Ross Lovegrove would put holes in everything?

Conversation is worth more than 2c.

The art of conversation is one I take seriously, and strive to improve.  It was with pleasure that I saw an article in the Economist (Dec 23, 2006) that discusses the “enduring rules” for rewarding verbal exchanges:

- the desire to understand the ideas and opinions of others, where the purpose of speaking is not so much to get a point across as to find out what others think about it, with mutual expressed respect among all speakers equally.

- sincere good manners (gallantry, integrity, not playing devil’s advocate for its own sake, obligingness)

- charm (flattery, cheerfulness, respectful silence, no airs)

- humor (playful teasing, joking, epigrams, rhetorical flourishes of subtle wit)

It is too hard to find Americans who value conversation, especially outside of New York City.  Charles Dickens complained in the early 19th century that Americans “love of trade” was what narrowed their interests and reduced their desire to share information  - lest it reduce their competitiveness.  In NYC, there’s a playfulness, tremendous wit and a wide ranging frame of shared reference due to the prolific cultural exposure in that town.  

But here in Silicon Valley, I see that technology — even tools for communication — distract people from focusing on each other, and so further threaten the quality of conversation.  Even music, as Orwell is quoted as saying, “prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent.”  

People complain about email, mostly, I think because of the quality of the content, and how much it demonstrates the weaknesses of human interaction in the absence of real conversational rules.  Unlike IM, email makes it difficult for the participants of a thread to explore each other’s interpretations of what’s being said.  The throwing of ideas AT each other is what email does to human interaction, as characterized by the common sign-on of IMO (in my opinion) and sign-off of “My $0.02″.  

There’s more value in understanding what the other is saying than pushing one’s own agenda, but until the art of conversation is treated as a currency of knowledge exchange and human networking, all we’ll have is a lot of pennies thrown at each other.

The Holy Grail of Animalia

What better way to start a blog than by talking about the book one is reading?  I hope none.

Nicholas Christopher came into my life when my dear friend, Martin Joseph Quinn, gave me A Trip to the Stars.  The magical realism of Christopher’s prose transported me just like Garcia Marquez himself.  Quinn may be gone, where I don’t know (but darling, I love you so.) And so Nicholas’ new book, The Bestiary, jumped into my arms at the new fiction section of my Oakland Public Library at Rockridge.  It has a spiritual intellectual quest at the center of its plot, with the narrative from a young man seeking a holy grail in a book of cross-species animalia.   And it crisscrosses the world and its cultures to find it.

The power and beauty of animals, as spirit guides and as forces of god’s nature, sometimes overwhelms me.  I want to honor the words of another Bay Area believer, who spoke her peace on NPR’s Perspectives, found at: http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R801250737.

 

Headtracking and interaction design

Up to now, interaction design accessed two dimensions.  Established conventions about how to use the top strip and the far left column of page space show that we have assembled a meaningful and efficient grip on how to engage any body of content therein, be it an app or a site.  

But maybe now we can move into new conventions that look more like a tetherball game than a book.  Carnegie Mellon student Johnny Lee has prototyped the use of the Wii remote controller to show how an individual user can navigate in a 3D space.  

 

What’s interesting for my work is the possibility of organizing one’s personal information in that space to make connections faster across different lists: contacts, calendar, to dos, as well as the communication messaging actviities and reusage itself.  We can tether bits of our lives together to make a more interesting visual representation of our day, our work, our identity, our community, than we could have up to now in a 2-D environment of page or paper.  What goals would be associated with that potential?  Hmm..

Well, in the short-term Johnny’s simple headtracking should prove the value of the telepresence for the individual user.  This headtracking mechanism could afford individuals in a geographically distributed team to “gather around”, and so become of one mind in the deep engagement of the design they are discussing. 

What is missing in that scenario is the easy translation of everyday data into visual representations of data, a la Smart Money’s Map of the Market or NewsMap if they turned 3-d to show other variables in play.  My husband’s start-up ModViz, purchased this March by NVidia, had a product that dynamically generated 3-d, high resolution visualizations of complex data sets (like geological data from oil explorations).  Maybe the combination of all these technologies isn’t far off at all.  Maybe we’ll soon treat two dimensions as archaic, and be immersed into our work like never before.  Bring it on!

And, thanks Johnny Lee!

Scanning my whole life away

My appetite for political and sociological media is bigger than my eyes.  I have magazines in piles everywhere, and only recently discovered a solution for all my coded binders of articles clipped: now, I have them in piles waiting to be scanned in by my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M.

All I need now – Apple SDK developers, take note — is a superior high-res PDF viewer in my mobile.  The OCR software that came with the ScanSnap lets me search for any words (correctly recognized) in any article, so I’m no longer dependent on the document title for its retrieval.  And so now, I can search for all the keywords that will engineer a dynamic sample of my interests.  I can search for an ingredient at the farmer’s market and see which recipes I’ve scanned use it, and what else I need to get.  No more paper!  Downsizing!  It’s all good.