Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

Visiting a friend’s place that has before been heavily featured on Flickr is no different from visiting a set where a familiar movie was shot. The similarities between social media and narrative media, as we tried to sketch with this project in 2005 are becoming increasingly visible and are merging into one stream.

Everyone’s an actor now, creating a great number of what Jyri Engeström calls Social Objects on the way. Maybe even TV shows like Big Brother were an early sign of that, in the way that they turned the private (although it is a scripted private) into a form of entertainment. Consequentially, according to psychiatrists in Montréal, there’s now what they call the Truman Show Disorder, which has people believe they actually are actors in a script.

News from an optimistic future, curiously plausible with sunny Sunday afternoon, Jonathan Richman and Yo La Tengo playing. (Via BB)

The other day, thanks to Jyri, I became able to use Spotify, something I had long been wishing to try out. This happened mostly through Twitter and mobile e-mail, so when I got home to east London and installed the software, it seemed to me as if someone had given me a million CDs on the bus and said “here you go”. It’s sounds funny, but I still don’t quite know how to use it, because the step from having your songs on your device to having all songs (let’s just assume their service carries everything) in the cloud seems quite big. And there’s different aspects to it as well–

iTunes, as an example, basically mirrors a physical record collection which is naturally limited by factors like storage space and money. The notion of the collection however, also implies something else, which is really important with music as a personality vehicle. A collection reflects its owner’s taste and thus serves to distinguish him or her from others, something that usually comes into full effect in puberty and, at least for me, although less strongly, has functioned like that ever since. So, with iTunes, that paradigm is still intact, it even gets extended by people browsing each others iPods on the go and, probably most importantly, constantly exchanging digital files of songs they love.

If you look at the notion of a server-based everything always available-paradigm now, there’s a problem, because, at least in the case of Spotify which even though it works wonderfully, is still lacking any true collection building-features and/or social exchange. These are things that are probably relatively trivial to implement, but they need to be considered. Last.fm, who have recently announced a future business model that is also largely cloud-based, originally came from a completely different corner, because they started with the social aspects. Only now they are including actual playback possibilities, at least for complete songs. As a result of that, the networking aspects of their site are extensive and recognize the social function of music well beyond anything else, with personal data that often reaches back tens of thousands of songs, event attendance and not always successful taste-matching. Presently, they seem to be in a much better position, because if they give their uses access to everything, the framework for showing off, liking, hating, and having a crush on someone’s musical taste will already be in place.

And, I can’t forget to mention Soundcloud here, the lovely people who introduced me to Spotify in the first place on some afternoon in Berlin. Their approach is much more low-level and allows you to get in touch with the music and the musicians on a post-and-comment basis, almost like Flickr for music. They take the social aspect even further, towards interaction, and I’m really curious how that will shine.

Blogging far and between, promise to improve, especially on what’s happening at the college. Two projects already finished (Turky, that smart little robot and The Sunlight Exchange) and somewhat waiting for proper write-ups as well as for a bit of documentation and alterations. Current one is about “The Future of Money”, a topic which I find immensely interesting (see earlier posts) but unfortunately there’s not much time. Here are a few thoughts as of Monday, will hopefully evolve significantly until next Tuesday–

“Wall Street, Half Past 2 O’Clock” by James Cafferty and Charles Rosenberg, depicting the moment when NY’s upper-class realize that they have lost everything they had deposited with their banks.

What happens to the money we have stored as information in our bank accounts–or basically all assets which virtually represent a certain value–when something really bad happens? Really bad means system-shattering, something which will potentially render what was formerly highly valued almost worthless, either through inflation or general collapse of the monetary exchange system as we know it. I am currently thinking about something that closely resembles flight data recorder (aka “black box”, even though they are usually bright red) and might be attached to a wall or hidden in a closet. In an exceptional situation like a desaster or any other kind of mishap, the owner can chose to detach it from the wall in which case it will freeze the assets and either contain them for future use or transform them into something more useful. That something might be of immediate use, for example items which are tradeable like nutritious food or cigarettes, but it might also be something that is as abstractly valuable as the original money, for example information about how to leave the city or such which might also become a commodity under such circumstances.

By the way – We have an open day on Friday the 7th, please come around the studio at the RCA if you got the time. And I live in Bethnal Green now, anyone up for a pint at one of the seedy pubs around, please come forward.

Actually I just wanted to post something about the fact that I will be in London until Sunday to check out the RCA’s Great Exhibition, meet some people and have some funfunfun (so get in touch) – but then I read this:

“If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. In other words that means, that German users can not access photos on flickr that are not flagged “safe”…only flowers and landscapes for Germans.” (Also see here, here and here.)

Oh that’s wonderful Yahoo, thanks for the localization, but you could have spared us of the kindergarten. I wonder how this relates to German law-making since they most likely just react to something with this new policy. In actually even worse news today, Yahoo’s shareholders vetoed and “rejected, by wider margins, proposals to establish a committee to oversee Yahoo’s human rights practices and to require the company to fight censorship and protect freedom of access to the Internet in countries with repressive regimes”. The shareholders were much more concerned with the company’s performance against Google.

Please Flickr, don’t go down that road. DIGG’s been there for an afternoon and it wasn’t pretty. Let’s hope they recognize this mistake and will make all photos accessible again. Otherwise, many users might actually start – for the first time – to really look for alternatives.

Aram Bartholl following me with his bubble. (That’s a girl though) Photo by Mr. Ariel Schlesinger.

I really liked the Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign conference a lot, mostly because the selection of speakers and their order (as excellently planned by Boris Müller), revealed various interesting things about the state of technology-related design.

What probably struck me the most, was the fact that one could roughly divide the lectures into two categories by how they dealt with complexity and simplicity. One group (usually the more business-oriented one) regard their products’ users as consumers with one primary need and a somewhat limited individuality. Someone who wants to buy a flight and likes some extra information or someone who is young, female and into fashion and celebrities.

Catering for those simple needs however, is being presented as an incredibly complex and almost impossible task to do, only to be accomplished by an army of professionals which are able to spin a cross-media web around the yearning customer. A notion which peaked in Mike Richter’s pathetic Don’t try this at home-statement. To emphasize on this, many presentations also featured some kind of diagram which would be presented with this we can’t really go into this right now but this is highly sophisticated, you know (and we’re worth your money, client)-attitude.

The other group also had points about this, but in their view as it seemed, the roles of designs and their users were just the other way around. Here, the individual is being presented as a highly complex and often even troubled human being with a life who has a need for simple designs to take some cognitive load off his or her shoulders. Anthony Dunne made some very good points about complicated needs, Bill Moggridge as well and Dennis & Patrick too. Maybe Bruce Sterling in his lecture-performance put it the most clearly with his hilarious juxtaposition of the iBrush (”Now on the wall, it’s Jobs himself!”) and the smart things which know that they haven’t been used in a year and can be asked to sell themselves on eBay to make their owner’s life a bit less complex and put a little more cash on his bank-account.

Of course this also resonates with John Maeda’s ideas about Simplicity in technology, but apart from the question of how to design, I was astonished by how different the weltbild of those designers was – particularly in their regard for users/consumers.

Also see our coverage on WMMNA.