French food for dreams

I'm off to Cannes for an intense week in April, as I'm attending the MipTV and Milia. The main themes for the five conference days are known but the speakers are yet to be announced.

And right outside Cannes, there's a lovely paeonia garden, La Villa Noailles. I do hope I can arrange time for a stop there! It's my dream to run a lush, green, quiescent garden where peonies would grow throughout the season starting early spring and ending in autumn. I'd run a small café with sherry, gâteaus and orange liquor, with tables only for two or three parties maximum. It's intentionally not a very profitable enterprise, rather it's the spirit, l'esprit of it. Hopefully, I get a bit of nurture in Cannes for my dream.

Finally a grain of outdoor activities

It's been a hell of a winter, pardon my French, but it has. There are few positive adjectives I can come to think of when describing it. It's been dark, quite warm, little snow but instead very rainy, resulting in unusually wet forests and no frost in the ground. The river running by our house is usually covered with ice in January but not this year. And since we're currently living January, the festivities of Christmas and mid winter are all behind us leaving little mental nor physical light to cheer for. And when you add that to the usual polar night spirit (or Kaamos which is the term in Finland), only keeping the eye lids open is a task comparable to walking ten thousand miles. That's why I jumped out of bed with a big grin on my face this morning, the sun was rising, the temperature was -10 and a white blanket of snow reflecting golden sunbeams. Beautiful! I grabbed the camera and headed out. Let's hope it stays this way for a while longer. Otherwise, I need to indulge more in my survivor trick during dark winter times, knitting, needlework and embroidery (the angel came about last November...).

Notes from Ebba von Sydow's talk

Her talk treated mostly trends in young women's media consumption, behaviour and taste.

• The internet is as such no biggie for young Swedish women. It's like any other medium, it's considered a carrier of other media, such as radio, TV, news papers...
• Many are more comfortable with expressing emotions and opinions in front of a computer screen or via sms, instead of face to face. Young women of today are afraid of making a phone call and talking to someone, instead, they prefer electronic communication.
• Ebba von Sydow dislikes the claim often heard today, that young people lack engagement, that they don't care. They do care, and they engage through clothing, fashion. The means of expressing the engagement is new, she stresses.
• As for the environment awareness, young Swedish women seem to think: "That's great, but I won't...". A t-shirt made of organic cotton every now and then may be ok, but making a long-term commitment is out of the question.
• She mentions the importance of involving the user in online sites and communities, the two cases she talks of are Ellos and Lego.
• Finally, the brand is of minor importance for teenagers online. They're extremely disloyal and unfaithful to brands. What counts is what buzzing at the moment, what others are talking about.

Ebba's blog is here (in Swedish).

The night prior to inspiration

My expectations of the coming weekend are high. It's the first conference for this year, and it's a good one, Mediespråk (media language). Two years ago, the chief editor of a Swedish evening newspaper, Bo Strömstedt, made fall in love with language and poetry again. On an early Saturday morning no less. I completely forgot the hangover and instead, I came to terms with the grudge against classic French literature (long story). I'm still impressed by the man. This year's main speakers are the journalist and fashion blogger Ebba von Sydow and the award winning journalist and author Mustafa Can.

Pen measuring emotions

According to NewScientist, the company Philips is launching a pen measuring heart rate, skin conductance, finger pressure and temperature in order to get an idea of the current state of mind of the author. I'd love to write a book about that pen, preferably a detective novel. And I'd love to see the SCL curves of Ms Rowling when finishing the Harry Potter series.

Highlighted in DN

The #1 daily newspaper in Sweden as to distribution and readership, DN, has an article on movies and audience screening. The reporter, who's taken part in such a testing, describes the process of having a say on how entertaining a movie is and presents an overview of the available methods of film screening on the Swedish market. This is where our iDTV Lab appears.

Although the Americans have carried the system of movie test screenings to an extreme, many of the technical progresses are made not in the West but in the East, in iDTV Lab in Vasa, the reporter writes. The article is found here (in Swedish only).

A YouTube for thinkers

Do you feel like YouTube clips mostly resemble silly sitcom copycats with little substance, that only occasionally succeed in providing semi-funny haha moments? Longing for depth and intellectual snack? There's an alternative now, a YouTube for big thinkers, grand ideas and genuine, thorough discussion. It's called Big Think, read more on the story behind it here.

Looking for a cool job in new media and research?

Then do send us your application! We're hiring more folks to the audience research lab at work. If you like exploring why people would bother being interactive on the web or on TV after a rough day at work, why someone would get excited over a thriller movie or if you enjoy finding out best practice of creating digital products with high scores in user experience and usability, this is the post for you.

What's going down next year?

I'm a bit disappointed in contemporary journalism. Too little attention is devoted to the glorious art of following-up. It seems to me that news media is way too focused on tomorrow, tonight (and possibly on the "right now" although not much), which consequently leaves the history and yesterday all gray and forgotten in the dumpster in the back yard. I'd appreciate a remembrance every now and then, a check up if you will, of the goals, beliefs and visions at earlier days and how it all turned out. For example a comparison between the actual weather and climate data of 2007 and how it was predicted by a) the local foretellers using coffee grounds or the mating behavior of frogs or swallows b) the meteorological institute and c) climate researchers. Who came closer to the truth? Or a comparison between the election promises given by local politicians and now, after four years of power, the results. Or a comparison between the fears and hopes regarding the web back in mid 1990's versus how we actually use the net today. Are there great differences? Did someone foresee the social networking craze of today?

My memory is extremely bad and I'm sure I'm not the only one to suffer from this. This being the case, there's money to be made :) But since the news I consume seem to be occupied with the next year's flowering season rather than with the roots and last season's blooming, I started documenting the weather and happenings myself in order to be able to make comparisons and remembering later on (a dream I have is to take an identical photo of say the views from my balcony, every day at the exact same time. That would make an impressive index of weather, the changes in how the local community evolves as new houses, trees and road would emerge and old ones perhaps disappear. The idea falls short however due to my constant moving around.) I've also been thinking of collecting the trend reports and predictions that flourish at every turn to a new year, and compare them with how it all turned out say after four, five years have passed. I've been happily reading every trend report I've come across, in all sorts of contexts, and this year, they're a bit contradictory. According to Kairo's institute, we'll see more of the blending of private and public on arenas such as MySpace or FaceBook. But as a consequence, conflicts in law, organization culture and conventions (what's suitable to reveal regarding your work online for instance) will emerge. This trend watch report was a great read, I do recommend it! The women's magazine Amelia on the other hand predicts that IRL is back, a social networking fatigue will hit us and we'll favor integrity and keeping thorough, deep discussions face to face with our friends. I will try to keep up and see which prediction is more accurate.

Playful products

I stumbled upon an article by Jonathan Follett on UX Matters. He suggests four characteristics for a playful product, and thus, these are the variables to measure when studying the playfulness of a digital product.

• lots of small rewards and positive feedback for taking action
• no negative consequences for experimentation
• the ability to take someone else’s work and build on it
• frivolous interaction

His suggestions are a good start. There are two more features I immediately want to add to the list, socializing and challenge. For instance challenging your friend to create a cooler Nike shoe than the shiny masterpiece you just did, by sending him or her an e-mail.

The tale of the well-being

D Kahneman (a psychologist awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences six years ago) tells a tale of being wrong in the research of well-being.

"Measuring experienced happiness turned out to be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected. We had simply been wrong. Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time."

wii 2.0

For a long time, we've been clueless regarding what to do with our Wii at work (gaming has naturally been out of the question), but that's hereby a solved problem.