Ethiopian Taxi license plate includes: vehicle-type designation, #1 being taxi; city designation – AA being Addis Ababa, and the same in Amharic; and a six digit number – recently clocked.

The ways in which things, like vehicles are coded.
How we think differently about then when their coding is revealed in new ways.

Is that a nice black car or an Uber limo?

And when everyone has the tools to see and communicate with what lies beneath the surface, do black, yellow or in this case blue and white cabs need to use colour to communicate their purpose?

Ad-hoc interview with a member of BOPE – background reading particularly the report entitled “They Come in Shooting” by Amnesty International recommended. Their working schedule changes daily spending a straight 36 hours in the field. “I carry three or four spare mobile phone batteries”.

The BOPE headquarters have a stunning view – not surprising since it’s housed in a would-be casino – construction was halted when gambling was outlawed in Brazil and it’s stood empty for years. Given the juxtaposition of the building’s history, the activities and reputation of its current tenants and its geographic location – expect to see a write-up in a mainstream male orientated glossy one of these days.

What, if anything does this have to do with the future perfect? The function and meaning of logos? For whom? The extent to which the logo ‘degrades’ with everyday wear and tear – in this instance bullet impacts hitting the caveir√µes armoured car. The extent to which its meaning changes with wear and tear.

This photo may not seem like much – just another shot of Omotesando kiddies giving it the “niii”. Except that this was taken by my 22 month old daughter, using a Canon dSLR. That she can lift something that heavy, look through the viewfinder, align the shot, find the button and press it with enough force to trigger the shot, and then peers at the back screen to view what she’s taken is at first glance pretty amazing. Like a kid cocking a Magnum. This is not proud parent post – it merely follows in the wake of many parents commenting about their babies/infants use of tech – swiping/jabbing/drooling on touch screen devices, the ‘my kid can use an iPad’ moment.

This are the tools that make up our children’s landscape – and they are as natural as forks and electronic calculators and electric car windows are to you and me.

At that age we mimic, if there’s enough pay-off we rote learn, and if there’s enough payoff we evolve that learning.

One of the perks this work is that you get to experience things a little off the beaten path – whether its remote vistas, or brushing up against personalities that wouldn’t be out of place in a Nollywood movie (or for me this week – for the first time experiencing adventure playgrounds in Tokyo through the eyes of my 20 mo/old). On occasion when I’ve shared an experience with on Twitter someone replies with “a photo or you didn’t see it”.

The keen researcher of human behaviour can dissect this seemingly trivial phrase in any number of ways: that in a world of almost infinite content and link bait the burden of providing proof is on the sharer; that by most metrics a photo will suffice to provide that proof; and that the statement assumes that for the sharer to provide that photographic proof is a relatively trivial barrier to entry – they will no-doubt have a camera phone and sufficient internet connectivity. (An insecure recipient would interpret this as an assault on their credibility).

The phrase “a photo or it didn’t happen” is very much of this time – if someone from 2021 were to remember it (and I doubt anyone will, unless someone from the future is doing a project about silly things people said in 2011, namaste by the way) it will be because it was still in that time when we still relied on, and trusted in visual information as being sufficient evidence, a primary source of information.

Today we are particularly enamoured with churning out visual material – well over a billion image capturing sensors in camera phones, cameras, computers and TVs every year – the growth of recorded and shared visual material would stun someone as little as 10 years ago. Photos make excellent containers of information – we are highly evolved at decoding and consuming visual material we have, in the words of Kevin Kelly, developed an acute level of screen literacy. But there are a number of technological trajectories that will change how we validate whether something is real, ‘the truth’ – and the relative importance of a photo in this validation.

The first is that photos are becoming ever easier to manipulate, to the extent that we will be able to create and recreate photo-realistic images in real time. The second is that as connectivity, search and predictability improves so will our ability to pull in and combine sufficiently plausible content in real time – if you can imagine it you can generate content related to it – the only barrier is your imagination. The third trajectory comes from a different angle – that the criteria for judging whether something or someone is real will depend so much more on that what you see: your location; what other people have recorded of the same situation; what a range of other heat/sound/humidity/smell/taste/light/speed/.. sensors will also record.

Enjoy the moment.

After a few days in NYC back in China.

One of the reoccurring conversations in the US that I coming back to is near-time facial recognition in the palm of the hand and how the face is increasingly be used as a gateway to our online identity/ies.

Putting the considerable issue of personal privacy aside – when someone points a camera phone at your face and connects to something online – which company is going to be making the connection? And what will they connect to? To cut to the chase – who owns the rights to your face?

How we search inherently changes what we search for. Consider the differences for searches on a mobile device in the back of a taxi in a foreign city versus in a web browser on a big screen at home – the speed and cost of connectivity, input, the ability to scan results, conduct follow up searches. And so it will be with person-recognition in the palm of your hand.

Ever looked in the mirror at the end of the day and realised that the person you see before is way off from the image you wish to project to the world – dodgy looking hair, a shaving cut, smudged mascara, …, and wondered how long that’s been there? In a world of near time facial recognition what will you see when the face stares back at you? Discovering that someone has bought the rights to associate your face with beauty products or face cream for acne, an online shopping mall or a porn site (where your face will be delightfully superimposed on the object(s) of their sexual fantasy). How will what you see differ if you have an admirer, a stalker, you are bullied, or even the bully?

For a while people will want an awareness of how much it costs to place advertising next to their face – monitoring spikes and dips in cost depending on context – a popularity index of sorts. For most the novelty will wear off (especially once they figure how little they are worth) but for a certain demographic the cost of placing an advert next to their face will be part of their personal identity – much like the number of twitter followers or unique users is in the online world.

As facial recognition evolves so will our ability to create more nuanced variations on the search string – people will change their facial expressions, hair, makeup to redirect search queries to new, or nuanced destinations. Smiling for the camera will take on another, complimentary meaning.

The decision by the Dubai police to publish the (part disguised) faces of the apparent Mossad team that assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh – Hamas leader is fine piece of passive aggression in retaliation for a state sponsored hit. The easiest way to manipulate what comes back on a search is to redirect queries for a particular face to an alternative identity – and the security agencies in [name of country] will obviously demand a backdoor into the system. Any country with sufficient resources will want to have control over which facial recognition searchers link to which faces (to protect their agents in the field). Today China issues licenses to companies that wish to offer location based services, expect to see a similar model adopted for consumer facing facial recognition based services.

Technically facial recognition is/will only be play small role of figuring who we are: the places we check-into; the transactions we make; where we are, with whom; other people nearby tagging us; other biometric data; the sensors we carry, can all be mined in real time. But it’s the face, and facial recognition – the most personal and comprehendible part of our human identity that we currently think of as our own, that we will take personally.

On a different tangent – there are many things that we used to have to remember and that we are now largely comfortable forgetting in the modern world: everything from addresses and phone numbers to how to do long form multiplication. Increasingly it will be less important to ‘remember a face’, or at least the faces on the periphery of our social, progressional and other networks – simply because the ability to recall can be delegated to technology. In a world we can be connected to what’s important in real time – its more about knowing what tools to turn to to recall than the need to recollection itself. This will lead to some interesting situations where when the network goes down we’re forced into the old ways – committing faces to names and the identities that lie behind them remembering what people do, who they are will at some point be a novel experience – much like the legions of laptop users talking to each other in cafes only once the network or power goes down. As with all socially connected services – adoption and usage patterns will differ considerably depending on life-stage and to a lesser extent culture and personality. You can only be a teenager once and as much as anyone who is not able to put something on the line as they explore how a services work will struggle to truly ‘get it’.

Of course reading the emotions on a face – whether someone is angry, sad, sympathetic, happy and so on will continue to be important – because it shapes so much of our social interaction – although as the resolution of the images that are being captures and our ability to read faces evolves – some of this will bubble up – our mouth says we have a deal, your micro-expressions show disgust, anger and fear. There will be a new generation of business leaders (and practices) who will specialise in closing cross cultural deals, knowing that every micro-expression will be recorded and played back.

Bootnote: Any profession that currently requires a degree of anonymity is going to be in for a bumpy ride in the next few years – as who we or could be becomes more apparent: researchers; journalists; undercover cops; spies. Social networks can be faked, but the depth, granularity that we require from a social network is constantly evolving and in the near-term will make faking a network increasingly difficult. Whilst some careers will be destroyed by real time recognition, others will be enabled – there will literally be a new army of people that will be the ‘faces of the brand’.

There was a time when we made an effort to connect. Today if you are reading this, then you make the effort to disconnect.

Today we have visual cues that tell us what can be touched, interacted with. In tomorrow’s future perfect the cues will be to tell us what cannot be touched.

See also: mechanisms to prompt us to touch, and the social/legal contracts that will be ‘signed’ through everyday activities such as walking in an elevator.

What kind of biases do you have when you choose a parking space? What affect your decision to park in one place and not another?

And how will this shift the market when it’s your (self driving) vehicle (without you in it) makes the choice?

Related: the parking thread.

Binocular optics + webcam + historical data = Timescope. From the WALL product line, more here.

The point at which the tools to re-imagine the past/present/future themselves feature in our visions of the past/present/future.

Today: metal detector.
Tomorrow: RFID detector.

In and around Johannesburg with the frog crew for a few days, before heading into the field – clients to meet, research plan to flesh out, a ground crew to onboard. A lovely, subtle transaction dynamic with 2 taxis from the airport – the first taxi driver turns on the meter, the second driver follows agreeing to receive payment on the first’s meter – one transaction on the books, the other off.

The ‘negotiate your own taxi fare’ dynamic is alive and well around the globe – no better illustrated than in Tehran where taxis are installed with meters that support up to 4 separate passenger fares – and are promptly ignored by passengers who prefer to negotiate a better deal, based in part where the other passengers are heading.

The common assumption for the future perfect is that larger volumes of a wider variety of data – such as more granular positioning (think cars fitted with AGPS) will narrow the opportunity for slicing a little something off the side – yet, similar data sources – such as the published meter-cost-per-trip could provide enough assurance for passengers who would otherwise insist on the meter to do without. It’s a new world out there – everything is still up for grabs.

You can divide the world into people who leave their lenses covered, and those that don’t.

And for every camera lens multiply by a thousand other sensors.

Some wonderful (paraphrased) quotes from the essay ‘The Camera Fiend‘ by Bill Jay on the early adoption of the camera, and in particular the rise of the amateur photographer.

‘Our moral character dwindles as our instruments get smaller’ 1910

‘There is but one remedy for the amateur photographer. Put a brick through his camera whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares’ 1885

‘All vagrants and photographers entering the village will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law’

‘Many hotels refused to give lodging to portraitists with a messy wet plate operator who spilled chemicals over clothes and carpets’

Our executive creative team came out to Shanghai last week – with plenty of interesting conversations in the many formal and informal sessions, a surprising number of which, with liberal lubrication went into the early hours.

Those of you that travel frequently to Asia will appreciate bar talk isn’t restricted to the group you arrive with, but rapidly spirals out – western vegetables into a Chinese hotpot, if that’s the right analogy.

One of the tools that I’ve grown used to using in the past months is Google Translate – it turns out its perfect for those long rambling conversations in bars where body language takes precedence over words – where you can indulge in a slow game of he said she said (and its variants). Which is all good and well, until the next day when you look at Google Translate history and decide that it was a conversation that was better off without a history. Except that Google doesn’t forget. It sometimes makes it harder to remember, deliberately (from a user interface design perspective) or by accident – by lacking the context to be relevant all of the time.

Today I not only buy into Google knowing both sides of the contents of my early morning bar-room conversations with half-strangers, but actively facilitate the process?

Take a look around you at every sight, sound, thought. Its all there for the taking for the companies that deliver the next.

Today’s early hours bar-room conversation with a tech early adopter is tomorrows real-time translation on a holidaying mainstreamer. Think babel fish, where the fish has a perfect memory of what was said, and hasn’t figured out what to do with that knowledge.

Still not found the word to describe the act of digitising what once analogue, creating persistence where once it was forgotten.

It’s not land-grab.

A mind-grab perhaps.

See also: Is Internet Access a Human Right?

These questions were originally meant to be weaved into a post here on Future Perfect – ended up being tweeted out from a bar in Tokyo in the early hours of the morning – trying to stay awake up long enough to catch an early flight out of Haneda. I’ve been teasing out the answers to these questions this part week in Egypt and Libya, but frankly still a long way off.

Car with parking ticket in Shanghai. The parameters (size, duration, …) that can increase, reduce or negate a fine? And the tools to collect evidence that supports these changes?

You’re at the check-out of the convenience store and hand over a couple of notes. As the cashier rings up your purchase you find a couple of coins that round off the sum and will save you carrying a pocket full of schrapnel.

In the US of A odds are that the cashier will be confused by the additional coins – returning them along with a pocket full of change.

In China the cashier will more than likely calculate the difference between the original sum and the addition of the coins and adjust the change on the fly.

This is not a fair comparison of simple arithmetic skills – the profile of someone working in a convenience store is likely to be significantly different in China or the US. But it is a subtle interplay between the knowledge and effort required to complete the interaction + service culture + devolving responsibility of completing the arithmetic task to technology (the cash register). But at what point are the skills of your parents no longer needed in today’s world? Is there a point when literacy, numeracy as we know it today is no longer relevant.

Local government office pen anti-theft mechanism.

What if we reverse this logic? What would it take to encourage the pens to be ‘stolen’? What business model might support this? What data might a sensorially rich pen pass onto its original owner?

This acure Shibuya station vending machine by the JR East Water Business Co. is interesting on a number of levels: it’s using a touch screen experience for a relatively trivial transaction in a public space – pushing the boundaries of the urban interaction vocabulary; as well as coins and notes it takes mobile payments and a variety of cards that identify the purchaser – data that helps it and its partners refine its future product offering; a camera above the machine tries to ascertain the gender of the purchaser and adapts what is shown based on gender; and it also points to another trend that you’re going to see creeping into many more nooks and crannies of our urban landscape – high resolution, interactive displays in place of what was once static. Sure this is Tokyo and a high footfall location at that, but its a harbinger, trust me.

What are the opportunities from the urban residents of your city from being only meters away from a large, connected, customisable touch screen?

More here.

See also: redbox changing the American urban vocabulary in the US.

A year ago today give or take, my partner and I welcomed a baby girl into the world. Born in Los Angeles, with mixed race parents she holds passports from three countries and, like the rest of her family she is now finding her feet here in China.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of watching an infant in her first year is that the smallest everyday tasks are filled with adventure – and that wriggling/crawling and now walking beside her on the path of discovery also stimulates her parents’ aging neurons otherwise dulled by repetition and apparent insight. For her everything is new, fresh (and apparently edible). For the professional observer it is like signing up to a year long workshop on everyday life, with a bit of sleep depravation thrown in. Wonderful. Recommended.

So on her first birthday give or take, one of her parents was seriously ill and a certain daughter didn’t get quite as much attention lavished on here as the parents had hoped. Which meant that after the recovery there was another, separate celebration of sorts.

Like many of you reading this I grew with the assumption that a birth day was a fixed entity – but over the years and on my travels I’ve come across many examples of parents shifting their children’s date of birth both formally (on their birth certificate, passport) and informally (celebrating birthday’s at a different time of the year ) with motivations for the change ranging from getting their child into a particular school year; to obtaining child benefits; to increasing the likelihood of being signed up for a professional football team.

How will emerging technologies affect the rituals and traditions in celebrating birth days? And the parent’s ability to change the date formally or informally?

In a world that is documented with ever more precision, granularity, and our very human desire to share there will increasingly be an online record that time-stamps the exact moment of birth. Shift your skeptical frame of reference from tweeting or streaming the birth live, skip one or two steps beyond Facebook to personal health monitoring systems++ synced up to your fluffy corner of the cloud, with elements of what is captured shared out to the wisps of the cloud used by your family and peers. That emotional graph of your spouse combined after checking into a hospital; the purchase trail of the child’s grandparents combined with communications chatter from your peer group? That’s the tell tale signature of a birth, y’know. Or at least someone will know. Which when you bring it around to our very human ritual of celebrating the day-of-the-birth, the birthday, will quite likely affect when, and how we celebrate.

What happens when you’re inherently aware, reminded of not only the birthday but the birthsecond? Or even the moment of conception?

Happy birthday, give or take.

Now spend a few, well calibrated moments on the Quantified Self.

A gem of a book found in the hotel library – details the history of dazzle camouflage – often attributed to the artist Norman Wilkinson.

Here be clues to our increasingly augmented reality.

The male changing rooms of this Daikanyama sento – includes a pin-up of a late 90′s gravia (underwear model). How future users/actors/constituents/participants/.. of the space will leave digital traces, digital pin-ups if you like, and how with what we will augment will vary by time of day, the genders that are present?

Some sento’s systematically switch the male and female areas – both to even out wear and tear that is biased by gender, and to add variety for frequent customers. Whilst the future male changing room might include a augmentation layer suited to male tastes, and the females likewise – to what extent, in what situations, and driven by what motivations will these leak?

If there’s one advantage to a couple of spare hours in Tokyo – it’s pulling up a seat in the under-the-arches back-of-Daikanyama Dexee Diner, and cranking out wpm. Unlike many Tokyo cafes where the cheque comes to the table Dexee pushes their customers to a pleasantly cluttered checkout that includes a menagerie of flyers and knick-knicks. It also sports the future of payment.

Not that contactless payment solution FeliCa is the future (it is doing alright in Japan, but fighting for point of sale space with a resurgent Pasmo) but rather that the point of payment/interaction is far more interesting/playful/confusing than the norm – as highlighted by the World of Pain figurine. Folks who work for design and innovation companies tend to position concepts in a brightly-lit clean future. Life is far more messy, prone to local motivations.

For contactless payments – who is motivated by what reasons to affect the direct environment in which the interaction takes place? Think aligning the interaction with a brand or personal values. The point of sale, is not always the point of sale.

For the lady wishing to know more about this club host – expect to QR barcodes to be supplanted by facial recognition – still through the mobile phone of course.

The only question is when.

The interesting thing here is not that you can pay for vending machine goods with your travel card; or that you can check the balance of that card against any similar vending machine (think displays everywhere), but rather than this SUICA/PASMO compatible card is no-where near a station. The technology extends its reach out of its traditional homeland of train stations.

When a vending machine can decide where it wants to be, where will it want to be?

If you want to understand the future of displays, you need to spend time in South Korea.

It’s that simple, that unevenly distributed.

Some of you are old enough to remember address books that aren’t connected – when the loss of a little black book or mobile phone triggered considerable consternation of tracking down and losing touch with friends. Connectivity and a not-a-little smarts changes everything, once you’ve enjoyed persistence its difficult to imagine how it was before.

Now capture that thought change lanes and scale up to autonomous vehicles. What happens when we combine your communication and calendar logs (forward knowlededge of your intended destinations) with a dynamic, futures marketplace where parking spaces can be bought and sold ahead of time (a semi-public resource to be booked, traded, in real-time based on known destination information). In this world a parking fine can also be negotiated automatically – the inconveniencer paying off the inconvenienced, with a cut going to the ‘fines’ facilitator.

The ways in which we interact with the world around us are rapidly a-changin’ – yesterdays button press is today’s direct manipulation is tomorrows…? Pause for a moment and enjoy what you can’t do with the world around you for tomorrow it will be gone, destined to become the simpler life that you look fondly back on.

Photo? Shoulder surfing this gent in NYC.

How much honesty do you expect from an in-flight magazine?

Bored passengers on Afghan airline Safi, are entertained by an inflight magazine jam-packed with Afghan alternative goodness: a review of the kabul dog-fighting scene and interviews with opium junkies slotted between advertising for armoured personnel carriers. Want more? Head over to the Wall Street Journal.

Re-imagine a world where in-flight magazines were known for covering the weightier issues of the day: American Airlines award winning coverage of life without health insurance; Mexicana’s top tips for stuffing 5 bodies into a oil barrel; Avianca on how to keep a coco-lab decontaminated – the scarred underbellies laid bare.

In a world where you decide what media to consumer where, the only stopping this scenario becoming a reality is you.

Photo? A couple of hundred opium junkies gather underneath this Kabul bridge – somewhere in there a group interview is taking place.

The security protocols for working in Afghanistan dictate that the driver doesn’t hold up the name of the person they are picking up, but but instead one that advertises the company he works for. It’s an invitation to start a conversation and under the midday heat of an airport parking lot we both want to rely on more nuanced cues to understand that we are in fact who we say we are. In every context there is a cost to getting it wrong, in Afghanistan the cost is higher than most.

The shift from ‘is this you?’ to ‘this is me’ is on one level a subtle distinction, but one that is indicative of some major social shifts that will occur in our oh-so-near future perfect. I’m talking about facial recognition in the palm of your hand – the ability to point a camera at a face and know, within a reasonable timeframe and range of certainty who it is that you or the person holding the camera is looking at.

Facial recognition is already a common enough feature in consumer photo archiving software and more military grade versions are hooked into CCTV systems around the world, but the big, big shift will occur when it can be used by anyone with a half-decent camera phone and an internet connection.

A number of BigCorps will have been considering their offering in this space for a while each with their own perspective on how it will be used; and each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Google’s main advantages in delivering the service are infrastructure; scale and context. It already has much of the infrastucture in place to serve up timely relevant search results/advertising – and this is one application where the shortest distance to the cloud will be an advantage over rivals; crunching large datasets is in its DNA and the more data that is collected the better its algorithms will become; and lastly it knows so much much about you, and the tens of millions of people just like you to be able to serve up something both accurate and ‘interesting’. (As a comparison – Facebook’s relative advantage is that it has a legion of volunteers who diligently meta-data photos – you probably think of them as users and their output as user generated content but its nothing less than crowdsourced data management). But the reason why Google and other large players are unlikely to lead the charge into this space is simple: there is too much at stake for another serious privacy screw-up in the hearts and minds of consumers, and under the watchful glare of the media and regulators.

I’m convinced that this is a technology where the gulf between those that get it, and those that don’t will be more larger and more painful than anything from recent memory. On the one side they’ll be a generation that has grown up digital, that is using the technology to explore their own identity and define the boundaries of their nacent social network – an exercise that often involves the rapid collection and ignoring/dumping of connections; and on the other side there will be people who will see this as a significant erosion of their privacy. I suspect that many of the media who would normally file a hey-the-kids-are-alright article will be overly unsettled by a technology that when applied, is literally in-yer-face. This technology changes the dynamics of many contexts – knowing that someone is a journalist before they approach you is particularly significant.

So who will be the first to bring this to market? My money for early success is on a start-up (nothing to lose) developing for Android (a marketplace with limited moral oversight, a decent set of APIs, global momentum, big in mobile), probably with their roots in Japan or South Korea (strong cultures of camera phone use, different attitudes to privacy, and tweens that consistently kick tech’s raw fleshy butt).

Thoughts for today as a before I turn my attention to the more pressing matter of our research: how do the dynamics of our relationships change when the ease at which we can be ‘captured’ affects people’s willingness and ability to engage? Imagine a room full of socialising teens/networking business people and track the dynamics of those whose qq/facebook/google me/gree/linked-in profile can be pulled up in real time with those that can’t.

When the ability to find the online you is dependent on how you look – forget dressing for success. Think dresssing for SEO.

Related: retrospective facial recognition.

Ssiiiihht: that’s the sound that a consumer makes when she buys a spare phone/laptop charger – the sharp intake of breathe that comes from paying a considerable premium for a lump of dumb plastic and metal. Given that the manufacturer already has a captive audience (you’ve already bought the product) and the the customers need is great (the product is useless without power) is it any surprise that manufacturers charge a premium for additional power supplies?

There will come a day when (some) phone/tablet/laptop chargers will be given away for free. What will make this feasible is: a charger that can measure the power that flows through its wires; a way of identifying the owner of the power supply and/or the device that is drawing the power; and a method for automatically billing the consumer when the power is drawn from supply.

Electricity sold at a premium – for the convenience of always being within a few meters of a power supply – will consumers go for it? Would you?

Photo? Been hot-desking this week, with a power supply in tow.