Lego and Adaptive Design
Creative types (artists, designers, programmers) often proudly state that their favourite toy as kids was Lego, as it allowed them to build something without any restrictions and nurtured their imagination. Now there are huge adult hobbyist and hacker communities based around building crazy things with Lego.
The nature of Lego has always been geared towards adaptability - you are literally provided with the building blocks, and allowed to create anything you want. It’s probably the most open-ended toy you can buy. (Some newer lego box sets provide you with the pieces and instructions to create an exact replica of what’s on the box - boo to that!)
I guess the people at Lego appreciate the fact that a lot of their customers are basically hackers; when their 3D digital Lego designer software was modified by fans recently, they encouraged the development, even though the changes to the software allowed users to order only the bricks they needed for their own designs, as opposed to predefined collections.
All it took was being open-minded enough to see that their biggest fans weren’t trying to rip them off; they were trying to improve Lego’s products in a way that, just maybe, the company’s own designers hadn’t thought of.
A couple of years ago when Mindstorms, Lego’s electronic and robotics kits, was being hacked by home users, they opened up the propriatary programming source code, and spawned a whole community, which in turn improved the product.
This is a pretty adaptive design-friendly approach to running a business, and it’s cool to see Lego still empowering their fans to use their toys in the way they want by remaining true to their product’s values.
Anyway, all of this popped into my head when John showed me an animation he’d made for his presentation at TechCamp this weekend. He used LDRAW, a Lego digital modelling program, to create a storyboard explaining the Semantic Web using little Lego men in an office scenario. Step aside, Powerpoint.
What is it about those bright little bricks that brings out the hacker in people?
Activity update
Time for an update on what has been keeping me busy recently, and plans for what’s next…
I went back to Plymouth last week to begin the second year of my Masters studies. Met up with some great, interesting people that I’ll be working with this year, and was really enthused by talking to them. I’ve got lots of ideas and thoughts for what might come next. Stay tuned at my research website.
I’ve also been working on a collaberative mapping project with a designer from Cornwall. On Friday I trained it down there are we mapped the perimeter of a lake using a GPS unit (photos). I’ll post more on this as the project matures, and you can follow along at home on the project blog and wiki.
A haiku
Toasted cheese sandwich for lunch; a sign of the times. Winter has arrived.
Adaptive Software
(or, how I learned to stop planning and become a slow programmer.)
Most programmers will have a structured approach to software development, probably involving a framework of modular code that lends itself well to a process of constant refinement. This means that changes can be made to the program very quickly and easily, and would generally be considered good coding practice. The management process of software development can learn from this approach, by being open to new ideas of what exactly the software will be used for.
This is basically what I was working towards when thinking about adaptive architecture. In fact, what I’ve been thinking about in relation to programming doesn’t really have much to do with writing code (although the style of coding would be directly influenced by the general approach, and necessary to it’s success), but more to do with the philosophy behind the code. That is: let go. Enable, don’t control.
In the same way that the ethos of adaptive architecture accommodates individuals’ interpretations of the function of a design, Adaptive Software design expects that users won’t always play along with the script. The software developer needs to be prepared to relinquish control of the software and definition of it’s function to the user.
An example of this at work is the evolution of Flickr, which started out life as an online multiplayer game. When one aspect of the site became more popular than all others, and visitors used the program as a photo-sharing facility, the developers ditched their original idea and went along with the popular momentum:
User feedback also drove a lot of the decisions about features. We had user forums very early on and people told us what they wanted… But we also have a very agile development process. We deploy code to the site maybe 10 times a day on a busy day. And we’re constantly adding new features, small and large.
Not only is the system flexible enough facilitate a two way relationship with it’s users, but the whole architecture of Flickr is already open enough to allow users to reinterpret it’s function without new features having to even be deployed. Here are some photos on Flickr tagged with 4sale; some people are now using Flickr as an online auction site. Here’s someone using Flickr as a movie blog. All the Flickr developers have to do is not interfere, and a new community of users creates itself.
Adaptive Software development means admitting that your users might know more about how they want to use your software than you do:
Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
I’m working with a designer from Cornwall on a software project, and we’re trying to implement some of these ideas. By publishing the software iteratively, and workshopping with groups of users, we’re hoping the tool will grow organically to meet a need that hasn’t been fully identified yet. She’s calling it ‘slow software’ (after the Slow Food movement), wherein each function of the tool gradually evolves to become more useful to it’s community of users.
It’s a mindset that’s about pull not push; bottom-up not top-down; organic not synthetic; evolution not stagnation; adaptation not restriction.
Some references:
Reverse Psychogeography
I’ve lived in Galway for a lot of my life now, and I know the lie of the land pretty well. I could close my eyes and take a fairly detailed imaginary stroll through town.
Just like someone you see every day getting taller or fatter or older, I sometimes don’t notice the landscape shedding it’s skin and gradually evolving into a new place over time; change comes dropping slow. Still, I can also go for a real-life walk and, if I’m in the mood to pay attention to the familiar surroundings, notice the most tiny detail — a new piece of graffiti here or a replaced road sign there. There’s comfort in it.
Alongside this organic type of development, there are the obvious and sudden changes brought about by Development-with-a capital-D. New buildings (like the hideous new city museum dropped from space next to centuries-old stonework) arrive from nowhere, catching me off guard and forcing me to annotate the map in my head.
RTÉ’s radio documentary series on architecture The State We’re In: Revealing Irish Cities features an episode on Galway. An architect takes the presenter for a ramble around the city, chatting about the design and history of the streetscape as they go. Even though they don’t explicitly name the buildings they are talking about, if you know the area, it’s easy to follow along.
It’s like being taken on a reverse psychogeographical journey, where your emotional connection with a geographical environment has already been defined, and by replaying the space in your head through someone else’s experience it becomes new. It’s cool.
On the design of useless Irish things
Being a cut-and-paste job from a rambling email exchange, this may be a bit haphazard; you get what you pay for.
There’s a site, foundmagazine.com, that has loads of photos, shopping lists, tickets, etc. that people picked up and sent in. I tried doing the same here for a while, but there’s not much interesting about soggy Bus Eireann tickets and dirty Major stubs.
Being in London a good few times in the last couple of years, I kind of got to thinking that Ireland is ‘under-designed’. There’s not a huge amount of visual stimulation to be had, natural features excepted of course. In London, design is everywhere: buildings, bridges, posters, advertisments, exhibitions, graffiti, etc. I even noticed that the content of ads and billboards are much more sophisticated over there (although this could be a demographic thing).
I wouldn’t like things around here to become any more hyper-commercialied, but it would be nice if there was more of an aesthetic (good or bad) to what is around - like your ticket has.
And snips from the reply:
I think Ireland is in a period of transition. Chaos rules the roost right now, but look back in time, mid 20th century. Shop fronts, pubs, post offices, news papers, cartons of milk, bills from the ESB, Telecom Eireann phone boxes, clothes, attitudes, religious beliefs, thinking, attitudes, nationality of inhabitants, all recognizable as being Irish, very homogenous no doubt about it.
I am excited by what is happening in Ireland right now, but also very afraid that it could all go wrong. Look at all the American mall type crap jumping up outside every town. That roundabout outside Athlone is a joke. There was nothing there four years ago, now McDonalds, Woodies DIY… have all arrived. Sure, jobs are being created but there’s nothing worse than a huge eyesore built for the sole purpose of allowing people to blow their money on shite.
You are right though, an aesthetic quality to the simplest of things, the crap we find on the street, is important, because if what we nonchalantly discard is aesthetically pleasing well designed items then I think we are doing well. It’s like having the confidence to throw money away as if to say, plenty more where that came from. Maybe not?
Design in Ireland is in an interesting place at the moment. I would just as soon (or sooner) like to see a hand-scrawled, misspelled sign as a well-designed advertisment. I just hope we don’t get stuck somewhere in between, where character, stimulation and individuality are lost completely, and where you wouldn’t pick up a piece of rubbish out of lack of interest.
Four Tet live in Galway
Consider my day made. The wonderful Four Tet is taking in Galway on his upcoming UK/Irish tour:
Saturday 12th - Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin, Ireland - with Kid Koala Sunday 13th - Spring and Airbrake, Beflast, UK - with Kid Koala Monday 14th - Roisin Dubh, Galway, Ireland - with Kid Koala Tuesday 15th - Club One, Cork, Ireland - with Kid Koala
If you haven’t heard his stuff before, it comes highly recommended.
Adaptive Architecture
The Economist on the London bombings:
No city… can stop terrorists altogether. What can be said, though, is that terrorists are unable to stop cities, either. Perhaps an army, launching wave after wave of attacks, might succeed in doing so, especially if it were to deploy biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Short of that, cities will always bounce back quickly, after the initial shock. They are resilient organisms, with powerful social and economic reasons to shrug off terrorism.
But of course, cities themselves don’t bounce back or change at all. The adaptability of a city lies in the fact that physically, it’s no more than a structure. The composition of the city, the orgamism of the quote above, is the made up of the people, social networks, experiences, and organisation that hang on the physical framework of a densely populated space.
In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand notes that family homes can easily adapt to the needs of those living in them - rooms can be swapped, renovated, and re-used. Institutional buildings, on the other hand, have great difficulty in changing their function after they have been designed. They can’t adapt easily because their function is too rigidly written into their structure. Form follows function, but it should also be ready to keep up with function. Brian Eno on the appeal of adaptability:
An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me.
This is also Jeff Tweedy’s approach to art:
I believe 50 percent of art is the perception of the listener… as an artist all you’re really doing is hopefully giving people the raw material to think here something and make something out of it. I always think about how the world made something just incredibly beautiful out of Elvis Presley that he could have never in a million years intended. The intent of the author, the artist, the writer is really once it’s done your involvement is finished.
It’s also there in Jane Jacobs’ community-led, bottom-up approach to city planning, and Steven Johnson’s swarmlike collaberative filtering to achieve the emergence of optimium performance.
This way of thinking about design applies to lots of other stuff too - programmers who write reusable, modular code; copyright, and the freedom to remix content; open source and the ability to branch developments; open-ended, free-roaming video games; templates, themes and plugins for blogs; digital rights management and proprietary formats; mobile phone covers and ringtones; evolution.
Meta-metadata
Links tagged with tag: http://del.icio.us/tag/tag Photos tagged with tags: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/tags Blogs tagged with tags: http://technorati.com/tags/tags
Of course, a link to this post would be meta-meta-metadata…
Vista and the Open Source opportunity
When Microsoft release the newest version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn, now announced as Vista) in 2006, everyone from network admins to home users will be faced with a decision: upgrade their existing operating system to Vista, or be left behind. There will be a colossal marketing push, and no doubt legacy users will be gradually frozen out in an effort to encourage upgrades. Microsoft will actually be spending loys of money and a huge amount of effort encouraging it’s entire user base to ditch Windows XP.
I wonder if many people will take this opportunity to ditch Windows entirely? Maybe, instead of shelling out for Vista, and faced with the prospect of having to install a whole new OS anyway, people will move to a Linux distro instead.
Vista’s release could see Microsoft retain market control. It could also be the tipping point for widespread adoption of open source software. Should the open source community see this as an opportunity and act on it?
Collected situationist quotes
“We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment.”
- Walter Benjamin (more)
“Unitary Urbanism: The theory of the combined use of art and technology leading to the integrated construction of an environment dynamically linked to behavioural experiments.”
- Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958 (more)
“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places - all this seems to be neglected.”
- Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (more)
“Live without dead time.”
- Graffiti, Paris, May 1968 (more)
Progress Marches On
I must say, I really have been hearing a lot about these “Web Logs” (or “blogs” for short). They work like this: people write about what they are thinking, and then they put it on the Internet for other people to read! I decided it was time for me to learn more about this latest fad.
Which is another way of saying that I’ve finally caught up with the times, and have moved everything here over to Wordpress. While my own handrolled CMS was once my pride and joy, I now realise that these last couple of years… well, we’ve grown apart. I’ve seen how the other blogs look at me, with their RSS feeds and their fancy plugins. I’m not blind.
So there’s now an RSS feed, some links and other ‘Small Pieces, Loosely Joined’ over there on the left (your right), and plenty of room for more to happen.