ETech '06
I went to ETech in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, my first time. Loads of people have written about the conference already and there are lots of session slides and other notes around so this is just my filter on the conference - concentrating on connecting things, real applications, how people use technology and, of course, anything to do with radio and music.
Intelligence Augmentation, not Artifical Intelligence
Using humans to provide intelligence
Amazon's Mechnical Turk (ETech session) - Amazon acting as a broker for services that need human intervention. There's actually a web services API to programmatically make requests to humans and get responses back. One company that are making use of this are www.castingwords.com who provide a podcast transcription service.
Eric Bonabeau's Hunch Engine, which didn't seem particularly new, used genetic algorithms to generate variations on things from which humans could then select their favourites. Working on the premise that humans are not very good at searching for things but are good at evaluating things and detecting patterns. Examples of car design and filters for image manipulation.
Patterns
Design patterns for, well, design. And social software
Derek Powazek of Technorait on The New Community
- Treat your community well. Because they'll leave if you don't
- Go where your community is. You can't "create community".
Peter Morville on Ambient Findability
Bill Scott of Yahoo on The Language of Attention: A Pattern Approach
- immediacy: live suggest, auto complete
- directness: drag'n'drop, inline editing
- invitational: hover/tooltip invitations
- without boundaries: endless scrolling, expand, hover details
- light footprint: rating an object, remembered collections
- cinematic: fades and slides
- rich content: shareable objects, microformats, web objects
Ethnography
G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide- Danah Boyd. Your culture affects how you see the world and how you design technology. Cultural and linguistic diversity often appear in popular social software sites. You need to design within the culture. Empower the user to personalise and culture-ise.
How a Small Island Held the Key to Better Collaborative Filtering - Charles Armstrong, an ethnographer, spent 12 months on the Isles of Scilly studying how information was distributed in a small community. And then created some new group software!
The Internet of Things
Hacking the physical world
New ways of controlling and interacting with the world. Prototyping products or ideas in SecondLife?
Bruce Sterling's talk from ETech - spimes, thinglinks, theory objects...
microformats
Additional mark-up in HTML that is human- and machine-readable - microformats.org
Other good stuff
Which didn't fit in above
Native To A Web of Data - Tom Coates
- Look to add value to the aggregate web of data
- Build for normal users, developers and machines
- Start by designing explorable data, not pages
- Identify your first order objects and make them addressable
- Correlate with external identifier schemes (or coin a new standard)
- Use readable, reliable, hackable URLs
- Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
- Create parallel data servicves using standards
- Make your data as discoverable as possible
- Give everything an appropriate license
The capabilities of mobile devices have outpaced usability so the speakers studied how the blind use similar applications for clues on interaction design. They built an audible calendar view with different sounds representing different events and stereo panning representing time. It is an important area of study but I don't think we're there yet.
Some of These Things are Just Like the Others - Meredith Patterson
Query by example for PostgreSQL.
SELECT title FROM songs WHERE EXAMPLE KEY title LIKE ("Canon in D", "Sonata") NOT LIKE ("Take On Me", "Closer")The Digital Avant-garde Paving the Way for New Developments of Technology by Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art. Suggested that digital art should make people talk about relevant issues and keep eyes and minds open. I was wondering if there was more - can it act as an inspiration for technology development?(and some photos from the trip)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment