart As A Puppy)

via Dilbert.com Blog

"Building a robot to imitate a person, as opposed to a dog, has an extra level of difficulty because human speech and intelligence are hard to mimic exactly. Building a robot dog is much easier. Perhaps your future robot dog will bark to get your attention if there's an intruder, or the house is on fire, and it might softly whine when it needs a service call.
...
Consider movies. A well-made movie generates strong emotions in people even though we know the movie screen is not alive. We know the actors are acting, and the story isn't real, and still we have an emotional response. I believe our future robotic dogs will have the same impact on us as movies. We will always be aware of their non-living nature, but we'll be helpless to resist forming emotional connections. If you doubt that humans can form emotional connections with objects, check out the stock price of Apple."

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"Instead of shocking society, [today's] art must respond to a shocked society"

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:00:34 -0700

"The New Aesthetic isn’t Impressionism or Cubism. Revolutionary art is not shocking and provoking society, as it did in the case of Monet and Picasso. The New Aesthetic, as it exists in drone technology and Google Maps imagery and data surveillance, represents a ground-level change in our existence. Instead of shocking society, New Aesthetic art must respond to a shocked society and turn the changes we’re confronting into critical artistic creation. Artists are only just starting to take the raw material of the New Aesthetic and aestheticize it in a conscious, intelligent way."

In Response To Bruce Sterling's "Essay On The New Aesthetic" | The Creators Project

Navigated from The New Aesthetic | shared via feedly mobile

Culture is expressed through art and is always reactive. Very interesting way to describe the fact that it's not always the artists doing the "shocking"; at different points in history they are in fact the "shocked."

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Reactive culture, from: "The New Aesthetic, and what's next."

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:30:23 -0700

"After Realism came Impressionism and Post-Impresssionism. When the art world got sick of viewing reality at every angle, they started warping and twisting reality into fantastical new creations."
http://remus-shepherd.livejournal.com/354140.html
The above article in its entirety is why I too talk about "reactive culture" in in the language of art history.

- via mobile

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“Companion Species”

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:09:16 -0700

via http://berglondon.com/blog/2012/04/02/companion-species-in-icons-special-edition-on-mobile-phones/
"They see the world differently to us, picking up on things we miss.
They adapt to us, our routines. They look to us for attention, guidance and sustenance. We imagine what they are thinking, and vice-versa.
Dogs? Or smartphones?"

- via mobile

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"Super in all the ways that ___ is more or less super"

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:38:23 -0700

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/
"I will hammer that iron nail a bit more, in case you aren’t getting it yet. Because this is the older generation’s crippling hangup with their alleged “thinking machines.” When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having “thought,” “memory,” and nowadays “sight” and “hearing.” Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see.
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.
...
Pretending otherwise is like making Super Mario the best man at your wedding. No matter how much time you spend with dear old Super Mario, he is going to disappoint in that role you chose for him. You need to let Super Mario be super in the ways that Mario is actually more-or-less super. Those are plentiful. And getting more so. These are the parts that require attention, while the AI mythos must be let go."

- via mobile

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