Bandai poking box

One of the weirdest electronic toy I've played with so far is certainly this "tuttuki bako" (tuttuki box) poking box by BANDAI. It consists in a basic box with a LCD screen, a cute yellow button and a hole on one side of the box. To play the games, you simply have to insert your finger in this hole, and see it appear on the LCD screen.

Apart from being a basic clock, you have different games as represented on the photo below: poking a panda, removing boogers from someone's face, touching slime or ticking a stick figure character. I actually played with it for sometimes yesterday afternoon at the game studio and it sparked a good discussion about this type of gesture-based interactions.

Why do I blog this? this object is the typical geek magnet as you can see from its presence on tons of blogs about gadgets. Oftentimes, they miss the point and only see the odd character as well as the proximity to old-school tamagotchis. Being interested in electronic toys and their user experience (in a video game project), I try to nail down the interesting aspects of this device.

What's intriguing here is the mode of interaction proposed. Clearly, sticking one's finger in a hole to interact with an object is highly uncommon and almost taboo. Furthermore, it's really about being "engaged" in the interaction physically since you feel that a body part is can be both an input and a somewhat output through the LCD screen.

Second, the vocabulary of interaction of highly interesting. On the physical side: insert, touch, twiddle around inside, stick in, etc. And on the digital side: pushing around a stick figure, ticking someone’s nose, petting a tiny panda bear, etc.

(Touch) interaction vocabulary

A very simple list of touch interactions seen on the streets of Paris, France. As parking meters get more and more complex, the types of activities you can have with these devices is much more diverse. It therefore requires colors, shapes, cancel buttons and stuff. What I find intriguing here is that all the possibilities have been sketched down. A contextual manual if you will.

Reminds of my old Palm with its handwriting alphabet printed on the device:

The complexity of interactions with our electronic devices nevertheless leads to the issue of how to make visible (or reveal) the whole set of possibilities. Especially when it comes to gestural and touch interfaces: how to make them more self-revealing? would it be possible to design clear affordances? or, in a button-less world, how to make apparent the diversity of interactions?

Night light night life

What stays awake during the night, what should not stay awoken when not used.

Approximately 15% of people's electricity bills can be saved if these lights were switched off.

Inspired by recent discussions with students at ENSCI, who works on a project about how the internet of things can be an inspiring framework to rethink our relationship to energy consumption.

Phone affordance

Phone affordance... for a phone and a door handle. Love the way one affordance can be transfered from one usage to another. The phone handle as a door handle and signage is an intriguing example.

Design and the Uncanny

(Spare parts from an old robot encountered last year)

In "The Uncanny and The Everyday in the Design of Robots" (a paper submitted as a CHI workshop in 2004), Carl DiSalvo discusses an intriguing topic: how the design should not prevent people loosing sight how unusual certain artifacts are. He applies his reasoning to electronic products such as robots:

"Recently there has been a surge in the development of robots as products for use in offices, public spaces, and the home. (...) The forms and functions of robots are often explicitly constructed as imitations of living beings. Through these imitations, robots exhibit and are attributed qualities such as emotion, intelligence, and autonomy, (...) how can we avoid losing sight of how unusual it is to grant such qualities and roles to them? "

Di Salvo then proposes that "The Uncanny" is a relevant and critical approach to reveal the underlying issues and implications of robots. What he means by this term is simply that the familiar can act strangely, which is of course related to this "Uncanny Valley" notion:

"The Uncanny Valley is that point where the resemblance between a robot and a human is almost, but not quite, identical, and the tension between this difference/sameness is disturbing. Even though The Uncanny Valley has never been systematically examined, it is perpetuated in the robotics community as a place to be avoided. But perhaps, it is not a place to be avoided. Because The Uncanny causes us to confront basic assumptions central to the design of robots, perhaps it is exactly the place where a critical approach to the design of robots should focus. "

He then gives three conceptual propositions for the design of uncanny domestic robots:

1. Robotic Vacuums That Speak Their Mind ("I have never been in this room before, please stay with me while I clean it.")
2. Homely Homes For Robots, Unhomely Homes for Humans ("uncanny homes, homes that were unhomley for humans but homely for robots — redefining the artifact as an inhabit")
3. Real Appliance Pets ("transform a robotic vacuum cleaner into a more realistic imitation of a pet")

Why do I blog this Beyond the fascination towards this sort of device (of course I'd love to have a nevrotic robot), I find this discussion about the Uncanny highly important. Not only about robots of course. Design is often based on the assumption that it will create objects and experiences that match up with people and their practices. Or that it can "integrate the new into the everyday". I wonder about different ways to go beyond this situation and what Di Salvo describes in this paper is surely an interesting solution to create enriching user experiences. I guess personalization is also another relevant possibility.

Ethnography and design

In "Experience Models: Where Ethnography and Design Meet" presented at the EPIC2006 conference, Rachel Jones discusses the roles of ethnography in design. She gives a quick overview of the literature regarding this topic:

• "Identifying “sensitizing” concepts (the identification of researchable topics)
• Developing specific design concepts (studying settings that may shed light on what abstract design concepts might mean concretely in order to sketch out and work up potential design solutions)
• Driving innovative technological research (explore the sociality of novel design spaces opened up by radical technology in real world settings)
• Evaluating design (conduct a “sanity check” on the design. Ethnography has also been used to inform the iterative design)
• Context awareness (immersing researchers, designers and sometimes clients in the setting, for the purpose of understanding the context in which a product will be developed)
• Identifying key emerging themes (an area of study, and developed with a view to identifying design opportunities and influencing design solutions)
• Developing experience frameworks (models that identify the key components of an experience and indicate the structural relationships between those components... facilitate the generation and mapping of opportunities)"

Why do I blog this? interesting overview, material for my UX course where I show the importance of "people research" (based on ethnography-inspired methods) for design.

On a different note, I am less and less using the term ethnography because (1) I am not an ethnographer, (2) the use os methods coming from ethnography is far different from conducting ethnography, (3) there seems to be some weird trend currently that confuse ethnography with data collection.

What to do with light bulbs?

An occidental kitchen, classic, with postcards, boxes and... this lighbulb. Why would people keep this? To have it up one's sleeve if another one breaks? Actually no, the bulb is sitting there because the owners do not know where to put it. In a 21st century society where you cannot trash anything (especially in Switzerland), when you don't know how to toss something, you preciously keep it.

Why do I blog this? thinking about practices related to electricity for my course/lecture in Paris tomorrow.

About nokia open studio

The recent "Nokia Open Studio: Engaging Communities" published by Younghee Jung and Jan Chipchase is worth to read for various reasons. The obvious one is to know more about open studio/innovation and how they conducted research along this line. Their case study shows how the purpose is not to generate ideas of services but instead, to "generate inspirational and cross-referential material about the role of future technologies in participant’s lives by giving residents the opportunity to articulate their needs and aspirations, and present these in the context of their everyday life". Another reason to read it carefully is more general and concerns the underlying issues regarding UX research in a company such as Nokia (an issue I already described here). Some snippets from the document:

"The decision of what to research is decided on an approximately 6-12 month’s basis with some themes drawn from corporate strategy, guided by a consumer insights team that highlights trends of interest, and based on team member’s instinct of what will have the most impact within the corporation. The style of research could even be described as migratory in the sense that the team is drawn to where the resources - research topics of interest, and the means to carry out that research are richest. A major challenge of any kind of corporate field research is finding the right balance between field work and maintaining relevance within the corporate structure, which can involve anything from the face to face sharing of the results to hands on application of what was learned into the design process. The challenge boils down to: how to efficiently and meaningfully gather credible and interesting data, within a relatively short period of time in the field (which for us equates to about two weeks) from a research location anywhere on the planet?"

Why do I blog this some interesting material about the link between UX and design... some interesting reflections that can be useful to rethink my presentation about how field research can inform design.

The document is an interesting use case that shows the different issues related to this sort of approach.

Baroque, creolization, cannibalism and technology adoption

"Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism" by Bar, Pisani and Weber is one of these mysterious academic paper that I enjoy running across. It basically investigate appropriation of mobile phones in Latin America, and how this technology is embedded within people social, economic, and political practices. Relying on the classic literature about appropriation (for example S-shaped curves and Roger's theories), they show how technology evolution progress through successive phases of adoption, appropriation, and reconfiguration. By analogy with the historical process of cultural appropriation in Latin America, they draw a parallel between these steps and the 3 following modes: “baroque”, “creolization” and “cannibalism”:

"Baroque layering: The most basic way in which users can appropriate a technology is for them to use the personalization features that are provided to them with that intent in mind. As technical objects, mobile phones come with many such affordances. These include for example the ability to change the ringtone, screen wallpaper, upload one’s phonebook, set up short-cuts for most-often called numbers, download games, and upload one’s music, photo, or video collection. (...) Creolization represents a deeper transformation, a more profound form of appropriation. It refers to practices where the user recombines or reprograms elements of the technology. In this appropriation mode, by contrast with baroque layering, users are more deeply involved in changing the technology. They now explore ways to adapt the technology beyond the options that have been designed by the phone makers and service providers. (...) Cannibalism: This third form of appropriation is the most extreme in the sense that it corresponds to practices where the user chooses to engage in direct conflict with the suppliers of the technology (or at least with the power relation as embodied in the technology.) Cannibalism includes modifications of the device that place the user in direct opposition with the providers’ business model, destruction of the device."

Why do I blog this? following theories of technology adoption for a while (especially for a course I give about innovation and foresight in a design school), I read a lot about s-shape curves, 3-steps theories and found this one quite intriguing. Also because after going 3 times to latin america for one year, I noticed how it could be an interesting field of observation. This paper is interestingly anchored in both relevant theoretical and empirical points that I may reuse in the course as well as in my research. The part about designing for appropriation is also relevant as it points out the role of taking into account these 3 phases in creating meaningful products and services.

Pre-computing dashboard

A fascinating stack of notes with numbers, additions and corrections encountered recently in a very old-school french grocery store. This awfully nice pile of duct-taped paper looks very pre-computing and surely plays more role than calculations: it's clearly as dashboard for the salesman as he told me he uses it as a reminder for customer credit "emprunts".

The importance of paper, again.

Proxemics in service design

The importance of proxemics in service design. Two examples of signage that warn people to keep a certain distance with each others in a (1) booth context (Switzerland), (2) vending machine context (France).

These signs are interesting cultural cues showing the value of space between people and things, as they reveal the do's and don'ts in terms of behavior. Service design of course needs to take this into account.

Bringing the "real" to design through user experience research

The link between user research and design is a topic I focus on even more closely than in the past, perhaps because of my involvement in different design courses. More specifically, I am interested in how user research can be relevant for design purposes and what are the underlying process one can put into place to work this out. Since I work with video game designers and interaction designers (yes I make the distinction between both but that's another story), this issue is quite important. One of the interesting term here is the notion of "the real" as user research is meant to bring material concerning the real world, what users really do, what are their constraints and needs, and in fine why they do what they do. The literature in HCI, especially about the use of ethnography, has a wide take on this but I was more curious to see what designers have to say about it. Reading User research at IDII: Three case studies, 2002-2004 by Simona Maschi, Laura Polazzi and Jay Melican, I ran across this interesting quote:

"Everything we learn from user studies has the great advantage of being “true” (although not in an absolute way), because it comes from the real world and fromreal experiences. This makes it somehow believable and graspable for our audience, both within and outside of the design team. In other words user studies provide the design team with “live material” that can be used to share thoughts and ideas and to communicate the project effectively to the world."

(The document is btw a relevant set of case study and quick description of research methods employed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea).

This notion of the "real" as the cornerstone of the exchange between UX research and design was also interestingly tackled at the recent EPIC conference. See for example how this weblog highlight the "real issue" in the discussion about how ethnographers can build and exhibit the authority necessary to be able to sell and provide ethnographic insights:

"Simon Pulman-Jones argued, ethnographers in industry are seeking to establish themselves as an authority on The Real - what it is really like out there in order to commoditize our insights, our epiphanies to help the organisations that we work for and with. (...) Ethnographers are indeed ‘brokers of the real‘ - they have themselves attained a sort of gatekeeper role between the designers and the engineers and the real world where real people actually use the products. They help the engineers meet and understand the users, in order to change the way the engineers think and feel about them."

Why do I blog this? preparing a lecture about this issue, gathering notes and elements for heated debates. I won't enter into the debate about whether the "real" is graspable (the amount of literature about this issue is so huge that you'd better start with Plato), nor about ethnography as the solution to the world's problem (is ethnography really about describing the world?). Rather, I find interesting here is the increasing impression that the "real" should be brought to the table in design and therefore a different set of allies (ethnographers now, ergonomists and cognitive psychologists in the past), tools (qualitative research today, quantitative research yesterday) gain momentum over time.

My personal impression here is that: (1) yes the real should be explored, analyzed and employed in the design process, (2) however the "real" is perhaps not so real for lots of reasons: the "data capture" implied by the time/budget constraints of project, the "data reduction" caused by the method (quant method = reductionism, qual method = research as the instrument), the mean of transferring the results to the design team (collaborative workshop? pdf report sent by email?), etc.

Vocabulary of touch

Quick wordle after a discussion I had about touch with Timo last week. Each of these words can lead to ask interesting questions regarding interface affordance, vocabulary of interactions as well as how create human-legible touch interactions. Exercise: take each of these terms and a technological device (eg. an SLR), ask youself how to use each of them to support the existing features. And then wonder about the relevance of gestures and touch-interactions for such uses. What does waving a device would support? What would caressing mean in photography?

Why do I blog this? mapping some words about the vocabulary of touch for future brainstorm (and then research). Echoes a lot with a current research project about gestures.

Delicate cueing

How to cue the passers-by to enter this shoe shop by using a delicate socialnav-like trick. Note how intriguing it is to use this lovely shoe material on the very swiss-designed raw concrete ground. Seen in Luzern, Switzerland yesterday afternoon.

Designing for the mobile and fixed

Found time to sort my notes from last week's workshop. Quick and dirty revision below The first presenter, Alan Dix, nailed down the differences between designing for the mobile and fixed in his "interaction with and through the mobile" speech. He pointed out the main differences: context/device/interaction/infrastructures.

Limited: screen size (if they have screen at all), input, bandwidth, cost connectivity (still today), computational power, heterogeneous platforms BUT opportunities (sensor, camera, projector) Context: variable context (street, meeting, train), focus of interaction (short focused activity, divided attention), interruptions (by mobile devices or mobile task, opportunistic), privacy and security issues, intimacy and availability, ergonomics (movement and vibration when walking/in car, etc.)

Besides, he showed how requirements and evaluation is hard: it's not that you can't do things, it's different. It's particularly hard to do field observation: - distribution of tasks in time and space - may use diary studies - or 'transect' study (loots at people for short time), you only get snippets

And even in the lab because screen capture and device logging may need special toolkits AND it's hard to capture eye gaze etc. hard with device in the air, but holding device on table worse

Heuristics such as Nielsen's are heavily used in UI design but situation is changed with mobile. There are heuristics of mobile UI literature: see Bertini et al. (2007). Appropriating heuristic evaluation methods for mobile computing

May use screen emulator OR "kludge" hardware; what is good enough? Or have 1/2 prototypes (physical input proto but screen on computer with different levels of fidelity)

The second tutorial was by Paul Coulton who gave an insightful overview of the creative capabilities of mobile devices to support original interactions. Paul presented a wide range of interactions using touch/near field communication, the digital camera or location-based scenarios using hands-on examples. I have already blogged about this "exquisite corpse" design rationale which I found intriguing. A slide that struck me as relevant concerning the difference between mobile and fixed computing stated the following:

Opportunities: context (location, presence, sensing), connectivity, feature evolution large demographic, high device penetration, changing fashion Constraints: constrained platforms, fragmentation (difficulty to reach critical mass), porting, distribution (nobody download), low revenues (nobody wants to pay), skills shortage

Why do I blog this? even if it's very raw here (no time to blog lately), I find interesting to describe recent material concerning the difference between fixed and mobile computing.

Electrical switchgear and meters

Recently involved in a design studio concerning electricity and the internet of things at ENSCI design school in Paris, I spent some time these days nailing down the topic of people and energy from various angles: perception and representation of electricity, the importance of infrastructures, the social interactions and practices surrounding electrical objects, etc. Most of the material I employ emerges from my readings (been perusing a lot about the history of techniques and electrical devices design as well as usage lately) and the pictures I take. These pictures come both from various urban safari I make (vacation, on purpose, etc.) as well as user studies. Although I have not studied the topic of electricity per se in my field studies, doing home ethnography allowed me to scratch the surface about these issues and discuss that with informants. We had an interesting discussion today about electrical switchgear and meters. These devices are kind of spot-on of the sort of artifacts I find intriguing to examine. There is indeed a lot to draw from observing them. See for instance the following set of pictures encountered in my recent travels (US - Brazil).

Depending on the culture, switchgear and meters are not located at the same place, and not always "protected". In France for instance, both are generally located close to each other indoor, and, of course, the electrical guy needs to have an appointment with the tenant/owner to check the metering. Whereas in lots of other countries (such as northern america but also in the EU), meters are outdoor. Electrical consumption is then more public and less personal.

Moreover, switchgear are generally indoor. France, again has the habit to refer to the "compteur électrique" has a sort of umbrella term for both the meter and the switchgear (no picture here). This interface with the electrical infrastructure is also more and more complex with lots of red buttons which correspond to an odd mapping of the house/appartment structure, with generally no clear rules.

This last picture, taken last summer in Peru is also very compelling to me as it shows how peruvian house actually reveal the electrical infrastructure from the meter to other house parts with white paint. I don't have any answer for this, my two cents would be that it can be useful for security reasons. In any case, the point of taking and discussing this picture is that is allows to question the environment, find intriguing phenomena and eventually inspire design.

Readers really into that topic might want to have a look at Sliding Friction as well as Jeff Makki's Critical infrastructure walking guide.

User acceptance of the smart fridge

The Internet of things field has given, for quite a long time, a prime position to the fridge as the sort of stereotypical device one could "augment". The ubiquity of this artifact, as well as its size and position, made it a good candidate to become the target of ubiquitous computing researchers. The general ideas is often to start from an existing object such as the fridge and try to project if into the future by adding displays, sensors as well as RFID technology. Giving "intelligence" to your fridge often corresponds to add new capabilities allowed by such technologies: internet browsing, fridge content scanning, automatic order over the internet to refill the fridge, etc. (picture taken from this BBC article)

Most of the time, the human aspect of such purposes is left out of the picture as if the fridge designers thought that thing would only requires time to be "accepted". This is why I was interested in Matthias Rothensee's paper entitled "User Acceptance of the Intelligent Fridge: Empirical Results from a Simulation" which he presented at the Internet of Things conference in Zürich few months ago. Although that event seemed scarily engineer/business-based, showing only one side of the coin, there were still some people there who realized that the internet of things is not just some über-cool engineer thing.

The authors employed a smart fridge simulation and a quantitative methodology to study the perception and evaluation of the various assistance functions provided by the system. The variable of interest were: the usefulness, the ease of use, the intention of use and the affective attitude. Some of the results:

"Generally, participants were neutral to positive about the smart fridge. They regarded the system as useful, easy to use, and would slightly tend to use it, if already on the market. Participants estimated their likely reactions to a smart fridge, both, before and after interacting with a simulation of it. Results have shown that despite the fact that the intention to use such a system remains stable after interacting with the simulation, usefulness and affective reactions are negatively affected by interacting with it. This reaction can be interpreted as the participants’ disappointment about the apparent dullness of the smart fridge. (...) usefulness remains the most important predictive variable for the acceptance of the smart fridge, as in traditional workplace technology acceptance literature (...) however, we learned that pleasure felt during interaction with the simulation is also a valuable predictor, underlining the importance of emotion in the acceptance of household technology (...) people’s evaluations differed between the groups, confirming the hypothesis that smart fridge functions are differently appreciated. Nutrition and healthy lifestyle feedback are evaluated most positively, whereas the recipe planer flops."

Why do I blog this? interesting elements here concerning possible users' reactions, especially when considering the low number of user studies which consider the human appreciation of intelligent fridges. However, I am dubious about the use of laboratory tests (and hence the corollary statistical tests) to analyze this kind of design issues. The role of context (spatial, social), practices and habits is very important to analyze regarding acceptance and usage of technologies since these different elements generally have direct or indirect influence on how people employ artifacts.

Nomadic posture

Nomadic posture seen at Boston Airport, and few minutes after, as it is not very easy to stay in that position, there's a new posture:

Difficult to find comfort close to the electric plug. Laptops and contortions, a long history.

Uncanny valley variability

Which part of this bear encountered yesterday at MIT Medialab is close to the Uncanny Valley? The bear-head-shaped face? The way it looks down? the fur-like body parts? or the explosive body wiring? Is the furry part more uncanny than the head?

welcoming a new device

As seen in Montreal last week, a pun made of the arrival of the recent iphone.