Below you see a picture of my harddisk. This picture will give you the agenda for some new IT developments in the coming years, at least if it’s up to me. Here goes. The picture shows all files and folders in a visual representation. I have had this application for many years now and I use it to determine what big files are eating up space on my harddisk. My harddisk was almost full. You can immediately see why. There’s three big things happening on my harddisk that occupy most of the space: photo’s, music, and video. 1) Photos. The purple block at the top, this is a folder called iPhoto, and in it are all our photo’s and small video’s taken with our camera. Holidays, children, and so on. 2) Music. The second is the green block on the lower right. It is the iTunes library: our CD collection. Since december I have been importing all our music into iTunes, and this is 
not even everything of it (I had to delete part of it after I had moved it to my iPod - which causes it’s own problems). The complete music collection is on the iPod, and I do have a backup of it on the external disk, so I could actually delete this iTunes library. But I still use it to listen to music directly from the computer. So I’ve kept it. 2) Video. Our good friends Paulien and Geert made many hours of video from our wedding. First these tapes have been lying at their house for 3 years, even surviving a move to their new house. At one point I remembered the tapes and took them home and imported all the tapes into the computer. But I never got to make the nice video edit of our wedding. And since I do not know much about video-compression, I have now a lot of very very large un-edited video files. Video-editing, especially with big files, is very cumbersome. You have to wait a long time for all files to load into your program, and the programs are often very complex. iMovie is pretty ok, but then there’s the compression issue. Big video files you can transform into small video files, but if you don’t do it the right way you end up with no sound, or bad quality image, or the thing won’t play on your laptop, or on anybody else’s computer, and so on. Digital video editing is pretty complex. Our students learn about it at bachelor college level.
So here’s my agenda for the coming five years. But first let me tell you what we should not be working on. The thing I am not proposing is bigger harddrives. One possibility is that we keep on designing bigger harddisks. Not 1 terabyte, but 10 terabyte, or 100 terabyte. This is the strategy that our politicians deploy with regard to traffic jams: if our roads are full, make more roads. We know what the effect is on traffic: more roads, more traffic. And the same goes for digital traffic. So bigger harddrives will lead to new kinds of files (HD video? 3D video?) and this will fill up your harddrive again. What I also do not propose is to upload all your files to the web. That is a ‘cloud-castle’ solution, in both senses, since The Cloud ultimately is stored on harddrives somewhere, and probably having things online means it is copied at least a number of times for each file which only makes the problem worse (think of energy consumption of having to accomodate all that server space in a reliable way). On the short run, it might solve ‘your’ problem, but on the long run, it will eat up our planet, and that’s everybody’s problem, even if it is not directly visible in your own backyard.
Instead I think a sustainable approach for the future is when we innovate in the following way:
* Create applications that really address the problem of what to do with photo’s. My problem is that I take many many many photo’s, and the task of ‘cleaning up’ my iPhoto library has simply become to big a task to handle. It will probably cost me about 3 weeks fulltime to decide which photo’s to keep and which to throw away. We could do a lot in terms of interaction design of 1) the camera (deciding to keep the photo already when you have just taken it), 2) importing (which photo’s to import, which not to import) and 3) in terms of managing your photo’s, e.g. by creating photo-albums etc… Some people have the mental power to actually make 3 albums each year, many people do nothing, like me. And the database grows and grows. If we want to do that, we have to make programs that specifically support the maintainance of your photo library, not the endless growth of it. Since people are lazy, and have a hard time keeping track of what’s ‘in the big box of junk’, the program needs to support people actively. One BIG move forward would already be a SAFE and VERY EASY way to say “get rid of all my duplicates”. There is not my knowledge no simple big button on my iPhoto application that does that in a way that I trust.
* Same issue as above, but with music.
* Create good and easy to use video editing programs for the lay-person. And make sure all frustration concerning video compression, with all the hassle with codecs, stays ‘under the hood’, that is, hidden from view. There’s two things that a user should be able to do very easily and that is: 1) creating a ‘crop’ from a video file (cutting a sample out of it and saving that under a new name, and discarding the left-overs) and 2) compressing the video to a format that plays on all standard video players and still has reasonable quality. (I propose that you can easily preview 3 kinds of compression, ranging from ‘low quality-small file’ to ‘high quality-big file’.
Popularity: 14% [?]