1 post filed under supernatural
Frodo’s Sword “Sting” glows blue when he’s in the presence of Orcs.
Yep. Lord of the Rings. You might be wondering why I’m posting this - but it’s a great example of a glanceable, “magical” ambient interface. It’s what David Rose (Founder of Ambient Devices and Vitality) uses to help describe GlowCaps - the network enabled medicine lids that glow to remind patients to take their medicine.
He calls them enchanted objects.
1 post filed under supernatural
I don’t know what this is but I think it’s some kind of speech synth based grave detector.
Cool!
1 post filed under supernatural
While I was on holiday in Norfolk I was lucky enough to see a talk about an incredible woman named May Savidge (Auntie May) by her nephew’s wife Christine Adams.
Born in 1911 May Savidge was a fiercely independent woman. She said that she was brought up to believe “There’s no such word as can’t” and it defined her life.
Her life is a hard one and is punctuated with the loss of loved ones which probably explains some of the behaviour that makes her so fascinating.
When Miss Savidge was 53 years old the council sent her a letter saying they wanted to knock down the house she loved to build a roundabout. A 15 year battle to save it began. Even though she discovered it was a medieval monk’s house and Monkey Row was originally Monkes Row the council still wanted to flatten it.
Deciding there was nothing else she could do May Savidge used her practical skills and technical drawing ability to singlehandedly dismantle and catalogue the entire building - and move it 100 miles to somewhere it would be safe.
May Savidge meticulously hand numbered and labelled the thousands of components and even took rubbings of the brickwork so she could ensure the bricks were equally spaced and the right way round when she came to put it all back together. It was a huge undertaking and she lived in the house until it was fully dismantled and toward the end she was sleeping in freezing temperatures with no roof. She transported the parts of her house to Norfolk using a lorry (after unsuccessfully asking the British and US Air Forces to help with a helicopter) and it took 11 round trips to get it there.
The rebuilding of the house took the rest of her life. She put herself through immense hardship to get it done. It took her a number of years just to get the parts in the right order and get the wooden frame up before she could begin the brickwork. She lived in a little caravan with no electricity and an oil stove and worked alone every day for a total of 23 years before she died in 1993 leaving the house to her nephew’s children on the condition that it was completed. Clever.
Christine spent another 14 years working on the house before it was completed a few years ago. It cost her her marriage and she had a nervous breakdown but she persevered. Miss Savidge’s house is now a bed and breakfast with a fantastic story behind it. I’d love to stay there one day.
The most incredible thing about Miss Savidge and the reason I’m writing this post was her habits. She kept everything. Literally everything. All her life. She had so much stuff that when she lived in her houseboat she had to rent a storage unit to keep it in. Using an ingenious method of filing based on using the pages of the Radio Times to to store items for each day she kept everything from sweet wrappers, milk bottle tops, matches, receipts, bus and tram tickets, notes from the milkman, every letter she ever received, a copy of every letter she ever sent and 440 detailed diaries that listed every action, every day for her entire life. The diaries describe her life but also reveal what life was like in Britain for the majority of the 20th century and were surprisingly positive even though some of the entries expose how hard her life actually was. One entry says “It must be spring, the ice on the water buckets is only an inch thick”. She was clearly obsessed but was very much in control of her faculties.
Miss Savidge’s collection of artefacts was enormous. When she died the three storey house was so full of stuff the only real clear spaces where where the dog basket was - and the chair that she slept in.
As you can imagine a collection of mundane every day objects like this would be incredibly valuable to collectors because nobody would even think to keep some of the things she kept. I find it a bit sad that a lot of Miss Savidge’s archive had to be sold to fund the rebuilding of the house and would love to have seen them (or at least photographs of them) as part of an exhibition of her life but for the most part they went to people that valued them - and the house needed to be completed which I suppose is the most important thing. Christine said she did make some huge mistakes whilst selling some of the objects but as there was so much of it would have been a full time job just to check the value of everything in the house.
I was completely blown away by this story. It’s contains almost everything I’m interested in but in a beautifully analogue way. Blogging, photo sharing sites like Flickr, email, GPS logs, assorted personal informatics and cloud computing are allowing us to become like May Savidge in our own way. We don’t need three floors to store our archive and we don’t need to use the radio times to keep things organised but I do like that her life’s archive was literally huge and I love the fact that her filing method was an important record of its own and added a huge amount of context to her archive. It’s something that really appeals to me and I’d really like to explore that one day.
I really like that it’s the more mundane stuff that holds the most value too. The things that people wouldn’t ever think of recording were the most important parts of May Savidge’s collection so maybe it’s the mundane photos, blog posts and data that will be of the most interest to others long after we die and become digital ghosts. If you’ve looked at my Flickr stream recently this post might help explain what I’ve been up to.
If you want to know more about Miss Savidge her story is told in a book called Miss Savidge Moves Her House: The Extraordinary Story of May Savidge and Her House of a Lifetime. I’ve not read it yet but it’s on my list and I’m really looking forward it.
Miss May Savage. 1911-1993.
Truly inspirational.
1 post filed under supernatural
Continuing from my post about supernatural being the new futuristic I’d like to put this out there.
We’re developing ways for physical objects and locations to have data spaces. People can tag data they create with geographic locations so that it can be found by navigating both the physical and digital realms. For example when I’m in a particular place I can read Brightkite comments left by other users about that place or places nearby. I can see photos, videos and tweets. I can see traces of their life left by their actions. I can follow these and find their friends and other elements of their life.
The Wikipedia entry for ghost says:
A ghost has been defined as the disembodied spirit or soul of a deceased person, although in popular usage the term refers only to the apparition of such a person. Often described as immaterial and partly transparent, ghosts are reported to haunt particular locations or people that they were associated with in life or at time of death.
The data we leave attached to physical locations has no way of telling whether we’re alive or dead. In theory it remains there forever.
Are we creating our own digital ghosts?
1 post filed under supernatural
I’ve been thinking about the future a lot, specifically the technologically utopian/dystopian future commonly associated with science fiction.
I’ve had a problem with it for some time because the future just doesn’t feel futuristic any more.
Music is a good starting point. I remember when techno was like music from the year 3000 and invoked undiluted visions of the future. Techno now feels more retro than anything else. A memory of a naive future we didn’t get.
I’ve been trying to think of any new music that could be deemed “futuristic” and all I can think of is the ultra minimal digital music on Raster Noton. Even that sounds “current” at the best of times and “Cold War” at others.
Modernism was supposed to be the future. We should be living in buildings like the Nagakin Capsule Tower by now.
I’ve said it to quite a few people and I really do believe the future was a lot cooler in the 70s and 80s. You can’t escape into the future anymore - because we’re living in it.
We’ve got readily available long distance transport, instantaneous mobile communication and the ability to seamlessly link to data networks spanning the globe from anywhere. Things have never been so good and they’re looking to get far better with the advent of the new mobile revolution.
It’s worth watching this appearance by Louis CK on the Conan O’Brian show
What he’s saying is funny because its true. It’s close to being magic, which brings me to Arthur C Clarke’s three laws.
Magic.
In our pursuit of making things easy to understand, easy to operate, useful and natural we’ve really been creating the supernatural, which is incredibly interesting to me. I’ve been saying that the traditional scientific approach to interaction design leaves the things we create lacking a certain something. That something is true emotional engagement and any attempt to turn that into a science seems to fall short. When something is supernatural it can’t be totally explained by science. It’s that something else. The essence, the spark. Genius. Magic.
Supernatural is incredibly popular at the moment. Whilst science fiction narrows in scope the paranormal widens. I include Super Heroes in this bracket. We’ve got TV shows like Heroes, True Blood and the rise of music like the Ghost Box label, Hauntology as an entire genre and the omnipresent dub. The word dub is arguably a shortened form of the word “duppy” which means ghost in Jamaican Patois.
Which brings me back to ubiquitous computing. When we live in the age of “internet of things” and navigate the networked urban spaces forecast by Adam Greenfield and others the technology we have and use will probably be indistinguishable from magic.
Does that mean we should look to studies of the paranormal, the supernatural, religion and the occult to find the things that man has been trying to create and the powers that we’ve been trying to develop for inspiration for our technological advances?
After all, using some kind of object that gives us power to complete tasks that would otherwise be impossible is very close to pulling out a magic wand or casting a spell isn’t it?
Near field communication using RFID (the technology that makes Oyster cards work) is enabling new digital objects like Skaal and Mir:ror to be very close to being indistinguishable from magic. This video by Timo Arnall from Nearfield and Jack Schulze from Berg London explores the magical properties of RFID in such a beautiful way you could say it’s like watching something supernatural.
This “internet of things” is about creating objects with online and offline locations simultaneously. We’re creating a world of two planes of existence - the physical and the digital. They’re really beginning to overlap and it feels familiar doesn’t it?
So if we’re heading toward an ecologically sound but high tech future maybe it should be closer to Swords and Sorcery than Star Trek. I’m joking but you know what I mean.
I’ve never liked Star Trek anyway.
