Our friends of Adaptive Path have uploaded (nearly) all videos of UX Week 2012, the premier user experience design conference that took place in August in San Francisco.

KEYNOTES

Ducks, dolls, and divine robots: designing our futures with computing [46:26]
Genevieve Bell, director of User Interaction and Experience in Intel Labs
No abstract available.

The story of Windows 8 [1:06:57]
Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience Team.
No abstract available.

TALKS

Steal like an artist [25:51]
Austin Kleon, writer and artist
When somebody calls something “original,” 9 times out of 10 they just don’t know the sources or references involved. The truth is that nothing is completely original — all creative work builds on what came before. In this talk, Kleon will teach you how to embrace influence, establish a creative lineage, and think of yourself as a mashup of what you let into your life.

The power of “why?” [21:31]
Bill DeRouchey, creative director at Simple
Designers must continually learn to survive. New technologies, new philosophies, new roles and responsibilities, new tools and methods all keep designers on their toes throughout their career. But one skill persists no matter where designer find themselves, the ability to ask Why?
Asking customers why they do what they do or believe what they believe unlocks the foundation for inspired design. Asking organizations why they follow their strategies unearths good habits or dangerous ruts. Asking our most traditional institutions why things are the way they are uncovers the potential to remake our society. Constraints, myths, assumptions and perspectives can all melt with a well-timed and well-framed Why?
Let’s apply some toddler magic to our adult careers and ask Why?

Toy inventing in the 21st Century: hard plastic vs the attention economy [20:10]
Bill McIntyre, President of Atomocom
As surely as the digital era transformed work and home life, it changed the way kids play. Like their parents, kids are choosing technology, tablet computers and video games over traditional toys at younger ages than ever. So how do traditional toy inventors compete for a kid’s interest against iPad apps and 24 hour cartoon networks?

Build the future!! [31:10]
Brian David Johnson, futurist at the Intel Corporation
What kind of future do you want to live in? What futures should we avoid? What will it feel like to be a human in the year 2025. Intel’s Futurist Brian David Johnson explores his futurecasting work; using social science, technical research, statistical data and even science fiction to create pragmatic models for a future that we can start building today.

Go with it: learning by doing [26:15]
Brianna Cutts, Visitor Experience and Exhibits Director at the Bay Area Discovery Museum
The pressure is on more than ever now that “creativity” is the hot 21st century skill and American creativity is on the decline. What should we do?
Design educational experiences that don’t feel educational.
During her talk, Brianna shares insights from a career in exhibition design, which requires a delicate balance of content knowledge, design skill and rule breaking.

The future will be made of screens [21:58]
Rachel Binx, design technologist at Stamen Design
No abstract available.

Citizen experience: Designing a new relationship with government [26:48]
Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America
Code for America proposes what to many seems impossible: that interfaces to government could be simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Why care? Because the slow crumbling of our will to do things together as a society (what we used to call support for government) is a direct consequence of the public sector falling behind on modern technology and design. Who is fixing this? Talented, passionate designers and developers partnering with public servants in City Halls around the country.

iWitness case study [27:01]
Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and chief creative officer of Adaptive Path
From developing the concept through designing the experience to collaborating with an agile development team, Jesse will tell the story of creating Adaptive Path’s groundbreaking social media tool, iWitness.

UI for Big Data visualization [25:16]
Jonathan Stray, head of the Overview Project, a Knight News Challenge-funded semantic visualization system for very large document sets
Visualization is great way to understand data, but it breaks down when the data gets big. Simply plotting everything to the screen won’t work, because there isn’t enough screen real estate, interactions slow to a crawl, and human working memory isn’t up to the task anyway. Big data requires specific interaction techniques for visual exploration, such as filtering, summarization, and context. He goes over some basic principles, and shows examples of recent systems, including his work on the Overview Project, a system for visual exploration of huge unstructured document sets.

Testing positive for healthcare UX [18:27]
Maren Connary, Kaiser Permanente
The healthcare experience is improving even though we’ve almost all had a less-than-pleasant memory of either waiting endlessly for an appointment, forgetting when and what dose of meds to take, crying over massive and unpredictable bills, or even just locating decent care in the first place. All of these mounting complaints and expenses have finally pushed healthcare to the tipping point. As a result, a patient-centered paradigm has emerged that is forcing organizations to more closely examine and improve the experiences they provide.

Two brains, one head: analysis and intuition in design practice [23:44]
Maria Cordell, Design Director at Adaptive Path
Often connected to the unexplained or mysterious, intuition gets a bad rap. Yet intuition is at the heart of creativity, and significant advances in our understanding of the physical world are borne of intuitive leaps. While some hail its power, others advocate that what’s needed is more analysis — not intuition! What does this mean for us? What is intuition and why is it so divisive? And does it have a role in design?

Fashioning Apollo: the infinite, intimate lessons of technology, bureaucracy, and human beings in the space race [31:46]
Nicholas de Monchaux, architect and urbanist
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, the spacesuits they were wearing were made, not by any of the sprawling, military-industrial conglomerates who had forged the hard surfaces of their rockets or capsules, but rather by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand, “Playtex.” The victory of Playtex over the military-industrial establishment, and the soft, 21-layer suit that trumped hard, system-designed prototypes, is only one of the many stresses and strains that characterized the rapid effort to insert soft, human beings into military-industrial machinery originally intended for warheads, and nuclear destruction. And while it may seem—at least initially—that the process of designing for human beings is a less high-stakes enterprise than the summit of the Cold War, many of the seemingly otherworldly lessons of man, and technology, on the moon, remain urgent examples for our machines, cities, and ecologies today

UX is strategy; not design [25:26]
Peter Merholz, head of user experience at Inflection
In trying to understand the challenges the UX community has had in clarifying what the “UX profession” is, it occurred to Peter that we’re thinking about this all wrong. Though UX finds its genesis in design disciplines, user experience is not a design activity. In order for user experience to deliver on its potential, we need to reframe it so that it contributes directly to strategy, and, in doing so, drives practices throughout the organization.

Cars, castles, and spas [28:09]
Rob Maigret, SVP of Global Creative at Disney Interactive, the digital entertainment and games segment of The Walt Disney Company
From the time he was in his teens, Rob had heard about the lucky few who traveled to Germany to pick up their brand new Porsche automobiles at the factory and take them for an extended drive on the autobahn at great speeds. On the journey, they enjoyed beautiful scenery and Euro-luxury before having their cars shipped to the states for a much more prosaic driving experience. This year, he finally decided to check it out for himself. Maybe someday you will, too. Maybe you won’t. But either way, in terms of UX, this might be is as serious as it gets for fully experiencing a brand at its core.

Death to curiosity: will tomorrow’s [21:25]
Toi Valentine, experience designer at Adaptive Path
If the previous generation was responsible for defining UX, what is the next generation of UX practitioners responsible for? What opportunities exist for them? What impact will they have on UX? On the world? After collecting personal experiences from designers right out of UX-related programs and those with more than ten years of experience, Toi reflects on the challenges and opportunities that come with finding your way in UX. Without clear pathways and destinations, how will the next generation find their way? How can the discipline and UX community support them in their journey to impact the future of UX?

An animating spark: mundane computing and the web of data [42:19]
Tom Coates, founder and president of Product Club
Network connectivity is reaching more and more into the physical world. This is potentially transformative – allowing every object and service in the world to talk to one other—and to their users—through any networked interface; where online services are the connective tissue of the physical world and where physical objects are avatars of online services. It’s a world where objects know who owns them and can tell the world where they are. A world where ‘things’ are services, and where their functions can be strung together in daisy chains across the planet. Now the only question is how we make it useful and comprehensible for normal people…

How and why to start sketchnoting [19:40]
Veronica Erb, user experience designer at EightShapes LLC
When you attend a presentation, what do you do? Sit quietly and listen? Scribble notes? Live tweet? Get distracted by your smartphone?
There’s yet another option: sketchnote.
Sketchnoting is like notetaking, but with more flair and more focus. Hand lettering and illustrations provide the flair; focus provides you the time to include the flair. Besides keeping you engaged during talks, visual notetaking makes it easier to retain what you’ve heard and share it later.

The fall 2011 issue of AnthroNotes (pdf) starts off with an article by Genevieve Bell, senior cultural anthropologist at Intel.

She describes her latest research project, designed to understand how cars around the world can serve as windows into the future of mobile technology and computers. The article also contains an ample but simply worded expose on why Intel has anthropologist and what they do.

“We wanted to see what people carried with them [in cars] and to understand how cars functioned as sites of technology consumption and human activity, and how they became imbued with meaning.” [...]

“Cars are a contested space when it comes to new technology. What makes sense to bring into a car, to leave in a car, or to install in a car – all are still being negotiated. This negotiation is being impacted by many factors – legislation, social regulation, guilt, perceptions of safety and crime, urban density, parking structures, commute time, just to name a few. As such, imagining and designing technologies for cars, for technologies to be used in cars, and for the worlds that cars will inhabit is a more nuanced undertaking than many imagine.” [...]

“Cars are so much more than forms of transportation. They are, in point of fact, highly charged objects. They say something about who we are and who we want to be. They are also part of much more complex systems, ecosystems, environments, and imaginations. In this way, cars resemble many other contemporary technologies: our smart phones, tablets, even tablets and e-readers.”

UPDATE: Video version is here.

According to a recent multi-country study commissioned by Intel Corporation and conducted by Ipsos Observer on “Mobile Etiquette,” the majority of adults and teens around the world are sharing information about themselves online and feel better connected to family and friends because of it. However, the survey also revealed a perception of “oversharing,” with at least six out of 10 adults and teens saying they believe other people divulge too much information about themselves online, with Japan being the only exception.

Intel’s 2012 “Mobile Etiquette” survey examined the current state of mobile etiquette and evaluated how adults and teens in eight countries share and consume information online, as well as how digital sharing impacts culture and relationships. The research was conducted in the United States in March and a follow-up study was conducted in Australia, Brazil, China (adults only), France, India, Indonesia and Japan from June to August.

“In today’s society, our mobile technology is making digital sharing ubiquitous with our everyday activities, as evidenced by the findings from Intel’s latest ‘Mobile Etiquette’ survey,” said Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and director of user interaction and experience at Intel Labs. “What is most interesting is not necessarily how widespread our use of mobile technology has become, but how similar our reasons are for sharing, regardless of region or culture. The ability to use mobile devices to easily share information about our lives is creating a sense of connection across borders that we’re continuing to see flourish.”

- Press release
- Article by The Register
- Interactive data visualization

Social scientist Genevieve Bell – who is also the interaction and experience research director at Intel Labs – gave a major talk on what the future of technology looks like, and why middle-aged women may determine that future.

The talk, entitled “Telling the Stories of the Future: Technology, Culture and What Really Matters”, was the keynote at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Conference that took place in Brisbane in April, and was rebroadcast as a “Big Idea Talk” on Australian Radio.

Alexis Madrigal explores her talk in more depth at Atlantic, and cites some quotes, including these ones:

“It turns out women are our new lead adopters. When you look at internet usage, it turns out women in Western countries use the internet 17 percent more every month than their male counterparts. Women are more likely to be using the mobile phones they own, they spend more time talking on them, they spend more time using location-based services. But they also spend more time sending text messages. Women are the fastest growing and largest users on Skype, and that’s mostly younger women. Women are the fastest category and biggest users on every social networking site with the exception of LinkedIn. Women are the vast majority owners of all internet enabled devices – i.e. readers, healthcare devices, GPS – that whole bundle of technology is mostly owned by women.

So it turns out if you want to find out what the future looks like, you should be asking women. And just before you think that means you should be asking 18-year-old women, it actually turns out the majority of technology users are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you wanted to know what the future looks like, those turn out to be the heaviest users of the most successful and most popular technologies on the planet as we speak.”

“Furthermore, most consumers don’t own devices just by themselves, those devices exist within social networks. Consumers share devices in families, so that a mobile phone is owned by multiple people, a laptop is used by multiple people, an email account is used by multiple people. [...]“

Listen to audio (mp3)

Reacting to the Wired Magazine article that suggests that “the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete,” Jenna Burrell, sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, lists some questions that she (and maybe other ‘small data’ people) have about the big data / data analytics trend:

• What do researchers consider the most compelling examples, the ‘showcase’ applications of big data that involve study of the social world and social behavior?
• To what end is such a research approach being put? What actions are being taken on the basis of findings from ‘big data’ analysis?
• The data analytics discussion appears to be US-centric debate … how well are researchers grappling with the analysis of ‘big data’ when dealing with data collected from across heterogeneous, international populations?
• How do ‘big data’ analysts connect data on behavior to the meaning/intent underlying that behavior? How do they avoid (or how do they think they can avoid) getting this wrong?
• How might the analysis of ‘big data’ complement projects that are primarily ethnographic?

For good measure, she also provides a couple of interesting, probing takes on big data:

• Genevieve Bell on ‘big data as a person‘
• danah boyd and Kate Crawford – Six Provocations for Big Data

Jenna Burrell is an assistant professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana is forthcoming with the MIT Press. She completed her PhD in 2007 in the department of Sociology at the London School of Economics carrying out thesis research on Internet cafe use in Accra, Ghana. Before pursuing her PhD she was an Application Concept Developer in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation. Her interests span many research topics including theories of materiality, user agency, transnationalism, post-colonial relations, digital representation, and especially the appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by individuals and social groups on the African continent.

There was magic in the air on the final day of the Interactions 12 conference in Dublin, as a number of speakers drew the connections between magic and design, whether it be electric faeries, having childhood dreams of being a magician, or actually being one in a past professional life.

Louise Taylor, Boon Chew and Vicky Teinaki cover the presentations by Fabian Hemmert, Kate Ertmann (Animation Dynamics), Pete Denman (Intel), Dr. Michael Smyth & Ingi Helgason (Centre for Interaction Design, Edinburgh Napier University), Jeroen van Geel (Fabrique), Dan Saffer (Syntactic Devices), Matt Nish-Lapidus (Normative Design), Leanna Gringas (ITHAKA), Abby Covert (The Understanding Group), Adrian Westaway (Vitamins), Angel Anderson (Crispin Porter + Bogusky), Jonathan Kahn (Together London), and Dr Genevieve Bell (Intel Labs).

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Genevieve Bell, interaction and experience research director at Intel Labs, has published a guest post on the BBC website on how artificial intelligence will change our relationship with tech.

“I think in 2012 we will start to see signs of change in our relationships with devices.

Here I do not just mean more forms of new interfaces and new interactions. This is less about gesture and voice recognition and more about machines that are contextually and situationally aware.

And there is lots of serious technology in the works to make that happen – networking technology that knows when to switch networks to make sure your voice-over-IP call does not drop; cameras that know how to make you look your best, smart devices that actually learn about your likes and dislikes and make better choices to delight and surprise you.”

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Chip maker and technology group Intel says that women are emerging as the dominant users of technology and if it continues to enhance its ease of use, the fairer sex will continue to dominate the adoption of technology.

This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and director of interaction and experience research, who noted that European women spent more time on social networks than men, sent more text messages and used more location-based services on phones.

Read article

Dianna talked with her about social research, myths, design research and several other interesting subjects.

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring.”

Dianna Miller is professor and program coordinator for the Service Design BFA/MFA program at Savannah College of Art & Design. She has twenty years experience as an interaction designer, user researcher, project manager, and content strategist. In 2003, she completed studies at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

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“The answer is both intriguing and quite unlike most futurists I know. Johnson’s first stop is the social sciences. He works with Dr. Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist who has been at Intel since 1998. Their teams work with ethnographers, social scientists, and others to understand the current state of the culture and try to figure out where it’s going.

The next step is then looking at the hardware. Johnson and his team work with computer scientists to look at the current state of the art in hardware, software, and algorithms, as well as the research coming up. The tech data is meshed with the social sciences data to answer a simple question: how can we apply this technology to capture people’s imaginations and make their lives better?

“At that point,” Johnson says. “I start to look at the trends. Which is really where most people start.”

Combining all of this data, Johnson then develops what he calls a “vision of the future” that his team can work to build.”

Read interview

“Ultimately, my team’s role is about making sure the product development processes start from an understanding of what people care about when it comes to technology.

And that as an organisation, we are literally testing our silicon against that ideal at each and every step of the way.”

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“In Divining a Digital Future D&B reiterate many arguments made in earlier work, provide them with more flesh, and formulate some future directions for ubicomp. To be sure this is not a bad thing, neither for those who wish to read a book on the current state of affairs in ubicomp, nor for ubicomp researchers who wish to enlarge the scope of their own practice. The book attempts to foster an anthropological sensitivity among its (presumed) CHI readership. Fundamentally, their proposition to approach technology (and urbanism) through an ethnographic lens is highly relevant in my view. Imagine what the future of our cities look would like if it were the sole concern of coders and engineers? Indeed, we should never forget Jane Jacobs’ lesson that livable and lively cities are about people.

I also appreciate their relational view of ubicomp as intricately bound up with the messiness of everyday life, their concern with its multiplicity of forms and shapes, and their attention for fringes (edges, periphery, margins). Important too in my view is that D&B implicitly question the notion of ‘the everyday’. The everyday does not consist of stable pre-given categories (home, mobility, etc.) that can be supplemented with ubicomp. It arises from socio-cultural performances and is continuously negotiated. Still, they could have stated this even more explicitly, because ‘the everyday’ is so often unproblematically assumed as a self-explanatory term in both technology and urban studies.

That being said, D&B’s focus is too much directed inward in my view. D&B dish up insights from urban ethnography, sociology and human geography to a ubicomp audience. The ubicomp crowd may find this refreshing; those more familiar with these ‘soft’ disciplines will already consider such insights well-accepted. As said above, what I feel is lacking from their approach is a clear vision how ubicomp can reciprocate to an understanding of the intricacies of techno-urban practices. What can ethnography and urbanism learn from ubicomp?”

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According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture.

“She has a sort of work-in-progress theory to work out which technologies will trigger panic, and which will not.
- It has to change your relationship to time.
- It has to change your relationship to space.
- It has to change your relationship to other people.

And, says Ms. Bell, it has to hit all three, or at least have the potential to hit them. [...]

The problem, says Ms. Bell, is that cultures change far slower than technologies do. And because the rate of technological innovation is increasing, so too is the rate of moral panic.

When a new technology comes in, society has to establish norms about how to handle it. That is a long and slow process.”

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Bell’s main job is to look at what motivates people, and in turn understand how they think, so that ultimately Intel can work towards creating better products. If you’re wondering why that should be important to a company that makes processors rather than actual consumer devices like smartphones or tablets, don’t. Bell’s response is simple.

“If you can make an engineer understand why a processor needs to work without a fan, not because of a power need, but because of a social one, then you can make them create devices that fit into our lives better.”

Here are Bell’s ten predictions:
1. The Internet will get more feral
2. Next-gen interfaces will become old hat
3. We will still be social but the way we use the networks will change
4. We will “sledge” each other…
5. There will be stubborn artefacts
6. We will be bored together
7. We will have a lot of stuff
8. We will manage our connectivity, we will manage our disconnectivity
9. We have to maintain the network
10. We will develop new anxieties

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Now the Intel website provides some more background on Intel’s work on Context Aware Computing.

“Context-awareness can make computing devices more responsive to individual needs and help to intelligently personalize apps and services. Using self-learning mechanisms, sensor inputs, and data analytics, Intel research teams are engaged in a number of projects that promise to take machine learning beyond the lab to practical, real-world applications.”

Most interestingly, the site goes into some depth on Intel’s current projects that explore the boundaries of context-aware computing:

• Online Semi-Supervised Learning and Face Recognition: Use face recognition in place of a password to log in to any protected site. The self-learning techniques being refined by this project can be adapted to many areas of context awareness.
• Context Aware Computing—Activity Recognition: This project is developing techniques so that your computer can adapt to your patterns of activity and, based on your needs and expectations, instruct and guide you on a daily basis.
• Context-Aware Computer—Social Proximity Detection: Your friends, family, and co-workers all play a role in determining how your daily activities unfold. This project identifies ways to use the proximity of people important in your life to adjust communications and to help coordinate activities.

There is also more information on Intel’s Tomorrow Project & Futurism initiative.

“The project features science fiction stories, comics and short screen plays based on current research and emerging technologies and examines their affect on our future. “

Check the stories by Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond. Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz. The next one is by Cory Doctorow, it seems.

“Our current devices are terrible at determining context, especially with regard to how we relate to other people via our existing social networks. Today’s devices “blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device [in the future] might know when NOT to blurt out the truth.” They would know when to withhold information.”

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Ubiquitous computing (or “ubicomp”) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, ubicomp is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and “smart” domestic appliances.

In Divining a Digital Future, computer scientist Paul Dourish and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices that have emerged–both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors’ collaboration, the book takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Dourish and Bell map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubiquitous computing around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.

Paul Dourish is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. He conducts research in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and social studies of science and technology. Before joining UC Irvine, he was a Senior Member of Research Staff at Xerox PARC.

Genevieve Bell is an Intel Fellow and the Director of Intel’s first user-focused research and development lab, Interaction and Experience Research. A cultural anthropologist, she studies the relationship between information technology and cultural practice both in technology design and in settings of everyday use. Before joining Intel, she taught Anthropology and American Studies at Stanford University.

What exactly does context-aware computing mean? According to Genevieve Bell, director of Intel’s Interaction and Experience Research Group, context-aware computing refers to “technologies that are able to determine how you feel, who you’re friends with and what your preferences are to better deliver personalized information.”

At a recent event in New York City, Intel showed off four research projects that represent possible future everyday uses of context-aware computing.

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Before the Experience Lab, [Genevieve Bell] was working with the Digital Home team; a job she jokes that she got because of her criticism of Intel’s ill-fated Viiv platform; while Intel engineers were promising to “unleash the PC in your TV” she was pointing out that people already had a screen in their living room and they didn’t want it to behave anything like a PC.

“We put up with things in PCs that we would never put up with in a TV. Imagine the first time the TV told you it needed a new driver or the first time your Tivo said it needed to defragment before you could record a programme – or the first time your TV blue screened!”

Instead, she says, Intel should have been asking “What is the essence of TV that people love so much? What is it that’s so compelling that we still organise our day, our time and our furniture around it?” The very un-PC answer is that “People love TV because it’s not complicated. It’s one button to a story they care about.”

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PC Magazine
Rattner describes the future of context-aware computing
The real question, Rattner said, is: Is the market ready for all of this context? Intel Fellow Genevieve Bell (who also led the Day Zero events) arrived onstage to explain that all users have “ambivalent and complex” relationships with technology, and that discovering what people truly love is the key to making context-aware computing work. The process involves conceptualizing and designing potential products, validating that in the real world, integrating the changes, and repeating the process until the users are satisfied. This will involve, Bell said, talking more to users, but also helping them understand that context and life are not different contexts—watching a baseball game, seeing a road sign, or using multiple devices in a living room are all examples of context that can help devices learn more about you and what you need. Bell said, “If we get context right—even a little bit right—it propels an entirely new set of experiences.”

Wired.com > Gadget Lab
How context-aware computing will make gadgets smarter
Small always-on handheld devices equipped with low-power sensors could signal a new class of “context-aware” gadgets that are more like personal companions. Such devices would anticipate your moods, be aware of your feelings and make suggestions based on them, says Intel.
Researchers have been working for more than two decades on making computers be more in tune with their users. That means computers would sense and react to the environment around them. Done right, such devices would be so in sync with their owners that the former will feel like a natural extension of the latter.

Computerworld
Intel: Future smartphones will be assistants, companions [alternate link]
Rattner said that as devices begin to understand the way their users live their lives, they will turn into personal assistants. Within five years, smartphones will be aware of the information on a user’s laptop, desktop and tablet systems, and they will use that knowledge to help guide them through their daily activities.

Fast Company
Coming soon: mind-reading cell phones
Eventually, Intel might actually produce truly psychic cell phones. Earlier this summer, we learned about Intel’s Human Brain Project–a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh that uses EEG, fMRI, and magnetoencephalography to figure out what a subject is thinking about based entirely on their neural activity pattern. The technology won’t be ready for at least a decade–and that’s just fine with us.

And there is much more…