Saw Feist last night at Oran Mor and was struck by the number of people filming the gig on their phones and cameras (possibly to the detriment of experiencing the ‘here and now’?) and was wondering… If a move from product design to service design is a move from ‘you are what you own’ to ‘you are what you do’ does this constant digital documentation represent a new layer above that – a move to ‘you are what you document’.* With the emergence of facebook, myspace etc an unspoken function of these online communities is surely a digital persona, a record of your existence as defined by your friends (number of), your del.icio.us favourites, your flickr set. I blog therefore I am.
* Am sure Nokia et al are way ahead of the curve on this… if anyone has any interesting design stories about where this is heading would be keen to hear them.
I’m not so sure about being ahead of the curve. But it’s certainly a very familiar topic of discussion and investigation. The few Interaction Designers at Nokia try to do our best to counter the old school Industrial Design opinion that still perpetuates that Nokia are selling nice shiny boxes with a screen and keypad > to Nokia is selling a system of devices, software and services. The mobile phone is a conduit for keeping in touch with friends and increasingly keeping them up to date on what you are doing. MMS never took off – too expensive – but posting last night’s pictures and videos online has become more compelling than this ten fold. The web services that have exploded into mass use are those that get the interconnections right. Putting a photo album online is easy but being able connect this content with manually and automatically added associations: people, tags, places, etc is not just where the cutting edge software engineering is but also the most socially rewarding sharing. Whether it be one-to-many (facebook) or one-to-mass (youtube) people want to be seen doing cool things and spend a lot of time projecting a version of there lives online.
Without giving too much away, for Nokia this means reducing the time from night out to upload. As people start to have flat rate internet connections on their phone contracts those gig photos can be shared in near realtime. They can also be given a wealth of associations (metadata): place, time, friends around you (Bluetooth/WiFi IDs of their phones), etc as they are captured and uploaded. Your phone is, and will become more and more context aware – raising the social value of your outpourings to the web.
Designing and realising such new web services is a huge challenge for a manufacturing behemoth such as Nokia, culturally if nothing else. Small web startups who can develop in an agile way in small teams of designers and engineers. Releasing beta versions, and iterating their designs live with peoples feedback, will continue to create the most interesting new services. Others will follow or interface as best as possible as they become popular.
As far as ‘I am what I document’. This is no more acute than with my most geeky friends who will add a constant trickle of content: images to Flickr, status to Twitter and Facebook, last played to LastFM throughout the day, everyday. It is clear that this is done consciously to raise their social visibility, from letting their Mum know what they cooked for tea to making and keeping a name for themselves professionally.