Meaning in Communication

New Frontiers in Publishing

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:57:09 +0200

I’m currently involved with a startup in digital publishing. My work will involve bringing the design thinking perspective from other fields I previously worked in to a field that is notoriously conservative. So naturally when I read the post of David Pogue about e-book piracy, I was dumbfounded by this gem of an admission:

Traditionally minded publishers are very much opposed to the idea that abandoning DRM is a viable business strategy. When Tor (as have others) did provide their material free of the consumer hassling technology and noticed no increase in piracy, the go-to explanation is that their case is special and does not apply to other publishers.

Tor acknowledges that its science-fiction/fantasy reader community “is close-knit, with a huge online presence, and with publishers, authors and fans having closer communication than perhaps some other areas of publishing do.”

Here is my take, though: No kidding Sherlock!

When the main disruptive force of the internet lies in disintermediation,¹ that’s where your business model needs to answer some pressing questions. And if you fail to see how creating a close-knit community that connects authors and readers is part of your new role in a digital environment, you deserve to be strong armed into irrelevance by Adobe, Amazon and their ilk.

Dear publishers: There is a choice to aim to be special, too! Create a better experience for readers. At least that’s what I’m going to do.

A fancy way to say: Making everyone in between producers and consumers obsolete. ↩

Visualising Data | Tactile visualisations: Inuit wood maps

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:54:00 +0200

Visualising Data | Tactile visualisations: Inuit wood maps:

While we are on the subject of physicality in interfaces (see my last post) I urge you to have a look at what Andy Kirk wrote about tactile maps. These maps are a great example of design as problem solving and introduce you to several affordances that are grossly underrepresented in current design.¹

The indigenous people along the arctic circle have overcome many challenges of the environment they inhabit. So that they don’t get lost at sea they designed a navigation tool to guide them along coast lines. Bear in mind that it needs to be reliable in the harshest of circumstances. Functional constraints clearly drove this design process. It just works.

Though there is some talk about tactile feedback for shape shifting phones. ↩

Building Facebook Home with Quartz Composer (by David O...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:47:14 +0200

Building Facebook Home with Quartz Composer (by David O Brien)

This is just the first in a series of videos that Dave O Brien created in a timely fashion: Some of you may have heard about the Facebook design team using Quartz Composer for prototyping their Home app.

The emphasis on animations resonates with another current debate, about the haptic experience that physical books provide. The result of that haptic experience should not come as a surprise to you, my endeared regular readers: There are affordances about mapping information to spatial and haptic cues that pictures under glass can’t provide.

When you read a book or magazine, you are navigating information in physical space. Your brain creates a rough map of the information that you are browsing while you are flipping page after page. Moreover, it draws upon past experiences with book space to inform the mental image of your current read and bestows you with a sense of empowerment over the text, and a feeling of serendipity.

Now, when you take away the physical feedback that paper provides to your senses, you are taking away functionality from the user interaction with the text. No feeling the weight of pages to tell how far into the text you are, no sense of halting and reversing the flick of a page in mid-air because you glanced something you want to inspect more closely.

But you know what pictures under glass can do for you to give you some design elements not available to print? That’s right. Animation. Hence the video above. The design team from Facebook realized just how much physicality matters, so they looked for a way to make their wireframes animate according to physics. Inertia, pseudo-gravity, all these sorts of things matter in animation.

I’m not saying that you can fully emulate the experience of physical objects with current digital technology. I’m saying that you need to make up for the shortcomings of our current interaction paradigm (pictures under glass) by introducing explicit feedback mechanisms. Visual feedback is the go-to choice most of the time. But sound or vibration is already available in many touch devices.

Bond Reporting Standards | Bella consults

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:52:14 +0200

Bond Reporting Standards | Bella consults:

How would you quantify a statement like

We believe [terrorists are coming]

against

It is probable that [again, something terrible].

This is one topic to really tickle my fancy: Data Visualization, Semantics and Intercultural Communication all rolled into one. Even though I disagree that setting standards in phrasing is the right course of action, I very much enjoy the research from Psychology of Intelligence Analysis prompting it.

If you have a means to convey information less ambiguously, do it! Words don’t mean the same to everyone. Neither do images, mind you, but there is a decent chance that some very low level visualizations are less wrought with semantic ambiguity. Semantic ambiguity is definitely a challenge for quantificational statements in natural languages and as I have recently experienced it can be a pain to overcome in intercultural communication.

My problems were merely communicating workload estimates across a diverse team. Imagine what different interpretations of threat levels expressed in natural language can do to intelligence sharing between different cultures. Read the article on words of estimative probability to get an idea.

Prezi Interface Considerations

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:48:50 +0200

I had some opportunity to develop high concept Prezis with various clients in recent months. In doing so I learned a lot about how far you can push the technology and in what scenarios the software plays to its strengths.¹

Mind you that Prezi works best as an interface for content you prepare with authoring tools outside of Prezi. If you have a means to create vector graphics in a flash file format, you can enjoy intricate layering and zooming effects to navigate your material.² As this brief introduction may show you, there are ways to overcome Prezi’s technical limitations for both presenting, and—even more relevant in my opinion—exploring information.

Prezi, much like other authoring tools, still suffers from a lack of widely recognized best practices and commendable design principles. Here’s to hoping I may provide a bit of useful input to their fashioning. More information is in the Prezi itself, and some files for download can be found at my lab.

This is not going to be a post about critiquing a product, even though there is ample opportunity to do so with Prezi. Some of its idiosyncracies are baffling, to say the least, and the kind of design decisions Prezi forces upon its users are a tough pill to swallow at times. But hey, I made it work and so can you. ↩
I fully intend to post some tutorials about how to create the right flash files for Prezi in the future. The one tool that makes it possible, other than flash itself, is pdf2swf. ↩

what's really great about Fantastical

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:56:26 +0200

what's really great about Fantastical:

Some interesting words from Dr. Drang about how critical a properly implemented feedback loop is for human computer interaction. Just days after I lauded Apple for being quite savvy about this whole human-computer interaction thing, he presents a case where they fall short. Rightly so.

I don’t use Fantastical, the tool that he discusses, but I do endorse his comments about usability through instant, incremental feedback.

[The animations are] not just eye candy. The animations are providing instant feedback on how Fantastical is parsing your words and, more important, they’re teaching you Fantastical’s syntax. This is tremendously useful because, despite the wonderful flexibility of NLP, there’s always a syntax and you need to learn it if you’re going to use the product. This lack of instant, incremental feedback is what makes Siri impenetrable to some people; you have to give Siri an entire command and wait to see how she interprets it.

Incidentally, instant incremental feedback is ever present as a repair strategy in human-human interaction. A puzzled expression on a face of your audience prompts you to rephrase what you just said, for example. These sort of natural interactions are what artificially designed interfaces need to imitate in order to make interacting with them feel natural, too. Read the post on All This to see feedback discussed in the context of an actual product.

Wealth Inequality in America (by politizane) I’m pretty...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:13:00 +0200

Wealth Inequality in America (by politizane)

I’m pretty late to the game here—everyone and their dog in the data-viz blogosphere must have linked to this video already—but I believe I should still make an effort to tell you why this video deserves so much recognition:

Wealth Inequality In America encapsulates how to craft a compelling narrative out of data.

I’d like to point out three noteworthy elements you can learn from it.

Contrary to popular belief you don’t need a call to action to drive your message. You will find that at the end of the video it will sum up the narrative by telling you to realize what the situation is. There is no nudge what you should do about it, no step for you to take after watching the video. The message is all about insight, not about action and it works better for it.
You can make a successful narrated animated infographic, an explainy video if you will, with somber pacing that goes over 5 minutes. The video starts off with suspense as the storytelling device to draw you in. Giving you just enough information to make you question your own knowledge and wishing to know what others think (always a powerful motivator, curiosity about our peers) and what you may not know. From the big reveal onwards the narrative kicks in and creates the 1% persona, giving the audience an avatar to picture themselves in, somewhere in the 99% range
Translating numbers into charts and charts into stories works best once you cover the angle of how these charts and numbers are relevant to your audience. Find that angle and you find a story you can tell with the data. Take cues from how this video breaks down the complexity into bite sized chunks. The very same technique could be used to sway a board when you have to present in a meeting, or get investors to follow your reasoning.

As a quip to Edward Tufte:¹ This presentation style surely could have empowered NASA engineers to prevent a catastrophe.

He is famous for writing groundbreaking books about data visualization. Unfortunately what he has to say about Powerpoint is just as popular, if ill informed. ↩

On Social Affordances, Google Glass & the iWatch

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0200

I think¹ Google Glass makes for a wonderful case study to introduce yet another design theory buzzword to wider recognition: Social Affordance. The problems and pushback that Google faces with their newest toy can largely be attributed to their lack of understanding of this concept: Technology is never an end unto itself. Rather it is the use, that, well, users get out of a given technology.

tl;dr: Google does not inform its design decisions with UX insights into social affordances, which shows with Glass. Apple has a track record showing they are good at that sort of thing – and I believe some form of wrist worn device is much better suited to usher in an era of ambient computation than a set of glasses.

Technology is not the issue.

Some of the most successful products arise out of the accidental realization of potential in a technology that its creators never envisioned. One striking example is that of the SMS, or text. A friend of mine at Vodafone told me the story of this one engineer who realized that the unused data stream resources in cellular networks could be turned into a feature. And low and behold, the users gobbled it up².

Users adopted this new feature because it empowered them to communicate through their phone without actually calling on the phone. The social affordance is that people can communicate even in situations where they can not³ speak. Be it students doing it under their desks, people in crowded places, people wishing to avoid a direct conversation, they all found a common use for it and established new social conventions around the use of mobile phones, too.

With Google Glass we have a new feature, that of ever present ambient computing. But we, as potential users, don’t yet have a clear vision how that feature would fit into our daily lives. More importantly, we don’t quite know how it could fit into our social lives. A permanent HUD, especially one that is coupled with a camera, is inherently disruptive. Even if Glass wearers tune out the block of interface in their vision over time⁴ the ever present camera won’t be ignored so easily. The social affordances of Google Glass are too much of a disruptive element in social interaction to be gobbled up the way texts were.

With Glass, Google ignores the cultural construct that is the private vs public distinction.

When we talk about ambient computing, we need to mitigate two things: Attention management of distractive information streams and feedback mechanisms to control the computing layer. We need some sort of feedback to control our computing device. Something that tells us when a task is completed, if more input is required and what the results are. But this feedback is competing against the sensory input of the world that we navigate. And make no mistake, the most pressing sensory input actually stems from the social layer. Few things are more distracting than clearly stated disapproval of our peers.

If whatever we doing with our devices becomes too much of a disruptive element to our social responsibilities, that means we cannot use those devices in social settings. There is a limit to the alienation that both we and people in our surroundings can put up with before harsh penalties kick in: You face more than just a disapproving look in the cinema if you start talking on the phone during the film. Lest this is not clear enough for you to conclude on your own: You will be kicked out when you fail to adhere to the social conventions of watching a movie in a public theater.

This social layer to the use of technology is where appeals to technological affordances themselves fall flat: Yes, there are other technologies that allow you to film others. But they don’t come with the same social affordances. The excuse that the device you are wearing has other purposes besides filming will not eliminate the fact that you are clearly communicating “Hey, I’m wearing this gadget that empowers me to covertly film everything and everyone, at any time.” That is the message people will see first and foremost, when being confronted with such a device.

Ignoring consequence of social affordances is bad UX. “Ambient” needs mitigation to not be disruptive.

Believe you me: Outside the bubble of techno evangelists most people still don’t care about implications of data mining and this whole internet thing. They do care if you point a camera at them. As soon as Google Glass is in the evening news,⁵ and people can tell that your funny glasses are actually a camera, that is when they will care about you constantly flouting social rules.

It is at that very point of critical mass that the propensity of the technology to be so useful a product that its merits outweigh its strain on existing social etiquette is put to the test. Is there actually a benefit with mass appeal in the product? Or, as has been said before: Are you sure that the features you build are actually relevant to your audience? Relevant enough to overcome obstacles to adoption?

These questions can, in part, actually be answered ahead of time. You can at least identify the obstacles your product may be facing, if you do due diligence and research the social affordances within existing cultural norms before you are trying to change them. Low and behold, there is actually a return on investment with proper UX design. It pays to understand how humans interact with not just their tools, but each other.⁶

Ambient Computing and how to make it accessible to people is the relevant concept.

The success of a product is not defined by its features. At the end of the day users only care about how they benefit from using it.⁷ And we must understand that the benefit must be very obvious for them. Especially if a new technology threatens their habits. Humans are change averse.

I find it a bit ironic. For all the data they gather about their users, Google suck at understanding human behavior. To counter another point that has been raised in the online discussion: Google being evil is not the problem average users have about entrusting their data to them. People can put up with hypocrisy and even oppressive behavior as long as their needs are being served. They won’t put up with a company who does not understand their needs and hence fails to serve them.

It is mind boggling that a company who faced the kind of pushback in Germany, where their very lack of insight into the distinction of public vs private came back to bite them, seems unable to learn from the experience. Mind you that Google is not alone in this. There is a tendency among US based companies to fall prey to the hegemonic bias, a tendency even more prevalent in Silicon Valley. Tech is run by people who are so enamored with their privileged position of “knowing better” that they are completely blinded to their own privileges in the first place. They are oblivious to different cultural realities.

Exacerbating the hegemonic bias is that social in general is not Google’s forte. Just look at their efforts with Vave or Google+. Understanding social affordances, was never part of the design process in Google’s previous endeavors. All their tangible products, from self-driving cars to glasses, are driven by technological solutions that neglect social relevance for a blind belief in technology.

While Google Glass has lots of technological potential, potential to be a landmark that ushers in new interaction models between humans and computers, navigating the obstacles of disrupting innovation requires a perspective beyond belief in technology.

Navigating user expectations is Apple’s game.

There is a several billion pound gorilla in the room when we talk about user experience and market disruption. It’s highly likely that there will be some sort of wearable computing device coming out of Cupertino, too. But I’d wager that it will be quite different from Google’s attempt at it. Because Apple is actually paying attention to how technology fits into the lives of a mainstream audience. Heck, they are marketing themselves not on technological prowess of their inventions, but on the experience they deliver.

Apple is so focused on the user experience of non-geeks that they sometimes alienate a tech oriented clientele.⁸ That approach seems to be working out rather well for them. In fact, Apple’s ability to couple engineering ingenuity with an understanding of how people interact with technology led them to completely change the mobile phone paradigm into one of mobile computing.

While the mobile phone paradigm may have settled into a new status quo, it is safe to assume that mobile computing has not.⁹ Gathering personalized and ambient data and repurposing it through computation is the game that everyone wants in on. Add a layer of ubiquitous connectedness and sharing, and start connecting the dots which existing technologies could be brought together to afford users with meaningful applications. Meaningful in this case has a strong connotation with catering to preconceived expectations about using technology, mind you.

An iWatch makes sense.

There are always different options available to solve similar problems. But now that I have argued why I don’t think that Google has presented us with a solution that a mainstream audience would currently embrace, I think it’s fair I argue for one that I think does take social affordance into consideration.

Think of texting again (SMS in Europe): In various youth cultures, definitely in Japan, but even at Google’s very own doorstep in the US, people don’t use their phones for calling. A significant demographic texts, rather than speaks on the phone. Obviously it does not make it less awkward for them to speak on the phone when they speak through their glasses instead of a handheld device, much less speak to a computing device on their head in public.

So for reasons beyond the technological problems with speech recognition, there is a case to be made that talking to our gadget should not be the main interface option. Tactile or kinetic interfaces would tie in nicely with the “wearable” aspect of ambient computing. It would also be very discrete. But human cognitive propensity is just too heavily skewed towards visual processing that a main gateway into mobile computing could ever forego a visual interface. Hence, using touch (and speech to a lesser extent) for input, coupled with visual feedback is still the go-to fundamental for any break through in ambient computing.

It follows that the visual interface component should allow for ever present availability, while maintaining a bit of discreteness. What experience better to leverage than one that is already an established mode of interaction: The watch. As an added bonus it is close to able bodied people’s preferred mode of manipulating their surroundings and can track lots of data points originating in that interaction. Let me stress this fact about a wrist-worn device: It can record highly relevant data through proximity and kinetic sensors and it does not even need a camera to do it.

It’s hard to comprehend nowadays just how much of a disruption the introduction of time pieces was back in the day. Try to imagine a world where you did not set appointments by the minute, where your day was not compartmentalized in arbitrary segments, but governed by the necessity of tasks and the rhythm of nature. And yet, the mainstream application in which personalized time-telling wound up in is that of a wrist watch.

My main argument about why I believe we will see wrist-worn ambient computing devices soon is not one of technological affordance. It is that a watch is an established mode of interacting with information, a treasure trove of mental models about fitting technology into our daily routines. The user experience must drive design decisions, especially if we are actively trying to create a disruptive technology. Leveraging existing expectations about how to interact with technology greatly enhances our chances to create a product with mass appeal. Creating something much more discreet than a camera on your nose in the way of providing a background noise, a potentially distracting information stream into our social interactions seems like a sensible approach to me. Many companies seem to agree, with lots of rumors of smart watches going around.

But cracking ambient computing will require more than bolting an existing product onto another. A smart phone on your wrist does not yet bring a tangible improvement to what we currently have.¹⁰ Taking the affordances of both apart and applying those that are useful to a disruptive device will be the kicker.

I’ve had an interesting exchange with @iA, @jeroenvangeel and @rafweverberg on Twitter some time ago that prompted me to write down a few thoughts of mine. This blog post elaborates on the ideas I touched upon in 140 character segments. ↩
Some may even go so far to say that this one realization singlehandedly changed the business model of network providers, without a bit of new code being written. ↩
Or simply don’t want to. ↩
Even without ever experiencing wearing one I’m pretty confident that habituation will kick in to that effect, so users won’t be distracted by the hovering icons. ↩
Still the yard stick of mainstream in all the countries that tech people would consider “markets” for their expensive gadgets. ↩
There surely are an abundance of points about McLuhan to be made here. Since this post is already running quite long, I ask that you make them yourselves or, if you feel so inclined, nudge me to address them later. ↩
Incidentally: bragging rights about specs have very limited appeal outside of a zealous tech audience. ↩
Yes, skeuomorphism is more than a fad. It can be a functionally motivated design choice, and has been just that in many of Apples pushes for mass appeal. ↩
I would even go so far to say that whatever paradigm shift happens in the mobile computing space will have profound repercussions on the mobile phone space. Will smart phones continue to drive the computational work and distribute it to satellite devices, or will their computing aspect be replaced by something new? Either way, if you want to skate to where the puck is going to be, don’t bank on smart phones serving the functions they do now in the future. ↩
Really, it took me this long to get to a KnightRider reference? Anyway, the Hoff is popular in Germany for a) his wicked car and the remote on his wrist (think about it - satellite computing, not a smart watch) and b) the unbelievable outfit he wore on a historic night. An ensemble that could have brought down the Berlin Wall even without him performing in it. ↩

From abstraction through application to theory in reverse...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:46:39 +0100

From abstraction through application to theory in reverse chronological order. Part three: Abstraction.¹

Max Hattler: Collision on Vimeo ↩

From abstraction through application to theory in reverse...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:44:00 +0100

From abstraction through application to theory in reverse chronological order. Part two: Application.¹

Jr. Canest for Buck: TakePart: Participant Media - Waiting For ‘Superman’ - Infographic on Vimeo ↩

From abstraction through application to theory in reverse...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:39:00 +0100

From abstraction through application to theory in reverse chronological order. Part one: Theory.¹

Column Five Media: The Value of Visualization on Vimeo ↩

Lost in computer mediated communication...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 01:26:00 +0100

I recently had a text chat conversation with an online acquaintance of mine, a wonderful fellow who shall not be named. My perception of him was shaken, however, when he concluded our spirited exchange about how to manage complexity in visual representations with the word “bye.”

Only that he did not, in fact, write “bye.” I was about to get comfortable for some football watching¹ and completely shellshocked by his mastery of German football mockery – not to mention the fact that we never discussed football or my affliction to the game. Talk about a non sequitur.

He wrote “Freilos!” which is a rather popular (among fans of the beautiful game) German reference to a cup fixture, where one team is deemed enough of a pushover to claim that the game need not be played in the first place.

And if you, my dear readers, are as puzzled as I was, chances are you are either not a native speaker of English, as am I, or not a sports fan. Because the solution why my conversation partner chose this strangest of greetings is that computers are stupid. Stupider still, if algorithms have to operate out of context.

Because when entering the word “bye” into Google translate, “Freilos” is the first hit that the machine spits out for German. Whoever programs an algorithm to rank an obscure sports term above the most commonly used English signal to end a conversation, I take my hats² off to you master prankster. The payoff may be rare, but, oh so sweet.

It just so happens that “bye” is a homograph. Never send a machine to do a human’s job.

The beautiful game. You play the ball with your feet. ↩
For emphasis I did wear two of them prior to composing this blog entry. ↩

headlikeanorange: A red kangaroo (Natural World - BBC) Must...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:49:29 +0100

headlikeanorange:

A red kangaroo (Natural World - BBC)

Must work harder.

UX and Localization

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:12:00 +0100

It is more by happenstance than by design, but I came across lack of localization as a user experience issue on several occasions recently.¹

I don’t think that it is by chance that most of the issues revolved around a lack of empathy for non-angloamerican users. Many of the biggest web services and tools still stem from the US. Being from the US entails that you experience the hegemonic bias² privilege of being blissfully unaware of your lack of empathy for needs and expectations of non-angloamerican users ³. I do wonder if UX design teams in US based companies really pay enough attention to intercultural communication issues.

Case in point: Several times in the last weeks did a web form refuse to accommodate my non-US data, and in turn I was forced to BS the system go gain access. Surely that’s not the kind of user experience you want your customers from abroad to have?

Moreover, software that is meant to be deployed to a world wide audience often lacks localization features that are critical for the tool to work in other cultural contexts. Mail automatization was but one example where I cursed the Intertubes. Surely the T/V distinction is relevant to a large enough part of your users world wide, what with the European languages (and their colonial offspring) all featuring it? Well, almost all. English being the one sizable exception. How many Spanish, Portuguese and French speakers are you willing to exclude from your service?

There is more to honorifics in other languages, where implementation may be more complicated than introducing a toggle switch. I should know, because the intricacies of Japanese were part of my personal struggles. And yet, would it not be worthwhile to spend resources to overcome the limitations of your tool once you are expanding your target audience?

Apple for example still does not provide me with an easy toggle in my address book to mark if I am on first name terms or still on last name terms with a business contact of mine. That is critical information in many cultural contexts, and it’s not like Apple is struggling to make ends meet. Then again they are notorious for screwing over their non-US customers anyway. USD prices converted into other currencies, like EUR, without doing any actual conversion except for changing the currency sigh are not unheard of.

But most companies cannot rely on zealous customers to overcome their apathy towards foreign users. There is a reason so many well designed tools fail to get any traction outside of the US. It’s because they are not designed for us. So stop wondering, why your marketing does not work for you and start investing in localization expertise for your UX design team. Localization is about much more than translating your interface.

Seeing that I intend to share my experience with you more frequently than in the past year, it is probably a good idea to quit putting things on my radar into an ever overflowing task box: Rather than waiting to post until I can show off my solution (that I may never get around to create) I should think that perhaps smarter minds than I may find it worthwhile to be made aware of those issues. ↩
$%&, 1504 Google hits. I thought I was more of a sociology hipster. Anyway, more chance for you to read up on your Gramsci about hegemony. It’s not a leftist-liberal conspiracy, it’s about understanding how experiences frame your perception of the world. ↩
Shall we call them “core removed users”? Peripheral users would be my preferred term here, but unfortunately it is being used with a slightly different meaning in UX design already. I mean users from the periphery (as opposed to core) in the sociological sense. Yes, I want to make sociology a thing in UX circles. There are some pretty well thought out articles out there that deal with the sorts of phenomena where design is still struggling to find a name for. ↩

It is common knowledge that YouTube is full of copyright...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 22:25:00 +0100

It is common knowledge that YouTube is full of copyright pitfalls. Less known is that some of the troubles are a very peculiar case of copyright trolls who exploit the automated system of ContentID. I am rather convinced that at least to some extent there is a defraud of advertisement revenue involved, yet Google is not the victim, but rather users of iLife music.

I have in the past been notified of copyright infringement of my work on YouTube. More than once did a third party claim they held the rights to the music I used in my tutorials. I don’t know the motivation behind the claims, it may well just have been a matching algorithm going wrong, yet I do know that they were in error. As a consequence my ad-free videos were no longer ad free, and the spoils went to the party who claimed they had the rights, as confirmed by a matching algorithm of YouTube.

The thing is, though, that the Content ID database has never been updated to eliminate false positives from Apple’s royalty free iLife sound library. Which puts a lot of Apple users in the position of being confronted with unwarranted copyright claims. Once one of the Apple stock loops is being used in a track that is in the YouTube Content ID database, the algorithm returns a match for your videos whenever they also use that loop.

This is not a new problem. Google has at least acknowledged that their previous process for users to dispute copyright claims was plain ridiculous and at least made it manageable, as the video above should explain. But they know about the whole false positive issue with iLife music. As does Apple. Lots of angry mails have been sent both ways. And yet, neither party has introduced a process that would simply prevent iLife music to trigger the content matching algorithm.

Raoul Pop has located the problem and monitored user rage a few years ago. Still, the false positives hit users today.

I have traced back the pesky Kahuna Jack “Avon” track that blatantly uses an iLife music sample with a few added vocals to a self publishing service¹ and did the same for

William Pasley: Music for Hyper-Teens, distributed by: CD Baby and 4Century: Side by Side, distributed by: Believe ²

I don’t think playing a game of whack-a-mole is going to do any good, though. While I hope that YouTube may some day come around and put their users first³ and update their data base to eliminate the false positives that iLife users have to deal with, I went another route.

I’m producing my own tracks to avoid the issue in the future. Like I promised in a previous post, I’m making the track where I used absolutely no loops or samples freely available to you. Do whatever the heck you want with it. I won’t hold you, nor be held accountable for any mischief you intend to cause with it, mind you.

Here you go: Electric Sheep.

about the exploitative nature of which I hesitate to speculate for fear of litigation. ↩
I’ll add to the list if I get more YouTube copyright notifications in the hope that Google may help others. ↩
Which may be naive, because YouTube does profit from having ad-free videos being turned into ad-serving content, after all. ↩

Worldbuilding in Presentation Design

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:48:33 +0100

Worldbuilding in Presentation Design:

Happy New Year everyone!

I told you I’d write more about presentation theory and I finally made good on it. Better than most New Years resolutions after a week, I’d say.

Anyway, it has taken me some time to get up to speed working full time with BrightCarbon, but I am starting to get the hang of things. Which bodes well for those of you who would like to see more stuff like this: Cognitive science informed writing about presentation methods. This one is framed in a way that’s quite geeky, I’ll admit.

Then again I am of the firm persuasion that Presentation Design has a lot to learn from Game Design. Game designers excel at applied psychology to drive human interaction with information. The methods they use to solve the communication issues between man, woman and machine are a treasure trove for other design professions. See for yourself:

Since I can’t be bothered to waste my time combatting...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:08:51 +0100

Since I can’t be bothered to waste my time combatting fraudulent content matches for licensed music (like from the iLife suite) on YouTube, I figured I’d just make my own.¹

This track should loop rather well, if you cut it up in the right places. And it’s yours to use under however close me using Garage Band synthesizers to create a track from scratch gets you to the WTFPL. Which means I don’t care what you do with it and will not hold you, nor be held, accountable for any mischief you cheeky little monkeys are going to be causing with it.

More on this later. I’m currently uploading a video to YouTube that holds the back story to my annoyance with Apple, YouTube and the Content Match algorithm. ↩

As you can see I’ve experimented with gifs recently. Their...

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 01:06:00 +0100

As you can see I’ve experimented with gifs recently. Their most debilitating limitation lies in the way they encode color, so I tried to mitigate that problem by introducing a halftone effect that breaks up the gradients a bit.

However, they do allow for transparency, which makes them useful in a lot of scenarios where I want to use a sophisticated (if gradient-free) animation. Powerpoint comes to mind, where the transparent gif becomes something like a poor guy’s (or gal’s) green screen.

I prepare an animation in Motion¹ and export it as a movie with a transparent background. From there I use a gif converter to create a gif in the size I want and import the gif to powerpoint.² Thankfully the 2010 version unlike its predecessors allows for the animation settings of the gif to prevail, making a looping animation on a slide possible.

Check out the resulting effect for yourself and download the free Christmas Card that I designed for BrightCarbon. You can experience the animated Christmas motif in its full glory. In the true Christmas Spirit we made it a competition, so please do vote for me while you’re at it. The winner gets Christmas Eve off. Or at least out of the office at six. Ish. ³

Or After Effects, Blender or whatever animation software you use. ↩
If you want to use an animated gif on Tumblr, make sure that it is less than an MB in size or else it will have its animation stripped. Grrr. ↩
Seriously, go download my file and help me. Tell all your friends, too. Also tell the people you don’t like. Pretty please! ↩

I was digging through some old bookmarks of mine that were...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:36:24 +0100

I was digging through some old bookmarks of mine that were relevant to upcoming work in which I will attempt to wed presentation design and motion graphics. That’s when I came across this little gem from Marco Bagni, a motion graphics artist from Berlin. Obviously not all of it translates to the way I envision dynamic infographics¹ to work, but wow, lots of inspiration in a very compact space.

InfoGraphic Reel (by Marco Bagni - LostConversation)

Dynamic infographics is a working title for the concept I’m testing. This concept will have to work in the goldilocks condition paradigm of dual channel coding, the marketing phrase I invented for the method in which presentations and narrated animations, aka explainy videos, combine verbal and visual information. Catchy isn’t it? ↩

I consider explainy videos a particular genre of information...

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:12:00 +0100

I consider explainy videos a particular genre of information visualization that follows established conventions by now. The video presented here is actually several years old,¹ and yet I find it still works quite well as an example of many of these conventions:

A narrated script is being enhanced through simple motion graphics to illustrate complicated concepts and break them down into more easily comprehensible chunks. The visuals are closely related to information graphics, but can rarely stand alone, they need the narration to make sense. Using context dependent graphics helps set up a goldilocks condition² of a cognitive gap. Neither the narrative nor the visuals are overpowering, both complement each other to facilitate an unencumbered uptake by the viewer. Other videos may feature more flourish to leverage the novelty effect, then again keeping the visuals simple helps a design to stay timeless.

To finally make good on old promises (this is only the beginning, btw) you can download the video from my lab. You may edit the video file, translate it, put a new voice track on or put subtitles on there as you see fit. Just please extend me the curtesy of a link, if you may, and do at least include a mention of my name, Jakob Jochmann, as the original source.

Now for the script to help you with translating the narration:

Did you know the word politics comes from ancient Greek “polis” — the city state in which the first kind of democracy was carried out by its citizens? They, like us today, identified problems and discussed them. We do it on the streets and in bars and sometimes begrudgingly at thanksgiving dinners. In Athens the citizens all came together on a designated hill outside of the city to discuss current issues and create policy solutions. Every free man, literally only free men by the way, had a say and a vote to decide on a policy for each issue. Thus word on the street was transformed into politics. This input from citizens into policy making is what we call direct democracy.

Modern nation states, like Germany in our example here, do not share one common public space where all citizens could meet. Reaching an understanding about common issues merely by talking them over is unfeasible for the amount of people that would have to be included in our modern societies. The problems of our time are very much different from those of ancient Greece in three ways: Because of the diversity among our citizens mitigating their issues is far more complex. Moreover, to be a citizen today is no longer a vocation. Unlike the men of Athens we usually have to work to earn our living and do not have the time to spend all of our day pondering and discussing political issues.

That may be part of the reason why many people today feel they do not have the adequate expert knowledge about those issues to contribute to the political sphere. What most modern democracies do instead, then, is have designated representatives from the populace devote their full time to be professional politicians. They carry out the public discussion of issues in our place. Mass media channels their discussions back to our societies. But only the politicians get to decide on those issues in the designated political arena.

We, the public, do get the chance to vote for a representative of one world view or political persuasion in certain intervals, usually every few years. In most of our democratic systems the representatives are being organized through party affiliation. The majorities that come about in the election then get to decide on current issues and turn them into policies for as long as th ey are elected. We regular citizens do not get to have an input on policy making during that time. This system of politics is what we call (for purposes of this explanation) indirect democracy.

Recently there are people who are no longer satisfied with such a rigid system that all but eliminates the input of citizens from policy making. They argue that any citizen at any time should have the chance to make their voice heard in the policy making process, even if they do not want to become full time politicians. Full time politicians and parties may still be useful, but every citizen should be given a vote for every issue on the table. In this system, people may choose to delegate their vote to another person, whom they trust to make an informed decision in their place, who in turn may delegate those collected votes further on to yet somebody else, a politician who stands for a certain world view, perhaps. They may also choose to elect professional politicians themselves. And now people also get to vote on policies directly.

Now there are several ways in which the input from people may be transformed into policy. Moreover, whenever there is a particular issue in which a person has such a strong opinion they do not want to trust anyone else to make the decision for them, they can take back their vote from the person they delegated it to, and vote on the policy themselves. It is this fluid alternation between direct democracy and indirect democracy that gives name to the proposed system of liquid democracy.

Modern technology has made a public space that all citizens can inhabit possible. Instead of on a hill outside the city we may meet in cyberspace. We can discuss events online to determine issues that warrant policy making. Collaboration tools, of which Wikipedia is but one small example, can facilitate ways in which many people can have an input on policies. And computers and modern cryptography can tally votes and the delegation of votes so we can decide on those policies. This way all citizens could partake in policy making once again, much like on the Agora, the hill outside of Athens.

Originally I created the video as a product of a class on democratic theory in political science. It just so happened that at the time I was the first person to publish something on the concept of liquid democracy that is still in its infancy. It also happened that the class was in German and I have since received many requests by interested parties to make the video available in a way that the rest of the world can reuse it. Done. ↩
The goldilocks condition is named after the tale of Goldilocks And The Three Bears, in which a girl gangster ruthlessly robs some poor animals blind of the things that are “just right” to her. In terms of how a cognitive gap can be just right it is the amount of cognitive work that an audience has to put in to understand a concept. If understanding requires too much of a leap to a conclusion, the audience will fail to make that leap. If getting the meaning out of something is too trivial, on the other hand, an audience gets bored and loses the incentive to follow the information stream of the narration along, because they think they already understood all there is to understand and switch off. ↩