Seen in Verona, Italy last week-end. Different layers of information, some official (regular signage), some more informal (badly written with Tipp-Ex, to state that drugs can be find on the right).

Another way to communicate that information is to use shoes hung onto a telephone wire as seen on the picture taken in San Francisco few years ago (but this is not more a sort of urban legend):

Anyway, this is part of an ecosystem of signs in contemporary cities that are more less perceived or understood by city-dwellers.

Via, I payed close attention to the screenshot capture of thisincredible book by Microsoft called “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? helping understand the Stay-At-Home Server”. The book basically describes how a server “is a funny looking-box” who “makes friend with computers” which are generally in “boring offices” but sometimes can go to your house (”some servers aren’t boring, they don’t go in offices, they go in houses”), especially when “a mommy and a daddy loves each other very much the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift”.

In essence, it describes the advantage of owning a server: sharing content, accessing it remotely, being regarded as a nerd, looking at blinking lights

Why do I blog this? …

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“.

I’ve recently encountered two times this quote from Lewis Caroll taken in Alice in Wonderland:

‘There is no use in trying’, said Alice; ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

Why do I blog this? One of the occurrence with it was in “After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (International Library of Sociology)” (John Law), where the author use it to stress the need to have “metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable.” His claim is that it’s important to open space for the indefinite.

This surely seems very abstract but the practice itself of such weird exercice is intriguing in terms of the implications for foresight. In a sense, it reminds of Donald Rumsfeld matrix of known/unknown.

Currently in Brussels where I gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a center for digital cultures and technology. The presentation entitled “Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art” was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. As a matter of fact, the hybridization of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions. It’s not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts.

Slides can be found on here (.pdf, 20Mb):

In a sense, this presentation emerged from the sort of things that appear on this blog, a mix of pasta (academic or R&D stuff coming from the research world) and vinegar (weirder projects coming form the design/new media art world). It was then about why vinegar is important for pasta. The presentation went through 7 reasons why projects form artists and designers are important, especially for academic researchers and engineers:

“ (1) avantgarde: as they can announce things to come (new practices, new artifacts)
(2) challenge existing practices (for example by highlight new interaction partners beyond the classical and canonical “human computer interaction”: blogjects, animal-controlled video games)
(3) criticize the state of the world by making explicit invisible/implicit phenomena or certain aspects that are hidden (like pollution mapped on cityscape)
(4) address issues in novel way that are not possible in academia or in private R&D: by using fakes, humor or non-utilitarian perspectices.
(5) “breaching experiment”: When trying to predict or design the future of technologies, you can’t just rely on what exist today… you want “disruptions” as the literature about innovation states. So technologies developed in new media art / device art contexts are often DISRUPTIVE platforms that allow to investigate what changes.
(6) arts+design do better to convey desire and emotions (and less mechanistic vision of humans who do not always want automation in their lives for example)
(7) the design process: something is investigated in the construction of hypothetical artifacts, the design process itself is important and bring lessons. A totally different approach than engineering and academic research.“

Thanks Yves Bernard for the invitation.

The NYT has a piece on the “culture of mistake” that I found intriguing

“good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates. We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

The resistance to making mistakes runs deep, he [Mr. Schoemaker ] writes, but it is necessary for the following reasons, which he outlined in the article:
- We are overconfident. “Inexperienced managers make many mistakes and learn from them. Experienced managers may become so good at the game they’re used to playing that they no longer see ways to improve significantly. They may need to make deliberate mistakes to test the limits of their knowledge.”
- We are risk-averse because “our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes.”
- We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs.
- We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don’t often look outside tested channels.“

Why do I blog this? all of this is exemplified a lot in the psychology literature but I still find this very interesting. Especially if you think about the context of technology design, these elements echo a lot with some problem in how certain technologies are designed. My favorite, and the one I try to face in my work with designer is certainly the “We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs”… as user experience researcher, it’s always a matter of challenging people’s mindsets… which is often turned to belief confirmation.

It’s been 6 months or so that I am working at the Media and Design Lab, a structure led by Jef Huang that sits both in architecture and computer sciences faculties. My motivation to join this lab, as a researcher, was both to work on architecture/urban projects and to learn more about design thinking.

My background being mixed up (undergraduate degree in cognitive sciences/psychology, MSc in human-computer interaction in a psychology a faculty, PhD in human-computer interaction in a computer science faculty) I quite like discovering new territories, epistemologies, methodologies and purposes. Therefore, discovering and working with architects and designers (other than game designers with whom I work for 7 years now) is very worthwhile and relevant. Given my interest in “user experience” research (or behavioral studies/psychologie ergonomique/…), it’s important to live with people who create, design, build and think technologies or services, especially in domains that I am interested in (urban computing , mobile applications, tangible interfaces, games).

Speaking about projects, the lab is a bit scattered as each of us have his or her own project but there are some common ones that involves everyone and most of the time we’re required to give feedback on each others’ work (be it about teaching or research). It’s especially during those moments that I feel how we can learn the richness of multidisciplinary design work.

(Picture of a lab meeting)

Over time, I tried to take notes of the elements that I found interesting and that seems to be referred to as “design thinking”. Coming from more structured research traditions (HCI, psychology and social sciences), it’s pertinent for me to see the differences as well as the idiosyncrasies of that group work. Reading this made me think that I should post about it. So here are some of the elements I spotted a interesting [if you’re from the design community, you might find that a bit dumb]:

The first thing that is striking when you come from more monolithic-science department is the use of artifacts during the project process. I won’t enter into much detail about it (rather read “Sketching User Experiences” by Bill Buxton) but it’s important to notice how artifacts such as posters, sketches, drawings, cardboard stuff are not an end but a way to convey and discuss ideas. See for example the huge posters below that we used for a project, it was mostly to discuss the evolution of interface design. Over time, there has been at least 8 iterations of different visualizations, all supporting the arguments. Hence the gathering of artifacts in sourcebook that can be reused afterwards as inspiration.

The corollary of this is the importance of prototyping and hence the presence of fascinating material all over the place (not that different from computer sciences department though):

Of course, this does not mean that the end product/report does not also benefit from this… there is comparison between reports/presentations that I have seen in some academic psychology/HCI contexts and what is in that community.

Another side issue is the importance of the design critique in the process, which is quite surprising you’re thrown in the arena, having to criticize architectural projects you have no clue about how to articulate the validity. Over time, you grow and habit and learn what elements can be criticized, especially about how the design process has been achieved, what has been done from the starting point and whether there are flaws in the reasoning/building of the artifact.

Something that keeps surprising me about this is both the “tabula rasa” attitude in which, at the end of the day, the ideas and artifacts are stored somewhere and the next day starts with new ideas. I don’t mean here it’s a constant attitude but I noticed the tendency of architects to do so (without reinventing the wheel afterwards). This is linked to the design thinking/process that is very different from what scientific research in the sense that it’s much more creative and based on defining different vectors, evaluating their pertinence, exploring others in a less incremental way than engineering or scientific research.

In sum, I am happy to see that and how I can adjust my own research to this. Of course, this is just after 6 months there but I really have pleasure to discover all of this and to compare it to other settings. And not only to scientific research, my biggest surprise (in retrospect) is to notice how video game design suffers from the lack of design thinking, how they’re definitely closer to the engineering way of thinking (problem/technological solution) and that there is a whole set of things to apply there. This is not astonishing as the work I am doing for certain video game companies for few years is spot on this (user-centered design, ethnography, foresight).

As a side note, what I wrote here mostly emerges from my academic work. Foresight and research work don with Julian at the Near Future Laboratory explores that area in different ways.

As a complement to the discourse about seamful design), I found these lines by Anne Galloway very relevant:

“seams and scars point to where we have in the past made or become something else—and yet they also remind us that we can do so again in the future. If we treat them not as irregularities to be hidden but as indicators of our abilities to intervene in the world, seams and scars offer us glimpses of how we shape and re-shape ourselves, each other, and the worlds in which we live.
(…)
I find remarkable hope in seams and scars. But because liminal spaces, like all potentials, are also rather uncertain I find good reason to proceed with care.
(…)
Who is making the cuts? Who gets left behind? What goes forward? Who does the suturing and sewing? Has there been
suffering? Healing? Are the seams ugly? Are the scars beautiful? What can we learn about ourselves and others by attending to the seams and scars our work creates and leaves behind?”“

Why do I blog this? “seamful design” or how to reveal the seams/limits of technologies is an interesting proposal in terms of design thinking. However, what it implies is often quite difficult to conceptualize in terms of consequences. The paper provides some elements about it.

Galloway, Anne. (in press) “Seams and Scars, Or How to Locate Accountability in Collaborative Work,” in Uncommon Ground, Cathy Brickwood, David Garcia and Willem-Jan Renger (eds.), Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

In Switzerland, the large majority of switches fall into 2 categories:

As if there was some sort of CH’s designer-in-chief who ruled the existence of switches. It eventually leads to a great homogeneity in their design (compared to the very broad diversity in France for example).

Find it intriguing, and not that bad actually.

Speaking about Dubai, Mike Davis in his essay “Fear and Money in Dubai” highlight this quote from an article by Ian Parker in the New-Yorker:

“It’s as if a list of all known human pastimes have been collected on PowerPoint slides and then casually voted on by a show of hands.“