alleshannes.

Growing without design? housings in El Alto

The more I get to know the work in large corporations the more it strikes me how much money they spend (or waste) on generating new ideas. Thousands and millions are made available for new or not so new ideas and for exploring new fields of business in continually saturated markets. It comes by little surprise that a lot of the results are pretty poor. Granted, when dealing with “innovation processes” you never know what you’ll get for your investment which makes it hard to judge which money could be saved. But what could be sparked with these funds if applied elsewhere, outside of the business context?

A lot of “ideas” or development efforts are not focused on new technologies or services in the sense of making our lives better. They are just meant to produce new or refined business models so that the company can earn more money. Serving the user’s (let’s say: real) needs from a more holistic point of view is just not taken into account (literally!). In the end of inovation workshops, the single factor for decisions about the future “life” of an idea is profit and not user needs.

I don’t want to criticise companies (at least not here) for their single minded goals of making profits–in the system of capitalism it’s their only reason of existence (and even the companies can’t keep the money but have to pass it on to their shareholders. The contradiction between user needs and profits grows even more this way, as André Gorz describes very clearly). But if we allow us just for a little moment to think outside these business restrictions: Enormous resources are spent to make some bright minds comfortable and creative every day so that they struggle with those oversaturated markets and fight against the “no need barriers” of obviously happy customers.
What if a fraction of these efforts was directed on problems like child poverty, ecologic smartness, cultural diversity? What if oxfam, amnesty international or terre des hommes could be supplied with a comparable stream of brain work?
For sure the effects would be enormous. So many people are longing for a better life and don’t have to be convinced by (insanely) expensive marketing. And all those people are more than willing to contribute as much as they can (and often fail because of lack of influence).

Increadible amounts spent to get ideas on how to cram even more products into costumers in the one world and the destruction and the eradication of so many perspectives because of lacking funds and minds in the other one: That’s an insight that makes me really, really sad.
Of course, you could believe in the Trickle-Down-Effect and hope that the more profits large companies make the more they can invest in new ideas that finally will make the lives of all of us better; but noone is able to tell how long are we supposed to wait for some drips to reach the bottom.

On the contrary! It might be totally plausible that we can’t design within the usual innovation (business, distribution) system if we want to reach this bottom…

Here comes the all new and sparkling abstract of my Thesis (old stuff). You might want to have a look at it and give it some comments!

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In my thesis I propose the idea of a socially aware computer. In order to get to know the user‘s circles of friends, it will mine and analyse the data that is left as traces by her communication, mainly phone call logs and email archives. As a result, a value for personal or subjective importance can be computed for each person in the user‘s network.

This allows for a new arrangement of the personal address book so that more relevant persons can be found more easily – an important feature regarding our ever expanding and globalized personal networks.
Moreover, tasks that require knowledge about the user‘s personal relations can be handled automatically: One is turning the user‘s attention towards old friends that tend to be neglected when he is burried in work or because he is always on the run due to our mobile and flexible times. Another one is managing access to her personal data that she stores online, like photos, travel plans or her activity stream that gets created by recent software like Jaiku or Twitter.

Handling friends and acquaintances in such an environment opens up new challenges that are explored by means of a visual prototype. Different types of displaying, managing, and enriching information about related persons are developped. Results from a user testing will be provided.
As a preliminary study, the data sets of several people have been analysed and plotted into an interactive diagramm in order to investigate the potentials of the communication data given. It also offers the possibility to look for the relevant parameters that determine different types of relations (e.g. best friend or old friend).

To provide a conceptual background, existing social network theories are explored and related to personal, ego-centric ones. I take a closer look onto the whole process of operationalisation, i.e. turning human behaviour into quantifiable data by statistical methods. Finally, implications and problematic consequences of both, the software itself and the concept of the „network society“ in general, are discussed. The felt need to turn our friendships into „social capital“ is one of the most remarkable shifts in the functioning of our societies. Others can make draw profits from this capital if they collect detailed data to establish profiles of us and our relationships. Thus, the whole field of privacy is entangled.
And across all these dynamics, computers become so inseparably intermingeld into our daily social life that borders between our (extended) self and the machine is often hard to determine.

Basically, I will look at how Computers can help us with managing our ever growing networks of friends.
I will try to make use of models from mathematical-sociologic network theories and apply them to subject-related, private areas (my network and I). The thesis of social objects will be part of this effort as alternative or addition.
Special attention will be given to the process of operationalisation which converts interpersonal interactions into machine readable numbers. Which actions have to be considered and which parameters are used in this process? At the end of such an automated analysis a computer will have an image of our social relationships available. These considerations will be worked out as applications in the practical part of my Master’s project.
The use of new technologies to organise inter-personal relationships will change them inevitably: But do we transfer the responsibility for our social lives to algorithmic machines in the end? Possible consequences and alternatives have to be taken into account.

In-depth description (german only so far) …

A hybrid version between an outline for my thesis and a collection of thoughts and questions in particular is now available as foldable structure (as it came out of FreeMind)

After some days of intense writing mostly done by Larissa, our first paper in our lives ever has been submitted! Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Abstract
We are exploring the use of small displays as an instrument to enhance social communication. Our focus is on encouraging communication between strangers by revealing the existence of common friends. In the following we present the concept of the SocialButton, a wearable mobile device which displays aspects of friend-of-a-friend networks. A group study has provided us with an initial understanding regarding the potential of the SocialButton to influence our social environment.

More backgrounds on the paper can be found in the archive and on Larissa’s blog, of course.

Are Computer Games evolving as their own medium, a new form of art and even as tool? Strong arguments for the autonomy of games were deliverd by a class at FU Berlin, Computer Games and Media Theory, that introduced the emerging field of Game Studies to me.

Economically, the production of computer games generates a much larger impact than the production of film for several years already. But gaming itself was still regarded as a waste of time. This does change a lot nowadays, as games get a tool in business processes i.e. you can earn money with it i.e. it suddenly turns out to be something very sensible to do. (best example: SecondLife). Plus, serious gaming tries to make use of our desire to play.

Beside these purely economic interests there is more and more evidence that gaming makes you think and gives your brain a good training for your everyday life as well as for some specialised tasks: fine motor skills for surgeons, faster reactions for sports and military, knowledge of economic correlations, just to mention some ideas. While trying to master a game, looking for workarounds – yes, cheating – even amplyfies our creative efforts and must be regarded as an approach of its own to games. As Reto Wettach (one of my professors at FH Potsdam) and Ralf Grauel mention in their talk at Typo Berlin 2006, a game offers a unique combination of joy and mental activity, offering ideal possibilities for the growth of neurons in our brain. They even come to the conclusion that we are on the way from the achievment- towards a play-oriented society: Being not only faster and better in a playful competition, but finally winning by being smarter!

Moreover, it seems to me to be a small proof for my opinion that our society is judging about life-styles, activities and projects way to fast and with little regard for other than fast-paying economic factors. The importance of games was evident to Schiller already (in his Aesthetical Education of Man) and we are, however, still far form his ideas today

[Man] is only fully man where he plays

When talking about virtual and real worlds it soon gets difficult to determine what we consider as virtual and real. Our thoughts and imaginations are not technically enhanced or otherwise mysterious but they are not part of the actual, material world, either. They do shape our perspective and our plans and actions.

Public Buildings are solid environments but their particular determination, they way we perceive the building and select a proper behavior is not built-in but a system of signs and codes that we read permanently.
With the means of Semiotic Analysis I investigated on the relation between (real) buildings and our interpretation, that means our (virtual) reconstruction. The results are presented by an interactive documentation that reflects the subjective process of decoding (unfortunately, texts in German only). It is the fruit of the Master Class in Design Theory, led by Prof. Dr. Rainer Funke.

As a first example, I examined the Berlin Central Railway Station as a hub of public transport on the one side and I discovered an interference with the mixed-in shopping mall concept on the other one. Having travelling in mind initially, a passenger has to cross the shopping sector. This changes the context for his decoding of sign systems, so he misses the guides to the trains easily.

flash, 3.4 MB

For the second example, I was wondering which signs and features render a church into a somewhat mystic room with a very special atmosphere. Although one could still call it a house by its primary features it makes people whisper and feel different. Featured buildings include St. Hedwig, St. Paulus, Sophienkirche, and Maria Saal (Kaernten, A)
flash, 4.6 mb

Everyone uses Google (or search engines in general) to find something from the past: What are the soccer results from last week end, who wrote an article about surveillance, where is that “critical update” for my webbrowser? Google finds out the questions and needs of a lot of people (e.g. 50% of all US-search) and with a little extrapolation one could say: of the world. The (monthly) statistics on the psyche of the world can be inspected at the Google Zeitgeist.
The future is nothing random but created by ourselves everyday through actions that are driven exactly by these questions and needs that condense at the search interface of Google. Wouldn’t Google be able to predict the things to come?

While this is one of the stunning (at least to me) results of the Google and Borges class at Humboldt University, I developed a game concept that takes one step back and leaves prophecy to the players. …

For getting a grip on my master thesis I made up a collection of fields of interest. There are a couple of buzz-words that I want to unfold in order to make them fructous for further investigations. This is one of the first steps and I hope to be able to add some details soon.

simulation/virtual
simulation depends and constructs reality (WoWarcraft, Second Life)
machines simulate an interface in order to get usable for humans

thoughts and theses?
opposite (according to Baudrillard): Illusion

is simulation linked to virtuality?
is operationalization the basis for simulation?

authenticity
unique, personal experience <> reproductive society, sampling

what role plays the “I” and how do we define it? >emotions

truth
democracy (many) <> experts (peers)
poetry and truth (>Goethe)

emotion
human control system, adding salience(”weight”) to information
subconscious

Links to authenticity and maybe truth?

games
a way to liberty/freedom (>Schiller)?
some things can not be described directly but rather circumscribed
storytelling, truth in poetry

immersion
which truth(s) might be created, available or perceived by being immersed into some medium, computer games in particular?

emergence
can truth come from (super)complex systems? What do emergent structures show?
are evolutionary systems useful?

massive systems can no longer be calculated but must be estimated statistically and are often simulated in advance > simulation

Some time ago Berlin’s UDK had the luck to award Sasha Pohflepp with his diploma degree in Visual Communication for his brilliant work called Blinks&Buttons. Although I knew his work for some time my research on social interaction for a mobile world gave me reason to read it in more detail. It triggerd some thoughts on public, community, and private use of media. …