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Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Ubicomp’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet
My learned neighbour Mike Kuniavsky, on the ever-receding horizon implied by the phrase Ubiquitous Computing:
I see [ubiquitous computing] as analogous to "Physics" or "Psychology," terms that describe a focus for investigation, rather than an agenda.
Why don't others see it the same? I think it's because the term is fundamentally different because it has an implied infinity in it. Specifically, the word "ubiquitous" implies an end state, something to strive for, something that's the implicit goal of the whole project. That's of course not how most people in the industry look at it, but that's how outsiders see it. As a side effect, the infinity in the term means that it simultaneously describes a state that practitioners cannot possibly attain ("ubiquitous" is like "omniscient"--it's an absolute that is impossible to achieve) and an utopia that others can easily dismiss. It's the worst of both worlds
Mike also identifies Artificial Intelligence and Ambient Intelligence as having this problem too. In they eyes of your detractors you'll never get there, you're crazy for thinking it's worth trying, and the steps along the way don't measure up to the vision. I'd add that Virtual Reality also has this issue, since the reality part is unattainable (and if the uncanny valley is to be believed, steps towards it can actually make things worse).
I like the solution Mike offers to this. Rather than inventing new terms, he's simply asserting that ubicomp has already happened, and has been with us since around 2005. There's more on this in his talk from UX Week last August which was great, and no doubt also in his upcoming book.
I like the idea of framing these unattainable words as being about now, not some distant future, and working with that to see where we go next. It's fun to imagine a light misting of comp, that will steadily increase in saturation until it's ubi... a luminous bath, some might say. A version of Gibson's "the future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed", perhaps.
I'm also wondering if there's something to these limitless phrases that attracts academics. I have degrees in artificial intelligence and in virtual reality so you might think I'd know, but I always felt late to the party in those circles, like I'd missed the initial buzz and arrived in time for the hard defensive slog. And hey, Web 2.0 feels like that sometimes too - arguably, whatever's next is already here and we should take a leaf out of Mike's book and start declaring it so. When Web 2.0 was first coined, it wasn't about the future!
New Maps at London2012.com
At Stamen we've just finished building a new map for LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games). This map builds on the work we did last year, with some new work on the back-end to expose a wider variety of content and another round of improvements to the Modest Maps powered front-end. This time we're trying to organise and make spatial sense of the thousands of geocoded articles and photos that the London 2012 team are producing, highlight the ongoing works in the Olympic Park, London and the UK, and showcase the depth and breadth of information available on the main site.
As always when we've just released something, I haven't had a lot of time to reflect on what's been done since I stopped working on it every day, but I wanted to get some words down while the paint's still wet. As always, but sometimes it's important to state clearly: I write for me here, not for Stamen (though I'm not sure what I'd change) and certainly not for LOCOG (you shouldn't take any of this as an endorsement from them). As always, and sometimes you can't say it enough: not all the work shown here is by me, I'm part of a bigger team at Stamen and almost all of us had a hand in this one. We also have very attentive and supportive clients!
We've had a lot of fun paying attention to their brand; going to town with the bright colours, seamless transitions, polygon shards, flags and so on whilst keeping that controversial logo moving nicely. It's sometimes tricky to stay within the guidelines and still have things make sense on top of the maps we've made, but the style guide is tough but fair and it's definitely worth it in the end. Since the branding already pushes things from the graphic design standpoint we've taken the opportunity to push the interactive end of things. The map allows you to filter the content by category, time, search terms and place, with all those (except the search terms) happening client-side to give you an immediate update.
From a technical standpoint the trickiest bit was getting the clustering right. It uses multiple levels of the UK's administrative hierarchy behind the scenes to group different categories of content together into those numbered and coloured flags. When you click on a flag we display an info bubble with tabs containing excerpts from all the content. All of those elements update when the filters change, either immediately or with a slight (and hopefully imperceptible) pause, and hundreds or thousands of animations get kicked off every second if you drag the time slider. With all that going on, the clustering had to be robust!
It's one thing to identify that your map has too much content when it's zoomed out, or that when you're zoomed in some things are overlapping. But it's another thing to group things together in intuitive ways, and yet another thing to have those groupings behave appropriately with other UI elements, and to have the content (which is really all that matters) remain accessible at all times. Throughout the final stages of the project we were worried about cramming too much stuff into the info-bubbles that appear when you click on the flags, and we considered sending you to a separate page section below the map to read extended search results. In the end though we went with the tabbed info bubble approach (I felt a little better about this idea after seeing that people like Mapeed were taking a similar approach). This can sometimes present you with a lot of scrolling to do, but with the added control given by the filters (and the constant updating of the content in the info bubble) we're happy with how that turned out.
Anyway, it's not all about technical achievement, even if that was my personal focus. Some of the features are very simple conceptually, such as showing and hiding webcams depending on whether you're zoomed-in or not. But if you zoom into the park and it happens to have snowed, you can be greeted with a pleasant surprise:
And sometimes we're really just trying to get out of the way, so that the park can speak for itself:
What's next? Well I probably shouldn't say... but since it's custom cartography season at Stamen at the moment, and we all make our interests public, you might be able to guess where we'll take things next. We'll see!
Airport Scheduling
It turns out Oakland airport has a form to fill in if you want flight schedule information. I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not sure if they'll respond to casual interest, but it's nice to know they're accessible.
They also have an interesting PDF talking about how to interpret the data. Heathrow had nothing of the sort when I worked with their schedules at my last job. It was more a combination of hearsay, logic and rules of thumb to predict gate assignment there. Good stuff.
LÖVE
If you're the kind of (mainly 2d) graphics programmer that I am, the thing you find most attractive about Processing is the one-click publishing to make a webpage and show people what you've been doing. Everything else after that is a bonus.
If you're not that kind of programmer, and the web isn't your primary concern, then you should definitely check out LÖVE. It looks like they're having a lot of fun over there, and Lua is just nicely mind-bending enough but still familiar if you're coming from Java or Actionscript.
3 For ‘09
November 2008 marked two years at Stamen for me, and I'm not done yet. Three purely technological things I'm excited about working with in 2009:
- Realtime messaging and XMPP. After some initial experiments, I'm really excited by the possibility of visualisations driven by realtime data feeds. I like the idea of XMPP, and although scaling it out gives me the fear it's a fear I'd like to confront in 2009 on a real project.
- Custom cartography and up-to-date maps. I'm a long-time cheerleader and supporter of the OpenStreetMap project and the project is reaching a level of completeness and complexity that competes with commercial map providers. I'm looking forward to writing tools and maps that work with OSM data in a way that just wouldn't be possible with Google-Maps-style mapping APIs or would require data well out of the budget range of most of our projects.
- Visualisation and vector mapping in a web-browser using NotFlash technologies. The healthy competition between Gecko (used in Firefox) and WebKit (used in Safari, Android, the iPhone etc.) is improving the performance of javascript, canvas and svg (not to mention the new CSS transforms). This means that the potential for interactive vector graphics in the browser is almost on a par with Flash. I imagine the developer tools will keep me with Flash for a long time, but I'm looking for the right project to kick-start a comparable tool chain for in-browser vector graphics, and looking forward to thinking about what that might look like for myself this year.
This post could probably use some supporting links, but I thought I'd get it out there before my first week back at work ended. Happy 2009 to you all.
SFMOMA ArtScope
Once again I've been beaten to the punch by Stamen, infosthetics, Geraldine, Esquire and more. But here it is for posterity: we released SFMOMA ArtScope a couple of weeks ago. This was a fun one, we're really pleased with the lens approach (rather than continuous zooming) and we're loving the serendipitous bouncing from piece to piece when you search.
Inside info: the artwork is arranged by acquisition date, earliest acquisitions are top left and latest are bottom right.
Processing 1.0!
The first and last time I'll cut and paste a press release on this blog. Casey Reas writes:
We've just posted Processing 1.0 at http://processing.org/download. We're so excited about it, we even took time to write a press release.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and LOS ANGELES, Calif. - November 24, 2008 - The Processing project today announced the immediate availability of the Processing 1.0 product family, the highly anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency - and packed with hundreds of innovative, time-saving features - the new Processing 1.0 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.
Whups! That's not the right one. Here we go:
Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.
Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing's growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.
Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.
+ At New York University's graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.
+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.
+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.
Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.
+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.
+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.
+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.
+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.
+ The University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.
+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.
The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.
Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda's students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.
For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director's Club.
The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.
Extremely well done and congratulations to all involved!
Guest-blogging at infosthetics.com
I've been guest-blogging recently at infosthetics.com. I started with a post about wikinvest.com and more recently one about a map of European genes that turned into a mini-rant about academic research on the web.
Party Like It’s 1997
Awaiting yesterday's election results, I couldn't help but compare to the 1997 UK general election where Tony Blair and his New Labour movement came to power in a convincing landslide. It was an awesome couple of years we had there, with a government with a proper mandate and a clear ideology – even if they've later disappointed me on many counts (Iraq, ID cards, etc...), I'd still rather have them than the sleazy, obnoxious and complacent Conservatives they displaced.
Anyway, this morning I woke up and for some reason Pulp's Mis-Shapes was going around my head. When it was released, my naive 15-year-old self thought it was all about the rise of britpop/indie music and nerdy guitar bands having their day in the charts. I must have listened to it hundreds of times* without really thinking about it. Thankfully it's bubbled up into my consciousness on a wave of late 90s political memories to remind me that it's all a bit deeper than I first thought.
Listening now, of course this 1995 hit is about meaningful political change, about being sick to death of right-wing politics, about setting things right, about doing things our way:
"Brothers, sisters, can't you see?
The future's owned by you and me.
There won't be fighting in the street.
They think that they've got us beat but revenge is going to be so sweet.
We're making a move. We're making it now.
We're coming out of the sidelines.
Just put your hands up – it's a raid.
We want your homes, we want your lives,
we want the things you won't allow us.
We won't use guns, we won't use bombs
We'll use the one thing we've got more of – that's our minds.
And that's our minds. Yeah."
Jarvis Cocker's a smart cookie. Go Listen!
* maybe thousands of times – the double A-side single was one of the only CDs I had, and the fact that you could use any CD as the soundtrack to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation meant that the song was on repeat in my life for most of that year.
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