Here’s something: a venerable analogue monosynth re-imagined for the 21st Century and the Nintendo DS, no less.
2 twin-ocillator synths and a 4-part drum machine pre-loaded with samples create by the DS-10 itself. A 6-track sequencer. Built-in FX and real-time sound control via the touch screen. Wireless communication allowing you to sync multiple units together and swap data. From this:
To this:
Fun. Amazing. Mind-blowing. And yet so musically limited (to put it mildly). A Toy.
This is quite an interesting device (providing you are seriously into arpeggiators):
As usual the video brings up as many questions as it answers:
I think without 1 & 2 the device would be very limiting if used on a regular basis. Whatever, it’s mostly interesting because of the way it asks the user to rethink the way they visualize and spatialize music: it’s a new notational form as much as anything else. See also Reactable.
[Thanks to John Hill for this one.]
Multi-touch interfaces have been one of the themes of this blog over the past 18 months or so. In fact, they’re becoming so commonplace it soon won’t be worth my mentioning them any more. However, before that day finally arrives, here’s a quick look at some recent developments.
Within the last couple of weeks Microsoft have shown their Touch Wall. Here’s Bill Gates driving it:
And here it is being demo’d by Microserf Ian Sands, with a good deal more technical detail included towards the end:
Well in theory it’s a great idea, right? (I’d love one to teach with, for example.) But you’d have to ask how viable a system this is at the moment, especially when Sands admits that you can’t even edit a Word document on it! It also looks slow, glitchy, and just plain clunky. Notice how the slides don’t sort properly when Bill Gates gestures them aside—sometimes one doesn’t go at all, and then two jump the next time—and note the problems Sands has in selecting the right mode in the toolbar. “The calibration is a little off,” he says. Yes, quite.
Compare the Microsoft Touch Wall with the fluidity and sophistication of Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel products:
Well I know which one I’d buy….
Back in July last year—is it that long ago already?—I had a good look at the Microsoft Surface. Here it is, out there and doing a job in the real world:
Are those thick cables security tethers, or are they connecting the phones to the computer (i.e. the PC inside the Surface)?
What exactly is an interface anyway? In its simplest sense, the word refers to software that shapes the interaction between user and computer. The interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between the two parties, making one sensible to the other. In other words, the relationship governed by the interface is a semantic one, characterized by meaning and expression rather than physical force. Digital computers are “literary machines,” as hypertext guru Ted Nelson calls them. They work with signs and symbols, although this language, in its most elemental form, is almost impossible to understand. A computer thinks—if thinking is the right word for it—in tiny pulses of electricity, representing either an “on” or an “off” state, a zero or a one. Humans think in words, concepts, images, sounds, associations. A computer that does nothing but manipulate sequences of zeros and ones is nothing but an but an exceptionally inefficient adding machine. For the magic of the digital revolution to take place, a computer must also represent itself to the user, in a language that the user understands.
Representing all that information is going to require a new visual language, as complex and meaningful as the great metropolitan narratives of the nineteenth-century novel.
Put simply, the importance of interface design revolves around this apparent paradox: we live in a society that is increasingly shaped by events in cyberspace, and yet cyberspace remains, for all practical purposes, invisible, outside our perceptual grasp. Our only access to this parallel universe of zeros and ones runs through the conduit of the computer interface, which means that the most dynamic and innovative region of the modern world reveals itself only through the anonymous middlemen of interface design.
[Quote adapted from Johnson, S. (1997) Interface Culture. Harper Collins (pp.14-19).]
This is an interesting idea:
I like this just because they’ve taken the everyday equation (bigger displays are always better) and turned it on its head. I’m not sure that any, or many, of the applications they show in the video are that useful—and the photo sorting thing really is becoming a bit of a cliché—but one could easily imagine this type of interfacing becoming useful with ’swarms’ of mobile devices.
This is very cool:
[Thanks to John Hill for this one.]
There have been four posts so far on this blog about multi-touch interfaces: Jefferson Han’s work (along with the iPhone) here and here, Microsoft’s Surface, and Reactable. Why? Firstly, I love ‘em. Secondly, I think they will soon become the norm as far as human-computer interfacing goes.
However, the first commercially available multi-touch interface must surely be the JazzMutant Lemur, released around October 2005. This is an audio-media specific control surface that is “able to track an unlimited number of fingers at once” according to their website. It’ll work with all the major DAWS, and will even interface with Flash. Its controller software includes a whole range of presets objects such as faders, rotary controllers, sliders, pads, scopes, switches, and various readout/LED options, and it will allow you to build almost anything:
There’s loads more info on the JazzMutant site: technical description, image galleries, and some strangely silent videos.
What a great piece of kit, and it’s a shame it’s marooned in the boondocks of the music technology industry. In fact, if I was a venture capitalist I would buy JazzMutant and get this thing out into the mainstream of the computing world now! First off, I’d invest in top-notch and heavy-duty presets for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash…. Then Google Maps, iPhoto, etc., etc..
Yeah. If.
I have previously posted several items about multi-touch interfaces: Jefferson Han’s work here and here, and the Microsoft Surface here. I was therefore quite excited to come across Reactable, described by its developers at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona as a “musical instrument with a tangible user interface”.
However, that’s actually a pretty daft description of it (in oh so many ways): it’s simply a multi-touch interface to a virtual studio built using PD. It’s constructed in the same way as the Microsoft Surface, with the touchscreen positioned above a camera and projector. Here are the Reactable ‘Basic Demos’ 1 & 2:
Pretty neat. I can see there might be major problems using it—e.g. interfacing, playing a tune, remembering patches or sequences, and it’s not exactly portable—but I would love to see something like this as (part of) an interface to a commercial synth or something like Reason.
It’s the future.
My fourth and final post on the D&AD Xchange 07 conference brings us to ex-IDEO Global Head of Interaction Design and ex-Managing Director of IDEO London, Colin Burns. Colin now runs his own company, Martach Designs, that specialises in what he calls Transformation Design: according to his bio this “is a methodology that harnesses user-led creativity to create new strategic business and social value.”
Colin’s presentation was called Beyond User-Centred Design, and began with a gentle introduction that outlined some basic definitions of what we mean by ‘a designer’ and what we mean by ‘a successful product’ of design. Having set these basic premises up, he then outlined his conception of what it means to be a designer in the 21st Century:
Colin illustrated his Transformation Design thesis with a case study of the Activmobs project he did for the Design Council and Kent County Council. Briefly, this involved designers working with healthcare professionals and groups of patients to create fitness regimes that would be integrated into people’s lives and allow mutual support mechanisms. For Colin, this type of project highlighted a single fundamental issue: whether it was really possible for designers working in isolation to understand complex real-world problems or dynamic systems.
This is an excellent question to ask, and you’d have to answer that, as Colin suggests, no they probably can’t. However, when Colin suggested in the Q&A session that, because of this, the ideas of a non-expert should carry equal weight to that of the expert, a passionate debate kicked off. Firstly, it was suggested by someone in the audience that in the Activmobs example used by Colin it was ridiculous to suggest that the advice of a lay-person should carry equal weight to that of a healthcare professional. Secondly, Chris Bennewith said that the vast proliferation of “crappy” movies on YouTube shows what happens when you put sophisticated tools in the hands of people without the formal skills to use them. To which Colin said things like “But are they really crappy? Who says they’re crappy? Aren’t they vibrant and life-affirming?” And “I keep asking myself as a designer what right I have to judge what’s good and bad or right and wrong.”
And then the session ended!
I think this is a really important question and it can’t be left unanswered, so here’s my take on it: the reason an expert—and it doesn’t matter here whether we’re talking about designers, doctors, lawyers, musicians, or whatever—has a right to judge on issues within their own specialism is that they’re familiar with the cultural discourse associated with it. That is, they should be aware of the history, context, and theory of the discipline. They should be highly experienced practitioners equipped with a broad range of techniques and the insight that can only be gained from the day-to-day involvement with it. They can speak the language of that discipline.
Which does not mean I don’t agree with all the six points laid out by Colin, above. Yes, of course all experts need to work with mixed communities, get out in the field, and—as I discussed in the Flo Heiss post—leave their work ‘unfinished’. They need to participate with the end-users in the dynamic systems they operate in. But this does not mean that they must therefore relinquish the right to arbitrate, to make decisions, to exercise authority. That way leads to madness…
The example of YouTube is illuminating. Here we have literally millions of short films submitted by people from all over the world, 99% of which are culturally insignificant. It doesn’t matter whether they’re crappy or not: the problem is that they don’t engage with culture at any level: they’re just throwaway, ephemeral, meaningless except to those involved. (It’s only as an aggregate, a phenomenon, that they have any cultural meaning). To be involved with culture means engaging with discourses that persist over time and that evolve through dialogue and negotiation, and you can’t do that without some knowledge, some expertise, some willingness to get involved with a community of practice.
***
I hope this post has given a true reflection of Colin’s presentation and the discussion that followed from it, bearing in mind I was hastily scrawling down notes and at the same time trying to follow what was going on. I thought this was the most thought-provoking and important of all the sessions I saw at Xchange 07 (i.e. for me the question becomes what right do I have to teach this subject?).
Thankyou Colin Burns.
© 2012 Paul Hazel. All Rights Reserved.