Seen this morning in Geneva. A subtle reminder crafted by the driver to keep in mind the presence of speed/traffic enforcement camera/gatso. The location of the note right above the dashboard is especially interesting.
What's also intriguing is the fact that the note is a reminder of a possibility, unlike post-its notes to remind you to do something
Recently working on a project about gestural interfaces and the user experience of the Nintendo Wii, I had my share of discussions about sampling in user experience research and the role of exceptions. Quantitative researchers often drawn nice curves with cute statistical distributions with "means" and quantiles. The type of things I've done in my PhD research, measuring X and Z (satisfaction to a certain project, number of messages typed on a phone, number of time someone pressed a certain button, etc.). In the end, you get this sort of graph represented below with anonymized dots which eventually represents how normal humans did certain things.
In general, quant research (the sort I've done in the past yes) compares different "conditions": you have two sorts of interfaces, each group of users test one of the interface and you compare the number of time a certain group did certain things on the interface they had. Say, the number of time they pressed on the button called "OK". Applying different statistical techniques (like variance analysis is the distribution is normal in the statistical sense, checking variances and if you're in trouble then you always employ "non-parametric tests"). This is robust no kidding, I don't criticize that kind of method. However, what I am wondering about is when this sort of methodology is solely applied to design research.
And it leads me to the discussion I had the other day with a colleague about the importance of exceptions, dots which are not close to the means, the weird outliers, peeps who do not fall in the distribution like that weird circle on the upper right-hand corner on the boxplot below:
Depending on your mood, the research methodology and your colleagues' attitude, there is a wide spectrum of reaction ranging from "WTF, that person screwing my distribution?" to "OK this is an extreme user, he/she is special, let's have a look more closely". And then, of course, because you're a smarty pant and you ALSO have qualitative data you see what the person SAID or DID (or whatever other types of data sources you have). Then the real thing starts: who are the extreme users? how extreme are they? what makes them extreme? are there other data source which attest that they are "exceptions". And obviously this leads you to the question the norm (the mean).
To some extent, that's the story of why I slowly moved from quant research to a mix of descriptive quantitative and qualitative research in user experience projects. I started getting interested in the role of exceptions, especially with regards to their importance in design. Why exceptions are important in design? Perhaps because they might show peculiar behavior and routine which can announce futures norms or trends (and then inspire new products, features and services) but also to show that the notion of a "normal user" or "mean user" is difficult to grasp as diversity exist and is important. Surely a very relevant near future laboratory spin.
An interesting example of an extreme user was this deaf guy I saw the other day at the train station, walking and gesticulating in front of his video cell-phone. If you map the use of video-communication on cell-phone you get a very low usage of the feature in general but that guy would be an exception.
"Technological Landscapes" by Richard Rogers is an essay about "relevant past futures", i.e the "past roads not taken", in which he invites us to re-read the history of technological culture "to inform the selection of the technological landscapes of our day":
"Historical comparison with imagery of previous technological landscapes fires the imagination. It is also the stuff of argument and defence for an idea or a project (...) The rationale to looking closely into the early history of current dominant systems relates (...) to challenging the commonplace idea that the marketplace sorts out the 'best' technology and that the consumer and society are the beneficiaries. (...) the 'alternatives paths' or 'roads not taken' historians examine the effects on society (and increasingly the environment) of having lost a potentially viable system - technology opportunity cost.
After mentioning some examples such as FM radio, Rogers goes on with:
"When new and 'better' technological systems are trumpeted, it is worth recalling these and other specific examples of lost battles, from the level of abstractions of craft versus mass production down to that of keyboard layout. In confronting better technologies of the future, the question always remains 'better for whom'?"
And then some more elaborate thoughts about how past futures are used or can be relevant:
"The Nineties [case for space exploration] also shows us how earlier models (relevant pasts) are employed as 'guides' to make current futuristic cases more compelling. To make a case for a futuristic technological project, the promoter often must finds 'usable pasts' or indeed 'usable past futures'. (...) We learn the past futures for at least two reason. They aid us in thinking through the ideals, principles and social relations which have been and could be reflected in and designed into our technologies, bringing within our grasp the ability to 'imagine alternative technological designs' and act accordingly. Secondly, comparison is the stuff of case building. Drawing the right parallel (or spotting the spurious analogy) is one step in proposing or opposing particular cases to be made for new technology and new forms of decision-making on technology."
Why do I blog this? collecting material for a project about technological failures. I am interested in the role of failures in foresight and design. Rogers describes some pertinent ideas about how failed futures can frame design, and the intrinsically political imaginary realm of this practice.
Encountered this afternoon in Grenoble France, in a café where the WiFi was available for 2 euros (no time restriction) and electricity for 1 euro:
The price tag on the power plug is amazingly contextualized.
There's a topic I rarely discuss here: how we work on the program of the LIFT conferences. With 3 editions in Geneva, a small event in Seoul and the LIFT Asia in CheJu next september, a long list of speakers has been booked. Since I am in charge of that part, it's always interesting to shed some light about we handle that part of the conference.
So how does that work? Well, it's not so much of a formal process as it's a combination of the LIFT coreteam daily observation of the Tech world and a discussion with members from our board as well as local advisers. The daily dose of newsfeeds, magazine reads, meetings with researchers, designers, entrepreneurs, public institutions lead us to add names of relevant people in a database we called "LIFT parking". This is mostly coordinated by myself and approved by the coreteam with recommendations coming from the LIFT team, the LIFT board, some partners/friends who reads specific resources (and get a free subscription and LIFT entrance) and of course local contacts who keep us posted about who is intriguing, pertinent and interesting in other part of the world such as South Korea, China, Japan. In the future we'd like to open this to new contacts from other countries in Latin America and of course Africa. Finally, the suggestion part of the website allows people from the community to suggest names and topics.
7-8 month before the event, we start cobbling our notes, potential speaker names and list of topics so that we can discuss the main theme and subtopics for the conference. This allows us to narrow down the list of potential speakers. Board members also suggest speakers at this time.
Quite enjoyed reading future perfect's rationale in this interview:
"Your blog Future Perfect ("about the collision of people, society and technology") includes a lot of your musings about what you see on your travels, but poses more questions that it answers.I'm pretty bad at shoehorning life into what amounts to lifeless journal and conference submissions. I mean, how do you take the essence of what's out there, the richness of life, and put it on paper? I don't think you can. The motivation behind the blog is that I do something that totally fascinates me, and I'm lucky to be well resourced and to work with very talented people. I want to be able to communicate some of that. It's not about saying what the answers are; it's about asking the questions and maybe some of those will stick in people's minds and they'll ask those questions in their own contexts."
Why do I blog this? it's always interesting to get people's motivation behind what they're doing... Also, I like the idea of "asking questions" to inform design.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter's author) about the importance of failure in her Commencement Address at Harvard:
"What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. (...) Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. (...) So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. (...) Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. (...) The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."
There are also some great parts about to confront oneself to others and other cultures ("How much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives?). Why do I blog this? collecting resources about failures for a book project.
A weird keyhole which needs more information about what sense to turn the key ("ouvrir" in french means "open"):
And an elegant solution to the "elevator button issue": how to know which of the "up" and "down" button to choose: what's the underlying rationale? what's the referential? the elevator that you want to come down? or yourself who wants to go up? A basic caption with "to go up" near the button is a good fix.
Innovation vs. Invention by Bill Buxton is short but really full of great insights that sums up lots of interesting ideas about innovation. First about the innovation process:
"the difference between ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’. The closer one gets to Route 128 in Boston and Silicon Valley, the more it seems that people confuse the two. Too often the obsession is with ‘inventing’ something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative understanding of what is already known. Too often ,the obsession is with ‘inventing’something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative. (...) The key thing to note is that the average time from invention to market was 20-plus years. So much for fast moving tech sector! Which brings us to one of the most insightful quotes that I have encountered, from William Gibson: “The future is already here. It is just not uniformly distributed.” Here is the business lesson: innovation is far more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value to ‘gold’ than it is about alchemy. Rather than focusing on the invention of the ‘brand new’, one might better strive for creative insights on how to combine, develop and leverage"
Then about design:
"So now we come to the big debate: who is a designer, and who should be a designer? Don Norman.It has an epilogue entitled, “We Are All Designers”. To this I say, “Nonsense!” (...) it was not enough to simply have great ideas.If you wanted the ideas to come to fruition,you had to spend as much time directing your innovation and creativity to fostering a culture of creativity and a receptiveness to innovation within the company, as you spend on the ideas themselves. "
Why do I blog this? preparing a course for tomorrow about foresight and innovation in a french design school.
Having the Euro soccer cup in Switzerland (and Austria) is interesting as lots of people are cruising around on the streets. Hence, lots of interesting practices or signs of people's practices occurs. Some excerpts from the last few days:
Paper notes at a street corner to give friends an update about the new whereabouts (it says "We're at café pessoa, 30 meters ahead in Dassier [street]":
The hospitality of some places however reach certain limits, as "tents are not umbrella" sign attest from the need to buy an umbrella when it rains instead of staying around:
The inherent contradictions of signs in a city not very well-accustomed to helps its tourists (Geneva):
BUT, a fruitful attempt to help soccer-fans takes the form of a pavement map; nicely employed in the picture below. The elegant map-on-the-ground solution is efficient for people who walk and ride bike, as it gives information in context and also allows congregation around the signs to find the stadium:
And, of course, when it comes to computer-based real-time street information, failure and glitches are never very far:
The presence of other cultures, and their intricate relationships with their host country. In this case it's Spain and Switzerland: some only put their spanish flag but most of the flag we see are grouped with both a swiss and spanish flag (you can replace Spain with Portugal, Italy, Turkey and France in the sentence before):
Why do I blog this? what a nice context to observe cultural issues and whatever can be related to human behavior regarding mobility and techniques/technologies/organizational solutions for recurring problems.
(Via Small Surfaces), this "Do humans really need location based services?" is interesting at it covers some of the questions I am wondering about when it comes to the potential of LBS. An excerpt I found intriguing:
"Even though I am confident that there will certainly be significant growth in some areas (i.e. vehicle tracking, in-car traffic information) I doubt that someday everyone will be using Google’s "Search nearby" feature to find the next ATM, restaurant or supermarket.Even though mobility and travel has increased tremendously, the majority of people still roam in just a few locations and in general they do not move far from home. Vacations and business travel are exceptions - the percentage of time individuals spend in locations they don’t know is very small. (...) I strongly believe that there will be a market for location based services. Nevertheless I think one has to shift focus from the technical possibilities that GPS-enabled, connected mobile devices potentially offer. The key is to understand the potential users of these location-based services in order to be able to find the next "location-based killer app"."
What I find intriguing here is the coupling of the need for LBS and the recent results about people's mobility showed in the last issue of Nature. It seems indeed that apart from navigational LBS (in-car GPS), other applications (such as location-based annotations and friend finders) are failing to find a user base.
Why do I blog this? interesting elements to be added to my list of LBS issues that I presented at O'Reilly ETech 2008 (see my slides on Slideshare). Although there are more and more "yet another LBS" projects recently, i am also noticing that people increasingly start to raise eye-brows about it (see for example Joe MacCarthy's blogpost about meetro) 2007 was about the delusion of the non-satNAV LBS pioneers and 2008 start to get some interesting criticisms and afterthoughts about LBS.
Interestingly, one of the comment of this blogpost is about the fact that "the title is intriguing as it suggests that there might be someone else (machines, m2m, the web of things) who will make use of LBS more than we will do (location-based APIs?)". As it surely connects with 2006 discussions about blogjects or the idea of "new interaction partners" (the presence of pets in the internet of things).
In the CatchBob! project, the location-based game I used for my PhD research, players often reported the encounter with other persons puzzled by the presence of running people with TabletPCs. The general reaction of passers-by seemed to range between ignoring the game to asking players about how to participate in trials. However, the physical environment is an overlap of lots of activities carried out by different groups and individuals, which can be conflicting. In one trial, two players tried to visit one of the campus library and the janitor forbid them to enter the building carrying out the game TabletPCs. This kind of phenomenon unfortunately undermines the engagement of players in the game, turning the experience into something less fun to achieve. This problem has been investigated by researchers, as shown by this warning quote from one of the deliverable from the European iPerg project entitled "Designing Pervasive Games":
"Pervasive games introduce an important problem: when a game is expanded, the bystanders do not always have the means to distinguish game events from the non-game events. However, regardless of whether they know or don’t know about the game, they perhaps should have a choice pertaining the mode of attendance, i.e., they should be given chance to play, or ignore the game and appreciate it as an art artefact, or view it as a morastatement. Otherwise, the game is can lead to ethical and practical problems. (...) Whether unaware or aware of an ongoing game, bystanders have no intention or opportunity to participate in it or at least no opportunity to do so. Here, we probably find the most challenging effects of social expansion. Socially unexpanded games are typically completely insulated from bystanders: they are not affected by the game (even if aware of it) and they have no influence over the game."
Why do i blog this? The presence of bystanders in some pervasive games or ARG is interesting as it shows how the notion of "user" in ubiquitous computing is flawed. Unlike face-to-face (so to say) interactions with a desktop computer, ubicomp/pervasive computing/internet of things can lead to situations where people experience non-intentional participation in services/events they did not want to be engaged in.
If pervasive games can take this into account and not affect people' life, other ubicomp applications can be less careful about it. What am I thinking about? perhaps applications which tracks individuals and propose them services without any consent form the user (to be tracked or to receive services s/he does not want to receive).
Last thursday/friday, I was in Brittany for an seminar called "Imagine 2015", the annual gathering of companies from the Media and Network companies from there (France Telecom/Orange, Alcatel-Lucent, Thomson, Philips, etc.). The point of such event is to discuss the future of networks and what it means for these organizations in terms of foresight, change and (of course) possible new products/services. I was invited as an expert (a "witness" as they call it) to present various things related to my work (user experience research results, foresight issues that I find interesting and work practices related to the use of digital tools). Thanks for Jean-Noel and Christiane for the invitation. Instead of giving a summary of the event, I am more interested here in the process and how people answers the questions we addressed. The starting points were (sort-of): "according to you what interesting thing will we see from now to 2015?" and since they are focused on networks: "what does network allow? what are the implications of networks?"
Given that I participate in other seminars in the same vein (some pretty focused on a clear goal, like Lyon 2013, some other more speculative such as Cinum), I always find relevant to observe what are the arguments employed by the experts (and the crowd) to answers foresight questions ("what do you think will happen from now to 20XX?"). I've tried to make a raw-and-not-exhaustive list here of what I observe as being used:
Why do I blog this? preparing a course about foresight and innovation, I am listing the "sources" for foresight analysis. The notion of data to draw scenarios for the future is something I am always been intrigued about. Feel free to add things to the list, which is definitely not exhaustive.
What I find interesting is to confront the types of arguments described in the literature and those employed in seminar/conferences, not really to evaluate which are more powerful to persuade others, rather to understand which emerge spontaneously.
Spotted in CDG airport yesterday in France, this Nintendo DS and its lovely book-like affordance which make the user taking the same posture as when perusing a book. The dual-display device offers an interesting affordance for book reading. And, researchers have found how such setting is relevant to improve the reading experience: it has indeed been found that users of dual-display ebook readers benefits from local navigation and applicability to multi-document interactions when using two displays.
After 5 years blogging in english, and considering that part of my network (friends, colleagues, clients, etc.) are french, I found interesting to experiment with a blog en français. Since I don't have tons of time, i picked up a tumblr and chose to post short things when I have time, some similar to here, some different depending on my mood. It's called +41nteraction and will revolved around the same thing as P&V.
The E have a short piece about the GPS Letter Logger, an interesting shrunken GPS device to track small things such as letters:
"The Letter Logger can be programmed to check its position every few minutes, over longer intervals, or only when a built-in motion detector senses movement, says Jude Daggett, of TrackingTheWorld. The journey log is stored on a standard micro-SD memory card to make it simple to use without any special software. This allows the log to be read by a laptop computer and displayed as a journey on Google Earth, the software giant’s popular world-mapping software. The inability to transmit does not greatly detract from its usefulness: if the probe’s log showed, for instance, that the envelope it was inside crawled along Interstate 405 before turning off to Los Angeles International Airport where, after a short delay, it suddenly zoomed off to Phoenix Sky Harbour, then it probably went by air."
Why do I blog this? my curiosity towards how miniature devices like this are now more and mores available. It echoes well with Christian's post about 8Gb mini SD card. Small is common although we still have to carry big battery chargers...
A quick post about the latest project by my former Media and Design Lab boss: Jef Huang and his wife Muriel Waldvogel: the newscocoon project:
"Newscocoons is a set of pulsating furniture objects that display news - user-generated videoclips, pictures, stories, blogs - fed from geographically dispersed sources. The cocoons glow and breath slowly. Each cocoon tracks specific keywords (such as “body,” “emotive,” “recombinant,” “alienation,” “reality,” etc.), and aggregates content tagged accordingly, created locally and over the Internet, by amateurs and professionals. The global shape of Newscocoons is constantly in flux, emerging from the particular constellation and intensity of information flows from the various sources. (...) The ambition for Newscocoon is to create a new kind of furniture for news consumption, one that breathes news, has a memory and fosters social interaction in the form of co-zapping."
Why do I blog this? what I find curious in this project is the notion of pulsation with fed information and the importance of a threshold where physically it gives the impression of "when the eminent danger of an explosion becomes unbearable".(and yes of course it's easy because I love inflatable stuff). The co-zapping feature is also innovative.
Wandering around the interwebs to look for curious content, I ran across this interesting short paper by Basile Zimmerman: "When the Chinese Teach Us What Technology is Really About" (ESSHRA International Conference 2007, Towards a Knowledge Society: Is Knowledge a Public Good?). The paper uses the example of dedicated software that allows to turn things written on ASCII keyboard in Chinese (See the image above) and employs it as metaphor to investigate the relationships between computer technology and society. Some excerpts I found intriguing:
"To build on Akrich and Latour’s famous model of the door-closer, If a technical object is used, and if its content cannot be modified by its user, its content will be –during its use– imposed on the user. (...) If one is given chopsticks to eat an ice cream, who should be blamed? The waiter, the ice cream, or the chopsticks? For many Chinese today, it is the ice cream. After over three thousand years of use, I hear today’s Chinese computer users, including engineers, confronted to alphabet-encoded difficulties, complain on a daily basis that “the Chinese script is not convenient.”
Fortunately, for many reasons, the Chinese characters will not disappear soon. Attempts to abolish them have been made in the past and failed miserably. Besides, China is currently investing billions in science and technology innovation. Its computer industry is growing at an amazing speed and the first computers with homegrown Chinese processors came out this year. Graphic tablets and competing interface systems, better suited to the Chinese script, are under constant development. How will computer technology look on the day it was re-invented by the Chinese to fit their own needs? "
Why do I blog this? Browsing material when preparing the upcoming LIFT Asia conference makes me encounter intriguing types of research (from Geneva though). Although I am not a great fan of the "how technology impact society" meme (preferring the more complex notion of co-evolution or intertwined relationships), I found this topic intriguing from a more general perspective, beyond current research projects. The same question can be asked for OS or cloud computing apps.
Doing ethnographical research about game controllers and carrying out home visit makes me encounter very curious assemblage like the one above. How to turn a chair into a speedy car-simulation seat where the player seats on the back, spread the leg and pump pedals to the maximum.
A very intriguing made-up controller for car simulation that reveals how people tend to modify devices to their convenience. The creative use of duct-tape to enhance the digital experience is interesting to document as a way to find out opportunities to design both physical peripherals and digital counterparts.
In his Language of Interaction talk at Interaction08, Bill DeRouchey addresses an interesting issue: how people learn how to use technology from other technology. Given the quantity of consumer electronics that surround us, people become more tech-savvy and learn from experience with other products, it then turns into expectations about how a new device will function. As DeRouchey points out:
"When we figure out a new product, we look for familiar visual cues to guide us, elements that we have seen before in other products and have learned in the past. It’s very natural and normal: we learn from experience. Our brains are always looking for the patterns in what we see, trying to find the consistency, looking for the language. We subconsciously latch onto the most familiar interface elements and construct the instructions from there. (...) Washing machines from companies like LG now use the play/pause icon. Even though it originally meant make the tape play, when someone encounters a right-pointing triangle and two vertical bars on a washing machine, without any accompanying labels, they immediately understand that it means start and stop, because they’ve learned that from other technology."
A relevant example here is the one described in "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" (Christian Lindholm, Turkka Keinonen) which describes the design rationale for a past Nokia interface:
"Consumers knew arrows from several other devices such as remote control (...) The C-Key /c for clearing) was also considered intuitive. It was very well known from previous Nokia phones and from all calculators. Only later did we discover a drawback - because our concept lacked a SEND key, users also found it intuitive to understand C as call"
Why do I blog this? no big theory here but some relevant practical point and example, showing the conscious effort by interaction designers to rely on past knowledge and expectations.
Directly connected to my earlier post about the interface transition from common artifacts to new one.