Saint Blog

Following on from the new technology theme, I just came across this which I think is lovely. A concept by lTP graduate Adam Lassy, he utilises Ikea furniture with robotics to create furniture with awareness.

From his site: “A conceptual study of dynamic and responsive environments, using Ikea as the structural platform. I have modified an Ikea Lack table and an Urban chair to create mobile, wireless robots that can dynamically reconfigure interior space in response to people”.

Ikea Robotics - Animals from adam lassy on Vimeo.

How aware will the inanimate objects in our home become? For example, I have a table and chairs in the corner of my lounge that we get out whenever people come around for dinner. What if it was aware enough to do it itself whenever the number of people in the house was greater than 2 and the cooker was on?

Or my girlfriends dream, objects that tidy themselves away…

Last night a small delegation from Saint London attended a discussion at London’s Southbank on the weighty subject of Future Technologies. The speakers involved in the debate were:

- Sir Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Stephen Fry, writer, broadcaster and technophile
- Professor Dame Wendy Hall, leading computer scientist at University of Southampton
- Bill Thompson, technology critic and commentator on digital culture
- Jim Haseloff, expert in Synthetic Biology at the University of Cambridge

The session was lively and challenging and covered a broad spread of subjects, from the worrying advent of a digital underclass to the longer term effects of the meshing of man and machine. There were two main things that stuck in my head personally from the night though that I’ll expand on.

Firstly, Stephen Fry talked effortlessly about the ridiculousness of even trying to predict what technology will appear, or more specifically the pointlessness of predicting how people will end up using the technology made available to them. Would the inventor of the piston ever have imagined that out of that technology the car would be produced, swathes of tarmac would cover the world in the form of motorways, that one way systems and congestion charges would be commonplace in cities, or that Top Gear would be so very popular on the tele. We guess not.

And I think that this is a very important point for all of us working ‘in digital’. Technology is set free by the people who play with it, to use Mr Fry’s terminology, all technology in the end becomes ‘human shaped’. Are we prepared to develop future technologies in such a way as not to dictate its usage (Apple), but to encourage its development by the people who use it (Google)? Are brands ready to understand that people will not always use what they make for them in the ways in which they intend? If they do then they’re half way there.

The second area that fascinated me last night was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s reference to the technology that he’d like to see in the future. He made reference to the potential of technology to make the world a smaller place, to break down borders, to help maintain Democracy, and even to improve Democracy and make it more…er….Democratic.

We’ve seen many examples of people taking to the web in protest, to join forces to engender a change in the real world, using the web as the starting point. But from an anthropological perspective, what does this smaller world mean for us long term, how likely is it to affect the way that we exist as people? Will it change us as human beings knowing that language is no longer a barrier (Google Translator), that location no longer makes face to face conversations prohibitive (Chat Routlette, iPhone 4) and that there is never any piece of information we can’t lay our hands on within seconds? Or will our innate humanness, evolved over thousands of years, remain intact and our behaviours rigidly in place?

I can’t help but come over all flower powery when I think about a future world with more and more access to information and fewer and fewer barriers to disseminating it. Future technological developments will I believe be judged on how well they facilitate deeper involvement between people, a greater communal understanding across the globe, and the moment that happens will truly be the moment that the machines have taken over the world, a moment when rather than us improving the technology, the technology improves us. And for brands this means transparency, an opportunity to be whiter than white, to come clean about production practises and work ethics. An opportunity for them to adapt to this new, connected, digitally empathetic society with positive products and relevant brand utility, and as a by product become better than ever.

Right now we have the opportunity to jump online and be paired with a random stranger anywhere in the world which to me is an epic, epic opportunity for humanity.

Yet people still want to get their meat and two veg out. Shame really.

On the 9th September 2009 something wonderful happened – Hasbro launched Monopoly City Streets (MCS) to a wanting audience of over 1.7m people, and the most talked about MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) of all time was born.

If you haven’t been following the events over at Monopoly HQ since, 1st of all, where have you been? And 2nd, we’re sorry to be the purveyor of bad news… but you’ve been missing out!

Monopoly City Streets is a free online multiplayer version of the popular board game Monopoly, launched to raise awareness of and promote the latest version of the game – ‘City Streets’.

Played out on Google Maps, MCS invites players to buy, trade, and build on any street in the world that hasn’t already been snapped up by another person. You earn rent based on how well you play (there are various strategies), and compete with friends and other members of the community to dominate local, national and global leader boards.

It is fun, competitive, and highly addictive. It is simply brilliant, and brilliantly simple. It is, in short, a really powerful idea. Peter Parker said that “with great power comes great responsibility”. If I were to tell you now that Monopoly City Streets has perhaps done more harm than good to the Hasbro brand image, could you fathom how, would you want to read more?

On day of launch, all expectations were exceeded when 1.7m people turned out to play MCS. Within hours, everyone was disappointed when the game server crashed under pressure. For 2 days it went offline whilst upgrades were made.

On its return, bugs in the code were quickly found and exploited, cheating became rife, and those playing fairly started to get upset with Mr Monopoly’s inability to control, moderate, and fix the problems. The game went offline again, this time for a reset – wiping everyone’s hard work. Rather than re-launch in beta mode (which would have given developers more time and scope to iron out any further problems), Mr Monopoly opted for a more heavy handed approach; writing on the official game blog – “cheaters beware; we are watching you, and you will be banned!!!” At this point, Mr Monopoly hadn’t even lain down the ground rules.

Humoured by Mr Monopoly’s tone, people started to form online alliances, Mr Monopoly quickly became ‘the game’, and even the cheaters worked together to see whether measures had been implemented to control  the cheating and fix the bugs. The top 10 Global Leaderboard at the end of day 1 consisted of ‘Cheater # 1′ – ‘Cheater # 10′… On day 2, it was used to promote websites and blogs (Best Cheater) that gave out tools and advice on how to hack the game.

From that point on, every post on the official game blog has been met with a hundred angry comments. Mr Monopoly has been deadly silent.

It has been 3 weeks since launch, and Monopoly City Streets has now pretty much ground to a halt. Daily visits to the site have fallen by almost 75%, and reading the comments on the games official blog (where angry people viciously attack its makers) has arguably become more entertaining than playing the game ever was.

Mr Monopoly has been carried to ‘jail’ by the fans he so desperately sought to please, and whilst his punishment seems severe, it serves as a warning to all of us – even great ideas fail when they aren’t implemented and moderated responsibly.

Had Mr Monopoly been honest with fans, had he had listened, responded, and invited them to get involved, to collaborate, and be a part of the project, perhaps the outcome would have been different.

Check out the game here – http://www.monopolycitystreets.com

And the official blog here - http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com/

This looks seriously cool and very useful indeed for all sorts of applications. Check out the full article here