This month on KCRW's DNA, the podcast beings by interviewing Jessie Scanlon, the online editor for a newly launched Business Week channel: Innovation and Design. The interview offers insight into how the approach of producing products better, faster, and cheaper will not offer success in a global economy. Jessie describes how innovation and the 'design of services' is becoming the the focus for innovative companies. Even though user research is not mentioned specifically it is alluded to. Jessie speaks of companies 'developing from the inside out' instead of from the outside in. She gives specific examples of how people have been observed in order to develop new products, which is at its core what user centered design is all about.

The bigger picture is that we're beginning to see the emergence of a design economy. This is partially due to the fact that the United states will never be able to compete on a global scale when it come to production of goods. China and India will always be able to produce products and software at a much lower cost. Companies are looking to innovation and design for a competitive advantage.

While the Innovation and Design channel is an 'overview' compared to the more design specific sites likeCore77, Engadget, Design Observer etc... it is great to see publications like Business Week taking an interest in design and realizing that design has come of age.

Recently I've been working on a piece of video tracking software. Built with Processing, the software uses a method Golan Leven refers to as 'background differencing'. The technique is fairly straight forward. Basically you take a snap shot of a frame and compare the incoming video feed against the original snap shot. The image to the left is an example of the result.

In the bigger picture, this is part of a Physical Computing group project. Once we can track the location of where things are happening in the video, we can analyze where motion is taking place, and control something physical based on is location.

This past week I had my presentation for Red's class, Applications of Interactivity. Overall the presentation went well. My group presented our reaction to Lili Chang's work (our speaker from the previous week).

Lili is the head of UI group at Microsoft. She graduated from ITP (long ago), worked at Apple briefly during the dark ages (when Jobs was exiled), and now manages a team of over one hundred UI designers (holy crap that must be hard). She's a great person. However, I wasn't impressed with Microsoft's UI. Plain and simple, Microsoft is copying Apple. After much debate, we decided not focus on the Apple/ Microsoft relationship and instead focus on the beginning portion of Lili's presentation: her personal inspiration and insights into managing a team. The images seen left are screen shots from the presentation.

Once we focused the presentation on inspiration, things took a n interesting turn. Inspiration can be difficult thing to put your finger on. Admiration is very different from inspiration. Although, most people when you ask them what inspires them, they will tell you people whom they admire. Respecting someone for what they have achieved is very different form inspiration. It's easy to find inspiration, but to figure out why you find that streak of light, that sunset, that conversation inspirational can often be challenging.

I recently attended a talk by Philip Rosedale, from Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life. While Mr.Rosdale did talk about distributed computing, and the challenges of building a world with digital atoms, the more fascinating discussion arose out of the social implications of the Second Life virtual environment.

I've never been very interested in gaming. I seem to loose interest too quickly. However, Second Life is not a game, even though it may look like one. Simply put, Second Life, is a virtual environment where you can can fly, make things, talk to people, dance, shoot things, date people etc.. Really you can do just about anything you can think of.

Immediately I thought: What about crosswalks and the need for urban planning? If you can create and destroy anything at any time; is there a historical society? Is there jail? The questions seemed never ending.

Thought discussion with some of my class mates afterwards, I began to realize that you wouldn't need crosswalks if death were a minor nuisances. And, if you could teleport your self anywhere, what good is a city's grid system to help you navigate? The moral implications of anonimity, having no laws, or government regulations create challenging questions.

The crazy part (as if if weren't already crazy enough) is that Second Life has it's own currency. You can exchange money made by selling objects in Second Life back into dollars. The virtual dollars can be converted into cold hard cash. There are apparently already real-estate developers, making upwards of 150K annually. INSANE!

Also recently, Korea decides to jump ahead. New Songdo city promisses to be a ubitiqious play ground for testing new technology by the year 2014 (although you wouldn't guess it from their web site, and, I really hope that the future is nothing like the promotional video, it's so phony and altruistically depressing).

I've updated the Spatial Design section with some of the 3D Processing work I've been doing. Enjoy.

This week in Physical Computing, we connected variable resistors to our PICs and sent the data to the computer through a serial port. You're probably wondering, what the fick is a variable resistor? I know I was. If you've got nob in sight, you're looking at it. Simply put, a variable resistor creates a variable amount of resistance in a circuit. When you turn up the volume on your stereo, you're changing the resistance, and, increasing the volume. Next week we'll be pulling the serial output through Processing, so things should get interesting. For now, I've posted photos of the PIC with the potentiometer and serial out.

Spatial Design class is getting crazy, in a good way of course. We've been working on mapping movement. We created three dimensional maps in acetate derived from movements captured on video. I'm trying to work with some footage I have of a break dancer doing a back flip. Originally I was thinking I could use a more complicated move like a baby sweep, but it's too complicated for what we're doing. This coming week' we'll be creating a three dimensional form out of our movement analysis. I haven't posted anything from this research yet, but I did compress the Painting With Light video.