Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Interface design

    Interface design

    This reflection on interface design has taken a while to write. When I started we were on the cusp of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. If you’re interested in technology, but aren’t an Apple fan it still matters as it sets the agenda. Apple’s moves affect wearables, smartphones, tablets and OTT (over the top) TV services.
    The New York Times published an interesting article Apple Piles On the Apps, and Users Say, ‘Enough!’.
    Ignore the title of the article itself, which is a function of clickbait rather than content. Instead, it provides an good critique of interface design across platforms. It highlights:
    • The difficulty in finding and installing other apps inside Messages. Many users aren’t aware of the functionality. This is different to the ‘interface as oldster barrier’ that SnapChat had. DoorDash – a Deliveroo analogue dropped a support after a few months due to a lack of users. Apple took a second run at this with iOS 11 trying to improve discoverability
    • Apple 3D touch isn’t used to drive contextual features by app developers
    • The Apple Watch’s mix of crown, button and small touch screen made ‘lean in’ interactive apps hard. The Apple Watch interface isn’t learned by ‘playing’ in the same way that you can with a Mac or an iPhone. Apple’s forthcoming watchOS update looks to have Siri ‘guess’ what you want. It wants to provide contextual information to users (and reduce interactions)
    If you ignore 3D touch for a moment, these problems are cross platform in nature. (Some vendors like Huawei have attempted a similar 3D touch feature in their own apps. They did not try to get developer adoption.)
    Thinking about Messenger app developers struggle to integrate disparate features into the interface. The exceptions are:
    • LINE
    • WeChat – the take up of mini-apps in WeChat have been disappointing performers. Is this indicating a possible ceiling for functionality?
    Wearables as a category looks thin, with Apple being one of the largest players. Pebble got acquired by Fitbit. Jawbone seems to be a dead company walking. Their blog was last updated in October 2016, Twitter in February. It’s ironic: their original BlueTooth headset business would now be a great opportunity.
    I’ve tried Casio’s BlueTooth enabled G-Shock, four Nike Fuelbands and a Polar wearable. I am on my second Apple Watch and I still don’t know what the real compelling use case is for these devices.
    So how does this stuff come about? I think its down to the process of creation, which affects analysis and critical analysis of the product. Creation in this case is essentially throwing stuff up against the wall until it sticks and then the process becomes reductive. As a case in point, look how smartphones have evolved to the slab form factor. 
    Throwing stuff against the wall
    I’ve worked enough times on digital products to understand the functionality is king. It’s the single most important thing. I’ve worked on products that wonderful functions but:
    • Consumers didn’t know they had a need, its hard to get consumers to build new habits. Forming habits can be hard
    • They were a bitch to sign up with. Yahoo!’s sign-up process killed products. It’s a fact. We’d get consumers hyped up, we’d deliver them to the relevant page and they wouldn’t convert. I didn’t blame them, if I wasn’t an employee or digital marketer I’d have done the same
    That’s how products are now built. The focus is on speed of execution of the idea. It isn’t about thinking through the complete experience. Agile methodologies with their short sprints puts emphasis on function. Away from data to feed into big picture optimisation. A function focus means that you end up with ‘lean in’ interaction designs as default.
    There aren’t many organisations that get it right. I’d argue that the early Flickr team and Slack ‘got it’. Though there are common factors:
    • Both Flickr and Slack had common key team members
    • Both products fell out of failure. Flickr came out of tools for Game Neverending. Slack began as a tool in the development of Glitch
    Where are the ergonomists and futurists?
    There are people who can provide the rigorous critique.
     
    Back in the day organisations with large R&D functions like NASA and BT employed writers to envisage the future. Staring into the future became a career. People like Syd Mead provided a visual map of the future. Mead and others did a lot of work thinking about the context of technology to users. At the present time lots of criticism levelled at VR glasses is it being anti-social. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Social interaction is more likely to come glasses wearer to glasses wearer. It will happen in a virtual third space. Neal Stephenson explored this third space in Snow Crash. The Black Sun was a virtual night club.

    Bill Moggridge, designer of the GRiD Compass computer – the world’s first laptop thought a lot about ergonomics. The laptop had a 11 degree slope from pop-out leg to the keypad. This is something that your MacBook Pro or Surface doesn’t have. There is a lack of depth in technology design compared to what Moggridge had. He brought in psychologists and studied human computer interaction. He eventually co-founded IDEO.

    Whilst the elements that Moggridge looked at were well known the thinking doesn’t seep into product categories. We are very good at asking can a product be made. We are poor at asking what does the product really mean. Apple’s viewpoint on the tablet segment is a case in point.

    The vast majority of tablets are used for lean back media consumption from watching films and reading books to reviewing emails. It can work as a productivity device in specific circumstances with custom built apps – say field sales or replacing a pilot’s flight paperwork. The keyboard and power of modern Macs (and PCs) provide a better tool for content creators; whether its analysing a spreadsheet or writing this blog post. 

    Yet, since its launch by Steve Jobs, Apple has viewed the iPad as a new PC. The iPad Pro has been designed to try and catch up in features with the Mac. It is ironic that Microsoft has moved a slim ‘MacBook clamshell design’ analogue into its latest Surface range.  

    Shanzhai

    It is very different to the pragmatic design ethos of China’s ‘shanzhai‘ gadget markers who came up with both laughable and exceptionally smart solutions. Everything from the dual SIM phone to the phone / electric razor hybrid. Successes bloomed, educated a collective knowledge of makers and a manufacturing ecosystem of facilitators, while the oddities slipped into the night.

    The manufacturing ecosystem played a crucial role in upping smartphone quality. Metal phone enclosures started to trickle down to other manufacturers once Apple had grown the capability of CNC manufacturers with orders for thousands of machines in Foxconn factories. This also fed expertise in how to use these machines in mass manufacturing. Which shows how physical interface design can be influenced almost as fast as software interface design in terms of commercial rivals.

  • True Names by Vernor Vinge

    I was inspired to read True Names by a podcast. New York Times journalist John Markoff was interviewed by Kara Swisher on the Recode podcast in February and talked about reading science fiction to better understand how technology is likely to affect us.
    Untitled
    It’s actually a great piece of advice. Back in the day, large corporates used to employ authors to write stories based on scenarios as part of their research programmes. Many people have attributed the clamshell mobile phone to the Star Trek TV series and the flip communicator devices.

    Markoff outlined his favourite stories.

    “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson (1992): “The premise is, America only does two things well. One is write software, and the other is deliver pizzas. [laughs] What’s changed?”
    “The Shockwave Rider” by John Brunner (1975): Markoff said he built his career on an early understanding that the internet would change everything. He said, “[The Shockwave Rider] argued for that kind of impact on society, that networks transformed everything.”
    “True Names” by Vernor Vinge (1981): “The basic premise of that was, you had to basically hide your true name at all costs. It was an insight into the world we’re living in today … We have to figure it out. I think we have to go to pseudonymity or something. You’re gonna participate in this networked existence, you have to be connected to meatspace in some way.”
    “Neuromancer” by William Gibson (1984): Markoff is concerned about the growing gap between elders who need care and the number of caregivers in the world. And he thinks efforts to extend life are “realistically possible,” pointing to Gibson’s “300-year-old billionaires in orbit around the Earth.

    I had read Snow Crash relatively recently and Neuromancer was revisited last year. I had a vague recollection of The Shockwave Rider and True Names, but hadn’t read them in over 20 years.

    Vinge’s True Names is published by Penguin with a collection of essays from a range of technology thinkers including

    • Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer who founded Habitat one of the first massive online multiplayer games, back when dial up bulletin boards were the bleeding edge. Farmer worked at Yahoo! when I was there and was involved in Yahoo! 360 and still consults on community / social platform issues
    • Bruce Schneier wrote about how security products fail us. Bruce is one of the world’s leading commentators on all things hack and cryptography related
    • Mark Pesce is better known now as an Australian-based computer academic, but two decades ago he invented VRML – a way of representing the internet as a 3D thing and prescient in the light of Oculus Rift and others.
    • Marvin Minsky; was a pioneer in AI and machine learning provided an afterward to the story

    That True Names managed to attract essays from these people should be an endorsement in itself.  Re-reading it two decades on, Vinge’s story echoes and riffs on the modern web. Hacking, cyberterrorism, constant government surveillance and the tension between libertarian netizens versus the regulated  real world. The central theme of Mr Slippy; a hacker who is identified by US government officials and co-opted as an unwilling informant and agent provocateur feels reminiscent of LULZSec leader and super grass Sabu. It’s amazing that Vinge wrote this in 1981 – although he envisages the web as being rather like a Second Life / Minecraft metaverse – with NeuroSky style interfaces.

    Penguin’s careful curation of essays riffing on the themes of True Names is where the real value is in my opinion. For someone who cares about technology and consumer behaviour. It is worthwhile keeping this book on the shelf and diving in now and again. More related posts here.

    More information
    Want to understand the future? Read science fiction, John Markoff says. | Recode
    Habitat Chronicles – thoughts on gaming, online products and community building by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer
    Schneier on Security
    Mark Pesce’s professional website and his columns for The Register
    Vernor Vinge lecture on long-term scenarios for the future via The Wayback Machine

  • Smartphone addiction + more

    Smartphone addiction

    Smartphone addiction gets the Scott Galloway treatment. Childhood smartphone addiction has been a social and government issue in China for years as part of wider concerns over online and mobile gaming. So in some respects Galloway on smartphone addiction feels behind the curve. What is more interesting is how smartphone addiction goes beyond gaming into areas like airline loyalty schemes.

    40 years of hip hop

    The Hood Internet have done an amazing four minute edit of forty years of hip hop. It’s razor sharp precision. I have a pretty good knowledge of old school hip hop and couldn’t name all the tracks. The cuts are so short, Shazam isn’t likely to help either.

    Chinese dream

    BBH Shanghai have created a beautiful ad for Audi China which features science fiction author Hao Jing Fang. This feels like a mix of Wong Kar-wai and cyberpunk fiction. In some ways it isn’t that far from the aesthetic in present day Chinese tier one cities central business districts. It represents a brighter techno-utopian future than I would expect in an advert for American or European consumers.

    In some ways what was the American dream is now the Chinese dream. This implies a Chinese golden age of sorts, but there a number of headwinds to this dream from demographics to the authoritarian nature of the party.

    Louis Vuitton

    Louis Vuitton have been doing a lot of forward thinking content and events. Whilst this video is beautifully shot, it feels retro by comparison to other things that they’ve done. I went to the Louis Vuitton series exhibition was far more forward looking than this video.

    Work in Progress

    Carhartt Work In Progress created this great skate video in Italy.

    AZZURRO from Carhartt Work In Progress on Vimeo. Work In Progress have been consistently doing a great job commissioning content. In this respect, I would put them right up there on Red Bull in terms of quality, if not quantity of content. The alignment with skateboarding in this film is perfect.

  • 2017 internet trends + other things

    2017 internet trends report

    Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report: All the slides, plus analysis | Recode – was the big thing to drop in my week.

    The key themes for me from the 2017 internet trends report were:

    • Continued slowing in internet growth showing that the previous years decline in growth wasn’t a one off. In the 2017 internet trends report we also saw a decline in smartphone growth as well
    • All of these trends don’t apply with India where the market is still growing for internet access and smartphone growth. In India the 2017 internet trends isn’t ‘2017’ but 2010
    • Lean forward media is beloved of internet entrepreneurs. Interactive gaming is becoming mainstream around the world, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the largest market for gaming.
    • In the US at least wearables are becoming mainstreamed. 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Back when I was in Hong Kong, Chinese manufacturers were cranking out low cost health monitors to monitor your exercise activity

    More related content here.

    The Reflex remixes

    The Reflex remixes Gil Scott Heron. Nicolas was one of the few remixers who can make a production that’s better than the original. 

    Ultraman theme tune

    Scatman Ultraman – Ultraman is a famous suited super hero. It is part of the Japanese TV and movie ‘special filming or tokusatsu genre. It is the grandfather of the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. One of Ultraman’s powers was the ability to grow really large, which spawned other giant hero or Kyodai Hero characters. 

    Surreal and manic

    Surreal and manic

     

    A post shared by DJ STYLEWARZ (@stylewarz) on

    Kouhei Nakama 

    Kouhei Nakama | Design & Motion – really nice 3D animations by Japanese artist / designer Kouhei Nakama

  • Black technology (黑科技)

    Black technology

    An all-compassing phrase that I’ve heard being used by Chinese friends Hēi kējì in Pinyin or black technology. It’s been around for a couple of years but recently gained more currency among people that I know.

    Microsoft Hololens 💥

    It is used as a catchall for disruptive / cool innovative products. What constitutes ‘black technology’ is subjective in nature but generally Chinese would agree on some examples such as:

    • Magic Leap
    • Microsoft Holo Lens
    • Bleeding edge silicon chips with an extraordinary amount of memory or machine learning functionality built in
    • Tesla self-driving cars

    Magical quality

    The key aspect is that the product as ‘magical quality’ in the eyes of the user. Technology companies have tried to use it in marketing to describe the latest smartphone and app features like NFC, gesture sensitive cameras and video filters. Your average Chinese consumer would see this as cynical marketing hype. Xiaomi had been guilty of this over the past couple of years. Chinese netizens aren’t afraid to flay the brands for abusing the term black technology.

    As technology develops, the bar for what represents black technology will be raised higher.

    Manga origins

    According to Baidu Baike (a Quora-like Q&A service / Wikipedia analogue) it is derived from the Japanese manga Full Metal Panic! (フルメタル·パニック! |Furumetaru Panikku!).

    In the manga black technology is technology far more advanced than the real world. An example of this would be ‘Electronic Conceal System’ – active optical camouflage used on military helicopters and planes in the manga. It is created by the ‘Whispered’ – people who are extremely gifted polymaths who each specialise in a particular black technology.

    In the manga they are frequently abducted and have their abilities tested by ‘bad organisations’ who support terrorism. Whispered also have a telepathic ability to communicate with each other. If they stay connected for too long there can be a risk of their personalities coalescing together. Similar content can be found here.

    More information

    黑科技 （动漫中出现的词语）- Baidu Baike
    Full Metal Panic – Amazon