Elasticspace

Project Soli

Timo Arnall — Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This film was the result of a multi-year design project with Google. Project Soli developed a new interaction sensor using radar technology, in order to find new kinds of interactions with products.

Immaterials: Satellite Lamps

Timo Arnall — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Immaterials: Satellite Lamps

Satellite Lamps reveals the invisible accuracy of GPS positioning across an urban landscape. Three lamps with built-in GPS receivers vary their brightness depending on signal accuracy, photographed over time to build a picture of how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.

Satellite Lamps

Timo Arnall — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMT

A Satellite Lamp on a snowy fjord. Each lamp samples the uncertainty of GPS signals at a particular point in the landscape. When we photograph them and make timelapses, the patterns of GPS uncertainty over time come into view.

Satellite Lamps is a project that reveals one of the most significant contemporary technology infrastructures, the Global Positioning System (GPS). Made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the YOUrban research project at AHO, it continues our project of revealing the materials of technologies that started in 2009 with RFID and WiFi.

GPS is widely used yet it’s invisible and few of us really have any idea of how it works or how it inhabits our everyday environments. We wanted to explore the cultural and material realities of GPS technology, and to develop new understandings about it through design.

“Satellite Lamps shows that GPS is not a seamless blanket of efficient positioning technology; it is a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment. GPS is a truly impressive technology, but it also has inherent seams and edges.”

We created a series of lamps that change brightness according to the accuracy of received GPS signals, and when we photograph them as timelapse films, we start to build a picture of how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.

Video: Immaterials: Satellite Lamps

We’ve made a film that you can watch here.

The project is documented in an extensive article that thoroughly details how it was made and why. You can read more on how we explored GPS technology, how the visualisations were made, and about the popular cultural history of GPS.

Making Visible

Timo Arnall — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:00:00 GMT

The cover and opening pages from the thesis ‘Making Visible’.

My PhD thesis called ‘Making Visible’ was submitted in December 2013 and successfully defended on 12 June 2014. The thesis reflects upon the design material exploration research from the Touch and YOUrban projects. It uses these explorations to situate design research with technology as a cultural, material and mediational practice:

In Making Visible I outline how interaction design may engage in the material and mediation of new interface technologies. Drawing upon a design project called Touch, that investigated an emerging interface technology called Radio Frequency Identification or RFID, I show how interaction design research can explore technology through material and mediational approaches. I demonstrate and analyse how this research addresses the inter-related issues of invisibility, seamlessness and materiality that have become central issues in the design of contemporary interfaces. These issues are analysed and developed through three intertwined approaches of research by design: 1. a socio- and techno-cultural approach to understanding emerging technologies, 2. through material exploration and 3. through communication and mediation. When taken together these approaches form a communicative mode of interaction design research that engages directly with the exploration, understanding and discussion of emerging interface technologies.

The thesis is made up of four peer-reviewed journal articles accompanied by a ‘meta-reflection’ document that reflects upon and situates these publications through theory, concepts and models.

Overview

This document develops the concept of mediational material that focuses attention on the material and communicative practices in interaction design. These are used to explore, develop and share knowledge of technologies as design materials.

The thesis is 178 pages with 53 illustrations.

I’ve made it available in a number of different digital formats:

Download as PDF (7MB)
Download as ePub (14.4MB)
Read it on Kindle (US, UK)

It will also be available through AHO’s open-access archive ADORA.

Articles

The four included articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Article 1: Exploring ‘immaterials’: mediating design’s invisible materials

This article takes up the issues of so-called ‘immaterial’ and ‘seamless’ technologies and asks how designers might explore them in order to consider them as design materials. It situates interaction design as a sociocultural practice that is concerned with culture, critical approaches and with engaging the technocultural imagination. It concludes by analysing its mediational strategies, such as the use of documentary formats, online film and weblog writing, and the ways in which new material perspectives have been shared, discussed and developed by others.

Arnall, T. (in press). ‘Exploring ‘immaterials’: mediating design’s invisible materials’. International Journal of Design, 29. Will be available at the International Journal of Design.

Article 2: Visualizations of digital interaction in daily life

This article explores how visual signage may make aspects of ubiquitous computing technologies visible and how digital tools and platforms impact that visual design and semiosis. It looks at a range of ‘identification’ technologies such as barcodes and RFID, that only become ‘visible’ or ‘interactional’ through a designer’s intervention in physical or visual expression. It finds that designers should emphasize the bindings and distinctions between design processes and visual mediations, and symbols and signs, in engaging with emerging technologies as material for creative and communicative composition.

Morrison, A., & Arnall, T. (2011). Visualizations of Digital Interaction in Daily Life. Computers and Composition, 28(3), 224-234. Available at Computers and Composition.

Article 3: Satellite Lamps

Satellite Lamps is a project about using design to investigate and reveal one of the fundamental constructs of the networked city: GPS - the Global Positioning System. It extends the concepts of ‘mediational materials’ to an investigation of the ways in which GPS technology inhabits urban spaces. The article takes up how a discursive and reflexive interaction design practice can contribute to new perspectives on networked city life. Importantly, Satellite Lamps is a multimediational web text, involving different media (film, media, notebooks and a host of images) allowing for the richness of the work to come to the surface in a way that would not have been possible in traditional means of academic publishing.

Martinussen, E, Knutsen, J & Arnall, T. (forthcoming 2014). Satellite Lamps. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Will be available at Kairos.

Article 4: Depth of Field: Discursive design research through film

This article is about the role of film in interaction and product design research with technology, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies in multiple contexts. It concludes by looking towards the potentials for a discursive design practice, where the object of design and analysis is the discourse that is catalysed by new artefacts, and the emphasis of design research is on communication.

Arnall, T., & Martinussen, E. S. (2010). Depth of field: discursive design research through film. FORMakademisk, 3(1). Available at FORMakademisk.

Internet Machine

Timo Arnall — Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Internet Machine’s three-screen installation at Transmediale 2015.

Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.

Video: Internet machine (trailer)

Film: 6 min 40 sec, digital 4K, 25fps, stereo. Installation: Digital projection, 3 x 16:10 screens, each 4.85m x 2.8m. Medium: Digital photography, photogrammetry and 3D animation.

Internet machine (showing now at Big Bang Data or watch the trailer) documents one of the largest, most secure and ‘fault-tolerant’ data-centres in the world, run by Telefónica in Alcalá, Spain. The film explores these hidden architectures with a wide, slowly moving camera. The subtle changes in perspective encourage contemplative reflection on the spaces where internet data and connectivity are being managed.

In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them.

Interior of the data centre: a wide aisle flanked by tall black server racks, lit in cold blue

What we find, after being led through layers of identification and security far higher than any airport, are deafeningly noisy rooms cocooning racks of servers and routers. In these spaces you are buffeted by hot and cold air that blusters through everything.

Inside a data centre: rows of server racks with orange and blue cabling visible between units

Server rooms are kept cool through quiet, airy ‘plenary’ corridors that divide the overall space. There are fibre optic connections routed through multiple, redundant paths across the building. In the labyrinthine corridors of the basement, these cables connect to the wider internet through holes in rough concrete walls.

Server rack detail: the back of a rack showing bundled cables and status lights

Power is supplied not only through the mains, but backed up with warm caverns of lead batteries, managed by gently buzzing cabinets of relays and switches.

A data centre corridor, tall server racks on either side receding to a vanishing point

These are backed up in turn by rows of yellow generators, supplied by diesel storage tanks and contracts with fuel supply companies so that the data centre can run indefinitely until power returns.

A cavernous server hall in the Telefónica data centre, Alcalá, Spain

The outside of the building is a facade of enormous stainless steel water tanks, containing tens of thousands of litres of cool water, sitting there in case of fire.

Close-up of a server rack interior showing fan arrays and cable looms

And up on the roof, to the sound of birdsong, is a football-pitch sized array of shiny aluminium ‘chillers’ that filter and cool the air going into the building.

Low-angle view along a data centre aisle, floor vents in the foreground and server racks receding into the background

In experiencing these machines at work, we start to understand that the internet is not a weightless, immaterial, invisible cloud, and instead to appreciate it as a very distinct physical, architectural and material system.

Production

Behind the scenes: the film crew setting up a wide-angle camera rig inside the Telefónica data centre during the Internet Machine shoot

This was a particularly exciting project, a chance for an ambitious and experimental location shoot in a complex environment. Telefónica were particularly accommodating and allowed unprecedented access to shoot across the entire building, not just in the ‘spectacular’ server rooms. Thirty two locations were shot inside the data centre over the course of two days, followed by five weeks of post-production.

The three-camera rig in the virtual reconstruction of the data centre server room.

I had to invent some new production methods to create a three-screen installation, based on some techniques I developed over ten years ago. The film was shot using both video and stills, using a panoramic head and a Canon 5D mkIII. The video was shot using the Magic Lantern RAW module on the 5D, while the RAW stills were processed in Lightroom and stitched together using Photoshop and Hugin.

The three-camera rig in the virtual reconstruction of the data centre rooftop.

The footage was then converted into 3D scenes using camera mapping techniques, recreating the perspective by hand (a kind of low-tech, traditional photogrammetry) so that entirely new camera movements could be created by animating a virtual three-camera rig within this new virtual space. The final multi-screen installation is played out in 4K projected across three screens.

There are more photos available at Flickr.

Internet machine is part of BIG BANG DATA, open from 9 May 2014 until 26 October 2014 at CCCB (Barcelona) and from February-May 2015 at Fundación Telefónica (Madrid).

Internet Machine is produced by Timo Arnall, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), and Fundación Telefónica. Thanks to José Luis de Vicente, Olga Subiros, Cira Pérez and María Paula Baylac.

Pixel Track

Timo Arnall — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Original film no longer hosted by Vimeo. Open in Wayback Machine.

Pixel Track is a prototype of a new kind of connected display, produced by Berg in collaboration with the Future Cities Catapult. More…

Cloudwash

Timo Arnall — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Cloudwash the connected washing machine

Cloudwash is a prototype washing machine that was made to explore how connectivity might change the ordinary appliances in our homes. Made at BERG and designed by Durrell Bishop. More…

The Immaterials project

Timo Arnall — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Light painting the field around an RFID reader.

The Immaterials project is concerned with the increasing invisibility of interfaces and infrastructures. The systems we interact with everyday such as WiFi and 3G networks have a profound impact on how we experience the world. As Adam Greenfield says:

the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis. [...] it’s hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us.

And as James Bridle has eloquently and disturbingly observed:

Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless.

The project set out to expose some of the phenomena and mechanisms of technological infrastructures through visual, photographic, narrative, animated and cinematic techniques. Over the last five years I have worked with Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones towards a body of work that is now brought together in an exhibition for the first time.

Video: The Immaterials project

From 2004–2008 I speculated about the ways in which wireless interactions inhabited physical space, through my work on a Graphic language for touch, and also through films such as Wireless in the world. Some of my students made beautiful but fictional speculations about the physical qualities of different kinds of radio.

Video: Nearness

Jack Schulze and I also made a short, playful film called Nearness about action at a distance. In the film, a series of simple reactions are set off by immaterial phenomena, such as radio waves, mobile networks, light, magnetism and wind.

In 2006 we ran a Touch workshop with BERG where we became concerned about the invisibility of RFID technology, and the effect that had on our ability to design with it. We found it extraordinary that a technology that was defined as a proximity or ‘touch’-based interface, was so opaque in terms of its physical, spatial, gestural materiality. How do we as designers make these materials visible, so we can have reflective conversations with them?

We developed Experiments in Field Drawing as a method of revealing, literally drawing, the physical presence of RFID interactions. We revealed these fields in a much richer, multi-dimensional way using photography, animation and light painting in the film Immaterials: Ghost in the Field.

Video: Immaterials: the ghost in the field

Matt Jones coined the term immaterials to describe the project and gave a great talk about some ways of understanding the immaterials of interaction design. Matt and I also looked at machine vision, another phenomena that increasingly becomes a material for design in Robot Readable World.

In 2011 at AHO, as part of a research project called Yourban, we extended the investigations to WiFi, using similar light painting techniques we revealed the enormous scale and pervasiveness of ad-hoc WiFi networks in urban spaces in Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi.

Video: The Immaterials project

Finally, over the last two years we’ve become increasingly interested in the Global Positioning System (GPS), that has become a central part of both the vision and the implementation of contemporary interfaces.

Satellite Lamps exhibited at Dread 2013 at De Hallen Haarlem.

We have built a series of Satellite Lamps that sense the presence of the 24 GPS satellites in orbit. The lamps change brightness according to the strength of GPS signals they receive, showing how the technology itself is messy and unpredictable, and revealing how GPS is a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment.

Video: Immaterials: Satellite Lamps

Satellite Lamps has so far been exhibited at Lighthouse and Dread. You can watch the film and read the extensive article detailing our process as well as a cultural history of GPS.

The visual languages that we’ve developed have ended up in advertising, on the BBC and Discovery Channel, and the techniques have been extended in research at MIT and CIID, and by many designers, enthusiasts and hackers. It’s exciting that both the subject and the methods are being taken up and used broadly by other people, and we’re looking forward to seeing more.

the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them. — Adam Greenfield (2009)

The Immaterials project emerged from the humble preoccupations of a few designers dealing with some of the invisible, immaterial, intangible stuff we had in front of us. These small experiments led to larger and more visually and narratively communicative work. In the end what I think we’ve developed is an approach to technology that revolves around material exploration, explanation and communication. Because images and language, as well as materials, form our understandings of technology, Immaterials has shown how we can use ‘design and playful explorations to shape or stir the popular imagination’.

The exhibitions

All the Immaterials projects are on display at Lighthouse in Brighton from 5 September until 13 October 2013.

Satellite Lamps and Robot Readable World are on display at Dread in Amsterdam from 7 September until 24 November 2013.

No to NoUI

Timo Arnall — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A selection of recent articles on ‘invisible design’ and the disappearance of UI.

‘The best design is invisible’ is the interaction design phrase of the moment. The images above are from my ever-expanding collection of quotes about how design and technology will ‘disappear’, become ‘invisible’ or how the ‘best interface is no interface’.

The Verge has recently given both Oliver Reichenstein and Golden Krishna a platform to talk about this. This has spawned manifestos, films, talks, books, #NoUI hashtags and some debates about what it might mean. I’ll call this cluster of things ‘invisible design’.

I agree with some of the reasons driving this movement; that design’s current infatuation with touchscreens is really problematic. I’ve spent the last eight years rallying against glowing rectangles, studying our obsession with screens and the ways in which this has become a cultural phenomenon. In response I have been researching and inventing interfaces for taking interaction out from under the glass.

But I also take issue with much of the thinking for a few reasons that I’ll outline below.

1. Invisible design propagates the myth of immateriality

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die.

Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality. – Jean-François Blanchette

Invisible design propagates the myth that technology will ‘disappear’ or ‘just get out of the way’ rather than addressing the qualities of interface technologies that can make them difficult or delightful.

Intentionally hiding the phenomena and materiality of interfaces, smoothing over the natural edges, seams and transitions that constitute all technical systems, entails a loss of understanding and agency for both designers and users of computing. Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty and folk-theories that hinder our ability to use technical systems, and clouds the critique of technological developments.

As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is exactly the wrong model.

By removing our knowledge of the glue that holds the systems that make up the infrastructure together, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to begin to understand how we are constructed as subjects, what types of systems are brought into place (legal, technical, social, etc.) and where the possibilities for transformation exist. – Matt Ratto (2007)

In other words, as both users and designers of interface technology, we are disenfranchised by the concepts of invisibility and disappearance.

2. Invisible design falls into the natural/intuitive trap

The movement tells us to ‘embrace natural processes’ and talks about the ‘incredibly intuitive’ Mercedes car interface. This language is a trap (we should ban the use of natural and intuitive btw) that doesn’t give us any insight into how complex products might actually become simple or familiar.

Invisible design leads us towards the horrors of Reality Clippy. Does my refrigerator light really go off? Why was my car unlocked this morning? How did my phone go silent all of a sudden? Without highly legible systems for managing and understanding all of this ‘smartness’ we are going to get very lost and highly frustrated. The tricky business of push notifications and the Facebook privacy train wreck is just the tip of the iceberg.

The example of the Nest thermostat invisibly ‘learning’ your habits to control your home temperature is a good one. But the Nest has a highly visible interface that reassures you as to its status, tells you when it is learning, and a large dial for adjusting temperature. Beautiful, legible microinteractions. A Nest without these visual and direct manipulation interfaces would be useless, uncanny and frustrating. Nest wants UI.

The discussion around invisible design often talks about using sensors and tangible interfaces instead of visual interfaces. But these systems are not inherently simpler or more familiar. They have their own material qualities with edges and ‘grain’ that need to be understood and learnt. Their literal invisibility can cause confusion, even fear, and they often increase unpredictability and failure.

Video: Immaterials: the ghost in the field

Revealing the invisible seams of RFID interfaces in the Touch Project.

In our work with interface technologies such as RFID and computer vision, we’ve discovered that it takes a lot of work to make sense of the technologies as design materials. So it’s not useful to say that UI is ‘disappearing’ into sensing, algorithms and tangible interfaces, when we don’t fully understand them as UI yet.

3. Invisible design ignores interface culture

Interfaces are the dominant cultural form of our time. So much of contemporary culture takes place through interfaces and inside UI. Interfaces are part of cultural expression and participation, skeuomorphism is evidence that interfaces are more than chrome around content, and more than tools to solve problems. To declare interfaces ‘invisible’ is to deny them a cultural form or medium. Could we say ‘the best TV is no TV’, the ‘best typography is no typography’ or ‘the best buildings are no architecture’?

Much of our work at BERG is not just about solving problems, but about cultural invention:

We’re not interested in this idea of the invisible technology in a modernist sense. Tech won’t be visible but only if it’s embedded into the culture that it exists within. By foregrounding the culture, you background the technology. It’s the difference between grinding your way through menus on an old Nokia, trying to do something very simple, and inhabiting the bright bouncy bubbly universe of iOS. The technology is there, of course, but it’s effectively invisible as the culture is foregrounded.” – Jack Schulze (in Domus 965 / January 2013)

We should be able to simultaneously celebrate the fantastic explosion of diversity in UI, and develop healthy critique around the use of interfaces like touch screens. But by calling for UI to disappear altogether so that things can be more efficient, we remain in the same utilitarian and rational mindset that produces inert technological visions like this, rather than seeing interfaces as part of the cultural landscape.

4. Invisible design ignores design and technology history

The movement ignores at least thirty years of thinking in design and technology. A few examples:

Much of the recent invisible design discussions repeat the thinking in Jared Spool’s ‘Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen’ and Donald Norman’s ‘Invisible Computer’. But a better reference point would be Don Norman’s earlier book, The Design of Everyday Things, where he instead talks about the ‘problems caused by inadequate attention to visibility’ and supporting or managing our mental models of systems. We need a lot more thinking about our mental models of algorithms in particular.

Adam Greenfield has investigated the social and ethical issues around the development of ubiquitous computing systems, and is particularly concerned by its disappearance:

“Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, and capabilities. Everyware must, in other words, be self-disclosing. Whether such disclosures are made graphically, or otherwise, they ensure that you are empowered to make informed decisions as to the level of exposure you wish to entertain.” – Adam Greenfield (2006)

Some designers have talked about the actual qualities they want from ubiquitous computing interfaces, such as polite, pertinent and pretty:

“The vast quantities of information that personal informatics generate need not only to be clear and understandable to create legibility and literacy in this new world, but I’d argue in this first wave also seductive, in order to encourage play, trial and adoption” Matt Jones & Tom Coates (2008)

Matthew Chalmers has, more than anyone else, revealed the history of seamlessness. Seamlessness is ‘the deliberate “making invisible” of the variety of technical systems, artifacts, individuals and organizations that make up an information infrastructure. This work actively disguises the moments of transition and boundary crossing between these various parts in order to present a solid and seemingly coherent interface to users.’ (Ratto 2007). Although Mark Weiser is often thought of as an advocate of seamless systems, Chalmers found that:

Weiser describes seamlessness as a misleading or misguided concept. In his invited talks to UIST94 and USENIX95 he suggested that making things seamless amounts to making everything the same, reducing components, tools and systems to their ‘lowest common denominator’. He advocated seamful systems (with “beautiful seams”) as a goal. Around Xerox PARC, where many researchers worked on document tools, Weiser used an example of seamful integration of a paint tool and a text editor (Weiser, personal communication). He complained that seamless integration of such tools often meant that the user was forced to use only one of them. One tool would be chosen as primary and the others reduced and simplified to conform to it, or they would be crudely patched together with ugly seams. Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained their individual characteristics. This would let the user brush some characters with the paint tool in some artful way, then use the text editor to ‘search and replace’ some of the brushstroked characters, and then paint over the result with colour washes. Interaction would be seamless as the features of each tool were “literally visible, effectively invisible”. Seamful integration is hard, but the quality of interaction can be improved if we let each tool ‘be itself’. – Matthew Chalmers (2003)

Matt Ratto investigates the darker side of this drive towards invisibility, revealing that seamlessness encourages:

“a particular kind of passivity and lack of engagement between people and their actions and between people and their social and material environment” and that we must “critique the clean, orderly, and homogenous future that is at the heart of these modernist visions” – Matt Ratto (2007)

And Anne Galloway suggests that it is in the seams where the design work can be done:

“Although seamlessness may remain a powerful and effective metaphor to guide particular projects, when it comes to actually getting the work done—and the challenges of having to do it with people who can be very different from each other—then I suggest it is in everyone’s best interests to recognise the importance of seams and scars in marking places where interventions can be made, or where potential can be found and acted upon.” – Anne Galloway (2007)

In interaction design we need to look at the long history of Durrell Bishop’s work, one of the strongest advocates for self-evident design, whether it is physical or virtual, through his teaching and design practice. Durrell’s ‘Platform 12’ in the RCA Design Products course attempts to see design as:

“a celebration of a model for how things work, where once again we can treat function as beauty, instead of merely treating design as form and image.”

Durrell’s work on the Marble Answering Machine (1992) is a brilliant piece of self-evident design, and remains a touchstone for all interaction design work.

Designers also need to look at the first four chapters of ‘Where the action is’ by Paul Dourish which give a coherent account of the relationships between human abilities and computer interfaces over the last 50-60 years. Dourish shows how interfaces are not becoming invisible, but how they are increasingly social and tangible.

And finally, from a design perspective, there is a long tradition of making complex products legible and understandable. Industrial designer Konstantin Grcic talks about the relationship between the technologies and the use of an object:

“A machine is beautiful when it’s legible, when its form describes how it works. It isn’t simply a matter of covering the technical components with an outer skin, but finding the correct balance between the architecture of the machine… and an expressive approach that is born out of the idea of interaction with those using the object.” – Konstantin Grcic (2007)

And perhaps more famously, Dieter Rams has always talked of honesty and understanding in his product design practice. Making a product understandable is one of his Ten Principles of “Good Design”.

Dieter Rams's ten principles of good design, shown as a poster: good design is innovative, makes a product useful, is aesthetic, makes a product understandable, is unobtrusive, is honest, is long-lasting, is thorough to the last detail, is environmentally friendly, is as little design as possible

This drive for understanding needs to go further than physical form (as it has done at Apple) and start to inform the design of systems and UI.

Towards legible, evident interaction

We must abandon invisibility as a goal for interfaces; it’s misleading, unhelpful and ultimately dishonest. It unleashes so much potential for unusable, harmful and frustrating interfaces, and systems that gradually erode users’ and designers’ agency. Invisibility might seem an attractive concept at first glance, but it ignores the real, thorny, difficult issues of designing and using complex interfaces and systems.

‘Legible interactions’ by Durrell Bishop, Joe Malia and Timo Arnall at BERG.

We might be better off instead taking our language from typography, and for instance talk about legibility and readability without denying that typography can call attention to itself in beautiful and spectacular ways. Our goal should be to ‘place as much control as possible in the hands of the end-user by making interfaces evident’.

Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use, effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background.

Immaterials at the Vimeo awards 2012

Timo Arnall — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi, a night-time long-exposure photograph showing a luminous green line tracing the edge of a WiFi signal around a building

The film Immaterials: Light painting WiFi, made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the YOUrban project, is a finalist at the Vimeo Awards 2012.

The awards ceremony is on 7 June at 8PM in New York City. The Vimeo Festival also looks great!

Robot Readable World

Timo Arnall — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This is a short film, an experiment in machine-vision footage. It uses found-footage from computer vision research to explore how machines are making sense of the world.

Video: Robot Readable World

Robot Readable World. Timo Arnall 2011. 5’09”.

As robots begin to inhabit the world alongside us, how do they see and gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? Machines have a tiny, fractional view of our environment, that sometimes echoes our own human vision and often doesn’t.

Read more about the film and have a look at Matt Jones’ talk of the same title.

Little Printer

Timo Arnall — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Hello Little Printer, available 2012

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper. More…

Talk to Me

Timo Arnall — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I have five works in MoMA’s latest exhibition ‘Talk to Me’ in New York. The works are Nearness, Immaterials, Media Surfaces, The Journey and Suwappu.

I have written more about the exhibition and the works at the Touch and BERG weblogs. The exhibition has also been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others.

The films of Adam Lisagor

Timo Arnall — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been quite taken with the films of Adam Lisagor for a while.

I make small, palatable videos, like commercials, for companies involved in tech, to figure out how to convey the essence of their products in concise, accessible ways. I like to think that I’m able to do this because I think slowly enough to notice the exact points while using a product at which I respond with the most delight. And if I can reproduce those moments on-screen, without explicitly saying that they’re delightful, an audience will intuitively understand the delight they might feel themselves. (From an interview in Business Insider.)

He’s good at surfacing the joy and pleasure in some of the smallest interactions, particularly evident in this ad for the Jambox by Jawbone.

Mother. Father. Always you wrestle inside me.

Timo Arnall — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Hunter McCracken as the young Jack. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011).

A truth that releases a waterfall of emotion. It is this energy that propels us through The Tree of Life. A voluptuous, bulging energy shaped and encouraged by sweeping camera movement, ultra wide lenses, lyrical blocking, the safe-harbor of Jessica Chastain’s face, and the vacillation in Hunter McCracken’s. These combine to create scenes that perfectly capture the rapturous feelings of childhood. Sensations evoked when light & dark entwine, and our instinctual knowledge that these things are the same.

The Father (Brad Pitt) walking with the young Jack. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011), shot in Waco, Texas.

And on how to approach the film:

A moment long enough for me to relax, and I was suddenly taken by a feeling of great tenderness and calm. I don’t completely understand why I felt this, but the inclusion of these CGI dinosaurs struck me as an particularly affectionate and loving decision. Terrence Malick believes in his audiences, and has faith that we also can believe. It’s the feeling of your mother brushing the hair off your forehead as she tells you a bedtime story. You protest because she’s changed a part of the usual tale, or it’s not the way you want it to be, but smiling, she says “Shhh shhh. Just listen.”

From the brilliant Kartina Richardson.

Connecting the digital world with print

Timo Arnall — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A rare piece of writing from Durrell Bishop:

What if there was a generic tool to link the digital and the physical worlds? A way to touch an object, to select and see its digital augmentation? It would just send a message via your chosen device: laptop, mobile, home wifi et al. The equivalent of a digital finger. Passive objects would act as physical buttons to the digital world. All that these objects would require is that we perceive their purpose, and see how to act on them. We would need to have an accessible tool to make our selection, and carry out the link between the two worlds.

Read the whole thing: Connecting the digital world with print.

A phone to save us from our screens?

Timo Arnall — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has two new ads, anticipating their upcoming Windows Phone 7 launch. The first is an almost post-apocalyptic vision of humanity stuck with their heads in their mobile devices:

Video: Official Windows Phone 7 Ad, Really [HD]

Here’s David Webster, chief strategy officer in Microsoft’s central marketing group, explaining their anti-screen strategy:

“Our sentiment was that if we could have an insight to drive the campaign that flipped the category on its head, then all the dollars that other people are spending glorifying becoming lost in your screen or melding with your phone are actually making our point for us.”

The problem of glowing rectangles is a subject close to my heart, and Matt Jones has been bothered by the increase in mobile glowing attention-wells.

Video: Season of the Witch: New Windows Phone 7 Ad

I think Microsoft & Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s advertising strategy stands out in a world full of slick floaty media. The only problem is that without any strategy towards tangible interaction, I’m not sure the ‘tiles’ interaction concept is strong enough to actually take people’s attention out of the glass.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting

Timo Arnall — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Making Future Magic: iPad light painting

Made at BERG for Dentsu London, this film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world. We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation. More…

Olars: physical toy inspired by karl sims evolved creatures

Timo Arnall — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A lovely piece of work by Lars M. Vedeler and Ola Vågsholm from the Tangible Interactions course at The Oslo School of Architecture & Design:

Video: Olars

Olars is an electronic interactive toy inspired by Karl Sims’ evolved virtual creatures. Having thousands of varieties in movement and behaviour by attaching different geometrical limbs, modifying the angle of these, twisting the body itself, and by adjusting the deflection of the motorised joints, results in both familiar and strange motion patterns.

Olars on Vimeo

The future is Movie OS

Timo Arnall — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A still from the film xXx, an elaborate fictional computer interface from Mark Coleran's motion-graphics portfolio

Still from the film xXx from Mark Coleran‘s portfolio.

The idea that Apple is grasping at real-life objects because they support effective visual storytelling is very interesting:

In Movie OS, visual storytelling is used to make the system’s important, critical reaction to a user’s action abundantly clear. In Movie OS, you know if you’re logging into Facebook. I’d argue that visual storytelling doesn’t exist – if it does, it hardly exists at all – in computer or consumer eletronics user interfaces. The entire palette of visual storytelling in terms of interface, through accident of history, is purely engineering and control-led. This is where, I’d say, Apple is grasping when it says that interfaces should sometimes look toward real-life objects. Real-life physical objects have affordances that are used in effective visual storytelling – and animation – that can be used well to make clear the consequences of actions. It’s more complicated than that, though, and it can go horribly wrong as well as right.

From Dan Hon at Extenuating Circumstances – The future is Movie OS.

Proximity payments

Timo Arnall — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Bump Pay

YouTube – The new PayPal iPhone app seems to use the Bump API to match up two physical gestures and make a payment. (I even like their tacky faux-anthropology video).

Video: Demo - Square Card Reader from Squareup.com

And Square has just announced their payment app for the iPad.

CCD and computational photography

Timo Arnall — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A few links on imaging and computation:

I’ve concluded that the promise of RFID was eclipsed by another technology out there that’s poised to become more and more disruptive, not only to RFID, but to a host of technologies, and that’s the CCD.

from CCD by Joe Gregorio. Via BERG.

Cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects.

from Computational Photography, American Scientist

The camera as a device you carry has completely disappeared. Image sensors have become part of the literal fabric of everyday life.

from What Photography Will Look Like By 2060

Wireless in the World

Timo Arnall — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Made for the HABITAR exhibition at Laboral, Wireless in the World overlays representations of invisible wireless technology into real, public spaces. It aims to provoke discussion around the new ‘immaterials’ that underpin many of our urban interactive experiences. More…

3D secret – hidden pictures

Timo Arnall — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Video: DSi「立体かくし絵アッタコレダ」(Looksley's Line Up) PV

Beautiful new exploratory game for the Nintendo DS, that uses the front-facing camera and face tracking to calculate a perspective that renders like a window on a new world.

DSi「立体かくし絵　アッタコレダ」(Looksley’s Line Up). Via BERG

Augmented (hyper)Reality

Timo Arnall — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it. A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

A competent visualisation of an undesirable future.

Augmentia

Timo Arnall — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Anselm Hook, one of the founding thinkers of the geo-web, co-organiser of the first ARDevCamp at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View late last year, lays out the emerging issues with Augmented Reality. He relates it to a whole host of known and unknown problems around ubiquitous computing, semantic publishing and data platforms. A few passages worth holding on to:

It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”. Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge. Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds. Interfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself. By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet. There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view. AR is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters. Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.

Things

Timo Arnall — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Things I’ve noticed today:

Thinglink homepage (Little AR-esque pins and bubbles)

Lovely new exploratory homepage at Thinglink.

Engaging and engrossing navigation of products

There is clearly a very well curated user-base at SVPPLY creating a continuous navigation of want.

Pour votre sécurité

Timo Arnall — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Pour votre sécurité.

17 January.

Parallel tracking and mapping for small AR workspaces

Timo Arnall — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces (PTAM) - extra

AR in unknown scenes is always going to be difficult without a remote expert to annotate the map. Here, we restrict ourselves to finding a dominant plane in the scene, and then running simple VR/AR games on this plane: essentially, you can have little AR critters running around on your tabletop. At present, no attempt is made to exploit the map to e.g. find occluding geometry; this is an area of future work. (From Georg Klein).

I love how it goes in and out of register, and how it ‘picks up’ the registration from an initial set of objects. People will end up intuiting that AR works in certain ways “not around trees” for instance, or only in “static scenes”.

YouTube – Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces (PTAM) – extra.

Immaterials: Ghost in the field

Timo Arnall — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Ghost in the Field makes the field around an RFID reader visible. Long-exposure photography traces the volume in which a tag and reader can talk; outside that volume, the radio falls off and nothing happens. Made with Jack Schulze as part of the Touch project, 2009. More…

Sniff

Timo Arnall — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Sniff

Made with Sara Johansson and Einar Sneve Martinussen as part of the Touch project. Sniff is a soft toy dog that 'sniffs' and reacts to objects that come close to his nose. More…

Speculative practitioners symposium at the AA

Timo Arnall — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Announcement image for the Speculative Practitioners symposium at the Architectural Association, London, July 2009.

In this symposium we will hear stories from such foreign fields as gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art. These speculative practitioners present alternative models as test sites for the deployment of the wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales of our own architectural imaginings. (via AA School Website)

Aurora: Mozilla Labs concept video by Adaptive Path

Timo Arnall — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Video: Aurora (Part 1)

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

Olinda: digital radio prototypes from Schulze & Webb

Timo Arnall — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Olinda, the social digital-radio prototype by Schulze and Webb, shown as a stacked modular device.

Olinda is the first step of this exploration with home digital radio. A small number of fully functioning prototypes show that it’s possible to design social, Web-like experiences using industry standard DAB chip-sets, and conventional manufacturing techniques. We hope this project provokes as many thoughts for you as it has done for us

Olinda (Schulze & Webb)

Schulze on design as invention

Timo Arnall — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Slide from Matt Webb's Scope talk at reboot11, quoting Jack Schulze on design as invention.

What Schulze says is that design has to invent, to create new ways of doing things, and to contribute to culture. (via Slide 4 of 44 (Scope at reboot11, Matt Webb, S&W))

The original Nintendo Wii trailer