Experience, design & technology.

On sharing and memory

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Posted on September 27th, 2012

Traveling around the world requires a different kind of mindset to one you might find familiar. It’s one which calls for a kind of comfort in the unknown. A pleasure, even, in not knowing what the next step holds for you. Like many things, travel is rarely a singular experience, nor is it ever solely experienced in the ‘now’.

Travel is an anticipatory thing, a reflexive moment, a memory in the rear view mirror, a journey as yet untaken. You think about the next thing around the corner, you think about the places you seek to find, the people you hope to meet. You think about all that you know you’ll never be able to fit into this hopelessly short period of time. You spend so much time thinking about what’s next, talking about where you’re going, reading about the places on the way, thinking about how you’re going to manage connections between here and there, asking people what they know about this new place and where they’ve been before. Travel is a whole-body, whole body-mind sensory experience. Let’s not forget the not-so-minor problem of language (or lack thereof).

When you are in the moment (having one of those moments you know you’ll talk about later) I tend to find that I sway back and forth between two main emotional states: i) the body as experiential tape-recorder focussed on absorbing anything and everything, letting the tape run (so to speak), capturing the moment for future reflection and ii) that of simply being. It’s easy to get lost in the wrestle of technology, of the ‘I’ve just got to get this shot’ mentality. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of the ‘capture everything’ mentality. To think that you’ll be leaving empty handed if you don’t somehow manage to capture this amazing thing.

With modern social networks behaving in a more near-realtime way than we’ve seen before, you can receive positive feedback on your amazing experiences, even as you are having them.

Why do we feel the need to show our friends and families just exactly what we’re up to, in the moment? Is it because we have no other way to compress 9 months of experience into a catch-up conversation at the end? Is it because we need to feel in touch with those whom we’ve left behind temporarily? Is it because we don’t want to be forgotten, or that we’re all still seeking praise from others, or that we want to feel superior for having been and seen all that this world has to offer?

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The things you want to remember are worth capturing in some way. Written in the torn pages of a notebook, blinking out of a pale white laptop monitor, residing in the very pores of a newly suntanned skin. Each of these act as a kind of memory cue, useful in conjuring up past experiences and events. I’ve found that even the simplest of cues (a scent wafting past, a glance at some bright neon lighting) can bring back the most vivid experiences, as though you were not in the present but actually transported to some time in the past.

So when I find myself in the moment, as it were, pondering how to frame up the next shot, I sometimes stop and take pause. Taking in the many aspects of this experience: the temperature of the room, the way the light bounces so softly off a certain piece of fabric, the muffled echoes of a man negotiating the price, the steps I’d taken to be there at that moment in time, the curiosity and mild fear of the street animals who are sniffing around for a free feed, the sensation of being completely taken by absorption mode.

None of this is for the sake of sharing with my friends, rather it is for the sake of sharing with myself. The very act of remembering, well after the event has passed. Each piece will have its own story to tell, when I have the time and inclination to listen.

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The call to productivity

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Posted on September 21st, 2012

My girlfriend recently said she wondered how I would go without work during our trip around the world, how I would manage both ‘not working’ and ‘traveling’. To give you some background, I’m a little bit of a worker bee: I love getting my hands dirty, pulling up my sleeves and getting to work on some new problem (large or small). In the two months before leaving for Central America I decided I wanted to get started learning Ruby, or Google App Engine (whichever seemed most immediate, which ended up being GAE). In my spare time in the last two years, I’ve found myself working with some great people, creating on the design and then creation of things like large interactive public artworks and short burst flying contraptions (which I also ended up piloting into Sydney Harbour). I even started writing more consistently here on this website. I’ve considered writing email iOS apps, creating a ‘tangle free’ sock for my headphones, making my own steadicam (which, in practice ended up being not that great).

Every now and then I get a niggling feeling that I ought to make this website work/look/read better, and so out come the HTML editors and I spend some late nights reading over specs and trying to understand CSS (it’s simple, I’m lead to believe. I think wordpress templates are where it gets complicated). In short, I like to keep my hands busy. I’m a tinkerer, a designer, a creative mind and it’s often hard to shut that part of me off.

So it’s easy to see how my girlfriend — with whom I’ve shared nearly every single day for the past 2.5 years, someone who I would say knows me very well — would wonder how I would handle traveling this year. To be honest, I have some mixed feelings about this.

In some ways I’ve dealt with the think/design/organise/create part of me by giving it things to do. Learn spanish. Find most optimal way to pack my bag. Read books (on creative entrepreneurship). Create a new video series, to explore the threads common and differing between the cities we discover. Listen to Radiolab. Keep clicking away at the keys for my writing here.

In short: I have a bit of a problem. I can’t stop myself from tinkering, from creating, from doing.
I might give this challenge a name: the call to productivity.

Now, normally this wouldn’t be much of a problem, it would be a case of finding the right time in the day to tackle such ideas. Sometimes it’s a case of jumping in head-first and taking an idea as far as I can in a given time (what can I achieve in a weekend, say). Sometimes it’s a case of dreaming up a cool new thing and looking at it under the cold light of day. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of adding more detail to see if it really works as I think it ought to – do a drawing, write about it, talk to someone else about it. Often it will circle around like that for a while before I do anything about it. Sometimes doing nothing is the most productive thing I can think of (playing soccer really helps, believe it or not).

So how does this work, when all you have is free time? How does this work when you’re left completely to your own devices (for better or worse) and you’re faced with the mother of all challenges: having complete freedom to do what you will, and the responsibility of not wasting a moment of that time. Say what you will about following your heart and ignoring what people will think: if you have the opportunity to travel and explore the world, you’d better not waste it. You’re going to miss the people who’d love to do what you’re doing, and you’re going to meet lots of new people who couldn’t even dream about it. You’re going to need to plan this one out.

The call to productivity has a very different sound when you’re on the road. Travel milestones are a distant cousin to project milestones, but with one major difference: they’re completely subjective. Project milestones always contain subjectivity, but there are (in well structured projects) objective outcomes or goals that ought to have been agreed in the outset. Have we met those goals, or are we still on the way?

Travel milestones are so subtly different. Does it matter how many countries you’ve seen, if you never saw the real culture and essence of the people there? Does it matter how many beers you consumed in your time, if you only come home with memories of bars and hostel dorm room afternoons? Does it matter how far abroad you’ve been, if you never bother to learn a new language (or even a few simple words)? These are my milestones, don’t worry if they’re not your own. What makes a good travel outcome will differ from me to you.

What makes this interesting, and therefore worth writing about, is the change in mindset it requires, especially for someone like me. It did take me some time to get beyond the call for productivity, at least as I knew it. It took me time to adjust my expectation for what a week could hold. It took me a while to learn that being productive whilst traveling is in many ways a complete redefinition of the term.

Travel adds a very new dimension to your life, one that is hard to imagine before you arrive (very prescient, wouldn’t you say?) and can be hard to articulate once passed. It is tomorrow, today and yesterday all at once. Everything so tightly wrapped up that which is still yet to come, and all the lingering thoughts which form the spooling threads of memory.

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Breathless

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Posted on August 1st, 2012

It starts with a chill. You open your mouth, to suck in some air, to replenish your desperate vital organs, when it hits. The chill. It touches your lips, it sweeps over your tongue, it flashes past the tips of your teeth and tickles the back of your throat. The cold spreads down into your lungs, where it takes hold. I notice each and every part of this. It’s no better to breathe through the nostrils, as despite the respite it offers to the lips, the nose sniffs the cold with far greater sensitivity than I could have imagined. You could alternate between the two, and at times I do, but no matter how hard you try, the cold digs ever deeper, sinking it’s cool roots as far down as it possibly can. This is not even the coldest place I’ve been, not even close to the coldest place on earth, and yet I feel it so. The cold breath of the mountain does not willingly let go.

I make do with a number of makeshift solutions: turning to breathe downwind, pulling my hood up over my head, wrapping my not-designed-for-this-kind-of-cold scarf around the lower half of my face. It works, to a point, but even the thickest cloth can’t change the temperature of the air that rushes down my lungs every time I inhale. By contrast, my exhalation comes as a kind of bastard warmth, a temporary warmth that fogs up my glasses and moistens my scarf, only to chill again with each new breath. It teases me with this fleeting warmth, a warmth which mocks my attempts to fight the cold. It seems to say: why are you here to begin with?

The wind cuts through my defenses so easily. It whips though wool, through cotton, through synthetic thermals. It barely notices these barriers, flicking its cool fingers at my torso before continuing on beyond where I stand. The best relief for this is an object – any object – to stand behind. People work well, sometimes. I scramble behind stone monoliths, behind volcanic rock which serves as the best possible minder that this wind is nothing if not relentless. I crouch behind rock which has been shaped, no carved, into likenesses by the winds caress. They are smoothly formed wind tunnels, basking in a vast emptiness of sand. Howling through their crevices, the wind is like a river of tiny knives. Invisible and relentless, my soft-fabric existence is no match for this.

If it were simply the cold that held me in its grasp, I could perhaps bear it more lightly. If it were only the icy breaths which chill me from the inside, it might not be so hard. No, it is not just the cold with which I struggle. It is the very air itself that fights me, that challenges my every motion, that demands my respect. Each action comes at a cost, each movement depletes the small amount of oxygen given. I must ration out my thoughts, my steps, my entire repertoire of action. Walking up a flight of steps is a luxury I cannot afford, let alone the inverse. I must stay still, savoring this ‘almost air’ with an acceptance almost spiritual. In that state, I can almost see the strings which twist and jerk this puppet about.

I remember earlier efforts, exertions against gravity, with a rueful grin. I remember what it was like to bound around, paying little to no mind to the forces which let this play unfold. To before when the abundance and scarcity of (nothing more than) air humbled me.

I scramble out into the wind, leaving behind my shelter, like some long abandoned volcanic sentry. I shuffle around, shifting and adjusting my hoodie/beanie combination to ‘see’ into the wind. I search for a more mobile, man-made shelter – the one which brought me here. In this place, I cannot but move within the confines of such a shelter. I could not imagine how life could take hold, let alone thrive, here. It seems as though it doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t let on. The desert must keep its secrets close, only willing to share three with me before I leave – fast, relentless and ice cold.

Safely back in the warmer confines of the rover, trundling over rocks and dirt, I glance down to my hands. It is only then that I noticed that one of my gloves is missing. I look back, towards the towering columns of rock, and know that it is already too late.

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Slow show

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Posted on June 29th, 2012

Recently I bought a mac mini, for reasons I’ve mentioned before, primarily to take care of a little bit of iOS app-making. I was tempted at one point to splash out and buy one of the nice and light macbook airs, but at the time I wanted the best bang for buck, so I went with a compromise machine, the low-end mac mini.

I decided to buy this machine whilst on the road, at this point somewhere in Mexico. I went with the lowest end machine possible, really, though I wasn’t expecting to be as wowed (in both the positive or negative) as has been my experience to date.

I noticed Ben Brooks posting his thoughts on a similar purchase, made recently to replace a broken mac laptop. Given how closely his experience has matched mine (and given how we’ve both been spoilt using iPads and Macbook Airs), I thought I’d share some of that with you here;

On the mini every single thing I did felt like it was being bogged down by the hard drive. Want to search for a file, sure thing, just let me think about that for 15 seconds.

Boot up and shut down was slow.

Search was slow.

Opening apps was slow.

Scrolling large lists of files in a Finder was slow.

To which, I might add;

Emptying the trash is slow.

Writing text is slow.

Having two windows open at the same time is slow.

In short, the mac mini has not been the whiz kid I hoped for, nor even the mildly lazy teenager I’d anticipated. It’s been sloooow. Switching from the SSD iPad, or the lovely Air, it’s a clunky beast, unhappy and unwilling to help me out. It probably doesn’t help that I’m (as often as not) using the machine through a funky screen sharing app on the iPad, but still, even when I’m on a dedicated monitor/keyboard/mouse setup, it’s a pain. I expect I’ll do some upgrades when I get back (the RAM for one), though at this point it’s hard to justify the cost of a 500GB SSD – so it’s likely that I’ll be mentioning this issue again at some point in the future.

Overall, I’m not unhappy with this machine. It’s given me the tools I needed to pull off a spot of iOS development (I can’t wait until the day that it’s possible to write, review, compile and distribute all from the iPad), and it’s been reasonably reliable. Unlike Ben, I’m not going to send it back for the refund (it’s too bloody hard to do that in Mexico, anyway!).

I’m generally happy with the Mac Mini, once given a bit of a speed boost (via RAM), it will certainly make a welcome addition to the apple commercial our household is becoming.

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Problogging

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Posted on June 21st, 2012

A few days ago I posted a short note, essentially my thoughts on the ‘do what you love’ topic, which has also been covered quite extensively elsewhere.

One great way to start doing what you love (as a job), is to just start doing what you love and receiving payment for it! The way I’ve done that is to start this blog, then I left my job for 9 months to go traveling around the world. Right now my only job is to write interesting things on this website, for interested and interesting people to read. That’s it. Right now I get paid in page views and (very rarely) nice comments. You know, as well as I do, that I can’t feed myself with page views or comments. But for the moment that doesn’t matter, because I’m doing something that I love.

After reading this, a friend of mine asked me if I did in fact earn any money from what happens here. I mentioned that I’d put a disclaimer at the bottom of that post, saying how I don’t run this site as a job, nor do I get paid in any way for the things I post here. I haven’t considered this blog (at any point) to be a potential candidate for full-time work, nor do I see that changing in the near/mid-term future – and I felt like it might not be such a bad time to reflect on this in the public domain.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the effort and reward of growing this blog, as a place to jot ideas down for future reference, and as a place to share interesting things I spot in my daily wanderings. It’s a pastime, a hobby and a whole lot of fun. I don’t make any money from this blog – and to be perfectly honest, that’s not really the point. I actually find it somewhat strange to find us living in a world where people actually do this kind of thing for a living, successfully! I actually considered putting a note on my about page, mentioning how I don’t run this thing as a full time job, before remembering how odd that concept is and that it’s even odder to think people will come here with the expectation that it would/could be the full fruits of my labour.

I’m sure there are ways that I could turn this thing into my full time work, if I put a whole lot of work-like effort into it — but that’s not my goal. I would hate to turn this pleasurable, enjoyable pastime into something I was forced into doing daily, or that I felt contingent upon to earn a crust each month. Today the pageviews and comments are a nice reward for writing (hopefully) interesting things here, tomorrow that could horribly turn into a metric by which my value can and will be calculated. Who needs that kind of pressure?

Perhaps more importantly, doing so would rob me of a myriad of opportunities and challenges in the realm of my actual passion — the design of things! I would no longer be able to put my head to the very real and important challenges that face us daily, the design and life of the cities we live in. What could be a more worthwhile challenge, than to seek new and interesting ways to improve the ways things are done? I know I’m being rather obtuse here, but I really don’t wish to put a finer point on it. I want to be involved in shaping, in creating, not solely reflecting and writing on these things here.

I’ll continue writing here, because I love it. It’s an outlet, a way to give you a few new and different ways to unlock my brain. Without this, you’d need to spend an uncomfortable amount of time with me to get the same insight – and I don’t think either of us is really ready for that level of commitment.

I do hope you stick around, though, it’s really nice to know you care.

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The view from the Andes

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Posted on June 21st, 2012

We’ve been higher before, no doubt, but this scenery is nothing short of breathtaking. These shots were all taken at a place called Villa De Leyva in the Colombian Andes. It’s somewhat near (4 hours) Bogota, although I’ll be pleased if you can quickly find it on a map. We only spent one day/night here, seeing the town spring to life for a long-weekend festival, then shut down and die the morning after – it’s incredible to see such a remote-ish place become a hub momentarily, then altogether disappear.

I climbed up to the mirador to get a better look at the landscape, and it’s incredible. See for yourself:

Villa de Leyva

Villa de Leyva

Villa de Leyva

Villa de Leyva

Up in the mountains

I took more shots than I should be posting here, if you’d like to take a deeper dive into the Colombian highlands culture, you can take a look at the shots over here.

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Learning Processing (again)

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Posted on June 21st, 2012

So, tonight I had the idea to download a few of my old processing sketches, to dust off the code and have a bit of a play. Before long I noticed just how dusty my processing memory/skills have become, after having spent much more than a year or so working primarily in c++ (openframeworks). The idea of re-learning some old and new things is at once both daunting and exciting..

The other thing I noticed was a collection of sketches I created whilst learning how to code in Java, using Daniel Shiffman’s excellent Learning Processing guidebook as my primary reference. Zoog (pictured above) is one of the characters you meet and create as you go, guided by Dan’s patient and careful writing. I couldn’t help but be tunnelled back in time (to 2008? 2009?), to when I was learning how to create interactive pieces with code in earnest. The knowledge gap between now and then is so immense, I immediately felt grateful that I’d had enough opportunities to stretch, test, learn and grow through (sometimes painful) experience. I’ve been given ample opportunities to earn my chops in this game, and I wouldn’t change any one bit of it.

So apart from that stab of nostalgia, I’m once again feeling slightly nervous about opening up processing again. I intend on updating and posting here a few computer vision examples that were created 3 years ago (an eternity, surely, in CV terms), about which, a few of you have written me. It may take some time, given how rusty I am. The examples should hopefully only need a healthy smatter of comments before posting – but you never know, I might get carried away.. We’ll see.

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One early morning ride in Colombia

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Posted on June 15th, 2012

This morning, on a bus from Bucaramanga to San Gil, we happen to pass by the very recent scene of a motor accident. The accident is between a small hatch car and a motorcycle. The roadside is full of people, our bus slows to pass. The first thing I notice is a woman on the phone, distressed, pacing back and forth. She’s crying, speaking rapidly, to whom I couldn’t say. Then I spot the emergency crew, and a policeman standing nearby. Nobody seems to be too concerned about either. The crowd mills about, murmuring amongst themselves, more curious than concerned. Then I spot the car. It’s front bumper bar is ripped off, a few feet away from where the car has stopped. It is on the wrong side of the road, seemingly having swerved off towards the wrong shoulder – a familiar site to an Australian like myself (where cars pass on the RHS), but uncomfortably so here in Colombia. A broken cable or pipe swings into view, but I cannot say if that is another victim of this early hour collision. As we pass by the car, I can see that it is empty, only the young woman on the phone, she seems to have been the driver.

The next thing I see is the bike, on it’s side a few meters away. It is off the roadside, scratched and fallen. It’s indicators are still on, blinking innocently from its prone horizontal position and seemingly unaware that it’s ride is over. There are some skid marks in the dust, but otherwise no real signs of an impact, no oil or petrol, no tyre marks on the road, no debris to mention aside from that bumper bar. The scene looks quiet, peaceful, somewhat tranquil.

It’s only now that I see the motorcyclist, some several meters further away, lying face up on the ground. He isn’t moving, he’s so very still. He also looks peaceful, asleep, tranquil. Nobody is with him, tending to his wounds, talking to him, or even taking any notice. The only sign that he might have been hurt is a small trickle of blood coming from his mouth. His jeans aren’t torn, his shirt shows no sign of the accident, his hair is even and mostly in place. It’s almost as though he isn’t even there.

A briefer glance might not even notice him. But I do.

It is a sad start to the morning. The young lady is overwhelmed, her hands now heavy, her distress palpable. I’ll never know if the motorcyclist was wearing a helmet, or if casual confidence was to be his end. I’ll never know if he left behind a family, children and a wife, or if he loved zooming around on his ride. I’ll never know fully who was at fault, and how dire the consequences of that will prove to be – except for one. The roads in Latin America are dangerous, you know that just by looking. Riding or driving can be a harrowing experience, but from so much of it I am abstracted. This mornings ride slams home that horrible truth, with awful clarity.

The rest of the mornings’ ride is a surreal glide, through cloud capped mountains, snaking our way through the Andes. I can’t help but wonder what it must have felt like, and how dangerous it is to be motorcycling – even in a place like Australia. I imagine the bus losing control, or of a truck careening into us by accident. I imagine the terror and the surprise, the pain and the nothing that follows. I wonder if I would feel the same way after seeing my 2nd motor accident, my 10th, my 50th. I can only imagine what that must be like, to see this horrific tranquility daily, how that must dull the senses. Would I be writing any of this?

We arrive in San Gil, safe and well.

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K.I.S.S.

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Posted on June 14th, 2012

Function reforms form, perpetually. As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

That’s Matt Mullenweg, WordPress creator.

WordPress could really learn a lot from both Tumblr and Squarespace. The mobile (read: iPad) experience for WordPress is painful at best. I dislike posting to WordPress on my iPad so much, I actually set up a tumblr blog as a halfway house for my posts – each post is sent to Tumblr, then auto-posted here by ifttt. Squarespace is another thing altogether, setting up new posts, updating and editing a site using their iPad app is a dream. I’m well aware that the commercial interests of squarespace and the community agenda of WordPress are quite different, but from from a purely user experience quality point of view, WordPress is quite rapidly falling behind.

It seems like Matt and the rest of the team at WordPress.org understand this, and recognize that the shift isn’t going to be easy, but I can’t – as yet – tell how well this will translate into the next versions of WP, and more importantly whether or not this will make any impact on the future use and adoption of WP as a platform.

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