What I did over vacation
This last week, I was invited by Dave Gray to the 2008 Sarasota International Design Summit.
There really is too much to summarize in a single post, but here are some of the highlights as I saw them.
People
I had the honor of meeting and befriending some amazing folks. A partial list:
Jennifer Magnolfi, Matt Jones, Timo Arnall, Matt Cottam, Michelle Malott, Chris McCray, Charles Warren, and probably a half-dozen others whose contact data I haven’t pulled out and reviewed yet. (Sorry!)
We managed to spend most of the summit sitting at a table in back, with half of us working on their presentation for the next day while listening to the presentation, and the other half listening to the presentations and exchanging (occasionally snarky) comments on twitter.
The GooglePhone’s internal compass and its ability to do an augmented-reality view with it, using Google Street View, was the technological nerdgasm of the weekend.
PaperCamp
The highlight of the weekend, for me, was meeting Matt and Timo, and getting to talk about paper as prototype spime.
(It was a bit gratifying, when meeting Matt, to be greeted with, “Oh, you’re that guy!” Admittedly, that’s usually what people say when a locally infamous eccentric shows up at a party, but it was fun nonetheless.)
Timo made the insightful comment that the idea of just attaching a URL to paper is kind of broken, and we need richer and more interesting interaction patterns. He and I agreed that the usability of QRCodes is quite poor as they stand, but they are a printable, inexpensive analog for passive RFID and touch interaction in some ways.
Matt percolated a bit, and came up with the idea of having a PaperCamp event for like-minded people to explore what can be done with printable protospimes.
Matt’s suggested topics:
- Way-new Printing
- Protospimes
- Ingestion/Digestion/Representation
- Bionic Sketching
- Folding/Structure
- Paper’s Children
(”What would Paper’s Children be,” I asked. “That’s the point, I’m asking you,” Matt said.)
(I have some ideas about that, but let’s save it for later.)
Memes!
Some ideas that got bounced around, from talks, hallway discussion, and drunken ranting:
- Personal Informatics
- Game Mechanics for motivation and change
- Manatee Rape Waivers - band name, or legal necessity?
- The lack of personal fear in a welfare state (Norway)
- Warren Ellis won’t actually eat your heart if you buy him a beer.
(Matt claimed this, but I’m still skeptical) - Obama as the president in Independence Day
- RFID fields as physical objects
- Wii Fit and Nike Plus –- and how you should be able to change and record the messages in both
- Will the FUBAR security fiasco in Mifare RFID chips harm NFC adoption? (Yes.)
So, in other words, we made as much sense as you’d expect.
On the whole, as I said later, it was simply refreshing to show an example of my thought experiments and for people to not look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick. Worth the price of admission right there.
Thank-you’s
I really have to thank Dave for inviting me, and of course the summit organizers, Michelle Bauer and Mary Craig for allowing me to attend. Also, everyone else for being generally awesome.
What’s next?
Well, I just got this, from Matt Jones:
@paperbit 15.24, restate your assumptions.
Sounds like a good place to start.
