Scrollables is a stunning exploration that uses paper as an interface for digital content. Move the scroll, and control the content projected onto it:

Current is a real time data visualization of the life-cycle of internet memes, from birth to evolution and decline, in relation to the daily news cycle. By visually anthropomorphizing the capricious nature of public attention we are able to spotlight missed opportunities in news coverage, and, potentially, recover news readership that has been lost to more sensational sources. Download and run the application yourself!

Plus and Minus visualizes the progress of HIV/AIDS in the last 20 years and lets users see how changes they make can affect the future. It is based on data from 1990 through 2007 and lets one compare see possible outcomes of investment in different solutions like condoms, HIV screenings and education.

Mobile Logger is an iphone application that lets its users record location, direction, speed, altitude and sound level as they go off on a journey. This is especially designed for bikes, but can obviously be used in other “journey” situations. Check out the Gizmodo post.

Chat Roulette 1988 is a phone based system that allows you to chat with different people anytime, anywhere. Since the 80’s are back (or so claim the creators), you might as well give this a try! The project leverages the Asterisk Open Source telephony project.

SHORT++ is a pair of interactive robotic elevators shoes that are activated by an iPhone app. (There’s a new UP for that…) Check out Adi’s video:

Papel is a retail display that mixes paper art, illusions and human interaction. When a viewer is not present, the wall paper will radiate a soft glow. When the viewer stands in front of the installation, the glow fades out, and their image is back-projected onto the paper structure.

Thermogen is a cool project that converts heat from a toaster over to electricity. In essence, a cirtuit to be used where power is unavailable, but heat is plentiful. Additionally, David created not only electricity from the heat, but also yummy choc-chip cookies.

Three glowing screen are set amidst arching piles of ghostly pale books. One continuously reconfigures Twitter posts about reading, on another bouncing letters randomly settle into place, revealing pointed quotes about reading drawn from well-known books, while the third uses the viewer’s image to trace out a series of related passages.

Photos below:

more project information here.

I am sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, since ceasing to exist on Facebook so will drastically reduce my ability to communicate with many friends. And this gets to the crux of the challenge: are we so addicted to Facebook that we can’t tell whats good for us anymore? Is Facebook an Evil? Are they trying to Monopolize the social web? All of the above??

Last December, Facebook broke the social “contract” that we all signed up for by changing its privacy defaults. It switched the context right under our noses, prompting some 65% of users to go public without even knowing it. Many users still have no clue how visible their profile information and photos are (we all know how unintuitive FB privacy controls are). While this is totally unacceptable behavior and places some users in potentially risky situations, I can’t help but also look at the flip side. Facebook is on its way to becoming the first truly global social network platform that has potential to fundamentally change the way we experience the web. By placing social information in context and not in a single, aggregated feed, Facebook might actually succeed at creating some fantastically useful socially-aware and personalized browsing experiences. All that simply traded for our privacy!
Well, not so simple.

Some think that it is possible to bring the demise of Facebook by creating applications that will scare users; creepy apps that know way too much about you. While this might make headlines, it is unlikely that such an approach will prove to be successful in the long term. As a society, we’ve become so hooked on Facebook, that we are willing to take potential future risks in return for current socializing. And realistically, unless I were a hormone-fluctuating, socially uncomfortable teen, what content could your app possibly surface that is so detrimental to my life?

Raul Pacheco hits the spot when he writes that Facebook’s actions are ‘not enough for us to care’:

There has been a lot of debate online about how Facebook keeps making it more difficult for users to keep their privacy. My question to everyone is — if Facebook is that “evil,” why are we all still using it? Why not be completely democratic and demonstrate (with our vote, e.g. with our not having a Facebook account) that this loss of privacy is unacceptable?
The answer is — because not enough of us care. If the millions of users of Facebook really cared that much about their privacy, they would make the Big Brother/Sister accountable. But in a society that is valuing privacy less and less, accountability has become an afterthought and not mainstream. Sadly, that also means that we have lost the power of protecting our privacy to commercial interests.

I wouldn’t say that Facebook users don’t care about privacy. I just think that many don’t care enough to be obsessing and worrying about potential future risks. Even if one recognizes a slightly riskee photo or comment, it is tempting to just leave online, as the fun of social interaction trumps the thought about potential future uncomfort. While these types of actions most likely don’t affect users in the near term, there are two things that we should be aware of: (1) the consequences of our actions onto others, and (2) the long term implications of sharing our data.

This is where User Experience Design can play a significant role, as we are facing an extremely difficult design challenge. We need to create a visual language that helps users understand these potential risks taken by making content visible. Not unlike the automobile association in West London who set the first warning signs on roads in 1908, or the cigarette manufacturers who were mandated to highlight the medical issues correlated with smoking, we need to figure out best practices to display potential risks without scaring users away. We need to design digital warning signs that keep attracting people’s attention and not fade into the background. We should be aware of our privacy controls at all times – perhaps by placing icons of just how many people can see an item before it is submitted.

As Danny Sullivan writes:

I shouldn’t have to dive into complicated settings that give the fiction of privacy control but don’t — since they’re so hard to understand that they’re ignored. I shouldn’t need a flowchart to understand what friends of friends of friends can share with others. Things should be naturally clear and easy for me . . .

Would you like to see your dad, teacher and ex-girlfriend’s icons next to an item before submitting it? Probably not.
Is there a system that can helps us visualize the audience to which we are writing? That’s something users don’t want to see, and thus a challenging design problem.

There is a growing need for applications that help us understand our personal online brand: how we are portrayed online, and what potential risks we face. What’s the equivalent of an anti-virus application, that instead of protecting our computer, protects our online persona? We need something that can warn us when a risky action was taken online (either by us or our within our social network).

Facebook’s new APIs makes is super easy for web developers to build on top of its social graph. Almost too easy. By embedding widgets in the form of like buttons and status update boxes, websites can easily personalize their views according to you. For a growing number of services, this is done without even requiring users to login. For example, on likebutton.me you will see your Facebook friend’s activities from a variety of websites, as long as have previously logged into Facebook. A central listing of what my friends recommend, separated by topics. Creepy, but potentially useful.

The same type of connection happens with both yelp and pandora. At first feels creepy, yet as an experience, potentially something we may get used to, or even like.

Here are two examples where things can get out of hand:
(1) There are Facebook “community pages” that automatically add any status updates that include the page keyword. From CIA and FBI to Terrorism, they’ve got it all, with your name and thoughts right there, thanks to your inability to understand their privacy defaults! As a user, without even knowing it, your name is automatically associated with a community that algorithmically formed around a used keyword.

(2) It is dead simple to create Evil “Like” Buttons – by hacking the button to point to another page. Again, adding the risk that our usernames would be associated with something we are not aware of.

As a User Experience designer my task is to think about users first, place them in the center of my design, protect them, respect their needs, and help them accomplish whatever they come to do in the best possibly way. However, Informing users of privacy hazards is a difficult design challenge, one that Facebook obviously doesn’t want to handle. As web entrepreneurs, should we be leveraging this powerful yet scary technology that Facebook has enabled?
If so, how do we warn our users without scaring them away? How do we show users what they don’t really want to see or deal with? How can we warn of risks that only affect the far future?

We should also ask ourselves if regulation is needed. And if so, what would it look like and how it might further complicate the matter?

Ironically enough, Bing sponsored a really cool lounge which included a number of interactive art pieces. This is were Dan Goods and I installed a variation the Aerogel installation. For TEDActive, we slightly altered its interactivity and the projected material:

Aerogel is a solid made up of 99.8% air and 0.2% of a smoky form of silicon, hence its other name: ’solid smoke’. While it is easily breakable, the material is super light and a fantastic heat insulator. Throughout the week, Dan would let people hold a piece of Aerogel on their hand while directing a blow-torch at it. When projected upon, it captures light in a stunning way:

NASA uses aerogel to capture dust particles in space. These particles vaporize on impact with solids and pass through gases, however can be trapped within the aerogel. Our installation dealt with this notion of capturing that which difficult to hold or grasp. As the conference progressed, the ideas that were raised and discussed during the talks were captured and projected on the aerogel pieces. At different times, a variety of topic would be projected within the aerogel pieces. When left by itself, the projections morphed between movement and colors. But as a person would move their hands in front of the installation, some of the most recent messages posted on Twitter about TED or TEDActive would explode within the projected space.

Here’s a video demonstrating the material’s amazing capability to capture light:

Here’s another video showing Dan interacting with the piece:

How did this happen and what prompted this message to spread?

#CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike

About an hour after Matt sent out his first message, one of his followers, @lizzieohreally, wrote the following message ‘@jaketapper? @abcdude? …Hoping someone w/ more Twitter than I can help popularize #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike (via @mattsly)‘. Lizzie clearly understood that in order to get many others to play, she would have to get someone with a large set of followers to participate. Lizzie had only around 500 followers at the time, so posted this message in an attempt to seek @jaketapper or @abcdude’s attention.

Sure thing, some twenty minutes later, @abcdude see’s the message and adds his own variation to the meme: ‘#cheeringfortheyankeesislike pulling for Regina George in “Mean Girls.”‘ He enjoys it so much that he promptly posts another message and attaches the hashtag. @abcdude is a new york based correspondent for ABC news. He dubs himself a RedSox fan and a cosmic power broker. Not as cosmic as Lizzie had hoped, but still, he has some 7,000 followers, which could certainly help give the meme some traction. We see a small spike after @abcdude’s participation, and by now, some 3 hours after Matt sent the original message, there have been 34 different messages posted with this unique hashtag.

But it wasn’t until @jaketapper joined in that the conversation really took off. The hashtag came to Jake’s attention after @DetourJazz, whom he follows, participated. Jake reacted by posting:  ’RT @DetourJazz: #cheeringfortheyankeesislike rooting for “Craterface” in Grease to beat Danny (via @Laura_Martin)’. He then added a new message that he posted to his followers. Jake is a senior White House correspondent for ABC news with over 30,000 followers. Before he took part in this meme, new posts appeared at a frequency of one every 5 minutes. Immediately after he joined, we see a sharp rise in participation, with multiple messages from a variety of users every minute.

Seeing it Spread

1. Graphing the Network – Every user who participated in the meme is represented by a gray circle (Matt, whom first started the meme, is shown in yellow). Edges represents the person who most likely influenced the other to first participate.

2. Seeing the Flow – in this applet, a user is represented by their twitter icon. As the timeline moves forward, each profile lights up when they post a new message with the hashtag. Tthe moment that @jaketapper chose to participate is evident – there’s a clear, sudden spike in participation after his profile picture lights up.

3. Seeing the distance – the following applet highlights the total social distance that this hashtag traveled between users. Each user is represented by a circle, the more influence a user has, the larger their circle is drawn. Edges in this example represent the social ties – when there’s a follower/friend relationship between two users, a line is placed between their representation on the screen. The first column includes only Matt who first used the hashtag. The second row consists of only those people he directly influenced to participate (his followers). While there are a total of 9 columns, it is crystal clear that the most important phase happened in the second and third column, when a core cluster of users chose to participate, and a mini tipping point was reached.

Parsing the Data

#CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike lasted for a total of 9 hours that day, activated 271 different users and included around 500 messages in total. From looking at this meme, it is clear that on Twitter, there’s great advantage to having many followers if one intends to spread a message. It is also clear that having the right followers is key. If it were not for @lizzieohreally who knew to actively pass the message onwards to heavy Twitter users, the meme would never have spread out the way it did. In order to come to these conclusions it was necessary for me to look at social ties in addition to the semantics of the messages posted.

I used the Twitter API to discover the follower/friend relationships between all users who participated in this meme. This is extremely important  data, especially when modeling  the flow of participation and influence within this hashtag. For example, lets look at a simple case where user B follows user A. If user A first participates and is followed by user B participating, user A is rewarded some number of influence points – this is assuming user B saw the hashtag posted by user A, and decided to participate. Additionally, if a user is retweeted or ‘@’ messaged they are rewarded some number of influence points. Real life situations can easily become complicated, as user B might also be following user C, who participated in the meme as well. Now how do we know if user B was influenced by user A or user C? Hard to tell, but we can build an influence model that takes these situations into account, which is exactly what I did.

Translating the semantics and social ties from the dataset into a visual language that made sense was key to helping me understand this hashtag experiment. I am a big fan of visualization as a means to parse large datasets, however dealing with social, implicit data is tricky, and extremely challenging to represent visually. But when done right, these representations can shine a whole new light and hopefully help us better understand some of the dynamics at play.

What I’d like to see is a comparison of multiple people at the same time. I’d also like to minimize the timeline so that i can see the whole evening at a time, rather than have to scroll horizontally. I don’t like the aesthetic of circular profiles over a black background. The circular border has too much contrast – some alpha blurring would’ve done the trick nicely. Whats definitely missing most is the multiple channel view, especially now that people aren’t talking as much about the event. In any case, nice to see MTV investing in a Twitter viz. (click below to try it out)

]]> http://giladlotan.com/blog/2009/09/twitter-visualization-mtv-vma-tweet-tracker/feed/ 2 http://giladlotan.com/blog/2009/09/david-kord-murray-borrowing-brilliance/ http://giladlotan.com/blog/2009/09/david-kord-murray-borrowing-brilliance/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:22:48 +0000 http://giladlotan.com/blog/?p=469 I’m very excited about the new Speaker Series that MSR New England has kicked off today, featuring David Kord Murray, author of Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by building on the ideas of others. David gave a solid talk, emphasizing the importance of two aspects in the process of being “creative”: Borrowing [...]]]> I’m very excited about the new Speaker Series that MSR New England has kicked off today, featuring David Kord Murray, author of Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by building on the ideas of others. David gave a solid talk, emphasizing the importance of two aspects in the process of being “creative”: Borrowing other ideas, and knowing how to Judge ideas.

In his book’s second chapter (on borrowing) he quotes Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”. What he lays out later in the chapter, describes “smart” ways of borrowing – basically don’t borrow ideas from your direct competitor, but possibly someone else in a related field, or yet better, someone in a completely unrelated field, who is trying to solve a similar problem. Bill Gates borrowed solutions from the existing software industry, while Charles Darwin borrowed his creative solutions from places not usually associated with biology (Galapagos). Borrow from within your industry and you’re considered a thief or lowly pirate. While if you borrow from another industry, you are considered a creative genius.

Another interesting quote from that chapter: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” He continues to write about how Bill Gates stole the mouse+click GUI idea that Macintosh developed first. Apparently Steve Jobs spotted that technology at XEROX parc, hired the reseracher who worked on the mouse, and put him to work on the Mac. Gates immediately recognized the potential of the idea, and blatantly copied it. After years of legal battles, Microsoft won the suit, on the claim that the original idea didn’t originate from Apple, but from Xerox. Dan Bricklin, a prominent software engineer who developed the first spreadsheet, said about the suit, “This is a sad day for the software industry in America.” He added, “Writing software is not the same as writing a book. Software builds on what was there before.” Bricklin is right. Software builds on what was there before, but so does every commercial product, engineered machine, scientific theory, and creative thought… also books!

In the Q&A session I asked the author what his thoughts of DRM & technology/web copyright. He didn’t have a stong opinion other than – he understands why its necessary for profitability, but also sees how it inhibits the creative process.

My notes from his talk:

Borrowing Brilliance is about taking ideas and restructuring them. New ideas are always built out of existing ideas. The key becomes where you go to look for ideas. Main questions:

1. can you teach someone to be creative? Definitely.
2. is there a defined process? Maybe.

defined six steps:
the origin of a creative idea:
step 1) defining – define the problem that you’re trying to solve
step 2) borrowing – borrow ideas from places with a similar problem
step 3) combining – connect and combine these borrowed ideas (this is the essence of creativity)
the evolution of a creative idea:
step 4) incubating – allow the combinations to incubate into a solution
step 5) judging – identify the strength and weakness of the solution
step 6) enhancing – eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones

DEFINING
We’re not necessarily good at the formation of a problem. The problem is the foundation of a creative idea. Its important to define, understand and describe the problem. Its important to describe the problem from different perspective, define it differently.

BORROWING
The problem with define where to look for the solution. John Nash had an economics problem: how do members of the economy act, he sensed that they were acting with incomplete information. He recognized that as the same problems he had playing poker. He took the same solutions to the problems from poker into create a decision-making model as a solution for his economics problem.

how do you solve a navigation problem? First look at other software companies. Then step away outside that industry and look at search&rescue teams, truck drivers… etc, and see how they solve their navigation problems.

COMBINING
this is the essence of creativity.
Walt disney created disneyland by using a movie metaphor while constructing the park. Used a move metaphor while breaking out the different experiences that people should have in different parts of the park. Facebook’s original metaphor was an online yearbook. Creative thinkers use metaphors. Isaac Newton was thinking in terms of metaphors – making the connection between the apple and the moon – the apple falls down, but moon moves around. combined celestial and earth-based physics.

INCUBATING
Input to the subsounscious is important => incubate => output from the subconscious (usually happens in the shower! -> the one time of the day where we’re not consciously thinking). Before going to bed, important to glance over some things we’re thinking about, then put it away… It’ll come back.

JUDGING
This is used to drive/improve the idea. Put on your positive and negative hats. So in the next phase, you can bring up an idea that doesn’t have the negative bits and mostly the good bits. This helps develop your intuition, identifying good ideas fast. Example: steve jobs visits XEROX PARC 20 years ago. Goes wild over a demo of mouse+click GUI. Identifying that as a brilliant idea vs. others that had the same demo…

ENHANCING
Trial and error as the passage to the creative solution.

[tags]creativity,book,review, David Kord Murray [/tags]

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Jason Krugman’s Firefly 870 LED Prototype.

Firefly 870 L.E.D. Prototype Promo Video from Jason Krugman on Vimeo.

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Che-Wei Wang’s 3.16 Billion Cycles – a stunning exploration of time:

3.16 Billion Cycles from che-wei wang on Vimeo.

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FormScreen by Minsoo Lee:

FormScreen from Minsoo Lee on Vimeo.

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Tom Gerhardt’s Mud Tub (http://dirtycomputing.com/) – an experimental organic interface that allows people to control a computer while playing in the mud.

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Bestiary by Caroline Brown and Bryan Lence:

Dynamically generated projections on an interactive book interface.

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Jackoon by Oscar G. Torres:

Jackoon Painting from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.

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Mechanical Wooden Face – Eun Jung Park:

Mechanical Wooden Face from Eun Jung Park on Vimeo.

Even with the staggering numbers that we have seen over the past year (the newspaper industry shed an estimated 15,970 jobs in 2008, and 8,484 through April of this year), it is important to remember that the future of quality journalism does not depend on the future of newspapers. People have gotten used to getting the news they want, whenever, however and wherever they want. This change is here to stay. The discussion needs to move from “How do we save newspapers?” to “How do we strengthen journalism — regardless of which platform it is delivered on…”

We must not act as if we are still operating in the old content economy, as opposed to the new link economy. The survival of the industry cannot be found by “protecting” content behind walled gardens. The future is a linked economy – it is search engines, online advertising, citizen journalism and foundation supported investigative funds.

Arianna firmly believes in a hybrid future:

where old media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism). The emphasis should not be on subsidizing what exists now, but on how to rededicate ourselves to the highest calling of journalists — which is to ferret out the truth, wherever it leads. Even if it means losing our all-access-pass to the halls of power.

Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists who, like Pontius Pilat, wash their hands of finding the truth and instead are obsessed with a false view of “balance” and the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth can be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found lurking in the shadows.

[tags] huffington, news, senate,arianna[/tags]