"In transitioning ambient intimacy from one mode to the other, it turns out that our desires are more ambient in text and more intimate when visual. Even among the rather ordinary set of people I follow on Instagram, there is an undercurrent of the erotic more immediate and obvious than on places like Twitter. An ambient sense of social desire is something else when it is visual; we aim to be seen, and are thus asked to be seen in certain ways. And if the camera asks you to be seen, it also offers a chance to determine how you are seen and by whom, this new insistence on the scopophilic turned back against the viewer. I have watched people I know who long seemed to avoid being looked at settle into a new idea of who they are: The ego, once pinched, releases and expands from the center to the skin, a kind of warm fluid of confidence, a body now radiating a newly-minted sense of self-possession. A watchful eye once avoided is reclaimed, welcomed, relished — and so of course, the connective tissue of our communication came to include the image of the body.

There is a tension in this, though. It is hard to separate visual culture from economies of various sorts, from systems of circulation and exchange. The demand to place yourself into the swirl of images comes with certain rules. These are the boundaries of our particular modal shift. One can, for example, embrace body acceptance, can challenge regimes of corporeal domination, but it helps to do so symmetrically, in fashionable clothing, against well-lit backgrounds, engaging in the logic of the rectangular image, augmenting one form of desire with another. When intimacy is a thing to be as much seen as felt, one must, if not contort oneself, at least turn one’s life to the camera. The lens is like a supportive mother believing she is simply doing the right thing: “Be who you are, dear, but at least make yourself presentable.”

Yet there is warmth in the feed of images, too: a steady cavalcade of tiny, precious detail, a gentle flood of affection for both others and ourselves. For the lonely, sitting by themselves in quiet rooms and apartments, it represents an emergent social field, a kind of extra-bodily space in which one communes. The modal shift of ambient intimacy from text to the image is itself a minor analog of the broader one, from mass media to the network, from the body to its holographic pairing. There is in it surveillance and self-surveillance, the insistent saturation of capital down to our most private core. In its most ideal state, the collection of stories on otherwise faceless platforms is like an auditorium of holograms, a community of bodily projections. In those rare moments, one does not find oneself simply alone in the dark and cold, barely lit by a glowing phone. Instead, if only for a fraction of time, it is a field of light made full by incandescent strands of connection, staving off a colourless abyss, an intimate ambience that is — temporarily at least — just enough."

"Learn how human-led design makes a deep and connecting impact, leading to innovative and inclusive solutions.

Learn more at inclusivethefilm.com

Participants:
Catharine Blaine K-8 School
Susan Goltsman - MIG, Inc
Will Lewis and Ted Hart - Skype Translator
TJ Parker - Pillpack
Graham Pullin - University of Dundee
The High School Affiliated to Renmin University Of China (RDFZ) Beijing
Jutta Treviranus - OCAD University
Mike Vanis - Interaction Designer"

"The world around is made up of information that competes for our attention. What is necessary? What is not?

When we design products, we aim to choose the best position for user interface components, placing the most important ones in the most evident and accessible places within the screen. Equally important is the design of communication. How many are notifications are necessary? How and when should they be displayed? To solve this, we can be inspired by the principles of calm technology.1

Principles of Calm Technology

I. Technology should require the smallest amount of our attention.
Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.
Create ambient awareness through different senses.
Communicate information without taking the wearer out of their environment or task.

II. Technology should inform and encalm.
A person's primary task should not be computing, but being human.
Give people what they need to solve their problem, and nothing more.

III. Technology should make use of the periphery.
A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back.
The periphery is informing without overburdening.

IV. Amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity.
Design for people first.
Machines shouldn't act like humans.
Humans shouldn't act like machines.
Amplify the best part of each.

Examples

Tea Kettle
If a technology works well, we can ignore it most of the time. A teapot tells us when it is ready, and is off or quiet the rest of the time. A tea kettle can be set and forgotten, until it sings. It does not draw constant attention to itself until necessary. A tea kettle's whistle brings information from another room to one's attention.

Inner Office Window
An inner office window provides an understanding of whether someone is busy or not without the need to interrupt them.

Jawbone Up
The Jawbone Up has a single button and a colored status light. The device can be set to buzz after a short nap or at the optimium sleep cycle for a good night of sleep. It counts movement in the background without requiring additional action from the wearer. The device syncs to the user's phone through the audio jack and gives a summary of the wearer's individual day in sleep and physical activity.

Lavatory Sign
This simple sign tells you whether the lavatory is occupied or not. No need to translate it into multiple languges. The simple icon is either occupied or not.

Roomba Vacuum Cleaner
The humble Roomba Vacuum cleaner chirps happily when it is done and emits a sad tone when it is stuck. There is no uncanny valley present in this technology. Roomba doesn't have a spoken language, just simple tones. This makes it easy to understand what Roomba is saying, and elimates the need to translate the tone into many different languages.

Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle is a mobile application that monitors your sleep and allows you to track times of deep sleep and REM. You can set an alarm in the app and Sleep Cycle will wake you up before the time at the best place in your sleep cycle with a soft noise or buzz. Because the haptic alert occurs under your pillow, you can configure it so that you can wake up without anyone else being affected by the alarm.

Smart Badge
A smart badge is simple. Smart badges are small, wearable technologies that don't require a charger, user interface or operating system. Simply touch a provisioned smart badge to a door or elavator panel and you'll easily gain access.

Calm Communication

Haptic Alert
Use haptics or touch to inform someone of important information. Many people set their phones to buzz, but other products such as the LUMOBack Smart Posture Sensor buzzes you when you exhibit poor posture. Touch is a high resolution of human sensation. A lot of information can be conveyed with no visual or auditory requirement.

Trend Graph
A good trend graph is all about making the formerly invisible visible. The Sleep Cycle app graphs sleep over time, compressing that long term data into an easily accessible format. Be patient: good data may a long time to collect, but it is well worth the wait! Displaying data in a elegant way is one of the most important aspects of trend graphs. Elegance is about information and comprehension, not just visual appearance.

Status Light
Status lights are farily common on video cameras. A device is active when the red 'record' light is on. Status lights can be used for more than just recording. Our daily travels are mediated by the simple colors of traffic lights. A light that shows the weather is far more calm than a weather ssystem that constantly calls attention to itself. Think about how to use different colors of light to inform and encalm in your products.

Status Tone
A status tone is a quick way for a device to let a person know whether it needs attention or not. Products that have a positive tones upon completion, or negative tones when stuck are more likely to be helped by their human owners.

Status Shout
A Status Shout is similar to a Status Tone but can be much louder and more urgent. Smoke alarms, tea kettles and microwaves all use shouts to alert people to their status. Ambulances use Status Shouts to alert people to make way for an emergency. Tornado warnings utilize Status Shouts to help neighborhoods get to a safe place and out of the tornado's path. Status Shouts should be reserved for very important information.

Popup
Popup alerts are perhaps the most common form of alert, but they can quickly overwhelm people when not used correctly. Alerts should be used when deleting a piece of content, for an emergency, or when someone has specifically opted into a piece of content or stream. Otherwise, try to think of ways to alert a person using the other senses.

Timed Trigger
A simple status light on a timer can make for a calm and informative notifier. An orange light that turns on at sundown or reminds you to brush your teeth.

Delay
Use a delay or interrupt during a change of state. For example, when the headphones of an iPhone become disconnected, the music player automatically pauses the music."

"present day technology allows us to hear, text, see, and use pictures and icons to express how we feel. however, there are physical and emotional dimensions that exist only when we’re close to loved ones. in response to this problem, daniel sher asked himself, ‘how can I use technology to bring people closer in a different yet familiar way? it was important to me not to try to reenact the feelings of touch, pressure and warmth we feel when we hug of caress our loved one. trying to imitate that will always feel fake.’ with this understanding of human interaction, he wanted to create new experiences for those who wish to express their love and affection. as a result, for his final project at holon institute of technology, sher, along with ben hagin, has developed ‘saying things that can’t be said’, a series of objects that revolve around people in long-distance relationships."

"As explained in Lisa Reichelt’s Twitter-friendly coinage of “ambient intimacy,” social media use countless trivial messages to build a detailed portrait, even an imagined presence, of a friend. At least to some degree, this restores a lost kind of awareness found in traditional life. The upstairs shutters are opened, the bicycle is gone from its usual spot at the usual time, deliveries are being made, and the neighbors are gossiping. To their enthusiasts, social media re-create some of this environmental sense, albeit across the necessary distances and at the accelerated paces of the metropolis."

…

"The world has been filling with many new kinds of ambient interfaces. Nothing may be designed on the assumption that it will be noticed. Many more things must be designed and used with the ambient in mind. Under these circumstances, you might want to rethink attention."

…

"Embodiment makes the difference. Walking provides more embodiment, more opportunity for effortless fascination, and better engagement than looking or sitting. Depending on the balance of fascinating and annoying stimuli, a walk around town may well do some good. That balance is now in play, under the rise of the ambient."

…

""Does having more ambient information make you notice the world more, or less? Can mediation help you tune in to where you are? Or does it just lower the resolution of life?"

"(T)he Internet shakes the university to its core; presumably, the two are now breeding a new heir."

(((The first statement is true. The second? Not without a little help, at least not with purpose and foresight. And no, it's not massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are the mp3 of education - they radically disrupt the distribution of information, but that's only one slice of the wider pie. mp3s have not radically changed music; largely only distribution. Likewise, MOOCs are the low-hanging fruit of learning: the easiest bit to translate and transmit, and the lowest value component. It is learning at its simplest, its most mundane. This is still useful as it frees up education - say, the university - to spend its time and resources doing something higher value instead - focusing on moments of intense, engaged collaboration, together in physical space. The rest can be displaced: with a hand; it is no great loss. No more than compact discs, and their absurdly-named "jewel boxes". Anyway.)))"

"The role of architecture seems central to future inquiries into attention. The cognitive role of architecture is to serve as banks for the rivers of data and communications, to create sites, objects, and physical resource interfaces for those electronic flows to be about. At the same time, architecture provides habitual and specialized contexts by which to make sense of activities. And, where possible, architecture furnishes rich, persistent, attention-restoring detail in which to take occasional refuge from the rivers of data."
(((Very good. Again, you won't see architects getting this pointed out at architecture school much currently - with a few honourable exceptions - but there's a good role for architecture in future (alongside many other things of course.))))

"The Good Night Lamp is a family of connected lamps that lets you communicate the act of coming back home to your loved ones, remotely.

A family of lamps is made up of a Big Lamp and Little Lamps that are linked to it. Send the Little Lamps to anyone in the world so that when you turn your Big Lamp on, the Little Lamps turn on as well.

Collect your friends' Little Lamps and watch them turn on and off as they come home, go out or go to bed. You'll never come back to an empty home again."

"The Good Night Lamp can be used as an intimate network for two, or as a physical social network for all your friends.

Close family: When you worry about a loved one living alone, give them a Big Lamp, and your Little Lamp will switch on whenever they use it. It's a simple way to see that they're around and pottering. …"

"How can design bring empathy back in an increasingly disconnected world?  Modern war has lost traditional connection between soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home.  Shifting enlistment to the poorest members of the nation, increased media coverage of data, rather than individuals, and government censorship has lead to apathy.  The Beat Empathy Device records the heartbeat of an anonymous soldier, and physically taps it into the chest of a civilian.  They share excitement, fear, calm, and death.  The news becomes news about your soldier, not just some soldier.  Now, imagine if this was your drivers license or Government ID."

"For future generations, the experience of rediscovering long-lost friends will be unfamiliar. Similarly, new friends are all too easy to make. If alienation was in part the product of feeling alone in a city or in mass society, misunderstood and unable to find others like oneself, today the Internet makes it possible for us to connect to a massive number of dispersed, networked publics brought together around particular taste cultures. Through social networking sites, we come to regard each other as intimates even before we have met. Intimacy is now a matter of keeping up the "telecocoon," the steady, ambient conversation that keeps individuals together regardless of how far apart they are."

"In this special episode, Dan Benjamin talks with two of his heroes, Merlin Mann & Jeff Veen about independence, free thinking, email, productivity, & changing your game."

[There is more here (on shared values, innovation, organizations, management, entreprenuership, change, etc.) than my notes reflect—all worth the listen.]

[Video also at: http://5by5.tv/conversation/27 ]

"So, all of this is leading us to the 'why bother?' of ambient intimacy. Why do we bother participating in this kind of communication with others and why do we bother to keep track of others in our social network, or even have a social network at all? The following is a list that I first saw in Tom Coates' excellent presentation on social software. It shows four key reasons why people participate in on-line communities. I think it's pretty self explanatory and it works really well when you think about why we've participated in methods of communicating with each other, right from back when we were picking fleas, through to now, when we check our phones for messages from Twitter:

1. anticipated reciprocity
2. reputation
3. sense of efficacy
4. identification with a group"

"Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together." ... "So when you run across a Twitter message like "we had chicken sandwitches & pepsi for breakfast" from someone who has around 30 followers, what's really so odd about it? It's just someone telling a few friends on Twitter what she might normally tell them on the phone, via email, in person, or in a telegram. If you aren't one of the 30 followers, you never see the message...and if you do, you're like the guy standing next to a conversing couple on the subway platform."

"These days, we want to carry the contents of our homes with us wherever we go. Photos, once housed in beautiful frames and curated in albums, are now stuffed into our iPhones, and our relationships are nurtured on social networks via electronic address books from anywhere on the planet. I know Coltrane, Miles, Dizzy, Ella and Thievery all come for a walk with me whenever I pull the door behind me. Thanks to the rise of place-shifting and devices such as Sling Media’s SlingBox, even my television travels with me. And when that’s not possible, I just buy and download shows from either Amazon or Apple. I even took my favorite television show, “Criminal Minds,” for a ride across the country (or rather, the planet) last week.

Now I want to carry all my books with me, too."

"paradox of ambient awareness...Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But...together, over time...coalesce into surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ & family members’ lives, like dots making pointillist painting...never before possible, because in real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating...ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,”...invisible dimension floating over everyday life." ... "common complaint I heard, particularly from people in 20s...If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world."

"The ability to stay in touch with people that we have stronger or weaker ties with in this light weight way will be something available to them from a very young age and...throughout their entire lives. What do you imagine the repercussions will be?"

"So the iPhone wins because it both keeps us in the flow and keeps us loosely connected. Perhaps a little like adding a “lurking” factor...iPhone in hand I have a better sense of what my friends and colleagues are doing"

[via: http://www.smallsurfaces.com/2008/06/staying-loosely-connected/ ]

"Buddyping is a whole new way of keeping in touch with people using your mobile. It enables you to pinpoint the location of your mates and invite them to join you if they are nearby."

"one of my rare visits to FriendFeed...reminded [me] that I consistently regret it. Breaking down those contextual walls means I consistently like the people I find there less then I did when I was able to interact with them in isolated manners"

"And it's all the verbs that make tweetclouds so interesting....I know we're all supposed to be thinking about social objects, but social doing seems to be potentially potent too."

"So a social aggregator with degree-of-intimacy - where you can choose elements of a person's behaviour to subscribe to...with a few smart bits at back which would desubscribe or deemphasise sections...according to your consumption behaviour."

"Education is probably the best way to help people manage exposure via content, but one of the key challenges for designers in social spaces is to design tools that support awareness and management of this exposure through unruly contact lists."

"three reasons: Most people are not that interesting. Twitter takes bite-sized content about three bites too far. Twitter feels distancing even as it connects me to others."

"Twitter is a tool that allows users to have some sense of where and what their friends and family in their social network are up to. It's a manner of establishing and maintaining a connection without geographic proximity to prevent isolation in an increa

"Post to Twitter from your iPhone What makes Thincloud so special? It's very finger- and eyeball-friendly, much more in fact than other iPhone apps. It's got huge buttons and a friendly graphical interface with thumbnails for browsing and checking up on y

""social proprioception" -- the ability of a large group of friends and colleagues to know what each other are doing, and to co-ordinate themselves accordingly"

"5. Our whole economic system will be reinvented around the correct assumption that people do not create for money but for fun. 7. Entrepreneurs will equal adventurers. 8. Presence applications will impact sociality in a negative way."

"But I believe that mobile blogging can be attributed to the fast take-up and continuity of use that PA’s are currently experiencing. So how is this technology changing the way we connect and interact?"

"Technology often promises transcendence from real life but is eventually domesticated through interaction with real bodies in real spaces. We find new relationships with technologies by rubbing our corporeal bodies up against them, not by crossing a thre

"7 challenges to our shared mobile future.: 1. Reach 2. Sometimess Off vs. Always On 3. Hackability 4. Social Primitives 5. Openess 6. Simplicity 7. Justice. A public conception of justice for freely forming networks. That could be our shared goal." and this quote from Pakistani master singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: "Throw out the clocks, My lover comes home, Let there be revelry. My lover comes home, Let there be revelry."

"new architecture for the 21st century will be less concerned with sensation & affect, less obsessed with either box and blob, and more concerned with new kind of place-making, enabling us to dwell more creatively in both “real” & network space"

Blyk betting consumers will tolerate this presence [of brand/politician/institution in their intimate community] in return for free connectivity. Is this mutually parasitic relationship the only tenable one or are other mutually beneficial relationships p

"Jaiku potentially gives Google Holy Grail - time relevant, location based targeting of info, personalised to very high degree...not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on profile, location & availabil

From "away messages" like earrings as an accessory, to MySpace or LinkedIn pages that constitute casual or business "mental attire," ...we live in a world where we put as much time into the clothing that we wear as we do our own online identities."

"Mainly, they describe the minutiae of their day, but when their lives take more dramatic turns, they often take the network along in real time."

"Is blogging now nothing more than a proving ground for would-be publishers? Will real blogs disappear now that most individuals have their own blogs in the form of Facebook or Myspace profiles?"

"I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic."

"alternative approach for location-based technologies“...collecting & keeping of content can have important social values over & above simply consuming the content in situ"

"Although things have been achieved in the academia, it’s as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming, social computing or navigation. My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow

"I was trying to unpack some of our hopes and fears about the prospects of emerging immersive telecommunications technologies to displace high-energy, high-impact air travel."

"Specialism is a good thing, but its not the only thing. Do you know any good bridge-builders? If you don’t, find some and hire them."

"as we access net through a computer, it's a place we visit. As...something we carry with us everywhere, it swallows us whole. Our presence...becomes constant, intertwingled w/ real world, connected in ways that will emerge from constancy/intertwingling."

"New Nomads illustrates the research that Philips Design, together with Philips Research, has carried out on wearable electronics.

"This garments uses mobile phone and camera technology to help parents pin point their kids' position, but also fabric antennas, radio tagging and miniature remote cameras to allow children to play exciting games outdoors."

"I love that I spend my downtime in my life listening to people and talking to people, rather than surfing for something entertaining and mindless on TV."

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible."

"3 models for communication: information transfer, storytelling, and presence. While analysis of communication has tended to employ first 2, the 3rd provides a better orientation for recognizing & organizing useful knowledge about sensuous choices in comm

"a mobile phone is an adequate “social presence” device with lots of room to grow; a weak information transfer device, with lots of potential; a fantastic device for capturing personal narrative; but only average at enabling the consumption of persona

"...is already on the horizon. A screen perhaps without a screen, without contact even, or on the contrary connected through a multitude of extensions....that will highlight the evolution towards more autonomy and more mobility"

"3 basic modes of communication: presence (sensuous sense of the other person being with you, social bonding); storytelling (narrative of a game, lyrics/emotions of song, scenes of movie); pure information transfer (want a taxi! tomorrow’s weather?)"

"It may seem to be less, since it is partial, but the reality is that all friendship is discontinuous, even the realest of meatworld relationships. It is a matter only of scale. And I maintain that it is these tools that will allow us to scale friendship

"Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen."

"In the future everyone will only get to go home once a year. In the future everyone will stay home all the time. In the future we will not have time for leisure activities. In the future we will only 'work' one day a week."

"Our Passively Multiplayer Online Game ("PMOG") follows people as they surf the web, giving them experience points, levels, items and currency. PMOG layers social gaming on top of web browsing."

"As he abandoned his Nokia S60 phone for an iPhone, he found himself missing the presence-enabled phonebook we created for the Nokia handsets."

"What Google keeps getting closer to with first its acquisition of Dodgeball a year ago and now Jaiku is the socialization of presence. That’s what it’s all about."

"What really needs to be done is not just to connect the various social networks that do exist in internet network-of-networks style, but also to social-network enable our real social network apps: our IM, our email, our phone."

"I love the idea of knowing where people are before I call them, as well as other details of a phone's status. And that's where Jaiku shines. How often have you woken someone up in the middle of the night because they were in Europe instead of Silicon Val

"Picoformats represent an effort being undertaken led by Chris Messina to codify various standards and openly pursue a nomenclature and syntax for communicating and executing commands with mobile devices over SMS or via command line interfaces (CLI)."

"I was very happy to have the opportunity to hop up and share my thoughts on Ambient Intimacy at the Future of Web Apps conference in London yesterday. The slides are above."

"we're expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips with this info, it's just there to take it all in if we want. These are the kind of things that represent ambient intimacy that are really lightweight powerful ways to communicate: twitter, flic

"won’t have to rely on professional noticers to tell you [what the next big thing is] because it’ll touch your life directly. Probably by opening another conduit for the flow of ambient intimacy...sinking ever more deeply into the ambient Internet hum

"People look for two qualities in this type of infrastructure provider: 1) critical mass and 2) ethics. It should appear stable enough that it's reasonable to expect it to stick around...and since we trust it with our data its intentions have to come acro

"Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) where MyWare tracks and catalogues your online activity and assigns a point giving system so checking your email might yield you 10 extra attribute points for "wisdom" or reading the journal of experimental quantu

"bud.com will turn our personal data trails into a playfield for a web-based massively-multiplayer online game. Call it passively multiplayer - the reality of communication networks. Already, Web 2.0 and social networking sites keep track of our relations"