News | Blog

August 01, 2007

ThingM Newsletter, August 1, 2007

CONTENTS

- Sketching in Hardware 2: a recap
- "User expectations" article translated into Spanish
- A physical computing art/development space for LA
- Wine as an informational object
- Appearances
- Unsubscribe

Since our last update we've been working flat out on a number of exciting projects, some of which we'll be able to talk about soon. Suffice it to say, Tod spent two weeks straight in the electronics lab, his view of the oscilloscope only occasionally interrupted by sleep. Meanwhile, Mike and ThingM industrial designer Ryan have spent many hours investigating the properties of walnut tape, closed cell foams, and whether it's possible to get white neoprene by the yard in San Francisco (yes, but the lead times are kinda long). Much time has been spent with thistothat.com.

SKETCHING IN HARDWARE
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Our conference, Sketching in Hardware 2, was a huge amount of fun and quite successful. Thirty people from industrial design, education, interactive art and technology converged on the Mechanics' Institute Library in San Francisco (some from as far away as Japan and Sweden!). We spent two intense days talking about what it means to create toolkits that allow designers and artists to explore electronic ideas with the freedom of sketching on paper.

You can get a basic overview of the conference at:

 http://www.sketching07.com/

And download many of the presentations here:

 http://www.sketching07.com/participants.html

A couple of weeks after the conference, I gave a presentation at frogdesign in San Francisco on the nature of Sketching. This presentation presents our latest documentation of ThingM's working methods. You can get the 650K PDF presentation here:

 http://www.orangecone.com/tm_sketching_for_frog.pdf

On the sketching tip we would also like to recommend Bill Buxton's new book, "Sketching User Experiences." In it, Buxton (currently Microsoft's UX czar and a longtime user experience guru: www.billbuxton.com) advocates a highly iterative, highly experimental approach to interaction design. He uses research, personal anecdote and many examples to back up his claim that the current linear methods of software (and I would argue all product) development produce worse user experiences than what is possible. Further, he argues that the problem is cultural, rather than technological or who's on the development team. I agree with much of what he has to say and wish I had written the book. Here's the Amazon page:

 http://tinyurl.com/2mb5r3

"USER EXPECTATIONS" ARTICLE TRANSLATED
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

During my Adaptive Path days four years ago, I wrote an article that set out my perspective on how user expectations (and design for them) will change when everyday objects can communicate and process information. The nice folks at Capire.info have now translated that article, "User expectations in a world of smart devices," into Spanish:

tinyurl.com/3yatsv

You can see the original here:
www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000272.php

A PHYSICAL COMPUTING ART/DEVELOPMENT SPACE FOR LA
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Tod is working to create a collaborative physical computing laboratory, education and project space for the Los Angeles area with Machine Project (http://www.machineproject.com/) and Prof. Julian Bleeker's Near Future Laboratory (http://research.techkwondo.com/) at USC. The goal is to create an environment with equipment and space to create technology art and design and teach people about it. Several spaces like this exist in the Bay Area (The Crucible, www.thecrucible.org; Techshop, www.techshop.ws; and the Shipyard, www.theshipyard.org, are the most prominent) and we'd like to bring that kind of collaboration to Los Angeles.

If you are interested in helping out, please send a note to tod@thingm.com.

WINE AS AN INFORMATIONAL OBJECT
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Finally, some thoughts on objects and data.

Wine keeps reappearing at the intersection of the digital world and the physical one. Bruce Sterling's pioneering book on the implications of ubiquitous computing, "Shaping Things," uses it extensively as an example, but he wasn't the first to discuss it. Wine is the textbook example (literally) in the Information Architecture world, where the problem of organizing is often used to explain an approach known as faceted classification. Virtual Vineyard (arguably the first successful ecommerce website) launched before Amazon did.

Why? Our theory is that wine exists in two worlds: as a physical object and as an informational one. The informational object doesn't just exist as a way to help people select wine to drink, but the information about the wine becomes an important part of the process of collecting wine. Moreover, unlike other collectibles that exist as physical and informational objects (think Magic the Gathering cards), wine is a consumable. You can never get a complete set and what you have is always shrinking, so there's a perpetual pressure to gather new information to gather new wine.

The problem is that wine bottles are terribly difficult to track. As collectibles, there are market pressures to create scarcity, which leads many producers (especially of high-end wines) to avoid using the most common object tracking mechanism, the UPC barcode. Barcodes symbolize mass production to wine producers struggling to create scarcity, so they don't use them, or use them haphazardly. We feel this ends up backfiring on wine producers, creating obscurity instead. Wine is a classic Long Tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail) product: in other words, there's a huge volume of potential in the obscure end of the market, but despite wine's early entry as objects of cutting-edge technological consideration, it hasn't achieved nearly its potential.

We believe the core problem is that most wine is virtually untrackable in the information space. It's a physical object that has no anchor to which to attach data. There is huge potential in creating such anchors. Ulla-Maaria Mutanen created the thinglink.org project to create "social objects" that "make it possible to 1) aggregate online discussion around particular items, 2) track their history, and 3) develop new ways of connecting through particular objects on the web." She's talking about handicrafts, but the same thing can--and should--apply to wine.

However, when I went to the Wine Industry Technology Symposium (http://www.wineindustrytechnologysymposium.com/) a couple of weeks ago, there was virtually no discussion of ideas like this, even as the group discussed the power of "Web 2.0" and social networks.

Since we're currently working on an RFID wine rack, we're thinking a lot about these issues. We would like the answer to be RFIDs embedded in wine labels (invisibly) coupled with open, shared communication standards for exchanging wine information. These should look forward toward the capabilities of the technology and the "social life" of objects that bridge the information and physical worlds, rather than trying to copy UPCs or ISBNs, as valuable as those have been. Until then, wine, that most textbook example of hybrid objects, will be frustratingly out of reach for consumers, who then will be themselves frustratingly unavailable to producers. It's a situation that could be much better (i.e. profitable and enjoyable) for everyone involved.

APPEARANCES
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This upcoming Sunday, August 5, Mike will be on a panel with artist Andrea Zittel, California College of the Arts furniture professor Donald Fortescue, and artist and designer Bruce Tomb at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, discussing the relationship between art, design and commerce.

www.headlands.org/event_detail.asp

September 13-16 in Los Angeles, ThingM will be presenting its WineM RFID wine rack at Wired's NextFest.

www.wirednextfest.com

Finally, on August 18 Mike is getting married! He and Elizabeth Goodman (artist, designer, ubicomp researcher, UC Berkeley PhD student) will be married on a pier in San Francisco. Their wedding will be entirely illuminated by the sun, LEDs or both.