Russell Davies

widget goodness 4 - magical things

People talk about the Nike+ a lot. I do. It's a brilliant thing. And there's always a lot of widgety conversation about it. All of this chat seems to focus on this stuff:

Which is good and nice and everything, but with all of our obsession with screens we seem to have missed the bigger, magical thing:

And that seems to me to be the really interesting possibility for widgety goodness - adding information and social networking to products, not to marketing; making things smarter, not websites. And I suspect this means moving away from screens at both ends of the process. It means delivering smarts and information to the things in our pockets. It means getting things to talk, and to listen. And smell, and everything.

Widgets make sense when they're sending meaning and fun to ambient devices, to things like Nabaztag and Chumby. Or when the socialness is built in with things like Olinda. This, I bet, is how widgetness will really escape the  dreariness of services and transaction. By making magical things. Think of the joy of that. Widgets might become the way that our spimes talk to us. And they might actually talk. Widget makers will be the people who work out effective sound-design for ambient information. Or they'll build an interface we can understand just via touch. That seems the big opportunity for the widgety industry - to escape the little boxes on websites and build connectivity and socialness into the world of products, things and people.

Anyway. That's it. Like I say, early thoughts, but I enjoyed the day at WidgetyGoodness. Thanks Ivan.

This is Part Four of a very long thing four-part thing. (1, 2, 3, 4)

interesting south videos

Emily and the InterestingSouthers have got their videos up. There's some great stuff in there, and they've done it really nicely, with two cameras and everything. And it serves to remind me I still haven't got all the Interesting2007 videos done yet. Sorry about that. Will do asap. You know, when I've finished painting these Warhammer Ultramarines.

weare

Moving Brands are one of the most impressive companies I've met all year. Too good actually, I had to advise them that I couldn't really do any more for them than they could themselves. Curses. And they've just launched one of the more interesting things of the year - Weare.

Last Christmas they put a grid of fairy lights in their window and allowed people to send simple pixely pictures and messages to it via  the web.  They stored all the images that were sent and have made it into a splendid scarf  (complete with rude words). I really like the simplicity of this. And you can imagine all sorts of possiblities for co-created textiles. What a genius thing.

conference advice

I want to go to some conferences next year. Conferences about things I don't know anything about, so I can hear new stuff. With the weakness of the dollar and a few left-over corporate airmiles I can probably afford one trip to the US and one mainland Europe trip. I'm not one for chatting in the foyer much, not very good at that. So I don't want a conference that's good for networking, I want one that's good for sitting in a chair and listening to people talking.

I'm thinking I'd like to go to a proper tech conference (not a marketing and technology conference). And I was thinking about ETech because it looks like it'll be about the future, not the internet. But I'd love advice on other possibilities. ReBoot always looks brilliant too. Or Lift?

I'd like to go to a proper art thing. Not an art shopping event like Frieze but something properly long and impenetrable. Like a biennial or something? Does anyone know about those?

And I want to go to a literary festival. The only one I know of is Hay, but is that too obvious? Is that like going to Reading?

After that I'm very open to suggestions. A design thing? Architecture? Postopolis would be great if it happens again. What did anyone think of Poptech? I can't afford TED again but I loved its range of speakers. Is there a cheap TED? (apart from Interesting). Games? Logistics? Model railways? Printing? I'd be up for any of those.

And I'm very keen to supplement the big things (tech, art, books) with some more unexpected things - golf course design, chicken-sexing etc so if anyone has any thoughts there that'd be good.

Sorry, this is a bit lazyweb isn't it? But I thought it might be a useful conversation for other people too. If anyone has any thoughts. Many thanks.

UPDATE: I forgot about We Love Technology. I'll defintely go back for that if they do it again. And dConstruct.

coffee

I think that, for me, coffee morning has run its course. I'm working too often on a Friday to organise it regularly, and now it's turned into a thing I don't have the energy to do it properly like the likemind folks. This Friday was going to be my last one, but as if to prove my point, I can't now make it. But I would love it if someone else would take on the coffee morning baton. All you have to do is say you're going to be somewhere and invite others to come. All that's required is purposeless chat. Though, you, of course, might have different rules. (To instantly start the nostalgia click here)

on the value of specificity

best urban spaces

There's a fantastic blog called Digital Urban. It's the work of a guy called  Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith and is "aimed at examining the latest techniques to visualise the city scape via digital media". There's always interesting stuff on there, especially all the work they're doing on virtual london. A little while back they raised the notion of making a book about the World's Worst Urban Places and Spaces. It's going to be a crowd-sourced, self-publishingy thing written via contributions to a special flickr group. I thought that was a really interesting idea, a great way to use a distributed publishing model.

But, while chatting about it with Mr Dan Hill and, both of us being mindless optimists, we wondered if we could do a companion piece about The World's Best Urban Places and Spaces. That seemed like a good idea too. Accentuate the positive and all that. So we checked with Dr Hudson-Smith, he's cool with it, so here we go.

This is the plan. Dan's set up a flickr group here, all you need to do is contribute a picture or pictures and as much text as you think is appropriate. We'll leave you to interpret 'best' 'urban' 'space' and 'place' as you like. Could be anywhere or anything; bus shelters, buildings, bombsites or benches. Rather than wait until we've got enough for a book (which, of course, may never happen) we're planning instead on doing a series of pamphlets. We're going to try and persuade some top designers to do them for us. There'll be a free one as a pdf online and lovely specially printed ones for everyone who contributes and/or who'd like to buy them. Obviously we've not really worked out all the details on that yet, but will let you know when we have.

Does that sound interesting? I think it might be. Pile in, if you'd like to.

deadline

If you're thinking of having a go at the APSotW thing, over at Paul's blog. The deadline is approaching.

interesting pictures

James asked a question about digital versus film. Well, this is my most favourited picture on flickr, so I'd say yes.

money changing

One of the things I like about fairs and amusement arcades is the way they have a slightly different sense of money. Arcades almost always drive you to the change machine to get piles of metal to shove into the slotties. Which makes money much more tangible than it normally is. It must be one of the frictional drags on their business. Both the palaver people have to go through to pay and the business of collecting, storing, counting and doling out physical cash.

Clearly they're not the only people who have to worry about this. Visa and Oyster are doing all sorts of cashless things. And the phone and other companies are working on it too, which of course they've already done in many bits of the world.

Even Westminster council is doing things , they're about to remove loads of parking meters and replace them with 'pay by phone'.

But I think I was struck most forcibly by the whole thing when we went to the winter fair in Hyde Park yesterday. Most fairs now have a system where you have to buy tokens to pay for rides - presumably to stop petty theft among the people running each ride. I always liked those tokens, they were like play money but they had real value. It made you think about the actual value of money a little bit. At this fair though, these were the tokens you had to buy. You could see why they'd do it, easy to administer, less bulk to deal with. And, these expire that day, so, if you're left with one over, as we were, they're very happy. This must be a transitional stage though, it can't be long before these things are contactless; just swipe a card or a phone and get on-board. I can see the advantages of that for customer and ride-people but I hope someone's giving some thought to creating some digital ephemera to replace the tokens and tickets some of us love to keep for souvenirs.