I'm sorry about the absence of the last bits of interesting. The only delay is me, we're now getting to the bits that require trickier editing. But, to keep you doing, Dave has put his slides up on slideshare and synced them with his audio. Which means you can see the very rare missing few minutes from the video (due to tape change). It's like some sort of rare Dylan bootleg. (Picture above is Dave, but it's better of his camera.)
So I bought a Wattson yesterday. Partly out of enthusiasm over the new Howies shop, partly out of genuine ambient eco-curiosity, but quite a lot so I'd have something to talk about at this tomorrow. It's a simple, clever thing that tells you how much electricity you're using. It tells you in £s, it tells you in watts, and it tells you with an ambient glow. And it's incredibly simple to set up. The video above is the Wattson in our kitchen (dig the crazy worksurface) with me turning the fluorescent light on and off. So the figures represent what our annual bill would be if we left it on the whole time, versus sitting in the dark for a year.
In some ways it's just a silly, indulgent, middle-class eco-worrier, gadget freak toy. It's been perfectly possible to sensibly manage your electricity consumption for years. It's just we never have.
And the Wattson makes it a playful, easy activity. So far we've sat and asked ourselves, how much is our annual bill? do we know? how many watts do we use? is that above or below average? how much are we actually paying for our electricity? (the machine defaults to a typical UK price but can be adjusted). This is stuff that a lot of people just don't think about that much.
And then immediately we started playing with it, because it's presence encourages you to think about your consumption. Arthur insisted that the first thing we did was see how low we can get it:
That's everything in the flat turned off, except for the fridge. And the Wattson itself, which is obviously, slightly ironic. It's made us all much more conscious about what we're leaving on and what we're using. And I don't think it's just a novelty, I think it might be like driving a hybrid car, where the interface gives you a different implied goal in the game of driving - maximum fuel efficiency.
The website says that there will soon be a community aspect to the Wattson, and it's got a USB hole which must be useful for something. I'm hoping it'll be a way to see how your consumption compares to others, which will also be useful, but, more importantly, it'll be competitive, like nike+. Then it'll really be fun.
The big problem with it at the moment is the unit price, it's a lot, £150. That makes it mostly a bourgeois indulgence. But hopefully that's just the effect of it being a fringe-ish device not expecting to sell a lot of units. Once this idea kind of idea is embedded into every fusebox or fridge as a low-cost, component then it might start to make a difference to the way we play with and use electricity. Because it obviously be ideal if we didn't try and solve every consumption problem by buying new, powered gadgets.
I know I mention In Business quite a lot, but the programme this week is one you really have to listen to - it's about craft. Not in the potter's wheel sense (not that there's anything wrong with that) but in the sense of 'doing things well, for the sake of doing them well'. And it seems very relevant to what a lot of people who read this do. It starts with an interview with Professor Richard Sennett and it's great stuff. He talks about the way we think through touching and holding things and doing stuff with them, how 'we don't proceed from principles to particulars', how long-term profits come from quality and how to many businesses separate people with power from people with knowledge. Great stuff. And the programme backs it up with good examples.
But it was rammed home to me because just after I listened to it I watched a programme with Stephen Fry talking about Abba. And how good they were. (You can see him for yourself above) He talks about how they were good because 'they were better than they needed to be'. Their dedicated pursuit of pop craft led to their being some undefinable elevated quality to what they did. Something that made it better than the typical pop culture. And I think it's that craft focus and dedication that makes for a great ad too. It's when something's been done that makes it better than it needed to be just to achieve the short-term goals of awareness, or whatever. It's what transforms it into something that contributes to the broader culture rather than just sucking life from it. Which, in the long-term tends to make it more effective anyway.
I just noticed that we've had a day of blending and bleeding digital and analogue.
We went bowling this morning. And the fun was considerably enhanced by running back to look at the animations on the computer scorecard.
You'll notice that we got many more of the 'you've not done very well animations' than the strrrriiike! ones.
And then, this afternoon, we've been playing with UB Funkeys (which seemed less of an inexpensive treat once I'd bought copies of Parallels and Vista). It's quite good. Like Club Penguin with a real world token. Not as much fun as Club Penguin though. Seems like we're edging toward spime-iness through the world of play.
I'll stick this on speechification too, but after years of being terrible at business coverage (and the news reporting still is, for the most part) BBC Radio 4 now has two rather good and thoughtful programmes about the dread world of commerce; the estimable In Business and the feisty newcomer The Bottom Line. And, also departing from BBC tradition, there are comprehensive archives and podcasts available for both shows. It's well worth digging through the radio crates.
My original splurt on powerpoint/keynote inspired by Rich Gold's idea that powerpoint is a toy for thought drew a load of fascinating comments, ideas and links, so I thought I'd like to get some of them out into the main body of the blog and think about them some more. Thanks to everyone for chucking stuff in. I get the sense that there's a real appetite out there for a presentation tool that stimulates thought as well as marshals it and that allows presenting to become variously less formal, more theatrical, more improvised and more conversational.
I don't think we can do it all in one post so I'm going to tackle different aspects in separate posts. Today: what keynote calls Light Table and what PowerPoint calls Slide Sorter. ie this:
Now that's the view where I do quite a lot of thinking about structure. And I know I'm not alone in that. Dave says that's how he put the structure together for this, probably the best 20 minutes of PowerPoint you will ever see. Unfortunately the snap-to-grid linearity of the tool doesn't allow the kind of sorting, randomising and testing that you'd really like to do at this point. Kevin talks about his process of sorting images on the floor and that reminded me of a couple of possibilities I'd love to see in Light Table / Slide Sorter, the first of which, I guess, is about more closely mimicking the actual physics of sorting slides.
So instead of being forced to sort in a fixed grid.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could pile, group and stack slides, and maybe leave a couple on their own in the corner, because you know you want to include them but you're not quite sure where. Sort of like BumpTop. Well, exactly like BumpTop. That can't be that hard can it? You wouldn't have to have really complex physics, just the ability to break out of the grid a little. But it'd be great.
The other thought is a little sillier but I still think it'd be useful. And it combines two of my favourite interface/structural ideas - fruit machines and Runaround. I've always thought that more things in life could do with Hold and Nudge buttons. There are so many situations where you'd like to Hold one or two elements of a situation and stir up the rest.
Like that. So it might be useful to have a couple of slides you could Hold, you know they have to stay there as anchors in the story. So you could click a Hold button for them. But then you'd like to stir the rest up to try and create some interesting new variations and juxtapositions, to shake up your thinking. I guess if you were being consistent with the metaphor this is where you'd click a Nudge button, but that's not quite what I'm after. So I preferred the idea of a big Run Around button where everything just re-sorts itself. (And which should include a pleasingly silly noise.)
I'd like that, even if no-one else would.
And then, while I was putting this together, and looking through my flickr stuff for images of fruit machines I realised who could do this really well - flickr.
Flickr could become a great presentation tool. I bet people already store lots of presentation stuff in there. (Like this one I did for w+k). You could turn the Organize view into a slide sorter and add a presenter thing like Google's (but better). Or just do it in a browser. And I bet you could create interesting webs of slides using tags. Or something. Anyway, I'd love to see how the flickr people would do a presentation tool. That'd be brilliant. Anyway.
Next time we'll think about some of the other comments.
My field notes arrived from Coudal today. Lovely things.
I like that thought. That's probably why I take notes too.
But this bit's the best bit. A detailed and comprehensive review of the decisions and materials that went into making this little book. It makes you realise it's not all simple and obvious, it makes you think about the content and production of the thing and that's something we're increasingly going to have to do. Adding information to physical goods (in a non-digital proto-spime kind of way) is a good habit to get into.
I was going to write about this after the event, but it seems like there's still some places left, so Malcolm's hoping for a bit of publicity now. (I'd therefore imagine it's safe to ignore that bit about 'the launch is for contributors and Planning Directors only' - I suspect that the launch is for anyone with £50.)
If you're a planner and you can go, you should. Without Mr King you wouldn't have a job. He was probably better at it than any of us since, and one of the things I've loved about the plannersphere is the way some of his thinking, previously only passed around as treasured photocopies, has emerged for everyone to see. This book will be even better.
I've been re-reading Leisa Reichelt's fantastic thoughts on Ambient Intimacy and it reminded of one of the things I really like about twitter, which I don't think you get anywhere else, and I'd call it intimacy leakage if that didn't sound so yucky.
It's the phenomenon you get when someone using twitter on the phone accidentally sends a text meant for someone particular to all their twitter friends, normally shortly followed by the twitter equivalent of an apologetic cough. It's hardly ever anything very embarrassing or revealing, it's almost always something quite sweet. But I like the way you get a little innocent glimpse of another side of someone.
You don't get people accidentally blogging in the same way, blogging's too considered and its off in a separate space on its own. I guess that's part of why twitter works, it smoothly integrates into the fabric of our existing digital lives. Or something.
I guess I'm just pre-apologising for the moment I send an embarrassing text to twitter. Ahem.
I seem to have ended up with work to do on the next few Fridays, so I can't do a London coffee morning until the middle of October. Does anyone else fancy hosting one?
Also, my esteemed OIA colleague Emily is going to be in Singapore on Wednesday (the 26th) and wonders if anyone would like to meet for communal coffee/drinks there and then. Details here.
