PUBLIC MARKS with search consumer

Increasingly, hardware products (especially consumer electronics) include computers, sensors, and connections to the Internet. These capabilities enable changes in what products “know,” how they are used, and how we develop them. They are becoming more like websites. This simple fact became apparent to me during my work at Dash Navigation as their design director.

This API defines a language- and platform- neutral protocol for Consumers to request address book, profile, and friends-list information from Service Providers. As a protocol, it is intended to be easy to understand and implement, either as a Service Provider or Consumer, using any language or platform of choice. It is also intended to be implemented by both individuals and small services as well as large providers, in any case where a service contains data about who a user knows and wishes to make that information portable, under the user's control.

What is our business is not determined by the producer but by the consumer. It is not defined by the company’s name, statutes, or articles of incorporation but by the want the consumer satisfies when he buys a product or service. The question can therefore be answered only by looking at the business from the outside, from the point of view of the customer and the market what the consumer sees, thinks, believes and wants at any given time must be accepted by management is an objective fact deserving to be taken as seriously as the reports of a salesman, the tests of the engineer or the figures of the accountant — something few managements find it easy to do. In management must make a conscious effort to get honest answers from the consumer himself rather than attempt to read his mind.

One massive wave crashing down is confusing enough. But when three crash at the same time, even seeing what's going on (let alone predicting how things will play out) becomes really difficult. These three big new waves are:

1. The digitization of print books by Google Book Search.

2. Increasing consumer acceptance of e-books, mostly because of the Kindle.

3. Print on demand.

This three-day workshop ([WWW]InterAccess, Toronto, 1-3 May 2009) will explore the theme of E-waste and environmental data. Working in small groups, participants will be given the task of hacking some typical consumer e-waste to create reflective technological assemblages that incorporate 'nature' in some form while calling one or more of our basic assumptions into question.

Mike Winkelman of Beeple has created an animated editorial on over-consumption. His short video features a spinning house being upgraded, expanded, and refurnished over and over again. The rotating and rebuilding visuals are completely captivating. The whole thing makes you question your own need vs want, consumer self. I will even, just this once, forgive them their isometric ways (perspective people, PERSPECTIVE).

That ad-space put up there and lovingly maintained by JCDecaux? There for the taking - for the company with the right augmentable-ad-platform, the right amount of consumer pull.

The Information Ecology group (formerly the Physical Language Workshop) explores ways to connect our physical environments with information resources. Through the use of low-cost, ubiquitous technologies, we are creating seamless and pervasive ways to interact with our information—and with each other. We focus on projects that harness the ecology of consumer electronics and sensor devices—present and future—to more smoothly mediate the boundaries between the physical and information worlds we inhabit.

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