I was honored to have been invited to present at XD Forum, Intuit's internal user experience design conference, last week. My half-hour talk focused on the relationship between ubicomp devices and services, a topic I've been evolving for much of the past year. The presentation's argument is as follows:

• Moore's Law makes computation cheap.
• This makes incorporating information processing into devices a cost-effective way to create a competitive advantage by creating user experiences that would be otherwise impossible, or prohibitively expensive.
• This, in turn, has contributed to a proliferation of computer form factors in the last couple of years (laptops, then phones, then connected TVs and netbooks) that shows an increasing specialization in computer-based devices. This, I feel, represent the early stages of a trend that will lead to high degrees of specialization in devices that use information processing, and the end of the general-purpose computer.
• Simultaneously, we're entering an era of Widgetization, where large blobs of monolithic functionality (think "productivity software suite") are similarly fragmenting into clusters of network-connected widgets.
• Some of these widgets exist as software (as in Yahoo's connected TV widgets), but some (think Nike+iPod) as hardware.
• These widgets don't just output information that's generated in the cloud, but provide input into the cloud.
• This round trip between simple input widget, simple output widget, and processing and networking between them, creates profoundly new possibilities. Socially complex functionality is made possible through mashups between simple data collection devices and the technologies of the internet. Think about how a single sensor on the Nike+iPod, when mashed up with online analytics and social networks, creates a much richer experience than that same sensor in an unconnected pedometer.
• This round-trip sensing-processing-outputting cycle leads to a fundamental erosion of what we consider to be an object and what we think of as a service. Vitality's Glowcaps are a prime example.
• Objects now become representatives, avatars, of services. Like mobile phones and ATMs are useless without the network they're attached to, so to will many other devices have a physical presence and will function without a network, but without the cloud they will not have any value.
• This relationship now leads to deep questions about ownership, and in how we distinguish between service providers, manufacturers, and brands.

Download the whole 814K PDF presentation if you want to see the pictures and read the details.

Posted by at 1:19 PM | Permalink

I expanded on my LIFT France presentation at this years' Sketching in Hardware gathering. The two presentations are quite similar. My core point is that the fundamental nature of making things changes as the cost of moving atoms goes up and technologies for exactly reproducing physical objects using computer-controlled tools moves into more media.

Here are some key points:

If you look at [Thomas Chippendale's] Director, it’s full of variations. Chippendale expected that each piece was made individually. By showing all of these variations, he’s essentially saying “I am defining a design space for you, each piece is a collection of parts that you can mix and match. They all work together because I’ve created a standard interface and standard components. A kind of furniture description language.” The system is Chippendale’s, but the specific pattern is up to the individual craftsman.

In fact that’s how people treated it. There’s actually little Chippendale furniture from that period that looks identical to what is in the Director. Moreover, cabinetmakers were free to add to the language, to change, improvise and then distribute their designs themselves, as many did in their own pattern books.

Why would Chippendale give away his unique secrets?

Because he was working in a Read-Write culture. He knew that he wasn’t going to sell much of his actual furniture in Boston: wood furniture is just too expensive to ship across the Atlantic and his workshop can only put out so many pieces, but by publishing the Director he would profit from the designs’ publication and his reputation would benefit because he would have a lot of influence. And he did. The Director was a big hit in both England and its colonies and an entire style of furniture, whether he designed it or not, became known as Chippendale furniture. He was the first person who wasn’t a king to have a style of furniture named after him.

The full presentation is available as an 860K PDF.

Posted by at 3:15 PM | Permalink

A journalist acquaintance asked me about the relationship between journalism and product development in the context of Sketching in Hardware. I wrote him an email that (somewhat densely) summarized much of my current thinking about the relationship between cheap hardware, open standards, vernacular technology creation, social research and Sketching in Hardware (whew!). It probably makes no sense out of context, but I liked it enough that I thought documenting it on the blog would be worthwhile. Here it is:

Cheap, fast computation and increasingly open standardized interfaces encourage abstracting away from low-level operations to higher-level functional modules. This, in turn, opens the possibility for non-specialists to envision and create electronic devices, which in turn means that people who have domain-specific knowledge can now contemplate creating their own devices.

Thus, from my perspective, we're shifting from centralized, technology-centered product development to a more distributed, user-centered model. From supply-driven to demand-driven product development. As journalists--and, really, all forms of social researcher--are on the demand-side, it's a natural fit that they should play a larger role in the development of products. Sketching in Hardware becomes an approach to creating lightweight prototypes by nonspecialists so that they can better understand the role that technology can play in specific social situations.

Posted by at 7:12 PM | Permalink

A couple of weeks ago Liz and I had the pleasure of speaking at LIFT+Fing France, a great conference about technology, design, society and the future. The lineup was fantastic and both the in-band and out-of-band conversations were great. I would not have predicted ahead of time that I'd end up discussing crowdsourcing techno-anarchist eco revolutions, but there we were and it wasn't even that many glasses of pastis in. ;-)

My short talk focused on how Lawrence Lessig's concept of read-write culture applies to the computer-driven making of physical things, rather than just media, and how this has the potential to change our relationship to objects.

The end of Read-Only material culture, as I mark it, began in 1985, with the release of the Apple LaserWriter, which was the first mass market device that merged the flexibility of bits with the tangibility of atoms. It could provide the precision and control of Industrial Revolution tools, with the flexibility of pre-Industrial Revolution techniques. It did this by making the instructions, the code, the knowledge for every part of the finished product changeable, while the end result was completely consistent. Now, someone can buy the tool, have it produce great results without any modification OR look at the knowledge that's embedded in it AND change it to suit their needs. Until desktop publishing, typesetting was very expensive. Now, what was an expensive process reserved for special occasions is nearly disposable.

Information processing as a material changes everything it touches, often in unpredictable ways, including the tools used to make end products. Ubiquitous computing isn't just about offices and homes, but garages, workshops and assembly lines.

The full presentation (752K PDF) is available.

[Also, in the presentation I say that Lessig is at Stanford, but I've now learned that he's moved to Harvard.]

[Liz's talk is on slideshare: Designing for Urban Green Spaces. She also took very extensive notes on many of the presentations.]

Posted by at 9:24 PM | Permalink

I'm going to be speaking at LIFT France 09 later this week. The talk is an intro to presentations by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of tinker.it and Michael Shiloh. I'll post the actual talk when it's done.

Here's the summary:

According to Lawrence Lessig, the 20th century is a brief period of Read-Only culture in a world that in the past has been Read-Write. He draws his examples from media, but the same ideas apply to other products. The definitions of "producer" and "consumer" change when information is cheaper to move than objects. Thus production becomes less centralized as knowledge is shared in an open and standardized way.

Modern digital tools for making things bring the flexibility of digital media to the creation of everyday physical objects. This change powerfully challenges 20th century manufacturing processes that depended on centralizing knowledge while transporting products cheaply. Today, atoms are getting more expensive to move, while bits are getting ever cheaper. Read-Write culture is returning to the processes of making things, bringing the end of Read-Only objects.

It's a short talk, so I'm not going to talk about the relationship between lightweight data-driven manufacturing and ubiquitous computing, but for me there's a direct correspondence. "Everyday object + information processing + networking = something new" (in simplified ubicomp math) is a superset of "tool + information processing + networking = a new tool." The products of those tools don't have to be digital objects, but the fact that the tools are digital profoundly changes the capabilities of those tools to create objects. When those (digital tool-made) objects then have embedded information processing and networking themselves--as now is increasingly happening--that changes the nature of the further object still.

Oh, and thanks to Liz for her thoughts and editing of my summary...she will also be at LIFT, sharing the stage with John Thackara and speaking about urban green spaces in a talk that has evolved from her ETech presentation earlier this year.

Posted by at 1:40 PM | Permalink

I gave a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo today where I tried to tie together the basic tenets of Web 2.0-style thinking about sharing data through open APIs and the promise of embedded information processing and networking distributed through the environment (i.e. ubicomp).

Here's the description:

Ubiquitous computing has been here since at least 2005, but we may not have noticed it. Computers are rapidly fragmenting from expensive general-purpose devices to cheaper specialized networked tools (phones, netbooks, desktop RFID readers, MP3 players, running shoe sensors, etc.). These tools bridge the physical world and the Internet in new ways, often using Web 2.0-style interaction to create unexpected ways to work and play in the real world while simultaneously having the power of the Net available to us. This talk will discuss how mashups between meatspace and the Net have already happened, what the emerging patterns are, and how widgetization is about to jump from social networks to devices and then disappear altogether.

The presentation with full text is available here (1.2MB PDF).

I also realized belatedly that I never once mentioned "The Internet of Things" as a unifying concept, but it's definitely what I was talking about. My apologies.

Posted by at 3:43 PM | Permalink

Today was the first day of a workshop I participated in (and assisted with), run by MIT's Eric Von Hippel on Open Hardware (or Open Source Hardware, or Open Design, or however you want to call it). It was a pretty all-star cast in attendance, and I was honored to be among them. I gave a short talk that was a kind of personal history about why I believe that Open Hardware is important. Here is my conclusion:

I think that we are seeing proliferation of small, niche Open Hardware suppliers—a cottage industry—of digital technology manufacturers whose existence owes itself to Internet shopping, online social networks, cheap electronics manufacturing and mutual openness. And every year we are seeing more of these products and more businesses being built on Open Hardware principles.

[...]

This cottage industry is supplying the materials to a much larger group participating in a new culture that treats electronics more like a design material than an industrial process. This I believe points to a much deeper cultural shift. And although on the surface Open Hardware looks like a discussion about the economics of manufacturing and intellectual property, the effect that it has is creating new building block with which people can remake, redesign, their world.

Mediamatic, the Dutch technology/culture organization ran a one-week RFID social games workshop last year. A group of 30 people, many of whom are not electronics engineers by training, created a dozen complete, working, completely novel technologies in less than a week. This kind of wild experimentation, using technology to create new social relationships would simply not have been possible without Open Hardware. And it is in these kinds of environments in which the truly magical, deeply disruptive technologies are created.

That, I believe, is the key power of Open Hardware.

You can find the presentation is available(520K PDF) for download and via Slideshare:

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's discussion. Eric has said that he'll make videos of the whole day's presentation and discussions available, and I'll link them here when those have been posted.

Posted by at 8:18 PM | Permalink

I presented a talk at ETech today. It links the capabilities of ubiquitous computing and intersects it with service design to come up with a justification for creating subscription-based services out of (certain) everyday objects.

The original description is

Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths’ hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks.

For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as an RFID or a high-density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Once you have the capability uniquely identify anything immediately, you can attach meta information to it. Any meta-information. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom’s china? Will it make me sick if I eat it? Was it made by children?

I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID, an object’s “information shadow” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Beyond getting meta information, however, lies an even more powerful concept: changing the physical object to a service, for which the thing you’re looking at is but a single instantiation of that agreement. It’s already happened to media, and to car-shared cars and shared bicycles in urban areas.

When this happens, the objects have to change at a fundamental level. They have to be designed differently and they have to be described and discussed differently. The “owner’s” relationship to the object changes. The very idea of ownership changes. The solid object grows a dotted line that is filled-in as-needed, when-needed, and with the features that are needed. This is not the same thing as renting or co-ownership, its anytime/anywhere nature-enabled by the underlying technology makes these new service objects fundamentally new.

This talk will discuss the implications of the social and design changes created by these technologies and give multiple examples of services that already exist.

I've put up a PDF with all of the images and notes(884 PDF), and Slideshare, which is missing many of the images (I think it doesn't know what to do with pictures that have been pasted into Mac Powerpoint 2004), but still has all of the text.

Posted by at 2:15 PM | Permalink

One of the reasons I haven't posted to this blog in months (and likely won't post anything original to it for months more) is because most of my time is spent writing my ubicomp user experience design book. The chapter I'm currently working on touches on service design, so I decided to do a little research about it. Three days and several hundred papers later, I think I've sorted out some parts of it, which turned into two sidebars for the current chapter. I present the sidebars to you in their raw, first-draft form because I think they may be useful (and continue my obsession with clearly defining and understanding the terms we use).

Sidebar: Software services vs. end-user services

That's where the two concepts diverge:

• From the technical perspective, a service is an atomic unit of functionality. Something that is kind of like a superset of a well-constructed object in object-oriented programming. This is the meaning of the term as used in the definitions of things like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): "Services are collections of capabilities." Footen and Faust (2008)
  
• From the user experience perspective, a service is an atomic unit of activity. It is the elements that would be connected by an end-user when describing something that helps accomplish a specific goal. "A chain of activities that form a process and have value for the end user." (Saffer, 2006)
  

Sidebar: Top-down, holistic service design

• Product-Service Systems (Mont, 2004) emphasize the potential of efficiencies created by designing products and services together, especially ecological efficiencies.
• Service Science Management and Engineering, aka SSME (with D sometimes added for design) or service science (Maglio et al, 2006) is IBM's approach to creating a systematic discipline for understanding and building systems that encompass people, technology, organizations and shared information.
• Service design (Blomberg and Evenson, 2006) is a term used in the design world to describe a practice that designs products in the context of the key value that the organization creating the product intends to provide the end-user.
• Service Blueprinting (Bitner et al, 2008) is a notational technique for visualizing the relationship between service components.
• Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) (Schultz and Kitchen, 1997) is an approach that ties together all communications between an organization and its audience into a single unified strategy. If products and services are considered to be a type of communication, then this approach includes them, too.
• The Elements of User Experience (Garrett, 2000) is a conceptual system for interaction designers that places a range of design practices in a unified user experience model.
• Transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006) describes the practice of create a unified experience across a number of media and products. Like IMC, it's pretty far from the core focus of technology in much service discussion, but I believe there's a relationship. Stories aren't services, but storytelling is, and since digital technology plays such a large role in contemporary storytelling, there's a practical connection as well.

[Basically, in these two sidebars I'm saying that there's one elephant, it's not really a new elephant, but it may be a newly-relevant elephant, and all of these different terms are descriptions for different parts of a single elephant.]

[1/29/09 Update: after a request, I figured I'd post a mini-bibliography to this. Here are all of the books and papers I managed to get into Zotero as somehow related to the topic, though they're not all the papers and books I looked at]

Mini-bibliography of service [design|system|science|development]

Blomberg, J., and S. Evenson. 2006. Service innovation and design. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 28-31. ACM New York, NY, USA.

Carbone, L. P., and S. H. Haeckel. 1994. Engineering Customer Experiences. Marketing Management 3, no. 3: 8-19.

Erl, Thomas. 2007. SOA.

Footen, John, and Joey Faust. 2008. The Service-Oriented Media Enterprise.

Gillespie, B. 2008. Service Design via the Global Web: Global Companies Serving Local Markets. DESIGN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 19, no. 1: 44.

Glushko, R. J. Designing Service Systems by Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage”.

HOLMLID, S., and S. LINKÖPING. INTERACTION DESIGN AND SERVICE DESIGN: EXPANDING A COMPARISON OF DESIGN DISCIPLINES.

Jonas, W., N. Morelli, and J. Münch. Designing a product service system in a social framework–methodological and ethical considerations.

Maffei, S., and B. Mager. INNOVATION THROUGH SERVICE DESIGN. FROM RESEARCH AND THEORY TO A NETWORK OF PRACTICE. A USERS’ DRIVEN PERSPECTIVE.

Maglio, P. P., S. Srinivasan, J. T. Kreulen, and J. Spohrer. 2006. Service systems, service scientists, SSME, and innovation. Communications of the ACM 49, no. 7: 81-85.

Mont, O. 2004. Product-service systems: Panacea or myth. The International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE), Lund University: Lund, Sweden: 233.

Mont, O. K. 2002. Clarifying the concept of product–service system. Journal of Cleaner Production 10, no. 3: 237-245.

Morelli, N. 2002a. The Design of Product Service Systems from a Designer's Perspective. Common Ground 2002.
---. 2002b. The Design of Product Service Systems from a Designer's Perspective. Common Ground 2002.

Pires, G., P. Stanton, and J. Stanton. 2004. The Role of Customer Experiences in the Development of Service Blueprints. In ANZMAC 2004 Conference.

Schultz, D. E., and P. J. Kitchen. 1997. Integrated Marketing Communications in US Advertising Agencies: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Advertising Research 37, no. 5: 7-18.

[1/29/09 Update 2: Jeff Howard pointed me to a comprehensive annotated bibliography of service design that he has compiled. Thanks, Jeff!]

Posted by at 5:39 PM | Permalink

I recently lamented in Twitter that my blog posting has become shovelware from my presentations. That mostly shows how busy I am--which is actually good--but it's also a shame, since I like having the time to use this as the public notebook it's supposed to be. However, even though I don't have time to update the blog as often I would like, I realized that I'm still generating content that's not in formal presentation or book form. It just (as Paul Boutin recently noted in Wired) just happens in different channels. Here's two more pieces of shovelware, one from a familiar source (a talk I gave at UC Berkeley's School of Information) and one from a different source.

Materials that dematerialize

In what's becoming a ThingM tradition, I spoke last Thursday at Prof. Kimiko Ryokai's Tangible Interfaces class at UC Berkeley. Tod spoke to the same class last school year. My presentation was called Materials that Dematerialize ( 740K PDF) and it brought together several high-level thoughts I've had recently about how the social effects of ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things technologies create challenges for experience designers. Specifically, it brings together the themes of "information processing as a material" and "information shadows that turn everyday objects into services" that I've recently been thinking about.

Cloud computing, ubicomp, service design, interaction design

Here's a discussion that I had with Tom Igoe and Brian Slesinsky on Facebook in response to another Twitter post I had made (you can find the original here).

Mike Kuniavsky at 6:02pm November 10
A thought: service design is what links cloud computing and ubicomp. It meets industrial/interaction design at the device/service interface.

Tom Igoe at 6:14pm November 10
How exactly does cloud computing differ from the web?

Mike Kuniavsky at 6:20pm November 10
There's terminology slippage, for sure. You could also ask how the Web is different from the 'Net. I think it's a question of where the data lives and whether devices are expected to be the homes of data, or whether data primarily lives in centralized services that live on the Net and are exposed and manipulated by a variety of devices, some of which are physical, some of which live on the Web or other distribution mechanisms. I agree that I think that "grid computing," "distributed computing," "cloud computing" and "service oriented architecture" are probably all describing the same concept. I'm trying to use the most evocative terms and to relate them.

Tom Igoe at 6:29pm November 10
I think the web and the net, there's a qualitative leap there, because the former made visual communication easy, right? I'm still undecided on whether cloud computing offers any new insights on what we're doing.

Service design kinda does, in that it suggests a different way of approaching the problem, in terms of who owns the assets. Though it's basically what Ray Anderson was on about in "Mid Course Correction," but his thinking on that pre-dates service design, and his action probably pre-dates the web. Seems service design mostly gives a name to the concept, and the net -- and the web, if you want -- make it easier to implement.

Sometimes I wonder what ubicomp would have looked like if the web hadn't happened. I suspect the banks and credit card companies would have made it happen anyway.

Brian Slesinsky at 9:34pm November 10
If you don't know or care which machine(s) your application is running on, it lives in the cloud.

Mike Kuniavsky at 11:24am November 11
The question is in the definition of "application." It used to be relatively straightforward to figure out where "the code" ran, but when a widget on my phone sends an SMS to a service that's then syndicated to an aggregator which then generates addition information that's then displayed back on my phone, what's the "application"? That's why the service becomes the focus of the design, because there are now many possible ways that a person can interact with a single set of functions, still have it feel like a single thing at the core, even though there is no single "application" that's running on a single "machine." Think of how the service of banking is provided through ATMs, online banking, phone banking and human tellers, all of which run different codebases on different hardware, and yet still deal with the same money.

[On a tangential note, I was first exposed to the ideas of cloud computing when it was presented as the Andrew File System, a distributed file system that was being worked on at the University of Michigan in the late 80s and early 90s when I was there. It's interesting to see how the ideas of using networks to distribute computing evolve. In many ways the core ideas don't change, but the model of what people need changes, and what was considered esoteric and irrelevant suddenly becomes interesting when framed a different way. In this case, the distributed file system was abandoned and forgotten until it re-emerged as a service distribution infrastructure.]

Posted by at 2:50 PM | Permalink

About six months ago, I was invited by the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) to keynote their annual conference. After admitting that I didn't know what "serials" were (think periodicals, journals and other similar things), I realized that this was a perfect opportunity to address a unique group, so I jumped at the opportunity. Serials librarians, and publishers of serialized works, have been at the forefront of understanding the relationship between physical objects, digital objects and how the two relate to each other. The music industry, as we know, tried to fight the conversion to digital of the physical objects with which they had traditionally made their money . As soon as Internet search engines appeared, and I suspect as soon as Google started indexing PDFs, the serials world realized that digitization of their content made it simultaneously more visible (since now the most obscure journal could now be found and cited) and possibly less valuable (since it could not be copied easily). Moreover, libraries quickly realized that online access changed their understanding of what it means to the products of their subscriptions. Most people no longer look at the physical journal in the library, which the library clearly owns outright, but look at articles through online services. The questions then become: how is that paid for? What is owned? What happens to the "owned" content when publication goes out of business?

These are profound questions at the core of nearly all modern digital products, and instead of hiding from the problem, the serials world has quietly and methodically tried to articulate the questions and negotiate answers. Publishers, libraries and information brokers all participate in the NASIG conferences and discussions, and they've collectively come up with a range of fascinating solutions ranging from license models to technologies that preserve access to owned resources when the original provider disappears. In short, they've spent years trying to answer questions that are only starting to occur to folks in other disciplines.

My presentation, called Information Shadows: How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things (1.2MB PDF) is my attempt at showing how ubiquitous computing technology is, in essence, turning whole classes of everyday objects into serials, or services, by creating pervasive digital access to the objects' metainformation, their information shadows. In the process, I talk about blenders, timeshares, Cuddle Chimps, City Carshare, and Exactitudes. I think it's a fun talk, and I'm really happy to have had the opportunity to articulate these ideas in this forum.

Posted by at 6:48 PM | Permalink

When I was in Milan for the Furniture Fair/Design Week I took a break from all the current design talk and looking and went to the Triennale for the inaugural show of the new design Italian museum hosted there, "The Seven Obsessions of Italian Design." If I had more time, there are many aspects of the show I'd like to explore: the excellent exhibit design, the intriguing and beautiful objects, the absurd sexism of a film loop of giant naked women's butts when talking about "comfort," the insightfulness of the theme, the daring of putting a Berretta handgun as the totem object for the "Energy" obsession, the oddness that the exhibit treats Italian design like an art movement that already happened, ending around 1982. Unfortunately, other than to list those, I'm not going to talk about them, but I urge you to go to the show if you're in Milan.

The one thing I'm going to talk about is how the show's curators use animism as the foundation for describing the origins (and presumably the core) of Italian design. And, frankly, I'm not even going to talk about it. I'm going to quote a big chunk of the catalog introductory essay by Andrea Branzi (as translated in the L'Europeo magazine catalog--there were at least two, and possibly three English translations of the text available: one in this magazine-style catalog, one in the book catalog, and one in the exhibit itself).

Italian design (which has never had a single style or sole work methodology) uses technology to express artistic possibilities, and art to express its technological possibilities. Its project philosophy still conserves the deep-rooted influences of ancient Latin animism and pre-Roman mysticism, which attributed a soul to every object, a soul that could be called forth at will and was not just a distant reflection of utility and esthetics. All of this still constitutes the difference between design in Italy and that in other countries, which often interpret design as a function of business guided by marketing. In other countries the history of design consists in a succession of formal styles and typologies and therefore represents a lesser reality, devoid of autonomy, crushed between the Great Histories of Art and Architecture. In Italy on the other hand household objects, work tools or pieces of furniture have always been co-protagonists of a broader history, of "elevated" events connected to cultural anthropology, religion and politics; to the point where Italian design constitutes an integral part of the country's overall history, supplying many precious indications regarding ways of thinking, behaving and being.

The animism theme continues with the first of the show's obsession, "The Animist Theater"

Beginning with the Latin Domus and continuing right up through modern times, there has been an idea of the house as a theatrical place in which household objects are actors participating in a dialogue with inhabitants (like in the Palatine Anthology in which lovers call on lanterns or beds to testify to their oath of love), and, like "household pets," which protect the house from the dangers of fate and evil-doers.

[the description continues and describes the household as the stage in which the "comedy of life" has been played out from ancient times to the present -mk]

In my experience, Italian design has always been held up as the sensual and emotional side of Modernism. Exemplified by folks like Pininfarina, it's held up as how to successfully fuse emotion and desire with functionality to create beautiful and useful objects. That may well be true, but for me what's interesting in this description is that an Italian design critic bases that success on an animist relationship to everyday objects. I don't think that Italian designers consciously thought of their products as alive, but as a cultural phenomenon it seems for me to approach the idea of an implicit design metaphor that has guided Italian design to create objects in a certain (commercially successful) way. As someone who is thinking about magic as a design metaphor for future technological products, it's interesting--and heartening--to see this retrospective analysis as an explanation of a metaphor that worked.

Tangentially: several of the photos at the top of this blog post are from the third major design experience I had in Milan this year, the Milan Monumental Cemetery. If you think that ancestor worship is not a contemporary European phenomenon, you need to go to this place. 100+ years of Milanese money, technology, and competitiveness have come together to create a fantastic, enormous architectural theme park for the dead. I have a Flickr set that would have been even bigger if my camera's battery hadn't run out.

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink

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 were implemented not based on the reality of the situation, but on the perception of the reality. Matching people's expectation is a core concept in user experience design. Most of the time designing to expectations, even if that design does not match an underlying reality (i.e. the user model does not match the system model, to use Don Norman's excellent dichotomy) will be the right choice. But as Bruce Sterling pointed out so well in his keynote at Ubicomp 2006, it creates an interesting new set of challenges and responsibilities for user experience designers: while trying to match people's models, we should not fall into techno-mysticism, lying about what's really going on, rather than using a model to simplify coginitive load. I predict there will be many more user experience design tradeoffs such as this in the future.

Posted by at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Sympathetic magic is a common magical belief that I believe underlies much of the thinking behind animist relationships to the world. Essentially, it holds that something that resembles something else holds a magical link to it, and that resemblance between a controllable thing and an uncontrollable one leads to the ability to control one with the other. Ginseng's health properties may well have been inspired by its shape as the "man root". The wild, but tamable, nature of bulls may have led to them as the symbol of tamable nature (and made Taurus the spring constellation), while the untamable nature of lions made them the symbol of untamable resistance and the wild (and made Leo the fall constellation). Etc. Images are a particularly powerful sympathetic magical element and it's possible to regularly observe people in all cultures creating mystical associations between images and their subjects.

A second common magical concept is the talisman, or amulet. These often have a sympathetic component as either representations of or pieces of something that is considered powerful.

The products of technology are no stranger to either of these ideas. From photography onwards technology has allowed for the rapid creation of highly identifiable images of objects, creating lots of raw material for associations, and industrial production cranks out all the talismans one can imagine. Thus, it's not surprising that there are technological items that are designed for the expression of sympathetic magic.

Here's a recent digital example (from Engadget) :

It's described (in Engadget) thus:

In addition to acting like a plain old storage device, the pendant promises to help you find your lost items just by loading photos of them onto the drive.

In other words, it's a dowsing rod for your stuff.

This goes well with last year's technomancy device. That device was more psychological and personal, but still a product of sympathetic magic, as its functionality depended on the similarity between the peace associated with the sound of water and one's desired mental state.

Posted by at 3:14 PM | Permalink

Although there's been a lot of talk over the last decade about the importance of creating technology for Baby Boomers, the conversation has largely focused on the size of their population, their charateristically different behavior than previous generations (thoughout their lives) and the amount of disposable income they have available. When working on the Whirlpool in.home project last year, I realized that there was another compelling reason why design for Baby Boomers is important: their familiarity with computer technology. A lot is made of the fact that today's teenagers have never known a world without inexpensive mobile phones, 3D graphics cards, gigabytes of data storage, fast Internet access, etc., but there are also some interesting statistics to note about Baby Boomers that put that generation into a similar perspective. During my Whirlpool book research I came upon the following collection of statistics:

Baby Boom begins: 1946
Transistor invented: 1947
Average age of retirement in the EU: 60.4 years
Number of hours of the day spent at home at age 65: 20*
(source: EC)

If you add these up, you get: 2006 is the year that Europe's Baby Boomers start retiring, they've never known a world without a transistor, and they're going to spend a lot of time at home. What are they going to do with that time? Maybe they're going to use much more technology than previous generations of retirees, since they're so comfortable with it.

*=this statistic is, of course, based on the behavior of pre-Boomers, and as with much else Boomers may behave differently.

Posted by at 11:29 AM | Permalink

Last week, I posted about, Sketching in Hardware 1, a conference I organized. Now, I'd like to comment on an issue that has come up at other tech conferences and which came up again at sketching - the disproportionate demographics. Specifically, the disproportionate ratio of men to women who attend conferences, relative to the proportion of people working in the field.

During the planning of this conference, I talked to a number of people about how to attract more women to technology conferences. My goal was to create as gender-balanced an invitation list as I could manage. I sought input from a broad range of folks (thank you Molly,Anne, Liz, Julian,Rael, Judith and everyone else I've consulted with). The conference focus was to bring together developers of toolkits for rapid prototyping of physical/ubiquitous computing devices, or heavy users of such toolkits. With that as the primary gating criteria, I tried to invite a broad range of people, especially women, across a range of career trajectories (i.e. I didn't want to stick with established professors and professional engineers, but PhD students, researchers, artists, educators and designers, managers). I spent several months collecting lists, using Google and working my social network (i.e. asking folks to tell me who they thought was interesting). [BTW, if you you fit this criteria and you weren't invited, I apologize and please contact me.]

I want to share what I feel is an interesting and frustrating statistic: the ratio of men attending to those invited was about 1 in 3, yet for women it was 1 in 19. Here is a graph illustrating the invitation process:

You can see that although proportionally more women replied to my invitation (80% of women invited replied, as compared to 68% of men), the proportion who said they would attend was much lower, and the proportion who could actually attend was even lower. Basically, only one of the 30 women I invited who wasn't somehow involved in the planning was able to attend the event. I don't really understand why. It's of course tied into the mesh of social factors that cause a gender disparity in technology, and the numbers aren't statistically significant if you take the population of technology workers as a whole, but it's still frustrating. I'm not sure what I could have done (or could do) differently, and I appreciate your suggestions or thoughts on the topic. What is going on that's causing proportionally so many fewer women to attend conferences, relative to men? I don't know.

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Technology art is important for design

In this light, it's not surprising that the products of so many design programs (RCA, ITP and Interaction Ivrea) can be read equally as art and as technology and why the mixture on We Make Money Not Art has proven to be so popular. We can even trace the lineages: dodgeball.com is closely linked to flash mobs, which are a modern version of a 60s Happening. Flickr.com was created out of Game Neverending, which was as much a conceptual art piece as a game. There's almost certainly a relationship between Philips Ambilight TVs James Turrell's lighted color spaces, Dan Flavin's work and color field painting, too. (this leads to all kinds of interesting questions about intellectual property)

(Philips, Turrell, Flavin)

There's a lot of feedback between these worlds when the participants rub shoulders and explore each others' ideas: technologists can borrow ideas from artists and vice-versa. Jeff Bezos, the founders of Google, and countless other dotcom entrepreneurs used to go to Burning Man for more than the opportunity to wear funny outfits and dance all night long (though that kind of freedom is immensely valuable, too). Partly it was a generational thing--every generation's entertainment influences its view of the world, and the rave generation is no different--but it was a way to explore the idea of art, technology and experience without the normal intellectual shackles. The core that drives Google to not want to be evil and iRobot to include a geek port on the Roomba.is the same core that drives people to make technology into art. It's the ability to see beyond the technology to what it does for/to people and for/to the world. It's the core user-centered design philosophy.

The Bay Area is a major center of subversive technology art

Also, critically, the Bay Area technology art scene has always been part of the counterculture. With no government or academic support, tech art in the Bay flourished for close to 40 years with few in any official capacity noticing. This gives it a unique flavor that's not just the expected (and certainly existent) hippie dilettante vibe that seems to be people's expectation. Tapping the Beats and Dada more than the hippies and Surrealism, SRL embodies depths of nihilism that can shock jaded New Yorkers. Ant Farm fetishized plastic, television and the Kennedy assassination.

The Bay Area is also home to an enormous amount of technology innovation and a major center of contemporary industrial design innovation. IDEO, which looms much larger in the industry than even their sizable portfolio of projects, and frogdesign, have their primary bases of operation in the Bay. I think it's no accident that the proximity of technology, art, subversive culture and optimism produces some of the best and most innovative products in the world.

This is, of course, not to say that all innovation happens in the Bay Area or that these things only exist in the Bay, but I believe that the mix is uniquely influential there. Other cities trying to create similar environments and design organizations thinking about what makes for good design should look toward the history of the Bay Area as a venue for subversive technology art, rather than just looking at the concentration of money on Sand Hill Road (though that's certainly important, too).

Three important technology art events

• Frankenstein Theory and Robotics at RX gallery, open now, features a number of prominent Bay Area technology artists participating, though the title still betrays an unease with manipulating technology it correctly identifies the artists as explorers who have been laboring outside the academy.
• ISEA2006/ZeroOne San Jose, a festival that starts out as a twin festival and becomes a biannual one after this year. (the brand new biannual local festival, ZeroOne San Jose is using the established international festival, ISEA, as a kind of gravity slingshot). I'm a co-chair of the C4F3 and I'm really excited. Also, Anu Vikram, the producer of the C4F3 will be speaking at the RX Gallery next Wednesday about that show.
• Burning Man, which has been growing in official recognition, may well have made the leap this year. If you plan on going, old timers will probably tell you it jumped the shark when they laid out streets, installed portapotties and forbade people from carrying automatic weapons. Last year was the best year for years and it looks to be even better. Still totally worth it.

*=Yes, I realize that the art world is subject to economic pressures, too. In fact, I believe that the art world is a large, under-regulated market driven by huge amounts of insider trading and influence peddling, but my rant on the mythology of art as pure expression and the failure of art schools to teach students that it's a commercial practice will have to wait for another day. For now, there's this post that addresses some of the issues. My point in the above description is that it's not nearly as bound as client-driven design or market-driven development.

[Addendum: Liz points out that San Franciscan exceptionalism seems to have creeped into this post. That's probably true. I like San Francisco a lot and think it's special. I also acknowledge that despite its specialness and its stature as (what I believe to be) a center for the ideas behind technology, art, design and innovation, it has produced very few first-rate artists in the last 30 years. There are social reasons for that, too: art schools that didn't recognize what was going on around them, a seductive large art market in Los Angeles that siphoned off many promising artists, a community that valued creativity only inasmuch as it made for great eye candy while dancing, etc. However, I hope that's changing and that these exhibitions will signal the beginning of a shift in the environment.]

Posted by at 2:50 PM | Permalink

An addendum to my Magic in HCI bibliography of a couple days ago:

The list of references attempted to identify sources of discussion of magic as a metaphor for ubiquitous computing, but I decided to include some older sources which were written before the possibility, and language, of ubicomp became available (i.e. before the mid-90s). Most of these deal with "cyberspace" and are some of the core sources in discussions of virtual reality. I believe that they are relevant here because physical information processing objects in the ubicomp world are projections into the physical world of digital services. The older "cyberspace" literature envisions a virtual world of objects that represent things in the real world. One of my points, and certainly Weiser's point in referring to ubicomp as the opposite of virtual reality, is that with ubicomp objects there is less need for there to be a virtual world, the real world can manifest the same magical properties envisioned by the older cyberspace science fiction and theory.

Posted by at 2:05 PM | Permalink

Analysts are an influential lot. Their predictions of ecommerce riches led to the 1998-2000 stock bubble, and companies often take their advice with a lot of faith. Gartner recently release a report examining non-graphical user interfaces entitled "The Evolving User Interface From Graphical UI to
Environmental UI ." I haven't read the actual report, but there's a new a summary on Gartner's site. What's interesting is that they avoid all of the terminology of ubiquitous or pervasive computing, maybe knowing that their audience needs to have the results in familiar words. Maybe they're also right in de-emphasizing the most buzzy tech.

Here are some parts I found interesting, as much for what they're chosing to concentrate on as their date predictions:

The GUI will remain the main UI model through 2010. However, several factors are increasing the pressure to extend the interaction model — especially for targeted niche markets

[...]

Organizations must also look beyond functional issues to psychological ones to identify all potential economic consequences.

[...]

Mobile and workflow applications are more-promising candidates for gaining value from speech recognition, however. These applications use speech recognition for application control and will feed speech recognition to the desktop over time as users become comfortable with the voice interface paradigm.

[...]

Through 2007, fewer than 20 percent of organizations will adopt desktop videoconferencing (0.8 probability). Through 2010, the use of video in corporate environments will split into low-end and high-end markets. Meanwhile, improved display technologies and sound will make multipoint videoconferencing more palatable for most environments. [...] Eventually (2010 to 2015), high-end video systems will allow the remote experience to approach that of being in the same room with a remote speaker (0.8 probability).

[...]

The emergence of rich Internet applications combined with user demands to reduce interface latency illustrates how the emergence of a UI technology can drive new business opportunities. The application service provider (ASP) market failed because users were unwilling to step back from the user experience with the client/server and locally hosted applications or to experience poor latency and extended data entry times.

[...]

Today, multiple symmetric displays are used primarily in specialized applications to stretch the desktop but will become mainstream by 2009. Asymmetric displays will become prevalent, especially task-focused, at-a-glance displays for calendar or status information.

[...]

By 2010, e-paper capabilities will be addressed, providing wall-size, low-resolution monochromatic displays, which will dip into the price range of a cubicle wall or high-end wallpaper by 2015. Interaction with wall-size displays will finally bring gesture recognition into the mainstream, illustrating how the emergence of one UI element can influence the value and adoption of another technology.

[...]

Through 2008, new interfaces for established functions will dominate, with sociable devices growing through 2012. In the long term (2010 and beyond), devices will integrate information from many sources to deliver an integrated and sociable user experience.

[...]

Looking to 2015, there is potential for more dramatic shift in the UI. The so-called desktop will flow off of the desk and into office appliances and the walls around the user. Meanwhile, the expansion of personal/mobile devices and evolving embedded systems (for example, radio frequency identification [RFID], telematics and consumer electronics) will further fragment the desktop model of computing.

In this world of ambient intelligence, any nontrivial device will contain some degree of embedded processing and communications capability.

[...]

By 2015, the focus will shift from designing individual interfaces for particular devices to creating a proactive UI framework for the environment (0.6 probability).

I think that their numbers are interesting, and probaby accurate for the mass adoption range, but the unevenly distributed future will show that there is a layer of technology development and adoption that will make the more ubicomp-ey stuff much more prevalent than 2015. I'd argue that by 2010 there will already be a bunch...and then, because the ideas of the cutting edge hit the mass market a ways before mass adoption, there will be a big shift in people's relationship to technology. On the coasts, the early-adopter parts of the lifestyles that will go along with these technological shifts will appear much sooner.

Posted by at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

An AlwaysOn discussion between venture capitalists turned to the notion of moving away from dicussions of core technologies to what those technologies enable:

Roger McNamee: [Mr. McNamee is a venture capitalist with Elevation Partners.] I believe that electronic technology—semiconductors, enterprise software, personal computers—is changing from the growth engine of our economy to a fuel that, very simply put, is following the same course that steel, cement, and other input materials took in the 1950s. It's transforming from a growth industry (where it was really interesting in its own right) to one that's entirely dependent on other industries to add value to it and make it more compelling.

In the discussion that ensued, it was interesting to note that the ideas danced around the concepts of design--service design, product design, the relationship between the two, notions of ubiquitous computing, etc--but never actually mentioned design, and design as a process of taking technology and applying it in a targeted way. This identifies, at least for me, that there's a conceptual gap in the terminology (yes, here I go with disambiguation again) and that the terms identifying the practices that satisfy the needs that the VCs were talking about are hazy. In other words: better definitions of what design does, as a process of human-centered innovation that bridges the gap between organizational needs and consumers' needs and desires, could help create and ease the transition that Roger McNamee identifies.

[Addendum: in the root page for this discussion, I notice that the last item the VCs talked about is entitled "Design Counts Double." It hasn't been posted yet (AlwaysOn's model is to trickle out the stuff for free), but maybe it covers what I'm talking about. Nevertheless, to discuss hiding technology without talking about design says to me that design, as an idea which has at its core the hiding of technology by shifting emphasis from functionality to effect , hasn't spread in the way I would have expected.]

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Permalink

+ =

In the most recent edition of Innovation, the IDSA's magazine, an article(100K PDF) by James Conley got my interest. The subtitle is "Using Brand Identity to Reinforce Market Value," but the real point of the article is about how the basic elements of experience can be legally coralled and restricted as a form of competitive leverage. The importance of this is summarized in this key point:

If used properly, marks, unlike patents or copyrights, never expire. Registered design elements that serve as a brand foundation are therefore indefinite forms of competitive advantage.

Towards the end of the article he says:

Without the proactive management of intellectual property, the innovator’s ability to build and/or sustain market value is compromised. Designers who know how to legally encode a unique product differentiation and/or cognitive touch-point will have a strong competitive advantage.

This is all saying that our legal current system is so set up that ever-more specific sensory phenomena can become the property of organizations forever. And when "forever" and "property" are used in the same sentence, you know there's going to be trouble. My first thought about this related to an observation from a couple of years ago: digital technology has made color reproduction much more accurate, allowing designers much finer control over the exact color used in a product...and a much more consistent way of establishing ownership of a color. Old logos had to be in a relatively limited set of colors both because mass color reproduction technology was limited and because variability in printing technology made it much harder to insure consistency in a color. Coke own "red" (not a specific shade of red) partially because red is easy to reproduce. Pepsi owns "blue" for the same reason. It's not surprising that Tab Cola, which uses magenta as its signature color, was founded the year after Pantone: by the early 60s, color reproduction had probably gotten to the point that companies could use more subtle shades, and Pantone saw the need to standardize that capability. Since Pantone and, especially, since digital reproduction arrived in the 80s and 90s, accurate color reproduction has come to dominate the design world.

And now intellectual property theorists such as Conley, and lawyers, especially ones at technology and design-savvy companies with lots of money (read: phone companies) have realized that this is fresh, under-regulated ground for claiming territory (i.e. competitive advantage). Conley references T-Mobile's cease-and-desist complaint that made Intel change their Centrino logo to be less "magenta" (because both are in the "mobile" space, even though that makes no sense if you think about the context of use) and Orange's lawyers, who tried easyMobile to stop using orange in their advertising, despite easyMobile's reationship to easyJet, who are clearly very orange.

You can see this shift in large design-savvy companies already: DHL changed their logo colors to include the yellow of Deutsche Post, but also to differentiate itself from FedEx, who are quietly claiming more and more color territory. You can also see this with moving trucks: Ryder, Penske and Hertz used to all have yellow trucks; Budget had white. Ryder went to white. Budget went to blue in response. Hertz is moving to orange (I think). Penske gets to keep yellow, maybe.

I predict that soon, because there is no regulation in this market and ownership apparently forever, there will be major color wars to register colors for specific industries and uses and masses of litigation about color infringement, all created by the fidelity of color reproduction.

Now here comes the chilling part. Conley describes extending these ideas to other senses:

Beyond the world of static shape and form, Yamaha has succeeded in registering a stream of water as the unique source identifier for the Wave Runner line of personal watercraft. That’s right, that silly, rooster-tail shaped jet that fires up off the back of the unit when you crank the throttle is a registered trademark. This water stream is the monopoly source identifier of Yamaha’s Wave Runner and cannot be found on competing products from Polaris or Seadoo.

[...]

Midwest Biologicals Inc. has registered the scent of bubblegum as a source identifier on its machining oil and metal-cutting fluids.

[...]

Akzo-Novel’s subsidiary Organon is now attempting to register an orange flavor as a trademark in the market for pharmaceutical antidepressants.

I'll leave the consequences of a logical conclusion to this line of thought to the reader.

Posted by at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Last fall I wrote about supply-driven development models dominating what I understood to be at the core of Japanese consumer electronics. Today, CNET writes about (and Slashdot blogs about) Sony's trouble making good software as the core problem behind their lack of success with their recent consumer products. They discuss how siloed the software development is and how the culture pendulums from centrally-controlled to distributed software products, and how they've hired an Apple exec to oversee their new centralization, but I think that somewhat misses the mark: the problem is not necessarily the central control or its lack. The problem is that whether or not that control is asserted, it's done in the name of company identity and techical achievement, rather than end-user behavior, or competitive demand. This is classic supply-driven thinking and the core of the problem in an engineering-driven culture. It's going to take Sony a long time to explain to its people that the important part is not the coolness of the technology, but what it does. Thinking in those terms is why they keep first isolating themselves to develop the cool tech, and then swinging the other way to try and unify the individually-isolated technology. If there isn't a user-guided vision at the center of that unification, it's going to fail as quickly as the islands of engineering utopias. An archipelago of islands, each with a noncompetitive ecology, is no more competitive than the individual islands. Only when exposed to the environmental pressures of user needs do the genuinely valuable ideas survive.

Good luck to Sony in changing that culture. You could do worse than start by hiring an army of usability testing people.

Or at least that's the theory, as of today. ;-)

Posted by at 1:45 PM | Permalink

I recently got a list of magazines pirated by what I believe to be a group of Chinese media pirates. As far as I can tell, most of the magazines they get digitally from some subscription service, though some appear to be hand-scanned. It makes for an interesting profile of the pirates. They're interested in computers, of course, but also motor sports, home decor, luxury goods, horror movies, and business. Politics is noticeably (and nor surprisingly) absent from the list (or maybe it's just because I can't read Chinese and this list is primarily in English).

Anyway, here's your free market research on the interests of today's Chinese magazine pirate:

Posted by at 2:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For the new year, I was treated to an amusing honor. Australian ABC news used one of my Flickr pictures to illustrate a story on Sony's fake graffiti ad campaign. This kind of "guerilla" advertising always smells of someone in an ad agency reading a business book, then pitching the idea to an ad buyer who doesn't really know what hip is, but works for a hip company. This kind of astroturfing nearly always backfires. Like Nike's appropriation of a Minor Threat record cover last year, it may sound like a good idea to everyone except its audience. When a phenomenon was mocked by the Simpsons 8 years ago, it's probably time to give it a rest. That said, maybe Sony managed to get some of the 18-24 year-olds who were the likely target of this campaign to actually buy a PSP, but--frankly--I don't see how. I think they would have done much better if they let real graffiti writers design custom cases for the things, or something.

On another graffiti-meets-video games note, it seems that after two years, Getting Up, the graffiti-themed video game cobranded with Marc Ecko's clothing line is nearly complete. I hope they've fixed some of the moralist-baiting stuff: versions I saw had the lead character doing all kinds of violence against hapless security guards in order to get into a good spot for tagging. That's both unlike how graffiti writers generally behave and totally undermines any positive "graffiti is cool" message Ecko and Atari may have. It's using cultural cues with no appreciation of the long-term effects on that culture (contrast with GTA: San Andreas, which was a full-on homage to the culture it was invoking, down to the stuff revealed by the"Hot Coffee" mod). But, then again, that's not surprising, either. Clueless cultural tourism is par for the course for unsuccessful products. It's one of the things that makes them unsuccessful. Good luck Sony and good luck Atari.

Finally, I think that the reason my picture was picked was because of its Creative Commons license. Woohoo! Go CC.

Posted by at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In September, Liz and I went to Japan for the Ubicomp 2005 conference. It was my first trip to any Asian country, and like any first-time tourist in Japan, I was overwhelmed by the lights, continually surprised by subtle cultural differences (for example, why are so many restaurants in the basements of buildings in Tokyo?) and enchanted by many aspects of the place (the Great Buddha in Kamakura is awesome).
One thing that struck me about Tokyo is how Modernist it is. By Modernist, I mean more than just "new and shiny" or "made of concrete, steel and glass." Much of it seems to be pre- postmodern (in other words, Modernist), in its design. Unironically minimalist housewares and stationary at Muji and Tokyu Hands. 1920s France- and 1960s US-inspired fashion in Harajuku. Sure the cosplay girls dressed like Victorian babydoll zombie dominatrixes is totally not Modernist, but there were few signs of that attitude spilling over into broader life. Even the current fashion in motorcycles seems ultra-minimal. No more splashy plastic and chrome, it's all about having as little as possible between you and the enormous back wheel on your small-engine 1960s bike.

I'm sure I'm missing the point or misunderstanding a lot of what I see, and people who are more familiar with the cultural indicators can point out where I'm misreading the situation, but what struck me is how the Modernist perspective extends to the way that business of design is managed and handled there. Much of the perspective seems based on a classic Modernist "supply-driven" model, which means that a company produces stuff based on internal gut-level determination of what's interesting (usually done by executives or project managers). Sometimes it sells, sometimes it doesn't. When it sells, they make more. When it doesn't, they don't. You can see the Cohen Brothers' version of this Modernist myth of product design is distilled and presented in The Hudsucker Proxy: Norville has a big idea, everyone thinks it's crazy, but they make it anyway, it's a huge hit, he's a genius. No field research, no usability testing, no focus groups. "You know, for kids!" That movie takes place in a fictionalized 30s/50s past that's the glory era of supply-first thinking. In Akihabara, the big electronics district of Tokyo. I got the feeling that's the perspective that Japanese electronics manufacturers still take. Let's make a bunch of variations on an idea; whichever variation sells more, we'll make more like that. It's a continuous Cambrian explosion of products, with the ideas sorted out by the pseudo-evolutionary forces of market adoption.

This is in contrast to the philosophy I see at work at large American and European companies that have enthusiastically adopted end-user research methods taken from marketing techniques and pioneered by the social sciences (see my discussion with Anne recently about the bumps that this adoption is causing in both the academic and corporate spheres). On the one hand, this is great, and the core of my "demand-driven" philosophy of product development. Too many companies are still doing no end-user needs assessment and research at all. Further, I'm certainly not going to say that user research is ever bad ;-). However, the Japanese way of making and marketing made me rethink my stance about the need to always make decisions based on a priori user research. Maybe, just maybe, the current capabilities to prototype, engineer and distribute product variations on a core idea allows for ideas to be tested, and markets to be primed for the acceptance of new ideas, without conclusive documentation from end-user research. Thinking that there's a single product and a single answer, and that research should continue until that's determined, is an equally Modernist idea, from a time when retooling was incredibly expensive. Now, as one hardware designer in San Francisco told me, it's possible to sketch some ideas on a piece of paper, fax it to China, and have a working prototype designed and engineered in a month, and to have production samples soon thereafter. I'm sure this doesn't work for revolutionary ideas, but ideas based on technologies that the engineers and designers are comfortable with--but that's probably where most hardware designs are.

With technological and design possibilities like this, maybe a hybrid approach is appropriate. One that's not based on the idea that the user research is useless ("they don't know what they want" and all that) and also not based on the idea that only deep, exhaustive field research can produce insights that lead to product features. Maybe the hybrid approach is an iterative one based on iteration between rapid research and feature experimentation. What's an appropriate iteration cycle? The Japanese companies have already settled on a release cycle that's nearly quarterly, with a new version of whatever product released every 3 months. However, the feature set in these seems to be still nearly arbitrary, probably determined by product managers in engineering groups based on what the engineers have developed. Maybe the right hybrid approach is a quarterly release cycle of multiple variations on a product idea coupled with both field research to identify new behaviors that can guide innovation and fairly rigorous evaluation of the popularity and actual use of product features. It can be a kind real world conjoint analysis.

Yes, this would screw seriously with the idea that a company needs to put all its marketing muscle behind a single product and promote it as if no others exist. But maybe it's amenable to another approach, one that markets a product line as a single product, but with options. This is the classic automobile model, though one that's fallen out of favor (as I understand it, most Americans buy cars off the lot these days, rather than custom ordering them and waiting, as they did in the old days; Germans, I believe, still prefer to wait and get just the car they want). Maybe a configurator could narrow the options to just the variations that were built and there wouldn't actually be any customization, just assistance in getting the features you want, while follow-up research figures out what you actually use.

Anyway, the thought that struck me as I saw the rows of nearly-identical MP3 players and phones was "There is great research waiting to happen here, if the people making the stuff and the people obsessing about research could only join forces."

Posted by at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

Over on Anne's excellent, insightful, blog we've been discussing the tensions faced by practictioners of social research in constrained development contexts. It's a discussion that's made me think about the context in which we do research and the importance of what we call what we do. The use of the term "ethnography" is currently particularly problematic: as a shorthand for fieldwork, it threatens to undermine the current usage, but "fieldwork" doesn't quite describe the activity that's being done by researchers working in the corporate environment. I don't have a good replacement, but it'll certainly be a topic for conference hallway discussion.

Posted by at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stepping away from my recent interest in ubiquitous computing for a minute, I presented a case study called "Guidelines as Tools: Building a design knowledge management system for programmers" at the DUX 2005 conference. The case study documents a project I did with a client (who participated in the writing of the case study; thank you, Srinivas!). The project was an experiment to introduce a tool into the development process of an organization, with the ultimate goal of shifting it toward a more user-centered development model, with minimal disruption to its existing processes.

There's something for everyone in it: knowledge management, interaction design, agile software development, organizational change, open source software, blogging. (well, OK, not everyone... ;-)

My presentation of it at DUX was limited to 7 minutes, so it covers just the core idea (100K PDF) driving the project, but it's a good place to start.

The full case study (450K PDF) is significantly longer and offers a deeper perspective on our methods and ideas. Here's the abstract:

This case study describes the creation of an internal design knowledge management tool for web developers as a means to encourage user-centered development practices. With a goal to shift a software development culture from waterfall-style to user-centered practices, the repository of knowledge and code is created as an incentive for programmers to create interfaces in a user-centered and consistent way.

Several experimental techniques are used in development of the tool. The process treats software developers as a user group and approaches the creation of design guidelines as if they were a product. In addition, the use of agile software development techniques, as driven by interaction and interface design, coupled with off-the-shelf blog software as a extensible, lightweight content management system makes this an experiment on multiple levels.

Results about the success of the experiment are still pending, but the authors are optimistic.

Feel free to post comments and questions here, or to send me email.

Posted by at 2:07 PM | Permalink

I presented a short talk at the Ubicomp 2005 workshop on situated computing today. Here's the abstract:

The assumption that the goal of ubicomp is to make technology disappear stems from a Modernist ideal of purely utilitarian design that creates social invisibility. In fact, everyday design is anything from invisible, as can be seen in how furniture and cars are designed and from the hotrod and casemod cultures that modify everyday technological objects. Ubicomp design can learn to understand the design of situated technology from industrial design and from the study of technology modification cultures.

Posted by at 1:44 AM | Permalink

Just noticed that Vonage is sponsoring a phone casemod contest (called "Pimp that Phone"). Seems a bit half-baked and jumping on the flavor of the moment, but it's an interesting experiment and another example of casemod culture moving into the mainstream.

Posted by at 9:24 AM | Permalink

I've written about how I feel that given enough exposure to digital black box devices whose function is difficult to discern, people may likely start projecting psychology onto the devices, much as they project consciousness on the natural world. Gizmodo has a description of the Cure-Alpha MP3 player that

will not only allow you to listen to your favourite tunes, but it will also produce "alpha waves" that are, according to certain scientists, beneficial for the human being and the human brain. You can find alpha waves in the sound of water falling or in the noise that waves make.

I'm reminded of quack medical electrotherapy devices that appeared in the early days of electricity. Then, as now, the new technology seemed magical, and so magical properties were assigned to it. It's not surprising to see it happening again with contemporary digital technology, especially technology that's so personal and portable as MP3 players and cell phones (whose emissions have been the subject of a lot of scrutiny because, as ubiquitous objects whose actual operation can't be easily understood, they naturally create suspicion--because magic can be both good and bad, and we don't trust magic that's appeared to be all good for so long). As ubiquitous computing becomes, well, more ubiquitous, I can imagine both phenomena appearing: first, a projection of magical properties onto everyday objects; then, a backlash and suspicion (see I, Robot for an example of an expression of these fears percolating in culture already).

This, of course, is not to say that such thinking is necessarily bad, quack radiation therapy preceded therapeutic radiation therapy--and there are positive electrical therapies. I'm more making an observation about human nature and the cycle of social acceptance of technology.

Posted by at 11:53 PM | Permalink

When I live in Portland and I'm not working in a cafe, I work in my living room. We have a guest room/office, but it's a small bedroom and, if I'm going to be sitting around all day, I'd rather be sitting in a larger room that's right next to the kitchen (that's how I treat cafes, after all). It seems I'm not the only one, as this story from Ontario's Businss Edge describes:

"What we are seeing is that the home office has replaced the family room, and it seems to be the most utilized room in the home," says Susan Speake, owner of The Art of Working, in Oakville, Ont.

What impact does this have on the way that technology is used? Offices are traditionally the most technology-laden part of the house after the kitchen. If they're now being used as both offices and social spaces, that changes the nature of the technology that can be in them.

To utilize the passageway space, Richardson put up a full wall to block off the walkway from the dining room, but used pony walls (three feet high) that front onto the living room. The low walls provide an openness that is airy but also functional, because he can keep tabs on the kids.

"The small wall gives you all the visual separation of a room while still making the two rooms that are attached seem bigger because they are joined," he says. "It's just another trick on space without breaking a house up into teeny rooms."

I can imagine the dual-use large monitor/second TV, or a white board that works both for work and for household information sharing (much as the fridge does in the kitchen). Actual use is still unresolved--is it a situation like in the 19th century, when home businesses were more popular and people "lived upstairs" from their jobs? or more like a hobby space?--but there's likely to be a market for such flexible devices that are more specialized than just the "home entertainment PC."

Posted by at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gizmodo announces that "wood inlay is the new gloss black," and I think they're right.

In Milan I saw an exhibit of appliances by Realfleet's Amadana line, which features things such as humidifiers that look like wooden rice steamers and headphones with bamboo:

The casemod community has been making wood cases for a while, so it's only a matter of time that it moves out of the garage dremel world to the industrial design world and commercial computer cases start using the material to make plastic look more sophisticated. Then (maybe) it's only a small conceptual leap to merging things that are made of wood and getting back to...furniture!

[Update: Engadget also notices the wood theme, and mentions a wood-covered cell phone by Siemens.]

Posted by at 12:42 PM | Permalink

I just submitted a paper(44K PDF) to a workshop on situated ubiquitous computing at Ubicomp 2005 in September. I just submitted it minutes ago, so it's hot off the presses and may be totally off-base, but I figured I'd share it anyway. Here's the abstract:

The assumption that the goal of ubicomp is to make technology disappear stems from a Modernist ideal of purely utilitarian design that creates social invisibility. In fact, everyday design is anything from invisible, as can be seen in how furniture and cars are designed and from the hotrod and casemod cultures that modify everyday technological objects. Ubicomp design can learn to understand the design of situated technology from industrial design and from the study of technology modification cultures.

In other words: the way that people choose and modify technology is testament to the fact that they're not interested in having that technology be solely in the background. Understanding the boundaries of choice and the directions in which modification progresses may help us understand how to make ubiquitous computing that feels natural, without necessarily trying to make it invisible.

Posted by at 6:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

It looks like LG has decided to get into the domestic technology space. Right now its vision of that has 4 rather vague components (as described here):

• Convenient Life
  
• Safe Life
  
• Pleasant Life
  
• Comfortable Life
  

Never mind that the last two seem like synonyms, their Flash demo (click the links on the left to see the demos, and use the back button to go back) seems to imply that a Home Network will be really good for getting email in every room and using the phone as a kind of super remote control.

[As an aside, this Flash is an interesting cultural artifact in terms of what it unintentionally communicates about its makers more than the ideas it's trying to sell: check out the implication of pirated MP3s and watching porn, not to mention the, uh, traditional gender roles. Or maybe I'm just projecting. I don't know.] ;-)

[Update: just looked at the 2001 copyright date--I suspect LG has changed their home strategy by now. Sorry. The Flash demo is still funny, though.]

Posted by at 2:40 AM | Permalink

I was flipping through a book on Controlled Flight Into Terrain (i.e. plane crashes based on pilot error--and an excellent euphemism to boot) at the book store when I saw the following illustration of the causes of CFIT:

I think it's actually a pretty brilliant description of the systematic buildup of errors that occur in almost any organization, 'cept here they lead to a big crack in your plane, rather than a bad product launch or a recall. It also shows how the fault does not just rest with the last person to have had the control stick (so to speak).

[Update: a little research revealed that the diagram was originally published in James Reason's book Human Error, which seems like an interesting general theory of error.]

Posted by at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jupiter just published a report called "Home Automation: The Viability of Remote Household Management". I haven't read it (I don't have a Jupiter account--if you do, and have access to this report and wouldn't mind letting me look at it, drop me a note), but the summary is pretty clear: "Consumer interest in home automation is stagnant. Slow vendor response to a growing interest in the networked home has prevented the uptake of home automation solutions."

I'm not a big home automation fan, as far as its current incarnation as an extension of audiphile technological obsessiveness is concerned, but I do think that as computers fragment into everyday objects, what we call "home automation" will merge with ubiquitous computing. If the analysts are thinking about this market as stagnant because vendor response is slow, then that's potentially a trigger for the vendor response to be quicker. Technology companies have been puttering around this field ever since Gateway tried to follow the "convergence" star and put out TV-computer hybrids in the mid-90s that weren't particularly good at being either, but there seems to be a renewed interest in the home. Dell is successfully selling TVs. Microsoft's Xbox 360, with it ability to do other things (what other things isn't clear yet) beside play games, is an interesting way to weasel into hardware without having the overhead of competing against Dell (granted, they have to compete against Sony, but only on one front). Intel has a Digital Home division. There are rumors of Apple buying TiVo.

The meme is out there, it's been out for a while, but maybe it's approaching some kind of inflection point. Most of these companies are still thinking in terms of standalone boxes, but someone's going to find the writing on the wall (i.e., the money in people's pockets) pretty soon, and then it's going to break open for consumers like WiFi did, which will in turn get the other companies into the act.

Posted by at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've been thinking about personal geographies for a while, especially lately. It came up a bunch in the last year in various forms, though I didn't know the term until a couple of days ago. Mappr is one, Jack Schulze's map of a massive London apartment complex (shown at Design Engaged), which changes perspective from 3D to flat as you move around the space is another. Timo Arnall's Time that land forgot project is a third. The idea of finding your place in the world is now both possible and, seemingly, important and people are moving on to try to make meaning of it. Or at least it's one of the memes du jour because GPS, mobile phones and discount airlines have enabled it. In addition, my personal sense of the importance of geography has been heightened since I've been traveling so much.

I think that these ideas tie closely into ubiquitous computing--tools that are here with me--and experience design. Often as not, experiences are special locations with special things in them. As Disney and video game designers know, the theater of experience design has a stage, props and actors. Locations are the stage, users are actors and the objects are traditionally props. However, if augmented with information processing, maybe they become extras (unless they misbehave, in which case they get promoted to villain)? Especially if people start to relate to the objects in their lives in an animist way, I can see this being less a farfetched conceptual model and more an actual framework for design.

Understanding how people perceive location is important in designing the products that they're going to be using in that location. Physical context matters. Now that we've been able to package objective location data into handheld GPS devices and maps.google.com, how are people processing it? At Design Engaged, there was tacit agreement that having people create their own paths in the world is a good idea. Brian Boyer's Indy Junior is an interesting first cut at a simple tool for an available set of data, but to understand how to design for products that are going to be used in locations, I think we need something that's at a finer grain, but more evocative than simple GPS traces. I'm not sure what it is, but clearly there's something culturally going on with location and the meaning of location that is already affecting how people are using products (more than it has in the past, where contexts were a lot more stable than they are today) and design is grasping at ways to manage it.

In my life, I've seen several places outside of Disney and video games where context plays a big role in the experience. Growing up in Detroit, Greektown was a safe area for suburbanites to go and have "urban experiences" (there's a book about this). Venice, Italy is a simulation of itself these days, down to companies that specialize in chipping plaster so it looks old. >Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas simulates how people in the rest of country thought California looked like around the time of the 1992 LA riots. In these cases "Disneyfication" means using design to express a culturally shared vision of a place, and I think there's an important lesson to be learned there about creating objects.

To be honest, I'm not sure I know what that lesson is--I just started muddling through this--but there's something important about designing products with a deep understanding of how people perceive location--not just how the location is actually laid out, but what the mental model of the layout looks like. Katherine Harmon's book, You are here is a terrific picture book of such maps, and the first place I heard the term. You can see this in pre-Renaissance painting, such as this Scenes from the life of St. Nicholas by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The buildings represent real buildings, but the proportions are scaled not to be realistic, but to be representative of what's important.

The same thing happens when we think about spaces: different things are prominent than are prominent in the actual landscape.

There are glimmers for developing tools personal geography tools that are parallels to the tools for folksonomies, but they're still in their infancy and even the basic differentiations (for example, tools for helping me understand geography aren't the same for helping me communicate geographic ideas).

Also see: Matthew Ward's blog post on cartographies.

Posted by at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the perennial criticisms leveled at the home automation world has been that it's obsessed with technology for technology's sake. I think that, for the most part, thats justified. Like audiophilia, it's long been a hobby for whose practitioners the pleasure is as much in the process as it is in the end result. So you end up with houses that are the technological equivalents of ships in bottles: fascinating experiments in what's possible, but not great examples of what's useful or usable to most people. Lately, the Wired Home blog has been tackling this, which I see as a good sign.

Although gimmicky (the solenoid key fob car starter, especially) and still more about the technology than the end results, there are glimmers of interesting ideas. I, for one, would like to have everything in the house that makes noise grow quiet when the phone rings.

Posted by at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jeju Province plans to build a world model of telematics city and ubiquitous computing technology-based free economic town by next year. The municipal government began last year installing infrastructure for telematics city, injecting 10 billion won (approximately 10 million dollars) for two years.

[...]

In the first half of this year, Daejeon City government will craft a roadmap for fostering 'ubiquitous computing technology-based industry'. The city authority will make its concerted efforts to attract the World Radiocommunication Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) slated for 2007, while taking initiative in developing ubiquitous computing technology and its market. It also plans to install smart home systems in new apartment complexes that can receive communication-broadcasting-game convergence service.

(from an Electronic Times article only available in the Google cache right now)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, except it's a top-down technology investment model that assumes the need for large infrastructural investment (although $10M is not really a large investment by any infrastructural standard, really). I think most new technological innovation is going to be bottom-up, since the smaller physical size and wireless network connectivity implies less reliance on large infrastructures. It sounds like they're approaching ubicomp like it was steel production or electrification, but it's not. That said, I wish them luck.

Posted by at 10:43 PM | Permalink

Found this article in an old IDSA newsletter. It talks about how furniture is changing to accommodate new usage patterns. Some excerpts:

Many of the furniture designs introduced here last week at the International Home Furnishings Market and that will be in stores in the fall are likewise intended for a harried, hassled nation -- in this case, people who eat on the run, hypertask, work all the time, relocate often, and are too busy to pick out furniture or to give much thought to their design style.

[...]

One solution touted at High Point was the "lift top rectangular cocktail table" by Lane Home Furnishings. It looks like a regular table, but the top pulls up and toward you "so it's just about table height,"

[...]

Ottomans are getting higher -- some are at least 4 inches higher than they used to be -- the better to balance your laptop on your lap while you're sitting on the sofa. Likewise, reclining chairs are being reinvented for people who can't spare the time to simply recline.

[...]

"Now, you see your back and your foot rest operate separately," he said, making it possible to sit up straight while your legs are up and your computer's on your lap.

[...]

Since we're on our cell phones all the time anyway, why not literally be on our cell phone? This seems to be the message of the new Cell Phone Stash Chair by Lumisource, a plush chair stylized with a keypad. Fittingly, it multitasks by opening up for storage in the seat.

[...]

Where at one time consumers purchased furniture with the expectation that they would spend years, even decades, at the same address, today's manufacturers are designing for a population on the move.

[...]

As a result, a new sub-genre of home furnishings seems to have emerged, meant to suggest a kind of faux togetherness. Stanley Furniture's "Provincia Trilogy Partners Desk" would fit into this category: It's a desk for three people with two laptop stations.

On the one hand, it sounds like there's a somewhat cynical sneer to some of the pieces (or maybe just to the writer's coverage of them), but--critical design aside (what does it communicate to the user that their relaxation and work spaces have been explicitly merged?)--it's interesting to see furniture manufacturers shift their focus to design based on an understanding of the changing role of furniture. It's still pretty haphazard--the bemused tone of the article clearly shows that this is all new and wacky--but it's nice to see the industry more explicitly approaching design based on an analysis of user needs.

Posted by at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Looking through my Dad's bookshelf, I started flipping through a book called Henry's Attic. It's a fun book describing stuff that's been donated to Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn. The museum is a tremendous collection of the history and culture of technology. You should go there if you're anywhere near Detroit.

One of the entries caught my eye. It was for the 1957 Liberty Mutual Insurance Company's "Survival Car I":

Among the innovations that the project spawned were the concept of "packaging" passengers for safety, simulating accidents to analyze how injuries occurred, and using dummies in auto-crash testing.

[...]

The tanklike vehicle--basically a 1961 [sic] Chevrolet Bel Aire--incorporates some sixty-five safety features for preventing accidents or reducing injuries when accidents occur.

That's not surprising, but here's the kicker that relates this as a parallel to today's open source/closed source debates:

Although auto manufacturers thought the safety features on the survival cars would not sell, more than fifty of them are standard equipment on today's automobiles. Liberty Mutual [...] sought no patents on the research or designs developed for the survival cars. [emphasis mine--mk]

Further, the DOT's site has an interesting quote about these cars from one Ralph Nader:

"That an insurance company," Nader said, "had to produce the first prototype safety car itself constituted a stinging rebuke to the automobile makers." The auto industry was hostile to Survival Cars; Nader reported that the experimental Mustang (1963) included eight of the safety features, but all were dropped by the time the car went into production.

For me the primary lesson is that eventually investment in good user experiences pay off, and resisting things that make products easier, safer and with better functionality, then sharing the most valuable insights with everyone, will pay off for everyone. Liberty Mutual invested $250K, in 1960 dollars, into their program. I'm sure that their innovations have saved many times in excess of that for insurance industries (who don't have to pay out claims) and consumers. I bet even car companies made money off of making safer cars.

Another lesson is that it probably took car companies a couple of tries, an impetus from consumers and regulators, to figure out how to incorporate these features into their cars. So iterative development, patience and perseverance are also necessary to understand exactly how to incorporate these ideas. For example, I don't see many modern cars with six windshield wipers or accordion doors (some pictures of the thing).

Posted by at 5:37 PM | Permalink

About a year and a half ago, I did a sketch of an idea I had about how a dynamically created travelogue could look like. It was nothing earth-shattering, but it was an interesting exercise.

John Udell has now taken this to the next level, using Google Maps and various video/photo clips to illustrate a walk he takes around his neighborhood (Flash). It's really nice and it shows what may be possible if this kind of personal data can get mushed together automatically. This said, I still don't get why there aren't more consumer-grade GPS-savvy cameras. Even if the battery life is bad, it still seems like there would be a significant-enough market for 'em.

Posted by at 4:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

This ad from the 1918 Sears catalog is often cited by ubicomp people (including me, in my upcoming talk to the IA Summit) as an example of how electric motors stopped being special things and disappeared into our tools, with the point being that computation is likely to do the same. They refer to the sewing machine attachment when it's discussed. But one thing that I don't see many citations for is for the other interesting attachment in this ad. The one that's second from the bottom, the one right above the grinder. Yes, that's the one, the one for the vibrator. Sears was right, it really is an ad for "Aids that every woman appreciates."

(click through for the big ad--and, yes, I know there was probably some other justification for vibrators, but, really, I'm sure everyone knew what was up)

Posted by at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I showed in a recent blog post, I carry a paper notebook around. I've been doing it for years. From Genevieve, I learned to paste stuff into it--like business cards, notes on napkins, and clippings from the Economist. That gives me an artifact and context (the notes around it), rather than having the artifact in one place and the notes in another.

I also, of course, note the prevalence of index cards. They're all over agile programming techniques, geek task organization and the current personal productivity trend.

And then there's the reinterpretation of digital artifacts in meatspace (blinkenlights, Space Invader's digital tile graffiti, and the "Connect-Four" version of Tetris).

Anyway, this has led me to conclude (of course) that

Analog is the new digital.

What does that mean? Got me, but it's a slogan. ;-)

Posted by at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft the last couple of weeks. Ben has been talking about it, and I have heard so much about it, that I felt it needed to be tried. It's been years since the last time I seriously played video games, so I was behind on all this MMOG stuff and wanted to see what was up.

To write a simple review: Warcraft is fantastic. The way that the experience is constructed is very clever and there are great little touches everywhere. The problem the designers face are similar to many other kinds of experience designs (whether for theme parks, web sites or functional consumer products): they have to keep people's attention, make it fun regardless how long someone's been playing, guide people deeper without alienating or boring them, and constrain the behavior of many hundreds of players while giving the perception of complete freedom.

It's a difficult task and they pull it off very well. I may be writing more about it as I force myself to tear away from the game, but suffice it to say I've been dreaming in Warcraft for about a week, and although that's a little disturbing, it's a testament to the power of the experience (or maybe I just have too much time on my hands these days, but I don't think that's it).

The observation for today is on feedback. One of the ways that Warcraft differs from everyday life, and one of the primary ways that it stays so addictive, is through continual quantitative feedback. There are a lot of different progress indicators, and one or another is always going up. There are many, many ways to get "better" and, unlike the real world, these are quantified and observable. Rather than the abstract notion that I'm getting smarter by reading books, or getting a little more fit by walking, I know immediately when I get better and by how much. This is powerful positive feedback and although it's certainly possible to go too far with obsessing about quantifiable achievement, it's one of the things that drives the interest, and continual use, of the game.

Why would someone--namely, me--spend hours killing and skinning virtual animals just to get his shooting, skinning and cooking skills up?

This lead me to thinking about smart devices and social effects. One role that smart devices, or personal technology in general, can play in people's lives is to quantify the normally unquantifiable achievements. This quantification can help us conceptualize numerically--and we love to boil things down to numbers when obsessing, don't we? (see: engine displacement in hotrods, MHz in overclocked CPUs, heart rate, frequent flier miles, dollars in the bank, etc.)--things that we can't imagine otherwise. I think that there's an immense potential in devices that help us understand how much we do x or y. Then the whole world becomes a little like Warcraft and we can take our goals--"Level 14" becomes "a bit closer to my 43Things goal"--and maybe make them happen in the small steps that Warcrafts shows us and real life doesn't.

[The screenshots are, in order: places Irving--my dwarf hunter--has explored in the land of Westfall (the UI exposes more map as Irving travels), Irving's reputation with various races and cities, and Irving's skills (you can see he's not much of a cook, but he's even worse a miner ;-).]

Posted by at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Liz posted an interview she did about the class she taught last fall at SFAI. I was flattered to have been invited to participate the final crit of one of the first art classes to talk about the digial radio spectrum as a medium, anywhere, and it was very interesting. She generalizes her experience to talking about what it takes to teach art in such a heavily technological medium. Go Liz!

Posted by at 6:40 PM | Permalink

A new school in the UK was furnished without teachers' desks or desktop computers. Instead, they get podiums and laptops:

She disapproved of the stooped stance at the teacher's desk, and the way that trailing wires seemed to snake in all directions. She didn't like the way a teachers' desk occupied valuable space at the front of the room, or the fact that the laptop screen was itself a distraction when the teacher wanted pupils' eyes to be fixed on the whiteboard.

She went looking for an alternative - and eventually found one. "Using one of these, the teacher can use the laptop and see all the children," she says.

(from this article)

People have often attempted to change behavior by changing affordances, but they rarely admit to it. It's interesting to see how they're consciously trying to create a different behavior in teachers and students, and it'll be interesting to see how long it lasts. Usually changes dictated from above, without a lot of other incentive other than mandate, don't work well.

Posted by at 9:04 PM | Permalink

Reading IDSA's "Innovations" magazine this morning, I found an example of two very different ways to view user research in the industrial design process.

In describing the design of the DeWalt 735 planar Bob Welsh and David Wikle talk about how they do user research:

Marketing led the charge by conducting user research throughout the country, digging into what fed portable planer users' likes, dislikes, needs and wants.

[...]

This preliminary information was converted into quality parameters, which focused on the team's efforts. These parameters were ranked in order of importance and quantified so that we could directly measure our progress toward each prescribed target. [...] The team proceeded to zero in on the top four opportunities: surface finish, minimum snipe, accuracy and ease of knife change. Curiously enough [because it's a portable planar --mk], portability pulled up last in the rankings.

What's interesting about this to me is the tension between their functionality-driven philosophy, natural in a power tool company, with the recognition that the rationality of function is not necessarily a primary driver. In between discussions of features, thoughts like the one about portability slip through.Portability is not an actual functional factor, merely an aspirational one, in the way people choose planers. Similarly, they acknowledge these kinds of emotional/surface design decisions later when they talk about the placement of the threaded posts at the corners. Yes, they serve a functional purpose, but "the team thought that visually exposing the posts would drive the machine's character as well as garner credit for their function and design." In other words, the posts are there to look like big, badass bolts as much as to elevate the mechanism. Another quote is amusing: "just above the opening to the cutterhead, 'teeth' were added to cognitively warn the user that this is the business end of the machine."

Tej Chauhan of Nokia takes the opposite direction when describing his design for the Nokia 7600, that wacky lozenge phone that came out last year. He begins his description by talking about functionality:

The Nokia 7600 had to look like no other mobile handset. But this wasn't an exercise to design something different just for the sake of being different. The form had to be as purposeful as it was unique.

He then describes Nokia's user research process/philosophy:

Our research extends from people, to trends, ergonomics, technologies and a host of other criteria. Trend research is in itself a vast area. "It's all about making observations, and then defining them and telling them as stories," explains Liisa Puolakka, experience design specialist at Nokia. "And like stories, they should have a frame, characters, context, references to culture and society, and so on. These observations are looking at new emerging interests, lifestyles, desires, dislikes, attitudes, etc. But the most important thing is that the products we then create appeal to people, are relevant to them and their emotions."

Of course the role that the 7600 was supposed to play was to introduce new functionality to the world, since it was Nokia's first 3G phone, so the phone has a camera that can do video and a large color screen. Plus, it's designed to be more of a camera and picture viewer than something to dial numbers, enter text or talk on, as evidenced by the wacky key layout: "Having the keys on both sides of the display put the display and image at the centerpiece of the design. It also encouraged two-handed use, giving the produce and instinctively familiar [in a phone?!? maybe a camera. --mk] and natural-to-hold quality."

Comparing Nokia to DeWalt is interesting: one talks about functionality, the other with emotion, but they're both making consumer products and both dealing very much with both. What's interesting to me is how the corporate culture of the two groups has defined the approach to design and the shape of the end-product. i would say that if they're making mistakes, it's that they're both taking their positions too much to the extreme. DeWalt seems almost embarrassed to talk about the esthetic impact of their design, choosing to couch it in languages of touch "DeWalt design DNA" and Nokia seems to be so obsessed with the emotional impact of their products that they're forgetting that they have to work first. Maybe the two could learn from each other.

Posted by at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I posted a note to Core77's blog about the Arts and Crafts show at LACMA. Here's the highlight of my post:

The show's strongest point is how it contextualizes the objects and draws interesting connections between product design and social philosophy. Most surprising is how much the European movement linked handicrafts and motifs with "national identity." Traditional elements stand in for "traditional" values and explicitly refer to a mythological agrarian, pre-industrial utopia.

Posted by at 2:17 PM | Permalink

change and innovation in technology that people will see affecting their daily lives, he says, will come about slowly, subtlety, and in ways that will no longer be "in your face". It will creep in pervasively.

This is coming from Nick Donofrio of IBM, quoted in this story from the BBC. It's interesting to see a representative of a tech company downplaying the immediate effects of technology. That implies a potentially deep strategic shift, one that requires a different approach to understanding the role technology plays in people's lives. Of course he's using it to push IBM's pervasive computing agenda (whatever that is) and, surprisingly, big iron:

Behind this vision should be a rich robust network capability and "deep computing", says Mr Donofrio.

Deep computing is the ability to perform lots of complex calculations on massive amounts of data, and integral to this concept is supercomputing.

IBM clearly hasn't given up all of its assumptions, and I think the supercomputing idea is totally shoehorned into the pervasive idea, but it's interesting to see that they're at least giving lip service to some of these thoughts, if only to further their existing position. GE created GE Capital when they realized that their role in the building process had changed to one of financier and oursourcing consultant. IBM's consulting unit became responsible for a big chunk of the profits because they realized that they weren't just selling computers, but services. These things point to the idea of understanding the system in which products exit. Similarly, this could be the beginning of an attitude shift in tech toward understanding and manipulating the social system in which technology is used.

Posted by at 1:56 PM | Permalink

At Design Engaged we put up Post-Its of books we liked. I put up the following 3 books and decided to share my decisions with everyone, especially now that Christmas is coming up. ;-)

Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture by Thomas Hughes. A short and awesomely enlightening history and contextualization of where our contemporary attitudes toward technology come from. (Thanks, Mom!)

Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin. The Bay Area was the worldwide center of technology innovation before, during the heyday of mining in the 19th century. There's soon going to be a big biotech campus is on the spot where the worldwide center of iron, steel and machinery innovation was happening around 120 years ago. It's intensely instructive to see how the power (literal, in terms of electricity and figurative in terms of influence) related to what, how and why technological advancement happened, and the consequences (it's not surprising that John Muir and modern ecological consciousness happened in Northern California when you see the context). And it's a great read, especially for those who live in SF and the surrounding area.

The Red Queen : Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley. A masterful presentation of sex, evolution and how much like birds and the bees we really are. Those who still maintain the Descartian Duality may be surprised as to how much of our behavior is part of a feedback system that's quite obsessed with sex-based competition. All of Matt Ridley's books rock, but this was the first one I read and it's still a big touchstone when I think about human behavior.

[An update: Andrew posted the whole list on his blog. Excellent!]

Posted by at 1:01 PM | Permalink

I'm at Andrew Otwell's Design Engaged conference right now in Amsterdam with a bunch of really great folks. Yesterday I presented with my latest polemic, Talking, walking and chewing gum: the complexity of life and what it means for design. Here's what I said, roughly.

Continue reading "Talking, walking and chewing gum" »

Posted by at 1:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (3)

A nice, short summary of a longer paper by Jeffrey Tang that traces the history of the home theater in the 70s and 80s.

it was not technological breakthroughs, but rather marketing considerations which led to diverse �product families� centered around three types of audio designs: the cassette recorder, the combination unit (�boom box�), and the personal stereo. Both the producers of audio equipment, and audio equipment users assigned new meanings to these sound machines and to the practice of listening to music.

[...]

These fields came together when [Dolby] introduced a home version of its 4-channel cinema playback system, called Dolby Surround. Technically, Dolby�s initial system differed little from quadraphonic sound, a technology that had already failed to woo the music lovers of the 1970s. But where quadraphony had failed as a simple technical upgrade to the home stereo, the new system promised not just improved fidelity but an entirely new kind of experience. Its social meaning was dramatically, and successfully, reconstructed.

Technological innovations enable the social innovations, they do not define the whole of them, even though to the participants at the time it may seem to be only about the boxes. The experience is not just about the boxes, and it's not even about the immediate experience (the interface) of the boxes, the experience is created by the boxes, and part of it (the configuring and tweaking the paper mentions and we've all been through) but it's not limited to them. It's a lesson that product designers should keep in mind, though I think there are few techniques for encapsulating or designing for it.

Posted by at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A surprisingly good report on mesh trucker hats and the ever-shortening cycles of fashion that we've all experienced, from the decidedly unfashionable USA Today (a year ago!).

The cool continuum � that twisty trajectory that traces pop culture from cultish to trendy to mainstream to so-over-it's-embarrassing to, finally, kitsch � is being compressed.

And then there's this interesting paragraph:

Being cool means being the first to yank something out of context and layer on the contradictions. Having money, for instance, is OK if you cloak it in Salvation Army apparel and a shift waiting tables at the local (non-Starbucks) coffee shop. Desk jobs are verboten. The goal? A career in dilettantism.

In Amsterdam I'm going to be talking about how communication and transportation technologies have revealed the complexity of the world to a record number of people in the last 50 years. The understanding that the cycles of the world are really intricate has shifted how people react to the objects and roles (thus the dilletantism) in their world. The last 10 years of have pushed this new understanding--and people's reactions to it--to a new level, aided by cell phones, the Internet and deregulated airplane travel. I think that the decrease in fashion cycles is related to this, and is itself a product of both that understanding and the technologies that created it, so it's interesting to see mainstream (and how much more mainstream than USA Today?) recognition and analysis of the phenomenon.

Posted by at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's interesting to see how ideas slide around. In this article, in an electrical engineering publication, the thinking goes from "component manufacturers are saying that this ubiquitous computing thing is the next big thing" to "people do funny stuff with their personal technology" to "someone should decide how the electronics should be integrated into people's lives" to

It doesn't take much imagination to see that if you are involved in the development of personal portable electronic products, your engagement with the marketing department is only going to grow as time passes. The subtle nuances of how users actually handle the gadgets in a social context could well set the course of product development.

Which, of course, is what user centered design people have been saying all along, but it's interesting to see how it's being recognized by at least an engineering publication. It'll take it a while, I suspect, to become engineering doctrine, but at least the acknowledgement that ideas come from end users, rather than just going to them, is important.

It's still funny though, that although at least this article recognizes social science, there's still a level of discomfort with the whole idea, as the last line shows:

Your marketing colleagues might come to include as many social scientists as "hard" scientists. I will leave it to you to decide whether that prospect is appealing.

Posted by at 1:05 PM | Permalink

The following paragraph caught my eye (really, the eye of Google's news alert) in this story on Apple's new G5 iMac design:

"Sony has another desktop, the W series, whose overall design feels more like the iMac. It feels more like modern furniture design than a consumer electronics product. In fact, we have one in our living room. People are always commenting on what a beautiful design it is. When the keyboard is folded up it doesn't really look like a computer."

It's a minor point, but telling. Some thoughts:

• It doesn't look like like a computer, and that's considered good.
• It does look like modernist furniture, and that's also considered good.
• The problems with the iMac are about tangled cables and instability--things that identify it as machine-like.

What this points to me is a recognition that technology's role is continuing to fade into the background and people are starting to desire technology that doesn't advertise itself as such. Not that that's a big revelation, but it's interesting to see how these ideas are appearing as desires.

Posted by at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Wall Street Journal had a piece on circuit bending in yesterday's paper.

It's interesting to me to see this surface, but it only makes sense: technology is getting more pervasive, it's cheaper, so there's less risk in breaking it and the DIY esthetic is being encouraged through all of the TV shows about making and modifying stuff.

I wonder if there's a relationship between cultural penetration of a technology, the power of the technology and affluence to people's interest in modifying it for purely their own pleasure? I mean, it was about 50 years after the introduction of the automobile that hotrodding took off, but only after America was pretty rich and the 454 Chevy big block became commonplace. Now it's about 50 years after the beginning of computers and we're an affluent culture...so what's the current tech equivalent of the 454?

Posted by at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've been thinking about the adoption of new ideas lately, both in companies and in the market at large. Inspired by the Cambrian Explosion and subsequent die-off, I've been thinking about what happens to people's perceptions when new ideas come along.

Continue reading "Ideachasms" »

Posted by at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

I can't tell if the following quotation about why Thomasville is using a new generation of stain-repellent fabrics is deep insight into the social effects of tragedy on consumption, a myopic oversimplification, crass sensationalism, or all three:

"After the events of 9-11, we decided collectively as a culture that it's our friends and our families that matter, not our stuff," says Sharon Bosworth, Thomasville's vice president of upholstery design.

"The best thing is to get people to come to our house. You can't have that kind of life unless you take the velvet ropes off. Children and pets can go anywhere. People are invited into every nook and cranny. Nobody is going to say, `I can't stand her because she spilled red wine on my sofa.' We count our riches these days in friendship."

From Superfabrics: Imagine a plush sofa that can repel mustard.

Posted by at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my favorite brand experiences arrived in the mail today, the Harley Davidson 2005 catalog. I don't own a Harley (I ride an old Kawasaki) and I don't particularly like the bikes...but, oh, the catalog. It's the size of a phone book, with full-color pictures on every page and it takes the "brand promise" of technology fetishization to an amazing extreme. Starting from the beginning, where the catalog suggests that

Before customizing your VRSC model, you should get to know it from front to back. Identifying where parts are located and the impact they have on your bike is a crucial part of the process.

it's all about the minutia of decorating, personalizing, worshipping your motorcycle. To help you maximize the impact, they custom make variations of every single part on the bike. The catalog realizes that people don't buy Harleys to ride Harleys, they buy them to customize them, to project themselves, not to use them. Riding is secondary, and--in fact--riding the bikes is pretty de-emphasized. All the parts down to the washers, on the other hand, are lovingly photographed on a white background, with descriptions worthy of Martha Stewart:

The Lower Triple Tree Cover dresses up the unfinished underside of the triple tree for a complete custom look. The chrome-plated steel cover installs easily, concealing the brake splitter fitting.

It's a complete sensual immersion in chrome and steel, with barely any reference to anything outside of the world of the bike, and speaks lust on about five levels, and there are two words that appear at least a dozen times on every page: Harley-Davidson. Yet, somehow, it's not annoying Harley while at the same time being overwhelmingly Harley. A pretty amazing document from a company that knows where their value lies. Hell, after reading it, I want to chrome something on my bike, even though I haven't washed it in 6 years.

Posted by at 4:26 PM | Permalink

Incomprehensible icons are nothing new. Regularly, when a new technology that has a display and multiple functions appears, designers flock to iconify all of the functions, since icons save screen real estate and translation costs. In general, I think icons seem like a bad idea in all but a few cases, but it comes up again and again. With cars growing more UI functions as the various subsystems merge their display, car UI designers have (re)discovered icons. And, not surprisingly, they're experiencing the same problems that icon designers before them have had:

But for drivers and passengers, the symbols can sometimes be indecipherable without a stroll through the owner's manual.

And, of course, the traditional "they'll learn what they mean" specious argument is brought up:

Automakers, who started using icons at least a decade ago, say consumers accustomed to seeing icons on personal computers and cell phones are comfortable with them in their cars.

And this quote belies a deep chicken-egg misunderstanding of the nature of symbolic meaning:

"It's all about recognition," says Gary Braddock, design manager of the product design studio for Ford Motor. "If you can create a symbol like the Nike swoop that everyone recognizes, you can add a function to the symbol."

The symbol is only meaningfully associated with an idea after the idea has been firmly established. Nike made good shoes for a long time before their symbol came to be associated with their brand values. That's why when they expanded to China, their shoes had a giant Nike swoosh, whereas their American shoes have a tiny, every-shrinking, one. It's because the symbol means less in China, so its association with the shoe needs to be emphasized more.

What's interesting, as the article points out, is that cars have had icons for quite a while: dashboard lights and control indicators. There were already problems with these (I'm still confused by various heating/cooling icons: am I warming my feet and head or my chest and defrosting the window?), but they were relatively stable (there's even, apparently an ISO standard). The proliferation of new functions is going to push the limit of people's recall ability when new icons are introduced, when even the supposedly time- and lab-tested existing icons have problems(PDF file). What's going to happen when a bunch of new icons are created?

This is tough stuff, as these groups are finding out, and contentious precisely because it's tough:

In the USA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration considered adopting all of the standards, making their use mandatory. But the agency backed down after "several groups said they don't want to go to all symbols, because symbols are not intuitive and some people would not know what they mean," says Stephen Kratzke, associate administrator for rulemaking at NHTSA.

Frankly, I think that this is a holdover philosophy from an era where manufacturing restricted the number of variations on a button or dashboard, restrictions where largely no longer exist.

But that's not my point. I'm thinking that this is a good example of the real world problems that ubiquitous computing is going to encounter when the, ahem, rubber meets the road and specialized devices have to communicate their functionality intelligibly. Just wait, if appliance icons are bad now, wait until this level of integration and confusion hits.

Btw, I found that article on the Intelligent Transportation Society of America's site. Maybe the ITS people have something to teach the smart everyday object people....

Posted by at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is a basic branding exercise, but I've been surprised as to how often bad names are given to perfectly good technologies, as if it doesn't matter what it's called. I think it matters a lot. Technologies are products, but they have many o the same competitive hurdles. So I decided to brainstorm a list of comparable technologies with good and bad names and see which one had faster adoption (as a technology).

The ones with the catchier names (which means: easily pronounceable, easily memorable, evocative) seem more popular. There may be some entanglement there, maybe better technologies come from more clued people, who are likely to understand the value of naming. In those cases the technologies may win both in terms of the tech and the name, but that doesn't happen often enough that I'm not sure it's a rule. There may be all kinds of other factors. 802.11a probably failed because 802.11b was selling to the markets that 802.11a was targeted toward, and as WiFi (the name and the technology) took off, the network effect (so to speak) was so huge as to dwarf any other factors, but there was crucial moment (sometime in 2001 or 2002) where the name probably had an effect.

I'm interested in other examples, especially ones where the technologies may have had comparable marketing support. And I'm trying to avoid comparing identical technologies (Firewire is IEEE1394 and iLINK, so comparing those is just comparing branding). Suggestions welcome.

Posted by at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I experienced a black box failure today. The IC Igniter on my 1985 Kawaski GPz 750 is going flaky, and there's nothing my mechanic can do about it. My motorcycle has been misbehaving for a while, generating enough buildup on the #1 sparkplug (it's a 4 cylinder engine) that a new plug gets as much carbon buildup in 5 minutes as it would in 5000 miles on a normally-working cylinder. This causes it to backfire and, eventually, makes the plug--and the cylinder--go dead, so I ride around on a bike that's weak, shakes and sounds like a truck.

At first my mechanic thought it was a problem with the plugs, so he had me put in new plugs. Then he thought maybe it was dirt in the #1 carb (the bike also has four of these, one per cylinder), so I first flushed it out with a solvent. Then we thought it was a short, but there seemed to be more than enough current going to the plug.

It turns out that it's the only piece of computer equipment on the bike. My bike is from the very first generation of engines that had any kind of computer equipment in them. In the early 80s, car and motorcycle companies realized that they could get much better control over spark timing by using electronics, rather than the old mechanical distributor. So the distributor went away and was replaced by the unsexily-named "ignition module," a cluster of relatively simple electronics that monitors some sensors in the engine and processes that information to adjust the spark timing. The distributor was soon followed into extinction by the carburetor (whose job it is to mix air and fuel), which was replaced by electronic fuel injection.

The benefits of this way of doing things made cars in the last 20 years much more efficient, reliable, predictable and durable. All great stuff, except when something goes wrong. Now, when there's a problem, there's no way fudge, tweak or adjust around it. Digital technology is binary: it works, or it doesn't (this isn't quite true: you can hack any digital technology if you know what you're doing, but you have to know a whole host of new information to hack the electronics embedded in solid blocks of epoxy, which is how ignition modules are made).

One of the complaints that people have when they criticize the inclusion of information processing into everyday technology is this opacity of operation. Well, I experienced this first hand today, and, as someone who evangelizes for the introduction of information processing into everyday objects, I had to deal with an everyday object whose information processing was faulty. I tried to evaluate the effects the opacity had on my life: would it have been better if the bike, otherwise completely mechanical, did not have this electronic part to fail? My opinion: the module is worth it. My bike ran for almost 20 years with no ignition problems. Having all 4 carburetors adjusted cost me $400 earlier this year, and that's something that has to be done every 5 years. A new ignition module will cost me under $100 and the installation process will consist of popping my bike seat off, unplugging the old black box and plugging in the new one. I say it's a win for the black box.

Posted by at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last year, I posted a rambling analysis of why McDonald's WiFi plan didn't seem to make any sense (and, really, neither did my analysis, but my heart was in the right place ;-). Then I posted a follow-up where I mentioned the competitive landscape of San Francisco's WiFi cafe scene.

It seems that WiFi is becoming an infrastructural service, in that it's expected to be free, or not be available at all, like bathrooms. Jupiter just put out a report saying as much. I don't have access to the report, but here is their teaser for it, which is pretty much all I need to know:

In 2003, six percent of online consumers used public hotspots, and only one percent paid to use them. Not surprising, high-profile players in this space dropped out of the game in early 2004.

Key Questions

To what extent has adoption of public hotspots increased since 2003?
To what extent are consumers willing to pay for public wireless high-speed Internet access?
What should service providers do to drive paid adoption?

This may be the fastest move that a technology has ever made from being cutting-edge to being a utility (well, OK, it's overstating that it's a utility, but it's quickly approaching that). The one place it seems to work is Starbuck's/T-Mobile, and then only for busy travelers or people who can get it paid for by their company (often the same group): I wonder if that model could work for...bathrooms? Private bathrooms all over the world, accessible to anyone with a monthly subscription. ;-)

Posted by at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In this USA Today story furniture makers are said to be scrambling to adapt their technology furniture to modern computer technology. They just figured out how to make decent computer desks, and look what happens: everyone moves to laptops and flatscreens.

I predict that this is only going to increase as the monolithic computers that we're using right now fragment into task-specific computer-based tools for living. It's not surprising that "writing desks return" (as per a subhead in the story): writing is what people care about. They care about the task, not the tool. The furniture provides a context in which to do the task and needs to accommodate the tool (whether it's a tower-case PC or an inkwell), but it's purpose is to support the task.

Another interesting point is that furniture styles change more slowly than technology. That's absolutely true. In fact, other than the bleeding edge, furniture styles that people actually buy are pretty much frozen in the 1950s: Country, French Provincial, Colonial, Eames Modernist (and probably a couple others) represent 90% of the market. (maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe there's a secret cachet of "70s Swinger" style that's still getting a lot of play, but I don't think so) This is actually a good thing, since the adoption of smart furniture can leverage the expectations and modes of a host of existing furniture tropes (modalities, use cases, whatever you want to call the cluster of expectations people have for specific furniture pieces). The TV was a piece of furniture before it was an appliance (the Philco Predicta notwithstanding). Now it's pretty much unthinkable as a piece of furniture because culture has accepted it in its more natural state, but that intermediate stage was important for acceptance.

Posted by at 12:29 PM | Permalink

The AllMusic relaunch is the worst I've seen in maybe five years. The amount of visual clutter seems to increase with every page, there's nonstandard DHTML that only works in IE, s a largely-useless Flash navigation widget, an enormous banner ad floating in whitespace, information that used to be in one place has split up into multiple screens, etc. I could go on, but it's sufficient to say any general-public site redesign that requires a manual is a failure on a number of levels. And that's not even addressing the terrible performance problems, both on the browser end and--judging from the frequent unavailability of the site--from the server end.

But this is not the fault of producers who crossed the "should-can line" when specifying fancy gadgets (a term Molly uses when talking about fashion: just because you can doesn't mean you should), or designers who designed interfaces that could only work with IE, or engineers who didn't load test the new design. No. They were never given guidance that would have allowed them to prioritize those things appropriately. The fault lies squarely with management.

Continue reading "allmusic.com's bad redesign" »

Posted by at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

I've spent the last couple of weeks preparing for the workshop William Pietri and I are going to be teaching in August. I'm really impressed with how you can take all of the references to writing code out of, for example, Agile Software Development Ecosystems and it still makes sense as a philosophy for how groups of people can collaboratively solve problems and make things. It may be the first fundamental rethinking of how things are made since Taylorism. That's not to imply that XP and the other agile methodologies are equivalent to Taylorism, but I think that they, as a philosophy of how to get groups of people to make stuff, are as profound a concept.

I'll write more about this as I finish reading and thinking about it, but I'm quite taken with the ideas at the moment.

Posted by at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I wrote my rambling review/essay of John Heskett's Toothpicks & Logos I linked to Colin Martindale's The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change. I hadn't bothered to read the official reviews Amazon printed there, because they deeply don't get it. I find it to be a problematic work, but a really interesting one which attempts to find a predictable pattern in creativity and probably does in several places. It came out before all of the emergent theory literature (like Six Degrees, which I also reference in that piece), so Martindale didn't have the tools to try and take his analysis further and critics had no basis from which to evaluate the book, since it was--and still is--quite in left field.

I have also found a much better review of the book by Denis Dutton. In this review he summarizes the point of the book quite well:

Perhaps it�s just that I�ve become so habituated to the literary journals, but not only did I fail to find The Clockwork Muse boring, it was for me full of all sorts of revelations. Martindale writes with a calculated, in-your-face insolence, heaping contempt on critics, humanists, behaviorists, Marxists, philosophers, sociologists. He credits Harold Bloom for having half understood, in his bumbling English professor�s manner, the law of novelty, but doesn�t have much nice to say about many others except psychologists in his own field. He uses his various theses to analyze the histories of British, French and American poetry, American fiction and popular music lyrics, European and American painting, Gothic architecture, Greek vases, Egyptian tomb painting, precolumbian sculpture, Japanese prints, New England gravestones, and various composers and musical works.

A major lynchpin of the investigation concerns what he calls �primordial content,� roughly the emotional or emotionally expressive aspects of a work. Martindale argues that the arousal potential of works tends to require more primordial content as time go on in a particular art or style. Thus the natural progression will always be from classic to romantic, for greater musical forces, for more violent metaphors, larger, more extraordinary paintings, and so forth. The (Dionysian) primordial is contrasted with (Apollonian) conceptual, which involves, if I understand him, the stylistic mode of an art. Within an established style, primordial content in time must increase. When a style changes, primordial content will decrease. Thus art evolves.

In other words, novelty in form means that content can be less complex, but as we get tired of the form, content becomes more complex (or, in Martindale's unfortunate terminology, "primordial"). Think of electronic music: at first, it was all techno and disco, 133 bpm four-on-the-floor. It was a big hit. Now, 20 years later, there's a forest of subgenres. Why was the original formula not enough to sustain 20 years of dancing? People feel compelled to create ever more complex content when a new field of ideas opens. Is the pattern of that creation somehow predictable?

Dutton raises some very good questions about the book, but concludes--as I have--that it's far from useless because it asks many old questions in an entirely new way, a way that produces unexpected answers that have a face validity that's hard to ignore. That said, the book has been on the remainder shelves pretty much since the day it was published, so it in fact has been ignored and Martindale's assertions have never been validated or refuted on anything like the terms he created them under. Too bad, and I hope that now that the emergent property analysis tools exist, someone in need of journal publication will use them to analyze Martidale's assertions.

Posted by at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

2ad, the Second International Appliance Design Conference was one of the best conferences I've been to. Small (150 people, though it seemed even smaller than that), focused (one track, carefully sequenced), brave (they scheduled a robot soccer tournament in the middle of the thing!) and smart. I was really flattered when they accepted my proposal to do a side show for their Bazaar, similar to UPA's Idea Market (which, incidentally, I--uh--was supposed to talk at later this week, but unfortunately can't be at--it looks great, though). I really like the Idea Trade Show concept behind this, and it seemed to work particularly well at 2ad. In fact, Ann Light, of Usability News, has written an excellent roundup of how it went.

I don't know if it's just my brain pattern matching, but it seemed that key ideas of two of my favorite gatherings--Burning Man and the TED conferences--were incorporated in, of all things, a corporate research lab context. Burning Man is the mother of all performance bazaars and TED is the best idea theater in the world, and 2ad managed to capture some of the magic of both. Props to the organizers. I can't wait to go next year.

Posted by at 11:35 AM | Permalink

There are few things that are not part of our bodies that are as universally present with us as our phones. As Bluetooth beacons appear in our phones, this means that our phones are broadcasting identifiers of us. Ignoring the potential privacy problems with this (yes, ladies and gentlemen, if every database in the world was linked, bad people could find out information about us that we don't want them to know), the idea of having a broadcast identifier of us is really powerful.

Continue reading "My phone=me" »

Posted by at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I just finished reading John Heskett's Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life. It's an interesting counterpart to Bill Stumpf's The Ice Palace That Melted Away: How Good Design Enhances Our Lives and Virginia Posterel's The Substance of Style (which I discuss here). All three books create a case for the importance of design.

Stumpf, one of the designers of the Aeron, writes an intimate personal description--almost an autobiography--of how design has shaped his world and why he thinks it's a crucial part of civil life, though his reasons are primarily personal. In that respect, it's an insider's book for insiders. Postrel, an outsider, states that design is important because people find it important and that it should not be ignored for that reason. Hers is an outsider's book for outsiders. Heskett takes the middle track between the two. He's an insider to the field, but his book is for people outside it. It's positioned as an explanation of why design makes a difference not in terms of how it fits into a vision of proper living, but how its effects are felt throughout society.

Continue reading "Toothpicks, logos and definition of design" »

Posted by at 6:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

In the March 11 "Technology Quarterly" the Economist had a story on domestic robotics (The gentle rise of the machines) concluded with a summation that captures my thoughts on the subject pretty well:

Commercial airliners fly and even land themselves using radar and satellite-positioning systems to navigate through fog and storms. Autonomous trains, akin to giant robotic snakes, drive themselves. All of these devices are autonomous computer-controlled machines, capable of responding to changing circumstances in accordance with orders from their human masters. They are, in other words, robots. But they are not the general-purpose mechanical men that most people associate with the term.

Why not? The answer, ironically, could lie in the rapid advance of computing power. Back in the mid-20th century, when the robotic future was being imagined, computers were huge and expensive. The idea that they would become cheap enough to be integrated into almost any specialised device, from a coffee-maker to a dishwasher, was hard to imagine. Instead, it seemed more likely that such intelligence would be built into a small number of machines capable of turning their robotic hands to a range of different tasks. In place of the general-purpose housebot, however, we are surrounded by dozens of tiny robots that do specific things very well. There is no need to wait for the rise of the robots. The machines, it seems, are already among us.

I think the article's point is to clarify the definition of "robot" and "robotics," but I think the sentiment is in the right place, too. Finding words that describes our relationship to the technology of our lives helps us understand and manage those relationships. As technology becomes ever more pervasive, and as it becomes ever more intelligent, these definitions are going to start to matter more while simultaneously meaning less. People will need the words to talk about their lives, but the words will become less and less precise as new technology subverts definitions--this is continuously happening.

Posted by at 11:37 AM | Permalink

I just bumped into HP's Agile Computing intitiative, which they apparently started (or announced) in 2002. It's an interesting perspective, a beginning, of creating systems of smart objects, rather than individual smart objects. I'm pretty much convinced that people's changing relationships to technology and the possibilities offered by the power of new technolgies, are going to necessitate a rethinking of design from single object to object system. HP's initiative seems to be a technological platform for this, and their Cooltown project seems to be an attempt at creating applications for this. I really agree with the core idea, which is articulated well by Jim Rowson:

We are proposing with the agile model that appliances be designed to be single-purpose in an ergonomic sense (it should be simple and natural to use and fit with the constraints of the human form) but general-purpose in an application sense.

And although there seems to be some amount of confusion (PDF) around the "agile computing" term and what it means in practice, it's clear that the idea of computation as being a generic service that the user is supposed to know what to do with (the old "buy an electric motor and make attachments for it" model) is going away. The new model, a reaction to people's animist expectations for technology, is to create interactive, mutually-aware systems of task-focused devices (much like how blenders, vacuum cleaners and drill presses replaced electric motor attachments).

Hell, while we're on the a's in the term-coining game, I'll coin mine: I hearby define any group of mutually-aware computational devices as being an animist system. ;-)

Posted by at 5:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Where are the cool places today? This question has come up a number of times, but most recently in a conversation I had with Jesse, Rebecca and Peter back in October. For Bohemians there have been many cities that serve as the icons of their age, where "interesting stuff" was happening: Picasso's Paris, Weimar Berlin, Beatnick San Francisco, Swinging London, Post-Wall Berlin, dotcom San Francisco. What's the cool city today? San Francisco currently seems spent (for the purposes of this discussion�there was disagreement around the table) and there must (it's felt) be the next big thing, but where is it? Where is that cheap/creative/liberal/exciting cultural space where people stay up late talking big ideas and "subverting the dominant paradigm"? Could it really be....Portland?

We didn't know and I wonder if that place can exist anymore. The dynamics that led to many of those places were caused by influx into inexpensive urban centers, often emptied because of war or shifting population dynamics. There are few inexpensive urban environments left as cities have gotten popular again, victims of a reversal of the mid-century suburban exodus, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the general rise of the standard of living among the middle class in Europe in the 90s. Certainly the "good ones"--the traditional centers of Western culture--are now too expensive to live in for someone trying to make a living selling abstract watercolors on the street to tourists (I'm using that as a caricature of Bohemian life, but it's the romantic ideal that fuels this desire for a cool place, so I think it's appropriate).

We're designers and designers are second-wave Bohemians. Designers come after artists, who come after musicians, who come after junkies, who generally live in transitional neighborhoods of first-generation immigrants, who have lived in neighborhoods abandoned by the middle class as they moved to the suburbs in the middle of the century. Or at least that's a rough approximation of the pattern I've seen in many places. It's a fascinatingly aspirational cycle, with each cycle aspiring to be a bit like the one before it (the exception is junkies, whose horizon is so short that their aspirations don't generally extend to examining the lifestyle of those who came before). As designers, we have the dubious honor of being the first group of people with stable incomes to move into a neighborhood, and therefore the ones who actually represent the beginning of the end.

But now the cycle has almost run it course, at least as far as coastal urban centers in the go. Designers are everywhere. Sure LA's downtown is still primed for gentrification, Philadelphia and DC are still only patchily gentrified, but almost everywhere else I've been, both in the US and Europe, urban renewal has actually happened. So where is the next generation of disaffected creative youth aspiring to go? Where is the 1966 Haight-Ashbury of 2010? The current trend is to inhabit second-tier cultural centers, places where there is not a history of being a major cultural center. So Portland and Pittsburgh are acquiring their share of boho life, even Detroit is experiencing a revival of sorts, but it's seeming like a major migration has ended. Now all of the "prime" places have been taken by those with six-figure paychecks and it's up to the secondaries to pick up the, er, slack. ;-)

So what happens next? I'm betting that the movement moves back out to the suburbs. New Urbanism, which has been simmering for 20 years, seems to be gathering steam and, frankly, it's not because people are suddenly realizing how much more sense it makes; I think developers are realizing that there's a growing market for a new suburban Bohemia, a brand new, prefab, simulated, yet comfortable environment that symbolically links the values of the urban creative class to the manufacturing technology of the burbs. There are already loft-style developments in non-urban settings and I've heard of a suburban development that attempts to mimic the loft-style architecture of downtown, which�at least in San Francisco�is already a copy of actual loft spaces. From there it's only a matter of time before someone starts building suburban developments that refer to the symbolism of artist colonies in the same way that retirement villages refer to outdoor living. Kerouac Court, here we come!

[Or, at least, that's was my thinking about the US and Europe back in October when I wrote this. Since then I've read a bunch about the growing middle class in China and I think that the real next cool place is going to be there. The educated classes are becoming sufficiently affluent to be able to have the time to create a Bohemian intellectual environment, an artist/rebel/philosopher class. I wouldn't be surprised if there was already an expat community in Shanghai and Beijing.]

[2/19 addendum. Jon Logan, a DJ living in Shanghai, sent the following in response to this post:

in fact, shanghai already is ostensibly the hot hip
city of the new century... or, perhaps, was. the crest peaked in
2002, they say. real estate is skyrocketing and people are falling
all over themselves to get rich. car ownership is exploding and the
advertising industry is the biggest growing business here. mobs of
money is moving from hongkong into the mainland by way of shanghai.

kind of a bittersweet situation, actually, seeing this relentless
drive for development.

there's a *huge* expat community here. funny thing is, most people
dont know that china slipped out of its mao-suit wearing,
chickens-in-the-street guise fifteen years ago. while america was
busy downplaying china as backwards communist, they were busy
converting to 100% capitalism in everything but the name.

shanghai is like any other international city now; there are
starbucks on nearly every corner and i swear something like 90% of
the population has cell phones. the cool thing though is that in all
the alleys and side streets, you can find the old china, which means
friendly old folks who've never talked to a westerner, or bowls of
steaming fresh noodles for 25 cents.

cool place. feels like san francisco a la 1999, except its the full
spectrum: everything is booming here, not just the IT industry.

some sites to prove my point:
http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/
http://www.thatsmagazines.com/home/index.asp?location=sh

Thanks, Jon!]

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (2)

Linksys has included Matt Jones' Warchalking card in the appendix to the manual (PDF) for their latest wireless router (on page 68), but they've definitely not done in as promotion of his ideas. In fact, quite the contrary:

Wireless networks are easy to find. Hackers know that, in order to join a wireless network, your wireless PC will typically first listen for "beacon messages". These are identifying packets transmitted from the wireless network
to announce its presence to wireless nodes looking to connect. These beacon frames are unencrypted and contain much of the network's information, such as the network's SSID (Service Set Identifier) and the IP address of the network PC or router. The SSID is analogous to the network's name. With this information broadcast to anyone within range, hackers are often provided with just the information they need to access that network.
One result of this, seen in many large cities and business districts, is called "Warchalking". This is the term used for hackers looking to access free bandwidth and free Internet access through your wireless network. The marks
they chalk into the city streets are well documented in the Internet and communicate exactly where available wireless bandwidth is located for the taking.

Of course they have every reason to get people to buy more routers, and closing networks is an easy way to do that, but it's interesting to see how they're envoking "hacker" boogeymen throughout the description, after implying some kind of vulnerability created by beacons (which they describe in a way that's clearly not designed to describe what beacons are, but to imply that there's this scary highly technical vulnerability that should be closed off immediately).

Silly, but it just shows how confused people are about bandwidth and property.

Posted by at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's really exciting (and humbling) to find an entirely new vein of thought that's deeply resonant with what you've been thinking. The people behind ITEA's Ambience Project seems to be thinking along much the same lines as I was when wrote my Expectations in a World of Smart Devices essay. They even had a Symposium to talk all about it, back in November. Granted, their focus seems to be more along technological lines than the user expectations-driven axis I'm currently focused on, but it's definitely the same ballpark.

Here's a definition I like:

Ambient Intelligent environments can be characterized by the following basic elements: ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, and natural interaction. Ubiquity refers to a situation in which we are surrounded by a multitude of interconnected embedded systems, which are invisible and moved into the background of our environment. Awareness refers to the ability of the system to locate and recognize objects and people, and their intentions. Intelligence refers to the fact that the digital surrounding is able to analyze the context, adapt itself to the people that live in it, learn from their behavior, and eventually to recognize as well as show emotion. Natural Interaction finally refers to advanced modalities like natural speech- and gesture recognition, as well as speech-synthesis, which will allow a much more human-like communication with the digital environment than is possible today.

Excellent!

Posted by at 10:16 PM | Permalink

From my bedroom I can see 8 WiFi access points (thank you San Francisco ;-). Two are locked. Why? On the one hand, there are potential security problems--packet sniffing by Bad People and the like--but I think it's something else. I think it's a relationship to bandwidth that's akin to property. People don't have a framework within which to evaluate the pros and cons of sharing bandwidth with strangers--what does it mean to me if someone uses some of the bits I'm paying for? So they retreat to a concept they understand, a mapping of their relationship to their property to their bandwidth. I'm not comfortable letting someone I don't know set up their lawn chair on my front lawn, even if it doesn't hurt me or my lawn, so why should I let them freeload on my bandwidth? Or, at least, that's how I feel the thinking goes.
It's as if there's a confusion between ownership and property. I think that the confusion comes in the reversal of a truism: if something is my property, I own it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that because I own something, it's property.
Yet that's how people treat it. Two examples:

• I was in a loft recently that a friend of a friend moved into. He got broadband, set up his WiFi base station. "I was going to leave mine open, but then I saw that everyone else's were locked, so I said 'fine' and locked mine, too." It's a classic tit-for-tat Prisoner's Dilemma response, effectively creating a kind of responsive fence-building around what's perceived as property.
  
• More and more cafes are starting to give away free wireless, possibly in response to other cafes giving away wireless. Morning Due cafe, near my house, used to charge for WiFi access. Then Maxfield's Cafe, a block away, started giving it away for free. Maxfield's is always full. Now Morning Due is giving away WiFi "for a limited time." The fact that they're doing it "for a limited time" means they're not completely bought into this idea of "giving away" their property, but they see what it did for Maxfield's and they're reluctantly trying it out. But there's still clearly a feeling that it's property and parting with it without reciprocity is somehow losing something. What is being lost is unclear, but it's a very deeply-held mapping that somehow there's something that's lost.
  

Posted by at 6:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My favorite new brand experience (though not really new, just new to me) is the Lush soap store, which opened a branch in SF a couple of months ago, but which has been in Europe for about eight years. Lush is built on a simple premise: they sell soap as if it was food. They take all of the symbolism of a gourmet deli and map it to soap: big pieces of soap get cut into small chunks and sold by weight, products are labeled as to whether they're vegan, big wooden bins are filled with spheres (is it an orange or a bath bomb?), etc. What's most interesting to me about it is that it's a brilliant insight about how people--women, really, since I'm sure their target market is at least 80% female--shop for "intimate consumables" (for lack of a better term). In a food store, quality is usually judged by how something looks, how it feels to touch it and, most importantly, how it smells. Traditional soap tried to hide all three (except for smell, which leaked out of packages not really designed to let it out). It's an admission that factors such as how well something works or how well it was made or where it was made don't really matter: what matters is the immediate experience. It's also an interesting counterpoint to the presentation of cosmetic products as a kind of medicine, which is the other big trend. Sephora looks like a high-class drug store, with the implication that you need to trust them to make something so high tech that you'll never understand it, but it'll be good for you. Lush makes everything seem so low tech that you feel comfortable choosing simply on immediate experience and impulse.
The insight that people shop for these goods by immediate kinesthetic experience, and the soap-food remapping that follows it, is really fascinating to me. It's a small shift that creates a whole world of design ideas. It's almost dream-like in its simplicity ("doctor, I had this dream where I walked into the deli and all of the food was made of soap..."). What's also interesting is how it's all about the trade dress, the look and feel of the store, and not really about a designed brand identity. The Lush logo doesn't look like their store, and they don't seem to have a particularly consistent visual presentation (for a $60 million company, their Web site looks almost amateurish), but the trade dress is so strong, that it may not matter (and maybe they're trying to look rough around the edges--but I kinda doubt it...).
The futurists, who liked to play with the idea of food (make food look like things that are inedible! Make things that aren't food look like food!), would be proud.

Posted by at 5:34 PM | Permalink

I just installed Jay Allen's excellent Movable Type Blacklist Movable Type spam blocking utility (yes, people have figured out that if you put comments about penile enlargement and the years' hottest toys in old blog messages, they'll probably get ranked higher in Google, while remaining relatively unnoticed to the blog owners/readers). It's yet another content filtration technology and the latest carnivore in the spam ecology. It seems to work quite well and Jay is giving it away, which is great. I'm actually quite amused by the evolution of spam and anti-spam technology. In a sense, it's a microcosm of the kind of content filtering/organization problems that we're going to be running into from here on. It just happens to be at the crudest, most basic level of parasite/antibiotic relationship, but it's also a harbinger of the kinds of attention-getting versus attention-focusing tensions that are likely to only increase.

I also installed Alexei Kosut's MTSpeling plugin, which also works quite well.

Posted by at 12:59 PM | Permalink

While photographing Renaissance masterpieces in Florence, I was struck by the decreasing value of images. The cost of making images has been dropping precipitously over the last 150 years, since photography. In the Renaissance, they had to choose their subject matter very carefully, because a single image took a long time to make and, by virtue of its rarity, often had to serve a broad audience and communicate many messages simultaneously. This is especially true of the major masterworks, which are often dense and broad (in terms of audience) in content, but it's even in casual decorations, which often had at least two purposes: to cover up a surface and to communicate ownership or status. Since photography, I think that the number of images (and this is a very abstract measurement, of course) that are produced per capita has probably been going up at an exponential rate. Today, there's a deluge of images--I can get 2000 digital photographs onto a memory stick the size of a cracker, five years ago this would have consumed a backpack of 35mm film, fifty years ago it would have consumed a truckload of 120 film, one hundred years ago it would have consumed a train car of glass plates, five hundred years ago it would have consumed, well, the Uffizi.

This has had the effect that images have become both much more personal, as they can be made and shared in ever smaller quantities, and much more ephemeral. To create a painting for just a couple of people was an extravagant indulgence and it became a permanent heirloom, to share a digital camera snapshot with just one person--or even to not share it at all, to keep it completely private--is trivial, to throw it away is just as easy.

This all leads to the current problem: the firehose of information. We all know about it, and have for quite a while, but it keeps ramping up, growing. In terms of my image calculation above, I hypothesize that this is because our ability to find important images, to find meaning in our representations of the world, hasn't grown nearly as quickly. It's grown, but there's a gap between the number of images we find that represent our world in an interesting way and the number of images that we can choose from. That gap is the firehose and closing it is what an enormous amount of energy is devoted to:

When discussing this with Fabio he put it very poetically: rather than creating ever newer technologies for remembering, we should think about creating technologies that help us forget. I'm not sure I completely agree with the idea that we should be discarding our information (we never know what will be interesting later--I often find that what's going on in the background of old photographs and painting to be as interesting as what the photographer thought was the most important thing), but I definitely agree that there's a value in technologies that forget for us, that filter for us, that make some things more important.

Which brings me to an idea I had back in May, a UI implementation of a baby idea embodying some of the philosophical discussion above: I want there to be a slider in all my Windows Explorer windows that allows me to hide/highlight files based on date. A time horizon that I could choose, which would "forget" things for me based on when they were made. This is more than just sorting by creation date, it's actually making the stuff disappear. Of course it would reappear if I moved the slider, but it would allow me to sort things based on other meaningful criteria while also also sorting them based on time. One end would be all files, the other end would be files/folders changed today. The rest would follow the Find File conventions. Here's a sketch:

So, Microsoft, build me this. Thanks.

[a side note: I've been using Adobe Photoshop Album to manage my digital photos and I like how it lets you manage images. It's essentially a faceted classification tool and an easy one at that. It even has a time slider that's quite nice, although it's absolute, rather than relative to "today."]

Addendum: It seems that Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems has also been measuring how much information is being produced. This is the more general case of my thought above and the results seem to follow my gut-level curve.

Posted by at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

So exploring some of my animist ideas further, I found a nice summary of technological determinism in philosophy. The basic idea is as follows:

Rather than as a product of society and an integral part of it, technology is presented as an independent, self-controlling, self-determining, self-generating, self-propelling, self-perpetuating and self-expanding force. It is seen as out of human control, changing under its own momentum and 'blindly' shaping society.

Although I don't agree with that statement as a philosophy, I do believe that it plays a part in the way that (some? many?) people think about technology. In other words, because some people think that technological artifacts exist in a quasi-separate world (for example, Mark Pauline of SRL has talked about freeing machines from their slavery to humans and Kevin Kelly quotes Pauline in the same paragraph as Marvin Minsky, who basically says the same thing), they are likely to interact with them as beings from a separate world.

It's interesting that there's a long history of people describing their discomfort with technology in anthropomorphic philosophical terms.

Posted by at 9:46 AM | Permalink

Molly and I went to Berlin for the weekend, to visit friends and get out of Ivrea (go go discount European airlines!) and went to the Rem Koolhaas show at the Neue Nationalgalerie (a link in English that doesn't have pictures, but a nice video).

It's a fascinating and frustrating show because it really embodies the whole Koolhaas art/architecture/design/infographic "more is more" esthetic. There's so much and it's so chaotic that it's overwhelming. It looks like a a giant installation piece, a business school conference poster session and a garage sale. There's no central story, and the threads never seem to be tied together, but it's a profound statement about design, nevertheless. He is inspired by the Russian Constructivist arcitects of the 1920s, who saw it as their responsibility to not just build buildings, but rebuild society. Soviet philosophy notwithstanding, Koolhaas interprets this as meaning that design needs to take the context of the design into account, that understanding the context is as important as the design itself (presumably, that's why it's called "Content," because he sees architecture as significantly more than just the creation of containers).

At least that's how I see it, since that's how I think about design. Granted, his presentation still boggles me, since it tends to represent the complexity of life with complexity of presentation, but it's a start. It's also intensely inspirational, and it showed me how incredibly valuable even simple images can be when communicating an idea, which is somehting I'm going to be trying to emulate.

Oh, and I think that his relationship to is pretty funny. He talks about how much he respects Mies (probably because the Neue Nationalerie is a classic Mies building), but then goes on to try to find every possible way to not be like Mies.

Posted by at 3:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I've been very busy here in Ivrea for the last three weeks and should be transferring more stuff from my paper notebook to this one soon. In the interim, I'm still thinking about animism and expectations. At one of the many dinners full of Interaction Design heavyweights I was talking to Andrew Ortony who pointed me to Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves' book, The Media Equation which seems to be about exactly the stuff I'm thinking about. Haven't bought it yet, but read their interesting article, Perceptual Bandwidth (Google cache), which defines a framework by which we can discuss some of the perceptions created by computer-mediated perception. Yeah, that sounds pretty heady, but there are some nice quotes in the paper:

Human-computer interaction is fundamentally social and perceptual in exactly the same ways all other interactions with people and the physical world are social and perceptual. This means the lessons of psychological research about perception can be applied to media with few considerations for the special status of technology.