Hypercontextual

Introduction

I’ve been developing some concepts to better understand how people can and will use NFC in printed electronics.

As it relates to the ‘Internet of Things’ — many of the narratives related to NFC involve using a mobile device as an active communications endpoint. For example, using your mobile to make a payment at the point of sale.

However, I want to understand the potential of the passive endpoints. TheNFC tokens that remain inactive until powered by a sensor — such as anOyster card or contactless credit card.

Remembering that the Small Data fringe of the Internet of Things will be powered by these passive tokens that will help us build a physical-to-digitallink between the things that surround us and the machine readable datapoints that will unlock data-driven insights about the world.

5 interaction patterns

Thinking through various scenarios, I’ve developed 5 interaction patterns for using passive NFC tokens:

The Transaction

The Dispatch

The Signal

The Token as Totem

The Disposable Token

In my current project at MOO, I’ve been thinking a lot about potential future scenarios for printed electronics (e.g. embedded NFC chips), connected products– and as of yesterday a colleague put the term ‘intelligent materials’ on my radar. All of these technologies form the ‘small data’ fringe of what is popularly referred to as the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) – although perhaps more appropriately named, ‘ubiquitous computing’.

Early concepts for a mobile-based visual development environment

MIT neuroscientists find the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds.

We're gathering the tools together to model every tangible and perceivable aspect of our experience and environment as virtual reality.

Emerging devices such as Structure.io and Oculus Rift suggest that we're not far off from everyday consumer mobile devices carrying both the means to capture and to immerse you in 3D environments – in other words, you will be able to carry virtual universes around in your pocket.

However, once we've rigged up this 3D model of our world, we will only have architected a 'puppet-space' – a universe without a soul.

The challenge of understanding how to create hypercontextual links between objects, in order to create meaningful behaviours in this VR space will be a challenge that will require all of our professional disciplines in society to pull their respective strings to bring the puppet-space to life.

Recently, the online game Glitch shut down. However, in one final and admirable act, the Glitch team put all of its original game artwork into public domain.

That was the first time it caught my attention, sadly, because Glitch was an impressive game. It was impressive not only because it offered a seemingly endless playground for its players, but also in that it provided a limitless canvas for the imagination of its designers– headed up by Keita Takahashi, who created the wildly imaginative Katamari games.

Digging through the wealth of artwork they left behind, you can imagine what a rich world this MMO must have been. There is so much there, it's easy to overlook a link in their Wiki, filed under 'Odds and Ends' called Keita's 200 Quick Ideas.

But don't skip that link, go there now, and I recommend you watch & read every single one. It reveals a glimpse into an incredibly creative mind– but it also describes a process that has already profoundly changed my own process.

The Quick Idea is short, visual and disposable.

Short– 'quick' to be exact. Takahashi seems to draw or animate as little as possible as quickly as possible in order to express the smallest atomic idea. Keeping it short, like a tweet, keeps it uncomplicated and easy to understand. It also means that it doesn't take much time to create.

Visual – a quick animated doodle seems to communicate what might take a few pages of a design document.

Disposable – the ideas are almost a stream of consciousness. In this way, Takahashi has presented his ideas to the team softly- you can take it or leave it. It's not a design requirement, nor does it always have to be sensible. Instead, Quick Ideas are an opportunity for the team to get involved as the idea takes shape and becomes real.

A simple thing, but I've found it revelatory. In the past I might jot down a few notes, or sketch a few ideas – and some of those might make there way into a document eventually. Now, I'm doing Quick Ideas like the one below, and never looking back.

I've been spending a lot of time working with Vine, the 6 second video format. I'm particularly interested in just how much information can be communicated in 6 seconds. Below is a Vine of the entire collection of paintings held on a floor of the SFMOMA –

Before Vine, I was doing video experiments where I compressed full-length films down to 1 minute in length. I was amazed that, having seen the film, I could remember everything again- scene-by-scene.

As with most things we're catching up with science-fiction. In the 80s, Max Headroom had an episode about 'blipverts' – a form of advertising compressed and accelerated to the point of fatally overloading the viewer's brain. But what technology the older generation fears, the younger generation accepts as normal. I'm interested in what happens when we speed things up – how much data can we compress into our limits of perception, cognition and comprehension.

If Calvin Klein's Obsession lies between love and madness, Peter Molyneux's Curiosity lies somewhere between obsessive-compulsive disorder and repetitive strain injury.  

It's also genius, and points the way to tapping into the only infinitely renewable and infinitely valuable resource – people's time.

Bitcoin, the digital currency, popularised the concept of time and processing power as a measure of value. Allowing my computer to run algorithms 24-hours a day to yield something to which we can attribute worth in terms of goods or services.  Before that, you might allocate your computer's processing power to search for aliens or cure cancer.  Bitcoin took that practical value and added a layer of abstraction– where the effort itself is stored in virtual form, like digital potential energy that can be converted into something real at a future date.

When I was working for a luxury brand, creating digital products, I began to wonder how luxury translates to the world of digital.  Luxury products are differentiated by their attention to detail, craftsmanship and the use of rare or difficult to source materials.  But Luxury is also about time.  Having the time to browse products at your leisure.  Having the time to have someone talk you through all of the different types of materials available for your upholstery.  As an extension of that, I realised that digital luxury could be some form of encoded time product – like bitcoin.  Could you make a luxury digital product woven out of bitcoin thread?

Curiosity has taken that idea, of the investment of time to create value, and applied it to a game.

The basic premise is that you tap on the individual squares, and reveal bits of the layer beneath.  There are so many bits comprising the layer of a cube, that it's an impossible task for a single person – so the task is distributed across all players (about 11,000 when I joined) – with the incentive of one single player revealing the final tile and getting a reward.

(I had the idea for the Billion Dollar WebCube in 2006 - too bad I didn't get a patent.)

In a way, this form of 'gold mining' is more valuable than BitCoin – CPUs will continue to get faster - lowering the premium on computations-per-millisecond. On the other hand, I've tried various ways of playing curiosity, some of which put my at risk of RSI, ultimately I was limited by the speed at which my fingers could tap the screen.  Human processing speed cannot follow Moore's Law.

I've spent a few days lost in the world of Google Scripts after looking into the current range of Google products for a project I'm working on.

Now I'm no coder– I gave coding up over 15 years ago for product design and strategy, but I did get a degree in Computer Science, so maybe I'm not afraid to jump into code as much as another designer or planner.

But I think non-coders need to understand some of the amazing things you can do, with not a lot of effort.

Here's the result of a few days of hacking:

It's not much to look at, I know, but bear with me.  That's the just the raw data in a Google spreadsheet.  What I've done is load my Twitter timeline, keeping only the tweets that have links in them.  That's what you see in blue.  

Then I've expanded those links, and pattern matched them against a blacklist of website urls and twitter usernames.  I've built up this blacklist to exclude the noise– such as all the instagram and foursquare links. 

The idea is to extract the signal (good links) from the noise.

Once that's done, it starts to get interesting:

Here you can see that I've pulled all of the domains from the links coming through my timeline and counted them up.  I'm starting to get some analytics on the most tweeted about sources of information.

So now that I've got all these great links what to do with them?  The final step was to push them all into Pocket:

Which is a pretty great way to scan through all the interesting links people post– rather than in my Twitter feed.

And finally– Google lets you run scripts on a timed interval.  Which means I can switch everything off, and I still getting my links from Twitter pushed through to Pocket.

Language is a substrate for thought. A means of translating figures that exist as pure idea into a form that can be communicated. Some ideas can be expressed as speech or transcribed in writing. Other ideas defy literal translation and can only be represented through visual imagery or music. 

Language not only expresses our thoughts but shapes how we think. Fleeting ideas become higher-ordered and more structured concepts through the linguistic scaffolding we use to "think them through." 

Ideas put through the filter of a language either benefit from its semantic richness and depth of syntax- or they have expressive bits of meaning shaved off from the edges, as if by crude tools, from a language lacking the ability to fully communicate robust concepts. 

Languages form personal and cultural identities. Memes given form and shape by language find receptors in our minds and change us.  There are words that can't be expressed in any other language.  Japanese contains layers upon layers of social deference, which reinforces generations of cultural values.

The point of all this is to say – a language becomes an intrinsic part of who we are, and how we think.

So what then of programming languages?

First of all, I would argue that programming languages are not languages at all.  They are not written forms of spoken word.  There are only a handful of them that can (almost) sensibly be read aloud.

Programming languages are actually a kind of sophisticated calculus. They are a system of communicating a programmer's intent into a machine's functional algorithms.

The problem is– coding, or rather the need for the final product– a programmed application– continues to extend to every aspect, and every field of our modern lives.  And the means of production, the ability to code, is limited to a relatively small part of the society who are programmers– who I would suggest share similar psychological traits and dispositions (I have nothing to back that statement up with other than observation).  This doesn't mean there aren't brilliant outliers, but they are the exception, not the rule – as evidenced by the ongoing discussion led by the statement: "everyone should learn to code."

Like I said - the problem has been framed incorrectly.  Programming languages have evolved and been refined by generations of programmers who share similar traits and the languages themselves reinforce and support the way in which these programmers are most comfortable thinking and creating.  Asking a designer to suddenly become a programmer is as unfair as asking an illustrator to suddenly become an accountant.  

This doesn't mean there aren't 'T' or 'I' shaped people who can do it but it does mean that it's a bit like learning to write with your other hand.  There's a more natural and intuitive way to do it.

We need to change the programming paradigm.  We need to invent new languages, metaphors, input devices and as-of-yet undiscovered means of production to sit as the interface between idea and execution for non-analytical, creative, intuitive and other types of thinkers in our society.