I gave a talk at Interesting 2007 about three weeks ago now. The day was great and though I wasn’t able to stay for all of it, I really enjoyed myself, and the few talks I did catch were very absorbing. So well done to Russell for sorting all that out.

I gave a talk on comics and while there are some images of me talking about them on Flickr, some people have asked for a list of the comics I discussed. Below is the list and brief descriptions. I’ve also transcribed my talk and put the slides online: Comics and Pictures.

Though I read lots of different comics, I only really follow four authors: Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and Garth Ennis. Really, you can’t go that wrong reading stuff by these guys, they are awesome, although many people find Ennis a bit heavy. Here is the list in the order that I discussed them:

• The Kingdom by Mark Waid and drawn by Ariel Olivetti and Mike Zeck. Wikipedia has a good description of Hypertime, so no need to hunt down this comic if you are just curious.
• Sea of Red by Rick Remender, Kieron Dwyer and Salgood Sam. This is the one about vampire pirates.
• New Universal by Warren Ellis and Salvador Larroca. This is the comic I discussed where all the characters are derived from film stars.
• Planetary by Warren Ellis. This is really good, everyone should read it. There are four main books, all are good. I specifically discussed Planetary Crossing Worlds which includes the Batman story.
• The Filth by Grant Morrison. This is the best comic that there is, everybody should read this. It is the one with the guy who speaks with thought bubbles.
• Desolation Jones by Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams III. I’ve mentioned this before. It is a great read, and drawn with deft elegance, really nice work.
• I spoke about Madman. Very weird but good.
• I also mentioned a cover from The Flash who can run really fast, and that’s about it.

I’m enjoying a couple of American authors at the moment: Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, and Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-men is good too.

That is the list of comics I mentioned. They stock them at my favourite comic shops: Orbital and Gosh, both nicely located in central London.

Having slipped from Pulse Laser to Lazy Pulsar, occasionally twitching in the cosmos but not really shining very hard, I am going to write a post.

I had a really good time at Reboot 9.0 this year, never been before, but it was top drawer. My favourite discoveries were the brilliant David Smith and Tina Aspiala. Also good to catch up with old friends at the shiny and new Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. So in the spirit of the people, I sat in the talks, looking through the faces oscillating between laptop and speaker, and drew them. Some drawings went into Webb’s talk, my favourites are below, and the rest are in a Flickr set.

I liked this guy’s glasses a lot.

Smart suit.

This guy kept fidgeting and glancing between laptop and presenter.

Shockingly, we’ve not posted in two months. We’ve evidently been taking on too much work.

Before we get back on the wagon, another pointer for visitors here because they came to a conference presentation: I gave the closing keynote at reboot this year, and put forward an approach to product design that takes its lead from experiences and stories. There’s a look back at social software, adaptive design and engaging technology as some of my key influences too.

The slides and talk notes are online: Products Are People Too.

(I also gave the XTech 2007 closing keynote a few weeks back. Do these conference organisers know something I don’t?)

Just a quick pointer for visitors who were at my Emerging Tech Conference keynote: The slides and talk notes are now online, From Pixels to Plastic.

(For those visitors who weren’t there, here’s a photograph.)

We’re making our trip to San Francisco in a few days, and speaking at Yahoo! at the end of next week. But if you’d like to catch a public variation of that same presentation, the evening rather than the matinée version if you will, read on…

Adaptive Path are generously hosting us on the evening of Tuesday 30 January for a talk about:

How a new generation wants social, creative, networked products, and how design can help not by identifying tasks to be productively performed, but experiences to be deepened and made fun. All told through some of our favourite things, and a series of increasingly tenuous references to The Sound of Music.

The talk is called The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design and, if you’re coming, you should sign up at the upcoming.org event page. See you there!

Adaptive Path kindly invited me to their offices this morning, where I muddled through my Making Senses talk, on using the human senses as inspiration for next-generation Web browser functionality.

Revisiting the slides, and the conversation afterward, has shown me how to state the argument more directly:

1. As far as interaction on the computer desktop and the Web goes, navigational and spatial metaphors dominate. On a micro level we talk about direct manipulation of files via icons: Dragging, moving, opening and so on. On a macro level, we have addresses, visiting, and sitemaps.
2. When a person has navigated to something, they can know what it is because of the navigation itself. For instance, you know you’re in London because you followed all the signposts to London.
3. In a world of cheap sensors, many, many display surfaces, and high connectivity, we are presented with information without that navigational context. Furthermore, in areas which have traditionally used the navigational metaphor (mainly the Web), navigation might not be the most appropriate approach to reading the news, buying books, or hanging out in chatrooms. Yet still we approach Web design armed with this metaphor.
4. It’s as important that a thing can be instantly appreciated for what it is, as that it can be navigated to. ‘Instantly appreciate’ means comprehend pre-consciously, just as we instantly appreciate a chair as a chair when looking at it, without having to deliberately deduce the meaning of the pattern of light on our retina.
5. As a guide to what qualities we should be able to instantly appreciate, we can use human and animal senses to show what features we need to recognise of things in the environment. Sensing these features is sufficient to let us intelligently interact, without navigating.
6. To summarise these features, we need to be able to detect: Structure, focus and periphery, rhythms of activity, summaries, how this particular thing is situated in the larger environment (and more). The Web browser, as our sensory organs online, should do this job, instead of leaving it to the websites themselves.

Applying the sensory model to Web design triggers a few ideas:

• The high-level structure of all sites should be represented by the browser in a consistent way, not by each site differently.
• Regular patterns in browsing (such as the sites visited daily or weekly) should be supported by the browser.
• Using the extracted keywords of a web page as its ’scent,’ hyperlinks should indicate how their odour strengthens or detracts from the smell of the current browsing trail.

There are more ideas, but that’s what the presentation discusses and illustrates.

Incidentally, the image at the top of this post is from J. J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which talks about how we see continuously and actively as we move through space. I’d like to consider browsing the Web in the same light.

XTech, the European web technologies conference, has picked The Ubiquitous Web as its 2007 theme:

As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to be part of the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.

The call for participation is now open; topics we find especially interesting are mobile devices, RFID, user interface, web apps, and of course where this is all going.

Alongside Adam Greenfield of Everyware and Gavin Starks of Global Cool, S&W will be keynoting. See you there!

Web apps are currently undergoing a renaissance–or perhaps they’re fulfilling the promise made when the genre was created in 1999. The technology, skills and community that go to make these web apps is beginning to turn in many different directions. We’ll soon see a number of different web app species. One I find most exciting is Deploy to Desktop. What if the same skills needed to build complex web apps could be turned to making desktop applications, starting from a simple web app in a HTML renderer window, and iterating to use native widgets, drag and drop, and full OS integration? (More about this in my App After App talk.)

We’re on the way there. Three data-points for that journey:

Apollo is Adobe’s cross-platform runtime, based on Apple’s WekKit, that lets you run HTML/CSS/AJAX apps on the desktop. It works offline, includes an API for communication between Apollo apps, and will let you write database hooks to a local or remote persistent store. The Apollo wrapper will be distributed free, like Acrobat Reader or the Flash Player (personally I think this is the wrong model–apps should be standalone, but we’ll see). Some Apollo screenshots.

Next is WebKit on Rails which is exactly what I wanted to see when I gave that talk. It makes it easy (well, easier) to take your Ruby on Rails web app, wrap it in WebKit, the Mac HTML renderer, and run it as a desktop app. See the list of existing projects for applications you can already download.

Last up is Pyro, which wraps 37signal’s Campfire browser-based live chat application and turns it into a Mac app. Features include a badged application icon (the number of unread messages are shown), drag and drop upload, scripting support and more. Someday all web apps will be available this way.

First talk!

I visited the London office of Agency.com a week last Friday and reprised Engaging Technology. The gags went down okay - something I’m always nervous about, especially with an end-of-the-working-week audience - and I made a few small changes, mainly to focus the Acts Not Facts slide on interactive agency work. I said:

When I buy a holiday, Expedia makes it feel like I’m engaging with tedious bureaucracy. My ringing phone embarrasses me when it rings on a train or in the cinema. But when I purchase something, that’s not just a cold fact… it’s the first time a product and I engage, and if the purchasing experience is lousy then the brand is damaged. […] And when I’ve talked to advertising planners and folks working in brand communication in the last few months, they’ve all told me that the days you want a product in your life because that product is “cool” or “reassuring” or has a particular lifestyle, whatever the fact… those days are gone. It’s all about the acts instead. What’s it like to purchase? To show off to friends? To sell? To clean? To run in? What are the stories? How do I engage with it, and how does it engage with me?

I keep meaning to post more about how to design for intrinsic activities. Remind me.

Second talk!

This Saturday, I spoke at an away-day for the folks behind BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight (my slides aren’t online). It was rather disconcerting to see the faces of voices with which I’m extremely familiar–I catch the programme almost every weeknight. I was speaking about the leading edge of media consumption, especially new media, covering old and new media channels (giving some demos–I think hands-on is important in understanding threats and opportunities), social media, citizen journalism, and a little trend speculation on where people will be spending their time in coming years:

Virtual worlds such as Second Life and the creative renaissance evident in Make magazine and more (the example I gave was Instructibles, where the empowerment of creation from the internet has come together with the loosely-coupled collaborative ethos)… both of these feel as energetic and full of potential as blogging did in 1999.

Thanks, too, to Dan Hill and Suw Charman, who were both generous with their help when I was putting together the talk.

I wanted to mention, here, how I concluded the presentation. I’d begun by stating that while technology changes, people mostly don’t. At the end I highlighted one social change that, from my perspective, looks as if it might be taking place:

Far from being an antisocial medium, the internet is enormously social. We in this room are media literate, from being surrounded by tv, cinema, radio, magazines, adverts… People growing up online are surrounded by people, and are socially literate. They’re fully in-tune with small-p politics. Interpersonal politics. Social politics. Sometimes it shows as a lack of respect, because they know how people work and aren’t willing to think that some people are special, just because they have authority. They understand that people are just people. […] There is a small-p political literacy that comes from continually socialising. It manifests both as people forming communities online, and as a lack of respect for big media that means media needs to personalise, and meet people in their communities as peers.

Highly speculative, of course! I also touched, briefly, on social capital.

It’s been a while since I felt like I was banging the drum for the internet. But being online is a large component of most of my friendships, and a lot of those friends I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the net. Often people who have purely utilitarian use of the internet don’t see that.

I find it enormously heartening that there’s a general intelligence, online, about how people work in groups, gleaned from folks living on mailing lists, making stuff together, and chatting. I wanted to get that across.