Interface Culture
Just as the basic tools (if not necessarily the high aesthetics) of visual communication have been thoroughly democratized, tools for data visualization are moving to the mainstream. The most recent example I’ve seen, and it’s a lovely one, is The Gapminder World 2006. The exciting thing to me is not so much that the information design clearly and simply reveals unsettling truths (people in Africa live 30 years shorter lives than people in the US; think about that for a moment) but that the tool makes play out of the work of visualizing the ubiquitously invisible patterns of the world. Along with such as Stamen’s Trulia Hindsight and others, these tools are not only leaving the academy and the messy basement desks of government analysts and moving out into the world, but they are becoming more playful, more narrative, and more polemical. Let the spime wrangling commence (can people be Spimes?).
I heart culture jamming: Sniggle Net has lots of good stuff, including a bit on one of my favorite culture hacks ever, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO).
Apparently rigid gender-stereotyping is OK again, as embodied in the pre-xmas interface over at Target.com: 
Funny how “Music” is the only overlap, though I suspect the girls’ side may be all about booty-dancing in the boys’ videos.
I hate to be negative, especially in the midst of so much web 2.0 circle-jerking that’s going on, but I’m not so happy that I have no control over where my stuff might appear. I just went to 43things (for the first time in months) and was surprised to see my flickr photo feed right there on the page. Is that not “commercial” use (which is prohibited by the “Non-commercial share-alike” license I used)? I don’t really mean to single 43things out, and in fact don’t really mind the feed being there, but this does raise the question of the consequences of all this “openness” everyone’s so fired up about.
Well, the Veronica Mars season premiere was last night and unfortunately I couldn’t watch it (that’s bad) because I was out on a date (that’s good). In the past, I would have Tivoed it, but since I’ve moved back to my house I no longer have cable or satellite. I’ve been debating whether or not to pay the 60 or 70 bucks a month for hundreds of channels of crap (that’s bad) and I think my mind just got made up (that’s good). You see, even though I can only get like 4 channels via the airwaves (that’s bad), I took a quick look for the show I missed this morning (the next day!) and there it was all patiently waiting for me (that’s good). An hour or so later (I didn’t notice because it was downloading in the background) and there it is on my desktop. So, Comcast, DirecTV, Tivo, et all: Screw you guys, I’m going home (and watching what I want when I want). A side note to the above mentioned companies: I’d happily pay let’s say $25/month for a box that sat by my TV and gave me a nice interface onto all those shows out there on BitTorrent. You’d have to do some work to make sure the files were high quality, etc, but since you have the originals that shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe there’d be a cap on how many I could download. Heck, with TV I’d even be willing to submit to relatively stringent DRM since I have no real desire to “own” the shows outright.
File under there-should-be-a-standard, Steps for finding a human on various phone systems. Some of them are pretty amazing, such as Delta, where you say ‘agent’ four times until it finally gives you an agent. This is firmly in that part of the Venn diagram where business needs fail to intersect with user needs.
This Rugby Logotype Comparison is a great “illustration” of the way Flickr facilitates an ongoing visual conversation.
My own private SFO: a personal geography is Mike’s map of a “place” he’s spent a lot of time in over the past year. Love it!
There seem to be two distinct approaches to the collision of space and information. The first is to create a new view to some portion of the world by collecting and organizing “reality” (photos, timestamps, GPS data) into a coherent information space. Examples include mappr, Mike’s own PhotoGeoBlog, and other 21st century variants on what is at heart a travelogue. The second is the reverse: layering information (annotations, reviews, links) onto real space. Examples here include HIPS, Vindigo, and lots more.
But I’m guessing the really interesting stuff happens when you drop the self-consciousness of either approach and build things that are what they are by virtue of knowing where they are and, further, where location-awareness is only one facet. So, for example, you’re driving to a family dinner in the next town and your car is low on gas and it knows that if you don’t stop and fill up over at that Shell station by the onramp you’ll run out of gas before you get to Aunt Vida’s house, so it tells you. I’m sure there are plenty of less-cheesy examples, but you get the drift.
Microsoft has posted a parent’s primer to computer slang, which will do them no good but is pretty amusing.
Rajat describes the “digital photo effect” (That his ability to produce and acquire has far outstripped his ability to consume), which leads to a state where it’s difficult to enjoy/savor/experience any one photo. I’d add that, with this impoverishment of attention, organization takes the place of interaction as the locus of pleasure. We take delight in seeing the patterns in the data or in rearranging our collection so it looks different or seems more meaningful.
So, is this a bad thing? Well, I think it’s mixed. I think the loss Rajat points out is a real one, though not a new one: Walter Benjamin was talking about the the loss of “aura” way back in 1936. And, as far as I can remember, he was somewhat ambivalent about it, chronicling a profound change in the production and reception of art, pointing out both what was lost and what was gained.
So, too the current change. I may no longer put together a photo album every 5 years documenting important events in my life (losing a tooth, first day at school, senior prom), but now I am using photographs to take part in an ongoing visual piazza. Something lost, something gained.
Still, Rajat’s post made me stop and think about the loss. I want to preserve some of that contemplative time, in which as Benjamin put it “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it.” So, I hereby resolve to contemplate something every day; to give it my full attention, if even only for a few minutes.