Prototype: inbox Magazine
Coming back from my week-long email vacation last year, I realized I had not missed anything important and that checking my email once a week would probably suffice. To that end, I started thinking about email as a weekly publication instead of an always on application. I took all of my emails from that week of December 1, 2009 through December 7, 2009, organized them and laid them out as a set of magazines.
The primary magazine contains the bulk of the emails and the addendum contains a handful of extremely long emails that would not fit into the page count of the first volume. This prototype demonstrates email in a completely different, more readable, less urgent context and although it’s not practical for mass consumption, it does highlight the one-directional, informational nature of many email messages.
Prototype: Bloom
This piece involves moving an emergent function of email—task management—out of the inbox and into a physical object external to the computer. Drawing on the ideas of ubiquitous computing, this project focuses on combining an existing behavior, starring items in an inbox, with a familiar metaphor, the desktop plant.By endowing an everyday object with computing intelligence, this prototype tests the theory that moving seamlessly from the periphery to the center of attention eases technological overload. It also provides a calm, less judgemental display of task management. Ideally this would be a physically tactile and tangible plant, but in the face of the current constraints of botany, the task plant, Bloom, is presented as a digital prototype programmed in Processing and displayed on a touchscreen submonitor.
Bloom prototype in action. I am using a set of my own email for the week of December 1 - December 7.
Google's Buzz
So Google recently launched Buzz, a twitter/facebook-like application, inside of Gmail. The general response of people I know is confusion, irritation and skeptical experimentation. The addition of another folder quickly filling up with comments from friends of friends feels quite overwhelming at the moment and seems like the exact wrong thing to do (with email, I mean). For the time being I will let it sit and see how I feel about it later. I have to say, though, my gut says I don't have patience for yet another "tiny updates of no consequence" aggregator.
Postcards from the Web
About twelve years ago, I maintained a website with a handful of regular readers. At some point, I was tired of talking to them via the web (and the occasional email although I've never been very good with responding in a timely manner), so I sent out my address and requested that people send me some postcards. Here are some of the ones I got.
I got around 15 in total from random, sometimes awesome internet strangers. I must have exchanged hundreds of personal emails over the last fifteen years and it doesn't really surprise me that this handful of postcards from strangers is what I've kept.
I was reading a blog post the other day about how digital service companies (such as Google) don't get nearly as much mythological brand cred as a company like Apple (a more physical company). I don't know if that's entirely true, but again, I'm not surprised that the author was suggesting physical items hold more resonance with us than digital ones.
I updated some structural elements of my website today to reflect that my thesis topic is no longer about attention (too broad). I didn't want to directly say it was about email either, though, because although it is, that is somewhat of a practicality. I can't help but wish that the things we spend hours doing are things that matter. My thesis doesn't really address this because that wouldn't be a design thesis. I really don't know what that would be. 2.07.2010 // 0 Comments // READ FULL POST...
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