Honest costs, Closed Market Economics

If we were going to pay for things more reasonably I think we might break them into three groups:

1. Environmental Costs
2. Human Outlay
3. Design Value

I think these are relevant because as far as I can tell so far they represent most of the points of need in a economic chain. The combined cost would look like this:

Amount Paid = Environmental Cost + Human Outlay + Design Value

B2B and other relationship models would also assume this cost system.

Environmental Costs

These are the costs that have been determined by the absolute impact of a thing and all its contributing processes to the environment. A specific value would be associated with these things based on how cheaply they could be cleaned up and then, the money in this aspect of the cost would be used directly for only that. Essentially this cost pays for the removal of the environmental impact of a product. If that is impossible the cost is infinite. (Bad system design. Perhaps that end state could be more elegant later)

Human Outlay

This cost is that of the impression this product makes on the humans in its creation and handling.

Design Value

The perceived value of the design work done in a production cycle. In some respects this is the only subjective part of a pricing I think, though that could just be because I am a designer. 

I know that this approach is not very new but I think an point of innovation could be achieved by standardising various things within the system. For instance, each of the cost analysis systems would have standardised and independently evaluated indexes, also the cost of things would be clearly marked on everything purchasable so it would be very clear to people why things cost what they do. 

One problem that I am not visiting with this model is the fact that economies seem to have a hard time remodelling fast. I do not yet know how to achieve a model like this, or if it would cause major problems because everything would be too expensive

Google Sites not Google's Sights

My new homepage on Google Sites

As I may have mentioned before I am in a gradual shift from Google Pages to Google Sites . So far I have been happy in most respects however there are a few core aspects of Google Sites that really annoys me.

1. No RSS Feeds - Though a user can sign up for email update of changes or posts under a specific title or whatever there are no RSS feeds accessible. I want everything to have feeds and I want to be able to make this site into a blog of sorts.
2. Crap (Fake) Commenting - The commenting is currently either limited to only collaborators or the whole site has to be editable by anyone to allow normal people to leave comments. This is lame, and another thing making it hard to do blog like things.
3. No Scripts, Limited to Gadgets - Because Sites is a hosted solution they rather you not editing the main template's HTML or CSS. However, they have also made it so scripts can not be pasted into HTML content boxes. This means users can only use interactive things that come from the google gadgets library (which is okay but way too small).

One of the reasons these things annoy me is because I really want to test out some of the new Google tools but they have not even made them compatible with the background system. Friend Connect for example, it is far to tough for me to implement such a technology within Google Sites. Hence, I think it would be really interesting if Google made Google Sites into a sandbox of sorts where all the new web technologies could be available to be tested etc. Perhaps this could be something like Blogger in Draft . 

The things I love most

A awesome advanced mechanical pencil I got from Jetpens 

I love stuff, especially products, especially good ones - and, I love telling people what to buy. So I want to make a list of things that I think are good that I think people should buy. However, my opinions are limited by what I own, what I have seen, and what I have heard about online or wherever. So, I want to make this a open project to find the best products of each of a number of categories. The categories may include such things as different kinds of cameras, pencils, watches, jeans, flip flops, and everything else that money can buy. Also, when I say "find the best products" I really mean find the products that suit an unknown list of requirements that I agree with - for now lets just say things that make people happy.

I am not sure what platform to use for this project yet. Perhaps a google spreadsheet thought that might be a bit bland, perhaps a google sites pages. Suggestions? Also any products you love... tell me about them.

Lastly, I need to think of a name for this. One of the driving forces is that I think people have a lot of things they don't need. A lot of bad pens and pencils for instance, so I was considering a name which suggests singular solutions. Something like "Just get this one.com", this obviously is not good so please think of a good one and tell me about it.

LinkedIn Answers and Questions

Answering LinkedIn questions has been quite helpful for me in the past year or so and I have managed to find a few good business contacts as a result however I tend not to ask questions so often. One particular connection that I gained as a result of answering one of her questions is Karen Fu who seems to ask an inordinate number and answer just as many. Recently as I have been working on a wide variety of projects I have come to realise that I could do the same sort of thing as a form of expert research. I feel a bit stupid not trying this earlier but in any case it seems like a great method for the time being.

So I am going to try to ask questions as soon as I find one I am interested in. This way building a wide and active set of data and opinions.

Any suggestions?

Update: It looks like I am limited to 10 per month. My goal is now of course to use all 10 every month.

Better Banking (2.0)

Ammunition's work for Wells Fargo ATMs

I have talked about banking before, and talked about bank related online interfaces, and I think in both cases I have expressed a number of negative emotions. Either way, I was looking over an interesting little design company's website and I came across this image thinking it was their work for a bank website. I realised it was actually for an ATM and became saddened because for a brief moment I thought someone might have actually had some good ideas about web banking. As a reaction I thought perhaps this was a seed for a development process.

So far I like the ideals of simplicity and clarity and I think that online things are perceived as fast and that it is an important aspect of the whole issue of modern banking. More than this however I think data is one of the most relevant things when sitting at a computer so I think providing a lot of really useful data visualisations would be great. Lastly, money needs to have tight security however there are some imaginable instances when some of the more social aspects of the web could come to play. Not sure how yet. We will see.

More to come I hope. Comments and suggestions are encouraged.

Other places and things that begin with KAIST

Recently I have been working on another, new website. I may have mentioned it before but it is starting to actually have pages and content and stuff. I can not get a RSS feed out of it very simply yet so I am not bothering but I hope to at some point. In any case, my new home page is now located at google sites. For now the URL is not really that nice but at some point I am hoping to get a good one.

KAIST Emblem

In other news. I have been accepted to KAIST and have been given the appropriate scholarships to go there. I will be pursuing a Masters in Design Management and Strategy and hopefully learning a lot of Korean at the same time.

In other unrelated news, Soumitri is working on a project that I think is kinda cool and has been pushing me to think more about the before mentioned Google Design School. Also, given the new website etc. I have been commenting on my project more here, than on this blog.

Comments comments comments. Any medium available.

11-11 11:11:11

From Da Zai

Me in Da Zai, we were in a mountainous hotel in room 11

11 is my favourite number which makes November 11th my favourite day. I know this conflicts with most of the world's thoughts on this day so I try not to bother people with my strange habits.

Pepero Box

Also, I should add, 11-11 is Pepero Day in Korea and Singles Day in China which are both related to love and things, a bit like valentines day.

Writing to be translated

With Google Reader's recent new feature, being able to translate all one's feeds into a language of their preference, using Google Translation Tools, it seems the language of the web is becoming less and less noticeable. However, reading the output of translated sites can often remind us of the value of knowing more than one language. The value I perceive is of course having expression for things which are not included in ones base language. French, the language of love has many shortcomings when describing technical situations,  German, great for precise and complex descriptions but with a very different kind of romance, and for my self with asian languages, a word like rènào or 热闹 which has no direct English translation yet describes one of the key things I love about China.

When it comes down to it, Google translator sucks quite a lot, however languages do not make this task easy.

Where do we go from here?

I think there are 2 directions of interest.

1. Write content with the intention of it being translated - For the time being we do not really know what this means I think most of us do not really know how Google Translator works, perhaps however Google could provide some guidelines on how to make things more translatable by their service. I think this could also include a feature which evaluates a given translation task and suggests words that are uncertain or sentience structures that may cause some problems.
   
2. Create a systems of exceptions - If a writer tacks advantage of the specific strengths of a language it will become harder to translate, however those strengths are really important and can offer significant changes in meaning. To deal with this situation I think known exceptions could be added to a system like the Google Translation Tools. These exceptions would extend the ability of the translation system to firs state that there is some difference in meaning and secondly suggest words that may approximate the idea in the target language. The scheme of having user editable results (which google now has) is great but going on to use that data to create richer output would be really fabulous. 

What do you think about this?

Things that start tomorrow

I have not been blogging much recently because I have been travelling and working and not doing this. In any case, I think I might start doing some more because it can be fun etc.

I need to make more of the things that are supposed to start tomorrow start today. But I guess it is getting late, so it will end up being tomorrow again.

Why are most Australian movies bad?

Does anyone else agree that most Australian made movies end up being relatively bad? It is almost like a trademark of the local industry and yet they keep trying and there is quite a lot of related activity with all the movie shows and film festivals.

Tonight I plan to watch a movie with friends that is said to be a good Australian movie, even here in the states, Australia's movies have a reputation that far proceeds them as most people have not seen too many.

Who knows... Any insight would be nice.

eewBay

My first eBay purchase because my phone stopped working recently.

Why is eBay so ugly and why is the user interaction in almost every aspect of their site so archaic. It is a slow and ugly interface which is inconsistent and often breaks a standard browser view size. In terms of interaction the number of times pages have to be reloaded is much higher than could be necessary, not just in the main use of the service but also in the preferences and many of the other pages a user may commonly see. Preferences are often not great in web services but in the case of eBay it is as though they have tried really hard to make them especially bad.

I do not get why this is the case. They are a large company with a lot of money and a lot of engineers, why is it not better?

Rant over.

TinyTop

TinyTop

For fun I modelled something I want to buy. Feature low at the moment...

I have a feeling that this mock up, and the real products in this sector, are not doing it right yet. I think perhaps there is a different approach. Something that is not just touch screen and is not just a tiny laptop. Also something which does not think of its self as a computer but just as what it is. Perhaps like a really good Peek, or not.

Another Special Bugatti

Really pretty Bugatti Veyron

So if I was nice and cared I would know what this car is called and all that sort of thing. As it is I am not that nice and I do not care that much so I will simply say, the above image of some special edition Bugatti Veyron evokes some form of visceral love for me. Perhaps it is the glass roof or the smoorh organic flow decpite the extreem functionalism and mechanical prowess of the design. Alternitavily perhaps I just like white. In any case. I thought other people might like to see this car to.

I found this image among many others on a luxury blog I quite like called Sybarites.

Google Reader knows when you made a mistake

Google Reader knowing what you did not mean to do. 

Back in the day if you accidentally pressed Shift+A in google reader you would find that you had just marked all your items as read. For some people this may not be a problem. For me, it is. I often have 1000 or more unread items, some of which I am deliberately saving so I do not have to keep track of them.

So, just a few moments ago I accidentally pressed Shift+A when going for Shift+S and I got the popup pictured above. Yay for Google's UI team.

Google Chrome the best thing since Electricity

The last page of the carton which includes a near complete description of the service.

Today some people got a strange cartoon in the mail that depicts a great thing from google. Check out the scanned images here. The destination Google Chrome seems to not be live yet.

I am so happy. This is like all the people in government in the USA just turning around and asking the rest of the world, "how did we piss you off and what can we do to make it better?"

What do people think. What browsers do you use.

Haptic Interfaces that do not try to trick

A Crayola Keyboard for Children.

So I often love old button interfaces, the interfaces that have well labelled buttons that go click when you tap them. One of my favourite interfaces in the world is that of the Bang and Olufsen BeoCom 1401 and 1400. The buttons are firm and they offer sublime haptic feedback.

I don't know much about the Crayola keyboard above but I love the design language and I think it is highly representative of reasonable interface design. Perhaps the grid is a little too strong on the alpha keys and perhaps the arrow set is a would take a moment to get used to but I think the idea is much more respectful of users than that of something like the new top end keyboard from Mircosoft. Interestingly as you pay more for a Microsoft keyboard the features become less stupid and in some ways the product is altogether more elegant. You would however, still have to give me one for free to get me to use it.

A really short rant with links I guess. I think interfaces, haptic or not, should not trick people unless they are tricking them into performing better (which Microsoft is obviously not doing)

PreLaptop Portable Computer

Combined display and keyboard terminal William N. Mayer et al:

This is crazy cool. It is actually referenced by the first laptop patent ever (the one that Bill Mogridge is on in any case D280511)

Anyway I love the idea of a flute case computer!

Google Design School

Google Logo for Lego's 50th Birthday

I am in the midst of applying for a interesting looking job. I hate writing cover letters, however I did think of something a little interesting. Google Design School.

Google, as everybody knows has a great line-up of really usable services and they have consistently kept the user at the centre of their design requirements. Being a large company and one that claims one of its core fundamentals "don't be evil" there is a need for a well defined path to avoid the expected corporate evils and ensure a future of great user service. Google has published their interpretation of this path on their corporate home-page and in doing so created a defining structure for others, in the same space and in my opinion, in almost any other industry. My personal interest lies in two of their documents which I think combined could be used to teach comprehensive design thinking, and hence the prospect of a school of design based on the methods and thinking of Google. The two articles are as follows

1. Google User Experience - A casual documentation of what google holds important when considering the user in their products. 
2. Google Philosophy - Seen as "ten things Google has found to be true" and some great insight about good strategy for almost anything, business, design and whatever else. 

I think it would be fun to discuss this more. If anyone wants to help me put together a course outline for a Google Design class it would be a lot of fun. I really think there is a lot of design learning available there and that it could be used to create something really interesting. 

Moving Places - Thinking Stuff - Giving Things

My New Kidneys

Firstly. I think I said previously I am looking to go to KAIST in Daejeon, Korea next year. If anyone knows anyone with input I would love to learn more. For now they have given me a scholarship pledge but we will see how other things turn out. I am also considering doing a US school. Obviously D.School is probably the most attractive for me at this point but that is also in debate.


Next. I am working with a few new people, including a group called SocialAtom.com who do social media marketing with an emerging market tilt. . I am helping them deal with the Chinese market. So far so good.


Additionally I am now also working with a web outsourcing startup in China which should be interesting. I think we are going to try to target people who want to do minimal input and minimal interaction to develop desired applications. This will be fleshed out in the next few weeks. I am not sure when we are going public yet but it should be soon.


I am also trying to get a blog off the ground with a friend here in the states. We are still not sure what we are actually writing but I think it is going to be along the lines of writing about stuff in design that people are not discussing, to our knowledge. We are interested in logic based arguments etc. I will link here when we have some posts up.


Lastly, Brittany Veitch gave me a wonderful birthday present, a pair of kidneys. They are really beautiful I think I am going to wear them with my suit. Obviously the image at the top is them. Thanks Brittany. 

Comments please.

Combined video editor and monitor Tetsuro Miyazaki

An interesting patent from Sony about some sort of portable editing system. One point of interest is that it references the first laptop patent ever. 

Combined video editor and monitor Tetsuro Miyazaki

Design in Holland

I am in Amsterdam for 2 nights and on this trip I have realised a few more things about the design here.

On my last trip here about a month ago I noticed that many systems are rather open, more so than in many other countries, with the expectation that people will find a good solution and use it instead of having to follow a strict set of rules. Now obviously this has advantages if done well because it means more things are more intuitive to do if things have been made "open" properly.

I think it is often considered the case that less confined things tend to succeed more often or at least have serious advantages that lead to a market share.

I should note that despite there being a lot of really well designed open systems in Holland I think they just have a lot of trouble with information systems even when they have obviously had the crap designed out of them. Perhaps this is a cultural thing but I have found on a number of occasion that there is not a lot of consideration for real users. One instance was in a parking lot payment system where almost every user I saw firstly did not understand how to use the machine and then when they thought they did it still seemed not to work properly.

So, on this trip I think I realised there is more to the multitude of open systems here than simply making things more intuitive. Having spent a significant portion of my time on this trip looking at architecture here in Amsterdam and also in Utrecht, I have realised that though may people live in apartment blocks and many apartment blocks are similar there is a lot of subtle work done to make apartments dissimilar. The way this is done, a block of several hundred apartments may be made up of something like 10 different apartment types each with a few subtle but noticeable differences. In many places it is common to have 2 or a few more types of apartments making up the core of the block because of the symmetry about elevators etc.  Here in Holland buildings are usually not so tall and people are less lazy so there are stairs. So yes 10 different sets of 10 apartments scattered around a building so each has a unique view and has unique value. The reason, I think, is because of the perceived value of being personally unique. So now I think, though I could be totally wrong here, that in Holland there is a strong value associated with being unique. Of course there are lots of social norms and people tend to be similar as people are in most places of the world, however I think people here really like the idea that they could do things specifically how they wanted, and see things in a way that suits them.

I think this is really different from the perception of uniqueness that is found in many Americans as here it is based on actual interactions and systems built to provide for them where in the USA it is much more based on personal claims and perceptions.

This does not explain the multitude of really badly design information systems but it does give me a lot more context to watch the way people do various things. I know this is just an assumption but I have not seen any contrary evidence as far as I know.

Improving Bathrooms

Korean and Chinese and other bathrooms are really neat because they use a much more open architecture and contribute to a more designable experience for the user. I think there are a few important parts to this flexibility that make it really fun:

1. Water Room - everything is designed to get wet. It is easier and more fun. I think it could be a good design principal.
2. Feature full Floor - many bathrooms have wash racks mounted into the floor for people to do laundry. I think this could be extended to a few other features.
3. Continuous Experience - this is a bit less certain but it just seems that when I use bathrooms in Korea or China, whatever I am doing it feels that the tools are really built into the environment. I am not sure what I mean but I think it is a good feeling and I think it is something that could add to the experience of western bathrooms. Perhaps it is the really modular multi function nature of every aspect of this kind of bathroom. Each fixture seems to have distinct uses but also ends up emerging as a solution to many problems, just by the nature of the simple and elegant environment. 
4. Isolation from Dirt and enforcing Cleanliness - In these settings it is common for people to use small towels which is really nice for various reasons, and also use slip on shoes when they are in the bathroom. This is interesting because it combines to make a really fresh cleaning experience every time. That is to say; I think I feel a lot more clean after showering like this because you can concentrate on cleaning and you are sort of forced into cleaning. A small towel also works better to retain quality in your skin. 

That is all I can think of at the moment. I am trying to put together some ideas to make a bathroom design that ties a few ideas on washing together to create something that is a bit more efficient and a better experience.

Comments or stories about interesting washing experiences would be great. Especially if you know a lot about Japanese washing. 

Innovation in work settings

So a whole lot of companies recently have been talking and thinking about work settings to cultivate good work and innovation. (I think I posted about this before but I can not find it so oh well) The thing that is interesting is that what many of these companies are doing, i.e. google, is creating more flexible environments and more ad-hoc relationships so that people cross-pollinate a lot. There are various other objectives as well, including user convenience and the ability to enter and stay in a state of flow. In any case, when I was recently looking at this kind of innovation I thought a few things. One main one being that it would be a good project to actually go and do some research in how people work well because I totally think the "nice" offices of the world are doing little more than scrambling it together. A lot more recently I was thinking about it again and I thought what a good office from my perspective would be.

For me a good office is a clean desktop on a nice little and adaptable laptop. I do not use paper (though I think it would make my work better if I did more often) and I do not use a mouse (people who actually know how to use trackpads know they are faster than mice) and I tend not to use a table even when it is available. I am happy with my laptop in my lap. Additionally I need my office with me all the time, because I work everywhere and all over the world, and I need my office to be able to fit in and interact with anyone else's office. In addition to a laptop my office includes a few things like cameras, a global socket power board, so I can plug in a lot of anythings, and a global plug adapter, so I can plug my power board in anywhere. I also tend to have at least one mobile phone and about 20 SIM cards for various different countries. For networking I carry a Airport Express because even in a hotel room wireless is really convenient, especially when working with a few other people and creating ad hoc networks. I also carry a large hard drive but ideally I would have a smaller one of similar capacity, 500 Gb or 1 Tb. Headphones are also really important, though at this point I should invest in an ace bluetooth earpiece, the B&O one seems nice or perhaps the new Jawbone. For the time being I am not sure what the ideal office would be like in terms of a cubicle. I mean, I presume I should have a briefcase however so far I like a simple bag that I can take anywhere. Perhaps I would also take a pen but I think that is it.

So, if a ad-hoc work space can be this ad-hoc, can it also be more motivating of innovation and flow producing?

I think that a few steps could be taken. Firstly, better flow creating software needs to exist and more users need to be in a position to take advantage of the more advanced flow related features of tools they use (Designers fault not users fault). For the cultivation of innovation I think it comes down to some other issues. One key one, and something that really gets in my way some times, is a way to take notes and make them easy to find and readable. Evernote is ok in theory but a bit much effort for my needs some times. Another thing is being able to interoperate as much as possible and being able to operate as effectively as possible outside ones' own office. The obvious thing here is to use web-tools but sadly I have found that sometimes the web sucks in some places, and some websites do not work everywhere. So this is an issue that I have yet to find a good enough solution for. I think the only thing that computers and computer systems still do rather poorly is integrate functions, especially communication with other tools. i.e. modelling and talking to someone on the other side of the world about my model at the same time is really lame, even with the various tools that people have been working on.

So at some point I am going to try to find a better way to ensure this kind of mobile office is really mobile but also good and innovative and flowing and then I am going to try to link it back to the way real offices work to see if they can be made better...which I am pretty sure they can. More on that later.

Ok. So that was almost ranty I think, and I think I did not really come up with a good closing solution yet. Does anyone have any suggestions. I would really benefit from them :-)

Another project that I have been playing with a little bit is trying to work out what people actually need to travel with. Every time I travel I find I have something I do not need. So I want to put together a document that helps people work out what they need and which products are good solutions for those needs. If anyone is interested I would love some help because I suck at packing light.

iCar Initial Thinking

This afternoon I spent 6 hours in a KTV room and although I can sing a few songs I could not sing that many. The extra time I used to start thinking about what an anthropomorphic car is going to be and what kind of features it might have. I am still pretty lost in this regard but I have a few notions.

So my thinking was along the lines of a car that acted the way a car should act in order for it to parse correctly in terms of the human experience. This is a bit strange as it is hard to say what a car should do, however, I guess it is pretty obvious that it is a driving machine. So, a thing for moving people around. I am guessing it might park automatically. I am also trying to think of how one should get into and out of such a device. I think doors are a pretty in elegant solution but for now they may be the only option.

Next I tried to think of what is wrong with the state of existing cars. There are a lot of things, but the ones that are really important are the ones that people have not solved well. One is the power issue, so I have a feeling the iCar would be not that fast and pretty toy like. Its speedometer would go no higher than the speed limited of a road. I suspect it would also function mostly automatically. I am still not sure how to deal with reversing. I think that is a major point of failing in the driving experience. Another point I thought of is getting into and out of cars and loading things in and out of them. Other issues include things like safety.

I have very little idea of the driving experience for now. I think this will be hard. I am not sure how removed it should be or how familiar it should be.

I have also thought a little about the overall object of the car. I have a feeling it will not look a lot like a car and may look a bit more like the Scion box cars that exist in Japan and now the states, however I am not sure yet. I think because I suspect for it to be all electric I suspect there to be very little mechanical envelope. So the car may end up as basically a box (smooth or not) on wheels. I am not sure if it should be solar assisted. I am also not sure if it should be AL, Polycarbonate or Si3, or SS, but I think those might be the main materials. I do however want to incorporate a black plastic like is current at the back of the iMac.

What do you think? Comments Appreciated!!!

iCar - Thinking Agian

Soumitri has started blogging about making an iCar again. We had talked about this project a while back and done a few things for a competition along the lines of an iCar. The idea being worked with at the time is as pictured.

Since then I have become a little less stupid and realised more about what is really needed in an iCar. I in fact think this project is quite fun an interesting so I am going to try to create some kind of solution. I think the approach that I am going to start with is to start to get an idea of what makes a design Apples'. There is quite a lot of literature on this but for now I will just make a cursory list.

1. An obvious reaction to the norms of an industry or expected experience - I think Apple often tries to make the quintessential product of a sector. iCar should be the quintessential car.
2. Anthropomorphic - The user experience should parse logically to all users.
3. Intuitive - New users should have little or no trouble understanding what is expected of them
4. High Quality Experience - Where quality is not possible, design to remove the need for quality (or the perceived lack of quality) is important.
5. No buttons - Specific mechanical interfaces only, as much as possible or none what so ever.
6. Important controlls are really easy to get to. The things one would want to can usually be done with no digging in the interface.
7. Manufacturing is invisible.

So. Please add more things or ideas in comments or link to articles etc. that might be interesting for this project. Soumitri linked to an article on this matter but I think they writer is not completely right. I would love to see more info if anyone has found interesting stuff.

Reinclusive Design

Reading about Ergonmidesign who seem a bit cool and I noticed a thing they were calling Inclusive Design. The idea is as follows:

Have you ever felt excluded? Many people find it difficult to carry out simple, everyday tasks such as opening food packages, retrieving cash from an ATM abroad, or finding clothes that fit properly.

Now imagine if you have such pain in your wrist that you cannot enjoy the simplest of pleasures, such as calling a friend, using the TV remote, or preparing your favourite meals. All of these examples are affected by, and can be aided by, inclusive design.

Inclusive design is about making sure that as many people as possible can use or consume products, services and spaces. At Ergonomidesign, inclusion takes human diversity as a starting point.

I think it is quite silly. I think the world would suck if things where designed for everyone, I think a huge value in society is that we can creat demographics and target products acordingly. That is perhaps an over simplication of the matter at hand but I think a more valid way of looking at this process is to reinclude an audiance by creating more independanttly targeted products.

 

I think the weakest link is often not strong enough to be accomidated by a single solution. I think targeting is gold.

On Real Semantic Web and Language

I am in China :-) and I am really happy to be back here. At the moment I am in Hangzhou which is where I used to live.

The other day I posted about language and how natural language systems would be gould for Semantic Web and then today I cam upon a Google tech talk that details the matter quite well.



Have a look if you have some spair time. I am about 20 minuts in so far and though it is not completely thrilling the speaker has made some interesting points.

Sorry about spelling I am using an internet cafe in which pages are not loading perfectly and spell checkers are not working.

China is so much fun.

More Images from France

Paris Trip 2008

I am really slow to put images online. Sorry world.

I have however updated and put a bunch more from Paris on Picasa.

Language for Computers not People

A post about the UNIX programer who killed his wife drove me to consider the notion of syntax heavy languages being used to avoid the large problems associated with the semantic web. I am not really sure what this would entail but I guess it is really something like the kind of pattern language issue that I was thinking about for my graduate project at RMIT.

What makes what we say and think so hard to understand (for computers at least) apart from what we use to say it?

Is it possible to make design decisions for a language at this point and have a substantial enough effect on syntax and parsing to achieve the goal of natively supporting direct communication with computers? 

Just on the matters of designed language, in Korea they use a really really awesome alphabet called Hangul. It is highly optimised for both high speed reading and pure graphical logic. It uses simple letters that build things like syllables that become visually compressed into a character without reducing the identify-ability of the individual letters. The system was designed rather recently, 1443, with the intention of creating a better system for dealing with complex sound based languages. 

Future and Magic

Today I thought about how a big part of the things have made now the future are the things that do what would have been considered magic and are now provided by technology and science. At the same time, I think the other side of the future is undoing all the bad innovation that has lead to the strange world state we are in now. 

For those who have not seen it please watch Future Perfect's TED Talk


Today I had I took a train too and from Daejeon, about 2 hours south of Seoul where I had an interview with KAIST for a PhD. I am not sure if it is the right place for me. 

Korea is still a lot of fun however this evening I realised I had no water. I will have to find a way to get some tomorrow. 

Seating in public places and transport

Does anyone think that seating in public environments could be designed better. I was thinking that perhaps there are a few issues with some of the common trends in this area. I have been travelling a lot recently, waiting in public spaces like airports and stations and using a lot of busses and trains and so on. The thing I have been noticing is that people often do not sit optimally for the best health of the crowd, that is to say, people often sit to to isolate them selves using a certain method, i.e. not sitting next to people if possible. There are of course other factors that are seen in some of the mentioned areas, like the availability of power, the fact that groups often move together, and the fact that some of the noted environments involve distinct changes in use statistics. 

Sooo. I thought about a few of these things and though a way to make busses or train a little nicer would be to make less wall oriented seating and more floating seating that would still let people walk around and would let people either be close to or less close to people around them depending on their acquaintance with each other and without taking up too much extra space. 

Also, I thought a little bit about steps to socially engineer people sitting in airport gates and other such places to make sure they would use the available chairs optimally, or at least in the sense that clusters and isolated individuals could exit without wasting seats or making either group less happy. 

I will try to put some sketchup models together to show what I am thinking about. Any other ideas?

Fixing Computers, Playing Games, Singing Songs

First, it looks like I have a place in Korea. But I am still interested in ideas in this regard. 

Next, I repaired my computer on my kitchen table here in Paris with a bunch of really inadiquate tools. It is really nice to have my main machine back up and running. 

My computer when open

Last, travel is good. I have met a few interesting people recently. Some in Sligo at IT Sligo where there is some possibility I will do some further study. They were rather nice and so on and Sligo seems like an interesting though remote and small place. Additionally I met an interesting girl on the Chunnle coming back from London to Paris. She was an RMIT Architecture student who is now doing lots of other stuff including a few greats, Zaha Hadid and Tom Barker. As most people will know I think architecture is really silly but after talking to this girl for a wile, someone who likes Zaha's work none the less, I realized a few things:

1. Architects can be nice though there is no question that they are silly.
2. Without knowing what you do it is hard to do it. I think I specialise in trying to do things that are not identifiable and spending time making it impossible to really understand what I do. Though this has some value I think I really need to make a decision and try to work at something specific, even if it is still abstract in its specificity.
3. Usually the truth ends up being good. I think designers and normal people should realise this more and use it in a few ways. Nice innovation is good design, true and honest design that works because it has been done well. Not changes that are made to take advantage of a relationship with end users that offers subtle advantages, truth is a lot nicer.

OK I need to stop being silly and get ready to do something interesting today.

The hotel in Sligo which happens to be an old mental institute. Bat shaped architecture at its best.

Paris and a few big problems

So I am in Paris.  It is pretty nice. Travel images are here. More will go on now and then but my main computer is broken now so I am not doing that so much.

I was thinking recently about the worlds problems and a conversation triggered the idea of thinking about what one would do if they were in control of the world. So I know that is a bit vague, but what would you do first if you had world power? Put answers in the comments!

I think I would put in motion systems to normalize the global economy and try to rebuild culture in culturally sparse reigns. I think I would also be interested in reducing the influence of politics in an attempt to reduce the political battels at all elvels of society that plague our systems with corruption and a lack of flexibility. 

Just one more thing. I am going to Korea in about 2 weeks and I really need a place to stay. Does anyone know some place  I could crash for free or cheap from 1st to 11th of July in Seoul. Please please tell me if you know some place.

Also, I should just say, I am not doing a lot of reading while traveling so sorry for not reblogging as much. 

Ruth is my sister. Plugs are her art.

My older sister just posted a recent exhibition of hers online and is selling most of the pieces. 

She has RuthWhiting.com which forwards to the online gallery at the moment. 

Robotics Nerd

Long ago and far away I was involved in a robotics team at Eastside High School. This is an image I found the other day in one of my old drafting text books from that period. 

Those things are not awards they are badges from other teams. My team was on a winning alliance at a regional competition but the badges were just for fun. :-)

My hair is not naturally that colour and naturally this is not the only coloured hairdo I have had. I look more human now too.

Grey For China

In mourning for the global destruction of the past few weeks.

This is a photo near the affected area from my trip there last year.

Permanent Sleeping Bag

An example of a bed involving a balance between the blanket and the mattress and few distractions or complications. 

The other day I was thinking about this issue in life which is that I really like beds that are just 2 parts. A mattress or futon and a heavy blanket. This is how I like to sleep 100% of the time and it is a form factor that I think looks quite neat of done in the right way. 

An example of a bed with rollup blanket. Click for a larger image.

So I was sitting considering life and blankets when it dawned on me that one of the reasons I really like this schema is because it is so easy to clean and aesthetically balanced, however one problem with it is that it is hard for tall people like me to not end up with cold feet. So I suddenly realised the perfect (not really) solution. Have a single roll up blanket at the end of the bed. This way my feet would be locked in and not get cold (this is really a big problem for people like me) and it would be sort of a self cleaning bed. A friend of mine also brought up that it could be used as a padded seat when rolled up but I am not sure if that something I am eager to take advantage of. I was also considering making it with the roll under the end of the bed but Zen told me no. 

Budgeting

So I have been using mint for a few months now and more recently I have been spending a fair bit of time planning and budgeting my upcoming trip. During this process I have experimented with a hole bunch of information models and approaches to money. Not really thinking about breakdowns and contingencies but just trying to work out really effective ways to visualise the data at hand and also ways to work with it. Part of this has included considering sources of data and how the data will be used at different times during this process. 

A scenario of what I am thinking about is as follows. 

A person planning a trip around the world must consider a number of things; travel costs, passports and visas, projected income, projected living costs in each location, and accommodation. They can map these things out pretty easily before they start actually making reservations and so forth so they can just get a rough idea about weather or not it will work with the money they have. This is not hard, essentially writing documenting dates of events, like the start of a trip and so on, and costs of things that can be estimated or referenced online. As a side note, I really think travel sites should give an estimated cost per day living, at perhaps 3 different tiers of luxury. That would help so much. 

After getting an estimate cost model and realising whether or not the trip is even remotely viable they need to start actually buying tickets and so on. At this point I think the common visualisation methods, such as daily balance spreadsheets, begin to fail because they do not let the user really represent the information the do and do not know in a realistic manner. I may be very sure that I need to leave a specific country by a certain date, or meet a friend somewhere at some time but for the most part I think there are just too many variables to construct a good model in this way. This really is quite a wicked problem, too much potential to change. 

I guess what I am really getting at is that there is a gap between having an idea of what should happen and making it happen in naive budgeting methods because they do not seem to accommodate indecision well.

I also think as one lives the process of spending money the budgeting model should be a tool that can continue to provide feedback and help with contingency processes. 

So the end product I think should exist is some kind of thing where costs have various statuses of certainty, as do most other details, like dates. This should also be applied to income as so many people work on hourly wages. This would basically let the user forecast a cost or profit and as time comes close establish greater detail, then as the expenditure occurs it can be represented within the system in absolute detail. I think beyond that the role of such a product is just to provide a hole lot of really useful ways of looking at the data at hand. I really think people miss a lot of info about their money information because they do not look at the data properly. This is something a good money product should help with.

Oh gosh what a scrambled set of thoughts. Luckily I can blame my concussion for this post. 

In other news, I obviously lived through the night re. yesterday's post on my Concussion. 

In other other stuff, why on earth do more spell checkers not use Google's spell checking technology. Apple's sucks so much in comparison to Google's. 

Brain Damage

Earlier today I had a grade one concussion a few minutes after hitting my head on the floor during a kung fu drill. As the concussion set in I realised I did not know where I was or what I was doing and a few other things like that. Luckily the person I was doing drills with was a neurologist and he quickly analysed the situation and started to explain what had happened. As the evening went on I think I remembered most things that happened before hand but I do not really remember some of the time from initially realising i was concussed and then sitting down and talking with this guy about it. I am not sure if that is a serious problem though. 

So my parents are supposed to wake me up 4 times to check if I have not fallen into a comma and I am not supposed to not do anything to hurt my brain. We will see. If I am not alive tomorrow I am sorry to all of you who I owe money and the people who's stuffed creatures are not yet in the mail. 

In other news, there were some really interesting articles on China in a Boing Boing post I read today. Check out the links in this post. 

Projecting Costs for Mint

I think it would be really great if Mint let you project costs for things as this would essentially let you make a full budget. I also think there should be a little more in the way of consolidation and a manual input so you can input expenditure that has not appeared independently. One feature of forecasting would be that Mint could automatically consolidate actual earnings with expected earnings, when your bank sends the info out. 

All in all I think Mint now does something that is not that useful in a way that is not that great. It is a good idea as a product but I think it needs a bit more energy and a more features to really push in this market. 

Google Sites and Zen Products

Today I think I have started actually using google sites a little bit which is good fun. I am using it to help manage a project I am on with some people in australia, for now it is private but there may be some stuff for public view in a bit. 

Also, I have recently begun to realise I really like some aspects of Zen, especially when they are represented in products and systems. I think a big part of my interest in these systems is the sense of really robust simplicity, not ephemeral or short sighted simplicity. There are a number of things I think fall into this category nicely so I was thinking of starting a list of Zen products and systems and services. I think the first thing to go on the list will be Sakura Systems because they are just so Zen. Does anyone have any good things to add on? 

I will just add that I think [good] one page sites could be added to this list. I will see what I can find. 

Stupid White People

This is a great TED Talk about cultural diversity. I wish there was a way to stop stupid white people. Good blog too. 

Also, Google has added some more sharing features recently and I am going to start using them a little to see if there is any value. Here is my shared items list so far. 

User Centred Dogma vs. Design that is Good

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So this is a really lovely talk by some guy. I completely recommend everyone in the world watches it. It is about an hour and fifteen minutes long but I think it is worth it.

Just in case you were wondering, it is about how user centred design is not as effectual as it is claimed to be and is often used to justify useless endeavours. The speaker (who is actually Jared Spool) claims that simple good design with a strong interaction with people actually using the outcomes is a better model.

I agree. But hey I love doing dissemination maps so I am not going to drop trying to work out how people think yet. Also, I think his model is a good proposition but I think it could be made better by tailoring methods for this kind of work; "Release Early, Release Often" as Google often says.

Persistence of Vision with Tag Clouds and Whatever

I was just thinking, setting stronger standards in where, for instance, a specific tag is found on a blog post or whatever item we are talking about is could make a nice difference to workflow. I was thinking specifically in the context of Highrise in which contacts have tags referencing their importance and I thought if it was possible to do something like put common tags in the same relative place per contact it would be a lot easier to quickly analyse the list. 

I don't actually use Highrise but I think this kind of interface optimisation would be useful in a lot of contexts. 

I wonder if there is a way to implement such a thing in Blogger.

Should I use Disqus

So there is this neat commenting service that I think I can set up to be used here instead of normal Blogger comments. It kind of socialises comments but mostly does things that I have not bothered to read about yet. So my query today is; would any of my millions of readers be interested in (or problemed by) me changing to this service. Also, would any of you like to do a match (I change my comments over and you do too so we grow the network together)

I think it looks like an okay service. Please tell what yawl reckon.

The image is obviously not related to Disqus and actually comes from the EOL. I just thought it looked like a cute little creature. I started modelling it the other day but modo crashed. Perhaps I will do it again later. (I really like the EOL but they seriously should get their act together. There is a lot of good data on the subjects they work on but they seem not to be procuring it or linking to it much. They also have a bit of funding which to me seems like it is not being used)

Planning to Travel Around the World and Using the Google Visualisation API

So I am going to France this summer then I thought it would be nice to go overland to Korea and then to China before coming home. Here I have started to plan my movements but I have not yet checked spelling. I have also used the google data API to render this in an interactive timeline. I think it is still linked to the online data I am editing so it may change without notice.

It was not hard to use but it did take a little while to get it to work. I wish I could pipe in other data sets or something. Perhaps I can... I will see what I can do. 

Update: The timeline has stopped working for anyone now so I am going to not bother fixing it until I know some more details about my trip. The API is good but seems to be crufty and have some serious reliability issues at the moment.

Modo 302 Gotzd

Last night I finally got Modo 302. It is quite nice though I really have not used that many of the new features yet. Perhaps there will be more on that later. In any case I did some network render tests with an old model. Here is a pic. 

The lights are not done at all so please ignore them. 

Network rendering in Modo is fine but it seems to me that it can not set up radiance cashing as a network task. I think this is about as large of a shortcoming as you can get when doing something like this. Perhaps I just don't know how to do it yet.

Now I am working on a fish.

Search to Activity

This is the idea that instead of URLS one could just type something like Mark, and a bunch of potions would pop up. These options would include things like, contact methods (email, im, phone), sites, feeds, projects etc.. I think this is most interesting because right now there are a lot of good solutions that seem to stay independent. For instance, if I type something into Google I will find a lot of things. If I type something into Address Book I may find some things, come things I want but perhaps some of the things I want will not yet be back in Address book. Similarly, if I wanted to email someone rather fast I would essentially first have to create a new email. If I wanted to instead of emailing them look at their LinkedIn page I would have to either know their LinkedIn URL or first search or go to my contacts list in LinkedIn. 

My argument is that all this data, like the URLs of a bunch of my friends LinkedIn pages, and their email addresses and their websites and their blogs are all stored in places that are accessible already (many are stored simply in the browsers URL auto complete. So, there should be a thing that checks who a page or account is about and then associates them with it. So if i start typing there name in or a service in I get either a semantically useful list of their sites or a list of people I know using that service respectively. Just to give a completely obvious example, when I type Will (someone I studied with) in the right place I should see an option to instantly email him, I should see his online presence, and I should see some contact or info like any data that is on his openID. 

I know that things like Quicksilver and Launchy do this a little but in terms of process optimisation they are still off the mark. They are also not integrated into many systems that people do not really realise they use, especially online services. 

This sort of tool could greatly increase the effectiveness of things like GTD by providing a really 1 to 1 connection with the information that is known by a user and the tasks they want to perform. 

The web is the world and seemingly a large part of the future of computer platforms. If we want this to be the case we should make good tools to interact with it. All the current browsers and most of the browser extensions that exist today do not take good consideration of this fact. I think this feature is one of many that could be used to improve the human interface with the web and the world. 

More on why I think browsers suck later. 

Said Bear

This is a bear i made for a friend. It is not detailed but round. 

I think bears are cool but I think they would be better if they were equine. I think humans should do research on this matter and create a super race of pony bear tiger animals. They would surely rock.

In other news I really would like to find a simple way to get large maps without labels out of Google Maps. They are pretty. 

Small Services and Topology for the Same

Today I was trying to work with a few groups of friends on a few different projects at the same time all via the internet. We were doing a few things; research, content building, organisation and  communicating. None of these things by them selves are problematic and especially if they were been done in personal collaboration or by my self then no problems would exist. In this case however, it was very difficult to suitably take part in this system. I found that many of the small tasks I wanted to do could not really be done without a prohibitively large set-up time and more complex things I wanted to do could not be done without more sophisticated web tools. 

For example, I was working away and realised I had an idea for a way to deal with something I was not working on. So I wanted a tool that I could simply write a snippet of text into that would be like a post-it note. Not a big problem, but, I wanted this note to also be connected with the task I was thinking about and annotated so it would be seen by the relevant team members. Now I know there are tools that do this, and services that offer a lot in this respect but I can not afford to sign up for every service just so I can do a few different tasks, and more so, I can not expect all of the people I work with to do the same. So, the answer I think is appropriate is essentially a set of operators on basic communication networks and offer various things like content tagging, targeted messaging, really fast content dropping and so on. I think using as many existing networks as possible is really important, i.e. using email and im instead of creating a new notification methodology, such as the Facebook Inbox, because this approach lets messages go to non members and people who just need to know the content not anything else. 

A different example was when I wanted to create a simple and quick list that included images and some text, it needed to be sortable and searchable but nothing fancy. Now this can be done in many tools like Google Docs or Zoho but all these interfaces are pretty slow and arduous. Also, I wanted to make this list in a way that would make it useful for me later, so potentially I could get a feed out of it or at least use it as a data store for a website. In any case, nothing was really offering me what I wanted so I ended up doing it in a context that had the advantage of local speed, Compendium. Here i could make it both a graphical and context driven list or layout and get rich relationships between elements. Now I know I will have to remake the work later which I think is quite lame. So, I want a tool that lets me have more flexible content manipulation and output settings while also having a high speed interface. An AIR application may be a start and perhaps building it to provide basically a really fixable content bucket that has a hole bunch of import and export tools that are all based on standards. 

I hope open standard interface languages become more popular. I really think they are the answer to a lot of serious problems. But more than that,  I really hope people start to take advantage of them. RSS is a wonderful tool but very few services use it to its full. Similarly, dynamic OPMLs , lists of lists, could be so well used in certain contexts. 

I think almost none of what I have said here makes any sense. I really just want to say. 

1. Service should do one thing perfectly and nothing else. 
2. Everything should be built to work with other things in as many ways as possible.
   
3. The things things work with should be up to the user or the receiver if that role exists. 
4. Standards should even be used for preferences. For instance, how do I like being notified by a tool? The answer to this question should be used when I need to be notified by someone else's service that I have never heard of.
5. Naming and interfacing should be search to activity. (This I will talk about later)
6. Relevance should exist for everything. Like realtime, automated discourse mapping of everything that is relevent. 

If strengths and weaknesses are the same thing

I think in some problems the strengths and the weaknesses end up being the same issue. For instances in Co-ops, where a main strength is the localised control over activity and intentions and similarly a main failing point is the exact same issue. This is an interesting prospect to me as it seems to suggest that good solutions only come through a wicked problems analysis. Or at least an IBIS one in which there are tightly quantised strengths and weaknesses to, essentially calculate net value of features in a system. 

So I am not sure if this is relevant or interesting to anyone but I think it is something worth considering. I would perhaps even say that this is a good measure for how solvable a problem is. If solutions generally include features as strengths and weaknesses then great solutions are probably hard to find. (I have no data supporting this it just seems to be an interesting possibility) I think this is a little relevant with the idea of how to ask an answerable question. 

Artificial Limitations in PlanHQ

Recently PlanHQ have done a bunch of updates to their service which are making it a lot more usable. I think they are still missing the money in some respects and they persist in providing an interface which seems to remove all familiarity and context driven knowlege from the process of business decision making.  Workflow should not be ignored, yet the updates are exciting. Now it works in most browsers quite acceptably.

One aspect of their product which they are yet to change is the minimisation model. Currently the do not offer a free product, though next week they are opening one aspect of the product to free accounts, which in its self is not a bad thing but I think most costumers they could get are turned away buy the fact they have to pay even on the lowest level. My real gripe with this model is that it often inspires companies to create really lame lowest level products. In the case of PlanHQ it is not too different, their lowest level model includes a number of serious hindrances that are completely artificial to the system. There is no complexity involved just convenience on the customers part, for updating to the higher services. The limitation in this software are things like the number of users, which is 3, and the number of (presumably) concurrent goals, which is 10. There are a few other more legitimate limitations like higher security and customisation, but really, for $9 a month, you can only have 3 users. I think that is really lame. 

So in protest, perhaps, I have been using the software on a trial plan for 30 days. On Monday I think I am going to start paying for it but I am still really annoyed that I would have to pay $49 just to get more than a few users. 

Ok so I hate artificial limitations, especially ones you have to pay for. But all this ranted, I think that the limitations in something like twitter really make the product. Without such a thing it would be quite a different, and presumably less desirable service. 

Just is my last utterances I think PlanHQ should set up a contractor account system. That could be really nice, almost like a CMS service. Perhaps this is a distorted dream that would never work as well as Sugar or Highrise with companion services. 

Asking for Money but not Typesetting

I love this image except for the ugly typesetting. :-)

I really do not know much about its historic importance but I think there is some. I think campaigns like this could be really effective.

If anyone knows about they history I would be interested to find out.

Seen on Dark Roasted Blend one of my favourite blogs in the world.