In a video published by Intel on its YouTube channel, one of the company’s ethnographers describes some of the background research behind the new design of the device, which is aimed primarily for education in emerging markets.

Intel looked closely at how students collaborate and move around in classroom environments. The new tablet feature was implemented so that the device would be more conducive to what Intel calls “micromobility”. Intel wants students to be able to carry around Classmate PCs in much the same way that they currently carry around paper and pencil.

We want to offer more choices to meet the diversity of student learning needs across the world,” said Intel Emerging Markets Platform Group manager Lila Ibrahim in a statement. “Our ethnographic research has shown us that students responded well to tablet and touch screen technology. The creativity, interactivity and user-friendliness of the new design will enhance the learning experiences for these children. This is important for both emerging and mature markets where technology is increasing being seen as a key tool in encouraging learning and facilitating teaching.”

In the past, user participation in editorial publications was limited to writing “letters to the editor.” On the web, users take an active role in shaping the message through their comments and debates.

Bond Art + Science looked at how traditional media and online publications invite, manage and benefit from user participation, and identified some best practices and common pitfalls:

• How are users asked to register to contribute?
• How do site moderators manage comments to ensure quality?
• What are the best ways to treat user comments as content?

View slideshow

(via InfoDesign)

This new book, which grew out of the digital natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, investigates “what it means to grow up in a mediated culture and the ways in which technology inflects issues like privacy, safety, intellectual property, media creation, and learning,” (as introduced by Danah Boyd). Here is the official abstract:

The most enduring change wrought by the digital revolution is neither the new business models nor the new search algorithms, but rather the massive generation gap between those who were born digital and those who were not. The first generation of “digital natives”-children who were born into and raised in the digital world-is now coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our cultural life, even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these digital natives? How are they different from older generations, and what is the world they’re creating going to look like?

In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of this exotic tribe of young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Based on original research and advancing new theories, Born Digital explores a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical: What does identity mean for young people who have dozens of online profiles and avatars? Should we worry about privacy issues? Or is privacy even a relevant value for digital natives? How does the concept of safety translate into an increasingly virtual world? Is “stranger-danger” a real problem, or a red herring?

John Palfrey is Clinical Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He is a regular commentator on network news programs, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, NPR and BBC. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Urs Gasser is an associate professor of law at the University of St. Gallen, where he serves as the director of the Research Center for Information Law, as well as a faculty fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He has published and edited, respectively, six books and has written over fifty articles in books, law reviews, and professional journals. He lives in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

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What can designers learn from anthropologists?

Our guest today believes they can learn a great deal. In fact, she has married the two disciplines and is a leading exponent of what has come to be known as design anthropology.

She believes successful design begins with carefully observing human nature, whether it be how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking or how participation in the design process empowers marginalised communities.

Listen to interview (starts at 39:52)

(via Culture Matters)

“But it [the positivist tradition] stands in stark contrast to the phenomenological take on things, which is premised on the instability and subjectivity of the things we perceive, and on the irreducible importance of these perceptions as they register on the lived body, i.e. you, now, here, in your own skin, heir to your own history of experience. On the phenomenological side of the house, all of the grandeur resides in the act of interpretation - which is always somebody’s interpretation, crucially inflected by their situation. [...]

The phenomenological approach - and this is the worldview that stands, either explicitly or otherwise, behind the entire field subsuming design and user research and ethnography, at least as those things are practiced by the people I know - insists that the world in its richness cannot be reduced to datasets. Or not, anyway, without doing fatal damage to everything that truly matters.

But Dourish ["What We Talk About When We Talk About Context?", Paul Dourish, 2004] argues (persuasively, I think) that this is the wrong question. For him, this mysterious thing context is something that only be arrived at through interaction - “an achievement, rather than an observation; an outcome, rather than a premise.” It’s relational in the deepest sense of the word, a state of being that arises out of the shared performance and understanding of two or more parties (actors, agents, what have you).

And why do we want to characterize this state of being in the first place? “[T]o be able to use the context in order to discriminate or elaborate the meaning of the user’s activity.” That’s it.”

This is highly recommended reading. Thank you, Adam.

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“Submitting to chemotherapy, radiation treatments, MRIs, CT scans and the like can be bad enough. But often, dreary, windowless rooms and corridors only worsen the experience.

Now, some institutions hope that by making these areas more appealing, they can ease patients’ stress, fear and feelings of helplessness, and perhaps influence a patient’s outcome for the better. [...]

Many of the innovations stem from the nascent field of “evidence-based design,” which ties design decisions to research on how the physical environment can influence well-being and promote healing. That includes practical design elements meant to improve safety, as well as the use of purely aesthetic features such as waterfalls, gardens and artwork.”

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via Mark Hurst

“Technologists are busying themselves turning buildings into displays, or at least draping them with informatics (whether physically or via various forms of augmented reality.) It’s all really exciting, thoughtful, stuff with tons of thrilling prototypes and sketches, it reminds me of early webiness. Because, unless I’m missing something, there’s not a lot of sophisticated thinking about how this intersects with commerce, marketing and advertising. (And I’m very willing to believe I’m missing something, this is why this is a bit of a voyage of discovery. And I just noticed today that Adam Greenfield’s talking about it here.) The city is already festooned with persuasion, screens are already talking to phones and animating transport systems but it’s not being done by thoughtful UI experts it’s being done by poster contractors at the behest of advertising agencies.” [...]

“Is there some connection to the (admittedly unformed) notion of pre-experience design? How cool would it be if the data that’s draped around the city leaks back into communications, and if those communications helped to explain and contextualise that data.”

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(via AHOi)

Access is empowering
16 August
A reflection on the GSM Association’s research report on the economic and social impact of mobile communications in developing countries, as reported also by Business Week, particularly on the subject matter of mobile phones and women.

Women and mobile phones
18 August
A further reflection on the topic, in part based on the research by Kutoma Wakumuna of Zambia.

The Indian BoP market experience: fact or fantasy?
20 August
So is it true or not that there is a profitable market at the Bottom of the Pyramid?

The essence of poverty is the asymmetry of information
20 August
Why is Nokia opening up a research unit in Nairobi?

But what about the people?
21 August
The new web, the one on the mobile, must be human centered from the start. This is one revolution - the Information Revolution - that cannot be driven by technology, but must be guided by the human beings who need it the most.

For consumers, the development of wireless home networks will require a shift in thinking, as the lines between computing, home entertainment and communications continue to blur.

“The main challenge in our business is consumer awareness,” said Hans van’t Riet, a senior director for Philips’s Streamium line of wireless audio components, which transmit music over home WLAN networks. “Research shows this is a great idea. We just have a marketing challenge.”

Well, that’s a dubious comment: people don’t buy it so it is a marketing challenge. Curious what research he is referring to.

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“You know, I believe that cities are all about difficulty. They’re about waiting: for the bus, for the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. They’re about frustration: about parking tickets, dogshit, potholes and noisy neighbors. They’re about the unavoidable physical and psychic proximity of other human beings competing for the same limited pool of resources….the fear of crime, and its actuality. These challenges have conditioned the experience of place for as long as we’ve gathered together in settlements large and dense enough to be called cities.

And as it happens, with our networked, ambient, pervasive informatic technology, we now have (or think we have) the means to address some of these frustrations. In economic terms, these technologies both lower the information costs people face in trying to make the right decisions, and lower the opportunity cost of having made them.

So you don’t head out to the bus stop until the bus stop tells you a bus is a minute away, and you don’t walk down the street where more than some threshold number of muggings happen - in fact, by default it doesn’t even show up on your maps - and you don’t eat at the restaurant whose forty-eight recent health code violations cause its name to flash red in your address book. And all these decisions are made possible because networked informatics have effectively rendered the obscure and the hidden transparent to inquiry. And there’s no doubt that life is thusly made just that little bit better.

But there’s a cost - there’s always a cost. Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I’m so interested in, but by the same token we’re that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It’s a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it’s one we’re making without really examining what’s at stake”.

Read interview

Meanwhile Greenfield posted on his own blog about the difference between context-aware applications and location-based services.

Referring to the prototypes by designer Mac Funamizu, Greenfield writes:

“The device’s capabilities and available interface modalities at any given moment are largely if not entirely determined by the other networked objects around it. If you pair the device with a text, it’s a reader; at the checkstand, it provides a friendly POS interface; aimed at the skyline, it augments reality.

Why this argument is so self-evident to longterm IxD folks and so relatively hard for anyone else to grok is, I believe, a function of the fact that we already take for granted the (rather significant) assumption from which it proceeds: that the greater part of the places and things we find in the world will be provided with the ability to speak and account for themselves. That they’ll constitute a coherent environment, an ontome of self-describing networked objects, and that we’ll find having some means of handling the information flowing off of them very useful indeed. [...]

The second thing Mac got right is more subtle, and it’s a line about the evolution of mobile devices that I think is deeply correct. It’s that the device is of almost no importance in and of itself, that its importance to the person using it lies in the fact that it’s a convenient aperture to the open services available in the environment, locally as well as globally.

Mac happens to have interpreted this metaphor particularly literally, but there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s certainly a defensible choice. The business lesson that drops out of it, though - and of course I would think this - is that the crafting of an impeccable user experience is virtually the only differentiator left to a would-be player in this market, with clear implications for allocation of organizational effort and resources.”

Read full story (and clarification)

Here are his predictions:

• The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service
• The browser is going to swallow up the desktop
• The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention
• Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders
• The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence
• The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in
• Interactive shared spaces will replace folders
• The portable desktop
• The smart desktop
• Federated, open policies and permissions
• The personal cloud
• The WebOS
• Who is most likely to own the future desktop?

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Here are some basic website traits that will help to encourage flow.

• Clear navigation: Make it easy for the user to know where they are, where they can go, and where they’ve been, by including signposts such as breadcrumbs, effective page titles, and visited link indicators.
• Immediate Feedback: Make sure all navigation, such as links, buttons, and menus provide quick and effective feedback. Offer feedback for all user actions. When this isn’t possible, provide an indicator to hold the user’s attention while waiting (e.g., progress bar).
• Balance the Perception of Challenge With the User’s Skill: Since user skill levels differ, it’s up to you to balance the complexity of the visual design with the number of tasks and features people can use. Consider whether they are likely surfing experientially for fun or completing an important task. Tailor your sites to your audience’s scenario of use: more visually rich for experiential use and less so for goal-directed use.

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Introduction

Whether designing the rooftop of a building or the rear end of a home or business appliance, sociable design considers how the design will impact everyone: not just the one, intended person standing in front, but also all the rest of society that interacts. One person uses a computer: the rest of us are at the other side of the desk or counter, peering at the ugly rear end, with wires spilling over like entrails. The residents of a building may never see its roof, but those who live in adjoining buildings may spend their entire workday peering at ugly asphalt, shafts and ventilating equipment.

Support for groups is the hallmark of sociable technology. Groups are almost always involved in activities, even when the other people are not visible. All design has a social component: support for this social component, support for groups must always be a consideration.

Sociable design is not just saying “please” and “thank you.” It is not just providing technical support. It is also providing convivial working spaces, plus the time to make use of them.

Sociable technology must support the four themes of communication, presentation, support for groups, and troubleshooting. How these are handled determines whether or not we will find interaction to be sociable. People learn social skills. Machines have to have them designed into them. Sometimes even worse than machines, however, are services, where even though we are often interacting with people, the service activities are dictated by formal rule books of procedures and processes, and the people we interact with can be as frustrated and confused as we are. This too is a design issue.

Design of both machines and services should be thought of as a social activity, one where there is much concern paid to the social nature of the interaction. All products have a social component. This is especially true of communication products, whether websites, personal digests (blog), audio and video postings mean to be shared, or mail digests, mailing lists, and text messaging on cellphones. Social networks are by definition social. But where the social impact is obvious, designers are forewarned. The interesting cases happen where the social side is not so obvious.

The psychology of waiting lines

Waiting is an inescapable part of life, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy it. But if the lines are truly inescapable, what can be done to make them less painful? Although there is a good deal of practical knowledge, usually known within the heads of corporate managers, very little has been published about the topic. One paper provides the classic treatment: David Maister’s The Psychology of Waiting Lines (1985). Maister suggested several principles for increasing the pleasantness of waiting. Although his paper provides an excellent start, it was published in 1985 and there have been considerable advances in our knowledge since then.

In the PDF file, The Psychology of Waiting Lines, I bring the study of waiting lines up to date, following the spirit of Maister’s original publication, but with considerable revision in light of modern findings. I suggest eight design principles, starting with the “emotions dominate” and ending with the principle that “memory of an event is more important than the experience.” Examples of design solutions include double buffering, providing clear conceptual models of the events with continual feedback, providing positive memories and even why one might deliberately induce waits. These principles apply to all services, not just waiting in lines. Details will vary from situation to situation, industry to industry, but the fundamentals are, in truth, the fundamentals of sociable design for waiting lines, for products, and for service.

Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common; products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made — and often not by the people who designed them.

Creative designers and engineers are rebelling against their alienation from the physical world.

The article concludes: “Bringing human hands back into the world of digital designers may have profound long-term consequences. Designs could become safer, more user-friendly and even more durable. At the very least, the process of creating things could become a happier one.”

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As Slate commented in his Adbusters essay, “It seems the more ‘connected’ we are, the more detached we become.”

Back on the hiking trail in Spain I saw this play out in a myriad of ways. Though I was experiencing cell-freedom, throughout the trip, I found myself surrounded by people, mainly Europeans, on their cell phones, texting and talking with concerned family members and friends throughout the day. People were torn between developing friendships with strangers and calling up or texting old friends and family they already knew. Similarly, back in the U.S., I often found myself checking my messages or making a phone call rather than striking up a conversation with a stranger at the post office or bus stop. In this way, I was cutting off potentially eye-opening conversations and new friendships. I also walked around, talking on my cell phone, ignoring my surroundings and neighborhood the same way that Italian hiker did that morning in the mountains. If we can’t talk to face to face with our neighbors, or notice the world we’re walking through now, where will cell phone use take our communities and families five years down the road?

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One of our jobs as UX professionals is to provide context for all this data, making it easy for users to understand and interact with it. However, it’s rarely in our mandate to determine the types of data we’re delivering to our audience. This is usually the responsibility of the business side of the product development equation.

However, if we begin to consider data not as something that flows through our designs and even dictates their form, but instead as yet another design material, we can bring value in the sphere of content as well. As more and more data becomes digital–so rapidly, in fact, that we cannot possibly be aware of it all–and there are fewer technical hurdles to making it publicly available, creativity and insights that help UX professionals find the right data to incorporate and feature in their user experiences will become increasingly important.

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The Italian newspaper La Stampa reports on plans for a virtual cemetery in Turin to commemorate those cremated, apparently developed without public consultation (my condensed translation):

The project is not yet implemented, but is already subject of debate. The high-tech cemetery is not liked. Virtual tombstones and monitors with the names of the deceased seem to be in contradiction with the wishes of those who chose for cremation and not leave their traces in the earth. So, technology and prayer still seem incompatible concepts.

The Turin municipality plans to provide family members with a place where they can gather to commemorate the deceased. As of 1 November, there will be three displays at the entrance of Turin’s main cemetery. Two of them contain the names of the over 4000 deceased, those who do not even have a small box that contains the urn with the ashes. The third monitor is reserved to the virtual tombstones: each visitor can access, with a personal code, the page with a photo of their dear one, their date of birth and death, and an epigraph. A tombstone in other words. Or better, an image of a tombstone.

The idea made some people smile, others however cringed at the thought.

Ines Poletto approaches one of the four (stone) cenotaphs, makes the sign of the cross, and says: “Who has chosen to be in here doesn’t want a photo or an epigraph. It may be difficult to accept for those who remain behind, but we need to respect the wishes of those who are no longer with us.” Carla Costa, 52, whose father also preferred the cremation, is of the same idea: “Those who made this decision did not want visibility. Why put their name and photo on a screen? It is not right to put them in a box now, even though it is a virtual one.”

Margherita Bertin reacts ironically: “I understand the importance of the computer, try to stay up-to-date, and know how to send emails, but this thing about the dead on the internet…” The use of new technologies in this context doesn’t even convince the younger generation. Claudia Cicirelli, 28, thinks the idea of the municipality is “crazy”, because “connecting the memory of the deceased with technology cancels the emotional side of the loss.” A clear no also from Laura Garolla: “This is buffoonery. They are now also making a business out of the dead. If I want to see a photo of my father, I can always do so in a family photo album. I don’t like the idea of seeing his photo on a screen at the cemetery.”

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica today provided an unusual example of this phenomenon: drug dealers (which in Italy tend to be of immigrant origin).

Here is my condensed translation:

Drugs now come via the internet - dealers use Skype to get in touch with customers
by Lorenza Pleuteri

They fear and know that their calls are being intercepted, so they change their habits and use the latest technologies. Cellphones are out, much better the internet to transmit voice and text and to speak without risk of being listened in on. Skype is the latest challenge for the police investigators who are after those who import and deal in illegal drugs.

The drug dealers have turned out to be quite clever. They order, confirm and approve deliveries and payments, with the certainty that the security protocol is impenetrable. Conversations between computers do not go through a central server, so even if the police where to get access to the conversation data, they would not be able to understand them.

The reason is that each conversation is encrypted to guarantee people’s privacy. So Skype has become a problem. But also video calls, emails and chat conversations. Even “push to talk”, which allows people to use their mobile phone as a two-way radio receiver, without distance limitations and outside of any network that can be intercepted.

It has therefore become increasingly difficult for the police to confiscate substantial quantities of drugs. Those that have happened are generally in rural areas, where 3G networks are not available.

According to a Dell press release, the site “is designed for individuals who are not defined by the four walls in their office or home, but by a desire to always be connected for work and play no matter their location.

“Community members can come together to read about other digital nomads and share ideas, tips, tricks and best practices.”

There are even Digital Nomad communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and delicious.

According to a BBC report, Dell predicts that the demands of the digital nomad are expected to drive laptop sales to over one billion in the next five years:

There is no business as usual in the connected era,” said Andy Lark, Dell’s vice president of global marketing.

“Boundaries for businesses are virtual. This is a new class of worker who maybe doesn’t have an office and who maybe visits 10 offices in a day and visits several different customers.” [...]

“If you look at India, about 67% or more of their workforce is going to be entirely mobile and that is driving the demand for new features in the laptop like all day connectivity, long battery life, high-level security and uncompromising design and durability.”

I would be curious to hear more about the research that went into this all, but the site seems to have no information on that.