Architecture is not just a way to house bodies and fulfill function, but to feel.

Software is no different.

Go right from the inspiration — the vision — to actually making it. Don’t think it through. Don’t talk about it. Don’t plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that — if you can start rocking — you’ll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you’re into it. It’s going somewhere, it’s tangible. Sure, you’ll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you’ll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You’ll solve them so you can keep moving.

Truth.

There is no end to this, in that short of eviscerating the content all together (and removing any impetus the reader might have to visit in the first place), our attention to the advertisements is always waning. Sadly, our attention elsewhere also suffers and declines; instead of staying still to read, we skitter from place to place, like frightened prey assured the predators are near.

(Incidentally, I suspect I could save everyone some time if I just point at A Working Library and gesticulate madly. Go. Just go.)

Follow the link for explanation and more photos.

The metaphor of personal computer as physical space has been strained beyond usefulness, in my opinion. It’s the lack of physicality that affords such insane productivity for Quicksilver users. Everything is abstracted into nouns and verbs and I get to mash them up however I need to. I’m unconstrained by “here” and “there.”

– Merlin Mann, 2006, on BumpTop.

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.

Fantastic essay on the way that the tools we use shape us.

I sketch almost all the parts I make. This sort of back of the envelope scribbling is very different from precise engineering drawings – I change my mind all the time, scrubbing over the lines again and again. Drawing like this is a wonderful tool for thinking, for exploring different solutions, rejecting bad ones and developing good ones. I also use Solidworks, and I can see the power of CAD programs like this, though I still prefer drawing. Drawing parts is actually very similar to drawing cartoons – scrubbing over lines, trying to make the idea clear and concise, thinking up endless variations and embellishments.

Drawing parts does depend on experience. I don’t remember drawing my machines much as a child, and when I started making things again after leaving Cambridge I still did very little drawing, working out the detail by trial and error. There were so many factors, particularly with moving parts, that drawings didn’t help with – will a lever be rigid enough, will a spring counteract a weight, will a grub screw be enough to hold a pulley on a shaft, will a motor be powerful enough, will it stop quickly enough. The only way to find out things like this was to try them. There is something intuitively obvious that it must be a good idea to make use of as many of the senses as possible (smells and sounds can also be very useful in identifying a problem), but in practice trying everything out is very slow. With experience, it’s much quicker to solve design problems on paper…

My cluttered workshop, particularly the comprehensive stores of bits I’ve salvaged or otherwise acquired, is also vital to my working process. Browsing through my stores, I often think of a better way of making a part, and sometimes ways of adapting something I’ve already got. The stores and the tools are literally an extension of my brain, a physical version of a memory map. Anything I can’t find in my stores will be in one of my many vast catalogues. Rural sheds may seem quaint but they are no longer cut off from the world. Modern distribution means I can get anything within 24 hours.

(Via Matt Jones.)

This piece inspired the login illustration that vimeo commissioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use throughout the site. The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video. I’ll upload that for posterity later.

(Via Unstoppable Robot Ninja.)

I, too, find [Social Objects] a useful paradigm for web service design and community building.

Stop me if I’m wrong, but this is what I got out of the concept: A social object is something that you care about enough to form a social bond around. It’s an interesting, external thing.

Or, to put it another way, a social object is something “sticky.” It’s a node that gathers attention and acts as a network link between people.

In LibraryThing, the object is a book. On Flickr, it’s a photo …or a short video. On de.licio.us, the objects are URLs or tags. On Twitter, it’s short messages.

In blogging, the objects are sometimes posts, and sometimes something more nebulous: a shared interest or tag. This is one way that I feel blogging on Wordpress or Blogger or TypePad could be improved, and one reason why my posting here is sometimes sporadic: there’s no easy, accepted way to make those social bonds, without doing a lot of extra work to hold it together. There are ways: to name one, you can create a Technorati search, or subscribe to feeds and piece the threads together yourself, or use the comments on the blog itself (and then subscribe to the blog comments, I suppose), but the experience is fragmented and frustrating.

This is a difficult problem to resolve: in a network of independent actors, without a coherent service to form explicit bonds, is it possible to make a “sticky” social object? Can you still form an automatic, explicit bond in the absence of a controlling authority? Can you do it in a way that’s as easy as commenting on a Flickr photo and then getting to see the rest of the conversation through email?

(I’m using the term “explicit bond” to mean a way in which you can set a flag, so that changes to the object get pushed towards you, like a comment on a Flickr photo, or a @reply in Twitter.)

I hope the answer to this question is “yes,” but as of yet, have no idea how it would happen. Or, if it’s happened yet, would someone tell me? I’d like to stop doing the gruntwork myself and let the computer do it. I hear that’s what they’re for.

MJ: Well – let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else – people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.

RF: It functions as both artifact and instigator?

MJ: Yep. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”

RF: It’s the thing I’ve created, and placed into the network for others to react to and generate from.

(Edit 1:57 PM, Monday; April 14, 2008: Alex De Carvalho says, via Twitter: ’social object’ had been coined in sociology papers before @jury and I discussed the term at Reboot7. He links to this blog post on the subject, where he details the origin of the phrase.)

The conversation is worth reading, and skips from topic to topic. It’s hard to pin down what I took away from it, so I’ll just point and gesture wildly at the interview in the hopes that someone else will see what grabbed my attention. Or, you know, not.

MJ: I think this is somehow the consolation of these personal informatics. We find data about ourselves – these patterns, somehow affirming.

RF: All of this data is hidden from us, and we’re the one’s generating it… we aren’t equipped, cognitively, to learn anything more than impressions from our own actions. In attempting to gather more complete pictures of our behaviors - and gain better analysis of ourselves – what’s our motivation?

MJ: Well – coming back to the social aspect. The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will…

In a low-tech way, that’s what Dave Seah’s Printable CEO is good for. It provides an accumulated data set for introspection. It’s a low-tech, explicit tool… meaning, you have to decide to capture the data, it isn’t captured for you.

That’s not a bad thing, mind: the act of stopping, thinking about what you’ve done, then noting it is itself valuable, I think. I wonder if the PCEO would be so effective if the data capture was automatic.

Anyway, go check it out.

(Via Matt Jones (again).)