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Ubiquitous Coffee

Nov 20, ’11 9:48 PM

Recently I’ve noticed a trend in future visioning videos, ones that attempt to visually describe some kind of future technology enabling and meeting the needs of an increasingly connected and technological society.  It’s a trend that would seem to be designed to appease the future shock in an assumed audience.  It works to help transport a viewer from the present into this new scenario, by placing cues and similar elements to mentally and emotionally tie the two together.  I’ve seen this cropping up in a few different places, and I think it’s worth giving name to.  For the moment, I’m going to simply call it ubiquitous coffee (or ubicof).

from Microsoft’s recent Productivity Future Vision.

From Berg London’s Media Surfaces: The Journey video sketch.

From Berg London’s Media Surfaces: Incidental Media video sketch.

From Microsoft’s Future Vision 2019 video.

From a compilation of Microsoft and Cisco future visioning videos.

Don’t get me wrong, coffee has been consumed for more than 500 years now, so it’s not unlikely to be around in another 10 years or so.  I think the technique at play here is – “look at this futuristic place with new technology, but don’t be too worried, we all still drink lots of coffee”.  A way of tempering future shock with some present-day cultural symbols.  Not very deep, but at the surface level, effective.

Watching all of these augmented media visioning videos is actually quite depressing, the sheer banality and similarity of ideas present (not to mention the prominence of hand-waving and non-meaningful touch gestures) really set the bar low for the future of technology and information interfaces.

So much of what’s shown is either possible today, only a small step in a slightly different direction for the emergence of new technologies.  The major tech companies (RIM, MS, Nokia, IBM, Cisco) seem to spend countless hours telling us what the future could look like, and it’s honestly not very inspiring.  Not to parade the success of Apple, but their vision looks a lot more like this;

Familiar, no? It’s what’s available today. Tested, iterated, prototyped and designed to within an inch of its’ life.  A real device, that will change the way we think about the future.  I expect I’ll follow this post in 6-12 months or so, when RIM, IBM and Cisco decide to copy the reality of Apple with their own “visions” of the future.

But more to the point, the field of research into Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) is so much more rich and interesting, full of design complexity and real world challenges that at least excite the mind.  This glass-half-full future (which ironically is half filled with glass interfaces) just doesn’t sit well with me.  We can do so much better.

Comments (1)

shut up and ship

Oct 29, ’11 3:59 AM

I came across this post on Binary Bonsai earlier today, mainly focussing on Microsoft Office’s new Vision video (see below).  Michael’s response is fairly gentle, nudging MS and noting how far from reality the future visioning tends to be

The latest is the Productivity Future Vision from the Office division, which like all their videos, looks great (and probably would interact horrible in a real-world scenario):

I suspect these videos are made not only by outside agencies (if you know different, let me know), but entirely by graphic designers who dream about interaction design, but never had to realize their ideas in the real world.

I’m feeling much less generous when looking at this finely crafted, shiny vision piece.  It’s clear that MS has an eye to the future potential of technologies like touch, tablets and the ‘big data’, but it’s so far removed from the reality of what they’re actually producing.  Frank mentioned to me the other day something that’s worth noting here — Apple doesn’t create concept videos for future products.  They don’t make ambitious future vision style images of the future — they just make great products that people can use today.  The magic of it is that these products push us a great deal towards a different future, but they don’t bother trying to impress us with their vision, rather they do everything possible to impress us with what their vision has lead them to create.

It’s a world apart, the two approaches.  Shut up and ship, Microsoft.  If this is the future, create it.  We’ll love you for it, but not if you never bother following through with this vision.

On another note, I have to say the similarities between this vision and the amazing work BERG London have been producing in the last few years is striking.  Here’s a few BERG visioning pieces that have, in my view, been quite influential in shaping the future of products and interaction.  Well done, lads.

 

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As noted elsewhere #2

Aug 24, ’11 10:08 AM

This is just too cool not to share, a camera made almost entirely out of lego

via Kottke

Our comrades at BERG London have been recognised in the press recently, which is a well deserved pat on the back for all the great work they’ve been banging out over the last few years.  Remember Schooloscope?  BBC Dimensions? Suwappu? The ghost in the field?  Yep, all of them came from BERG.  Whilst they’re busily innovating, they take the time to share snippets from around the globe (inspiring this, for instance), I noticed a small story about a picture of earth taken from space, called That Wasn’t planned originally

The Robbers Cave Experiment story is a fascinating glimpse into self differentiating social groups, á la Lord of the Flies…

During the study, Sherif posed as a camp janitor. The study team screened a group of 24 twelve-year-old boys with similar backgrounds. They were picked up by two buses carrying 12 boys each. Neither group knew of the other’s existence. The boys were assigned to two living areas far enough apart that each group remained ignorant of the other’s presence for the first few days. The Sherifs had broken up pre-existing friendships to the extent they could, so that each boy’s identification with his new group could happen faster. Asked to choose names for their groups, one chose “The Rattlers”, the other “The Eagles.” Within two or three days, the two groups spontaneously developed internal social hierarchies.

Apparently not too long after the two groups self-identified, they noticed each other and started to aggressively interact.  This apparently devolved into violent raids which had to be stopped before any of the boys were hurt.  The solution to this problem? Get the two groups of boys (who were from a very similar background) to cooperate and solve joint problems together, like a water shortage or pulling a broken down truck a short distance.

Weather Wheel, a weather visualisation by Bard Edlund, is just beautiful to watch.  Make sure you take a look at it in motion..

 

Can you spot the octopus? Via Science Friday

Cinemetrics is a brilliant visualisation project by Frederick Brodbeck, produced for his Bachelor major project from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), Den Haag.  It’s an incredibly detailed study of film focussing on many of the common elements of film (shot length, predominant colours), with the intent of identifying a film’s fingerprint.


That’s about all for now!

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As noted elsewhere.. #1

Aug 19, ’11 1:07 AM

I’ve had it in mind lately to do more than simply collect and store the design inspiration ideas, concepts and images which get the creative juices flowing. If design school taught me nothing else, it’s that ideas and concepts don’t exist in a vacuum, and that any creative process will thrive when given the right nourishment. So to that end, I’m commencing a small project to share the small collection of ideas/concepts which excite, inspire and guide us as designers.

So, without further ado, here is the first instalment of

As noted elsewhere..

First up is a short series of questions about design, conducted with Charles Eames in 1972.


Design Q&A

Staying with the Eames pair for a moment longer, here’s their seminal Powers of Ten video, made with IBM in 1977. It’s a short film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe, and the effect of adding another zero. Each 10 seconds the film zooms out (and in) by a factor of 10. Charles & Ray Eames also produced this as a flip book, but the youtube video is the best we’ll get.


Powers of Ten

Changing tack completely, our friends at BERG linked to the amazing Kinect Fusion project, emerging from researchers at Microsoft and a number of universities in the US and UK. This incredible video is made possible through the innovative kinect camera, a consumer grade camera designed for use with the XBox 360 gaming console! It’s an incredible piece of technology that appears to be reinventing much of what we think is possible with 3D scanning techniques. Of particular interest is the ‘physics simulation’ 4 minutes in, and the object detection algorithm, detecting new objects in a 3D mapped space. It’s not clear how open the software will be, but it certainly points to a new paradigm of site analysis.


Kinect Fusion

Staying in the UK, BERG and Denstu London recently teamed up to introduce a new type of toy, being described as a new type of media platform, full of possibilities. The toys interact using augmented reality, which is certainly a new direction for media-gaming.

Recently we were linked to the Hyphae lamp by Nervous System, a design firm using generative algorithms to create unique lamp designs for their new series of lamps. Inspired by the growth of leaf veins, they designed a script to create new lamp geometry for each lamp, which is produced by a 3D printer.

Very exciting!

We’ll leave it there for now, stay posted for more notes from elsewhere.

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