Technologies for creating online relationships from real-world actions

Some recent research into technologies that create online friendships or links using real-world interactions, typically proximity. Any more in the comments please.

Poken

Poken is a physical USB key-like object where you touch other Pokens to share a business card or contact details then sync it over USB To your computer. It seems to use a proprietary wireless technology. If you want to know what’s inside, take a look at Hacking the Poken.

Bump

Bump is an iPhone and Android app that lets you exchange information by “bumping” your phones together. But what’s notable is how it works. From their FAQ…

“Q: How does Bump work?
There are two parts to BumpTM: the app running on your device and a smart matching algorithm running on our servers in the cloud. The app on your phone uses the phone’s sensors to literally “feel” the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route information between the two phones in each pair.”
“Q: No way. What if somebody else bumps at the same time?
Way. We use various techniques to limit the pool of potential matches, including location information and characteristics of the bump event. If you are bumping in a particularly dense area (ex, at a conference), and we cannot resolve a unique match after a single bump, we’ll just ask you to bump again. Our CTO has a PhD in Quantum Mechanics and can show the math behind that, but we suggest downloading Bump and trying it yourself!”

Disney Fairies

Bracelets from Disney that allow kids to become online friends by touching the objects together then returning home and docking them over USB.

“Tink Friendship eBracelets bring girls and Disney Fairies characters together with the mere touch of a band powered by Clickables™ technology. The magic begins with the creation of a Fairy Friendship Kit online at www.PixieHollow.com where a girl can select her fairy avatar, a special message and a gift, then save it onto her Tink Friendship eBracelet to be shared offline with friends. When a girl touches her band to her friend’s and presses a button, her band will glow to confirm that a Fairy Friendship has been made no cords, no computer, just a touch of Pixie Dust! Just like the girls, their online fairies are friends too and can easily find each other in Pixie Hollow.”

Petimo

A research prototype from Keio University where children are only able to accept online friends in a proprietary online social network by bringing their Petimo toys into physical contact. The toys also feature a screen and a wireless connection to allow other interactions and features.

Cuddly robots aim to make social networks child-safe - tech - 07 May 2010 - New Scientist

Petimo: Safe Social Networking Robot for children (PDF)

Facechipz

Facechipz is a proprietary social network that uses the distribution of physical tokens with unique codes to create online friendships.

“The way it works is: parents register their child on the site for a one-time fee of USD 1. Kids purchase packs of five collectible FaceChipz tokens from select retailers and then register each token online by entering the unique code printed on the chip. Once the FaceChipz are registered, kids hand them out to friends. A receiver goes online and they also enter the chip’s code. The FaceChipz database then confirms the friendship, and the two people are linked.”

Online network for tweens requires offline introductions

A guide to building prototypes

I’ve been trying to express some of the principles and ideas that I use in my day-to-day work in the R&D Prototyping team and this post has been sitting on my desktop for far too long. Think of it as a first draft and let me know if it’s useful or what’s missing or even what’s plain wrong about it. I’m not going to go into why you would or should prototype, and some of these things obviously apply to all kinds of projects. It is inspired by countless things including 37signals “Getting Real” (if you follow this, you’ll be fine), 43folders, Diego Rodriguez’s Innovation Principles, lots of people I’ve worked with, and more. I’m not sure any of what follows is original, and it’s not comprehensive, but this is my list and I find it useful.

1. Ideas are easy, building things well is hard.


2. Build things to surface problems and understand things. Until you build it you won’t truly understand the opportunities or challenges.


3. Read in and around the problem area. A lot. There aren’t many new ideas and lots of things already exist. This should be obvious but it will stop you wasting time.


4. Make it simple, then simpler still if you can.


5. Embrace constraints, they are there to help you and make you more creative.


6. Define the approximate scope of what you’re going to do, you can always change it later but you’ll have something to work to.


7. Know when to stop. Make up a deadline if you don’t have one. And reduce scope if you’re not going to make it.


8. Work in an agile manner, but I don’t really care if you have a methodology or not.


9. Get T-shaped people, or at least have T-shaped multi-disciplinary teams.


10. Work together all the time. Try to get your engineers and designers working and thinking together and exploring problems from both perspectives simultaneously. This can be hard.


11. Talk a lot within your team. Make sure you know what everyone else is doing.


12. Support team-members’ passions but be pragmatic.


13. Sketch. On envelopes or napkins or with code. This helps communicate the problem, get a shared understanding of things and get further support for the work.


14. Make it just good enough to work and look good enough to attract people. But not too polished; the lowest resolution you can get away with.


15. Tell people about it. Write about it. Communication helps form your ideas and develop your prototype further.


16. Don’t chase shiny things.


17. Don’t get hung up on a particular technology. Build it with anything that works, you can refine it later.


18. Try to make it fun but not frivolous.


19. Just start, I know it’s hard, but once you’re going it will get easier. And even if your first attempt fails you’ll have learned something.

The Nature of Technology

I’ve just got round to writing up my notes on The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves by W. Brian Arthur. The overall theme of the book is along these lines…

p.2 “Technologies in other words consisted of other technologies, they arose as combinations of other technologies…But it meant, I realized, that if new technologies were constructed from existing ones, then considered collectively technology created itself.”

p.3 “Technologies consisted of parts - assemblies and subassemblies - that were themselves technologies. So technologies had a recursive structure.”
“And every technology, I realized, was based upon a phenomenen, some effect it exploited, usually several.”

On how technologies are combinations of other technologies…

p.21 “If we put these two pieces together, that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget future technologies, can we arrive at a mechanism for the evolution of technology?”

p.25 “Slowly, at a pace measured in decades, we are shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes.”

Talking about domains of technology and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon he says…

p.74 “You recognize them as mid-1800s because of the component sets they draw from: the iron-place cladding of the craft; the artillery cannon that hurls it into space; the brick-and-wrought-iron structures that house the venture. Such component sets and the way they are used do not just reflect the style of the times, the define the style of the times.”

On insight and the origins of technologies:

p.116 “It comes as a moment of connection, always a connection, because it connects a problem with a principle that can handle it…And it not in the midst of activities or in frenzied thoughts, but in moments of stillness.”

p.128 “Origination in scientific theorizing, as in technology, is at bottom a linking - a linking of the observational givens of a problem with a principle (a conceptual insight) that roughly suggests these, and eventually with a complete set of principles that reproduces these.”

And concludes with…
p.209 “The economy, in a word, is becoming generative. Its focus is shifting from optimising fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings.”

p.213 “It is reinforced nonetheless by the qualities of modern technology: its connectedness, its adaptiveness, its tendency to evolve its organic quality. Its messy vitality.”

There’s also a lovely little sketch of how technology has evolved in human history, but you”ll have to buy the book for that. Fairly interesting overall but not as compelling as I had hoped.

Garden birds in 2009

A little late but here is the list of birds seen in our garden during 2009. Last year's results are here.

A goldcrest
A wren
Long-tailed tits
Blue tits
Great tits
Coal tits
Dunnocks (breeding I think)
The occasional sparrow
Robins
Chaffinches
Greenfinches
Blackbirds
Thrushes
Starlings
Woodpigeons
Collared doves
A pair of greater spotted woodpeckers

And a male and female blackcap have recently taken up residence in the garden over the winter.

Some visualisations of stories and narratives

Timelines are pretty common visualisations, there’s a lovely history of them here from Cabinet Magazine. My current project is looking at representing narratives and drama online and as part of this I’ve been researching existing visualisations of narratives and stories, some of which I’ve collated below along with my own sketches and thoughts. They’re in approximate order of complexity and we start off with some relatively simple hand-drawn diagrams illustrating general plot features.

The Archers

A hand-drawn diagram from one of the scriptwriters on The Archers radio drama. It shows the intensity of the storyline for each character over the week.

x: time, y: intensity of story, a line per character

Cinderella

Another hand-drawn diagram, this from Kurt Vonnegut in his book, Palm Sunday discovered via this post. He shows the Good or Ill fortune of the protagonist over the duration of the story. The steps up represent the gifts from Fairy Godmother to Cinderella culminating in a plunge at the stroke of midnight when everything changes back again, but then the prince finds here and she lives happily ever after (tends to infinity).

x: time, y: fortune

Tristram Shandy

Illustrations from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne circa 1760. Described by Cabinet Magazine as “indicating the non-linear path of a well-told story; narrative digressions appear as deviations from a straight line.”.

x: time, y: digression

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

The classic infographic from Charles Minardi, “Carte figurative de pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813” represents the story of Napoleon’s march into Russia and shows location, time and his army size.

x/y: map, width: size of the army, annotations: events and temperature

Now onto some interpretations of plot and episode structures.

Hill Street Blues

Diagrams from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You illustrating the increase in complexity of contemporary television drama and the evolution of multiple storylines. The featured image shows a Hill Street Blues episode with each grid square representing a scene and each row representing an individual storyline.

x: time/scenes, y: storyline

Jazz on 3

Following on from Steven Johnson’s diagrams I drew these a few years ago showing the fractal-like nature of nested events in TV and shows. “The radio show (Jazz on 3 in this instance) can be broken down into segments - the introduction, a discussion of the artist, interviews and a live session. Each of these segments is further broken down (in green) into the individual interviews and the individual tracks.”. This could also apply to TV and radio drama.

x: time, y: scenes

The Archers again

This comes from a project a couple of years ago to build a web app that segmented the Archers radio drama into individual scenes and marked up each one with relevant facets. This diagram illustrates how the episodes are split up and how ongoing storylines would thread their way through the episodes.

x/y: time/episodes/scenes, annotations: facets and storylines

Movie narrative charts

And then there’s this classic from xkcd to “…show movie character interactions. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicate which characters are together at a given time.”. The Lord of the Rings diagram is beautifully constructed to simultaneously show time, character groupings and major locations and events.

x: time, y: character and groups, annotations: places and events

Stories are rendered as TV Programmes

I recently drew this after considering TV drama and how a show is a particular rendering of a story into the form of TV. The conceptual story happens along a timeline with significant plot events marked. These events are then rendered in scenes in the TV programme thereby creating a programme timeline. But sometimes events may be portrayed in multiple scenes, as flashbacks or different points of view for example. And sometimes a single scene on the TV may portray multiple narrative events. An ongoing story arc comprises many events in the timeline from many episodes.

x: time, y: rendering, annotations: connections and storylines

Memento

The film Memento is a particularly good example of using a complicated structure to create a compelling story and Density Design have created this set of visualisations based on it. The example above has slices showing the order of the scenes in the film and then the same scenes re-ordered as they would have been experienced by the protagonist. This diagram is also interesting and shows character involvement as a coloured bar in each scene, ordered both by film- and real-time.

x: time, re-ordered by film or real timeline, colour: b&w or colour scene

Now let’s have a look at some time travelling stories which makes things a bit more complicated…

Doctor Who: Blink

This diagram comes from my colleague Paul Rissen who has been doing some very deep thinking about modelling narratives in data. It is based on events from the Doctor Who episode Blink) that features characters being thrown back in time. The diagram shows various timelines from the show - the timeline from the perspective of the main character, Sally (which is the same as the timeline shown in the broadcast episode), the universe timeline (i.e. how events occurred in linear time and different from the episode) and the timelines of various other characters who time travel in the episode and thus experience events in a different order.

x: time/scene (re-ordered by character), annotations: connections

Time travel from fiction

An original work from Information is Beautiful showing all the time travel in various films and books on a single timeline.

Universe timeline, annotations: time travel

George Bush

Ben Fry talks about these complex hand-drawn depictions by Mark Lombardi of “social/commercial interactions and their hierarchies, and politics” where “…he began to create drawings such as this one to depict the complex narratives he would uncover through his curiosity about anything from failed banks to corruption in government to organized crime.”. This one shows the investments and relationships of George W Bush. An interesting combination of a timeline and complex relationships.

x: time, annotations: relationships and connections

Jules et Jim

Finally, another set of film visualisations from Density Design based the the film Jules et Jim. The one shown above uses the curve of the storyline to represent the feelings and involvement of the three characters. There are lots of others in the set.

x/y: storyline and feelings, colour: involvement

I’m particularly taken right now with the very simple illustrations of the shape of the story from Kurt Vonnegut and I’d like to incorporate something like that into our project. And time travel also gives you a lot more to play with. Have you seen any more story visualisations that you like? Please add them in the comments below.