The Fall 2012 Toronto Content Strategy Meetup Guest Speaker Series!

SXSWi is Dead

Just kidding. Please vote for my panel about Creating Great Analog Souvenirs for a Digital Era.

Physidigital Life is a Beach -- So Don't Forget to Make a Few Digital Souvenirs

It says physidigital.com. My sand calligraphy is rusty.

Please vote for my SXSWi proposal entitled "Creating Great Analog Souvenirs for a Digital Era." I promise to you that I will not be arguing that the future of interactive involves writing URLs in beaches.

Consider my SXSWi 2013 Proposal -- Creating Great Analog Souvenirs for a Digital Era

Given that my recent talk about the physical-digital trend at June’s NXNEi was not only super fun but super popular (I received an 8.4/10 overall score!) I decided to pitch an updated version to SXSW interactive.

If you’re at all familiar with SXSWi, you’ll know about the PanelPicker. One of the criteria for speaker selection is the number of votes your idea receives. I have until the end of August to convince as many people as possible to vote for (that is, +1) my SXSWi panel entitled “Creating Great Analog Souvenirs for a Digital Era.”

Rather than simply nag and harass my Twitter followers and Facebook friends, I’ve decided to combine the necessity of self-promotion with witty visual explanations of what an analog souvenir (aka physidigital object) actually is. Which should help explain the photograph above.

Here’s a teaser from my SXSWi proposal:

The online and offline worlds are now melting together thanks to smartphones and social media. But as our life shifts into the cloud, we’re starting to realize that 0s and 1s lack the tangibility and permanence of paper and film. Significant emotional moments are easy to lose or forget in the online ether, which helps explain why artists and brands are trying to create analog souvenirs of our increasingly digital lives. 

If you’re so inclined, please vote for me.

At the very least, enjoy the next three weeks worth of serious and goofy experimentation with analog souvenirs.

Further reading:

- Examples of physidigital objects and experiences.

- NXNEi article about the digital backlash

Nora Young Searches for the Soul of The Virtual Self

 I discuss Nora Young's new book for Nurun's Digital for Real Life blog:

In her new book The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us, Nora Young explains how the combination of social media and geolocative smartphones now allow us to create elaborate shadow selves comprised entirely of data. Never before have we been able to share our daily activities with the world and also have them link back to our physical locations. The result is “a Data Map, a digital version of our earthly selves.”
The explosion of self-generated personal data has happened so quickly that we have yet to fully understand its implications. Through a combination of research, participatory journalism and in-depth interviews, Young considers the unintended consequences of our ability to post photos of everything we eat to Instagram and track our spending habits via Mint.com.

Read the full review.

Toronto Content Strategy Meetup Reboot

Take a glimpse at the new logo for the Toronto Content Strategy Meetup.

Almost makes you want to sign up for our fall series of guest talks, doesn't it?

How the Betamax, the TRS-80 and the Intellivision taught me to be a better novelist

In keeping with my family’s affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we’d bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we’d unbox Mattel’s Intellivision, instead of Atari’s legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

-- Colson Whitehead in the New Yorker

My favourite Francesca Woodman photograph

As part of my trip to New York in early May, I went to the Guggenheim to see the Francesca Woodman show.

I didn't realize the photos were mainly nudes -- I had to sheepishly explain to my wife that New York magazine declared it a "Critic's Pick" but had failed to mention the nakedness.

As it happened, my favourite photograph did not involve nudity. But it wan't included in the exhibition catalogue either. I tried taking a photo of it in the gallery (tsk, tsk -- not supposed to do that) and it turned out a blurry mess.

And then, by complete fluke, I found a high-res version of the image I was after through the Paris Review blog. (Click above image for article).

If you don't already know, Woodman committed suicide at age 22. This image combines a chalk outline element, a lingering shadow, with her hidden, off in the corner, perhaps contemplating her after-image self. It's an obvious reading of the photograph, but so what. Sometimes art is obvious. 

The digital backlash and the rise of physidigital

The digital backlash and the rise of the physidigital world

How analog suddenly became cutting edge

Despite being a dozen or so years younger than me, my 25 year old friend Adam and I share a surprising number of technological touchstones. He’s a part-time DJ who only plays vinyl 45s and owns (and actually uses!) a typewriter.

Adam’s predilection for analog media might sound anachronistic, or even sadly unhip, but instead his anti-digital tendencies now put him on the cutting edge of a contemporary subculture.

Everyone is familiar with the rude snub fans can give their favourite band when they become too mainstream. In the same way, a small but growing number of artists and culture mavens have begun expressing their frustrations with the digitization of everything.

The fancy term for music, books and photographs being converted into zeros and ones is "dematerialization." Spotify might be a tremendous service for music fans but try impressing someone with a record shelf full of cloud storage. For anyone who has lost a hard drive’s worth of photos or MP3s the limitations of a world where art and culture are no longer anchored to a physical object are clear.

To escape this binary trap in December 2010, during my residency at the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, I began researching the emerging shift toward rematerialization. I discovered a company that prints posters of your Tumblr followers (socialprintstudio.com) and another that can publish a book of your favourite Tweets (tweetbookz.com). Even the high priestess of low culture, Lady Gaga, noted last year that her new Polaroid mobile printer would ensure that precious images “will no longer die a death on your cell phone or digital camera”.

Drawing inspiration from these and other examples, my team at the CFC decided to create a physical manifestation of a digital experience. What began as drinking straws in a cardboard box eventually turned into a prototype for txt2hold, a service that debuted in May 2011 at Maker Faire Toronto. Txt2hold takes any text message forwarded to our system and incorporates it into a unique paper sculpture. Or, to be more precise, an origami pyramid that’s colour coded according to the emotional content of the text, thanks to the assistance of a sentiment analyzer called Lymbix. The idea proved so popular that for Nuit Blanche 2011 our team was asked to create a modified version of the system that converted Twitter @replies into paper birds.

Since then, I’ve seen numerous rematerialization projects, including BERG’s upcoming Little Printer (bergcloud.com/littleprinter) and a hacked telegraph called Tworsekey that can send Tweets via Morse code.

This does not mean, however, that the 21^st century will be predominantly Amish, even if a Portlandia sketch joked - “Remember when kids grew up to be artisan bakers and everyone had homemade haircuts and guys shaved with straight razors?” - that the latest hipster craze involves a return to the 1890s. Instead, the future will be neither purely digital nor analog, but a messy hybrid of the two. And to acknowledge the awkwardness of this fusing of the past and the present I’ve created a gloriously clunky neologism: “physidigital."

Novelist William Gibson famously observed that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The past, meanwhile, remains everywhere, and we shouldn’t be afraid to get physidigital by jamming a USB drive into an old cassette tape.

Even Adam, alongside his typewriter, owns an Android phone that allows him to remotely download and launch a torrent file on his home computer. He might be technologically eccentric, but that doesn’t mean he’s crazy enough to abandon all modern conveniences.

(A version of this article recently appeared in the 2012 NXNE print magazine). 

Show us the better way at Spadina station

Here is the unabridged version of my Grid idea to improve Toronto, which I titled “Toronto sUXs.”

The morning commute via the southbound Spadina streetcar is a terrible user experience (UX for short). It doesn’t have to be.

Inside the Spadina subway station, three long snaking lines of people waiting for southbound streetcars block the flow of transit commuters exiting northbound cars. A few hundred dollars in vinyl floor signage could indicate the optimal line-up configuration so people don’t have to guess. Built into this signage would be strategic gaps where perpendicular commuter traffic could pass through the line. Currently people have to poke their way through the fence of people between them and the subway stairs. That sUXs.

This is not rocket science – just a bit of design thinking. Step One: Observe how people actually use Spadina station. Step Two: Offer a solution that respects natural human instincts. Design thinking doesn’t have to involve visionary, Bruce Mau fantasies of iStreetcars powered by unicorn laughter. UX does the most good when it invisibly solves the major problems that people face on a daily basis.