LIVING LIFE SECONDHAND 

By: EDWARD HOAGLAND

“LIFE is an ecstasy,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay called “The Method of Nature,” a founding document of American transcendentalism. Life is also electricity, as our minds’ synapses and heart muscles would testify if they could.

Living molecules bear a charge and thus can intersect with others of their kind, as molecules of rock do not. We marveled at electrical displays plunging from watery clouds in the sky as perhaps divine until we finally learned to manufacture and wire electricity ourselves, lighting the dark, then muzzling it for mundane use, to the point of blotting out the sky.

To forgo seeing the firmament, as many of us do, for Netflix and the blogosphere, is momentous — nature “unfriended,” enjoyment less impromptu than scripted.

Does life become secondhand when filtered through a tailored screen? Text unenriched by body language or voice box timbre, film omnivorously edited. Is our bent straightened or warped more deeply? That’s our choice in what we Google, but in the meantime, will we notice the birdsong diminishing?

I like Gene Kelly dancing in the rain as much as anybody, and geniuses from Mozart to Fellini on call 24/7, but has electricity become part-Frankensteinian, a force for segmented myopia? Not a fist, it’s an explosion, hurling society toward Brownian motion, and coalescing Roman Catholicism with yoga. Fusion yet fission: Email is a fine way to query experts in your field en masse, but for somebody feeling suicidal it’s no substitute for a hand on the shoulder and the voice of a friend.

And that friend who might hurry over to comfort you may have difficulty in distinguishing the tenor of your texting from the spaghetti of other people’s commentary. Blather is precious in natural amounts: Like lubrication, it greases the gears, yet in excess can gum up the works.

I live on a mountain without utilities for a third of every year, so for nearly half a century I’ve swung back and forth to and from electrification. In the summer, living by the sun couldn’t be simpler. There’s more daylight than I can use, and I revel in the phases of the moon, the conversation of ravens, owls, yellowthroats and loons. The TV and phone calls resume before winter, though life itself does not seem richer than when I listened to the toads’ spring song or watched a great blue heron fish, amid the leaves’ ten-thousand-fold vibrancy.

The difference of course is that leaves, heron, loon and toad would not remain as glories when I returned to electricity. They are “electrifying” only when Vermont is temperate. I appreciate the utility of power in the winter, but many people seldom see a sunrise or sunset nowadays; they’re looking at a screen. What will this do? The Northern Lights, the Big Dipper — are they eclipsed like the multiplication tables? There was a magnetism to aurora borealis or a cradle moon, to spring peepers’ sleigh-bell sound or spindrift surfing toward shore under cumulus clouds, that galvanized delights in us almost Paleolithic.

Are we stunted if we lose it, a deflation associated with migrating indoors to cyberspace, Facebook instead of faces? It’s lots of fun, but will ecstasy remain in play in front of a computer screen? With microscopes and telescopes we are able to observe unscripted reality, or (if you prefer) Creation.

“The cloud” is not a cloud, however. Wild animals are filmed in Africa but edited in New York for nature programs, although the glistening tree trunks — raindrops trickled down the collar of the cameraman — become invisible. Online, does one even have a neck? Electricity brings us the joy of music performed elsewhere, and sports heroics, but the happiness of lying on one’s back in a summer meadow flowers in us like photosynthesis, perhaps, and as innately as hugging a child. Will cyberspace sidetrack us from not only outdoor but direct experience? (via YMFY)

Miu Miu has teamed up with artist and filmmaker Miranda July to create a new app, Somebody, which allows you to send messages to friends and have them delivered, verbally, by a stranger nearby (who also has the app). I know, I know... you're thinking 'but when would I actually use that in the real world?' I was too, but then I watched July's quirky film to go with the app and suddenly this seems the way forward for all communication...

Perhaps wisely, the app comes with a series of 'official hotspots', where users are particularly encouraged to use it. These are mostly galleries so far (including Los Angeles Museum of Art, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The New Museum in New York), where one might expect something a bit unexpected to happen anyway or, if it's an opening, you might be a little bit drunk. Here's July's film though, which brings the app to life in entertaining fashion:(via)

somebodyapp.com

SHOULD DESIGNERS TRUST THEIR INSTINCTS€” OR THE DATA?

By: Braden Kowitz, Google Ventures

For many tech companies, design is no longer subjective.  Instead, it’s all about data. Analytics click and hum behind the scenes, measuring the effectiveness of even the tiniest design decisions. This constant data-stream plays an increasing role in determining what new products we will use, and what forms they might take. And when we think about the future of design and technology, we bump into an uncomfortable question: do human design instincts even matter anymore?

In the design world, there’s always been a dichotomy between data and instinct. Design departments — think Mad Men — were once driven by the belief that some people are gifted with an innate design sense. They glorified gut “instinct” because it was extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of designs in progress; designers had to wait until a product shipped to learn if their ideas were any good. But today’s digital products — think Facebook and Google — glorify the “data” instead; it’s now possible to measure each design element among hundreds of variations until the perfect outcome is selected.

For designers, this influx of data can be frustrating. If you thought you were hired for your good taste, you’ll quickly get discouraged in a culture where tech companies meticulously test 41 shades of blue. Imagine convincing a team to trust your gut instincts when cold hard data says you’re wrong. How do you simplify a crowded homepage when the data scientists agree it’s ugly, but tell you it signs up customers faster?

From my perspective working with over 80 product teams, data is important, but there’s no replacement for design instincts built on a foundation of experiences — including failures. As engineering and design become ever closer collaborators, the biggest challenge is to make decisions through a careful balance between data and instinct.

Instincts are made, not born

We all know that following your instincts is sometimes a bad idea. A quick look at Apple’s infamous round USB mouse or Segway’s first weeks should be enough to warn designers and business leaders alike that having too much confidence in one’s “design instincts” can be dangerous.

No designer is born knowing exactly what their customers will want, or how people will behave when faced with a novel design. Instincts are learned. And they’re best learned by paying attention to the world around us. Luckily, the human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine that develops and hones our instincts every time we’re exposed to a new design and the data about whether it worked.

Designers constantly pay attention to the world around them and notice when experiences fall short. We notice when door handles signal you should push, but require you to pull. We notice when the font on road signs change. We notice that little button on your phone that’s just a bit too hard to find while driving.

Trust me: paying this much attention to the details can get annoying.  Not just for designers but for those around them, too.

Still, there’s a benefit to being so aware. Whenever designers notice something is difficult, we mentally dissect why that’s happening, what design was involved, and how a different design might solve the problem. Each time we do this, we’re slowly building our design muscles — what people commonly refer to as “instinct.”

This introspection only gets us so far. And that’s because the audience for our designs are often so different than ourselves. Users might be older, younger, bring other cultural contexts, expectations, or be different in so many other ways.

Even when designers think they are exactly like their users, there’s one sure difference: Designers are experts in using their own product, while new customers are seeing and experiencing the product for the first time. Since there’s no way to unlearn what one already knows, it’s essential to do user research and see the world through our customers’ eyes.

Watching customers use a product through user research is the absolute best way to develop design instincts and avoid mistakes. User research is really just another stream of data, one that’s qualitative and messy, but still extremely valuable.

The Goldilocks of instinct-driven and data-driven design

Strong product teams develop habits that strengthen everyone’s design instincts. One of the best habits to build is a cadence of user research every few weeks. When the whole team watches customers struggle with their designs, it’s possible for everyone — from engineer to CEO — to possess brilliant design instincts.

Just don’t let these instincts run the show. The trick is to recognize situations when teams should dig for data, and when they should let instincts shine.

Curious about customer behavior? Use data. When it comes to digital products, web and mobile analytics tell us exactly what customers do. Even if customers say they would never, ever, ever buy rainbow suspenders for their avatar, we just never know what people will do when we’re not watching. Better to trust the data and see what people actually do rather than trust what they say they’ll do.

Decisions about product quality? Use instinct. To build quality into a product, you have to pay attention to hundreds of details like crafting clear help content or moving that button 3 pixels to the left. None of these small changes individually would prove worthwhile with data. But taken together, they create an overall impression of quality — a halo effect that improves a product in many ways. So when wondering how much time to spend on the details, designers should trust their instincts.

Deciding between a small set of options? Use data. There’s nothing like an A/B test for making an incremental, tactical improvement. When trying to pick the just-right words for a homepage header, there’s little to be gained in arguing over the right copy. It’s better to test a few versions and pick the right one based on data. The key is to measure the metrics that really matter to the business longer term (such as sign ups, purchases, or user retention) instead of just measuring clicks.

Concerned with long-term impact? Use instinct. A good reputation takes years to build, but just one bad experience can destroy it. So when balancing between tactical easily measurable goals like more clicks, and long term goals like trustworthiness, it’s essential to listen carefully to your instincts. And if your instincts need a little boost, get curious: go out in the world, talk to people, and gather data. (Via)

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It’s common to think of data and instincts as being opposing forces in design decisions. In reality, there’s a blurry line between the two. After all, instincts are built by observing the world around us, and those observations are just another stream of data. Statistics help us summarize and understand the hard data we collect, and instincts do the same for all the messy real-world experiences we observe. And that’s why the best products — the ones that people want to use, love to use — are built with a bit of both.

At this year’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, Portuguese designer Susana Soares presented a device that can detect cancer and other diseases using honey bees. Known for their extraordinary sense of smell, bees can detect airborne molecules in the parts per trillion range and can be trained to recognize certain smells associated with diseases such as lung, skin and pancreatic cancer, as well as tuberculosis.

TO CREATE THE FUTURE OF BRAND IDENTITY, IDEO LOOKS INWARD

Imagine it’s 15 years in the future, and you’re wearing Google Glass 3.0. The spectacles have matured far beyond their awkward picture-in-picture beginnings, now offering something much closer to true augmented reality. It’s a strange new hybrid world. You glance at a subway station and see an overlay of how long until the next train arrives. You look at a dog, wonder what type it is, and a voice in your ear identifies it as a Thai Ridgeback. Of course, commerce has kept apace. A window display at Macy’s comes to life when you look in its direction; a virtual billboard on top of the Starbucks facade rotates through a half dozen drink specials.

This future, or one like it, isn’t hard to fathom. But here’s something that’s a bit harder to pin down: What does the logo on that Starbucks look like?

That’s one of the things Hendrix hopes this project will get his designers to start considering. “We haven’t had to think about responsive identities,” he says. “We haven’t had to think about time or space. And I think those will all become more important dimensions.”

“The complexity of this conversation to this point has been: ‘Do we animate or do we not animate?’” he continues. But augmented reality—or really any interactive digital space in which a brand tries to do something more than simply announce its presence—poses all sorts of challenges. “How do you express [a mark] physically and digitally? What kind of life does it have? How is it born in that moment, and how does it go away? How does it tell you why it’s there? Those are all really interesting questions.”

But to see it as simply a matter of whiz-bang animated logos is too shortsighted. What Ideo’s really searching for is a better way of communicating in general—an identity system flexible enough to work in countless new situations, across myriad channels. “It’s a complex idea, but I think it’s actually a more human idea,” Hendrix says. “And that’s what we’re trying to work towards; a more human way of expressing identity.”

Connecting...

APPLE VS GOOGLE 

Almost anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess, save for their excellent web browser teams.

Meanwhile, Google, specifically Android, has been steadily improving its entire platform. To me, it still doesn’t have the same quality of polish and feel that Apple software does. However, it’s getting harder to argue that point, especially since their web services all tend to Just Work. Features like Google Now and near-instant voice commands are starting to give Android a serious leg up on iOS. Design is coming along as well. Android is still ugly, but it’s much less ugly than it was a few years ago. Google seems to be actively addressing this, and if Apple isn’t worried, they should be. Tom is the first friend I’ve had who has switched from iOS to Android, and he is unlikely to be the last.

WHAT INNOVATION SCARES YOU THE MOST THESE DAYS?

The Internet is not merely connecting computers together for the benefit of humans; it’s connecting humans together to reinvent labor. This opens terrific opportunities along with real worries. Soon we’ll have to question whether an earnest-looking group of protesters with hand-lettered signs is genuine or simply rapidly convened as a paid flash mob: a crowdsourced crowd. We’ll be able to one-click shop for cheering throngs or protests at a particular location on a moment’s notice, indistinguishable from genuine collective sentiment. A house can be surveilled and a spouse tailed because an online bounty has been put out for anyone nearby to take a photo of the building at a particular address, or to “follow that car.” -Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard professor of law and computer science

THE FUTURE IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK →

During the last two decades, we have witnessed a technological acceleration unlike anything the world has ever seen. Exponential progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology, among many others, put us on track to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have had in the previous 200 years. We will soon have the capability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp.

But it won’t happen without your help. While accelerating technology is an awesome force, it’s not enough to bring on a golden age. However, three additional forces are emerging—and this is exactly where you come in.

The second of these forces is the rise of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) innovator. No longer content with hot rods and homebrew computers, DIYers (working both in small teams or collectively, via crowdsourcing) have made major contributions to fields like healthcare, energy, education, water, and freedom—areas that were once the sole province of large corporations and governments. This means that whatever challenges we face in the world—climate change, AIDS in Africa, energy poverty—more than ever before, we are now empowered to individually help solve these problems. And it’s our ability to do so, this newfound power of the maverick DIYer, that is the second of our four forces.

The same technologies that enabled the rise of the DIY Innovator have also created wealth much faster than ever before. Tech entrepreneurs such as Jeff Skoll (eBay), Elon Musk (PayPal), Bill Gates (Microsoft) became billionaires by reinventing industries before the age of 35. Maintaining their appetite for the big and bold, they are now turning their attention and considerable resources toward bettering the world, becoming a new breed of philanthropist—technophilanthropists—and, as such, yet another force for abundance.

Perhaps the most significant change of the next decade will be the dramatic increase in worldwide connectivity via the Internet. The online community is projected to grow from 2 billion people in 2010 to 5 billion by 2020. Three billion new minds are about to join the global brain trust. What will they dream? What will they discover? What will they invent?  These are minds that the rest of society has never had access to before, and their collective economic and creative boost becomes our final force: the power of “the rising billion.”

We are living in a time of unprecedented opportunity.

Wacom just blew my mind!

Wacom introduces Inkling, a new digital sketch pen that captures a digital likeness of your work while you sketch with its ballpoint tip on any sketchbook or standard piece of paper.