I think every practitioner misses the freedom of the school studio at one point in their career. I’m definitely wishing I could play, incubate, and innovate uninhibitedly. This is mostly a nostalgic post and a plug for my old school The School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU Surrey.

I recently came across a marketing video the school put together. I think it does a great job of demystifying what one can accomplish at the school. I remember going into the school just thinking that I used computers a lot and that I may be interested in business at some level. How things have changed

I also loved the faculty. They really challenged you and treated you like a peer, a stark difference from high school that’s for sure. The learning style at the school reminded me of the article Allan Chochinov put together at Core 77 - Those Who Can, Teach. 1000 words of advice for design teachers.

There is a post maybe once a week on the IxDA list about how to get into the field. I’d highly recommend this little known school. Well it’s probably more known now that the school is hosting Interaction 09. But if you’re lucky enough to devote 4 years to the craft, this is one of the few places you can focus your undergrad on Interaction design.

In New York, life moves by pretty quickly. Sometimes going to the grocery store or even spending the time to cook is a huge burden. Enter SeamlessWeb, a web service that connects a pool of restaurants to an online POS.

Usually the delivery people who come by my building flood it with new takeout menus. Yesterday, I was about to order from one place when I saw the URL for SeamlessWeb on their brochure. Once I went to the site I was pleasantly surprised. Basically SeamlessWeb has done the leg work of getting a large set of restaurants in Manhattan and a couple other urban centers and created a system that will show you a menu from these restaurants, take payment, and ping the restaurant with the order. It is rather seamless and there are a number of restaurants with additional discounts as well. You can include gratuity and basically make the entire transaction cashless.

What interested me more than tasty food (hard to believe, I know) was the platform. Enabling traditional brick and mortar establishments from a similar industry with a useful platform. I’m going to stew on it for a bit and thank SeamlessWeb for really fast food + an idea seed

Oh and the one criticism I do have is their name is not indicative of their service. They should probably rethink that a bit.

I’ve been really into content aggregators lately. These sites gather information around specific topics and troll the internet to find out what is top of mind and any moment in time. There are many ways to do the feed but here are a couple that do it well:

Lou Rosenfeld’s UX Zeitgeist

Rating the top UX topics, books, people across the blogosphere, amazon, etc

and

perspctv

Following discussion trends for the major party leaders through news, blog mentions, and tweets.

What I would like to see is the evolution of this through dialogue. The artifacts on Flickr have a one to many relationship without discussion. But with conversation around, how a photo was taken, or how to reproduce the results of the photo, it produces that many to many dialogue that creates a rich set of tangents and a more human way way to stitch information together through conversation.

I guess in a way this is an extension to the post I wrote about APML feeds. Except the ambient feeds are around topics of interests instead of people. Still with these types of feeds becoming more prevalent and the future casting of the Aurora concept, feeds associated to people and topics will only become more popularized and embedded within the technology we use.

I’m beginning to believe strongly in Wade Roush’s vision of Continuous Computing. It’s an incremental step from what we already have and it’s much more feasible than ubicomp. Why? — Because the technology is already here.

For those not familiar with Continuous Computing it’d be a good idea to read Roush’s manifesto. If you’d like the Cole’s notes, I’d like to make the simple distinction that it is augmenting existing technologies with social networks and real time information in which users of this technology have unprecedented amounts of choice and access to information.

As a result of this existing infrastructure there are new opportunities to create very interesting software to compliment these technologies. Ubiquitous Computing on the other hand is more of a hardware driven revolution where by ambient devices are embedded into the everyday and interaction with these ambient devices seamlessly occur as they track and gather data. (think minority report – very hardware intensive and requires an infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet).

Anyway, I’m just babbling like usual but I have a strong feeling that there will be more applications built to propel the Continuous Computing revolution. We are just at the cusp of what can be possible. Applications that allow you to access their services anytime and anywhere and let you connect with people in the virtual and physical world that you may not know otherwise.

I’m working on such an application right now with a group of intelligent people. Right now it’s still very hush hush top secret but as it becomes more concrete I’ll release the details. In the meantime take a look at dodgeball which is just the beginning of what is possible.