Technological change & cultural attitudes

I was walking down the aisles of my supermarket here in Jersey City, and picking up frozen vegetables: shelled peas, corn, okra conveniently chopped into pieces, cauliflower & broccolli florets in a bag!! How wonderfully convenient all this is. I don't remember having shelled peas for a number of years now.

And it just brought home to me how much has changed. Even back in India, I bought my yoghurt off the grocery store shelves, rather than making my own. Here in the US, I haven't succeeded in making my own yoghurt, it just never sets right. Also, I remember as a child, part of the routine during hot, long, lazy summers was sacks of wheat lying in a corner of the house, a grim threat everyday that I may be called upon to help in this terribly boring chore: sit with other women, & help clean out the grain of stones & bugs. I did serve my time here, & it was always a relief to see the sacks sagging & getting smaller as the contents moved from there through our watchful eyes & fingers, & into large metal containers to be stocked away for the coming year. ( There was sometimes an in-between stage where the job done by us kids was scrutinized again by an elder before making it to the final storage!!)

Then as the years passed, my generation was disinclined to go through the tedium of this routine. Things had changed too, there wasn't a need for this: the erstwhile days of shortages of every necessity had given rise to the practice described above; now there were none, one could buy as & when one needed, without any significant difference in price from season to season. In addition, family sizes were getting smaller; it just did not make sense to buy the volumes my parents did.

But the older generation frowned upon the methods we adopted. In their eyes, not buying & stocking up for the entire year meant that one wasn't doing well enough financially; it almost was like a literal living-from-hand-to-mouth as far as they were concerned. Just-in-time inventories meant nothing to my mother & grandmother, and their generation, believe me.

In a similar vein, I love the idea of chopped & frozen veggies in my frig: I for one have the least patience with chopping beans or getting the cauliflower cut & sized for the next meal. Like I said earlier, I haven't shelled peas in years, & I don't think I am upto the task anymore. I would cry from the sheer tedium of it! But it amuses me to go back to my teen-years when I was the veggie-chopper of the family. Holidays & vacations would have my mother setting aside baskets of veggies for me to work my magic with: potatoes, onions, peas, okra, beans, the lot. And back then I enjoyed this task, and I'll divulge my reasons now. It was like this: I either chopped the veggies, sitting next to my favorite gadget, the radio, listening to my favorite Hindi movie songs, humming along with, and in short, getting transported to a lovely romantic world, while the hands mechanically did their job with the veggies. Or I would have to help with dusting & cleaning the house every morning, or standing by the hot stove in the kitchen. My little sister could work herself into a lather over a sparkling house every morning, not me. Don't get me wrong here, I love a clean, fresh home: but will someone else please take care of that!! I am grateful my sister did just that, every morning!! ( It also occurs to me now, but pray what did my brothers do during their summer breaks? hmmm............)

And I'm sure the current spate of technological change will throw up equally fascinating stories of how different people are taking to such changes in their lives. If you have a family story like this, do feel free to send it to me. I might just make a project out of it!!

(Technorati tags: culture, family, life)

Podcasts

I have been reading up on discussions about podcasting: opinions range from 'it's the next big revolution' to 'this is just fluff, and a lot of hype by some'. As with most such issues, it's best to see for yourself. And I accidentally hit upon BBC's podcast for their 'Go Digital' section. Here's what I experienced:

First, it was a pleasure that the download was so quick. I tried this on a dial-up (as a designer I am intensely interested in how accessible a technology really is to people world-wide, not just the ones with broad-band & cable connections; that's a great reason for using PCs too in one's toolbox). So this one started streaming in a few seconds, no stuttering, no pauses that one typically gets with audio & video downloads as the slow connection gasps to keep pace with the material coming in). Great experience there.

As I listen to the interviews & discussions, I started getting really excited about it. I could move about in the house, carry on my other activities, & yet continue to listen to news I wanted to stay abreast of. Now what routinely happens with me is that everyday I plan to get into my favorite news sites (BBC is one) to quickly scan through important happenings. It never works, really. I put these news sites into a favorites folder, but that was it. There were always other things to take care of, so ............ Next I added all of these to my news aggregator, hoping that would solve the problem. But again no, there are times that I do not open my RSS reader for days on end!

I now realise part of the problem may have to do with the nature/constraints of the above experiences: I have to be at my computer for one; and more importantly, a good deal of focus & eye-power ( for want of a better term) is required to carry out these activities. Reading off computer screens is enormously straining on the eyes, thus inducing one to scan text rather than to actually read.

Podcasting solves that problem beautifully: download the file to your computer or mp3 player, listen to it at leisure. No eye-strain, plus one now has mobility, and there are other bonuses too!! Listening to the BBC podcast brought home to me the wealth of communication in the human voice. The intonations, the laughter, the warmth, the horror: all so effectively conveyed through this channel. And the best bonus for me was I didn't have to look at grisly pictures even when the topic might steer to Iraq or the London bombings. This enables one to focus on other bits of the story, rather than the overbearing pictures!!

Search & hierarchies

With the new-found enthusiasm for tagging and folksonomy all around, combined with my passion for all-things-findability, I have been following up on these areas. My interest in information organization & hierarchies also stems from mailViz, a personal project that I am pursuing (among a dozen other things, I'm afraid). This involves the design of an email-visualization add-on to Outlook Express that will 1) enable a more visual view of emails in the system 2) produce better/richer alternatives for information-seeking. (Write to me if you'd like to be involved in this project, the concept & design are still in the very early stages).

So as part of this project, I am looking into the whole issue of folders & how they can be improved upon/done away with/what are the alternatives. I found the following posts useful to start off with:

• Desktop Search: The End of Folders?Posted Jun 9, 2005, 9:07 PM ET by Brad Hill.
  Much buzz is circulating about the Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight feature replacing the traditional file-management system of nested folders. Spotlight is X’s built-in desktop searcher. If the search is so transparent, effortless, and accurate as to render the folder view irrelevant, Spotlight has great implications for Windows-based systems (Longhorn), and, by extension, for search companies.Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I have trouble conceiving the death of nested folders. I use Google Desktop Search and Yahoo! Desktop, and appreciate the tremendous improvement over the panting Windows search puppy, but the folder structure remains active in my mind. I don’t always want a spotlight to laser into a single file. Often, my preference is to view an entire folder’s contents. Admittedly, I am freakishly organized about placing files in correct folders, and I create elaborate folder hierachies to match my mental organization. When using desktop music programs, I sometimes use their search functions to find individual tracks in my collection, but just as often I go into the folders via My Computer and drag desired tracks into the media player. Searching and browsing enjoy equal emphasis in my computing lifestyle. So while I’m all in favor of improved desktop search, I cannot (yet) get my mind around a computer with no folders.Tagging blog:You're It!
  
• The Death of Hierarchy?John Hiler has an interesting post on Microcontentnews called Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders. He talks about how that computing standby the folder is being replaced by search and tags:Hierarchical Folders have helped us manage information for decades. They’ve proven themselves as some of the most flexible tools ever created: organizing wildly different industries, from Web Directories, to Email and Desktop File Systems.But Folders rarely solve the core problem that they address - and often create new ones, like forcing you to create new folders just to manage new information. Solutions like Search, Archives, Stars and Labels get more directly at the core problem… and promise that the future of information management will look very different from its past.Dan Brown posted a thoughtful follow-up that digs into the distinctions between hierarchy and structure:Hiler is right to point out that folder-based navigation is going away, but I think it’s dangerous to extend the demise of the folder (a bad metaphor) to the demise of hierarchy and formal structure. There is still a place for formal structure in interface design, even if it doesn’t look or behave like our old friend the folder.It’s also dangerous to compare “hierarchy” with “search.” Hierarchy is, most typically, a part-whole organization of things. Search, on the other hand, is a behavior where users specify some criteria and the computer does the work of locating objects that share something in common with them. These two notions are hardly mutually exclusive. Perhaps Hiler meant to compare search with browse, a behavior where users select from menus of options to arrive at the desired thing.In Hiler’s three “search” case studies, there is evidence of formal structure, though it’s under the surface. With Gmail, for example, there’s still the notion of a thread which contains messages. There is an inbox and an archive, which contain threads. There are relationships between original messages and replies. These are abstract hierarchies that are inherent to the information architecture, not layered on top like a folder structure. They may seem self-evident, but constructing these hierarchies requires a careful, user-aware design process.Indeed, structure is useful. And instead of one structural option–the folder–we now have derived structure (like search engine indexes and the derived polyhierarchies in iTunes) and user-applied structure (tags, labels, links, playlists). This is not the death of hierarchy; it’s the augmentation of hierarchy.

Street life

I enjoy reading about street life in cities, and enjoy more the act of simply experiencing & exploring cities. And there's nothing like walking down the streets of a city to get to know it intimately: the character of the stores lining it, the way people loiter around their corners, the way it connects to adjacent places: all have rich stories to tell about the place. My family & i make it a point to tramp around new places, that is our way of making it our own.

In this context, I've just come across this book called Small Change by Nabeel Hamdi. Here's a description:

'Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it - that is the power of small changes that have huge positive effects.This book is an argument for the wisdom of the street, the ingenuity of the improvisers and the long-term, large-scale effectiveness of immediate, small-scale actions. Written by Nabeel Hamdi, the guru of urban participatory development and the master of the art, Small Change brings over three decades of experience and knowledge to bear on the question 'what is practice?'.

Seems like an interesting buy!