TWAB08

The Web And Beyond 2008: well organized by the Chi folk, introduced by a voiceless Peter Boersma, in the beautiful Beurs of Berlage.

Things of note:

Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku (a Twitter competitor bought by Google) wins the prize for best keynote: simple, succinct. With his mix of entrepreneur flair and researcher thoroughness, he builds up a coherent, inspiring way of looking at social interactions: objects, verbs, and nodal points.

‘Good services allow people to create social objects that add value’ — the idea here being that social interaction successfully revolves around creating objects — photos (flickr), texts (twitter), video (youtube), bookmarks (delicious). Every service must be able to define an object and verbs. The nodal point concept is very interesting in that it he more or less describes it as the ‘payback’ for leaving behavior traces in a system. A simple, crude form is the ‘update stream’ seen at starting pages of facebook, flickr, etc — but this is, in Engestrom’s mind, but a prelude to something much richer, more apt at filtering things that are truly relevant to you.

Also of note is Engestroms focus on the ’social peripheral vision’: being peripherally aware of what your friends are doing, and what others are doing in the same city, creates something called ‘the Big Now’, and paints a very convincing future for twitter-like services.

Ben Cerveny, the famous experience/game design passionate, also the guy who put the fun in flickr, decided to completely redo his presentation and talk about geomorphic organisms as a sociological/biological metaphor for communities as a whole, on- and offline. At times inspirational, and at times he completely lost most of the audience in overly abstract biological metaphors (imagine someone explaining to you how email works by continuously using metaphores from quantum theory).

Adam Greenfield touched on a subject dear to me: the usability of cities. I adore books by Kevin Lynch and Christopher Alexander, that deal with the image of the city, patterns for creating an environment from the ground up, and democratization of urban design.

Greenfield nicely brought out a few properties of the current urban environment, ranging from the horrible cookie-cutter-mind-numbing “Repeating Module Of Doom” city design that’s spread throughout America like the black plague (”and everybody knows this!”, thanks for saying that out loud, Adam), to some of the effects that rampant bad city design has caused (mainly: withdrawal; hence the hordes of white earbuds). Quote of note: ubiquitous computing is a term that will be gone soon: our environment already mostly is ubiquitously computing.