tecznotes

Michal Migurski's notebook, listening post, and soapbox. Subscribe to this blog. Check out the rest of my site as well.

Jul 30, 2007 6:05am

ffffound!

A lot of the links in my snippets feed are visual, but I only post a small portion of the images I encounter. Even then, context is a bitch. All of it gets fed into my Del.icio.us account, which is Flickr-aware but not otherwise picture-friendly. So, I was really happy to find FFFFOUND! last week, thanks to Lydia for the invite.

FFFFOUND! is a website for collecting and sharing images from the web, like Flickr for other people's pictures:

FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

I've been using it for the past week or so, and have really been enjoying the experience. It fills a niche that my other micro-bloggy services, Twitter, Pownce, and Reblog, can't. It also has some interesting borderline social features thrown in to boot.

First, the good:

The site provides a bookmarklet for importing images. The expectation is that you casually throw interesting images over to your account as you move about the web. Activating the bookmarklet adds a heavy yellow border to all page images, so that clicking on them imports them to FFFFOUND!. The source URL is sent along as well, to maintain the connection back to the original location.

It's possible to add other people's images on FFFFOUND! as well, by clicking the "I (heart) This!" button below each site image.

Recommendations branch from each image, via a collection of related thumbnails. Browsing the site is a many-tabbed experience, and I routinely follow a thread of interesting pictures every time I visit. There's a healthy population of users here with excellent taste, most of them Japanese. Images range from Processing screen grabs, to fashion photography, to architecture, to excerpts from graphic design portfolio websites. There's a heavy emphasis on inspiration among the pictures I've browsed. There are also personal recommendations behind the "New For You!" link in the navigation. Both seem to work just like your basic Amazon "people who liked this also liked..." feature.

The site has no tags, which makes me happy. All connections and content are purely visual.

The site also has a decent respect for animated GIFs, even in thumbnail and preview form.

There are a few bits that need work.

The only way to pull new images into the site is via the bookmarklet. I've found this limiting in two cases: many excellent images live on the web in thumbnail form, with links to full-size versions invisible to FFFFOUND!. Also, I spend a lot of time on an old computer with a slow-javascript-performance browser, and I'm aggressive with turning off JS and Ajax on many sites. The bookmarklet doesn't work on Flickr and certain other sites unless I make a special point of temporarily enabling javascript. This inhibits the flow.

The site's "followers" feature informs me that I have 8 followers, but it doesn't say who they are. I assume these are people who like the same images as me and find them after I do, but I can't see their identities to understand what it is they find interesting. It also doesn't tell me whose follower I am, so I can see whose tastes I tend to share. This part may actually be a feature, keeping a focus on the pictures instead of the users.

There's no way to deny recommendations. You can either love an image, or mark it as inappropriate, but you can't politely decline. This decreases the value of the recommendations feature, making it necessary to wait for uninteresting stuff to scroll off the bottom.

The site is in private beta, and each new user gets a single invitation to pass on. Mine's already accounted for, but it sure would be nice to see a more ambitious invite policy.

They offer a screensaver built with ScreenTime, but it totally crashes my shit and generally doesn't work.

Overall, though, FFFFOUND! is a joy to use. I've been introduced to a steady stream of beautiful work, and the "followers" count is a tiny nudge of positive social feedback. I love seeing the images that inspire me framed on a gallery wall like this. The domain is just a few months old, and the site seems to be in a sweet spot of growth, with quality users posting beautiful pictures, and not a lot of noise. It's interesting joining a service where I don't know anyone (yet).

The site is cagey about its source, but the WHOIS lookup says it's a project of Yugo Nakamura, designer of the freakishly awesome Uniqlock and this ball dropping thing that's become something of a joke around the office for its frequent appearance in conversation.

Jul 20, 2007 10:54pm

bunny emoticons

Gem sent me these, they're out of control:

Jul 20, 2007 7:06am

slate's page navigation

These made me very happy:

They're the page navigation links at the bottom of Slate's multi-page stories, and each image shows how the set of links looks when the mouse if hovering on the 1, the 2, and the NEXT, respectively. I'm very much enjoying the fact that the yellow highlight on the rightmost link matches the vertical height of the other two, making the whole block a tightly coupled unit.

Jul 14, 2007 8:10pm

modest map tutorial

Heads up, new Modest Maps tutorial featuring Zoomify and AC Transit.

Jul 8, 2007 7:13pm

federal building

The new San Francisco federal building opens tomorrow, and there are a few details I like very much.

There's a sky garden on the 11th floor that overlooks SOMA, and is open to the public behind a security checkpoint:

The exterior has a nice, jagged look to it, with lots of energy-saving skin features:

The elevators only stop on every 3rd floor, "to improve worker health by nudging them to use stairways - and also create crossroads where employees run onto each other, since each three-story segment includes a lobby with art and a viewing platform."

Jul 8, 2007 6:52pm

transit data

I've been collecting Bay Area public transit schedules from 511.org. I have loose plans for them, but it's going to be awhile before I get around to doing anything.

Meanwhile, here's the data: transit.db.gz, 6.4MB compressed SQLite 3 database, ~84MB uncompressed. Contains all stops for SF MUNI, AC Transit, AC Transit transbay service, and BART, in the following format:

CREATE TABLE stops (
    provider TEXT(16),
    route_name TEXT(8),
    schedule_name TEXT(32),
    stop_location TEXT(32),
    stop_time TEXT(16),

    schedule_url TEXT(128),
    PRIMARY KEY (provider, route_name,
                 schedule_name, stop_location,
                 stop_time)
);

Jul 6, 2007 7:07am

thither design camp!

A few days ago, I posted a question about "design camps", specifically, why don't they exist? The model I had in mind was the technology geek unconference scene, most visibly implemented as Bar Camp, and most famously as O'Reilly's Foo Camp. There's also a host of tech conferences with BOF (birds of a feather) sessions and other self-organizing nerdery going on.

My loaded question got me a few mails that mentioned events such as last year's DCamp, which even has "design" in the name (sort of):

Unlike traditional conferences, there is no program created by conference organizers. What happens at DCamp depends on you. Come share your work and ideas. Tell us about some interesting UX method, explain how design fits into agile development and open source, share your design dilemma, or tell us about your new and interesting design.

In the end, the event was heavily HCI-focused, as might be expected from a BayCHI-sponsored event.

Mark Rickerby pointed out that New Zealand is home to a few emerging "time limited design contests", focused on competition rather than conferencing. 48Hours is about filmmaking, while Full Code Press is a "geek olympics": Web teams take each other on to build a complete website for a non-profit organisation in 24 hours. No excuses, no extensions, no budget overruns. These events remind me strongly of the late-90's sport of photoshop tennis, and are quite close to the problem-solving aspects of design.

One big difference that I can see already is a focus on two different ends of the process: technology events are about inputs, design events are about outputs. In general, it's possible to abstract a creative solution or sweet trick out a technological problem, and have that be the focus of a talk or session. For example, at the most recent FOO Camp I participated in a session on API authentication, specifically the derivation of a new standard process for authenticating to 3rd parties for web applications. There were people from Flickr, Google, Verisign, Dopplr, and Twitter there, and it was possible to have a meaningful conversation about the problem domain without everybody having to expose their secret sauce. Inputs. As Kevin Cheng put it, it's "fun to talk with a mixed group of both engineers and designers to get energized about building stuff."

In contrast, the competitive design events above are output-driven. Participants are expected to use the event to make a thing, with the conversational parts expected at the end. Make something, then talk about it. Mike Kuniavsky's event Sketching in Hardware (see also '07) had a lot of this element, especially the afternoon wrap-up design-off that had teams converting found electronic junk into working prototypes (my team made a record/playback telegraph machine out of a lamp and a stepper motor, and I still managed to get a bit of Flash involved). Timo Arnall imagines more of these events, with "a room full of markers, spray cans, nice paper and lego... access to a laser cutter, RP machine, etc..."

The prime example of a successful design event in my mind is Andrew Otwell's Design Engaged, held once in 2004 and again in 2005. We attended the second one, and it was really something special: fairly ad-hoc, small group (~30 people), and an incredible amount of energetic participation. I think it's important that the attendees for these two events were mostly hand-picked, with DIY social events far beyond the usual eat+drink planned for attendees; you'd be hard-pressed to beat a walking tour of Berlin/Charlottenburg hosted by Erik Spiekermann. The best way I can think of to sum up the talks at DE is that every single one was delivered by a designer of some variety riffing on what they thought was personally interesting to them. Adam talked about peak oil, Jack showed comic books and alloys with low eutectic melting points, Liz described her research work in hospitals, and Malcolm threw out some ideas on the differences between access and mobility, to name a few of my favorite sessions. It was a difficult event to sum up, and takes on a special significance in retrospect because it was such a fragile, unlikely co-occurence. It was also probably one of the few TAZ's I've participated in:

The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) describes the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control. ... A new territory of the moment is created that is on the boundary line of established regions. Any attempt at permanence, that goes beyond the moment, deteriorates to a structured system that inevitably stifles individual creativity. It is this chance at creativity that is real empowerment.

Jay Feinberg gets at this as well, in his description of geek camp events as:

...enthusiast clubs, e.g., computer clubs of the 1970s or BBS clubs of the 1980s. The clubby aspect is, IMO, expressed through an implicit or explicit hierarchy among "members." People are invited and anyone can participate, but, ultimately, there are core members and even a hierarchy of leaders who define the culture of who is really "in" and who is really "out." And, the activities at camp are, on one level, very much about being part of the club - doing things that prove one's value as a member or move one up the hierarchy of important people in the club.

I liked this description enough to go scurrying for an article that Nat pointed out a long time ago, Jo Freeman's Tyranny of Structurelessness. Freeman is a feminist scholar most active in the 1960s and 70s, and her essay describes the power dynamics of supposedly-unstructured movements:

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a "structureless" group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds, makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness - and that is not the nature of a human group.

...

Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all.

Jay points out that the designers often come together out of existing, established structures (there's a rough taxonomy of job titles and professional organizations such as AIGA, if I understand what he's getting at), and don't need to do quite so much jockeying for "geek cred".

Oddly, I've begun to form a mental model of how the conference/camp ecology operates by analogy to a previous scene I was a member of, San Francisco's mid/late 90s rave underground (just think "dj is to party as speaker is to conference") There was a constant push-pull dynamic between the promoters of permitted (in the legal sense), for-profit parties, and the collectives responsible for a dizzying array of remote, hidden, and otherwise illegal events. Questions of credibility and legitimacy were a core focus, and it was always important to stay just on the bleeding edge of acceptability and risk. The trigger for this association was a talk on unconference planning given by Jo Walsh and Rufus Pollock at E-Tech 2006, effectively an hour's worth of advice on scouting, securing, and using out-of-the-way venues for ad-hoc technology events. Same damn thing as a party, with no ear-bleeding bass.

What made it all work was the same fragility that Design Engaged featured: "any attempt at permanence, that goes beyond the moment, deteriorates to a structured system that inevitably stifles individual creativity." Look to Burning Man for a long-running example of permanence stifling spontaneity. How does an event go from inspiring, utter fucking chaos to the flaccid, gormless prose of today's annual desert art social? I'm sure that being forced to worry about BLM permits and power-tripping DPW wonks cuts the tolerance level for rave camp and the drive-by shooting range.

Many of the designers I've met over the years share joy in short-lived coincidence and unlikely collisions, and I think this is a reason that the "camp" meme hasn't found a home among designers as it has among techies. Foo camp, Bar camp, Etech, and other technology events are fundamentally about repetition: geeks need a refuge to congregate in, and this refuge can be constructed and duplicated in a fairly reliable manner. Tech events focus on inputs to the creative process, tools and techniques that want to be tried and implemented. Design events focus on outputs, results of a creative process whose constituent parts are fly together at the last moment in unpredictable ways. Boris says design is "dictatorial"; how can you have a session about the last-minute flash of inspiration, except to share war stories?

(Thank you Jay Feinberg, Timo Arnall, Peter Merholz, Boris Anthony, Hillary Hartley, Mark Rickerby, Tom Carden, and Andrew Otwell for your replies)

Jul 4, 2007 5:34pm

new typepad design?

This is interesting:

Is it a new standard Typepad template? If so, I'm all for it.

Jul 3, 2007 6:38am

whither design camp?

The technology crowd has a range of social events to choose from where actual work often gets done: etech, xtech, foo camp, bar camp, etc. For the most part, designers don't do this. Why not? I have my ideas, but I'm curious to hear yours. Mail me if you have something to say, I'll post a followup later.

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