Last week I was away in Cornwall and lost (but later found) my phone, so was both without a phone and with no internet connection … and it was amazingly liberating. My life is driven by the never ending stream of incoming mails and while in principle I could ignore them, in fact I find myself constantly breaking off what I do and seeing what has come in.
This reminded me of a Times article Haliyana pointed out to be a couple of weeks ago “Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks“. We make a virtue of the never ending stream of interruptions that assail us; “multi-tasking” we call it, but in fact they not only mean we are less focused, but are possibly loosing the ability to concentrate at all.
While reading the article itself I found myself fighting not to want to follow the numerous links to other stories that littered the Times online page … and I would like to tell you more about it, but I never managed to read to the end before succumbing to the next interruption.
The workshop covered loads of ground and included the design and then construction of a real application – part of the project’s methodology of research through design. However, two things that I want to write about. The first is the way the workshop made me think about the ontology or maybe semiology of tags and tagging, and the second is a particular tag (or maybe label, notice?) … on a toilet door … yes the good old British scatological obsession.