What ‘light loving moths’ forgot to tell you about ‘experience design’

‘Light loving moths’ and the world of design?, why this weird comparison! Yes, you may be thinking for a while. As we know there is a common belief that moths, flies, beetles are attracted towards light and that leads them to their unfortunate miseries at the candle light. When we understand that it is by their sheer inability to understand the circular light emitting behavior of the artificial light, these little insects fall prey to the candle fire and other hazards caused by artificial sources of light. Those insects are actually in search of the moonlight that has a constant angle of radiation. 

This occurrence in nature often reminds me about the hypes of nurturing and manufacturing customer experience design. Primarily design has two layers; one physical and second ideological. When physical layer of design act as the necessary act to optimize the functional and material aspects of the subject matter or the object manifestation, ideological layer act as the force that can create a demand or customer appeal beyond its actual capacities. Hence when we make all sort of fuzz about design, design thinking, truth in design we should understand the layer in which we are applying our design efforts and logic.

Big Data is not born in a Day !

Adieu to an Algorithmic Age::

Intelligence every where! Sensors every where! Data seems to be liberated from all the corners of universe. One may wonder, where was all these exabytes and petabytes of data hidden. Or is this internet universe that spawn monsters of data from nowhere? 

Absolutely not. Big Data is not born in a day ! This rich collection of data that we see accumulating in minutest measures of seconds was nothing but encapsulated in the abstractions of an algorithmic age. 

A Critique of Classical Computational Models:

In the scientific computing community, there is an emerging realization that we are moving ahead of an algorithmic age to an age of intelligence and adaptation. We emulate more and more the natural cognition. Data structures have grown beyond the linkages and contextual affinities of algorithms. We may look back for a while. What were we doing with information spaces all these while? Data structures in various information spaces where conditioned by a logic that could approximate a mathematical behavior.

In a way , Boolean logic is largely a mathematical behavior or an operational approximation for the convenience of calculation. Mathematical behavior can be modeled by approximations. Thus we created concept machines based on Boolean logic.Mathematical behavior or for that matter any behavioral logic is just the reflection of a larger set of conditions. If we look from a higher abstraction, we were trying to fix the multidimensional data structures into a partial projection of Boolean logic. Thus my argument is that Boolean logic was insufficient to capture the computational complexities of data streams.

Data Structures and Dialectical Logic

Then what is inherent in data structures: in reality, do they exist at all? I am not an exponent enough to lay down my arguments in mathematical formats. However, I may try in terms of dialectical logic here. Data as such is a representation of a physical entity or a cognitive process. It may have its own primary structure or it may be derived or dependent on a much more relatively invariant structure.  This integral between representational mathematical format ( symbol ) and the corresponding primary or secondary structure constitute a data structure. This visualization is in terms of dialectical logic. 

In the measures of physics, we may use the metrics of space time in many models. But when the data streams are dependent or realizations of energy structures the scenario becomes more interesting. The high energy physics and the future smart sensors may become the sources of such #energy structures. As the data explosions gains momentum, we may need inner eyes to capture the innate structures behind the 'Big Data' ecosystem.

Data Diary #3:

Network Equipment Providers's (NEP) and Next Generation Content

We have already witnessed the wonders of streaming media and video streams. Now comes the real time video streams. At the recently concluded Mobile World Congress, Peter Linder,VP, Fixed Broadband and Convergence, Ericsson speaks about how much Ericsson is enthusiastic about the possibility of live and multimedia content in mega sporting events such as FIFA World Cup, Olympics and so on.

Ericsson Speaks on Next Generation Content

This speech is a pointer to the direction in which Network Equipment Providers must be moving. This is nothing but out of the realization that Voice communication networks can no longer be the only revenue generator or business value accelerator. Voice -Data convergence, Content explosion and the entrance of traditional NEP's in this ecosystem opens up interesting possibilities of competition in the content aggregation and content analytics space.

Already we have a lot of players in the content aggregation and content analytics space. How can NEP's leverage their experience and infrastructure to create new opportunities and user experience ? And that is something worth study.

+Gokul Alex 

Data Diary #1

Monsters in Memory !

Can you imagine idle java processes eating away 70% of your Operating system RAM share. In our Content management system built on a propriety product suite, we were taken by surprise to realize that it is a baggage from the product architecture. However, I must not point fingers at the vendor as they have mentioned in their product manuals to disable the non-essential services to be disabled in the early phase it self. But we have left with no such choice now. May be this kind of elasticity & flexibility is desirable any product in the days forward.

Our content management system follows an event based consumer - subscriber model for sharing the events across different content related services such as Workflow, We found that our event subsystem and the associated small relational database related Java Processes are alive all the time. That must be the rationale behind keeping these processes alive.

Along with it, we could find a Servlet and Search agent built on Java API's alive all the time. All the villains are identified. But not able to keep them behind the bars as they are essential for the system's standard behavior and as-is status. This makes me think and highlight that Content management systems are still memory and event intensive model. I must say that this +ECM has derived lot of base model from the standards of Version Control systems and relational data models. What made it unique was the OS level coupling it has achieved by adding a lot of modifications on the OS registries and device drivers at the firmware level .. Anyway I am just curious what will these bunch of monsters will do tomorrow as the story continues. Data Diary and Data Dilemma continues ...

+Gokul Alex

PS: All views are my own