Two intriguing examples of persuasive design encountered at ENSCI in Paris:
The first one, next to the stairs, is an invitation to use the staircase as opposed to the elevator so "harden your butt".
The second is a sticker that someone have put on the toilet hand dryer. It says "What's the largest contributor to global warming?" with two answers: "Dry one's hand with a tissue?" and "Press a button?".
Subtle cueing to invite for behavioral changes.
An interesting quote from "Halting State" (Charles Stross):
"We used to have sliderules and log tables, then calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don't use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things (...) The city look the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the lines we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it'll run on quantum key exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveller - they won't know that. It looks like the 20th century"
Why do I blog this? I found intriguing this familiar-but-different depiction. The scene happens when 2 characters of the novel wander around Edinburgh in 2018 and discuss how it would look familiar to a time-traveller coming from the 50s and how it's only underneath the surface of buildings and infrastructures (as well as clothing style and presence of cell-phones) that things work very differently.
This is quite interesting as it seems to follow how innovation works (step by step most of the time) with disruptions under the surface of things.
In his "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects", french sociologist Gilbert Simondon interestingly addresses the flawed distinction between culture and technique:
"Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contains no human reality. We would like to show show that culture fails to take into account that in technical reality there is a human reality, and that, if it is fully to play its role, culture must come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values. (...) The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and has not foundation. (...) It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man and nature"
And he goes on be raising an interesting point: art pieces and more aesthetic objects are not criticized in the same way. A painting is part of culture but a robot isn't:
"Culture is unbalanced because, while it grants recognition to certain objects, for example aesthetics things, and gives them their due place in the world of meanings, it banishes other objects, particularly technical things, into the unstructured world of things that have no meaning but do have a use, a utilitarian function. (...) Our culture this entertains two contradictory attitudes to technical objects. On the one hand, it treats them as pure and simple assemblies of material that are quite without true meaning and that only provide utility. On the other hand, it assumes that these objects are also robots and that they harbor intentions hostile to man, or that they represent for man a constant threat of aggressions or insurrection."
Why do I blog this? Simondon is always refreshing and his writings (not very common in english) quite pervaded sociology and philosophy nowadays (Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler) and theories such as ANT. What I find relevant here is the importance of locating technique (i.e. technologies) where it belongs and not distinguish from other human-based creation.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, our TGV is running at its maximum speed at 300 kilometer per hour" as announced by the train controller. Revealing the company's (and country's) pride? Informing passengers of service quality (assuming that speed is quality)? Telling consumers that they're taken care of by recurring feedthrough information?
"Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism" by Bar, Pisani and Weber is one of these mysterious academic paper that I enjoy running across. It basically investigate appropriation of mobile phones in Latin America, and how this technology is embedded within people social, economic, and political practices. Relying on the classic literature about appropriation (for example S-shaped curves and Roger's theories), they show how technology evolution progress through successive phases of adoption, appropriation, and reconfiguration. By analogy with the historical process of cultural appropriation in Latin America, they draw a parallel between these steps and the 3 following modes: “baroque”, “creolization” and “cannibalism”:
"Baroque layering: The most basic way in which users can appropriate a technology is for them to use the personalization features that are provided to them with that intent in mind. As technical objects, mobile phones come with many such affordances. These include for example the ability to change the ringtone, screen wallpaper, upload one’s phonebook, set up short-cuts for most-often called numbers, download games, and upload one’s music, photo, or video collection. (...) Creolization represents a deeper transformation, a more profound form of appropriation. It refers to practices where the user recombines or reprograms elements of the technology. In this appropriation mode, by contrast with baroque layering, users are more deeply involved in changing the technology. They now explore ways to adapt the technology beyond the options that have been designed by the phone makers and service providers. (...) Cannibalism: This third form of appropriation is the most extreme in the sense that it corresponds to practices where the user chooses to engage in direct conflict with the suppliers of the technology (or at least with the power relation as embodied in the technology.) Cannibalism includes modifications of the device that place the user in direct opposition with the providers’ business model, destruction of the device."
Why do I blog this? following theories of technology adoption for a while (especially for a course I give about innovation and foresight in a design school), I read a lot about s-shape curves, 3-steps theories and found this one quite intriguing. Also because after going 3 times to latin america for one year, I noticed how it could be an interesting field of observation. This paper is interestingly anchored in both relevant theoretical and empirical points that I may reuse in the course as well as in my research. The part about designing for appropriation is also relevant as it points out the role of taking into account these 3 phases in creating meaningful products and services.
"Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box" by Lehau, Sengers and Matcas makes an interesting analogy between Ubiquitous Computing and the situation encountered by Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s. They state how the current debate in ubiquitous computing regarding how a computational system can both make sense of the environment AND respond to it in a sensible way belongs to the same class of problems AI had to face in the past:
"In particular, ubicomp is currently facing a series of challenges in scaling up from prototypes that work in restricted environments to solutions that reliably, robustly work in the full complexity of human environments. These challenges echo problems AI researchers tackled as the field sought to move beyond ‘blocks-world’ solutions to build real-time systems that could work in dynamic, complex environments."
Part of the paper is about this analogy (in terms of the difficulty encountered by both fields), another part is about proposing interactionist AI (e.g. autonomous agents) as a potential solution to scale ubicomp prototype to real-world deployment. Why do I blog this? For people interested in the debate about the capture of context, there are some interesting points here about how to reframe classic ubicomp issues, as well as answers to some concerns raised by Bell and Dourish.
A fascinating stack of notes with numbers, additions and corrections encountered recently in a very old-school french grocery store. This awfully nice pile of duct-taped paper looks very pre-computing and surely plays more role than calculations: it's clearly as dashboard for the salesman as he told me he uses it as a reminder for customer credit "emprunts".
The importance of paper, again.
Back in the days, Regine's blog "We Make Money Not Art" was still called "near near future", a name I was really fascinated of, as it implied how the short term is on the verge of going something different, more curious with intriguing alternatives. The near future laboratory's rationale of course emerged partly from that logic. Recently, sci-fi writer Charles Stross posted a interesting text about what he means by "near future SF". His text is coincidentally very relevant to my fascination towards "near (near) future" design and foresight. Stross basically shows how "Near future SF is about how-to-get-there-from-here". See some excerpts I found relevant:
"near-future SF isn't SF set n years in the future. Rather, it's SF that connects to the reader's life: SF about times we, personally, can conceive of living through (barring illness or old age). It's SF that delivers a powerful message — this is where you are going. As such, it's almost the diametric opposite of a utopian work; utopias are an unattainable perfection, but good near-future SF strive for realism.
Orwell's 1984 wasn't written as near-future SF, even though he wrote it in 1948, a mere 36 years out: it explicitly posits a global dislocation, a nuclear war and a total upheaval, between the world inhabited by Orwell's readers and the world of Winston Smith. You can't get there from here, because it's a parable and a dystopian warning: the world of Ingsoc is not for you. In contrast, Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire is near-future SF (...) You're meant to think, "I could end up there" — that's the whole point of near-future SF."
He then distinguishes near future-SF from technothriller ("The high-tech stuff is window dressing") and the discussion in the comment section quite echoes some of the discussion we had at Design Engaged after Julian's presentation about science-fiction and design. Why do I blog this? sunday's thinking about the near near future, as well as recent discussion about this issue. Of course, this is related to my work as "near future-SF" is an interesting source of material for current design and foresight projects.
The importance of proxemics in service design. Two examples of signage that warn people to keep a certain distance with each others in a (1) booth context (Switzerland), (2) vending machine context (France).
These signs are interesting cultural cues showing the value of space between people and things, as they reveal the do's and don'ts in terms of behavior. Service design of course needs to take this into account.
The link between user research and design is a topic I focus on even more closely than in the past, perhaps because of my involvement in different design courses. More specifically, I am interested in how user research can be relevant for design purposes and what are the underlying process one can put into place to work this out. Since I work with video game designers and interaction designers (yes I make the distinction between both but that's another story), this issue is quite important. One of the interesting term here is the notion of "the real" as user research is meant to bring material concerning the real world, what users really do, what are their constraints and needs, and in fine why they do what they do. The literature in HCI, especially about the use of ethnography, has a wide take on this but I was more curious to see what designers have to say about it. Reading User research at IDII: Three case studies, 2002-2004 by Simona Maschi, Laura Polazzi and Jay Melican, I ran across this interesting quote:
"Everything we learn from user studies has the great advantage of being “true” (although not in an absolute way), because it comes from the real world and fromreal experiences. This makes it somehow believable and graspable for our audience, both within and outside of the design team. In other words user studies provide the design team with “live material” that can be used to share thoughts and ideas and to communicate the project effectively to the world."
(The document is btw a relevant set of case study and quick description of research methods employed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea).
This notion of the "real" as the cornerstone of the exchange between UX research and design was also interestingly tackled at the recent EPIC conference. See for example how this weblog highlight the "real issue" in the discussion about how ethnographers can build and exhibit the authority necessary to be able to sell and provide ethnographic insights:
"Simon Pulman-Jones argued, ethnographers in industry are seeking to establish themselves as an authority on The Real - what it is really like out there in order to commoditize our insights, our epiphanies to help the organisations that we work for and with. (...) Ethnographers are indeed ‘brokers of the real‘ - they have themselves attained a sort of gatekeeper role between the designers and the engineers and the real world where real people actually use the products. They help the engineers meet and understand the users, in order to change the way the engineers think and feel about them."
Why do I blog this? preparing a lecture about this issue, gathering notes and elements for heated debates. I won't enter into the debate about whether the "real" is graspable (the amount of literature about this issue is so huge that you'd better start with Plato), nor about ethnography as the solution to the world's problem (is ethnography really about describing the world?). Rather, I find interesting here is the increasing impression that the "real" should be brought to the table in design and therefore a different set of allies (ethnographers now, ergonomists and cognitive psychologists in the past), tools (qualitative research today, quantitative research yesterday) gain momentum over time.
My personal impression here is that: (1) yes the real should be explored, analyzed and employed in the design process, (2) however the "real" is perhaps not so real for lots of reasons: the "data capture" implied by the time/budget constraints of project, the "data reduction" caused by the method (quant method = reductionism, qual method = research as the instrument), the mean of transferring the results to the design team (collaborative workshop? pdf report sent by email?), etc.
Super quick notes from Felix Petersen's talk last week at Web2.0 Expo in Berlin. Felix founded Plazes, a web-supported location-based service in 2006. He basically built upon his experience to describe the state of the geoweb in 2008 (excuse the rawness of my notes):
"founded in 2006 / one of the first start-up in this geopresence space check each others' location with your laptop that detects the wifi where you are we had to build the whole thing, now the geoweb is a more mature ecosystem and the components ar emore specialized nokia acquired plazes few months ago, now plazes is part of nokia maps; trying to mash things upwhy going with nokia? if you look at my card it says "heads of social activities" my mother thinks i am organizing bbq party but it's a sign that nokia is advanced division " context-based services", expanded from LBA
the promises of geoweb: connected guidance of people (reach any place on any terrain... mass market... on foot+car), discover and share places (find and add cool places, recommend to others), record and share your life (record hikes, journeys and share or relive your life), stay close to your friends (stays close+ plan joint activities)
this promise has been around for sometimes the nokia phone from 1998 with WAP was cool and it even had a buddy-finder (vodagone germany) but it did not work, it never came out on that product broken promise, it was very naive, people seemed to haven't think lbs through
falses ideas: it's creepy that people can see where I am: i don't think so cool, i can finally track my friends wherever they are: this is wrong, it's not about tracking but about publishin great i can push an ad or coupon to anyone passing by my store: naive vision + this does not scale, this use case won't work
AND TIME WON'T HELP, it's not just about waiting the other part of the hype cycle
what it takes to build the geoweb, you need to understand that: - location detection: it's not soft, of course there is GPS enabled devices but... - mapping: layer of rules and metadata, google maps helps a lot, that's a component that is at a good stage - social objects: what are the geoweb specific objects that emerges: what are the unique objects that work with location?
1) location detection: GPS, A-GPS, wifi localisation (skyhook wireless), cell localisation, cell-triangulation (never really useful because it was confiné au seul operateur: pas possible de transmettre cette information aux amis d'un autre provider sans qu'ils aient a payer...)
what does location detection save? it can put you at a certain lat/long at a certain time does not sound like much, lat/long without context is not much but if you add existing social objects, location can add valuable information: geotagging pictures, twibble other objects: email, music tracks? what other objects can improve through location? sorting/filtering your email by location? this is where things will happen
there are still challenged: battery life: and it needs to be aware all the time... probing frequency privacy scheme needed pattern detection background processes: it's not possible to build an app that track my position in the background for other applications
there is a tendency to build gps in every devices (camera, bike) but interestingly there are also tracker that does uniquely tracking: little sony gps box
2) Mapping provides context and rules lots of improvement in that field enables routing and navigation personal nav is already mass market today mapping will constantly improve: google cars that collect streetview imagery, 3d models...
3) Social objects a social network is not only a connection between people, social connections happens through social object examples of social objects: bookmarks, people, pictures... web2.0 is the web of social objects
a social object: represents atomical data (i can refer to it, it becomes a conversational piece: like a picture on flickr), has a perman-linkable/embedable, often provides a conversational canva
you can add location to other social objects and sort them so which new social objects emerge in the geoweb? 1) places (a point in space): the most important, places are the most reference points of the geoweb the challenge: name space unification (how to refer to you couch as a place? your appartment? this is not just using the yellow pages, the idea is to come up with sth that is open but has a controlled vocabulary), open versus closes, dupes (we have to allow duplicates (different city names berlin) but also control them: how do you allow for ambiguity), lat/long which allows to place assignement yahoo had done it with the "where on earth" idea 2) traces: lots of points over time ideal container for attaching places and media 3) activities vast amount of data social activies are on the intersection of time and space what dopplr calls a trip is an activity
SO what can we build? 1) cool new apps: lat/long: this picture was taken here +place: three of your friends are at this bar +trace: this place I visited on my italy trip +activity: five people you will run into at Shift08
2) privacy right now: time and relation future: place-based privacy other options: chaffing, granularity
3) advertising - monetize targeting based on meaningful locations triggering upon engagement: you only get an ad if you engage physically a place, if you go there... turning advertising into information
what the ecosystem will look like? object creation (phone, laptop... automatic)...api layer... object storage (contextual logic/provacy, data layer)... api layer... object publication (published through all kinds of chanels: twitter, facebook, ovi, google earth, skype, fireagle...)"
Why do I blog this? material for my book about locative media, content for a foresight study about the future of the web.
Browsing through weird interfaces, I ran across this air-augmented display.
It's called BYU-BYU-View and it basically adds air to the interaction between a user and a virtual environment, and communication through a network, by integrating the graphics presentation with wind inputs and outputs on a special screen:
"As a telecommunication tool, BYU-BYU-View could enable a system that presents a cutaneous sensation that distant lovers are sharing the same space. As an interface in a virtual environment, it could add the cutaneous sensation of air movement to sight and sound in a novel game. It could become a new input tool for people who have limited abilities with their hands or feet, or a communication method for deaf or blind people that delivers information directly to the skin."
Why do I blog this? wondering about non-standard interfaces and how "blow" can be an intriguing interactions for users, all of this after a long discussion with friends about "blowing" in your nintendo DS in public when playing with nintendogs.
In the latest issue of ACM interactions, Steve Portigal's column is a categorization of different "approaches to making stuff" that I found both insightful and ironically intriguing:
"Be a Genius and Get It Right (James Dyson): Be a Genius and Get It Wrong (Dean Kamen) Don't Ask Customers If This Is What They Want Do What Any Customer Asks Understand Needs and Design to Them"
Why do I blog this? an interesting typology of design, perhaps to exhaustive but that certainly tackle relevant issues. For example, one of my favorite is certainly the "Do What Any Customer Asks" as it is often the case with people confusing "user centered design" with "doing what users asked". This is a problem I face very regularly when describing my work: there is this idea that being user-centric is about giving users what they want/asked. Which is of course different than what they need or would desire, since there is a wide gap between what people say to do/want and what they really do/need. It definitely shows the interesting tension in design between relying on users' practice or inventing new futures. As Steve points out, the point is a feature request should be translated in a need request. He takes the example of a customer who want a handle; the important thing here is not that the person wants specifically a handle but simply a way to move the thing from one place to another, and the handle is only a solution instance. So what's a better way to get it? It's all about grasping the needs:
"Needs, as considered in this approach, can be functional, like when a design firm discovered women shoveling snow more than men and redesigned the ergonomics of a snow shovel for this typically smaller user. Needs can also be emotional, such as when Sunbeam studied the backyard-grilling process and realized that the grill itself was associated with family moments and social connectivity rather than a set of meat-cooking features. Sunbeam then worked with Continuum to design the Coleman Grill to connote nostalgic camping cookouts. Needs can deal with shifting mental models of common behaviors, too. Work by B/R/S for Colgate identified that brushing teeth is seen by people as a way to maintain their entire mouth, not just scouring the surface of the teeth. This led to Colgate Total, which promises "Superior Oral Health.""
Quick wordle after a discussion I had about touch with Timo last week. Each of these words can lead to ask interesting questions regarding interface affordance, vocabulary of interactions as well as how create human-legible touch interactions. Exercise: take each of these terms and a technological device (eg. an SLR), ask youself how to use each of them to support the existing features. And then wonder about the relevance of gestures and touch-interactions for such uses. What does waving a device would support? What would caressing mean in photography?
Why do I blog this? mapping some words about the vocabulary of touch for future brainstorm (and then research). Echoes a lot with a current research project about gestures.
As I already discussed here, the topic of Lift09 (25,26,27 Feb. 2009) will be "Where did the future go?":
"After three successful editions in Geneva, two events in South Korea, we are preparing for the 4th edition of Lift in Switzerland (February 25-26-27, 2009). This year, the topic will be "Where did the future go?".We were indeed told the future would be about mechanization and computerization leading to 3D flying virtual assistants, 1984-like nightmare or Asimov-inspired robots. Most of the entertainment culture as well as scientific research have contributed to this representation of a future filled with disruptive and glossy inventions that may or may not eventually turned our world upside down.
Beyond this depiction of tomorrow, we realize nowadays the long-praised "21st century" itself may not materialize. The long-awaited videophones did not really take off in terms of user adoption, flying cars are still sci-fi and we do not yet jack direct interface into a nervous system. As some anthropologists recently claimed, it is as if we were stuck in a perpetual present, looking for the short-term.
That said, change happened but not necessarily where we though it would. Although innovation is not always shiny and visible, things as fundamental as solidarity, love, or way we inhabit our physical environment have evolved dramatically, calling for new approach to design meaningful new interactions."
Pre-early bird registration is available for few weeks here.
In their paper entitled "New uses for mobile pervasive games - Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites", Matthew Chalmers and Oskar Juhli discusses how such games could be of benefit to conduct research about mobile and distributed work (e.g. infrastructure management at airports and road inspection, as well as public bus transportation). From what I can tell, it's a sort of longer development on their previous workshop paper "New uses for mobile pervasive games"from the Computer Games & CSCW Workshop at ECSCW'05. They take on the analogy of space and place issues in both domains (pervasive gaming and mobile distributed group work), more especially concerning the focus on the geography both as a topic and a resource in the work. They then show how different pervasive game they worked on (Treasure, Road Rager, Backseat gaming, Castles) as well as the results from user studies can give fruitful information:
"we suggest that there are valuable lessons to be gained from research into games in which players create their forms of play subject to the rules of the game, the technology they use and the wider social and environmental situation. We see strong and useful parallels with the situation of workers who create their work within organisational rules but also within their wider technical, social and environmental setting. "
Why do I blog this? This was the approach we also adopted in CatchBob during my PhD thesis work. What I find important today is that beyond the current serious game trend, there are more and more initiatives that try to employ games as platform to do other things than playing. The paper above is an example but thing such as Superstruct, i.e. the use of ARG as a foresight tool, is another interesting sign.
How to cue the passers-by to enter this shoe shop by using a delicate socialnav-like trick. Note how intriguing it is to use this lovely shoe material on the very swiss-designed raw concrete ground. Seen in Luzern, Switzerland yesterday afternoon.
Continuing my exploration of internet vocabulary, the terms employed in different cultures to refer to WiFi are diverse and interesting to document (and discus with Timo). The first one is from Boston airport (but I could have shown some from other countries) and the second from Berlin. I find intriguing the use of a technical term such as "WLAN", as opposed to the more universal (and more basic) "WiFi".
Two maps to navigate in Berlin yesterday and today. The first one, on the right, is the classic lonely-planet-like artifact you give to the hotel, asking them "can you point me where we area?". The second is the lovely and more valuable map handed by a local friend who made some recommendations. Even though most of the context (parks, other streets) is lost, there is more value to me in this second one (and it's also more foldable in my pocket).
Two different sorts of information: where the former is exhaustive and official, the latter is minimal but goes straight to the point: the place where my friend assumed I'd be intrigued. Services opportunity here.
Coincidentally, and because we passed by Berlin in the same week, near future laboratory compadre Julian Bleecker has also a post about maps.
A picture I took yesterday morning in Geneva. It shows an interesting (and sad) trend lately in the city: the disappearing of mom and pop's shop which are now so expensive to rent that it's more valuable for certain luxury companies to use the shop as a billboard structure. In the case depicted above, the former DIY shop on the right has been turned into a billboard for a watch company (but of course some cool graffiti-makers attacked it). The portuguese restaurant showed on the foreground (left) has also recently been turned into this kind of surface: the wooden structure will soon be covered by crappy watch ads.
In the end, we have an empty volume with this super-expensive surface.
Why do I blog this? this quick thought ("surface more valued than volume") while walking around there yesterday led me to think about how spatiality is a complex issue. It's kind of weird to think about this sort of practice.