Floozy Speak!

Yesterday flew by.  I think it was a mix of proper stimulants that did it.. and some excellent stimulus as well.  First up I had about five cups of various black teas.. i'm sure that helped in switching me into high gear.  I finished seemingly minor changes to the work website that had been on the to do board for months.  I probably need to take a short course on Dreamweaver just to get back into the swing of site design. 

After cranking out the web changes I dived in to the "to do" list which this month is exploding with action items.  I russled up the contacts for the ever dragging Tablet PC project.  It's dragged on too long really and it has serious research/promo/yeeehaw potential.  Gathering all the players up for that project took a little time but its on the schedule now - excellent!  200+ students diving head first into pen based interaction tablets and the wireless world of education.  Theres going to be ton of insight coming to the table on that one.  I'm particullarly interested in the backend of things.  The intergration of systems and software to pull off a seamless experience of "it just works" i think is going to be a long road for schools getting into this field.  Sure we've had computer labs in schools for awhile but we haven't seen a school individually arm each student with a tablet before.  That kind of system and infrastructre to support it can and should be dynamic, automated, easy to use etc.  There is a ton of pioneering happening on the back end.  A huge potential for Microsoft and other players to see whats happening, where educators are heading and what students are demanding thru their various workflows etc. 

I've had this school tablet agenda on my to do list for almost a year now.  I think its a great story and a great piece of work to be apart of.  Luckily my contacts on the school end happily agree and can't wait to get started. 

There are some significant hurdles though:

• how do you make it wifi friendly free creative and yet restrictive to limit the amount of p2p action that will occur
  
• tablet os is still primarily developed around a keyboard mouse UI enviroment, who will pave the way for smarter ui apps that are developed for the end user in mind
  
• is it fast enough, do we meet the specs, is it good enough, are we faster - surely, are we as connected?
  
• whats my persona, im a student in the year 2005 and im armed with a tablet pc in a wifi enviroment where all my books and education rides with me, who am i... and am i popular? 
  
• personal customization, what will students do to seperate themselves from the pack, how will they create new packs and what role will the technology play
  
• backend connectors, whos making sure all big picture connections and plugins are being created,
  
• logistics of hardware and the new educational space, whats it mean to not have any more books and that everything is electronic, do we need labs any more, do we need lockers? - syd mead, come visualize with me
  
• social software collaboration tool explosion, groups working together takes on a whole new meaning in the classroom, what software developers are taking that on, what are students looking for, what are teachers looking for what are educators looking for
  
• adoption by students to this tech offers little resistance, wheres the bottleneck - teachers, how to overcome their hurddles
  
• redefined bookbag, yer bookbag now contains a $3000 piece of hardware that holds everything you do, tell me more about that, weight, damage-ability, replace-ability, backup-ability, ruff-tough-ability,
  
• wifi campus, hazards of wifi, free wifi, hacks in wifi, perimeter awareness and wifi, wifi tracking of students and usage, where do kids typically connect, why there, whats it about that space, real time visualization of tracking,
  
• security access, monitoring usage, bandwidth concerns, hidden prowlers, educators on board roaming students machines in real time, privacy issues
  
• documents and winning formats, whos going to be the winner - pdfs, docs, pngs, gifs, xml, do we need new formats to do what were doing - if so what why and how
  
• admin access, essentially all these students are given a form of admin access on thier gear to promote the idea that they are in control of their future, how do you prevent or deter a level of user fumbling errors within as we know is a complicated os to begin with, the potential to royally mess up yer box is high, do we need a shell, a kind of shield of control that lies beneath a system of free will
  
• tech and maintaince, who does what, who fixes, how, whats the downtime, whats the repair like,
  
• proper consideration on what gravitates more than others in a tablet os/wifi enviroment, math apps vs social study apps, math apps are booming, social studies apps.. well its not the same, how do classes and how they are taught break down differently when translated into tools and enviroments, science, math and art translate well into the tablet os development enviroment, social studies and other like classes struggle with no pioneering application to help drive stimulus of that field of interest, why, what can be done
  
• where does the technology end, what gaps can we not breach, will it be "pens down" or "tablets down please.."
  
• what is this new educational space look like, describe it, visualize it, render it, tell me about it, talk about it, whats the new lunch room look like, what about the halls, how bout the kids in metal shop, visualize the space and what is occuring
  
• whats it sound like, how do we talk now, what terms are being used, what do we hear in the halls "joey and his 802g, my b is just as good.. have you checked out bit9.5 yet, it easily bypasses the new firewall"
  
• how do we keep up, how do we maintain a level of control vs an army of explosive minds
  
• theft, theres a whole new market advantage here in top dollar gear to hussle, we're not sellin pens and staplers any more we can deal in smart cards, lithum batteries, chargers, cables, flash drives, media, memory and machines to boot.. we've raised the stakes and now our potential loss is far greater, how do we deal with that, how do we work to prevent it
  
• not just for school, these tablets arent just for school, they arent just used in school, they go into the home, they go to the park, they are part of the students life, tell me about that dynamic, where does the school system end and the home enviroment begin, what are the issues with connectivity and workflow in an non schooling enviroment 

As you can see, I personally have alot of questions.  I doubt I'll get all my answers, but you can sure bet I'll be seriously curious and tryin. 

After the fury of activity for the tablet project I gobbled down some minor lunchable action and headed off to talk about retail retrospective ethnography.  Wow, yeehaw!  WTF is that?  Its basically our new system we've developed to observe/track/data-collect/analyze and visualize consumers in a retail space.  The system is only the what, we back that up with the why and complete the research with retrospective intercepts that occur in sync with the live data collection process.  In the end we get some serious insight into the customer experience.

Its a great system for before/after store design, problem seeking and tuning of a merchandised space or for discovering key interaction points and emotional drivers behind the customer in your envrioment.  Whats particularly exciting for me is the development of the application, the visual synthesis of the data to a more pleasurable measure of viewability (woooha!), hardware + logisitics of camera usage, and the desired metrics from the client.  Thats all a pretty spiffy way of saying I'm damn proud of our retail rig creation.  Especially since it started more from a pure data capture application and continued to evolve.  I'm also proud of having excellent folks to work with on the project, namely - Troy and Bob, two local friends here who helped me assemble my vision of what we needed to do to pull this rig off.  And of course to Lextant for allowing me to run with it.. though I wouldn't of given them the option really.  Passion doesn't work that way its all one way baby, whether ya like it or not, i'm making this thing! 

Anyways I'd like to think one of first big ahhhhh ha's in diving into this design research for me was the opportunity to work with retail design folks.  I've been a big fan of firms like RPA and Chute Gerdeman for years.  Even before going to texas to work in animation and then coming home here to lextant, I've been a total slobbering fan over retail design firms.  Its the art of creating a space that just sucks me in, i love every aspect of it.  So now that the retail rig is off and running and getting some killer feedback from retail design folks I can't help but be passionately excited about it.  Yesterday we took a mini tour of Chute Gerdermen and I was floored by the creativity their office oooooooozed with.  Right away you know these guys and gals simply KICK ASS.  It was awesome to be there and I can't wait to do expectional work with them.   

When I got back to the office a smoothie laced with bee pollen helped jazz me up for another 4hrs of bliss.  I contacted some folks in Montreal to get the skinny on their application for store displays to interactivily change with tracking, I honestly got the take-a-way that they had no idea what they really had there.  Its built for tracking people in a space and telling the plasma screen that "someone is near start playing that cool video" etc.. but their technology could just as easily be developed more into a "customer has reached this segement of the store, etc etc" like our retail rig.  Our rig is a bit more sophisicated though.  We don't do static cameras, we follow folks, zoom up on them etc.  How would the system handle that?  Dunno.  It does create unique realtime outputs that are right outa terminator though.  I like that part. 

Tracking people in a space isn't new btw, but its hardly "obtainable" without pain.  Lotta folks go "ya ok ya track so what", its not the tracking thats the big winner on these ideas and tech, its everything else.

Initally the gang in Montreal is targeting advertisers with their application.  Makes sense, makes things like the gap ADs in Minority Report seem more likely etc.  Least thats the comparison people continually bring to the table.  And all the fear around it?  Whaaah?  I can't understand that really.  Besides retailers and advertising folks would be stupid in my opinion to simply ignore that aspect of emeriging technology.  My first thought is - has anime taught you nothing?!?  heh.