kip/bot/blog

“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”

Inspiring morning about invention, innovation, design, and the cognitive surplus. It started with reading Clay Shirky’s web2.0 expo talk on the blog White African (”where Africa and technology collide!”). On White African I read an interview of the founder of CraftSkills, Simon Mwacharo. I’m having one of the moments where accessible technology + surplus time + application to small aspects of big problems == something amazing.
Craftskills focuses on bringing affordable energy to parts of Kenya that are currently off the grid. It has a special focus on wind power because it’s more readily available and less prone to theft than solar equipment. My favorite part of the interview is the origin story. The founder knew that he wanted to do something with wind turbines, and got it moving thus:

I started with two workers. I could not afford to hire trained people so I decided to train myself first then train my two boys. Then I got a friend who repairs radios and TVs in Kibera to help me design and put together a charge controller.

There are so many powerful dynamics in that simple story.

• cognitive surplus: he saw something he wanted to do and trained himself in the skills he needed to do it

• physically accessible technology: he collaborated with friends to acquire the basic skills needed

• intellectually accessible technology: those basic skills (managing electrical power) already existed, just in another place (TV and radio repair) and partly obscured. (Intellectually accessible, doesn’t mean that it’s simple. Rather, it refers to the fact that this technology is transferable among non-experts, without need of a lab or deeper training.)

• small aspect of big problem: the problem of getting people on the grid was defined as simply as: I need to figure out how to build a charge controller

And just like that, Mwacharo is transforming the lives of thousands of people directly, and many thousands more indirectly through the promotion of an industry.

Silly but part of the appeal of the game.  Creating humorous, clever, even downright creative moments with your character and the environs.

I just had my first twitter exchange of real, compelling value. Whitney Hess, whom I know only by reputation (she gets lot of trackbacks and twitter-points from my network) is responsible for it.

It started with me twittering something like: “Just put Shirky’s new book in my bag. That’s a pretty good first step toward reading it.”

The twitters continue:

To which she responds:

A collaboratively generated insight and gag. These twitter people might be onto something.

Seen in Dumbo just this morning:

A very special moment.  This Dumbo bus stop has been moved to yesterday . . . until previous, or should I say advance, notice.

Gever Tully of the the Tinkering School has a great TED University talk (I think these are the people who don’t get the big stage . . . they should publish more of these) about 5 dangerous things parents should let their kids do. Most of them, in their straight form or adapted, are pretty useful for adult designers, especially those of us who manage more than do these days, as ways to keep us fresh.

One of the downsides of blogging about video or audio is that it’s hard to transcribe the key points, so I’m going on memory, here:

Play with fire — for kids, this covers everything from actually learning how to build a fire (stones and sparks, fireplace arrangements) to working with kilns and fire ovens. Kids not only learn about the physics of fire and respect for powerful forces, but they also learn about the creative power of subjecting things to heat. For adults, I think there’s an analog to playing with electricity, electronics, and code . . . things that are powerful and promethean, but where even a bit of familiarity can be massively empowering.

Throw a spear – it’s physical physics, problem solving, optimization of body mechanics and trajectories, and deeply Savannah evolution primal (I’m going with the secondary -h spelling to see how many people think IxDA08 rather than Africa.) For adults, I think it’s guns. There’s a woman in my office who goes shooting once a month at a Manhattan-based gun club with a Ladies night. My first game design title was a hunting game (Trophy Buck, it’s still on some clearance shelves) and I was fascinated all the things about bullet trajectories, winds, shot, timing and the calculation goes into guns. Bows are good too, but they lack the chemistry, and oiled metal of guns. Shooting in general has a good hunter-gatherer feel, worthy of throwing spears.

Own a pocketknife — this one was a little nostalgic for me.  Tully leads with the point that getting a pocketknife used to be a rite of passage for a young boy.  It was a tool, but it was dangerous and there were safety lessons and responsibilities somberly passed on to me when I got a knife.  This one may be a literal translation for adults:  get a pocket-knife, and not just one with a USB drive, but one that has some tools.  Remember not to take it to the airport, but see how useful it is to carry around, see if you find yourself tinkering more. Then there are some adult tools to potentially play with:  routers, soldering irons, a decent tool box.  Or upgrade to a DeWalt tool and read the last chapter of Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning there was the Command Line

Take apart appliances — I’m doing this one tonight or tomorrow. I just replaced a clock radio (with an iHome!) and I’m going to dissect it tonight.  I may try to connect parts to a power supply and play with contact points to see what I can do.  But it’s a sad reminder of how many things I throw out without looking at them.  Gamers:  take apart a rumble-pack or haptic empowered controller to see how they do it before you chuck it!  Very cool!
That’s four, but I think my enthusiasm wanes here anyway, cuz I think the remaining ones are drive a car (let your kid drive a car) and break some DRM.  I didn’t find those so compelling and the adult analog of driving a car — sailing or gliding or flying — seem expensive and outdoors.

Clifford Stoll’s TED talk may not work for everyone. There’s a hippy daftness that may sometimes feel forced and a self-dismissive “what I do so is so boring” that may feel condescending, but about six minutes in he is charming, oddly moving, human, and clever. There’s also some cool stuff in there, like klein bottles, a grade school experiment to measure the speed of sound, a tribute to Moog, and a pervasive Richard Feynman tinkerer-thinker mode. He constantly grounds himself in tinkering that leads to bigger ideas.

He also has a line that sits in nice contrast to my current reading of The Craftsman and pre-occupation with expertise:

The first time you do something it’s science.

The second time it’s engineering.

The third time, you’re a technician.

He was saying this in reference to his boredom with hacking and computer security. (He first came to prominence with a fun, witty, popular computer science of his detection and catching of East German hackers in Cuckoo’s Nest, a book I still remember with a smile 15 years after reading it.)

On the other hand, he seems to have been making Klein bottles for many years and is still getting something out of it.

=-=-=-=-=-=-

I’m a little disappointed in myself for not knowing Klein bottles. Wikipedia has several pop culture references listed that make me think I should have known it: Futurama has Klein beer sold in Klein bottles, and Magic has an Elkin bottle card.

Maybe it’s not my fault It’s just something damn hippies seem to do:

I missed this in January, but Nuts and Volts pointed it out to me in this month’s issue: contact lenses with circuits capable of superimposing visual data on the natural stream of light coming into your eye.

The press release displays an interesting journalistic emerging journalistic formula for announcing or describing new technologies: lead with a reference to a user benefit seen in a movie or TV show, say that someday is now that much closer, and talk about the project.

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

Anyway, kinda cool.

The Mars rover Spirit is being put to sleep, or “infinite hibernation” mode, as reported by the AP. Now begins the long process, where across decades and lifetimes, the small pulse of energy from the sign will be self-directed towards Spirit’s sentience. Like Vee-ger before it, Spirit will come back and let’s hope it’s not pissed. In ten years, someone will write yet another Mars colony book, in which it the colonists — a multi-culti mix of scientists, jocks, babes, nerds, a bureacrat, a rogue unfairly disgraced military, and an artiste of some sort — are terrorized by an uncaring, mercilessly logical machine that calls itself Brit.
This is a serious bummer, really. These Rovers have already lasted 16x as long as planned and it’s made very cool discoveries, took the highest res picture of Mars, and had Marvin the Martian on its mission patch. Cheap government wankers . . .

A Martian sunset, brought to us by Spirit.

It seems like everything I read or think about interactive eventually, but quickly, zooms into next steps: how can we use this for marketing? how will this help us talk to our customers better?

I’ve almost forgotten the fun stuff that made me think this was an amazing medium, so I put together a list of the top 5 interactive things I’ve experienced over the years. These were more like interactive epiphanies, things that made me think this was a new medium with power. There are millions of little moments I can get all Chris Farley “that was cool” about, but these are ones that showed new possibilities.
Beethoven’s 9th

An educational CD-ROM made in hypercard by Robert Winter. It presents the 9th as the fulcrum to the romantic era musically, culturally, philosophically, and within Beethoven’s career. Using clickable pieces of music, often synched with scores, as well as photos, sketches, and active maps, the CD-ROM explains sonata form, the classical style, and development of themes. It also has an interactive score which allows you to listen to the symphony, while watching the score, all the while displaying comments and which section (development, false cadence, recapitulation, etc.) of the symphony you’re in. (Interesting article about the title and its place in the history of books.)

Final Fantasy 7

I can’t say it’s the best FF (I have only played a few), but it is the best game I have ever played. The story was one I actually followed, I was genuinely sad when Aerith died (I mean, it’s f*’ed up how bummed I was, I think I gasped), the combat system was clever and required tactics and strategy which I was proud of, and I still remember the characters.

Journeyman Project Turbo

This is a strange choice since the game was kind of crap — from that era when interactive stories were getting full of themselves. It was a time travel game, where you have to go and retrieve things from different eras to prevent oh, I don’t know, an exponentially growing rift in the time-space continuum that would destroy this universe and maybe others as well. What was cool, and truly memorable about it, was that one of the time settings was Leonardo’s workshop. You could wander around it at night and it was absolutely gorgeous. It was one of the first games to do sound design with stereo headphones in mind, so the ambient sounds and the music added to the immersion.

Fantasy Baseball Draft

Real-time fantasy baseball drafts are amazing fun. (Real-time as opposed to the turn-based email drafts, which I’m doing this year). Sitting around waiting for the draft to begin and talking to people, watching bots pick players for people who haven’t shown up yet, scrambling to figure out your next pick (or next two picks if you’re at the end of the snake), back-channel chatter. The funnest thing I’ve done on the web. I stayed in a league for three years too many just to experience the fun of that draft.

I actually had to stop at 4, cuz I already had two games and all I could think of were other games. It also highlighted that I haven’t had any mind-blowing experiences in the last three years, which was kind of sad. Flickr comes close, but I was looking for things that I still talked about years later and remembered the epiphanous flash that said, “things are different.”