Just thought I’d briefly mention this Italian interaction design/theory event. With Adam Greenfield, Bruce Sterling, Nicolas Nova and Ashley Benigno - who I’m proudly working with at HWL - amongst others.

Via Experientia: Putting people first.

It’s always nice to get some kind of confirmation that you’re heading for something good. That my senses aren’t way off and that what I’m doing might even be useful in a way. Let me explain.

As you may or may not know, I am doing a graduation project. When I started I had no idea I would be heading for a social interaction tool to be used in education, but hey, there you go. And to find an article in the “newspaper” - metro, wish I could find an online source of this article - , while evaluating the result from my little three-week qualitative reseach with fourteen twelve year olds in a school for media and arts, about the European Commission starting an investigation whether mobile phones are good for our children.

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We all know presence settings. I’m available, busy, away, out to lunch, offline etc.. This is all good and well, but obviously, this kind of presence is rather useless in a mobile context. I’m hardly ever away from my mobile, I’m offline in tunnels, and availability .. well, to be honest, how often do you turn down a phonecall without a comforting txt to explain.

And it’s exactly this type of text message which I won’t need to send you if you would know what I’m doing and where I am. I’ve always believed there’s room and need for an extended contact list, which informs you about your contacts, friend, colleagues, clients, family. So you don’t disturb them when they’re asleep, so you can check when they get into the office, so you can see if they’re in the bar around the corner. I don’t know if the developers of Jaiku considered these ideas, but even if they haven’t, I believe they’re heading the right way.

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Are mobile devices really enhancing our social habits?

It’s probably a question that’s been asked many many times before, but to which a good answer is still out in the open. We’ve all seen or maybe even experienced the problems in today’s society, e.g. happy slapping, conversations being interupted to get that call, loud music on the bus or tube, accidentily bumping into people because you’re talking on the phone, ignoring violence on the streets.. the list goes on and on.. And there is no apparent movement in the industry to acknowledge, let alone try and tackle these social changes. On the contrary, every product that’s been released to the market is focussed on preserving the mini-private space where you are not engaging in what’s going on around you at all. Voice calling, mobile TV, portable gaming, iPods, all destined to enable us to ignore everything and everyone around us alltogether. Where has the surprise element gone?

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PHLAT from Windows has just been released. It includes an advanced filter to find any kind of information stored on your desktop, by name, date, tag, folder, type. The ‘coolest’ feature is the ability to add tags to your content, as Flickr, Del.icio.us and other utils have shown, is a pretty nifty addition to add context to your data. A functionality that works better when used among groups of people as the aforementioned utils have shown, but still quite handy nonetheless.

It all sounds a bit Google desktop to me.

You’ve probably seen something similar to ‘my delicious tag cloud’ on loads of sites already, and you may, or may not have wondered what it does, not technically*, but visually. If you compare the del.icio.us links and my other links, it’s pretty clear what the effect of this cloud is. Be it so, I’m going to pretend (also to make it clearer to myself) you’re stupid (no offense) and explain it to you anyway (perhaps to open a little discussion).

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I’ve been following the debate on Web2.0 for a while now and initially couldn’t help thinking just about how it’s just another name for technologies we’ve been creating and using for a long time already. But reading more on the topic - yes, i know it’s very hard to avoid nowadays - it’s clear there’s more to Web2.0 than just plain Flash or AJAX RIA’s (Rich Internet Apps) or even hot air.

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