designswarm thoughts

Brilliant. From Russell of course.

I’ve been thinking about embodied contexts for maps lately, beyond flat paper maps.

I have 3 sets of keys that I carry around and I thought that a simple way of differentiating them would be to design location-relevant key rings. There’s such a familiarity with specific locations like the office, home, your partner’s home, that labels aren’t necessary anymore.

KeyMaps are key rings with a very focused zoomed-in map of where that key goes. The hole in the keyring is the place those keys are connected to. Around them, the area. Something that only the owner could make sense of. Granular, but not too granular.

I think they might be nice made out of wood and generated easily online somewhere.

That’s it. Happy Easter!

Hackday today at RIG with James and Phil and I thought I’d share what I came up with.

I’ve been using Google MyMaps for about 4 years now, mapping out the cities I visit and live in with pins that often relate to food and culture. I share them a lot and most of them have been viewed by thousands of people. They do however feel like the lonely Google project noone cares about. I think there is so much they could do with it if anyone cared about the implications of those maps during a travel experience. They have the data, it’s only a question of layout and a little intelligence. So I thought I’d try designing what clicking “print” should give you.

I made a prototype last friday for a weekend trip to Paris which gave me some insights but made a cleaner version today. Pics of that on Flickr.

MyTravelMaps is the size of a Moleskine so it’s compact and you can fold it in half to fit into your pocket. Design for pockets is important as Russell said.

The first page has your travel details and the name of your hotel. Nothing else. You don’t need anything else if you’re a seasoned traveller anyway.

The other pages have the description of the pins on one side of the page, tagged according to categories (food in yellow and culture in blue) and listed from North to South to match the map, so as you travel around you kind of know what you’re likely to bump into. It also allows you to make decisions about where you’re likely to end up looking for a place to eat versus visiting museums as those areas don’t often overlap (or shouldn’t if you’re on a budget).

This isn’t about accuracy because travel is about the things you didn’t know about, the stuff people will tell you, the hand-written notes on those maps, the unplanned. It’s building in a little less accuracy than a directions map. It’s building in fun. This is also designed for the wanderings of walking around a city, not for someone who is looking for something specifically. They’ll use their phone for that. I used 3 pieces of paper all weekend, never once taking out a phone to check where we were. That’s kindof what I’d like this to be. Small, smart and useful.

I did a bit of Olympics-related media thinking for a client last month and it dawned on me that the most interesting thing about that 2 weeks will be the social and cultural gap that athletes and their entourage will have to deal with, not to mention the millions of tourists. How do you make the whole experience of living in England for a short amount of time less troubling. Often, when you visit a place for a short while, you accept the cultural differences, but some of these people will be here for months, training before the events. Linguistics is not that much of a challenge and something like Point it will do a basic job. But how do you explain simple everyday things like: what should I listen to in the morning?

Radio Cards are a little set of cards attached to the aerial of a radio to remind you of the major UK radio stations.

Just a friendly tiny useful thing. It took me about 2 years before I started listening to Radio 4 and I sometimes switch to a classical channel (not sure which) when I can’t fall asleep. I had to look up the other stations for this. Radio is a funny old thing, a thing of habit. To an English person, this will make no sense because it is assumed you know these things, but from a foreigner’s perspective, every little helps.

More pics here.

Always good to know how to look back. Very nice deck.

I got this last month from Michel, a lovely student from Eindhoven:

“I am currently looking for an internship in HCI/ID, but I am suffering from a “typecasting”-effect. Many companies ask for “interaction designers” when they really mean “graphics designers” or “css monkeys”. The fact that I have a background in computer science just makes things worse by adding “programmer” to the list of stigmas. My interests lie in the more physical kinds of interaction, but it’s really hard to find the right positions for that. Do you have any advice as to how I might better find the right places? Any help would be greatly appreciated!”

This felt deeply familiar of course as when I graduated in 2006 and it was a problem even then (I ended up working as a visual designer / information architect for a year even if my portfolio of work was much more product-based).

I try to explain to people what an interaction designer is in the way that I understand it, and in the context of the business I built, it makes sense. But in isolation, it no longer means anything on the market. Physical computing is too embedded in academia and is starting to feel old. Bill Verplank had suggested Physical Interaction Design, but it sounds a little clunky. So should we be concerned by this? As per Michel’s email, i think so. Graduates become senior designers, strategists, creative directors, etc. rarely interaction designers.

Lack of terminology ultimately leads to lack of identity and the dilution of a field into the market, unnoticed. Something to think about for the start of the week :)

Read one of Wired Uk’s 20 ideas worth considering for 2010 and one of them caught my eye. Clive Thomson reported on ideas from the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age and I can’t help but think that we have naturally adapted to what we so often call “information overload” in a way that doesn’t require us to design for forgetting.

One of my theories is that we’ve built up the internet as a way of finding rather than as a way of remembering, naturally allowing us to forget most of it. Digital stacks of papers and bookshelves. We’ve built up the equivalent behavior of “oh I’m sure it’s in that pile”. Digital synapses dying every day.

Just as an example, here are some things I do now as ways of forgetting:

- Use Delicious to store rather than as a reference point. I rarely look at my own bookmarks.
- Not actually remembering where a link came from, but who tweeted it instead.
- Check RSS feeds in a “watching TV”-like trance: I just click through the channels and stop on the stuff that visually catches my eye. I open my RSS reader once a week at best, and the stuff that’s at the top gets read, the rest kindof gets ignored.

We have more ways of archiving than ever but that doesn’t mean we’re interested in that archive. I was a guest lecturer last month in a design school and was shocked to find that most of the research students were pulling out was from the past 3 years at most.

Archiving doesn’t have the same qualities as a library quite yet. Maybe that’s a design opportunity, or maybe the FluidData metaphor needs to be reexamined.

In any case, I think we’re better at forgetting now than we used to and that has raised the profile of “knowledge” and “opinion” over “information” (also probably explains why blogging is not quite a dead art). The people who take the time to remember will rule us all. The rest of us, will rely on our “devices” and Google.

I’m giving out a prize in about half an hour to whoever made the best thing today at Hack the Government day in the lovely offices of the Guardian. In spite (I say this as I’m surrounded by very serious looking data wranglers) of not being a coder, I made something too.

Number 10 has a lovely website, they’ve made an effort it must be said, however, their petitions site (one of the best ways to express yourself to the government) is somewhat hidden (under the overly formal “Communicate” tab and it’s actually called E-petitions…yuck) and essentially a very heavy collection of lists, formal and legal requirements and generally not web2.0 friendly at all. The thing is there are a ton of really interesting petitions in there and some great stories about the UK and how it works and sometimes doesn’t. It would be great to get to see that and browse through these stories in a more interesting way.

Inspired by Wordle, Digg, Pledgebank, Upcoming and other things I use, I thought I’d revamp it a little, so here’s what I’ve done:

- Pushed Petitions to the top level navigation.
- Used a tag cloud for people to randomly explore content and get them engaged.
- Added an element of timing to push people who created these petitions to share them and get as many people signed up as possible within a given timeframe. People work well within a small number of constraints.
- It could do with a better info viz then this graph but hey, this is what you get after 3 hours of work, build on it if you’re not happy :)
- Rearranged content for each petition to that the description comes first, the signing up after.
- Added the ability to comment, which is always a nice add-on (wasn’t sure as to whether digging + or – each petition was the way to go so left it aside for now)
- Added tagging to each petition which should create a nice richness of information
- Added a whole bunch of tools that someone might use after they actually write up a petition, if they were engaged enough to write it, they’re probably engaged enough to link to it or email their friends or shout it out on Facebook.

So there, a little pixel pushing which did me a world of good but killed my back (stupid Aeron chairs). There are a bunch of things to add on that would complement this I suspect, but it is a Saturday :) Happy Weekend!

So I thought I’d map out the interesting academic environments where one might find a course that relates in some way shape or form to interaction design in the broadest sense possible (notice there aren’t any web courses here). I’m interested in how these schools form the professionals of tomorrow and how the field will find it’s way on the overall market. I’ll evenutally try to do the same with the interaction design businesses.

Note that this map is publicly editable so if I’m missing something, do add to it!

View Larger Map

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.