PSFK Conference Speaker Interview: John Dimatos

John Dimatos will be one of the speakers at our upcoming PSFK Conference 2010, taking place on April 9th. John is a Resident Researcher at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and will be teaching ‘Designing for UNICEF‘ in the fall.

PSFK caught up with John recently to see what he’s been up to.

What are you working on right now?

I’m collaborating with my ITP colleague Ithai Benjamin on a wall mounted puppet called “Otto the Resident” that provides answers to questions commonly asked of ITP residents.  Otto is one of my prototypes for physical interfaces to wikis. When you trigger a switch, a hidden audio speaker reads a random line from a specific wiki page. It’s basically an elaborate scheme to solicit contributions to a FAQ page, but if you want Otto to read your pearls of wisdom to new students, you’re going to have to register and learn some basic wiki syntax.

Over the past year, I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with wiki software. The love comes from the sensible notion that more web pages should be editable by everyone, that the democratization of the web includes more living documents accessible by willing contributors. Unfortunately, between the babel tower of wiki syntax and the bureaucraticminefield of most public wiki projects, the first time user is faced with an opportunity cost far too high to make most wikis competitive in the attention game. The wiki projects I find most intriguing and able to entice user contribution are niche fan created wikis like Lostpedia. If you’re a rabid fan of Lost with a novel ‘Smoke Monster’ theory to share, most likely you will overcome the barriers to share that theory. On the other hand, in communities where documentation is incidental and provides diminishing returns to the contributor, how the heck do you solicit contributions? Ultimately it’s worthy long term projects like the Wikipedia Usability Initiative that will make compelling changes, but expressive interfaces are worth exploring.

What projects, people or ideas are currently inspiring your thinking these days?

My favorite project is definitely OpenStreetMap, the collaborative effort to create a free global map. In terms of global impact, this project is  building up to be the crowdsourced equivalent of the Apollo 8 photograph of earth from space. OSM is a transparent, non partisan effort in a historically guarded trade used as a political tool by governments, and a competitive advantage by corporations. As a point of relevance, consider that the NGO’s providing humanitarian relief in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake were using OSM, as volunteers quickly mapped roads, hospitals and refugee camps from satellite imagery. As a point of aesthetics, consider the wonderful simplicity of the  GPS traces RSS feed.

What developing trend, idea or technology makes you most excited or hopeful for the future?

The trend I find most exciting is the ongoing liberalization of prototyping tools in the form of broadly useful abstraction layers. On the hardware side the open source Arduino microcontroller platform is approaching a 1.0 release with an agnostic approach to board variants, introductory tutorials, and development libraries. It’s a strong community of builders that celebrate a ‘more the merrier’ ethos of innovation. Since it has roots in electrical engineering but it’s been explicitly developed for beginners, it’s proven to be an initial meeting ground for two categories of thinkers traditionally separated, often times in corporate environments by walls and floors.

On the software side, I’m excited about the ability to prototype social websites using authentication that takes advantage of your existing online social graph. A couple of years ago, getting a hundred people to user test your one man shop website was an exercise in spamming your friends, finding a way to grow beyond friends was an exercise in patience. Last year, I  saw beginners go from zero to the twitter API in 14 weeks, inserting their simple projects into complex systems beyond their technical reach. This year, we’re primed for an explosion of ITP graduate thesis projects that are well past the point of proof-of-concept prototype. One of my favorites is noah, a tool for citizen scientists, which has a web app, an iphone app and facebook/twitter integration – the social web hat trick -  developed by three students over the past few months.

Thanks John!

John will be speaking at the PSFK Conference 2010 – a Gathering for our Future. Come listen to likeminds as they share their ideas to make things better on stage and off. Find out more about the full line of of speakers at the PSFK Conference 2010 here.