Pieces of my digital life

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I’m not alone

I think almost anyone who has a multiple computer household experiences this problem to some extent: I have music, video, pictures, and audiobook files scattered everywhere.   Over the last 14 years or so I’ve been through so many moves from place to place, so many upgrades from different computers, and so many devices it’s all over.  I thought I had a pretty good handle on the whole thing when we finally bought a 1TB external drive along with our decently sized 320GB drive on our imac that stays at home, but the collection of media comes from so many places and in so many forms it’s spread out again.  You would think that with One iMac, one macbook, and my computer at work plus the external devices it wouldn’t be too bad, but yet it is.

I know the greatest part of it is located in those two big drives, but where exactly I don’t know.  I also know I have other media scattered on my laptop at least 2 USB drives and my work computer.  Admittedly my work computer has more work related media (TED talks and other conference video or audio related to my research or at least my interests), but there’s other stuff too.

I don’t organize, I search

I’ve long long since given up on trying to organize this stuff.  I let google desktop or spotlight find stuff for me, but I do want to be able to know what’s out there.  With the recent loss of my ipod music (had to restore it, soon to be restored AGAIN) I’ve been hoping to get some more musical variety on my ipod.  I also used to enjoy pandora for music listening and discovery, but since my move from the USA I can longer enjoy that service with using VPN or other means to circumvent ridiculous geographic restrictions.

I know I can go get it all onto the external drive, but then it’s not always readily accessible.  Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a nice idea, but I just don’t have the money to spend on it, and still that really won’t help unless I can get remote access from work to it as the majority of my computing time is at work and I don’t carry a laptop to work anymore.

Online solution?

Dropbox is great for keeping all the files I’m currently working with and my current account limit of 3.25 GB is adequate only for those things, not full-scale storage of my media life.  Not even close.  I don’t think we have that many pictures, but it has to be 4-5 GB of pictures alone.  Music is somewhere in the 70 GB range.  Video isn’t that extensive, perhaps 30 GB.  So let’s just round up to 150 GB.  Is it practical to have all that on the cloud?  It wouldn’t be very cheap, Amazon would want $22.50/month or $270/year, and that’s just for storage, request to use it would be more, though I doubt it would add significantly to the costs.

A Story

I just chatted with an old friend I haven’t seen or talked to in 15 years.  She was telling me about how she was trying to upload some photos to facebook and messed it up, deleted them and is now trying again.  She had to stop chatting with me so she could concentrate on the task.  Admittedly she is 20 years my senior, but things like this are even more important and probably more common in her age group.  I also don’t think that this is much less common for younger folks.  Sure if you have the uberconnected smart phone pictures from that are easily and instantly online where you want them, but what about those pics you take with your camera?  What about if you have multiple cameras?

So what?

This makes me think again of the complexity we deal with because of technology.  We’re all already cyborgs.  When I think of technology’s ability to shape our consciousness, I wonder how much responsibility one should have when designing such systems?  How well is the average user equipped to make good decisions on which products and services to use when you consider how much extra time it takes to maintain and do all these little things that eat up so much of our time?  Will this be the one of differentiators in the future for buying choices? I think so.

It’s the conversation that counts

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Let me say it again: It’s the conversation that counts.  I’m talking about social media and some people are looking at at the title and saying, “duh! of course it is.”  I’ve read some interesting blog posts recently and with the advent of Google Buzz we’re starting to see how conversation is put much more into focus.  I’ve noticed often if it is a very long blog post I’ll often skim the first part and then just go right down to the comments and see what people are saying about it.  In Twitter I see replies to things (even those directed at me) and I have to go back and look at what we were talking about.  This happens especially after a weekend when I’m online a lot less.   I want to see what people were talking about. I’ve also been using Yammer on the Philips network over the last while and been happy to see that when people reply to others it’s possible in the client and on the website you can click thread and see the whole conversation.  Facebook has become much more conversational with commenting not just on pictures (as it used to be) but you can comment or like just about anything in people’s activity stream.  It’s not just about what you’re doing, what you think, and what you are writing, but talking about it to others that is important.

Well as those who’ve seen it already google buzz seems to be putting the conversation part of the whole social media experience front and center.  As people comment on things it appears in your inbox.  Te me this is a bit what I was hoping for with google wave.  I think there are a couple reasons why Google buzz is much more likely to succeed than some of the other efforts out there in this space.  Fortune has a good little article about how Microsoft and Yahoo were quick to point out they’ve been doing this “for a very long time” i.e. since 2008 which in the internet reality distortion field is really is a long time.  The reason why I think this is so is how the conversation becomes so important to the level that one is notified in their inbox about new comments.

Is it a good thing?

Do you really want to be notified every time someone comments on something?  Well I suppose it all depends on if you’re an email & social media junkie.  I personally am moving away from having my email on a constant IV drip into my system distracting me from some of the other things that are so important to my work that require longer periods of distraction free time.  For those who are already obsessively in their gmail inbox, I suspect that they will grow even more obsessed and glued to the screen.  Is this a good thing?  It will be for the individual to decide, but personally I like the more conversation centric thing, and since I’m already well on my way to practicing moderation in my email checking habits, it won’t bother me at all to have it mixed in there.

Please steal this idea

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Do you ever have a variety of disparate deadlines and you would like to keep track of them in a very visual way?
Quite often academics have this problem in that there are a number of possible conferences or journal issues that have deadlines not only for submission of your paper, but if accepted you then have a deadline on “camera ready” editions of your work, a deadline for registration, and of course the conference itself.
What if you could see how many days you had left in a countdown kind of style until the deadlines of these various conferences?
This could be a customized webpage or a “widget” associated with igoogle, yahoo, google toolbar, or something native to your OS. Though you could of course enter in your own deadlines, you could however search for conferences and other things by keyword or tags assigned to them as others upload their due dates. One could also create lists of conferences and journals and you could import a list wholesale.
I imagine there are a number of ways this could be used, but this is the one I can think of most readily.
Who wants to make this one? Go ahead and steal it, attribution would be nice, but hey, in this game execution counts for a lot more than the idea.

Innovation Methods

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I have begun my PhD journey into the world of innovation methods.  I have been thinking about what I think innovation is.  My first working definition is the creation of a new experience.  I should first qualify that I am using the word experience as a port-manteau kind of catch-all term that envelopes everything from products or artifacts, to systems, or services to something that can only be described as an experience such as cirque de soleil or Disneyland (for one take on types of innovation see doblin’s ten types).  When I say new I mean some facet of it is new, it may only be the packaging, or branding, or it may be a feature, or it may be the way it is marketed or a combination of some of these or other things I haven’t mentioned but are equally applicable.

Methods are activities, processes, or tools used while innovating. I haven’t worked on a good working definition for methods, and am open to suggestions of course.

One of the first challenges of my project is that innovation happens all over an organization, and Philips is certainly no exception to this.  There are people in traditional R&D functions (like where I am in Philips Research) and people in various business units (or sectors as we like to call them at Philips) as well as people in strategy, marketing, marketing intelligence, and design.  Just getting a handle on what all these various departments are doing is a massive undertaking, so I’ve begun interviews all over Philips to start understanding what is happening and to digest this information.  At the same time I am trying to make sure that my present work adds some value to my department before I am ready to start producing some kind of intervention into a process with a new process or training or whatever it is I will choose to do.

Of course the other thing that is constantly on my mind is that this is not just about Philips, but rather any organization, so I am working on reaching out to other organizations to see how they are doing this and how it works for them.  I certainly will need help to do this, so anyone reading this, if you work in an organization and would be willing to talk to me about innovation methods, please contact me.

The last thing of course is targeting my findings for publication in various places.  Of course various design-oriented venues come pretty high on my list, I’ve considered some communications venues (as communication between parts of an organization are so important in innovation), and I’m still actively looking for other high quality venues for either journal articles or or conference presentations (and certainly for the next 2 years or so doctoral consotiums or other similar venues where the feedback and interaction is high would make a lot of sense).  Again I welcome any all all suggestions for these.

The big move, working at Philips, and CHI

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So it’s been a long while since I’ve taken the time to blog.  I never thought it would let it go this long, but here we are with a big several-month-long gap in blogging.  Essentially the 3 big things that have and are happening are what are in the title, the move, working at Philips, and working on CHI2010-2011.

I blogged previously about being the preferred candidate, and when I was later offered the position outright I accepted.  Then, even after buying tickets and scheduling movers we got the news that my visa/work permit had not come through.  This was in late April with a May 15th starting date.  It threw us back into limbo while Philips tried to work things out.  After much travail we were able to get everything worked out by Late June, so we chose August 1st as a start date.  So we flew out on July 29th and stayed in a temporary apartment for a few weeks while we found a house.  There was much hullabaloo about finding the right place, and then our stuff was stuck in customs forcing us to stay in the apartment longer, but in the end we’re finally settled in more or less.

Working at Philips has been an interesting experience.  Some of the bigger challenges are involved with the fact that I started on Aug 1.  For those who are not familiar with how much of western Europe works late July and August are the vacation (though they are more like to say holiday) period.  My supervisor here was gone for the entire month plus some, my line manager here also gone for most of the month.  As I walked down the hall of my floor in building 34 on the beautiful high tech campus I saw many of them empty each day.  I’ve never worked at one of the really large corporations or one that has been around for decades upon decades.  While I’m sure they’re not all like this, it’s pretty crazy how much bureaucracy there is.  In many ways one part of the company has no idea what another part is doing.  A very funny thing happened where I corresponded with the human resources department.  As a series of people from different departments came and went from vacation,  and changes in job function a huge misunderstanding came about.  A concerned HR supervisor type person asked me for a meeting over in the building not too far from mine.  After a few minutes of chit-chat he came down to the question, and in a matter of perhaps 15 seconds the whole thing was cleared up and we both laughed.  We both kept on laughing as we thanked each other for a fun and easy meeting, and we did it again via email.  Almost all these kinds of incidents have happy endings, like when I called the IT helpdesk “engineer” who insisted that the exchange server name I needed to set up mail on my ipod touch didn’t need a top level domain (tld) in order for it to work.  Of course that is true on a local network, but I would certainly be taking my handy portable device many places, and even on campus the wireless is outside of the intranet here so yah nice.  He insisted that the iphone was not supported so there was little he could do but he pointed me to a site that was designed to help Windoze mobile users set up their phones after 10 mins on the phone.  Within a minute I found the super secret information I needed (www.mail.philips com, shockingly difficult stuff) and it worked perfectly.  So yes it all does work in the end, but I ask at what cost?  I guess that is part of my research, which I will certainly blog more about in the future.

CHI, the premiere venue for those working and researching the topic of Human Computer Interaction is a fun dynamic conference.  One visit in 2006 to the annual conference in San Jose and I was hooked.  Now I’ve been asked to help organize the student volunteers for the conference in 2010-2011  (Incidentally you can now register for the lottery for 2010).  It’s been a blast to be on the organizing committees for these two conferences and get a peak at the tremendous amount of work that it takes to pull a conference like this together.  Of course with all that organizing I have perhaps let my own preparation for my submissions suffer a little, but hopefully I’ll still have something to present.

So these are the three things that have been taking my time lately, keeping me away from blogging, but I am sure to be more prolific in the near future.