Luke Tipping writes:

Lots of talks today and the big theme uniting them was privacy. First up was Julian Assange. Teleported in by Skype from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Julian talked about how there’s been a militarisation of our civilian space. He suggests that our information is being stolen from us every day by governments and brands. It is now almost impossible to live outside of surveillance. In the next hour, how about trying to live without a digital sensor of sorts recording any of your behaviour?

Later in the day Jon Lebkowsky and Patrick Lichty talked about the "Cyborg Gaze". They suggested that pervasive imaging is now everywhere and that there’s a shift occurring from surveillance to "sousveillance". This is defined as the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity. It is done typically by way of a small wearable device like Google Glass.

A Cyborg turned up to the Q&A:

Lebkowsky and Lichty suggested that today a participatory panopticon is occurring, wherein we increasingly have no idea whether we are being watched or not. Nor do we know whether somebody elsewhere is copying the photos and videos we take and analysing them for another purpose.

Why does it matter if we’re being watched? If we’re good people with nothing to hide then it doesn’t really matter, right?

Maybe. Although for me the real issue boils down to the fact that machine vision has better memory than human. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger talks a bit about this in his fantastic book Delete. He says that once upon a time it was hard to remember. Now it’s almost impossible to forget.

As humans it's really important that we’re able to grow and escape our former selves. Think about some of the things you may have said on the playground when you were younger. Part of growing up is about making mistakes and learning. How can we do that if increasingly our every word and move is being recorded, potentially appearing later in life in a completely different context. If you’d like your daughter or son to be a future Prime Minister or President it’s probably worth making sure they never use a social network. Or maybe get them started on Secret first. Here's what everybody here is secretly thinking about SXSW by the way.

So quite a dystopian day, really. A lot of the stuff we build in technology is progressive but I really do believe that we don’t think properly about the social implications. The creative industries are increasingly embracing new and quick 'do then learn' iterative processes but perhaps we should all be a bit more thoughtful about what we’re making.

The privacy backlash is certainly making its way from governments towards brands. So if you’re using data to create a personalised product or service it's now more important than ever that you make the return of information disproportionately big enough for people.  

More tomorrow.

Luke Tipping writes:

Day one was fantastic. A great start to SXSW. Rather than dashing from talk to talk we decided to do one thing well and get stuck into a workshop. The workshop was titled 'Making More of Ourselves – Sensory and Multimodal UX'. It was taken by the brilliant Alastair Somerville from Acuity Design.

It was an activity-based session about challenging our tendency to default to designing purely visual interfaces, instead asking us to consider using other senses. Alastair talked about how it’s actually other senses – like touch, smell and hearing – that are key to designing the future of multimodal user experiences for wearable technologies.

First up was an exercise in haptics. In our team we were asked to communicate a simple message using only touch. Here’s W+K's Will asking Marshall Page (Tech Initiatives Manager at Nike) what time the store closes using only his hands.

Turns out it’s actually really difficult to communicate with touch on the hand because hands are massively overloaded with sensory input. That’s why the US army is in fact designing haptic direction systems that communicate by vibrating on the individual's back.

Next up was an exercise in gesture, supposedly the next chapter in interface design. See Leap Motion, etc. The interesting thing about gesture is that, like words. it's a language riddled with cultural and universality issues. (Think about how better at it the Italians are than us). So Alastair asked us to explore this by looking at well-known symbols and trying to translate them into body language.

Lastly we did an exercise in sensory augmentation. Alastair talked about how we have nine senses yet current wearables in the market ignore the majority of them:

1. Sight
2. Hearing
3. Taste
4. Smell
5. Touch
6. Balance and acceleration
7. Temperature
8. Kinesthetic sense
9. Pain

In the past Alastair worked on using fragrance to help direct the visually impaired. We tried apps like Heare, that help the visually impaired to see with sound, and the Scenti app that wakes you up with the smell of bacon.

So all quite profound, really. How else could you communicate with people beyond the visual? What does your brand's front door feel like? How might a vibrating basket handle help people find the products they want in your store? How might smell reward your customers for a desired business outcome? 

More tomorrow.