The Mobile Visual Environment

Mobiles are so important in our lives.  Probably more important than most people realise.  The pressures of people’s lives give a drive for a need for mobile technology.  One contribution to this need for a mobile is caused by killer apps.  Killer apps are not actual apps but and application that the whole world completely wants and needs overnight and they change the way in which the world works.  At this minute in time the two major killer apps are texting and email.  Email changed the way education worked.  People don’t have to attend class anymore if their tutors do online lectures and this works for businesses also with lectures and meetings.  Texting changed the how language was used and created some of its own.  The need for mobile phones created a paranoid society.  Parents now have this desperate need to stay in constant contact with their children when they are out playing.  This has partly to do with the crime rate rising but most of it is to do with the mobile phone acting as an essential piece of people’s lives.

                Mobile phones have positive and negative sides.  A positive is that mobiles can mean you can be in a physical location but intellectually in multiple places.  It can sustain relationships like face timing etc. and has opened people’s lives with sexting.  This then can lead into the negatives of mobiles where sexting can blur the meanings of particular messages and they can be misread.  We have also become medically obsessed that phones can cause problems with our health.

                From the visual side of mobile phones they are seen as a fashion accessory and with some people they are a statement of wealth and status.  Phone covers are also a statement and an expression of us to the world.

                On a global scale mobile phones can be used as a legally binding contract in Africa and they only use it for texts, they can’t afford to use it for calls.  I found that really interesting and was an insight to how different cultures see and use the mobile.

                The future of the mobile means we will have:

• constant connectedness
• more interaction because of the development of apps
• no interface interfaces : touchscreen will die and voice interaction will develop
• immersion : it will become part of us, holographic images and 3D
• similar to the previous point human and machines will converge.

 

Overall I learnt some interesting things about mobiles and didn’t realise how essential they were to some people.  I love imagining what sort of devices and developments will be thought of next because the technology is so advanced already.

Internet of Things

The internet of things is how we have evolved with use of the internet and its devices. The internet and the interweb are two different things. The internet is an object that does a particular thing. The interweb is the interconnections of how that is used and connected. The connections between these things have changed over the years. It began with the Sarnoff Loop which is a broadcast of 1 source to a number of people and there is no connection within the people. This then developed into the Metcalf Loop, a one to one connection and a prime example of this is the mobile. Now we have advanced to the Reed Loop which is lines of communication multiplied such as the computer.
If we have an internet of things connected all the time we will have too much data and we won’t know what to do with it all. The negative sides of having too much data are that we will be judged on it like how doctors are judged on their fail rates etc. although it’s not fair that their patients could have been seriously ill. A major positive side is a video we watched of a TED talk by Deb Roy “The Birth of a Word”. It’s amazing what he has done with the use of data. It’s obvious that he and his team put so much work into it but because it was so personal it would have been well worth it. The fact that he invites you into his life and his family makes you feel like part of the experiment. This talk benefits us because it would give us inspiration and make us think of new ways to start presenting data. We would also start thinking about our own data and if you are a parent you may start to think about how you’d teach your child to talk.
Overall the internet of things is where you gather together your data to make your infographic. Sometimes the data doesn’t matter it’s the art of how it’s presented.