Aghillo

A response to a digital play brief aimed at teenagers and attempts to subvert mass consumerism. Teenagers want to both belong and to sit outside. As Quentin Crisp said – “the young always have the same problem – how to rebel and how to conform at the same time”. They want to distinguish themselves from the crowd, experiment with self-identity and develop new values for a new generation. What is the world’s current obsession? What do we seem most concerned about? It’s clearly economic growth. And our response to this? It seems we need to consume more products. Consume more products, keep buying, keep, in that dreadful phrase, ‘economically active’. What a marvellous opportunity to rebel – almost perfect! Simply stop buying so much stuff. Stop buying stuff. Stop it. Be proud of it and celebrate it.

The koppla bracelet (named after the Swedish for connect) symbolises this rebellion. A commitment to the five values of be active, connect, take notice, learn and give is rewarded through seeing your bracelet turn from its original colour through to pristine crystal. A symbolic transformation that connects you with a new way of living. Commit to these values and you will see a change in your life and it will be made visible to others through the koppla bracelet. It becomes a symbolic totem for a generation. The bracelet is not just symbolic, but functional as well. It incorporates a range of technologies to sense your location, sense your activities, provide communication and provide physical feedback.

These technologies are used as part of its first service offering, launched in connection with events surrounding the Cultural Olympiad. The koppla bracelet provides connection to the community of wearers and access to a special kind of music service. A service that reflects the five core values and enhances a musical experience – we give digital music a home, geo-locate it and make it only possible to listen to it when you’re actually in the location. Artists can decide to locate their music on a beach, on a mountain, anywhere where they think will enhance the musical experience and make it special again. Finally, we provide access to the koppla bracelet and technologies to 3^rd party service providers to enable wider development of digital play services that embody the five values of be active, connect, take notice, learn and give.

UX Honeycomb from Peter Morville

I had an interesting conversation the other day about sustaining the ubiquitous computing experience – prompted by the limited user experience provided by the augmented mobile browser Layar.  Layar provides graphical information overlays which are geo-located through the use of geo-data. They are then visible through android based phones such as the HTC Hero. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems as it has only novelty value and my colleague grew bored after half-an-hour of use.

This got me thinking about engaging user experiences. I’ve noticed myself that there are some websites, devices or applications I use once or a couple of times, then never use again. At other times, they seem to fit in with my short-term activities and are really useful resources. Indeed there are some that I would class as providing a sustained experience - i.e. an engaging experience that is more than a passing fad. As an example, I use my 5 years old Nokia mobile phone all the time for texting, checking email and even making phone calls. A slightly more complicated example is my use of Twitter, where it peaks around sporting events I’m interested in.

It seems to me that there are a few themes around the question of how we can make user experiences sustainable – perhaps it is related to content and how often it’s updated, perhaps it’s related to the overall aesthetics of the experience or maybe it’s to do with personal narratives and how will the experience fit into that?

I’ve been looking at graffiti again for The world is your canvas project I’m working on with Kevin Smith – the idea is we’ll  design support for graffiti tagging (see TAKI 183) in the digital space – but you can only tag (and see tags) when you’re in the physical area through your mobile phone. They beauty of this is we get to play with tagging styles (fills, pieces, rollers, wildstyle…) and tagging practices (owning a black book, capping…) We’ll also get to see how we can re-interpret shared spaces and throw in new media types as well. Should be fun!