Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Category: Contemplation

  • The issue with software-defined products

    The issue with software-defined products

    30 years ago the idea of “using” instead of “owning” was all the rage as a way to move into a more ecological future. To have products used by many people would allow to offer its services with smaller ecological footprints. This in par became true for car sharing services today.

    But the main use case of the idea of renting things instead of purchasing things has been perverted: Companies are producing more and more stuff that you have to purchase but then they behave as if you have only rented them. And they use the fineprint in the end-user license agreement to limit the ownership of the thing you think you own.

    One way to do that is the software defined products: Companies over-provision the hardware just to be able to enable or disable functions remotely. The reverses the ecological idea: instead of light hardware the products are filled to the brim with stuff, that provides features that you MIGHT want to rent out after the purchase.

    Also, these companies also often regard any sensor data of the hardware to be owned by them – and not by the customer. So even you toaster might collect data about how you use it. A toilet may collect data about how and when you poop. You think that is absurd?

    Think again.

    Look at what the car companies are doing with the »software defined vehicels«:

    Here is Louis Rossmann calling out this practice… calling companies »rapists« as they use their customers data without their consent or using dark patterns to hide the consent in the end-user license agreements:

  • Artificial Intelligence everywhere

    Artificial Intelligence everywhere

    Disclaimer

    This following text was generated using GPT-4.
    Don’t take it too seriously. It is just a test.

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands out as a revolutionary technology that’s altering the foundation of how we live and work. The impact of AI on the global economy far-reaching and it is touching every industry sector. What is the impact of this technology on our world?

    For creative minds, AI has emerged as a tool to unlock new levels of productivity. Creative professionals are harnessing AI’s capabilities to automate mundane aspects of their work, leaving them more time to focus on the creative process. From generating quick prototypes to providing insights based on data, AI allows creatives to experiment with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

    We also must confront the challenges that the advent of AI poses. One of the most pressing concerns is the potential for significant job displacement. With the power to automate complex tasks, AI could render certain roles obsolete, making it imperative for the workforce to adapt. Jobs as we know them may vanish or undergo radical transformations, necessitating a new approach to skills development and employment strategies.

    The technological change is also characterized by the fact that many individuals fail to anticipate the path we are on. Those most likely to be affected by AI’s disruption may not see it coming or fully understand its ramifications. The sheer breadth and depth of this transformation can be difficult to grasp, covering everything from job security and economic inequality to ethical considerations in AI application.

    A significant segment of the populace has yet to comprehend the vast implications of AI. It’s not just a tool that will change certain aspects of business and leisure but rather an upheaval of the present status quo. Its influence spans the elimination of jobs to the creation of new industries, calling for a societal shift in the way careers and economic contributions are viewed.

    On a more positive note, others are beginning to incorporate this change into their understanding of the immediate future. Education systems are slowly integrating AI-focused curriculums, businesses are investing in employee retraining, and governments are considering the societal impacts of AI, setting up frameworks to mitigate its potentially harmful effects.

  • Testing World Outliner

    This is just a test with the WordPress editing tool of Dave Winers OPML Editor and Word Outliner software.

    I owe Dave Winer a lot. He invented Frontier (which apparantly is running at the core of the OPML Editor). It got me into Blogging in 1996. I experimented a lot with it at the time an even wrote a bunch of plugins for that system. Out first univeristy blogging server was based on Frontier and UserLands Manila.

    Dave is also an innovator of a rare kind and writes at scriptingnews.com. He is a developer by trade but also an Internet pioneer (or the other way around) — thinking about Internet culture and business like few do. He is always someone to listen to. He may be very subjective and personal from time to time — but we all are sometimes. He may be even wrong about things — but when he is right, he is often is dman right about it.

    I lost track about what Dave is doing acouple of years ago (obviously still the same after all), but maybe I should tune in to him again. I also don’t know if I will spent more time with the World Outliner tool. But being able to edit my WordPress blog with it is a plus.

  • OK. Reset!

    Well, as this blog obviously shows: I simply did not have the time to blog in the past (the Twitter account is more active). The past years have been of that sort. There is too much going on and I started to contemplate for a moment if I should revoke the old blogging habit from the nineties an »blog to focus«. Problem of that is that much of that is confidential stuff from my consulting work. But maybe I could use the subjects to touch some overarching topics. Let’s try…

  • Zoot Woman as well!

    I am sorry to “spam” my music interest recently. But I am just so glad about what the Berlin team was able to pull up again. As my Last.fm profile discloses I have been listening to the britsh band called Zoot Woman recently. Now I am happy that Hobnox has the concert and an interview:

    [See fullscreen and also interview available]

    (Reminds me of the fact that I forgot to link the interveiw with Jose Gonzales in my last post).

  • Hobnox recieved the Grimme Online Award

    grimmeHobnox recieves the Grimme Online Award.

    The Grimme Online Award is one of the most prestigious awards for online projects in Germany. The jury does mention the quality of the design.

    As Head of Concept and Design this makes me happy. But there have been many people working on the design that are not yet mentioned anywhere. And I want to give them credit here – even though some may have been working for Hobnox only a short period of time:

    I want to thank everyone mentioned here for the effort that contributed to the achievement. Thank you!

  • Grimme Online Award Nomination for Hobnox

    Hobnox was nominated for a Grimme Online Award yesterday (category “special”). The Grimme Online Awards have always been a sign post for cultural relevance of web projects for me. So this makes me very glad that Hobnox has achieved this nomination.

    Side note: As announced on the FMX/08 conference the Audiotool has been updated with a TR-808 rythm composer. The next update (hopefully) will add saving compositions and maybe MIDI support.

  • FMX/08

    I am going to speak about web entertainment (and Hobnox) on FMX/08 tomorrow. I will probably see some friends there as well.

    I haven’t been to a previous FMX-conference. Judging from their program they do focus a lot on technology and Visual FX. The panel I have the privilege to participate in is subjected “realtime”.

    I think this is a very good topic altough the notion is quite dated. But the term gets a slightly new meaning as the networks start to become real multimedia channels that can deliver streaming high quality video and multiplayer games with minimal latency and without wires.

  • Things move on…

    Things have been very busy for me lately. But instead of just apologizing I give you some links to see some stuff that is coming out of that:

    99stories.com – sly-fi.com – str33t.org – mi145.com

    Most of that is “viewing only” at the moment. This will change radically… 😉

  • Tinderbox 3.6.3

    One of the tools I love to use is Tinderbox. The homepage says: “Tinderbox is a personal content assistant that helps you organize, analyze, and share your notes.”

    I just downloaded the latest beta version (3.6.3 b17) and found that it has a list of improvements that push it forward again.

    If you never heard of Tinderbox try looking at some of the screencasts that are online.

    Tinderbox is a tool that has been around for ages now and while the technical progress is slow compared to other tools it remains unmatched for a lot of tasks. The sad part of it is, that it does have some limits and missing features that people expect from a writing tool. But besides of that it’s potential has not yet been fully exploited by its community.

    The tricky thing with Tinderbox is, that it does “take off” unless you know how to use the tool wiseley. For a newbie it may feel like just another note-taking tool that misses some core features. But once you discovered some of the core concepts of Tinderbox a whole new set of options.

    Findamentally it is a tool that keeps asking you: What do you want to do with your thoughts? How do you create relevance out of randomness? What does order in a chaotic world of fragmented information mean?

    Tinderbox somehow forces you to answer these questions and define a concept how you want to process everything you write down. You may start with no such concept and try to develop it while playing around with Tinderbox. But once the level of interdependence of notes, actions, templates and such gets high (which can happen quickly) you need to become smart about how you manage you material.

  • 6 billion Others

    This is a very nice project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand that shows video portraits of 6000 randomly picked people in 65 countires that are talking about personal things.

  • Blog lag….

    There has been no post here for over a month now. I really feel bad about that as I can see from different stats, that there are more than 550 subscribers to this blog (slowly growing) – which is not too much compared to some other blogs… but a hell lot of people for me. And with a 20% reach (people that actually click or act on a blog post) I think it is not wise to neglect a blog for so long. But then again I need to thank all subscribers for the confidence I sense from that.

    Truth is that I have been way too busy the last month. I stopped working as a professor at the computer science department of the Cologne University of Applied Science (I still do teach Design though) and started to work on an international project related to the music and TV entertainment busniess. I probably will contemplate and write about that sooner or later, because there are really a lot of stories that I’d like to share in future.

    So keep me on the radar… I am still alive!

  • Desire (Design and Democracy)

    I think the current Privacy/We-blog seminar (see blog) is turning out very well. The students are working on a project that is very “web2.0-ish” and a profound reflection on the business models that drive this market (or new bubble if you will).

    One of the questions that constantly return to me is what is the function if design as seen from strategists. There is a discourse about design is being in charge of providing “emotional value” to products – or in other words: to sense desires of consumers.

    I have addressed the core strategies of design in several seminars. They were called: Perception, Mind (called “Remembering and Design” back then), Density, Simplicity and Continuity. And it always appered to me that I one day I will have to address the topic of »Desire«.

    The problem with “desire” is that it appears to be a mainstream topic – but in fact is not. It is a pandora’s box and it will ultimatley lead to political implications of design. And that is probably why I postponed it several times although I am totally convinced that there is no real way to get around this issue.

    One place to start is Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays invented the term “public relations” and spawned research that led to the idea of “life style” and “focus groups”. His influence has been portrayed in this four hour BBC documentary “The Century of the Self” (Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4). If you watch that documentary you’ll see the dilemma.

    The documentary ends with the impression that the affirmative politicians in western societies have eroded the notion of democracy by replacing political policy with public relations (thus tuning their speeches and programs towards the short term desires of swing voters). Like Bill Clinton has asked one of his advisors: “What is a mandate if you can’t get elected with it?”

    I want to point readers, that managed read this post until here, to a document called “Design and democracy” [PDF, 148 KB / german], a lecture given by Gui Bonsiepe in 2005 at the UTEM, Santiago de Chile (and be assured that the issue of democracy is not only a matter of desinging better election ballots).

  • Design switch

    This weblog has changed under the hood: the code is cleaner. Everything is CSS based. It doesn’t validate yet, but it will. There have been only a few minor tweaks to the design itself. It pushed most of the templating away from Tinderbox and up to the server.

    The next step will be to circumvent the HTML export of Tinderbox completely and publish everything directly from a database (by converting the XML file into RDBMS tables). It will also reduce the number of agents (like the ones that collect the weblog posts for each category).

    Update 5/29/2006: Some people asked me about how I did the rounded corners. Actually I am using CSS 3 styles for that which is implemented partially in Webkit (Safari) and Mozilla/Firefox. I don’t use any CSS tricks (even if I could).

  • Flickr facelift

  • Switching this site to a CSS-based layout

    I am not working offline for that and I am also not doing it in one single step. So there will be pages broken and/or looking odd. Sorry.

    This change is a preparation for easier future design updates. I also want to make the page more standards compliant.

  • Old computers harm office morale

  • No one reads what you write?

    Dave Winer in this interview makes some comments about his online writing style. His weblog is less a collection of posts, but rather collection of paragraphs per day with. Sometimes he uses headlines to separate content. But generally it seems to be true that people skim blog pages a lot.

    With Tinderbox it is quite easy to shape the style of a homepage. You can add some fields here and include some if/else-statements in the templates there. I wonder if I can find the time to come up with a design that is as easy and “skimmable” as possible.

    The first thing I’d do is to not include the full posts on the homepage all the time. Sometimes there will just be an tiny teaser with a link to the full posting at its permanent URL. Of course I need to come up with some design tweaks for this yet. It’s a work in progress….

  • BlogLag

    Ok. I am way behind schedule. Posting to this weblog has become a rare activity lately. There are a couple of reaons for that. It is a matter of priorities. I am pretty confident, that I’ll get “back to normal” soon.

  • Featured blog

    Yesterday this weblog (»details of a global brain«) was featured on »The Main Quad« – a private blog that is “promoting viewpoints and topics that are international, multicultural, multi and interdisciplinary, and all over the political spectrum” (with a focus on academic blogs). I am pleased that I appear to be the first non-native English speaking blogger in their directory and I appreciate the kind words of editor Jennifer Chernick.

  • Mobile photo blogging

    I recently switched to a new mobile phone with SymbianOS. Nothing spectacular. It was cheap as I was extending my contract. It is a Nokia 3230. The user interface really has serious issues (which I think is amazing for a multi-million dollar company like Nokia that does not sell phones only by their external look).

    I am not so much into mobile phones and I am not willing to spend lot’s of money to be an early adopter. I am more “early mainstream” in this.

    I was looking for a free solution to post pictures online in a second. I was not satisfied with PicoBlogger or LifeBlog and I also did not want to use pricy MMS messages for submitting large images.

    Now I found SplashBlog. This service seems to be straight forward and free for a limited amount of images. So from now on you might find some images from me on my SplashBlog site.

    Update: I found something better: the fastest way to get photos online with a Symbian phone ist ShoZu. Once you have a Flickr account it’s just a click and it will be uploaded to Flickr in the background. Nice.

  • News (in desperate times?)

    Mark Bernstein about the ignorance of US mainstream media to world events:

    The CNN front page headlines include, among the top 6 stories:
    “Jennifer Aniston photographed kissing Vince Vaughn”
    I don’t follow the news much. Is there some reason Jennifer Aniston shouldn’t be kissing Mr. Vaughn?

    This simply made my day 😉

  • Need more time for work? Sleep less!

    Interestingly there is a whole armada of things keeping us under pressure: you got to be more productive, faster, better organized, and so on. The computer has not only enhanced our productivity: ubiquitous computing also means there will be no excuse to be unproductive (except when you »deserved« a break)?

    There are already many people working almost round the hour – from early morning when they wake up to late night when they fall asleep. For those there is now »aid« available:

    Glen Rhodes explains how to reduce the daily amount of sleep needed to 4.5 hours:

    Typically, I sleep 3 hours a night, and nap for 90 minutes in the evening. That’s a total of 4.5 hours, and I am always alert, always awake and always feel rested and refreshed.

    Update: There is a Wikipedia page about »polyphasic sleep«.

    Hooray! I’d like to quote Alex Albrecht from diggnation.com: »We live in desperate times, Dude!«.

  • How weird the job of an character animator can be

    So, you’d think that the job of an computer graphics animator would involve nothing but sitting in front of a screen and clicking little icons and buttons all day long? Well, looking at these folks I think the curricula may need some tweaking for the required skill sets… 😉

  • Enabled comments via Haloscan

    Marco Kalz complained about a missing comment feature. So, Marco, especially for you: Comments!

    I did not want to implement a comment feature myself, so I use the free Haloscan service to add comments and trackbacks. The drawback of this is, that comments may get lost once I want to quit the service.

  • Return from Hamburg

    I am in the train back to Cologne. I am thinking about, what I was seeing and hearing the last two days at the Campus Innovation conference. The conference theme was trying to bring educatiors and administration closer together in context of e-Education. Talking about the different sessions would make this a very long post. I’ll skip that. I just want to state that I got the impression that politicians and university administrators try to turn higher education in some kind of electronic commerce. »Education = content delivery«? No wonder faculty and university administrators are like oil and water: you need to steadily stirr them to keep them together.

    Yesterday I had dinner with Marco Kalz from FU Hagen and three other people. They were attending another conference in Hamburg. They were “Wiki people” giving presentations of how to use Wikis in e-Learning. One guy was from Switzerland (I didn’t get his name right first). We were debating the issues of structuring content in Wikis over some beers when I said I know a brilliant example of structured content for almost 10 years and he should have a look at that: Biblionetz by Beat Döbeli. He started to laugh and Marco said: »Oliver, you’re just talking to him!!«.

    Even while I was the idiot here, it was kind of a nice way to meet someone.

    (BTW the other two were Helmut Leitner and Anja Ebersbach)

  • CS site up

    I seems I am making a slow move to Plone. I just replaced a static Manila-driven homepage of me with a Plone site.

    After working on a Plone skin for a client it seems creating a design for Plone has become less of an obstacle. The main problem I have is lack of time: there are many details to touch when doing a “real” new Plone skin. So it currently is running the default skin. It’s kind of ugly but still works better than what most people run as homepage in the computer science department (BTW Tom Lazar seems to do amazing work with Plone).

  • No comment

    Too late!

  • Upgraded!

    YES! My DSL connection was just upgraded to 6MBit/s downstream. It’s amazing that these speeds are available for consumers for affordable flat rates.

    I remember a comment made by Derrick De Kerckhove in the final panel of a 4th doors of perception conference about »Speed« in 1996:

    No body is complaining about the television being too slow. But everbody is complaining about the Internet being too slow. And why is that?? Because the Internet definitely is too slow!

    Good old days!

  • How long does it take for a weblog to become inactive?

    Several weeks now without any update here. Why? Well, too many reasons to list here. I was too busy on the one hand – on the other hand I did not want to blog just to remain »active«. I know I ignored one the »post early, post often« rule for running a successful blog. I was still posting here there in some of the seminar weblogs I maintain and I am still reading RSS feeds. So I wasn’t dropping out of blogging at all.

    Another reason is that I want my personal blog become more a commentary blog with more thinking going into the content – not so much a filtering blog which just collects cool links. That I am doing with del.icio.us – so no need to do it here… (BTW: if you are using del.icio.us you have to see the del.icio.us direc.tor!)

    Finally there are so many threads to follow currently, that I need some time to think about them. That’s probably one of the privileges as professor: there is a lot of noise around you all the time. This is rewarding – but also stressing.

  • Fighting wiki spam

    I lost the wiki on this site due to hackers. I didn’t have a recent backup so I am trying to recover as much as possible from Google cache. The wiki wasn’t a wiki anymore anyway: i needed to close it for public editing due to spam bots.

    The best solution I have seen for fighting this kind of automated spam is a small Turing test. Ingo Hinterding has good experiences with it and it seems to protect is comments quite well. It may also be easier to implement that captchas. Here is a german article about the issue. It contains a quote by Stephan Mosel:

    Open wikis are so 2004!

    Well, I’d add that closed wikis aren’t anything beyond 2004 as well. The open editing of wiki pages is a key for success of wiki sites. I don’t want to contact the site maintainer or subscribe to an account when coming across a wiki page that I feel needs some refinement.

  • Blogging strategy reconsidered

    I really like this weblog of Clark MacLeod from Taiwan (he is very much into sound and interaction design). In addition to common blog post keywords. He categorizes his posts in three domains: work, life and play. I think this is a good way to separate social roles and personal motivation in blog posts. I just need to come to a conclusion about this. It would be very easy to add with Tinderbox.