As Far As I Can Tell

I ran across an interesting article, Creative Gesture or Vapid Prototyping?, on Adobe’s site yesterday about fictional products and the narrative forms that bring them to life. The examples may be just for fun or a bit sci-fi but I love these sorts of projects and see some relevance for project work as well.

Often times Interaction Design experience prototypes are focused on conveying a realistic experience of use, but the idea of a fictional product is more about probing a pure idea. What role can this sort of thinking play in our projects and where would it fit in the process? Inherent in these fictional products is that they convey an idea, and are thus meant to be shared and discussed. I keep thinking about using this approach for research probes; creating post-brainstorm fictional products that embody wild ideas for soliciting feedback.

Fictional products don’t have to be just for letting off steam, when designers play with alternate futures and new behaviors they are prototyping potential new relationships. The article doesn’t bring it up specifically but one can’t help but think of Critical Design in this context. I have previously associated fictionalized products with the sort of critical approach taken at the Design Interactions program of the RCA. I quite respect that work and the broadened cultural scope it gives to design, but there may be more productive and process oriented roles for fictional products to play as well.

I know that these notes are quite old at this point, and everyone else has already given their opinion on the conference. Better late than never though, and writing this helps me clarify my thoughts and revisit my experiences.

Putting together a coherent conference the topic of “designing for user experience” is a wide reaching challenge, made wider still by the theme this year to explore “changing roles & shifting landscapes” within the field. Accordingly, at DUX 2007 I met designers and researchers with varied backgrounds and responsibilities, a number of product managers, computer scientists, linguists, writers, dancers, academics of all stripes, and even proprietors of a yoga center. This was my first time as this bi-yearly event, conveniently held this time in downtown Chicago. My review of the proceedings is incomplete due to the varied level of attention I gave to particular presenters in my notes. Regardless, I hope that these remarks on the conference act not only as clarification and record keeping for my own experience but also encourage non-attendees to investigate the work presented.

Session 1: A Very Big Picture
The opening session felt like a grab bag, a place to put presentations that didn’t fit cleanly elsewhere except to illustrate the diversity of the conference, which was actually an okay way to begin. Moderator Pamela Mead, Zannel, began by discussing the theme of shifting landscapes, bringing up mobile platforms, social networks, user participation, and the complexity/necessity of managing different virtual selves in varying contexts. This opening presentation was on target with the conference theme, which unfortunately didn’t ring true for many others.

Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path, followed with a presentation entitled “Designing for Unbounded Experience.” He begin by decrying the word “innovation”, challenging all upcoming presenters to avoid using the term and say what they really mean instead. It was a point brought up again and again throughout the conference as presenters tried and (usually) failed to answer that challenge. He told a story about client work at Adaptive Path for a financial services firm (which I had heard before at a previous talk or podcast somewhere) that illustrated his point that design needs to address larger system and organizational issues to have true impact, not just a particular silo like designing a website. He argued that for design to have impact it must not be pigeonholed, that we should be designing for unbounded experience that address all touchpoints. Clearly this is something that many companies, and many in the audience, are already striving for — though it requires a high-level of engagement with a client or management group to accomplish. It seems like this is a particularly relevant line of thinking for Adaptive Path as they transition from their roots in web-based user experience and aspire to more holistic offerings.

Elizabeth Goodman, UC Berkley and Intel Research, followed with a project called “AnyPhone: Mobile Applications for Everyone.” The idea behind the AnyPhone project was to design mobile applications that can run on ANY mobile phone no matter how old — meaning no Java, SMS, Bluetooth, or even color screens. The technology they settled on was DTMF tones, which are simply the sounds you hear when you dial a touch-tone phone. An example application they prototyped involved a public screen with visual representations of each person’s mobile phone. People could call in to interact with the screen, and were identified by caller id. Commands were issued via key press to control their icon, and since feedback was happening visually people didn’t have to listen for audio messages or hold the handset to their ear; the phone was used as a remote control. Interaction could also go the other way, where a person could call in with a question and when their icon was selected the system could call them back. The prototypes demonstrated a way to engage an unknown public without excluding the less technologically enabled. The take-away was that creative use of old, but still operational technology is sometimes the best choice to create accessible and universal solutions.

Marc Pifarre and Oscar Tomico, University of Engineering and Architecture La Salle, Barcelona and University of Technology, Eindhoven, presented their work on “Bi-Polar Laddering,” which I found a bit hard to understand due to accents and mumbling. The process they were describing had heavy psychological underpinnings, but I found it similar the simplistic method “5 Why?” which involves asking “why?” five times to get to the underlying reasons behind a person’s behavior. It’s possible that their technique was more nuanced, and it was certainly more quantitatively and theoretically driven, but I didn’t find it different enough to warrant future investigation.

BJ Fogg, Stanford University, was not physical present to present his paper entitled “The Elements of Simplicity,” but appeared via pre-recorded video instead. I’m familiar with Fogg’s work on Persuasive Technology, but hadn’t read anything in his recent topic of study. The tone of the video presentation was kind of condescending; I guess it was a failed attempt at humor to go along with the video composition and editing styles of Ze Frank he was using. Maybe it was to counter notions of the “boring academic” or other such nonsense but it was off-putting. Fogg laid out a framework for Simplicity, noting that it is the resulting perception of an experience more than a particular attribute of a product, a useful point and one well taken. He then listed the features of simplicity: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and routine. How simple something is relates to how scarce any of these resources are at a particular time. Honestly, I feel as if this is intuitive to designers and something we manage the trade offs of for every project we do. Does it help us to have a theory and framework to talk about it? Yes. Do I want it explained to me in a goofy and aggrandizing way? No, not really. For a less critical viewpoint on this talk look here.

Mick Wallis, Alice Bayliss, Sita Popat, Joslin McKinney, John Bryden and Matthew Godden, University of Leeds, presented “SpiderCrab and the Emergent Object: Designing for the 21st Century”. I started out skeptical of how relevant this work by performance artists could be to my own. The SpiderCrab is a work in progress, a robotic dancing partner that acts as a kind of Turing test for dancing with the goal of detecting intimate body expression and responding with appropriate changes in robotic movement. The key directive, based on a EU research question, was “How can we design robots that are socially acceptable to people?” I’m honestly not that interested in robotics and began to wonder if this was more appropriate at HRI than DUX but near the end as they were explaining their critical and theoretical foundation I made a note to give it another chance, to read the paper and dig into the thinking that couldn’t be conveyed in a short presentation. I’ve yet to do that, but based on other presentations by the same presenters I’m hopeful that when I do I’ll be presently surprised.

The final presentation of the session, and the day, was David Pescovitz, Boing Boing, Institute for the Future, MAKE, with a talk on “Sensory Transformation: How We’ll Sip from the Information Firehose.” His talk was a bit like reading his blog or magazine as he showed us example after example of interesting technologies and projects. He described his work as future forecasting, which he defined as developing “plausible, internally consistent views of what may happen.” To develop this sort of foresight he looks for patterns of “weak signals” — small but significant events often found in the sorts of technology or art project examples he was showing. Most of the projects mentioned I had seen before in some form, but this entertaining presentation drove home the oft-repeated William Gibson quote that “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

That ended the presentations for the first day of DUX. I hope to do similar write-ups for the following two days. There are photos on Flickr (none by me unfortunately) and hopefully the full proceedings will soon be hosted by the AIGA as they were in 2005.

I’ve added a new section to the sidebar on the right called Micro Updates. These short blubs about what I’m doing are updated via Twitter, and you can follow along there if you’d rather. It’s just another way to keep in touch since I don’t find the time to make proper posts very often.

Also, I’ve made a change to my email addresses that I’ve been meaning to share. For years I’ve had both my mopedarmy.com and currentform.com accounts go to the same place. Now I’ve bifurcated them into two proper accounts and I’d like everyone to update their address books accordingly. If you want to get ahold of me for personal or professional reasons use the currentform.com address. Use the mopedarmy.com address only for things related to Moped Army. Oh, and anyone still holding on to the andrew.cmu.edu address should switch since that one is nearly dead. This will really help me manage my inbox better, so thanks in advance.

But even more interesting — through “Red,” VA will also be offering what amounts to a fleet-wide, airborne social network. Guests on one plane will be able to interact with other guests on that plane — and with flyers on other planes within the VA fleet — using Red.

The movie is made up of 18 autonomous short stories created by a different directors with different actors. Each represents an arrondissement of Paris (there were a full 20 but two were cut) and are thematically tied together by place and the theme of love. The result is actually quite wonderful and not as jumbled or tiresome as one might expect. The time constraint placed on each director seemed to focus them on making a singular point well, with the bulk of character details left for the viewer to fill in. Like the best short stories, most of the vignettes started in the middle and ended with enough ambiguity for a discussion of possible futures.

Paris, je t’amie plays well within the current trend of micro-format media. These stories would truly work well as a video podcast and I can image watching one per day during a morning commute. The length of each story is similar to the user generated videos on YouTube but the narrative quality and production values remind me more of the advertising experiment The Hire, where BMW commissioned well known directors to create short films staring their cars but with few other constraints. For this film the assignment seemed similarly loose: use the backdrop of a great city to explore the complexity of love between people and with their surroundings.

It’s not a wide release in theaters so look for this one on DVD and if the directors are smart perhaps someday as individual story downloads on iTunes.

Last week we were in Chicago to find an apartment and ended up with a great duplex near Damen and Division in Wicker Park. It’s the second and third floor of a coach house with two bathrooms and four (!) entryways. We looked at lots of places but most seemed like college crash pads, trashed by the previous tenets with liquor bottles and filth everywhere. Finally, the second to last place on our list was an apartment we could picture ourselves living in.

We also bought a new car, a first for me since I’ve had pick-up trucks since I was 15. Our reasons for switching included wanting to haul friends more than stuff, easy parking, and fuel efficiency. The last one was a key point for us not only on economic terms ($3.90/g for gas in Chicago) but for our environmental conscious. The only car that made sense was the Prius and luckily it’s not only the most fuel efficient car in America but has some fun ways of interacting with it as well. The key is RFID-based so you can keep it in your pocket and just press a button to start the car, the doors unlock automatically for you, it has Bluetooth integration so we can make phone calls hands free from our cell phones, and a touch screen handles all car controls so the dash isn’t cluttered.

The core feature of the car, the hybrid engine system, is even more impressive than I expected. We drove from Chicago to Pittsburgh, nearly 500 miles, on a single tank of gas. It shows you what MPG the car is achieving in real time as you drive so you can begin to learn how to drive in the most fuel efficient way. That gauge is a key part of the Prius innovation since it begins to teach behavior change instead of just acting as a technological cure-all.

I really love this car; you can see more photos on Flickr.

I love watching TED Conference sessions while easting my breakfast and this morning I ran across Stefan Sagmeister’s talk from 2004 entitled Yes, design can make you happy. He discusses other people’s projects that have made him happy but also shares some insights in the form of lists that are worth repeating here.

His first list is a distillation of what he likes about his job, what he strives to do more of in his professional life:

• Thinking about ideas and content freely, with the deadline far away.
• Working without interruption on a single project.
• Using a wide variety of tools and techniques.
• Traveling to new places.
• Working on projects that matter to me.
• Having things come back from the printer well done.

I interpret the last point broadly as being satisfied with with quality of your finished product. He also shared a longer list taken from his personal diary of the lessons he has learned so far in his life:

• Complaining is silly. Either act of forget.
• Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid, I have to live now.
• Being not truthful works against me.
• Helping other people helps me.
• Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.
• Everything I do always comes back to me.
• Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
• Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted.
• Money does not make me happy.
• Traveling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life.
• Assuming is stifling.
• Keeping a diary supports my personal development.
• Trying to look good limits my life.
• Worrying solves nothing.
• Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small does.
• Having guts always works out for me.

Sagmeister has illustrated some of these lessons as magazine spreads and billboards, which can be seen in his Ping Magazine interview or SVA exhibition.

One of the really fortunate things about our apartment in Pittsburgh is that it’s right across the hall from Shiv and Dahlia, who we’ve become good friends with over the last two years. They’re moving to Ann Arbor and we’re moving to Chicago, so Meredith and Dahlia decided to start a new food blog together that chronicles their gastronomic adventures in separate cities. Be sure to check out the Good Eaters blog in the coming months.

Last weekend I received my Master of Design degree from Carnegie Mellon but today had more finality to it as I handed in my studio key and returned my much loved PowerBook. It’s time to talk about what’s happening next. Meredith and I will be in Pittsburgh through the end of June and then we’re headed to Chicago where I accepted a job as a Senior Interaction Designer at IDEO. I couldn’t be more excited about both the job and the city.

Tomorrow we head to Michigan for Moped Army BBQ 13, which also celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the organization I co-founded a decade ago. After that we’ll be in Chicago looking at apartments, hopefully finding something great in the Bucktown/Wicker Park area.

It’s over. Done. The last responsibility taken care of, printed, signed, delivered, archived, and graded. Graduate school, the all consuming force in my life for the last two years is officially wrapped up. It’s been three days since my final presentation and I’m binging on all the things I’ve been without for so long including sleep, music, reading, TV, people, and just plain relaxing. Graduation is this Saturday and it’ll be great to have my whole family in Pittsburgh. I’ll have more time to update this blog of course, but for now — a sigh of relief.