Design Engaged 2004

Ben Cerveny

• The growth of the soil
• How do we comprehend complexity
• How do we build structures around complex information

• Accreting meta-data: GPS data, descriptive information

Decomposition

Break down of material as it hits the soil

• Soup, tags, condensed and distilled meta objects

Self organisation

sorting mechanisms, affinity browsers, related, filtering, emergent relationships, interrelationships

How do we conceive a metaphor for building these processes? A structure that is meaningful for the users.

Application design: movement through states of application: to tending to a flow of processes

Tending to meta-data is a growth process

DLA diffusion limited aggregation, natural process model

• The relationships between metadata can be visualised as this * Should model metadata using plant models: plant models have existed for eons, basic structures for material

Rules for expression

L-systems growth, mimics biological rulesets

Map rule-sets in metadata onto L-systems, affinity rules

• Branching tree structures could be used to make metadata more useful

Roots and Feeds

RSS feeds, a root system, aggregator has roots, to the surface of a newsreader

Structural information

After applying rules of expression (algorithms, l-systems) we could see differences in the way that the plant has evolved

• A “botany” of these different structures: smaller, larger clusters, structures.

Cultivation as culture

From a user perspective the idea of cultivation: users can actually affect change: can breed your own searches, using searches generationally, using own adapted metaphors for new contexts

Mix and match mechanisms or instruments (specific rule-sets) move expressions and apply them to different rule-sets

Don’t have to understand genetics, but we have found use for plants for generations

• User doesn’t need to know mechanisms, just ability to make changes and view outcomes

Tending the garden

Incredible complexity, incredible diversity

Not intimidated by the complexity of the garden

• Present similar tools to tend to data

Discussion

Casey Reas: organic information design

Thinkmap, physical simulation systems

Mitchell Resnick: Turtles Termites, Traffic Jams

• Matt J: Does it rely on visual metaphors: how do we get people to cultivate rather than consume?

Thomas Van Der Wal

Synching feeling

Everything fit in our brain

then libraries

then digital bits

then putting everything in one place

Our information on our pdas, cellphones, somewhere

The dream is that we have accurate information at our disposal when we need it

Personal info-cloud

Local info-cloud: should it be located?

External info-cloud: things you don’t know about

How do users use information?

Device versus network?

Our networked space, that exists out in space

Usable: syncing between two devices: calendar, address book, to do list

Dodgy: documents, media maps, web-based info, multiple devices

Personal version control: different devices have different versions

• Personal categorisation:

Standard metadata for personal info-cloud

content description

creator

privacy

context

use type (eg)

instruction: destroy, revise in 6 months

object type:

• categories: not a structured system, but hackable flat data

Actual solutions

Spotlight (Apple Tiger)

• MIT Project Oxygen

Possible/partial solutions

Script aggregation by metadata tag

Publish to private/public location in RSS

Rsynk and CVS

Groove (Windows)

• Quicksilver (Mac)

Adam Greenfield

All watched over by machines of loving grace

Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous computing environments

Ubicomp is coming: IPV6 6.5×10 to the 23 addresses for every square metre on the planet

Moving from describing to prescribing

Technological artefacts are too dismissive of people

• Someone to watch over me: attractive as well as scary

Default to harmlessness

must ensure user’s physical psychic and financial safety

must go well beyond graceful degredation

• faults must result in safety

Be self disclosing

Contain provisions for immediate, transparent querying of ownership, use, capabilities, etc.

Seamlessness is optional

Analogue of broadcast station identification or military IFF

• Web derived model for user-consent: cannot carry over to ubicomp, would be too intrusive to have to approve each and every disclosure of information in four space

Be conservative of face

ubiquitous systems are always already social systems: they must not unnecessarily embarras, himiliate or shame

Goes beyond formal information-privacy concerns

• Prospect of being nakedly accountable to an inseen omipresent network

Be conservative of time

Must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations

Adult, competent users understand adequately what they want, shouldn’t introduce barriers

• Potential conflict with principle 1

Be deniable

Should be able to opt-out, anytime, anywhere, any process

Critically: the ability to say no, without sacrificing anything but the ability to use whatever usage

• The “safe word” concept may find an application here

Discussion

Fabio: what about gossip

Chris: surely there’s human responsibility

Tom C: Social control includes humiliation and embarrasment

• Molly: systems for shaming: can be institutionalised and applied in problem places: difference between smart and smartass. Haven’t got good enough at modelling situations in order to get this right.

Stefan Smagula

Teaching and writing about interaction design

Mike Kuniavsky

Writing about ubicomp, society and social

Material products areform from social values

Products affect how we think

The pattern is “a recognition of the complexity, unpredictability, confusion of the world”

The framework of thought of the last 600 years is coming to an end

“by dividing the world into smaller pieces, ways can be found to explain it”: this method is waning

Communication and transportation has been the key driver of this change

Shown people (designers?) how complex life is

Most people don’t know what to do about this complexity

At the end of the prescriptive rationalist vision of the world

It is our job as designers to recognise these ideas: “design is a projection of people’s ideals onto product”

Past the confusion of postmodernism: the complexity hasn’t been branded yet, hasn’t been given a core set of ideas

Book: Human built world

The complexity of the world is an uncomfortably bright light, people turn away: designers can make it manageable

• Go to the light of compexity!

Discussion

Adam: are we up against biological limits: are we wired to deal with things in a linear way? Yes: physiological limits: 7 +-2.

Ben: we conceive as a subtractive process: a mental scene out of an excess of input: we have a body of linear tools to process. There is a realisation that we are non-linear systems: technology is becoming us, and the other way around.

Matt: we can learn complexity way more than we realise: tests show that we subconsciously learn complexity beyond language and rational thought

Magical thinking is not wrong: all our models are wrong

• Tom C: Looking at people as shearing layers of perception and cognition

Remon Tijssen

Behaviours, tactility and graphics

• Tensionfield between playfulness and functionality

David Erwin

The funnel

• Serial, parallel and optional interfaces

Peter Boersma

Transactional interfaces

ezGov uses IBMs RUP

RUP is weak in user-experience

• Added StUX, definitions of deliverables for user experience

Dan Hill

Self centred design

Not selfish design

Background: adaptive design, design as social process, inspiration from vernacular architecture, hackability, allowing and encouraging people to make technology what they want to be

Inspiration from trip to US

Assumption that UCD is generally a good thing

The focus on usability has distracted people: it has become an end in itself

UCD manifests itself in usability, at the expense of usefulness

Cultural and social products: massive variation of use across the globe

Products most innovative at BBC/music: audioscrobbler/lastFM: intense meaning in the patterns it generates. More innovative than iTunes music store. Steam: setting reminders for radio stations: hacked third party product, BBC is trying to support this innovation.

This innovation is coming from non-designers

Veen: Amateurised design: the most interesting design on the web: Shirky: Situated software

Always consider a thing in it’s next larger context: Eliel Saarinen: useful piece of design process. Chair, room, house, city.

A lot of information about the self, coming out of these systems

Audioscrobbler: looking at ones music, bookmarks, photos, lunches, weblog posts, gps co-ordinates: how does this affect habits?

Pace of development: what can be done on the web.

Self-knowledge and enlightenment: how does it affect one’s life

• The practice and focus of design is moving towards behaviour

Limitations

This is early adopter activity, this is geeky, high barrier to entry, it requires code to make these things. It’s self limiting: only certain kind of people can make these products.

Scaleability problems: resilience: lack of reliability of iterative development, when will we be at the stage when we can rely on things working?

BBC, radio broadcasting needs to be resilient: public service

Database design and scaleability: Flickr doesn’t need to be normalised

Common appeal of these things is self-limiting: too much systems level thinking.

Moving into a space where products are social, and can have social meaning, and thus be socially harmful

People’s assumption and experiences are based on context

Need to be more rigourous about understanding social patterns

audioscrobbler is not good at classical music

Designers and researchers need better understanding of each other

Designers are at their most useful when they are enabling adaptive design

Using ethnography within a design process, look at long-term ethnographic process: hooking it into the rapid prototyping of the adaptive design world

There is the value of sociology here. Ethno-methodology, Heidegger

Book: Where the action is, Dourish.

Social systems work well when there is accountability

Building things where this also builds an account of the building

Place and space: place being about social structures

Embodiment: Appropriating products, building social meanings into products

Accountability: part of the action is a documentation of the action (Dourish). Is ‘view source’ accountability?

• Book: Presentation of self: Irvine Goffman

Matt Webb

Neuroscience and interaction design

This is really mostly psychology

Game: remembering animals

Light comes from top left

Easier to react in the direction that things approach you from

Dialogue boxes, work with natural directions

We follow human eye direction, not robot eye direction, pulling a lever is faster when eyes point in that direction

We respond the same to arrows as we do to gaze

All that neuroscience has done is to confirm what we know from psychology

3 types of object, animate, inanimate and tool

3 zones: graspable, peripersonal The schema of the body is extended by the held tools

Our body space is quite mutable: space on a screen becomes the space represented by the body, anything which moves as part of your hand becomes part of your grasp, there’s an amount of time that this takes to understand this, learning process and experience

Grasping has as much primacy as a cup itself: so “sit down” or “chair” are equivalent in the brain

If we see or say grasping, or looking at coffee cup shows

• “What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time” a* Mapping observed phenomena to the science of jetstreams, same thing will happen to neuroscience.

John Poisson

The stretch time conundrum

Sony is a huge force: vaunted to villified in three short decades

Loss of brand value: products are not meeting user expectations

Sony founders have changed, directions have changed

One of the problem is in the fact that it’s japanese: basic simple cultural processes

Hikaru dorodango: process refinement as creative expression: successively sculpting and crafting mud balls into spheres

3 interconnected languages are undocumentably mixed

Languages are connected to neurological development: learning japanese at an early age increases the threshold of tolerance of the pain of complexity: Kanji pain begets user pain.

At first thought that it was a problem of language, but then realised this increased tolerance of complexity pain.

Sony “iPod killer” is a user-experience nightmare, but for japanese it’s not too complex

There’s an overall acceptance of complexity in Japan

Pattern based learning: origami: 48 steps of process, more complex than interfaces

Stretch time: at 3o’clock on the Sony campus everyone stops, music plays and everyone is encouraged to stretch.

• Process is good: start with rice cookers and end up with transistors: releasing lots of stuff and then seeing what works. But there are a lot more misses than hits at the moment

Sanjay Khanna

Kurt Vonnegut in “Cold Turkey”

• Mike: intended effects are insignificant compared with the emergent effects, just noise compared to the overall outcomes

Niels Wolf

Intro to JXTA

Works on every network device

Allows control over your data, sharing, peer to peer backup

Implemented in many languages: including python

Assigned a unique number, which works across IP, bluetooth, mobile rendezvous, etc.

• Everybody becomes a server if no other can be found

Molly Wright Steenson

All hail the vast comforting suburb of the soul

Lots of research into garden cities

Worried that the future is going to be boring

Closing off some avenues for development by focusing on urban environments

• What are the constraints that define a suburb?

Jack Schulze

Mapping and looking

• Lots of cool stuff: no notes.

Matthew Ward

Questioning the commodification of space

• We are social, spatial, temporal beings

What were the conditions for the rise of these spatial technologies

2001 descrambling of GPS

FCC policy to make sure 911 callers can be located

Ubiquity of mobile phones

If we don’t move away from the “where’s my nearest pizza” we are going to get really bored really soon

Differential space: socio-spatial differences are emphasised and celebrated

Iain Borden: Skateboarding

• “social space is a social product.” “Our task now is to construct everyday life, to produce it, consciously to create it, boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated desires” Lefebvre.

Chris Heathcote

Nuts and bolts, how to use location

Location is co-ordinates

Location is names and titles

Location is also near Matt Webb, or near my iBook: relative position might be more useful way of thinking

Physical augmentation: using, abusing, changing where they live

Visual design: Buddy finder on mobile phones: spatially false, chart junk

Context awareness is really hard:

What happens when you get rid of the maps?

• Lots more cool stuff that I didn’t take notes on…

Matt Jones

Nokia: Insight and foresight

A hard problem: “Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high.” Gene Becker, Fredshouse.net

Next-gen mobile: big screens, more whizzy features, but we still have the same old messy world

A modest start: being in the world instead of in front of the screen

3220: 5140: power up covers with new capabilities

3220: LED displays with accelerometers and thus motion capture

Where the action is: This ignores 99% of our daily lives

dance dance revolution and eyetoy: new world

5140: first RFID reader phone

New ways of using mobiles with touch based tech

easy and concrete access to services and repeat functions

transfer of digital items between devices as simple as a gesture of giving

in the future also fast and convenient local payment and ticketing: fast, easy way of getting settings and services

When you count all the steps to make simple actions are about 100 actions: to find settings, set up the human modem thing

Touch actions are potentially two orders of complexity less: into 1 action

LAunched active cover with NFC: near field communication: philips, sony, visa, samsung: nfcforum.org

Pairing things up, putting things together (how is this different from BT? passive chips)

Prototype things!

NFC is a touch based RFID technology

Putting the information into the tag: can contain more than an ID

Close mapping to physical objects: Dourish

NFC active objects will have mixed spirit world of objects having magic behind them: permitted moves for games, origins of objects, spime like stuff,

One to one mapping: multiple digital meanings on objects

it’s not a one-way world: these things are re-writeable: secular isn’t the dominant way of thinking

Now that we can give objects spirit world, semiotic, actions

Into fetish objects: auspicious computing, unique wooden balls (minority report)

Friendster: a game of how many connections. Turning into an info-fetish physical game

– phones are precious, tags are not

– throwaway, data detritus, spime spume

+ programmatic product life-cycle

+ audit trails for trash

+ automation of recycling

Techno-optimism

• WWF: sustainability at the speed of light

Long now, (Stewart Brand)

Fashion

Commerce

Infrastructure

Governance

Culture

Nature

• Sometimes technology can disrupt these layers

Fabio Sergio

From collision to convergence

How I learned to stop worrying and watch tv on my mobile phone

2001: who the hell would want to watch tv on a mobile?

2003: using mobile to watch big brother from the car

consultants: timeliness, context sensitivity, self-expression, immediacy, relevance

People rely on their connected devices to fill-in interstitial time slots

Armed with this notion outlets aquired content and chopped it into 3-5 minute videos

The end result is too much navigation and not enough content, undermines the concept of “snacking”. The navigation has become the experience

Navigation is not bad per-se, the web is arguably built on it

Flow: where the consumer is completely engaged with interaction

Mobile content experiences happen in contexts that basically negate the ability to focus

How do you access video: at the moment through a browser

Big Brother: lessons learnt

Always on-ness: there is aways something new happening: marshall mcluhan meets orwell

Something might happen at any time

Action can be just a video call away

Easy to get into the flow of what’s happening

Cut to measure: as little or as long as you want

Conversation-based: you can keep hearing when you can’t watch: don’t need to look at the screen

Why should the browser and media player be two different applications? should probably be one.

People need context medium content, probably in this order

The handset should be a remote control: as much as possible make navigation resident on teh device

Content should be snackish: but should be grouped

• The experience should be around the on/off switch

Timo Arnall

Presentation and notes

Sunday discussion

Brief: design a ticket machine that also allows city navigation and takes care of tourists and busy commuters equally, that doesn’t have a screen

Alternative brief: A permanent tag large enough to contain digital info, that could be unobtrusively attached to anything in public space

• Mechanisms for friendly denial

  I’m lost: design a physical pathway which

  includes the idea of signs to explain features of teh environment to the unmediated

  which could serve as a compensation or apology for people denied in the ubiquitous sense

  which was distinctively local and amsterdamish

  includes infrastructure

• poetics and emotional enhancements required

  Overheard somewhere at the bar: anthropology/ethnography is this year’s library science: another new/old juxtaposition. Not that I agree.