Innovation vs. Invention by Bill Buxton is short but really full of great insights that sums up lots of interesting ideas about innovation.

First about the innovation process:

“the difference between ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’. The closer one gets to Route 128 in Boston and Silicon Valley, the more it seems that people confuse the two. Too often the obsession is with ‘inventing’ something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative understanding of what is already known. Too often ,the obsession is with ‘inventing’something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative.
(…)
The key thing to note is that the average time from invention to market was 20-plus years. So much for fast moving tech sector! Which brings us to one of the most insightful quotes that I have encountered, from
William Gibson: “The future is already here. It is just not uniformly distributed.” Here is the business lesson: innovation is far more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value to ‘gold’ than it is
about alchemy. Rather than focusing on the invention of the ‘brand new’, one might better strive for creative insights on how to combine, develop and leverage“

Then about design:

“So now we come to the big debate: who is a designer, and who should be a designer? Don Norman.It has an epilogue entitled, “We Are All Designers”. To this I say, “Nonsense!”
(…)
it was not enough to simply have great ideas.If you wanted the ideas to come to fruition,you had to spend as much time directing your innovation and creativity to fostering a culture of creativity and a receptiveness to innovation within the company, as you spend on the ideas themselves. “

Why do I blog this? preparing a course for tomorrow about foresight and innovation in a french design school.

Having the Euro soccer cup in Switzerland (and Austria) is interesting as lots of people are cruising around on the streets. Hence, lots of interesting practices or signs of people’s practices occurs. Some excerpts from the last few days:

Paper notes at a street corner to give friends an update about the new whereabouts (it says “We’re at café pessoa, 30 meters ahead in Dassier [street]”:

The hospitality of some places however reach certain limits, as “tents are not umbrella” sign attest from the need to buy an umbrella when it rains instead of staying around:

The inherent contradictions of signs in a city not very well-accustomed to helps its tourists (Geneva):

BUT, a fruitful attempt to help soccer-fans takes the form of a pavement map; nicely employed in the picture below. The elegant map-on-the-ground solution is efficient for people who walk and ride bike, as it gives information in context and also allows congregation around the signs to find the stadium:

And, of course, when it comes to computer-based real-time street information, failure and glitches are never very far:

The presence of other cultures, and their intricate relationships with their host country. In this case it’s Spain and Switzerland: some only put their spanish flag but most of the flag we see are grouped with both a swiss and spanish flag (you can replace Spain with Portugal, Italy, Turkey and France in the sentence before):

Why do I blog this? what a nice context to observe cultural issues and whatever can be related to human behavior regarding mobility and techniques/technologies/organizational solutions for recurring problems.

(Via Small Surfaces), this “Do humans really need location based services?” is interesting at it covers some of the questions I am wondering about when it comes to the potential of LBS. An excerpt I found intriguing:

“Even though I am confident that there will certainly be significant growth in some areas (i.e. vehicle tracking, in-car traffic information) I doubt that someday everyone will be using Google’s “Search nearby” feature to find the next ATM, restaurant or supermarket.

Even though mobility and travel has increased tremendously, the majority of people still roam in just a few locations and in general they do not move far from home. Vacations and business travel are exceptions - the percentage of time individuals spend in locations they don’t know is very small.
(…)
I strongly believe that there will be a market for location based services. Nevertheless I think one has to shift focus from the technical possibilities that GPS-enabled, connected mobile devices potentially offer. The key is to understand the potential users of these location-based services in order to be able to find the next “location-based killer app”.“

What I find intriguing here is the coupling of the need for LBS and the recent results about people’s mobility showed in the last issue of Nature. It seems indeed that apart from navigational LBS (in-car GPS), other applications (such as location-based annotations and friend finders) are failing to find a user base.

Why do I blog this? interesting elements to be added to my list of LBS issues that I presented at O’Reilly ETech 2008 (see my slides on Slideshare). Although there are more and more “yet another LBS” projects recently, i am also noticing that people increasingly start to raise eye-brows about it (see for example Joe MacCarthy’s blogpost about meetro) 2007 was about the delusion of the non-satNAV LBS pioneers and 2008 start to get some interesting criticisms and afterthoughts about LBS.

Interestingly, one of the comment of this blogpost is about the fact that “the title is intriguing as it suggests that there might be someone else (machines, m2m, the web of things) who will make use of LBS more than we will do (location-based APIs?)“. As it surely connects with 2006 discussions about blogjects or the idea of “new interaction partners” (the presence of pets in the internet of things).

In the CatchBob! project, the location-based game I used for my PhD research, players often reported the encounter with other persons puzzled by the presence of running people with TabletPCs. The general reaction of passers-by seemed to range between ignoring the game to asking players about how to participate in trials. However, the physical environment is an overlap of lots of activities carried out by different groups and individuals, which can be conflicting. In one trial, two players tried to visit one of the campus library and the janitor forbid them to enter the building carrying out the game TabletPCs. This kind of phenomenon unfortunately undermines the engagement of players in the game, turning the experience into something less fun to achieve.

This problem has been investigated by researchers, as shown by this warning quote from one of the deliverable from the European iPerg project entitled “Designing Pervasive Games“:

“Pervasive games introduce an important problem: when a game is expanded, the bystanders do not always have the means to distinguish game events from the non-game events. However, regardless of whether they know or don’t know about the game, they perhaps should have a choice pertaining the mode of attendance, i.e., they should be given chance to play, or ignore the game and appreciate it as an art artefact, or view it as a morastatement. Otherwise, the game is can lead to ethical and practical problems.
(…)
Whether unaware or aware of an ongoing game, bystanders have no intention or opportunity to participate in it or at least no opportunity to do so. Here, we probably find the most challenging effects of social expansion. Socially unexpanded games are typically completely insulated from bystanders: they are not affected by the game (even if aware of it) and they have no influence over the game.“

Why do i blog this? The presence of bystanders in some pervasive games or ARG is interesting as it shows how the notion of “user” in ubiquitous computing is flawed. Unlike face-to-face (so to say) interactions with a desktop computer, ubicomp/pervasive computing/internet of things can lead to situations where people experience non-intentional participation in services/events they did not want to be engaged in.

If pervasive games can take this into account and not affect people’ life, other ubicomp applications can be less careful about it. What am I thinking about? perhaps applications which tracks individuals and propose them services without any consent form the user (to be tracked or to receive services s/he does not want to receive).

Last thursday/friday, I was in Brittany for an seminar called “Imagine 2015″, the annual gathering of companies from the Media and Network companies from there (France Telecom/Orange, Alcatel-Lucent, Thomson, Philips, etc.). The point of such event is to discuss the future of networks and what it means for these organizations in terms of foresight, change and (of course) possible new products/services. I was invited as an expert (a “witness” as they call it) to present various things related to my work (user experience research results, foresight issues that I find interesting and work practices related to the use of digital tools). Thanks for Jean-Noel and Christiane for the invitation.

Instead of giving a summary of the event, I am more interested here in the process and how people answers the questions we addressed. The starting points were (sort-of): “according to you what interesting thing will we see from now to 2015?” and since they are focused on networks: “what does network allow? what are the implications of networks?”

Given that I participate in other seminars in the same vein (some pretty focused on a clear goal, like Lyon 2013, some other more speculative such as Cinum), I always find relevant to observe what are the arguments employed by the experts (and the crowd) to answers foresight questions (”what do you think will happen from now to 20XX?”). I’ve tried to make a raw-and-not-exhaustive list here of what I observe as being used:

1. personal experience (expert) and of course naive personal experience (when people are not expert but rely on something they’ve lived)
2. statistics about people, environmental issues.
3. use of the long term/now perspective because as Paul Saffo points out in his Long Now talk, “We tend to over-estimate the speed of short-term adoption and under-estimate the diffusion of the technology”
4. bring history to the table: especially the greeks, the egyptian and the roman
5. the use of abstract metaphor coming from fields such as thermodynamics (entropy employed as a metaphor for chaos, disorder or dissipation of energy) or biology (the other day Thierry Gaudin talked about apoptotis: form of programmed cell death caused by a lack of information transfer).
6. the use of sociological or psychological models, concepts and sometimes controversial universals.
7. imagination, be it about novels from the past or sci-fi
8. to be continued

Why do I blog this? preparing a course about foresight and innovation, I am listing the “sources” for foresight analysis. The notion of data to draw scenarios for the future is something I am always been intrigued about. Feel free to add things to the list, which is definitely not exhaustive.

What I find interesting is to confront the types of arguments described in the literature and those employed in seminar/conferences, not really to evaluate which are more powerful to persuade others, rather to understand which emerge spontaneously.

Spotted in CDG airport yesterday in France, this Nintendo DS and its lovely book-like affordance which make the user taking the same posture as when perusing a book. The dual-display device offers an interesting affordance for book reading. And, researchers have found how such setting is relevant to improve the reading experience: it has indeed been found that users of dual-display ebook readers benefits from local navigation and applicability to multi-document interactions when using two displays.

After 5 years blogging in english, and considering that part of my network (friends, colleagues, clients, etc.) are french, I found interesting to experiment with a blog en français. Since I don’t have tons of time, i picked up a tumblr and chose to post short things when I have time, some similar to here, some different depending on my mood. It’s called +41nteraction and will revolved around the same thing as P&V.

The E have a short piece about the GPS Letter Logger, an interesting shrunken GPS device to track small things such as letters:

“The Letter Logger can be programmed to check its position every few minutes, over longer intervals, or only when a built-in motion detector senses movement, says Jude Daggett, of TrackingTheWorld. The journey log is stored on a standard micro-SD memory card to make it simple to use without any special software. This allows the log to be read by a laptop computer and displayed as a journey on Google Earth, the software giant’s popular world-mapping software. The inability to transmit does not greatly detract from its usefulness: if the probe’s log showed, for instance, that the envelope it was inside crawled along Interstate 405 before turning off to Los Angeles International Airport where, after a short delay, it suddenly zoomed off to Phoenix Sky Harbour, then it probably went by air.“

Why do I blog this? my curiosity towards how miniature devices like this are now more and mores available. It echoes well with Christian’s post about 8Gb mini SD card. Small is common although we still have to carry big battery chargers…

A quick post about the latest project by my former Media and Design Lab boss: Jef Huang and his wife Muriel Waldvogel: the newscocoon project:

“Newscocoons is a set of pulsating furniture objects that display news - user-generated videoclips, pictures, stories, blogs - fed from geographically dispersed sources. The cocoons glow and breath slowly. Each cocoon tracks specific keywords (such as “body,” “emotive,” “recombinant,” “alienation,” “reality,” etc.), and aggregates content tagged accordingly, created locally and over the Internet, by amateurs and professionals. The global shape of Newscocoons is constantly in flux, emerging from the particular constellation and intensity of information flows from the various sources.
(…)
The ambition for Newscocoon is to create a new kind of furniture for news consumption, one that breathes news, has a memory and fosters social interaction in the form of co-zapping.“

Why do I blog this? what I find curious in this project is the notion of pulsation with fed information and the importance of a threshold where physically it gives the impression of “when the eminent danger of an explosion becomes unbearable“.(and yes of course it’s easy because I love inflatable stuff). The co-zapping feature is also innovative.

Wandering around the interwebs to look for curious content, I ran across this interesting short paper by Basile Zimmerman: “When the Chinese Teach Us What Technology is Really About” (ESSHRA International Conference 2007, Towards a Knowledge Society: Is Knowledge a Public Good?). The paper use the example of dedicated software that allows to write turn things written on ASCII keyboard in Chinese See the image above) and employs it as metaphor to investigate the relationships between computer technology and society. Some excerpts I found intriguing:

“To build on Akrich and Latour’s famous model of the door-closer, If a technical object is used, and if its content cannot be modified by its user, its content will be –during its use– imposed on the user.
(…)
If one is given chopsticks to eat an ice cream, who should be blamed? The waiter, the ice cream, or the chopsticks? For many Chinese today, it is the ice cream. After over three thousand years of use, I hear today’s Chinese computer users, including engineers, confronted to alphabet-encoded difficulties, complain on a daily basis that “the Chinese script is not convenient.”

Fortunately, for many reasons, the Chinese characters will not disappear soon. Attempts to abolish them have been made in the past and failed miserably. Besides, China is currently investing billions in science and technology innovation. Its computer industry is growing at an amazing speed and the first computers with homegrown Chinese processors came out this year. Graphic tablets and competing interface systems, better suited to the Chinese script, are under constant development. How will computer technology look on the day it was re-invented by the Chinese to fit their own needs? “

Why do I blog this? Browsing material when preparing the upcoming LIFT Asia conference makes me encounter intriguing types of research (from Geneva though). Although I am not a great fan of the “how technology impact society” meme (preferring the more complex notion of co-evolution or intertwined relationships), I found this topic intriguing from a more general perspective, beyond current research projects. The same question can be asked for OS or cloud computing apps.

Doing ethnographical research about game controllers and carrying out home visit makes me encounter very curious assemblage like the one above. How to turn a chair into a speedy car-simulation seat where the player seats on the back, spread the leg and pump pedals to the maximum.

A very intriguing made-up controller for car simulation that reveals how people tend to modify devices to their convenience. The creative use of duct-tape to enhance the digital experience is interesting to document as a way to find out opportunities to design both physical peripherals and digital counterparts.

In his Language of Interaction talk at Interaction08, Bill DeRouchey addresses an interesting issue: how people learn how to use technology from other technology. Given the quantity of consumer electronics that surround us, people become more tech-savvy and learn from experience with other products, it then turns into expectations about how a new device will function. As DeRouchey points out:

“When we figure out a new product, we look for familiar visual cues to guide us, elements that we have seen before in other products and have learned in the past. It’s very natural and normal: we learn from experience. Our brains are always looking for the patterns in what we see, trying to find the consistency, looking for the language. We subconsciously latch onto the most familiar interface elements and construct the instructions from there.
(…)
Washing machines from companies like LG now use the play/pause icon. Even though it originally meant make the tape play, when someone encounters a right-pointing triangle and two vertical bars on a washing machine, without any accompanying labels, they immediately understand that it means start and stop, because they’ve learned that from other technology.“

A relevant example here is the one described in “Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone” (Christian Lindholm, Turkka Keinonen) which describes the design rationale for a past Nokia interface:

“Consumers knew arrows from several other devices such as remote control (…) The C-Key /c for clearing) was also considered intuitive. It was very well known from previous Nokia phones and from all calculators. Only later did we discover a drawback - because our concept lacked a SEND key, users also found it intuitive to understand C as call“

Why do I blog this? no big theory here but some relevant practical point and example, showing the conscious effort by interaction designers to rely on past knowledge and expectations.

Directly connected to my earlier post about the interface transition from common artifacts to new one.

The screenshot depicts a GDF Artillery Interceptor Turret from Quake Wars (left) and the original device that inspired it: Raytheon’s Phalanx Close-in Weapon System (right). Both have been taken from an insightful article in Popular Mechanics by Erik Sofge which deals with the design of weaponry in video games and what it means for real weapon design. As the caption in the article says “how long can games mimic reality while still adhering to the balance of their arsenals?“. The point the author made is that video game designers are less concerned by sci-fi or real-warfare inspiration than in the game balance.

More interesting IMO, there are intriguing arguments there about the relationship between fictional material and military warfare gear that shed some light between imagination and design:

“If empowering the player by grounding his artillery in the real world is gaming’s way of staying current, it’s the more distant war-zone style of the alien enemy—ever reliant on their gadgets to do the fighting—that represents gaming’s way of building toward the future.

That might explain why futuristic video games—and science-fiction movies and TV shows, for that matter—are such a strange blend of old-fashioned values and forward-looking technology.
(…)
game developers, ultimately, are almost narrow-minded and self-limiting in their visions of future warfare—not forecasting wars so much as dreaming up cool toy soldiers and tossing them into a virtual paintball arena (where both teams have a fair shot at victory). In our collective fantasy of the wars to come, however, the central fiction of warfare prevails: The fight is ever fair, and clean, and inherently good. Even aliens—the ones that leave plasma mortars behind, not flesh-eating blood stains—have mothers. “

Why do I blog this? as I’ve already made the case, I am definitely not a fan of weaponry, I just find this article interesting as it uncovers the relationship between a collective imaginary realm (the one of sci-fi warfare) and the design of digital and virtual devices. To some extent, it’s a relevant case study about innovation.

The introduction of “Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone” by Lindholm, Keinonen and Kiljander features this interesting excerpt:

“the only way to get a working assumption of what the technology enable us to do and how they are likely to be used is to be involved in these projects long enough. Even then, educated guesses and developed intuitions are only approximate. Something that was supposed to be easy to implement turns out to be practically impossible. Sometimes, the opposite occurs. Solutions that were originally postponed to allow technology to catch up are suddenly realized in unexpected ways“

Why do I blog this? This quote is an interesting summary of what I believe as it covers different aspects:

• The importance to have a long-term involvement in an organization which design something: I personally work with a french video game studio for 7 years and it strikes me how much I learn in the long run and not through short gigs on their projects. For example, it’s been almost from the beginning that we discuss the usability test and user experience field study ideas. It took us approximately 4 years to turn what was “user research as a R&D project” into “user research in the production pipe-line”. The time to convince people, to show the value of user research, the importance to insert it in the production process, and finally to get some funding to make it accepted…
• The notion of “educated guess” and “developed intuitions” is important. For that matter, I like how Jan Chipchase frame the results form his work: not facts but “informed opinions”. Although the quote does not refer to user research, I find an interesting pattern here in the sense that knowledge construction about the evolution of technology is rarely absolute. There are contingencies and idiosyncrasies that plays an important role.
• The difficulty in forecasting results because the world is a complex system.
• The importance of time: innovation is slow, change takes time and as foresight researchers say, we always tend to overestimate the short term and minimize the long term (tail).

Once in a while the Harvard Business Review tackles topics close to my field. Sometimes it’s about foresight, today it’s about design with this article by Tim Brown called “Design Thinking” (in the june 2008 edition).

Starting an insightful model in R&D/innovation, namely Thomas Edison, Brown describes design thinking as a descendant of that tradition of a “blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets“. He simply defines it as:

“it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.“

In these days of desperate need of innovation as “a source of differentiation and competitive advantage”, design thinking is literally more and more invited to the business table (hence a publication in HBR). Brown definitely make clear that design evolved from

“put a beautiful wrapper around the idea (…) making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies”

to

“Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

Giving some examples, he also enters in more detail in the process itself, discussing the role of prototypes and “tools for design thinking”. As well as an interesting deconstruction of the myth of the creative genius, Brown shows how it’s not about ideas popping up out from the blue, but instead the results of an hardworking process with human-discovery and iterations.

Why do I blog this? it’s a decent overview of what is design, to be kept up handy for upcoming teaching gigs. The good thing here (for designers) is the acknowledgement of the strategic value of design and the intrinsical importance of adopting a user-centred approach. The sidebar about designers’ profile and the non-importance of black clothes is also a good start.

As a side-note, I find intriguing that the term “behavioral scientists/researchers” is more and more used. It sorts of echoes with the NYT piece about Jan Chipchase. Working in that domain and having troubles to define in 2 words what I am doing, I am always intrigued by the terms employed by different stakeholders: behavioral researcher seems to be the term for the press lately, whereas consultants and companies use “user experience” (I know there are nuances though).