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.

The last step of a neverending story (see previous episode here and when it all started). The tagline for this would be “how to kill a an unofficial route, a path that is formed in space by people making their own shortcuts“

July 2006:

February 2007:

January 2008:

(the last picture shows the sign that say “please take care of the lawn, don’t cross it please”)

Why do I blog this? this is one of the most interesting aspect of urban life, how people’s intents materialize (’desire lines’ as one of the comment on my Flickr picture says) and how this is prevented by others forces. In this case, it’s “to protect the lawn”, which is a quite intriguing reason.

In addition, other things to think about: what’s more efficient? the barriers or the warning sign? why isn’t there any other elephant path starting on the other side (where there is no sign)? is it because you just get out of the building and it’s acceptable to take a longer path?

Recently read L’Age du Plip by Bruno Jacomy, a french book about stories concerning the evolution of techniques. The book haven’t been translated in english but there are some interesting aspects I wanted to report here. Using different examples of techniques, the author describes different rules of technical innovations

The first example is about the “plip”, the remote keyless system to access automobiles. One of these device, invented by Paul Lipschutz received the name “plip”. Jacomy finds interesting to describe “the fact that there is a mutual coexistence in drivers’ pockets, of 2 distinct objects with the same function” (to open up doors and start off the engine). According to him, it shows that we’re in a transitory phase with: the physical key made of metal with weird shapes and the “plip”, that small box full of electronics. He also take two other examples a different transitory phase from sailing ships to steam ships (with a co-existence of both steam engines and sails) or the use of crank to start engines in old cars. In these cases, it took 50 years for the innovation (steam instead of sail, removal of the crank) to be fully deployed.

The second case study he observes is the difference between cook handles depending on their use of gas or electricity. To be started gas handles need to be turned counter-clockwise (to the left) and electric handles do not have standards, and generally need to be turned clockwise (to the right). The author shows that this is caused by the two different “cultures” behind the design of such instruments. Gas are fluids, and as every other liquids, one open handles by turning it to the left whereas electricity comes from a different culture in which things has been derived from devices employed to take measures (such as voltmeter). The modifications of voltage for example was measured by a small increase that would go clockwise (because of the resemblance of the measuring device and a clock). Then, when people had to design electrical appliances, they figured out that it would be better if an increase was translated by a clockwise movement. Things get complicated when the interface that evolved from two different culture can be found in the same cooking device (gas and electricity). Jacomy uses this as a second law in which he shows that the confluence between two techniques will have three phases: the two ignore themselves, then they coexist, then one win over the other.

We’re in the midst of such a situation with the examples below: a telephone, a computer keyboard and… a lovely-but-dusty minitel.

This has been caused by two different technical cultures: calculators (started with Felt and Tarrant’s Comptometer) and telephone keypad. The minitel is the most interesting because it’s a sort-of computer designed with the phone interface culture. The author also mentions how ATM use both interface.

Why do I blog this? few notes and thoughts about that book (which have more to offer!). I find interesting this timescale dimension that also give some interesting elements to consider in terms of foresight issues and the evolution of artifacts. Moreover, the notion of “design culture” who set standards is also important, especially when things start to mix because of the convergence between manufactures objects. Surely material and food for thoughts for a near future laboratory pamphlet.

Toilet ergonomics is always intriguing as attested by this picture taken from the french TGV. Using the tap water and the hand dryer require to pass your hands close to a sensors, as indicated by the 2 stickers. However:
- the depiction in red of radiowave detection is perhaps clear enough for someone used to live with sensor-based device all over the place but not for everybody.
- the exact location of the sensor is wrongly depicted as it is not necessarily on the left of the tap/dryer.

Why do I blog this? As we already discussed here, the representation of sensor-based interactions is always more complex than expected by the engineers who designed them. Next time, you’re in such train try to spot if the tap has been used (see traces of water).

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

As Timo describes on the Touch weblog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The richness of phone booths

(Paraty, Brazil)

(Amsterdam, Netherlands)

(Lyon, France)

(Marseille, France)

Please note the different conception of privacy (bubble, box) or how parts of the booth are used in other way (broken glass to seat, to attach a bike, to put ads). What does that say about space? urban computing?

Different ways to protect one’s source of electricity:

Well covered in a french train:

With duct tape at the airport in Brussels:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning read in the train this morning was “A Framework of Place as a Tool for Designing Location-Based Applications” by Anna Vallgarda. The paper is about a “framework of place” defined through interviews with architects, that aims at informing the development of location-based applications. The author describes what are the structure and properties of place that are important for architects as potentially influencing the conception of “how human beings perceive their presence in place”.

The point is that developing applications based on context require the knowledge and meaning of the significant parameters of the place where it should work. That’s why she reviews different “location models” (aura model, nexus model, etc). TRying to summarize the framework she describes lead me to:

“To recapitulate, the concept of place refers to the physical order of objects; it is the physical boundaries within which we act. This framework is an account of what such boundaries contain (and their potential attributes).

Atmosphere:
Light: northern, southern, artificial or strong/weak or direct/indirect
Color: cold/warm or strong/pale or red, yellow, blue
Materials: concrete, tree, glass, stone, clay, tile or rough/soft
Proportions: human scale or large industry building
Shape: circular, square, blurred
Vertical position: floor or altitude
Temperature: Celsius or Fahrenheit
Air/wind: clean air or wind speed
Sound: machine, animal, human or high/low

Activities:
Entrances: bodily, visual, audible or mediated/direct or easy/difficult
Functionality: bathroom, kitchen, playground
Resources: power, water, gas, WiFi

Hierarchies:
Social: home – community garden – town-hall square (enables social navigation)
Proportion: house – apartment building – industrial area (enables physical/social navigation)
Indoor/Outdoor; bed room – balcony – plaza (enables physical/social navigation)

Infrastructures:
Type Modalities Measures Enables
Bodily: foot, car etc. (measure: meters, miles) (enables movement, overview, social interactions)
Visual: direct, mediated (measure: clarity) (enables: visual contact, overview, social interactions)
Audible: direct, mediated (measure: decibel) (enables: audible contact, social interactions)
Material: water, power etc. (measure: liters, voltage) (enables: various activities)“

Why do I blog this? as I am interested in the UX of location-based application, this sort of framework is interesting as it aims at “establishing a more nuanced notion of location”, which is often a problem (as location is often limited to a dot on a map without any thoughts about granularity or contextual problems). As the author mentions,it would be good to complement it with environmental psychology, cultural geography, and anthropology.

It’s also limited to indoor locations, I may find interesting to repeat this work and complement the model at the city level, with urban planners or transport/infrastructure practitioners for example.

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.

In the last science and technology quarterly of the E, there are two interesting articles closely related with the hybridization of the digital and the physical: “Playing tag” and “Watching as you shop“. While the former is about spatial annotation through mobile devices, the latter addresses locative technologies in shops.

Notes about “Playing tag”: the article is about the new “nirvana”: “linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world“. The typical use-case they propose is the following:

“MAGINE you are a woman at a party who spots a good-looking fellow standing alone in a corner. Before working up the courage to talk to him, you whip out your mobile phone. A few clicks reveal his age and profession, links to his latest blog posts and a plethora of other personal information. To many, this sounds like a nightmare. “

. And the article goes by describing a new service called Aka-Aki which uses Bluetooth for that matter.

Notes about “Watching as you shop”: the technology they describe aims at monitoring queue lengths, adjust store layouts and staffing levels or gathering data on where customers go, where and how long they stop, and how they react to different products (so that in-store designs and marketing campaigns can be improved). Some are even jumping on richer data acquisition processes:
“These sensors recorded data on customer-traffic patterns, to which was added further information recorded by human observers. By comparing the resulting data with sales information, it was then possible to gain insight into shoppers’ behaviour.“

They obtain this sort of map, which is now common… as it is the sort of canonical representation of any spatial behavior analysis ranging from a supermarket to first person shooter games.

Why do I blog this? following the progress of this field for quite some time now and having written a PhD dissertation on the topic, I am always surprised by how locative or tagging technologies are presented. It’s always the same story of weird use-cases (targeted to a certain elite or nonsensical to 99% of the population on earth)… and finally what we end up with is to have mobile social software that are (almost) not used AND monitoring systems that are more easily deployed in shops and supermarkets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An interesting talk I attended yesterday at the Lyon Game Developers’ Conference was the on entitled “Creating Great Games for the Nintendo Wii and Its Unique Controller” by Philip and Andrew Oliver from Blitz Games:

“Even though the ideas are fairly simple to prototype, getting the feel of each control system just right was a challenge in itself. Detecting the correct motion of the controller had to be very specific and tested thoroughly as different people held the controllers in sometimes very different ways. The problem of how to convey the instructions for the controller types within the game had to be addressed. As we all know, nobody reads the manual, especially at the target age range. A series of images, text prompts and even animated movies were experimented with, all with different results. Testing and interpreting these methods were key to getting a successful title.“

Some of the results they described about designing wii movements:

“- swiping is tiring and it’s difficult to sync movements on the screen
- driving using the wiimote as a steering wheel that you can push/pull to accelerate/brake did not work because it was too tiring and small movements were unnoticed… and they noticed how an abstract notion like accelerating is better conveyed by pressing buttons
- people hold the wiimote VERY differently. Kids tend to hold it very loosely and do movements with large amplitudes whereas adults hold it more firmly and do not swing it away too much (as if it was a sacred grail or a TV remote control)
- certain controls that require player to hold the wiimote vertically did not work… because people do not hold it vertically: people do not look at the wiimote especially when standing. Asking someone to hold the wiimote vertically is difficult because it depends on situations: sit at a desk, lie on a bed, standing, standing with friends.
- distance between the wiimote and the screen was easily detected and that variable was very accurate to be employed in a game mechanic.“

Why do I blog this? these few elements are interesting and echoes with the (private) work I have done about this. More specially it resonates quite well with the importance of context in playing with the Wii. I am currently thinking about a study concerning how people have expectations about the wiimote, how they understand its usage. It would also be interesting to observe how people naturally hold the wiimote