A curious prototyping device for hairdresser students... sort of uncommon to see teenagers hanging around with chopped off head in train station.
Why do I blog this? fascination towards objects that can be employed as prototyping devices. Certainly to be contrasted with this one.
It seems that people wanted to combine toys and robots for quite a long time, as attested by this intriguing dog-shaped vacuum cleaner patented in 1972:
"A toy dog closely resembling a real dog and having a hollow interior in which is mounted a vacuum cleaner having a suction hose which is retractable from the tail end of the dog. This enables vacuuming a dog after a hair cut and grooming without causing fear to the dog, inasmuch as the vacuum cleaner noise is greatly muffed by such enclosure. The vacuum cleaner is convertible to a blower and air issuing from the tail end can be heated so as to serve as a dryer."
why do I blog this? curiosity towards robots and their combination with familiar representations. The dog is interesting as it is a pet (easily acceptable by owners) but it's curious to think about a furry device to clean things up. It's also pertinent to see the time taken by this sort of artifacts to be adopted... in the end with roombas which are a bit more minimalist.
Topic addressed during lunch with Etienne Mineur in a nice italian restaurant.
Or... the intriguing settings of the numeric keypads on the iPhone.
Yes "keypads" is plural because there are two layouts:
Why two layouts? For a reason I explained here already: this basic interface evolved from two different culture, which are the calculators culture (started with Felt and Tarrant’s Comptometer) and the telephone keypad.
Why do I blog this? What we have here is a tremendously interesting example of an interface clash between two design cultures. It's highly intriguing to see that it has not been made more cohesive. Perhaps both layouts are so sticky that it would be weird to unify them? Who's ready to change that?
In the last issue of Vodafone's Receiver, there is an article by Anne Galloway about environmental sensing projects. Anne gives a quick summary of some meaningful citizen sensing and community mapping projects such as Proboscis' Snout, Preemptive Media's AIR or Beatriz da Costa's pigeon blog. These different endeavors generally aims at collecting and viewing a wide array of location-based data to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. They want to do so by (1) engaging people in collecting information about their environments, (2) revealing invisible phenomena such as pollution.
(Pigeon Blog maps)
What's more interesting to me is Anne's perspective about that matter:
"What all these exploratory projects have in common is a shared expectation that mobile sensing technologies can be effectively used to effect social or political change. (...) For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. (...) While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve. (...) While it may be accurate to point out the ubiquity of mobile phone use, it is also worthwhile to account for how new technological applications stand to impact those who are absent from typical-use scenarios. Furthermore, while promoting public science is undeniably a laudable goal, it is also a rather complex one. Despite the emphasis on local knowledge production in such projects, the data collected still speak the global language of science. By implicitly supporting the notion that scientific data are the appropriate types of evidence a citizen can collect, political action relies on conformity to existing structures of knowledge and power. (...) Finally, this complexity is further compounded by the capacity (or incapacity) of people to make sense of the data collected, not to mention their willingness (or unwillingness) to act as data collectors in the first place."
Why do I blog this? currently writing a book about locative media and working in the field for quite some time now, I am more and more interested in "reality mining" and "people as sensors" (intentionally or while using their own electronic devices). I find quite intriguing that what is sensed is often related to negative phenomena (such as pollution) and it's rare to see other variables. Anne's arguments here are spot on the critiques one can make about this people-as-sensor frenziness. What I appreciate here is that she doesn't "jetter le bébé avec l'eau du bain": a french expression that literally means "not throwing the baby with the bath's water", that is to say that she describes the problems with regards to this approach whilst not dismissing the purpose. Accounting for the problems of reality mining allows to know one's bias:
"I also believe that we need to approach our activities in this area with a clear understanding of their boundaries and biases. Because, in the end, I believe that it will take working through – or around – these limitations in order to effect the most profound and lasting changes."
She then takes Chris Nold's Biomapping project as a project that both take environmental and social concerns into account properly.
Don't think I posted it here but this initiative about mapping and analyzing design process is of tremendous value. Hugh Dubberly collected "over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes, from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development". All this material is a great way to understand how people design and how they describe what they do. The process are often presented in a "designerly" way, mostly with graphics and process representations.
Why do I blog this? material for teaching as well as my interest towards representing designers' process. A must read.
What? A quickly found picture to celebrate the 5000th post on this blog.
By Pierre la Police of course, depicting an imaginary sport elec competition.
Weird devices, electricity and strange people. Surely a good summary of this blog.
Finally managed to get some time to write down my notes from the conference I attended last week in Paris. Called "Mobilisable" and organized at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the conference was both a scientific and art event about focused on mobility and the hybridization of technologies, environments, objects and people. The whole point of the event was to highlight and illustrate the current mutations at stake in interaction design, new media art and new mapping forms.
The first session was about relational cartographies, maps and mobilities.
Boris Beaude started off by describing the problems to visualize mobility on maps. Some of them are due to the inherent characteristics of maps:
This is why most of the map depict means of transport, instead of mobilities. In addition, geographers like Boris are experimenting a shift in map design: they try to represent the "space of individuals". He showed results from a project called Scalab in which they asked people to describe their own mobility and map the results on graphics. This type of visualizations allows to show different set of practices. He also talked about projects such as Real Time Rome or Facebook Palantir to show how this sort of visualizations of maps is a evolution of mobilities, that spatial practices are different and that art is inteing as it manages to uncover new forms of representations beyond what geographers are building.
Then Philippe Vasset talked about an interesting book he just wrote about holes in maps: the white spaces you can find on maps where nothing is represented. He explored different white spaces in Paris area, documenting what sort of stuff you can find there.
(Map produced by Bureau d'Etude about the crisis in Argentina)
And finally, Bureau d'Etudes showed their different projects and the underlying rationale or process to design them. Their objective is to represent the world and its components with a subjective approach using visualizations tools and abstract maps. They discussed how this kind of representations have an important critical component. They basically focus on creating informational maps whose purpose is to visually represent different facets of contemporary capitalism: corporations, industrial and financial or influential groups.
(The conference leaflet annotated by my chinese neighbor)
The next session was about "pervasive art", i.e. how artists and designers envision the internet of things as well as ubiquitous computing. Lalya Gaye, Usman Haque and myself discussed the role of these practitioners in the field.
As a first speaker, I showed why and how designers and new media artists are paving the way for the near future. After a quick introduction of ubiquitous computing and a description of the current challenges, the other part of the talk was a rerun of my why art/design is meaningful to HCI research.
The second speaker, Lalya Gaye gave a great presentation about audio projects in urban environment. What was highly inspiring was that she grounded the discussion about these projects (hers as well as some made by others) in a very relevant design rationale:
She presented various audio projects built on these principles and concluded with this intriguing question: "what if the augmentation of objects and activities through this process may change the initial meaning of these? Do we get rid of the original object's signification?".
Finally, Usman Haque gave a great a talk (in french!) about his projects to show four key ideas:
Why do I blog this my notes from this insightful sessions. Good material from interesting speakers. Some good things to sleep on and re-inject in current projects.
Thanks Samuel Bianchini for the invitation.
Two intriguing examples of prototyping in the urban environment. The two pictures above (taken in Geneva and Lyon) depict another form of trying to represent the upcoming colors of a building. Different colors are presented (stand-alone or with a combination of others) to the people who will take a decision.
The pictures below that I've already shown here is a basic model of how a soon-to be skyscraper would look like in Zürich, Switzerland. An intriguing steel structure that represents the volume which will be occupied soon by a new building.
Different range of representations using shapes and color. Although the color example quite minimally shows the future of the building, the steel structure is impressive.
Why do I blog this? interesting documentation of a certain design process and how certain elements can be prototyped to evaluate people's reaction to a certain change. These elements acts as a sort of prototyping the near future of the urban fabric using shape and color probes. Very important in terms of user acceptation since colors and huge shapes can be problematic for city-dwellers (say, in continental europe).
Tangentially, it also shows that physical and situated artifacts can also be employed to design the city of tomorrow. It doesn't mean however that digital techniques such as 3D modeling or augmented reality cannot be employed.
More about present and near future sci-fi with this interview of Cory Doctorow in The Guardian. It practically addresses "why he's not interested in predicting the future using science fiction, but influencing it". Doctorow describes himself as a "presentist", that is to say someone who writes metaphorically about the present (something every sci-fi writer do as he points out) and therefore "comment on the now" to "extrapolate the future". He then contrasts this with other forms of engagement with reality:
"The job of a science fiction writer, historically, has been to understand how technology and social factors interact," he says, "how technology is changing society. An activist's job is to try to direct that change."
Why do I blog this? simply find intriguing this sort of meme lately about the "near future". It's therefore interesting to observe what sci-fi has to say about it: an intriguing locus of interaction between the social and technologies. The reason why I am digging this down lately is that fiction plays an important role in both shaping our imagination towards various inventions and setting up the scenes about possible alternatives.
An intriguing aspect noticed at the Design Biennial the other day concerns the status of objects presented in design exhibit. Most of the objects have warning signs forbidding people to touch/use/employ/walk on/sit on artifacts. However since most of the objects have clear affordances and are quite successful as calling for their own use... people cannot help using them (design success uh?). Which leads to pictures like the one above and below with foot traces here and there on some pieces.
Plus, given the huge quantity of kids there, this sort of audience inevitably wants and needs to touch artifacts.
As a matter of fact, I find this extremely interesting as a person intrigued by usage and the passage of time (generally synonymous of dirt, dust and rusted pieces). What do people think at the end of the exhibit? Is the quantity of dirt a measure of success ("ah the affordance of this couch is so great that it's trashed by now").
This week, I finally took some time to attend the Design Biennale in Saint Etienne, France. In this post, I tried to gather my thoughts about what I've learned there. Before starting off, I should perhaps point out that I am not that familiar with such events, having perhaps a different take on design per se. In my discovery of design as a domain, I tried to sketch down my impression here.
My first comment simply goes to the biennale setting. I am often struck and very intrigued by the environment where design and art exhibit are located: the place itself and its history is sometimes more intriguing to me than what's exhibited. This is why I was really mesmerized by the place where the Biennale happens. It's basically a huge and old manufacture, the former Manufrance and L'Arsenal buildings. Simply put, it's where both consumer goods (and weapons) use to be produced till the 1970s in France. Huge industrial buildings with weird lights, alleys and concrete stonewall. You can even encounter some remnants from the past, in the form of old signage or dirty windows. What's at stake here is that this building (which is going to become the french "Cité du design") bears lots of meaning in terms of the french industrial history. It thus gives a certain framing, at least for me, to the whole exhibit.
Now, regarding the exhibit itself, I did not have time to have a look at everything since the whole event is quite big. My general impression is that it was sort of messy with a lot of different sub-exhibits. Down the road, it was sometimes a bit confusing but I guess it's what happen when you have different curators who want to bring forward different perspectives. No problem with that. There are of course lots of colorful and weirdly shaped objects that I don't know what to think: cushions, weird chairs and tables, futuristic objects with ugly fluo-colors and stuff... this is an aspect of "design" that I don't really understand (not to mention the personification of the people who produces these artefacts). What's weird here is that in french, the word "design" is now commonly used as an adjective to refer to stylish-and-snub objects bought (or loved) by some folks. Certain parts of the exhibit may have been targeted to this crowd, familiar with the whole literature about colorful and expensive crap, but it was less present than what I feared beforehand.
Another general impression was also bound to the french system of museums and exhibits: I went there on a week day and it was crowded... with kids. It's indeed very common in France for schools to organize visit for their pupils and most of the museums rely on this audience. Of course kids are so-so with long exhibit but I found interesting that they can approach the field like this, with teachers and design students giving them some information about the context and what the artefacts mean. Don't know whether it may shape their design culture but still.
Among the large variety of I was particularly interested by three places/sub-exhibits: EcoLab, the "Demain c'est aujourd'hui" ("Tomorrow is today") and Jean-Louis Fréchin carte blanche by Via. Let me try to nail down the implications of these.
In "Fabrique 5000", The City Eco lab, orchestrated by John Thackara, was a huge and fascinating temporary "event about city-regions and design that includes permaculture, mushrooms, spin-farming, fritzing, open money, peak protein, alternative trade networks, dry toilets, sustainable urban drainage, alternate reality games, watershed planning, seed banks, de-motorisation, and VeloWalas".
What was important here, especially at a design biennial, is simply the idea that it's not about products (be they green or not) but about people and practices. Creating a more sustainable way of life is indeed not just about turning anything into green stuff but certainly changing people's habits and practices. Therefore, the important issue at stake for design lies in the role of designers (and artists): what is left when innovation should be less about adding new products to the stack of artifacts we have? Eco Lab answers this by showing real-life solutions that have been envisioned. It was all about low-energy food storage solution, recycling practices, new forms of mobilities, new economic models, local trading schemes, community supported agriculture, urban gardening, the re-connection of cities with their natural resources and of course (we're in France) a great canteen that only served products sourced within a 80km radius.
I have to admit that although I support this approach, I have never approached these issues in my work (perhaps because I haven't found any context to do so) but it seems highly motivating. Perhaps the sort of stuff that I am doing (studying how people do things) may be valuable for this sort of approach: documenting habits, uncovering practices and weak signals, people's daily bricolage, etc. and turn them into insights about sustainable behavior that should be amplified or act as inspiration for designers. City Eco Lab also interestingly proposed real-time activities (lots of kids!) and discussions. It was certainly one of the liveliest event in the whole biennial. Finally, it was tremendously inspiring to see this thing and envision some possibilities of sorta "real time/living lab" where solution can be explored, and not necessarily with technologies. I liked this a-technological approach which highlight the fact that innovation can also be social (with process and collaboration between people and existing artifacts).
The next event I looked at carefully was the "Demain c'est aujourd'hui" ("Tomorrow is today". Described as an "industrial prospective exhibition", it presented a selection of objects, prototypes, videos and mock-ups about the near future. The whole set sort of exemplified how design can be used a tool in foresight and strategy. Although I was not convinced by some projects (perhaps because I've seen them elsewhere), some were intriguing and could be described as good landmarks. What was kinda weird there, was this fascination with the "electronification" of everything. "The intelligent pillarbox" was the sort of stereotype for that matter.
That said, one of the most intriguing one was certainly the Wablog (see above) by Jean-Louis Fréchin and Uros Petrevski. This device allows to turn yourself in an avatar using gestural interactions to get and show presence-awareness. You can also leave "traces" on different platforms such as twitter, facebook, flickr and blogs as well as being aware of connections/comments by others on the very platforms. Very low-tech and minimal, designed with arduino and processing, it's an intriguing piece of object.
This leads me to the other work of Jean-Louis and Uros, that they presented in a separate exhibit that was called "Interface(s)" enabled by VIA.
It's a set of objects called "objets relationnels" that explore how the objects we know at home (light, wallpaper, shelves) can become interfaces. The point is that computation is present but not necessarily visible, as it's dissolved in the device. It's also about mixing ancient and modern material. Technology is not important per se, it's sits here only to create relationships between objects and people or between people/the environment.
Five objects were presented:
All of them are clever instantiations of ubiquitous computing where computing vanished and is smoothly integrated to the object fabric. Interesting integration of technologies in objects. The proximity of these different interfaces in the same room makes the experience very coherent and gives a certain flavor of a possible "near near future". It was actually more relevant to me than the "demain c'est aujourd'hui" exhibit with this nearfuturistic sense.
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?
Obama is ubiquitous in France. Beyond press articles, he is present in street art (Saint Etienne) but more interestingly as a bait or as weird cue to buy things such clothes (Paris) or pizzas (Paris):
Why do I blog this? not very related to the topics at hand here but this sort of pervasiveness is intriguing. Obama is clearly a meme spread in the physical environment. Perhaps it can show how people have certain hopes or want to benefit from the Zeitgeist.
CCTV camera turned into birds' nest. Seen at the Design Biennale in Saint Etienne, France.
Will be in Paris tomorrow at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) to give a talk as part of conference called Mobilisable. I'll be in the "pervasive art" session around 7pm along with Samuel Bianchini, Lalya Gaye and Usman Haque. Mobilisable is a conference about research and artistique creation with mobile and locative media. It is “a project of the research program « Forms of Mobility ». It is directed by the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and the Université Paris 8 in cooperation with the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Toulouse, the Haute école d’art et de design-Genève and the Tokyo University of the Arts.
The whole thing is free but certainly in french. Here's the description of the session:
"Environment, performance, « in situ », body art, … far from restricting itself to the object, contemporary art has long since conquered all sorts of spaces and situations. As mobile, diffuse and interconnected devices are increasingly operated, this development is still growing. Contemporary art seems to merge with the new informational ubiquitous paradigms of the « everyware ». The communicating objects are leaving their object status behind, as they reduce in size and invade more and more diffuse situations in our environment, by grafting onto ordinary objects that can also be worn (« wearable technology ») or even by being implanted in our bodies. If the first ones mentioned are not necessarily mobile, the second ones are, since they accompany us in each and every movement. And all of these are able to communicate and to create networks ad hoc, which are continually reconfigured. In this way, our public, professional and private spheres will soon be invaded. Which artistic form can be given to these devices and to their applications ? Between « ambient intelligence » and society of access and/or of control, how can the artist take a position regarding these new forms of hybrid networks ? How can he put in place, infiltrate or even exfiltrate these mobile and diffuse technologies ?"
Will talk about why, as a researcher in the ubicomp area, I am interested in what artists are doing, and how it helps the field to move forward.
People interested in hybridized ecologies (how the digital and the physical can be interlinked) and how they can be designed in weird ways may be interested to have a look at Julian's pictures from a workshop carried out at the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto last week.
There is also a report about this topic but it's not accessible to the public.
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.
The first issue of Design Research Quarterly features the above map that represents the "topography of design research" (made by Liz Sanders).
She basically mapped the different approaches to design research based on two dimensions:
The visualization of the different methods and approaches allows to represent different clusters of activity (human factors/ergonomics, applied ethnography, usability testing). You can also read an update of this article in the last issue of ACM interactions.
Why do I blog this? an interesting mapping to be used in my course about UX research. Coming from the user-centered design cluster (ergonomics mostly but now doing applied ethnography), it took me a lot of time to get the global picture represented on this representation. It also took me some time to understand the underlying issues and struggles between the different perspectives as most of them are grounded in different vision of what humans beings are and why they do what they do.
Reading this article in The Economist about some problems encountered by scientific research, I stumble across this intriguing paragraph:
"There also seems to be a bias towards publishing positive results. For instance, a study earlier this year found that among the studies submitted to America’s Food and Drug Administration about the effectiveness of antidepressants, almost all of those with positive results were published, whereas very few of those with negative results were. But negative results are potentially just as informative as positive results, if not as exciting."
Why do I blog this? That's surely a problem I encountered when writing during my PhD work. It's funny to notice this bias, especially when you know the value of negative results. It's clearly true that there is a tendency to prefer selling "positive" experimental results than negative ones... which are in general less described.
Being interested in UX research, I also draw a parallel between this example and the sort of things we are looking for in user research: most of the work is about usage (what people do with/without technology), but it's also important to consider what people don't do. There are surely some relevant questions to ask concerning what shows up and what doesn't show up in field research.
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.