Medfører innsikt en delingsforpliktelse?

Jeg begynner å bli ganske lei av å lese bloggposter som “Derfor bør du bruke sosiale medier internt i organisasjonen” og “Tre enkle steg for bedre samhandling”. Men det er vel bare prisen man betaler for å være tidlig ute.

Og ulempen er: om de som kan, ikke deler, så leser folk bare innleggene til folk som ikke kan.

Altså: enten må du dele det du kan, eller så må du se på at folk som har mindre kompetanse enn deg dele, bli hørt på og kjøre båten på skjær … fordi du ikke gadd å bidra.

Jeg har brukt snart åtte år på å forstå hva som får samhandling til å fungere, hvilke faktorer som bidrar eller blokkerer, hvordan forståelse kan muliggjøres i stor skala og utrolig mange andre ting. Jo mer jeg leser, jo flere fagfolk jeg blir kjent med og jo flere metoder og verktøy jeg lærer meg, jo vanskeligere synes jeg det blir å gi entydige råd og kjappe svar. Du verden så moro det var å tenke “vi kan jo bare erstatte Word med Wikier, så blir det enklere å dele, og så …” yeah, right.

Dette er ikke et nytt problem: Bertrand Russel formulerte det godt: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision”. Tvil og motstridende opplysninger til side: medfører innsikt en delingsforpliktelse? Objektivisten i meg sier selvsagt nei, forvalteren mener dog det er viktig.

For meg er den største ulempen at vi overfokuserer på verktøyene og glemmer virket. Spør meg ikke hvorfor, men vi hopper rett til løsningen uten å stille diagnose, kartlegge aktører, regler, flyt, rammer – ja nesten hele schmæla unntatt dokumentene og datasystemene. Før vi kan foreskrive løsninger må vi forstå hva folk egentlig gjør, hvordan, hvorfor og hvor glippene er. Hva gjør de for å finne, klippe opp, destillere, reartikulere, omstrukturere, raffinere, revidere og utnytte hva de finner av tall, fakta, informasjon, innsikt og teft?

Det er flusst av metoder, verktøy, teorier og lærdom å benytte, men den opplyste dialogen mangler. Hvordan kan vi få den på plass?

Datavisualisering på IxDA Oslo i mars

I. Einar Sneve Martinussen | Immaterials: Light painting WiFi

Einar Sneve Martinussen er designer, forsker og doktorgradsstudent ved Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo. Du husker kanskje Einars tokenbaserte medieprosjekt, BOWL?

Einar jobber nå med det nyoppstartede forskningsprosjektet YOUrban, som ser på nettverksbyens fenomener (The Networked City) og beskriver det digitales inntog i byene. Tekniske og interaktive fenomener som vi tar del i gjennom trådløse nettverk, datasignaler, mobiler og mer fyller byen med et usynlig landskap av usynlige nettverk. Hvordan kan vi avdekke disse, gjøre dem synlige, sanse materielle kvaliteter ved wifi, og sette teknologien i en sammenheng?

“Wifi er allerede blitt en del av populærkulturen”, hevder Einar. Tettheten av overlappende nettverk er stor. Vi tar wifi for gitt når vi drikker kaffe og lurer på hvorfor det ikke er å finne på flyet. Da er det greit å huske på at den massive framveksten av trådløst internett har skjedd må mindre enn seks år. Da jeg for første gang så en Airport-basestasjon montert i taket på medialabben i Helsinki tenkte jeg “hva skal man med slikt?” for min PowerBook hadde jo ikke wifi. I følge Einar ble VIP-loungen på Gardermoen og spesielle kafeer ansett som det naturlige stedet å ha wifi da det kom, ikke i hver eneste leilighet på Grünerløkka. Men det er over alt, og disse immaterielle fasettene blir stadig viktigere for oss som kjøpere og brukere:

“The products we design now are made with new stuffs. Service layers, video (…) places radio, data, APIs and connectivity are amongst the immaterials for modern products” – Jack Schulze/BERG

Sammen med Timo og Jørn laget Einar en fire meter høy målestav med en lang remse wifisensorer. Når sensoren plukker opp radiosignalet som bærer wifi blinker den. Man velger et nettverk og starter målingen, den lange remsen med blinkende sensorer fanges av et kamera som tar bilde med lang lukkertid (såkalt lysmaling). Målestaven er bygget med Arduino, en wifimodul à la dem man finner i mobiler og “en masse kjempekraftige LED-pærer fra Kina”. Ingen stor ingeniøravdeling trengs, her kan designerne bygge og måle ting selv.

Noen stikkord:

• Wifi opererer på arkitektonisk skala, derfor er målestaven fire meter høy
• Desember er den ideelle måned for å ta bilder av wifi. Mørkt, dog kaldt.
• @snve & co målte nettverk på Grünerløkka. Styrken, konsistensen og rekkevidden på nettverkene sier noe om byggets kvaliteter og om avsenderen. Hjemmenettverk som kommer ut av en 1890-talls bygård ved Kuba karrer seg knapt over gaten. KHiO og andre institusjoners nettverk stråler bredt ut.
• AHOs nettverk strekker seg helt ut til Akerselven. På midten av broen over elven møter det nettverket til KHiO.
• Bylandskapet og arkitekturen former nettverksformene sterkt.
• Lysmaleriene viser at nettverkene er veldig lokale, uformelle, utilgjengelig. Ingen kongstanke fra ingeniører eller store firmaer, bare folk som har satt dette opp selv. Og derved er wifi en del av bylandskapet.
• Nettverksbyen tar altså form rundt oss. Kanskje Bjørvika/Operaen/Groruddalssatsingen ikke er Oslos viktigste urbane satsing, kanskje det er sammenkoblingen via wifi. Dette siste poenget bet jeg meg merke i. Som pendler setter jeg pris på at NSB pusser opp togene sine, men det jeg aller helst vil ha er stabil og rask internettlinje hele veien fra Moss til Oslo – da kan toget gjerne være gammelt.

Mer om prosjektet

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

BTW: om jeg husker rett laget Timo, Even og Simen en enkel NFC-detektor i 2006 eller så som tegnet av RFID-signalet med blyant på papir. Timo brukte lysmaling for å synliggjøre RFIDs romlige kvaliteter i videoen under, og nå er altså store målinger mulig.

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from Timo on Vimeo.

UXnet blir IXDA Oslo!

Tidligere i sommer meldte den globale UXnet-organisasjonen oppbud.

Her i Oslo her vi nær mer enn 800 medlemmer og skulle selvsagt drive videre, så jeg tok en prat med Niklas Mortensen og Lucas Cueni som dro i gang IxDA Oslo i fjor. Resultatet ble at vi slo oss sammen og stiftet IXDA Oslo som forening i Brønnøysundsregisteret.

For deg som utøver betyr det i bunn og grunn at det vil være flere engasjerte personer som ønsker å drive fagfeltet vårt videre både profesjonelt og sosialt gjennom forskjellige typer arrangementer.

Rent praktisk bytter vi URL fra meetup.com/UXnet-Oslo til meetup.com/IXDA-Oslo. Husk å oppdatere dine bokmerker.

Takket være Sturla Bakke har vi nå funnet vårt “hjem” hos NITH på Grønland, og så godt det lar seg gjøre vil alle arrangementer fremover holdes i deres auditorium eller studentbar. Vi takker spesielt studentene ved NITH som stiller bar og teknisk utstyr til disposisjon.

Neste møte er onsdag 24. november og fokuserer utelukkende på iPad. Aftenposten og Katachi deler sine tanker og erfaringer om det å lage avis og magasin for mobile fikleflater. Les mer og RSVP nå.

Vi har mange spennende planer for vinteren og våren.

Men! Fortell oss hva vil du høre om og hva du vil presentere i 2011. Send oss en mail eller del dine forslag på idésiden vår.

The summer of Enterprise 2.0 reading list

I’ve been on paternity leave for a few months now and have finally found the time to re-read, dissect and compare some of the books on networks, collaboration, participation and crowdsourcing that I’ve been reading these past five years.

Here’s my reading list for those who want to understand Enterprise 2.0, its foundations and drivers:

The Power of Pull (2010)

John Seely Brown and John Hagel explore how networked informatics (i.e. cheap, pervasive, connected computing power) and economic liberalization are charting a new course for society and are radically changing the way we do business. Which is a good thing, since an extrapolation of their & Deloitte’s Shift Index suggests that most major US corporations will go under by 2020.

What do they mean by pull?

The ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.

Greg Lloyd pointed me to the following author videos, which serve as excellent introductions (or codas) to the book.

John Seely Brown at Standford’s Entrepreneurship Center

John Hagel at the Dean’s Speaker Series at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

The Future of Work (2004)

Thomas W. Malone’s book would benefit from a refreshed set of examples, but it remains a forerunner. Exploring how a drastic reduction in communication enables easy, decentralized coordination, Malone explores old, new and different ways of organizing work and discusses how they will shape our businesses and lives (yep, there’s a value discussion in there too).

There’s no Kindle version, but check out the preview below from Google Books.

Thomas W. Malone at MIT World in 2004 (prescient!)

Wired for innovation (2010)

In this book, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders unpack Solow’s computer paradox – “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”. They look at how the information economy is measured, point out weaknesses in the categorization scheme and discuss how GDP excludes non-market transactions (where no money changes hands).

OK, so that doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but when you realize that there’s no statistic that monitors the gratis utility offered to you by Google, Flickr and others, the IT sector’s reported contribution to the overall economy is likely artificially low.

Additional topics include measuring the information economy, enhancing productivity via practices, organizational capital etc. plus why it’s so hard to transplant best practices across companies and teams.

Erik Brynjolfsson introducing his book.

15×15-foredrag på Designdagen 2010

Hva er designernes utfordring/rolle i fremtiden?

På Designdagens 15×15-sesjon delte jeg (og 14 andre norske designere) den største utfordringen som venter oss som utøvere og bransje. Hva er den? Deltakelse.

Nå som det er praktisk mulig å involvere brukere, kunder, borgere, naboer, meningsfeller og -motstandere i vårt arbeid, hvordan attnytter vi innspill og deltakelse?  Hvordan trekker vi veksel på et kvalifisert kognitivt mangfold når vi lager nye verktøy, produkter, løsninger og tilbud? Videoen gir forhåpentligvis noen svar på dette.

Norsk Designråd organiserte og Medvind produserte. Det var et überprofft opplegg som frister til gjentakelse.

QR codes here, in my lifetime?

When Jørgen and I were working on Geoloq.us in 2005, we prototyped the use of EAN barcodes, Semacodes, Shotcodes and QR-codes for marking locations and embedding messages. At the time, cameraphones were rare and cheap mobile data access unheard of, so we decided against using 2D barcodes in our app.

Five years later cameras and internet access is a given on most mobiles, but QR codes are still quite rare in US and European consumer markets. Sure, Semacode now makes a QR code reader for the iPhone, but it remains to be seen if Facebook’s QR-coded status updates will make us love 2D barcodes.

There are several lines of verse in the QR code above. Tell me who wrote that text in the comments and I’ll reward you with a bottle of wine if you live in/around Oslo. Really.

Is Google Buzz broken or lost in translation?

When the purpose and method of a product is hard to explain, we ask “What is this for? Why does it exist?”

What is the purpose of Buzz? Perhaps Hank Williams said it best: to make Google look social.

Buzz was shaped by many forces. Were it a car, we might compare it to an Edsel, but social software is so much harder to decipher. The interface we’d eventually figure out, what we can do with it also. But describing a social tool’s underlying structure, hooks, flows, sociality and vectors of exploration takes painstaking work.

Social software is still a young genre. Activity streams might be old conceptually but they were seldom seen five years ago. Were Buzz a film a critic might say that the script was poor but the actors good, the director off course but the editor a master. Mostly, though, I think Buzz lacked an executive producer with instincts, ability and drive.

Why do I say this? Because it’s the only way I can comprehend how Google could buy Jaiku, Netscape it, quietly convert it run on their App Engine, go off and do something else for years on end and then open-source (thereby gracefully ditching) it before shoving a socially inept Buzz out the door to great fanfare.

I think Google just wanted to show that they were good at making social software, that they could succeed beyond the realm of search, analytics and advertising.

Google Buzz might be the best tool ever for sharing ideas, locating experts and documenting what you know – at Google, which is 100% geek.

For the less geeky other 98% of humanity, it’s less obvious why we want this tool, much less what we can gain from using it. In addition to/as a replacement for the gazillion other manners and means we have of discovering, sharing, discussing and connecting with people.

Any ideas?

Eight stages of design evolution?

I came across the list below some time ago. It’s from a Gartner presentation by Ray Valdes on the business value of user experience.

Ironically, the slide deck was in desperate need of graphic design love.

Anyway, the list chronicles an apparent evolution of design approaches over the last decade or so. Here goes:

1. Designer-driven: small fonts, garish colors, monolithic images
2. Developer driven: gratuitous animations and visual effects, heavyweight tech
3. User-configured: basic personalization, not exactly user-driven
4. User-centered: based on research on user needs
5. Usability-oriented: validated by tests on actual users
6. Analytics-driven: live testing with actual users, instrumentation
7. Conversation-driven: participatory, many ways for users to register behavior, beyond raw data
8. Continuous optimization: A/B and multivariate testing, business metrics

Whenever I see a neatly progressing list like the one above, I’m reminded of the great posters HistoryShots makes. They do their best to present a complex reality, gracefully accepting the incompressibility of complex systems.

My main complaints with Valdes’ list are the haphazard ordering of the items, the jumble of user-centered and usability-oriented and the insinuation of causation, but my main annoyance is that it ends with continuous optimization.

For, as Kuhn will tell you, it’s when you’ve advanced so far that only the littlest details can be tweaked, the world is likely on the verge of a leap.

I love continuous optimization just as much as I love infrastucture that can handle diversity and scale, disciplined collaborators and teams that are focused on the outside world, not their corporate logic.

To me, continuous optimization is a smart way of working, not the zenith of design practice. What’s the zenith? I don’t know, but I think strands of activity theory and outcome-driven innovation are a part of the next big step.

I’ll forgive Mr. Valdes, though, because he says something every designer working with/in large corporations should have tatooed onto a lively limb:

Accepting political compromises as design decisions is a top mistake in user experience design projects

Tammy Erickson’s E2Conf keynote

Tammy’s talk starts at 3:15. The player controls are awful, but the talk is excellent.

Testing web fonts

Having recently received my TypeKit invite, I went ahead and purchased the USD 25 Personal plan and font-ified my blog. TypeKit takes a very interesting approach to web fonts: you add a bit of JavaScript to your <head> tag and then manage which fonts you want to use where in the TypeKit editor.

Great fonts in the Portfolio/Performance plan

I initially found TypeKit’s font library unimpressive, but Jeff Veen was kind enough to point out that the portfolio and performance plans have more (and better, to be honest) fonts. I upgraded to the USD 50 Portfolio plan right away; it’s about twice the size, packed with great fonts.

Using TypeKit with “your own” fonts

Many of our clients will want to use their profile fonts; an option under development will allow us to purchase web licenses for the fonts we use in print, and have them served via TypeKit. Remember: we don’t buy fonts, we license them, but with webfonts, you pay as you go and you pay for use, so you get more bang for your buck. Actually, I wish print fonts worked in the same way.

Typotheque web fonts

In the meantime, I wanted to check out Typotheque’s new web font service as well.  So far, I’d say that the TypeKit site itself is easier to use. They’re also leveraging their customer community (via GetSatisfaction) to their advantage. Typotheque has a great webfont FAQ, but as always, I prefer a well-formatted means of engaging with my suppliers.

Typotheque offers their entire font collection as webfonts. Their selection isn’t as large as TypeKit’s, but they are all excellent, and some have been my personal favorites for years.

I decided to use Jigsaw (you’re looking at it) across this blog for now, and simply added the font names to my CSS file – after selecting fonts to use at Typotheque (below)

I believe TypeKit also allows you to add font information directly to your CSS file, but I haven’t tried it, so I may be wrong.

Naturally, different browsers render the fonts differently.

Firefox 3.5 on Linux

Firefox 3.5 on Mac OS X

Safari 4 on Mac OS X

Which approach works best?

I tried using TypeKit and Typotheque webfonts simultaneously. It worked rather badly (that could be due to my poor coding skills) but it might mean that you have to stick with one supplier. Unless you’re a huge fan of Typotheque’s fonts (I am), you’re probably better off with TypeKit, whose library is set to grow.

Typotheque might franchise their Amazon-powered webfonts solution to small foundries (e.g. Process) or larger foundries/publishers (e.g. FontFont) – or they might all make their own solutions. Other foundries might create their own solutions for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). Microsoft’s Embedded OpenType (EOT) format might win in the end (and it could have won,  long ago, had they not had such bad manners in the 1990s and awful karma now).

Erik Spiekermann (see all his fonts at FontFont) endorses WOFF. Typotheque made their own solution. Emigré, Hoefler & Frere-Jones and the rest of the foundries who want in might make their own tools, too.

Dear WOFF: please succeed!

The creation of a webfont format that people will use and designers can make a living from has been a slow, stunted process. Technology Review gives a great overview of this débacle, you should read it.

What we need, now, is an approach that is equally exciting to type designers and type users, one where both parties win. On your computer, type works because PostScript and OpenType fonts follow a standard format; once you can pay, you can play. Fonts-as-a-service should be as simple for the designer as it has to be for the user. Creators want a font system that’s compatible with most browsers, and we want them served reliably and quickly.

If the webfont service market becomes very fragmented, we will end up selecting from a subset of high-availability fonts so that our more-gorgeous-than-ever services don’t suddenly collapse into a ghastly kaleidoscope of sans-serif when an AWS server crashes.

In some cases we’ll be able to host the fonts on our own servers, for added reliability or for internal use (e.g. your intranet). Typotheque has €1500-per-individual-font licenses that you can host yourself (I’m sure there are conditions). Still, it looks like we’re headed towards an easy, cost-effective, reliable way of getting licensed fonts onto my blog and our clients’ websites.

Learn more about web fonts & web typography

• Smashing Magazine’s Rich typography on the web is a great place to learn about the many different ways you can add fonts to yoursite.
• Zomigi’s Roundup of font embedding and replacement techniques is worth a look
• Typotheque‘s web font service has great fonts and is easy to use – I hope they create a franchise that other foundries can use.
• The TypeKit web font service has lots of great fonts in the Portfolio and Performance plan
• FontDeck (not launched yet) web font service should be interesting
• .webfont was a suggestion by Erik van Blokland and
• Mozilla’s Web Open Font Format (WOFF) will hopefully suceed
• Microsoft’s Embedded OpenType (EOT) format was created in 1997. It was a proprietary format that worked for Internet Explorer only, but in 2007 Microsoft opened it up and proposed it as an addition to the CSS3 standard, something the W3C rejected for security reasons. It was resubmitted in 2008.
• Ascender Corporation recently created the EOT Lite webfont format. Similar to EOT, it does away with proprietary compression and URL binding (limits which sites you can use a font at)
• Tim Brown’s Nice Web Type aggregates the latest web font news; subscribe to his newsfeed for the latest updates.
• The League of Movable Type promotes the use of open-source fonts and has gathered a very nice collection that you can use freely. Chunk, for example, is a great slab serif.
• Zoltan Hawryluk explores the performance and development side of web fonts with @font-face in depth and More @font-face fun
• High Performance Web Sites Blog (sic!) puts  @font-face and performance under the microscope, and offers some smart workarounds that keep your site fast.