Design thinking and techniques can help create radical innovations needed to meet the challenges facing local communities and services, says Philip Colligan, executive director of Nesta‘s public services lab.

“What we’re now learning is that there are low-cost and low-risk ways to apply design techniques like prototyping to innovation for even the most sensitive of social challenges. We’re also finding it’s possible for public servants to learn those techniques and that has got to be a priority for any organisation trying to find innovative solutions to big social challenges.”

Read article

Note that Nesta and thinkpublic have recently published a framework for prototyping in public services.

One of the people presenting at the DPPI conference in Milan last week was Aviaja Borup Lynggaard, an industrial Ph.D. scholar at Bang & Olufsen (B&O), attached to the Aarhus School of Architecture and Aarhus University.

Her very interesting Ph.D. project – which aims to inspire new B&O products – is called On the move – creating domesticity through experience design. It is part of the larger research project Mobile Home Center, which receives funding from Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation.

The project explores how to achieve a sense of home for people who travel extensively.

Together with researchers from The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University and the Aarhus School of Architecture, Aviaja Borup Lynggaard sets out to map how people manage a mobile lifestyle and to develop prototypes and concepts for products and services.

The project is guided by home researcher and anthropologist Ida Winther’s definition of the phenomenon home as an activity, ‘homing’, defined as something one does to achieve a sense of being at home, wherever one is currently located.

The goal is to study how interaction design can help promote this sense of home and facilitate homing.

Aviaja Borup Lynggaard’s project is focused on people who have an extremely mobile lifestyle, including B&O customers with heavy travel activity between multiple homes or hotels.

The project applies a user-centred design process that actively involves the customers in the design process from start to finish through ethnographic studies, interviews and trials of concepts and prototypes for new products.

The Ph.D. project will foster a range of products and services for subsequent development at B&O.

Three recent papers provide more background:

Home awareness – connecting people sensuously to places (pdf – 09/2010)
People living a global lifestyle connect remotely to their families while away from home. In this paper we identify a need for connecting with a home as the physical place itself. For this purpose we introduce the concept of Home Awareness that connects people sensuously to remote places through sound, light and feeling of temperature. A working prototype has been successfully tested and we present some results from early user studies.

Tactics for homing in mobile life – a fieldwalk study of extremely mobile people (pdf – 09/2010)
For many people home making is an activity, which extends beyond a single house. We introduce the terminology of Homing as the act of home making, when in a primary home, secondary home or more temporary spaces. By point of departure in existing literature on home making and through ethnographic studies of extremely mobile people we identify general tactics for homing. We present the identified tactics and show how people deploy not only one but several tactics in their intention of making a homely feeling despite not being in their primary home.
Reviewing the mobile technologies currently in use we argue that several of the tactics identified are currently not well supported. We discuss how technology design can learn from this study through pointing to the potential in designing mobile technologies to better support these unsupported tactics.
We consider the tactics as a tool for deeper understanding of mobile practices and thus informing the design of more relevant future technologies for people engaged in a mobile lifestyle.

On the move : creating domesticity through experience design (pdf – 10/2010)
This paper is a summary of the Ph.D. project about home and mobility. The project concerns design for mobile life and through various prototypes it is an investigation of how to support the act of home making away from the primary home.

The Washington Post describes the world and the impact of everyday hackers who use social networks, do-it-yourself-then-show-it-off Web sites, cheap parts from China, and blissfully simple microprocessors to modify or invent new electronic products for their houses, cars, offices and back yards.

“Recent studies show consumers now spend more money tweaking and inventing stuff than consumer product firms spend on research and development. It’s more than $3.75 billion a year in Britain, and U.S. studies under way now show similiar patterns. Makers are even morphing into entrepreneurs, with some of the best projects, including Kleinman’s, raising money for commercial development of self-funding Web sites such as Kickstarter, where anyone with a credit card can chip in to back cool ideas.

Major companies such as Ford are, after years of resisting inventor gadflies, inviting makers to submit product tweaks. “This is the democratization of technology,” said K. Venkatesh Prasad, a senior engineering executive at Ford.

“Policymakers and economists always assumed that consumers just consumed and that they don’t innovate,” said Eric von Hippel, who studies technological innovation and makers at MIT’s business school. “What’s clearly happening now is that all of a sudden it’s easier for us to make exactly what we want.””

Read article

Experientia is excited to be working on two applied research projects for Flanders InShape, a Flemish design promotion agency that supports and advises small and mid-size companies in Flanders, Belgium on matters related to product development and design.

The ASSIST project, in collaboration with Enthoven Associates, is focused on improving mobility and communications for people with motor disabilities, whereas the EVENT project (conducted with FutureProofed) supports Kortrijk Xpo in becoming the most sustainable trade fair and congress complex in Belgium and one of the top five most sustainable fair complexes in Europe by 2020.

With these applied research projects, Flanders InShape aims to augment the efficiency and effectiveness of product development in Flanders and to improve the competitive position of Flemish companies through the development of products with higher added value for the customer.

ASSIST – Improving mobility and communications for people with motor disabilities

The Assist project, which Experientia conducts in collaboration with acclaimed Belgian design consultancy Enthoven Associates and care organisations Centrum voor Zorgtechnologie and In-HAM, aims to develop new concept ideas for assistive technologies for people with motor disabilities, using a people-centred design process. Although aimed at a Flemish context, the project focuses on international technological and design projects.

In the first phase of the project, Experientia has conducted a comprehensive benchmarking of current assistive device solutions for people with walking difficulties. The benchmark explores both on-body assistive devices, which are always in contact with motor disabled people, such as wheelchairs, rollators and standers; and assistive environments, including public transportation, mobile applications and accessibility.

Experientia will also contribute to the creation of scenarios for use during contextual observation to validate the design opportunities found in the benchmark. Enthoven Associates is currently conducting the user research and jointly the partners will then take the insights further, supported by a creative workshop to generate ideas, into design concepts.

EVENT – Sustainable event management project

The Event project sees Experientia team up with Futureproofed, a sustainable design consultancy, and Kortrijk Xpo, a conference and trade fair venue in Kortrijk, Belgium, to explore ways to make events more sustainable. The ambitious goal of this project is to make Kortrijk Xpo the most sustainable trade fair and congress complex in Belgium and one of the top five most sustainable fair complexes in Europe by 2020.

Trade fairs, congresses and events are key areas of concern for sustainability, because they involve a large number of diverse players both directly and indirectly (e.g. stand builders, lighting installers, textile manufacturers, etc.) and because time criteria often become more important during assembly, disassembly and transport, than any concern for sustainability.

This project will explore how impact can be best achieved, though good planning, preparation and usage of the right materials and products.

Futureproofed will carry out a carbon footprint analysis of Kortrijk Xpo, whereas Experientia will benchmark international best practice on sustainability for trade shows, expositions, and major public events. Together with Futureproofed, we will build a behavioural change framework, and conduct participatory workshops and concept development for more sustainable practices.

This exciting project builds on the themes that Experientia is currently exploring in our Low2No project in Helsinki, and is in keeping with our overall company commitment to sustainability.

The New York Times reports on how car designers have recognised the challenge of keeping vehicles’ controls up to date in an era when technology evolves far more quickly than automakers can move.

“Ford’s goal in establishing a set of design principles for automotive interfaces that would be consistently applied to all models was to improve what it called the cabin experience. The program was given the internal code name HAL. [...]

The guidelines that resulted from the program, a sort of universal logic for all the cars’ switches and systems, helped shape the dashboard controls in the redesigned Ford Edge and Explorer. The standards will apply to future Ford models around the world.”

Read article

TAT, a Swedish software technology and mobile interface design company, recently ran a two-week open innovation experiment, during which they collaborate with the web community to sketch out an idea for two weeks and then build a video of the concept that gets most contribution and attention – measured in votes, ideas, and comments.

They concentrated the open innovation on three areas: the future of driving, the future of communication, and the future of screen technology.

The latter – screen technology – became the winner of the initiative. After concept design and video production, which TAT conducted internally, the movie which aims to showcase user interfaces in 2014 is now ready and available online.

Watch video

The current issue of Interactions Magazine is generally on the nuances of what makes us human, writes co-editor-in-chief Jon Kolko, and more in particular “about authenticity, complexity, and design-and the political, social, and human qualities of our work”.

Here are the articles that are currently available for free:

interactions: authenticity, complexity, and design
by Jon Kolko
Frequently, designers find themselves reflecting on the nuances of what makes us human, including matters of cognitive psychology, social interaction, and the desire for emotional resonance. This issue of interactions unpacks all of these ideas, exploring the gestalt of interaction design’s influence.

The meaning of affinity and the importance of identity in the designed world
by Matthew Jordan
When a designer is thinking about ways to create experiences that deliver meaningful and lasting connections to users, it is helpful to consider the notion of our personal affinities and how they affect perception, adoption, and use in the designed world. In our cover story, Matthew Jordan explores the term “affinity,” leading us to consider new and useful ways of informing design thinking and ultimately help us design with more success.

Why “the conversation” isn’t necessarily a conversation
by Ben McAllister
Architects have long understood that the structures we inhabit can influence not only the way we feel, but also the way we behave. This turns out to be true in digital environments like social networks, too. Subtle differences in the underlying structures of these networks give rise to distinct patterns of behavior.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst: interaction design and the tipping point
by Eli Blevis and Shunying Blevis
Typical interaction designers are not climate scientists, but interaction designers can make well-informed use of climate sciences and closely related sciences. Interaction design can make scientific information, interpretations, and perspectives available in an accessible and widely distributed form so that people’s consciousness is raised.

Gestural interfaces: a step backwards in usability
by Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen
The new gestural and touch interfaces can be a pleasure to use and a pleasure to see. But the lack of consistency and inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery, threatens the viability of these systems. We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company-interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

All look same? A comparison of experience design and service design
by Jodi Forlizzi
The comparison of experience design (or UX, as it has been labeled) and service design seems to be a topic of interest in the interaction design community. Can we and should we articulate differences among these fields? Can the methods and knowledge of one successfully transfer to another?

Relying on failures in design research
by Nicolas Nova
The investigation of accidents within a larger process can be inspiring from a design viewpoint. Surfacing people’s problematic reactions when confronted with invisible pieces of technologies highlights their mental model and eventually has implications for design.

Solving complex problems through design
by Steve Baty
What is it about design that makes it so well suited to solving complex problems? Why is design thinking such a promising avenue for business and government tackling seemingly intractable problems?

On academic knowledge production
by Jon Kolko
Now, as design enjoys the corporate credibility of “design thinking” and with the social problems confronting the world growing increasingly intractable, the need for bridging the gap between practitioners and academics is more important than ever.

On 10-11 May, UNICEF New York organised the Design Days, where they invited designers and engineers who have worked with UNICEF to discuss the organisation, the (rapid prototyping) design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations.

They have now produced a video that is a synopsis of the projects, themes and trouble-shooting expressed at the event.

“We have edited down a conversation between UNICEF sponsored rapid design prototypers to profile what they have created in order to respond to and alleviate actual needs of families and children. This video is intended to help make transparent the iterative process that development must undergo in order to create a new device that can respond to global concerns. Also touched on are ways for the organization to make the process of creating prototypes more streamlined, and to take what is developed and make it open source in order to create a sustainable and beneficial outcome to those that need it.”

Watch video

BeAware, an EU-supported research project, has created a solution to motivate and empower citizens to become active energy consumers, by offering them the opportunity to raise awareness of their own power consumption in real time.

Energy Life includes a mobile phone application and an ambient interface that makes use of the home lighting and lamps as a means to communicate with the user. It provides feedback about consumption habits, and empowers users to become active and responsible consumers.

The efforts are part of a European Union research project that is creating new ways to allow consumers to follow and better understand their use of energy.

The technology developed in the project is being set up in two different pilot si­tes – one Nordic (Sweden/Finland) and one Southern European (Italy). In each site, studies are carried in a home environment. The research is highly multidisciplinary and combines a variety of approaches in the area of user studies, user-centred design and evaluation.

- Read article
- View video

Tinker London (the team promoting the use of Arduino in design) started a collaboration with EDF R&D on Homesense, an open user-centered research project investigating the use of smart and networked technologies in the home.

Homesense will bring the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Over the course of several months, selected households across Europe (UK, France and Italy initially) will have access to the latest in open source hardware and software tools, decide what they want to do with them in the context of their home and share the results with the world. Local technology experts will be selected to support them in the development of their ideas and the whole process from start to finish. The process will be documented by users themselves in the form of blogs, videos and images taken throughout a 3 month long process in the Autumn of 2010.

The team believes that better scenarios and solutions could emerge when design and research in this area can be conducted in an open way. This breaks from tradition as users, rather than seeing products forced on them by a top-down design process, will create their own smart home and live with those technologies they have themselves developed without prior technical expertise.

Tales of Things is a new tool that allows people to attach memories to their objects in the form of video, text or audio, thus “exploring the implications of The Internet of Things (network of objects that are traceable at anytime) on objects that already exist in the world.”

The people behind it are part of the TOTeM research consortium – a collaboration between Edinburgh College of Art, Brunel University, University College London, University Of Dundee and University of Salford – and here some of their launching statements:

“tales of things is an exciting new tool that allows users to attach memories to their objects in the form of video, text or audio. Users can quickly “tag” their objects by using QR codes or RFID with stories and connect to other people who share similar experiences. This will enable future generations to have a greater understanding of the object‟s past and offers a new way of preserving social history. tales of things will depend on real people‟s stories which can be geo-located through an on-line map of the world where participants can track their object even if they have passed it on. The object will also be able to update previous owners on its progress through a live Twitter feed which will be unique to each object entered into the system. The website (www.talesofthings.com) and iPhone application will be available from 16 April 2010.

The project will offer a new way for people to place more value on their own objects in an increasingly disposable economy. As more importance is placed on the objects that are already parts of people‟s lives, it is hoped that family or friends may find new uses for old objects and encourage people to think twice before throwing something away.”

It seems to be still very much a research project not yet thought for actual rollout. I found the repeated use of the word “users” in the press release a bit disturbing and pedantic, and found no answer to the question how this “preserving” will actually take place: how are they going to assure that future generations (i.e. people growing up in the 2030′s and 2060′s) will still have access to all this info? Will Twitter still be around in 2060?

The Guardian, one of the leading UK newspapers, has publish an eight-page supplement on service design (pdf) – subtitled “Design innovation in the public and private sector – in association with the Service Design Network (that Experientia is a member of).

“Service design is a relatively new discipline that asks some fundamental questions: what should the customer experience be like? What should the employee experience be like? How does a company remain true to its brand, to its core business assets and stay relevant to customers?

Design is a highly pragmatic discipline. That is why it is of such interest to business: it gets results. But if at its heart lies the idea of experience, then, as this supplement shows, the methods and ideas behind service design can equally be applied to the public sector. We reveal how service methods can help design experiences that are more efficient and more effective.

We also take a look at developments in sustainability for transport and water systems, as well as at changes in the voluntary sector, where the question: “Can design help change the world?” is increasingly gaining relevance.”

Articles cover service innovation management in major industries, service reform in the public sector, sustainability in the financial sector, car design as service ecosystem design, environmental design and social innovation. Much attention is devoted to methodology. Also included are interviews with Dan Pink (author), Joe Ferry (Virgin Atlantic) and others.

(From a Darden press release)

On March 19 the Darden School of Business [Charlottesville, VA, USA] and the Batten Institute [an academic research center of the business school] will launch Darden’s new innovation laboratory, or i.Lab, a state-of-the-art learning environment that inspires a new approach to teaching innovation and entrepreneurship. [...]

“In contrast to many traditional business-school offerings, the i.Lab provides experiential, team-based and collaborative learning opportunities, such as a design-based studio where students can transform concepts and ideas into physical prototypes,” said Elizabeth O’Halloran, Managing Director, Batten Institute. [...]

The Innovation Lab, or “i.Lab,” at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, is a unique physical learning environment rooted in multidisciplinary thinking and informed by ethnographic, anthropological, and other methodologies traditionally used in the social sciences.

Read press release

Arup Australasia has published a three-part technical overview on its research blog of its ‘urban sensing via mobile phones’ project.

The research project, in collaboration with the UTS Centre for Real-Time Information Networks, explores technical approaches to sensing the presence of mobile phones in transit environments (bus, train, ferry etc.) as well as pedestrians, in order to provide real-time data on such activity, potentially informing urban planning and transport planning decisions. Such approaches might reveal how the city is being used, in real-time.

Disclosure: Experientia is working with Arup on the Low2No project in Helsinki, Finland.

Approach – Hardware – Sensing

Bonnier R&D, the research unit of Bonnier, the publisher of Popular Science, invited the designers from BERG London on a corporate collaborative research project into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices.

“The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.

The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines. It has been designed for a world in which interactivity, abundant information and unlimited options could be perceived as intrusive and overwhelming.”

Watch video prototype

Prototyping
A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping
By Todd Zaki Warfel
Rosenfeld Media, November 2009
Available in paperback and digital package (1-933820-21-7), digital (PDF) editions (ISBN 1-933820-22-5)

Prototyping is a great way to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users.

With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.

Prototyping is available in two packages: a full color paperback plus a screen-optimized DRM-free PDF, and a digital package (two DRM-free PDFs: one screen-optimized, and one for printing yourself). An EPUB version is on the way as well.

Testimonials | illustrations

Philips Design and ABN AMRO’s Dialogues Incubator cooperate to create the ‘Rationalizer’ concept, an emotion sensing system targeted at serious home investors who trade online.

It acts as an ‘emotion mirror’ in which the intensity of the user’s feelings is reflected.

Research shows that home investors do not act purely rationally: their behavior is influenced by emotions, most notably fear and greed, which can compromise their ability to take an objective, factual stance.

This insight led to the Rationalizer concept in which online traders are alerted when it may be wise to take a time-out, wind down and re-consider their actions.

Read full story

When companies develop innovative products that don’t obviously fit within established categories, managers need to help people understand what they are. However what category you place something in has a huge influence on how you view its basic properties. Mary Tripsas reports in the New York Times.

“Depending upon what cues they are given, people will place the same item in different categories.

In management, these traits imply that companies can benefit by using comparisons to create expectations that best match an innovation’s strengths. [...]

Finding the right label is only one of the many ways organizations can influence the way consumers categorize a product. They can also experiment with the product’s shape, packaging, pricing and retail store placement.”

Read full story

This week the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation hosted Transform, a collaborative symposium on innovations in health care experience and delivery.

The symposium, which featured over twenty presenters, was structured in six sessions — Redefining Roles, Policy Perspectives, Enabling Technologies, Alternative Models and How We Pay for Them, Content – Community – Commerce – Care and Choices, and Designing for Social Change.

Videos of all talks are already online.

The last session on Designing for Social Change focused on “Design Thinking — an approach that produces innovations from thoughtful, experiential, participatory research. Innovating in response to human need is what designers have done for centuries. Recently, these master innovators are lending their talents to the design of health care; this segment gave a few examples of what has worked, what hasn’t, and what’s on the drawing boards.”

Speakers included Maggie Breslin (SPARC Design Group / Mayo Clinic), Tim Brown (IDEO), Larry Keeley (Doblin, Inc.), Karl Ronn (Procter & Gamble), and Christi Dining Zuber (Kaiser Permanente).

For years, the experience design community has been using the term ‘good enough prototyping’. Wired UK argues quite convincingly that this approach is now moving into product design:

“Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.” [...]

“As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.”

Read full story

Cambridge Design Partnership and Instrata, a Cambridge-based user experience specialist, recently teamed up to approach mobile communications innovation from the experience of the consumer.

More in particular, the team developed some ideas into new device and service concepts focussing on three key areas: the tactile experience, personalisation and practical enhancements.

Breathe
Breathe is a phone that comes alive – it is responsive, tactile and highly personal. Mobiles go everywhere with us; they have become accessories; and they have the potential to offer enormous pleasure through their physical expression. Breathe is a concept that responds to the need to produce a more emotional experience. Breathe recognises and responds to friends calling, the music playing, new pictures, and people’s own touch. It is perfectly weighted and shaped to fit in the palm of our hand, with colour changes, ripple effects and vibrations bringing it to life. It responds to who we are and comes alive with everything we do.

Choice
Choice gives people options every time they take a phone out with them. They can take a larger handset, which has all the features packed in and is ready to go for a day at work. Or they can select a smaller handset, which they can pop into their top pocket for a trip to the shops or into a clutch bag on a night out. The Choice Sync Station keeps their handsets synchronized with contacts and data while providing simple services such as automated backup and recharge. All handsets stay charged with up to date phonebooks ready to go when you are.

SeeUs
A video call from a mobile is so difficult to make that many people never bother. Holding a phone out with the camera trained on your face while the caller at the other end does the same, is both tricky and uncomfortable. The SeeUs clamshell phone makes it easier by simply adding more stop positions to its hinge to allow the phone to act as a tripod for its cameras. It gives people the option to set the phone on a surface for shake-free imaging and an effortless call and offers an integrated handsfree kit.

Read full story

According to an Elsevier press release, the ew article prototype introduces non-linear structure, enhanced graphical navigation, and integrated multimedia.

“Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announces the ‘Article of the Future’ project, an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how a scientific article is presented online. The project takes full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques.

The Article of the Future launches its first prototypes this week, revealing a new approach to presenting scientific research online. The key feature of the prototypes is a hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers based on their current task in the scientific workflow and their level of expertise and interest. This organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization of a traditional print-based article in incorporating the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure. [...]

The prototypes have been developed by the editorial, production and IT teams at Cell Press in collaboration with Elsevier’s User Centered Design group using content from two previously published Cell articles. They can be viewed online where Elsevier and Cell Press are inviting feedback from the scientific community on the concepts and implementations. Successful ideas from this project will ultimately be rolled-out across Elsevier’s portfolio of 2,000 journals available on ScienceDirect.”

Read full story

>> Read also this reflection by ReadWriteWeb on the matter

In this article Jessica Ching, Laura Henneberry and Shally Lee share the findings of a collaborative project between the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and Canadian network operator TELUS.

“Touch is a vital human need and a deeply emotional form of communication. When we physically interact with people or things we enjoy, we connect with them and react to them. They can make us feel warm, calm, playful or excited. The physical sensation of using a mobile phone, however, is missing these emotional and physical reactions. When we think about other objects, we can clearly imagine the feeling of sensual underwear, luxurious cars or high performance runners. In contrast, using a mobile phone is a bit like pressing your face into a remote control.”

Read full story

Human-Computer Interaction: Development Process
(Series: Human Factors and Ergonomics)
by Andrew Sears and Julie A. Jacko (Editors)
CRC Press, March 2, 2009
Hardcover, 356 pages
Amazon – Google Books Preview

Hailed on first publication as a compendium of foundational principles and cutting-edge research, The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook has become the gold standard reference in this field. Derived from select chapters of this groundbreaking resource, Human-Computer Interaction: The Development Practice addresses requirements specification, design and development, and testing and evaluation activities. It also covers task analysis, contextual design, personas, scenario-based design, participatory design, and a variety of evaluation techniques including usability testing, inspection-based and model-based evaluation, and survey design.

The book includes contributions from eminent researchers and professionals from around the world who, under the guidance of editors Andrew Sear and Julie Jacko, explore visionary perspectives and developments that fundamentally transform the discipline and its practice.

Table of contents:
User Experience and HCI, Mike Kuniavsky
Requirements Specifications within the Usability Engineering Lifecycle, Deborah J. Mayhew
Task Analysis, Catherine Courage, Janice (Genny) Redish, and Dennis Wixon
Contextual Design, Karen Holtzblatt
An Ethnographic Approach to Design, Jeanette Blomberg, Mark Burrel
Putting Personas to Work: Using Data-Driven Personas to Focus Product Planning, Design and Development, Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt
Prototyping Tools and Techniques, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Wendy E. Mackay
Scenario-based Design, Mary Beth Rosson and John M. Carroll
Participatory Design: The Third Space in HCI, Michael J. Muller
Unified User Interface Development: New Challenges and Opportunities, Anthony Savidis and Constantine Stephanidis
HCI and Software Engineering: Designing for User Interface Plasticity, Jöelle Coutaz and Gäelle Calvary
Usability Testing: Current Practice and Future Directions, Joseph S. Dumas and Jean E. Fox
Survey Design and Implementation in HCI, A. Ant Ozok
Inspection-based Evaluation, Gilbert Cockton, Alan Woolrych, and Darryn Lavery
Model-Based Evaluation, David Kieras

Ethnographers at Microsoft: A Review of Human-Computer Interaction: Development Process
Book review by Ronald J. Chenail

Qualitative researchers and those with qualitative inquiry skills are finding tremendous employment opportunities in the world of technology design and development. Because of their abilities to observe and understand the experiences of end users in human-computer interactions, these researchers are helping companies using Contextual Design to create the next generation of products with the users clearly in mind.

In Human-Computer Interaction: Development Process, the new edited book by Andrew Sears and Julie Jacko, the authors describe an array of models and methods incorporating qualitative research concepts and procedures that are being used in technology today and can have great potential tomorrow for qualitative researchers working in fields and settings outside of business and technology.

In a country where people don’t have electricity, much less Internet access, the Grameen Foundation partners with Google to relay information through mobile phones. Dara Kerr reports from on the ground for CNet:

“The research for this project began a year and a half ago at the Application Laboratory, AppLab, which was set up in Kampala, Uganda, by the Grameen Foundation. It has done field research, quantitative needs assessments, prototyping, and focus group testing to figure out how to design and structure mobile applications that could deliver the information.

Since most cell phones in Uganda have only voice and SMS capabilities, the technology was built for SMS. A person texts a question to a specific code, which goes to the database built by AppLab, then using Google’s algorithms, keywords are identified and the most suitable answer is sent back to the cell phone. ” [...]

“For the next few months, there is a promotional period and all texts are free, which helps AppLab continue to build its database of queries. When the promotional period ends, MTN and Google have agreed to charge agriculture and health queries at half the cost of a normal SMS message, while all the other services will have the standard rates. Meanwhile, Google will be supporting an on-the-ground assessment to make sure these services are having a beneficial impact for the people of Uganda.”

Read full story

The MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory has just published a recent project about location-based media, focusing on how the future of mobile contents are related to the physical environment. The project, Locast, was made in collaboration with RAI New Media in Italy.

Locast is an innovative platform for sharing and discovering location-based user-generated videos and production quality multimedia content provided by RAI New media. It consists of a combination of Mobile and Wearable Computing elements supported by a distributed Web application.

Locast seeks to shift the innovation from the wide-spread concept of Web 2.0 to the promising framework of Space 2.0 that keeps the physical and social characteristics of the Italian cities and augment them with the potential offered by pervasive computing.

MIT MEL ran a user test in Venice (Italy) during the days between July 2 and July 10, 2009.

In my ongoing exploration of the theme “we are all hackers now” (also the title of a talk I will give on 29 June in Brussels), I once again found quite a lot of recently published supporting material.

We build the parts, you build the product
The creator of Zoybar, an open-source hardware platform that lets anyone invent their own instrument, talks about “decentralized innovation.”

Neil Gershenfeld (MIT) on the future of invention
By digitizing not just the communication of ideas but also the fabrication of things, the campus can now effectively come to the student.

Future of Open Source: Collaborative Culture and Hardware Hacking
Douglas Wok talks on the new open source culture, in which anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media, whereas Ryan Paul discusses what the open source movement will generate now that it is extending its reach to the hardware industry.

The Repair Manifesto
The Dutch art collective Platform21 introduces The Repair Manifesto, which “opposes throwaway culture and celebrates repair as the new recycling.”
(via Design Observer)

Now think what all this could mean in emerging markets:

UN and HP bring technology training to youth in Africa and Middle East
The United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the technology company HP announced today the opening of 20 training centres in Africa and the Middle East to expand youth entrepreneurship and information technology education.

And finally there is the truly unbeatable video Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant, which I posted about a month ago on Core77.

The site of Participle, a UK social design consultancy, contains some good materials on the design of the next generation of public services.

Only the Lonely: Public Service Reform, the Individual and the State
Article to be published in the forthcoming issue of Soundings.
In 2008, Participle worked with a diverse group of over 200 older people and their families in Westminster and Southwark. We spent time in their homes, going shopping with them, helping with the odd job and introducing them to one another, gaining insight into how individuals and families see themselves, their aspirations, their dreams.
The aim of our work was to ensure a rich third age, one that every citizen, regardless of income level or assets might live: a life less ordinary. Specifically, in Southwark our goal was the design of a new universal service that might be replicated nationally – supporting older people to live in a way of their choosing as they age. In Westminster our work has been more closely focused, we have worked only with those who define themselves as lonely, the majority of whom are over 80 and housebound with the goal of facilitating rich social lives.
This article briefly tells the story of this work, the affordable solutions we have designed and the nascent lessons for how we might re-think a welfare state, its relationship to individuals and most importantly of all to wider social bonds.

Video postcards from a town called Thriving
After an intensive 3 months of discovery and an even more intensive month of idea development Reach out is now entering the prototyping phase. We’ve developed a vision of a ‘youth development service’ based in a fictional town called Thriving. A town where young people and adults take part in loops of doing, sampling and reflective experiences.
(Very nice example of low-fi experience prototyping!)

Employability – the Bev 4.0 Way
It is time for a radical re-think that makes new vertical connections between the British people and a macro vision of our future economy. And new horizontal connections between skills, apprenticeships, learning and work.
Imagine a service that starts from where you are, visualises where you want to be and then supports you to plot a path – bringing modern and personal techniques to bear.

How a little lab called MAYA is giving firms such as Emerson and General Dynamics an innovation boost. Fast Company reports.

“MAYA Design is juicing innovation by teaching techies design basics.

The 50-member team of computer scientists, psychologists, designers, engineers, and anthropologists dedicates 30% of its resources to researching how humans and technology will interact 10 years from now, thanks in part to $20 million in funding from the Department of Defense. The other 70% goes to applying those lessons for MAYA’s corporate clients, helping to craft everything from washing machines to wearable computers for companies including Bayer, GE, and Whirlpool.”

Read full story

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, is working on a book on the end of cyberspace – which he thinks will come as the internet moves off desktops and screens and becomes embedded in things, spaces and minds. So what lies beyond cyberspace, he asks in an essay he wrote for Vodafone’s Receiver magazine. We might find out if we tinker hard enough …

“Tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its ‘now’ is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today’s needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.”

Read full story

(In short, we are all hackers now).

Our friends at Adaptive Path have posted some information on a design and research project that aimed to understand how mobile technology can work more effectively in emerging markets.

The company went to rural India to investigate the impact of mobile technology and developed concepts for new mobile devices for this market. Based on the research they conducted there, they developed a series design principles and concepts for mobile devices to meet the needs of people in emerging markets.

You can find more information in a new dedicated section of their website.

More background is also on their blog:

• Mobile Literacy: an integral research approach – using respect and instinct to reach the heart of mobile design issues
• Our primary research: understanding how people use mobile phones in rural India
• MobilGlyph: making data tangible
• Steampunk: a mobile device concept for rural India

For months now, I have been running with this simple thesis in my head: “We are all hackers now”, and again, again and again I notice it getting confirmed.

The latest confirmation comes from The Institute for the Future, which for the last six months has been researching the “future of making,” exploring how the stuff of our world may be researched, invented, designed, manufactured, and distributed in the next ten years.

At last weekend’s Maker Faire, they released the results of their research in the form of a visual knowledge map, summarizing drivers, trends, and implications.

“Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.”

Download the Future of Making Map

(via Boing Boing)

Carla Diana reports on Core77 at length about the highly conceptual CHI presentation/panel “Eek! A Mouse! Organic User Interfaces: Tangible, Transitive Materials and Programmable Reality“, where heavy hitters presented their own visions of how computing devices will move away from the keyboard and mouse and manifest in unexpected forms.

“This panel was composed of researchers whose passion lies in the tangible manifestation of dynamic data. According to the panel, which included famed researchers Hiroshi Iishi and Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab, along with Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University, Sony’s Jun Rekimoto and media artist Sachiko Kodama, data-laden, sentient, computational devices will be embedded in the very fabric of everyday objects.” [...]

“While we found the panel incredibly inspirational, we couldn’t help but wonder how close the projects showcased are to coming out of the lab and into users hands. Seth Goldstein boldly proclaimed 2015 as a “conservative estimate”, while Hiroshi Ishii reiterated his estimated one-to-two-hundred year timeline required to make the technology a reality. While it all seems very promising and prescient, none of the panelists could describe a clear vision for power management (with all these advances, will we still have to lug around batteries and power cords?), admitting this is a tough problem that the physicists in the labs next door are tackling. Regardless of the time frame, every panelist expressed confidence in the ability to produce the future as described, stating that the technology is essentially in the works in their respective labs. Though the researchers envision a fascinating future of possibilities its clear that designers will be needed more than ever before to act as mediators determining appropriate and meaningful ways to embrace these new ways of relating to our synthetic world.”

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Tish Shute’s UgoTrade website is quickly becoming one of the prime sites in the field.

In the last months she interviewed Andy Stanford-Clark (IBM Master Inventor), Robert Rice (CEO of Neogence), Usman Haque (architect and director of Haque Design + Research and founder of Pachube), Adam Greenfield (Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design), and Chris Brogan (president of New Marketing Labs).

Her interviews are as well-researched and in-depth as they come, and each one of them is a highly recommended read.

Her most recent talk with Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM came after his presentation “The dotted-line world, shadows, services, subscriptions” at ETech 2009.

The interview covered “dematerializing the world, shadows, subscriptions and things as services”.

“I presented on essentially the combination of being able to identify individual objects and the idea of providing services as a way of creating things… the servicization of things …turning things into services is greatly accelerated by network technologies and the ability to track things and what leads this to the potential of having fundamentally different relationships to the devices in our lives and to things like ownership.

Like we now have the technology to create objects that are essentially representatives of services – things like City Car Share. What you own is not a thing but a possibility space of a thing. This fundamentally changes the design challenges. I am pretty convinced that this is how we should be using a lot of these technologies is to be shifting objects from ownership models to service models. We can do that but there are significant challenges with it. What is happening is that we have had the technology to do this for a while, but we haven’t be thinking about how to design these services. We haven’t been thinking about how to design what I call the avatars of these services – the physical objects that are the manifestation of them, like an ATM is the avatar of a banking service. It is useless without the banking service it is a representative of, essentially.”

Julian Bleecker of Nokia calls it a “short essay”, but “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction” is really a 97 page book.

“Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, with examples and some insights that provide a few conclusions about why this is important as well as how it gets done. How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called “design fiction” that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices. [...]

The essay is a way of describing why alternative futures that are about people and their practices are way more interesting here than profit and feature sets. It’s a way to invest some attention on what can be done rather immediately to mitigate a complete systems failure; and part an investment in creating playful, peculiar, sideways-looking things that have no truck with the up-and-to-the-right kind of futures. [...]

Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It’s about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.

Design is about the future in a way similar to science fiction. It probes imaginatively and materializes ideas, the way science fiction materializes ideas, oftentimes through stories. What are the ways that all of these things — these canonical ways of making and remaking and imagining the world — can come together in a productive way, without hiding the details and without worrying about the nonsense of strict disciplinary boundaries?“

- Read Julian’s introduction
- Download essay

Jennifer Bove, a former Interaction-Ivrea student, sent me a link to a case study on a gestural entertainment center that she and a team at Kicker Studio developed for camera maker Canesta:

Canesta, Inc. is the inventor of revolutionary, low-cost electronic perception technology that enables ordinary electronic devices in consumer, security, industrial, medical, automotive, factory automation, gaming, military, and many other applications to perceive and react to objects or individuals in real time.

In Fall 2008, Canesta approached Kicker Studio to create a demonstration of their latest camera technology for the Consumer Electronics Show 2009 and at the TV of Tomorrow conference. The prototype was to be of an entertainment center controlled by gestures alone, and powered, of course, by a Canesta camera.

This highly attractive project is well reported in a case study full of photos and videos. It is a recommended read.

The final session of the 2009 LIFT conference was about new frontiers, devoted to people who are pushing the envelope, and reinventing their fields in the process.

Melanie Rieback discussed the evolution of security with regards to RFIDs. Creating the future is also a matter of methodology, Clive van Heerden from Philips Design showed how they employ past technological failures to develop disruptive futures. And finally, Vinton Cerf showed us his perspective about the Internet of the future

Note: this post contains embedded video which might now not show up in your rss feed.

Melanie Rieback

Dr. Melanie Rieback (website) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, in the group of Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. Melanie’s research concerns the security and privacy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and she leads multidisciplinary research teams on RFID security (RFID Malware) and RFID privacy management (RFID Guardian) projects. Her research has attracted worldwide media attention, appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, UPI, Computerworld, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and many other print, broadcast, and online news outlets.

Melanie is a “white hat hacker”, which means that she breaks systems in order to show to other people how to fix them, with a specific focus on RFID systems.

RFID is a technology that uses radio waves to identify things and shows much of the promise of the internet of things.

Melanie sees RFID as the new or next low-end of computing, with many of the same problems of previous generations of low-end computing, including hacking attacks, phishing, and spamming, but now they will start happening in the physical domain.

One of the problems with these very low-end, weak computers is that they don’t have the capability of being able to protect themselves with standard security tools such as cryptography. Anyone with a compatible reading device can access your tags much of the time.

In the media there have been plenty of reports of RFID-enabled transportation passes and credit cards getting hacked.

Melanie was the very first person putting a hacking attack or a computer virus on an RFID tag.

Master students in the Netherlands were able to hack a 2 billion euro public transportation in an eight week project.

In fact, in order to influence politicians it is better not to talk to them (because they won’t listen), but to demonstrate the attacks directly.

That’s where the RFID Guardian comes in.

The RFID Guardian Project is a collaborative project focused upon providing security and privacy in RFID systems. It provides audits and it also operates as a firewall. It is a handheld mobile device for RFID privacy and security management.

The basic idea is that it is a software defined radio, i.e. a piece of hardware that is fully controlled by software and specifically optimised for hacking on RFID systems. The RFID Guardian project can spoof RFID tags (pretend that they are one or one hundred), selectively jam RFID tags according to a user-generated security policy, even replay RFID tag responses at a later time.

In short, these systems are broken and will be broken more and more. We therefore need an RFID security industry.

Clive van Heerden

Clive van Heerden is creative director of Philips ‘Design Probes‘ programme.

Philips Design Probes is a dedicated ‘far-future’ research initiative to track trends and developments that may ultimately evolve into mainstream issues that have a significant impact on business. Emerging developments in five main areas are tracked – politics, economics, environment, technology and culture.

The outcomes of this ‘far-future’ research are used to identify systemic shifts, with the aim of understanding ‘lifestyle’ post 2020. These shifts could affect business in years to come and that could lead to new areas in which to develop intellectual property.

The way that technology is presented to us is often offensive: we have to confirm to devices, rather than devices confirm to us
Technology is still so unbelievable unaccommodating of human incompetence.

“What we try to do in Philips Design is not to propose definite product propositions, but present design provocations and assess the reaction to them. We are specifically looking at crises, to understand people’s reactions and therefore better understand the future lifestyle in 2020/30.”

Some of the probes that Clive showed included and with each he explained the sometimes unexpected reactions of people:
- Off the Grid: Sustainable Habit 2020
- Skin probe dresses (video)
- Skintile: Electronic Sensing Jewelry
- Skin Tattoo (video)
- Food probes (press release | backgrounder)

Vinton Cerf

Vinton Gray “Vint” Cerf (born June 23,1943) is an American computer scientist who is the “person most often called ‘the father of the Internet’. His contributions have been recognized repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cerf has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since September 2005. In this role he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPV6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model.

I am not writing my notes here on his talk, since it goes beyond the scope of this blog, but you can view it in its entirety online (above), or check out an interview (below).

The session devoted to Design Thinking was my personal favourite of the entire 2009 LIFT conference.

Beyond the engineers and business’ discourse about the future, what is it designers can propose? What sort of alternatives are they envisioning? What’s the role of design thinking in creating more meaningful futures?
With Fabio Sergio, James Auger and Anab Jain and open stage talks by Fabian Kalker and Felix Koch, and Bill Thompson.

Note: this post contains embedded video which might now not show up in your rss feed.

Fabio Sergio

(Note that the above video is actually in English, and not in French, and that it doesn’t always load).

Fabio Sergio (blog | site) is a design and user experience strategist, and creative director at frog design.

At LIFT he presented a designing for social impact project: Masiluleke (which means “lend a helping hand” in Zulu), a breakthrough approach to reversing HIV and TB in South Africa and beyond.

Frog was asked to conduct a project on this in New York and Sergio is simply relaying the project approach and results (he didn’t work on it himself).

Based on on-the-ground research, it became clear to t he designers that HIV is primarily a problem of information and social stigma in South Africa.

The methodology used was the normal Frog one of shaping the user experience, which goes from immersion, to synthesis, to concept development, and to service design.

In South Africa more than 80% of the population has access to a mobile device. So one of the key ideas of the Masiluleke project is to broadcast sms in the unused space of the “Please Call Me” (PCM) text messages (a special, free form of SMS text widely used in South Africa and across the African continent). These messages can connect mobile users to existing HIV and TB call centres, and remind patients to take theirs drugs.

But the project also wanted to facilitate local testing, so they created a low cost in-home self-test kit with mobile support, that was conceived for easy local production and assembly.

Design, says Sergio, is “how it works” not “how it looks”. When we talk about design as a future shaping discipline, you have to understand people and their behaviour. We don’t call this testing, but verification, as testing implies standing out of the activity.

The secret ingredient to it all is empathy. People-centred design goes beyond usage or consumption. It is also about culture and seeing people how people react to things within their culture.

Technology in this context is just a material to sketch with.

James Auger

James Auger is a partner in the critical design practice Auger-Loizeau whose projects explore the role of technology as a mediator and modifier of the human experience in both contemporary and future societies. He teaches on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art in London and is currently undertaking a design practice based PhD looking into the role of robots in the home environment.

James talks about another way of approaching design. Some call it critical design, others discursive or speculative design. By removing the commercial content, we are free to dream and to see things in a slightly different way than they are done at the moment.

The mibEC was an audio tooth implant that looked at the ramifications of biotechnology. This implant, which was positioned as a real product, could be inserted during normal dental surgery and would give you superhuman capabilities. It gathered a huge amount of press attention and was voted as best invention of 2002 by Time Magazine (who never talked to James).

At Medialab Europe, Auger-Loizeau critiqued our immersive use of mobile technology, and created the IsoPhone, an immersive environment for deep social conversation. The 40 to 50 people that tried it at Ars Electronica all said it really changed the way they thought about telecommunications.

Now they are working on a new provocative, discussion-generating project: the carnivorous domestic entertainment robots, that explore the idea of evolution, value and aesthetics.

All these robots are based on microbial fuel cells, which turns organic matter into electrical potential.

What kind of services exist in real life environments that do that that could inspire our designs? Many people own a vivarium, where they feed real life animals to other animals.

James and Jimmy (Loizeau) developed a series of prototypes taking this idea to the extreme, such as the Flypaper Robotic Clock, the Lampshade Robot, the Fly Stealing Robot, the UV Flykiller Parasite Robot, and the Coffee Table Mousetrap Robot.

Anab Jain

Anab Jain (blog | website) is an independent designer and film maker. She likes to tell speculative stories of possible near futures at the intersection of the technological and sociological. She also likes to make these stories tangible by using design objects as props and narratives. Most of all, she likes to play with tomorrow by engaging with people in every possible way. Until recently she was design lead on a project at Microsoft Research Cambridge, which attempted to rethink notions of machine intelligence by developing product and service scenarios around biotechnology and RFID. Currently she works as a service and interaction designer at Nokia Design in London, while developing her emerging design practice ‘Superflux’.

Anab Jain’s talk, entitled “Learning to play with Tomorrow“, was according to me (together with Bill Thompson – see below), one of the best of this conference.

She talked about design futurescaping, which is using design methods like storytelling, experience prototyping, making scenarios tangible, and talking to people on a daily basis, to influence how our near future will turn out.

Anab started off with referring to some historic examples of designers for whom the process of sketching has been hugely influential in their thinking, and allowed them (and us) to think outside of the box.

Two projects Anab worked on in the recent past illustrate this new way of thinking.

“The future of work“, a project for Colebrook, Bosson & Saunders, a product design and office furniture company, explored the nomadic nature of work in contemporary life. The client wanted an open-ended project, that created new ways of thinking about the future of work, and opened up new spaces for product innovation. They were particularly interested in the home worker, the nomadic worker and the office worker, and in the demographic of the elderly worker.

Anab decided that the best way to find out what this future would be was to put these people in the future, and she created personas which she projected fifteen years into the future. She invented new jobs for them and placed them in a fictional space, which she called Little Brinkland. By having a new job, they needed new work places, new products and new services, which Anab chronicled about. Many practical service ideas and scenarios came out of this project.

The other project she talked about was loosely titled “Rethinking machine intelligence” (a.k.a. Life and Death in Energy Autonomous Devices and Objects Incognito), a project done in collaboration with Alex Taylor at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

The group at Microsoft Research that Anab Jain was part of was quite critical of smart homes of the future, simply because the way intelligent machines work may change drastically. Their concept was that the everyday ideas of intelligence are not fixed, but are active in the world. Anab designed a small number of interventions that can show how material things are imbued with intelligence. Perhaps we can even start thinking of new objects and new kinds of computing machines.

To explore better what intelligence means, she designed four objects, the Gubbins, that are mini single-track robots. They are storytelling devices that can be situated through scenarios in people’s everyday lives, and are meant to get people think about ‘smart objects’ in the home.

One of the ideas that came out of the research is that people associate intelligence with living things. This brought up the question how to embed this quality of life, of biological “livingness”, in everyday objects.

So they created the Eco Board, which is an autonomously powered robot, which powers itself. This was then further iterated in objects that are made of sugared and powered things in our homes, but had a fixed lifespan, and in a big radio that can live forever as long as you feed it.

Open stage talk: Fabian Kalker and Felix Koch

The two “lefthanded bloodbrothers from back in the days” Felix Koch, strategic planner and Fabian Kalker, musician/composer, talked about knives, “just knives”.

In five minutes Felix and Fabian went through their wittily called presentation “Who has no knife may not eat pineapples. An off-topic tour d’horizon on the literacy of cutting“, and shared their insights about cutting-culture ( and the most memorable/painful experiences acquiring it ).

This pure and simple user experience presentation was for many in the audience one of their favourites. A must to see on video.

Open stage talk: Bill Thompson

Bill Thompson is a UK technology critic and commentator and his talk, entitled The death of privacy and why we should welcome it., was just marvellous, bringing together philosophical concepts with the mundane tasks of dealing with privacy on Twitter, in a series of thought-provoking questions.

The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, new social tools, new practices, new ways of seeing things.

Bill thinks that instead of worrying about it, we should embrace it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by ‘personality’, and perhaps even to find new ways of being human.

how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private, because those of us who live our lives in the open are the avant-garde: we can take on those who believe in the old truths, and we can a find way to live in the new world.

Every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And you are doing it voluntarily, willingly, because you are hoping to benefit in a variety of ways. You believe that this unwarranted disclosure will in the end produce some public good, or even some private benefit.

Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy, should start thinking about what it means.

We can offer advice and support to those who might be less happy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption tracked and made available to all.

We can begin to explore what it might be like to be a post-private human, or perhaps a human in recovery from the stultifying burden of privacy.

Bill Thompson is telling the “great God Google” everything about himself, and has no expectation that that data is or will remain private.

The reason he objects to the encroachment of the database state is because he is aware of the power that the asymetrical relationship gives the state at the moment.

Yet to some extent the power only exists because we believe there is a border between public and private. But this only matters if we believe in the individuals, if we believe in people that have behaviours, characteristics and personalities instead of accepting that each one of us is simply a contingent set of responses to stimuli, that we are defined by the people and situations around us.

The idea of the monolithic personality is in fact a mistake. We do not exist in the sense that we think we exist, and therefore we do not require privacy in the sense that we currently think about it. It is a necessary illusion.

We have a legal framework that is based on assumptions of individuality, existence and personality, that encourages us to draw lines. Bill Thomson is not sure those lines should be drawn any more.

We need to think about it again. The technologies we have around us now are challenging the enlightenment way of thinking, and what it means to be a human being at all. We have the option now of taking the big risk of living life in the open, and to embrace it. Privacy is over already.

This will not work for everyone. Some will suffer. That may be the price we have to pay for finding a new enlightenment, a digital enlightenment, that is far more powerful and important even than the first enlightenment was. But in order to do we have to get over the idea of privacy.

Get an overview of the thought process and common strategies for generating prototypes from Dave Cronin, Director of Interaction Design at Cooper.

Although applied to Fireworks, Cronin’s discourse is general, especially when he talks about his four reasons for creating prototypes:
1. Prototypes make your designs better
2. Prototypes facilitate communication
3. Prototypes enable user input and usability assessment
4. Prototypes help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time

Read full story

The last day of the LIFT conference started off with a session devoted to inspiring stories from people with extraordinary projects and lives.

Designer Matt Webb talked about the relationship between science-fiction and design, followed by Joerg Jelden, a trend analyst from Trend Buero who addressed the importance of fake products and services in the near future. Web veteran James Gillies told us his perspective on the history of the Web, and new media artist Natalie Jeremijenko discussed the opportunity for social and environmental change that new technologies provide.

Note: this post contains embedded video which might now not show up in your rss feed.

Matt Webb

(Note that the picture above does not show Matt Web, but the video does.)

Matt Webb (blog) is a principal of the design shop Schulze & Webb, which has a special focus on the social life of stuff. Projects include material prototypes for Nokia, Web strategy for the BBC, and an electronic puppet that brings you closer to your friends. Matt tinkers with short fiction and web toys, speaks on design and technology, is co-author of acclaimed book Mind Hacks – cognitive psychology for a general audience – and if you were to sum up his design interests in one word, it would be “politeness.”

Matt talked about scientific fiction and design. He starts from a book called World War Z, the 21st Century best zombie novel so far. When you read it, it makes scientific sense. It is believable.

Despite the outlandishness of some science fiction novels, what has held constant is believability, plausibility.

In a scientific fiction, there are three things that have to work together: human nature, society and things.

You can see the same things in physics: pressure, temperature and volume are intimately linked in water.

Scientific fiction explores the chart of possible worlds in the future. You can’t just invent a product and expect that things will change. Society and human nature will have to change too.

Which products are going to work in the landscape of possible worlds?

Market research is one solution. Economics is another. Evolution is another such way of exploring the chart of possible worlds.

This kind of evolutionary thinking was implemented in the iterative design process to create Olinda, a prototype social digital radio Schulze & Webb developed for the BBC.

The radio then evolves into a number of prototypes and ended up “in where we ended up”.

The past is another set of possible worlds, and just as hard to read. Matt focuses on counterfactuals: “what if?”. Popper says it like this: “try to imagine the conditions under which the trends of the history in question would disappear.”

It is manifest in the counterfactual mobile phones, a project done for Nokia in 2005, which melts at 47 degrees Celsius. What is it about the mobile phone despite this violent evolution into different forms? That brought about an exploration about fabrics and phones, and the possibilities of “editing” your phone, thus creating the much-desired value of “greater attachment”.

For Matt, “design is a way of walking over the landscape of possible worlds.”

Joerg Jelden

Joerg Jelden (blog) is a senior trend analyst at Trendbuero – Consultancy for Social Change, in Hamburg and Beijing. At Trendbuero, Joerg advises companies like eBay, Deutsche Post, O2, OTTO or ECCO about the opportunities of social change. His main field of interest is centered around Network Economy: How will the rise of the internet change our society? How will consumer behavior change? How will we do business tomorrow? What will be new business models to answer the changes?

During his stay at Trendbuero’s Asia-Pacific office in Beijing Joerg examined The Future of Fake or “Fakesumption”. He tried to find out, why fakes are so successful, what they do differently and what brands can learn from the fake industry. The project will be published in early 2009 and he gave a preview at LIFT.

Joerg started off with a history of fakes, some insights on a survey they did on how Germans feel about fakes, and a description of the fakes industry in 2009.

So, what can we learn from their success stories? (Fake creators)
1. Consumers: fake delivers something to consumers that the originals don’t, but still these consumers consider themselves to be brand customers. To spy on, sue or punish these consumers might not be the best idea. Are there new ways of integrating customers rather than outlawing them? Can we give consumers a convincing reason to spend much more for the original?
2. Brands: fakes truly explose the brand gap. Companies overvalue brands, brands overestimate themselves. But consumers aren’t buying it. Trust in brands has decreased by 50 percent in the last fifty years. Brands focus too much on products, but what makes the difference is strong relations. One way to deal with this is a better bonding.
3. Fakers: The originals look at the fakes, are inspired by the fakes. Yet fakers attack brands from within. They convert originals into fakes. They sell fake parts to manufacturers, mix fakes with originals and open up online stores to sell directly. So the originals can’t find the fakes anymore. Why don’t brands collaborate with their best fakers? In other words, the way we deal with fakes might need a reconsideration.

James Gillies

James Gillies is the head of communication at CERN. In 2000, he published a book with Robert Cailliau, Tim Berners-Lee’s first partner on the Web project, giving a history of the internet seen through CERN eyes. The fact that the Web was invented at CERN “is no accident”.

James was asked to write the story about the history of the web, when he started working at CERN in 1995.

His presentation, which is best viewed on video, goes through some of the main historical founders — Vannevar Bush (who in July 1945 wrote about the Memex machine), Donald Davies (who developed the concept of packet switching), and Louis Pouzin (who was commissioned by France’s national research network INRIA to build the first internet).

So where does CERN to fit in? It is and has always been a very open place and a research place. In the early 80′s, the Internet was already in place.

Tim Berners-Lee came to work at CERN in 1980 as a consultant to computerise the control system for the particle accelerator. He noticed that none of the programmes could talk with one another. So he wrote a paper that argued that the internet should be an emulation on a computer platform the way that our brains work. He then left CERN and came back in 1989 to implement his vision. By Christmas 1990 he had the web up and running. It only ran on Next and allowed a collaborative flow. Tim always saw the web as a collaborative tool, not as a one-way flow of information.

Then there were a series of developments (the first browser, the first server outside of Europe in 1991, and the pick-up of the web’s commercial potential in 1994).

What was probably the most significant thing that CERN institutionally could have done for the web, happened on 30 April 1993. The web was put in the public domain through the issue of a legal document.

James is absolutely convinced that this single act is the only reason why we have a single web, and not an Apple web, a Microsoft web, etcetera. Another main factor was that all the people James interviewed were altruists in the best sense of the world. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee: “It’s not always what you get out of society, but what you put in.”

Natalie Jeremijenko

(Note that the video stops a few minutes early, which is a pity.)

Natalie Jeremijenko is a new media artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science, and engineering. Her work takes the form of large-scale public art works, tangible media installations, single channel tapes, and critical writing. It investigates the theme of the transformative potential of new technologies—particularly information technologies. Specific issues addressed in her work include information politics, the examination and development of new modes of particulation in the production of knowledge, tangible media, and distributed (or ubiquitous) computing elements.

Natalie, who started her career at the computer science labs of Xerox Park, has always been concerned with the question what the opportunities for change are that new technologies represent and how might we seize that to build the kind of social change that we want.

She introduces the audience to a future where environmental issues are “no longer out there” but right here, in our cities and houses. It is a future where global media and global discourse has crumbled.

Whereas environmentalism used to be driven by the “sue the polluter” approach, now the biggest polluters of an urban centre are you and me (because of the city’s many impermeable services).

Natalie then introduced us to a different strategy in the light of this transformed environmental discourse. An example is the environmental health clinic which is in the East River, and thereby externalises health (as health is not only internal and pharmaceutical, but external and something that can be shared).

Another strategy are the pet tadpoles — named after local bureaucrats whose decisions affect water quality — a species which is very sensitive to industrial contaminants.

Finally, she showed the mouse trap that self-administers anti depressants.

Microsoft Office Labs is a group within Microsoft that tests ideas by building prototypes and gathering usage data to inform ongoing and future research and development in the productivity space for both work and home.

The Labs just launched Canvas for OneNote, a prototype conceived by former Interaction-Ivrea student Ruth Kikin-Gil.

“Within Office Labs, we’ve been exploring alternate interactions with software that take advantage of the natural human capacity for spatial recognition in order to help users organize their digital belongings in much the same way that they organize their physical belongings.

Canvas for OneNote explores how you can browse, organize, edit and create OneNote content using a canvas.

How does a canvas make things better? Think about your desk, with piles of papers on the corner and things in certain spaces. You have a lot of liberty to sort and arrange as you want. You know where certain things are, and you can go quickly and easily to those spaces to find them. Our gut feeling is that this canvas-like approach to organizing digital content is really promising, and with this prototype you can help us explore the truth of that feeling through your actual use, interactions, and work flow.

Canvas for OneNote was designed to allow OneNote users to navigate their notebooks more efficiently by using a high-level view of all of the documents, pictures, and anything else they’ve stored in their notebooks. Users will be able to see all their notebook pages and sections at a glance, and zoom into any content for which they want to see more detail or perform edits. It also enables users to organize sections and pages using spatial placement, easily browse and find content based on size and color, and add new sections or pages by simply double-clicking the canvas or using the toolbar. It also provides an Activity View to easily locate pages modified by date.
We feel that the canvas can help users better organize, access, and engage with the work they do, and that it is especially useful for previewing lots of content at the same time. However, we realize it is not the be-all. We know there may be ways that the interface may actually hinder productivity or could be significantly improved. That’s why we need your feedback.

From our research we’ve noticed that the “value” (or Ah-Ha! moment) isn’t fully experienced until people actually try out a canvas interface for themselves using their own data (it’s hard to visually recognize content you didn’t create!). So, we hope many of you will download this prototype and give us the feedback we need to improve productivity solutions of the future.”

We just came back from the LIFT conference and have lots to blog about. Our LIFT experience started off with the KashKlash game, an action-packed workshop that explored alternative methods of exchange [and I helped prepare].

The focus was on a possible future ecosystem – in a new world where today’s aging, less useful and even dangerous financial systems are replaced by (or mixed with) more disruptive innovations and exchanges. Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless. Yet you still have your handset and laptop and Internet and a broadband cellphone connection….

This is one of the provocations posed on KashKlash, an open forum and web project focusing on alternative economies in a post-money future. What will such a world look like? How will the concept of value be measured? What concepts will shape the formal and informal economies? Bright thinkers from around the world came together online to discuss, debate and ideate in this innovative and exciting project.

KashKlash is a collaborative project between Heather Moore of Vodafone, Experientia and a group of independent visionaries. The project started with four bright and innovative provocateurs, Nicolas Nova, Joshua Klein, Bruce Sterling, and Régine Debatty, and as the debate gathered steam, contributions, comments, flickr photos and twitter streams rolled in from more than 50 additional participants to shape and envision possible futures.

Here is how Bruce Sterling, the game master par excellence, introduced the game:

“This is the KashKlash game. It is a game of development, design, construction, building. What you are trying to do is dominate the world with your group’s theory of how the world should be.

So you are going to use these devices to construct a model of your civilisation. Unfortunately you have to bid for them, and you also have to communicate among one another, to get your hands on these delightful building materials.

Now you each have different advantages and deficits.

This is the high-tech group here. They have more money than anybody else and instead of the normal chopsticks, straw, clay and cheap string, they have exciting high-tech girders.

The rather emergent slumdogs group over there repesents tomorrow’s emerging economy. There are more of them than anybody else. But they have a lesser income and lesser communication than anybody else.

This group here, the Communists, have a relatively modest income in cash, but they have an open means of communication and solidarity. They have more communication and less cash.

And this group here which represents the marketeers has modest communication skills but a booming and sometimes crashing economy.

So each turn you are going to get some money and communication tokens that you can use to bid for things and to build things. So you can buy these materials with your tokens.

Now I am the auctioneer. I am the invisible hand of the market.”

The game was won by the Pragmatic Communities, who – pragmatically – joined forces with the High-tech Progressives.

You can watch the video of the KashKlash workshop (and of many other workshops) on the Klewel website. On Flickr you can see about 75 photos of the workshop.

A new video from Microsoft shows in an elegant, if utopian way, what it might look like if all of those gadgets came together several years hence.

Ina Fried of CNet News wasn’t entirely impressed:

“The hardest thing for me to imagine wasn’t that in several years time, all our walls will be displays, but rather that Microsoft will have become so efficient in getting all of its product groups working together.”

- Read article with embedded video
- Read related interview