Empathy, augmented - public services as digital assistants
Empathy, augmented - public services as digital assistants Google Now is probably the best known example of the so called ‘intelligent digital assistants’*. It suggests relevant information based on your location, your calendar and your emails. So, for example, it might automatically track a parcel based on a confirmation email from Amazon, or nudge you with the quickest route home based on your location.
Google Now is (for now) confined to day-to-day admin, and using it feels very obviously like having a machine help you out (and I’d guess a machine that runs off simple ‘given these events have happened, then do this thing’ rather than any artificial intelligence cleverness).
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Product Land (Part 3)
This is the 3rd and final part of an essay about design and possibilities.
The first part - You can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place - was about the process of design being too linear, taking inspiration from evolution and the concept of hyper-volumes of ‘potential products’; the second part - Tools for exploring the margins - listed some approaches for thinking harder about the things that are possible in product design.
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Open standards for job vacancies
Open standards can be a force-multiplier: a standard voltage for electricity abstracts away how the electricity was generated, this allows companies to confidently and cheaply build everything from household lighting to MRI scanners on top of it. An open standard can enable a wider public good.
Vacancy publishing today is skeuomorphic, not in the visual sense, rather it is functionally skeuomorphic: newspaper small ads put on the web (with the addition of a basic search).
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Brand archaeology
![Reverse of a TfL bike key with plastic pealed back to reveal a Barclay']s URL](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7704/16995499017_535832226d_k_d.jpg)
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Telegraph laws
This was part of the telegraph zone of the new Information Age gallery at the Science Museum:
New technology, new data integrity and privacy laws?
There’s a couple of mentions of section II in Hansard here and here. It was part of a bill introduced by reformer Henry Fawcett when he was Postmaster General. Seemingly it only gets those mentions in Hansard due to inteventions from Charles Warton who was a bit of a pedant for process (although objecting to a bill being read at 5 AM does seem reasonable).
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Permissions. Understood.
This is part follow up to The challenge for web developers in 2015, part inspired by Francis Irving’s The advert wars.
Better patterns for helping users understand software permissions feels like an imperative; somewhere a lot more technical, design and research thinking should be directed.
By permissions I mean ‘what bits of software are allowed to do with data and input/outputs’, and the mechanism by which a user is informed of those things.
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Product Land (Part 2)
Tools for exploring the margins.
In the part 1 I set out the proposition that the way we think about building digital products is too linear and, as a result, our thinking about what is possible is constrained, with some sectors, I used the example of the ‘job-search’ sector, stuck shuffling around a local minima.
Instead, I suggested we should take a lead from evolutionary biology and start thinking about a hypervolume of potential products - after all, you can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place.
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Habitat - Fosdem 2015 talk
This is the talk I gave at Fosdem 2015 about a proof-of-concept
personal datastore called Habitat.
My name is Richard Pope, and I am going to talk to you about a proof of concept service I’m building called Habitat. Habitat is a self hosted, programmable geospatial datastore, or a kind of digital assistant, an external brain like google now or IFTT. Or rather it could be, for now Habitat is just a proof of concept to try and scratch some particular itches:
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Fosdem 2015 - interesting links
Web pages in Firefox are getting a Bluetooth API for pairing and sharing data directly between devices and web apps. GeoTrelis is a tool for doing fast queries against geospatial raster data. The demo I saw was priocessing several GB in a few sseconds on a standard laptop. GeoGig is distributed versioning of geospatial data. Matrix a distibuted comms system, but looks like it could also be used as a distributed immutable datastore.
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Signing in & composite services
Usernames and passwords are on borrowed time as a design pattern. Examples of the damage it does are everywhere. The only thing keeping it credible is two factor authentication via SMS or a mobile app, and that can’t reasonably survive the switch to mobile as the dominant way of accessing the web (because it’s not really two factor if it’s on the same device, right?).
The future, probably looks something like this from the FIDO Alliance, which sets out specifications for the use of hardware dongles for strong 2-factor authentication in association with a pin or password.
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Democracy at the point of use?
I went to hear Vernon Bogdanor talk about the (first) 1974 General Election the other day. It’s part of a seris about post-war elections that is well worth a watch.
In passing he used a phrase that stuck in my head:
Democracy is government by explanation
Apparently it comes from Prime Minister A.J. Balfour and/or Geoffrey Howe.
What I think it is saying is this: it is a characteristic of a democratic system that people have clear opportunities to be able to understand the workings of that system, and that one of the ways you build trust in government and health in the system is by actively exposing how it works and why things are how they are, be it planning permission, taxation or hospitals.
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The challenge for web designers in 2015 (or how to cheat at the future)
This is a second attempt at articulating this issue, and was inspired by a conversation with @psd who also pointed me at a TEDx talk entitled A time traveller’s primer. The first attempt is here.
It took 4 or 5 years of ajax / XMLHTTP being a thing for it to change almost everything about the sort of things that were built on the web. That was 4 or 5 years when lots of amazing things didn’t get built, not because it wasn’t possible, but because people just, didn’t.
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Abundantly useful
It’s nice when things just become quietly, abundantly useful.
QR codes have gone from something people plastered over business cards and adverts in failed attempts to appear cutting-edge, to the default pattern for moving information along the following interaction:
a web transaction → time passes → queuing up for something → human interaction → scan → some sort of change of state.
Quickly thinking back over the past year I’ve:
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Time to start designing and demoing mobile first?
I’ve always had a bit of a problem with responsive design. It too easy to assume the most important context is the size of the screen, too easy to fall into the habit that the way you build a mobile version of a service is to change the presentation layer - just shuffle the same content about the page in a different order and hide a couple of things *.
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co-op v2?
There’s a quote in this O’Reilly Radar trailer for a talk about the bitcoin blockchain that has slightly melted my brain:
I think 10 years from now we’re going to see that these types of semi-decentralized companies are going to be replaced by fully decentralized companies, where the company itself just runs in an automated way on some kind of cryptocurrency.
Imagine a co-operative or mutual, setup in a few lines of code, able to programmatically distribute shares in itself at point of sale, the purchase being the proof of work.
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Product Land (Part 1)
You can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place.
This is the first of a couple of posts about why I think we need better ways for thinking about the design of digital products.
Thinking in a linear way, in simple hierarchies or in timelines, is pretty simple for us; our brains evolved in a world with 3 dimensions (plus an additional one for time), but for more complex systems, systems with many dimensions, we tend to need tools and concepts to help us.
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Music notes: September
Real Lies - Dab Housing Benji Boko - No.1 Sound - Beta Hector Remix - feat. Ricky Rankin Brother culture - Sound Killer Half Man Half Buscuit - National Shite day - if only for the lyric “A man with a mullet went mad with a mallet in Millets”. You could build a great passphrase generator from HMHB lyrics. Spotify link
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OpenStreetMap as infrastructure - a localgov map?
The Moabi project is reusing the tools of the OpenStreetMap project to map natural resource use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is an example of what Mikel Maron (from the Moabi project) and Elizabeth McCartney (from the US Geological Survey) called ‘OpenStreetMap as Infrastructure’ in their recent talk at State of the Map US ie taking the OpenStreetMap tool-chain and applying them to new problems.
I got to experiment with some of the OpenStreetMap tool-chain at bit during recent work at the Land Registry and, now in its 10th year, the OSM tools are really impressive:
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Info-buildings
Image derived from (cc) martin allen
Lambeth Council are asking residents with digital skills to help them improve the services they provide. As part of this, that they are holding a hack evening (which, annoyingly, I can’t make, hence this blog post).
One of the challenges is:
how can we make it easier for people to engage with the council in decision making online, particularly those who aren’t that comfortable using the internet?
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Music notes: August 2014
Baxter Dury - Pleasure. Walking south towards Bedlam? Original members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at Glastonbury. I was at this and it wasn’t being pro-filmed, so I assume this is from a bunch of fans with GoPros. The Human League - 4JG, from The Golden Hour of the Future. Cristobal Tapia de Veer - Utopia Finale
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