Still gathering stuff about “failed futures” for a project, I ran across this interview of Matt Jones by Adaptive Path peeps that is very insightful. Some excerpts I found relevant for my project:

“RF: You’ve mentioned the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. One model becomes wildly popular, and other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored when they could be doing the most good.

MJ: Exactly - the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components.

RF: Our friends the cognitive anthropologists have warned us about the implications of subscribing to the wrong cognitive artifacts…

MJ: So everyone for the last 2/3 years has been offered the same touchscreen components more or less by a few suppliers. And we all (more or less) have similar dimensions we can work within in a touch UI.

RF: So thinking in hardware becomes even more constrained?

MJ: To an extent. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘.“

Why do I blog this? I am trying to collect material about what Jones calls “lost future” (in design+foresight), I quite like his stance here, not only about the example discussed (that 16:9 touchscreen device coming from Cupertino) but, rather, its possible consequence: how it eclipses other innovation. There are different consequences of failed futures, some are about traps like in this examples; others are about perpetuation of wrong ideas.

Cell phone booster/repeater solution seems to be a trendy path lately, as shown by this NYT article which presents devices such as femtocell to extend mobile phone service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable.

What I find interesting here is less the technology than the reasons why these solutions are brought forward (or at least the one mentioned/promoted by companies designing these solutions). Excerpt from the article:

““Because more and more people are not taking landline telephones anymore, adding a signal booster is becoming much more popular,” said Richard Holtz, president of Infinisys in Daytona Beach, Fla. His firm plans the placement of cellular boosters in high-rise buildings, dorms and offices.

“People are expecting perfect coverage everywhere,” Mr. Holtz said, pointing out that being indoors or outdoors can make a big difference in call quality.
(…)
Many things get in the way of wireless signals. Trees and intervening buildings can degrade the signal from the cell tower, while brick walls and wallboard supports can block them completely. Sometimes many obstacles will conspire to create a “dead zone” of dropped and missed calls.
(…)
Of course, boosters require you to shell out your own money to improve a service you are already paying for. Pestering your carrier to upgrade its network is a cheaper — but slower — approach.”

Why do I blog this? I’d be curious to know more about the real expectations of people but the seamless coverage might be a need. In our field studies, it’s generally the case that people ASSUME wireless coverage (or perfect positioning through LBS) but then realize there are some discrepancies. It’s then interesting to see both human and technical solutions to this problem. Technical solutions are boosters and repeaters described in this article whereas human solutions are behavioral adjustments (like sending an SMS instead of calling when you only have 2 bars on the signal reception display).

“Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See” is a nice little booklet by Andrew Burroughs from IDEO. A bit in the same vein of “Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design” by Jane Fulton Suri, is about all these small things and details that I sometimes blog about: observations about the world, the complexity of assemblage, failures, cracks, misuses, etc. All these small details matter as they tell us about “the thought process behind designed things”.

Compared to Thoughtless Acts, that book is more about the way to see the world in the engineer’s eyes but it’s definitely of interest for anyone interested in design or user experience research.

In addition, this collection of pictures is an invitation to be more “inquisitive” about our environments. As I sometimes try to do with picture I annotate here, the point is rather to ask questions concerning why things are like this or that. And as the author says, it allows to become “better observers”:

“Perhaps we discover a point of failure that is completely counterintuitive, as when corrosion aggressively attacks the most protected part of a steel beam. And we can also see success, when things do go as planned and the end product proves to be a match for everything that is thrown at it. Regardless of whether we find inspiration or not, we owe it to ourselves and those around us to become better observers. Our environment is brimming over with information that can help us with our basic ability to navigate a course. The better we are able to refine our actions and our thoughts based on seeing what has gone before, the fewer mistakes we will make“

An interesting sidebar from an old issue of game developer (november 2007) called “usability research commandment” by Randy Pagulayan (Microsoft Game Studio user reasearch) deal with the relationship between user experience researchers and designers. Some excerpt that I find interesting and relevant beyond the game field:

“Be flexible, it is our job to try an account for as many sources of bias and influence when we run usability tests and collect data, but sometimes the ideal is simply not practical.
(…)
Users have opinions, but designers make the call. During your research and testing, users will always have opinions on things they do or don’t like. Your job isn’t to adhere to user whims - your job is to identify areas where user behavior is not consistent with the design’s vision. What you do from there will be context dependent.
(…)
Most developers aren’t interested in the classic “it depends” answer to something [very academic]. They also aren’t interested in inferential statistics, hypothesis testing, or the number of users you need for a valid test. When asked to do something or answer a question, do your research and testing, and give it your best shot. Don’t be afraid to have an informed opinion, even if your research wasn’t suitable for a scientific peer-reviewed journal.“

Why do I blog this? All of this rings a bell with my current practice. There’s even more to be quoted here but it’s certainly that last bit which caught my attention. Working with designers for a while, I certainly shared that sort of feeling about what sort of material I needed to bring to the table to help them. However, it does not mean that the result should be overstated. As Pagulayan says, “What you do from there will be context dependent”. Also see how Jan says about this notion of informed opinion and the risk of overstating:

“So why should anyone give your research the time of day? How to build credibility? For starters recognise and communicate the limits of (mostly qualitative) design research. We start out with opinions, and all things by the end of study we move onto having informed opinions or on rare occasions very informed opinions. Overstating the value of the research makes you a bullshitter.“

The need to put a “bell” arrow sticker to indicate the button position.

SK8 OBJECT 1.5 is a very interesting urban artifact designed by Melanie Iten and Gon Zifroni, commissioned by the city of Geneva. It’s actually a mix of a bench and a skateboard bank:

Why do I blog this? simply because I find that kind of project interesting and curious. Readers here know my interest in skateboarding practices and how I see skateboarders as an interesting target group to foresee the future of urban behavior. In this case, what I find relevant is the fact that it’s not the skaters who are innovative but urban designers. Beyond the shape and the affordance of the object that I like, the implications are very interesting here in the sense that the object can be used by different populations (BMX+rollers+skaters AND regular pedestrians). Of course, it can be employed by these different population at the same time, showing the urban tensions of urban furnitures.

I also find intriguing how it looks like a mix between a skatepark artefact and something more… urban, less artificial like the assumption that if you build a skatepark, people will go there.

The twelfth episode of The Simpsons’ fourth season, called Marge vs. the Monorail is maybe one of my favorite episode and is definitely a great lesson in design. And this, not only in the conception of public transport, but also in terms of innovation as a whole.

This episode focuses around the town of Springfield buying a monorail from a Lyle Lanley after earning lot of money, and instead of fixing more urgent problems like cracks on the streets. Only Marge seems to dislike the purchase but everyone in town seems to succumb to the glossy value of the Monorail. After a quick training, Homer happens to be the monorail driver. At first things run okay, but then some malfunction occur and the monorail accelerates dangerously. It’s eventually stopped by Homer who launched an anchor on a big donut.

What does that say about design/innovation?

First, it’s an interesting example of how a group of people puts lots of money in some sort of crazy things utterly cool that is not the most necessarily need of a community. When Marge tells Bart “Main Street’s still all cracked and broken“, he replies with the wisdom of the crowd motto: “Sorry, mom, the mob has spoken… Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!“. As if the street, as a means of mobility, was boring, old-fashion and useless compared to the shiny representation of the future depicted by the monorail. What’s funny is that even Lisa is fooled by the salesman when she tells him that such a transportation system would be useless in a low-density town such as Springfield. The promise of the value of a futuristic device such as the monorail is almost unquestionable (ah… progress), based on the common sense of the group.

Second, and surely a corollary, it also shows (and criticizes) how social pressure is important in the diffusion and acceptability of an innovation. “Ah it’s not for your, it’s more of a shelbyville idea” or”I’ve sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!” says the salesman showing a map of the US with only these cities on the map. To some extent, it follows innovation researcher from the 19th century Gabriel Tarde’s laws of imitation: innovation are adopted faster when they have already been accepted elsewhere.

Why do I blog this? preparing material for a course, looking for interesting examples of failures. Reminds me of some innovations-who-became fads right? Of course every fad are not always comparable to the “springfield monorail” (scholars would say “isomorphic”) but there are some good points in that episode.

People interested in the diffusion of innovation can find perfect exemplifications here:

• The monorail as the invention
• Springfield’s inhabitants as the social structure. As usual when they have to decide municipal decisions, they gather in the townhall, under the guidance of Joe Quimby (the mayor), showing a very swiss landsgemeinde way of making decisions. Innovation researchers who employ the term “authority-collective decision” to describe how this choice to buy and build a monorail is made.
• Lyle Lanley, the salesman, as the change agent external to the system
• Lisa and then Marge as people who are part of the social system but who have doubts.
• The monorail value proposition is the one of an innovation: faster than other means of transport, more sexy, complex and launched with the help of a VIP: Leonard Nemoy from Star Trek.

Of course, it does not depict the whole innovation diffusion, only the recurring failure of the monorail (based on different iterations) and how the salesmen made money out of it.

If one take cell phones as the prominent ubiquitous computing platform, an important problem is the one of the platform diversity. Greenhalgh and colleagues tackles this issue in their Ubicomp 2007 paper called “Addressing mobile phone diversity in Ubicomp experience development“. Phones vary enormously in their capabilities and designers face a trade-off between capability and availability: “ between what can be done and the fraction of potential participants’ phones that can do this“

Comparing four cell phones platform (SMS, WAP/Web, and J2ME, Python and native applications), the authors interestingly propose “four development strategies for addressing mobile phone diversity: prioritise support for server development (including web integration), migrate functionality between server(s) and handset(s), support flexible communication options, and use a loosely coupled (data-driven and component-based) software approach“.

Why do I blog this? documenting reasons of failures for certain projects in the field of consumer electronics.

Greenhalgh, C., Benford, S., Drozd, A., Flintham, M., Hampshire, A., Opperman, L., Smith, K. and Von Tycowicz, C., 2007. Addressing mobile phone diversity in Ubicomp experience development. In: UbiComp 2007. 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Innsbruck, Austria, 16-19 September 2007. pp. 447-464

Seen last week in Geneva, next to temporary constructions for immigrants.
What can we see here in this interesting “point of contact”
- almost all have the same orientation (= same channels? same cultural group of viewer?)
- they are grounded, do not at their regular position on the roof (= left here in a a hurry? not possible to climb to the roof)
- they are very close to the sidewalk where people pass by (low number of people passing here anyway)

In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment by Leshed, Velden, Rieger, Kot, & Sengers is a paper presented at CHI 2008 that deals with the relationship between GPS car navigation and how people interpret their environment or navigate through it. What’s interesting here is that they avoid technological determinism (technology as the external causation of change) and the traditional lament/pessimisn about technologies influence on social change.

Using an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, the authors show that GPS disengages people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it“. The issues of environmental engagement and disengagement are the following:

• Pre-navigation/Route Choice: ““Finding” the destination is thus modified from a relative spatial activity to correctly keying in the address“
• Route Following: GPS eliminate the attention to objects in the paths, some people less blindly than others.
• Orientation in Unfamiliar Areas: “ the GPS disconnects the drivers from the external environment, as they no longer need to find out where they are in order to avoid getting lost or for getting oriented when already lost. This issue is intensified when the GPS automatically and quietly recalculates a new route when its directions are not followed unintentionally (e.g. because of a mistake) or intentionally (e.g. because of road constructions and detours): the practice of re-orienting and consciously re-routing oneself is not necessary anymore. However, some informants reported that they do like to know where they are

Orientation in familiar areas: people do not want to have oral instructions, sometimes disagree with paths, use the gps “just for fun” or use it mark place they know.

• When driving: social Interactions around the GPS: with: “interaction with other passengers in the car has altered given in-car GPS units. With vocal directions from the GPS unit, a passenger who serves as a navigator in the car is no longer in need, and so the driver/navigator roles are modified“
• When driving, the GPS is often treated as an “active agent”, socially speaking: naming the device, talking to him.
• When driving, the interaction with the external environment and locals is also altered. For instance, the digital representation is not accurate enough so people have to look outside and see if their POI is here or it can allow to discover new elements (rivers or parks) on the way. And interaction with other people are less needed (to ask a direction).

Based on these results, the author provides some “high-level guidance rather than feature-centered design” ideas:

• “GPS instructions could refer to landmarks in aiding navigation.
• Highlight the ambiguity of GPS data (…) to minimize risks associated with over-trusting an automated device.
• Extend context-aware capabilities: distinctive usage of the GPS in familiar areas
• Support the car as a social place: Instead of secluding the passenger seated near the driver (…) we can engage them in the interaction with the GPS
  unit.”

Why do I blog this? great paper from lots of criteria (theoretical justification, nice exemplification of techno-social recombination, design implications). Moreover, the design implications are close to what we found in another location-based context: in the CatchBob experiment, while studying how WiFi positioning is employed by players (I’m currently writing a paper with Fabien about it). That paper is also interesting at it contradicts what that “location, location, location” article in the last Economist report state (the fact that we will never be lost or be more immersed in the physical world.

Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., & Sengers, P. (2008). In-car GPS navigation: Engagement with and disengagement from the environment. Best Paper Award. To appear in Proceedings of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy.

11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft by Colin Stewart is a very interesting discussion. I don’t agree with all of them but some are important.

That one struck me as relevant:

“6. THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT FAILURES
“One of the mantras that a large software development company uses is ‘Fail Often, Fail Fast,’ ” Wartenberg said.
“As Alan Mullaly said when he led Boeing Commercial Aircraft, ‘We celebrate mistakes; bring them into the open, because we can’t help fix what we don’t know about.’ ”
To show Blizzard’s devotion to this principle, CEO Morhaime and other executives listed the titles of canceled games Blizzard had worked on: Nomad, Raiko, Warcraft Adventures, Games People Play, Crixa, Shattered Nations, Pax Imperia, and Denizen.
“We don’t have a 100 percent hit rate. We just cancel all the ones that aren’t going well,” Morhaime said.
“Failure begets success,” intellectual property attorney St. George said. “Many successful companies and CEOs have noted that their best successes have come from failures. The lessons learned from failures will provide the stepping stones for the next innovation.”“

Why do I blog this? gathering notes about failures for a personal project. It’s also interesting to see that game companies are only reaching the stage where they figure out the lessons described in that paper (”GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD“, “MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS“).

Random street encounter tonight in Geneva:

A manual for a flat-screen LCD television, obviously tossed out in a trash. Made me think about the value of manuals from technological devices. It can also be a manual on one the 3 languages (+english) of Switzerland. We have often get 3 of 4 manuals for each technological good that we buy.

Among my readings during Easter was this “Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design” by Henry Petroski. The whole book is about design as a compromise in response to constraints, illustrated by stories concerning automobile cup holders, duct tape, WD-40, paper cups/bags and the devices to make them, the invention of single-lever faucets, the redesign of vegetable peelers and printers. It reads a bit like a Stephen Jay-Gould book in the sense that it’s highly descriptive with lots of details. Some chapters are a bit less insightful than others (the one about buying a house was a bit less interesting). And Petroski is an engineer, which gives him a certain perspective of the world.

The conclusion was certainly the part that interested me most, about silos/disciplines:

“Designing and building a piece of technology is more than an application of science. In fact, relying on science alone would make it virtually impossible to design even a modest bridge. What science would be applied? The laws of mechanics tell us that forces must balance if the bridge is to stand. But what forces, and stand how? Unless inventors and engineers, designers all, can first visualize some specific kind of bridge in their mind’s eye, they have nothing to which to apply the laws of science. The creation of a bridge or any other artifact requires, before anything else something imagined. Whether or not science can be applied to that mental construct is a matter of availability. It there is a body of scientific knowledge that can be applied, then it would be foolish not to exploit it.
(…)
In fact, “Science finds - Industry Applies - Man Conforms” will never be more than a catchy motto. The reality is “People Design - Industry Makes - Science Describes.” It is the creative urge that drives the human endeavor of design, which leads to inventions, gadgets, machines, structures, systems, theories, technologies, and sciences. Both science and technology are themselves artifacts of human thought and effort.“

And the last bit about failures:

“Simply put, all technology is imperfect as its creators, and we can expect that it will always be. As we can, by practice and discipline, improve our own behavior, so we can, by experience and process improve the behavior of our creations.
(…)
As this book has suggested, there are countless examples of technology’s imperfections and limitations, from the simplest of the most complex of made things. By understanding their flaws and the limitations of the design process that created them, we can better appreciate why they are and must be imperfect. All things designed and made have to conform to constraints, have had to involve choice among competing constraints, and thus have had to involve compromise among the choices. By understanding this about the nature of design, we can better negotiate the variety of stairways that we encounter, no matter how idiosyncratic or metaphorical, taking us from one level of technology to another.“

Why do I blog this? Being currently interested in “failure, possibly for a book/short piece, I am gathering sources like this. What did I learn here? all the evidences gathered in this book are meant to illustrate that “design failures” are not caused by human errors but are a side-effect of the need to make compromise between needs and constraints.

How to use spare/interstitial spaces (seen in paris last monday in the RER)

Near-Future Laboratory colleague Julian Bleecker wrote an important piece about manufacturing (as part of the Share Festival Catalog 2008):

“First, we’re not talking about manufacturing (…) Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to the experiences of mere mortals.
(…)
If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between an your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material.
(…)
The sad consequences of manufacturing’s scale is that it defaults to the least common denominator. (…) True customization means materializing one’s own designs, one’s own imagination. This is where we begin. (…) What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale - quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer incumberances.
(…)
The “manufacturing process” is a kind of extended sketching activity. Ideas are first expressed informally, perhaps with a simple “wouldn’t it be cool if..?” question at a moment of inspiration.“

And why this is important to interaction design:

“these expressive objects form their interactivity around physical actions that may include the Nabaztag’s articulating rabbit-like ears, or Clocky the coy alarm clocks that roll away when you try to hit the snooze button, or Maywa Denki’s punch-drunk dancing BitMan character. These are distinct kinds of digital objects that mix physical space, digital technology and design.
(…)
The weak signals suggest kinds of design-art-technology that are growing tired of the screen.
(…)
What is emerging is an ability to make your own stuff - not just “skinning” your mobile or modding an MP3 player. Materializing ideas is about making your own - “whatever” - unanticipated, unknow, visionary, expressive things. It is not a manufacturing process“

Why do I blog this? some important points here about why manufacturing is important, what is is and what does that mean for human practices. This is relevant at a time where hardware fabrication and manufacturing has been left over to south asian countries and that we should not give away our effort to build concrete things (and do only so called “virtual” building).