gosh, why is studying such a tried and tired task? Surely there must be a way to reinvent the system, providing tools to process and create notes better through intuitive interfaces like the iPad. Something which allows you to read text and draw out key words into a plane for example, and immediately research associated graphics. Or something which lays out necessary information for studying and maps them for you as you learn.

social networking idea set #1

Like a message wall that's actually a wall, and has all your posts, emails, texts, every kind of information coming to you.

One wall to the side of your main home entertainment, where there's an interactive oled and on that are all, All, the messages you receive.

People posting on your wall, sending you messages, replying you on twitter, sending you emails, sending you waves, are all added to the same space. they can be themed differently to represent where they came from. Most importantly, texts and voice mails also go into the same place.

aND, it has a slot for you to put your mail when you just walk through the door. so All the information you could possibly have to respond to is in the same area. One key idea is that why can't texts and voice mails have the

same flexibility of what you can do with online emails -- where you can star them, flag specific ones you have yet to reply to.. redefine the inbox to be a reaL inbox.

Represent your life via your media center. Your online profile updates according to what shows you watch most frequently, music you listen to most, websites or search strings you've been looking at most frequently recently.

Let people draw their oWn lines. Let everything be amorphous and let the user have controls over where he puts dials, splits groups, filters info. i.e. if everything in the social network and in his own life were post-its, he could re-stick those into new areas and new groups all the time, every day a different configuration. Let him arrange information to receive it the way he's comfortable with.

Every time he uses Facebook, he has an accompanying visual in the background showing him exactly the quantity of people he's connect to, and exactly who they are. As above, he has the flexibility to move these 'dots' or whatever they may be that represent his friends in this media, and move them around on the screen to group them as he likes into areas of relevance. There can be stronger colored dots which correspond to exactly which users he interacts with the most, has the most common physical circle, or are his closest friends in real life -- or they can move to be closer to the inner of a circle. There's no clear boundary though between 'inner circle' and 'outer circle', because they all can be moved in and out as he likes.

As he goes to another media, Twitter, the visual changes to represent the people here instead, but the colors and placements of pre existing dots stay the same. *one key not is to have the idea of dots all around, and that your friends are not simply dots on this one page, but more than you are in a sea of social networking, out of which you have only temporarily taken a bite size chunk. but everyone out there in the whole world is a possible friend.

Now. when you click on one friend, you have the opportunity to pull up all the information on that person from all the different sites he may post himself on. Besides this, you can add personal information from the artifacts of your own real life relationship with one another, for example photos you've taken in real life, or maybe some plane tickets you happen to be buying together. The point is that you perSONALIze this meeting space. you can even decorate it as you like, but it becomes almost like a shared arena that you and your friend exclusively share as if you were in the space living together. Anything you both might be interested in can be placed in this sort of corridor that links the two of you. Every one to one relationship becomes rich.

And everything you have in one-to-one like this, have the same thing in every increasing degree of freedom. So the person does not feel confined to have to act in one dimension, with one person, but if several people so desire, they can have spaces with many people at one time. Huge groups can share a certain space. Tiny lines joining the 'dots' can show who you have spaces with. You can have degrees of organization, so that in the 'space' you have with your colleagues, information is presented extremely categorically and according to the needs of your organization or current project. but the one with your best friend can be personal, can be vivid, dynamic.

social networks

Localized to users, not by site.

My friends are islands on the screen. Nicole has facebook, twitter, and anything I wanna know about her, shows up immediately around her from all of the different places that information about her could possibly be. If it takes pictures immediately from her camera and puts them up for our sharing, I can see her as she's going about her day, what she's doing, experiencing, and in an essence, each of these friend nodes becomes enriched by every aspect of the person's life, and I don't have to go to several websites to find out what's going on. Just because they use several media doesn't mean that when I want to approach them as I would a friend, I cannot simply know all I'd like to about my closest friends. I can know when Debs puts a new picture on deviantart, I can know when Jo has a new photo set up on flickr, and when all of us have the same system, I can comment on her experiences as a whole and she can do so on mine. I'd like to leave e-voicemails, actually hear my friend's voice. I'm up to date with my web lingo, but a couple of ha has and 8)s aren't going to convey what I feel. I have alot more than just the terse one-liners to say to my closest friends.

I'm thinking as well that my being here in Cali, completely distant from all my friends, makes this easier to conceptualize for me. And easier to bring it down to exactly what I wish I could be doing with my friends.

design for defence

Wow I had an amazing lecture on design thinking today -- basically how to make products that Rock.

I wonder what the heck kind of awesome products we could come up with if Singapore were to devote the same kind of design thinking to Defence. Our defence requirements are so unique -- from a unique strategic perspective on deterrence coupled with neutrality, down to the physical constraints of a tiny island where you run from jungle to mall to jungle in the span of a kilometre. What kind of intricate networks of technology and communications could you put together to come up with defence uniquely applicable to a country like that -- and from that, what kind of new defence policies could you establish?

What if defence could, for a day, be taken just as cavalierly as any other design project with the aim to please, and thinkers from so many aspects of the problem could come together and brainstorm, just the way designers do? Think of the perspectives that could be shared, between policy makers and hardware designers -- two people that never mix.

I imagine there could be things like.. individual soldiers as information points. Each one has an idea of the lay of the land, represented as players on a virtual field, which are delegated by a central commander. Think playing war games, but applying that speed of deployment to real life. If every soldier is aware, more satellite groups could break off or coordinate, independently relating with supplies or with strategists. Translate from the hub and spoke model to a grid network. What technologies can immediately tell you the pertinent status of your troops -- think of the decision trees you could draw in seconds based on established factors that could tell you whether to make use of one troop or another, or to be able to even preempt the support they may need.

Anyway I don't know as much about military strategy as I'd like to yet in order to innovate on the lay of the land, I have no idea how efficiently systems function today. But I definitely want to learn a lot more about it now.

And before any of this even happens, it would be amazing to try and think up how you might establish this kind of design cooperation within the defence community itself, in a way that we can work off one another seamlessly. What kind of red tape needs to go away, what kind needs to be put in place? In such a traditionally straight laced, results oriented, and top-down infrastructure, how can we play and tweak with policy and mindsets to allow the fruit of new perspectives and design analysis to grow? Strategy needs to be based on technology, which needs to be based on strategy.

Oh imagine if we could reinvent defence with all the emerging benefits of design, operations, and strategic thinking. And the way you would go about it would be so unique too. Unlike the head over heels changes that occurs within certain corporations, change to a defence organisation needs to be handled in a much more delicate fashion, changing strategic points at strategic times that make sure the paramount defence capability is never lost. How would you seamlessly introduce a change in methodology, and likely more importantly, control the reception to it? Changes in one thing today could mean a whole new paradigm shift if a war were war to break out tomorrow and what will you do if everyone is not equipped to incorporate it? How can all that be changed within the additional setting of international policies and coalitions? The interplay is amazing.

collaboration

I definitely need to be able to see through my keyboard. When I'm talking to someone on gchat trying to understand what they think about a DA problem, it's impossible to really convey what I'm thinking. I need to have a table right in front of me, with a voice over, and just drawing and demonstrating my ideas. I need a tablet right in front of me that we're all seeing. and I don't want a big table that's so spread out and importable, I don't want to be using my cursor and I don't want it to be blended with my non-work. i don't need to write on everything, do i. but for the collaboration heavy.

for design stuff, I want to be able to move concrete, decided-on ideas from my base up onto the screen. at a column. the base is for brainstorming, the upper is for how that translates into the project flow.

but for math, homeworks, i have to have a separate multi touch screen. it might be still a little too contained for large scale work though.

character decoration

I wonder if I can have a personalize-able form of decoration, into which I input my most favourite things. Cars, pointe shoes, flowers -- they inform the shape of a work of art that entirely represents who I am.

sonar maps for the blind

I saw a man in the bus yesterday. He was blind, and when he got on he asked the bus driver about a location, then sat down and started making a phone call by feeling the numbers on his phone. I have no idea how he actually got onto the bus in the first place. How does he know the bus is coming and How does he know it's his bus?

There's a great deal of sensory information that we are fortunate enough to have access to these days, and our capacity to assimilate every aspect of our lives is speeding far ahead of us. Effective signs tell us where to park, iPhones tell us where to go, and we don't need to sit and sift through useless information like we used to. And this makes us very efficient people. But only when I read iPhones for the Blind a few days ago did I realize how absent this potential for optimization was for the blind.

The through-and-through

Buses that tell you their number, ear phones that give you directionally-placed sounds -- sounds that give you the low down on where the road stops, where the building starts, where the bus stop is and where the food may be. Sounds that vary by pitch for proximity, by velocity-difference for direction, and one chord tells you everything you want. Isolate the signal for a certain region, or a certain type of destination, and you can find exactly what you're looking for.

And now in slow motion.

So here's the not-too-complicated-idea, possibly not-new-idea -- a simple sonar-map set up in public, frequently visited areas. Starting with buses, every one can have its own wireless transmitter that triggers the recitation of its number to a blind individual's ear piece, when it arrives at a bus stop. Bus comes, number is told to the user.

To find the placement of bus doors, have one transmitter on each side of the doors. Now say you're standing facing the road, the bus is coming from your right. You hear two dings coming from far away, getting closer, getting louder. One ding suddenly travels to your left, because sound's now being transmitted from your left side. One ding on your left, one ding on your right, the bus door is right in front of you.

[Spatial sound representation like this is actually a very common thing. Your earphones can relay sound as coming from your left, your right, or right ahead of you. It depends on the speed at which these sounds come to you, just like in real life. In fact your earphones can simulate sound coming from 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock -- the entire spectrum.]

Okay so this sounds like overkill for what could essentially be two bells attached to either side of the door that the bus driver will ring every time he approaches a bus stop. Yayyy problem solved. But what if we could put these transmitters on every building, every street corner, every fire hydrant... And what if the pitch of these sounds increases with distance? The further away something is, the higher the pitch will be.

Then all you need is one simple, beautiful chord to play and all at once you have an entire mental map of your surroundings. It's not like simply listening to sounds coming from everywhere and identifying that This Rustling Tree is Here, or That Horning Car is There, or That Loud Woman is over There. It's like suddenly having complete information about Where is Your Pathway. What is a Wall, and What is actually a Door?

Now. as far as useful information goes, this might not be it. Power to knowing where streets start and stop, but there could be 10 people in your way and 6000 pebbles. So a service like this has to have a great deal more utility. So, what if the pitch or the frequency of the Ding could tell you more information about what exactly is at that Ding? Like that's an Office Building, that's a Bus Stop, that's a House, that's a Restaurant.

All you need to do is issue the same transmitter to every eatery, put the same transmitter at every bus stop, different ones for each MRT line. Have it run on a passive system, so that only when the person presses for assistance do the transmitters and receivers go active.

Anyway it is obviously not any kind of full-proof answer, I have done no research into this and as yet know nothing about the needs and provisions for the visually impaired in Singapore. Maybe there's already a far better way and this is rather pointless?