Rich Conversations with Matt Lewis
Every so often I meet up with Matt Lewis a professor at OSU's ACCAD department. We get together at the north market, snag some lunch and dive into a conversation that never seems to end, in a good way.
Today's meet up was no different than the ones before. We covered a vast array of subjects from augmented reality, data mining, data visualization, art, location based services, books, how to improvement ideas, GTD ideals, software, hardware, community collectives, theories on crowd sourcing, collective intelligence, managing presence online, and the how the future you is really here today just juggling it all.
In a typical meetup, the conversation starts in hi, how ya doing to current what's up and ends in rethinking man's potential existance in this new ubiquitous reality we're all living in.
Needless to say my brain is alive and on fire with ideas. I love these simple lunches. My fried tofu was yummy and the Tom Kai Yum soup was amazing as usual there at Nina's Sushi there in the north market.
Matt talked a bit about how with the iphone its hard to imagine a life without instant access to google and wikipedia. I think about that now, and in some ways I can agree, though I don't have the insta-access via the iphone with me, that will soon be remedied I think. We messed around testing a new link where you can turn any thing you want to from wikipedia into a quicktime podcast. It worked well on the iphone, now instead of you glancing in that data of whatever, it can speak right in your ear, thats cool!
We also talked in great detail different ideas and needs around manging ones presence online. For me, I want more tools to come to me to ask what I'm doing. I'm tried of always drilling in to new betas, new social networks, and participating at such a "i gotta go right to yer doorstop" kind of way. I want smart tools to come to me, to say "got an opinion on augmented reality for such and such group that you follow via RSS?, and i say ya.. and give my two cents in a generic input window, and off it goes to manifest my interaction with that service, and then later, i can catch up with the output of all that via RSS feed. That's still not really here yet. There's no active bot to engage me, again I always have to engage it. I want a smarter tool to know me, know my preferences, lifestyle, routine, and sense when best to interact with me, obtain my bit of data, and pass it along.
We also talked about sign-posting, this idea that many of us beta-junkies who play in the 2.0 space get burned out quickly and that we almost need to get into a potential network not so much that we really need it, but we feel compelled to be a part of it, at the mimimalist level in the sense of a sign-post. Facebook for me is exactaly that. I was here. My profile is a sign-post in Facebook, I don't interact with it daily, its merely an outpost for a potential person that may either know me or wanna know me to SEE me, I exist in that network soley due to the sign-post, but then, in reality, I've moved on to something else. I think other beta kids do the same thing, we all leave traces of who we are throughout the various networks, and then like frogs leap from lilly pad to lilly pad on to what we feel is next or home, but you can always retrace us back through the various pads we've been in before.
We talked a bit about data visualization and the fun and potential I saw in Yahoo Pipes. He mentioned Many Eyes, a site I checked out awhile ago, but like most of research data here, I dunno how well it could serve up some visualization for me. What's cool about alot of Matt's work is that it plays in the purely expressive play space. Its uber creative to the sense that there's no agenda other than fullfil a need to do something, see anything, visualize something new. Sure theres objectives but the pipe is wide open, take it all in, do whatever ya gotta do with whatever toolset, play, go and impress me, play. Prehaps thats the academic freedom you get with a school like ACCAD, you have to go boundless and open minded into the fringe if you hope to walk away with something really powerful.
In all I can't explain the mental high I've got at the moment. I wish I could have those kinds of conversations all day. I can't wait for the next lunch.
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