Spent two days at the RCA in London. A good opportunity to have some time to discuss with James Auger, Anthony Dunne and their class, give a talk to them and explore the “Impact!” exhibition.

This exhibition is another highly interesting example of interdisciplinary collaborations between design and scientific research, as already discussed about this other project. As described on the web platform, 16 researchers have collaborated with designers from the RCA under the coordination of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Designers worked with them to produce conceptual designs (videos, photographs, interactives, prototypes, props and system diagrams and illustrations).

What’s interesting here is to reflect upon the role of design. As described by Anthony Dunne, who curated the exhibition:

“Design can shift discussions about the impact of science on our daily lives away from abstract generalities to concrete examples grounded in our experience as members of a consumer society. It can facilitate debate about different technological futures before they happen, create dialogues between different publics and the experts who defines the policies and regulations that will shape the future of technology, and help ensure that we pursue the most desirable, and avoid the least desirable.

The design projects in this exhibition offer an alternative view of how science could influence our future. The purpose is not to offer prediction but inspire debate about the human consequences of different technological futures, both positive and negative.

There are no solutions here, or even answers; just questions, ideas and possibilities. They probe our beliefs and values, they challenge our assumptions, and they help us see that the way things are now is just one possibility - and not necessarily the best one.“

Some projects were more revealing to me than others, I guess my choice reflects a personal choice rather than a judgement on their quality. Perhaps the most inspiring to me is the one called “Happylife” by James Auger and 3 other scientists. It basically explore the uses thermal imaging to analyse emotional states in a domestic context. This technology embedded in a HAL9000-like eye of Sauron can detect heat signatures (as shown on a video on the left on the picture below). Doing this, the system assesses a person’s physiological state and turn the changes into movements/dials on a family dashboard (with barometer-like displays). This project questions how imperceptible body parameters could reveal emotions such as guilt. What is highly intriguing (and smart according to me) is that the dashboard does not have any label… leaving its interpretation to the people who will live with it. How would this change social interactions in the family home? Would this electronic device enable family members to infer new things about their relatives? Would the device detect patterns invisible to people? All these issues are suggested by beautiful vignettes that I did not capture with my camera.

This Happylife project evolved from James and Jimmy’s ideas about this notion of artifacts that would detect cues about our behavior and pre-empt what we feel and desire. Autonomous and adaptive devices have explored by science-fiction writers and researchers desperately want to implement them (sometimes urged by politics who find it could be a convenient solution against terrorism for instance). In their own words, here is how they frame their design research about this topic:

“The potential for this to go much further with the application of face recognition, thermal imaging and expression monitoring is obvious. The design challenge here is to explore how this might happen. How might products and services react to humans if they were aware of their mood.“

Another project I enjoyed as the one called “The 5th dimensional camera” by Anab Jain, Jon Arden and three other researchers. It explores the notion of quantum mechanics and the possibility to access multiple dimensions. The project consists in a fictional camera that can capture “glimpses of 450 parallel universes suggested by quantum physics“. By presenting such images, the two designers aimed at highlighting the “the strange processes at work within quantum computation to the wider public, and explore how they might impact our beliefs, our values and indeed our fabric of reality“. To understand more the implications of such potential, the exhibit featured different narratives of test subjects who employs the camera in their own different ways.

Why do I blog this? these are quick and selective notes about the exhibit to keep a trace of what echoed with my interests. The two projects I mentioned as well as Anthony Dunne’s framing are relevant IMHO in terms of how design research can operate and what sort of artifacts could be designed in such context. We’re close to the idea of design fiction here.

People interested in this can also look at other write-ups by Richard Banks or building_space_with_words.

Marketing people, engineers and designers often rely on persona, i.e. fictional characters created to represent the different user types within targeted characteristics that might use a service or a product. In the history of human-computer interaction, some user figures have been so prominent that it is important to keep them in mind.

Two of the most prominent characters are Joe and Josephine, a fictional couple described by Henry Dreyfuss, in “Designing for People” with plenty of simplified anthropometric charts. Dreyfuss introduced what has been called “Human Engineering” in the form of this couple, his common denominators for all dimensions. Simply put, Joe and Josephine representing the numerous consumers for whom they were designing:

““if this book can have a hero and a heroine, they are a couple we call Joe and Josephine…. They occupy places of honor on the wall of our New York and California offices…. They remind us that everything we design is used by people and that people come in many sizes and have varying physical attributes…. Our job is to make Joe and Josephine compatible with their environment… consider josephine as a telephone operator”. It wasn’t too long ago that she had the mouthpiece of the phone strapped to her chest and the earphones clamped to her head.”

Another good example is Sparky, the “Model Human Processor“, introduced by two HCI researchers: Stuart Card and Thomas Moran in 1983. In this case, Sparky was less a persona than a model of user interaction with the computer. For these authors, the goal was to build a model of computer users based on their perceptive, motive and cognitive abilities to interact with digital artifacts.

Perhaps the most caricatural is Sally, the fictional secretary from Xerox PARC. You can find the following description in a conversation with Douglas Englebart:

“But fashion shifted. XEROX PARC was formed. The ‘inn’ thing to do was to focus on the ‘real’ user - personified at PARC by ‘Sally’ the secretary. She need to have a computer she could figure out how to use quickly and have her paper-based work on, after all, XEROX was a ‘document company’. The thinking was very far removed from augmenting the executive ‘knowledge worker’.“

As discussed by Thierry Bardini in his book:

“the real user was born, and her name was ‘Sally’ (…) Two main characteristics defined this new model of the user: Sally was working on paper, on her Royal, but in the professional business of publishing, and she was a skilled touch typist. (…) Sally, “the lady with the Royal typewriter,” once and for all validated Licklider’s conclusion that the real users, “people who are buying computers, especially personal computers, just aren’t going to take a long time to learn something. They’re going to insist on using it awfully quick - easy to use, easy and quick to learn.”

You can also traces remnants of Sally in this research paper where she’s back with a guy called Bob.

Why do I blog this? This is only a limited list of classical persona in the history of HCI, I am pretty sure there are others. There were helpful in my presentation (in french) about how networked objects are designed with limited models of targeted users. As you surely realize, these fictional characters tend to exhibit important bias and flawed representation of human beings. Thanks Emmanuelle Jacques for pointing me to this line of work! What is of interest here, is simply to trace reasons of design choices made by certain “innovators” over time.

Back from interaction10, the annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Savannah, Georgia. A good occasion to visit the deep south (aka “dirty south 2) that I did not know at all. More observation on this at the end of this post, let’s focus first in lessons learned at the conference.

Before coming, I was not sure about the whole thing, wondering whether the talk/audience would be into web-stuff or other concerns. After three days there I have to admit that I am really happy with the quality of the talks as well as the diversity of the conference formats. As opposed to lots of events, it seems that the venues have certainly contributed to the quality of the interactions (definitely no big hotel-chain lobby with their cheesy carpets). Furthermore, I was also glad to present my talk about failures and get some interesting feedback to go further.

Instead of a selection of semi-automatic writings of the talks as I’ve done after the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, I tried to put together a selection of insights I collected at interaction2010. Overall, I was struck by the following three elements:

Incentives and rewards

A recurring topic was sur toutes les lèvres: the notion of providing “incentives and rewards” for the use of certain services. Be it about changing one’s behavior to reach a more sustainable development model or as a way to let people use applications they wouldn’t otherwise. This was a term I’ve heard in talks, conversations, participative activities and side activities. The break-out group about Foursquare at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium the other day also connects to this discussion because I think 4^2 epitomizes by-products of incentives. Simply because one the rewards the interaction designers of this location-based system created turned users into point-addicts. Although the design community has always talk about this, my impression was that design was more about creating “affordances” than incentives. Where the former lies in perceptual and cognitive psychology, industrial design and human–computer interaction, the latter stemmed from economics and sociology. I don’t judge anything here, I just see a pattern, perhaps design is well qualified to use both metaphors in its creative repertoire. The very notion for service design is perhaps useful here to understand this shift and I’ve heard someone arguing that an incentive was an “immaterial affordance” (which made me frown).

(someone typing notes without bothering looking at the blue-glow display)

About models

In addition, one of the theme I was interested in was the way designers work, achieve their projects and think. Which is why I paid close attention to tools, methodologies and abstractions. Fortunately, most of the presentation I attended showed some interesting examples of “models”. See for instance the two examples below: Nathan Shedroff’s model of experience/meaning (see his presentation for more) or Timo Arnall’s interesting model of the 3 levels for designing networked objects, and the one presented by Mike Kruzeniski.

Shedroff’s model was descriptive: as he explained, it helped him to show how meaning works in experience and the 6 dimensions of what constitutes an experience: significance, breadth, intensity, duration, triggers and interaction. As shown on this checklist, the role of the model is also prescriptive because it helps practitioners making decisions and acting upon other insights (i.e. user research).

Timo’s model is different, it originated in the categorization of experiences with networked objects, which can be:

1. Immediate tangible experiences: glanceable and that do not take too much attention as the Nabaztag, Nike+ or Chris Woebken’s animal superpower
2. Short term connecting and sharing: where the purpose is to share/get immediate feedback from friends such as the on-line component of Nike+
3. Long term service, data & visualization of the data produced that become social objects

What was interesting in Timo’s talk was that he showed afterwards how these three central aspects could be used to evaluate existing objects AND as a basis for designing new artifacts that could be used as an iterative cycle. The model is therefore evaluative and generative.

A third sort of model was the one showed by Mike Kruzeniski in his talk. In his work at Microsoft, his purpose is to connect engineers with a more emotional vision of innovating. The problem they encountered was that developers tended to cut features and design elements with a specific rationale which did not take into account emotional factors. The first model/metaphor they chose was the tree (cutting two many features of a product may lead to a weird tree) but it was not efficient. Thus, they adopted the “Body, Heart, & Soul” framework to qualifies, validates, and prioritizes the intangible qualities of design work alongside the more practical concerns of our Engineering partners. To put it shortly, categorizing features as “heart” or “soul” was a more legible way to prioritize (and suppress design elements). The soul is untouchable, the heart elements support the soul and the body is the rest. Each of this component has certain rules (”no more than 5 “soul” features) and it was a more humane way to prioritize than “p0″, “p1″ and “p2″. This kind of model was metaphorical in the sense that it helped engineers talk in a different way, a “beginner’s design vocabulary to start with an grow from”. Additionally, doing the simple work of categorizing features in these 3 topics was about articulating what matters emotionally to users (and then making choices). In this case, the model is both metaphorical (to convey this emotional sense) and operational (to enable easier prioritization).

These three examples are interesting given they exemplify the use of abstract models by designers from the ixda community. It as if the notion of model had been re-appropriated in a flexible way to serve the designer’s purposes, which is a relevant locus of observation. Make not mistake here, these are only examples I’ve seen and I won’t generalize from this sample. I am pretty sure you would also find predictive abstractions in designers’ work. However, it’s curious to point them out to show how models here are more seen as “tools to give structures to help you think” than explicative elements. The difference between designers and scientists in the way they build and use models, some epistemological comparisons may be intriguing here and I feel I am just scratching the surface.

(Wifi data points on a post-it in the washroom)

Showing products or not?

My third comment on the conference was the surprising lack of examples/products/services in lots of the presentation. I expected a design conference to be much more evocative in terms of design examples and it was not the case. Of course there are exceptions (as if Matt Cottam, Timo Arnall or Dan Hill’s presentation were exceptions) but it’s as if all the potential examples had been vacuumed and resurfaced in Paola Antonelli’s talk.

The interest in objects

The mention of Antonelli’s work allows me to make a smooth transition to a trend I find interesting: the increasing interest (or the resurgence of interest) in technical objects and a way to talk about them, to analyze them (Timo’s model is inspiring for that matter) and how the history of digital artifacts matter. In her talk, she described how objects have always spoken to her and she summarized an upcoming MOMA exhibit that will cover the evolution of new media/digital technologies. Perhaps it’s just me reading The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (Henry Petroski), Carl di Salvo’s new blog about objects, discussions with my neighbor or the game controller project with Laurent Bolli, but I am feeling a renewal of interest in analyzing objects (rather than users).

Not so much time for a write-up about the city itself but some pics are always worth a thousand words.

(The intriguing repartition of green pockets in Savannah)

(The pervasive presence of a local design school)

(Savannah has remnants of old shops)

(Luxuriance on the street, lovable pipes and nature around)

(Cultural shock for me maybe)

(Gorgeous brick buildings to be rented, a common feature in this town)

(Evocative drain pipe)

Yes, there’s the iPad but it’s a different Apple “pad” product that grabbed my attention. This morning, I received this morning a package from Honk-Kong with this curious gamepad that was designed for the Pippin, a console/multimedia platform designed by Apple and produced by Bandai back in 1995. Pippin was actually derived from the second generation of Power Macintosh computers. It was unfortunately a failure.

The game controller was called “AppleJack” (a name that eventually has been re-used because it’s now a command line user interface for Mac OS X). White models like this one were called “Atmark” (for the “@” mark) and were only marketed and sold in Japan. What’s curious here is that it features two interesting elements:

• A centre built-in trackball, which is highly uncommon on game controllers (instead of a joystick)
• Two front mounted orange select buttons designed to replicate the features of a computer mouse.

Apart from that it’s quite common: boomerang-shaped, direction-pad on the left and four action buttons “laid out in the classic Super Nintendo diamond design + the button colors are a match for the PAL SNES controller” as pointed out here. What’s maybe relevant in terms of design is the button shape with tiny braille-like dots to indicate the user which one he/she is using without looking at it.

Another curious aspect is the fact that the Applejack controller was sold with a floppy disk that contains the “Applejack Software Developer’s Kit” for editing the `pippin mapping resource, and an Applejack 2.2.0 system extension file. Which means that you could customize the `pipp’ mapping resource of the Applejack input device drivers.

Why do I blog this? this pad goes straight into the collection/project about gamepad evolution. Although it was a failure, it’s definitely an interesting artifact that tried to innovate (trackball!) and its “boomerang” shaped was also the one Sony showed as an early version of the PS3 controller. A sort of evolutionary dead-end to some extent because of the trackball.

Last week, I was at the Social Computing Symposium at the ITP in New York; a small event sponsored by Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group that “brings together academic and industry researchers, developers, writers, and influential commentators in order to open new lines of communication among previously disconnected groups”.

The theme of this symposium this year was “The city as platform”, which revolved around various sub-topic such as urban informatics, the city as a social technology, pervasive games and government infrastructure/data. My notes are definitely messy and incomplete but I tried to cobble some excerpts below as a reminder of what I learnt there. Sorry this is a blog and I have less and less time to make my notes very coherent.

Kevin Slavin gave an insightful presentation that connected lots of various fields that I found refreshing to hear about, I’ve taken (badly) handwritten notes (see below) so readers may want to access Liz Lawley’s more legible write-up.

In the afternoon, Adam Greenfield gave a short presentation about “what cities are for?”:

“what functions and activities they have evolved to support? plausible deniability (but with technologies such as social software… life become explicit and declarative), anonymity (but tech can determine whereabouts, activities and intentions), reinvention (but tech re-laminates our “separate masks”), forgetting (but tech leads to a global mnemonic), becoming urbane/confront the others (but networked tech can undercut the logic of networked sociality).“

In her ignite talk Alice Marwick dealt with the following issue: “Why kids do care about privacy?”:

“there is this misconception that kids don’t care about privacy
but this is not the case
there’s a range of privacy concern; 3 categories of people: privacy pragmatists (open-minded liberals), privacy fundamentalists (cynical concealers) and privacy unconcerns
overlapping spaces: public/private/semi-public…
opting out of social media is a great disadvantage for kids
AT&T family map = invasive privacy invasion!
kids deeply care about their privacy whatever they define it“

Which was nicely complemented by Alice Taylor’s presentation about the fact that teenagers don’t change much (”teens don’t have ADD, they’re just bored) and Genevieve Bell’s discussion about how the notion of “digital native” is a wrong paradigm… “because in general natives lost (at least where I come from [australia]
should we talk about refugees? squatters? there a new nomenclature. On a different note, she also cited some interesting statistics (26% of americans who don’t use the internet) and the fact that for some user groups “the internet is just for TV or for phone call“.

On Day 2, the morning was devoted to “The City as Social Technology”. As proposed by the session organiser (Mr. Tom Coates, thanks for the invitation!):

“It’s an attempt to bring together the various levels of the built environment (the home/office, the city etc) with the “Social computing” in the name of the event. The basic premise is that the city is an invented thing, designed to support, extend and derive value from human socialising, collaboration and labour - and that new pervasive technologies (sensors, programmable environments etc) are going to take all of that stuff to a completely new level.

Tom reminded us how the city emerged and different implications of the city as a social platform:

“the city only appeared VERY recently, about 12,000 years ago
urbanization has increased dramatically
but why? what functions did it fulfill?
numbers of theories: agricultural societies that fostered more resilience, static population are more robust/protected, better for trades
once cities have appeared, they gave massive advantages to the collective, making it more efficient
+ doing more together than was possible to do apart
not only the city is a social technology but other tech came from the city: money, alphabet & writing, law & government
le corbusier: a machine for living in
but the city has also costs: infectious diseases spread more in cities… hygiene, sewage, crime, pollution…
there is another leap forward right now. the city will be upgraded
sensors will transform the idea of the city as a social technology“

As a follow-up, Molly Steenson gave us an historical perspective on the way that architecture and computers were imagined as a symbiosis in the late 60s and early 70s. She started by quoting various quotes from the 60s by JC Licklider (”The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly” or “your computer will know who is prestigious in your eyes and buffer you from a demanding world“) to show that the ideas we are discussing nowadays have been around for quite sometime. Then she exemplified the 3 ways these ideas affect the city (or were supposed to affect it):

• Representing and visualizing: computer graphics… which comes from wing/cockpit design and mechanical engineering. Ivan Sutherland’s sketchpad (1962)
• Defining the right problems to solve: c. alexander, was interested in defining problem to solve and apply analysis (1963: “design today has reached the stage where sheer inventiveness can no longer sustain it”)
• Generating symbiotic systems: “someday machines will go to libraries to read and learn and laugh and will drive about cities to experience and to observe the world.” Negroponte, 1995 in his booked called “The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment.

Her presentation was very visual based on seminal texts by the authors mentioned above. See some example from my Flickr stream:

Then Duncan Wilson + Dan Hill from Arup showed some projects going on right now in the architecture community. They called it “digital built fabric“:

“Sustainable dev:
- making the invisible visible (barangaroo in Sidney) via real-time data on neighbourhood activity projected throughout site, acting as a civic-scale collective smart meter.
- infographic sketches for responsive street furniture throughout site, inspired by vernacular symbols traditionally found at docks
- smart-meter style dashboard schematic indicating zones of responsibility and contribution as well as consumption
- Forcefield (London, Arup): LED-based lighthing structure responds to proximity and movement of visitors
- unfolding resource use: fitzroy street, london (arup)… hard to read for people: who knows what is the baseline (what number is wrong or good?)
- EST (environment sustainable…) low2no (helsinki)… with web-based and phone-based services, carbon-shadow (yours in comparison with others)
- Kurilpa bridge, Brisbane: LED-based lighting structure capable of responding to environment… we tend to avoid the “big screens” (non-screen, LED instead)… to show collective wifi

“Encrusting the building with sensors”

Aaptive ambient information:
HINTeractions, Green screens (Chiswick park)

Wireless civic spaces: state library of queensland (use of wifi, transformation of public space, library used 23 hours per day, safer, more active)… what can we learn these activities? what sort of patterns can we reveal?
tag cloud of internet connections within public wi-fi space: what countries?
tag cloud of term extraction of public wifi: nouns or people’s names currently being browsed in this space?
what if we could put these viz back into the pace? interactive installations

Responsive architecture: mediamesh (UTS broadway competition entry): reveals character of production within building by tapping into the wifi

Mazdar: parasol star… plaza that plays back pattern of activities collated through the day; city centre acts as dashboard/central processing unit for wider city

Persuasive public transit: post-hoc analysis of large data-sets (real time rome), “smart light fields” (Jason mcdermott: traces of BT enable phone), “Mobile sensing” (can we trace where people are, how space is used in real-time…), active wayfinding“

In this talk, Usman Haque started by 10 things he doesn’t believe in” and turn them into insights about what he is interested in:

“
make data public …which becomes… public make data
more data is more useful …which becomes… more context is more useful
freedom from constraints is the end goal …which becomes… constraints provide hints
local = proximal …which becomes… local = shared (we have neighbor but they are asymmetrical) stanislaw lem’s about robots fucking other robots (inorganic evolution)
architecture is about organizing …which becomes… architecture is about disorganizing (h. von foerster: there are no such things as self-organizing system), it’s about putting something out there that reconfigure/re-adapt
people need simplicity …which becomes… we are complexity processors (granularity is essential), people learn to understand the tokyo map! we should not dumb down representations; it’s not about simplifying but creating multiple levels of granularity
individualism is the key to behavior change …which becomes… neighbours just as important! (natural fuse project)“

After that, we had different break-out groups. Mine was called “From instrumentation to social technology” and here is a summary of what we dealt with:

“ The digitization of the contemporary cities with technologies embedded into its streets and buildings and carried by people and vehicles has appended an informational membrane over the urban fabrics. Location-based services,  interactive architecture, real-time visualizations of cities activity provide new means to make decisions and navigate city space. However, by being more operationally efficient, there is a risk that the urban environment becomes limited to an utilitarian perspective: going from A to B as quick as possible, receiving geolocated-café coupons or getting updates about contacts’ whereabouts can be seen as the new cliché of this model.

Questions to be addressed:
1) Yesterday: What have we learnt from the past 10 years in the field (beyond the usual clichés I listed above)? Where did this system fail?
2) Tomorrow: How to go beyond these issues? What kind of problems will emerge? Is there a balance between utilitarian and more desirable systems? What’s the stupidest idea one can we think about?
3) Summary: Can we discuss a roadmap of possibilities/problems for the near future?“

In the afternoon of the second day, the topic was “Cities and Play”. Kati London started off by showing an interesting set of projects such as “avatar machine” by mark owens, and the surge in location-based games (or Mobile social software that uses game mechanics): Parallel Kingdom (a mobile location-based MMO), Mytown, or Monopoly city street. Dennis Crowley from Foursquare also showed some interesting lessons they drawn from the platform evolution and how it’s differentiated from other friend-finder systems.

Why do I blog this? It was an interesting event, very diverse in terms of the topics that people presented and perspectives. What I found relevant was that “social computing” was not taken to the letter, which is good. Surely, some elements to be directly re-used in current projects.

Readers interested in reseachers-designers collaboration may be interested in the Material Beliefs project:

“Rather than focusing on the outcomes of science and technology, Material Beliefs approaches research as an unfinished and ongoing set of practices, happening in laboratories and separate from public spaces.
The lab becomes a site for collaboration between scientists and engineers, designers, social scientists and members of the public. Alongside existing research activity such as collecting experimental data, writing academic papers and funding proposals, the collaborations lead to a parallel set of outcomes including interviews, brainstorming, drawing, photography, filming and discussion.

The collaborations lead to the design of prototypes, which embed these parallel outcomes into something tangible. These prototypes are exhibited, transforming emerging laboratory research into a platform that encourages a debate about the relationship between science and society.“

The project is summarized in a booklet that I received (thanks Tobie Kerridge!), which is full of interesting insights (see highlighted excerpts below), interviews and project descriptions (some of them have been shown last year at the Lift09 conference).

Why do I blog this? highly interesting summary of how design and scientific research can be combined. Surely some good material to reflect on in current meetings and talk about what is design research, what’s research for/in/about/by design in different contexts (design schools I work for and clients).

Reading this during the xmas vacations alongside with Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy by Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe was very curious. It occurred to me that “material beliefs” was a sort of “hybrid forum” as defined by Callon et al.:

“forums because they are open spaces where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous, including experts, politicians, technicians, and laypersons who consider themselves involved. They are also hybrid because the questions and problems taken up are addressed at different levels in a variety of domains, from ethics to economic and including physiology, nuclear physics, and electromagnetism.“

An hybrid forum where design would play an important contribution as shown by the Material Booklet introduction:

“The inspiration for this project came from the perception that the discipline of design, and more specifically the tactics employed in certain design research, might act on the many issues surrounding bioengineering technologies and public engagement as an integrating and illuminating force, by bringing very different people together and provoking debate.“

Interesting kitchen hack noticed last week in France. A stopper duct-taped to a pan lid to prevent people from burning themselves. Note the interesting use of grey duct-tape to make it more coherent color-wise. Quite elegant.

(The city being measured, encountered in Annecy, France few weeks ago)

The short article “Research through Design in the Context of Teaching Urban Computing” by Andrew Vande Moere and Dan Hill (Street Computing Workshop co-located with OZCHI’09, Melbourne, Australia) is an interesting read for people interested in both urban computing and teaching in design schools.

The paper discusses the role of interaction design in the field of urban computing by presenting various student projects. Interestingly, it also provides relevant resources in terms of approaches to student learning in this specific context (”research by design – design by research“). The project started with this issue of data that will soon “emerge from the street” and then be used as a material for new sorts of urban services “which in turn challenges new opportunities for designers across disciplines”“.

(Picture of students work by Dan Hill)

To explore these aspects, the following assignments were proposed:

• Photo-annotation: “An exploratory student assignment focused on the creation of annotated and illustrated photo-based montages, starting from existing street scenes rather than imaginary future cities. The overlaid textual and graphical notations indicated data sources that might shortly be inherently available in such streets, while also imagining the then possible urban services as a result.” As interesting as it is, it seems that the scenario envisioned “proved less impressive, with many scenarios feeling under- developed, and sometimes inappropriate or irrelevant“.
• Design Fiction: “students were asked to construct speculative textual narratives through which their proposed design ideas would be articulated, contextualized and critiqued“
• Prototyping (as well as documentation of prototyping to reflect on the design decisions): “the development of low and high-fidelity prototypes installed on and around the intended site location, in order to encourage students to explore their design ideas by confronting them with the reactions and opinions of passers-by”

Why do I blog this? Being involved in teaching activities in various design schools and working with Fabien on a series of workshop about urban computing, it’s always refreshing to hear about how others work on these issues. The range of activities you can propose to students and workshop participants is very rich. This paper provides some good insights about them and, of course, on the topic of “what to do with the data”.

On that note, I am happy to see that the authors encountered the same issue we had in different workshops. A conclusion like:

“much of the perceived innovation of the proposed student projects rests with the relative novelty of embedding communication technology and alternative information displays in a real-world, urban context. Discovering a genuinely compelling application for such technological platforms, and then making it work, however, proved to be a more challenging endeavor for the students.“

…echoes a lot with similar experiences. Nevertheless, as they say, it does not diminish the educational value of this work.

Although I did not include the students’ projects in my notes, they’re quite interesting. Readers may also have a glance at Dan Hill’s blogpost about it.

Besides, I was also fascinated by the following element:

“despite the emerging sense that much data is already currently created ‘in the street’, the infrastructure anticipated by the urban computing vision is still largely non-existent, out- of-reach, or so nascent as to be inaccessible. [hence the use of their own sensor infrastructure (a group was however “stopped and requested to remove all sensing devices by a worried police patrol”)].“

Reading the PDFs that accumulate on my computer desktop (see picture above), I ran across two columns by Bill Buxton. Both addresses a constant pattern: the very slow diffusion of technical innovation over time.

The first one, from January 2008 is about what he calls the “long nose of innovation”, a sort of mirror-image of the long tail that is “equally important to those wanting to understand the process of innovation“. Like its tail counterpart, the “long nose” is an interesting metaphor to describe the diffusion of a certain technology. It complement the list I’ve already made here by taking a different viewpoint.

To Buxton, the long nose states that:

“the bulk of innovation behind the latest “wow” moment (multi-touch on the iPhone, for example) is also low-amplitude and takes place over a long period—but well before the “new” idea has become generally known, much less reached the tipping point.“

In his column, Buxton grounds this notion in research conducted by Butler Lampson which traced the history of a number of key technologies driving the telecommunications and information technology sectors. They found that “any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.“. Research about technical objects diffusion often refers to this kind of delay (some says 10, other 20 but one should also remember than some technologies never make it) and Laurent gave another example this morning.

The conclusion the author make is the following:

“Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea’s augmentation and refinement. The newer the idea, the coarser the granularity of most analysis, and the more likely people are to say, “oh, that’s just like X” or “that’s been done before,” without any appreciation for how much work and innovation is involved in taking an idea from concept to wide practice.
(…)
The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. (…) those who can shorten the nose by 10% to 20% make at least as great a contribution as those who had the initial idea.“

In a second column, Buxton applies this to the frenziness towards “touch technology” that appeared after the iPhone. He describes how “touch and multitouch are decidedly not new“. It was first discovered by researchers in the very early 1980s and staid below the radar before some peeps “recognize the latent value of touch“.

But there’s another good lesson from this article. He starts by mocking executives and marketers who rush on saying “It has to have touch” (I guess you could replace “Touch” by 3D back in 1998, or Second Life back in 2005 or Augmented Reality in 2009). He then recommends that “true innovators needs to know as much about when, why, and how not to use an otherwise trendy technology, as they do about when to use it.” What this means is simple: one should not dismiss the technical innovation, but simply have a more specific/detailed approach. As shown by his example of touch interfaces on watches, saying that “something should have a touch interface” is pointless because “The granularity of the description is just too coarse. Everything—including touch—is best for something and worst for something else“. Therefore, his lesson is that:

“Rather than marveling at what someone else is delivering today, and then trying to copy it, the true innovators are the ones who understand the long nose, and who know how to prospect below the surface for the insights and understanding that will enable them to leap ahead of the competition, rather than follow them. God is in the details, and the details are sitting there, waiting to be picked up by anyone who has the wit to look for them.“

Why do I blog this? Good material for my course about innovation and foresight, as well as insights for an upcoming book project about failures.

Two unusual topic that attracted my attention on this Dec 26th day:

1. Football/soccer evolution as an interesting model of futures thinking as described by this quite curious article in The Guardian that Scott Smith dispatched on Twitter. Some elements to draw here in terms of culture, foresight and the diffusion of innovation: “maybe North Korea, which is about as close as football gets to the Maliau Basin, will take advantage of its isolation to generate something new (…) Isolation in itself, though, is not necessarily a good thing, because it often leaves the isolated vulnerable to predators to which the rest of the world has built up immunity “, “Evolution, though, is not linear. It hops about, goes forward and back, and isn’t necessarily for the better“, “Lurking behind progress, though, are old ideas waiting to be reapplied“. All these quotes actually exemplify existing theories in futures research/innovation.

2. Car body lines and creases which remains constant over time in automobile design (as shown above). The crease is a “pressed or folded line created by the meeting of two different planes or surfaces” (as explained here). I don’t really have any interests in cars but I tend to have a glance at car culture as an interesting locus for design issues (as addressed here for example).

Why do I blog this? material to keep up my sleeve for discussion about the importance of observing the mundane in design/futures research. Perhaps also some examples to use in class with students.

Approachability: How People Interpret Automatic Door Movement as Gesture by Ju, Wendy, and Takayama Leila (International Journal of Design, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2009) was a curious read. The authors describes this issue as interesting to exemplify the challenges of designing emotionally welcoming interactive systems:

“While people understand the basic interaction with automatic doors, any sustained observation of a building employing automatic doors will reveal numerous breakdowns: people have difficulty distinguishing automatic doors from non-automatic doors; people inadvertently trigger the doors without meaning to; people walk toward the door too quickly, or not quickly enough; people frustrated in their attempts to trigger the door before or after regular hours. Automatic doors show that extended use and familiarity alone are not sufficient to attain the critical sense of approachability; people are familiar enough with doors that they illustrate what can and cannot be accomplished through conventions of design alone.“

The paper reports the result of a study about how how people respond to a variety of “door gestures” designed to offer different levels of approachability. They expected that the door gestures would be interpreted in a similar fashion by a range of study participants (even when the door gestures themselves are non-conventional). Results are the following:

“These two experiments indicate that door trajectory is a key variable in the doors expression of welcome, with door speed and the interactive context in which the door is opening acting as amplifying factors influencing how the door’s gestures are interpreted emotionally. The wide range of expression available with only one physical degree of freedom suggests that designers can trigger emotional appraisal with very simple actuation; unlike previous systems, which employed anthropomorphic visual or linguistic features, our interactive doors were able to elicit social response by using only interactive motion to cause attributed cognition and intent. If designers can convey different “messages” in such a highly constrained design space, it seems reasonable to extrapolate that more information could be conveyed with more complex ubiquitous computing and robotic systems.“

Why do I blog this? This is a topic that I have always been interested in (the doors EPFL sparked some good discussions about this) from a user experience point of view. The notion of “implicit interaction” described in the paper is interesting and the results are curious. Besides, I very much like the idea of going beyond anthropomorphic cueing.

As part of our project about gamepad design evolution, we collect plenty of material concerning game interfaces (mostly joypad but still) and historical pointers about these devices. Which is why we’ve paid close attention to the recent “Platform Studies collection at MIT press, which “investigates the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems“.

Although it does not deal with gamepad per se, the first book in this series is highly relevant to us. Called “Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System“, it’s written by Nick Montfort & Ian Bogost. The point of this book is to show that the physical hardware design of the Atari VCS influenced the design of some games, and that those design decisions themselves gave birth to conventions still apparent in modern video game design. In terms of methodology, Montfort and Bogost details that their approach is “mainly informed by the history of material texts, programming, and computing systems“.

The whole book was a great read (both from a personal and project-oriented perspective). The introductory chapter set the issues at stake and gave a good perspective on the decisions that lead to the Atari 2600. Each of the other chapter presents different cartridge-based games as case studies to highlight design issues (such as space scrolling for example). The descriptions are quite detailed, which makes the book a good reference. Some excerpts that I found important to my work:

About the importance of “platform studies”, p.3

“Studies in computer science and engineering have addressed the question of how platforms are best developed and what is best encapsulated in the platform. Studies in digital media have addressed the cultural relevance of particular software that runs on platforms. But little work has been done on how the hardware and software of platforms influences, facilitates, or constrains particular forms of computational expression.
(…)
work that is built for a platform is supported and constrained by what the chosen platform can do. Sometimes the influence is obvious: a mono- chrome platform can’t display color, for instance, and a videogame console without a keyboard can’t accept typed input. But there are more subtle ways that platforms influence creative production, due to the idioms of programming that a language supports or due to transistor-level deci- sions made in video and audio hardware. (…) platforms also function in more subtle ways to encourage and discourage different sorts of computer expression.“

This is important for our project because we want to observe a different sort of platform: the gamepad, how it has been created (based on earlier lineage such as joysticks), how it evolved and what is the relationship between the joypad hardware and game control schemes.

The design of the Atari VCS itself is based on a different set of decisions that are grounded in earlier platforms, as shown on p.11 and 12:

“The tremendous success of Pong and the home Pong units suggested that Atari should produce a machine capable of playing many games that were similar to Pong. The additional success of Tank by Kee Games suggested another similar game (…) along with projectiles that bounced off walls. The computational model and basic game form were almost identical to those of Pong, and became the essence of Combat, the title that was included with the original VCS package. The simple elements present in these early games would be the basis for the console’s capabilities from that point on.
(…)
The engineers developing the Atari VCS needed to account for two goals— the ability to imitate existing successful games and some amount of versatility —as they designed the circuitry for a special-purpose microcomputer for video games
(…)
Material factors certainly influenced the design. (…) The Atari VCS would need to navigate between the Scylla of powerful but expensive processors and the Charybdis of a cut-rate but inflexible set of hardwired games.“

The part about controllers is of course relevant for our project, p.22-23:

“although joysticks were already in use in arcades by 1977, the introduction of the VCS joystick into the context of the home undoubtedly did much popularize the controller (…) the game joysticks are connected by cords to the console, where they are plugged in. This means that they can be unplugged and different controllers can be swapped in for different games: it also means that players can sit back away from the video-game unit as they play”
(…)
“there arose the issue in the difference between the controller scheme of the inspirational arcade game and the available VCS controllers. The VCS controllers were simpler than those in many contemporary arcade games. Although it was possible to develop new controller, the cost and difficulty of doing so precluded it in almost every case. It also wasn’t tenable to produce arcade-style controls of greater durability, higher quality, and higher cost for the home market.“

About the “lineage” and path-dependence between the VCS games and recent games, p.5:

“Gradually, conventions of different sorts began to emerge and various genres became evident.
Some of the development of today’s videogame genres arose thanks to computer games and arcade games, but games for the Atari VCS made important contributions as well.
(…)
In studying the Atari VCS from the perspective of the platform, several things stand out about the system and its influence on the future of video games.

1. The strong relationship between the console and the television. (…) The focus on the production of images for display on the TV helps explain why games running on circuits and later computers became known as “video games,
2. Its controllers and peripherals were fashioned for use on the floor or the couch. The games made for the platform are likewise oriented toward home use—either for enjoying the arcade experience at home or for playing in different ways with friends and family.
3. The powerful influence of earlier games.
4. The tremendous representational flexibility of the machine and the less-than-obvious reason for this flexibility. (…) The breadth of the system’s software library becomes even more striking when one considers that two simple arcade games were the major inspirations for its hardware design—and that no one fathomed how successful and long-lived the console would be.”

Why do I blog this? The “platform studies” rationale seems to be an interesting approach for our gamepad project. We’ll try to ground our discussion in such type of work, although we do not know yet whether ours should be as academic as this piece.

Mundane things always hide elements that are not obvious when you see them for the first time. Peugeot cars names have always been curious to me with their “x0x” nomenclatural label. A sunday in a small village in France enabled me to document this more thoroughly and wonder about it. There is a indeed a curious reason for this convention with a mid “O”: at the time when Peugeot brothers invented their car models, starting the engine was done by turning a handle/crank. Drivers needed to turn a crank that they had to put in a hole in the front of the car. The “O” of the Peugeot car name is thus a remnant from this time.

Why do I blog this? Nothing really digital here, curious observation though. It’s yet another interesting example of a process that I am trying to follow and document: the circulation of cultural elements as theorized by Basile in this paper. Hope that can be useful for him.

A quick visit to EPFL last week in Lausanne gave me the opportunity to observe and test the new QR-code system that enable to get some information about the tram schedule.

The service works pretty well but it’s rather the little poster showed on the picture above that raised my attention. What is strikingly curious is that the size of this sheet of paper (that explain how to use this weird B&W square) is the same as the tram schedule (on the bottom left-hand corner). For most of the cell-phone users, this kind of system is fairly new and the transportation company (+ the IT company which provided them with this “solution”) felt the need to give some sort of step-by-step description.

Why do I blog this? Observing the environment and trying to surface some remarks about the implications. The poster describes what the user needs (obviously, a phone and a service that allows to scan QR code), the different steps to make it work (I like the “Confirm the Internet connection” phase) and a warning that you should check with your mobile phone carrier what would be the price of such transaction. As usual with technological innovations, the stake-holders try to help potential users and give a large amount of details that make the poster as long as the schedule poster. Of course there are two supposed expectations from this long description: (1) Teaching people how to use a technical objects (the QR code scanning process that can help to get real-time information), (2) Once the lesson learned it will be OK to remove this description and only keep the two QR codes.

On the UX side, I am also a bit concerned by the legibility of the two QR codes that refers to both directions of the tram. My guess is that some sort of graphic design trick could help here, either below the code (with a bigger font) or on the code itself using a different sort of visual marker. A D-touch marker with some easy-to-read “Flon” and “Renens” (the name of the two directions) tags would be helpful. Although they look curious-and-cool, I’ve always thought that a solution which can be “both machine-readable and visually communicative to humans” would be better. Especially in an urban context.

My interest in old phones as well as interface that tells you time has been attracted to this utterly weird telephone found at a flea market in Paris. What’s curious here is that the device itself is a mix of a phone and a clock but, as we can see, it doesn’t go fairly well:

• The numbers are set in a way that do not correspond to neither the clock arrangement nor a standard phone keypad.
• To some extent, there is a mismatch between the mapping of the phone numbers (from 0 to 9 with a Bis and I do not know what P stands for) and clock numbers (from 1 to 12).

Down the road, this interface is not very meaningful to the user. The design decision to use the clock analogy as a phone keypad (arranging the number all around the circle) is simply wrong. Even tough it looks curious, you should definitely not look at the numbers if you want to read time.

Why do I blog this? rationalizing the discussion I had with Julian while visiting the flea market. A great place to collect insights about design decisions.

Moreover, this is an interesting example for Basile’s research about cultural elements circulation that you can find in the following poster and a forthcoming article entitled “Redesigning Culture: Chinese Characters in Alphabet-Encoded Networks” at Design and Culture from Berg Publishers.