Syd Mead and Third Tuesday

A Bet­ter Blade Run­ner and the Designer Behind its World

Before I got started on redesign­ing this blog, I did get to spend an evening hear­ing sto­ries from a real designer. Last Wednes­day evening’s talk by Syd Mead was a mind-blower.

Before his talk, how­ever, the SIG-CHI Chap­ter of Van­cou­ver, who were host­ing the evening’s event, made some announce­ments, and then… well, the best descrip­tion of it might be a ‘happening’.

Here’s a video that some­one took of it:

(For those who can’t see the video, essen­tially, the lights went off and 2 light­weight balls of stretched fab­ric enclos­ing multi-coloured lights were tossed over the audi­ence. They were about 7 or 8 feet in diam­e­ter, and changed hue every few sec­onds or so. The crowd hap­pily bounced the balls around the hall, remind­ing me of those beach balls that get bounced around over the crowds at polit­i­cal con­ven­tions. Accom­pa­ny­ing the bounc­ing balls, which were called ‘Zygotes’, cour­tesy of Tan­gi­ble Inter­ac­tion Design was a sort of processed audio, from sen­sors respond­ing to impacts as the balls bounced off the crowd or the walls and ceiling.

The main event fol­lowed: Syd Mead. Mead is the designer of a half a dozen films, includ­ing the sci­ence fic­tion clas­sics Tron and Blade Run­ner. He spoke about his work, using a Quick­time movie to show sev­eral decades of illus­tra­tions of futur­is­tic cars, build­ings, cities and other arti­facts of the future that were inside his head and now, per­haps, inside our own as well. There is a DVD of his work as a ‘Visual Futur­ist’, con­tain­ing much of the mate­r­ial from his lec­ture, as well as inter­views with oth­ers about him and his work. Here’s the trailer, from his web site (check out the high def­i­n­i­tion ver­sion there, it’s well worth see­ing at a larger size):

He’s not only a bril­liant designer, but he was a good speaker as well, com­ment­ing on his work and influ­ences. He showed prob­a­bly 50–75 exam­ples of his work over the past 50 years or so in var­i­ous games, car­toons, movies, cars, and indus­trial design projects. I was sur­prised to hear that the two artists who influ­enced him the most were the Baroque painter Car­avag­gio and 19^th/early 20^th cen­tury illus­tra­tor, Max­field Par­rish. As one per­son inter­viewed in the trailer put it, Syd Mead is essen­tially an ‘18^th Cen­tury Man moved to the 20^th and 21^st Cen­tury’. Many oth­ers spoke of the ‘real­ity’ of his vision, that it had gone through much of the evo­lu­tion and test­ing related to a prod­uct, build­ing, or tech­nol­ogy, but entirely in his own mind.

After the talk we saw a screen­ing of the Final Cut (or so it’s now known) of ‘Blade Run­ner’, a film that . That screen­ing, in and of itself was fas­ci­nat­ing as well. The ver­sion has none of the film noir, Ray­mond Chandler-style voice over by Har­ri­son Ford, and there are quite a few scenes either length­ened, added or in one par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal case, omit­ted (I won’t spoil it if you don’t already know). As I was watch­ing it, I kept mar­veling at the con­sis­tency and rich­ness of the visual envi­ron­ment. The only give­aways that Mead’s vision (like Kubrick’s) of the future wasn’t 100% cor­rect was the appear­ance of the Pan Am logo on a few elec­tronic bill­boards. Boy, nobody saw that air­line as going away, and its logo still looks fine in all of the visu­al­iza­tions of our future.

Third Tues­day

Last night was the monthly meet­ing of Third Tues­day, a com­bi­na­tion pre­sen­ta­tion and mixer, focus­ing on (but not entirely lim­ited to) mar­ket­ing, web 2.0 and the new ‘social media’ that takes place, when­ever pos­si­ble, on the third Tues­day of the month. Last month, Writer and Social Media Evangelist/Consultant, Mon­ica Ham­burg intro­duced many who attended (myself included) to the con­cept of crowd­sourc­ing. This month, Local Van­cou­ver Tech­nol­o­gist, Writer, Racon­teur and Mis­cel­lanist (that’s how his web site puts it) Dar­ren Bare­foot gave an excel­lent ‘case study’ that explained how his mar­ket­ing com­pany, Capulet Com­mu­ni­ca­tions got the atten­tion of the web’s movers and shak­ers through an online demo of his client’s prod­uct. Most sur­pris­ing detail of the cam­paign? To invite key peo­ple to the online demo (actu­ally, a faux company’s Intranet Wiki), they sent invi­ta­tions to about 35 of them via snail mail. That’s right, email has pro­duced so much noise and clut­ter (read: SPAM) that the best way to get to some peo­ple is the old fash­ioned way. It reminded me of an Isaac Asi­mov short story where a bunch of mil­i­tary sci­en­tists real­ize that the best way to com­pute some mis­sile tra­jec­to­ries is through some lost ancient tech­niques, known as ‘mul­ti­pli­ca­tion’ and ‘long divi­sion’ per­formed by a sol­dier with (*gasp!*) a pen­cil and paper… There was no men­tion of telegrams or sig­nal­ing fires, so I’m going to assume that those ‘Employee kits’ sent via Courier were as far back in tech­nol­ogy as he was will­ing to go.

I met up many friends and acquain­tances, and am glad to see that the sum­mer sea­son (and mostly sunny skies) has not meant that every­one is head­ing for the beach, only to recon­nect up in the fall. At least, not yet.

Summer (Blog) Fashions

How can you tell when I have a lit­tle more time on my hands? A change to the look and feel of this blog is a sure sign. For those who don’t read it via the feed (which means, fam­ily and a few oth­ers, rather than other blog­gers), I’ve once again fid­dled with the theme or rather the pages of the blog/web site. There are a few minor glitches, but over­all, I’m pleased with this one, and if I don’t screw it up, this design might be in place for a while. The pic­ture of the moun­tains in the header is from a recent pic­nic at Locarno Beach.

(Warn­ing, geek­ery to fol­low : ) I’m still a fan of the Geor­gia font for body text, but now I’m mak­ing the more stan­dard font choice of a sans serif (Hel­vetica or Arial if you don’t have that installed) font for head­ers and nav­i­ga­tion. I’ve decided to take the chance of using the Word­Press ‘wid­get’ tech­nol­ogy for the side­bar, instead of rely­ing on the theme’s own PHP code for gen­er­at­ing the cal­en­dar, search box, blogroll and cat­e­gory list, which may or may not be a good idea. Already I can see some dis­ad­van­tages to this approach, as the sort order of the blogroll is no longer ran­dom­ized and always appears in alpha­bet­i­cal order. I guess the answer is to use a dif­fer­ent wid­get, but I’m new to this approach. I also can’t fig­ure out how I’ll insert Flickr thumb­nails between wid­gets. I’m think­ing that will need a wid­get of its own. Will have to research further.

At any rate, the advan­tage to exper­i­ment­ing is that you learn more, so I’ll surely be play­ing around a bit more. I’m already a bit more sure of myself on the CSS side of things, so hope­fully there will be fewer lay­out glitches.

Now I just have to fig­ure out how to get the home page listed in the page list…

Under Construction

You know how it is: A drippy faucet leads to a tile com­ing off, which leads to a hole in the wall, which leads to…a new bath­room. Well, that’s what hap­pened to us years ago in Boston, and that’s all sup­posed to be a metaphor for what’s going on right now with this blog (or at least, the design of it).

I just wanted to ‘fix’ a Flickr badge, and incor­po­rate some new func­tion­al­ity. That led to the whole design com­ing apart before my eyes. So, bear with me while I essen­tially start from scratch. I’m exper­i­ment­ing with a new look. I’ve tried 2 new themes so far and I’m not happy with either of them. I really hate mess­ing with this.

Northern Voice 2008, Day 1 Continued

The high­light of the after­noon was for me, as it turned about, Pho­to­Camp. That’s the ses­sion on pho­tog­ra­phy led by Kris Krug, Pres­i­dent of Bryght. I’ve been to this ses­sion in past years, but this year Kris had a slightly dif­fer­ent for­mat (although he had done Pho­to­Camp this way at other venues like Bar­Camp): A group of dif­fer­ent experts in a vari­ety of pho­to­graphic tech­niques and top­ics fol­lowed. Tim Bray talked about what ideal small cam­era to get, even if you already have a larger Dig­i­tal SLR (and I was glad to see that he pro­moted the site DPRe­view, a site that Steven had rec­om­mended many times when I was shop­ping for a cam­era.) Local art pho­tog­ra­pher Rachael Ashe showed some stun­ningly psy­che­delic effects you can get by using long expo­sures in a dark room along with var­i­ous kinds of coloured lights; a kind of light paint­ing. You can see an exam­ple done today here. I’ve seen other exam­ples of this online, but the ones she did had an almost iconic (in the reli­gious sense) qual­ity. Novak Rogic of Microsoft showed how you could make ele­gant and almost pic­turesque lit­tle plan­ets from stiched together panora­mas, Duane Storey (who I am hop­ing to pur­chase one of his stun­ning pho­to­mu­rals of the Van­cou­ver sky­line from) talked about how to set up a store to sell your pho­tos on SmugMug.com and Miranda Liev­ers, a local por­trait and wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher, gave a superb show of how to make the best pic­tures from avail­able light. It was that last pre­sen­ta­tion that par­tic­u­larly impressed me, and I hope I’ll be able to use some of what I learned in future photos.

After Pho­to­camp, I went to the ses­sion on Word­Press (partly as a pre­lude to tomorrow’s keynote by Matt Mul­len­weg, the found­ing devel­oper of Word­Press, one of the most suc­cess­ful blog­ging soft­ware pack­ages today, and the soft­ware I use to pub­lish all of my blogs.) While that was mainly a break­out ses­sion where we all had the oppor­tu­nity to avail our­selves of local experts, it was fol­lowed by a ter­rific pre­sen­ta­tion called ‘More than Cat Blogs’, which was how Word­Press can be used to build web sites that are either not blogs at all, or don’t look any­thing like blogs. (unfor­tu­nately I didn’t get the pre­sen­ters name and he hasn’t posted any links to his ses­sion or him­self on the North­ern Voice Wiki).

After all of these pre­sen­ta­tions, I went with sev­eral oth­ers to the nearby Mahoney’s bar, where Vox­ant News­room, a dig­i­tal news video host­ing ser­vice, was offer­ing free drinks and t-shirts in return for fill­ing out a short sur­vey regard­ing blogs and other demo­graphic infor­ma­tion. It was nice to be able to get drinks (and even­tu­ally din­ner) so close the the con­fer­ence, and I was home at a decent hour, ready for a full sec­ond day of North­ern Voice tomor­row. It starts early (at 8:30 AM), so hope­fully I’ll be up and ready.

Northern Voice 2008

I always have a hard time con­cen­trat­ing on try­ing to blog in the mid­dle of an event, even if in this case, it’s an event about blogging.

All right, let’s fill in the when and where: It’s lunchtime, and I’m sit­ting in the atrium of the Forestry Sci­ences Build­ing on the UBC Cam­pus. I like this space. It has 3 lev­els of bal­conies and bridges, as well as a glass roof, where this year, the sun is stream­ing down. Being the Forestry Sci­ences build­ing, there is wood every­where, from sup­port­ing beams and a sys­tem of struc­tural sup­ports to desks and pan­el­ing that cov­ers most of the walls. Despite the fact that it’s clearly a mod­ern build­ing (and a lit­tle bit util­i­tar­ian), it has some nat­ural warmth, which is also enhanced by the crowds of peo­ple all tak­ing pic­tures, chat­ting, and writ­ing on their lap­tops (in other words, act­ing like students).

The morning’s ses­sions that I attended were mostly about blog­ging in cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments: how to cul­ti­vate Wikis inside of com­pa­nies, nav­i­gat­ing the IT Depart­ment, deal­ing with a tech­no­log­i­cal deci­sion, and find­ing some­one who can be an effec­tive ‘Wiki Gard­ner’ (Now there’s an inter­est­ing title for a busi­ness card!)

I’ve seen many old friends, and am try­ing to keep from spread­ing what­ever may be left of the my cold (which has been around me so long that I almost feel as if we are on a first name basis). The tech­nol­ogy I’ve spied is not all that sur­pris­ing: mostly Macs, both Mac­Books and Mac­book Pros (plus a sprin­kling of a few Vaios and Dells). I’ve seen at least 4 iPhones.

Which brings me to my good news: After a period where I thought I had ‘bricked’ it (i.e. turned it into an expen­sive paper­weight), I got my iPhone work­ing. It is Jail­bro­ken, Unlocked, and see­ing the Rogers net­work (Rogers, inci­den­tally, announced their mas­sive earn­ings today, which doesn’t sur­prise me in the least given that our phone bills are the high­est bills of any­thing we pay in Van­cou­ver, sur­pass­ing elec­tric­ity, cable TV, Inter­net and gaso­line ) Every­thing is work­ing fine except for the ‘where am I’ fea­ture, which I haven’t been able to get at all. For­tu­nately for me, I know where I am with­out hav­ing to con­sult the phone.

This after­noon will be some more ‘techie’ ses­sions (I think). I’ll write about those and put in the few snap­shots that I’ve taken, this evening.