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The very lengthy presentation (there are two slides on each of the 124 pdf pages) is organised in two parts. The first one looks at research topics, such as stakeholder interviews, in-depth case studies, user research, field research, defining the information architecture, content analysis, whereas the second part is an overview of all the various aspects of interaction design.
Download presentation (pdf, 12.7 mb, 124 pages)
“Thanks to cheap and easy-to-use recording devices – digital cameras, camcorders, camera phones – today’s kids are forming the most documented generation ever, as parents, relatives and friends capture forever the first, second and hundredth smile.
But all this documentation may carry a price if parents, in spending so much energy creating and preserving a digital archive, fail to enjoy living the moment.
And will future generations even have time to look through stacks of CDs containing tens or hundreds of thousands of photos, and even if they do will individual memories become less precious because there are so many?
What if disk drives fail or software formats change, rendering photos unreadable by tomorrow’s computers? Will CDs even work? Think of those reels of 8 mm home movies with no projectors for viewing them.”
“When Lovie Smith calls in plays from the sidelines during Bears’ games, the television cameras showcase that he converses through a Motorola headset.
Motorola pays a fee for the right to furnish National Football League coaches with headsets, so it is critical that the equipment not only functions well, but also looks comfortable to the millions of viewers watching at home.
The practice of ethnography was written into Motorola’s game plan to achieve those objectives.
Ethnography is a field of anthropology that studies human activities and interactions through rigorous fieldwork. When Motorola was developing prototypes for the headset, it engaged the product design firm Herbst LaZar Bell in Chicago and its ethnographers to study how coaches were using and responding to the new technology.”
After French newspaper Le Monde reported yesterday on couples’ mobile phone spying behaviour, now the International Herald Tribune has its own take on the matter, although – frankly – it doesn’t provide much real insight:
“The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases.
Spurned lovers steal each other’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.
Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients’ adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.”
Description:
Students are equipped with creative design skills backed by a strong foundation in technology and craftsmanship.
This course is a specialised design programme which focuses on engaging contemporary cultures, business and technology by exploring new strategies for generating design ideas using both digital and physical media. These ideas are then turn into reality with innovative craft, technical innovation, invention and professionalism.
The course is designed to support the Government’s initiative to produce multi-disciplinary specialists who are well equipped with skills to understand design, technological processes, and enterprise to propel the growth of the creative industries.
The aim of the programme is to train students to be an Experience, Product and Interaction Designer, who is able to conceive creative products and services, and the experiences associated with these, for contemporary cultures.
This is achieved by understanding the users’ experience, imagining new opportunities, testing and prototyping ideas, determining and applying appropriate materials, processes & technologies, and designing and crafting new interactive experiences and enterprises.
A full listing of the courses and their descriptions can be seen here.
Interestingly, the Singapore Polytechnic has also launched a new Experience Design Centre [no website]. Singapore Radio International has published a short interview with Liang Lit How, the centre’s director.
I am curious to hear if Niti Bhan, who just moved to Singapore, has some more insight on these initiatives.
The conference took place at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, 30 August – 1 September, 2007, and was organised by the International Science Shops Network, Fondation Sciences Citoyennes, International Network of Engineers and Scientists for global responsibility, Centre for the Sociology of Innovation of the Ecole des Mines, and the “Social and Political Transformations related to Life Sciences and Life Forms” (TSV) research Unit of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).
Darren Sharp of Smart Internet CRC (Australia) was there to present an academic paper drawing on his organisation’s research on user-led innovation, Web 2.0 and participatory media from an upcoming report.
His paper titled “Citizen Innovation: using participatory research for knowledge discovery”, discussed how user-led innovation provides new concepts and methods capable of extending the field of knowledge about participatory research. It explored how practice-based methods such as Participatory Action Research and Community-based Research have facilitated the rise of Citizen Innovation which provides opportunities for citizen empowerment; supports the co-creation of new public-sector services and scientific knowledge discovery; and utilises knowledge that is embodied, experiential and collaboratively produced. The presentation also canvassed pathways for public-sector organisations to leverage the participation of citizens and amateur scientists in the interest of co-creating new forms of knowledge.
In his blog report on the conference, Sharp also mentions his meeting with Eric Seulliet, a Paris-based foresight consultant and founder of La Fabrique du Futur (The Factory of the Future) and their talk on his interesting new book project on user-led innovation.
The 4th Living Knowledge Conference will take place in Dublin, Ireland in 2009.
Now they also published a background report to that study.
The purpose of this background report is to map the growth potential of the Danish design industry. Is there a particular type of growth-oriented companies working with the combination of innovation and design? And if so what characterises this type of company?
The analysis shows that the design industry’s potential goes far beyond the traditional focus on product design. Design is an important discipline to concretise innovation and to create new products and services – this implies that the companies’ increased focus on innovation has opened new opportunities for the design industry.
It should be stressed that design cannot drive company innovation on its own. Other industries including advertising and consulting use disciplines that are important to the development of innovative solutions. Companies assisting other companies with innovation must therefore work with tools from various professional disciplines. These are the companies referred to as concept design companies throughout this study.
Chapter 1 highlights the general structure, size and importance of the Danish design industry and maps the Danish concept design companies. The chapter also introduces a point system for ranking individual companies in terms of their ability to carry out concept design.
Chapter 2 maps and describes internationally leading concept design regions and compares results from the Danish survey with the results from the international mapping. In continuation thereof the chapter compares the identified companies based on the system introduced in Chapter 1.
Chapter 3 describes a range of trends that impact concept design companies and their potential for growth. These trends include choice of business strategy, how to combine concept design competences and finally how large industrial companies are moving into concept design.
Download background report (pdf, 990 kb, 75 pages)
The prevalence of modern entertainment technology – DVD’s, satellite TV, computer games – is the biggest threat to the ancient craft and the only “rescue” seems to come from a UNESCO digital preservation project, accessible via the web.
With all the attention these days to the importance of storytelling in experience design, why then are the historic origins of the trade being lost? Isn’t there a way to enhance the relevance of these people through entertainment technology and to make the craft attractive again for a new generation?
Watch video (2:32)
His reflection is all about the currently very active field of presence research, though strangely he doesn’t use that word. I very much like the challenges he posts at the end:
“Over the past few decades many researchers have built devices that use light, color, sound, or motion to convey information about people, activities, and places. These devices let people see information at a glance, without the need to go to another device or navigate an interface. Particularly interesting to me has always been how our environments can keep us more aware of those that we care about and help strengthen social bonds. [...]
In our research, we’ve been investigating how these sorts of displays can help people learn more about the lives of others in their close social networks. We’ve found that these devices can draw people into richer types of social media experiences by conveying social information in the home on an always-on device and can be frequently observed without any additional effort. This powerful new way to get data fits nicely into people’s routines and helps them be aware of their social network without the need to do go out of their way to check a web site or computer application to receive social information.
The power in this class of devices is in delivering information about others who are important in our lives in a way that reminds us of these people and their activities as we go about our lives. While from time to time it might be nice to see the weather or another information channel, the frequently changing information about the people in our social circle allows us to become more aware of their behaviors and have social experiences that would otherwise not occur. These are the exciting aspects of ambient devices that were not possible with existing computer and television-based interfaces. As we all continue to lead increasingly busy lives, the ability to tie into the patterns of others can help us stay social and connected.
There are two big challenges in this space from a research perspective. The first is to create displays that are truly ambient and don’t interfere with the home environment. We want to ensure that we can provide useful information without distracting people from their home lives. The second challenge is all about finding the most useful information sources for these displays. Obviously, the two are closely tied together and are a big part of our research into ambient communications. We have a few educated guesses that we’re currently testing and hopefully will have some data to report at a conference next year.”
The research, which involved six months of field observations and interviews, was commissioned by the French Association of Mobile Operators and managed by researchers of Gripic, a research group of the information sciences school Celsa at the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne.
Here are some of the insights, as reported in Le Monde (and translated by the author of this blog):
“The mobile phone is more and more used in a collective way,” says Joëlle Menrath, one of the researchers. “Real collective strategies are developing, with teens often passing their phone on to their friends to take maximum advantage of the prepaid calling plans and the discounts these offer.” Those who have not fully used their own discount options, let others profit from it. In fact, these users often juggle with the tariff options of their close friends. They might take advantage of the free calling hours of one of their friends, or will choose a plan based on the plans that other friends have chosen. Sometimes, a group of friends might subscribe to different mobile operators so that they can extend their geographic coverage.
These strategies can also be found within families. Children “beep” their parents to save on communication costs: it works as a code, with one or two rings before hanging up, and lets people know that you want them to call you back. “This way parents are reassured, they maintain their hierarchical position, but they also have to pay for the communication,” notes Mrs. Menrath. Children have in a way largely subverted the initial attempt at constraint to their own advantage…
The shared use of the mobile also leads to the disappearance of its function as a private object containing intimate secrets. “It servers more and more as a tool to express oneself,” says Anne Jarrigeon, another of the researchers involved. When a teen is momentarily absent, friends often take the phone to read out recently sent text messages or to view recent photos.
Such a transparency can of course backfire. “Within couples, spying on the mobile of one’s partner is very common,” says Mrs. Menrath. The call history and text and photos in the phone’s memory can have devastating effects. “The mobile phone plays a key role in many break-ups,” admits Mrs. Menrath.
Whatever may be the case, the device has become indispensable and people use its many new functions is ways that were not anticipated. “The music or the photo functions do not transform the device into a digital Swiss Army knife,” says Mrs. Jarrigeon. “It remains a telephone that allows for some other secondary uses”. The research shows that the mobile phone is no substitute for an MP3 player or a digital camera. But it lets people create a photographic notebook of daily life that one can show to close relations to illustrate a story being told, or to let people listen to one’s exploits.
These new ways of using the mobile orginate more often from the imagination of the subscribers, than they do derive from the manufacturers. “In Japan, the users of the metro system always keep their travel card and mobile phone together,” reminds Mrs Menrath. “It is by observing them that NTT Docomo decided to integrate this function into their phones.”
The new research, which is not yet available online, builds on a previous research project on the social use of the mobile phone, published in 2005.
Her article covers a range of fairly conventional ergonomic problems, such as repetitive motion injuries, awkward posture, excessive strain, damage to bloodstream or lungs, mental overload and occupational stress that might occur when working with computers, Blackberries, telephones, automotive technology and nanotechnology.
Roth concludes:
“With the advent of new technologies and their acceptance into a variety of industries, ergonomics assists in creating specifications for designs that “fit” the end users. Ergonomics helps create appropriate training modalities for learning new technologies. Ergonomics can impact work organization by adding to efficiency and reducing errors and waste. Ergonomics can identify risk factors to reduce workers’ compensation, disability costs and lost work time costs. Ergonomics leads to the design of workstations and accessories that are comfortable, and helps create new designs for products, equipment and tools that enhance productivity.”
(via Usability News)
The project will employ psychologists to closely study a small group of people to reveal what stops them joining the net-using majority.
The BT project website provides further insight:
For millions in the UK, the online social networking phenomenon, commonly referred to as web 2.0, has really brought the internet to life. People can now go online to access hundreds of services that make their lives easier and help to connect them to friends and family around the world. But 33 per cent of adults are still not online and remain excluded from the increasing number of web-based resources, services and information that many of us take for granted.
The digital divide is not always about a lack of access to the internet. From our work with the charity Citizens Online, we know that some of the biggest barriers are fear and lack of confidence.
To understand these fears and how to overcome them, BT is running a two month trial with participants across the UK. Individuals who have never had access to the internet are being given the technology and support to explore the web for the first time. They are recording their journeys and, at the end of the trial, their experiences will be shared with government, charities and other businesses to see how the process can be scaled-up in future to bring the benefits of the internet to more and more people across the UK.
CHI 2008 focuses on the balance between art and science, design and research, practical motivation and the process that leads the way to innovative excellence. It is about balance in our rapidly evolving field, the balance between individuals and groups, collocated and remote, stationary and mobile, in both our local and global communities.
CHI 2008 will be held in Florence, Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance, and home to great artists and scientists. This is the city of Leonardo Da Vinci, who spoke of balance in saying “where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”
They will jump start the conference with two days of workshops, the doctoral consortium, and a small subset of courses. Within these CHI venues, attendees will interact with friends and colleagues in an intimate academic setting. The main technical program begins on Monday and will run for four days again this year. Within this program, attendees can look forward to a myriad of presentations designed to convey new findings and methodologies, elicit interaction, and stir your creative juices. Numerous breaks and social activities are also planned in order to further promote the exchange of information and ideas within the CHI community.
The submission deadline for papers is 19 September 2007.
(via Designophony)
[See also these previous posts on C-Mine and Genk]
We are treating the project as a typical user-centred design project, starting off with an extensive assessment of needs and requirements of users and stakeholders. These insights will then be brought together in a series of prototypical ideas that we are going to test again, before a final constellation will be agreed upon, and formalised into a legal entity.
At this stage it is too premature to say what the new design centre might focus on, but in the current research phase we are exploring many options: in terms of design – from product to service to strategic design; in terms of stakeholders; in terms of sectors we might be working with – e.g. business and industry, social services, public structures; and in terms of territory – considering only the Province or also its immediate surroundings (Maastricht, Leuven, Aachen, Eindhoven). At this exploratory stage we want to keep an open mind before we start making choices and assigning priorities.
The Province of Limburg is the region where Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken was born. He hasn’t lived there in several decades, in fact he haven’t lived in Belgium since 1994. Not surprisingly, much has changed. There is a new dynamism in the region, a belief that things are changing in a good direction, that Limburg could have a promising future. There is also a high quality of institutional leadership. Mark’s impressions are still fairly limited but energising nevertheless.
Hence our idea to bring together some Limburgers or Belgians, who may or may not be living abroad, are active in the design and design innovation area, care for the place they come from, and want to participate in an online think tank on regional innovation in that area. In fact, also non-Belgians are welcome to join, provided they know the area somewhat, for instance people from the neighbouring countries.
We are not yet entirely sure how we will structure this process, but to start off with we have created a Facebook group called C-Mine and a Yahoo Group that you can join. Once we have a small group of people on board, they will get to know more about the project and how they can contribute.
As the populations of America, Asia and Europe continue to grey at an unprecedented rate, more and more objects will need to be designed to be elderly-friendly.
“How to design for this burgeoning group of consumers? Well, don’t, at least not specifically, recommends Davin Stowell, CEO of product design firm Smart Design (New York). He says designers should not limit themselves to products specifically marketed to the aged or elderly, except for extreme products. “We’re becoming a more youthful society,” he notes, not in terms of average age but with reference to how people perceive themselves.
His recommendation: think in terms of ‘universal,’ or better yet, ‘inclusive’ design. Using lighter materials, combining materials with greater contrasts to make products easier to see or for backlighting, and using of soft-touch or other easily handled grips: all are examples of design aspects that appeal to seniors but also offer benefits to most other users, too.”
An excerpt:
MJ: I’d say that many service companies have traditionally worked with management consultants, not with design consultants.
RH: What do you think is the fundamental difference in working with those different types of consultancies? Design versus management consulting.
MJ: As a design company we are trying to visualize the future from a customer point of view. We always start with what a customer needs, what the stakeholders need. I think that management consultants start with, “What are your technological constraints? What are your operational constraints? How can you leverage them?”
I think we tend to push people a little bit further than a management consultancy. We say, “Well, your customers need this and you’re not delivering — it may be quite a large stretch for you — but it’s what you have to do to compete in this space to satisfy those needs.” It sets up a different dynamic of where you are today and where you’re going.
(via Usability in the News)
At HCI 2007 two papers addressed this development, the first being Bardzell and Bardzell’s fascinating insight into the BDSM (bondage, discipline and sadomasochism) subculture on Second Life. In this paper the researchers reported from a two-year study, combining virtual ethnography and artifact analysis with recent HCI theories of experience design to understand how and why the complex phenomenon of BDSM subculture emerged from Second Life users.
The researchers show that participants view virtual BDSM not as a sexual practice, but rather as a full-blown aesthetic, and that its sexual practices are a part of that aesthetic.
Less exotic, perhaps, but no less important, Bertelsen and Graves Petersen presented research on the impact of home-located technology on ‘everyday erotica’.
The researchers studied eroticism and sexual practice as aspects of everyday life where technology impacts massively in the private and intimate sphere. Sometimes the effect of the new technologies is positive, but most often it seems that intimacy is jeopardised as these workplace-centric technologies invade private life. In combination with an intensified working life, these can be significant factors in making a sexual life difficult for many couples today.These adverse effects should be counterbalanced by deliberate ‘design for erotic life’.
User Experience: Towards a unified view (pdf)
Proceedings of the 2nd COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop (October 2006, Oslo Norway) – “The concept of usability has been evolving, along with the emerging IT landscape and the ever-blurring boundary of the field of HCI. Specifically, the so-called user experience (UX) movement is gaining gound.”
The Art of the Conceptual Prototype [Blink Interactive]
“Conceptual prototypes are often very interesting projects because the ideas are leading edge. But they also present some unique challenges compared to more traditional projects where we are designing for actual implementation.”
XcD
“The scope of human-computer interaction design has widened to include concerns with fun, emotion, beauty, aesthetics and values. There is an increasing emphasis on holistic approaches to user experience and what is now called experience design. A number of frameworks and theoretical approaches to experience design have been developed and a range of methods and techniques have also been proposed. This website is part of the work carried out on the EPSRC grant Theory and Method for Experience Centred Design. This site links to our own work and that of others on theory and method for experience centred design or XcD as we seem to have started calling it.”
Design for the Dream Economy [uiGarden.net]
“After the eras of the Commodity Economy, the Manufacturing Economy, the Service Economy and the Information Economy, we have now entered the era of the Dream Economy.The key to success in the Dream Economy is an in-depth and holistic understanding of people. It’s not only about meeting people’’s practical needs, but also about meeting their aspirations and providing a positive emotional experience.”
Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved [Bill Buxton]
“Since the announcement of the iPhone, an especially large number of people have asked me about multi-touch. The reason is largely because they know that I have been involved in the topic for a number of years. The problem is, I can’t take the time to give a detailed reply to each question. So I have done the next best thing (I hope). That is, start compiling my would-be answer in this document. The assumption is that ultimately it is less work to give one reasonable answer than many unsatisfactory ones.”
Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned [UXmatters]
“Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.”
Conducting Successful Interviews With Project Stakeholders [UXmatters]
“A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I’ll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews. (And I’ll come back to that word, insights, a little later on, because it’s important.)”
A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory [Boxes and Arrows]
“After giving it some thought, I find that the thing I like most about the map is that it is pure, stripped down navigation. Harry Beck decided that including streets, districts and other geographical information on his underground maps was distracting and added little value. All you need to know is how to get from A to B. I suspect that the same may be true in information spaces.”
Social Networks And Group Formation [Boxes and Arrows]
“Humans suffer from information overload; there’s much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend upon each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how or know-why information has become most crucial. It involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person.”
The Tagging Growth Curve [tagsonomy]
“The apparently irregular growth and spread of tagging is simply example of the real nature of how innovations spread. Professional analysts and other meaning makers tend to draw smooth graphs to depict these things. But in reality, natural systems (and the tagging / technology landscape is a legitimate ecosystem) are noisy, cyclical, chaotic, complex, fuzzy, non-linear, and unpredictable. They only appear to follow smooth curves at a high level of abstraction, or a low level of resolution.”
Looking Back on Data-Driven Design Research Personas [Todd Zaki Warfel]
“The primary goal of the tutorial was to show people how to work data into developing personas and how they can be used for more than just design.”
Sterling [wikipedia - blog] is an American science fiction writer and highly acclaimed futurist thinker and design critic.
He will be living in Torino for the next eight months, “helping out” with the Torino SHARE festival, do his customary blogging and novel writing, cover the design scene for the US press, and also write some contributions (we hope) for the Torino 2008 World Design Capital website.
His book “Shaping Things” [now also available in Italian as "La Forma del Futuro"] introduced the term “spimes” for future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.
At the event there will also be interventions by Andrea Bairati (Piedmont Regional Government Deputy for Universities, Research, Innovation and International Relations), Luca de Biase (director of the NOVA supplement of the Sole 24 Ore newspaper), and Claudio Germak (Polytechnic University of Torino and Torino World Design Capital). It will be moderated by Chiara Garibaldi and Simona Lodi, who are in charge of the Piedmont Share Festival.
In his introductory article to his visit, Jacobson critisises the recent Danish “Concept Design” report that I wrote about earlier this week.
He will be staying there for a further two weeks so I am expecting more insights soon.