Conditioned Reactions to Spaces

Fancy title eh? But then I'm not sure how else to describe this.

I was at the John Rylands Library in Manchester last week, talking with Carol Burrows and Caroline Checkley-Scott who are part of the new Centre of Digital Excellence there. Nice people both and a good source of lunch recommendations.

I was taking a tour of the amazing Victorian Gothic building and commenting on how people were talking in hushed tones. The building felt just like a church and people were acting that way. I mentioned to Carol that children must be spooked by the place. She laughed and said it was quite the opposite - they loved it and tore around the place. "They just think it's Hogwarts!" she said.

Not having been to church much, this was what the building reminded them of. Unlike their parents.

We're about to launch some software for the Imperial War Museum in a new space called Explore History. Not gallery and not reading room, it's a third space in the museum (I've blogged about this before). Now if this ends up looking like a departure lounge I kind of know how people are going to behave. If it ends up looking like a Starbucks, I'd guess people will behave in a different way.

We'll find out on 21st May. If you're in London, drop by and take a look.

Less is More

There's a dicey-looking restaurant down the road from me. The sort that offers 3 course dinners for £9.99. It bills itself as a Mexican/Irish/Italian place. Really.

For some reason known only to it's owners, it was called Robin Hood. This is Hammersmith, not Sherwood Forest we're talking about here, but, hey ho, maybe the owners had a thing about early Errol Flynn movies.

The other day I walked past, and they'd changed the name to Robin Hood Zorro. Everything else looked the same, but I guess they figured that if naming your restaurant after one mythical medieval freedom fighter was good, naming it after two was even better! I can't wait until they change the name to Robin Hood Zorro Don Quixote.

It's the same in the world of software. We're building out some apps, and there's a clamour for "more". More features, a change of name, funkier design. I've resisted this and drilled down to the need to just do what we are doing better.

So instead of adding Zorro to the restaurant name, maybe they should just focus on Mexican food. Or Irish. Or even Italian. Wait, what about Polish? Or Lithuanian...

Sleep In Heavenly Peace

I was reading just now about how tired we all are. A few years ago Ariana Huffington (she of the Huffington Post) apparently passed out through exhaustion, fell over, broke her cheekbone and had to have five stitches.

That's a serious case of your body telling you to slow down. Which she did.

Which I hope to do also over the next few Christmas weeks. I may even turn email off on my iPhone (hmmm, let me think about that one...).

I suggest we all do. I wouldn't want to run into you in the New Year and have to ask "What happened to your face?"

ps the story is part of Seth Godin's new free online book What Matters Now.

Moving Images, Moving

I was at the launch of Wellcome Film the other night, the hard work of Angela Saward, Curator of the Moving Images and Sound Collection at the Wellcome Library. They're putting hundreds of hours of, frankly, amazing video online for free here.

The day before I was at another museum looking at streaming multiple HD streams over their network and pondering the viability of delivering HD to a ship.

At the weekend I was talking to a friend at the BBC who mentioned that researchers use an iPlayer-like platform to view the mountains of digitally archived BBC output. Waaaay more than we ever get to see on iPlayer.

My how we've grown up. I probably watch more web-based TV than broadcast nowadays. My especial favourite is iPlayer on the new iPhone with a built in speaker. Wandering the house watching back episodes of Top Gear...

A few years ago I had dinner with a friend who worked at Gartner and we were discussing the likelihood of IPTV taking off. This was probably just prior to YouTube going mainstream. He confidently asserted that the internet would "break" if something like that happened. I guessed two things would happen: network capacity and bandwidth would grow and compression algorithms would improve. A bigger pipe and a smaller file. I'm not sure I was entirely right, but the internet hasn't "broken" just yet.

So what's the next frontier?

Undoubtedly video on mobile - streaming video both to and from your phone. 15 million people viewed mobile video content in the second quarter in the US - only 7% of all mobile users, but up 70% on the previous year (Nielsen Mobile Video Report 2009).

Ustream allows anyone to broadcast their mobile video.

A lot of what we're doing at Armadillo is starting to take into account this demographic. They're young and influential, but this is moving mainstream as users want to consume all their media and continue all their conversations wherever they are.

A big game-changer could be the long-rumoured Apple Tablet - a ten inch screen iPod Touch/iPhone. Put me down for one.

And get ready to fix them internet pipes. Just in case...

The third space

In his book "The Architecture of Happiness", Alain de Botton goes to some lengths to outline how we are different people in different spaces. He cites the example of a miserable experience in a crowded McDonalds in Victoria "The restaurant's true talent lay in the generation of anxiety".

Leaving the bedlam noise, he found himself outside Westminster Cathedral, and entered to avoid the rain. "Concepts that would have sounded demented 40 metres away, in the company of a party of Finnish teenagers and vats of frying oil, had succeeded - through a work of architecture - in acquiring supreme significance and majesty".

I'm working at the moment on developing interactives for a "third space" for a museum. Not a public gallery, and not a reading room, we are trying to develop a space where people can be themselves and still explore the collections digitally.

I hope this will mean conversation and coffee, parents and children, sofas and cellphones. So many spaces we engineer in cultural spaces are, by need or tradition, constraining. We become an unfamiliar person. The hushed whisper in a gallery, the frustrating peering at undersized labels.

In this third space good things can happen. I was in Cambridge again yesterday at the library. Mostly I go to the tea room, as it was pointed out to me a while ago "Oh, that's where all the real work gets done."

One day...

If you're archiving material in a digital repository or just making a backup of an archive, there's one thing you don't want to do if you're thinking long term. Use proprietory standards. Use formats like JPEG2000 for delivery and as proxy files for sure, and use pdf files for ease of portability, but don't rely on them for posterity. Because Adobe will go out of business. Maybe not soon, maybe not for 50 years, but it will disappear. That's what happens to commercial companies.

So that's why I'm delighted that we're finally seeing some mainstream pushback against the Google Books settlement. It's been all over the BBC website like a rash the last week or so.

I'm not going into the mechanics here, but my view is simple. Businesses have one driver - profit, and they change and disappear, and we cannot allow our cultural heritage, the drivers of scholarship, learning, research and innovation to be in the hands of any commercial entity.

For more on this see what the Open Books Alliance have to say.

In the Zone

One thing that has been occupying some of my thinking recently has been the way trains of thought break down.

You know, when you've got an idea or theory and you're desperate to commit it to paper before it evaporates. I was in Cambridge the other day talking with some Darwin scholars about the manuscripts of "On the Origin of Species". I asked them whether there was any evidence of Darwin's fluidity of thought. Sometimes you write in a staccato way, struggling to formulate or express ideas, and sometimes it just flows - the ideas are clear in your mind and stream onto the page as if your pen is just a conduit.

Their eyes lit up "Yes, yes!" they said. Apparantly on occasion Darwin was writing so fast that, when he turned a page, almost the entire recto was still wet with ink, and they can see the impression of that wet ink on the facing verso. Sometimes this happened for page after page, Charles Darwin writing faster than the ink could dry.

Almost 150 years after the publication of the "Origin", we're still finding out much about how it was written.

That's why I love working with libraries.