The Future of Products #ndf2012

The Future of Products
Dave ten Have, Ponoko, davetenhave
How digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing changes the way products are designed and used.

We sit at the centre of a supercollider - social, cultural and technical changes in the way things are made. The orthodox of getting something made on the other side of the world is changing. Looping back around to the way things used to be made - by ourselves. A manner focused on relevance, "customer of one".

What if the carbon component of a product/transportation were transparent, priced into the product? How do you design a factory with all we know today?

Keep the point of instantiation as close to point of consumption as possible. Instead of putting factory in China, smear it across the surface of the Earth. A distributed manufacturing system.

Built the Ponoko platform made up of

• a catalogue of digital product designs
• catalogue of materials
• digital fabrication hardware (eg 3d printing but other tools too)
• buyers

This last part is the hard part. Etsy was and remains dominant in this space...

At core, system is a file checking mechanism. Designed a design language - design checking in order to allow credit card charging. Have relationships with eg electronics components producers so people can develop very complex products.

Achievements: Have moved amateurs to professionals - people using this to run their own business. Tapped into inter-generational shift and cultural shift around the maker movement.

Diagram showing level of need of something crossed with degree of effort to create it - intersection is point of relevance.

Use the network to give you reach. Move fast, iterate, eschew IP protection. Quotes someone saying "If I were to apply for a patent, by the time I got it I'd be onto my 10th product."

Someone using Kickstarter to determine whether people want it and whether people would fund it. TechShop for local prototyping, fabrication, and Ponoko for digital prototyping and fabrication.

Future of products - that people can build their physical environment in same way as digital environment.

The tales we can tell #ndf2012

The tales we can tell
Tim Sherratt and Chris McDowall
The growing proliferation of digital sources provides opportunities to view the past in different ways. We can analyse textual content of documents, extract and compare information from images, and build all manner of impressive graphs and visualisations to discern new patterns and insights. But this data has its origins in human activity. Behind each data point is a multitude of stories, as different as they are the same. By abstracting these experiences, the world of big data can become detached and alienating. How do we take advantage of quantitative techniques for contextualisation while holding on to the differences, the anomalies, the contradictions that continue to nourish and intrigue us?
Using examples drawn from a variety of collections and projects, Tim and Chris will investigate ways of bringing the two perspectives together. How can we construct interfaces that enable us to move freely across gulfs of scale and meaning? How can we present online narratives that embed multiple contexts? How can we use machine- readable data to frame and enrich our human-sized stories?

Tim: What happens when we bring stories and data together?

The excitement of linked open data is about making meaning. Explore, wonder, linger, sometimes stumble. The frustration of linked open data is that we talk as if it was all just engineering - a big industrial plumbing project. Can instead be a craft, created with love - or in anger. Linked open data will be a success not when we've linked everything to DBpedia, but when we've created thriving communities.

Western tradition equates knowledge with accumulation. Linked data promises Lots More Stuff. It'd be a tragedy if all we ended up with was a bigger database or better search engine. Want enriched stories, embedded meaning.

Did a presentation once adding triples - but presentation and triples were still separate. Want to create something not with a platform ("sneaky server-side stuff"), something anyone could do. Plain text, no markup. Hacked together javascript to work with text in document, get data from elsewhere, and: Live demo. Script inspects text onscreen and displays visible entities to the right. (The audience is audibly wowed.) Right now most data comes from within document, but sometimes only includes an identifier and pulls info from other sources. Rough demo and long to do list - but gives ideas on how to create data-rich stories.

Just used HTML, RDFA, and some javascript libraries. Wanted it to be accessible. "Access" not just the power to consume but also the power to create. Doesn't want to live in a world where data is something other people collect for us. Wants "slow data". Not the giant global graph, but data artisans hand-crafting stories into a messy tapestry.

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Chris: Showing DigitalNZ listing thumbnails which link to institutional landing pages. Thinks it's great if you know what you're looking for. Tells of being in museum - not looking for a specific thing but just exploring. When online, don't want to look at a postage stamp.

On a screen there's so little real estate. Most compelling part of an image is typically the face. So took images (all 21,000 of them) and passed through OpenCV to extract 16,500 faces. Started experimenting with tile placement algorithms.

Composited images into a single image (in five clusters eg the area of soldiers' faces) displayed with a maptiler interface: can zoom out to full mosaic or zoom into individual image. Wants online but first needs to add a metadata overlay and a clickthrough to source.

Has questions: Is this useful? Would this scale? Does this automatic cropping respect the images?

Sembl, the game of resemblance #ndf2012

Sembl, the game of resemblance
Catherine Styles, @cathstyles
Sembl is a powerful system for thinking in a playful, dialogic, creative way. Cath will introduce Sembl through its initial manifestation as a real-time group adventure game at the National Museum of Australia, and explore how its play cultivates polyphonic, associative thinking, and new ways of knowing. She will explain where the game comes from and speculate on where it could go, in physical museum space but especially on the web, as an engine of open and linked data, and a game- based social learning network.
This game of resemblance has been gestating a long time, so Cath is stoked to share the story of its emergence.

[ETA: Cath's own images, notes and clips from the presentation.]

Sembl
Game derives from Charles Cameron's "Hipbone Game" who got the idea from Herman Hesse's "Glass Bead Game".

Started as an iPad game at National Library of Australia. Users make connections between objects (a branding iron and a breastplate "label bodies"; leg irons and a Welsh organ both "involve keys"), which are then rated according to how interesting they are. What makes a resemblance interesting? Makes you think about things in different ways.

Developed on paper, tested with kids, then moved to a digital prototype and tested with same kids. This got them even more interested in getting into the museum itself.

Co-authorship, radical trust, open authority, new epistemology. Meaning not just imposed by museum, created by visitors. Game provides structure for dialogue between museum and visitor and among visitors.

linked data --- linked link data
identy --- similarity
logical --- analogical
prescribed --- freeform
comprehensive --- generative

Those creating network links learn network thinking.

"You kill what you categorise." @ffunch
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant" - Emily Dickinson

Image of an exhibit colocating slave shackles with fine silverware

Open Museum had a game where users posted "this image is similar to that" until the chain of images looped around to the first image again.

"Every move you make is a futher link in the pattern that connects. Every move you make is a creative leap." - Charles Cameron on Sembl

Beyond social #ndf2012

Beyond Social
DK @justadandak
If social (media) is no longer the new shiny set of tools that everyone gasps at then what are the next set of questions? In this fast-paced session, DK will balance his presentation with overarching cross-sector 'big picture' strategies right through to platform-specific tools and techniques which deliver.
DK (yes, just a D and a K) is a social media advisor who has helped people like UNICEF, BBC, the Gates Foundation, Welsh National Assembly etc. He lives on the internet at justadandak.com. @justadandak

Not going to talk about "Why Twitter is cool" because assumes we already know that.

Shows interactive TV from 1953 Winky Dink where kids had printouts and at some point in show it told them to join the dots.

April 20th someone became first person to edit Wikipedia 1,000,000 times - rewarded by Wikipedia with a day named for him.

Quick dirty simple ideas for museums (people are already aggregating stuff for you- why not borrow/steal/embed existing work?). Problem is at conference people get excited and then realise they have to go back to work.

"Culture eats strategy for lunch" - Peter Drucker. We need a culture that embraces social media - it's not one person's job. Doesn't mean everyone needs a Twitter account, but everyone needs to embrace idea.

(Lots of animated gifs in this slideshow.)

We need to become a lot more curious about other people's work. Not just within GLAM but outside the sector. Social media lets us do that with RSS feeds.

Currently we think of our website as a destination. But the most popular places on the planet are not destinations, they're intersections. Google's popular but we don't go there to stay there - we go there to go somewhere else. Same with Twitter. We should be an "intersection of amazingness".

"Trust people to know that there's a back button on their browser."

Recommends Rework by Fried. DK wrote notes as read it summarising it, posted to blog. Two weeks later retweeted by author (who "could have gone a different way with that") and got tens of thousands of hits on his blog - and was then remixed by someone else adding colour; and then someone in Sweden remixed that into a more corporate-style format. Nothing the author could have planned!

Ideas - "Social media Tuesday" once a month for social media geeks to get together over lunch and share - build culture

For a long time Mr Potato was sold without the potato because they assumed you already had one.

Clip of William Gibson talking about how we can get a bit "iPads, meh. gene therapy, whatever" about the present. DK says instead of looking forward to future, should sometimes focus on using the cool stuff that already exists.

Could ask us "Who's got a social media strategy?" and hands would go up. But what if he asked "Who's got a cultural strategy?"

New Memory Palaces and the Sublime #ndf2012

Piotr Adamczyk, @adamczyk, Google Art Project
Piotr has been exploring the possibilities for exchange between practices in the sciences and evaluation techniques from the arts. Most recently he led development on the Google Art Project. Before that he held an analyst position with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a background in Mathematics and Computer Science, Piotr holds graduate degrees in Human Factors and Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Piotr has authored papers and organized workshops for Association for Computing Machinery conferences centred on human-computer interaction, and served as a Program Committee member for ACM Creativity & Cognition in 2007 and 2009. His recent work is focused on the use of open/linked data in cultural heritage institutions.

Shows images of museum content contrasting with museum data... Worked on Museum Data Exchange Project with OCLC

At one pointed had to scrape own website to get data sharable. Has used Yahoo Pipes. Tried this with a single object - what about with a whole collection? V&A infinite scroll. [Google, DuckDuckGo, etc do this - why not library catalogues and databases?] SFMOMA ArtScope lets you see an overview of the whole collection but still distancing, doesn't give you context or differences. SFMOMA Collections Online Visualization Tool - Beta makes it into a graph.

Got into Google Art Project as a Met employee. Now working on backend metadata and systems. 36102 artworks from 184 collections from 43 countries - 2 from New Zealand. Will take any nonprofit institution, copyright-free or -cleared content. Not replacing existing platforms but creating another one. Not just the art but also a streetview component currently in 55 galleries. (2m-tall trolley that someone walks behind and gallery says where to go.)

Adding features - In Google can do things quickly compared to "museum time". Eg user galleries, compare features to compare two artworks eg a sketch and a finished painting. Unplanned benefit of aggregation. Quickly added a Hangouts feature, so can take people through guided tour. Goggles - image recognition software for mobile devices to lead back to institution website.

"Memory Palace" (Wikipedia, WikiHow)

Lots of photos of exhibits here, and Flickr groups - What's in your bag?, Bookshelf project - musing about how we visualise collections of things.

Google Art Project can only give a sense of what's measurable, a sense of what institution has said is most significant. "But what we do well is we do everything at once."

Brings us back to copyright, he says, showing a streetview with one of the images blurred out. (There's someone who goes through this streetview and takes the blurred images and gets someone to paint it so that the blurred painting now actually exists!) There are also some glitches due to software/hardware images from the trolley trundling through. Some issues remaining but thinks still doing good stuff.

Q: What problems do people report with StreetView?
A: Visitors ask why they can't go into certain spaces (navigation is determined by institution); institutions report more technical problems.

Q: Showed us several examples of meta-art - would it be useful to articulate a new level of language to talk about this kind of art?
A: Big data's something we need to deal with which scientists have been looking at. When you start putting things together, need to have a different way of talking about collection. Language of curation and selection has to change. Trying to get metadata from different institutions to talk together is hard.

Q: Just used "big data" and "curation" and "selection in a single sentence. Can we select ("a person sifting through every day for ever") or do we just take everything ("the firehose")?
A: May need to go with the firehose. Can we expect people to sift, or machines, or...? May depend on how much meta info we need - if we want richness might need human intervention, to get closer to meaning. Machines can only do so much.

Q: How do we enable people to make meaning for themselves; how enhance engagement?
A: Each institution has very different reasons for joining the project. Some because everyone else was, some because they don't have own website, some trying to drive users back to their own site, some to make use of advanced features. How do we measure success? 50million visits in last six months, which we know is just looking at the objects. Does this mean more engagement?

Q: Can you talk about the Google Art Project's plans for opening up connections not just through screens?
A: When setting up background did work on converting data to a metadata standard and giving this back to institution. Less of half of institutions have given metadata (for whatever reason). So are being kept back from opening up as an API because only a few institutions could do something with it right now; but is something they're interested in.

Walking backwards into the future - #ndf2012 opening by @vikram_nz

Am at National Digital Forum 2012 doing my liveblogging thing...

Opening address
Vikram Kumar (@vikram_nz), InternetNZ

[ETA: Vikram's posted slides (and will link to video when available.]

Vikram Kumar is currently Chief Executive of InternetNZ and has previously worked with government (State Services Commission) and the private sector (Telecom). He writes regularly at http://internetnz.net.nz/news/blog on a range of issues related to the future of internet in New Zealand. Recent topics have included re-invention and evolution of the internet, piracy, privacy and cyber-security. A regular at NDF over the years, he's interested in how the GLAM sector can support new creative and commercial models online.

"I curate stories about the internet - how it changes individuals, organisations, countries." Internet driving massive disruptive change. Such change has happened before, eg television.

Quotes: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore from The Medium is the Massage: "When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

Disruptive change like a midlife crisis - does God exist? why am I here?

Shows excerpt from TED talk Thomas P. Campbell: Weaving narratives in museum galleries

How do we look forward and use digital technologies in context of social, political, economic change. When looking at technologies we wonder, "What can I do with this?" Sometimes this is wrong question - should ask, "What should I be doing?" Don't extrapolate the past to define the future.

Look at what we want to achieve, don't worry about how we're going to do it.

New media affect society not just by the content, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. Eg how does the internet affect copyright? Copyright from an age when cost of producing copies was high. Internet disrupts this - copying becomes not just cheap and easy but inherent to how the internet transmits information.

Internet is:

• ubiquitous - especially with APNK. What does it mean when people are constantly connected? Need to think of ourselves not as a destination - we can go where our community is. Eg Quake Stories. Organisations coming together to deliver virtual reality - overlaying past street images over present empty lots.
• End-to-end principle, layered architecture - internet itself is simple, just moving bits around, but it allows all sorts of things to be built on top of this. Need to permission to innovate. Semantic web emerging slowly. 1762 means nothing by itself - but add context/metadata and (a year), it gives meaning.
• Everyone can be a producer - people we're trying to reach needn't be passive consumers. We don't have to do all the education/preservation on our own.
• Openness - goes back to not needing permission. Lets us experiment. Deep engagement. Get people involved in projects - even to put in money. Pledge Me to crowdfund NZ creativity. But only works if you've got engagement.
• Bottom-up evolution - new areas of collaboration all the time.
• Global and universal

What future do you want?

LIANZA and open access

Moving to a new job has been keeping me happily preoccupied, but the email I received from LIANZA yesterday was just about calculated to spur me to break radio silence. To quote, interspersed with my commentary in [square brackets]:

From November 22, parts of the LIANZA website will be locked to members only. As the cost of developing and maintaining the website comes out of LIANZA membership fees, LIANZA Council decided to make certain pages exclusive to members. The Council worked with the Website Advisory Group to determine appropriate members-only content.

From November 22 you will need to login to the website to view these locked pages:

• LIANZA Blog
  [Really? Does anyone really think I'll log in to read a blog? I won't even click a link to read a blog; I certainly don't have time to log in to a website just to find out if there happens to be a post today. If the full post isn't in my Google Reader, I don't read it.]
• Library Life newsletter features
  [I occasionally click a link from the email newsletter to read the full story. That's about to become even more occasional.]
• Latest issue of the New Zealand Library and Information Management Journal (NZLIMJ)
  [This implies that previous issues will remain accessible, which is something at least. But still a tremendous disappointment. I thought I'd been seeing a move towards opening NZLIMJ up, and had hoped to see it soon appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals. In the current climate, I think a library association should be promoting open access, not locking information down.]
• Conference papers
  [!!!
  ...
  Just... What a tremendous disservice this does to the authors! Conference papers are hard enough to search as it is; locking these behind a login only guarantees that no LIANZA non-members (and not many LIANZA members) will ever read or cite these. Don't we want rather to raise the profile of New Zealand LIS research?]
• Copyright resources
  [...Okay, if you really must have an easter egg for LIANZA members I guess this qualifies as reasonable.]
• Member profiles
  [Okay, sure, whatever.]
• Advocacy Portal (already restricted to members)
  [Because it's... vitally important that only LIANZA members advocate for libraries...? To be honest I can see the argument for this as a valuable resource. I just think it'd be even more valuable if we all - members and non-members alike - cooperated on advocating for both our individual libraries and libraries as a class.]
• Code of Practice
  [This comprises the "policy and procedures that are to be followed, day to day, in the running of the Association." So mostly only of use to members; otoh it seems a bit odd to keep it secret.]

Does LIANZA actually have evidence that there are significant numbers of people choosing not to be members because the content's there for free anyway? Enough people to be worth causing this hassle to existing members?

Because as a member, this does increase the hassle for me to access the content, and therefore reduces the amount of content I'll be bothered to look up. When I was a member of the Website Advisory Group, a big concern was getting conversations going on the website; hiding those conversations away just seems likely to exacerbate that problem. This move also reduces the visibility of LIS scholarship published by LIANZA, so makes it less likely I'd consider submitting to NZLIMJ (however see footnote). And philosophically, I'm not overly happy about paying a subscription to a library association that is working against open access to information.

Lucky for LIANZA's coffers, membership comes with other benefits that still make it worth the annual cheque. Because the moment its website content is locked behind a login screen, its value to me plummets.

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Footnote for authors: If your conference paper is about to be locked behind the login screen but you actually would like other librarians nationally and internationally to have a chance at finding your research, you can deposit a copy at E-LIS - a subject repository for library and information science. (And/or in your institution's repository if it has one.)

Likewise for NZLIMJ articles - the author guidelines state a 6 month embargo for publication elsewhere, but I emailed editor Brenda Chawner to clarify this, and she says she interprets it to apply to formal publications, not repositories, and it would be fine with her if authors put copies of their articles into an institutional or subject repository.