Nicolas and I gave our presentation yesterday at Reboot on Blogjects. It was a lot of fun to think about how to deliver our early thinking and insights and capture the substance of the concept, and deliver some of the design thoughts developed at the workshops, and think of the ways these things tie into the many other ideas circulating around related to the participation of material objects within the network.
Nicolas has a very comprehensive post about the lead up to the talk. I won’t duplicate any of that here, he’s done a great job.
Here’s a copy of the presentation, mostly images and text, no notes.
Two insights that I’m thinking about.
1. In a way there’s some characteristic that seems to resonate with the Blogject design concepts and that’s the way they embody social practice. So the “flickr camera” tries to capture the ways in which the media sharing practices that Flickr seems to encourage become part of the designed object when we’re thinking about networked objects. That’s great, I think, in that the emphasis on the intersection of social practices and digital networks yields more than bland designed scenarios.
2. Establishing linkages between material and digital representations. This theme came up while Nicolas and I were working through some notes and became part of the presentation, although the precise thinking about how to articulate this is still really gooey. I mean, I think there’s something that’s particular about the Blogject concept that means these linkages aren’t the “plain old” way in which material becomes digitized — I think there needs to be a richer set of semantics around that that is about more than simply indexing the world of objects, and definitely not this business of material items translated into shape and form that gets fetishized in virtual worlds (a la 2nd Life or some Google Map mash-ups..more on that later.)
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