Designing interactions, designing conversations

Morning read in the train: Uncertain futures: A Conversation with Professor Anthony Dunne by David Womack. Yet another insightful short article on the Adobe Design Center think tank website. Womack starts off by describing how Dunne+Raby's work is meant to reclaim the original meaning of interaction design: generate particular types of conversations, usually about technology or an aspect of the future. Some excerpts I found relevant:

"With classic design, the idea is generally to solve the problem or cure the ailment. If you’re getting wet, you make a shelter. Placebo projects we see more as a way of negotiating a relationship to something. It’s not solving a problem. You’re setting up a situation that facilitates a discussion. (...) it stops students thinking in terms of, “Here’s a problem, now I’m going to solve it.” We want to think about people in a complex way that isn’t neat or containable.

For example, if nanotechnology is on its way in its various manifestations, which of these manifestations seem acceptable and which seem scary? And why? Design can be a medium for exploration and a place for experimenting and engaging people in dialogue. We think design can provide a very concrete and down to earth language for exploring the implications of technology.

I would never describe designers as problem solvers. I might describe them as meaning makers."

Why do I blog this? preparing a presentation for a design conference, I am cobbling some notes about utilitarian versus critical design. What I find of particular interest here with what Dunne is claiming is the importance of this approach. As he wrote with Fiona Raby in Design Noir, "Beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs". A quote I really enjoy and often use even in less critical-design-prone domain (e.g. with business exec wondering about the "added value" of the weird stuff I throw up when interacting with them). Why is it pertinent IMO? because it's about asking questions, uncovering new meanings and desires and not about doing new product development by adding the word "intelligent" as a creative way to design the future.

What is beauty?

Great quote discussed by Christian Lindholm in his LIFT Asia talk:"Beauty: the adjustement of all parts proportionally so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole" Leon Battista Alberti, 1435

Diagrams and visuals in anthropology

("Tuamotuan Conception of the Cosmos", by Paiore, 1820)

Recently looking at how to shape ethnographic results in an adequate form for designers, reading Dori Tunstall's post about how "anthropology has always been visual" is very relevant. She points to this Flickr pool entitled "Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, & Social Theory". As she says:

"I have always bristled at the notion that anthropologists are more textually-oriented than visual, that somehow there is no culture of the visual in the field. Having misspent my youth trying to figure out the subtleties of kinship diagrams, mastering the art of reading archaeological site maps, and illustrating the distinct morphology of early hominids (pre-humans), I knew that to be empirically untrue. So I am happy to have the vindication through visual documentation that Anthropology has always been visual."

Why do I blog this? currently looking, by personal interest (i.e. not linked to a specific project so far), the diversity of material which can be generated by ethnographic material. sort of thinking about how to use more visual representation (as opposed to the textual format). Of particular interest to me is this sort of spatial diagrams (would have been helpful in the home ethnography project I did in july):

(Kabyle House or The World Reversed - Bourdieu, 1972)

Theories of embodiment

(A gestural interface tested in South Korea last year)

How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott Klemmer, Björn Hartmann and Leila Takayama (DIS 2006) gives a relevant overview of different themes of interest for interaction designers focused on tangible/gestural interactions. It covers a broad range of topics concerning how our body is fundamental in our experience with the world.

Drawing on theories of embodiment in philosophy, psychology and sociology, they came up with 5 themes:

"The first, thinking through doing, describes how thought (mind) and action (body) are deeply integrated and how they co-produce learning and reasoning. The second, performance, describes the rich actions our bodies are capable of, and how physical action can be both faster and more nuanced than symbolic cognition. The first two themes primarily address individual corporeality; the next two are primarily concerned with the social affordances. Visibility describes the role of artifacts in collaboration and cooperation. Risk explores how the uncertainty and risk of physical co-presence shapes interpersonal and human-computer interactions. The final theme, thickness of practice, suggests that because the pursuit of digital verisimilitude is more difficult than it might seem, embodied interaction is a more prudent path."

What does that mean for tangible computing? see what the authors say:

" we should not just strive to approach the affordances of tangibility in our interfaces and interactions, but to go beyond what mere form offers. As Dourish notes, “Tangible computing is of interest precisely because it is not purely physical. It is a physical realization of a symbolic reality”. For a combination of virtual representations and physical artifacts to be successful and truly go beyond what each individual medium can offer, we need a thorough understanding what each can offer to us"

(picture taken from one my home ethnography study)

A current research project about the user experience of the Nintendo Wiimote lead me to investigate that last theme concerning the "pursuit of digital verisimilitude. Some excerpts from the paper about it:

"It may seem a platitude, but it is worth repeating that, “if technology is to provide an advantage, the correspondence to the real world must break down at some point” (Grudin). Interaction design is simultaneously drawn in two directions. (...) This section argues that interfaces that are the real world can obviate many of the difficulties of attempting to model all of the salient characteristics of a work process as practiced. This argument builds on Weiser’s exhortation to design for “embodied virtuality” rather than virtual reality. Designing interactions that are the real world instead of ones that simulate or replicate it hedges against simulacra that have neglected an important practice."

Although I fully, "interactions that are the real world" are not so easy to design depending on the technology one have: the hand movement captured when playing Wii tennis is only a basic representation of the complex hand movement when playing tennis. Therefore, as I observe in different field studies, if the interaction per se is relevant for Wii players, there are often misunderstandings between the expected events on the screen (based on what gestures the players felt she did) and what really happens in the game. So what I mean here is that "digital verisimilitude" is also hard in tangible computing as capturing movement is definitely tricky. Think about human physiology, the fact that movement is a dynamic (and capture may imply statefulness), the role of context, etc.

Ethnographic outputs for design

Working lately on how a course and a seminar concerning how ethnography can produce relevant and adequate material for design, I read "The ‘adequate’ design of ethnographic outputs for practice: some explorations of the characteristics of design resources" (by Tim Diggins & Peter Tolmie) with great interest. Published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing in 2003, it used to sit on my laptop for ages and I finally got time to peruse it properly. The paper deals with the difficulties of making good use of ethnographic output in multidisciplinary user-centred design team and discusses some pertinent observations about the kind of characteristics the result may take for a successful collaboration between designers and UX researchers. Although they acknowledge there is no overall consensus concerning this question, the authors acknowledge the importance of employing diagrams as representational devices. Which reminds me of this other paper by Hughes et al. entitled "Moving Out from the Control Room: Ethnography in System Design" which claimed that "The output of ethnographic analyses are typically discursive and lengthy, looking nothing like the blueprint diagrams which are de rigeur in systems engineering".

After an analysis of few ethnographically-inspired diagrams, the authors nail out the characteristics and problems that can be encountered. They propose their own representational vehicle along with an organizational solution:

"so that a particular formulation of ethnographic material is locally (indexically) relevant, it must have provide for mutual appopriateness among the interested parties (i.e. the design team). And mutual appropriateness is something that is worked up in situ between the ethnographer and designer, rather than something open to generic pre- formulation. The grounded innovation map was, for us, a mutually appropriate means of representing the ethnographic work for design, and it was designed and redesigned by us according to current need. (...) It’s worth noting that the actual work of arriving at a mutually appropriate (and mutually acceptable) form, is arguably the most important output of the formulation itself – it is in this collaborative design and negotiation that some of the most important transfer of understandings can take place. (...) The interest is not in exporting detail, but rather in supporting the provision of information that is relevant and meaningful for the purposes in hand. At the same time it is important not to consider these devices to be offering generalisations to cover all ends (...) it is a mistake to presume that generic claims will be relevant and meaningful to just any particular design enterprise (...) This also forcefully underscores the importance of colocating designers and ethnographers on the same design teams."

They then describe the different characteristics of such representation (that they the "grounded innovation map" as represented above):

• Form: economy (appropriate for its presentational use, whether screen-based or on paper), appropriate format (to a given subset designers)
• Use: ordering & logic of practice (how the representation is delivered), indexicality (should have internal features that can be pointed out and explicated in a variety of ways, both in terms of occasioning particular ethnographic accounts and/or recollections for debriefing), mnemonicity (a resource for a member of the design team, for calling to mind instances from the fieldwork)
• Embededness: iconicity (physical resource and support for talking about the ethnography in multiple settings), sequentiality and organisational accountability (serve to show that certain kinds of work and collaboration have been done), integration (provide common resources for those right across a multidisciplinary/multi-organisational project)
• Warnings: reductivity (it may be seen to replace the diversity and irreducibility of the fieldwork observations.), constraint (the local groupings and categorisations within the representation may come to have too great a significance and become constraints on further interrogation of the fieldwork and thinking about the design space.)
• Strategies for coping with warnings: change (engendering a lack of attachment to a particular phase of the representation by continual editing and change), instantiation (the deliberate bringing-up of ‘difficult’ instances that cut across the local categorisation), open-endedness/incompleteness (the deliberate avoidance of once-and-for-all formulations that are presumed to ‘explain’ the domain for all purposes), self-insufficiency (Making sure that the representation is not self-sufficient, but instead requires either a locally gathered competence with it or an accompanying explanation).

Why do I blog this? always struck by how this topic is rarely discussed on depth in various UX/IxD/HCI documentation, I am starting to collect material about it to go beyond the current practices. I do admit that some of the ethnographically-inspired research I've dealt with lately were not that imaginative in terms of output and I want to change this. Perhaps it can be caused by the client (who want above all a report with text, text and text) but I am sure one can iron out more adequate material. I generally use lots of pictures in my report too and some higher-level diagrams but it's always good to have some pointers and guidelines about how to craft them more nicely.

On a side note, I am wondering about the importance of providing both primary (pictures, narratives, video excerpts) and secondary data (higher-level representations such as diagrams). Combining both in a topic-map way could be a solution, as described in the paper.

Finally, I found interesting here the notion of organizational solution, with the UX researcher(s) and designer(s) working together to produce this output. Too often both are working in different units and not producing something together.

Diggins, Tim, and Peter Tolmie (2003) "The 'adequate' design of ethnographic outputs for practice: some explorations of the characteristics of design resources" in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Volume 7 (3-4) July.

Hands on

The NYT had a good piece about how digital designers rediscover hands-on activities. With examples from Adobe and Mike Kuniavsky's Sketching in Hardware gatherings, the article describes the renewed interest in manual tinkering "or innovating with the aid of human hands". Some of the reasons for that described in the article:

" “A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,” says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. “You can’t simulate everything.” (...) The hands-on part is for me a critical aspect of understanding how to design,” said Michael Kuniavsky (...) Such experiences hone instinct and intuition as opposed to logic and cognition, advocates say, and bring the designer closer to art than science. (...) At Stanford, the rediscovery of human hands arose partly from the frustration of engineering, architecture and design professors who realized that their best students had never taken apart a bicycle or built a model airplane. (...) “Students are desperate for hands-on experience,” says Neil Gershenfeld (...) “People spend so much time in digital worlds that it creates an appetite for the physical world,” says Dale Dougherty, an executive at O’Reilly Media"

Why do I blog this? Beyond the obvious interest in this interest in bricolage, these remarks echo a lot with my personal experience with students. Few years ago, in a course about interactive table, we asked master students to design tables per se: drawing shapes, cutting huge pieces of woods, adding a beamer, etc. and they really loved it saying that it was the first time they had to design something physically in their engineering school.

Bricks from the ground

Turning raw material into "concrete" and actionable items for building constructions. Or, how to create bricks from the ground and then sell them to others. Can only be done in the dry season using a wooden mold. Seen in Canyon de Colca, Peru.

What is interesting here is the proximity between the raw material and the end product, a very short production cycle and the use of basic Sun/Wind capabilities to dry the bricks.

See also Jan Chipchase's post about that topic.

Design and robotics

Focusing lately on networked objects and robots for a project, I re-visited the interview of Carl Di Salvo made by Dan Saffer in his book Designing for interaction. (Nintendo Chiritorie, a remote controlled vacuum cleaner designed by Nintendo back in 1979)

The point which interested me here is the role design plays in robotics:

"What type of design work is being done with robots now?

Perhaps the most obvious is the work in industrial design in creating the visual form of the robot. The industrial design of a robot is an example of styling visual form with significant impact on interaction. In fact, its difficult to separate industrial design from interaction design in robots. Because of the newness of robotics and the public's unfamiliarity with robots, the visual form of the robot often takes a precedence in shaping our expectations of the robot and how we interact with the product.

In addition to designing the visual form of the robot there is a lot of interface design involved with robots: interfaces for tele-operation as well as interfaces for direct interaction. These interfaces might be screen based, physical, voice, or some combination of the three. Because we have yet to arrive at any standards for, or even common experiences of, interacting with a robot"

Why do I blog this? I am personally less interested in "robots" than in communicating or networked objects. And the role of design in the process of creating these new devices is relevant as it can uncover lots of new issues.

The nature of prototypes in design

In the last TOCHI issue, there is this paper called The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas by Lim, Stolterman and Josh Tenenberg which deals with prototypes in HCI and design. They state how the role of prototype is well known but there's a lack of knowledge concerning the "fundamental nature of prototypes". They subsequently try to provide an "anatomy of prototypes as a framework for prototype conceptualization". Some excerpts I found relevant:

"we identify an initial set of design aspects that a prototype might exhibit. We call these aspects filtering dimensions. We use the term filter, since by selecting aspects of a design idea, the designer focuses on particular regions within an imagined or possible design space. (...) The Principles of Prototyping and the Anatomy of Prototypes

Fundamental prototyping principle: Prototyping is an activity with the purpose of creating a manifestation that, in its simplest form, filters the qualities in which designers are interested, without distorting the understanding of the whole.

Economic principle of prototyping: The best prototype is one that, in the simplest and the most efficient way, makes the possibilities and limitations of a design idea visible and measurable.

Anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes are filters that traverse a design space and are manifestations of design ideas that concretize and externalize conceptual ideas."

Also about the quality of a "good" prototype:

"...can only be understood in relation to the specific purpose of the design process and to the specific issue that a designer is trying to explore, evaluate, or understand. The purposes for which prototypes are used can be broadly categorized into the following areas: (1) evaluation and testing; (2) the understanding of user experience, needs, and values; (3) idea generation; and (4) communication among designers. These categories are not meant to be mutually exclusive, and any one prototype can be used for multiple purposes."

Why do I blog this? documenting some aspects of design for project discussion with a client in the video game industry. The notion of prototype is intriguing in that field and would benefit a bit from design thinking.

Salient design factors for kinetic user interfaces

In a recent issue of Communications of the ACM, Designing kinetic interactions for organic user interfaces, Parkes, Poupyrev and Ishii reflects on the notion of "kinetic user interface":

"Kinetic interaction design forms part of the larger framework of Organic User Interfaces (OUI) discussed in the articles in this special section: interfaces that can have any shape or form. We define Kinetic Organic Interfaces (KOIs) as organic user interfaces that employ physical kinetic motion to embody and communicate information to people. Shape-changing inherently involves some form of motion since any body transformation can be represented as motion of its parts. Thus kinetic interaction and kinetic design are key components of the OUI concept. With KOIs, the entire real world, rather then a small computer screen, becomes the design environment for future interaction designers."

They also discuss "salient design parameters and research" issues to consider when utilizing kinetic motion in interaction design:

"Form and Materiality. In order to recognize and comprehend motion, it must be embodied in a material form. Hence, a crucial and little-understood design parameter is how properties of materials and forms affect motion perception and control. (...) Understanding the material affordances, their interaction with the user and other objects, environmental light and sound is crucial in designing kinetic interactions.

Kinetic Memory and Temporality. While computational control allows actuated systems to provide real-time physical feedback, it also offers the capability to record, replay, and manipulate kinetic data as if it were any other kind of computational data. We refer to such data as kinetic memory (...) for example, objects can fast-forward or slow down motion sequences, move backward or forward in time; or the objects can "memorize" their shape history and share them with other objects.

Repeatability and Exactness. We can easily distinguish artificial motion because of its exact repeatability. In designing kinetic interactions, repeatable exactness is the simplest form of control state, and in many behaviors it is easily identifiable.

Granularity and Emergence. If this principle of dissecting form and mechanics into single elements—kinetic phrases—is combined with contemporary digital control structures, new materials, and actuators, it becomes possible to imagine a system where a kinetic behavior could be designed both concretely and formally."

Why do I blog this? working recently on tangible UI project in which sensors can be put on everyday objects, the ideas expressed in that paper are relevant to what sort of design parameters should be taken into account (and serves as design constraints).

Delineating the future of making

The IFTF recently released an interesting "future map" called "Future of Making Map:

"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."

Why do I blog this? this topic quite resonates with the near future laboratory purposes and concerns. It's interestingly frames in that document showing the driving forces (eco-motivation, rise of amateur-professionals...), the signals from today and trends.

The importance of exceptions for design

Recently working on a project about gestural interfaces and the user experience of the Nintendo Wii, I had my share of discussions about sampling in user experience research and the role of exceptions. Quantitative researchers often drawn nice curves with cute statistical distributions with "means" and quantiles. The type of things I've done in my PhD research, measuring X and Z (satisfaction to a certain project, number of messages typed on a phone, number of time someone pressed a certain button, etc.). In the end, you get this sort of graph represented below with anonymized dots which eventually represents how normal humans did certain things.

In general, quant research (the sort I've done in the past yes) compares different "conditions": you have two sorts of interfaces, each group of users test one of the interface and you compare the number of time a certain group did certain things on the interface they had. Say, the number of time they pressed on the button called "OK". Applying different statistical techniques (like variance analysis is the distribution is normal in the statistical sense, checking variances and if you're in trouble then you always employ "non-parametric tests"). This is robust no kidding, I don't criticize that kind of method. However, what I am wondering about is when this sort of methodology is solely applied to design research.

And it leads me to the discussion I had the other day with a colleague about the importance of exceptions, dots which are not close to the means, the weird outliers, peeps who do not fall in the distribution like that weird circle on the upper right-hand corner on the boxplot below:

Depending on your mood, the research methodology and your colleagues' attitude, there is a wide spectrum of reaction ranging from "WTF, that person screwing my distribution?" to "OK this is an extreme user, he/she is special, let's have a look more closely". And then, of course, because you're a smarty pant and you ALSO have qualitative data you see what the person SAID or DID (or whatever other types of data sources you have). Then the real thing starts: who are the extreme users? how extreme are they? what makes them extreme? are there other data source which attest that they are "exceptions". And obviously this leads you to the question the norm (the mean).

To some extent, that's the story of why I slowly moved from quant research to a mix of descriptive quantitative and qualitative research in user experience projects. I started getting interested in the role of exceptions, especially with regards to their importance in design. Why exceptions are important in design? Perhaps because they might show peculiar behavior and routine which can announce futures norms or trends (and then inspire new products, features and services) but also to show that the notion of a "normal user" or "mean user" is difficult to grasp as diversity exist and is important. Surely a very relevant near future laboratory spin.

An interesting example of an extreme user was this deaf guy I saw the other day at the train station, walking and gesticulating in front of his video cell-phone. If you map the use of video-communication on cell-phone you get a very low usage of the feature in general but that guy would be an exception.

Tailored solutions for various affordances

A weird keyhole which needs more information about what sense to turn the key ("ouvrir" in french means "open"):

And an elegant solution to the "elevator button issue": how to know which of the "up" and "down" button to choose: what's the underlying rationale? what's the referential? the elevator that you want to come down? or yourself who wants to go up? A basic caption with "to go up" near the button is a good fix.

Nintendo DS' book affordance

Spotted in CDG airport yesterday in France, this Nintendo DS and its lovely book-like affordance which make the user taking the same posture as when perusing a book. The dual-display device offers an interesting affordance for book reading. And, researchers have found how such setting is relevant to improve the reading experience: it has indeed been found that users of dual-display ebook readers benefits from local navigation and applicability to multi-document interactions when using two displays.

Relying on previous interface

In his Language of Interaction talk at Interaction08, Bill DeRouchey addresses an interesting issue: how people learn how to use technology from other technology. Given the quantity of consumer electronics that surround us, people become more tech-savvy and learn from experience with other products, it then turns into expectations about how a new device will function. As DeRouchey points out:

"When we figure out a new product, we look for familiar visual cues to guide us, elements that we have seen before in other products and have learned in the past. It’s very natural and normal: we learn from experience. Our brains are always looking for the patterns in what we see, trying to find the consistency, looking for the language. We subconsciously latch onto the most familiar interface elements and construct the instructions from there. (...) Washing machines from companies like LG now use the play/pause icon. Even though it originally meant make the tape play, when someone encounters a right-pointing triangle and two vertical bars on a washing machine, without any accompanying labels, they immediately understand that it means start and stop, because they’ve learned that from other technology."

A relevant example here is the one described in "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" (Christian Lindholm, Turkka Keinonen) which describes the design rationale for a past Nokia interface:

"Consumers knew arrows from several other devices such as remote control (...) The C-Key /c for clearing) was also considered intuitive. It was very well known from previous Nokia phones and from all calculators. Only later did we discover a drawback - because our concept lacked a SEND key, users also found it intuitive to understand C as call"

Why do I blog this? no big theory here but some relevant practical point and example, showing the conscious effort by interaction designers to rely on past knowledge and expectations.

Directly connected to my earlier post about the interface transition from common artifacts to new one.

Conviviel/Mixware

Via Etienne Mineur, I found some photo captures of this amazing book about designing for the french minitel. The book's called "Conviviel 1, dialogues et images électroniques de grande diffusion" (in english: "Mixware: electronic dialogues and images for the general public"). See here some parts of the book scanned by Mineur.

What is interesting is the "rules" described by the books' author (my translation form french to english):

"The relevant "telematic" applications:

1. Does not imply training on the user's part, nor manual
2. Answers a need and bring an advantage compared to the means of communication employed thus far
3. Never fail to logic
4. Has a personality, its own brand
5. Does not have dead-end or wrong tracks
6. Give surprises and lives with its own time
7. Take into account the user's training level
8. Take into account the user's personality
9. Gives benefit rather than costs
10. Let people get back to it

"

Why do I blog this? although this gem is impossible to find, I would crave to have a copy (even a pdf) as the ideas described there seems very relevant (as aesthetically great). A side-reason for this blogpost is that I am collecting material for a discussion about "hidden sources of interaction design" to show how certain paths are valuable (and shaped?) interaction design: some good lessons for the field can be drawn from the minitel and also CD-rom applications.

Product ecology as a design framework

Recently, in my daily data farming, I ran across several sources mentioning the notion of "product ecology". It generally refers to how (interaction) design broaden its focus from systems targeted on one person to more socially or culturally situated products. Among the sources about this, Jodi Forlizzi's work struck me as very relevant. In this article in the International Journal of Design, she focuses on the interesting notion of "product ecology" and how it can be employed as a theoretical design framework:

"In the Product Ecology, the product is the central unit of analysis. (...) The functional, aesthetic, symbolic, emotional and social dimensions of a product, combined with other units of analysis, or factors, in the ecology, help to describe how people make social relationships with products. These include the product; the surrounding products and other systems of products; the people who use it, and their attitudes, disposition, roles, and relationships; the physical structure, norms and routines of the place the product is used; and the social and cultural contexts of the people who use the product and possibly even the people who make the product. "

(image taken from Forlizzi's paper)

But how does that help designers? Forlizzi highlights few key ideas about the assumptions of the Product Ecology framework[I recommend reading the whole paper here]:

"First, each product has its own ecology, resulting in subjective and individual experience in using the same product. (...) Second, the factors in the Product Ecology are dynamic, and interconnected in several ways. (...) Third, changes in product use cause changes in other factors of the Product Ecology.(...) When a product no longer plays a key role, it is marked by events such as people changing roles, or going in and out of the ecology; (...) Fourth, the Product Ecology can be delimited by a group of people in close proximity, or a group that is spread out over a great distance. (...) Factors in the Product Ecology can be examined in isolation or in combination at the level of a single product, to understand what particular product features will inspire social use, or at the system level, to understand how a particular product will have an impact on a system of products retained for similar functional, aesthetic, symbolic, social and emotional factors. Similarly, behavior of individuals or groups using products can be studied."

So, to some extent, the "product ecology" can be employed to study variety of products/services. An interesting example of such use can be found in this article (from CSCW 2006) about how robotic products become social products. The paper basically shows how different people within a houselhold formed different social relationships with Roomba vacuum (and not with the more classic vacuum). The classic vacuum, in this ethnographic study, affected significant change in the families, while the stick vacuum did not: people cleaned more often, more members of the family participated and there were more prone to make social attribution to the roomba. The author then draws some design implications concerning the importance of social attribution: "when simple social attributes are part of the design of robotic products and systems, people may adopt them more readily and find them less stigmatizing". Why do I blog this? find interesting this notion of product ecology and how to apply it in UX research. Some ideas/methodology to dig up for current projects about gaming platforms (Nintendo DS and Wii), as well as the perception of the devices and services in families.

design+future+optimism

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Richard Seymour has this good piece entitled "Optimistic futurism" in which he articulates an interesting vision of design+foresight. After discussing how a wave of relevant innovation stopped around the 70s ("what the hell happened to the future") people realized that the future dystopia represented in pop-culture may happen (although people though it couldn't possibly happen): "shrinking ozone layers, global warming, airplanes into buildings, rising fuel costs etc." The good point of the articles comes when Seymour states that "It's something we all need to see" (visualize the future!) and the role of designers in this, as in this excerpt:

"Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. It just doesn't go with the job. We're supposed to be defining the future, aren't we? (...) There's nothing on the planet that can't be made just that bit better (rather than just that bit different). But before you do it, you need to have an idea of where you want all this to go eventually, a vision of the future, with a set of stepping stones to let you get from the now into the future in an effective and efficient way. " (...) that's what we should be doing: leading the way by visualizing and articulating achievable futures that get us out of this hole.

I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple don't call themselves optimistic futurists, but that's exactly what they are. My favorite Steve Jobs one-liner is: "It's not the consumer's job to know about the future; that's my job." And he's absolutely right.

Jurassic corporations need to learn from the mammals. The secret of the "next big thing" isn't lurking inside the consumer's head, waiting to be liberated by some well-paid focus group. It's inside the heads of the dreamers, the futurists, the utopians."

Why do I blog this? some good thoughts here about the design+foresight issue and how both are connected through this notion "optimism", which correspond to a direction given to the future.

Also, the "beyond-focus-groups" design stance is important as shown by the quote from Steve Jobs; I guess some people may mistake it with a "don't pay attention to the user" but I don't think it's contradictory with having a user-centered approach by any means. It just reinforces the role of designers, who can him/herself base the work on informed opinions/educated guesses about people's life/motivations/desires/needs through field observation.

Status of objects

Encountered in a french hotel lately. With the flat affordance of screens, TVs can get a status update through this sort of frame. Supposed to be classier? or to fade in the background.

On a more ironic glance, it can look as the deification of TV.

Various resources from a late sunday evening:

• Thoughts on Interaction Design compiled by Jon Kolko (.pdf, 2.5mb): "a text intended to contemplate the theory behind the field of Interaction Design in a new way. of elements (...) explore the semantic connections that live between technology and form which are brought to life when someone uses a product"
• The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research by Erik Stolterman in International Journal of Design (Vol 2, No 1, 2008): "The main argument is that this kind of interaction design research has not (always) been successful, and that the reason for this is that it has not been guided by a sufficient understanding of the nature of design practice"
• About Bill Buxton’s CHI2008 keynote: "Nothing that transforms our culture is brand new. It always takes twenty years. That means that anything that comes out in the next ten years that is amazing has already been around for ten years". Well the power of s-curve ;)