A living room adventure

Repost from Run on Toast

I had a rather lovely Saturday over at Lift @ living room, an informal satellite of the Lift conferences. For some bizarre reason I didn't take any photos, but here is Amanda's picture of Charlie giving his talk, so you can get an idea of what it was like:

As always, a couple of bits that I found interesting:

One of the themes of Charlie's talk was about how we can incorporate the charm of patina/analogue into digital services. It is starting to happen (Flickr's hello in different language, the awesome Handbrake piña colada visual, phone software which responds to the time of day), but much of service design is currently so focused on the functional that there is no room for stories.

He also talked about the shift to an intelligent networked city, which bought up some interesting ideas about privacy from the group. Namely:

• The generation behind us don't have the same privacy worries that we do
• If everyone has a certain type of information about them in the public domain, you become conspicuous because of an absence of this information
• Without privacy, will behaviour change to become more socially acceptable?

Stephen Molloy spoke about craftsmanship and how it is losing out to mass production. It's a shame that craft is a luxury proposition because of a dearth of craftsmen. Someone evoked a future scenario where outsourced production ceases to be cost-efficient meaning that furniture production, etc, would have to bought back home. The demand would result in a boom in the number of craftsmen to address the need. There were some questions raised about immediacy, and whether demanding consumers would be prepared to wait, but I think that as consumers we're very understanding of the fact that bespoke takes longer. We can see examples of people waiting to have something bespoke to them already, from Bodymetrics jeans to Tossed salads to Nike iD.

There was so much other amazing conversation, will post again soon. Thanks to Charlie for inviting me and to Felix for organising. Was an awesome day.

Comments

[charlie gower]

Gosh who's that Muppet who can't sit upright?