design

Less is more, or running without shoes

Running today is all about taking the basic and turning it into technology. Technical clothes that breath, technical toys to measure everything from heartbeat to location and, of course, shoes. Running shoes are a mix of fashion, function and technology. But they are based upon the idea that they are necessary in order to make us able to run. We are told we need shoes, the right shoes, in order to run. This is despite the fact that barefoot runners do quite well.

There is a new trend to provide a new set of technology for runners. A technology based on less. The New York Times (Amy Cortese Wiggling Their Toes at the Shoe Giants) has a fascinating story on the new trend on barefoot running, including the new technology, equipment and the economics of running.

Check out the cool Vibram Five Fingers

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When robots kill

Not long ago I wrote about a worker who was “attacked” by an industrial robot. In the aftermath the role of the courts was to attempt to decide who was responsible for the industrial accident. But what will happens when robots become more autonomous.

The Royal Academy of Engineering has published a report on the social, legal and ethical issues surrounding autonomous systems. As one of the contributors, lawyer and visiting professor at Imperial College London, Chris Elliot says to the Guardian:

If you take an autonomous system and one day it does something wrong and it kills somebody, who is responsible? Is it the guy who designed it? What’s actually out in the field isn’t what he designed because it has learned throughout its life. Is it the person who trained it?

These are very cool questions which need to be discussed now as we stand on the eve of autonomous systems. Read the report here.

Naturally the whole autonomous systems brings to mind the whole Skynet (from Terminator) plot. From Wikipedia:

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military’s weaponry. When they realize that it has become self-aware, and what the computer control is capable of, the human operators try to shut the system down. It retaliates and believes humans are a threat to its existence, it then employs humankind’s own weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the human race.

But if that happened I doubt that legal responsibility will be the most important thing to discuss…

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Humpty-dumpty and irreversable systems

While reading a bit of retro work I came across this:

A little known law of life is that of irreversibility. No human or physical act or process can be reversed so that objects and states end up as they were. During the original act and in the time just after it, both object and state undergo change that is irreversible. An early known poem, Humpty-dumpty, recognises this. Once the egg is broken, that is that.

It is the same with systems. They can never be reversed. They can be changed, certainly, and sidetracked, and they can be very easily destroyed, the moment a human-machine information system comes into being, it takes on a life of its own independent of its creators. The operators just run it, while programmers merely maintain it. The process called entropy begins, a confusion that can be measured by the growing gulf between what people first knew about the system and now know about it.

Brian Rothery (1971), The Myth of the Computer, Business Books, p 43.

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Fairey gets two years

On Friday Shepard Fairey was sentenced to two years’ probation by the Boston Municipal Court. The sentence is based upon the images he posted on public and private property over the years. (via Designboom)

the well-known illustrator and graphic designer has pleaded guilty to three charges of vandalism, including defacing property and wanton destruction of property under 250 USD. he had 11 other chargers which have been dropped. he has been fined 2,000 USD for graffiti removal. Designboom

Fairey’s most widely spread and famous work (probably) is the André the giant obey mashup (or whatever it should be called).

Multi-affiches Boulevard St Germain 06e? .jpg by yoyolabellut (CC BY-NC-ND)

But he reached new peaks of fame for his wonderful “hope” poster designed during the Barack Obama campaign.

Obama Posters by el clinto (CC BY-NC-ND)

Is this the plight of all known street artists who become famous enough to be identified?

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Design to meet the daily needs

Designboom reports that French designer and architect Philippe Starck has criticized designer items. During his recent lecture in the main hall of the university in Florence he

…rejects design activity that ‘wants to become art, but in fact is producing items’ – unnecessary and costly things.

he continued by advising students

…to develop objects ‘with a spirit of service towards the people’, as this would help creating a more ‘easy and comfortable daily life’.

Starck explained his philosophy of design: “in the design of an object, we must always focus on the way in which  its use can meet the daily needs”.

Starck continued his attack and claim that ‘he had never  understood all those designers who are trying to become an artist, creating products that end up being useless, expensive and therefore are a danger to society.’

‘I prefer to design mass-produced chairs at a cost of 1 euro, that sell in 100,000 items, rather than a single one that is quoted 100.000 euro.

Philippe Starck has given a funny, deep & thoughtful TED talk about design and his thoughts on task of designing and the role of the designer. His basic premise is designing for the user.

This is nothing really amazingly new but it still needs to be said and he says it in a very convincing way!

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The Vulnerable IT Society

The formalities are cleared and I will be responsible for a new course at Göteborg University begining after summer. The course “The Vulnerable IT Society” (Det sårbara IT-samhället) will be in Swedish and there is some more information here.

Naturally the new course already has a blog http://techrisk.wordpress.com which will focus on the vulnerabilities of the information technology society. So basically I am looking for students, bloggers and general interest in the subject – but all in Swedish this time.

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Social and Technological Determinism

It’s been a long time since I had a real good discussion on determinism but recent discussions online and off have brought determinism back in focus. In particular the differences between technological and social determinism.

As a brief recap technological determinist believes “the uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself, that is, that its functions follow from its form” (Neil Postman). On the opposite side of the spectrum is social determinism which, as Langdon Winner states, “What matters is not the technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded”. Basically that society is not controlled by technology but innovation and the consequences of technology are shaped through the influences of things like culture, politics, economic arrangements and regulation.

What really annoys me with both these positions is their lack of flexibility. In order to make their positions work both the social and technological determinist attempts to be blind to facts which do not support their pet theory.

Look at file sharing – yes I know that this is a big target.

The regulation of file sharing through social, economic, political and moral attempts have been a failure in attempting to change the way in which certain social groups behave. Given fixed price, high bandwidth Internet connections and high storage – low cost mp3 players there is a high incentive to file share. Technology alone is not enough. The low chance of getting caught is also an incentive to copy.

But being either/or in attempting to explain the reason for file sharing is too narrow minded since it can only provide a limited view of the problem. So when the legislator attempts to regulate the problem it is indispensible to see both the social and technical forces which drive social changes related to technology.

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Photographic film and social change

While in Vienna I saw the surprising and nostalgic sight of two tourists helping each other to change a role of film in their camera. The development of film has been superseeded by digital cameras which themselves are losing to mobile phone cameras. Mobile phone cameras are digital cameras but the camera as an artefact is slowly disappearing. Another thing that happened in Vienna was that I browsed a collegues photographs of the art she had seen over the last year all stored in her mobile phone – no need for a camera here.

The demise of photographic film is a fascinating story beginning way back in 1876 when Hurter and Driffield experimetnted with light sensitivity of film. Naturally early photography did not use rolls of film which I have pangs of nostalgia for but the early daguerreotypes used tricky glass plates consisting of polished silver surfaces coated silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor (wikipedia).

Eastman Kodak changed all this in 1885 with the first flexible photographic film. This breakthrough made cameras cheaper, easier to use, lighter to carry and the era of snapshot photography was launched. Now the photographer could easily carry a camera and use it on people who did not have to be standing still. The privacy implications launched a major discussion into the nature of privacy in relation to technology. The seminal article in the privacy field is The Right to Privacy by Warren and Brandeis (1890), is still widely quoted.

The move from the heavy and complex equipment to the small, cheap and portable devices show how changes in base technology affect social change. The ubiquitous holiday snaps are a product of these developments. Now that this phase is going to its grave, being overtaken by digital photography, we see new developments. More photographs are being taken and (maybe) saved but there also seems to be an issue of accessibility and use.

If the pictures are not online do we ever look at them?

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FSCONS & Free Beer

Today was the pre-launch of FSCONS and it’s soon time for the registration and social event. During the social event there will be Free Beer – free as in libre!

Here is an excerpt from wikipedia

Free Beer, formerly known as Vores Øl, Danish for Our Beer, is the first brand of beer with a “free” recipe – free as in “freedom”, taken after the term “free software”. The name “Free Beer” is a play on Richard Stallman’s common explanation that free software is “free as in speech, not free as in beer.” The recipe is published under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The beer was created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen together with Superflex, a Copenhagen-based artist collective, to illustrate how concepts of the free software movement might be applied outside the digital world.

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