Ohrworm's earworms

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Reminds me of Louise Downe’s - good services are verbs, bad services are nouns

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"This is based on observations. This is based on people I have met, people I've known, people I've sat with and talked to. Thieves, cops, killers. It's not derived from other cinema, it's based on research." Michael Mann

Michael Mann's Heat: how research created a classic thriller | Den of Geek

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"the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends is critical to its innovative capabilities. We label this capability a firm's absorptive capacity and suggest that it is largely a function of the firm's level of prior related knowledge."

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For all the crisp clarity of the screen, the Nokia is a richer multi sensory experience than the iPhone all round. The ocularcentric design approach of other phones becomes even clearer—the iPhone really is all screen; it's all it's got. As an object and an interface, the iPhone is ignoring far more precise senses, such as touch and sound. In comparison, the N9 excels at these. The keyboard is excellent, as good as any, not least due to the subtle tactile feedback of faux-localised vibration. The sounds for calls and other notifications are both carefully crafted and discreet (Nokia has form here: remember 2005's Nokia 8800 featured sounds by Ryuichi Sakamoto.) Near-field communication (NFC) is built into the device, indicating the potential for more embodied interactions. 'Discreet' is the overriding sensibility in terms of notifications in general, actually, which is another smart differentiator. This is essentially recessive and respectful companion, at least compared to other phones, which is a welcome innovation indeed in an age of social media and internet-of-things. Design director Marko Ahtisaari has also placed emphasis on being operate the phone one-handed, even in your pocket. While such a manouevre might garner the occasional raised eyebrow from onlookers, it is both a gesture based on recognising the urban context of mobile phone use and a reminder of a phone-based characteristic, as opposed to something emblematic of the smartphone.

Portable cathedrals

Thinking about tactility and texture in our personal objects brought me back to this piece.

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When foodie gentrification occurs, the food is spoken of only in terms of stereotypes, rather than in terms of flavor.

The Authenticity Trap | Phoenix New Times

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And then he talked about the Food Network show Chopped. The reason he loves Chopped is that it's a show that is wholly about process, about creation within a limited range of possibilities. “This show,” he said, meaning The Late Show, “is Chopped. Late-night shows are Chopped. Who are your guests tonight? Your guests tonight are veal tongue, coffee grounds, and gummy bears. There, make a show.… Make an appetizer that appeals to millions of people. That's what I like. How could you possibly do it? Oh, you bring in your own flavors. Your own house band is another flavor. You have your own flavor. The audience itself is a base dish, like a rice pilaf or something. And then together it's ‘Oh shit, that's an actual meal.’ And that's what every day is like at one of these shows. Something is one thing in the morning, and then by the end of the day it's a totally different thing. It's all process.”

Stephen Colbert on Making The Late Show His Own | GQ

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When doing fieldwork in a new city, one of the first things I do is try to bond with taxi drivers. They make the best informants and have such a rich sense of the city's informal and formal layers. They help me create what I call "consumption maps of the city. I buy a big street map and hang it up on my wall. Then I try to map the following onto it: - formal business mapping -  location of business districts - wholesale markets (import and export of clothing, food, and etc) - usually you find a lot of informal economy stuff around any import/export area - popular shopping areas - high-end to low-end - food areas for locals and tourists - music - where people go to listen to music, esp sub-culture/alternative music - where people  have sex

mapping the city, first stop: sex workers - Bytes of China - Tricia Wang, Global Tech Ethnographer transforming research, specializes in China & emerging markets

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When we are designing platforms for contexts that are radically different form what we know, there are a few design research principles that are important to keep in mind .   1.) Lower the threshold for trust to be established with your users. Make it easy for them to judge the veracity of information sources.  2.) Do a thorough ethnographic study on how users conceive of information and trust. Ask questions like: What does search mean to the users? What is the history of information in this region/country/community? How is information access moralized?  What are the concerns around information? What are legal constraints on information practices? What are the trust-establishing practices?  2.) Designed minimally enough so that you can watch how users establish desire paths. And do this as soon as possible. This is one the of the tenets of The Lean Start-up and why Ruby is the preferred tool for rapid development -  Ruby allows developers to get something to the user quickly. Analyze the emergent desire paths and see if you want to build services that extend those paths or cut those paths off.

Lift Talk Notes - Dancing with Handcuffs: The Changing Geography of Trust in China - Updates - Tricia Wang, Global Tech Ethnographer transforming research, specializes in China & emerging markets

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Our assumptions about the utility of the social graph doesn't just influence how we code relationships, but how we codify them, as if that was how we actually interacted. Coding online behaviors with algorithms is a slippery slope that easily leads us to treat what these algorithms reveal to be a blueprint of our social worlds. For example, a marketer or statistician inside a company would want to believe that these social graphs give accurate enough indicators about their consumers. And they do to certain degree as we learned from Target's pregnancy indicator. But these social graphs will always run into a wall called Meaning and Reality. Our information acts are laden with meanings that constantly change with context and time. Quantitative data sets, like social graphs, can only reveal so much data.

Lift Talk Notes - Dancing with Handcuffs: The Changing Geography of Trust in China - Updates - Tricia Wang, Global Tech Ethnographer transforming research, specializes in China & emerging markets

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In the higher education market, we’re being sold “the customer is king.” That means a college’s highest purpose is co-creating a future that looks a lot like our past: educated but still unequal.

Minneapolis professor Shannon Gibney: Reprimanded for talking about racism.

Dangers of co-creation and participatory approaches - don’t challenge structural inequalities or try things that make participants uncomfortable.

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Video about a community building project in Kreuzberg, Berlin. The project was a “two-sided project from the very beginning”. The community had a direct impact on the architecture and development.

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“A series of eating experiences. A long spectrum of tiny foods with a few simple rules to abide by; create combinations of 3, only try a combination once and tell others about it. A platform where individual creativity morphs into a collective one.” 

(via MIXOLOGY - Josefin Vargö)

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“The aim of the project is to trace how technology can be processed by humans and blend with local folklore and beliefs. I am looking at the particular location of Tooting Market, which is situated on the periphery of London. It represents an eclectic and exotic blend of myths and customs specific to London.I’ve created a series of non-pragmatic devices that warn of probable and improbable dangers associated with the metaphysical idea of the End of the World – common to all religions and belief systems.The objects are designed to be sold individually, however the effect is amplified when all four devices assemble into one piece to create a mini-observation station that informs you about the active forces of Earth and the Universe.”

(via Anastasia Vikhornova / Meta-devices)

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Together we followed a Design Fiction approach to produce a Quick Start Guide for a technology that could substantially change mobility in the future. First, over the course of four hours we identified the key systems and the FAQs that implicate the human aspects of a self-driving car. For each key system, we illustrated the interaction, described the system and the steps for its use. The FAQs represented what we determined might be questions raised by the new self-driving car owner. Using the Quick Start Guide format as a Design Fiction archetype provided a way to focus the workshop discussion in order to identify topics that may not come up when discussing the larger system. It also forced us to create rather than just debate, and represent topics concisely to focus the work and challenge us to describe features succinctly. 

This Quick Start Guide Design Fiction archetype is a natural way to focus on the human experiences around complicated systems. The Quick Start Guide implies a larger ecosystem that indeed may be quite complex. It also allows one to raise a topic of concern without resolving it completely — often an approach that's necessary in order to not be bogged down in details before it's necessary. For example, mentioning that it costs more to park your car rather than sending it back on the roadway as a taxi is a way to open a conversation about such a possibility and its implications for reclaiming space used by parking garages.

(via Helios: Pilote Quick Start Guide by Near Future Laboratory)

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“If someone has gaps in their narrative, they can fill it in with lots of things,” she said. “Often they fill it with their own expectations, and certainly what they may hear from others.” These are not the knowingly untrue or devious statements of people who are deliberately lying. False memories can be as persuasive as genuine ones, Dr. Loftus said: “When someone expresses it with detail and confidence and emotion, people are going to believe it.” Said Dr. Strange, “It is surprising to the average person how quickly memories can be distorted.”

Witness Accounts in Midtown Hammer Attack Show the Power of False Memory - NYTimes.com

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Your farm is completely surrounded by a foreign country because the king lost it in a game of cards. You live in Cooch Behar. You are eating at a cafe when you are informed that it must close. If you’ll just shift to a table in the other country, service is still available. This café is in Baarle/Hertog. You work in the mayor’s office. Down the hall is a parallel mayor’s office with a whole mirror set of city officials to govern the other half of your city. You work in Texarkana. * * * * * We believe that a great deal can be learned by investigating the strange edge cases of the world. Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity

Border Town