A World of Enchanted Objects - Avoiding a Cacophonous Internet of Dings

Last night I learned of David Rose's book Enchanted Objects, and watched his fascinating talk at Google from last month. Highly recommended, and I plan on getting the book.

His examples are subtle, often with warm and positive emotional impacts. The hooks on your wall gently reminding you of friends, or that you can use those running shoes today. Your doorbell alerting you to loved ones' locations as they make their way home. Your umbrella by the door alerting you as leave that it will be needed today based on the weather forecast.

If you take a look at Rose's "psychoanalysis" of traditional furniture forms, you can see how to get a lot more ideas on new "enchanted objects":

A Rose[tta] Stone for Generating Ideas for Enchanted Objects
Results of David Rose's "Psychoanalysis" of Traditional Furniture Forms
(from 1:05:23 of his talk at Google)

Per Rose, these "enchanted objects" should be tangible, haptic, incidental, embedded, natural, expressive and humanistic. For the first few products out the door, this will be exciting. But a world full of these things could be a different matter. However subtle these devices are, when there are enough of them all around us, we will need to deal with a cacophonous Disney-topia where every everyday thing is "magical."

And as cheap as these objects will be to make, it seems inevitable that WalMart could become a Brookstone Death Star, filling all of our homes, cars, offices - anywhere we go - with devices that can watch us and (hopefully just) want to helpfully communicate with us.

But enough simultaneous "subtle" tones and alerts could result in what are effectively loud "dings" that counterproductively irritate and distract.

We need to avoid the Internet of Dings.

And don't get me wrong - I love the examples he shows in his talk at Google last month. Both my wife and daughter thought the "Internet of Things" umbrella was "cool."

I think that we'll muddle through this. It's just another side of what's coming when the evolution of it trying to scale meets reality.

And I'm going to use that table by Rose to think of other ideas for enchanted objects :)

Note: After I wrote this this morning, I found that Joshua Benton had used the term "Internet of Dings" in a tweet in June 2, 2014 (https://twitter.com/jbenton/status/473617737164816384). I also saw it used in this 2005 blog. There may be other references as well. I am pretty sure it has popped up before several times, given the recent interest in the "Internet of Things".

Art via Javascript via Art

Recently, I came across this bizarre but beautiful animated D3.js visualization by Francois Vanderseypen at http://www.orbifold.net/:

Art via Javascript (from http://orbifold.net/html5/)

If I saw this in art gallery I wouldn't blink - it would fit.  Vanderseypen put this visualization together as an example showing some of the things that D3.js can do, and it is mesmerizing to watch.  Lots of little movement on an exotic dashboard suggesting some kind of obscure, curious, and important meaning.

And this is scratching the surface.  The creative power that can be unleashed with javascript and libraries like D3.js and Three.js, coupled with advances in css and browser technology is staggering.

And it extends beyond the visual - there is a tantalizing creative, fun, and satisfying component to the code/algorithm design underpinning an evolving javascript application.

It has already been nicely mused how famous writers might have written javascript.  What would famous artists do with it?  What aspects of the javascript/programming process might be surfaced as artistic media themselves?

These are good times.

The Rule of Thirds in Design

I am in the process of trying to redesign a visualization.  The layout is bugging me, but I'm not sure how to deal with it.  That got me to take a few moments to crack open google on graphic design.  Are there magic rules that probably can help no matter what?

Seems so.

A key factor at play is how the eye naturally tends to read a web page, or a photo, or a painting... or actually every single scene of life we visually experience(!). The Rule of Thirds is a principle that describes how this manifests itself: our eyes tend to go to four specific locations when they scan a scene, these locations being the inner intersection points of a 3x3 grid overlaying the scene.

Carrie Cousins has several blog posts on this (Using the Rule of Thirds as a Grid Outline, Understanding the Rule of Thirds in Web Design) that particularly resonated with me.  Here is one of her images I found particularly useful:

Where Our Eyes Focus on a Scene (from Carrie Cousins, Using the Rule of Thirds as a Grid Outline) 

It would seem fairly ineffective to put together any visualization without keeping these things in mind, simply because it is important to know where a user's eyes will focus... whether or not we want to put anything interesting there.  To quote Cousins,

"You can work with or against the rule of thirds, but you can’t eliminate it."