Donald Norman’s column about the analogy between “queues and interaction design” was very thoughtful:

“What is a buffer? It is a holding space between two systems, sometimes in space, sometimes in time, allowing the objects or information from one system to await the next system.
(…)
We can see buffers in operation almost everywhere. For example, when I walk into a dining room and see the food waiting to be dispersed to the guests, these are inventories of food, buffers. Even when eating from a plate heaped with food, the food not yet in the mouth is inventory, a buffer that makes it easy to select from the preferred orderings at the eater’s own pace.
(…)
Interaction design is about interfaces, which means it is about synchronizing the events of different systems, about memories, buffers, queues and waiting rooms. Waiting is an unavoidable component of interfaces, an unavoidable part of life.“

Why do I blog this? just found the analogy intriguing.

To access the underground:

To recharge your card/pass:

(Seen in Paris last week)

Why do I blog this? I just wanted to point the size and color of the contact area (coherence and homogeneity). This big violet circle is intriguing and as you can see on the second picture there is a sort of “tail” maybe to facilitate the passing of the card/pass when moving. The tail allow the user not to stop to validate his/her card.

Not really a pattern, but I ran across two articles about design process this morning. The first one (found here) is about the design of a new ride (Toy Story Mania) at Disney theme parks:

“BUILDING elaborate models is among the first formal steps in creating a Disney attraction. Engineers, paying attention to scale and sight lines, want to find out how a planned addition would affect the existing park. Models are built on large tables equipped with wheels. The company keeps room-size models of entire parks, and engineers will eventually wheel the new model into that area to see how it looks.
(…)
To give birth to Toy Story Mania, Mr. Rafferty and Mr. Coltrin went to work turning drawings of the ride into foam models, toiling in the same 1950s-era building in suburban Los Angeles where Walt Disney himself once tinkered. Tweaks started to happen. The team added turrets to the top of the ride for a more dramatic flair. (…) Upstairs, designers entered blueprints for the ride into a computer program. This would allow them to start building and refining the entire project
(…)
“It is much easier and less expensive to do this before the concrete has been poured,” he added. “As rides become more complicated, your ability to tweak in the field gets harder and much more expensive.”

Across the street, in a cold, unmarked garage, Ms. Allen helped to conduct “play tests” on rudimentary versions of the ride. More than 400 people of all ages — all had signed strict nondisclosure agreements — sat on a plywood vehicle set up in front of a projection screen and played various versions of the games. Disney workers studied their reactions and interviewed them afterward.

And this interview of Bjarne P. Tveskov, the classic LEGO Space Designer addresses interesting topics related to design:

“BBG: Where did the ideas for the models come from? Did someone from LEGO say “Bjarne, we need a big space ship for the Blacktron line” or did you come up with the ship so they decided to produce it?

Bjarne: Well, normally there was a brief to create a new space ship or vehicle or base at a specific price point. Maybe the model were to replace an existing set or maybe there would be some other requirements. But there would always be a fixed “brick-budget” one had to stay within. That was often the hardest part; If the model was over budget, one had to simplify and sometimes strip all the little cool extras of the models. Each brick has an internal price, and there was a whole department that did nothing but calculate the prices of all the prototype models we designed. Often 20-30 different models would be built, and only one would be selected for production. Then the models went through a committee of super-experienced model-designers to make sure stability and buildability was optimal.

I remember that one of the toughest ones to slim down to the right price was the Blacktron Alienator (6876). It had to be rebuilt and re- calculated several times before the brick-count was low enough. But it’s still also one my favorite sets out of the 20+ LEGO Space models I designed back in the day from 1986 to 1990.“

Why do I blog this? two interesting accounts of design process in less known fields, some curious elements to be thought of. For example, the description of the test approach in the theme park scenario would be a curious topic to discuss with urban planners. Are there some transferable approaches? Would a public transport company benefit from this?

These two ash-tray found in Geneva and Lausanne are two impressive examples of an object affordances:

Why do I blog this? This is utterly curious from a design perspective. the artifacts designed to received trashed objects looks like the object itself. A sort of recursive affordance to some extent. What does that mean? It’s actually not that recursive and the second example if maybe more self-explanatory since the two different garbages are next to each other. Besides, the first one has a little hole that only allow to receive small things like cigarettes.

There is a great interview of Steve Portigal in influx. Some excerpts I found relevant:

“A great design strategist (…) someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what’s going on around them and they’re good at listening to people. And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book “Accelerando”, describes the profession of a “meme broker” and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this. Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy.
(…)
The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed.“

Why do I blog this? some good insights here that rings a bell with personal thoughts, especially concerning the messiness of reality and the need to uncover quirks, peculiars situations, extreme users as well as exceptions.

Read the english translation of an interesting article about Experientia from “The Marker. The description of their design work process, by Jan-Christoph Zoels is interesting:

““We spend a lot of time thinking about future trends, about the enjoyment of the user, about his current AND future needs, about the obstacles to usability and how design can eliminate those. Usually, designers focus on their process of creation. We get out inspiration from the issues the end-user faces.”

We produce a prototype relatively quickly, to allow us to test and assess ideas, and to check on potential profitability. We’re very fast and interactive. This is unique in this market.”

Usually, the process of design starts with a thousand ideas drained and ends with the one product on the market. R&D departments or academia narrow down the one thousand ideas into a hundred business opportunities. Traditionally, they also eventually reduce them to five that then get developed and tested before one is put on the market. We believe that if you can prototype these ideas quickly and cheaply and test them with potential consumers, it will be much easier to make a decision on how to best move forward. Our added value is that we offer 60%-80% certainty that the final product will indeed sell, because it is already based on experience with the consumers.”“

The articles goes on with examples of their current projects (and insights they rely on for their projects in mobile services for instance).
Why do I blog this? pure curiosity towards others’ process.

In “Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control “, Mark Gross and Michael Eisenberg describes the tension between “ease of use” and user empowerment” that is at stake in kids artifact design. Starting from an interesting quote from physicist and science writer
Jeremy Bernstein, they how the design of toys (and the incorporation of technology in objects) raises the same set of issue. Here’s the quote from Bernstein that I quite like:

“Most of us, myself included, are increasingly surrounded by objects that we use daily but whose workings are a total mystery to us. This thought struck me forcibly about a year ago. One day, for reasons I can no longer reconstruct, I was looking around my apartment when it suddenly occurred to me that it was full of objects I did not understand. A brief catalogue included my color television set, a battery-operated alarm watch, an electronic chess-playing machine, and a curious fountain pen that tells the time. Here I am, I thought, a scientist surrounded by domestic artifacts whose workings I don’t understand.

The whole discussion, exemplified by toy project is about how technology seems like magic when we do not understand how it works. The authors then argue for intelligibility of use.

Why do I blog this? this discussion is quite common in design as it deals with issues such as transparency and glass/black box model of technologies.

Mark D. Gross, Michael Eisenberg, “Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control,” digitel, pp. 25-32, The First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (DIGITEL’07), 2007

Reading “Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne was quite interesting as it echoed with some other readings/feelings/discussions. Although the book is maybe more suited to a designer audience (format/references), it’s a must read for people involved in HCI or innovation/foresight. Some excerpts I found relevant to my work:

“… the Human Factors community who have developed a view of the electronic object, derived from computer science and cognitive psychology, that is extremely influential in the computer industry, for example Donald Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things.
A serious problem with the Human Factors approach though, in relation to this project is its uncritical acceptance of (…) the ideological legitimation of technology: “All problems whether of nature, human nature, or culture are seen as ‘technical’ problems capable of rational solution through the accumulation of objective knowledge, in the form of neutral or value-free observations and correlations…” (B. Waites)
(…)
The result, as the computer industry merges with other industries, is that the optimisation of the psychological fit between people and electronic technology, for which the industry strives, is spreading beyond the work environment to areas such as the home which have so far acted as a counterpoint to the harsh functionality of the workplace. When used in the home to mediate social relations, the conceptual models of efficient communication embodied in office equipment leave little room for the nuances and quirks on which communication outside the workplace relies so heavily.
(…)
design is always ideological. User-friendlyness helps conceal this fact. The values and ideas about life embodied in designed objects are not natural, objective or fixed, but man-made, artificial, and muteable
(…)
Current design approaches aim to optimize the experience of using an object, with the effect of constraining our experience to the prosaic (…) Although transparency might improve efficiency and performance, it limits the potential richness of our engagement with the emerging electronic environment and encourages unthinking assimilation of the ideologies embedded in electronic objects”“

And this is from 1999, it definitely rings a bell as every discussion I have about entertainment, city of the future, mobile communication are often hijacked by people who want “city inhabitant to be effective” or “home cooking system to rely on maximum reliability and allow to communicate information in real time”. So where does this research about the “post-optimal object” can be achieved? The conclusion offers a good summary:

“one result of this research is a toolbox of concepts and ideas for developing and communicating design proposals that explore fundamental issues about how we live amongst electronic objects. The most important elements of this approach are: going beyond optimisation to explore critical and aesthetic roles for electronic products; using estrangements to open the space between people and electronic products to discussion and criticism; designing alternative functions to draw attention to legal, cultural and social rules; exploiting the unique narrative possibilities offered by electronic products; raising awareness of the electromagnetic qualities of our environment; and developing forms of engagement that avoid being didactic and utopian“

Why do I blog this? Lots of interesting material there, especially the vocabulary (”user-unfriendlyness”, “inhuman factors”, “post-optimal object”), the richness of example and the aims. Certainly food for thoughts about critical design that I need to integrate in my work and connect to foresight research.

In a tiny street of Bern, Switzerland, I stumbled across that machine yesterday:

Why do I blog this? As it says in german, it’s a “weather station” with time, temperature, pression, etc. Beyond the interface that I find amazingly retro-like, I find intriguing to have this sort of device on the street. It’s actually an example of an ubiquitous computing device (so to say) that would make explicit invisible/implicit phenomena (such as temperature) to city dwellers. That machine is actually translating information about the state of the world to passers-by.

Of course, weather station comes from a long tradition (especially in Switzerland), with analog devices such as thermometers or manometers. Perhaps the oldest analog device would be the weathervane. I was thinking about this a sort of metaphor of information-pull device. Which is obviously opposed to information-push device (to which the ultimate stereotype would be the swiss cuckoo-clock as Frederic Kaplan stated in a talk I attended last week).

It’s only two metaphors for how information can flow from source to “users”: (a) Information Pull, where a user takes (or is given) the initiative to get it, (b) Information Push, where a supplier takes (or is given) the initiative to deliver it. It might be a bit limitative, what are the options in between? What can we learn from weathervane or cuckoo clock behavior? Is there any manual about designing cuckoo clock or weathervane?

Some random facts about how ebooks might be relevant for the Nintendo DS:

According to this press release:

“Darren Reid, author of the best selling Fantasy/Science Fictionfusion novel The Lord of Darkness and Shadow: The Chronicles of the Shadow Book One, today announces the release of a free ebooklibrary for Nintendo Wii, DS and Sony PS3. The free ebook librarycontains a collection of short stories, novels and novellas whichhave been optimized for use with the browsers in the Nintendo Wii and DS. “

An Francis Bonnin. It also seems that a french company is heading into that direction.

Notes from the person who described it:

“Actually reading the comic on my DS was a pleasent experience. With all of the display options, I had little-to-no trouble finding one that suited me. Everything worked as advertised, and I was enjoying an issue of The Books of Magic on my DS in no time. As expected, there’s a loss in “the experience,” due to the 256×192 resolution. Using anything that wasn’t the Dual Screen mode did not show enough of the page for me. Despite the limited screen space, text was legible, and the images appeared just as nicely as on the original pages.“

Further away, Toshiba released an interesting DS-like e-book, using the same affordance:

Why do I blog this? gathering some thoughts about the topic for a client project (not really a research project). As shown in this blogpost, some projects about using the DS as a way to convey textual content are starting off.

Some limits to have ebooks on the Nintendo DS:
- how to get the content: since Nintendo is less an less happy with homebrew developments/flash cards, what should be the best medium to convey texts? cartridges? download through the Internets/wifi?
- screen size and resolution are peculiar, what sort of content would be appropriate?
- the DS has incredible wifi capabilities (mostly in terms of practices and how people gather to play together), what would that mean for ebook applications? There might be great opportunities to design innovative applications based on ebook reading/educational applications.
- Same with annotation capabilities with the pen
- …

The IHT reports on a discussion about design at the WEF last week in Davos. It lists some of the themes of interest there:

“Alice Rawsthorn: designers will devote more time and energy to the underprivileged majority, the 90 percent of the world’s population who can’t afford basic products and services. (…) Another theme was dematerialization. Rather than creating new things, designers will also strive to make existing products disappear, often by integrating them into digital devices (…) guiltless consumption. At a time when none of us can ignore the environmental and ethical consequences of the things we buy, an essential element of “good design” is feeling free from guilt about how they were designed, made, sold and will eventually be disposed of.

Paola Antonelli: 3D printing, the extraordinarily precise rapid manufacturing processes now being developed by companies like Materialise in Belgium. (…) yearning for privacy - or Existenzmaximum, as she calls it - will be an increasingly important issue for designers in the future. (…) the potential for design to translate advances in science and technology into things we need or want. Recent developments in bioengineering and the cognitive sciences have tremendous potential, but need to be applied intelligently

Hilary Cottam: “design as a political force - the ways in which a design approach has real power to address the big social issues of our time.” She advocated using design to encourage people to change their behavior. (…) to develop new ways of tackling social problems through mass collaboration (…) the role of design in policy making, arguing that designers are better equipped than politicians to understand the ambiguities and contradictions of daily life.

John Maeda: the moral responsibility of designers. He stressed the importance of transparency in design, and of extending the participatory “open source” development process now popular in software design to other sector (…) simplicity, and its importance at a time when our lives are increasingly complicated, often unnecessarily so (…) the importance of appreciating the beauty of the everyday objects and places that are often taken for granted.

Why do I blog this some interesting trends and insight spotted there, although very general. It sorts of show where the emphasis is located in this crowd (no one mentioned critical design?).

Just discovered this new “jugadu” term reading this article:

“‘jugad’-street slang for the distinctly Indian ability to find a way around the system. And in this case, as ironies go, the origin of the word that has come to define the can-do attitude of an entire country lies in a makeshift vehicle popular in rural India.

Literally, ‘jugad’ is the colloquial name for water pump sets and a wooden cart miraculously assembled by any local carpenter into a mode of transportation that runs on diesel fuel. The vehicles are not recognised as ‘cars’ by the official transport authorities and so escape paying road tax. They are said to manage 40 km per hour and cost about Rs 40,000 to manufacture. No wonder then that ‘jugadu’ - a word that may have once had the hint of vice - has today come to be the ultimate compliment for the ingenuity of the ordinary Indian.

Basically, the word means finding an unconventional solution to a conventional problem. Whether it is using washing machines to churn butter, spreading out stacks of rice and hay on highways for some natural threshing by passing tracks, drawing electricity from overhead wires or magically converting the rim of a cycle wheel into a homespun dish antenna, it’s all about never taking no for an answer.“

Why do I blog this? yet another exemplification of people’s creativity that has profound design implications. I also find intriguing the sounds of that term, especially when you think about this other practice called “chindogu“.

Different approaches have been developed under the “seamful design” term. Chalmers, McColl and Bell indeed proposes to reveal seams and technology limites to empower users. In a paper from Eurowearable in 2005, they give an example: “By revealing such seams, users can better understand when and where to use digital resources such as network connectivity—and when not to—as they go about their work and use our systems in their ways“.

A common example is the one of cell phone reception bars that allows people to adjust their behavior (one bar = SMS, 3-4 bars = voice communication, 1-2 bars = assumptions that the communication quality would be bad).

But what does those reception bars actually mean? I cannot remember how I ran across this Metafilter discussion about “this topic. Some excerpts:

“They don’t mean much of anything, it turns out.

I don’t know what they’re displaying for GSM, but probably what they’re displaying is the signal strength. For CDMA (which is what I know about) that’s what they display, but in CDMA the signal strength is highly deceptive because it doesn’t inform you of what the noise floor is.

The technical term is “EC/I0″ (pronounced “ee-see-over-eye-naught”) and it refers to the amount of the signal which is usable. In CDMA you can have strong signal (4 bars) and lousy EC/I0 and not be able to carry a call, and you can have low signal (zero bars) and excellent EC/I0 and carry a call fine.
(…)
Even worse… there is no industry standard for what “one bar” or “two bars” means. None. Everyone just sort of sets some thresholds, and even from the same manufacturer it can change from phone model to phone model.
(…)
The GSM standard does not specify the meaning of the signal bars on your handset (correctly known as the “signal quality estimate”). Each manufacturer uses their own formula to work out how many bars you see. This varies not only between phone makers, but also between models, and between firmware versions of the same model. In short, you can’t compare phones using signal bars. You *can* - to a limited extent - compare the signal strength in different locations using the same phone, but even that isn’t reliable.“

Why do I blog this? this is an interesting example of how seamful design is hard to put in place. However, it would be intriguing to have behavioral adjustments (such as the one we often see with reception bars) even with reception bars that do not mean anything. As if the design itself was more important that the meaning of the information represented.

Recently read L’Age du Plip by Bruno Jacomy, a french book about stories concerning the evolution of techniques. The book haven’t been translated in english but there are some interesting aspects I wanted to report here. Using different examples of techniques, the author describes different rules of technical innovations

The first example is about the “plip”, the remote keyless system to access automobiles. One of these device, invented by Paul Lipschutz received the name “plip”. Jacomy finds interesting to describe “the fact that there is a mutual coexistence in drivers’ pockets, of 2 distinct objects with the same function” (to open up doors and start off the engine). According to him, it shows that we’re in a transitory phase with: the physical key made of metal with weird shapes and the “plip”, that small box full of electronics. He also take two other examples a different transitory phase from sailing ships to steam ships (with a co-existence of both steam engines and sails) or the use of crank to start engines in old cars. In these cases, it took 50 years for the innovation (steam instead of sail, removal of the crank) to be fully deployed.

The second case study he observes is the difference between cook handles depending on their use of gas or electricity. To be started gas handles need to be turned counter-clockwise (to the left) and electric handles do not have standards, and generally need to be turned clockwise (to the right). The author shows that this is caused by the two different “cultures” behind the design of such instruments. Gas are fluids, and as every other liquids, one open handles by turning it to the left whereas electricity comes from a different culture in which things has been derived from devices employed to take measures (such as voltmeter). The modifications of voltage for example was measured by a small increase that would go clockwise (because of the resemblance of the measuring device and a clock). Then, when people had to design electrical appliances, they figured out that it would be better if an increase was translated by a clockwise movement. Things get complicated when the interface that evolved from two different culture can be found in the same cooking device (gas and electricity). Jacomy uses this as a second law in which he shows that the confluence between two techniques will have three phases: the two ignore themselves, then they coexist, then one win over the other.

We’re in the midst of such a situation with the examples below: a telephone, a computer keyboard and… a lovely-but-dusty minitel.

This has been caused by two different technical cultures: calculators (started with Felt and Tarrant’s Comptometer) and telephone keypad. The minitel is the most interesting because it’s a sort-of computer designed with the phone interface culture. The author also mentions how ATM use both interface.

Why do I blog this? few notes and thoughts about that book (which have more to offer!). I find interesting this timescale dimension that also give some interesting elements to consider in terms of foresight issues and the evolution of artifacts. Moreover, the notion of “design culture” who set standards is also important, especially when things start to mix because of the convergence between manufactures objects. Surely material and food for thoughts for a near future laboratory pamphlet.

Toilet ergonomics is always intriguing as attested by this picture taken from the french TGV. Using the tap water and the hand dryer require to pass your hands close to a sensors, as indicated by the 2 stickers. However:
- the depiction in red of radiowave detection is perhaps clear enough for someone used to live with sensor-based device all over the place but not for everybody.
- the exact location of the sensor is wrongly depicted as it is not necessarily on the left of the tap/dryer.

Why do I blog this? As we already discussed here, the representation of sensor-based interactions is always more complex than expected by the engineers who designed them. Next time, you’re in such train try to spot if the tap has been used (see traces of water).