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).

Currently in Aix-en-Provence, at the School of Art where I’ve given a talk yesterday about tangible interfaces (a rerun from my GDC2007 presentation). The talk was part of a workshop called “Workshop Wiimote Hacking. The whole thing was about how to hack the Nintendo Wiimote and turn it into a tool that artists can employ. Students are involved in the process of adding new sensors as well as defining new sorts of usage. Thanks France Cadet for the invitation and Douglas for having taken time to discuss.

The discussion after the presentation revolved around:
- How the wiimote might have the potential to become a sort of standard in the living room as the controller. I personally don’t predict anything about this. However from current observations of practices, I do think that the Wii is much more than video game device and play an interesting role of multimedia platform in the living room (with photos, usage of personalized mii). In addition, the presence of very focused applications such as wii questions turns it into a platform where facebook-like small application can be played by the family.
- Why the game design ideas we have so far on the Wii are so conservative… which turned into why the video game industry is so conservative or how the whole economic system is so controlled by the marketing crowd that it’s difficult to go beyond usage of the wiimote as sword/steering-wheel/magic wand. This is a sort of over-statement but it’s actually close to the reality.
- How this work about tangible interfaces relate to my other work about mobile and pervasive gaming? we discussed the notion of granularity and how complex the game system is when the dimensions reach the city level. Much more than just gesturing in one’s own living room, using the city as a game field is complex for lots of reasons (technical, infrastructural, difficulty to have a continuous experience), etc.

Fortunately, there was also an exhibit about games as medium for artists to create and tweak digital worlds. Called gamerz02, there was a bunch of very curious projects.

The one that attracted my attention was Patch&KO (Antonin Fourneau and Manuel Braun): instead of using a joystick people can play Street Fighter 2 using a pachinko interface. In a sense, the player’s ability to control the character is disrupted by the semi-random movement of the metal balls. As the designers state, the player has to accept a loss of control. Slightly related was this Tictactoe played by robotic arms I blogged about the other day. In this case, what was explored was that the Tic Tac Toe is a curious game in which the only way to win is to rely on the opponent’s fatigue and loose of sight in the game. In the context of two mechanical arms played by a computer, the surest way to win is to avoid playing. Finally, I was also interested by Tchouri by Pascal Silondi, a sort of knife-based interface much more intriguing than always-seen magic wands. Some of the pieces there were maybe slightly easy-going and naive but the whole things made sense and I found find fruitful to make game designers more aware of such work, perhaps some ideas about a workshop/seminar.

One of the most interesting projects I’ve seen lately is “the bubbles of radio” by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always been intrigued by visualizing electromagnetic fields as shown by the work of Dunne+Rabby in “Hertzian Tales.

As Timo describes on the Touch weblog:

“Using inspiration from richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history, Ingeborg arrived at the concept of an encyclopeadia of radio waves that contains a selection of fictional radio ‘species’. Armed with a well researched and advanced knowledge of the use, application and technicalities of each radio technology she created fictional visualisations of the ways in which radio waves inhabit space. These are creative expressions based as much on personal creativity as on technical or scientific data like range and signal strength. Six contemporary radio technologies were visualised: Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi and Zigbee.
(…)
These visualisations are not intended to be technically accurate or to offer actionable information. Instead they provide a playful cue to reflect and consider radio as something tangible and physical to be experienced by other senses, not just through a screen.“

The visualizations are available as a poster here (.pdf) and slides from the final presentation of the projects are there. The book they published seems to be a must have: it’s a ‘fake’ encyclopedia of electromagnetic fields, with a main focus on wireless communication.

So why is that important to visualize these elements? As she describes in her report:

“There are many opportunities for where and what these patterns can be applied to. (…) They could be printed on fabric, for clothes and accessories, from handbags, umbrellas, to coats, linings and even underwear. They could be applied to domestic objects that are used near electromagnetic fields; apron for the microwave, cloth for the TV or telephone table, curtains for the windows facing the neares mobile communication antenna, to mention a few.“

Why do I blog this? personal interest towards the topic. Although the press captured that project as “artist work to visualize bluetooth and wifi“, I am pretty sure there is really more to draw out of this work. For example, I would be curious to see how people are aware of these airwaves and how they have a representation of them: how do we represent ourselves the airwaves of cell-phones or microwave-oven. And maybe in a second phase to use this a material to talk with people about the existence and the shape of electromagnetic fields (it would require a less barbarian vocabulary though).

Their usefulness is indeed tough to describe (it’s more an intuition) but my impression is that making such things visual is an important first step before discussing them (as we human being are very visual-oriented).

In the NYT piece “The Afterlife of Cellphones“, Jon Mooallem yesterday wrote about what happened to cell phones after they’re discarded. Most of the article deals with methods for recycling and e-waste but the end of it address interesting design concerns of electronic/manufactured objects as it stress how “our affection for many high-tech objects is tied exclusively to their newness. Some excerpts I found pertinent:

“There is no heaven for cellphones. Wherever they go, it seems that something, somewhere, to some extent always ends up being damaged or depleted

“The mobile phone occupies a kind of glossy, scratch-free world,” he says. Whereas a pair of jeans gains character over time, a phone does no such thing. “As soon you purchase it, you can only watch it migrating further away from what it is you want — a glossy, scratch- free object.” You might leave the plastic film over the display for a few days, just so you can take it off later and “give yourself a second honeymoon with the phone,” he says. But ultimately everything that first attracted you to it only deteriorates. You start looking at it differently. “It’s made of some kind of sparkle-finished polymer and it’s got some decent curves on it, but so what? The intimacy comes
more from the fact that, within that hand-held piece of plastic, exists your whole world” — your friends’ phone numbers, your digital pictures, your music — and that stuff can be easily transferred to a new one. So you “fall out of love” with the phone, Chapman says.“

Why do I blog this? pure personal interest in this discussion about the rush-for-new-objects as well as the role of age on objects. I am personally skeptical about this phenomenon, in the long run.

The idea of “new interaction partners” that we develop at the near future laboratory more and more echoes with projects here and there. For instance, Florent Deloison has an intriguing project about playing PONG with a fish (in french).

The system is based on mormyrophone, a device designed by biology researcher Christian Graff, able to detect and translate as image and sounds the electric discharges produced by a fish.

This was part of workshop at the Art School in Aix en Provence, France. Other students developed projects about allowing the fish to send e-mails or using the fish as THE interface.

Why do I blog this? reviewing some animal-based interactions that have I seen popping up lately is always refreshing. Although this looks a bit weird and pointless, I believe there is a great deal to explore in this “new interaction partner” vector.

Different ways to protect one’s source of electricity:

Well covered in a french train:

With duct tape at the airport in Brussels:

Why do I blog this? in a time where we have our pockets full of mobile devices that require electricity, it’s always an issue to find a power plug. This is even more important when you hang out in Marc Augé’s “non-places”. Most of time, it’s in these areas that owners of the infrastructures are trying to design different ways to prevent you from accessing it. Even when there are still plugs for vacuum cleaners or christmas trees, there are always some possibilities to show you that you’re not welcome to steal a bit of volts.

Last week I had two interesting encounters with gestural interactions. The first one was in the super-fancy double decker train that goes from Geneva to ZanktGallen/Zurich. In that train, there is a sensor to open up the doors between wagons. People, if they’re slow or if they don’t know that there’s a sensor generally walk in, wait a bit and then come in as the door opens up when the sensor detect the presence of a body. But usually, commuters know that they can wave their hand next to the sensor as I did here (very weirdly with the left hand):

In other trains, the sensor is situated on the floor. Standing next to this door during the whole trip to Zürich was a fantastic opportunity to observe the range of behavior in that kind of situation. I did not count or ran precise analysis but I tried to categorize these behavior in a sort of ludicrous way:
- old people clueless about the sensor presence but slow enough to see the door opened when they approach it
- people who knows that there’s a sensor, so they wait and go through the door
- commuters well-versed into swiss train sensors who wave their arm
- people in the rush who almost run and bump into the door because the sensor did not have time to detect the body
- commuters who know how the sensor works, wave the arm and fail to open it (for some reason… because technology sucks), so step back and try again 1 or 2 times. A variant is when you have people then looking at the sensor, sometimes talking to it.
- one person even try to open the door manually but he failed because there is no clear handle (nor affordance) to do so. He the looked at me and sighted.

Quite an interesting list and I am sure there can be other curious use case as I haven’t seen kids or people with loads of luggage. The underlying variables here are the following: the location of the sensor, its visibility and affordance to the user as well as the delay between body detection and opening of the door. It was obvious that all of them were problematic.

The second encounter was in Brussels, in an hotel loo, there was a sensor that detect a body presence to switch on/off the light. What happened inevitably is that the light went off and I found myself waving my arms here and there… eventually above my head… because I did not know where was the sensor. What happens? Who tuned the sensor? How did they tune that bloody sensor? Did they run user studies about how people spend time in bathrooms? In any case, what happened is that they created a sort of norm in that building, that tell people how long they must or must not stay there. The whole experience then becomes weird although I can adapt and find funny to wave my arm around.

Why do I blog this? there are two interesting aspects here: the mix of gestural sensing and automation. All of this is based on the assumption that the best way to interact with technology is to make things more naturals, more physical by removing any transducers between people and artifacts. No buttons, no switches to open doors or switch lights on. In a sense there is still an interface, that is gestural but as it is no self-revealing, people have troubles knowing what to do. And you have, on top of that, the clumsy automation issue: automation indeed create new operational complexities as shown by Wood.

On that topic, see also Fabien’s experience as well as Fabio Sergio’s story. Clive Grinyer has good thoughts about it too.

Was in Grenoble yesterday, attending an event called “Design Matters organized by the big nanotechnology operation they have there as well as several other partners. The gig was about design in the context of industrial innovation: “Is it possible to see designs as fundamental processes developed by a multi-partner, multi-disciplinary innovation hub which will allow us to combine the essential elements of research, analysis, conception, creation and production to develop highly valuable technological products?“. Speakers ranged from philosopher (Bernard Stiegler), UX specialist (Adam Greenfield), design (the director of a french design school, Federico Casalegno and a designer from Alcatel) and design/branding (SEB). Some of the elements I found interesting are summarized below.

Bernard Stiegler gave an inspiring talk about the evolution of techniques (externalization as described by Lerhoi-Gourhan) that lead to technosciences. He showed how the role of design evolved over time and how we reached a situation in which people/structures who build/design technologies are separated from users, now called “consumers”. He pointed how today there’s a “desire crisis”, a sort of exhaustion of desire in which the individual is disaffected. His claim is the techniques used to create “consumer behavior” amount to the destruction of psychic and collective individuation. According to him, technoscience developments became opaque and distabilize biological, physiological and geographical systems. For the individual, it’s a loss of intelligibility in the system as well as a loss of participation. He then advocated for more open and distributed design process in which people can participate. To some extent, Stiegler justifies bottom-up innovation by a psychological impetus necessary for our society to go beyond today’s desire exhaustion.

Federico Casalegno presented the eLense project and the Landmark interactive bus stop (in which my colleagues Enrico Costanza and Mirja Leinss participated). Federico showed their design approach at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, exemplifying today’s design methods there.

Attending Adam’s “Everyware” talk for the 4 of 5th time is always interesting. Especially to see how things eveolved over time. For example, I was struck by his new slides about “what does it suggest that the same presentation was illustrated last year with prototypes is now exemplified with existing products“. His addition of Deleuze work (see Postscript on the Societies of Control) is also strikingly relevant. It was important also to see what Stiegler had to say about Adam’s work, as he pointed our the importance of going beyond resistance (which reminds of “nostalgia is for suckers” that Adam threw at LIFT Korea) to participate and invent.

After this very high level discussion, a former designer at Alcatel described the role of a prudct designer according to him. Although what he presented was very conventional to me, it was interesting to see the designers’ stance in these big french operations. He claimed how design was blurry, intangible and “difficult to measure” in this context, showing example of meetings in which the person with the vaccum cleaner in the corridor is asked if she preferred “product A” or “product B” or how the CEO needs to get back the products at home and ask his wife about it. I quote that example because I was kind of astonished by the gender assumptions there, as if I had been swamped background in time. I also found curious the sort of design he presented as he never mentioned “critical design” or less mechanistic and utilitarian approach.

Finally, the manager of branding at SEB described the relationship between branding and product design. What was very inspiring there was his description of the failures of some products who wanted to jump in a certain bandwagon (like… designing ironing devices in an “apple-like” way with translucid material), forgotting to match the brand of the product. He also describes some of their process based on “affordance test” of pans, coffee-machine and toasters: how they ask 100 persons (who are presented the product) to use it, how they would hold it, use X and Y functionalities. In a sense, what he described what very close to usability testing in which people begins to explore freely the usage of a physical artifact.

Why do I blog this? although a bit loosely coupled at first, the program was very interesting in the sense that it showed the sort of messiness of approaches and perspectives, especially in the context of France. Good meetings there as well.

Seen in Grenoble today:

“no wifi”… as if it was important to indicate that this area is not covered? It’s not the case here, if you read the lines under that sign. Sometimes, 802.11b cannot be employed… some context prevent people from making it available and sometimes it’s even worse: you’re required to deactivate your wifi-enabled devices!

Also, think about the fact that I’ve seen this sign in France, and there were not french translation at all around it.

In this post, I mentioned this bike rental service called velo’v in Lyon (Paris has velib, Brussels has cyclocity, etc.). They’re managed by JCDecaux and you can read Re*Move for an analysis of this. What is interesting is to observe the side practices around these bikes. Two examples:

Look how here the saddle is rotated, which is a trick used by people to show that the bike does not work well (or a part is broken):

In the second example, a part of the bike has been painted in pink by ACTUP activitists (in paris they covered saddle with pink tissue):

Why do I blog this? going through some pictures I’ve taken recently, look at emerging patterns, observe what that means for urban computing. In these cases, it’s the “bottom-up innovation” aspect that I find intriguing and how the infrastructure that has been put in place by JCDecaux is apprehended, the creativity around it and what this means to rethink these artifacts in the city of the near future.

Certainly, material for a talk concerning “bottom-up innovation and urban computing”

Street encounter in Lyon: a phone booth turned into an aquarium (by Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino), as part of the Lyon Light Festival:

As the designers express it:

“With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically coloured fish; an invitation to escape and travel.“

Why do I blog this? an interesting way to explore how artifacts from the 20th century can be turned into other sorts of objects in the city of the near future.

Going through the EPIC 2007 proceedings, I ran across this interesting paper entitled “Ethnography as Design Provocation” by Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus. The paper starts off my explaining how the use of ethnography in technology development has been limited to data collection, which led to isolate the researchers from design (which is R.J. Anderson’s point) and a limit to the way practice and technology can evolve together (Paul Dourish’s point). The authors advocate for another approach in which ethnography can “provoke new perspectives in a design organisation”.

They describe this stance through case studies of “design encounters” (i.e. workshops) showing how ethnography could be “shared material”, “embodied in design” and a way to frame “user engagement”. The conclusion they draw are also interesting:

“ Firstly, to engage the potential of ethnography to provoke organisations to rethink their understandings of problems and solutions, the textual form may not be adequate. Neither are insight bullet points, as they submit to the logics of rational argumentation that hardly provokes questioning and engagement. Instead, we find it paramount to develop ways of engaging the organisation in sense-making through the use of visual and physical ethnographic material.

Secondly, the ethnographic theory building, though crucial to design, cannot progress independently of the prevailing conceptions of (work) practices ‘out there’ in the organisations – and these may not become clear to us until we confront the organisation with our material. Better sooner than later.

Thirdly, to move collaboration beyond requirements talk among the design team, organisation and participants, needs well-crafted ethnographic material to frame the encounters to focus on fundamental issues and perceptions.“

Why do I blog this? interesting reflections about methodologies, a good follow-up to this other post.

Found this paragraph in Bill Buxton’s book “Sketching User Experiences“:

“People on a design team must be as happy to be wrong as right. If their ideas hold up under strong (but fair) criticism, then great, they can proceed with confidence. If their ideas are rejected with good rationale, then they have learned something. A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right.“

Why do I blog this? I found quite interesting how this quote shows how design is compromise, it’s also something I should add up to the post

Some weird cards that I use for [absurd] persona discussion. Each of this very nice portrait has on the other side: its name, job and description.
Exercise for today: Try to design for “Teddy” an officer of the US navy (and try to spot him on these cards).