“Why do we feel like we need to keep visiting the archetype over and over and over again?” asks Karim Rashid, a New York designer. The camera, for example, which since digital photography’s complete obliteration of film has absolutely no reason to remain a metal rectangle.

Flying back from Chicago last night (and admittedly procrastinating a certain final paper), I threw open on of my favorite archetypes (the laptop) and watched the documentary Objectified. I had missed the chance to see it when it was screened at the Corcoran last summer (tickets were scarce, even for Steve) but decided to make up for lost time.

Objectified considers, well, our objects. It covers the gamut from industrial design, to interaction design, and even touches on the contemporary issues of sustainability and cross-cultural design. Slap it up there with its sibling Helvetica, the designer’s chick-flick where you know the cast of characters, and more or less how it will end. It gets thumbs up from me, but I’ll admit I am a sucker for seeing large pieces of scary machinery pop out friendly-looking industrial designs while listening to smart people talking about the things that they love.

And the love abounds. The documentary features an impressive collection of designers. Some of the favorites, including Moggridge, Ive, and Fukasawa, as well as some with whom I am less familiar.

Like Karim Rashid, who’s perspective was so fresh yet familiar, and for all the wrong reasons; I found myself watching his interview again and again. Rashid describes his work as speaking to a “techno-organic” world and as a “physical interpretation of the digital age.” In his interview he speaks about this relationship through our insistence on frequently expired forms.

We have advanced technologically so far, and yet somehow is almost some sort of paranoia where we’re afraid to really say ‘We live in the third technological revolution.’ I have an iPod in my pocket, I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop, but then somehow I end up going home and sitting on wood spindle… chairs. So in a way you could argue that we’re building all these kind of really kitsch stage sets that have absolutely nothing to do with the age in which we live in…

I find it… extremely perverse…

Watching this movie, you can’t help but think about the objects that fill your daily life and the work that went into creating them. However, I am also left wondering about the future of the product, consumerism, and the role of the “designer.”

Paola Antonelli, Design Curator for the MOMA, has one idea that is both optimistic and probable. Teasing the French for turning to philosophers as the arbiters of culture, she lauds designers for their expertise in converting complex ideas into something more comprehensible. The result?

“I… envision [designers] as the culture generators of the future.”

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long.

Eventually the blinking cursor became a burden; it would taunt me with accusations of abandoning the portion of my soul I had imprisoned into cyberspace. In moments of weakness, I would succumb to the cursor’s call. Yet interacting with LambdaMOO revealed how facile text-based interfaces can be, and it was clear that to participate in this “somewhere” would take a great deal of effort on my part. Unwilling to type long text descriptions of my “room” or “house” or whatever, LambdaMOO’s somewhere became a virtual “nowhere.”

Later that year, without quite realizing it, I did it again. This time I found myself wandering through Second Life. I had returned after discussing it in class, hoping that Second Life had grown up a bit and might have something more compelling to offer me this time around. In many ways it had, but I still was walking down empty virtual halls that uncomfortably reinforced the very thesis-isolation I was trying to avoid.

At some point I learned how to read the community announcements, several of which included ads for virtual raves featuring what apparently were some of Second Life’s hottest DJs. Perhaps only for the virtual company, for the next couple weeks I turned off iTunes, and sent my avatar off to different discos to listen to music (sometime broadcasting from actual club performances) and “dance” a harsh set of movements I had programmed into a macro set to endlessly loop. I would minimize my window and type away to the music, knowing that somewhere some generic representation of “me” was dancing the night away.

Fast forward to this last week. I have, with some surprise, returned to blogging with a vengeance. I think the stress and the need to “escape” has something to do with it. However, I find it curious that this time I escaped, well, into my own life. Blogging in the past has been one of the best ways for me to think through things, but sometimes the obligation of virtual (non)readership make it stifling. That said, a lot has happened since I moved to California, and I haven’t had much time to reflect on it all. Between Thanksgiving creeping up and CCT friends talking to me about their current PhD application process, I have been thinking about the things that are important to me and how grateful I am to be at UCI.

Blogging also serves another function: I find that I write so that I don’t forget. For those who are familiar with some of my current work, you know that I have been researching online death. This work has had me thinking about a quote from Foucault:

“Writing so as not to die… or perhaps even speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.”

Foucault was certainly referring to the potential for immortality through writing, but I am wondering if my scratching away at this blog attempts the almost opposite effect: Writing so as to live. Sappy endings aside, I am amused at the demise of my LambdaMOO and Second Life accounts, as well as their associated neuroses. I’d have to admit, even in the midst of all of this stress, there is no where else I’d rather be.

From the “technology is so cool” department: 10/GUI

Dear mouse, you suck. Monitor, you too. See what happens when one goes about “rethinking the desktop to leverage [new] technology in an intuitive and powerful way.”

From the “let’s create an infrastructure no one needs” department: Project ‘Gaydar’

At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy.

From the “Jed just really likes flash mobs” department: Madonna Celebration flash mob in Shinjuku, Tokyo

I particularly love the ballet girl at around 1:50. For CCTers out there — musicals and utopia? I think so. For Megan, who says networks are “unhuman”?

(via Towleroad, and omg, I just found another — in case you want to know what one look like when a drag queen takes control.)

And just because I am running around at UCI Medical Center this morning: Computer detects abuse before doctors

Victims of domestic abuse can hide the truth from doctors, but they leave clues in their medical records that a computer program has now learned to follow. The program could save lives by acting as an early warning system for domestic violence, flagging up possible cases of abuse to doctors months or even years before they would otherwise be detected.

Should we expect our users to have JavaScript enabled?

Perhaps more importantly, what should we do when they don’t?

Ever since Google Maps ripped open the possibilities of web-based development (with turn-by-turn directions no less), we have been stuck with this bizarre requirement: JavaScript. Sure, it makes the web go round, but I still have nightmares of trying to get the University of Utah labs to upgrade to Flash v7, and our web analytics show a stunningly high level of Netscape v4.

Right now I am building a fancy fan-dangled address widget for the Association (as fancy as an address widget can be), but through this process am also authoring/encoding into existence a fairly large number of front-end standards for our new Java/Spring architecture. Of course we are required to have some “lo-fi” version of what ever Dojo-steroided-monster I create, but when I ask my peers what possible message I could place between some <noscript> tags, they typically respond with a string of expletives.

Leave it to my colleague Patrick to find the perfect solution: A gentle message from mibbit that gets right to the point.

I kid you not. They are that awesome. I would tell you to go check it out yourself, but you would have to disable your JavaScript to see the message and I don’t want to be responsible for any more frogs. Consider this a public service.

So you’re writing a thesis, and you are stressed out of your mind, and you think you can’t write one more word. What do you do? You write a magazine article!

This news can be filed under “didn’t tell you about this because of my thesis”, but earlier this year Brett Harris and I wrote an article for the first issue of the new JavaScript Magazine.

ExtJS: An Introduction (the article we wrote), is a technical examination of this JavaScript framework, and how Ext, and frameworks like it, can make your code and your life awesome.

It is cheap to buy an issue online, so if you have been looking for a way to approach these big scary frameworks, it’s worth checking out.

Next Wednesday, craigslist founder Craig Newmark will be visiting Georgetown University. Given that my thesis examines craigslist extensively (with a particular focus on Missed Connections, of course), I have been given an incredible opportunity to interview Mr. Newmark. I am currently compiling a list of questions, but I wanted to let you do the same:

What would you ask the founder of craigslist?

Leave it in the comments, or twitter me. If the question is good, I am happy to get you an answer.

Update: For more information on the lecture, check out the event on Facebook. It is open to everyone, so if you are local, free up your calendar and come!

According to the NYT:

Ms. Wertz writes that she started reading Missed Connections not because she wanted to post an ad herself (oh yeah?) but because she was “intrigued” by the idea of “a subculture of people who feel they missed something great because they didn’t have the courage to speak up.”

I have always felt lucky studying Missed Connections. They are stories that tell themselves, and so I can only imagine how beautifully they must turn out once illustrated. Besides, this way I can justify reading some comics for my academic research! I have One-Clicked it, and will let you know how it is once it arrives next week.

(Thanks Barbara for the heads up!)

I have an article running on gnovis right now about privacy, Facebook, and its third-party partners. Facebook has a new system called “Facebook Connect” which is attempting to do a number of interesting things on the internet, but with the history of Beacon’s privacy debacle haunting Facebook’s reputation, it will be interesting to see if Facebook can expand into other services on the net.

This leaves me with the following question: What is the price of our privacy? Or, more to the point, when do we decide that our privacy is valuable? No one seems to mind the potential privacy issues surrounding social networking sites until something horrible like Beacon happens. So who is responsible for our privacy? And how can Facebook and its partners make sure that these mistakes don’t happen again?

Read more here >>
gnovis Journal – Facebook and the Price of Privacy

Well, today I got the closest thing: Paul Shaw’s AIGA article on the history of typography and the NYC subway system. Entitled The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway, Shaw blends a beautiful history of fonts, signs, and the complicated birth of the modern NYC subway system.

There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica.

It’s been a long day – you enjoy a treat. Read it here.

Here is a taste to wet the pallet:

When online, what counts as a “body” or “identity” emerges out of the coconstruction, negotiation, and even contestation of users and technologies. While users may prove their existence with each Cartesian account (i.e., “I login, therefor I am”), the terms of their existence is often preregulated by the technology. Moreover, these jealous applications may go to extremes to prevent you from leaving. Technology does a great job of enabling our own sense of immortality.

Read more here >>
gnovis Journal – Death of a User: The Overlooked Use-Case