2021 w17 & w18: ‘community experiments’ and a ‘new baseline’
As a community we are in a state of ‘maintaining’.
This means that our usage is consistent week over week. All metrics are ‘flat’ (maintaining), slightly increasing or slightly decreasing. This also means ‘something’ seems to be working because our core community uses Futureland every day. Some individuals have been using it for multiple years without ever missing a day. But how do we move Futureland out of a state of ‘maintenance’ and into a state of ‘growth’?
It ‘seems’ that the answer to this question might exist somewhere between ‘community experiments’ and a ‘new baseline’.
‘community experiments’ are anything we do to provide value and interact with the global creative community that we are part of. This newsletter is a 'community experiment'.
a ‘new baseline' is a multidisciplinary effort to address components of Futureland that are limiting our ability to provide value to our global creative community. Right now these components include onboarding, interface design and performance. Each component has been steadily improving over the past few months. This 'new baseline' serves as the necessary foundation for a higher frequency of 'community experiments'.
It will be interesting to observe how Futureland continues to unravel. What is all of this building towards? Perhaps in the near future we are building towards experiments with ‘web3’? Perhaps ‘community experiments’ and ‘web3’ are interrelated in some way?
Let’s see what happens.
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A few notes:
1 - Designing a morning routine using Futureland
Perhaps it’s obvious to most people that the more you do something, the better you get at it. In other words, repeat anything you want to improve. The thing that’s less obvious is that you can design your day around that insight.
Each day in your life is a group of interlinked behaviours. If you control and tune these behaviours, you transform your life - that’s what Futureland is for. The thing is, that’s really hard to explain (lol). And it’s something you have to experience for yourself.
So the focus of our onboarding with new users will be to get you in flow immediately by showing you how to use Futureland to design a morning routine (video).
You can shadow the real time development of our work through onboarding here: https://futureland.tv/vin/futureland-onboarding
2 - Recent enhancements to performance
With christian helping us out part time, lucas has been able to focus on improving performance on Futureland. You might have already noticed the increases in speed. All journals load faster and so do your daily journals in the side bar (as well as a lot of other things).
We’re steadily moving towards an interface that ‘assumes success’ in key places. We think if we can get this right, Futureland will feel more like an extension of your mind.
3 - Developing profiles that express your identity through your behaviours
What is a ‘profile’ in a network? Wikipedia has a simple description, “A user profile is a visual display of personal data associated with a specific user, or a customized desktop environment. A profile refers therefore to the explicit digital representation of a person’s identity”.
So how might someone express their identity on Futureland? Just like everything else, answering this question seems to require some experimentation - but one thing has always been kind of clear. Identities on Futureland should ‘mostly’ be an expression of your behaviours. In other words, on Futureland you’re more what you do than what you say.
And so, christian (in collaboration with our community) has been incrementally realizing new profiles on Futureland. These new profiles display a real time status of each individual's daily journals. You can jump around people's profiles, see what they work on daily and how their day is going in general. It's pretty fun lol 💕
These are still in development, but you can play with new profiles as we work on them using design.futureland.tv (a research version of Futureland). Here’s my profile and here’s a few more that you might find interesting: ethan, tania, christian, dan. reza, lucas, norton, vince, humdrum, tarun, jess, gndclouds, tmm.
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Now a few journals to visit:
josephazar has been using Futureland every day for multiple years. What started out as humble daily tinkering has grown into multidimensional creative projects and most recently a new gig at Spline. His journal ‘CREATIVE CODING’ is described as, “- Motion graphics - Shaders - WebGl - Machine Learning”.
‘Twelve Websites’ by christian is described as “Making twelve websites, one per month over the course of a year”. He recently completed a project he calls, Hyperfov. In a recent entry he describes it as: “a way of browsing the internet through the links between websites”.
‘Soho House’ by dan is described as “Design comp, theme unclear but intended for one of Soho’s NA houses”. He seems to be designing a concept for a new table lamp that can be embedded into the centre of a table. I asked him why and he said, “tbh I think I just wanna learn about/experiment with light diffusion, how different textures and geometries affect the way light is softened/shaped”.
ty for everything <3
We’re distilling our experiences on Futureland (FL) into weekly emails. If you ever want to chat or hang out, just reply to this email. Your input helps a lot on independent projects like this. 🌀
