Traditionally a Design work within an OEM studio (original equipment manufacturer), will spend most of their time and energy on identifying target markets and selecting themes to develop further, and then translate a theme into physical properties such as clay models and digital models. Within this system of theme development, production programs can be started, postponed, shelved or eliminated all-together based on decisions from senior leadership.  The remaining amount of time is generally used to identify more closely with the potential consumers’ mental and aspirational mindsets.  Part of our design work is dedicated to selecting key words, phrases and  images that bolster the theme development for an existing brand.  Identifying future consumer’s unmet needs as market opportunities can be very challenging, because the process and tends to be disconnected from real-life consumer insights.  The reason for this is because most of the attention and still spent on the day-to-day business operations.   When we as designers try to create sketches for vehicles and conceive scenarios that are 10, 15 or even 20 years into the future for our companies, things can quickly go astray.  Sometimes this vision models can get weighed because of all the layers of bureaucracy and legacy costs that are associated within an organization, and other times it may be difficult or nearly impossible to move swiftly on opportunities when because you are working within a large and constrained system.  This is the primary reason that why consultancies can provide such valuable insight and fresh perspective, because they have more flexibility to showcase new ideas and explore unknown product/service/experience territories.  Some car companies have an ability to overlap this with their branding strategies, yet most do not.  The opportunities which may exist outside their specific product realm could be more about services or more about delivering an experience and  in this case, the innovation and branding strategies fall short in helping to identify a key innovation.  The territory of traditional automotive design thinking has always been about proportions, stance and quality of execution on a theme.  This is one of the reasons why I chose to join Idea Couture because I wanted to share this process on their projects and at the same time combine my experience and knowledge of foresight strategy to facilitate the innovation and business side.

It was my participation in the foresight strategies and futures workshops that helped guide me to Idea Couture.   My prior experience working with the Advanced Design studio provided me access to an experimental team comprised of designers, engineers and manufacturing innovation experts.  Through foresight study, we reached a new level of understanding in regards to identifying unmet market needs, values shifts, societal changes, technology advancements, environmental concerns, economic forces and political pressures.  Each of these topics have an affect on the business planning and product development strategy, and it was in this field of study that I was able to capture a sense of innovation and an opportunity mapping that gave me an ability to correlate my ideas abou the future with Idris regarding transportation, personal mobility and fashion synergy.

In December of 2009 I traveled to Shanghai for a round interviews with potential employers.  I visited with brand name car studios, international consultancies and I was also able to meet with Idris after an exchange of information on Linked In.  We discussed some potential synergiesbetween his company and myself, even though at that time  I did not have a clear picture or prior knowledge of the backgrounds of his experienced professionals who worked with his team.  My only thought was that there would be a positive benefit for both of us by working together and that by bringing in my capabilities and combining it with their business thinking we could better deliver innovation for clients.

Working for Idea Couture has offered me a chance to build a framework of challenging old ideas.  Based on deep insights and a multi-disciplinary approach, I am fortunate again to be able to work with a group of such diverse and qualified business people, and experts to rely upon as we face the challenges of innovating new products and services at Idea Couture.   I can think of no better opportunity for using my experience and skills than with this team.  We will make a positive difference by way of delivering innovation to companies that rely on us to more effectively relate to the people that we all depend on the most, the consumer.

It requires that we put ourselves on the same streets of the people we would like to offer new services or products to.  We cannot simply sit behind a desk and target potential consumers with ideas which are created in a vacuum.

Corporations are more comfortable when they are able to absorb information that is presented in un-ambiguous volumes of information such as with infographics, data plots, matrix charts and/or clear examples that illustrate the archetypical consumers mated to a given technology.  See Ford’s Antonella, a Computer Generated personas used in development.

However here is where the problem arises, because most companies are too focused on their day-to-day production to really see any greater potential for other adjacent services, similar markets or entirely new opportunities thus limiting their capability to even begin thinking about taking a ‘calculated risk’.  Identifying and developing an entirely new product, experience or service requires a Re-Think, Re-imagining and Reset of business as usual.

Most companies already know who they want to target and what they are willing to spend, but what they don’t know and don’t have, are all the cultural points of reference, the interviews, the video-diaries,  the deep insights that come from knowing and understanding their ‘target market’ intimately.  Companies can literally get stuck when it comes to identifying new social classes that are yet to exist 10 years (even 15 years +) from now into the future.  Experimenting with branding techniques and products that aren’t really connected or based with anything that is current quickly loses relevance, authenticity and meaning.   Internal Design studies and Innovation work really start to break-down because no one actually knows who these future consumers really are.  Again, this is not an Engineering issue, it is an Anthropology study, also a Futurist’ scenario and a Qualitative research issue.

This is why a consultancy such as Idea Couture make sense for companies who wish to understand, utilize and implement foresight strategy that take responsibility for identifying, examining and creating innovative solutions for future target markets.

This issue is often referred to as a ‘wicked problem’, which is to say that the solutions are not obvious, nor are they transparent or easily recognizable upon initial inspection. The real answers are not known only until after someone has solved it.

Furthermore, if any attempt is made to solve a particular issue as an individual part of a wicked-problem, then it could potentially do more harm than good.  To ignore the over-lapping of adjoining issues for products and services is like to going into a field of land mines blind-folded.  You need innovation that that allow you to navigate the most effective  way through using the right tools and taking the right steps.

The opportunities to solve these issues cohesively, requires groups of different and complimentary minds (that do not have a conflict of interest in developing solutions) to work together as a team to create points of cultural reference, identify weak signals, map out scenarios and if need be engage even more raw ideas from un-biased participants.  This synergy-approach eludes most corporations primarily because each node of expertise comes from completely different and diverse set of backgrounds, which is normally not associated with human resources that are  available within an established organization.  What ultimately facilitates desired outcomes for Idea Couture clients is essentially our diversity and key competencies within our respective areas of expertise.

However, striking this balance in the modern world, and more importantly the emerging world must take on a different meaning.  As the old notions of luxury are challenged, they must make way for a new set of user dynamics and offer solutions to the people who live in the growing Megacities (cities with populations over 10 million).

In 2000, there were 18 megacities – conurbations such as Mumbai, Tokyo, New York City, and Mexico City had populations in excess of 10 million inhabitants. Greater Tokyo already has 35 million, which is greater than the entire population of Canada.  (source: Wikipedia)  2015 and beyond will also  see cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, added to this list to name a few.

Transportation on the whole is beginning to splinter into many different value streams such as delivery-on-demand, hub-to-hub services and deliveries, international condo cruisers, executive coaches, virtual garages, post-materialistic neighborhood eco-cars, shared-public vehicles, super-budget-sub $3000, and also new derivatives of personal mobility leading to even more avenues.

As Mega-cities become the norm, consumer attitudes will shift further away from the traditional aspiration of commuter vehicle ownership.  The costs associated with owning, insuring, driving, navigating, re-fueling, re-charging and parking will begin to unravel the notion of investing in one single mode of transport.  In its place, we will see more services based types of transportation.  All it will take are a few entrepreneurs who can splice together on-demand services with real-time users who consumers who are looking for more than just a taxi.

We must search out new ways of mobility, in terms of prestige, convenience, adaptability, affordability, dependability, the “raison d’etre” …… and we must find them quickly.  For consumers, they must be offered some form of tangible incentive, be it joy from the sheer act of being mobile, entertainment, price or convenience.

In terms of Engineering and Design, there are studies currently taking place around the use of robotics in the transportation industry; GM EN-V is one example of a technology demonstrator, and is now on display now at the Shanghai World Expo. The EN-V operates on technology borrowed from Segway, and the entire vehicle is half the size of a Smart car, fully electronic, has a top speed of 25 mph, and is capable of making turns 360 degrees in-place.Another example is the T.25 concept from Gordon Murray (Designer of the famous supercar; McLaren F1), which demonstrates foresight for government regulations, and fuel economy mandates, which are expected by the year 2020.

Transportation technologies have the ability to facilitate change, but ultimately adoption of this will rely completely on the behavior of how humans move about.  Metropolitan cities are more fashion conscious, and urban dwellers are more interested spending money on others things rather than to automobiles.  These people have other desires for items; shoes, purses, headphones, jackets etc…  But human behavior is not an engineering subject and neither is fashion. Therefore, the future scenarios of personal mobility will be less about pure Engineering, more about Ethnography and Designing towards consumer tastes and their unique interests.

Soon, consumers will not care so much about who manufactured their product, but instead they will be more interested in what Designer, Stylist, Co-creator or Theme Artist customized their mobility.  As this scenario evolves it will begin to see an over-lapping of transport services that combines with fashion design, product design, and experience design.

So, Facebook is evolving.

With emphasis on at least 3 core web services – search, chat and the upcoming email – Facebook is getting more serious about functions that Google, among others, are doing well at providing. It makes sense. So here are some quick thoughts on what 400 million users are experiencing on Facebook these days:

A bigger search bar, center stage.

Why it’s good for Facebook:

Keeps users in the site; search is clearly important, if it’s done well people may use it. Facebook controls not all but a lot of social capital on the web. Social search has obvious value for them (and us), but will it be enough? Not quite. Then… wait for it…. Bing! At least it’s trying now. With a lot of help from Microsoft meaningful search results can surface from within the Facebook wall.

Why it’s lame:

Integrated search is not executed well at all. Maybe I just don’t know about the secret and strategic plan to roll out reasonable usability at a snail’s pace? The search results don’t integrate with the Bing-driven web results that remain a click away from the sidebar. Google is always atop my browser, one click or keystroke away (F6 for those who don’t know). Why would I switch? Un. Bloody. Likely. Here’s a free tip for you, Facebook: if you can’t solve the true integration challenge, simply try placing Bing results right next to social results. Make that more visible right off the bat and some of us might actually intend on typing something into your search box rather than doing so accidentally. (But as of course that’s unlikely to happen, because we’ve got F6.)

Slightly more accessible chat.

Why it’s good:

Keeps users in the site; chatter is constant. Lots of people sign into this feature already. Maybe now the rest of us who don’t use it a lot will think of turning it on now and again. You know, because your chat box isn’t only available from the bottom-right anymore (a location also known as “the last place a person in the western world naturally directs their eyes towards”)

What’s missing:

3rd party email service integration, Facebook content integration, voice and video chat. Lots of work to do here, but doable, and potentially very useful. What else is missing? My objectivity. At some point in this post I began addressing Facebook as “you”. Ha.

Upcoming email service.

Why it’s good:

While they won’t likely get my business in this area, if rolled out properly they could get a lot of newcomers rockin’ the …@fbmail.com or ….@fb.com – if they could somehow pry that domain from the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Why you’ll wait for version 2:

Facebook will probably push social context down our throats, ignoring that email experience that do not need to evolve into a frenzy of likes and threaded rambling. After all, Google provides Wave for that. If my email procedures get just 5% less efficient, a huge time-suck will ensue. I can’t risk that. This’ll be a tough one for Facebook to generate conversion from, but new adoption is another story.

Ready? Set? Now race to the middle!

In a way, as Google gets more serious about the social game and Facebook moves towards the domains of the Mountain View Machine, we’re looking at a race to the middle that will have some very interesting outcomes, and perhaps some friendly ones as well. Clever mashups are already around; check out Threadsy. Some cool integration there. Now if only it was executed by the data sources themselves, in collaboration with each other. Imagine if Google and Facebook innovated together? Unlikely, I know. But the economies of scale could be there for their servers appetites. Lotta pictures on that site. And growing. Okay okay, enough economic rationale. It’s complex and they are fighting for glory. One is focused on implicit results and the other, explicit. And yes, the fight is too good for now. Like most of us, I enjoy watching it. I also find value in multiple services. I enjoy many benefits from several cloud services, and as for the drawbacks, I try to minimize my encounters with them. I like that the industry is busy and competitive because it’ll make result in better products, ones of better value. Mistakes along then way, for sure. But reasonable competition for the masses. I like that they’re trying.

Trying… and killing it out there… here are some recent stats… go to Facebook the source.

More than 400 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

More than 35 million users update their status each day

More than 60 million status updates posted each day

More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month

More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week

More than 3.5 million events created each month

More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook

More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook

More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day

Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

The supply chain for products we use is something that has undergone rigorous analysis and innovations that have resulted in improved efficiencies, but what about the “removal chain”?  Could a better understanding of what happens to products after we use them promote behavioral change and encourage people to make more sustainable decisions about what they consume and how it affects the world around them?

A team of researchers from MIT SENSEable City Lab (http://senseable.mit.edu/) recently embarked on a major project called Trash Track, which aims to get people thinking about what they throw away and how it impacts the environment. Like an urban equivalent of nuclear medicine–where a tracer is injected and followed through the human body, the project uses custom-designed electronic tags to track different types of waste on their final journeys through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle. Waste Management and Qualcomm funded the study.

The project’s objective is to reveal the disposal process of everyday objects and highlight potential inefficiencies in the recycling and sanitation systems. In mid-July, Trash Track enlisted volunteers in New York and Seattle, who allowed 3000 pieces of their trash to be electronically tagged with special wireless markers or “trash tags”. Working with Waste Management, the SENSEable City Lab team is monitoring the path of trash in real-time using the tags, which report data to a central server at MIT, where it is processed and visualized into dynamic maps showing a slice of the city’s waste stream.

Trash Track was initially inspired by the Green NYC Initiative, the goal of which is to increase the rate of waste recycling in New York to almost 100% by 2030. Currently only about 30% of the city’s waste is diverted from landfills for recycling.

This week, the preliminary results of Trash Track are being unveiled in two new exhibitions in New York and Seattle. For more information, visit http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtalk/index/php

Just as the web moved from static websites to “feeds and flows” objects too are moving from static things to service driven production by newly minted ‘manufacturing- as-service’ practices. We may begin to see ‘things’ as instantiations of responsive and relational system of services, feeds and flows. As objects become considered information, they become more and more malleable, subject to change, edits, mixes and blends. Simultaneously giving birth to a new breed of unconventional value propositions and business opportunities. Could what Google did for information, be done with matter? Today’s adaptive and flexible digital manufacturing technologies and production processes lend themselves to the kind of ‘experience data’ varieties, and flow of designs stemming from an interplay of experience sampling infrastructure, user-annotation and user-guided design. Objects can become passports to experience and feedback, a platform for citizen consultants to sketch dream products and interactions. Foraging a direct interface between people and organizations.

Object behavior, perception and communication explorations are strange attractors of interest to business, policy and academia. As consumers we ‘vote’ with our wallets, clicks, time and attention. People expect things to be easy to use, cost little or nothing, maximize personal freedom, be customizable, safe and secure, and to learn about our personal preferences. [Lee et al] According to the literature describing the promise of Ubiquitous Computing artifacts, people expect value from seamless anybody, any service, any place, any time and any device interactions. [Weiser] It seems as though people expect things to just get better, and to be a breeze, to be almost invisible. Organizations need sustainable returns on their IP holdings, mobilizing them through product, service and systems solutions in the marketplace. How do we create a common vocabulary for mass innovation interactions needed to move toward a system that satisfies all of these concerns?

Products and services are behavior ‘enabling and mapping’ technologies, the identification and recording of behaviors on an object level will be critical to mass innovation. Products and spaces too can be a platform for enabling the recording of user annotations and innovations. Labs will spill out in into the streets, into objects, and into your hands, boasting a growing evolving upgradeable ‘experiential literacy.’ Revealing new insights into the climate of intent, motivation, and experience that contribute to the meanings an object may be associated with. A future Google result for “Sketching User Experiences” may return – “Did you mean: Users sketching experiences?”

Can objects become collectively or individually authored by their users? The relationships between object and the individual/group experience produce a stream of information in regard to the conceptual, emotional and functional role of the object. Through time the information may show shifts and transitions of a given objects roles in relation to changes in what it means to people. This information is an invaluable and currently under observed resource that can aid in the design of the next instantiation of a given object. Designing in, through and from the human processes that negotiates meaning through experience is key to sustained relevance. Better inspiring and facilitating the habits that accompany new meanings around objects as they manifest. A great deal of strategic value for organizations, institutions and individuals lies in cracking this dilemma, and in creating the things and interfaces that operate not just for many people, but also because of them. An infrastructure that is an interface to infrastructure. New revenue strategies and more important, pervasive co-prosperity lie dormant in the interplay of the social negotiation of ‘what could be’ and ‘what comes to be.’

‘Non-destructive Annotation’, historically used in design and architecture where one would employ vellum in drafting to make suggestions, is beginning to migrate to digital media through startups such as Cozimo, that offer the sharing, discussion and annotation of digital files. Vellum was traditionally the tangible ‘comment medium’ beyond text. One could draw alternatives, suggest changes, write words, measures and dimensions ect. Cozimo offers a direct write onto digital video and image files, as a workflow friendly way to converse around digital works, as conversations become more remote and asynchronous. One side effect we are beginning to see as hard things gain increasingly soft qualities; the surface and motion of things are beginning to become interface. I can navigate a game or control my Roomba vacuum cleaner with the accelerometer within my laptop. I can translate complex real world actions into in-game behavior with a Wiimote. The iPhone’s ‘screen sprawl’ has almost engulfed the entirety of the device, and Apple’s patents suggest that it eventually will. Ambient Devices boasts objects that are screen, streaming real world data by way of color saturation and gradient change. Objects indeed are becoming screen, and screen is becoming interactive interface. If we push this to the limit of “objects as interface’ they become a ripe vessel for explicit tangible annotation, where people can voice what they might like to see and feel stemming from their interpretations and personal experiences. People sketching, scrubbing and manipulating, and speaking through tweaking in the context of use, produces a wealth of variants that add up to thousands or millions of nuanced ‘perfect’ products, a ‘mass innovation.’

The majority of people might allow objects to accrue metadata, cultivating its ‘aboutness’, as opposed to annotation. The use of products can become a direct interface to manufacturing processes, as objects implicitly harvest suggestions through their journeys in human habiture. What we may see is the collision of user driven ambient and explicit annotations and designs, with the emerging fabrication processes that are engulfing the production of everyday things. Normal things. A product line of enabled objects can become a networked innovation lab that innovates from within the experience and interactions of a population of prosuming-performers. There is opportunity in harnessing the narrative of edge competencies diverse and driven individuals are expressing. The convergence of hardware as software, new forms of experience sampling, user annotation and design, manufacturing as service, combined with the behavior of remix cultures create ripe conditions for new classes of user-generated content built around read/write matter.

Ambient Co-creation

BCN FORMULA GAME
“BCN formula is a planning tool in the form of an operational multi-player game, that generates building proposals for Barcelona in real-time. The existing city is modelled as a two-plus-eleven-dimensional grid that processes its internal states like a cellular automat, and can be externally influenced by the users through urban interventions. These interventions change the position of blocks within the eleven urban dimensions of Barcelona defined by ESARQ students. The dimensions are capturing the swarming life, traffic, and commercial activities enfolding in the existing Barcelona grid. The grid influences the movement of a swarming point cloud. As soon the point cloud reaches critical mass, it generates a sculptural structure informed by the multi-dimensional procedural model of the city. ESARQ students provided feedback to the process by interpreting the structures as buildings in urban contexts, which are placed by the point cloud at locations that fit the criteria. Parallel to the existing grid, a seducing city comes to flourish, respecting the old rationalist city grid but refraining from any mimicry. The new parallel city of Barcelona co-exists with the existing one.

Here, city planning is not thought of as a top-down pressure but as a strategy for evolving existing social structures. The workshop participants described the genetic codes of the Barcelona Grid and the Barcelona feeling and atmosphere. The students were asked to design flowcharts diagramming the city as an input > processing > output device. The students learned how to work with the game development programme Virtools, which was then used to build the multi-player planning game. Playing the planning game produces the data [in realtime], which are used for the design of the buildings from the parallel world. Procedures include intuitive acts.

The resulting structures are blobs, in that they are double-curved, twisted, seemingly irrational and not geometrically derivable structures. Yet such blobs they are only to those who do not know the genetic code and the procedures that generated these highly informed, context-related building structures.”

The example above describes a new anomalous form of co-creation, where interacting individuals and existing infrastructure becomes a stream of entangled and dialogical real-time data and information. This data constitutes a shared vocabulary for further discussion, a shared design material that can be observed, shaped, and expressed in a myriad of ways. In this example the Hyperbody Research group from Deflt TU in the Netherlands are enabling a system whereby users indirectly partake in generative architecture and city planning. The team of researchers may audit, tweak and further develop these plans for viable implementation. The BCN Formula game, through the mediums of location, transaction and visualization have fashioned a low cognitive sub-activity that generates useful pre-design material for professionals to ingest and design from. BCN is a weak signal that provides an existence proof that we can model, to some degree, products, spaces and experiences as a side effect of living.

Any product in the hands of a person, or any place proximal to people is valuable time that could provide useful information about how products and spaces are used, their unforeseen uses, as well as how they interact with other objects and spaces. Information such as this reveals unknown but existing value, that can be amplified to create more moving, useful and compelling experiences. This is a new evolutionary step from the Focus group or the Supergroup, it is unfocused, indirect creation through the ambient ‘sketchings and suggestions’ of people living life. “Everybody” may not be a designer, but indeed, “Everybody” can partake in “living co-authorship.”

Direct Annotation, Definition and Design
For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators. This is a huge cultural shift, for in this new economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part.

“We-think” Charles Leadbeater

There is the other side to this argument. People who want to do. People have always modded, hacked and ‘did it themselves’ and we still do. Communities such as make.com, instructibles.com and various DIY cultures in backyards and basements still preserve this resourceful skill. It spans everything from the biotech hobbyist to children who have to make their own toys. Some do it for sport, and some out of necessity.

‘Direct Creation’ is the idea that near future objects will be a medium of digital/tangible sketching, annotation and expression enabling people to customize, re-design, re-specify, re-render and re-print objects. Objects with this capability will enable a flexibility, hackability, and freedom with digital precision that former generations of objects just could not match. The difference between Direct Annotation/Creation and Ambient Co-creation is that Direct Creation is a individual or social act that takes time, attentional and cognitive resources of the user/creator. Time and attention are scarce, so the benifets and rewards of their participation would have to outweigh their investments.

Palcom, a recent European Union funded research project explored the antithesis of Latour’s “black box.” This touches on the difference of knowing how something works and knowing how to work it. Palcom, short for palpable computing supports the autonomy, authorship and access implied by Direct Creation in their statement:

“..notions like inspection, experimentation, translation, and emergent use become important, as people creatively connect and use ‘assemblies’ of palpable pervasive technologies.”

They continue to explain “palpability”:

By ‘palpable’ we mean ‘noticeable’ and ‘understandable’. Palpability is not a property of technology itself, but an effect of people’s engagement with technologies, objects, and environments. For designers of pervasive computing, this means that they cannot design palpability into technologies. But they can design for palpability, to support people in making computing palpable.

I love to look at toys sometimes as indicators of future features. One of these toys that offers rather unorthodox features of palpability and direct creation is Topobo:

Topobo is a 3D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo’s coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of Passive (static) and Active (motorized) components, people can quickly assemble dynamic biomorphic forms like animals and skeletons with Topobo, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly play back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements and walk repeatedly. The same way people can learn about static structures playing with building blocks, they can learn about dynamic structures playing with Topobo.

Simply Topobo is like Lego with gesture memory that you can ‘program through play.’ It is this form of playful programming that could enable many people to engage in design conversations through the object, the very subject of the conversation. As screen and shape deforming materials begin to merge with object skins and surfaces, form and function becomes no longer solely determined by material constraints, form becomes programmable, as does function and service. Form in this case no longer follows function, form follows sponentaity, improvisation, will and desire. Form follows Relationships.

Chances are ‘Thought to Thing’ interfaces will not occur so seamlessly. It will emerge in messy stages and spurts, with many faces. Recently on a trip to Amsterdam I walked into a Puma flagship store to find a novel way of buying a shoe. What appeared to be a cafeteria cashier’s station with small containers filled with shoe parts, was actually a small factory. The ‘factory’ combined physical pieces of shoes with RFID tags to be scanned, and a digital touch screen where one could modify the scanned pieces and build a new shoe. It could be paid for immediately and delivered to your door in a couple of weeks. This is a rather crude form of direct creation. Long waits. You have to do it in the store; cool, but no go. Stephen Intille describes ‘User based Digital Designs’ in his research paper entitled ‘Eliciting User Preferences Using Image Based Experience Sampling and Reflection.’ Stephen envisions users interacting with images and video from his experience sampling cameras. The images are manipulated with a stylus within an interface on a Palm handheld device. That interface could also include a scanning option where you could generate a 3d model from video or orthographic snapshots, manipulate away, and send to the fabbers. Perhaps near field data transfer where each object has its own mod data ready to be annotated, transformed, paid for and directions to pick-up, or send to home printer. Who knows, any, all or none may emerge.

Intel and Carnegie Mellon are working on a version of what Dr. J Storrs Hall first termed “Utility Fog”, a form of programmable matter. Carnegie Mellon calls it Claytronics, at Intel calls it by a more formal term, Dynamic Physical Rendering.

In the Dynamic Physical Rendering Project, researchers at the Intel Pittsburgh Lablet and Carnegie Mellon University are jointly exploring a new form of smart matter which would be composed of myriad tiny robots acting together for telepresence, teleoperation, material handing/manipulation, locomotion, and distributed sensing. “Ensembles” of thousands to millions of robots would form physical analogs of virtual shapes which human senses would accept as real, eliminating cumbersome virtual reality gear and viewing angle limitations now present for most 3D visualization and telepresence applications. Likewise, such ensembles would act as reconfigurable, general-purpose robots capable of many forms of locomotion and object manipulation.

Dynamic Physical Rendering intends to create a new level of ‘directness’ where designers, engineers or users could push and pull masses of nanobots into new configurations to negotiate a new design, create a button, or a new handle. Objects then would be reduced to a database, play list and replay within a context of new tangible media where soft and hard are phase states of desire. Such an extreme should be a starting point for philosophers, sociologists, designers, future MBAs, psychologists and political scientists willing to grapple with the future of symbols, signs, meaning, power, economy and access. How will we read as well as write into this new medium? What worlds will we render after having them rendered for us for so long?