Sean Voisen

Obviously, this is a blog post long overdue.

My notes from the last two days at ETech are sparse. This is partially because of my own growing laziness during the latter days of the conference, and partially because I (like to think) I was making a concerted effort to spend more time listening and absorbing, and less time trying to capture it all. Though note-taking certainly improves retention, its distractions can also lead to a lot of missed visual and auditory intake.

ETech is a hacker’s conference. It is a conference for technologists and programmers and designers and people who spend their days making things. At least, it certainly felt that way. The number of sessions with titles containing words like “hacks” or “hacking” or “do-it-yourself” seemed to far outweigh those that did not. But perhaps that’s just biased retrospection. On the first day, Tim O’Reilly delivered a rousing keynote that essentially boiled down to a 30-minute praise of hackers and makers and geeks in the trenches. My sense was that about half the people there were actually hackers, and the other half were people just trying to keep tabs on what the hacker/technologist community is up to.

Now, technology for technology’s sake is all well and good, but it’s not my primary interest, and I was happy to find that there were several presenters at the conference attempting to push the hackers to create technology for social good. “Green” technology was a big theme this year. Saul Griffith delivered a massively in-depth keynote on calculating personal energy consumption, the contents of which can now be found at wattzon.org. Even more rousing, however, was Larry Lessig’s special evening keynote on government corruption — an impassioned plea for hackers to start using technology to help expose what’s really going on in Washington. The Sunlight Foundation is a good first step in the right direction. Also, if you’ve never seen Lessig deliver a Powerpoint presentation, you should — it’s a brilliant example of how to turn the typical idiocy of Powerpoint on its head.

It was a lot to assimilate in a mere four days, and I was mentally exhausted by the end of it all. This was a conference jam-packed with a lot of smart people; some with egos to match their IQs, and others far more humble. I walked away with more project ideas than I could feasibly implement, and a larger network of people who know how to make some of those ideas a reality.

Was it worth it? For some, ETech can be prohibitively expensive. But if you really want to know where the next wave of technology is heading, and you pay attention and talk to enough people at the conference, it is possible to justify the cost. For me, it was just nice to have so many inspiring conversations with so many smart and like-minded people. Also, it doesn’t hurt to note that events like this are never without their unexpected surprises. Case in point: I spent my last few minutes at ETech learning how to pick locks during an impromptu lock-picking session delivered by a local San Diego hacker (and self-described “random douchebag”) — something that was definitely not on the official schedule. The maxim holds true again: the true value of any conference lies not in the speeches and sessions, but in the chance encounters and random hallway conversations with people you’ve never met before.

And, without further ado, notes from my second day at ETech. As mentioned previously, I’m currently in pure idea absorption mode. I will provide some type of editorial commentary after the conference is over.

From David Rose’s talk on PC-Free Computing. (PC-free for this talk basically means ambient informatics):

• Try designing “enchanted devices” — everyday things that are somehow alive with information. Avoid interfaces that require too much attention. Clocks are a great example of something that provides information at a glance without any attentive thought. The perfect design should be: pre-attentive, calm, culturally independent and open. Faster is better than more detailed (don’t tell Tufte).
• Look for natural mappings of information to physical display. Nature has built this perfectly into plants that wilt when they lack water.
• Did you know that average American refrigerator gets touched approximately 68 times a day? Neither did I.
• Pervasive is persuasive. Put energy monitors inside of the home where we can actually see our energy usage in real-time. Actual studies have shown that this lowers and stabilizes energy consumption. Think about what this could do for congested highways. Traffic-aware ambient informatics.
• The best way to support behavioral changes is through engaging a social network. Behavior-shifting devices (i.e. medical) should be socially-enabled.

From Elizabeth Churchill’s talk on how social experiences drive technology design. This was mostly about physical collaborative technology installations:

• Look for visceral emotional responses. Statistics can point to a place but they can’t talk about that place’s emotion or experience.
• Look up Hole-in-Space, an installation art piece from 1980.
• Online interaction and collaboration actually increases when it’s augmented with physical/offline interaction using installed devices.
• Every place is different. Every place requires different design and has different adoption patterns. Kids have sticky fingers that wreak havoc on public touchscreen displays.

From Matt Webb’s impromtu session on sci-fi and other interesting miscellany. (No, this one wasn’t in the program.) Here’s a link to the entire talk:

• What if cities could move as self-contained entities? Just think about it for a second.
• You can make light-avoiding robots out of slime mold.
• The “light cone” is the space that light/information from the moment of your birth can reach. For instance, 50 years from the moment of your birth, information about your birth has just reached a star 50 light years away. Here’s Matt’s way for you to create an RSS feed that will update you about your own light cone.
• Reach is what you can see. Grasp is what you can affect. In the online world sometimes these aren’t tied to each other. (Consider Second Life, where your avatar can be in one place, but your camera — POV — can be in quite another.) What if everyday objects (like phones) could “see?” What if your address book tracked the elapsed time since you last called each and every contact, and nagged you to call your mom more often?
• Pneumatic networks. The French invented packet switching 30 years before computer networking.

Notes without context. Just the essence of what is going on here.

I plan to write up my experience at ETech once I’ve had more time to sit and synthesize everything. In the meantime, here are a few random notes I scribbled down during the first day’s sessions.

From Tom Carden’s talk on info viz at Stamen:

• Just get on with it and show the data. Show everything and filter it out later. Sketch in code. Iterate. (Also, drinking tea is an important part of this process.)
• Take advantage of implicit data — data that wasn’t explicitly created on purpose, but is a by-product of other actions. Then, encode data directly in the pixels. Use gradients of color or grays for mapping in 2D space. Processing allows HSB (hue saturation brightness) color manipulation for making this easier. Play with color. Use MD5 or other hashing to deterministically map color values to data categories by hashing the category name string.
• But beware of “accidental visual resonance.” Colors carry emotional connotations and can give viewers the wrong impression. Dial back. Subtlety is usually better than the other way around.
• Give everything a URL so you (or someone else) can find it later. Value adjustments, map coordinates, query strings should all be encoded in the URL. Also, this dovetails nicely with principle #10: “make things public.” Make APIs. Let other people help breathe life into what you’ve created. Findability is important.
• Seek forgiveness, not permission. Get the data then find out later if you can use it.
• Strive for “direct manipulation.” The visual elements should also be controls. Avoids clutter and promotes intuitive interactions.
• Finally, bandwidth is the thin straw. More than 10,000 data points is usually too much for web-based visualizations. Use sliders. Progressively enhance as necessary (a la mapping).

From Marc Powell’s extraordinarily enthusiastic food hacking session:

• Salt draws out flavors by drawing out water. Fancy restaurants salt at different layers during the food preparation process. Putting food in a vacuum opens it up so that it can absorb flavors. Apparently, this is called super-masseration.
• Rheology in food is the science of gelling. Also, xantham gum is the waste product of a certain bacteria. But even a tiny amount can increase the viscosity of most liquids.
• You can make powdered oils by mixing tapioca powder with oil.
• More flavors are better than less. Try using many components to avoid “food boredom.”

I would have taken more notes, but I was too busy eating thyme-infused fruit and cake, celery flavored foam cooked in liquid nitrogen, pepper-sprayed melon balls, licorice soup and tofu cheese. Mmm … tasty.

ETech starts on Monday, and this year I’ll be in attendance. Considering the fact that the conference venue is approximately 5 blocks from my home, and considering the fact that it features all sorts of very smart people discussing all sorts of very fascinating subjects, I had few excuses not to go (exorbitant price-tag notwithstanding — for which I managed to procure a discount.)

A few of the sessions I am anticipating include:

• A half-day tutorial on information visualization with Tom Carden and Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. I am an info-viz junkie, and a bit of a Stamen fan-boy — if there can be such a thing — so I’m particularly looking forward to learning about Stamen’s design process and meeting the guys in person.
• Gary Bradski is going to discuss the Open Source Computer Vision Library. Computer vision has always been something I’ve wanted to explore, but I have never taken the time away from my myriad other projects to try it out. Maybe March will be my month for finally getting my hands dirty with CV.
• This panel on mind hacks sounds fascinating, as does this talk on synthetic neurobiology. Enhancing cognition with technology; we already do it to some small degree using PDAs, the internet, and what-have-you, but I think we’ve barely scratched the surface with what is possible.
• Also, body hacking. I think that one speaks for itself.
• Finally, Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried are giving a talk on open source hardware. There is also a half-day tutorial on open source hardware and Arduino, but alas I registered too late for this one and it was already booked to capacity. Instead I’ll be going to the food hacking session. I know absolutely nothing about food hacking or molecular gastronomy — I’ll go into this session with a beginner’s mind — which is probably all the better.

Feel free to get in touch if you’ll be in town. I’ve only lived in downtown San Diego for about seven months, but as an area native, I’m quite familiar with many of the local watering holes.