Editorial: Interactions: Time, Culture, and Behavior
Jon Kolko
Over the past 10 issues, interactions has, with a great deal of conscious repetition, investigated themes of global influence, sustainability, temporal aesthetics, behavior change, and the design for culture. These issues are at the heart of the human condition – whether exploring, solving, or celebrating the relationships between people and society. These themes continually combine to offer a glimpse into designing for interaction – the ability to forge connections and bridge gaps between experiences, people, and technology.
This issue of interactions is no different, but it exemplifies a new and subtle duality: impending doom and slight optimism.

Cover story: The Waste Manifesto
Victor Margolin is professor emeritus of design history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a founding editor and now co-editor of the academic design journal Design Issues. From this position, Margolin offers us an informed and historically grounded manifesto on the nature of garbage. Deemed The Waste Manifesto, Margolin describes the economics of waste, and offers a call to arms. As he writes, “At stake in attempting to create a sustainable waste economy is the issue of whether or not we can avoid social obesity, something that can paralyze us logistically, physically, and economically.”

“At The End of the World, Plant a Tree”: Six questions for Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield is Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, as well as the author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing and the upcoming The City Is Here for You to Use. He is also a compelling speaker and articulate blogger, and has become an authority in thinking about the impact of future ubiquitous technologies on people and society. In a lengthy interview with Tish Shute recently published on UgoTrade.com, Greenfield covered numerous topics including augmented reality, Usman Haque’s Pachube project, the networked book, the networked city, and what to do at the end of the world. The interview is dense and rich, with many of the questions raised relevant to our audience. We asked Greenfield to expand on some of his answers for interactions.

–> Although not publicly available on the Interactions site, this article (which I facilitated and has clearly inspired Jon Kolko’s thinking, as becomes clear in the above editorial), can be found on Adam Greenfield’s personal site. Make of his introduction what you want.

Column: Designing the Infrastructure
Don Norman
“It is time to work on our infrastructure, which threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on infrastructure design. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to provide the foundation for everyday life. If we do not respond, it will dominate our lives, preventing us from attending to our priority concerns and interests. Instead, we’ll just be keeping ahead of maintenance demands.”

–> Unfortunately the online version of the article comes without the figures that Norman refers to in his text.

Column: The Golden Age of Newsprint Collides With the Gilt Age of Digital Information Distribution
Elizabeth Churchill
Churchill is “screaming for a better news-reading experience on my desktop and mobile devices.”
“Certainly I love having access to so much information, but the reading experience is just not the same as the structured, well-designed experience of newspapers. News websites are like buckets of Internet storm-drain runoff, all laid out in some distorted version of their print counterparts.”

Column: Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
Steve Portigal
In Part I Portigal looked at some different approaches to design that do or do not succeed by omitting research. Here, he examines some of the limitations of doing research without design. His conclusion: “Rather than treat research and design as separate activities (sometimes performed by siloed departments or vendors), I would encourage all the stakeholders in the product development process to advocate for an integrated approach in which design activities and research activities are tightly coordinated and aligned.”

Column: On Hopelessness and Hope
Jon Kolko
“A number of individuals -a group that is small in number but significant in its contributions- have managed to deliver on projects broad and deep. They do act as renaissance individuals, and they do manage to tackle problems that are complex and whose solutions result in important contributions.” In working with and observing these types of people, Kolko sees several commonalities.

“There is a wealth of information available, and most of it these days is digitized. I feel that we still don’t have good ways to know what information may be available and what is relevant to whatever we are currently doing, to be able to access information, especially while we are in the middle of something. The current computers and the interfaces that we use, they are not really the ideal information-accessing devices.

Today’s hardware devices, the iPhone as well, they all assume that you completely shift your attention to the device if you want to access some information. You have to basically completely drop what you are in the middle of and redirect your attention to the screen and use a pointing device, whether it’s the mouse or your own fingers, and then use a keyboard to enter information. It’s very disruptive.”

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(via InfoDesign)

Table of contents:
• HCI 2009 by Alan Blackwell
• Play up, play up and play the game by Tom McEwan
• Reflections by George Buchanan
• Lancaster MA in Interaction Design by Alan Dix & Corina Sas
• Teaching design to heterogeneous classes by Sus Lundgren
• Can short courses create lifelong learning? By David Travis
• Practical Interaction Design by Phil Turner and Susan Turner
• My PhD by Nazean Jomhari
• Profile with Anthony Dunne
• Interfaces reviews by Shailey Minocha
• Interacting with Computers by Dianne Murray
• View from the chair by Russell Beale

The next issue has the theme “Celebrating people and technology”.

(via Usability News)

In the article, she discussed a service design talk she gave as part of the Dot Dot Dot series put on by the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts, and more in particular lays out five issues — immediacy, co-creation, voice, expertise and customisation — to keep in mind when thinking about the services we design.

Jennifer Bove is a founder and principal at Kicker Studio in San Francisco and on the faculty of the School of Visual Art’s Interaction Design MFA department in New York. She is also a former student of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy.

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Videos (alternate link) of the presentations are now online. A selection:

The Zen of presentation design & delivery: Why it matters now more than ever
Garr Reynolds, Associate Professor of Management, Kansai Gaidai University , Japan
Over the years presentation software such as PowerPoint has gotten better, but presentations largely have not. The presentation tools have advanced, but we have not. Why? Part of the problem has been a focus only on how to use the tools themselves rather than on how to clarify and amplify our ideas and messages through through fundamental design and storytelling principles.

“What’s going on” to “We’re not gonna take it”
David Malouf, Professor, Savannah College of Art & Design, USA
The new differentiators are beyond quality and usability, but is directly related to holistic aesthetic design consideration.
Designers bring a new level of “fit” to this new class of products and services. They imbue stories that engage and delight. Surrounding all this is depth, connectedness, and individual expression, that adds up to the “soul” of a design.

Designing personal informatics
Matt Jones, Co-founder/Lead Designer, Dopplr.com, UK
Here’s an explosion in “personal informatics”: Services that surface information about you and your network to your advantage.
Reviewing visualisations like the Dopplr Personal Personal Annual Report, Matt Jones will examine how great UX design can maximize the services’ benefits and impact.

Designing humanity into your products
Bill DeRouchey, Director, Interaction Design, Ziba Design, USA
Relationships are formed in the smallest moments and intimate details within each and every interaction, even between people and products. In this session, we’ll see examples of how humanity has been designed into products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. We’ll discover how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

Designing beyond the screen: the convergence of products, interactions and services
Niclas Andersson, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Ergonomidesign, Sweden
Lennart Andersson, Director of Interaction Design, Ergonomidesign, Sweden
During this session we will give you a look into what we believe is the future of convergent design, based on real-life case studies and by interpreting the signs of the future trends. We also share our knowledge and experience within physical, cognitive and emotional ergonomics to be able to give you insights and tools for developing people driven innovation.

“Every 3 Seconds, a User Dies Somewhere”. Making analytics matter in your design process
Gene Liebel, Partner, Director of User Experience, HUGE, USA
Nowadays almost every internet team looks at website usage statistics on a regular basis. But most of the discussion is still about broad measures like “monthly visitors”, “repeat visitors”, “sign-ups”, “conversion”, and so on. In reality the tools have evolved to the point where you can quickly learn things about users you would usually need to get from qualitative research techniques (such as user interviews or usability studies). We’ll discuss a few situations where the analytics are sending a clear message about what the user wants or the performance of the current design. Finally we’ll check out a few tricks for “humanizing” the numbers so they’re easier to present to product design teams.

Why designers fail and what to do about it
Scott Berkun, author, USA
All those who participate in design, from interaction designers, to usability engineers, to IA masters, fall victim to the same kinds of challenges when trying to bring good design into the world. From politics, to hubris, to downright incompetence, what can we learn by confessing to, and examining the causes of, our failures? Berkun thinks we can learn everything, much more than studying our successes. This fun, interactive talk, explores why designers fail and offers advice on how to learn from and triumph in the face of these situations.

“Given the themes of the conference and who else was speaking I decided to steer clear of potential irrelevance, and had fun superficially exploring an area actually at the frontier of the day’s very themes.
When the smart city will come to be – if it has not already – what will it mean for its human inhabitants?
Even more vertically: what will living in such a techno-cultural milieu do to people’s first-life avatar – to their body – and to their very perception of it?
I briefly touched upon “the body as a terminal” and “the body as a node”, and left “the body as a conduit” for a longer timeframe.”

- View presentation notes and slides (alternate link)
- View presentation video (24:59)

You can also watch other Frontiers of Interaction resentations in English (skip the Italian introduction):

• Elements of a networked urbanism, an excellent presentation by Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, and author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing” (33:47)
• The Consciousness Panopticon by David Orban, founder of WideTag, Inc. (12:55)
• Two thoughts by Liam Bannon, director of the Interaction Design Centre of the University of Limerick (8:23)
• The Real Time City by Andrea Vaccari of MIT’s Senseable City Lab (13:09)

See also my earlier post on Matt Jones’ talk at the same conference.

“We all know how great a touch screen is… But have you ever thought that it’s a nightmare for the blind? You never know what you’re touching because everything is flat. All the information and status is on the screen, so a user has to take the device up from a pocket, touch the necessary buttons and see with his eyes. In the future information is told in 3D.”

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Last week the people of Nokia Conversations had the opportunity to chat to them at The Inside Story design day in London about their ideas on mobile gesture design, the research they’ve been doing, and the tools that have been developed to help test how well future mobile gestures might work.

“As part of their fieldwork they ask people from many countries and a broad spectrum of cultures to play out scenarios of how they might perform a task with a gesture that feels natural to them, using simple plastic mono block phones as props.

They set out a series of tasks for people, such as silencing a ringing phone. Sure, the flip-to-silence gesture is already alive in a number of devices, such as the Nokia 8800 and N97, but it was great to hear examples of some of the physical gestures people suggested in their research. A few of my favourites that Younghee and Joe mentioned were people wanting to squeeze the phone to shut it up, while others put their index finger over their mouth to shush it or simply covered the phone with their hand. The strangest, but my pick of the bunch was simply staring at your phone with a rather annoyed look, as if it were a naughty child that needs to be quiet.”

In a video interview they talk about the creation of the gesture phone prototype that they use to explore this new dialect of physical interaction designed to let you perform tasks and communicate in very new ways.

Read full story (with video interview)

“The dislocation of form and function has set a new challenge for designers: how to help us to operate ever more complex digital products.” [...]

“The first wave of U.I. designs sought to reassure us by using visual references to familiar objects to help us to operate digital ones.” [...]

“The next phase of U.I. design will take this further. John Maeda, the software designer and president of the Rhode Island School of Design, believes that our current “awkward mechanical dance” with computers will be replaced by an intuitive approach.”

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According to a first post, Alastair Curtis, Head of Design at Nokia, shared the design insight that your mobile is becoming more of a “sixth sense”, equipping you with “super-human” abilities.

“This notion of your mobile providing your with pseudo super-human abilities might sound a little exaggerated, but the evolution of context aware services is arguably a powerful sixth sense that, as Alastair’s design colleague Bill Sermon mentioned, equips you with a new sort of “peripheral vision” that enables you to see things you perhaps weren’t expecting. And as Alastair explains this “frees you from the complexity of technology to let you look up and enjoy the world around you”. This new breed of mobile behaviour is being investigated and developed with the design ambition being to create interfaces that are absolutely instinctive and don’t keep trapped looking at a screen – instead of say how you might find yourself immersed in a desktop computer screen, the Nokia design team is looking at ways to make your mobile phone screen a glance-at tool to inspire you to spend your time immersed in your physical world, aided with digitized help from your handset.”

A second post reports on a presentation by user interface designers Juliana Ferreira and Lee Cooper on the future of Nokia homescreens.

“The upcoming N97 is the first device to fully realize the research that has taken place over the past two years by Juliana, Lee and the other UI design specialists at Nokia, when it comes to creating a new breed of homescreen experience – an experience that reflects the now embedded trend of personalization and our desire to communicate, share media and control any extension of ourselves on our terms.”

Also check the Making of the N97 video.

“Think of one of your favorite items and imagine it right in front of you. You can probably describe it in great detail to someone. However, try to describe it without mentioning or referring to colors, shapes, text, or any other visual elements. This is a challenging task, and attempting to describe any item to someone in this manner most likely will cause ambiguity and confusion. Subconsciously, we create an embedded image in our mind based on an item’s appearance or brand. Dick Berry in “The user experience” denotes this embedded image as a user’s mental model or conceptual model. A user interacts with physical items, builds up experiences, and as a result creates a mental model over time. This mental model can contribute to the success of product marketing and software. At the rapid rate of progression of technology, the acceptance of software with identical functionality can come down to user experience. A product can leverage itself above the rest by the superiority of its design. This article will discuss the emphasis on design as a primary vehicle for strategy, flow, and affordance as it pertains to user experience in a device or system.”

Ubiquity is dedicated to fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, cognition, technology, practices and paradigms of the computing profession.

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(via InfoDesign)

“A person is a first-time user exactly once (and in the case of the infusion pump, because of training and observation, nurses were actually never really first-time users), and in many cases a beginner for only a very short while. The first-time user scenario is always important to get right (as is that highly emotional first impression); for some products such as an airport check-in kiosk or a public emergency defibrillator, for example, it’s the most critical one and deserves the most elegant solution. But for countless other products that target people who will use the product to accomplish complex workflows over long periods of time, the first-time use case is likely only one of many secondary scenarios that deserve attention.”

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Here are some of the publicly available papers and articles, which she wrote or co-wrote:

Spinning Online: A case study of Internet broadcasting by DJs
Paper to be presented at the Communities & Technology conference, ACM, University Park, PA (June 2009)
Authors: Shamma, D.A.; Churchill, E.; Bobb, N.; Fukuda, M.
Personal video streaming websites have become common on the Internet. They are increasingly used by broadcasters, bands, and entertainers as performance spaces and community gathering places for “fans”. In order to understand how such live broadcasting sites fare as venues for gigs and for the maintenance of fan communities, we studied a video streaming site that is home to a vibrant DJ community. We spent time as audience members, analyzed site usage data, interviewed and charted the online presence of DJs who perform regularly on the, and talked with the site designers about their vision for the site. We found DJs use a number of tools to maintain close connections with three communities—their peers, with sources for new music and for related show content, and with their fans. When streaming live performances, DJs use visual interface cues to gauge audience reaction and tailor their sets accordingly. DJs talked about the broadcast channel as ‘a place’, and reported close social connection with invited and regular audience members. We conclude our paper with observations regarding the nature of community involvement on performance centered webcasting sites.

Digital Order: Just over the horizon or at the end of the rainbow?
interactions, ACM Press, (May/June 2009)
Confronting the iPod Shuffle with Churchill’s design principles, with some unexpected consequences. [Interesting to read this post, keeping in mind my earlier Intel digital storage post].

Learning How: The search for craft knowledge on the Internet
Paper presented at the CHI 2009 conference, ACM Press, Boston, USA (April 2009)
Authors: Torrey, C.; Churchill, E.F.; McDonald, D.W.
Communicating the subtleties of a craft technique, like putting a zipper into a garment or throwing a clay pot, can be challenging even when working side by side. Yet How- To content—including text, images, animations, and videos—is available online for a wide variety of crafts. We interviewed people engaged in various crafts to investigate how online resources contributed to their craft practice. We found that participants sought creative inspiration as well as technical clarification online. In this domain, keyword search can be difficult, so supplemental strategies are used. Participants sought information iteratively, because they often needed to enact their knowledge in order to evaluate it. Our description of people learning how allows us to elaborate on existing understandings of information-seeking behavior by considering how search originates and is evaluated in knowledge domains involving physical objects and physical processes.

On trusting your socks to find each other (pdf)
interactions, ACM Press, p.32-36 (March/April 2009)
This articles addresses design issues that may arise as a result of the deployment of networks of devices that will constitute the “Internet of Things”. Addresses issues in particular around the trustworthiness of information exchange and transparency in such networks.

How big can you think?
Yodel Anecdotal (26 March 2009)
Did you know that humans have only used verbal language for the past 50,000 years – a virtual blink of the eye in evolutionary time? This got me wondering how people communicated before language. Since we’ve been thriving on this planet for 160,000 years (or millions more, depending on when you start the “human” clock), how exactly how did we express ourselves? And do we hang on to old non-verbal habits today? An interview with MIT Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland.

Givin’ you more of what you’re funkin’ for: DJs and the Internet
interactions, ACM Press, p.20-24 (Jan/Feb 2009)
Since DJ’s always talk about “how they ‘read’ the crowd, garner a sense of the energy in the place, and manipulate its ebbs and flows with music to amp up the crowd, maintain a pace, or slow it down”, the question arises how this happens with a webcast and whether it is at all possible.

Kars Alfrink: Play in social and tangible interactions
Many of the interactions seen in tangible and social computing are essentially playful. Play can take on many forms, but they all involve people exploring a conceptual space of possibilities. When designing these “embodied” interactions, it is therefore helpful to have a good understanding of play – this session aims to do just that. We’ll compare the role of interaction designers to that of game designers, who concern themselves primarily with the creation of rule-sets.

Dave Malouf – Foundations of Interaction Design: Bringing design critique to interaction design
Foundation and critique are two core elements that separate design from other ways of thinking and practicing creation of ideas and solutions. Foundations are the core elements that we manipulate within our craft. Critique is the way we judge the results of that craft. For critique to be effective though it requires foundation. It is only through our understanding of what it is that makes up our craft, that we can bring consistency and consensus to design criticism. This 25min. presentation is meant to offer the beginnings of a discussion around what could be the foundations of interaction design, how they impact aesthetics of interaction and how they can be used for design critique within an interaction design practice.

Jon Kolko – Design synthesis
Interaction design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, which must be systematically and rigorously analyzed in order to extract meaning and insight. Unfortunately, these methods of analysis are poorly documented and rarely taught. As a result, raw design research data is inappropriately positioned as insight, and the value of research activities is marginalized. Interaction design synthesis methods can be taught, and when selectively applied, visual, diagrammatic synthesis techniques can be completed relatively quickly. This talk will introduce various methods of Synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights.

Aza Raskin – Designing in the open

Marc Rettig – How to change complicated stuff
In the midst of a global conversation about change, many designers are pondering their own impact in the world. How does our experience in software interfaces, web sites, and physical products prepare us to address the profound issues humanity is facing? These issues involve many complex systems, systems too big to fit into the scope of any single company or institution. Design methods are potent at large scale and scope, but what does it take to be effective as a practitioner, as a team, as a company? What is it like to actually achieve a meaningful, sustainable, positive difference in life?

Jared Spool and Friends – Hiring the next generation of Interaction Designers

Luke Wroblewski – Parti and the design sandwich
In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building. Will it be a public structure that provides safety or a commercial building focused on customer up-selling? Design principles are the guiding light for any parti. They articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. But design principles are not enough. Every design consideration has a set of opportunities and limitations that can either add to or detract from the parti. This combination of design principles at the top and design considerations at the bottom allows interaction designers to fill in the middle with meaningful structures that enable people and organizations to interact, communicate, and get things done. In this talk, Luke Wroblewski will illustrate how the World’s most accessed Web page, yahoo.com, was redesigned with a parti and the design sandwich.

(see also earlier post with links to videos of presentations by Dan Saffer, Robert Fabricant and John Thackara).

The 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award – given in recognition of an individual who has made a profound, long-term contribution to contemporary design practice – went to Bill Moggridge, a true pioneer in user-centred design and interaction design.

“Bill Moggridge is a co-founder of IDEO, a global design consultancy, creating impact through design. A Royal Designer for Industry, Moggridge designed the world’s first laptop computer. He pioneered interaction design and is one of the first people to integrate human factors into the design of software and hardware. He has been a trustee of the Design Museum; visiting professor in interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, lecturer in Design at the London Business School and a member of the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. He is currently consulting associate professor in the design program at Stanford University. His book, DVD and Web site “Designing Interactions” tell the story of how interaction design is transforming our daily lives.”

Bill, congratulations from all of us at Experientia!

A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India
Neil Patel, Sheetal Agarwal, Nitendra Rajput, Amit Nanavati, Paresh Dave, Tapan S. Parikh
In this paper we present a study comparing speech and dialed input voice user interfaces for farmers in Gujarat, India. We ran a controlled, between-subjects experiment with 45 participants. We found that the task completion rates were significantly higher with dialed input, particularly for subjects under age 30 and those with less than an eighth grade education. Additionally, participants using dialed input demonstrated a significantly greater performance improvement from the first to final task, and reported less difficulty providing input to the system.

Sacred imagery in techno-spiritual design
Susan P. Wyche, Kelly E. Caine, Benjamin K. Davison, Shwetak N. Patel, Michael Arteaga, Rebecca E. Grinter
Despite increased knowledge about how Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are used to support religious and spiritual practices, designers know little about how to design technologies for faith-related purposes. Our research suggests incorporating sacred imagery into techno-spiritual applications can be useful in guiding development. We illustrate this through the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application developed to support Islamic prayer practices. Our contribution is to show how religious imagery can be used in the design of applications that go beyond the provision of functionality to connect people to the experience of religion.

A comparison of mobile money-transfer UIs for non-literate and semi-literate users
Indrani Medhi, S.N. Nagasena Gautama, Kentaro Toyama
Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the “unbanked”. However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best.
In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task-completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.

Comparing semiliterate and illiterate users’ ability to transition from audio+text to text-only interaction
Leah Findlater, Ravin Balakrishnan, Kentaro Toyama
Multimodal interfaces with little or no text have been shown to be useful for users with low literacy. However, this research has not differentiated between the needs of the fully illiterate and semiliterate – those who have basic literacy but cannot read and write fluently. Text offers a fast and unambiguous mode of interaction for literate users and the exposure to text may allow for incidental improvement of reading skills. We conducted two studies that explore how semiliterate users with very little education might benefit from a combination of text and audio as compared to illiterate and literate users. Results show that semiliterate users reduced their use of audio support even during the first hour of use and over several hours this reduction was accompanied by a gain in visual word recognition; illiterate users showed no similar improvement. Semiliterate users should thus be treated differently from illiterate users in interface design.

StoryBank: mobile digital storytelling in a development context
David M. Frohlich, Dorothy Rachovides, Kiriaki Riga, Ramnath Bhat, Maxine Frank, Eran Edirisinghe, Dhammike Wickramanayaka, Matt Jones, Will Harwood
Mobile imaging and digital storytelling currently support a growing practice of multimedia communication in the West. In this paper we describe a project which explores their benefit in the East, to support non-textual information sharing in an Indian village. Local audiovisual story creation and sharing activities were carried out in a one month trial, using 10 customized cameraphones and a digital library of stories represented on a village display. The findings show that the system was usable by a cross-section of the community and valued for its ability to express a mixture of development and community information in an accessible form. Lessons for the role of HCI in this context are also discussed.

Designable visual markers
Enrico Costanza, Jeffrey Huang
Visual markers are graphic symbols designed to be easily recognised by machines. They are traditionally used to track goods, but there is increasing interest in their application to mobile HCI. By scanning a visual marker through a camera phone users can retrieve localised information and access mobile services.
One missed opportunity in current visual marker systems is that the markers themselves cannot be visually designed, they are not expressive to humans, and thus fail to convey information before being scanned. This paper provides an overview of d-touch, an open source system that allows users to create their own markers, controlling their aesthetic qualities. The system runs in real-time on mobile phones and desktop computers. To increase computational efficiency d-touch imposes constraints on the design of the markers in terms of the relationship of dark and light regions in the symbols. We report a user study in which pairs of novice users generated between 3 and 27 valid and expressive markers within one hour of being introduced to the system, demonstrating its flexibility and ease of use.

“When I am on Wi-Fi, I am fearless”: privacy concerns & practices in everyday Wi-Fi use
Predrag Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, Jaeyeon Jung, Benjamin M. Greenstein, Louis LeGrand, Pauline Powledge, David Wetherall
Increasingly, users access online services such as email, e-commerce, and social networking sites via 802.11-based wireless networks. As they do so, they expose a range of personal information such as their names, email addresses, and ZIP codes to anyone within broadcast range of the network. This paper presents results from an exploratory study that examined how users from the general public understand Wi-Fi, what their concerns are related to Wi-Fi use, and which practices they follow to counter perceived threats. Our results reveal that while users understand the practical details of Wi-Fi use reasonably well, they lack understanding of important privacy risks. In addition, users employ incomplete protective practices which results in a false sense of security and lack of concern while on Wi-Fi. Based on our results, we outline opportunities for technology to help address these problems.
Predrag Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, Jaeyeon Jung, Benjamin M. Greenstein, Louis LeGrand, Pauline Powledge, David Wetherall

Sharing empty moments: design for remote couples
Danielle Lottridge, Nicolas Masson, Wendy Mackay
Many couples are forced to live apart, for work, school or other reasons. This paper describes our study of 13 such couples and what they lack from existing communication technologies. We explored what they wanted to share (presence, mood, environment, daily events and activities), how they wanted to share (simple, lightweight, playful, pleasant interaction), and when they wanted to share (’empty moments’ such as waiting, walking, taking a break, waking up, eating, and going to sleep). ‘Empty moments’ provide a compelling new opportunity for design, requiring subtlety and flexibility to enable participants to share connection without explicit messages. We designed MissU as a technology probe to study empty moments in situ. Similar to a private radio station, MissU shares music and background sounds. Field studies produced results relevant to social science, technology and design: couples with established routines were comforted; characteristics such as ambiguity and ‘movable’ technology (situated in the home yet portable) provide support. These insights suggest a design space for supporting the sharing of empty moments.

“IDEO’s Bill Moggridge made a comment last week after a screening of Objectified that hit close to home. To paraphrase, he said interaction design has become pervasive, that anyone and everyone can be an interaction designer, and so the role of professional interaction designer is (or is becoming) unnecessary.

So, is Interaction Design a dead-end job?

As an expertise, no. But as a discrete service offering or a career path, I say absolutely.

This position has not made me any new friends around the office, but to be clear, I’m not suggesting our profession is akin to flipping burgers at the mall. Instead, it’s that interaction design has reached a point of maturity where growth is constrained. I see three major factors behind this and hope that by acknowledging them we can find a way forward.”

There is also a rich discussion in the comment thread.

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“We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out. Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.”

Thank you Bruce.

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Table of contents
• View from the chair by Russell Beale
• Preparations for HCI 2009 by Alan Blackwell
• Interacting with Computers by Dianne Murray
• Completing the Circle by Stephen Boyd Davis
• Becoming simpler and smarter by Azlan Raj
• Timely interfaces to the real world by Daniel Harris
• Visioning workshops by John Knight
• A sprinkling of usability and a dash of HCI by Janet C Read, Brendan Cassidy, Lorna McKnight, Pirko Paananen
• Gesture navigation in contextual menus by Dennis Middeke and Thomas Hirt
• My PhD by Dan Lockton
• Interfaces reviews by Shailey Minocha
• The new Interfaces by David Gardiner
• Profile by Alan Blackwell

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(via Usability News)d

The very successful conference, which was chaired by the UPA Europe president Silvia Zimmerman (who has meanwhile become president of UPA Global) and UPA-Italy chair Michele Visciola (who is also the president of Experientia), has clearly had some impact on UPA’s global thinking, as exemplified by its upcoming international conference in Portland, OR, USA.

Not only is the look and feel of the global conference’s website remarkably similar to the European one, but three of the invited speakers are actually designers — Dan Saffer (Kicker Studio), Nathan Shedroff (California College of the Arts) and Raphael Grignani (Nokia Design) — with a specific focus on interaction design and experience design.

Obviously we are excited about this embrace of design within the usability community and look forward to hearing more about this conference.