Besides being incredibly easy to use, and the gorgeous way archived posts are displayed, I love that Tumblr feels like a safe place to sketch out and test loose ideas. Its designed to allow users to post interesting quotes, videos, photos, or links they come across, or to quickly post ideas of their own. The culture surrounding Tumblr doesn’t always expect ideas to be fully formed or optimally articulated. Sure, it’s always preferable to communicate well. But, it’s ok here if your ideas are rough sketches, too. Executive Director of Civic Commons, Nick Grossman, welcomes people to his Tumblr account saying it’s a place where, “I think out loud and post clippings from my travels across the interwebs.” He credits Tumblr with “singlehandedly ignit(ing) my personal ability to blog.”
I can relate. I used to maintain a Wordpress blog, but I didn’t update it as much as I wanted to because I found it more difficult to use, and I felt like my ideas needed to be more polished there. I do have some qualms about Tumblr (perhaps fodder for another post), but I’m enjoying this feeling of freedom I have to explore ideas very roughly. It’s a nice compliment to Twitter that I originally described experimenting with here.
This is all to say that I’ve had a number of ideas popping around my head since watching a talk Nam-ho Park gave at Microsoft Research several weeks ago. [Cool side note: I learned that Nam-ho met Frank Martinez, who invited him to MSR, at InfoCamp! I mentioned Frank’s write-up of InfoCamp in my post about HTTML5 and CSS3.] Nam-ho’s talk is a two for one: the first half explores aspects of effective data visualization, the second is an interesting probe into mobile storytelling. The talk is just over an hour, so if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, you can scan the interactive transcript on MSR’s site. You can also read a thought-provoking post Nam-ho wrote about the mobile storytelling part of his talk on Forum One’s blog. (Nam-ho is Forum One’s Director of Mobile Services and the Regional Director of their West Coast office.) The ideas Nam-ho raises —the relationship between the digital and the physical, our collective stories, maps and place (to name a few) — touch on a number of areas that I’ve been fascinated by for some time now. Below are some reactions and connections to other writings and ideas Nam-ho’s piece stirred up for me. One of the biggest themes for me is the intersection of the digital and physical. I did my graduate capstone project on conference design and was largely drawn to it because of the interplay of people interacting online as well as in person and how those interactions supported and encouraged one another.
Gaming and Mobile
Nam-ho mentioned gaming in his talk, but not on his post. Here’s part of the transcript:
So this is a treasure hunt. I mean, people go on certain treasure hunts with location-based information. So there’s also geo cashing where you hide certain things in very remote locations and you just provide them some clues as to how to find it and people go on these adventures to locate these little hidden gems and hide things themselves as well. And theres’s a whole kind of gaming industry around that. So it’s a story, it’s sharing. So there’s a community, there’s a story and there’s an objective and that’s enabled through mobile technologies.
This reminded me of Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent, must-read piece, Games That Help Us Wander. Here’s a snip:
In 2005, Sam Lavigne, Ian Kizu-Blair and Sean Mahan moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and started building an alternate reality game designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration. Their game, SF0, invites you to score points by carrying out tasks, many of which are surreal, silly or surprising. You score by documenting your “praxis” and posting photos, videos and other evidence of the intervention.
……
What’s fascinating to me is that the game seems to work quite well, despite being almost solely player-generated. The tasks are created by players for others to complete, and despite a very broad definition of what might be allowable as a task, there are clear, deeper themes that emerge from reading some of the tasks. Most are efforts to make the world a surprising and wonderful place, to encourage people to go places they wouldn’t normally wander and to speak to people they’d generally ignore, to question societal conventions and the force of habit in a way that’s playful and provocative, though not confrontational.
For the curious: because the idea of play is so important to me, Ethan’s piece inspired me to write a comment about Improv Everywhere, “one of my favorite examples of people actively creating and engaging in the kind of interactions that wake people up, cause them to smile, and create a shared sense of community.” I list a number of my favorite videos of their “missions.” If you haven’t seen Improv Everywhere in action yet, they’re entertaining and worth checking out.
NOTE: This post was originally over 2700 words! I decided to break it up into five separate posts:
7th December 2011
