Reading the Future of Photography

Longtime friend (and colleague in a number of businesses) Mike Priddy flew back to the UK this week from his adopted home in The Netherlands, and we caught up by taking a trip to Birmingham's annual Focus On Imaging expo. One of the reasons for visiting the show each year is to try to take the temperature of the industry, and to get a sense of where it thinks it's heading. In previous years we've noticed swings towards (and then away from) ink-jet printing, to and from compact cameras (and back again), and the ebb and flow of services to photographers. This year seemed to me rather inconclusive, as if the industry is unsure about where it's left by the confluence of smartphone photography, digital printing services, ebooks, compact system cameras, large-sensor DSLRs, and digital video. Chinese companies offering remarkably good value accessories were in full force, elaborate wedding album vendors were everywhere, and the spectre of the devastated UK photographic retailing market hung silently in the air. 

​To coincide with the show, and to take advantage of Mike's visit to the UK, we used the opportunity to record a pilot to what will soon be a regular Futurilla podcast. You can hear us talk about some of the developments in digital photography, and some potential future directions, in the Resolution pilot episode.

The Re:Sleeves Podcast

I'm delighted to welcome Re:Sleeves to our fledgling podcast network. Historian, explorer and storyteller Ben Waddington and I have been hatching this one since spring 2012 when we started sharing our mutual fascination with album sleeve design. About a month ago we resolved to make it a podcast, and last Friday we recorded the first of a planned fortnightly show. Our first discussion is focused on the evocative sleeve art for Bowie's three-LP 77-79 run of studio albums; Low, Heroes, and Lodger. We very much hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Futurilla Radio

A couple of weeks ago we quietly added a second horse to the Futurilla stable: The Doom Ray podcast sprang from the brain of recent BIAD alumni Kyle Jobson, who also collaborated with us on the iBooks project. Kyle's a self-confessed geek and lover of all that geek culture entails, so it was pretty much a no brainier to schedule and record a weekly call in which he could let off steam on games, films and comic book culture, with me acting as a co-host and as someone to bounce ideas off. So far we've talked about The Dark Knight Returns, House of Cards, Ni No Kuni, PS4, and a bunch of films that Kyle's selected for BIAD's MA film screenings. Last week's show on Terry Gilliam's Brazil was, in my humble opinion, the best yet, and if you haven't listened to Doom Ray yet, you should start there.

While we've wanted to do a Doom Ray podcast for some time (indeed we started with a pilot episode last year), we began planning in December to try and do it in a way that we could learn from, with the intention of getting better at the business of recording and distributing audio media, and of learning how we might scale and extend it to other topics. In the course of our daily work we come across lots of fascinating, informed and opinionated people, and we'd love to find a platform for more of them. Some of these people get invited into BIAD to give lectures (which we're generally poor at capturing), some of them become trusted advisers and eventual collaborators. Audio is a fast medium for capturing and disseminating these various conversations and dialogues.

Doom Ray has been then, the beginning of this learning process. We've begun to put in place, test, and iterate the workflows and processes that allow us to record, process, and distribute podcasts. We've made (and will continue to make) lots of mistakes, and to learn from them (quickly!). It's hard to practice this stuff in private, and we've had to launch the show quietly into the public domain in order to make the experiment real, though the focus has definitely been on learning as a team, rather than on building an audience. We've told almost no-one about the shows up until now, though we're still getting a handful of downloads (we're building for scale nonetheless—it's absolutely our intention to be able to deal with a large number of listeners for future shows).

So, now we're moving into the next stage by developing a second show. Again, it's an idea that we've been discussing for over a year, and in that time it's moved from being a written project to an audio one. It's taken a month to think through what we needed in terms of recording a pilot show, and developing a strategy and timetable. We're very excited about the topic and the format, and we've got some big new things planned for this one. I'll be sharing more details as the week progresses, both here and on twitter (@sharl).

Switching →

Great, so you can quickly switch accounts, but why would you want to, especially if you’re just one user on one Mac? Here are a few possible instances for using multiple accounts, beyond the parents-with-kids scenario.

Smart advice from Macworld. I'd add one thing: Having Guest login available means you can allow someone else to use your Mac to get something done, with no danger of them accessing your files, screwing something up, or leaving their passwords and cookies in your web browser. When a guest account logs off, all the session data is deleted.

Pecha Kucha Preparation on the iPad

So, I had to turn a 40-slide twenty minute presentation on our electronic book approach into a 20-slide Pecha Kucha to last 6 minutes 40 seconds. Having never done one of these things before I was pretty uncertain about how to tackle it, so I turned to local design history sleuth, and Pecha Kucha veteran, Ben Waddington for advice. Ben's recommendation was to write two sentences per slide, and knowing my own tendency to use 100 words where 20 would suffice, I decided to double up on his advice: I figured that if I limited myself to a single sentence for each slide then I could afford to expand (or drift off the point) where necessary.

I'd built the original presentation in Keynote on the Mac, but had already tweaked it for iPad so I could reliably deliver the original presentation in a PC-centric department, and I wanted to stay on the iPad for the whole of the process, though I'd have to deliver the slides to the event organisers for conversion to the auto-running PowerPoint show they were using for the Pecha Kucha.

Getting the 40 sides down to 20 was relatively straightforward. Eliminating partial builds took 4 or 5 slides out right away, and a similar number of slides had information that was either unnecessary in the context of the event or impossible to explain in 20 seconds. Duplication and 'reinforcement' slides took care of another 5. In the end, only 5 or 6 slides were actually painful to cut, but I reckoned I could fill any interested audience members in on the relevant points after presenting, either in person or by email. Mailing the presentation from Keynote on iPad was straightforward, though the organiser's email server initially choked on the size of the file and I had to use Dropbox to get it across to them.

I'd allowed myself about two hours to write a single sentence per slide, and I wanted to do it right in the iPad. I'd sketched out some ideas in the Notes app the night before the presentation, and then sat down over breakfast on the day of the (lunchtime) presentation with wifi and coffee to whip it into shape.

There are still reasons to complain about multitasking on iOS, but it's mostly because of habits built up through desktop use. In practice moving between Keynote and Notes is pretty smooth (I use the four-finger swipe to go back and forth) and I had the basic numbered points down in about an hour, with most of the time spent working on the right way to précis some pretty involved stuff into 30 words or so.

I hadn't really decided in advance how to handle my presenter notes. I decided pretty much on the spur of the moment to build a separate Keynote presentation on the iPad with my notes on individual slides. Keynote on iPad was perfect for this, though I'd love an app that could take numbered notes from the clipboard and send them to Keynote for automatic conversion to slides. iCloud comes in for a fair amount of criticism too, but it's perfect for things like this: My notes presentation was on my iPhone pretty much instantly, and I could hold it in my hand as a reminder during my presentation.

Years ago, before PowerPoint (and then Keynote) handled proper dual screen presentations with presenter notes, I used to jot down my slide topics on a sheet of paper as a reminder of what was coming up and of what I wanted to say. Moving to iPad for presentation (where presenter notes are handled less well at the moment) requires kind of switching back to some of those approaches. I'm convinced that I can refine this kind of workflow, but I'm also looking to see how Apple's increasingly twin-platform approach itself develops over the next few months. Soon we'll have a good idea of how the next version of OS X is shaping up, and with it some possible clues to how a newly-unified development effort might play out on iOS too.

Technology in Education event: iBooks on the Rise

Last week colleagues at birmingham City University held a Technology in Education event, and I was invited to talk about our approach to building iBooks to support classes. The presentations were pecha kucha style, and I wasn't thrilled at having to cram a topic that ordinarily takes at least 20 minutes to explain into just 6 minutes and 40 seconds, but I thought it might be fun to try.

Aside from the process of compressing the material which I'll write about on another occasion, my main take-away from the event was a realisation of just how many of my colleagues across the University have begun actively developing iBooks for iPad. The projects vary in intent and scope, but we've moved a long way from when I was talking iBooks last early summer, and meeting quite a lot of resistance.

I'm going to be digging into the specifics by talking to some of the people running these projects on a new education/tech/design podcast we're preparing now, but a quick poll seems to indicate that the widespread ownership of iPads and the extended usefulness/connectedness of these devices in the classroom are major factors. I'll have some figures to share soon.

Virtual Valentine

"The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact is dead:

We are all players now in the great game of fact instead

So since you can't keep your cards to your chest

I'd suggest you think a few moves ahead

As one does when playing a game of chess"

Momus, "The Age of Information"

Sunday January 10th 2013.

It's The Year of The Snake, both here in the UK and in China. At 4pm GMT yesterday it was midnight in Guangzhou. My partner was celebrating the Lunar New Year with her cousin, while brothers, aunts, and mother slept in the scattered rooms of the house, its tiled floors swept and shrines prepared for the rituals which bind them to millennia of tradition.

She'd travelled the three hours from Kowloon by Ferry along the waterways which connect the Zhujiang River Estuary to southern China, and which in turn flow into the two-thousand year old canals that irrigate land and provide trading routes. She'd reached Hong Kong by Airbus A380, flying at a speed of around 900 km per hour.

The family television flickers with images of the fireworks which are lighting up the capital city 1,336 miles away. I am almost 6,000 miles away, connecting through Apple's servers in San Jose, about a 2.4 seconds journey from the iPod touch in Chun's hand. We're chatting about the cake she ate, and the one I'm about to eat, and about sticky rice dumplings.

Earlier the same day she'd called me on FaceTime and showed me the rooster that was loosely tied up in her aunt's house and which had woken her with its crowing. It was night-time in Birmingham, and the sound rang loudly around my living room at about 343 metres per second, probably disturbing my neighbours. By now that bird is most likely in a hot pot.

The Universe might have been expanding for 13 billion years or more, but human distance has been collapsing since at least the introduction of the railway. My lover might be fifteen hours away, or a 2 second journey between our mail servers, but I can still blow her a goodnight kiss at the speed of sound. We're able to be both further away and closer together than has ever been possible before. When we're half a world apart we exchange more inconsequential and private thoughts than we do when we're in the same room. It's as if we compensate for the lack of physical presence with increased transparency. We all say things online that remain unsaid in 'real' space.

From IDD calls and email to IM and Skype, and stretching back to the telegraph and beyond, technology has seemingly been on a centuries-long trajectory to annihilate distance. Lovers have endured periods of extended separations for all of human history, but we've never before been able to perceive so many aspects of each other's presence in the world while being so far apart.

The Internet has made long distance relationships more likely, and perhaps more sustainable, than ever, but it's also inserted itself into all of our relationships in ways that are less obviously progressive. Facebook has been the most visible example where the ease and fluidity of information sharing has created new tensions in less-solid partnerships, but pretty much all of the new platforms aggregate and share data in ways that rewrite our expectations of privacy. I read what you said on Twitter, I checked your tags on Facebook, I watched what you watched on YouTube. Trust has been redefined, and now seems to demand backup from facts.

In the end, this collapsing of space isn't new, and we've measured distance in time between points for most of our civilised history. What's new is our ability to maintain these low-level, almost trivial connections on a continuous basis. The kaomoji arriving in my Messages app is like a gentle touch of the hand, a privately passed smile that just says I'm still here and you're important to me. We occupy multiple spaces simultaneously, and we're no less here for being there. It's not that our attention is elsewhere, it's that it's everywhere.

A quick check of Find My Friends reduces ten thousand kilometres to a one-second scroll in an inch-square window. The ongoing dynamic of a trans-continental relationship now seems punctuated more by the relentless to-and-fro of time zones than by physical distance.

Today is Wednesday. By the time I sleep tonight it'll be Valentines Day in China, though they're still enjoying family gatherings for the new year. I'll be in Birmingham UK, but I'll also be just a fraction of a second away from my partner, in the cables and routers of the network, glowing on the display of the iPod on her bedside table.

This article was first published by Birmingham City University Views on 13/02/2013.

Buy Momus's The Age Of Information on Amazon.co.uk

The iPad is capturing the classroom →

Apple's 2012 performance in education was astonishing, and it's being driven especially by the growth of the iPad. What's clear though is that it's not a magic bullet:

"Simply handing out iPads to teachers and students (and going over the security protocols) isn't going to accelerate learning in your school. Educators need to become skillful at using these tools and then think deeply about how to integrate them into the learning environment in powerful ways."

This is patently clear in the work that we've been doing on the use of iBooks in the classroom. Educators need sound strategies for deciding when and how to deploy any technology as part of their pedagogic approach, and the iPad is no exception to this.

Analogue Students, Digital Teachers

Just before our MA course broke up for the Christmas holidays we had our first major submission deadline of the year. As a visually-driven design course, we need to assess not only the quality of final design solutions from the students (based on sound criteria from the brief), but also the quality of process. In fact it's the students' design processes that are most important of all; most of us can stumble on a great solution some of the time, but having sound processes makes for repeatable and consistently good design.

Within the School, the standard form for collecting and evaluating the students' design process is the Reflective Visual Journal. This is pretty much what it sounds like: a sequential and linear document of the process from start to end, incorporating design research, creative visual development, thinking and reflective evaluation of potential (and selected) design solutions to given briefs. It's actually a very effective tool for assessing a student's mastery of their own design processes, and how they're developing these through practice and reflection.

Over the last ten years we've regularly debated the merits of analogue over digital, and frequently looked at the current state of digital tools in terms of allowing the students to capture the flow of their creative development in a way that's at least comparable to the easily-accessible sketchbook format, and though students from time-to-time offer up digital examples of the RVJ, we've frequently found them to be limited in their ability to fully articulate the richness and depth of the design process. Instead they tend to be a kind of edited distillation of process and reveal less that is surprising or insightful about the student's design journey. Perhaps this reflects the kind of messy, analogue student that we've tended to attract, but it's a reality that we have to deal with when discussing the potential for a move to digital-first assessment.

This acknowledgment of the importance of analogue processes in assessing the students often gets viewed (especially when challenging those of us who evangelise digital tools!) as a kind of admission of failure, and I've seen a number of otherwise smart digital-savvy lecturers get tied in knots over this, constructing ever-more-elaborate schemes to have their students submit digitally. I don't believe it has to be a problem though: We can allow students to use the 'traditional' analogue methods for capturing their processes where they work best, while moving the parts that make most sense across to the digital domain.

It's actually on the Assessment side of the equation that I've been able to get the most rapid gains out of moving from analogue to digital. While students still need to capture their processes in a single analogue sketchbook, lecturers gain significantly from being able to convert this material as rapidly as possible into digital formats, with the big wins being in terms of:

• Portability: 30+ thick A3 or larger journals representing 12 weeks of design work isn't something I want to carry around with me. Even moving them all from one room to another is a chore. Digitising them in the room where they were handed in is a big plus, and I can move the digital files around with far less friction.
• Simultaneous assessment: Parity of grading across multiple tutors requires us to double-mark 10% or more of submissions, but physical sketchbooks creates a bottleneck. Digitising them means we can distribute to all assessors at once.
• Security: Having a single physical copy of each sketchbook inherently carries the risk of loss, especially when moving them around or transferring between lecturers. Digital copies can be backed up immediately.
• Archiving: Even on a relatively small course with 30-50 students per year we simply can't archive all the material that we might like to, and our move to a new building later this year means that we're being urged to dump paper wherever possible. Keeping digital copies of student submissions means that we can refer back to them for things like external examiner visits, and we've got plenty of example material to show new and prospective students what's expected of them. Additionally, we can hand work back to students quickly so that they can use it as a basis for future development.

The details of how we do this actually pretty straightforward. Speed and convenience take priority over archival quality, since the primary purpose is to be able to mark off of the digital copy, so the iPhone was a natural choice for me in capturing the images. When I started experimenting with the process I was using the 5 Megapixel iPhone 4, and quality was fine (I've since moved onto the 4S and 5 at 8MP). The iPhone is easily usable one-handed in decent light (I shoot on a table near a window), and I can turn the pages of the sketchbook/journal with my free hand which means I can get through the 50 or so pages in an average submission in about 5 minutes. I'm generally shooting a full A3/A2 spread in one go, unless fine detail warrants a closer crop on specific pages. All the pages are shot sequentially in order, and Photostream pushes them to the cloud over wifi to ensure they're backed up. Once they're shot I bring them all into Preview on my office iMac. This is probably still the clunkiest part of the process: Pages need to be rotated where the iPhone's orientation was incorrect, and all the images for one journal need to be selected (I shoot the student name tag as the first image for each book and a blank marker as the last to make this quicker) and 'printed' to a separate PDF, and then saved with the student name. Dropbox handles transferring all the files to my home iMac (where they're also properly and automatically backed up), and of course making them readily available on my iPad. The whole process takes the better part of a day at the moment. Not an inconsiderable investment of time, but one that is already making the process of assessing much more flexible.

The irony here of course is that we're urging students to master digital processes, yet encouraging them to retain aspects of analogue for documenting their work, and moving even faster to digital processes for assessment at the same time. This is bound to change. There are also a number of caveats, and we're offering guidance to students in recognising which parts of their processes need to be fully digital from the outset. I'll go into this in greater detail in a later post.

Ihnatko 2013 Apple Wishes

Even when you don't agree with him, Andy Ihnatko is always smart, interesting and critical, and his hopes for Apple in 2013 piece is no exception.

Of all his points, the iPad-related ones are the most interesting, and I'd be unsurprised to see good APIs for both keyboard and stylus use cropping up in iOS 7. I wouldn't expect to see Apple pushing them particularly hard though; Better keyboard support will likely be related to Accessibility features (as with Guided Access in iOS 6), while pressure-sensitivity for styluses won't be shouted about until Apple's ready to ship a 13" iPad for all the designers and photographers that I know would kill for one.

Gizmodo wants a pony

In a not-even-new-year-yet post, Gizmodo's Michael Hession tells us what features we should be demanding on our in-phone cameras for 2013. For the most part it's unremarkable; a list of features that still have Michael reaching for his point-and-shoot (or, in the case of his request for RAW image format, his SLR). Where he misses the point though is in repeatedly calling out for camera features that have already featured on a smartphone (he gives specific examples) but where their inclusion led to a compromised experience. The whole article is prefaced with a blanket wish for the Galaxy's camera in an iPhone 5 thin body. Well, duh. Design is about choices Michael, and five minutes with the Samsung Galaxy Smart Camera monstrosity will tell you that.

Two Thousand & Thirteen

As the first day of the new year draws to a close, I thought I'd wish readers a Happy 2013, and just tease a few of the things that are just around the corner here. For those of you who've been following what I've been doing with e-books (and especially Apple's iBooks format) I'll have some updates to post over the next few days, and a few more education-related things besides.

Hang in there, and thanks to everyone who's supported and worked with me on this over 2012. The last few months were enormously challenging on the work front, so thanks for your patience and enthusiasm. 

Talking Mountain Lion over at UI/UX

Apple released its latest update to Mac OS X (now simply "OS X") last Wednesday, and since I've been working with it full-time for the last few months I thought it a good time to start sharing my thoughts about what it means for the future of the platform, and for those of us who rely on it in our institutions.

Education as a sector is typically slow to upgrade existing computers to the latest OS, so Apple's declared intention to deliver smaller, more frequent, and cheaper updates on an annual basis is something of a challenge. The new approach of delivering these updates directly into the hands of individual users through a simple App Store download looks like a direct assault on centralised IT policies, but plays well to the BYOD trend that's growing within many universities and colleges.

Head over to the newly-minted user interface blog UI/UX (more on which soon) to follow what's likely to be a series of posts examining Mountain Lion from a non-technical user perspective.

Learning & Teaching Fellowship Presentation

As the BIAD Fellowship for 2012 draws towards its conclusion, I'm posting the presentation that I gave for this month's Learning & Teaching Symposium. Part of the undertaking of accepting the fellowship is to offer up our projects in a form that can be readily disseminated to other lecturers within the Institute. This is the first part of that process for me.

I've added notes (my 'director's commentary') to the PDF of my slides (originally created in Keynote of course), so they should stand as at least a reminder of the presentation. I've also tried to indicate some of the intended next steps within the notes, so if there's anything you think I should be talking to you about, please give me a shout. I'll share more of my outcomes as they happen.

I'm really interested to learn how others have tackled similar problems of teaching credible web approaches to diverse groups of students (especially in the art & design and creative sectors). How are you ensuring that students can develop strategies that adapt to technical and cultural changes? How are you measuring their effectiveness?

eBooks For Education

Over the past few months I've been participating in the SEDA-accredited Advanced Academic Practice program, and using it as an opportunity to develop ideas around using Apple's iBooks to support teaching. This last week saw two formal showcase events at which I presented along with my fellow participants in the course.

If you attended and watched the presentations, I hope you found them interesting. I've certainly had a good response from a number of different faculties across BCU, as well as within BIAD, and I'm sure a number of these will develop into new eBook projects. If you didn't make it to one of the presentations too bad, but I'll be opening out some of the ideas here over the next few weeks (and in a forthcoming podcast project).

In the meantime you can download the presentation in the form of an annotated PDF. This is a kind of attempt to provide a director's commentary alongside the slides, at least in text form. Slides are a very poor means of communicating when taken out of context, so this is an experiment at making them do a bit better job of that. Let me know if you have any questions.

Developing Web Strategies for Creative Enterprise

In August I was fortunate enough to be named as one of this year's Learning & Teaching Fellows at BIAD, with a programme that helps Masters degree students in Visual Communication make effective use of Web and online media in their developing creative practices. We'd piloted this earlier in the year, taking 38 students in a range of creative disciplines through a three-week programme to deconstruct their day-to-day practices and think about how they'd rebuild them using available online tools. As you might expect, social media tools featured heavily in students' strategies, and a significant number of them have continued to use their networks effectively after graduation, building reputation in their fields, securing jobs, and developing credibility.

The Fellowship Award is to allow us to develop the strategies for wider application and to make teaching materials available as a resource to other postgraduate and undergraduate courses in BIAD, and potentially further afield. We're also planning to publish a guide in ebook form. If you've experiences to share, or if you're part of a creative academic programme which might benefit from getting involved, get in touch sharl@mac.com.