Rachael: Do you like our owl?
Deckard: It’s artificial?
Rachael: Of course it is.
Deckard: Must be expensive.
Rachael: Very. I’m Rachel.

Ever since I can recall my first screening of Blade Runner I was a fan: the combination of gritty futuristic scenarios along with the Vangelis soundtrack had me hooked from the start. Based loosely on the book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick the film was a source of inspiration I used when creating interfaces such as the one for photographer Thomas Popinger. The last time I saw it on the big screen has been many years so, it is with delight and joy that Geek Flicks has chosen to show it again.

Tyrell: [Offscreen] Is this to be an empathy test?
[Tyrell appears at the other end of the room, walks towards the two]
Tyrell: Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response…fluctuation of the pupil…involuntary dilation of the iris.
Deckard: We call it Voight-Kampf for short.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.” – Roy Batty in Blade Runner

Here’s a question I posed at a presentation I gave in 2011.

Additional links:

Future Noir
One of the best tumblr’s out there.

Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner
The definitive three-and-a-half hour documentary.

2019: A Future Imagined
Visual Futurist Syd Mead (“Blade Runner,” “Aliens,” “Tron”) reflects upon the nature of creativity and how it drives the future.

Blade Runner Quotes
“I’m Deckard. Blade Runner. Two sixty-three fifty-four. I’m filed and monitored.”

What do you think?

Some behind the scenes footage:

Behind the scenes with Kasper and Frede at the Hamburg Harbor.

Filming at home.

Frede’s view (via)

A couple of months ago, while I was working at the co-working space Betahaus, I met and spoke with Wolfgang Wopperer, one of the co-founders of mindmatters. There was definitely an affinity for one another as we later met for lunch and decided that we should do something together. A couple weeks later he DM’ed me about speaking at a design camp for agile thinking he was co-organizing.

So, what is agile design? It’s taking the agile software development and applying it to the process of design. But more so, it’s about building on a collaborative level with multi-disciplinary teams where the final outcome is not necessarily set in stone. It’s about embodying a deep empathy for one another and working in parallel instead of a waterfall process.

Agile thinking is what I believe we did in the early days of Fork Unstable Media. We were a lean multi-disciplinary team constantly building and iterating on ideas we had made real. It was this process that I now identify with being agile and also why I think when a team is small, say less than 10 people, agile is in their DNA as communication is the shortest and exchange the most direct.

Needless to say, I promptly agreed to Wolfgang’s original query and the rest was a weekend filled with discussion, building and great folk.

More to come…

Related posts elsewhere:
A live blogging.

Leidenschaft, stupid!

Stop clinging to the past, it’s not cute anymore

This was my first year at the re:publica in Berlin, and the 11th re:publica to take place. I was graciously invited to speak from Christophe about hybrid culture, a topic I first wrote about in de:bug many years ago. The intro text for my presentation is below:

Apple, Star Wars, Girl Talk, Facebook, open source, 4Chan, memes, and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. We are innately born to imitate others. By copying adults in their first year babies learn a vast array of skills ranging from language to social interaction. Copying is how we learn. Artists, designers, writers, coders, and ultimately all makers, take copying a step further through the exploration of their own ideas built upon the semantic foundations of others. They create remixes. They create mashups. They create new cultures.

As we increasingly rely on digital, and computing becomes more ubiquitous, our lives will be more remixed, more mashed-up, and more copied. The consequence being: doing instead of saying, sharing instead of coveting, forgiving instead of asking for permission. A natural evolution in human culture because, as author William Gibson stated, “The remix is the very nature of digital.

You can view a Scribd version of this presentation if that’s more your kinda thing.

* The title is shameless stolen from Faris

Jeremy Tai Abbett: ” Talent Imitates Genius Steals” , auf der re:publica 2011,
(cc) Anja Pietsch/re:publica

Jeremy Tai Abbett: Talent Imitates, Genius Steals

This quarter at the Miami Ad School Europe my course deals with exploring what location means in today’s hyper-connected society by interpreting a story into a transmedia narrative . To free up my extended memory, aka browser tabs, I’ve posted some links that I’ve kept open in hopes of a sharing them with my class.

Power of Transmedia Storytelling from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.

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Because tracking our data is so easy, more and more folks are doing it. Some people track only one thing at a time; a few track several variables and a very few track dozens and maybe hundreds of factors in their lives. I’ve been calling this habit the rise of the quantified self. The idea has grown steadily and I thought I’d provide a status update on this meme. via

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there comes a degree of surveillance under which everything that matters will be digitally recorded – one’s location, communications, transactions, associations to others, and one’s proximity to things. via

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Most people’s understanding of what can actually be done with the data provided by our mobile phones is theoretical; there were few real-world examples. That is why Malte Spitz from the German Green party decided to publish his own data collected from August 2009 to February 2010. via

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Imagine walking outside, listening to music and having the music change based on your location, exploring a unique listening experience every time you hit play. That is exactly what Bluebrain, a D.C. based band has done. via

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Here’s a list of 20 apps that are part of this new wave of location innovation. All face the same three challenging questions: 1 How do they find an audience? 2 How do they make money? 3 If they’re successful, how will they avoid being cannibalised by Facebook? via

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Chromaroma takes your travel data and makes it into a game where every journey counts in a competition for the city! via

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These are maps of city streets, with a superimposed map of whether photos taken in the cities are by locals or by tourists (as reported on flickr. So you can see which spots in a given city the locals frequent, and which spots are the most “touristy”.

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From here to there
from there to here
funny things are everywhere

Hear me speak thanks to podcampus

Moore’s Law foresaw the evolution of computing, which in turn, created accessibility for the many. But with accessibility comes choice. And with choice fragmentation. As information multiplies we need to explore alternative ways of staying on top of what truly matters.

Presenting the New Scarcity at Raum Schiff Erde 2011. Photo via H. Angermeyer

A presentation for Raum Schiff Erde 2011(spaceship earth) – an unconference for digital, interaction design and Internet.

So postuliert Jeremy Abbett, dass zwar ein immer größeres Informationsüberangebot im Netz auf uns wartet, wir uns aber immer bewusster werden, dass Aufmerksamkeit unsere Währung ist, von der wir nur begrenzte Ressourcen einsetzen wollen – “We pay attention”, “We spend time”. Welche Filtermechanismen werden wir Menschen entwickeln um uns selbst zu schützen und wie wirken sich diese auf zukünftige Produktentwicklungen aus? – Frank Jacob, Human Interface Design

The backchannel via a twitter-wall was displayed right behind where the speakers stood. This made was a great demonstration of continual partial attention. Read a selection of the tweets that were wrote while I was speaking:

Working together with TBWA\Berlin on the pitch for Vattenfall Europe, Art Director Nils Hartmann and I came up with the idea of the Vattenfall PowerFaceOff, a large-scale social game that uses the data from the Vattenfall smart meters and pits rival cities against one another in a competition to find out who has the lowest carbon footprint per household.

“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

Public gameboards (digital out-of-home) display the current status of each city and their rivals using collective data from the Vattenfall smart meters while smartphone apps via geo-location enable players to view the action from the streets.

While at Fork unstable Media, we developed several games that co-opted pop-culture and mass media. Previous to Fork, my colleagues Dirk and Sven from Springer & Jacoby and I would stay after work and play multi-player LAN games such as Castle Wolvenstein and Warcraft. Zug zug! And back in elementary school, while in Mound, Minnesota, my group of friends were into Dungeons & Dragons.

As games and gaming evolve it is with fascination, respect and awe that I see the gamification of everyday life making headlines. Games such as Farmville with over 200 million people playing every day. Or games such as Call of Duty Black Ops selling over $360 million in one day.

The week before Christmas, in our somewhat irregular stammtisch on interaction design, I met a Phd researcher on the topic of games: Sebastian Deterding. Sebastian is best known for the presentation, “Pawned – Gamification and Its Discontents” that talks about “badge measles” and the confusions, side effects and missing parts of gamification. With my favorite books of last year, Daemon and Freedom from Daniel Suarez, being based on gaming crossing over to reality it was enlightening to get his point-of-view on the subject.

DICE 2010: “Design Outside the Box” Presentation

I personally think games are going to have to go further than the way of Nike+ and FourSquare have integrated gaming mechanics into the experience. This will happen when digital devices become cheaper and more powerful leading to more people having access to the tools to experiment with combining the digital and physical. A scenario like the one Jason Schell presented in Design Outside the Box presentation at Dice appear like one big blog of spam being offered by advertisers. Certainly a direction that is not so appealing as advertising takes the front-row and not the person. For gamification to be mass-adopted we’ll have to see real benefits for the user instead of just a badge or winning a coffee for being the mayor of a location. My students from the Miami Ad School Europe and I had an idea for Telekom that would do just that; take your existing behavior and apply a gaming like interface to create loyalty; a direction that I could see being very successful in the near future for those companies and people willing to make it happen.

Sega Installs ‘Toylet’ Games in Japan’s Urinals

Are you completely lost when it comes to games? Then start with this episode of gaming from NPR’s “On the Media”.

That’s the question James Cheung and I answered when we came up with a one-off custom mobile phone cozy for a friend of a friend of a friend for TBWA\New York. As time was tight, we were fortunate to have a kick-ass knitter that could engineer and build it over the weekend just in time for the holiday seasons.