Mine

As I type this, the Chilean miners are being rescued (number nine, Mario Gomez, has just popped out of that terrifying tube thing). My thoughts go to them and their families. Every now and then an ongoing news story comes along that catches the world’s interest in a strange, intangible way. Usually, it’s something horrible – in my lifetime, Diana’s death and the unfolding of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks are obvious examples. But I can’t recall anything so potentially horrible, yet ultimately filled with hope and joy, that has had this effect. There’s something elemental about the nature of the story, something different. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Of course, if telly has taught us anything, it’s that eventually the miners will feel compelled to go back to the cave. The reasons for this will be revealed in a series of convoluted flashbacks. What exactly is the Rubble Monster? Why is the cave now in the 70s? Who is the chosen Juan? Why are none of the miners able to get pregnant? And for crying out loud, why won’t Raul Fahey do his shirt up?

The inevitable obsolescence of digital publishing

I love new inventions. I love using technology in new ways to solve old problems. The future excites me. On top of this, yes, I admit it, I'm a shameless Apple acolyte.

And yet, with all the recent discussion about the iPad and the future of publishing, I seem to have inadvertently positioned myself as a sceptic. Maybe it's because I've been around the block a few times and seen so many things hailed as The Future that I'm just a bit harder to convince than I once was. You see, I don't have a problem with the iPad per se, but with our approach to software/hardware in general. We're so eager to jump ahead to the next exciting bit of tech that we completely ignore how to make what we produced with the old tech accessible.

For example, just over ten years ago, I produced a lot of (admittedly, not very good) artwork with DeluxePaint IV on my Amiga 1200. This wasn't a rare piece of kit – it was the leading graphics software on the leading home computer. How on earth am I meant to access those files now? Even if my Mac could read Amiga files, where the hell do I stick the floppy disk? I can pick up a piece of printed material from ten (or twenty … or a hundred …) years ago and I'll still be able to read it just fine thank you very much. If the history of computing has taught us anything, it's that the shiny new format you're currently using will be useless several times over within your own lifetime. An entire generation's work is being lost thanks to 'progress'.

Proof that our current approach to media is flawed is the Planets project (led by the British Library and a bunch of other European organisations). Acknowledging that most digital file formats have a life expectancy of five years, they've put the details of today's most common file formats – and how they can be read – into a time capsule, and then put that into a nukeproof labyrinthine bunker in the Swiss alps. Adam Farquhar, one of the brains behind the project puts it simply:

Einstein's notebooks you can take down off the shelf and read them today. Roll forward 50 years and most of Stephen Hawking's notes will likely only be stored digitally and we might not be able to access them all … The time capsule being deposited inside Swiss Fort Knox contains the digital equivalent of the genetic code of different data formats, a 'digital genome'.

Consider that for a moment: to make our current media formats usable in the future, we have to lock them in an impregnable fortress under a mountain in Switzerland.

By relying on hardware-dependent formats that will only last a few years, we're turning into a civilisation with no long-term memory, only short. Publishing sorts, please acknowledge that the iPad is not the future, it is just a very shiny, very promising, fundamentally flawed present.

Nicholas Felton

Every year since 2005, graphic designer Nicholas Felton has produced a personal annual report, collating and quantifying an assortment of of facts and figures about his life. Illustrating each one with all manner of graphs, tables and beautiful, beautiful maps (including one that could be folded into an icosahedron), he has created an extraordinary snapshot of 21st century life, like some kind of iPhone-armed Manhattanite Samuel Pepys.

The popularity of these reports (printed copies of which are available from his website) has led Nicholas to join forces with fellow data-obsessive Ryan Case to create Daytum, a personal statistics recorder. Now anyone can keep track of their own bizarre habits and routines, and wrestle the control of personal data away from the loyalty cards and cookies that permeate modern life.

I managed to interupt Nicholas’ work for long enough to throw some questions at him …

Hello there.

Hiya.

We’ve never met, but I know you. I know you better than people I’ve known for years. I know that you listen to a lot of Atlas Sound, that in 2007 you won four games of pool and that your average speed last year was 4.39 miles per hour. Do you ever find it a bit scary that complete strangers know so much about you?

I suppose it should bother me more, but you’ve only gleaned what I’d like you to know about me. I’ve given you a lot of insight into my interests and habits and some nice factoids, but I reckon that it does not give you a complete sense of who I am, or what I’m like. In fact people that know my work well have the tendency to tell me that I’m not at all like what they expected. So while you have the intimate knowledge of my favorite band, the broader personal strokes of my life are missing.

The publication of your annual report is now an annual event anticipated by design­geeks the world over. As something of a “celebrity designer”, do you ever feel the weight of ex­pect­ation?

Absolutely! I spend all year getting excited about my ideas for the report and love watching all the outings and adventures pile up from January to December. But when I start laying out the pages of the report I am a knot of anxiety. Do I have enough data? Is this report going to stand up to it’s predecessors? How will I ever make this better than last year’s?

Fortunately, things generally seem to come together. By the middle of the design process, I’m starting to get excited about elements of the layout that are working. By the end of the design process I am bursting with enthusiasm again and am eager to share the product with the community of people who anticipate and support the project each year.

How does your data-collection fit into your daily routine? Do you dash home from a bar and instantly record how many beers you’ve had?

The point of my report has always been to catalog my behavior and activities without unduly influencing these actions. It is my aim that the recording process be invisible, but this is of course impossible. For the most part, I have found that I can sit down each morning in my office and record the items from the previous day. Over the weekend, or on a busy night, I have found myself needing to take notes on occassion … and some of the more complicated tasks have required on-the-spot note-taking, as in my quest to determine every street I walked down in 2007.

These days, it pleases me enormously to record my entries on Daytum from the bar or the rest­aurant via my iPhone. I find it incredibly satisfying to have a tool that can keep my data up-to-the-moment and tally and present it for me immediately. I also recognize that I may be alone here!

So what can we expect from this year’s report?

I am really excited about this year’s report. For 2009, the statistics I would typically collect for the report have been catalogued daily on my Daytum page, forming a real-time annual report. Rather than using this material to form the printed report, I am relying on a feedback system I developed that encourages the people I spend time with this year to report on my activities, moods and our relationship. It is my hope that this data set will illuminate numerous aspects of my personality and social sphere that I would be uncomfortable collecting on my own.

I have a theory on your stat-nerdery: Manhattan is a neat, self-contained grid, covered in towers of varying heights. It’s basically a giant three-dimensional bar graph. Living amongst this spatial and geometric logic has influenced the way you see the world. Does that sound about right? Or were you just bitten by a radioactive statistician when you were a boy?

It’s a good theory, and I think the city has played a key role in the development of my reports. Clearly they are an attempt to bring order to a chaotic city and my place within it, but I can trace my stat-nerdery back even further. At art school I enjoyed mapping and graphing, and I think it all ties back to a radioactive book that bit me at a young age called Comparisons. This book is a visual dictionary of the tallest plants, fastest vehicles, oldest things and everything else a young visual thinker might wonder about. The pages of my well-worn copy are all trying to escape from the binding, and I keep returning to it’s pages for inspiration.

Daytum has really taken off. People use it to record all kinds of bizarre behaviour – do you have any particular favourites?

Certainly. I love the users who push the site into unexpected places... There is a dog using the site (charleylhasa) to track his interesting walk activites and the other breeds of dogs met. I was also thrilled to see another user (CBCV) adapt his page into a resumé.

What’s next? This time next year, are we all going to be walking around with Daytum-appified phones that record and quantify our every action?

It’s possible. We are currently building an API for the website. In the same way that the Twitter API has bred innumerable ways of accessing their site, we hope that this pathway will encourage our community to plug in more of the statistics they wish to collect.

I demand an exclusive. Tell us a quantifiable fact about yourself that you haven’t revealed before – the geekier the better.

I don’t think I’ve revealed this to myself before, but … Computers currently owned: 5 (4 Macs and 1 PC )

Thanks very much Nicholas! You can now add +1 to your “interviews conducted” tally.

Thank you Daniel. Consider it tallied.

Originally written for Gym Class Magazine

Some thoughts on digital publishing

Having just read Adrian Shaughnessy’s Design Week article on electronic publishing (as well as all the other iPad-centric artciles that have been knocking around the last couple of weeks), I’m left with some niggling concerns about where this is all headed, especially as the publishing industry continues to stick to the incredibly flawed and simplistic notion that the iPod/iTunes model will translate directly to publishing.

The beauty of newspapers, magazines and books is their accessible, dispersive nature. Libraries, hospital waiting rooms, charity shops, second-hand book stores, train carriages, coffee tables — books and magazines are everywhere, and in one way or other, accessible to all. Electronic publishing is great for the coffers of the actual publishers, but they have no reason to invest in the text’s life beyond the initial financial transaction. You’ll buy an e-book, it’ll exist on your electronic platform of choice, and then … dead end.

You can’t give it away or leave it somewhere for someone else or even easily lend it to someone. The whole idea of passing on knowledge through text – something we’ve spent centuries perfecting – could very suddenly take a huge backward step in the name of profit.

And what about those people (i.e. the majority of the civilisation) who can’t even afford the electronic device on which to read the text in the first place? Should we so blithely encourage the broadening of the division between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, literate and illiterate? Yes, I admit this hypothesising is all a tad extreme, but we are putting an awful lot of power into a handful of companies who don’t necessarily have a long-term view of how this technology is going to effect us. And it is going to effect us, for better or worse, really quickly.

Here’s hoping that there’s a Gutenberg or Carnegie out there who’ll be able to see things with a little more clarity and can keep the power of text in the hands of the readers.