The juries for the IxDA Awards, met in New York City at the Method Studios to deliberate over this year’s extensive and impressive catalogue of entries. They have shortlisted a set of finalists, with the winners to be declared at the Interaction 12 Conference, this week in Dublin, Ireland
Our work with Teaching Channel has been selected as finalists and is currently in competition at Interaction 12. You can still help us win ‘People’s Choice’ by voting here! Voting closes tomorrow at 12pm GMT, so please help spread the word!
Whatever you’re looking for on the Internet—entertainment, a product to purchase, a connection to a community—in most cases, you’re likely to receive an overwhelming amount of results to choose from. These relevant search results are valuable to you.
Or are they? More and more commentators are wondering if the tools we create to give us more choices—such as search engines—are delivering less variety, ultimately limiting chance discoveries and exposure to new ideas.
On the BBC’s The Culture Show, Aleks Krotoski recently examined the role of serendipity as an online commodity, questioning whether the Internet is as innovative as we think. She points out that computers have the unique ability to make valuable, unseen connections for us. Instead of maximizing that potential, our search filters keep us focused on only the most relevant information.
Alex explains, “We will never have the opportunity to bump into something truly new, because the machines are predicting our futures based on our past preferences, creating an infinite loop of cultural homogenization.”
The concern over the consequences of homogenized choice is not entirely new. David Byrne noted in his book Bicycle Diaries, that in many urban developments gentrification leads to separation, rather than integration, of different social and cultural groups. This separation leads to less collisions between ideas and the stifling of creativity.
David describes, “I think online communities tend to group like with like, which is fine for some tasks, but sometimes inspiration comes from accidental meetings and encounters with people outside one’s own demographic, and is less likely if you only communicate with your ‘friends’…”
Other commentators also question if recommendations based on a combination of one’s preferences, social profile, and history of consumption really offers new opportunities. In an article for Design Week, Steve Price discussed how the role of media retailers is changing in the age of the “Filter Bubble.”
“Google, as amazing as it is, can only answer the questions you ask it,” he states. “It cannot tell you which questions you should be asking. Search results and news feeds are all now influenced by engines that take as a point of entry all that they know about you and spit back the information they think you’ll want. What is on the screen when you open Spotify? Recommendations on new music based on its knowledge of you. What happens if you visit Rough Trade Records? You often leave with albums and music from artists you’ve never heard of, having heard it played in the store, or from talking to one of the employees who clearly live and breathe music.”
Concerns aside, the tech community seems to be moving in the direction of “smarter” recommendation engines. For example, The Filter founded by Peter Gabriel. These developments suggest we might soon see recommendations for vacuum cleaners based on one’s music tastes. For example, a robotic system called HyperActive Bob has been developed to anticipate customer behaviors in fast food restaurants. This includes correlating a customer’s type of car with what he or she might order, but this particular filter has failed to prove successful so far.
When the self-referential nature of media increases the speed of recycling ideas in film, design, music, fashion and global culture as a whole, what will it take to receive truly original recommendations? What can we design into user experiences that will allow for the unexpected?
Imagine the possibilities of using “dumber” algorithms that will allow us to be pleasantly surprised by serendipity wherever we are…and whenever we “don’t” expect it.
If you liked this article we recommend: http://youtu.be/9ZlBUglE6Hc
The San Francisco team had a special friend in the office on Monday. Pony ran around our ankles, bringing us cheer during our morning meeting. For more photos of our four-legged comrades, visit the Dogs of Method! 
If you can’t tell by now, we at Method love Arduino. So much, in fact, that this week some of the Method SF team journeyed to the California College of the Arts (CCA) to lead an Arduino workshop for industrial design students.
After giving an overview of Arduino, we shared a project we’ve been working on during our PLAY sessions, it uses a slider and Processing to make physical controllers for the arcade game Pong. Then we broke into groups to test the Arduino boards.
The students wrote their first program and soon had LED lights blinking and switches controlling the lights. A few adventurous students even worked on controlling tri-color RGB LEDs. The whole event was a fun and successful way to continue spreading the Arduino love!
After months of construction, our London studio has just moved into their new home, taking residence in the Tea Building, located in the heart of East London. Please note our new address!
Studio 7.01
The Tea Building
56 Shoreditch High Street
London E1 6JJ
We celebrated the move with a ribbon cutting ceremony earlier this week. Our new studio is one to brag about; large enough for our growing team, it even includes a full kitchen, beautiful views, and tons of natural light. We’re extremely excited to break in the new studio we’re already getting to work in it.
Take a look at the new space, and stop by to say hello if you’re in the area!
We’ve been selected as finalists in the 2012 Interaction Awards! You can help us win the People’s Choice Awards by voting for our work with Teaching Channel here. Spread the word!
We’ll be checking out the first London Content Strategy Meetup of 2012 this Tuesday at the Shooting Star, featuring some great speakers with deep experience in fields ranging from technical writing to information architecture. The presentations will be using the ‘Ignite’ format, (5 minutes, 20 slides x 15 seconds), which should prove for some interesting content.
You can also find us at Luis Urculo’s ‘Jet Lag’ at the Popular Workshop in SF. Urculo is a Madrid based architect, designer and artist who collects materials, errors, alternate versions of time and landscapes to create an atlas of memories, diagrams and structures. We’re excited to check out his new body of work, which will be exhibiting until the 24th of February.
Give us a shout if you’ll be at these events!
Now that the dust has settled, we’ve had time to take a look back at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show. It was great week and we had quite the experience browsing through the expansive show floor. The show was populated by hundreds of exhibitors showing a diversity in products and innovations.
However, it seemed like the popular theme was television. Several exhibitors displayed their take on integrating more of a complex UI into the TV experience – from various ways to hold and store entertainment content to different browsing mechanisms. Transportation was also a big theme – with many car manufacturers showing off all-new dashboard capabilities, incorporating more consumer control and involvement of what type of information is displayed on the dashboard. There were many similarities across industries, and it was great to see the conscious effort to consider good user interfaces and consumer experiences.
A few of the organizations we’ve collaborated with were alo present on the show floor – including Rovi and Basis, were we helped out on the design and UI end of the products.
View our exclusive photos from the show room below!
The response to our Dogs of Method Calendars have been wonderful. Thank you all for the support for the PetFinder.com Foundation and our delightfully mini project.
To celebrate, we’ll be giving away a select few of our calendars this week and early next week. Keep up with us on our Facebook and Twitter as we’ll be posting different questions and mini challenges and we’ll be rewarding a select few of winners with a free Dogs of Method Calendar.
