[Video tip off, courtesy of David Walker of 302 Designs]

Design Fiction has been on my mind as of late. Particularly after hearing Bruce Sterling’s thinking about it’s role in experience design, product innovation and technology as well as other’s speaking from a designers point of view at SXSW 2010.

What follows is a design fiction exercise, wrapping a narrative around thoughts about the weird, wired world we live in and the tremendous social implications it has for possible futures.  William Gibson I’m not, but digest this and tell me what you think it means to us now and possibly what it could mean for the evolution of the web.   Indulge me while I surf through themes of the social web, digital immortality, privacy, an open data world, artificial intelligence and more, not in a blog post commentary but instead in a blurb of storytelling.

I’m Jack Meta and I’m a repo man of the digital conscience.

Let me give you the 30 second update. Life got pretty weird for the bio-brains soon after the AI-Data Flux. Once the open-conscious hippies broke the Googleplex server-farm wall and data burst through the behavioral floodgates, meatspace humanity found itself standing around more naked than a politician post-sex scandal. Funny that nobody saw their personal Peyton Place hidden in all those facebook posts, tweets and ISP logs long ago. Just plain stupid that nobody figured their conscious would get reassembled from all that data, through code lumps that algorithm-geeks created in their hobbyist spare time. You can be damn sure no one would want think about little Bobby and Sue talking to your long “dead”, pixellated great grandood-self in a kitsch retro-quaint Ed Hardy shirt, your abrupt and embarrassing re-entry into the world 70 years into the future. They didn’t think of any of this, not until open-data and uber-AI hit them in the skull like a mallet anyway.

But I’m a bitstream myself, so far be it for me to judge what the bio-cell’s thought about the weird world of digital immortality back in the day. I’m just here to clean up their act once they hit the biological brick wall and surrender their brains and personal lifestream to the meta-sphere.

What’s my game? I’m an identity moving van pulling up to my client’s scattered persona-attics to steal back their life in little bits and bytes. Then I spit polish, metatag and redflag pieces of digital conscience so it ain’t so boring, confusing or just plain dirty once it hits the AI’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not much of a combinatorial artist so I leave your final coming out party good-looks to my persona stylist biz partners. It seems the cyberpunk jokers that plugged me into the meta-sphere to do this job secretly watched antique’s roadshow a hundred years back. Surfing through the digital-conscience flea market is in my genes.

Anyhoo, good meeting you mate and welcome to the ‘sphere. I can tell you’ll get the hang of things pretty quick once you shake that linear, cerebral cortex processing hangover. I’ve gotta get back to work to pull this boring experiencefreak.com assignment. Mundane crap I tell ya and a pisser given it hit my approval cue right before the Charlie Sheen assignment of a lifetime hit the market. Just my luck. Now that would’ve been hella more hilarious than this grey haired, tech-fetish archival and family photo-pixel antique show.

See you ‘round. And remember, watch where you leave your digital droppings now that you’re back in action.

More on design fiction:

Near Futures Lab

Interactions Magazine

An Essay on Design Fiction

]]> http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/18/info-agent-man/feed/ 1 http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/ http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:13:21 +0000 andyhunter http://experiencefreak.com/blog/?p=1242 I’ve never been a huge Gary Vee follower, but right on for this video.  I think it represents emotions many feel after being so immersed in social media, the info rich web and culture of personal branding world.  The addictive nature, the distractions and the overwhelming opportunity to interact with others can stretch people to extremes.

I see this as a tipping point in culture, not just for Vee but for many early entries into social technology.  Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr and others have seen, felt and are worried about how technology is effecting our ability to think, connect and be creative.

Get zen Gary, read, think.  Get at it.

[h/t to @alexknowshtml - dangerouslyawesome.com ]

While this isn’t new news, it’s an example I’ve used many times to show the depth that online media, social engagement and intrigue can take to promote an entertainment property or brand.  And in my opinion it is a prime example of where digital branding is headed.

Get Serious: The Future Transmedia Branding from experience freak on Vimeo.

Check out the full details, outlining all the expansive elements here from 42 entertainment.

[via http://www.boredomisyourfault.com]

This is an incredibly difficult type of campaign to construct, concept and a “slow burn” to build up participation. But, it’s probably the best example I’ve seen to date (other than Nike+) that shows how immersive transmedia content, social media+community, advertising and interactive media can be the key pieces to build a brand in a fragmented media landscape.

..and remember this was created over 2 years ago.

download the case study here and a comprehensive outline of strategy here.

Posted via email from experiencefreak

Virtually unknown to those outside of his music heights in the UK in the 60s, Scott Walker is both pop star of the boho 60’s pop set, a hauntingly dark musical artist of the ilk of Brian Eno, Trent Reznor and Radiohead and avant guard that explores issues and concepts in abstract ala Mathew Barney. Hard to imagine the combo? See it for yourself in “The 30 Century Man: Scott Walker“.

Movie produced by David Bowie and including interviews with Eno, Sting, Radiohead and others influenced by Walkers work. Check out the extended trailer and songs at Flavorpill.

Absolutely hilarious next move from the same guy who’s punk’d Jacques Chirac.

Check out the security guard-enforcer’s bad-ass double block and tackle move… “clean up in aisle 6″:

more feats of sublime+ridiculous here at Gaillard’s nqtv.

tip off by jasonoke.

James Howard Kunstler thinks you are…. (interview excerpt follows):

Personally, I think one of our biggest ailments now is the techno-grandiosity displayed by people in the tech sector. There’s some notion that just because we can move pixels around a screen with a mouse, that all the woes of mankind will yield to a set of techno tricks. This is dangerous fucking nonsense. It’s especially appalling in those who are desperately trying to rescue the Happy Motoring system by seeking to engineer cars that run on something other than fossil fuels.

For instance, the Rocky Mountain Institute, supposedly an “environmental” organization, has put its cred and muscle behind the development of a “hypercar.” What fucking idiocy. It only promotes the idea that we ought to continue being car dependent! This kind of thing drives me nuts. Of course, I’m not anti tech or anti science — I just think we’ve lost ourselves in fantasies of omnipotence that are very pernicious. What tech has to do now is re-engineer local, small-scaled living — the systems we depend on — so we can live in a manner consistent with our ecology, with the reality-based energy diet of the decades-to-come. The techies for the most part are not so interested in this. Just look at the assholes in NASA who are still fantasizing about space travel when we need to teach tens of millions of Americans how to garden!
(full interview on O’Reilly  by uber web developer Kurt Cagle)

Kunstler is predictably gloomy in his assessments of our future in most of his writings.  From rampant suburbanization and oil myopia, to hyper globalization and consumer consumption Kunstler connects the dots to predict a massive meltdown in the way we work, live and consume.  Though his stuff is viewed by some to be ranting and the product of a kook, to others it’s seen as a prescient view and brilliant thinking of an urban planning futurist.

PSFK has commented on his writings here.

With additional commentary by me here.

And his new futurist fiction here is alot less terminator, matrix, or mad max and much more Little House on The Prairie.

Whatever your views of Kunstlers tone, it’s a sobering fact that his predictions are emerging as truth (to a degree) as we speak.  And given the combination of big box/retail retail explosion of past years, sudden and sharp deflation of consumer spending, now common assumptions of future oil scarcity and current implosion in the auto industry I’d suggest all of us take a look at his work.

Though I’m extremely optimistic of technologies ability to foster change, work for good and fuel new economic expansion I’ve also seen dozens of developers, vc firms,  marketers and entrepreneurs wax increasingly myopic or unrealistically euphoric (*cough*..social media) about what these new tools, pixels and applications will do for us.

So for all of you fellow tech geeks, twitters, “social media experts” and new media strategists perhaps you should take a step back and we should check our collective heads.  The future might be a bit more luddite than you’d ever admit..or at the very least will require some “archaic” technology that works steampunk style with your magical tech goodness.

*brilliant nerd party photo courtesy of Tanya Zommer on Flickr.
other sidebar: How funny is it that this ad (below) appeared in Kunstler’s O’Reilly interview?

some people take the test.

hotels have offered up an escape:

those with a large perv-monkey on their back go to the hollywood rehab-spa.

others simply don’t bother and embrace their own digital-Geeking Man yearly.

Hi, My Name is Andy.  An I’m a Digi-Holic.

If you are as voraciously connected to the marketing interwebs as this man, or blog so prolifically that even your rehab needing brothers can’t keep up, you might be a Digi-Neck too.  And if you are, I’m your people.

So this August I put myself into detox.  Well.. not really, but I did go on family vacation.  A vacation where I attempted to disconnect 80% from my gadgets, my email, my cell phone checking, and my blog-surfing/social networking watching/twitter @ing/video game playing junk.   And damn, if it ain’t hard to drop the junk cold turkey. But after 3 weeks of forcibly keeping my phone off, gauntlets thrown down to clients about vacation calls and email, checking email only a couple times a week, posting to this blog 2x and blowing off twitter and facebook altogether, I realized that I too could be a semi-luddite and survive.  It all was ok people…

In fact, it was pretty freaking liberating.

So this may not be news to any of you.  “Yes, yes” you say – “I know it’s good to unplug”.  But how often do you?  I bet not very often.  So do it. Why?  Because.

#1) As much as you say your clients “need you” they don’t.  It’s a bunch of rationalizing crap.  The world goes on without you and if you have a shred of talent, they’ll be happier when you come back.  You’re just addicted to email crackberry-head.

#2) You’re not going to miss anything.  Well.. yes you will.  But not knowing that Jaffe is now speaking in Dusseldorf, or Scoble just used the men’s room at Google ain’t going to be a loss.  Your simply an info junkie.

#3) You’ll have a much better perspective on the real world.  Or at least you’ll let go of your internet OCD for a few days.

#4) With that little outside-in perspective, maybe you’ll make a little money working on something like this.

#5) You’ll fall off the wagon so gloriously you’ll end on Dr. Drew’s Geek Rehab Reality show.

#6) Or you can slowly wean off the stuff by playing  Spore. .. oh wait, scratch that.  that’s like giving Tom Sizemore a bottle of tequila in a bathtub of sudafed.

and with that and a much too long hiatus, hello again my blogging freinds.  Experiencefreak has fallen off the wagon.