About delegation and design

A recent post by Mr. Chipchase addresses the issue of "delegation". Jan proposed that "from a design perspective a potential solution to pretty much every design problem is delegation - getting other people or technology to complete those parts of a task or activity that the user is unable to complete themselves.". This issue is of particular interest to me and though it has been addressed by lots of researchers, it's certainly Bruno Latour who refers to the concept of "delegation" in the brightest way.

In his article entitled "Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door" (Chapter 8 (pages 225-258) of Bijker & Law (1992) - Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change), Latour describes the "door" cases and compares two approaches of delegation: with humans and "nonhumans". He starts by introducing the problem of doors: people don't close them and and cold air rushes in... and heat rushes out... and eventually it's impossible train people to keep doors closed. Hence a delegation of this task :

"either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only fonction is to open and close the door. This is called a groom (...) The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behaviour. (...) the weak point of the tactic can be seen: if this one lad is unreliable then the whole chain breaks down (...) It is at this point that you have a relatively new choice: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a delegated non-human character whose only fonction is to open and close the door. This is called a door-closer or a groom (...) Solved? Well, not quite. (...) We have all experienced having a door with a powerful spring mechanism slam in our face. For sure, springs do the job of replacing grooms, but they play the role of a very rude, uneducated and dumb porter"

Okay, now comes the important part:

"The interesting thing with such impolite doors is this: if they slam shut so violently, it means that you, the visitor have to be very quick in passing through and that you should not be at someone else's heels, otherwise your nose will get shorter and bloody. An unskilled non-human groom thus presupposes a skilled human user. It is always a trade-off. I will call the behaviour imposed back onto the human by non-human delegates prescription. Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. (...) We have been able to delegate to non-humans not only force but also values, duties and ethics. It is because of this morality that we, humans, behave so ethically, no matter how weak and wicked we feel we are. (...) The non-humans take over the selective attitudes of those who engineered them. So, to avoid this discrimination, inventors get back to their drawing board and try to imagine a non-human character that will not prescribe the same rare local cultural skills to its human users."

The article goes with other incredibly valuable insights ("The debates around anthropomorphism arise because we believe that really there exist 'humans' and 'non-humans' without realizing that this attribution of roles and action is also a choice.") but I'll stop here because there is already a lot on our plate. Why do I blog this? sunday evening readings... how does that relate to Jan's proposition? it's just meant to remind us how the design of things (nonhumans, in Latour's terms) is highly subject to embedding "values, duties and ethics" in the produced artifacts (or experience).

SLambx

(via), this press release from Philips describes how Philips ambx teamed-up with Rivers Run Red to produce a "dedicated amBX-enabled environment" for Second Life (they actually license the ambx technology to RRR):

"This will offer Second Life users the opportunity to experience their virtual world through real world amBX experiences, including light, air movement and rumble. The amBX agreement also extends to all-new commercially driven experiences, for future brand marketing campaigns, and builds on a highly successful relationship between Philips and Rivers Run Red and their long-running involvement with the development of the ‘immersive spaces market’. "

Why do I blog this? because it's yet another example of connecting the physical and the digital world through technology.

We like complexity?

Speaking with Fabien about my Geoware presentation, one the issue I raised is that some mobile social software have an intrinsic complexity that make them unusable. For example, this crazy project by Honda makes me utterly skeptic. I don't know whether it's a east-asian thing but there seem to be a tendancy towards complexity here (and yes I know Honda is japanese). This eventually leads to a paper by Don Norman that state how cluttered asian interface are perceived as powerful application. Some excerpts:

"I recently toured a department store in South Korea. (...) I found the traditional “white goods” most interesting: Refrigerators and washing machines. The store obviously had the Korean companies LG and Samsung, but also GE, Braun, and Philips. The Korean products seemed more complex than the non-Korean ones, even though the specifications and prices were essentially identical. “Why?” I asked my two guides, both of whom were usability professionals. “Because Koreans like things to look complex,” they responded. It is a symbol: it shows their status.

But while at the store, I marveled at the advance complexities of all appliances, especially ones that once upon a time were quite simple: for example, toasters, refrigerators, and coffee makers, all of which had multiple control dials, multiple LCD displays, and a complexity that defied description."

SO what's Norman's lesson?

"Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them? Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed."

And, as he explains we do not have to go to Korea or Iran to find this tendancy, we can find it everywhere. Why do I blog this? What is interesting is that Norman is a "less is more" person so he cannot really be challenged on that topic (though some readers took the piss and harshly complained):

"I am not advocating bad design. I am simply pointing out a fact of life: purchasers, on the whole, prefer more powerful devices to less powerful ones. They equate the apparent simplicity of the controls with lack of power: complexity with power"

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A dog reaction to an AIBO, an AIBO with fur, a remote-controlled car and a puppy

Kubinyi, E. , Miklosi, A. Kaplan, F. Gacsi, M. Topal, J. Csanyi, V. (2004) Social behaviour of dogs encountering AIBO, an animal-like robot in a neutral and in a feeding situation; Behavioural Processes, 65(3) : 231-239. The paper is an intriguing account of applying robotics in animal behavior test. The goals of these ethologists is to determine whether the a dog-like robot of the Sony can be used to study animal interactions.

"Twenty-four adult and sixteen 4–5 months old pet dogs were tested in two situations where subjects encountered one of four different test-partners: (1) a remote controlled car; (2) an AIBO robot; (3) AIBO with a puppy-scented furry cover; and (4) a 2-month-old puppy. In the neutral situation the dog could interact freely with one of the partners for 1 min in a closed arena in the presence of its owner. In the feeding situation the encounters were started while the dog was eating food."

The results shows that age and context influence the social behaviour of dogs. Moreover, the furry AIBO semed to evoke a higher number of responses in comparison to the car. Other aspects that I found of interest, as described by the authors:

A social partner is not only the carrier of species-specific characters to evoke behaviour on the part of the subject but also actively reacts to the actions of the other. In order to mimic interactive situations, the robot has to be able to detect and react to, at least, some elements of the environment that it shares with the tested animal (...) AIBO did not turn out to be a ‘real’ social partner for the dogs in all respects, but the change of its appearance, the improvement of its movements and speed could make this possible. (...) A further interesting question is whether puppies with experience restricted only to the robot (AIBO “raised” dog-litters) would consider the robot as a social partner.

Why do I blog this? working on a near future laboratory project with julian, I am gathering some material about pet-technology interactions. In this article, I was interested less by the idea of using a robot for behavioral tests (ethology is not my concern) but rather about this sort of study reveal about interactions between pets and technologies.

Zoolander phone

According to the Wikipedia:

Zoolander Phone is a term often used to describe any extremely small and new mobile phone. The term is a reference to the film "Zoolander" (Ben Stiller), in which the title character's (played by Ben Stiller) humorously miniature cell phone is a joke on the continually smaller phones released by phone manufacturers.

(picture taken on eatliver, but this is not the real Zoolander phone, only a look-alike)

Why do I blog this? I was only looking for a picture of an extremely small cell phone to illustrate how mobile UI are tough.

Prevent people from XXXX

When affordances of object prevent people to act. In this case, this garbage in Geneva does not allow people to trash big objects (bombs? private trash?). In a sense, this is about delegating to non-humans a certain function.

Be educated by objects.

Update: look at the two other examples that are from France below: on the left, a simple piece of cardboard, on the right, a lucid/translucent trash bag. Both are interesting examples of forcing a transparent behavior. There are also rigid plastic garbage that are transparent (no picture though), all of those appeared in the VIGIPIRATE frenziness in the 90s. This led to lots of curious behavior that I don't have time to address here (low number of trash = garbage everywhere around the one that people found...). No to mention the different way to cover/close the public trash to avoid them being filled (!) with bombs.

Areas of play

In "The space to play", Matt Jones (Nokia Design Multimedia) interestingly describes his group work process when exploring the theme of "play". First, it starts with spotting some signals that "play" is a driving force ("Through weak signals found by our trends research group we had a hunch that "play" as a force in the world was becoming stronger, so we got the go-ahead for a research and design conception project"). Then, they gathered of a multi-disciplinary team ("myself, a technical consultant, Janne Jalkanen and a business consultant, Minh Tran. Our ranks were swelled by academics, independent experts, researchers and designers throughout the span of the project.").

The team worked with user experience experts to refine the driving forces behind "play" ("One of the main components was research carried out with behavioral trend experts, Sense Worldwide. In this collaboration we identified areas of the ever-present driver of play in global culture.") which led to set 4 relevant areas: 1) the playful engagement people have technology by hacking/modifying/tinkering things 2) the reprogramation of space through technologies (turning a metro into a gig or railway station into a pillow fight) 3) the carefully-designed space that engage people in new experiences (serendipituous meetings) 4) re-imagining the urban experience

The next step was to work on how this can fuel interaction design and mobile applications development/mobile devices design ("What would it mean to create truly playful space in our systems, services and devices? "). Matt, for that matter, describes how they wanted to go beyond user-centered design by taking into account concepts such as Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" or examples like Parkour, Elektroplankton.

Why do I blog this? though very classic, it's interesting to see how this work process is described and implemented. My only concern is that I would be happy to know more about how this is turned into applications/products ;) But this is relevant:

“What does this have to do with interaction design or mobile devices? Well, as I’ve said, in play we explore, try new things and push our limits more than in any other state. The practice of experience design often tries to prescribe set paths for the end-user of the device, rather than allow the frustrations of a free exploration of the system. What would it mean to create truly playful space in our systems, services and devices? To create digital weather projects, not just thrilling but constrained slides?”

Hasbro and innovation

An article in yesterday edition of the WSJ about game company Hasbro and their innovation practices (by Carol Hymowitz). Some excerpts:

To spur innovation, Hasbro managers keep in touch with a global network of game inventors, do online surveys of customers and observe thousands of children and adults playing games developed in a new lab called GameWorks at the division's headquarters. They also talk with prospective customers about their lives and how they want to spend leisure time (...) "People don't have time to play a game for three hours, so we're asking ourselves how we can leverage brands so they can be played in smaller time frames," says Jill Hambley, a vice president of marketing. (...) Hasbro is also gunning for technology-savvy customers. Sales of videogames outpace board games by more than six to one, so Hasbro makes versions of its board games that can be played on laptops, cellphones or in video format.

Why do I blog this? no big breakthrough here but it's interesting to understand how they work/innovate and of course the results are not surprising: small time chunk devoted for gaming (same a video game industry), use of tech to create new experience.

Building a discourse about design and foresight

Currently completing my PhD program (thesis defense is next week), it gave me the occasion of looking back and think about what interest me. My original background is cognitive sciences (with a strong emphasis on psychology, psycholinguistics and what the french calls ergonomie) and the PhD will be in computer sciences/human computer interaction. In most of my work, I have been confronted to multidisciplinary/interdisciplinarity (even in my undergraduate studies). It took me a while to understand that my interest less laid in pure cognitive science research (for example the investigation of processes such as intersubjectivity, and its relation to technologies) but rather about the potential effects of technologies on human behavior and cognitive process. In a sense this is a more applied goal, and it led me to take into account diverse theories or methods. Of course, this is challenging since mixing oil and water is often troublesome in academia. Given that my research object is embedded in space (technology goes out of the box with ubicomp) and social (technology is deployed in multi-user applications), there was indeed a need to expand from pure cogsci methods and including methods and theories from other disciplines. The most important issues regarding my work for that matter were the never-ending qualitative versus quantitative methods confrontation (I stand in-between using a combination of both, depending on the purpose) AND the situated versus mentalist approach (to put it shortly: is cognition about mind's representation? or is it situated in context?). So, this was a kind of struggle in my phd research.

However, things do not end here. Working in parallel of my PhD as a consultant/user experience researcher for some companies (IT, videogames), I had to keep up with some demands/expectations that are often much more applied... and bound to how this research would affect NPD/design or foresight (the sort of project I work on). Hence, there was a need to have a discourse about these 2 issues: design and foresight. No matter that I was interested in both, it was not that easy to understand how the research results/methods can be turned into material for designers or foresight scenarios. SO, three years of talking with designers, developers, organizing design/foresight workshops, conferences helped a bit but I am still not clear about it (I mean I don't even know how to draw something on paper).

Recently, I tried to clear up my mind about this and the crux issue here is the constant shifting between research and design (or foresight, sorry for putting both in the same bag here but it applies to both). The balance between research that can be reductionist (very focused problem studied, limits in generalizing or time-consuming) and design that needs a global perspective is fundamental. The other day,I had a fruitful discussion with a friend working on consumer insight projects for a big company. Coming from a cognitive science background as this friend, I was interested in his thoughts concerning how he shifted from psychology to management of innovation/design of near-future products/strategy.

I asked him about "turning points" or moments that changed his perspective. He mentioned two highlights. The first one was the paradigm shift in cognitive science in the late 80s when the notion of distributed cognition (Dcog) appeared. Dcog basically posited that cognition was rather a systemic phenomenon that concerned individuals, objects as well as the environment and not only the individual's brain with mental representation. To him, this is an important shift because once we accept the idea that cognition/problem solving/decisions are not an individual process, it's easier to bring social, cultural and organizational issues to the table.

The second highlight he described me is when he use to work for a user experience company that conducted international studies, he figure out that the added value not only laid in those studies but also in the cumulative knowledge they could draw out of them: the trend that emerged, the intrinsical motivation people had for using certain technologies, the moment innovation appeared. This helped him change the way he apprehended the evolution of innovations and made him question the fact that they can follows long s-curves.

Why do I blog this? random thoughts on a rainy sunday afternoon about what I am doing. This is not very structured but I am still trying to organize my thoughts about UX/design/foresight and how I handle that. I guess this is a complex problem that can be addressed by talking with people working on design/foresight/innovation. What impresses me is observing how individual's history helps to understand how certain elements encountered shape each others' perspective.

The picture simply exemplify the idea that conducting design/foresight projects need a constant change of focus between micro and macro perspectives. This reflects the sort of concern I am interested in by taking into account very focused perspectives (user interface, user experience, cognitive processes) and broader issues (socio-cultural elements, organizational constraints...).

Speed radar camouflage

Spotted in Geneva this morning, this somewhat cute speed radar dressed with the idealistic cow camouflage (very close to the WTO offices). How this change the user experience of being detected? Is it about visiblity?

Share your life

I already blogged about onlife, this program now called Slife that tracks and help you to visualizes traces of your interaction with Mac applications. There is now a "social component" called Slifeshare:

A Slifeshare is an online space where you share your digital life activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about. It is a whole new way of staying in touch, finding out which sites, videos and music are popular with your friends, meeting new people and discovering great new stuff online. Take it for a spin, it's free, easy to set-up and quite fu

The "how page" is quite complete and might scare to death any people puzzled by how technologies led us to a transparent society (a la Rousseau). Look at the webpage that is created with the slife information:

Why do I blog this? Slife was already an interesting application, in terms of how the history of interaction is shown to the user. This social feature add another component: using Jyri's terminology (watch his video, great insights), it takes people's interaction with various applications as a "social object". This means that designers assume that a sociability will grow out of the interaction patterns (in a similar way to the sociability of Flickr is based on sharing pictures).

The uselessness principle

Free creatures: The role of uselessness in the design of artificial pets by Frédéric Kaplan is a very relevant short paper, which postulates that the success of the existing artificial pets relies on the fact that they are useless.

Frédéric starts by explaining that the difference between an artificial pet and robotic application is that nobody takes it seriously when an AIBO falls, it's rather entertaining.

Paradoxically, these creatures are not designed to respect Asimov’s second law of robotics : ‘A robot must obey a human beings’ orders’. They are designed to have autonomous goals, to simulate autonomous feelings. (...) One way of showing that the pet is a free creature is to allow it to refuse the order of its owner. In our daily use of language, we tend to attribute intentions to devices that are not doing their job well.

What is very interesting in the paper is that the author states that giving the robot this apparent autonomy is a necessary (but not sufficient) feature for the development of a relationship with its owner(s).

Then comes from the uselessness principle:

The creature should always act as if driven by its own goals. However, an additionnal dynamics should ensure that the behavior of the pet is interesting for its owner. It is not because an artificial creature does not perform a useful task that it can not be evaluated. Evaluation should be done on the basis of the subjective interest of the users with the pet. This can be measured in a very precise way using the time that the user is actually spending with the pet. (...) be designed as free ‘not functional’ creatures.

Why do I blog this? first because I am more and more digging into human-robot interaction research since I feel the interesting convergence between robotics and pervasive computing (that may eventually lead to a new category of objects a la Nabaztag). Second, because I am cobbling some notes for different projects for the Near Future Laboratory (pets, geoware).

Kevin Slavin on big games and location-based applications

(Via Fab), this Where2.0 2005 talk by Kevin Slavin (Area Code) is full of great insights about urban gaming ("big games"), and the user's apprehension of location-based technologies. There actually three aspects that I've found relevant to my research (excerpts are very basic transcriptions of the podcast).

First, Slavin explained how places where space + story

places need stories to look real. Big games: to make the most real and most fake stories they are large scale multiplayer real world games, things that transform the space around space in a game space basically a layer of fiction added on the spatial environment games with computers in them rather than the other way around

Second, from the user experience point of view, it's interesting to see how they evaluate when one their game is successful:

we also measured success because people started to cheat (when people screw things, that proves you're on the right track). the way we're going to misuse technologies are perhaps the most valuable way that we use them

And third, Mr. Slavin has a very relevant take on location (in the context of location-aware applications such as most of the big games):

location is not just GIS data, whether we're indoor/outdoor, whether the phone can hear you're on busy street or not... and build games that draw on that

it may not have been about location but maybe what's more valuable is dislocation: the most valuable experiences may have to do with disinformation, it might be more interesting/valuable for people to get lost than to know where they're going, to forget where where they are maybe the goal here is not emulate the PSP but rather to know what' different from a PSP and do that and instead of doing reportage, let's make it up, there's something else there, it's much more about misrepresentation and accuracy we're working on a often wrong version of "here"

I fully agree with this approach, which kind of resonate with the discourse I am building in my PhD dissertation: location is definitely more than what is implied by a dot on a map or x/y coordinates. Where Slavin advocates for expanding the notion of location (for example: to get lost or to forget where one is), my work is more about how the distinction between automated location-awareness and the explicit disclosure by the users. In both cases, these elements ponder the overemphasis lots of people put in location-based applications (especially buddy-tracking or place-tagging) Why do I blog this? I am currently in the process of finding the right angle for my talk at Geoware ("The user experience of location-awareness"). This is definitely food for thoughts for next upcoming writings/talks about how to go beyond current location-based applications.

The user experience of elevators

It seems that the elevator hacking trick could have been a rumor. Looking for articles about the user experience of lifts/elevators, I ran across this piece in the new yorker:

Richard Gladitz, a service manager at Century Elevator, an elevator-maintenance company in Long Island City, concurred. “It really shouldn’t operate like that, unless there’s something wrong with it,” he said. “People will think that someone did something to make it pass by, but it might have something to do with the dispatcher, various elevator-bank issues, something of that nature.” (...) “There’s so many misconceptions about elevators.” Could it be that engineers had designed elevators to have this door/floor feature but, for the common good, didn’t want civilians to know about it? Might there be an elevator conspiracy?

Maybe a weird solution for this would be a random lift button (by "chris speed"):

The Random Lift Button project was conceived as an opportunity to exemplify further the role of space at the mercy of time. Certainly in large commercial buildings lifts are implemented to squash space and enable people to move more quickly from one work activity to the next. (...) The random lift button would place us directly in the centre of a non-linear moment, its outcomes uncertain and unpredictable. A sensation that would be both rewarding and entropic. Random Lift Buttons are currently installed in two lifts in Portland Square at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Why do I blog this? elevators are one these technological artifacts that keep puzzling people (like doors but it's even worse). Since there is a large variety of elevator user interfaces, there are often anecdotes about them. What is curious is that it's possible to design curious experiences even in artifacts that look boring (I haven't mentioned a friend project that aimed at adding a empty floor on top of an elevator so that people can just breath the atmosphere and then get back to where they wanted to go). What do these 2 stories above tell us?

Yet another kosher phone

Steve Portigal pointed me on this jpost article about a kosher telephone "that minimizes Shabbat desecration" for military soldiers in the israelian army.So first, look at the problem from the user point of view:

"Until now, every telephone call [on Shabbat] that was not a matter of life and death or close to it raised questions and deliberations among religious soldiers regarding halachic permissibility. Now the calls can be made without any qualms,"

And then, solutions:

Dialing and other electronic operations on the "Shabbat phone" are performed in an indirect way so that the person using the phone is not directly closing electrical circuits. Instead, an electronic eye scans the phone buttons every two seconds. If a button has been pressed, the eye activates the phone's dialing system. This indirect way of activation is called a grama. (...) the Shabbat phone was just one of several devices that helps minimize Shabbat desecration. "The IDF is already using electric gate and door openers based on grama technology," he said. "And pilot versions of proximity sensors, magnetic cards and electronic eyes have been created." (...) Another gadget that is now widely used in the IDF is a self-erasing pen. Writing is one of hundreds of activities prohibited on Shabbat. However, writing in ink that does not remain legible is a less severe transgression that is permitted when necessary, even if there is no danger to life.

Why do I blog this? because design is about constraints and it's very intriguing to see how technological artifacts can be designed with those constraints in mind. I am always amazed by the workarounds for constraints that we don't experience in our usage of the same technology. Yet, as in Jan Chipchase talk at LIFT07 about illiterate users, this I about delegation. In that case, the delegation is done to the machine and not another human. This topic is also close to what Bruno Latour describes about how we humans delegate morals to objects (see his safety belt example).

Interaction design research

Reading "Interaction Design: Foundations, Experiments" by Lars Hallnäs,Johan Redström, I was quite fascinated by the chapter about methods concerning "interaction design research". Maybe it's because my research work is more and more linked to design. Some excerpts that I find relevant:

Is this science? Certainly not in the sense of natural science or in the sense of social science. It is simply not “knowledge production” (...) The idea of verifiable knowledge about the design process,validated models and working methods etc. is simply wrong here. It is a different situation, we find ourselves so to speak on the opposite side; in some sense it is research through defining in contrast to research through analytical studies. It is like the difference between studying how people open a certain door and experimenting yourself with different ways of opening that particular door. In both cases we could say that it is research in answering to a question about what it means to open the given door. In the first case it is important that your studies rely on sound methodology, as you presumably want to derive some general knowledge from your work. In the second case the situation is different. A good method for opening the door is what you want to find through your experiments. The aim is not to derive general knowledge about door opening practice, but to define, to suggest, a particular way of opening that door.

This said, the expected results also take a particular shape:

‘Results’ does not come in form of knowledge about things at hand, but in the form of suggestions for change of a present state, suggestions for a change in how things are done. ‘Results’ will here always refer to methods of practice in some sense;methods are in research focus. Suggestions of change will always refer to ‘new’ ways of doing things, it can be a matter of very specific methods,general guidelines, new programs for practice,new material to work with etc.

Why do I blog this? simply this help me making the difference between what designers wants (as opposed to what academic researchers do). Besides, it reminds of Jan Chipchase's presentation at EPFL who made the point that his work was no to produce facts but rather "informed opinions" that are employed as material for designing solutions.

It's interesting to see how the word "research" is definitely a boundary objects and refer to various meaning depending on the community of practice that employs it.

Steven Casey's new book

"The Atomic Chef: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error" (Steven Casey)

This book, reviewed by Scott Schappel in American Scientist aims at showing "how design and technology all too often leave unwitting humans on the brink of disaster". Some excerpts of the review:

Written in the style of a thriller by Tom Clancy or Dan Brown, these vignettes skillfully draw the reader into the world of human error and design flaws. But Casey isn't writing fiction—these 20 stories and the characters involved are all too real, and some of the facts he reports are chilling. (...) There are lessons to be learned from all of these accounts, from the chapter about a California freeway driver fed up with traffic to the story of a near-catastrophic nuclear explosion. Casey doesn't offer remedies for the design and technological flaws he presents. But that may not be a failing at all—in some dark and twisted way, leaving the reader to ponder how to fix things may make the book even more compelling and useful. After all, real life doesn't hand us easy solutions.

Why do I blog this? seems to be a must read for people embracing the real world's messiness.

Doraemon helicopter hairband

Via: an impressive Doraemon game for kids:

Doreamon has a cool gadget, the Yojigame Pocket (4th dimension pocket), in which he stores just about anything from cars to houses and planes. He also has a helicopter hairband that his friends can use for flying. Epoch has released a video game based on this helicopter hairband! Inspired by the Wii remote controller, the player uses a hairband to control his/her character by moving his/her head in all directions

Why do I blog this? that's an impressive game controller: it allows users to control Doraemon as the character flies through the air using a helicopter strapped unto the head (lean the head forward to go forward, lean the head back to move back, and tilt the head to go sideways)

Jan Chipchase at EPFL

I had the pleasure to set a seminar at Media and Design Lab (EPFL) today with Jan Chipchase. Jan gave a talk was about user experience methods, exemplified by rural charging services in Uganda, informal repair cultures and design for illiterate users.

what market will it be in 20 years(for nokia)? it could be media, search.. one way of framing what I do: human-centered design, creating things that people wants and needs thinking about the range of contexts in which people will use cell phones cell phone = last thing teenagers interact with before going to bed need to be in those contexts to understand those needs multicultural studies all over the world

pb = people are suspicious of large corporations so collect/treat data in a ethical way

going in a place for a couple of weeks, researching a particular theme, time pressure, and leave and getting information back to the company, which is the most difficult thing (even more than the field research per se)

use the data to inspire and inform the development team having hooks to bring people in the research: for example weird stories/anecdotes, it's successful when people starts smiling about that. need to engage people in research material, compete with other analysts' write-ups figure out what the future looks like invent new stuff, patents (technologically oriented)... give designers insights about people's life

in-depth field research: lives with peopel a few days, following them... every interaction with people/places seen as an opportunity tohave a research theme for example: buy a bike and ride, meet people 90% of interactions are successul, people are happy to comunicate and share lots of shadowing: following people (asking them before) little bit of danger: hurricane (katrina), naughty dogs street surveys "do you mind if I take some pictures?" street pictures of

problem for places where we can't go: use of diary but it does not work, people reinterprete what they're asked to do, so figured out other methods like everything i touch diary: take a picture of everything you touch in one day; even though we're not interested in everything they touch, things sneak in

mystery shopper: pretend to be a shopper; smash a nokia phone and ask a shop to repair it and document the way it is repaired.

Rural charging services, Uganda: dig up examples like banking practices over phones (sente) turn anyone with a cell phone in an ATM machine

is nokia can be supportive? is there a business here?

need to be humble when designing

Informal repair cultures the ecosystem: looking at what happen on the streets when people fix stuff researchers buy those rip.offs, amazing quality in India: pretty much any mobile phone shops has a booth in the back where phones can be repaired (Nokia does not want to control it) what is needed to repair a phone: a screwdriver, a toothbrush and knowledge can be torn apart on the streets with these tools vibrant second hand markets, sell parts, rip-off component supplies (keypads....)

what services do this ecosystem offer? mostly change the keypads circuit fixing re-soldering memories, boards language change software installation content movies unlocking (it goes without saying)

you can find repair manual of nokia phones (but it's not published by nokia), it's somewhat reverse observed/engineered for every new parts of a phone, it's documented online, how you can hack you can even get warranties for repaired stuff (on second hand batteries!)

buy stuff and send them to nokia engineers

india has a tradition about repair culture courses

what's novel? scale, cost, the cell phone: ubiquity of objects of repair (compare to other electronic) imported, grey market, stolen devices: things that need repairing... grey market services, fake accessories, risk of having stocks condiscated priority and speed of what is repaired (tv or laptop?)

implications for consumers: informal repair cuture is largely convenient, cheap and fast reduces total cost of ownership for existing consumers makes phones ownership more affordable increasing the life-time of products consequently lowering the environmental impact (!?)

does Nokia can support this? MOtorola made the unscrewing of the phone back more easily could nokia redesign the product so that these guys can repair it more easily? discussion about whether this is good/bad for nokia; it's at least good for consumers!

phone as a way to travel in space and time

Shabbat and automation

In the "Home spirituality" track at CHI 2007, there is this paper that I can't wait to read:

Sabbath Day Home Automation: "It's Like Mixing Technology and Religion" (Allison Woodruff, Sally Augustin, Brooke Foucault)

Presents a qualitative study of the use of home automation by 20 Orthodox Jewish families. Offers insights and design implications for user experience with smart home technology and religious technology.

Why do I blog this? as I already blogged here, the topic of how people deal with religious constraints regarding technology is of interest. This is tightly related with the user experience of automation (and hence its inherent problems). I am looking forward to read more about this.