Intro
It's 7pm in Tokyo, Coco is using her peripheral vision to avoid bumping into others while air tagging her avatar across the hall. She spots her friends Mei and Jimi tags, fading away as she updates the camera social location-based AR software. She quickly scans a QR code, placing an order for a +J jacket to be delivered at her home address later that night.
11am is the blinking acid green that beeps at the rythm of some LCD Soundsystem song, the vibrating of the phone silenced by the carpet. An all night spent updating the Engligh copy for the international front end, still logged in the CMS, the display a distant reflected light syncing with thousand of others in the search for intelligent life out there. Jamie is skimming few seconds of tweets, trying to focus through a steamy hot cloud of porridge. It's not raining, today, in London.
Rokia mobile's beeps twice, the sound coming through despite the speaker being partially covered by henna powder. It's almost 10am in Bamako, Rokia's daughter is ready for school and now that the money has been accredited on her mother's mobile, she's running as fast as she can, not to miss the first half hour of maths. Rokia texts the school secretary to pay for her daughter daily tuition, almost unbreaking her sewing pace.
Gordon is running, the transparent wall in front of him displaying charts and figures, his eyes focusing to find patterns. Images associated with the soundtrack from his FLAC player are mashed up with his friends' likes and the latest most rated feeds. It's not yet 6am and the sun is bright enough to dye a warm layer over New York.
Digital Experiences
Every day, any moment of the day, any where, we all experience some sort of digital interaction. We pass through interface after interface, almost ininterruptely trhoughout the day. Some interfaces are ecosystems, there we are digital avatars. There we are the interfaces our digital alteregos left suspended behind, our identities are digitalized.
We pass through an interface to access our smartphones, a different interface to set up the alarm, different from the interface used for the alarm to ring. We scan a badge to access pubblic transports, to get into our offices, another interface to access our computer accounts, different from the email client, the accounting software, the newspaper you read on a e-book reader on your commute, the website to book the flights for your next vacation, the website where you'll book a car, the website you'll post your holidays photos.
And we are frustratred because we can't find the hotel all our friends talk about, and we smile thinking of the rain on the first day of our summer vacation when uploading the picures, and we go mad becuase your colleague has more comments on her photos, and we were mad because we couldn't find out how to use the video feature on the mobile phone, and it's great because we now know how to do it.
We play, communicate, work, relax, learn, study, pay, buy, travel, remember, daydream, cry, love, in a always on, always connected digital state that is wherever we are, and is whatever we do, whoever we are. We don't see this experiences as mediated anymore, the ubiquity and persistency of the system it's what it makes it transparent.
Design
The use of tools to interact with the space we live in, to interact with the people we come into contact, has expanded along the centuries defining our societies and the way we live. Tools we use to produce experiences and objects, the experience being in the use of that same tool.
We play a song using the guitar tool, we play a song using the electric guitar tool, we play a song using a digital guitar sound tool. Writing, reading, painting, photography, they all experienced changes and contributed to change the society they were the product of at any given moment. The tools changing, and at the same time driving, and contributing to shape the way we communicate.