I went to the Long Now meetup Thursday night at Demos. Alfie Dennen gave a talk then we went to the pub. It felt like an RCA reunion with about a quarter of the participants being from the last 4 years of Design Interactions. I enjoyed chatting with people and realized that the Long Now discussions are actually just talking about the future which is something DI people do regularly for fun. It was good to have some new insights with their own expertise. I look forward to the next one.

[This a response to Kochiro Nakatsu's commentary that the only prolific American designers died more than 20 years ago.]

I agree a bit but I believe the American relationship with products is more complex than that. I think America has more focus on the family unit and less on your part in society. The family tries to fill the need for love in our lives so why do we need products to do that? Efficiency is good enough and leaves us more time to spend with those we care about. As family structures change into uncharted territory of fewer marriages, fewer children, and more support from non-traditional communities, the products in the US need to adapt. [disclaimer: not that I like the changing social structures, we aren't likely to go back.]

Reasons for this:
(1) although the US tries to maintain a separation of church and state (compared to the UK or Germany who have state religions), the society in the US is more affected by religion. I believe the values of religion are helpful for maintaining strong family relationships but religion doesn’t seem to be sustainable. it has mostly become obsolete for much of the Western world and nothing yet has come along effectively to replace it.

(2) The US has been engaged in war for the last 7 years. Passions are tied up in it on either side of the issue. Activists are protesting the war rather than addressing domestic issues. Also, financial expenses of the war haven’t allowed the US economy to be as productive as Europe/Japan. Poetic products are culture and I think the US has been starved for sweet, rich culture that makes us cry and dream and fuels more creations.

(3) [I'm not sure if this is a reason but I will ramble anyway...] Americans are good at marketing… selling things… economics. Post-WW2 we made the move on the global stage partially by exporting culture. Making movies that people wanted to watch and making them think they wanted to watch. I hear people in London refer to the American-entrepreneurialism and how that is lacking in Europe. The American dream is to start something new and get rich or die trying. This is where our economic theory is so strong… the efficiency or utility of a product is important. What features will sell the product? An American asks, ‘What’s the best bargain for my money?’. This approach of efficiency means if you can offer a product that seems to have the same features but is cheaper because it has less unmeasurable loveliness, you will probably sell more. It’s more of an engineering/economic approach that considers users as predictable objects rather than thinking and feeling beings.

I think the recession is an exciting time to be a designer. I am spending most of my time tinkering and trying to figure out ‘new’ types of products. I have the hope that by the time I’ve finished them, the world will be ready to consume them. I’m spending lots of time thinking of the future and trying to create a vision for myself of what our future will look like.
2009 will be a gem and 2010 a gold-mine.

I have been using a wifi-router with DD-WRT installed to connect to our house wifi-router so I don’t have to run a cable to my Viglen MPC-L. Soon I will get a USB wifi stick for it but in the meantime my router does the job.

Bridging was easy:
Under Wireless>>Basic Settings, set Wireless Mode to Client Bridge.
Set the SSID to the same as your host wifi router.
Set the WEP or WPA (under Wireless Security) to be the same as the host router.
‘Save’. ‘Apply Settings’. This is pretty straight forward but it didn’t go smoothly the first time but I found I was getting access through the router so I stopped futzing with it.

This week I removed the WEP passcode on the house wifi so some visiting friends could easily connect their laptops. To maintain the bridge, I also had to remove the WEP key on my DD-WRT router. This worked fun, but today when I put the WEP key back on the host, the DD-WRT router wouldn’t accept the WEP key. The web interface form had inputs for Passphrase, Key 1, Key 2, etc. I just needed the 64bit WEP key (10 digits) to be saved into one of the ‘key’ slots. DD-WRT would have none of it. It wanted me to enter a password into the Passphrase then press the Generate to create the hex-code for the keys. As I wanted to maintain the same WEP key my flatmates already have stored, I didn’t want to generate a new one.

My chosen angle of attack was to SSH (ssh root@192.168.1.1) into the router while plugged directly to the DD-WRT router (and wifi on my laptop turned off). I had used the nvram command on OpenWRT so I gave that a try. nvram show spit out tons of settings. nvram show|grep wep spit out the settings with wep in them. nvram set wl0_wep_gen=”1122334455″ followed by nvram commit to save. I didn’t have much confidence in this attempt, but when I typed reboot, my laptops networked apps, like skype, sprung back to life.

Worries of losing more life skills…

Most people have already lost the knowledge of phone numbers of those close to them through the use of a mobile phone’s address book. Our industrialized food production has allowed me to never learn how to kill an animal, but I still know how to cook a ‘processed’ one. How much knowledge of the world is needed to survive daily? How much knowledge is needed for the occasional loss of technology (power outage)?

Chris Hand’s social sensors relate to some of my concept. Mobile devices communicating a layer of hidden information to the physical environment.

Emotional, consumer robot. Older project but still a consumer product displaying ambient information.

I’ve been following Will Wilkinson’s blog, The Fly Bottle. He is an Iowan working at the Cato Institute (libertarian thinktank) in DC. Being a combination of a socialist and libertarian, I like some of his arguments relating to ethics, economics, emotions, etc. And he reminds me of my brother.

I read bits of Bowling Alone for my dissertation. Critics argue that although we may have lost some social capital, life is not going to go back to the jolly 1950s. Also, many new activities have replaced some of the nearly extinct traditional ones. I believe the problems Robert Putnam says exist are real but need to be modernized (even the book isn’t that old). Combined with Generation Me and Rise of the Creative Class, this book adds to the complexity of those stories.

We are going into our third week of Easter break. I’ve been doing a lot of programming, thinking, and some relaxing. Before break, I picked up a William Gibson book at the library, Count Zero. In our studies, I define Design Interactions as trying to figure out how technology will fit into society. I’m enjoying reading some cyberpunk and relating the mid-80s visions of the future with where we currently are. Virtual reality was a fantasy for the future. A dream of a what our world could become. Those dreams have been lost in recent years. Maybe with the dot com burst of the late-90s we had a loss of innocence. Maybe it was 9/11 and the ridiculousness of US imperialism that are more cause for worry than foolish, future fantasies. It is somewhat cliche but I am intrigued by dreams. Dreams fuel passion and passion is a reason to live. Before cyberpunk, there was the space-race. I remember waiting in line and getting to shake hands with an astronaut at the Invention Convention which I participated in when I was about 10. I had developed an automatic bed-maker. I wanted to be a scientist! an engineer! I was young and these dreams passed, but the need for heroes has not. I discussed last night with my brother about hope Barrack Obama brings me. For the first time in my independent life have I seen the possibility of being proud of America. His hope is to solve the problems that any innocent child already knows, so his hope feels too near to me and too mundane to keep my interest. We need some new dreams for our society. Nanotech? too small for people to grasp.Biotech/genetics? it’s been talked about for ages.Space? as much of a socialist as I’ve been, privatization of space flight gets my juices flowing. I want to float sans gravity and to feel infinitely isolated. Weird fetish maybe?Robots? maybe as they become consumerized, there will be a similar adoption to the advent of personal computers. The Wild West of robot outlaws will give little Danny something to aspire to. 

I just had the largest emotional reaction I’ve ever had from a web page (not including receiving emails). I tried to find my brother on Facebook. Against my better judgement, I input my password to my gmail account. Facebook returned a list of 120 people of my email contacts who have Facebook accounts. I hit ‘unselect all’ then found my brother’s listing near the bottom and hit ’send’. Immediately, it shows me a list of email addresses with checks. Oh no! My stomach dropped. The gut reaction was that I just invited all these people. Luckily it instead was showing me a list of 590 more people I could invite to Facebook. No thank you and PLEASE for such a potentially embarrassing actioin, please allow me to confirm or give me feedback of what I just did.

The New York Times had an article, Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzles Researchers [pdf], that may relate to some topics in the book, Generation Me by Jean Twenge. The article is addressing baby-boomers but Twenge points out developments in social and existential patterns between the generations that could lead to large-scale problems. Increased suicide is an unfortunate one. With rapid cultural changes happening from the ground up, no one is looking at the long-term effects. Can designers effectively do this? Designers work as artists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, scientists, critics, etc. doing none at an expert level. But since none of the experts in those fields consider the other fields, designers span the stage and hopefully make the right connections.

PagerMotors.com sells ‘pager motors’ and ships worldwide for $3.00. Many of us have had trouble sourcing them in the UK. I haven’t ordered yet but will soon. Usually people cannibalize a cell phone which seems silly for an inexpensive part.

[Jonathan Cabiria talk at Lift08] I just stumbled across this as I was needing a break from work on a Sunday afternoon and I think it is quite relevant to my dissertation topic. I am not much interested in Second Life but I am interested in how people fulfill their identity problems through virtual communities. He points out that marginalized folks end up having problems that our society has trouble dealing with, and virtual communities are provided the space and support those people need. I’ve heard but haven’t yet found that a study of hyves.nl found that people with many friends connected to their online profile also tend to have lots of friends in the physical world. One misconception I’ve been hearing from people when discussing my work in the interim show is that online friends are not ‘real’ friends and those people are actually lonely. Not necessarily true!

I’ve remade my website. I liked my old one. It was cute. For each user, it generated a new color palette. It showed my ‘friends’ or visitors with a visualization of how recently someone else went to the site. However, it lacked a content management system and therefore was hard to update with new projects. 

Now I’ve stripped down Wordpress to be decently suited for displaying projects. I also can have frequent updates on my current/thesis project (a blog?).

Statement of Intent for January Crit…. This keeps changing so I’ll post to have it documented.
Happiness in the Mobile Era
Over the last 50 years society has changed how people get support in their lives. A higher percentage of people are far from home and fewer people are involved with religious communities or social organizations. These were the traditional sources for support. This, and other causes, has led to an increase in the rate of depression. The World Health Organization believes depression will be the second leading cause of death worldwide by 2020. People’s emotional well-being is becoming a major issue.
Identity
I am looking at new and recent systems/services that help people fill and assess their emotional needs. Social networking services, like Facebook and MySpace, give access to new support structures and the rise of the virtual-self. How might someone bridge their physical and virtual identities?
Mythology
Mythology is said to be about seeking the experience of being alive. Religions use mythology to help people understand their existence (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth). In our modern, secular society we have a shortage of mythology. In what ways can technology bring myths (new or old) into people’s lives to fill the vacancy of past religions?

A thought for tying my ideas together for next year…. maybe I would design toys to encourage happy/healthy living. Toys would teach creativity and social behavior at an impressionable age. Legos encourage building. Playing with neighborhood kids in a vacant lot teaches self-regulating of the group and tact. I’m sure there is a gob of research in this area. Even the Lifelong Kindergarten group (worked there for a summer) probably has lots of papers on the subject. I would need to dive into it to find what has been done but then I could go my merry way to see what I come up with.