A Sustainable Train of Thought

I just started working at the Mobile Experience Lab at MIT. It’s been a while since I’ve had to fill in governmental-type forms, and it was slightly shocking to see my options as listed in one of their forms:

I live a multi-ethnic life every day, so why do I have to choose a single ethnicity for the convenience of this form’s creator? And it’s not about how I self-identify versus how others see me: even if I see myself as multi-ethnic, this form dictates that I can be only one.

I’m faced, effectively, with an impossible choice. It’s the same as if parents were asked to indicate their favorite child.

Well, a lot of little pixels at least…

My predictions (hopes) for 2007 as seen on TreeHugger.com.

(True, my name’s appeared on TreeHugger before, but this instance uses a bigger font, incorporating more pixels.)

It was difficult to choose from so many options. For example, SUN has a bunch of interesting products out that address power consumption, and in the larger IT industry there’s the general acceptance that power is now a major issue; there was the general awakening of people to the climate crisis, and a simultaneous trend of “it’s cool to care” in relation to the environment; and of course there were rumblings in the political arena from California to Great Britain to hundreds of US mayors with regards to the dangers of climate change and the long-term economic and strategic opportunities and risks it poses.

So many things…and that in itself is a great thing: I’d rather there be too much to talk about than too little.

Still, we can always do better. And we need to do better.

So let’s make 2007 the year of the sustainability change-agents. How’s this for a resolution: incorporate one environmentally-sustainable component in one project you work on this year. After you’ve done that, make it two in two. After that…you get the idea.

PS: Happy New Year!

Sometimes stock photos are good. Sometimes they can go horribly wrong:

What is Samsung trying to say here, that it takes four people to register a product on their site? Not exactly a stellar testament to their site’s usability or the registration process as a whole.

I just discovered that the Fresh Start project is listed as an example of service design on the INDEX:2007 web site!

Not to say there’s a direct correlation between internet access and my productivity…but if today is any indication, the evidence is rather compelling. Today I worked for about 9 continuous hours. Every other day this past week has yielded significantly less productivity. The difference? No internet access today, sitting in Gund hall in the shadow of a concrete stairwell.

I suppose another correlation could be proposed, one to do with my proximity to studio (apparently any studio will do) and productivity. But the evidence in this case is less compelling, because although I’ve typically produced more work in studio than when outside studio, I’ve also typically had internet access in studio. Comparing my productivity today with past work sessions in studio suggests that my previous output in studio has been less than optimal when exposed to internet access.

Or maybe I’m just more productive today because I’ve become sick of hearing myself complain about how unproductive I’ve been lately. Maybe I was resolved to be productive today and this clarity of purpose yielded tangible results. Perhaps…but I’m inclined to see the internet as the common denominator amongst all unproductive days.

So let’s extend the experiment and collect more data: I’ll avoid internet use during working hours (what I’m working on right now doesn’t really require it) and see if that contributes to increased productivity. I think the key is to intentionally put myself in WiFi dead spots, although that implies an addiction of sorts; kind of like getting sober by locking up the alcohol and destroying the key.

I wouldn’t characterize it as an addiction so much as a compulsion: if I have internet access, then I find myself occupying my time instead of using my time. Kind of like watching people on TV being creative for an hour and finding your own situation unchanged at the end of the show. Surfing the web for an hour or two leaves me feeling exhausted, as if I’ve been working all that time, but of course I haven’t produced anything. More thoughts, more ideas, more ruminations, more blog entries, perhaps, but no work to speak of.

Am I the only one to experience this phenomenon? What do you think it means for the future of ubiquitous computing? The fact is, sometimes I need a break. Sometimes I need to “get away from it all”. Sometimes I need to cut down on the noise and distractions, ignore the blinking lights and flashing screens. Sometimes I need a clarity of focus and purpose to get work done. How do I turn off the ubiquitous computer?

Yet the curse is that when I return, the inbox is fuller, the IM conversations longer, the phone calls more urgent. My RSS reader reminds me of exactly how many posts I haven’t read, or conversely, how productive everyone else has been (even if it’s to write a blog entry)—I haven’t opened that thing in months: the quadruple digits of unread posts is just too much. When do we stop running the information economy and it starts to run us?

Thus, I currently find myself very much ensnared in a love/hate relationship with technology. At the end of the day, it’s practically Pavlovian: New mail? Check the inbox!

So let’s try a few days without the internet…

If you’re reading this, then the DNS changes have propagated and you’re now viewing content from my new host. Yay!

As for what’s going on with this blog: personal, professional…it’s all tied up together now, so I might as well let this blog reflect it. Once things change, I may reformat things, but until then it is what it is.

Time to freshen things up around here.

If it’s not painfully obvious, I haven’t been paying much attention to this blog for quite some time, and I’m not really in the mood right now to catch things up. Suffice to say that plans are afoot to make some changes to my web presence, and that this blog will eventually undergo some restructuring to de-emphasize the thesis focus and turn it into my main mouthpiece on the web.

I haven’t decided if I will merge my blogger account into this Wordpress blog, but I think in the long term it makes sense. It will just require a bit of work to manhandle everything around.

Phase one will be an attempt to live-blog the Emergence 2006 conference in Pittsburgh, starting Friday. Well, to be more accurate, the workshop starts Friday, the conference starts Saturday. As I’m participating in the workshop on Friday, I don’t know how much time there will be to live-blog about it, but I’ll definitely be doing the conference (assuming a wifi connection and laptop power, of course).

Right now I’m in the process of encoding videos for the website. Which website you may be asking? All will be revealed in time….

I’m in London for the next week or so, working on my thesis at live|work. I’ll be doing some iterative prototyping and checking out how things work around the office. Looks like it will be pretty cool.

I’ve be helping to debug and improve the RapLeaf site before its official launch. Don’t think I can talk about it just yet, but as I’ve noted before there are some similarities to my thesis…and some big differences. It’s a big playing field and lots of interesting things still to be done.

Regine at We Make Money Not Art has posted about the reputation management service project I did with Didier for the last Applied Dreams at IDII.

Oh, and I had some fish and chips tonight.

I was wondering why certain images in my blog were showing a relatively huge amount of traffic. Turns out somebody deep-linked that image to what appears to have been a pretty busy message board. Grrr.

All the more reason for me to move everything over to Flickr. At least then I know if people are looking at my photos, and I don’t have to worry about bandwidth problems. This is especially useful when dealing with large images. Rumor has it that there’s a handy tool for migrating images from Gallery over to Flickr. At some point I’ll tackle that task…hopefully with a faster internet connection!

I was also looking at .htaccess tricks, but it seemed like more of a hassle than necessary.

I must say that I’ve become a convert to putting as much as possible onto the internet. The more publicity for my photos and projects, the better.

A funny thing happened this afternoon. I posted an old video to YouTube.com, and within twenty minutes it was viewed over 60 times. I was editing the details for the file and when I clicked “update” I noticed that the stats read 44 views, which I thought was a mistake.

So I reloaded the page (which had just loaded) and the number was now 46 views. And three ratings.

It’s a 28 second clip of a wind-power generator model being disassembled. I made it about eleven years ago and it’s been on my portfolio site for a while…but I doubt it’s gotten as many hits over the last two years as it did in the last half hour.