fisharepeopletoo

Sealed With An X Marks The Spot

About nine in the evening on February 13th I told my girlfriend I was going to get a pint of milk, ran down to the bus stop where she waits for the bus to work, recorded a stupid videophone message for Valentine’s day, and left it attached to that location for her to receive in the morning while she stands in the queue.

There seem to be quite a few systems being developed at the moment to let us do stuff like this, one of which is Urban Tapestries. They’ve had a public trial and then some follow-up interviews with people who took part, which threw up a couple of things: that it was mostly used to leave recommendations/reviews outside restaurants and so on, and that the users liked the system but couldn’t see how it fitted into their daily lives.

I’ve not tried out any of the gizmos developed for these systems, but two descriptions of the how they might be used stuck in my mind. One was on the Blackbeltjones site and describes someone going out for a breath of fresh air late at night and unexpectedly finding a video clip left by a group of his friends earlier in the evening, and the second was a line about the Aware project suggesting it might be nice to leave a video clip from spring in a favourite location and look at it again in winter.

What they have in common is a sense of missing people, and of time passing and slipping out of reach, and my friend Lisa’s Surface Patterns and (Area) Code events deal with the way memories attach themselves to patches of the earth’s surface, even if those patches are now supermarket car parks.

It may well be that the creative, poignant, poetic uses of Urban Tapestries-style technology that emerge are “poignant and poetic for me” rather than poignant and poetic for everyone. Imagine a couple on a first date recording a quick message – a sort of video version of a love heart carved in a tree – and then going back together and finding it again ten years later. Or finding it separately ten years later. Or places you went with your parents as a kid, haunted by their ghosts as video clips.

Those things would carry an incredible charge, much more so than looking in a family photo album, to do with the added richness of being immersed in the location – this is where it really happened - and an element of surprise and rediscovery (like the Situationists and their amazing ambles, made up of your own past).

But it would only create a charge if they were my memories and my clips, I wouldn’t want to wade through a blizzard of teenagers snogging on their first date.

The Condemned Man Ate A Hearty Breakfast

I'm going to reread a couple of books have a thematic connection with what seems to have got itself the name "locative media".

The first is 1984 by George Orwell, for the obvious reasons of pervasive surveillance and so on, though in fact the world is probably becoming a cross between 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World in that we're all being surveyed constantly while being tickled to death (though it's been so long since I read Brave New World that I can't actually remember what happens in it).

The second book I'm thinking of reading again is, ahem, The Tempest by big foreheaded greatest genius ever William Shakespeare.

In the Tempest some sailors are shipwrecked on a magical island where the atmosphere is full of strange noises and occurrences - it has a rich "hertzian space" to use the current terminology again. The island is ruled by a kindly but stern magician called Prospero who has a cute daughter and a magical servant called Ariel, who zips around the island through the ether, materializing here and there to do his masters bidding.

At the end of the play Prospero sets Ariel free and breaks his magic staff, which in student study texts is usually said to be Shakespeare's comment on retiring from his own genius, but for our purposes we might consider to be Prospero chucking out his wifi enabled laptop and becoming the Unabomber.

The Forbidden Planet is a sci fi version of The Tempest, so maybe this isn't so far fetched.

What's that you say? It's time? So soon. No, no, I don't need a blindfold...

You Rang, Master

This article, found from Smart Mobs, is about how we're all going to start talking to our kettles in the morning. Or at least how our kettle type gadget will know to make us a very strong cup of coffee in the morning based on how many beers we took out of the fridge the night before.

Objects will start to have the capacity to do "magic" things like know we've got a hangover - I'm streching the point with the kettles and the hangovers a bit - and in return we'll start to think of gizmos and gadgets as little imps doing our bidding, complete with their own characters.

At the end the writer asks "How will object intelligence play in terms of the desirability of objects? Industrial design has been very busy the last couple of years giving everyday objects “personality” through appearance. What happens when they can actually mimic personality itself? Where is the line between cute and cloying."

If your fridge knows about you and has a personality (in the Disney film "The Magic House" the fridge would be a bit dull but get a song about how there was always a light on inside) think about how your phone should behave - it knows more about you than your diary, your weblog, and possibly your partner.

One of the things I've got planned for the next week or so is to work out what my phone knows about me, what it knows it knows, what it might learn to do without being asked, and, bearing in mind the cute/cloying distinction, how I want it to offer me the fruits of its learning.

Seeing is Believing

This portable gizmo records the levels of smoke in the atmosphere and then gives you a visual representation of how much sooner you're going to die by breathing it in.

In itself, it may be one of those things that people just wouldn't take with out them, but what's interesting is how it would continually update and present big effects made up of small effects over a long period of time.

If we could see ourselves wheezing for the bus in 20 years time would we be more likely to give up smoking? People are pretty bad at looking beyond the end of next week, but having something like this that shows you the possible choices or the effects of choices in a clear, easily readable way, and that you take with you everywhere, might just tip an occaisional decision one way or the other every now and again.

There are 450 million people in europe, so maybe 45 million between 18 and 25 - prime smokey environment goers - so a few choices one way or the other every now and again makes quite a few choices.

Rather than the consequences of decisions - which in this case is a bit like being nagged by your mum (and I say that as a non-smoker) - what's actually really likely to sway people is what other people are doing.

Present people with representations of what everyone else is up to or where everyone else is heading - smokey environment or not - and watch everyone flock straight there. Or head in the oppositie direction and bump into a big gang of other individualists.

And being really smart, preseent people with representations of where everyone like them is heading.

Welcome to Bodega Bay

Supposing you've got a bird table in your garden and you put out some crumbs for the local robins, you might get a flock of starlings decending on you and scoffing the lot in a few minutes. But supposing every flock of starlings in a ten mile radius knows about it, it'd be like The Birds.

What I like about this comparison (from Gilbert) is that it shows that there isn't any sense of intention in the potential effects of us all being locationally-aware-connected - each individual starling is just doing what starlings do - and it's not necessarily a good thing.

If Looks Could Kill

i've no idea what it says on here but it looks fantastic