Russell Davies:

Hummadruz

There's a persistent whiny noise in the air near us. It comes and goes but it's more coming than going at the moment.

It's only mildly annoying in our flat, the sort of noise that bugs you when you can't sleep but doesn't wake you up.

It's hard to record, but here's a stab done with my phone. It's very quiet on the recording. Louder in real life. It's a fairly pure sounding A♭. Pretty sinewavey.

Hummadruz

It's been around for several months now. We assumed, when it started, that it was coming from the roof of our building. But, the Council Noise Team having been called, it turns out that it can't be pinpointed. Everyone thinks it's coming from the roof of their building. And there are so many buildings and echoes round here that it can't be traced. Which is just weird. You'd think that it was close enough to someone that they'd be complaining extra hard and it would be tracked down, but apparently not.

(All the info above, by the way, I'm basing on what I've heard from Anne about what the residents association mailing list rumours say, so it might not actually be true.)

Of course, it could be submarines or hill-spirits but I suspect it's not The Hum, since everyone can hear it and it's not that low.

March 21, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

The pen

I went to visit Aaron and Seb at the Cooper Hewitt on Monday. Their pen is up and running and it's a thing of genius.

You get this pen thing when you buy your ticket - it's nice and hefty, feels good to carry around - it's linked to a URL on your ticket. As you go around the museum you touch it to the signs next to any objects you're interested in and it 'collects' them for you.

Then, when you've finished your visit, you check out by touching your pen on another sign and hand it back. And then when you get home, or as you walk out the door, you type in the URL from your ticket and there they all are. Dead simple. And because it's open and webby you can then do all the social collecting things you might want to do - pinterest etc.

I guess they could have automated that, got you logging in to all sorts of things to do that 'automagically', I bet that was suggested, but why would they? They've done the hard bit, the basics, you can do the rest yourself. And, if you want to know just how hard the hard bit is, Aaron's written about it.

This feels like a prototype for a lot of future behaviour. It's not just the practical stuff of it, the way you don't have to take notes, or photograph the things you want to remember. It's the way that it gives you something to do other than stand and stare. Not a typical museum 'interactive' thing, but an act that feels appropriate to the reason for your visit, an act of collection and discrimination. 'This' you're saying, 'I'm paying attention to this thing here'.

In fact, I went to MoMA before that, to visit their show This Is For Everyone, Design Experiments for the Common Good and see The Big Red Button. I took photos of interesting things there, things I wanted to remember, but already I'm not sure I can be bothered to look through my photostream to find them.

The Pen has considerably enhanced the 'post-experience design' of the Cooper Hewitt versus MoMA.

March 20, 2015 | Permalink

The internet of rest

Nick Sweeney has a gift for writing just the right words on the internet. Crisp. Elegant. Thoughtful. Often the perfect capture of something that's been floating around for a while. He grabs the seeds from the air and firmly plants them.

His motion and rest is just such a thing:

"What, then, does the internet of rest look like? (More than just Netflix, surely.) How does it speak to us, and how do we address it? (More than just a listening box, surely.) What does it demand of us — or more importantly, what does it refrain from demanding? That’s the challenge for those who wish to bring the Internet of Things to the home: to draw upon the power of mobile devices without being beholden to their restive hardware."

I think this what I've been stumbling towards with Secondary Attention and my experiments with sound. I'm trying to imagine a background internet.

Right now everything's in a stream that looks like news. It all looks similarly important, so we have to engage with it as though it might be important - specifically, looking at it.

Whereas, if it was just on in the background, in a way we could put at the back of our minds, that would be fine, restful even. And the stuff that captured our interest would, well, capture our interest.

March 16, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0)