This is what I get for writing a blog, but not reading any. I've been talking about merging the physical and digital worlds and I knew I wasn't the only one doing it, but it's kind of embarrassing when I find out that someone so close to me in my social network had the same idea three years ago. Tom Coates' The Age of Point-At-Things totally beat me to it by three years. He was talking about his work with TV programs, but he knew that the implications went far beyond that.

But once you have decided what constitutes a programme episode then something really significant happens - you can give it a name, make it addressable, you can - for the first time point at it. Better still, you can move from pointing at something to glueing handles onto it. And once you have such a handle, then you can pick up the programme and throw it around and stick labels on it and join it together with other programmes with bits of semantic string. You've moved your engagement with the programme from only being able to look at it to being to manipulate it and do things with it. And there is almost no end to the things you can do once you've uniquely identified a television or radio programme. It's foundational. It's like there are two views of the world - the solid one around us and the Matrix-style flowing green lines one. In this second world, until you give a thing a name - until you can point at it in greenspace - it simply doesn't exist.

[...]

Now I know that the creation of universal and world-unique identifiers for things must seem one of the most tedious concepts or projects known to man. But I believe that it's fundamental to our technological development - and particularly our ability to take our ever-increasing computing power and increasingly interconnected appliances and merge them seemlessly with the environment around us. The greenspace of the Matrix needs to merge with the physical - they need to become indistinguishable. Until we can point at, until we can pick up, until we can handle, we will never be able to use these concepts around us effectively.

[...]

In this future world, all of our discrete objects (physical or conceptual) will be annotatable, or linkable to, referencable. Each 'thing' will be built upon in non-physical dimensions of data. And that final process of merging must start with addressability. It must start with identifiers.

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen of course went on to embody this idea in her ThingLink project soon after Tom's piece, but I'm happy I found Tom's clear and powerful articulation of the idea so that I don't have to recreate it. ;-) Thank you Tom and Ulla-Maaria!

Posted by at 6:01 PM | Permalink

My old friend and former business partner, Indi Young, has just had her first book published by my old friend Lou Rosenfeld and his new company, Rosenfeld Media, for which I'm an advisor. That caveat aside, I think this is a pretty great day for user research, user-centered design and publishing around, even as I've watched it take shape for several years from afar.

First, Indi's book. Although the title says it's a method to construct "mental models" through in-depth task analysis, it's a lot more. In the book Indi documents the many techniques she perfected working with a huge variety of clients. The techniques range from how to structure a cross-functional team, to recruiting people, conducting interviews, analyzing them, and creating effective diagrams that communicate the results. Really, it's Indi's whole rigorous process, which so many Adaptive Path projects hinged on, described clearly and in detail. It's a fantastic resource, a toolbox of highly effective, original tools for doing insightful, in-depth user research. I recommend it without reservation to everyone who does user research. We've all been asking Indi to write this book for years, and I'm so happy she's finally done it. Congratulations, Indi!

[FYI, get 10% off the cover price when you buy it directly from Rosenfeld Media's site when you use the code "FOKUNI10" I recommend doing this, rather than going through Amazon because Lou gets a larger proportion of the revenue, even with the discount.]

Second, Rosenfeld Media. Lou has been a friend of mine for many years. We were both part of the soup at the University of Michigan in the 80s and 90s which led to that school's far-thinking innovations in technology. We were there at the beginning of the Web and although we didn't know each other then, I believe we were influenced by many of the same ideas. When I went to LA in 1994 to design websites, Lou was already thinking and writing about information organization. He then went on to basically invent information architecture as we understand it today. He then went on to found a successful company and, in the process, he managed to write something like 8 books.

When he said he wanted to reinvent publishing based on his experiences writing books and designing information systems, I was very excited. Rosenfeld Media is the product of that redesign process. With it, he's decided to embrace the user-centered principles of site design and applied them to making books. But it's not just books, it's the whole culture of information around the books. In Lou's vision, the physical book is an artifact of a larger process of taking experts' knowledge and matching it to the needs of his company's audience of practitioners. Right now it looks mostly like traditional, if somewhat enlightened, publishing company, but you can start to see some differences in it immediately: books have version numbers on every page and you get the digital copy when you buy the paper one. He's also doing much of his marketing research out in the open and he's beta testing his books. It really is a different way of thinking about how to publish technical books, and I wish him luck and success (frankly, I don't think he needs the luck, but it can't hurt ;-).

Posted by at 3:56 PM | Permalink

Since we began work with The Henry Ford last year, I've been interested in how museums use technology to tell the stories of their artifacts. Having a single timeline narrated by a single curatorial voice and presented on tiny white wall cards cannot explain complex history and the significance of objects. Museums are, occasionally slowly, realizing this and it's fascinating to watch how they use technology to express their new understanding of their role as cultural repositories.

ThingM's focus on the Henry Ford project was communicating context in history museums, but today I watched how well the Detroit Institute of Arts does the same for art. Liz and I spent the afternoon in the recently redesigned DIA, and it was a surprise and a treat.

The DIA's collection is heavy on the classics and the 18th and 19th European art collected by its original auto company mogul donors. Not all of that art has stood the test of time and some is potentially embarrassing to display without explanation (chinoiserie anyone?). Fortunately, the DIA did not shy away from the questionable acquisitions or keep the "embarrassing" art in the warehouse. This is not to say that they don't have a great collection, they do, but what fascinated me was how they used their secondary pieces to tell stories, to explain and to contextualize the other work. Rather than galleries of dusty numbered Greek vases, for example, they had a life-size rear video projection that explained the social purpose of each of the vases in the Greek wine ritual. This was informative, since the pictures on the vases suddenly made much more sense once their function was understood. Moreover, the rear projection was in the style of the vase art itself, which tied together the artifacts to the people and their rituals in an immediate, entertaining and direct way.

(Flickr image by lisawiz)

Another great exhibit used a bunch of late 18th century French decorative art to tell the story of the life of leisure of French aristocrats, devoting each gallery to a time of the day and the artifacts that would have been found in each situation (implicit in the presentation was that this was the before picture; after the French Revolution, well, that's all different). A great installation in this exhibit was the dining gallery, which had a downward-facing video projection of a formal multi-course dinner, filled with Enlightenment-inspired symmetry, royal pomp and dozens of exotic-to-us dishes (wine aspic, for example). You could sit down at the table and watch as hands in fancy outfits places ridiculous dish after ridiculous dish on the table. Great.

(Flickr image by jtwilcox)

Finally, a much lower-tech technological intervention, but one that was interesting (if occasionally awkward because of its placement) was a set of triangular prism-shaped label spinners. Each side of the prism has a different complementary perspective on a given work from a different, named expert (as opposed to a single view by an anonymous curator). Some have historical context, some cultural. It presents a more nuanced exploration of the ideas.

The parts of the museum where they hadn't implemented all of the changes, where it was more like a traditional museum with vitrines, white cards and only occasional explanation seemed impoverished and bland. But on the whole, the redesign (described in detail [2.1MB PDF] in one of the local papers) is highly successful (and judging from the $180 million the museum raised in preparation for it, its success isn't just measured by the quality of the design) and engaging.

Posted by at 5:21 PM | Permalink

About a year ago I bought several books in an old set of Dickens' collected works from a book store that was going out of business. I bought them initially because of the nice texture that 19th century books have, but after reading Susanna Clarke's excellent Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell while doing "research" about magic, I decided to go back to read some of the Dickens that was her inspiration. I'm currently reading Bleak House, and apart from being kind of an amusing experience typographically (the letter spacing is definitely different than today's books and the books are slightly oversize and printed in small, two-column type to minimize paper cost, and I find I actually like the form factor), it's an interesting experience because the book keeps yielding pieces of its history in a way that modern artifacts rarely do. Here are some clues:

The inscription in the front has an oddly defensive quality, but is written with full names as a kind of explicit "message in a bottle" to future purchasers, to show that there were real people who really owned this book and that parting with it was not a wholly easy process:

Then there was this piece of music, which was either being used as a bookmark or just kept in the book for safekeeping. It also gives a good date for when the last time the book was read, which was likely the first time it was read, 1879:

Finally, this fell out this morning. I believe it's a souvenir of the US Centennial:

Apart from the amusing way to date the publication of the book (which is not rare in any way--I checked on Ebay) to the mid-late 1870s, these artifacts reminded me of the personalization traditional artifacts exhibit that today's digital artifacts do not. You can't stick a newspaper clipping into a Kindle and forget about it (though, admittedly, "time capsule" is a tertiary purpose for a book, too) and it would be weird to inscribing a mobile phone with its owners' history. Yet that's regularly found on furniture, in books, and even in older clothes. It gives these objects a depth that's meaningful in ways that transcend functionality, esthetics or design. There was an old SNL sketch about a Sentimental Pawn Shop which parodies the fact that sentiment and history have no material value. Th pieces of the original owners' lives that have fallen out of these books actually brings back some of that value, not in monetary terms, but in the experience of ownership. I'm keeping all of the things I found in the books in the books and wondering how I can design digital artifacts that will exhibit some of the same qualities.

Posted by at 11:20 AM | Permalink

(photo from Flickr, (cc) dailydog)

CHIFOO, the CHI forum of Oregon, invited me to speak at their January gathering, and it was an honor and a pleasure to accept their invitation. Their lecture theme this year is "From Ideation to Innovation," and I used the theme as an opportunity to describe our recent projects, including our work with the Henry Ford, and our products, and the theoretical framework that we're developing to think about ubiquitous computing user experience design and incorporating the principles of agile software development into design.

The full presentation is available as a 1M PDF.

Here's a highlight, the ThingM theoretical framework:

1. Information Processing is a Material

When a designer can include information processing in a product for very little cost, the calculation becomes not one of engineering complexity, that’s relatively cheap, but one of competitive advantage. What you do with that CPU becomes part of the design of the product and needs to be designed with the same attention to the other parts as any of the materials being used. And just like a material, it creates some new capabilities, and imposes new constraints.

2. Applianceness

Coined by Bill Sharpe of the Appliance Studio, states that applianceness is "the set of properties that guide the design process towards simple, helpful devices that exploit the potential of embedded information technology in everyday things." The core of the idea for me is that focus in functionality is more important than arbitrary flexibility. When computation is cheap, we no longer have to make general purpose computers. (Sharpe and his colleagues at an earlier incarnation of the Appliance Studio also did an excellent set of design principle cards (120K) that I still carry around)

3. Physical Objects Cast Information Shadows

In our modern world, everything exists simultaneously in the physical world and in the world of data. Nearly every object’s information shadow can be examined and manipulated without having to touch the physical object. Think of the Amazon and Google book APIs. Information shadows have lives of their own. Wine has a particularly rich one.

4. Devices are Service Avatars

Networks mean that the same information can be accessed and manipulated through a variety of devices. Most value rests in information, rather in the device that’s communicating it, which means that the devices become secondary. A number of familiar information appliances--cell phones, ATMs--are basically worthless without the networks they’re attached to. They are physical manifestations, avatars, projections into physical space of services, but are not services themselves. This means that when thinking about how to design user experiences for ubiquitous computing, the design of the service becomes as important as the design of the device. (I wrote more about this idea a couple of years ago)

5. Granularity Determines Key Aspects of Experience Design

Ubiquitous computing devices can come in all sorts of sizes and the user experience design for them must take this into account. This has been true since the earliest days at PARC when Weiser defined the tab, pad and board as names for the scales of the devices they were developing. I use a different set of terms, but the key idea is the same: what works at one granularity doesn't necessarily work at another.

6. Magic is a Powerful Interaction Metaphor

The concept of enchanted objects can help generate ideas about interaction and as a way to create user experiences that are easier to explain. People have a tendency to create animist explanations for the behavior of technologies that exhibit unpredictable behaviors. They treat their Roombas like pets, they get mad at their laptops, they think their iPod is obsessed with a band, etc. We can use these natural associations to design ubiquitous computing interactions. (I've written and talked about this idea more extensively before)

Posted by at 5:33 PM | Permalink

After several months heads-down on several projects (more news about that soon), I decided to go back and see what I had missed by skipping Ubicomp 2007. So far, the most interesting paper, from my perspective is Sung, Guo, Grinter and Christiansen's My Roomba is Rambo (1MB PDF). It is a small empirical study that validates that people's relationships to their Roombas is often anthropomorphic and positive (in fact, it's almost a love letter to the brand, though I don't think the researchers were biased).

I'm not surprised, since Roombas are one of the most prevalent forms of artificial life around and their unpredictable, unexpected behavior triggers is pretty "animal-like" to many people. This unpredictable, animal-like nature is what probably drove at least one Roomba competitor to show how their robot cleaner makes nice overlapping, distinctly mechanical sweeps when cleaning. Despite the fact that people have been naming their technology for thousands of years (ships, for example), there's still a tension between the rational response (of course it's a machine!) and the emotional one (...but it kinda acts like an animal) and it's good to see folks exploring and examining that tension.

Their conclusions are in line with other work that's shown that people respond to computers as if they were people (specifically Nass and Reeves' work), but their careful work enumerated the actual effects of these reactions.

First, we learned about participants’ happiness with Roomba because it helped them be cleaner and tidier. Second, people used anthropomorphic and zoomorphic qualities to engage with Roomba. Third, people demonstrated their Roomba to others, and went great lengths to change the home to accommodate it better.

Their section titles list how people's animist attitudes toward their Roombas manifests itself:

• Feeling Happiness Towards Roomba
  
• Lifelike Associations and Engagement with Roombas
  
• Valuing Roomba: Promoting and Protecting It
  

The details are predictable if you map "Roomba" to "dog": people named theirs, they were willing to spend extra time caring for them, they felt attached to specific ones, they ascribed intention and gender, etc.

They then analyze what this means for technology design. One thing I'm very happy to see is a discussion of the situations in which technology should not disappear. I've ranted about how technology should not be invisible, and it's satisfying to see that they reached the same conclusions: "high visibility of Roomba brought comfort to our
householders, which led to easier adoption of the robot."

Other interesting observations:

• "Instead of counting the hours of housework, people talked to us about the complexities of naming their vacuum cleaner. Further, we would argue that this suggests an adoption process that is not only different from that associated with conventional technologies (even potentially computational ones) but also perhaps more enjoyable and rewarding."
  
• "An interesting possibility that we raise here is that while accounts of vacuuming suggest that it is an activity that belongs to someone [in the household], the arrival of Roomba creates opportunities for a reallocation of responsibility. More generally, many of our participants articulated a sense of value that the robot created for them in their cleaning routines."
  
• "Our study showed that while Roomba users hoped that their robot would be reliable, they did not expect it to work flawlessly. Further, they took on extra work to increase Roomba’s odds of working well."
  

They conclude with some recommendations for design, but I think the greatest contribution of the paper is how it shows how technology design is deeply tied into the emotional and social relationships of the technology's users. Designing technology is not emotionally neutral territory. It's highly loaded. Moreover, I think that's only going to increase as we come to grow more socially comfortable with objects that have unpredictable behaviors.

I also think that Generation X and beyond are particularly comfortable with these ideas. Gen X is the generation that had Cabbage Patch Kids and Teddy Ruxpin. They are familiar at a deep level with high degrees of intimate object anthpomorphization. They may be even more familiar than previous generation because of the simultaneous mass-produced and personalized nature of these toys--possibly for the first time in history that combination existed.

I am very happy to see the implications of these effects explored and sad that I missed the presentation of the paper. Also, they reference Tod's caroling Roomba video, for which I give 'em props. Now on to more Ubicomp papers.

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reading a description of the design of the Appliance Studio's RoomWizard (now a Steelcase product sold by Polyvision) for my book, I came across this description of the tension between the capabilities of software-based devices and users needs. I think it's one of the clearest articulations of this dilemma I've read.

[O]ne of the measures of users’ enthusiasm for RoomWizard is the ease with which they generate new feature ideas. Everyone has their favourite “must have” feature.

On the one hand this is great. As suggested above, it could be taken as an indicator of the enthusiasm with which users embrace RoomWizard. It also means that we (and perhaps third-parties) will never be short of revisions, enhancements, and different versions with which to keep the product “fresh”. On the other hand, every silver lining has a cloud. In this case, the cloud has two parts: the real possibility that we might never satisfy every “need” of every customer; and the danger that we might damage our proposition--perhaps fatally--in the attempt. Of course, all these needs, and the features which purport to support them, are true and present. They’re strongly felt and very real. The question that we have to seek to answer is whether it is RoomWizard which should meet these needs, or something else. If it is RoomWizard, we need to ask the question, how?

This dilemma (that it’s easy to generate features but hard to deliver them without damaging your offering) is not unique to RoomWizard. In fact, it could probably be argued that a lot of software systems have this characteristic. It comes about because of the extent to which software can be extended and "improved" without violating any fundamental physical laws of the universe. Contrast this with a physical object, in which every new feature takes up space, introduces mechanical complexity, results in increased manufacturing cost, and so on. In the mechanical word, extra features have an obvious downside.

They then go on to discuss how they manage this tension, but I thought that this was a wise and insightful formulation, and especially prescient to ubicomp user experience design considering they wrote this more than 7 years ago.

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink

In the latest Economist Technology Quarterly, there's a story about a SUNY researcher who is creating an RFID and metal detector system for rangers identify potential poachers walking the elephant trails in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo. This in itself is somewhat interesting, but what's also interesting is how he's planning to deploy this technology within the local culture. As the Economist article says:

[...] Many people in Congo do believe in magic and Mr Gulick does not propose to disabuse them of the notion. Local people will receive no explanation for the rangers' new powers. That, Mr Gulick hopes, will discourage potential poachers from turning thought into deed.

I find this a little patronizing (NONE of the locals will read any news sources that will describe the system?), but it may be realistic, at least at first. Eventually, people will certainly figure it out, or they will be told, since possessors of black magic--as the rangers will likely be called after a while--rarely like to keep that label outside of fiction. They will do what they can to clarify that no, it's not that they're using dark secrets to do a better job, it's just that they have new tools. But by that point, if it happens, the value of the tools will have been established.

Posted by at 7:27 PM | Permalink

I'm reading The Design of Things to Come a book that advocates design as a competitive differentiator for companies. It came out in 2005 and the authors are from a (slightly) different world, the world of industrial design and business, but they include a chapter on "Design for Desire," and in that chapter, they spend a lot of time on fantasy. The basic framework is about defining aspirational products as embodiment of fantasies:

Fantasies take place on a personal level, in that individuals create fantasy. A product can support or even engender the fantasy, but the fantasy is that of the individual.

[...]

We dream of adventure, of independence, of security, of sensuality, of confidence, and of power. To achieve a sense of adventure, products promote excitement and exploration. To achieve the feeling of independence, products provide freedom [or the illusion of --mk] from constraints. For security, products provide a feeling of safety and stability. [etc.]

[...]

How is fantasy put into a product? What elements of a product induce users to fantasy? Customers expect a product to enhance and fulfill their lifestyle, not simply to perform a function or even to exhibit a desirable aesthetic. When a product fulfills fantasy, it fulfills a desired lifestyle beyond, and in contrast to, the current reality.

This is a fairly traditional, if succinct, definition of aspirational products, and of our projections of our own self-images onto the things we buy. Postrel's Substance of Style delved into it more thoroughly. What's interesting is where they next go with it.

They treat fantasy more literally than the abstract desire to be better in some way as a leading driver of consumption. They start talking about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and conclude that "in the fantasy economy, fantasy can be fulfilled in the midst of everyday experiences, for fantasy is just a wish or a desire" and they define good design (as per their book) as "meeting or exceeding the customer's emotional expectation, of form and function fulfilling fantasy."

This chapter is kind of a detour in their argument about design, but it's interesting to see them referencing emotion, fantasy and (implicitly) human irrationality that drives choice. It's a deeply anti-Modernist, anti-functionalist argument, and it's coming from Wharton School Publishing.

I hear Disney is bringing back Tinkerbell as a major character. As a bellweather of design, it's always interesting to see what Disney is thinking. Tinkerbell is one of the least grounded of the Disney pantheon--she only exists because children continue to believe she does--and I wonder if the combination of their desire to revive her, the Wharton folks encouraging the embrace of fantasy, and the popularity of Second Life are all part of a new zeitgeist about detaching from everyday life (through, because this is my filter on the world, technology). Interesting.

Posted by at 12:52 PM | Permalink

I just got a pamphlet inviting me to the 2007 Semantic Technology conference, which has a curious illustration on page 3.

The illustration shows the "evolution" of the Internet, really the Web, since what its creators do is show how "Web 2.0" becomes "Web 4.0." Or something. Basically, I read it as a kind of recasting of classical hard AI opportunistically in the language of modern Web development. You can see that there's an arrow that points to the upper right (connecting, somewhat confusingly, Web 1.0 and Web 4.0, while bypassing Web 2.0 and Web 3.0), which reads "Agent Webs that Know, Learn & Reason as Humans Do."

This is all happening along two primary axes, "Increasing Social Connectivity" and "Increasing Knowledge Connectivity & Reasoning." The first one is clear, it's the primary driver of the flowering of Web 2.0: people are social, so the information they use can be social, too. The second one seems reasonable as a label--yes, we are increasing in the amount of data that's available to us, so we're probably increasing the amount of knowledge. "Reasoning," however, assumes a lot. If you look at the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 clusters, I don't know if "Enterprise Portals" actually exhibit any appreciably more more "reasoning" than "Databases," as the graph seems to imply.

But this is nitpicking. The interesting thing for me about this graph is how it misses specialized devices almost entirely. "Blogjects" and "Spimes" show up in Web 4.0, yet mobile phones don't show up in Web 1.0/2.0 at all, much less fuzzy logic rice makers. My biases are well known, but if we're to read the projected dates, it appears that "Artificial Intelligence" will show up before ubicomp. I think that's wishful thinking. AI has been 10 years away for 50 years. Devices that employ a limited understanding of semantic relationships between objects in the world are much more likely to appear before reasoning "Intelligent agents" or "bots" and they will look little like top-down models of human cognition. They're going to be like the Roomba, much closer to insects, and behaving as "irrationally" as insects do while functioning much more effectively than systems that try to reason. They will most definitely be part of the evolution of the Internet, too, but it'll be the Internet of things, which will project the Semantic Web into everyday life, rather than leaving it inside some networked abstraction, as I feel this chart implies.

Posted by at 11:28 AM | Permalink

This week was a two conference presentation week for me. The second was the keynote for Etech, but the first was for the Outdoor Historical Museum Forum. The Forum, which our friends at The Henry Ford asked me to participate in, is a gathering of leaders in the US outdoor history museum world. I think that outdoor museums are fascinating examples of the long history of experience design. They've been designing experiences for 100 years or more, in the interest of creating environments that allow people to see things that no longer exist in their world, in environments people no longer live in. It was an honor and pleasure to spend some time with these folks.

Unfortunately, the audience of many of these museums is shrinking. My talk was about the role that technology can play in helping history museums communicate their core competitive advantage, which I defined to be authenticity, and provided some examples of projects that I think used technology particularly well to do that:

The history museum's advantage relative to other activities is direct exposure to real artifacts and experiences. You provide the examples on which explanations of contemporary life, politics, industry, etc, are based. People’s understanding of “here and now” starts with “there and then.” You’re the there.

[...]

I believe that new digital technologies can greatly lower the costs of communicating the value of authenticity. In other words, they can tell you what makes the real thing REAL.

The full text of my presentation is available as a 600K PDF.

Posted by at 11:37 PM | Permalink

I'm reading the entry about sympathetic magic in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences in preparation for my Etech talk. In it, they talk about the three "laws of sympathetic magic" set down by late 19th and early 20th century researchers. The first law is called the law of similarity, which they define as:

The law of similarity has been summarized as “like produces like,” “like goes with like,” or “the image equals the object.” Likeness is elevated to a basic, often causal principle; the simplest example confounds likeness with identity, hence “appearance equals reality.” The adaptive value of this law is clear: generally speaking, if it looks like a tiger, it is a tiger.

[...]

Examples of similarity include burning effigies of persons in order to cause harm to them, or reliance on appearance in judging objects when the appearance is known to be deceiving (e.g., avoidance by educated adults of chocolate shaped to look like feces; or difficulty experienced in throwing darts at a picture of a respected person). In the domain of words, Piaget (1929) described as “nominal realism” the child’s difficulty in understanding the arbitrary relation of word and referent. Similarly, educated people have difficulty disregarding a label on a bottle (e.g., “poison”) that they know does not apply.

Reading this, I thought of Virginia Postrel's Substance of Style. In that book, Postrel summarizes the user experience of the value of design as I like that. I'm like that. That sounds a lot like sympathetic magic to me. We choose the things we choose to decorate ourselves and our lives because those things resemble (in some way) the people we want to be (whether or not we are). In the two universes of Carhartt clothing: the European urban youth version of the brand, invokes the American rural laborer brand, because the laborer brand brings with it some of the values its youth brand buyers want, an aura of authenticity that's impossible to acquire otherwise. That's pure sympathetic magic, and it's interesting how hidden in plain sight it is.

Posted by at 7:42 PM | Permalink

The nice folks at Ambidextrous Magazine asked me to contribute an essay on magic as a metaphor for ubiquitous computing user experience design to Issue 6, which launches this week. This essay fleshes out my October dorkbot presentation. Here's the premise

What’s missing in this technological vision, however, is a consistent design language that explains how these devices work to the people who will use them. No common verbal, visual, or interaction techniques have emerged to help users navigate a world filled with augmented devices.

[...]

This is where magic can help us. The desktop metaphor is largely inadequate to describe the wide range of form factors and functionality possible with devices that do not have screens or pointers. Mobile phone screens hardly resemble 1970s offices (the inspiration for the desktop metaphor). A shoe that dynamically changes its functionality using sensors and a small CPU looks even less like an office. And yet nothing currently is replacing the desktop metaphor.

I then go on to define what a magic metaphor for ubicomp user experience could contain and how it structures the design process. For me, the point of metaphor is to communicate a set of concepts not just to users but also to developers, designers, marketers, and CEOs. In other words, metaphors ease the creation of consistent experiences by providing a useful set of constraints and a shared visual, behavioral, and verbal vocabulary.

The full text of my piece is here (224K PDF), but you should go out and get the magazine. Ambidextrous is always full of great stuff.

Posted by at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Excuse the shovelware. I just found a position paper I wrote for a CHI2004 workshop called "Lost in Ambient Intelligence." This is a very short paper that' a recap of the argument I made in my animism essay of 2003, but formatted for CHI. I wanted to link to it mostly so that I'd have it handy. Here's the abstract:

I posit that the more widespread ubiquitous computing becomes, the more people's explanations of technology will resemble animism. As common technology becomes more interconnected and smarter, people's understanding of its functionality ceases to be based on a mechanistic model and becomes more anthropomorphic. This model in turn changes the way that the creators of ubicomp devices have to approach their designs to consider systems of objects and users' acceptance of a level of unpredictability.

It's a 150K PDF.

Posted by at 10:01 PM | Permalink

Tod, my partner in ThingM has written a great analysis on his blog of how ubicomp will permeate everyday technology in the near term, and how adding technology changes how we relate to, and how we buy, everyday objects.

As technology suffuses more into everyday objects, those objects will exhibit the same price elasticity of gadgets. Many domestic objects already do because of luxury and designer brands. The difference in comfort between a no-name leather easy chair from Target and an Eames lounger from Design Within Reach does not track the 10x difference in cost. The cost of adding intelligence to the DWR chair is the same as the sales tax on it.

I think he's right on, and he concludes with the most succinct statement of ThingM's philosophy to date:

Exploring what will be possible in a decade’s time is a useful and inspiring task. But until we have nanoassemblers, if we want to impact the lives of people today, we must discover and utilize the technologies available today that are on the verge of having high economies of scale.

I recommend his whole post.

Posted by at 1:06 PM | Permalink

The Graffiti Research Lab pointed out that electronics are nearly as cheap as paint these days, but it took a panic in Boston (and maybe some reckless PR, but who knows) to give it widespread recognition:

More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger.

(from Flickr)

Here's a closeup:

I think it's interesting, although not surprising, that the authorities took these to be a bomb. Electronics are black boxes (especially when they're in black boxes), so it's easy to project the worst anxieties onto them when you don't know otherwise. And, frankly, you don't and in a society full of anxiety, it's not surprising that the Boston authorities overreacted. It's probably like when the first person painted the first bad word on a water tower with a paint roller: shocking and the talk of the town, but it eventually becomes commonplace. Maybe in a few years, when LED graffiti has become, ahem, ubiquitous and anything made of steel has cluster of expired LEDs, cheap batteries and rare earth magnets stuck on it this won't be a big deal, but right now it's a sign of the times...and a sign of the future.

Posted by at 4:43 PM | Permalink

Cassidy and several others pointed me to a NY Times article about magical thinking.

[...] magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.

The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress.

[...]

The brain seems to have networks that are specialized to produce an explicit, magical explanation in some circumstances, said Pascal Boyer, a professor of psychology and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. In an e-mail message, he said such thinking was “only one domain where a relevant interpretation that connects all the dots, so to speak, is preferred to a rational one.”

[...] in a series of experiments published last summer, psychologists at Princeton and Harvard showed how easy it was to elicit magical thinking in well-educated young adults.

[...]

The brain, moreover, has evolved to make snap judgments about causation, and will leap to conclusions well before logic can be applied.

This of course relates to the user experience design of everyday objects, including technology objects, since the tools that embody this kind of magical thinking are all the standard everyday objects of our lives. This can be seen in the illustrations to the story, which often involve "magical" objects, and in the description of how people's beliefs play out:

• "she saw a woman stroll by with a Michigan umbrella"
• "that young men and women instructed on how to use a voodoo doll suspected that they might have put a curse on a study partner who feigned a headache"
• "To be on the safe side, it is best to step into the sealed room right foot first."
• "He doesn’t change his socks; he doesn’t empty his pockets"

Cloverleafs, horse shoes, umbrellas, dolls, rooms, socks, pockets. All terribly mundane objects, and (maybe therefore) likely to be seen as particularly susceptible to enchantment. Building on the mundane may be thus be the key to making things magical, or, maybe making magical things look more mundane makes them more approachable.

Posted by at 1:31 PM | Permalink

While writing the last entry, I remembered a tongue-in-cheek myth from electrical engineering, documented in Wikipedia, which says that

there is a little bit of magic blue smoke in every integrated circuit, resistor, transistor, and all other electronic components and it is this smoke which makes the device work. The magic smoke is put in at the factory when the device is manufactured. High voltages or excessive current supposedly releases the smoke. [...] once the magic smoke has been released, the chip is lacking a key component and no longer works.

Without claiming that electrical engineers take this myth literally, it's a reminder of how easy it is to attribute magical properties to technology when there's no obvious mechanical functionality. Not even engineers can see moving electrons, and (I suspect) this "naive" gut-level explanation easily emerges, and regularly reappears. The joke pokes fun at how people who don't understand electronics think of how electronics works. It's funny, and it perpetuates, because it identifies an immediate reaction that everyone who has fried a component has probably had. The blue smoke is so startling, so physical (as opposed to electronic) and such a distinct marker that something is wrong that it's hard to not attribute some significance to it. If it's not magical, it sure feels that way, at least for a second.

Posted by at 12:59 PM | Permalink

My business partner in ThingM Tod continues to reach new heights in hacking Roombas. A couple of weeks ago, he built a custom circuit to give Roombas a Battlestar Galactica cylon eye...but just having moving LEDs wasn't enough, and he included a circuit that simulated the incandescent lights of the original costume. Then he stayed up all night making a parody of the new Battlestar Galactica credits.

Then, a couple of days ago, he figured out how to control Roombas using the MacBook's built-in tilt control (which has become a fascinating interface affordance in its own right).

Hacking robotic vacuum cleaners seems like a pastime--like building ships in bottles--and one of the common rhetorical questions that gets asked when these things get posted is "But why?" For me it's an important step in the developing a level of familiarity with technology and treating ubiquitous computing technologies as personal tools, rather than as mysterious "other" technology. One of the reasons why technology seems magical at first is its mysterious functionality: when it's unfamiliar, it's magical. I've argued before that magic may be valuable as a metaphor for explaining technology, but as many people have pointed out, technology is not magic and should not be presented as such literally.

I believe that part of using magic as a design metaphor should include a way to pull back the veil of the magic by familiarizing people with its actual functionality. The metaphor doesn't have to suffer--people will still understand that it's an analogy to magic, rather than a literally magical experience--but I believe it will help people position and use the technology to the fullest extent, but reducing the mystery. Showing that it's possible to hack everyday technology (especially technology that's designed to be hacked, like the Roomba) is akin to a magician explaining their tricks. The tricks aren't any less magical, but the process of revealing the actual working helps people understand themselves and their relationship to the world. That, of course, is the true brilliance of Penn and Teller's early work, which was about debunking the idea of magic, while still using magic. Hacking Roombas may not have the same impact as Penn and Teller's work, but it's a small step in clarifying the relationship between ubiquitous computing technology and people using it.

Posted by at 11:20 AM | Permalink

(images (CC), found on Flickr; by Huro Kitty, Sue Richards, Pernell, (C) David Fred)

If you look at the articles in the Ubicomp conference proceedings, you'll find them dominated by location sensing and tracking. Clearly, ubicomp is still about figuring where you are in a space. But what happens when you've done that? What happens to designing the user experience when you know location?

I'm trying to wrap my brain around what it means to design in this environment. Recently I tried to put some boundaries around the complexity with a simple powers-of-ten granularity scale. The goal is to define some classes of experience for which we can design and then assign a term to each class (from the words that regularly come up in discussions of ubicomp/ambient intelligence/geolocation, etc.). Basically, we may not know whether the fruit are apples or oranges, but at least we can say whether they're big or little.

This technique is, of course, indebted to two classics:

• the Eames Powers of Ten film
  
• PARC's inch/foot/yard scale in designing their ParcTab/ParcPad and Liveboard
  

The scale

(note: I'm using metric units because, well, they're designed to work as powers of ten. I'm not playing favorites among measurement systems, because, well, I like the English system a lot because of its excellent pre-Enlightenment idiosyncrasies)

My goal is to create a user-centered hierarchy (rather than hardware-centric) as a way of talking about the perceived effects of ubiquitous computing technologies. In other words, this is an attempt to talk (roughly) about end users' radius of focus in the moment as a way to design for that moment. Thus, these granularities do not necessarily refer to the size of the device, but to the range of effect that device has and the task being investigated. For example, video projector control panels are on the mobile scale, but a big video projector's industrial design can easily be on the personal scale, while its effects are usually on the environmental.

Undoubtedly, like with any classification scheme, there are going to be plenty of things that fall in between, but this is a classification exercise, rather than an attempt to create a canonical classification.

Posted by at 1:48 PM | Permalink

Tonight I gave a talk at the San Francisco dorkbot meeting. It was a great opportunity (thank you, Karen!) and an honor to share the stage with Tim Hunkin. In the talk, I presented a short history of the desktop metaphor as a way of thinking about screen-based user interface design and laid out my thoughts for why magic should be a metaphor for the user experience design of ubiquitous computing. I also presented a number of examples of how it's already happening, but without the explicit use of magic as a metaphor. I end by saying:

So, in conclusion, the age of magic is coming.

Chip manufacturers low-power roadmaps and congealing wireless communication standards ensure that there are going to be many more objects like this.

I believe that we need to systematically approach the user experience design of these devices. One way that's been shown to be successful is the adoption of a strong metaphor that can be leveraged to explain the functionality of many of the ideas embedded in a new set of technological tools. I believe that magic as a metaphor is an incredibly rich vein that can be mined for interesting and familiar user experience design tropes. It would be a mistake to pass up the opportunity to use it extensively at this early stage in the proliferation of these devices and ideas.

My slides and notes(630K PDF) have everything I said in them, although where I have mosaics in the PDF, I used animations in the talk.

Posted by at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tod pointed me to this excellent article by the late Jef Raskin, Macintosh catalyst, designer and author of The Humane Interface.

He rightly identifies a lack of ways of comparing outcomes produced by technologies as supporting th creation of superstitious beliefs. He uses fishing lures and stereo cables as examples of technologies that have lots of superstition surrounding them.

When out angling for rock fish, you generally use the same lure as everybody else. There is not much technique to it, so the number of fish you catch is proportional to the time your lure is in the water. Those who spend time fiddling with the equipment beforehand catch fewer fish. It's a mathematical certainty.

[...]

Superstitions grow rampant when testing is subjective, difficult, and (usually) not performed at all. There is a purely magical belief in the idea that you can hear the difference between different brands of audio cables, for example.

He then relates an experiment he conducted that showed that people's preconceptions affect their perception. This is a point explored in detail by Nass and Reeves in The Media Equation. He concludes by noting that

Computer systems exhibit all the behaviors best suited to create superstitious responses. You will try something, it won't work, so you try it again—the exact same way—and this time it works, or not. That's random reinforcement.

[...]

We rarely understand, in any detail, the processes going on behind the tasks we do with computers. We're using megabytes of code written by others, code that is indifferently documented and inadequately tested, and which is being used in ways and in combinations unforeseen by its creators.

No wonder we tend to act as if computers are run by magic.

I agree with him entirely, but I'm not sure what his recommendations would have been about how to avoid this reaction; clearly faulty, superstitious models based on incomplete information have existed for a long time (as one of commentors to Raskin's piece says, it's the basis of religion). But we will never have complete information and we can't expect the users of technology to go out and get it. Without going too far into philosophy, everything we know is an incomplete model. As technology becomes more complex, our models will grow ever more distant from the reality of what's going on, so Raskin's Complaint is totally valid, yet it's not clear (for me, anyway) how we can use it to determine where to go next.

NOTE: I've updated my Partial Bibliography of Magic in UX Design with Raskin's paper and the excerpt from Steven Levy's iPod story I had blogged about earlier.

[Tangentially, it's interesting to note the seemingly opposite directions that our understanding of technology and science are going: over the last couple of hundred years we've continually improved our models of how things--life, physics, society--work, while our tools have grown proportionally less comprehensible. Will there be a meeting at some point, where our study of our tools becomes as involved and complex as our study of our world? Will there be a crossover, where the study of our tools becomes a more relevant point of scientific inquiry than the study of the "natural" universe?]

Posted by at 11:45 AM | Permalink

Cassidy points me to a book excerpt by Steven Levy, a writer whose work I've been following for years. In it, analyzes why his iPod, and many people's iPods, seem to have preferences of their own. He approaches it with a sense of humor, but it's clear that initially he believes he's seeing a phenomenon he can't explain in mechanistic, or even software, terms and that the only way to explain it is through psychology:

It began to dawn on me that there were songs, and even artists, that my iPod had taken a dislike to, if not a formal boycott.

His investigations reveal that he's not the only one who believe their iPods can express preferences:

it appeared that nearly everybody's iPod seemed to have a favorite artist, or two, or three. Or, they believed, when their iPod performed a shuffle, it would decide which artist it was in the mood for and then flood the listening session with that performer's works.

Moreover, once the door had opened to psychological explanations, parapsychological (i.e. animist and magical) explanations weren't far behind:

"Over the last couple of days that I've been [putting my library on shuffle], I may think of a certain song or band, and lo and behold, that winds up being the next song or band played," writes a blogger named Kapgar. "It's like some sort of symbiotic relationship."

[..]

"It has moods," [another person] added. "Sunday and Monday nights, bluesy. Rocks at night during the week. Does folk on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Bluegrass on Thursday mornings and Sunday afternoons."

Levy tries to analyze what could be going on, why the iPod engineers claim that it's random, but it behaves in a way that implies it has behavior (maybe will? certainly caprice, in Levy's narrative).

Apple insists that there is no computational flaw in its execution. "It is completely random. It is absolutely, unequivocally random," says Jeff Robbin, one of the original authors of iTunes and later head of the iTunes development team.

Despite this, he doesn't believe it. He continues to look for something for a reason that his iPod has intentions and behavior. In other words, he's looking for the ghost in the machine. Ultimately, he gives up looking for the ghost and begins to investigate perception.

John Allen Paulos, a Temple University mathematician, agreed. […] "We often interpret and impose patterns on events that are random," he says. "Especially with something like songs. Songs evoke emotion, and some stick in our minds more than others." […] "Our brains aren't wired to understand randomness - there's even a huge industry that takes advantage of people's inability to deal with random distributions. It's called gambling."

Eventually, he comes up with an explanation that suits him:

Why does Autofill produce nine Springsteen songs out of 188? Because that is what almost always happens in normal distributions of items from databases. Clusters of something are to be expected. […] What we perceive as shuffle favoritism is well within expected mathematical bounds. [And] the seemingly magical effects of the shuffle function - a spooky just-rightness, even brilliance, that comes from great song juxtapositions - [are] also consequences of randomness.

This is an excellent analysis of how a mathematical, physical phenomena becomes perceived as psychological, even by people who know a lot and should know better (this phenomenon is well-documented by Nassim Nicholas Talib in his book, Fooled by Randomness). It also shows how easily we slip into animist explanations when we can't understand how something works. When physical explanations are exhausted, our other primary explanatory frameworks become psychological and magical. Look at how much explanation Levy required, how much detailed delving and convincing had to happen over a period of several years to get him to believe that a mysterious and magical phenomenon was genuinely random. I suspect few people will go to the extent that Levy did to try and understand what was happening, and many will just accept the simpler model: that there's something magical about their technology.

Levy finishes his story with an epilogue:

The non-randomness illusion was so prevalent that ultimately Apple felt compelled to address it. In the version of iTunes rolled out in September 2005, there appeared a new feature: smart shuffle. […]If you pull the lever to the right, the iPod will mess with its usual distribution pattern, intentionally spacing out songs by a given artist."

This, to me, is the key point in the story: that design changes wer