What do you imagine the world will look like in 2025?

The FutureScapes project brings together a range of expert thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers and you – the public – to explore the opportunities and challenges of life in 2025, and to consider the potential contribution that technology and entertainment can make in shaping a better, more sustainable future.

There are more videos scenarios, workshops activities and written report (PDF).

http://www.sony.co.uk/futurescapes

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My summary is not that good, so head over to his personal site for a proper read. It would be super inspiring to have him visit UID at some point in time!

More bits and pieces on Design Imperialism:
Design Crusades: A Critical Reflection on Social Design
The Language of Design Imperialism
Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?
Design For the First World

My problem with many modern UIs is that they never get past the telling phase. They’re always dressing up their various functions with glows and bevels and curves, and in the process they somehow become overbearing to my senses. “Did you know you can click this? Don’t forget there’s a save button over here! Let me walk you to your control panel.” Imagine a car that verbally explains all of its various knobs and levers the first time you get into the car. Wonderful, right? Now imagine that car explaining all of these various functions every single time you get in the car for the next five years, until you finally snap and drive it off a cliff.

Worth reading! Also make sure you check the link to Ars Technica, where the author talks about skeuomorphic design.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/9/2616204/the-condescending-ui

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The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunites.

This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.

You can download the movie for free at www.presspauseplay.com.

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Conversation, People, and Attachment View. Persona allows you to see your emails the way that suits you best.
Conversation View focuses on ongoing discussions presenting related attachments, messages sent, and messages received in one convenient place.
People View groups messages by sender and allows retrieval of emails by sender.
Attachment View is a revolutionary, unified, and seamless birds-eye view on the media shared via email. Attachment View presents shared YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Facebook links alongside actual attachments.

Please read more at www.personamail.info

The European final will start in just a month’s time so to make sure you have the best chance of winning some of the amazing prizes, get involved right now!

Underneath you can find relevant information around the competition:

-       Competition Video: http://bit.ly/MazdaVideoSVE

-       Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mazdasverige

-       Inspiration:  http://bit.ly/MazdaIdeaSVE

-       How does it work? http://bit.ly/HowItWorksSVE

Be Inspired!

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Occasionally, amidst the rapid rise and fall of trends, fashion and fancy, we are faced with true revolution: paradigm shifts that throw out excess baggage of some kind and usher in new ways of thinking and seeing altogether. The catch is that you need to have the benefit of hindsight to truly measure their effectiveness. With this in mind, I believe that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts.

I’d like to start with architecture and its recent history, and then compare it with current changes in the way interaction design is being conceived and made. Lastly I’d like to discuss the effects of such a revolution in architecture, and provoke thought on what the implications might be for the design of user experience.

Read the rest here.

Johnny Lee, king of the wiimote hacks, former Microsoftie and now at Google recently published a nice text titled The re-emergence of DIY vs Big Organizations . He presents his views on the state of DIY, the reduce cost of tools and advanced technology vs the large research organizations investing in research trying to come up with the next big thing. The article is available on his Procrastineering blog, and more recently it was reposted on Makezine.

I share some thoughts with him on the drive and motivation from the DIY community. The shear number of people spending countless hours to solve their important and not-so-important issues with the world is just mind-blowing. A large group of willing people can accomplish quite much, not only in the technology domain I would say.

My issue with the DIY world is that people can be pretty selfish from time to time, and I’ve experienced this a few times over the years (I might have acted like this myself): I have a problem, I think I’m important and the rest of world should listen to me or even help me resolve my problem. A human leech, sucking attention, other people work’s and resources for its own benefit. Don’t get me wrong, not every DIYer is like this, quite the contrary. But these DIY leeches don’t even say thank you when you just offered and sacrificed some of your blood to satisfy their self-esteem.

There are a few good things to learn from research and professional engineers/builders I think: probably some people have been through this before or tried to do the same thing as you. There are 6.7 billions people out there and most of them are quite clever in their own ways. We have been on the moon, built crazy infrastructures and dealt with a lot of human problems before. The internet is not the known universe, people have been trying, thinking and writing about a lot of stuff way before online search existed. So next time you think you have a big problem, think again and start digging in books, and talk to folks who are good at these things. You’ll be amazed I’m sure. Anyway this is diverging and is totally another story.

Back to Johnny’s text. The state of affairs he describes about large organizations vs innovation is very true I think. It is an issue of scale more than anything else I believe. Aligning the work and vision of a large group of people is really hard, even if people are well paid for it. Success and innovation are never guaranteed, even if you work really hard. On the other hand, large corporations can drive projects that are much bigger than what a group of 10-100 doers can do. Large corporations are resilient in their own ways, they often can afford to inject (and loose) millions in hope to maybe recoup some gains in the far future. Failure on an individual level is much more frightening. Without large mining operations, huge logistics supply chain, and major investments in new processes and materials there would be no 149$ Kinect, snazzy new iSomething or easy travel around the globe. Large and often nasty processes are needed for most of the stuff we have grown accustomed to. I’m not sure we can make do without large providers of technical prowesses.

So we need big orgs, and have to live with the issues associated with them the best we can. We also need DIY people and small group of independent tinkers who can poke the society to highlight problems or expose brilliant new opportunities. I hope both types will continue to push the boundaries in their own way, and cross-fertilize each others’ activities more and more.

What do you think? Are designers some sort of professional DIYers? Do we have to reinvent the wheel constantly (and blog about it) to make sure we understand it properly? Do you consider yourself a DIY person or more just like an user of friendly-technology? Are you making your real own stuff, or you are making stuff that other people tell you you can make?

/Camille

[thanks Stoffel for the link]

I sincerely hope we never get to a point where we do not relate to nature as having a personality and voice of itself; yet giving this second voice augmented by us, we may all be attent from wherever we want to be. So what happens when we apply this technology to our domestic technology?

Interesting video in the making of this project:

Talking Tree – Making of from Tom on Vimeo.

Everybody has an opinion on Nature. But what about Nature’s opinion?

EOS magazine decided to give Nature the means to talk.

A 100 year old tree, living on the edge of Brussels, was hooked up to a fine dust meter, ozone meter, light meter, weatherstation, webcam and microphone. This equipment constantly measures the tree’s living circumstances. And translates this information into human language. Then, the tree lets the world know how he feels. Follow the life of the talking tree via YouTube, Flickr and Soundcloud. And friend him on Facebook.

Starting Fall 2011 – non-EU students would have to start paying 270,000 SEK (approx $40,000) per 60 credits, inorder to study in Sweden. (This excludes living costs in Sweden.)

At the risk of sounding pessimistic – I believe that if this law is passed, the best and brightest talent from outside the EU, will think twice before considering Sweden as an option to study in. And the decision will be sadly, based on numbers.

I’m trying to understand the short and long term implications of this rather bold decision. I’m trying to compare it with loftier Swedish political thoughts that I’m well aware of – about immigration and other drains on the economy. I’m trying desperately to sympathize with a larger reasoning behind the decision, from a political viewpoint – and a LOT of it makes sense. A lot many people come to Sweden to take advantage of the ‘free education’ system, piggy-back on it and then leave when they’re done. On the flip-side, hard-working Swedes who are paying taxes to let us have our free education are not allowed the same privileges when they’re studying in most non-EU/EU countries. Understood. This is not a fair situation. But is charging fees the solution? Or does it aggravate the problem?

I’d like to take a selfish UID/IxD perspective in this discussion, because that’s what I care most about. Like most of us presently studying or recently graduated from UID, I missed the chance to say something about the ‘Artistic Campus thingie’ while it was being cooked in concealed kitchens behind closed doors in Umeå. I hope this discussion ignites something early with this issue with the hope that it will give the powers-that-be some precious time to understand the Storm that’s coming their way; not just to Umeå and UID, but perhaps to Sweden in general.

I’ve been a Swedish tax-payer now for over a year. I’m happy that I got an opportunity to do an MA (yes, for free!) in Sweden. I’m even happier that I’m being able to repay the debt that I owe to a progressive nation like Sweden that allowed such a thing to happen. I LOVE being in Sweden! But hey, I had it good! I dont have a 540,000 SEK debt to repay. If I did, I probably would be way more demanding and result-oriented.

More importantly, the fact that we didnt have to pay fees made me overlook a lot of flaws and loopholes in the education system. It made me value the importance of being small groups of deserving students, tightly-connected and embedded in the midst of a peer group of equals, each of whom had the same expectations and played by the same rules (more or less).

When I was accepted at UID, I had to choose between Art Center (Pasadena) and Parsons School of Design (NYC), but chose UID instead. The decision was dead easy back then. I’ll be honest, a huge part of the reason was the numb€r$. A lot many significant reasons were to do with Scandinavia, exotic locales, European culture and design sensibilities. These were however slightly secondary.

The passing of this new law (the details of which I cannot find yet) changes things drastically. I’m not sure if EU students have to pay at all, or pay a smaller fee. I believe UID is going to find itself cornered as a result of this decision. It will struggle hard to stay afloat in a competitive World, given the current limitations and threats it has allowed itself to be surrounded by and overlooked for the past 20 years.

With the passing of the law – one thing becomes clear. UID and ALL other Swedish universities have put themselves at the same level now as RCA, Art Center, Parsons, NYU Tisch, RISD and a bunch of other international programs that have enormous resources, locational advantages and infrastructure to pull the best students from across the World to it. Is Umeå up for the challenge ?

Location: – Would I want to pay $40,000 a year (plus living expenses) to be in Umeå??? Even if it was Cultural capital for the next 10 years, I dont think so. Not unless I had some serious scholarships and teaching assistant programs that allowed me lessen the blow. Otherwise, I’d happily make such a heavy investment to study in another place where numbers and probability offered better odds. I’m thinking cities like New York, London, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Chicago, Providence, Boston where there’s a lot more going on. The romance of being in Umeå to study just vanished for me with a figure like 540,000 SEK. And it would take more than just scholarships to bring it back for me. It would need a big enough job market in the region to ease the risk on such an investment, for starters.

Infrastructure: Learning from classmates ?? – Hannes Seeberg (APD 2007) brought up an interesting point made by Pete Avondiglio in his farewell speech to the 2009 batch. With such a law being passed and half the students paying fees while others dont – you can forget about learning from peers. You can forget about goodwill, family and all other feelings of shared learning. A system of fees will give rise to grading, competitiveness and expectation. It will put extremely high demands on infrastructure, facilities, staff and curriculum. Students that are going to pay 270,000 SEK per 60 credits will expect appropriate return on investment – and it had better be a lot more than your classmates as teachers. I know this sounds harsh, but that’s the reality that will now need to be dealt with. Charging fees opens the floodgates and the Swedish education system has some serious soul-searching to do. Charging fees throws the ball back in the court of the Umeå University administration – and a sluggish response will damage the situation beyond repair.

Compare some numbers with colleges elsewhere:

• Art Center College for Design = $50,000 per year, excluding Pasadena living costs.
• Parson’s NYC = $37,000 per year, excluding NYC living costs.
• Rhode Island School for Design (RISD) = $38,000 per year, excluding living costs.
• Royal College of Art (fees for non EU) – $40,000 per year, excluding London living costs.
• NYU Tisch School of the Arts – $39,000 per year, excluding NYC living costs.
• IIT Chicago – $32,000 per year.
• Umeå Institute of Design – $40,000 per 60 credits, excluding living costs.

Seriously?

Think of the sheer numbers of gifted students from Canada, U.S.A, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Brazil, China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Mexico and other ‘non-EU’ countries that have all spent years learning at UID, and other institutes in Sweden. Would you all have paid the same fees to study in Umeå?

With the intention of being very pessimistic early on, I’d like to say that I believe the Swedish education system has just shot itself in the foot, in the interest of tax-payer’s preservation. It is a fair decision on paper if you think of profit-loss in a myopic way, but its repercussions are going to be big. And they will not be rosy.

I understand that there are far bigger concerns than UID or a bunch of complaining designers. Just like the Artistic Campus is soooo much bigger than UID. But that’s really not the point.

The point is –
The Swedish Education System now needs to make rapid leaps if it needs to compete internationally, or perish to being mediocre and incestuous in its breeding of talent and skill. No longer will we be able to hide behind the same old excuses, that were generously overlooked in previous years. It’s money talking now, and fikas wont be so sweet anymore like they used to.

Aah, dont even remind of the winter…