Week of Nov 30, 2003

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Weblogs: An Antidote To Misquotes?

internet, politics

December 06, 2003, 05:40 PM

One of the biggest problems for people who are in the public eye is published misquotes from reporters or other mass media producers. This ranges from quoting out of context to inaccurate paraphrasing to flat out made-up statements, whether intentionally or by accident. There are several cases of bright careers getting ruined by misquotes, and many more of badly damaged reputations.

Declan McCullagh, the politics-and-technology writer, recently attacked Lawrence Lessig for allegedly promoting the elimination of anonymity online. Fortunately for Lessig, he keeps a weblog, and provides his side of the story there.

This is a direct benefit of personal publication; if everyone has their soapbox, they can use that soapbox to make responses such as these available to the entire world as soon as a potentially damaging misquote hits the public consciousness. This won't guarantee that people will believe them, of course, but at least it removes the barrier of enforced silence through a lack of publication resources. Beyond that, technology can no longer help, and your reputation must stand on the merits of your arguments and the trustability of your data.

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Infinitely Screwy Math

philosophy

December 05, 2003, 01:02 PM

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting post on doing math with infinity over on his weblog (and I usually don't go in for math articles). It illustrates the mind-bending stuff that can happen when you apply the mathematical model to extreme edge cases that are far removed from our reality. Of course, despite their apparent impractical nature, sometimes these edge cases turn out to be highly applicable to important domains. The field of Quantum Mechanics, after all, grew out of looking at extreme edge cases (quantum events) in which classical mechanics breaks down as a model of reality. And though it makes no more sense to us intuitively, it turns out to be the only accurate way to model reality.

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Augmented Reality Graffiti

design, society & sociology

December 03, 2003, 11:23 AM

Cary sent me a link to a website complaining about the iPod's allegedly short-lived battery life. Here's to hoping my iPod holds out longer; no matter how great the design is, I can't afford to buy a 300$ music player every year and a half.

The section of the video where the creator is spraypainting the apple advertisements with the message "iPod's Unreplaceable Battery Lasts Only 18 Months" got me thinking about technological measures for adding greater public deliberation to advertising, specifically using augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality is an interface genre that involves creating technology that can recognize something about the state of the world and then overlay some additional information on top of the user's experience of the world. For example, a (conceptually) simple example would be a pair of glasses with a small embedded camera that can recognize the faces of people you're talking to, look them up in a database, then display their full names underneath their face (or so it appears; the glasses would project the name directly into your eyes), which would greatly help out those of us who are bad at remembering names of people we don't know very well.

Now take this thought, and imagine a system where viewers of an advertisement could append commentary about the product or the company to the physical poster, television spot, or whatever that would then be available to all other viewers of the advertisement as a sort of "virtual graffiti". This gives us the benefits of the website author's approach to commentary without actually being illegal or even ethically questionable (although it also might lack the thrill of committing minor civil disobedience).

This approach is already taken by some websites, which have the advantage of not needing augmented reality since they exist in an entirely virtual space. Kuro5hin, for example, allows users to append comments to the text advertisements on the site to foster discussion about the product or service or company being advertised (although the advertiser has the ability to disable this feature). One problem with such systems which hasn't really been solved even in virtual spaces is how to empower readers to filter through a potentially large volume or comments, many of them useless, and how to get an at-a-glance "big picture" of all this commentary. In other systems, the problem may be encouraging contribution, since people may be less willing to take the time to contribute their recommendations or complaints if their feelings aren't strong or their readership is small.

I also confess to having no clear idea how far off in the future such an augmented reality system is. We had an interesting talk at the SSS on augmented reality given by a couple of guys from the ETC who were investigating the possibilities for AR in games. But I did get the impression that most of the technology was pretty nascent. Still, now is a great time for designers to start investigating the potential interactions afforded by AR so we'll be ready for it when it comes.

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Architect Programmers

funny, software development

December 01, 2003, 10:56 AM

This is exactly what many software architects have to deal with, so this analogy is more true than even the author of this joke thinks. I'm all for understanding the user's needs and all that, but that doesn't change the fact that some people have irrational "needs". I propose all managers be required to take a sensitivity course ("So You've Decided to Fund a Software Project...") before they're allowed to talk to a development team.

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The Design of a New Machine

design

November 30, 2003, 04:46 PM

There's an article in the New York Times titled "The Guts of a New Machine" that discusses the rise of the iPod and Apple's approach to design innovation with the product. The author takes the position that the iPod has been winning in the digital music player market largely because of a close attention to sound user experience design. Some highlights:

Steve Jobs discusses the difference between visual design and interaction design:

It is, in short, an icon. A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this -- it's about ease of use, it's about Apple's great sense of design. But what does that really mean? ''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''

Jonathan Ive, Apple's VP of Industrial Design, emphasizes the importance of design process and downplays "magic moment" innovations:

When it came to pinning Ive down on questions of how specific aspects of the product came to be, he stressed not epiphanies but process. Asked about the scroll wheel, he did not mention the Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones that use a similar radial dial; rather, he talked about the way that his design group collaborates constantly with engineers and manufacturers. ''It's not serial,'' he insisted. ''It's not one person passing something on to the next.''

The author discusses innovation in the marketplace, pointing out that often the companies that innovate get punished when the "followers" come along and refine their ideas into something a little bit better or cheaper, but not more innovative:

You can think of innovation as a continuum, and this phase is one end of it. The dreams and experiments that happen outside of -- and in a state of indifference toward -- the marketplace. At the other end of the continuum are the fast followers, those who are very attuned to the marketplace, but are not particularly innovative. They let someone else do the risky business of wild leaps, then swoop in behind with an offering that funnels some aspect of the innovation into a more marketable (cheaper? watered down? easier to obtain?) package -- and dominates.

Steve Jobs stresses the iPod's focus on user experience design:

As he described it, the iPod did not begin with a specific technological breakthrough, but with a sense, in early 2001, that Apple could give this market something better than any rival could. So the starting point wasn't a chip or a design; the starting point was the question, What's the user experience?

Of course, all of this is moot if you believe, as many cynics do, that the iPod is largely the result of a successful marketing campaign rather than sound product design. If so, we'll see what the future holds; many other companies have talented, well-funded marketing departments. But I rather doubt that will be Apple's downfall (if anything is); I predict the iPod will only lose out if another company manages to effectively clone it, which will only expand it's impact and influence (although this may be small comfort to Jobs and Apple).

Developing questions on whether our free market adequately encourages innovation are left as an exercise for the reader (for now, at least).

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