Neal Stephenson on failure and innovation

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A good excerpt from a text by Neal Stephenson:

"Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields."

Why do I blog this? This kind of situation echoes with my feeling in certain meetings and projects. Besides, I find interesting to rely on failures in order to move forward, as described in this excerpt.

Designing a marker system for the next 10,000 years

in

"Permanent Markers Implementation Plan" is a project initiated in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Energy in order to provide a permanent record which identifies the location of nuclear waste repository and its dangers. The report is quite big and it's perhaps easier to peruse this shorter version, more focused on the design component.

This report described the task handled by one of the expert group made of an anthropologist, an astronomer, an archaeologist, an environmental designer, a linguist, and a materials scientist. The brief for them was basic:

"The site must be marked. Aside from the legal requirement, the site will be indelibly imprinted by the human activity associated with waste disposal. We must complete the process by explaining what has been done and why. The site must be marked in such a manner that its purpose cannot be mistaken. Other nuclear waste disposal sites must be marked in a similar manner within the U.S. and preferably world-wide. A marking system must be utilized. By this we mean that components of the marking system relate to one another is such a way that the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

This team work led to the definition of design guidelines, which, in turn, served as the starting point for several alternative designs for the entire site: "Shunned land...poisoned, destroyed, unusable", "Shapes that hurt the body and shapes that communicate danger":

Their conclusion is also fascinating:

"To design a marker system that, left alone, will survive for 10,000 years is not a difficult engineering task. It is quite another matter to design a marker system that will for the next 400 generations resist attempts by individuals, organized groups, and societies to destroy or remove the markers. While this report discusses some strategies to discourage vandalism and recycling of materials, we cannot anticipate what people, groups, societies may do with the markers many millennia from now. A marker system should be chosen that instills awe, pride, and admiration, as it is these feelings that motivate people to maintain ancient markers, monuments, and buildings."

Why do I blog this? I find the brief utterly curious: designing a system that would work for 10'000 years is an inspiring starting point in the age of planned obsolescence.

Crosswords - QR - Game of Life

in

Lighweight QR code (as suggested by Paul Baron)? Game of Life (as suggested by Matt Jones)? or simply a red hand-drawn crosswords structure... as this kind of artifact fascinates me recently. I wonder if some people already thought about crosswords generated by game of life algorithms (beyond this.

Why do I blog this? I'm just mesmerized by the visual proximity between crosswords, QR codes and Game of Life rendering.

"the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life..."

in

The interview about SVK by Berg London is insightful but I was fascinated by this quote:

"I think the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life – that it’s something inventive, hopefully something that has some cultural importance – but mainly to have fun, make stuff y’know? When you can make that kind of thing achievable, when it gets some kind of independence from the client work so you can do it yourself, that’s really interesting."

Why do I blog this? this is exactly the sort of direction we are trying to aim at.

"Mobile 3D" projects

in

Currently working on a project about the user experience of 3D on mobile displays, I am fascinated by these two projects that came up in a discussion with Etienne yesterday:

Hasbro MY3D Viewer:

"Designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch, the MY3D Viewer lets you experience 3D games and 360-degree entertainment in a brand new way. Simply insert your device into the viewer to enjoy a variety of 3D and 360-degree-enhanced apps, many of which are free from the App Store. The MY3D Viewer includes four adapter trays sized to fit iPhone and iPod touch devices. Your device quickly snaps in and out--no wires or batteries are required."

Sensor Girl, an old stereoscope customized for iPhones by Dominique Cunin. This project has been shown at Mode:Demo (Lift Experience 2010):

"SensorGirl is an artistic experimental application that aims to question the new interactive relationship a user can have with represented objects on nowadays mobile screens. Embedded sensors like accelerometers and gyroscope are opening new modalities of interaction with images : the user’s hand changes the screen physical orientation which can be used to interact with the represented object without any third party device. The screen itself and its relative state can then be directly connected to an object image, linking both in a new way that common controllers like mouse or joysticks don’t permit on usual, non-mobile screens."

Why do I blog this? I'm accumulating examples of curious experiments like this for a project and wonder about people's reactions, the design possibilities and the value of 3D in mobile context.

Taxonomy, ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies

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"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that from a long way off look like flies."

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” Why do I blog this? Simply because it's a fascinating quote for a Sunday afternoon. Working on a course about qualitative analysis, it's intriguing to have such example of taxonomy.

ENDCOMMERCIAL® / Reading the City

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ENDCOMMERCIAL® / Reading the City is a book that Chris Woebken recommended few weeks ago via a quick exchange of 140-character messages. It's a fascinating object that is perhaps 102% in line with my interests (urban artifacts, classification, aesthetics).

This book is basically a compilation of pictures photographed by Florian Böhm, Luca Pizzaroni, Wolfgang Scheppe and published by Hatje Cantz Publishers. It is based on a exhibit located in Berlin back in 2002 and features an extensive exploration of New York City. The authors took this environment as a sort of generic city from which they could highlight certain aspects. Which was definitely the purpose of the authors, as they say, "it is about the represented not the representation" and their inspiration lies both in "scientific and ethnological photography and Claude Levi-Strauss" and "the device itself: the product line of electronic consumer goods. Digital cameras by japanese makers. Nikon, Canon, Sony".

Why do I blog this? What I found interesting in this work is that it's definitely more than a simple visual encyclopedia:

" I hope it can change your sensibility for your surrounding, a change in perception of the ordinary, a shifted view on something that has become invisible by its omnipresence. The images are arranges in a way that they have an effect on you, wake you up, make you see things for example reveal social and economic patterns that shape the modern urban enviroment, understand things in their context."

The way they sorted the picture is also interesting. Based on an inductive approach, they sorted the different themes and they created various "periodic tables" to define similarities and categories:

"WS: The quality of the diagrams is that of a taxonomy. A taxonomical order systemizes phenomenons due to analogies and similarities judging elements of their appearance. while analyzing and researching our archive we found similarities, types of figures, strange coincidences. after identifying these they were transformed in themes and subjects for new shootings and field researches. new material was collected to verify or falsify categories of the taxonomy.

FB: The Diagram was extracted from the material after screening and structuring the image archives into themes, not the other way around. In this way it is rather an empiric investigation with a result that could have not been anticipated fully in the beginning. The material reveals many aspects, sociological, political, economic, urbanistic etc... But we didn't plan for it to be anything."

As a final word, one of the best quote from the author about this work is certainly: "it is impossible to walk down the street without seeing social qualities in objects". This is clearly what this book depicts.

Funfaircomp: game interfaces

in

Some examples of game interfaces encountered at a fun fair in Nantes last week:

Why do I blog this? Fun fair and amusement park offer peculiar kinds of constraints for interaction design: noisy environment, presence of a crowd, cash-oriented money, balancing success and failure with regards to the reward at stake (toys, etc.) The crafting of sound user experience in this context is intriguing and lead to solutions as shown above.

It would be good to spend some time and observe more people's reactions when using these huge buttons and joysticks. That being said, fun fair interfaces and amusement parks experiences seems to be a forgotten realm in human-computer interaction. Apart from research about amusement rides, I haven't seen may occurrences of such endeavor. That can be an interesting lead for future projects.

Yuichi Yokoyama about the future

in

A strikingly interesting author, japanese manga author Yuichi Yokoyama has an interesting perspective on the near future:

"Matiere: Are you interested in Science Fiction?

Yuichi Yokoyama: I was impressed by Tarkovski’s films, Solaris and Stalker and also by Kubrick’s 2001, a Space Odyssey. I also like TV shows about aliens and prehistoric times… If one sees Sci-Fi in my stories, that doesn’t bother me, but it’s not specifically my intention. I’m not trying to write stories that are set in the future, but rather to write stories which are delivered from references to any given epoch or time. If the history of the world had turned out differently from what we know today, men would live according to different sets of values and different aesthetics. The culture of that world would probably demand that people not wear shoes or always cover their heads and never show their true faces. It would be a civilization completely alien to ours. Tomorrow’s world takes root in our present time, and is always connected to it. That’s why it doesn’t interest me to depict the world of the future. Two of my stories, entitled “Dress-Up” and “Travel” show characters with no hair on their heads. And yet these characters are not old men with bald heads. They are young people who shave their hair off. In the civilization portrayed in those two comic strips, that’s the way things go: it’s maybe part of the fashion to pretend to be old. I draw characters whose aesthetics are different from ours."

From Back to the Future 2 to a WIPO patent

in

It took 20 years to (finally) see a patent for self-lacing shoes. The Nike prop from Back to the Future 2 has indeed been shown in 1989 (with a non-automatic lacing version released as a collector in 2008).

People interested in rather low-tech solution can also have a look at this arduino-based version with utterly swell strapped micro-controllers and motors to a pair of Jordans.

Why do I blog this? Of course this is old news for the interwebs, but I find it interesting to collect examples of product featured in speculative movies that find their way to real artifact or intermediary artifacts such as patent. It's a good way to trace the evolution of product ideas from a Los Angeles studio to a huge server farm at the World Intellectual Property Organization near my apartment in Geneva. The fact that it took 20 years to see this move is intriguing too.

More game controllers evolution charts

in

Working on the game controller project book, we're building various charts of joypad evolution. What's interesting is that we're definitely not the sole persons doing this. Over the recent months, there's been several other relevant visualizations, that I compiled in this blogpost. Obviously, the first that caught my eyes several years ago is the following one by Sock Master:

Then, more recently by incontrol and Steve Cable:

Or these two, focused on game controllers, beyond joypads by Pop chart lab:

I also found this others one, slightly less visual:

Why do I blog this? We try to differentiate our representations, so it's good to see how others are proposing relevant visualizations. In our case, we're creating a family tree for each of the joypad characteristics (d-pad, shape, action buttons). Which, hopefully, will highlight the complexity of the gamepad evolution.

Pixels Per Person: making WiFi networks tangible

in

Pixels Per Person by Carina Ow is an inspiring design project that looked at how to give a tangible existence to the public WiFi network in the city of Geneva:

"In images, WiFi connections are usually represented as a series of fluctuating waves derived from signal strength indicators that fall and rise according to the strength of the WiFi connection. This inspired the creation of a system that would not stay static, but would instead be in a state of constant motion. To represent this idea, each installation takes the form of a dynamic OLED surface modelled differently each time depending on the characteristics found on site. Organic LEDs (OLEDs) were specified for surface of the installations because they work both in the light and dark, and can therefore contribute to the spatial quality of the installation site at night. (...) The graphical system is designed as different configurations of these pixels forming pixel images derived from classic Wi-Fi signal motifs. Depending on the total number of users connected to the network, the image will change to reflect the network traffic, i.e. the more users, the more pixels used in the composition of the image. The pixel images morph between themselves in a pre-defined transitional animation."

Why do I blog this? Because of my long-time interest in representation the digital envelope of urban environments. This project is intriguing as it represents WiFi usage and aims to induce a sense of participation and ownership in the users.

Back to school days, course are being prepared

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It's back to school days here, pencils are being sharpened, wireless notebooks being bought... and new courses are being prepared. This year will have a decent share of teaching in various institutions. I am currently preparing some fresh material for the following courses

  • HEAD-Geneva for masters students:
    • "Introduction to interaction design": a year-long 2-hours a week course about the main notion of interaction design (affordance, mental models, design process, direct interaction, usability, interaction styles), the history of the field and the main subdomains (web, mobile, locative media, 3D virtual worlds, networked objects, etc.). It's going to be a mix of lectures, discussions and practical exercises.
    • "Usage-Oriented Design": a semester-based course about how to apply field investigation in design. The emphasis will be made on data collecting techniques and how to turn the results into sound design. This one will be a mix of short lectures and studio-based activities.
  • ENSCI, for undergraduate students:
    • "Introduction to design research: from usage to design" with Raphael Grignani (Method, SF): a week-long workshop about how to apply field investigation in design, in November.
    • "Usage-Oriented Design: from usage to prototyping" with Yves Rinato (Intactile design) in March 2012, which will also be a week-long workshop about the articulation between field investigation and design prototpying.
  • Ecole Gobelins Annecy, for masters students:
    • Bottom-up innovation and foresight: a three-days workshop about diffusion of innovation theories and foresight methodologies. This course is based on both lectures and workshop-based activities.
  • EPFL, Lausanne, for masters students (yes I'm back teaching at my Alma Mater):
    • "A creative toolbox for innovation" with Daniel Sciboz. The year-long weekly 3 hours course will be an overview of design processes, approaches and tactics. From prototyping to sketching, design ethnography and storyboarding. This course is based on both lectures, studio-based activities and a personal project by the students.

And of course there will be more punctual interventions in other places about similar topics.

Cyberpunk and creolization

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Read in No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration by Patrick Novotny: Why do I blog this? Collecting material about cyberpunk for an upcoming interview about the connections between science-fiction and interaction design. The creolization meme seems important but, for some reasons, I don't know (yet!) how to articulate its role. More material needed to understand the implications.

Feeling interactivity in a video-game

in

An excerpt from Pilgrim in a microworld found in Rules of play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman:

"I'd catch myself turning my chair into a more en face position vis-à-vis the TV. An obvious delusion. Maybe I could rest one elbow on the set to help feel the angle of my look and deepen a sense of the scale of things. See it from this side and that; see the invisible backside of things through an imaginary bodily tour of the object. Nonsense!  If only I could feel the impact of the ball on the paddle, that would certainly help, would give me a tactile marker, stamping the gesture's places into a palpable little signature, so I'd feel each destination being achieved and not just witness the consequences of a connect shot. Nonsense!

Nonsense, just your eyes way up top, to be somehow fixed on things in ways that can't feel them fixing, then this silent smooth little plastic knob down there, neither near nor far away, but in an untouchable world without dimension. And in between all three nodes of the interface, there is nothing but a theory of electricity. So fluid, to have to write your signature with precise consistency in size within the strict bounds of a two and three sevenths of an inch of space, say, while the pen somehow never makes contact with the paper. There's nothing much to hold on to, not enough heft in this  knob so your hands can feel the extent of very minor movements, no depth to things you can use to anchor a sense of your own solidity."

Why do I blog this? This is an enlightening account of playing a video-game from the user's point of view.