At the intersection of design, tech, creativity and culture. Part blog, part life log.
Published in July 2003
Explores a growing split in how musicians and their fans view online digital music services. Some bands say fans downloading only a song or two dilutes the artistry they put into creating an album of songs, but customers, on the other hand, like being in control.
Heading to Vermont again, this time to Middlebury. Driving up to meet M in Woodstock and on to Burlington for an early check-in at the hotel. Picking up V at the airport for the presentation in the morning. Should be interesting!
Update: Had dinner at SmokeJacks. Best grilled tofu I’ve ever had.
Mood Letters. Why cast typefaces in “immutable metal” when digital offers so much more possibility? Such was the attitude brought by Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum of the Dutch design firm, LettError to a competition to create a “civic typeface” for the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, as reported by Matthew Mirapaul in The New York Times (7/24/03). The competition was sponsored by the University of Minnesota Design Institute, and the winner, chosen from among six entries, is best described as “a typeface that can’t make up its mind.”
This “morphing” typeface, appropriately named Twin, is based on “three typographic traits.” Formality is conveyed by “serifs,” informality by “roundness” and “weirdness” is “signaled through exotic means, like a lower-case ‘I’ made with four vertical dots.” Based on this standard, the designers created a total of 880 variations, and ranked each one based on “how much it expressed each trait.” Then the interactive part—the designers wrote software that allows “people to decide how much of each trait they wanted.” Just assign a value—from 0 to 100—to each trait, and enter your word, which will look stodgy, surreal, or anywhere in-between. Play with it yourself at: the UMN.edu site.
The truly intriguing idea is that the typeface can be controlled not only by people, but also data. For example, it can programmed to respond to temperatures (always a matter of concern in the Twin Cities). The more frigid the weather, the more formal the typeface; as the temperature warms,
the typeface turns “friendly and rounder.” Erik Spiekermann, a Berlin type designer, envisions the typeface responding to bull and bear markets. “Or, he says, “you could plug it into a calendar. Halloween will look as distinct as Presidents’ Day or the mayor’s birthday.” Ultimately, he says, it’s up to consumers—not designers—to work it all out. “When the Wright brothers built their first plane, they weren’t thinking of moving 350 people from Frankfurt to Minneapolis…They just wanted to soar.”
Kayak getaway in the Central Adirondacks near Inlet, NY.
(Flash stream, 5 mb)
We’ve always been obsessed with the High Peaks area of the Adirondacks and have hiked/climbed/bushwacked our way up 22 of the 46 peaks. Last summer, we discovered the thrill of kayaking in the many lakes that are found in the Central Daks. It was as if we had discovered a whole new neighborhood just around the corner from our old hang-out.
This was our second trip to Alger Island. The first time we camped on the eastern shore of the island, in a wooded spot with a lean-to rising high above the lake on a steep slope. This time, we kayaked and camped right at the edge of a sandy beach on the western shore, lit by brilliant sun, cooled by a lake-skimming breeze. Alger is in Fourth Lake, the largest of the Fulton Chain of Lakes (one through eight). Z (Max) and I paddled the 14 miles from Fourth to Old Forge and back to Alger on Sunday. The weather was perfect, mid-70s, sunny… swimming in the lake, pink skies at sunset. I won’t soon forget the calm and silence of watching fog rise off the surface of the water while the skies broke into pink dawn. What an immersive experience… I think I really needed to unplug.
A recent survey conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of AT&T predicts that four out of five companies will use remote workers by 2005, compared with only 56% today. The advent of more affordable (and workable) networking technology, combined with a corporate drive toward globalization is making telecommuting a practical option for many companies. As complaints from managers leery of overseeing remote workers have subsided, companies are finding that telecommuters actually deliver more productivity—an average of 60 minutes more a day—than office-based workers. In addition to the productivity boost, businesses also benefit from reductions in their office overhead and rent by allowing employees to work from home. “Teleworking will mean the evolution of the office of the future. The technology behind home working will equally bring benefits for fixed offices, allowing them to upscale and downscale quickly and easily, as well as encouraging the creation of temporary, effective office environments,” says AT&T’s Kevin Harvey.
Experimental constructions forming a village in the city
From 1 August up to and including 28 September 2003, Leidsche Rijn in Utrecht will be the scene for the outdoor manifestation Parasite Paradise. Parasite Paradise will put on an animated village featuring extraordinary constructions, titillating cultural activities, and a wide selection of international artists.
Students with laptops and wireless connections are opening up “back-channel” discussions during classroom lectures, according to a New York Times article by Lisa Guernsey. While the lecturer is up there lecturing, clusters of students are back there working the instant-messaging circuit—commenting, questioning and even blogging the proceedings. “We’re just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,” says one participant. Enthuses Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University: “The intellectual quality of a two-track meeting is extraordinarily high, if it is run right and you have smart people involved.”
Lecturers do not necessarily concur. “You realize that something is going wrong,” says Syracuse University adjunct professor Indira Guzman, of her experience with back-channeling. “You think, ‘Uh-oh, maybe they are talking about me.” Some students also think back-channeling is rude—not because it’s distracting necessarily, but because they are left out of it. Then there is Joichi Ito a venture capitalist, who agrees the “second track” can be distracting. However, he says he is working on an quick-response technology, called ”’ hecklebot’…a light-emitting diode screen” that the lecturer could use to display heckling messages, and responses, such as “pay attention.”
Most observers seem to agree that “back-channel” communications will only grow in popularity over time. Some trace its roots to VH-1’s “pop-up” videos, “in which commentary about artists pops up on the screen during the song.” Indeed, as reported by USA Today’s Janet Kornblum, a new study of 13-to-24-year-olds from Harris Interactive and Teenage Research Unlimited “confirms something other studies have shown: Young people like to multitask, watching TV while instant messaging and e-mailing while surfing the web.” The Harris study also found that “teens and young adults” now “spend more time on the ‘net than they do watching TV.” It reports “that young people spend and average of 16.7 hours a week online (not including e-mail), compared with 13.6 hours watching TV.” As one participant put it, “you can’t talk to your friends on television.”
I can’t wait to use the feature “instantly see all windows.” Here’s a small demo of Expose for OS 10.3 (aka Panther).
This is the personal site of Emily Chang, designer and co-founder of Ideacodes, specializing in web, UI, UX, IxD. Also an entrepreneur, webling, geek, blogger, surfer. Likes robots. More...
