designswarm thoughts

Not interactive designer, all designers are interactive!

Lovely interview of Kars here, I think that conversation embodies the misunderstandings and challenges around the concept of “just enough prototyping” (mantra that Gillian Crampton Smith pushed at Ivrea) and the need to be dependent on technology when designing or be technology agnostic.

It took me a while to digest Janne’s post on why ubicomp is a broken concept, mostly because on principal I tend to disagree. It’s also a bit in response to Tom Coates’s altered version of his talk with Matt Jones that he gave at Foocamp called “Personal Informatics”.

Firstly I think the starting point for thinking about ubiquitous spaces, objects etc is not necessarily that they are meant to be smarter, but perhaps more that they are meant to report better. Not smart, just less dumb :) Andy’s house is the obvious example of this. I think there is tremendous interest at the moment about being able to gather more efficiently stuff that is just lying around, invisible and not particularily useful. Innovation often comes from taking things we know and mashing them up with things we didn’t know we didn’t know. Someone pointed out the other day that we’re ultimately creeping towards AI with all these “clever” systems, but I think it might just be the reverse, we still hold the brain, we’ve just outsourced the synapses.

Also I think there are plenty of areas to think about in regards to the results of ubiquitous systems, information and data. One of the most important things, in my opinion has to do with evaluating the amount of behavioral or operational change based on the digestion and synthesis of all this data. It’s no use collecting the temperature and light levels inside a building if it isn’t with the aim to perfect your heating system or prevent collective seasonal depression for eg. Even on a personal basis, its no use me being able to monitor my heartrate everyday, because it only puts me in the “now”, an ephemeral place of thought and decision-making. One thing about technology, is that it tends to make people generally lazy about their levels of commitment. Perhaps we should push instead for the development of technologies and applications that encourage people to invest time and effort in an activity (think Honey we’re killing the kids).

Furthermore, what’s interesting about this idea of personal ubiquity is that some of it could possibly be shared online, so no longer relying on a sturdy and professional infrastructure other than the internet itself. Seeing people play around with Pachube and the Ethernet Arduino shield, makes things really exciting.

All in all I think the ubicomp ideas of the future will be more personal, more persuasive and lighter than what we’ve seen so far.

I never thought ubicomp would come out of an iPhone app. If anything, Exposure has the power to connect us with objects and lives that were lived around us in the past, as long as they’ve been geotagged first. Matt and I had a look, sitting on our couch at home, and found pictures of people who are probably our neighbours having a bbq, portraits, etc. There was something uneasy about seeing pictures of people who cease to become strangers yet aren’t familiar at all. A whole future of perception lies ahead.

So I find myself in the unlikely position of having bitched about an event I got invited to this year.

Since that post, I can say that the state of interaction design conferences and education has dramatically improved with This happened in London and IxDA in the US. Hopefully this is a “future trend” :) as the schools on the subject are also starting to mushroom:

- The Institute for Information Technology at Thames Valley University is opening a MSc in Computing Interaction Design in the UK in January 2009.

- Former Ivreans are starting Copenhagen Insitute for Interaction design as well as Interaction design program in Venice

- Even Carnegie Mellon is getting on board keeping up the good work with a Masters in Tangible Interaction design.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

I’ve finally found some time to have a proper read through Baudrillard’s System of objects to find it really is shaping my thinking around material culture and technology. Some quick thoughts based on quotes from the book:

“No sooner does an object lose its concrete practical aspects than it is transferred to the realm of mental practices”.

This made me think today about my first mentor if I can call him so. Hywel Jeffcott was my DTC teacher when I was 14-16 and the first one to truly encourage me to go into design. He gave me, on graduating from Year 11, a fabulous book I ended up endlessly flipping through called The Way things work by David Macauley. I think in a way the work I am doing with Tinker tries to somehow get back to the idea that innovation and technology are also palpable things that can be understood down to simple components. Simple components, simple actions that exist within the real of direct application are part of an art and a craft that in design is left to “fabricators”.
“Man has to be reassured by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one”

I think there’s much to be said about the fear that technology will take over. Baudrillard highlights an inconsistency in our thinking where we want technology to be as human as possible but if a sense of agency is too present (such as in articifial intelligence) then a line has been crossed which fills us with apocalyptic fears. We want so much for this technology to know about us and our needs, but not _that_ much. Where this line lies depends almost entirely on context of application, which means it isn’t policed and all sorts of privacy issues and concerns arise. It’s what he calls the “new anthropomorphism”.
“No man’s land between workplace and family home” is a metaphor that Baudrillard applies to the automobile. I think it can almost potentially extend to the cell phone. A personal object that is used so publicly and bridges space and time.

In any case, I truly recommend it as compulsory reading for designers. It is full of insights and questions about the great illusion we are creating and the mechanisms  and motivations that work just under the surface of  our everyday life.

(Disclaimer: My company Tinker.it was sponsoring this event)

Few events in London care about defining interaction design like thishappend does. It’s third edition took place last Tuesday at the Roxy Bar near London Bridge and in a matter of an hour or so really framed the current challenges the field faces in industry.

First and foremost thishappened is an opportunity for interaction designers to leave their laptops and post-its behind, have a drink and a good chat with each other as there are few other “industry events” (this one sold out in 2 hours) and only that in itself is extremely valuable.

Jussi Ängeslevä, Schulze & Webb, Kenichi Okada and Snug & Outdoor had been invited to speak about a project, it’s challenges and the lessons learnt, a format we don’t see enough and that allows for much reflection on the design process. What I found great in this edition is that each presenter ended up talking about a different aspect of the project and creative experience.

1. The problem with remote projects is…

Jussi started the evening by talking about Art+Com’s project Duality an interactive walkway surrounded by water which, when someone would walk on it, would display ripples of light that would then extend out to create real ripples in the water. This sounds fairly straightforward, but the project was entirely conducted between their Berlin office and Tokyo, through a myriad of emails, testing by the japanese team on the other end, exchange of videos to see if the theory was proving right or wrong. Sounds tedious no? I asked Jussi if he had found there were any additional cultural issues in overseing the project, he talked about the fact that the Japanese were always quite keen to say everything was alright, and not talk about having any issues, until the very last minute. Lessons were certainly learnt in this process and it was great to get to hear it first hand.

2. Design in R&D

Jack was up next to talk about Olinda the social radio project for the BBC. It was a lovely and simple presentation of their challenge in mashing up an online concept of sociability into an everyday object. Coming from a typography background, I could see why he made some of his aesthetic choices. I also think this presented the array of challenges that face you when the outcome of a project is something you’re not entirely familiar with (even if the thought process is) : the learning curve, the time you take in understanding the implications of your design, the way in which your design decisions impact the use of an object, are all part of a challenge that presents itself when you are master and commander of the project. It’s also something that rarely happens in commercial projects in equally large companies like the BBC as those challenges would be broken down into tasks that would be divided up among “specialists” and glued together by project management. ugh. I think a lot of people in the room felt envious of Jack and Matt’s freedom.

3. The utopia of design schools

A similar freedom can be found in design schools. As Kenichi presented his project Animal Superpowers I was having flashbacks of Ivrea. Quick, efficient, with no sleep and little food and no money, the best ideas are often created, prototyped and presented in no time at all. The resources are part of the school’s infrastructure and materials available everywhere. The deadline of the work-in-progress show allows him and Chris to present one of the most successful pieces of their course. The caveat was subtle though, as they struggled to find children to use their capacity-enhancing toys, and showed a picture where Kenichi was pretending to be one of the kids. I can totally relate to that struggle, as designing for children can be one of the most elating activities and at the same time full of restrictions and limitations. When you’re doing a quick project user research is the least of your worries.

4. Implementing is awesome

Access to children wasn’t a problem for Hattie, who presented a great documentation of Snug and Outdoor’s work on London playgrounds. It was great to hear that they had been thinking about undirected and open play way before the topic was an internet meme. Although they label themselves as artists, their approach is a user-centered one and captured everyone’s imagination by demonstrating the different prototypes they had designed and tried on children. This eventually led them to receive NESTA funding and manufacture the Snug Kit. I overheard someone say “Why couldn’t they have just used trees and grass instead. What’s the point?” and to that I reply: show me a school with a playground that isn’t made of concrete. Their challenge was in dealing with the existing social infrastructures that children build in the schools of today not the landscape design.

The fact that the project was tested, changed, accepted, and manufactured made most people in the room clearly envious. The creative process in interaction design can often feel limited to one-off events, screen-based interactions and generally projects that are very “precious” and need tending, so seeing real products being made with the kind of creative independence and scope that Hattie and her partner had was a breath of fresh air.

This crescendo concluded the official part of the event which turned into a mixer of 60 or so people having drinks, catching up and perhaps talking about where it is all going.

In anycase, I look forward to the next edition in June and hope you’ll join me too.

From the most excellent Adam Greenfield:

“Many of the more conceptual pieces - and here I’m thinking particularly of Noam Toran’s and Dunne & Raby’s - need a good deal more explication, at least if visitors outside the particular social/intellectual fold in which these artifacts were produced are not to take them at face value, which is something I overheard happening.”

Makes me think I’m not completely crazy

The London Underground is one of the few places where you’re likely to find me reading adverts, and I bet I’m not the only one (see Lesson 23). Fact of the matter is the Tube is the fastest way to get where you want to go, but the price to pay is higher than the £1.70 on your Oyster card.
Taking “The Tube”, is a most brutal experience, both socially isolating and physically violating as half of London (it seems) tries to cram themselves in the same carriage as you. Your mind wants to desperately wander as you stand there, squashed, avoiding looking at others at all cost, looking up to the overhead advertising banners. It’s a moment of boredom and mental survival at the same time and somehow having an iPod doesn’t quite help.

Molly Steenson wrote (and spoke at this week’s IxDA conference) about how boredom can influence designers and architects, but what I also find fascinating is how to design for someone who is essentially stuck in an environment that will force them to see your design… out of boredom. Would you want to design for that environment at all?
The motivation for the “user” here is not genuine interest after all, but escapism. Give them something to read, and not only will they read it, but they’ll be grateful for it (which explains why there are about 3 free papers distributed outside of stations in London).

Is there opportunity to change the nature of the environment or to change the nature of the relationship to its content? Should the carriage know where you’re at in your book and display the next page, even if others might read it too? Should there be theme-based carriages? Events at the back, products in the middle, news at the front? Should the real-time location of the train be somehow displayed, showing how long there is to go till the next station and alleviating some of the stress?

Just some thoughts and I don’t claim to think they are all that interesting :) but I think there are lots of opportunities both for really playful interactions to exist in this shared experience and environment.

I went to see the impossibly crowded opening of the Work-in-progress show at the RCA yesterday and although I really should try to go back, the feeling I got coming out of it was one of being puzzled by what it all meant.

Fact is, I’m not sure of RCA’s overall design rhetoric anymore. Durrel Bishop who once headed taught Design Interactions is now teaching at Design Products and the product design projects start to look like the works for Design Interactions a few years ago (especially the radio project, a late cousin of the IDII’s Strangely Familiar project when I was there in 2005). The Design Interactions projects are conceptually mostly based on either statistics, exploitation of the edges of society and in general not very self-explanatory. Maybe that’s what that course aims to do, to make us aware of problems to come and simply attempt to illustrate solutions or consequences. But then is that even design anymore or simply creative naysaying?

Few projects were really self-explanatory, and well isn’t that what art is about? You read the description to give you a contextual framework in which to understand what you’re seeing. Devoid of those explanations, I would challenge anyone to understand what was happening. Again, not a good or a bad thing, just a trend it seems.

Bless their hearts the IDE course presented loads of great work, themed on the next generation of mobiles (with the network 3) and global warming solutions for the household.

In strange way, the whole show could have been presented along an axis of time, answering the question: For who is it you are designing?
IDE would have answered: “someone from 2009″,
Design Products: “someone from 2011″ and
Design Interactions: “someone from 2025″.

Perhaps then for me would the show have made sense and so would the activity of designing and future-casting associated with it.

“The more I read interviews with these rock star designers, the more I realize how out of touch with real design problems these people are. Approaching design solely as style and brand simply perpetuates the notion of Design as transparent and shallow, and if these people continue to serve as the mouthpieces for our industry, our industry will continue to simultaneously lose the business-centered respect and credibility it so urgently needs, and to ignore the social and cultural problems it so direly needs to solve.”

Via nice article in Core77.

Thanks Chris.

Since I’m involved with way too much technology, leading activities for tinker.it! in London, and helping out Tom with thinking about the future internet of things, I suppose it’s only normal I’m also spending time on technology-light projects as well.

I worked on to&fro(muji) with Dave last August and we submitted the idea to the Muji Award 02. The second edition of this international conference, the theme this year was “re”. Re-do, re-use, re-think etc…

We focused on reviving a lost art of letter writing. Taking the idea of RE-spond, RE-use and RE-think, we wanted to inject this activity with some of the components of it’s more modern counterpart: email.

The reversible envelope allows you to write the name of the sender and receiver once. As you write your letter on the perforated letter-paper provided, you can choose to tear the leftovers after you’re done (leaving no space for a reply if it’s a “dear john” kind of letter :) ) or not. Put your letter in and fold up the envelope and make sure your “to” will match the adress you’ve written down. Put a stamp on the right hand corner and send it.

The person who receives it gets to open the envelope and reply with the space you’ve left, deciding whether to keep your letter or not. He/she simply reverses the envelope (as the adress turns from “from” to “to”) includes her reply and sends it along.

Check out the Flickr set for this project.

Enjoy!

As I’m flying to Amsterdam for a few days tomorrow, I had to literally squeeze my london design festival experience in 2 days. Yesterday was dedicated to designersblock and today was 100%design at Earl’s Court. Some nice finds there, still too many tiles, bathroom fixtures and lighting design, and not much interaction design but there were a few nice things and some weird ones too.

Tomoaki Yanagisawa, former RCA student I met a few years ago in L.A. presented his fabulous project Luminos.

“Luminos are bricks in darkness. Like a candle needs a fire to light it up, Luminos, which have light sensors and LEDs, need light to turn the LEDs on.
This is a simple and intuitive interaction yet it has the possibility of complexity of a chain reaction created by configurations of Luminos like dominoes and bricks.”

Cassi Hill presented a series of fabric life-like lamps that you can wrap up around your apartment.

Yeon Juyang designed some interesting looking lamps, I can’t feeling there could be more to them, just not sure what.

And finally I had the great pleasure of seeing one of the few academics I truly admire, Jonathan Chapman talk about emotionally sustainable design in product lifecycle, at the 100%sustainable booth.

One strange thing I noticed is that several exhibitors were members of a so-called Anti copying in design association, clearly showing that the open-source phenomenon is not making any headway in product design yet.

“Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral–about why and when rather than about what and how.”

This really isn’t helping anyone come up with that one liner at a bar in response to the dreaded:”So what do you do?”

boxes and arrows.