The other day, looking at toys in a kid store, I ran across this robotic horse and my attention was instantly attracted by the missing left ear:

Why do I blog this? My interest towards the user experience of broken artifacts. This poor robotic pet has lost an important body part. But important for whom? Obviously it would not really change the robot itself (I don’t think there was any noise sensor in there) but what does that mean for the robot “user” (I put it into brackets because it’s difficult to define a stereotypical “user”). It made me think of the uncanny valley (as defined in Wikipedia: the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities). How uncanny is uncanny? Would it repel kids? Would they find it curious? What would be the discourse around this?

Is it possible to take advantage of defunct parts of artifacts? Can design take this into account? I was wondering if there could be a sort of long-term design perspective in which you create objects with intended malfunctions (to foster specific user behavior).

[Last year, I wrote a paper for a workshop at a human-computer interaction conference about the user experience of video games, actually it briefly presents the work I am doing with game companies. The paper was not accepted and I thought it would be pertinent to leave it online anyway]

Introduction
Video game companies have now integrated the need to deploy user-centered design and evaluation methods to enhance players experiences. This has led them to hire cognitive psychology researchers, human-computer interface specialists, develop in-house usability labs or subcontract tests and research to companies or academic labs. Although, very often, methods has been directly translated form classic HCI and usability, this game experience analysis started to gain weights through publications. This situation acknowledges the importance of setting a proper method for user-centered game design, as opposed to the one applied for “productivity applications” or web services. The Microsoft Game User Research Group for example has been very productive on that line of research (see for example [5]) with detailed methods such as usability tests, Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation [4] or consumer playtests [1]. Usability test is definitely the most common method currently given its relevance to identify interfaces flaws as well as factors that lower the fun to play through behavioral analysis.

That said, most of the methods deployed by the industry seem to rely heavily on quantitative and experimental paradigms inherited from the cognitive sciences tradition in human-computer interaction (see [2]). Studies are often conducted in corporate laboratory settings in which myriads of players come visit and spend hours playing new products. Survey, ratings, logfile analysis, brief interviews (and sometimes experimental studies) are employed to apprehend users’ experiences and implications for game or level designers are fed back into game development processes.

While these approaches proves to be fruitful (as reported by the aforementioned papers which describe some case studies), this situation only accounts for a limited portion of what HCI and user-centered design could bring to table in terms of game user research. Too often, the “almost-clinical” laboratory usability test is deployed without any further thoughts regarding how players might experience the product “in the wild”. For example, this kind of studies does not take into account how the activity of gaming is organized, and how the physical and social context can be important to support playful activities.

What we propose is to step back for a while and consider a complementary approach to gain a more holistic view of how a game product is experienced. To do so, we will describe two examples from our research carried out in partnership with a game studio.

Examples from field studies

Our first example depicted on Figure 1 shows the console of an informant: a Nintendo DS with a post-it that says “Flea market on Saturday” and an exclamation mark. The player of “Animal Crossing” indeed left this as a reminder that two days ahead, there would be a flea market in the digital environment. This is important in the context of that game because it will allow him to sell digital items to non-playable characters in the game.

This post-it is only an example among numerous uses of external resources to complement or help the gameplay. Player-created maps of digital environments xeroxed and exchanged in schools in the nineties is another example of such behavior. Magazines, books and digital environment maps are also prominent examples of that phenomenon, which eventually leads to business opportunities. Some video game editors indeed start publishing material (books, maps, cards) and try to connect it to the game design (by allowing secret game challenges through elements disseminated in comics for example).

Figure 2 shows another example that highlights the social character of play. This group of Japanese kids is participating the game experience, although there is only one child holding a portable console. The picture represented here is only one example of collective play along many that we encountered, both in mobile of fixed settings. They indicate that playing a video-game is much more than holding an input controller since participants (rather than “The Player”) have different roles ranging from giving advices, scanning the digital environment to find cues, discussing previous encounters with NPCs or controlling the game character.

Another intriguing results from a study about Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS has revealed that some players share the game and the portable console with others. An adult described how he played with his kid asynchronously: he hides messages and objects in certain places and his son locates them, displace them and eventually hide others. The result of this is the creation of a circular form of game-play that emerged from the players’ shared practice of a single console.

Conclusion

Although this looks very basic and obvious, these three examples correspond to two ways to frame cognition and problem solving: “Distributed Cognition” [3] and “Situated Action” [6]. While the former stresses that cognition is distributed the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment, Situated Action emphasizes the interrelationship between problem solving and its context of performance, mostly social. The important lesson here is that problem solving, such as interacting with a video-game is not confined to the individual but is both influenced and permitted by external factors such as other partners (playing or not as we have seen) or artifacts such as paper, pens, post-its, guidebooks, etc. Whereas usability testing relates to more individual model of cognition, Situated Action or Distributed Cognition imply that exploring and describing the context of play is of crux importance to fully grasp the user experience of games. Employing ethnographic methodologies, as proposed by these two Cognitive Sciences frameworks, can fulfill such goal by focusing on a qualitative examination of human behavior. It is however important to highlight the fact that investigating how, where and with whom people play is not meant to replace more conventional test. Rather, one can see this as a complement to understand phenomenon such as the discontinuity of gaming or the use of external resources while playing.

One of the reasons why this approach can be valuable is that results drawn from ethnographic research of gaming can be relevant to find unarticulated opportunities. For example, by explicitly requiring the use of external resource or the possibility to have challenges designed for multiple players as shown in the Animal Crossing example we described.

In the end, what this article stressed is that playing video-games is a broad experience which can be influenced by lots of factors that could be documented. And this material is worthwhile to design a more holistic vision of a product.

References

[1] Davis, J., Steury, K., & Pagulayan, R. A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design. Game Studies: the International Journal of Computer Game Research, 5(1) (2005).
[2] Fulton, B. (2002). Beyond Psychological Theory: Getting Data that Improve Games. Game Developer’s Conference 2002 Proceedings, San Jose CA, March 2002. Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2002/features/fulton/fulton_01.htm
[3] Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press.
[4] Medlock, M. C., Wixon, D., Terrano, M., Romero, R., Fulton, B. (2002). Using the RITE Method to improve products: a definition and a case study. Usability Professionals Association, Orlando FL July (2002). Available at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/c/c/5cc406a0-0f87-4b94-bf80-dbc707db4fe1/mgsut_MWTRF02.doc.doc
[5] Pagulayan, R. J., Keeker, K., Wixon, D., Romero, R., & Fuller, T. User-centered design in games. In J. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), Handbook for Human-Computer Interaction in Interactive Systems, pp.883-906. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2002).
[6] Suchman, L.A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.

[Now it’s also interesting to add a short note about WHY the paper has not been accepted The first reviewer was unhappy by the fact that many ethnographies of game-playing have been published. Although this is entirely true in academia, it’s definitely not the case in the industry (where ethnography is seldom employed in playtests). And my mistake may have been that I frame the paper in an game industry perspective, using the literature about gaming usability. The second reviewer wanted a more extensive description of a field study and less a scratch-the-surface approach that I adopted. My problem of course is that it’s always difficult to describe results more deeply because most of the data are confidential… This is why I stayed at a general level]

Morning partner in commuting Frederic Kaplan finally revealed his latest project called wizkid (conducted with his team). In his words:

“Wizkid is a novel kind of computer permitting easy multi-user standing interactions in various contexts of use. The interaction system does not make use of classical input tools like keyboard, mouse or remote control, but features instead a gesture-based augmented reality interaction environment, in conjunction with the optional use of convivial everyday objects like books, cards and other small objects.
(…)
Wizkid could be described as a computer display with a camera mounted on top, fixed on a robotic neck. It looks like a computer, but it is a robot that can gaze in particular direction and engage in face-to-face interaction.“

Martino d’Esposito, who take care of the design aspects, defines it as “a computer with which we could communicate in a more natural manner, but which would still not look “human”.
Why do I blog this? I find the project interesting because it’s shows the convergence between computer/ubiquitous computing and robots, plus I quite like approach Frederic describes by: “despite some successful results this kind of natural interaction systems has tended to be used only in the domain of interaction with anthropomorphic or zoomorphic robots and progress in these fields has not impacted more mundane kinds of computer systems“. Furthermore, the interaction modes with that device are very intriguing through the “halo” mode (see description in the interview). From the output point of view, the interesting part is the “body language” used by the wizkid to express interest, confusion, and pleasure. To some extent it forces to ask questions close to the one I have to address with wii gestures, except that in the wizkid case it’s about output gestures (and not input gestures for the wiimote/nunchuk).

For those who want to see it, Wizkid is part of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, running from February 24 to May 12, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Accountabilities of Presence: Reframing Location-Based Systems, Troshynski, Lee and Dourish address the extreme case of paroled offenders tracked by GPS and describe lessons that can be drawn from this unconventional realm of location-based systems.
Here is how the system works:

“Location information is continuously reported to a monitoring center through a direct link to a localized cellular telephone network. (…) The GPS system allows correctional officials to define geographic areas from which released and supervised offenders are prohibited, a condition of their parole (…) The GPS monitoring devices are able to trigger alarms or warning notices upon approach of any such previously defined prohibited zones.“

Some excerpts about this that I found relevant to my research:

“the use of GPS tracking technologies are intended to maintain a series of spatial prohibitions for this population, to limit their mobility and enforce a series of proscriptions that are part of the conditions of their parole (…) In a dispute between MapQuest’s view and the evidence of the odometer, it is MapQuest that will generally “win. (…) it is the representation of the space provided to the technological system that matters, because, however inaccurate it may be, it is the system against which measurements are made.
(…)
This study illuminates the relationship between technology and the legibility of space, that is, the way in which spatial organization manifests itself for people who occupy and navigate it. (…) The participants in our study are primarily concerned with understanding how their movement appear to their Parole Officers. The question of course is how that understanding is developed. How does one learn how one is seen by another through the system? How does one learn, for example, how to account for the vagaries of GPS positioning or the problems of “drop-out”? (…) The offender tracking system is inherently asymmetric, at least in its current configuration, so that offenders are unable to see how their movements can be read as potentially appropriate or problematic except as a consequence of infractions, at which point the mediating technology may become a point of discussion.
(…)
The issue is not where one might be, and when; it is to whom one might be accountable for one’s presence, to whom, under what circumstances, and how one might be called to account. (…) accountabilities to different social groups are heterogeneous—the settings in which action is undertaken are rich and complex. (…) the heterogeneous nature of accountabilities does not presuppose any particular structure of everyday space but rather situates accountability within the context of the practices from which spatial organization emerges (…) the heterogeneous nature of accountabilities necessitates an orientation towards spatiality as an ongoing form of participation in social and cultural life.“

Why do I blog this? The study of less common case of LBS is interesting a it leads to different issues and effectively help to reframe the perspective about their design and usage. I rather insisted on spatial consequences but the discussion about the temporal implications is important (charging time of the GPS unit, dynamic reconfiguration of places where the parole can or can’t go…) as well as the GPS system as a device affixed to the body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to this press release:

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

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

Notes from the person who described it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Been reading this paper from Paul Dourish tonight in the train: “Seeing Like an Interface” (a paper he presented at OzCHI 2007). The author concluded about “the burgeoning interest in a reflective approach to HCI” that would be concerned by the “critical dimensions of design”. He basically describes technologies such as computers as “an effective site” at which to engage in critical engagements about the cultural values and assumptions. What does that mean for the everyday researcher/practitioner? Here are some hints described in the paper:

“Reflective HCI suggests an approach to interaction design in which cultural assumptions and values play as important a role as traditional usability metrics both as measures of success and as elements of the design process.
(…)
The discipline of HCI has evolved considerably over several decades, but so too have computer systems themselves. What I want to draw attention to here is not simply the fact that computers have become faster, smaller, and more powerful as technological artifacts, but that they have emerged as cultural objects in a radically different way than they did before. They are elements of the landscape of daily life in many different forms. Digital devices are embedded in our cultural and social imagination in very different ways than they were when HCI was emerging. To the extent that our discipline thinks not simply about user interface design but about interactions between humans and computers, these transformations suggest that we need to look more broadly for theoretical perspectives that help us understand how computation manifests itself as a cultural object“

Why do I blog this? surely some elements to be connected with what Anthony Dunne described in Hertzian tales about “critical design” (although the two visions are not the same). On a more general level, I find interesting to see when different disciplines (such as human-computer interaction or design) come-up with close concepts.

What is then interesting for the layman (for example when I am working with game designers on gestural interfaces usage for the Nintendo Wii) is to see how these ideas can be turned into (pragmatic) actions. In other words, what would “reflective HCI” brings to the table when I am surrounded by level designers, scenario planners, the production manager and the lead coder? Well, it’s certainly different from showing graphics about usability issues (that bloody tester missed the door 14 times on that level!) but it does bring questions, insights, discussions that sometimes allow to reconsider problems and results from tests/observations/ethnographic accounts of playtests.