Relentless

Binaural beats

burnblue @ Flickr

When two sounds with two different frequencies are played in stereo (i.e. to each ear), binaural beats are heard. These aren't real but equal to the difference between the stereo frequencies. You can listen to one here (headphones needed, toggle between each ear to see the effect vanish).

There are several companies that claim such binaural beats improve mental functioning and memory by reverse engineering brain frequencies via the audio. Naturally, the combined simplicity and complexity of this idea caught certain people's imagination, to the point that a musician-physicist mate of mine wondered it there was anything to it last year during exams.

There isn't. In this recent study binaural beats had zero effect on brain frequencies and, what is more, participants in the experimental group were more forgetful and more depressed than controls.

Cognitive neuroscience, one. New Age monkeys, nil.

(If you want to see more on music and mind, see this post.)

Now

I think technology should be about about manipulating space (by making it negligible - e.g., cars, planes etc) and time (by giving us more of it - e.g., microwaves, washing machines etc). In one sense, then, I admire Vodafone's newish strategy - to make the best use of your time - because mobile communication frees up otherwise dead time. This is the essence of their recent TV spot:



As Judy Dench tells us it's "the hanging around time, the A-B time" that could be better spent.

In another sense though, it just stretches the time when we need to be connected and available. This is further time in which to be interrupted by bosses or diverted by the non-linear attractions of the Internet.

Making the most of 'now' also means being in a permanent state of 'now'; time for reflection is suspended by the tyranny of being constantly 'on'. "The hours not really spent doing anything" are assumed to be bad in the ad. But the hours not really spent doing anything are important.

With the growth of hyper-connectivity the need for independence and quiet reflection amid this 'now' state are going to be every more important as technology (and thus bosses) encroach ever more on this time. We need may need digital holidays.

How to sell evolution

Darwin probably had the best idea any one has ever had. His main theory is so elegant, explaining so much with so little. (His other theory, sexual selection, is also pretty hot stuff.)

I'm not getting into the evolution/creationist debate because a debate needs two sides, and, in purely scientific terms, this 'debate' doesn't have that.

Worryingly, despite the vast importance of this account of life there is a staggering level of ignorance about it.

In my experience with children, teenagers, undergrads and adults:

• some know nothing about it;
  
• some hold a Lamarckian view (the idea that acquired characteristics can be passed on);
• some have a really weird version where frequency of use begets a trait (my favorite example is that smokers' children will be born with their index and middle finger as one uber-finger with a hole in it for the cigarette);
• lots think in terms of the Great Chain of Being, where there is a linear progression from things like amoeba up to us, stopping off at monkeys along the way. This idea is probably given legs because of Rudy Zallinger's much parodied "The March of Progress" in paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell's book, Early Man.
  
  
  This is wrong because, as Pinker says, "evolution did not make a ladder; it made a bush" [p. 343]. That is, we did not evolve from chimpanzees: chimpanzees and humans both evolved from a common ancestor.
  

I was never taught about evolution at school. I taught myself at University. This is the biggest betrayal of my education. Now, I don't know about how it's being done in schools now but if the children I know are representative, it's not being done well.

One thing that might be really, really useful is computational modelling of evolution (like Paegel, B.M. & Joyce, G.F. (2008). Darwinian evolution on a chip. PLoS Biol.) This brings natural selection to life, in a way that when made a wee bit simpler should wipe away all the misconception in a lovely interactive, tamagotchi-like way.

Evolution - and all complex scientific ideas - should be sold in the digital space. It's where children can interact with, test and better understand such ideas. Given a choice between a dull classroom lecture by a teacher, who will likely be worse than the top teachers used to develop a videogame, and such a videogame, the choice is obvious.

GTA Coke

This I like. Excellent work by Wieden + Kennedy and Nexus.

BBC Penguins

Seriously good work from RKCR Y&R (ergh, so many letters and, quick aside, who still has an entry page on their website?) and Passion Pictures for promotion of the Beeb's iPlayer. David Bainbridge, BBC head of marketing communications and audiences for future media and technology (his business card must comes as roll) said on BR: "It is also hoped that this creative device will not only celebrate what BBC iPlayer can deliver, but will also say something quite profound about the BBC's overall appetite for creative risk-taking and innovation." It does. (Although strictly speaking the innovation was out-sourced).

Trucks

Trucks from Cadbury and Fallon is not as good as Gorilla. I think that's the early consensus; some of the comments on YouTube are nasty though. (Aside: Why do people like to rub it in the face so fiercely when something is not as good as a previous performance?) Here it is:

The most interesting thing about it is a comment it invited on YouTube made by a certain funkymonkey86, "i just -chose- to watch an advert. that's weird". Cadbury and Fallon would smile at this I'd imagine: their ad is anticipated entertainment and hunted down for that.

Gliding about Earth

I commented on Photosynth - the very cool little app swallowed by Microsoft - a while back. Viewfinder is similar except it tacks on to Google Earth, adding an elegant new dimension.

I think if it takes on the multi-shot nature of Photosynth (as opposed to single shot shown in the vid above), it will be better.

The software clearly has a slew of uses but I think simply being beautiful is one. Software becomes art.

Tube paranoia

(ferro_ud @ Flickr)

I'm a little bit fascinated by The Underground. The visual language always gives me satisfaction. Then there is the strangeness to being underneath everything. I love this ad for making explicit what I always imagine (in slightly less pristine visuals) is going on above my head on the tube.

Transparente. Agency: Contrapunto Madrid

Most of all, the tube is intriguing because of the people on it. There's all the covert reading over shoulders, the seat politics, proximity negotiations, the conspicuously empty seats around a nutter and the wilful avoidance of making eye contact to the point where the mundane transmutes into the sublime.

In one of the most massively artificial places humans are forced to congregate, everyone wants their own cocoon; even Tony Blair was ignored on the tube. The only thing that punctures everyone's individual seals is a collective comedy or tragedy, like when someone's shopping or afro is pinched in the door. The valence of the emotion depending on which side of the doors the person is when this happens.

Simmel said in The Metropolis and Mental Life that "[t]he deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces...." One result of this struggle is the urban blasé, an indifference to much of the stimuli of the city.

This deadening of the senses though may not be entirely accurate. A nifty virtual reality experiment published in the British Journal of Psychiatry this month has shown a large proportion of tube travellers felt paranoia - a sharpening of the senses - where eye contact is misconstrued for something more malignant.

Being human and the future

Visions of the future of technology are always desperately void of any human element. That's one reason why I like Diesel's knowing 2007 winter ads: they admit that humans are at the centre of all this technology.

This isn't a new idea. People building things got interested in the users at the centre of their systems mostly to safeguard against that human propensity to mess up. For this they needed people who understood or could find out how humans tick: psychologists.

Although there is a history of psychologists and engineers occasionally getting into bed with each other before WW2, the relationship became serious after its start because as early computer scientist Grace Hopper said, "after that, we had systems". The systems they were dealing with were primarily airplanes and the ecosystem that went with that (e.g. radar monitoring). User-centred design became a necessity: lives were at stake.

Since then the relationship between psychologists and engineers has properly ossified. The marriage is called Human Factors (HF), although Ergonomics, Cognitive Engineering and Human Computer Interaction are other terms banded about.

No longer is it about simply making complex systems more tolerant of that human habit of making mistakes. Instead, it aims to create the best fit between the human mind and all the things it has built. More than ever, this is vital as technology becomes ubiquitous.

This includes things like making things easier to learn and use, promoting efficiency, tolerating and guarding against errors and promoting enjoyment. As Noyes (2000, p.63) (my old professor) has said, the role of HF is “to design to enhance human abilities, to support human limitations and the meet the subjective, affective component…of humans”.

This last bit, about "subjective, affective" stuff is getting more and more important. In fact, in a big sit down last month of clever people in this area, the question was asked "what will Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) be like in the year 2020?"

As I said at the outset, visions of the future of technology are always desperately void of any human element. Not in the answer to HCI2020: Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 reduces the answers down into a digestible form (in widescreen, which joyously fills my 22 inches of screen real estate) where the central focus is on "the embodiment of human values at the heart of computing."

Here is a summary:

Part 1 - timeline of major changes over last 20 years and beyond in computing, living and society

Changing Computers

1960s - Mainframe: one machine, many users
1980s - Personal computer: one computer, one user
2000s - Mobility era: many computers, one user
2020s - Ubiquity era: thousands of computers, one user
(I think this may have missed out the possibility of returning full circle, to a mainframe which supports many users. The mainframe or cloud will be the Internet.)

Interfaces
Replacing WIMP with more natural gesture, pen, multi-touch, speech, eye and mind control

Displays
All materials could be digitised as screens become flexible and part of the fabric of life (e.g. Animated textiles)
Hybrid digital-biological displays

Mobile
A very large part of all computing will be in the palm of our hands
Act as extension to our hands, shifting from communication devices to interaction devices (e.g. Apple's plans for the iPhone)

Robotics
Robots become semantic learners and can make inferences about the world (e.g. attractiveness or if now is a good time to be interrupted)

Life caching
When space is no longer an issue more and more of life can be recorded (e.g. MyLifeBits and see this Sci.Am. article)

More home brews
Just as content is no longer created centrally, application creation is decentralised so amateurs can freely mash-up more relevant and personalised applications (e.g. Feel Map or BabyNameMap)

Always on
Simply, that communication channels will be permanently open, everywhere and all the time.

Changing Lives

Learning differently
Learning, using and testing of material will change as new technologies are deployed in the classroom (e.g. podcasts, digital classrooms, Ubi-Learning etc). Home, school and play will be blurred.

Living differently in the family
More digital connections between family. This is not just communication, but also sharing of media and even events (e.g. grandma being 'at' the party whilst being 100 miles away). One issue may be surveillance by parents over children using technology developed for peace of mind.

New ways of growing older
Medical sensors are decentralised to allow better monitoring of health. 'Silver' social networks will be useful in health respects as well as assuaging social isolation. Increases in the amount of games for older populations.

Changing Societies

Computing and government get closer
Government will change the way they work because of computers; public will change the way government operates because of computers.

Part 2 - transformation of interaction

Human Values in the Face of Change

The changes in Part 1 are summarised:

1. The end of interface stability - they'll be everywhere and in everything
2. The growth of techno-dependency - we wont be able to cope without it
3. The growth of hyper-connectivity - being connected to family, friends and society
4. The end of the ephemeral - desire to be digital magpies, collecting as much as we can
5. The growth of creative engagement - "the proliferation and appropriation of new kinds of digital tools by people from all walks of life

These are then evaluated in human terms. "People will still wish to be part of families, to stay connected with friends, to educate their children, to care for each other when they are unwell, and to grow old safely and in comfort. Technology, digital or otherwise, is the enabler for all of these things rather than the focus. Shifts in computing are therefore not at the forefront of people’s concerns. What does concern them is how technologies can support the things that matter to them in their daily lives – the things they value."

The end of interface stability
- the issues raised by "the shifting boundary between computers and humans", like personal space, defining features of an individual if technology is part of us,
-the issues raised by "the shifting boundary between computers and the everyday world", like opting in and out of invisible interaction
- the issues raised by "living in a computational ecosystem", like the emergent effects of multiple systems working together, trusting them and problems of accountability.

The growth of techno-dependency
- what happens when systems fail and when there is a digital outage (e.g. YouTube in February)?
- what kind of basic skills will atrophy (c.f. calculator and mental arithmetic)

The growth of hyper-connectivity
- with everyone connected to everyone there are issues of etiquette. "For example, students feel it is perfectly acceptable to email their professors with excuses for late assignments using informal text slang. Professors, however, may feel differently."
- The need for independence and quiet reflection amid the constantly 'on' state.
- Work and home blurring, and the effect this has on life.
- The difference between digital crowd and mob, and whether the former reflects opinion accurately or just extreme and offensive views

The end of the ephemeral
- How digital footprints and privacy work
- Authentication, security and personal identification to protect the digital footprint
- Human memory is selective and constructive, digital memory is stable; how do these play out? Should we be able to delete digital memories (like completely removing a Facebook account, which is notoriously difficult)
- How will identity be shaped if such (unwanted) digital memories persist?
- People's awareness of when data are collected about them
- The possibility of geo-aware systems being used for surveillance by friends, family, society or state

The growth of creative engagement
- Is more automation a good thing?
- "How can the interaction and design of new computational tools be structured so they do not impede creative engagement?"
- "What new toolkits can be developed to enable scientists, and others to create tools for themselves to solve their own problems and explore new avenues?"
- How will new tools affect expertise?

Part 2, 3 & 4 - a desirable HCI agenda

I wont go into this in detail. See the paper for more.

Lots to be thinking about.

Pixels and Colour

Having been nowhere before computers, pixels are now everywhere.

They rarely get noticed because their sum is greater. Christian Zuzunaga - apart from having a great surname - has created a really strong visual language of lushly coloured pixels across his work.

One example that is doing the digital rounds, after being in Design Week, is the sofa above; I wouldn't want this in my house but I'd love it on my wall (as I pic, I'd add quickly).

His other work is exciting too. You'll find them on his website, which I would also class as a piece of art in itself, although I am a sucker for bright colours on black.

Cocoon

Hanging from a branch is Cocoon, O2's latest phone.

Name

I like it for lots of reasons, one of them is that it's called Cocoon and not the RX400 or something similarly cold. Engineers should be allowed to design things, they should not be allowed to name them.

Like Apple's operating systems, imaginatively named products are better because they slice off the bland and replace it with a useful communication moment.

Writing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Miller and Kahn (2005) found, at least in colour labels, more imaginative and unusual names beget more favourable perceptions and rates of purchase than functional ones. See their paper for why they think this happens.

Added to the various cognitive dynamics that bring about this effect, the nature of the label will cause a cognitive Litchenberg figure to branch out activating all sorts of potentially interesting and positive associations. There's something snug about a cocoon, something exciting about what's inside, and, of course, something natural.

Nature crops up again in a nice bit of 'ornimorphism' (attributing bird features to inanimate objects - yes, I made the word up), where the dock is called a nest, which lends it further cutesy charm.

More imaginative naming for bits in technology ecosystems please.

Design

It's clearly white, but the design doesn't end up tripping over itself to imitate Jonathan Ive; it has a sleekness and freshness of its own. I particularly like the LED lights on the outer shell that spell out messages, callers and the time.

Marketing

Anyway, that's the product; the marketing's is also good example of something done well because digital is used for digital, not as some lame TV follow up or place to stick JPEGs of posters.

VCCP discovered the 40 most influential bloggers, gave them a Cocoon and no formal instructions to do anything in particular. I believe similar blogger outreach was done with the Nokia N95.

The result of shirking the need to be perfect has payed off. According to Revolution, "72 per cent of the bloggers who took part said they would not have expected a brand such as O2 to do something like this, while 80 per cent would now recommend Cocoon/O2 to a friend." So impressive were the results on early sales that a TV spot was not commissioned, saving considerable money.

And engaging bloggers means a denser network of links that then exploits the algorithms of the Google ranking system to get higher within it. Such organic seeding obviates the need for specialists to artificially get it ranked higher, again saving money. All in all, good job O2 and VCCP.

Blowtorch

(from chunyang @ Flickr)

How do you produce quality in new media and all the participation it offers without suffering the rubbish that is most user-generated content. One answer might be Blowtorch. It's co-create with high standards exclusively for 18-24 year olds. That is, audiences get a say in the creative output - the soundtrack, the editing, the cinematography etc. I can see this sort of thing being eminently attractive to certain people.

Set up by a satisfying mix of entertainment, technology and advertising pros, this gets me excited because it's progressive. Unlike the rest of Hollywood whose nerves about damaging their precious DVD sales have meant congealment, Blowtorch's new rules of participation and using all the different media pipes to engage is new and needed.

Litchenberg, Memory & Brands

This is a vid of Litchenberg figure being created. It comes about by injecting a piece of insulating material with a high speed beam of electrons.

I like it because it is a natty metaphor for the way memory works.

The electrons are the start of a thought. This can be engendered by by external factors, like sound and light bouncing off things and hitting our receiving dishes (retinas or eardrums) or by internal factors.

Next a branch of activity spreads out rapidly. Neurons get excited and excite their connected neighbours. A pattern is made. And the pattern is memory.

Heraclitus wasn't talking about the brain when he said 'the cosmos speaks in patterns' but his epigram is apt for the way in which it works (this is von Oech's more accessible translation; for those who care, the literal translation, according to Robinson is 'all things happen according to the logos').

Such patterns of activation build up from repeated activation. As the father of this idea, Hebb, put it, "any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated', so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other." (Hebb, 1949, p.70). Or in other words, neurons that fire together, wire together.

That makes the prediction that if you activate a certain thought, access to a related thought will be zippier because it's already partly activated.

And this is true. Flash up the word 'bird' and 'robin' will be recognised more quickly than an unrelated word (e.g. 'arm', see Neely, 1977 for more. Plus if you care how the 'recognised more quickly' bit is measured have a look at what a lexical decision task is.)

This extends to thoughts about groups of people, also known as stereotypes (e.g. Germans, bankers, the elderly). Information about groups is built up over time (probably in the neocortical system [McCelland et al, 1995] and deployed to lubricate the whole process of person perception.

Where it gets really interesting is how these activated information bundles affect the rest of what the brain is up to. That is, how perception affects action. Lovely examples abound; here are six:

1. People primed with politeness stereotypes are less likely to interrupt an ongoing conversation.
2. The African American stereotype makes people more aggressive in response to slight provocation.
3. The elderly stereotypes makes people walk more slowly and more forgetful.
4. The professor and football hooligan stereotypes once activated affect the marks people get on general knowledge tests.
5. The neuropsychological patient stereotype makes people score poorly on an executive function test.
6. Primed with religious stereotypes people behave more pro-socially
   

(See Bargh et al., 1996, Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg 1998; Dijksterhuis et al., 2001; Dijksterhuis et al., 1998; Turner et al., 2005; and Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007 for more).

Brands are patterns of activation too. This is evident in the crisp, if less neurocognitively explicit, definitions of brands by planners.

Paul Feldwick has said “A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.” John Grant has even more pithily dubbed a brand the "sum of the ideas associated with it".

The ideas associated with a brand are built up over time by interaction with it and messages about it; firing together and wiring together the brand and it's associated ideas.

The logo of a brand, as its paragon symbol, should therefore act as a Litchenberg electron beam, causing an immediate pattern of activation to spread, bringing alive the ideas and concepts most closely associated with the brand.

Added to that, if the link between perception and action in stereotyping is anything to go on, presentation of the logo should affect behaviour in measurable ways.

It does. According to this great paper, published in next month's Journal of Consumer Research. After being presented with either the Apple logo or IBM logo (so fast as to be below conscious awareness), people behaved in ways consistent with the brand's associated ideas.
People who has seen the Apple logo were more creative than those exposed to the IBM one, as measured in a task thinking up different uses of a brick and as determined by independent judges.

This makes the Apple slogan self-fulfilling: 'Think different' really does make you think different.

Medium-rare ads

(from splorp)

Media companies or algorithms decide how we get our ads served up. Hulu, one of the most promising legit video-on-demand sites, is giving its users more of a say in how they get their ads.

(from CNET)

Its inevitable that all TV viewing will be done online in the future because the choice is better (although something will need to be done about choice paralysis) and time and space are no longer constraining factors.

Time is irrelevant because shows can be called up on-demand, making the 'old' system of programming look as silly as everyone being served up with the exact same meal in a restaurant. Space - or location - is irrelevant because although TVs are stationary, screens are mobile. Content can be picked up anywhere as long as you have access to the cloud.

Online TV also has the chance to be interactive. People are already using traditional TV and online together to enhance the experience (and here). Online TV will just remove the space between laptop and TV, packing it down into one device.

Because of this inevitability, the move by Hulu to exploit the interactivity of the medium is a good thing.

If online TV is going to be free, it's going to have to be ad supported. It could be charged but when you have free vs paid, free will win out as long as the 'costs of free' aren't too great.

The 'cost of free' being advertising and the 'too great' bit being when the ads subtract significantly from the experience by being intrusive and/or irrelevant.

By adding choice to the ad serving process the costs are lessened because people will feel they have some choice in the matter and - now going beyond what is happening at Hulu - choice might improve relevance, the nirvana of advertising that has allowed Google to make billions.

I've got a few ideas about how more choice can be added into the mix to make people feel more in control and to give them better (more relevant) ads.

The first thing to note is the gulf between products on a show and buying them. The Internet could close this gap to a few centimeters. Take for example House's leather jacket, something that keeps him both "warm and cool" and something that was probably just chosen by the show's wardrobe people rather than any money changing hands for its use.


Yet, there is demand for his jacket; people are asking where to buy one. It would be fairly simple to have an overlay with a tagging system similar to Facebook's (below), except rather than being static, it would be dynamic; hypervideo. The tags would be put in place by the production team or automatically once the technology gets good enough at object recognition.

The lovely Kate, tagged on Facebook

Everything in a show becomes a clickable object. Links out to products could be collected on a little 'shelf' which you could sift through at the end of the show. The transient nature of things in video becomes irrelevant. Clothes worn, gadgets used, songs played could all be put on the 'shelf' for later inspection and possible purchase. People could chose a specific type of ad (like clothing, gadgets or music) depending on their whim. I would find this much more useful than interupting messages or even a pre-show ad.

For some, this might seem rather unpleasant because of the risk of corrupting artistic output. This is as naïve as the idea of the sentimentalist idea of the noble savage because creativity has always used the oxygen of commerce. John Hegarty, BBH's creative supremo, uses Titian's The Annunciation as an example: "In the bottom right-hand corner you will see a decanter. Why? Well, the Venetians had developed clear glass and they wanted it in there as an advert. So the connection between culture and commerce is hundreds of years old." (source)

Titian's The Annunciation (click to enlarge)

Second, I agree with Hegarty's other point that the only problem with such placement is when it is done badly, when it is perpendicular to the story. It reminds me of the deliberately obtuse faux product placement in the Truman Show by Truman's synthetic wife:

In this situation both show and brand come off looking bad. As Hegarty says, "It doesn't satisfy the viewer, so it doesn't work for the advertiser" (also see this paper by Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown for more on this). Put differently, corrupting artistic output is not in the interests of either the people making the shows or the advertisers.

I would much rather have something like this, where I get to chose the ads in a more ecologically valid environment than have my viewing experience lacerated by the tyranny of jingles and over-enthusiastic voice overs. And with the long tail this could be very profitable for shows and films.

Advertising is here to stay. The more useful we can make it the better it will be for all involved. And one way to do this is let people have more choice about the ads they consume.