Posts filed under 'technology'
The world in your pocket
Tom Ding writes:
When I discovered last week that my brand new phone gives me unlimited Google Maps on-the-go, I had one of those ‘The Future Has Arrived’ moments, able to locate the nearest pubs and bus stops at a glance. Which got me to thinking about the different functions of a map, and how cleverly Google has partitioned them. You see, Google Maps is useful indeed: It can be a Sat Nav in your pocket or a route-finder on your PC and it has an interface perfectly suited for such quick tasks.
Perhaps though, we should regard it as the latest evolution of the 1920s ‘wrist-mounted, wind-up Sat-Nav’ shown in the picture at the top of this post. Google Maps gives you no context. It is great, so long as you know exactly where you want to go to. It is a road map, not an atlas, and definitely not a globe.
And this is where Google Earth comes in. Here, exactly the same data has been used for something completely different, and this time it is all about looking, rather than finding. Instead of the watch, I think of Google Earth as being a modern equivalent of the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican- somewhere that you go when you cannot see a place first-hand, somewhere that you could easily lose a few hours and somewhere that not enough people know about.
And Google Earth is getting better. We are now all free, in a Wikipedia-esque spirit of collaboration, to hack the program, at least a little bit, and create our own ‘layers’ dedicated to whatever topic we choose. Just this week, someone has published a layer called “Crisis in Darfur“. There is a layer of “Lighthouses in New Zealand” and another of Frank Gehry buildings. With all of this within a couple of clicks reach, I can’t help but feel like Google is biding their time here- waiting for their user-generated library to reach a critical mass before they tell the world about it.
By then, it will not just be an old fashioned globe, but an encyclopedia inside a globe. We will be able to visually explore almost any subject by geography, by topic and by time. And then, well, then the future really will have arrived.
Add comment 5 November 2008
7 million litres of water
Jo Phillips writes:
Our More London office reopens today after two days of closure following the Great Flood of Tooley Street. Some took the fact that the nearby Greater London Assembly building was out out of action in the week of the mayoral elections as a bad omen for Ken Livingstone. The events have demonstrated rather vividly the vulnerability of all city infrastructure; you might have thought a fifth floor office would be immune (I did), but servers and electricity supply in the basement are - unsurprisingly - vulnerable to street level flooding. Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital was similarly affected.
In this instance, 7 million litres of water poured out of a burst water main. But it gives us a glimpse of a possible future London — as we see more climate-change related extreme weather events, what will change? What I learnt was that crises in the real world push us further into the virtual world. With email and phone systems down, our company used text messages and a blog to disseminate important information. Local residents similarly used the SE1 community forum to communicate with each other. One possible outcome is an increase in mobile working (or more exactly, ‘extended working’, in which the workplace is extended in space and time), but this leads to interesting questions about infrastructure. Maybe not that sensible to leave it below street level when the local flood risk map looks like this:
So maybe there’s likely to be less emphasis on managing your own infrastructure, and more on getting it delivered to you as a service by a supplier - already a strong developing trend, as Nicholas Carr blogged this week. Having servers down in the basement may provide an illusion of control, but would not prove very resilient in a world of increasing environmental risk.
Add comment 30 April 2008
Usability and simplicity
Andrew Curry writes:
Our former colleague Chad Wollen, who has spent the last few years working for digital media companies, sent me a cartoon by Eric Burke that’s being going the rounds in the digital community:
Judging by the response to the original post, it’s clearly struck a nerve among designers and programmers, even provoking some discussion about the purpose of jokes.
What’s interesting, reading the comments, is that people are taking a somewhat ‘binary’ view of simplicity (it’s either ‘good’ or ‘bad’). As John Maeda reminds us in his Laws of Simplicity, it’s a bit more complicated than that. One of the ‘laws’ of simplicity, he suggests, is to ‘reduce’, for example by removing functionality - the Apple and Google trick. But he also reminds us that simplicity often requires knowledge on the part of the user, that “simplicity and complexity need each other” - and that “some things can never be made simple”. The design skill is knowing what can be, and why.
Add comment 17 March 2008
Cultural values, design, and global production
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
I recently read WPP’s annual journal of marketing insights, Atticus, and noted an interesting point towards the end of an article called ‘Getting the little things right’, by a team at the digital agency Digit, in London. [Not currently online, unfortunately].
They discuss how product and service design, in particular for electronic media, tends to reflect ‘Californian’ values, which include ‘pragmatism (a can-do attitude and belief in prototyping), audacity (focus on innovation and the pioneering spirit) and a certain lightness of touch (playfulness and optimism)’. Perhaps not surprising, they say, since so many user interface principles came out of Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s. When one thinks of Apple, for example, it’s easy to see how these values translate into product experience.
But users in other regions expect an experience which reflects their important values. In Europe, this might include ‘conviviality (social not solitary) and quality (craftsmanship, individualism, local provenance). Nokia, for example, has recently shown prototype handsets which embed ‘green values’ and social responsibility.
But as the global design market becomes more integrated, it may become increasingly hard in the future to work out whose values are inherent in services and products.
Image ‘ipod’ copyright 2007 Apple Inc.
Image ‘eco phone’ copyright 2008 Nokia.
1 comment 22 January 2008
iCoursework
Lucy Pickard writes:
In an interesting classroom change, A-level media studies students will now earn 20% of their marks by podcasting or blogging, according to various newspaper reports (Education Guardian, Mail). Formal essays are to be exchanged for voice-presented video clips and informal, blog-based writing in recognition of the skills needed to succeed in media today. The Queen’s English Society was quoted as lamenting the loss of traditional essay-based coursework, but the OCR exam board maintains that the changes are in line with both the growing demand for a ‘more modern and exciting’ media studies qualification and recent media developments.
The image is from the business blogging site RSSApplied.com
Add comment 5 January 2008
New ways to donate
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
With the rise of CSR and increasing interest in pro bono work, I was struck by an article in last week’s Economist which describes the range of projects now available which use spare processing capacity on ordinary PCs. They range from the biggest and best known, SETI@home, which started in 1999 searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, and now has over 3 million contributors, to projects looking for the next prime number. Whilst we are used to the idea of volunteering about ‘doing good’, donating spare PC processing power suggests we could think more laterally about how we can share under-used resources.
What is also interesting is the ever widening pool of those who might volunteer in this way. A growing number of other devices, including games consoles, also contain significant amounts of processing power and are internet enabled. One of the projects, Folding@home, (which looked at protein simulations) became the largest known distributed computing network thanks to its 40,000 plus PlayStation 3 volunteers.
Add comment 17 December 2007
Online couch potatoes
Becky Rowe writes:
Watching TV on your own or looking to indulge in the irreverent wit of a bunch of Guardian Unlimited readers? Then log on to the ‘Real time telly – talk about it now’ thread. The premise is that you can chat about what you are watching, whilst you are watching. Particularly good to spice up the solo viewing experience, or if your ‘witty’ comments have been banned by your sofa buddy, but you are still desperate to share…
This phenomenon came to my attention last Saturday when I noticed that the X-factor thread had become one of the most active on the GU discussion boards. Not only is a place to share observations about the contestants, or canvass votes for your favourite, but there is now a real sense of online community around the live Saturday night transmission. A perfect example of what happens when real (if you count X-factor as real!?) collides with virtual
Add comment 26 November 2007
Second Life interview
I know most interviews with site founders teeter on the grim line between marketing and hype, but there’s a surprisingly reflective interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale in today’s Technology Guardian,.
For those of you who haven’t got time to read it, the headline points are:
- Current turnover is $500m (and growing rapidly)
- The value of having its own virttual currency is that it enables micro-transactions.
- Retention of users is only 10% (they think because it takes 4 hours to get the hang of the place). If they can get that to 40 minutes they think that will rise to 50%
- The business model is less abstract than it appears: Rosedale describes it as: “What we are really selling you is computation. We are selling you CPU core. If you buy a 16-acre piece of land, which is about four city blocks, what you are renting is one processor.”
- They have plans to develop the avatars so they can function elsewhere on the web, outside of second life.
- And in response to a question about whether avatars can commit suicide, he says, ‘Yeah, in fact I think someone’s going to write a great dramatic book about that some day”.
Andrew
Add comment 17 May 2007
