Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem.

For more prototypes of the project, see here and for sketches see here.

Augmented Shadow was created by Joon Y. Moon, a programmer, designer who is exploring the realm of interaction, generative code and motion design on a basis of visual communication design. The project is a thesis project at the Parsons The New School for Design - Download .doc.

(Via CreativeApplications.Net.)

The Pirata Boat Race pits two teams against one another to row themselves to victory. With up to ten shipmates split between two vessels, the aim is to propel your boat to the finish line before the other team, using your iPhone as your oars.

The experience is much closer to console gaming than usually found online. The site itself acts as a hub, allowing multiple people to huddle around the screen, snap the QR code on their iPhones and propel their boat via the built-in accelerometer.

To play the Boat Race head on over to piratalondon.com/boatrace and download the free app from the App Store.

Developer: Pirata London Ltd

(Via CreativeApplications.Net.)

Our electronic representations are evolving, though; while our first few generations of social software have given us simple social networks and grouping features, they exist in the old internet, the geography-busting utopia of the 90s. As our electronic representations weave increasingly into our offline lives, aspects of our corporeality must feed back into our electronic selves if they are to make any sense. What liberated us with the original web, what gave us Amazon and eBay and communities united by interest not location, are being rediscovered as aspects of our new presences. We are learning again that it would be nice to meet our electronic friends face-to-face, to use our software to help us better socialise in the real world than simply exchange packets.

To this end, a number of services are appearing which inject location into the social representation stack. Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s location notification service, recently posted a list of services that integrate with their system (as well as emphasising the point that they’re not a first-order social network service, instead choosing to concentrate on providing broad-but-shallow locative services as part of the stack to other social software).

Appendix

As my aims are different from Fire Eagle’s, it makes sense for me to replicate their list here; mine will expand to include geographic services which are not necessarily associated with Fire Eagle. I’d like to thank them for a useful starting point.

Location broadcasting services

• Fire Eagle (invitation only)

Hybrid location and social networking

• Dopplr
• Plazes
• BrightKite (invitation only)
• Zkout

Locative search services

• Rummble
• Google Mobile

And so we come full circle. Jorn Barger, coiner of the term ‘blog’, who in retrospect was really writing a linkblog the whole time (though we lacked the context to give it such a relative label), joins the linkblog/linklog fray. Before taking a swipe at boingboing, he rightly points out that the best linklog tool is del.icio.us. And having watched Jorn’s site over the years, growing from manual HTML maintenance, to blogger, via third party RSS scrape-and-bake services, his current del.icio.us-based solution is perfect.

Abstract: Closed social network and web utility sites represent the old way of using the web. Today’s web is more agile and flexible, building on open syndication, RSS and APIs to allow the creation of new platforms and functionality which not just substitute but exceed the current offerings, while addressing the unspoken issues of data ownership and transparency.

Linkblogging is just the tip of the iceberg

The web has changed. It’s not where you read blogs any more – that happens in your RSS reader of choice, whether web-based or not. You use the web to run applications or access services (the aforementioned RSS reader, forum systems, your social networking tools, or go shopping). Every blog I visit I do through RSS, and rarely do I see the actual, original site (something I am increasingly happy for; with google’s insidious text advertising, and federated media’s bloatserv technology, I resent 200kb of adverts for a paragraph of copy – did no-one tell these guys that a 400×35 banner is worth 1000 words, not 20?). As Google reader, embedded RSS readers (Windows Mobile, iPhones, Nabaztag rabbits, sidebar widgets/gadgets/newyorkgets, you like what I did there?) and every modern browser and mail client pushes more and more people into adopting RSS, whether or not they realise they are doing so, this will become the norm. People don’t even bother crafting layouts any more; in one day, I saw approximately 4 corporate blogs using exactly the same off-the-shelf theme; it’s the content, it’s google presenting your text in a white-on-black, it’s Firefox’s chrome, it’s Outlook – this is your blog’s theme most of the time. Maybe you did spend a lot of time, or money, making a wild theme, and power to you – but ultimately, I’m there for your content, your output.

Which reminds me – I had some direction for all this. Del.icio.us is a superb linkblogging tool. It has organisation features (tags … and bundles, if anyone uses them), social and peer research and validation tools (30 other people bookmarked this site, but no-one else described it as ‘arousing?’) and a slew of publication tools and access clients. It does a single thing, and does it exceptionally well. It manages your bookmarks from around the web, and lets you share them – it linkblogs for you. But what’s this?

The Daily Mail, and I pick (on) them just because they’re on the top of my mental stack, make their own linkblog tools. You click a little blue button (blue – the spectral opposite to RSS orange) and the site remembers the article for you. The memory, however, is trapped inside the Daily Mail site. I have to go there, as me, and log in, to be granted access to these bookmarks. They can’t be shared. They can’t be backed-up, exported, consumed by other services, or subscribed to. They are a dead end; a metaphor for human memory, intangible, personal, private. Tears in the rain which expire when the account, the fleeting cookie, or computer dies.

But is this really so different from current darlings of the social media word, Facebook and MySpace? They generate (or rather, solicit) reams of experiential data; who knows who else, what they are doing, and what real or imaginary affiliations they wish to present. All of this data is then consumed internally, munged about, and fed back out to users through pages on either site. Exhibit A may help clarify things.

How Facebook Eats Your Data

This is an approximation of how Facebook plays in the social data world. We’ll use a few standard protagonists here, namely

• Alice
• Bob
• Clive

who visit the sites

1. Social Platform Du Jour
2. Twitter
3. Other Service

Clive is friends with Alice and Bob (they’re all into cryptography). They’re all signed up to services 2 and 3, and don’t mind sharing data between them.

Facebook operates a walled garden of user data. Alice goes to Facebook and says something, as does Bob. They leave a message on Twitter, and also do something with Other Service. When Clive wants to see what they’ve been up to, he has to visit the Facebook site, log in, and check the feed – it’s centrally owned by Facebook, who don’t provide an aggregate outbound RSS feed. This is the Daily Mail‘s blue icon approach to gathering user attention and activity – it’s ringfenced and shared, but only on their terms, through their site.

The orange strip describes what Clive can see of his friends in this scheme. He has to be on Social Platform Du Jour’s site, he can see what Alice and Bob have said and done on that site, which may include activity from Twitter and Other Service, as long as they have a service presence that’s been built by those provider and hosted there. He can’t grab it from anywhere else – he absolutely has to be on that site.

Decouple behaviour data from access

The true power of linkblogging (as described by Barger) lies in service agnosticism, of not relying on a single central path to access your data. Here’s where my interpretation of linkblog expands on Barger’s, to the point where any generator of a consumable feed is a linkblog (ical entries, flickr posts, and tweets all coming under my extended wooly definition). Here come our friends the protagonists, this time under Exhibit B, the new model swarmy.

This time, there’s no central location where data is held. Twitter and Other Service are accessed independently, without the middleman of Social site Du Jour. I can tweet from my phone and operate Other Service through carrier pigeon, if they support it. They both export platform-neutral RSS, so I don’t care. If I wanted, I could subscribe to Alice and Bob’s RSS activity feeds from both sites, but when my friend pool extends to the rest of the alphabet, it starts getting unwieldy. When my alphabetical friends sign up to 20 services each, it’s definitely overload.

This is where the next wave of social network sites steps in. I said before we had the same protagonists; actually, we don’t. In Exhibit B, Site 1, the Social Network du Jour is a jour later, and is a neutral intermediary. Rather than try to own content as our first generation social network sites have done, they aggregate and share that data out. In this scenario, Clive has told his social network provider that he know Alice and Bob. Bob has already told the site that he uses Twitter, and associated his public feed URL with his account. Bob does the same, and adds his Other Service activity feed to his account too. Should Alice tweet, our new social site finds out – it pulls in the data from external services, rather than simply owning the data, as our older social sites do.

Clive wants to know what Bob and Alice are up to. Rather than subscribe to each friend’s individual feed, he finds an agnostic social network site that Alice and Bob have already registered with. Because the site is subscribing to these other friend’s feeds, he only needs to subscribe to one new feed (or linkblog)- the aggregate feed provided by site 1 in Exhibit B. Alice and Bob can decide what they want to share, adding and removing services as they see fit. No-one has ringfenced the content, and should the social site become disagreeable, each user can migrate away and source their friend’s activity through alternative services. Everything is open, transparent, and running free in the cloud, to mix our river-of-news and internet-representation metaphors.

These new social sites are more like traditional RSS aggregators, although operating at a different layer in the aggregation stack.

People join sites such as flickr and del.icio.us, or create calendars, and go about their general business on these sites, generating domain activity. Different types of domain activity are collated together by sites (commonly known as ‘linkblogs’, such as tumblr.com) to generate live feeds for individual entities, which are usually people, but may be abstractions of some kind (such as a group of people, or search results). These groups can then be gathered together further up the stack in a FaceBook-style social network, a single feed which describes the collective activity of a number of people and their interactions. This is ultimately presented to the consumer, you, by an RSS reader (Feeddemon, Google Reader, or any of an ever expanding range of RSS consumers and output devices).

Of course, in this model, it’s still possible to bypass each level of collation; these upward flows are shown by curved, grey lines in the above image, and it’s what people have been doing for years with RSS, before aggregation services targeting different points between the bottom and top of the stack appeared. But the real power of this approach is how transparent and standardised the act of social networking and observing has become. The tools which have appeared to fill this space have only existed a short while; while they could have been created 18 months ago using Yahoo Pipes, the ecosystem has significantly geared up towards simplifying the functionality to bypass the ring-fenced social networks.

The immediate issues are of authorisation and standardisation. Authorisation is to do with who you allow to see what; if Alice doesn’t mind Clive seeing her pictures, but doesn’t want Bob to, how can she manage this when her aggregate entity feed doesn’t allow this granularity? This doesn’t seem much of an issue at the moment – pretty much anything placed on the web ends up indexed by the all-seeing G, but when these practices are adopted into mainstream business (and even social life), there will be a requirement for these levels of control. It won’t be possible to place a gatekeeper at each link in the chain – for one, the maintenance will grow exponentially with each new service or user added. At the social level, people will learn not to care so much; when you’re online, much of your life is laid bare and indexed anyway. But corporations will expect secured services behind passwords and authorisation, and each requirement that is introduced breaks the all-or-nothing sharing up the chain. It may be that aggregation services will arise that can be tuned to support higher levels of granularity, with public key authorisation at different endpoint allowing peer-to-peer permission management, and each layer sharing signed and encrypted RSS items.

Standardisation is playing out, either right now, or at the time of writing, depending on when you read this. Each ‘linkblog’ and ‘social aggregator’ handles things differently; there’s some crossover between them, and Darwinian software selection is deciding which features are best (until Google can implement one offering the best fit).

The question of revenue and the business model is a different issue. With RSS, it’s more subtle than even Google’s text-only advertising tucked away in a margin. There is a huge amount of intelligence and insight offered by user behaviour and movements discernable from the inbound data, more insightful than even Google’s simplistic keyword sales market. The ethics and realisation of profitability and permission is left for another post, another day. (I suspect once the VC cash has gone, many of these sites will go the way of the webvan).

Appendix – Relevant Services

Domain-specific

• del.icio.us – bookmarking (also, social sharing and discovery)
• vimeo – video posting and subscription
• YouTube – video posting and subscription
• last.fm – playlist capture (and sharing)
• flickr – image hosting (also, social networking and discussion)
• twitter – ubiquitous microblogging (with publishing)
• Google Calendar – calendaring (with sharing)
• Plurk – twitter with a richer interface (a cruel summary)
• tumblr – microblogging
• Blogger, WordPress, TypePad – (macro)blogging?
• fire eagle – geographic location publishing
• Dopplr – geographic location publishing (with social networks)

Entity Activity

These services combine multiple domain-specific RSS feeds into a feed that represents a single person – or entity.

• soup
• Pownce

Social network aggregation

These sites make it possible to combine multiple individual profiles into a single feed.

• friendfeed – adding discussions to imported activity
• Jaiku
• LinkedIn – concentrates only on networks, ignoring activity
• Plaxo pulse

Miscellaneous

• Yahoo! Pipes – data manipulation (combine arbitrary feeds through visual programming)
• ping.fm – centrally updates a number of microblogging services, with event-driven API hooks

The medium is the message: that we are now past the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and into the question of authenticity in the age of perfect reconstruction.

Pages and ideas like this have circulated in joke books and humour magazines for years, the creation of a pastiche of an already iconic pages (such as TV Guides, newspapers, et al) but what’s really interesting about this piece is that it’s based on an electronic, web-based original.

On non-web based media, the source material and the output are inter-related; there is no output without access to the sources. If I want to make a newspaper page, I need newsprint, news inks, access to printing presses and whatever hardware is used these days to transfer the ink onto the page. I need the same tools and software that is used to mark the page up. Without these things, the page will always be an imitation of the original. A copy of the Guardian printed on an inkjet printer, or using comic sans, just isn’t the Guardian, even if it contains the same text as the original.

The web is a medium where content is decoupled from it’s physical rendering; we are used to accessing the same web page on a CRT, an LCD, your laptop, or your phone. The colour is slightly different, the resolution changes, but the same site seen on each device will be understood as equivalent. Beyond this, however, it also encapsulates it’s own production process; that is, the document is not a ‘baked’ final version, as a printed page is; the output document can be accessed or viewed as the elements of the mechanism that produced it. “View Source” grants access to this; it’s the only medium I’m aware of that is so self-documenting.

As a result, authenticity is defenestrated. Authenticity is not an aspect of the final document, nor can it ever be; authenticity is instead implied by source (the URL the page is accessed from, as every paypal scammer knows) or simply the look; unlike television, radio, or the press, there is no feel to the medium itself that separates an amateur from a professional, no cost barriers (such as owning a printing press or radio transmitter and studio) to divide the two.

This is what is so uncanny about this page; it is an exact reproduction of a page that doesn’t exist, but at the same time (apart from the URL) is sensorially perfect; if Google news generated this page, this is exactly how it would appear, down to the byte. I had never stopped to give pause as to how important domain names were as our only layer of verifiability. Anyone can perfectly imitate anyone else in this medium.

First, it’s written in Director. We had none of that flash back in those days! We were grateful that we could even altavista for imaging lingo snippets (people who remember this will be cringing, the kids these days will be thinking… imaging flash?). Director recently came back from the dead, and you can get the plugin here.

It’s a quick hack version of space invaders, which, for some reason, I implemented obscure MAME controls to start. You’ll be pressing 5, then 1, to start a game. I know, I know. And yes, there’s no defence blocks; this was to avoid clouding the high concept… (game after the jump)

High concept? Yes! Press the return key in game. Twice. The game is replaced with a stack of numbers. Each number directly relates to one aspect of the game – the position of an enemy, the player firing counter, the horizontal position of enemy bullets; each and every number has a purpose. See if you can still play the game using this reference data (known as variables by those who programme), rather than the visualisation of it. Can you beat the computer on it’s own turf – the world of numbers? (admittedly, the computer is at an advantage – it knows what each of those numbers refers to. There’s a reverse engineering challenge as well as a poor space invaders clone here, for your double amusement.)

Internally, the game code is tracking this amount of data, analysing, evaluating and following a set of procedures defined in the progamme fifty times a second. This is a very simplistic game; it was deliberately chosen so that a full set of variables could be displayed on-screen at once.

Take a step back. Think about how much more data is being thrown around by modern games (space invaders could be written in less than 4kb of data) but also by your operating system, or even phone. Think about the complexity under the hood there.

Space Invaders <RAW> hopefully makes you appreciate how fundamental the role of data visualisation is in the modern world, how it imbues meaning into every computer mediated action we make; how pervasive the discipline has become, evolving from a by-product of basic programming roles into interaction, usability and experiential design specialities. Working with electronic data involves breaking tasks and processes down into their most fundamental, atomic pieces; this generates vast volumes of data to work with. Generations of computer science heroes have layered abstractions and metaphors on top of these fundamental approaches to hide what’s going on under the hood, from both the user and the programmer behind it.

Twitter seems to have been gaining a lot of traction in recent times. Originally a side project of Evan Williams, who begat Blogger as a side project of something else lost in time, it was a solution in search of a wider purpose. But what is it, and what itch does it scratch?

It’s seamlessly tied into everyone’s unwitting bigger brother, Facebook, talks to and from your phone by SMS, has a burgeoning ecosystem of third-party tools jumping into the open API it provides, and is so Current that Number 10 has jumped on the bandwagon, ahead of friends I’d expected less of. Some people are using it in interesting ways; soma.fm use it to broadcast their playlists in an agnostic manner, bypassing the problems associated with embedding metadata into audio feeds in different formats for different platforms – cutting a Gordian knot using a lightweight side channel. Others use it to collect and monitor friends and associates, organise teams and groups, or let everyone know what they’re up to.

So, what exactly is it?

It’s not really a ‘personal’ platform. Several examples above show it being used by institutions rather than individuals.

We need to look back to Evan’s earlier project, Blogger, to contextualise what Twitter is for. Blogger was originally a tool allowing single authors a web-based interface to their hosted writing. It managed chronology and organised information by date, but most importantly, made it public, and made it permanent and thus linkable (at least theoretically, testing and lazy authors aside). The Blog became the broadcast tool for those online; instead of managing mailing lists, or enormous groups mails, the writer posted to one central location, and readers (optionally) could visit that site, or subscribe to that feed – a much more manageable solution all round.

Twitter is an extension of Blogger, in many ways; it’s text based, it’s for broadcast communication, and is powered by an open API. However, it’s an inherently democratic tool; whereas Blogger forges a one-to-many relationship between Blog author and their readers, Twitter (and it’s managed subscriber/publisher model) demands equality between publisher and reader. You can’t fully play twitter until you create your account (carving out your URL at their domain, perhaps leading to later speculation and valuation of twitter account name? Will this become the DNS namespace gold rush we still suffer from?) and let people know who you’re subscribing to. And, by extension, who subscribes to you. It’s facebook without the cruft, showing only what you’ve explicitly expressed interest in.

The other noticeable feature of twitter is brevity. Tweets offer a similar payload weight as SMS, smaller even; 140 bytes compared to SMS’s 160. This forces a pithy, jargon-driven tone, not as lax as the U R SUX of the txting world, but definitely compressed, non-redundant word use. TinyURL is heavily (and automagically) used, allowing URLs longer than the message payload would allow to be posted. A lexicon of it’s own is emerging; as well as tweets, timelines, and tweeple, people are annotating posts with #eventnames and @direct-messaging. The at-sign convention is interesting; adopted by users to direct tweets back at other twitterers to maintain an ongoing conversation, it was anointed by the Twitter developers and integrated back into their command system and public timeline visualisation. Combining this with features such as TinyURL links has created a useful glue for third-party feed/stream aggregators such as friendfeed to unify conversations across differing online services, such as blogs, flickr and youtube feeds, and other systems exposing user data.

There’s even a command system. It’s possible to issue meta-tweets, instructions to the system for managing your account, using some of the twitter interfaces. Twitter itself refers to this as ‘Twitter Lingo‘ and allows you to subscribe (and un-) to people, send direct messages, and manage twitter’s interaction with your client devices. It feels very IRC-like, and only marginally less cryptic.

The easiest way I can summarise it is to say twitter is to instant messaging as blogger was to email, which is a slightly abstract take on it; the real value is how it is used for content, and what people are pushing through it. It’s still early days for this microcontent phenomenon; whether it’s used to solicit clicks, dinner, or political action, provide content for third party data analysis, or exist to state the medium <i>is</i> the message (with 114 characters left), the wide diversity of applications and approaches indicates a healthy birth, encouraging a spate of experimentation, open development and collaboration.

While we’re stuck with passwords, we should make them as painless as possible to use. My personal process is to have three passwords, at differing levels of privacy:

• A ‘public’ password, which I use for accounts I share with friends and do not care about compromising
• A private password, which I share across a number of services
• A high-security password, which is super-secret and only used for services which involve money, or present themselves as an authentic me

Anecdotal experience tells me a lot of people rely on similar schemes. This is a common approach, but did anyone tell security and sign-on developers? Seemingly not because this conflicts hugely with how many websites operate. While humans exist in a world where the aim is to minimise password redundancy (ie, memorising as few as possible), many online accounts aim to maximise password uniqueness: the password must be between 4, 6 or 8 and 8, 10 or 20 characters in length; it cannot or must contain special characters, which may include or preclude any, all, or some of dollar signs, pound signs, punctuation, underscores, accented characters and spaces You can or cannot start the password with a space, if that was a permissible character. They often seem designed to best suit the security or IT manager’s existing password schema, and I imagine there’s a fascinating study out there about this already.
It’s a wild-west of password requirements, basically, but human ingenuity always finds a way. We trim our passwords to suit the per-site rules, eliminating that now-illegal space, duplicating phrases to reach the minimum letter count. We do all in our power to preserve the spirit of the password, within the constraints of the rules.
Here’s some of those rules, pulled from a random website.It tells me the rules only after I propose my sign-in password (looks like the other davemee beat me to signing up here too). Ideally, it should have let me know in advance, but at least it tells me. Let’s review the constraints it’s imposing here:

1. Longer than 6 characters
2. Less than 12
3. Contain at least one letter
4. Contain at least one number
5. Contain only letters and numbers

This eliminates at least one of my passwords, the one I’d typically use for the level of security required here. I need to change it to conform.

On the same site, contrast with the login page (pictured below).
Without recording the site and credentials somewhere, my presumed login would fail here. I know which account I’m likely to have used, but without knowing the constraints imposed by the site, I would never be able to derive the correct password. When I enter my (illegal) credentials, it tells me my login details were wrong, but makes no mention (nor reminder) of the restrictions imposed on the password – I’d only find this out by creating a new account and having the password rejected a second time.

I’m not singling this site out, whoever they are – lots of sites do this. What disappoints me is this is such standardised, minimum-effort behaviour, which could be turned around with so little work to make the world a better place. We’d have less misleading sign-up figures from the bigger websites, more honest advertising figures, and better preservation of online identity. Sign-up, -in and -on interaction would stop being a hurdle and start being part of a sane, simple transaction.

Recommendations

I have a few ideas about what could be done here; I propose a SOS (sign-on sanity) group or marque that would guarantee predictability of registration. Minimum requirements would be to

• Spell out admissible characters for passwords, at both account creation and log-in time (this could be inline in the page, or as a popup display)
• Make explicit how case is treated, accented and non-latin characters are treated, and minimum/maximum size requirements
• Not impose back-end details on password choice; for example, banning leading spaces, banning dollar signs, backslashes and other ‘escapable’ characters

I also propose a full-compliance award, which would involve the above as well as

• A standardised set of acceptable characters, with a link to the SOS website where the characters would be made explicit
• Visible feedback (flashes, error highlights) when an inadmissable character is entered into a password field, without stating what that character is (‘the 5th character entered was bad’ rather than ‘% is not a permitted character’), for browsers supporting this functionality.

With this approach, the guesswork is eliminated from password recall, and the need to rely on external tools, whether paper or software, is greatly diminished. There would be fewer aborted registrations and less overhead from users having password-related issues at sign in, all the while requiring no major infrastructure changes, and only minimum additions to a few pages for site managers and administrators.

Last.fm started out with a similar concept; listening to the entirety of a song was also a ‘preference’ vote (or that you were away from your computer, how can you tell the difference?), and that skipping a song indicated you didn’t like it. These are quite harsh metrics; there could be other reasons for skipping a song (you’re not in the right mood, you have a twitchy mouse finger) so it’s not necessarily an analogue for voting.

However, I’m particularly enamoured of two things happening here; user-generated metrics and passive data gathering. User-generated metrics is the idea that users and their behaviour in an electronic space provide very tangible feedback about their relationship to those spaces. The classic example is Amazon’s recommendation engine – people who bought that also bought this – but there are many abstracts ways this information can be gathered, and what it can mean. Passive data gathering is the idea that, like the example above, the way people interact with devices (and interfaces) provide a great deal of extraneous objective information, which could not be gathered should the same information was expressed in explicit terms. ‘Skip this song’ says so much more than a form which assessed your liking of the current song, and whether you’d like to hear it again in a week, month or year. Just skip it; if I skip it again, I don’t want to hear it.

It’s only recently that the Wii has allowed physical movement and real post-digital controls into video games. You don’t just move left at this point in time in the game, you move leftish quite quickly. For years, promotional videos of gaming systems showed players swaying, weaving, moving their joysticks through space, all the while just pressing buttons on a block – yet nothing capitalised on this. The body was making subconscious hints that everyone in the room was picking up on – apart from the game itself, the mediator of the experience. I think this is one of the main reasons the Wii has cut through such a broad target demographic – it’s attempting to use this subconscious cueing, rather than impose an abstract (buttons and joystick) interface on the player. It’s working the way your lizard brain works, rather than the way someone who has spent years learning, studying and practicing button configurations, as well as their repeat rates, give, tension and other inherent variables affecting performance would work. The lizard knows how to spin your arm 100 different ways already.

I spent some time, unsuccessfully, trying to introduce the idea of insistence into interfaces. People press a key, or click a GUI button, and the software (as best it can) responds. People don’t work this way, though; they act like software is another person or intelligent agent with emotions and judgement of it’s own. We press that ‘call lift’ button ten times more often if we need the toilet, if there’s an axe murderer behind us, or we’re generally in a rush, even though we know the metal and current behind the lift couldn’t care less about what’s happening outside it’s immediate world; which is a a binary world, a world of lift, shaft, and electric.

When I post a tweet, or send an email, if there’s a pause between clicking a releasing the send button, why is the recipient not made aware of this? Could we introduce an x-apprehension-level: high header to our mail clients, or x-decisiveness-level:HELLYEAH to those people who whack the send button repeatedly until the window closes? We see capitals as shouting these days, but what subtle nuances of typing are lost when the action becomes captured; did we hold shift with one hand and aggressively peck each character, an insistent finger-jabbing shout? Or did we carefully engage caps lock, and type normally, the shouting emotionless and for emphasis?

There’s so many places we can hook these cues and gestures in; Apple’s Newton had a lovely ‘scrub out’ feature to erase items, engaging the same behaviour we use with paper and destructible surfaces to indicate deletion. Apple has started taking a leaf from their own work here, and are using flicks, squeezes and pinches to control their iPhones. But we’re still missing the adjective in our otherwise simple noun-verb HCI discourse; to a degree, who cares? People don’t really want to know how long I lingered over the ‘post’ button before you got to see this entry. At the same time, it’s an interesting metric of my relationship to this article, and taken over time, this posts’ relationship to other posts, and on a global scale, their relationship to everything else; you can suddenly start asking which content is the author most confident of? which authors are the least self-assured? Which day of the week does the world find the least confident when posting? That tiny little piece of extra data introduces magnitudes of extra meaning, raising the intelligence available from the standard metrics by an extra dimension. It may not be information I want to make public, but for my own reference, it could be very valuable; and anonymised, combined with other blind datasets, could provide a means by which I can asses my own progress and confidence with my writing.

Usability squads employ iris-trackers to understand where people focus the most attention on web sites; this feeds back into the design, nipping and tucking layouts to better serve expectations. Sites could do this automatically themselves though, by using the mouse cursor as a cheap iris tracker. Places my mouse hover a lot express interest, as do clicks. Those areas should become larger, more obvious. The iGoogle homepage and Facebook are examples of information-heavy sites that could benefit from this approach. This could be handled at the individual or community level. Games could benefit hugely from reading these extra cues and providing less binary experiences; Street Fighter, the original, features strength-sensitive buttons which would allow a direct correspondence between the player and their gaming character’s attack strengths. Even Vista’s start menu defaults to showing a list of programmes, from top to bottom detailing the most used over a long period, to the most recently used.

With his woolly ideas gathered and spell-checked, he clicks publish, decisively.

I’d seen pillow graphs before (my introduction was SequioaView, the disk-space analysis tool) but I’d never seen them organised into a circle, with such organic structuring – I’m not sure it conveys as much information as the cubic pillow map, but it feels more immediate and natural.

The addition of colour to convey change adds an extra dimension, particularly with that Tuftesque colour palette, but shows only a relative snapshot in time. It would be nice to see this animated, adding a ‘year’ slider to reallocate space as the year changed and showing absolute percentages, and colour being used to emphasise the relative differences.