Rants

Adaptive Path research Second Life. Yawn.

March 2, 2007

It’s been interesting (in that way that your mum says your clothes are ‘interesting’) to see all the hype excitement about Second Life build over the last year. Andrew Crow over at Adaptive Path is doing some research on it with his Second Life Project. <img src=’http://www.polaine.com/playpen/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/sl_header_andrew.jpg’ width=’400′ height=’80′ alt=’Adaptive Path’s Second Life Project’ /> [...]

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Company relationships are like a marriage

February 26, 2007

Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users just made a brilliant comparison of customer relationships to personal relationships. She points out that many customer relationships are like bad marriages. Everything starts off rosy, then it all goes wonky: This is such a big bowl of wrong. I don’t understand this in personal relationships, and I [...]

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Notes from Transmediale 07

February 2, 2007

In general the main exhibition of Transmediale 07 left me pretty unimpressed. But that may be due to my general cynicism (or arrogance – I prefer cynicism) – something that Regine picked me up on. I think it is an Antirom trait. It’s perhaps that I’ve see a little too much of the Emperor’s New [...]

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Why people hate mobile phone companies

September 26, 2006

It really can’t be that hard, smart customer service from mobile telcos. Have these people learned nothing, have they read Cluetrain?

Here was my experience of Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse’s Mobile World in the UK.

Warning, there is a rant coming…

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Vote for my manifesto

September 2, 2006

Having spent a long time thinking about and writing the Re-imagining Higher Education essay I am trying to get it published as a Change This manifesto http://www.changethis.com.

So, if you’re a regular reader, you can help me by voting for it to be turned into a manifesto. Just click on this link http://www.changethis.com/proposals/775 and click the “Yes, write this manifesto” button.

If it gets published I’ll love you forever. Or at least ten minutes. Or something.

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Interactive Tedium from ISEA

August 29, 2006

I didn’t get to go to ISEA this year (not that I’ve been for ages) and I actually pretty pleased I didn’t. I really wanted to like the stuff I saw online, largely thanks to Brett Stalbaum doing a trawl of YouTube for all the videos from ISEA.

But, as usual, there were the crazy modern telematic dance to squeaky violin crowd, the utterly pointless matrix of infrared LED’s, invisible to the human eye, which can only be seen through the viewfinder of a digital camera. (On the video you hear people discussing its pointlessness). And of course the usual array of ear-splitting electronic feedback with quivering, dull, dull, dull visuals and the blinky-blonk laptop music crew.

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Cambridge University prove their stupidity

August 29, 2006

A really enjoyed Francis Beckett’s article in the Education Guardian regarding Cambridge University’s entry requirements which lists 20 A-level subjects considered ‘soft’ options. Beckett argues, quite rightly in my opinion, that this is basically academic snobbery and has very little to do with the level of difficulty or rigour of the subjects in question…

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Re-imagining Higher Education

July 26, 2006

Recently I have been giving much thought to the structure and issues that most of us in Higher Education have been struggling with for several years. There are three areas of thought that come together when re-imagining education, particularly within Art and Design education. The theory of the Long Tail, the Play Ethic and Cradle to Cradle sustainability. Each of these requires a radical turn-around in current ways of thinking. Tweaking the edges won’t do. What if we thought about education the same way we thought about our other precious resources or the same way that we think about the changing face of the media? The full post is quite a long essay, but it covers a lot of ground…

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The Play Ethic and Sustainability

July 16, 2006

By co-incidence (and thanks to some birthday presents) I just read Pat Kane’s ‘The Play Ethic’ and William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s ‘Cradle to Cradle’ them back-to-back and I realised what a set of connections there are between the two ways of thinking. Kane’s Play-Ethic is a fascinating and well-researched literature review, Protestant work-ethic critique and manifesto for a new way of thinking and living. Cradle to Cradle is equally so – a manifesto for a new way of thinking and living as well as a rejection of the past 250 years or so of the industrial society

It’s exactly this sustainability which is also required from our working (read: waking) lives if we are not to all fall over in exhaustion. In short, play time or down time (and there is a difference) in order to sustain our lives. I believe it would have enormous social benefits that ripple out from this too…

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Warner Bros. to distribute via BitTorrent

May 18, 2006

I can’t believe I missed this story last week – http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060509/ap_on_hi_te/peer_to_peer_movies_1 – but Warner Bros. have finally started to get their head around the idea that BitTorrents are the most efficient way to distribute large files online and have announced they’ll start seeding their movies when released onto DVD. So, only about three years too late and after trying to shut down most BitTorrent servers for ages.

Read more… go on, you know you want to…

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