As the summer is coming to a close, I’ve finished reading two books that I’ve been chipping away at since the beginning. One is Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold and the other is Everyware by Adam Greenfield. They are both surveys of current technology and the possibilities for the near future.

Smart Mobs
This book, while it varies a lot, is mostly about mobility, networks, people and what is happening with all that. It’s a look at what happens when people as a group interact with technology, what we have done with it, and what we will be facing in the future. It dips into a lot of philosophical discussion and talk of ubicomp.

Everyware
Similar to Smart Mobs, it’s talking about the future, but the focus is more on technology that we are using and will use in our daily life. It’s a very good overview of recent research and ideas that are out there, with a greater sense of urgency than Smart Mobs. As a designer himself, Adam Greenfield takes a stab at some initial principles.

Smart Mobs using Everyware
The books are similar enough that I have trouble distinguishing my thoughts about them. Both of the authors call themselves futurists, and spend most of the time talking about the future state of things as derived from current technology and intentions by research groups and companies.

The most valuable thing I’ve gotten from both of them is a deep pool of resources that they bring up. They both bring up a lot of philosophical trains of thought, researchers, manifestos, and books that help to understand what’s around the corner. I think it’s great because a lot of them are confirming stuff that we already learned like Goffman’s various writings on the presentation of self.

 They also bring up and explain technologies that are enabling new ways of interacting with each other that we don’t really have time to cover in school. Knowing about what is going to happen with data networks and embedded technology will probably help to ground design ideas a little better

The other thing I liked about both books is the balanced approach they take. They are cautiously embracing the new, which is probably a healthy thing to do. They bounce back and forth, describing utopias and dystopias of the future. Both authors really want to preserve human dignity and use new technology to benefit us rather than just because we can, much like we are taught throughout school.

There is a strong sense of urgency in both of the books. They are talking about the inevitable and we have to be prepared to deal with complex situations that are very different from what we are used to. I think their sense of urgency is already being answered through user-centered design, I hope.

Not to go on too long, but I think both of these books are important for designers of all kinds, especially with mobility where it’s at today. I have heard lots of people distance themselves from anything technical because of the connotation that interaction design already has, but I’ll reserve my thoughts on that for later.

Criticism?
I don’t have anything that critical to say about the books. To people who are already familiar with this stuff, the books might not be so useful. For designers, they don’t offer many answers, but mostly questions and considerations we need to understand.

Smart Mobs came out in 2002 and Everyware in 2006, so sometimes it feels like Adam Greenfield is simply updating the state of things with his book. Smart Mobs takes a very massive approach and covers a lot of different topics, whereas Everyware is a little more focused and organized in bite-sized chunks. In terms of a knowledge resource, I found Smart Mobs to be a little deeper, and I plan on actually buying it just to reference. There are a lot of great quotes and references. There’s also the Smart Mobs blog which updates with news relevant to stuff that is talked about in the book. It’s a shame Everyware doesn’t have something similar, unless I missed it. Either way, both were well worth it, and are easily skimmable.

PS. No, I haven’t started reading for my thesis project yet.

I don’t think I’ll ever get it right. I was looking through some of the WordPress options and I thought changing my permalink URLs to a more “pretty” structure would be better. Changing that made every file and folder Forbidden. Based on last time and some quick googling, I found out it was the .htaccess file again and some sort of rewrite issue. Not something I was planning on dealing with today.

It’s hard for me to just leave something broken because I know I’ll never go back and fix it for a while. I finally did fix it, by putting the right cryptic code into the .htaccess file. This site helped me pick what to put in it, and with some tweaking I finally got this site back up. All I know is that there shouldn’t be a way for me to easily bring the whole thing down.

One of the biggest problems I have is keeping up with everything I want to read about what’s going on. I started with only a few websites that I visit daily a few years ago, and the list has grown ever since. Just keeping up with the regular news itself can be overwhelming. I settled on a system of bookmarks that I organized by priority, where I would just go further down the list the more time I had. The problem is that I rarely get very far down the list.

I’ve thought about using something RSS-related for a whlie, so I pulled some feeds into thunderbird, but I really didn’t want to know every time a site updated, especially something like BBC News. I liked that I was in control, so I visited whenever I had the time and would browse through things I missed. After all, we don’t all need to read every story and article that someone posts, right?

This might sound like a commercial, but they’re not paying me. Through a random link, I found netvibes, which is great just because I can use it as a universal dashboard for things like email and todo lists. The greatest thing about it is that it acts like an RSS aggregator. It pulls the 5-10 most recent topics into a window for each feed, so I can just browse what the most recent stories are without having to read through anything unless I find it interesting. I might be behind the curve, but I had an enlightening moment where I understood how useful it is. It’s also great since it’s a web app and I can access it from anywhere, so it’s always synchronized.

There’s still a problem though. Because it’s a live feed, I feel compelled to tab over to the netvibes page every so often to see what’s new. It hasn’t really cut down that much on the time spent and the amount of feeds I added are still overwhelming. One thing I’m noticing right away is how many stories I read that are duplicated everywhere. What I want is something that will scan through every feed I added and tell me which stories I should read. Maybe that’s what other people are for…