Dashboard For Your Life

One of the emerging themes of FOO Camp 08 dealt with people’s relationship with the data they create in their life. It began with the first session Saturday morning, where Esther Dyson lead a discussion on “user-generated metadata.” With services like Dopplr, Tripit, 23andMe, Mint, Wesabe, etc. etc, capturing all this information about our lives, what does this enable? I was disappointed at how quickly the talked turned negative, dwelling on privacy and policy concerns, and essentially fearful of tracking.

I believe that there’s immense opportunity in helping people make sense of such information about themselves. Actually, not only make sense, but use it as a kind of mirror that can serve as a form of feedback that allows you to understand the consequences of your actions. In the past, I’ve ruminated on the idea of a personal dashboard that presented data from seemingly disparate aspects of your life, and that could help you understand correlations between them.

As such, I was intrigued by the session Tom Coates lead on “Instrumenting Your Life.” Tom’s work on Fire Eagle has inspired him to think about how geodata can interact with other data about your life. Tom started the session with a brief presentation largely drawn from a talk he and Matt Jones gave at Web 2.0 Expo, titled “Polite, Pertinent, and Pretty.” It’s a must-read presentation for anyone interested in personal informatics. Tom’s session was the hopeful invert of Esther’s — as we throw off data in a variety of forms, what would it be like to align them?

Tom even spoke of the idea of a personal dashboard, making me believe that there’s something there. When I think of a personal dashboard, it quickly gets overwhelming because there’s the potential to track so much personal data. The blog The Quantified Self showcases a number of tools and technologies for tracking aspects of your life, and any interface that attempted to present all of them would overwhelm most users.

I guess this post is something a Lazyweb request for someone to start building that personal dashboard. Let me align my movements in space, Flickr activity, blog posts, heart rate, and financial status!

Crime dramas shot in the city

A few posts back, I linked to a video of Bullitt‘s famous car chase geocoded. As a near-San Franciscan, one of the things I love about Bullitt is the use of real San Francisco locations.

I recently rewatched the mother of all shot-on-location crime pictures, The Naked City. I strongly recommend viewing the Criterion Collection edition, which has a gorgeous picture, audio commentary from the writer who crafted the story, and illuminating interviews.

If it weren’t for The Naked City, you’d have no Law & Order or CSI – this one movie pretty much is the blueprint for all police procedurals to come. And, in addition, it was shot on location in New York City (107 locations!), and used the entire city — not just the shiny parts of Manhattan.

The Naked City was released in 1948, and Bullitt in 1968, so we also have their anniversaries to celebrate. I have no idea if there’s a quality location-shot crime drama from 1988, and I’m pretty certain we haven’t seen any this year.

(It’s also worth noting that The Naked City is the second of a string of 5 amazing pictures helmed by Jules Dassin, perhaps one of the most overlooked/underappreciated directors in Hollywood history.)

An Amazing Album of Historic San Francisco Photographs

I just stumbled across an amazing album of historic San Francisco Photographs on Calisphere. I’ve been digging through online collections of old SF photos, and most are muddy, brittle, damaged. These are in amazing shape and startling clear.

Some favorites:
Market, Post, and Montgomery (this is where the Montgomery BART station is now):

Market, Kearney [sic], and Third Streets:

Mission Dolores 1865:

California West from Kearney Street:

The City from an Oakland Ferry Boat:

Ferry Building 1905:

Street Scene in Chinatown (before all the obnoxious chinoiserie)

Smith and Foulkes – Cinema Told Through Bunny Rabbits

Just found out about these folks in a review of the upcoming Animation Show 4. In America, they’re best-known product was the Coca-Cola ad “Videogame,” which I unabashedly love. In clicking around their filmography (requires a little digging), I found “Grand Classics” an engaging retelling of the history of cinema with a rabbit as a main character. See how many film references you can spot!

Steven Heller Angries Up The Blood

In catching up with various media after my vacation, I got around to listening to a BusinessWeek Innovation Podcast with graphic design luminary Steven Heller on The Business of Web Design.

Given the podcast’s title, I wasn’t at all ready for the conversation that occurs, wherein Mr. Heller blathers a misguided, outdated, outmoded, and mostly pathetic commentary on the state of design online.

Anyone familiar with the history of web design, could tell you that his commentary is reminiscent of what was spouted in 1996-1997 when graphic designers realized they were going to lose their battle to gussy up the web with “aesthetics” and that, god forbid, people just wanted to get shit done online.

This is not to diminish the role of great visual design online. But why do old guard graphic designers have to declaim that the current state of design on the web is so bad, and that it must be thrown out in favor of a more aesthetic one? The web is a remarkably successful medium and content platform. I’d pay more attention to the likes of Mr. Heller if he demonstrated an appreciation for the nature of the medium, and articulated a desire to mix in great graphic design with what’s already there, instead of grousing about clutter.

It’s just appalling that after 12 or so years of web design practice, we’re still having to address these inane views.

Two Books Worth Reading

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. In retrospect, it’s surprising that it took this long for Clay to write a book. Given my past run-ins with his postulations, I approached the book with some skepticism. It won me over, though, because, unlike when he’s addressing issues of information science, when he talks about social software and social movements online, he knows what he’s talking about. In some ways, this is Smart Mobs 6 years later (which I blogged extensively at the time.)

Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely. However much I liked Here Comes Everybody, I actually believe this to be a more important, and fundamental, book. It’s a quick read — a few hours at most. It details a series of experiments that the author, with a variety of colleagues, conducted in order to probe the economic irrationality of humans. It turns out much of our economic behavior makes little rational sense. Thankfully, Ariely doesn’t propose any explanations for this irrationality (many others would be tempted to weave some evolutionary psychobabble)… But he does propose a set of implications, usually having to do with regulating our economy, because if people are simply not going to be rational, a “free market” ends up doing harm, because it inadvertently (or not) takes advantage of such irrationality. Ariely maintains an active blog on this subject.

I enjoyed the insights Ariely provides into understand human behavior. My only frustration with the book is that, because Ariely treats the population as a whole, and he’s interested in how populations behave, he doesn’t provide any insights into classes of people, and I think it would be interesting to know if there are, say, people who *do* behave rationally, and what characteristics do they possess?

UX Week – Programming Complete, Exciting Speakers, Things to Play With

The programming for UX Week is complete. The most recent additions are among the most exciting: Michael D. Robinson from Pixar will share with us their processes for turning story concepts into feature films, August de los Reyes and Dennis Wixon from Microsoft Surface talking about the challenges of designing for large-scale multitouch, and folks from Current TV addressing the idiosyncrasies of designing media consumed both on TV and on the Web.

Each day has a theme:

  • Day 1: Fundamentals of User Experience
  • Day 2: Service and Media Design
  • Day 3: Play and Immersion
  • Day 4: The Future of User Experience

    And you can now sign up for any combination of single days, or, of course, all four!

    I’m eagerly anticipating this event. We’ve aimed to put together the premier event for user experience professionals, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another venue addressing the distinct challenges UX practitioners face as well as this program does.

    Early registration ends June 30th (5 days!). Use my promotional code FOPM and receive a 15% discount.