target is new

The fifth edition of the Quantified Self Amsterdam meetups took place in Mediamatic on Monday May 21. It was hot and humid outside and melting inside. Quite a bunch of the 100 registered attendees showed up. It was a pleasant evening with lots of good people around and some fine talks.

Reflecting through these talks on the Quantified Self attitude is interesting. Merel Brouns showed a marvellous piece of tangible registry of life. 365 days divided by the hour, captured in drawings, notes and colored tape. This piece of QS art is really a fine representation of all QS people that found pleasure and fulfilment in the registry itself. That is a very important part for a lot of the people doing these kind of activities. The learning of life emerges from the act not from the result in the end. Something the presentation on DIYbiology underlines too.

On the other hand we had a great talk of Taco Ekkel, who just have delivered the Goodmove app to the Apple appstore. Apart from the very insightfull learnings on the struggle with Apples protocols his app stands for a different approach to QS; automated insights. No inputs are required to get insights on your carbon footprint, just by having the app on your iPhone. It is in that sense the opposite of the work of Merel.

He also showed the Nest as one of the few owners in the Netherlands. The hurdles you have to take to connect a smart device out of his context (no support for Dutch wires, no Amsterdam time support) made even more clear how hard it is to make a real smart device.

In his 5 laws for Quantified Self services he underlined the importance of creating real solutions against no effort. The presentation of the heart monitor was for me personal a proof of some aspects that especially are against those rules. However that is probably percieved differently for everyone.

I’m sure it is. I am not the most fanatic QS person; carrying the Fitbit around for so long is a miracle. A thought I had earlier the evening before going to the attent fits my qs experience. I checked in at the falafel place nearby and in the mood of selftracking I added in the tweet my falafel I ordered and ate. It would be great if could have Foodzy tracking my tweets and deducting the mentioning of the falafel, and proposing me via a notication if I want to add it to my foodzy profile. Frictionless.

I really think the Quantified Self movement can divide into two streams. On the one hand we keep the self quantifiers that want to learn from active tracking. On the other hand we see the quantifying merging in the ubiquitous data collection of all kind of services, adding up to my profile that enhance the services themselves. QS will be super important in the first stage for letting people understand what happens during collecting the data.
For me personally this last route fits the most my feeling and interest to keep following the QS developments.

(See also my tweets during the event)

Last Tuesday I visited a new event organized by the PICNIC organization; the innovation mashup. In the morning four speakers shared their visions, of which those from Shell and IDEO stand out. In the afternoon there were different workshops organized to think on innovation. I attended the one of colleague agency Frog to experience their methods of creative collaborative thinking, which is comparable to the approach we have. Sitting together with people from different backgrounds thinking on a case was a good experience.

In stead of doing a full report I publish my Storified tweets. Marcel Kampman did a nice video report of the day too.

This year I attended NEXT Berlin for the first time. The conference had an interesting theme with post-digital, spot on as far as I’m concerned, and with that, a bunch of very interesting speakers were programmed. It turns out that the conference had a bit strange mixure of great content and modest vibes. I felt a gap between conference topics and majority of attendants. A fact that is interesting alone of course. But let’s focus on the content, which was very interesting. I also collected my tweets on Storify.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I attended the 7th edition of The Next Web conference. Just like the last years, the conference puts a strong focus on the startup culture, hotter than ever. This year however the startup competition was not mixed up with the conference track, a separate room was dedicated to the vibrant world of entrepreneurs. The best ones were presented at the conference stage. This concept has good and bad aspects. The level of presentations of startups does not always meet the expectations of the conference audience, on the other hand is it part of the whole atmosphere and vibe of The Next Web. When you only follow the main track you miss a bit the startup roots.

That said let me focus on the main learnings of the conference. The speakers offered a mix of stories, as always with different quality and impact. Overall some important themes can be detected. As the first keynote speaker - Alexis Ohanian - showed in a graph: the digital and the real are highly connected nowadays. That together with the sense of data going mainstream were the main themes of the conference.

On the first day the talk of Hilary Mason stood out. She clearly showed the way data from bit.ly – the twitter link shortener – tells stories. How humans can be defined from the clicks. She started by pinpointing to the special position of a data scientist. Interesting to see that people are already manipulating the data exhaust to tell the stories they want.

Andrew Keen focused on the role data and the way our social internet use is infiltrating in our real life. His rhetorics are not mine and he was borrowing a lot from others, like the data oil, and you as a product, but the developments he sees are true of course. Robert Scoble at the end of the day was also pointing to the freaky that is crossed. I refer to this with ‘the uncanny valley of relevancy’ where we reach a state of personalised services that are too far from reality, to shiney. As ever Scoble did a presentation with a heap of examples, from a tabbed browser. It was his scenario for 2030. It will be sooner, and definitely develop not with a sunny path scenario as he sketched. For me the attention he and Keen gave, made me realize we are entering soon a state of data consciousness.

Another important theme are always the learnings from and for startups. The talks of AirBnB founder Joe Gebbia and Phil Libin of Evernote both did a good job there. Joe underlines the fact you should be working for your own passion and not starting with a an idea that should conquered the world. In short: solve what’s right in front of you, design at the beginning. Do things that don’t scale. 100 lovers are more important than 1 million likes. And iterate. He did not go deep in the success factors of his service, besides that it foremost an open platform that enables the entrepreneurship of others. I think the importance of focusing on all the aspects of making that entrepreneurship hassle free is the success, including the trust factor. His story proves again that the idea is just a small part of the success; execution is the defining factor.

Libin from Evernote gave a lecture on the business models of a modern online company. Freemium as leading model, where working on people to stay using the platform is the best guarantee to turn them in paying customers. Do that with a sharp focus on what your product is solving, how it changes the world. We are in the end now in a geek meritocracy.

Business models are also the central story of Mark Randall from Adobe, he showed a nice strategic tool to go beyond of strategies. Go for the magic, the emotion, the meaning. Combining different functions describes a product.

A different set of tools was presented by Gabe Zicherman; a preacher of gamification, often seen as ‘evil genius’ in the game design world. He started his talk with underlining that gamification is more than a trick, game design is a serious craftsmanship. Nevertheless he put it is quite simple: go for feedback, friends and fun. After that a bunch of examples did the trick for inspiring the audience to do the opposite from craftsmanship.

It was one of the more superficial talks of the conference, part of other power haleluya that also Keil and Dawson provided. It is the mix that The Next Web offers. Balanced luckily by talks like the one from Susan Crawford, pleading for consciousness in protecting access to the Internet infrastructure.

In a sense Jonathan Macdonald connects both themes nicely in his talk. He shows us what could be the consequence of the growing data consciousness, if we are realizing that companies are in need for our data, we will have privacy as a service. Build meaningful stuff. Treat privacy as a precious metals and build only the future you want. The future is what we design it to be. A nice mantra to connect to this The Next Web conference.

Last Wednesday I attended an edition of the Facing Forward lecture series. Topic of this one was future city and two keynote speakers shared interesting views. China Miéville is author and professor and for me most known of his wonderful book The City & The City that predicted the state of the current cities with different populations living together and ‘unseeing’ each other at the same time. Check this analysis of Nicolas Nova.
Rem Koolhaas was the second keynote, he needs no introduction; he is maybe the most famous architect of our times.

The two talks differed a lot in form. Miéville did a formal lecture, with some slides to underline his scholarly statements. Koolhaas used a lot of architectural visual analysis to build his point that the countryside is an important and neglected part of the discussion on the city. His talk was provocative in the subject but rather straight forward in the form. More accessible and fun. Miéville’s talk was the contrary; highly conceptual and well-spoken, with more constructed theory.

I am not aiming to do a report in any way. On Storify I collected some of the quotes that gives an impression. What I like to focus on is one aspect that was touched in the panel by the chairman, Christoph Lindner. Both speakers refers on the impact of our data driven world in the landscape. Miéville talked on the data building in the heart of New York City that was made famous by Kevin Slavin in his algo-talks. And there are will be more. Koolhaas mentioned the data farms that are not hiding anymore in the countryside.

One of the things of the talk of Miéville showed us how cities are more of a decor for our living, a set where we live in, highly planned and composed to leverage our consumption. There is a disconnection with the original city concept in the city in that sense.
Koolhaas asked himself how city behavior is taken over typical country sides. Like farmers that behave more and more like office workers behind the computer. In the way the space is used there is hardly any difference, he showed us. A bit constructed, interesting though is the way modern flex workers are entering the countryside because in our service economy people are unconnected from the city.

The necessary connections between people that makes citylife prosperous, is replaced with the digital layer we build on our own lives, or integrated in our relations. After hearing the two talks I felt this story emerge: the disconnection of our physical presence and behavior and our virtual layer we all integrate. In the virtual cities we shape and where we live most of our times, we need frozen spaces where we organize frictions with each other, both in the city as in the countryside. The differentiation will not be between the city and the countryside but between the planned context and the open context. We fill in the open spaces with our own virtual layer. In that virtual space we are building the real future cities. And therefore I strongly agree with Lindner that the virtual data space was the angle that missed in the talks on the future city.

Tonight (March 30) the last edition of This happened Utrecht will take place. I really regret I have to miss this edition, especially because I visited all previous eleven editions in Utrecht. The followers of my blog know I developed a routine in defining a theme for every edition in my blogposts. Maybe I will complete the series based on the videos, I will miss the IRL vibes that are important. For now I like to share some thoughts on the 11 previous editions of This Happened Utrecht and thank the organizing team – and Kars as initiator – for lots of inspiration the last 3 years.

Before sharing some overall learnings, let’s think of some talks that stood out for me and I remember well. And of course I miss a lot. See all my posts here.
One of the first editions had the makers of the Things app. I still remember my surprise in the unplanned way they developed the product, which was great, and still is with the new cloud version.
On the other hand the talk of Daan Roosegaarde was one of the best of all talks by the way he theorizes his work, he is thinking on the design and creating a factory of art.
Vlambeer stood with me as one of the youngest presenters with unmatched enthusiasm. The were one of the discoveries of This happened for sure and are stars now in the indie games scene I think.
The presentation of Elger Blitz I liked a lot on the way he was combining a huge amount of theoretical knowledge with experiment, playfulness and one of the key examples in creating effective open-ended play.
The presentation of Matt Cottam on its Wooden Logic was beautiful and above all the most poetic of all.

It This happened stands above all for me for a makers culture. Better do stuff than plan doing. Learn of the process of making.
This only can work with a good context. A context that is defined by the passion and vision of the makers. Making without a drive will not result into a good product. And secondly it important to be open for change. Be surprised and go for the learnings of the process. The recipe for open-ended products goes as much for the route.

This happened successfully proved how game design, product design and interactive art all are part to the modern interactive experiences where online feeling is default. Maybe not even explicit for everyone, but for me This happened defined and fundamented the new era of postdigital life as one exploratory research program. I’m sure this inspiration will last.

I wish Kars, Ianus, Alexander and all visitors a unforgettable evening!

For the second time I attended the Lift conference in Geneva this year. Last year it turned out to be one of the best conferences of the year, with some key talks, like the one of Kevin Slavin on algoworlds that was repeated often in course of the year. So expectations were high again. I cannot say of course if the conference will have the same impact, but it was certainly a great experience again with some great talks that mirror our next future.

My tweets on Storify give an overview of the complete conference. There were too many talks to discuss them all. Anaïs Saint-Jude, did a nice talk showing information overload is all times, Marcel Kampman made a successful attempt for the most smashing slides, Fabian Hemmert with some good insights in research driven design for mobiles, and the hilarious last session on extreme hacking.

For me the key talk this year was the one of James Bridle. I think his code/space story hits the central theme in the developments we are in now. There were more people that touched the subject. Sebastian Deterding mentioned code/space in his solid talk on gaming. And Ben Bashford did a great talk that set the context of our products with empathy. But the way James did peel down the concept was outstanding for me.

I saw James speak on Future Everything last year where he touched on the algoworlds ideas and saw online some presentations on the new aesthetic, a strong meme he coined. and it is interesting to see the story develop with new layers. The strong part is the way he makes the concept concrete in his project A Ship Adrift: where a ship that is lying on a building in London is enhanced with a life in code/space; every turn of the wind let the virtual mirror ship blow to that direction, in the meanwhile grabbing localized content from Foursquare, Wikipedia and fora turning it in a kind of Nordic polari when it starts to respond to people.

The code/space is all about the way we are living in this post digital context where our living space looses value as soon as the digital layer is disconnected. An airport is a clear example, but with us depending on our own digital context for our living, it is everywhere now. Bots are becoming integrated in our life. Two third of the editors on Wikipedia are bots.

The consequence of this code/space is more a complex systemic society. In the well curated game session on Thursday Tom Armitage showed us how we can deal with this society, how we can get system literacy by using games. The proces of actions and outcomes in rule based context shapes meaning.

Kars Alfrink took this a step further. Gaming is not a way to understand the systemic world, it is our mean to reach our sense of agency. We have to be aware at the same time that games are the same as life. We have simulation fever. But games can be performative like our language is. “I declare you husband and wife” changes a state in our life. We can make games that empower people, player-centric. In that sense games ca play an important role to a better world in our networked publics.

Sebastian Deterding turned it around and showed us what happens when we are in the end situation that our life is fully gamed. Gamification is the logical next phase in the code/space. The question is if we wanted to be manipulated like that. He showed us that adding game elements to the system, the intentions change. If you add incentives or goals to anything, you will get unintended behaviours. He quoted Foucault: “every technology that is used to control people, can also be used by the same persons to rule their ‘selves’”. It is all on how we relate to the rule system, whether we actively decide to make use of them or take a manual override.

It is interesting to connect this to the future scenarios of our financial system that David Birch very well sketched. The four scenarios for 2050 as build by the long finance showed different directions it can go. From a domination on virtual currencies to a barter based society (we are already see some examples). He expects the ‘Many Hands’ scenario as most likely, where cities dominate the world and competition between different moneys play an important role. How will we act in this new systemic context?

The talk of Tricia Wang gave insights in the way the social systems work here. In her high density talk full of research insights she showed for instance how trustworthiness + out circle + in network = participation.

The difference between you social circles and social network: Social circles is about the people you already know. Social network is about entities we don’t have a personal relationship with. It expands our relations based on common interest.
Your social graph is about trust. Sharing is a way to discover trust. This maps the possible roles of play.

Faride Vis gave us insights in the way twitter works with crowd control in her research to the relation between Twitter and the UK riots. What is interesting on her analysis is the way Twitter creates a new reality on the riots. As James Bridle tweeted; the analysis says nothing on the riots, only on the twitter behavior. On the other hand it could become an tool for crowdcontrol when people are reacting to the tweets. In that sense twitter is an important element of our code/space.

Another aspect is the way machines have place in this. Ben Bashford did great talk on the design of machines with empathy. With the embedding of social systems every computer is connected to people. If we see everything with a processor as computer, than a lot of the new products we are using are human. Think of this: as you cross an airplane with a computer, what do you get? A computer! Think of new products like Nest, Izon camera or Nike wristband. Still hard for retailers to categorize (miscellaneous).

Computers (and so all products) are going to talk back to us. The conversational UI. It is not anymore on what products are doing, but how they are doing it. Antropomorphism, system personas are important. The biggest challenge to avoid the uncanny valley. Clever designers go for the canny basecamp and go for the minimal viable person. How minimal you can go to become viably. Think pixar lamp, and light MacBook that simulate life by resembling a heartbeat in light.

Technology should create calm, not asking for attention all the time. We want to achieve the effect plants have. One plant is calm, more plants is more calm.
The beautiful seams. Telepathy between machines, agent centered design as computers are becoming agents. Don’t think we should make machines that empathizes with us, the empathy should be ours. Getting back to the talk of James Bridle: we should love our bots on the character they have, they will be an important part of our empathy with the products we use. They give us the sentience of our code/space.

So here lies the essence of this year’s Lift in my belief. Last year Kevin Slavin learned us how algorithms will define more and more of our life, and the disconnection we have with this world. This year we see a code/space that is much closer to us. We still need the literacy to deal with it.

For the first time the Utrecht-based This happened event was organized in Amsterdam. In the Vlaams Cultuurhuis De Brakke Grond four speakers dived into the road to some beautiful projects. The venue did a great job to host a wonderful evening again, and the Amsterdam edition has proven already to be a good addition to the Utrecht ones. As always I like to share my thoughts on the talks, and who knows, a theme of the evening will emerge at the end.

The evening started with the project of Belgium collective Unfold called Kiosk, a mobile 3D printer especially made for the Salone Mobile in Milan. The installation wants to discuss the value of products, I guess, but the presentation focused – in the best tradition of This happened – on the developing of the product. In that sense it was interesting to see what iterations the Kiosk made, some earlier models were disapproved becaused it was not enough design. This is of course an interesting statement if you are fighting the concept of high brow design with the art installation.

In the Q&A an interesting discussion evolved around the realness of the prints. Not really important of course, they make a strong point I think to offer this new future of 3D printing in the heart of the design mekka. This idea behind the installation was a bit weakened as the presenter did emphasize the differences of the original and the print due to the quality of the prints.

The second speaker was Edo Paulus who showed the lovely project of SonOrb, a sound installation made for the Klankspeeltuin in the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw aimed at children aged 7 to 12. His inspiration was the insight that abstract electronic sound normally has not the direct relation with the playing as acoustic sound does. This installation tries to add a physical handling to abstract electronic sound.

Edo showed how he used a lot of low tech solutions to create his installation. This was both caused by the circumstances, but brings also an extra robustness with the easy to replace elements. It seems as if the most of his design choices were a kind of incident like the choosing for the ballerina balls, that fits the right weight and characteristics for the children, and also make it foolproof when thet kids throw the balls around. The execution of the ideas of Edo showed a nice way of craftmanship in buidling an appealing work. With the way he was thinking on the volumes and the composition of the modular system he showed a true designer.

What was a bit underexposed was the way the installation was used by the children. In the Q&A we learned that the children could not play by themselves, an supervisor is necessary to get better experiences on the one hand and prevent misuse. It would be interesting to see if it was possible to have the same installation in a complete open play mode. On the other hand was the quote of Edo in reaction very strong: you need a clear framework to play more freely.

The third speaker was Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen of LUSTlab. In contrary to the other speakers he made more of a lecture on his visions than a talk on what happened in the design proces, however he touched some important choices en passant. In that sense his talk resembles a lot the way Daan Roosegaarde presented once at This happened. If the speaker and the story is as strong as that of Daan and also Dimitri , it delivers a very nice experience though. In the talk the consequences of our move to an Internet of Things were clearly sketched and the project that was put central was Res Sapiens, a set of the cheapest IKEA lamps that have an emotion to it by its moves. The interesting part is the energy that moves the lamps, which is public data of the Internet. Data and form was the central theme of his presentation. The objects are a translator of the data to emotions, the objects become an interpreter and a hub between people via the data.

The most interesting part of this talk was triggered by the question Kars Alfrink asked on the role these research could play to shape this kind of emotional products that are fed with data, and this enhanced IKEA lamp may well be the future of our products.

This kind of intertwining of our real world and the digital space are definitely also part of the last project that was presented that evening. Tim Knapen showed his older project Godmode, an installation where all kind of drawings are translated to animated creatures. The device itself is an old copy machine equiped with beamer, digicam and computer. The interesting part is the way he made the algorithms for the translation from the drawings to animated creatures. He wanted to make something that could work for every drawing with hardly any restrictions. It was nice to see how he is inspired by the creatures of Theo Jansen, because I see some resemblance in the way Theo Jansen made algorithms to simulate evolution in order to find the perfect dimensions of the legs of its creatures. In that sense was the solution of Tim less sophisticated because it misses the self learning aspect. But the way the animation learns is beautiful. And so is the result.

Tim Knapen did a real This happened presentation both in the presenting of the working process and the road to the result. In this first Amsterdam edition we saw less variation in projects. No games or applied products, all the projects were well thought-through installations. That did not make it a weaker (or better) edition, it was interesting to see though.
All talks had a kind of relation to our emerging post digital world we are shifting into now, the code/space context we are living in. Post digital could be defined bluntly as the reversal of digital and reality: in stead of a digital world that copies reality is our real world more and more acting following the rules of the digital. The projects of Tim Knapen and LUSTlab are directly related to this, and the Kiosk of Unfold is of course the mirror for the believers of a superior real world. Edo Paulus mentioned it as his inspiration for his project; how to make the digital abstractness into a physical world. He showed a form of interfaces that will be an important first stage in our will to get in touch with our digital context.

The guys from This Happened (@kaeru, @ianus, @dmos) did again a wonderful job in orchestrating such hands-on tangible interpretation of the transformations we are experiencing in our digitized life. Hope to be present again at the next edition on March 30 in Utrecht or at a possible THAMS #2!

Monday January 30 I attend the kick-off event of the Dutch branch of the Singularity University. I had to miss the first two speakers but the rest of the program managed to deliver a pile of information that presented the visions of the Singularity University.
Read the rest of this entry »