Which makes Skype’s new marketing campaign curious. Launched a week or two ago, Humoticons is a Facebook app that lets users choose a picture from a limited stash of their Facebook photos, which is converted into an emoticon. Once the bespoke emoticon has been created, you choose an existing Skype emoticon (smile, wink, angry) that best matches your expressed emotion. Voila, Humoticon.

The Humoticon campaign doesn’t only say something about improving an apparent communication hamstring (or about reviving emoticons). It shows that Skype is interested in conveying emotion, they think emotion makes us human, that the web could do with being “more human.” According to their blog: “putting humanity back into how we communicate with others each and every day.”

It also gives emotion researchers fertile ground for investigating users’ expressions of emotion. Browse through the Humoticon gallery and you’ll often find fascinating labels for people’s expression of emotion. Take the following:

Isn’t there also something to be said about reinventing emoticons? A new visual language is ripe for rising up to represent emotions. Can images make us feel? Or at least close enough…

In the same vein as the blooming flower or raining cloud emoticon, (below) is my stab at “gloomy”  and the unmistakeable ”chirpy”.

Truth #1:  If you’re not napping at the world mobile congress you’re meeting someone.  If you’re not meeting someone you’re trying to set up a meeting with someone. If you’re not trying to set up a meeting with someone, then you’re the guy making smoothies at the Android stand.

Truth #2: Why compete with Android. Seriously. Their stand had a slide. And free smoothies.

Truth #3 Eric Schmidt is a brilliant and visionary speaker. “Avoid the rise of the digital caste system.” While 1 billion people currently have smart phones, 6 billion people don’t. We forget that some people have never done a Google search, never experienced the cloud let alone an ice-cream sandwich.

Truth #4 You saw a tablet or iPhone get dumped in water. Or a fish tank. And it survived. Hello nano-technology.

Truth #5 You’re a guy. It’s hardly an overstatement, the WMC pulls a crowd of about 67,000 delegates from 205 countries and the vast majority of them are male.

Truth #6 Your tag didn’t give you access to something. A party. A keynote. Something. The conference is a shining beacon of hyper efficiency reminding delegates what they paid for. And what they didn’t.

Truth #7 If you’re woman at the conference you’re most likely a booth babe. Just shy of an 80s shoulder pad, see the girls in pink hotpants and tight black mini skirts.  It’s both opportunistic and uninventive.

Truth #8 If you’re interested in the power of mobile technology for social good then you’re in Hall 2, at the back, in the corner.  If you’re looking for programme details flip to the back of the conference booklet, to the bit without speaker names. Welcome!

It’s also a tool of aggression. In this image it’s used as part of a strange mimicry – the man holding the camera phone films the documentary maker. The whole exchange happens during a discussion between the man pictured and a Zimbabwean farmer. The discussion is volatile and heated, taking place during a time of tumultuous land takeovers in that country. The man in this image is intent on claiming the farm, he’s there to give that message to the farmer. And doesn’t like being filmed while he does it.
Yet he doesn’t obscure the documentary camera lens, he doesn’t demand for the camera to be turned off, instead he reaches for his mobile. He also has a camera! He can document! He can defend! He can attack too!

This highlights the phone as a player or actant in our public space and the way we form relationships with others in it. Here, the phone becomes the offender or the pacifier depending on how it’s used and our investment in this small piece of technology just continues to grow.

The majority of the clips star male tech fans proudly brandishing newly received iPhones with the programmed female voice*. Typically they start by asking a few practical questions like “Can you find me a Thai restaurant?” or “Send an email” but it almost inevitably goes straight to the heart by question 3. Questions like “Do you get a warm feeling when you think of me?” or the more direct “Do you love me?” SIRI brushes these advances off with a non-plussed and cool “Let’s get back to work”.

In the British version, as shown in this clip from the BBC, a tech journalist is interfacing with a male-voice SIRI (the U.S and U.K have different default genders) and again, goes straight for the heart. He asks SIRI where to take a girl on a first date. Hinting at how this relationship with SIRI is sure to evolve in coming months, the journalist unsatisfied with the answer SIRI gives, then assumes SIRI must be “jealous.”

We’ve long since viewed our phones as being conscious rather than inert objects or at least possessing some sort of “tech life force”. Think of how many times you’ve heard people say, “ Let me kill my phone” or “My phone died.” Now, with the introduction of SIRI , mobiles are further infused with a new breath or life force, one that engages with users more actively and intelligently than before.

The last frontier of course, is the one that all the SIRI Youtube videos hint at: does SIRI possess emotions? Can SIRI know how I feel? This will undoubtedly be part of future-version releases, a SIRI that can monitor the affect levels in your voice and then subtly recommend a movie to lift your spirits…

* The fact that SIRI is programmed with a female voice is a topic for another blog post as it presents a fascinating number of very deep and interesting questions and issues.

I scraped Twitter for #Blackberry, #Crackberry and #Blackberryoutrage last week (many thanks digitalmethods.net) yielding these gems:

It’s not you, it’s me. #crackberry
I love you #Blackberry – but if you continue to stop me BBM communicating with my sons, we’re so, like, OVER.
Last night with my #crackberry and I’m not sad in the slightest
Dear my once beloved #Blackberry… I’m thinking of breaking up with you. This is the LAST straw.
No one will understand the relationship between me and my blackberry and how heartbroken i am it’s not working
I just wanna curl up and die right now #blackberryoutrage
I hate you Blackberry #blackberryoutrage – It’s time to cross over to the bright side…iPhoneee!
#blackberryoutrage wtf am I supposed to do now?? CALL people?!?!!? Get it together #RIM
#blackberry #blackberry ……….goodbye!!

Mobile phones are our most intimate and cherished technology. The role of our “beloved” Blackberrys is not just in mediating emotion or as objects of affection due to their contents, but as a stand-alone affective actors. They are not simply inert objects that only respond to our whims and wants – they too have a presence. They move us in the same way that people can “move” each other – they are energetic participants in our assembly of human and non humans. As a result, users rarely view mobiles as mere technological devices but rather as natural beings, ones that have expressions – derived from the presence they create.

Looking at the word cloud I created for this Twitter fall over the blackout (thanks wordle.net) there is little guessing who people are leaving their Blackberrys for….

It’s a relationship rarely considered despite its rigorous reciprocal nature. Undeniably cities are one of our greatest developments and also our accomplices in building social capital, intimacy, innovation and (idealistically) better lives.

But how often do we invest time in understanding a city? It was a question posed at a new-media conference, called Picnic, in Amsterdam in September, with a focus on smart cities.

A smart city is not another way of describing a “digital” or “intelligent” city but rather a broader view of the investment made in technology, transport, social and human capital in cities to sustain economic growth.

To this end, cities are harnessing sophisticated apparatuses. Take the Copenhagen Wheel, developed last year for the city by the clever people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s essentially a “smart wheel” that can store energy created on the downhill and use it on the uphill. It also communicates with smart phones to give riders information about traffic congestion and programmed exercise regimes.

Criticised for being an overworked solution to a simple thing (bicycle riding and exercising), it is in contrast with the ingenuity of a water community in Nigeria. Makoko, a slum area of Lagos with a population of approximately 100 000, is built entirely on stilts in water. Schooling, shopping and soccer all happen on water. A former Office for Metropolitan Architecture architect, Nigerian-born Kunlé Adeyemi, draws inspiration from that rich research arena and on local knowledge for architectural innovation. To this end, he spent much of his time in Makoko studying the slum’s dynamics.

Multiple layers
The Makoko community “carves out a way of living, using resources, materials and technologies that are all local”, says Adeyemi.

“They are being sustainable with minimal needs. Why do we have to be so complex and ultimately inefficient?”

Adeyemi also studied informal spaces in Lagos, including a trading market near a busy bus and taxi rank. He photographed it from an aerial perspective and then mapped it out graphically to illustrate its hyper-organisation and symmetry. His work attests to the multiple layers that a city is made up of, ones we often misinterpret (markets are chaotic), or assume too little or too much about.

Understanding a city’s DNA might start with understanding these dynamics. But often dynamics are complex processes.
Saskia Sassen, a professor of sociology at Stanford and an international city commentator, considers the city a hacker. In the true sense of the word it does not necessarily imply anything negative. It refers to the capacity of cities to hack existing technology. Consider powerful machines such as cars and trucks that are reduced to crawling “nothings” in congested traffic, showing how the city is in command of its citizens or, using the hacker metaphor, has “hacked” our automotive technology.

Despite our self-sustained visions of technology mastery, when the city is gridlocked we are at its mercy. In a more literal example, people hack back at the city. Inventive thieves hack 3G SIM cards from traffic light systems to make phone calls. Or, in the Makoko example, locals “hack” the city to create a space (on water) that was previously perceived as uninhabitable.

But the city is capable of talking back to us — with the vast amount of information about residents’ movements and purchases through ubiquitous surveillance, the city becomes the ultimate data source. In fact, smart cities will soon have their own operating systems. Using sensor data, cities can start to understand and interpret information to improve city components such as traffic flow.

With all this technology the city has at its disposal, it may soon become autonomous in its functioning.

But, according to Urbanscale’s managing director Adam Greenfield, people are still the most valuable surveillance tool of all. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of CCTV on the street, people feel less obliged to be alert or aware of anything out of the ordinary because the “authorities” already have that “covered”. This makes the power of “natural” surveillance in city environments increasingly important — the traditional shopkeeper, butcher and baker, who watch, know and recognise people (especially strangers) and potential crime dynamics to augment the city’s technological surveillance.

In a sense, Greenfield and Adeyemi argue for the same thing — a return to basics — not basic thinking or basic ways but rather basic questions such as: “What do people really need in a city?”

Discovering a city cannot be achieved by measuring its parks, sunshine hours or commuter network. In Adeyemi’s words, “cities are engines” and have to be considered as spaces and practices.

(pic by STEPHEN MUDIARI)