blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

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.

We have almost reached the state when the simulation of sports will practically seem as real as what is being simulated – maybe one or two generations of hardware to go, then we’re there. If you stand a couple meters away from the screens of current consoles, it’s already almost indistinguishable.

I’m asking myself whether this will have an actual effect on the various sports themselves, the weekly spectacles. Will they be strong enough to stay interesting when their consumers (the ones that usually watch them televised) can actually participate? Or is is more the unpredictability and debating an individual player’s performance over a beer that makes it so interesting? What about interactions between real and virtual as they already happen in heavily GCI-enhanced replays of penalty shots, would that also work inversely? What happened if real and virtual would perfectly blend in the future?

(PS. Yes, I do prefer Nintendo’s current approach as well, but then again I’m a real sucker for hyper-realism sometimes)

http://www.gwei.org

“Google Will Eat Itself announced that is now fully censored on all Google Search-Indexes worldwide. What a scandal!”

True, a search doesn’t yield their site, but over 40.000 others linking to them. Anyway, here’s one more.

Went to see Pan’s Labyrinth yesterday. Fantastic movie, but we just had to leave the cinema at some point (I went along, that is). A fantasy world’s horror mirrors the horrors of Spain in limbo between civil war and Franco’s dictatorship. A nightmarish monster, torture, euthanasia, murder, a creature being burned to death, death during childbirth – all in a few minutes, very graphic and with no break whatsoever in between.

Interesting to feel again the power of fiction and to see what happens when there’s no trace of comic relief in such kind of narrative – it just got too much. (Badly want to see how it ends, though)

Update: So we watched the end yesterday. Of course, we had left the cinema just before things changed a bit for the better, thus perfectly traumatizing ourselves. The ending is actually really smart, in a kind of biblical way. Resolution through self-sacrification, but in a way that leaves the question of what happened in the end (or possibly throughout the entire story) entirely to the audience. It elegantly creates a divide between story and history while at the same time joining them together even closer. I’d recommend you to watch it. Don’t take drugs before.

And: Guess who Doug Jones, who plays the Pale Man, is as well:

I wish I could say I’ve known it all along.

At the panel about the new photography at the Musée de l’Elysee last Saturday in Lausanne, two questions came up which I found really interesting and worth sharing:

Firstly, is there a profound difference between photography before and after Flickr, in terms of how the moment is treated? Traditionally, the idea of finding (or crafting) the perfect and decisive moment has been the idea behind taking a photograph. There are limited exposures and subjects are fleeting, so better use them well. Nowadays, many of the old-school people argue, photography as such has become an indifferent process in which an almost infinite number of photos can be taken and stored and every artistic decision is gone. Is that really true? I actually don’t think that the classic kind of photography is dead as you can see so many people on the net work aesthetically with their cameras. There is, however, a second kind of photography which appeared with photosharing and which follows its very own paradigm. This photography is the kind which is much closer to what Flickr actually introduced, which is that cameras become just as much tools of communication as they are tools of photography. Here. the moment is a slice in time and the metaphor related to the moment is more one of a stream of consciousness out of which we take impressions than isolated aesthetic products. Very sensibly, Flickr call this the photostream. It’s for that differentiation I feel that I need to maintain my different Flickr personalities, plugimi is more about the crafted moments whereas saschapohflepp is the stream of impressions that i want to share with the world.

The other interesting question was, whether a screenshot from Second Life would qualify as a photo. Another one of those SL-paradoxons. But, I’d rather argue for yes I think. It’s difficult to make a point for that, but as a virtual simulation where individuals have real encounters and interact with the world, a representation of it should count as a photo. Maybe it only comes full circle this way since digital photography is half virtual already if you argue from the standpoint of representation through data. Many people are feeding their photostreams already with shots from their second lives (often alternating with photos from their first life), which for Flickr increasingly poses the same question. So far, their answer is no, by the way.

On a totally different note: Has anyone ever researched about how *much* music actually is becoming part of our working reality only due to the fact that we work and listen on the same machine?