Some surfaces are more attractive than others

Stickers and graffitis are now common on lots of urban surfaces. On this example found in Venice, Los Angeles, some surfaces are, interestingly, more attractive than others. Although the height of each sign is almost similar, the "stop" sign clearly receives more inscription than the street name plate. Is it because the red sign corresponds to an authoritative order (that should be regarded with mockery)? Or simply that the size of the sign is a better affordance?

Build your own burger

Personalized food composition seems to be pervasive lately, as exemplified by the "build your own burger" encountered in Palo Alto two weeks ago. Still looking forward a more participative steps in which the customer could be even more engaged.

From HCI to UX

Some excerpts from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) by John M. Carroll that I considered relevant for my research:

"To a considerable extent, HCI now aggregates a collection of semi-distinct fields of research and practice in human-centered informatics. (...) HCI has produced a dramatic example of how different epistemologies and paradigms can be reconciled and integrated. (...) There is no unified concept of an HCI professional. In the 1980s, people often contrasts the cognitive science side of HCI with the software tools and user interface side of HCI. The HCI landscape is far more differentiated and complex now. (...) One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation (...) Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. (...) Somewhat ironically, designers were welcomed into the HCI community just in time to help remake it as a design discipline. A large part of this transformation was the creation of design disciplines that did not exist before. For example, user experience design and interaction design were not imported into HCI, but rather were among the first exports from HCI to the design world. Design is currently the facet of HCI in most rapid flux."

Why do I blog this? some interesting historical elements here about the evolution of HCI, although it's clearly partial, mostly focusing on material, communities and conferences from UK/North America and a bit of Scandinavia.

IKEA hardware hacking

IKEA furniture hacking has always been an intriguing topic to me. Thinking that people would use IKEA artifacts and repurpose them to create original and personalized objects is strikingly interesting and important. I was therefore curious to read more about how people would treat this hardware as raw material for creative project in this CHI 2009 paper called "Learning from IKEA Hacking: “Iʼm Not One to Decoupage a Tabletop and Call It a Day" by Daniela Rosner and Jonathan Bean. The article describes the motivations for IKEA hacking and analyses the implication of information technology for DIY practices. Some excerpts I found interesting:

"the actual act of it is pretty satisfying too—the measuring, the cutting… there is definitely an added dimension of satisfaction if there is no template.” Another participant suggested he views the creative work involved with IKEA hacking as distinct from the challenges of his job. “I'm not a ‘real’ builder, I'm a web designer,” he reported. This sense of haptic satisfaction (...) IKEA hacking is partially an appropriation of the cultural meaning of IKEA. One participant said that IKEA had “no style,” explaining when pressed that “there's style but style is lost when too many people buy the same brand,” and others seem to like the ironic idea of using IKEA products in unintended ways. (...) IKEA hackers provide fascinating insights into the quickly shrinking division between the online world of bits and the material world of everyday stuff. We found that people are using ideas based in online culture to transform physical artifacts in three ways. First, we saw the application of metaphors and procedures associated with the online world to the material world: furniture can be “hacked,” the environment can be “programmed.” Second, we saw people using online tools to facilitate manipulations of material artifacts; we saw how DIY culture is moving the workshop from the garage to the web forum. Third, we noted a changing sense of creativity and identity. How can we support new models of collaborative design and design tools that incorporate creative thinking and tinkering? IKEA hacking points to the need for a more critical engagement with DIY culture and further reflection on the impact of online communities on identity and creativity"

Why do I blog this? a fascinating example of bricolage/DIY/tinkering practice that emerges from our contemporary culture.

Pneumatic mail and flows of information made explicit

My hotel last week in San Francisco had this fascinating mail transit system that allowed people to drop letters in this pneumatic-like system parallel to the elevators. You can leave your letter at the floor you're located (picture above) and it drops down the collecting box downstairs.

Why do I blog this? fascination towards this sort of communication system (as a first step in the sending of snail mail) that embeds an intriguing physical component. However, I haven't seen any mail/postcard going through it apart from the one I sent the day after I discovered such a device.

What I find interesting here, although it's rarely employed today, is the possibility to visualize the information flow. To some extent, it makes explicit an rather invisible phenomenon (communication). A sort of similar (and more quiet) version of Palantir (the vizualization of facebook data on the globe):

Computerized dispatched

When "computerized dispatched" becomes a selling point for cab customers. See last week in San Francisco.

Do you really wanna know the underlying process that made this cab approaching you (phone calls, location-based services, etc.)? Or will you be more confident that this cab company is efficient because of the computerized dispatching? Or less confident?

Space-time trails and locative technologies

(Pictures of space-time trails in CatchBob!, nothing really related to the paper below, just found it illustrative of this digital trail notion)

Perusing "Where Were We: Communities for Sharing Space-Time Trails" by Scott Counts and Marc Smith, I was interested by this notion of "space-time trails".

Constituted by the movement of people in space indeed forms an interesting social object. Space-time trails incorporate both a collection of spatial positions with relationships to one another along with sensor and community-based annotations (photographs, video, environmental sensor data, physiological attributes, community-based content such as tags and comments). According to the authors:

"We argue that space-time trails, or routes, include an intentionality on the part of the user that contains more information than a collection of points. A route has a start and finish, as well as properties like time, distance, speed, directional orientation, numbers of stops, and so on. When browsing, retracing, mining, recommending, and searching, these collective and relational attributes can be leveraged for a significantly richer end-user experience than could a collection of points. (...) The sum of these changes could be considered to be a kind of “pervasive inscription revolution”, an era in which practices of inscription explode to include almost all human actions and interactions. The signs of the expansion of inscription are visible in the behavior patterns seen in many online services."

Why do I blog this? interested in how "routes" and "trails" becomes social documents enriched with other forms of information (beyond synchronous/real-time location-awareness). Some interesting new practices can emerge out of this and lots of issues regarding privacy are about to be discussed.

*you are here*

The different way to express the famous "you are here" sign on maps (San Francisco, Zürich, Geneva, Saint Etienne and Zürich again). Regardless of the map type (w/o transportation system, with different granularities of environmental description and scale differences), the way your position is indicated can be described in a wide array of signs. Circles w/o arrows, w/o the "you are here" symbol, etc.

Perhaps the best one is the following: a sign which indicates that you are where you are ("here"):

Definition of "black-boxing"

A quick definition of "black-boxing" by Bruno Latour (in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies): a process by which

"scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become."

okay to play here / not okay to play here

Each places have their own rules. It's okay to play on this giant and empty parking lot above (Santa Monica) but this bench below in Venice depicts clear signs of defensible space (to prevent skateboarders to grind the curb). In one case the sign is explicit, in the other, it's rather a deterrent than a proper sign.

"Paper direct"

Encountered last week-end in Venice, Los Angeles. Still about press, I am fascinated by foreign press available as these A3 sheets of papers sold straight from the printer. Far from the complex e-paper technology, these very low-cost one-sided magazines show an interesting trend about the importance of physical artifacts. Besides, the name of this service ("paper direct") is conspicuously relevant in these times of frenetic digitalization. Given that it's printed locally, it's an up-to-date instantiation (that prevent you from waiting two or three days to have the same newspaper coming from the guts of an Airbus/Boeing Cargo flight).

Why do I blog this? observing original practices related to media consumption enabled by various technologies. I see this "paper direct" as an interesting signal that seem more usable than they bloody e-book reader that I rarely use.

Browsing time

Highly intriguing notice in this newsstands visited in Venice Beach yesterday afternoon: the indication of the time customers are allowed to flip through the magazines. Temporary consumption of products indicated in the place where you can access them (see of course "The Age of Access" by Jeremy Rifkin). As a customer, you then know the rules you're subjected to and act accordingly.

Interestingly, the duration is conditioned by the type of content one might want to access as attested by these two other signs:

Why do I blog this nothing particular in mind... this is fun at first glance but there are some interesting lessons to draw here about media consumption (signage to prevent certain behavior), the importance of certain types of content (and the inherent need to refrain people from spending too much time on it), design choices (3-5-15? I wonder how the owner made it up!, besides 15 seems quite a long time). The different shapes/typefont of the 3 signs is also curious: as if the norm was this "15 minute browsing" classic sign from back in the day (back in the days before people were soooo much into this "access" meme), followed sometime after by a more temporary "5 minutes ONLY" printed in black-and-white, and eventually by this quick-and-dirty "3-minutes only" sign (as if it reached a climax).

Success evaluation for radical innovation

Gathering some notes about "successes" and "failures" of innovations to improve my talk about foresight failures, I ran across interesting material in Communicating Technology Visions by Tamara Carleton (Funktioneering Magazine. Vol 1, pp. 13). The paper actually shows how measuring only financial and commercial results for a radical innovation is inadequate and that other aspects should be taken into account. She basically shows how "meeting management’s expected sales, profits, market share, andreturn on investment" only offer a partial view. Some excerpts I found relevant to my research:

"For radical innovations, this default definition presents a thorny issue. There is an assumption that all innovations are predicated on financial results. Many experts today consider the Apple iPod to be a successful example of a highly radical technological innovation, and most would argue that the product was radically innovative from the start. However, if the iPod was measured solely in terms of financial profit based on its first few years on the market, then its proof as a successful innovation is not as strong or convincing. (...) Radical innovations may be truly radical and innovative without necessarily producing monetary gains. There are at least three ways to be considered radically innovative. An innovation could create an entirely new market or product catego- ry, such as the Honda Insight, the first American hybrid vehicle that laid the foundation for other cars like the Toyota Prius to follow. Or an innovation might generate a significantly new customer base but still not produce revenue, such as Napster, the original file-sharing service for music. Or an innovation may introduce a new technological application that is recast as novel or revolutionary in a different market without generating lasting financial returns. This would be the adoption of text messaging in the U.S., years aftewidespread phenomenon in Europe. (...) There is another problem in using the common test of success. Financial information about a radical innovation must be available and unambiguous. (...) Historical analysis will identify radical innovations clearly in terms of success and failure, but investigation of contemporary or budding innovations for the future require different metrics."

Why do I blog this? some good elements here about the definition of "success". Given my interest in "failures", it's important as it helps to symmetrically rethink what is a failure: a commercial failure is not necessarily an innovation failure as described in the example above.

Dead end on the interwebs

There was a time when this sort of message was more common. For the record, an error 404 (or Not Found error message) refers to:

"a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and did not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with "server not found" or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all."

A time when information superhighways were full of dead-ends and wrong-ways... People were given means to circulate (through URLs addresses, Web directories and then search engines) but these tools could also be misleading... and lead to Error 404. It's less usual now, and web folks have learn to create user-friendly 404-pages.

Is there a physical equivalent to 404? What would be a "404 error" when wandering on the streets (or in the countryside)? A mistake where "you don't find what you looked for/requested".

Why do I blog this? thinking about translations of practices and rituals from the digital to the physical.

Physical layers

Seen in Lyon, France last year.

Accumulation of information or simply a physical representation of the history of concert posters. The different layers are added on top of each others creating this intriguing shape. This accumulation leads to a curious texture/surface in our environment: there is an inherent 3D effect to this stack of posters. Can there be a role of this "thickness"? What do people infer from it? the fact that no one is cleaning up this mess or the richness of cultural events in the area?

Technology breakdown and people's reactions

The picture above taken in Marseilles (France) few months ago depicts a human practice that fascinates me: the deliberate destruction of artifacts. There are different reasons for that, ranging from anger towards someone (and throwing the object at hand) to being upset by a certain piece of technology. Observing this practice is quite difficult as it's both uncommon and quick... you generally access to traces of this behavior. The phone above is an example of such traces. Among all the reasons to destroy things, it's perhaps the frustration the user feels when the object doesn't work as he/she intended. In this situation, of course, people are not always so violent but it can happen. This is perhaps why I am also intrigued by breakdown, failures and people's reactions (or perception).

Nailing down some references about failures and adoption issues of technology, I enjoyed reading this report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project insightfully called "When technology fails". The reports presents some statistics about people's usage (or non-usage) of various technologies in the US. Some examples of problems I found interesting:

"nearly half (48%) of adults who use the internet or have a cell phone say they usually need someone else to set up a new device up for them or show them how to use it. (...) 44% of those with home internet access say their connection failed to work properly for them at some time in the previous 12 months. (...) 39% of those with desktop or laptop computers have had their machines not work properly at some time in the previous 12 months. (...) 29% of cell phone users say their device failed to work properly at some time in the previous year."

And it's also important to look at how people deal with breakdowns:

"Some 15% of those experiencing problems (...) said they were unable to fix the problem. However, the majority of users found solutions in a variety of ways: 38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help. 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves. 15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family. 2% found help online."

People's perception is of course very emotional as the PEW research showed:

"Users whose technology had failed also reported a mix of emotions during the course of trying to solve the problem:

• 72% felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.
• 59% felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology.
• 48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.
• 40% felt confused by the information that they were getting."

I guess they did not find anyone in their sample revealing that sometimes they just trash/punch/kick the object that users can't use because it's a not-so-common behavior. Perhaps it can be a subset of "impatience"... given that this study as based on a survey it may be a side-effect of the methodology. I would find intriguing to show picture of tossed/destroyed artifacts as a probe to discuss with participants.

Why do I blog this? gathering material about this topic that fascinates me for quite a while. Documenting the experience of breakdowns is insightful for design, as a locus of people's creativity in finding solutions (bricolage, social navigation, asking questions to others, destroying the system and trying to repair it after a while, etc.).

These issues are also related to another favorite topic of mine: how people build a representation of their computers/cell phones/nintendo Wii/etc. and how they use this knowledge to explain the artifacts' behavior (and breakdowns).

Public notepad

This hanging pen/notepad assemblage can be found at a beauty salon in my neighborhood. Interestingly, the notepad is meant to be used by customers to note their contact information so that the owner (when busy) can phone them back. What is important here is that:

1. This notepad features contact information in some sort of transitional artifact: people write down their particulars, the owner tear up the sheets of paper and phone people back. It's only a temporary inscription.
2. For some time, contact information (and sometimes customers' requests) are in a semi-public display (that curious person can observe when passing by). The private/public boundaries are somewhat blurred.
3. This shop has a phone number BUT it seems important for the owner to provide its customers with a specific interface when people are passing by. In this case, the notepad acts as just-in-time just-in-place interface.
4. The fact that people can write with a pen (a costly mean of communication in these days of 140-characters messages) and that someone may peruse the requests and contact people back has an important value: a direct and specific relationship between customers and the shop owner.

Why do I blog this? observing rituals in my neighborhood when heading to the local baker to refill my stack of croissant this morning.

Adaptive street-signage?

An intriguing and purely accidental assemblage observed in Geneva this morning: as if the pedestrian's footsteps were reshaping the yellow band (of course it's not, these curves are caused by cars). An evocative image of the adaptive city.

A mixture of whimsy, propaganda and truth

Just found this interesting quote by James Carey (in "McLuhan and Mumford: The Roots of Modern Media Analysis." Journal of Communication 31 (Summer 1981): 162-78):

"all of the claims that have been made for electricity and electrical communication, down through the computer and cable and satellite television, were made for the telegraph with about the same mixture of whimsy, propaganda and truth. Cadences change, vocabulary is subtly altered, examples shift, the religious metaphors decline, but the medium has the same message."

Why do I blog this? collecting material to improve one my speech. I gather elements about the recurring promises of technologies (and their failure).

Traces of time and people interaction

Several examples of how people's activity and interaction with objects transform their appearance. Stairs in a bookshop (above), a door handle and the floor of the parisian subway are all victims of the passage of time.

Of course, these traces (or patina) can have an intriguing aesthetic function but they can lead to a specific affordances too: traces that orient action or shape people's interactions with the environment. Social navigation indicators of some sort.