Design
Some interesting design recommendations, read this morning in "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School" by Matthew Frederick:
Why do I blog this? A quick read; it's not a manual or a textbook, it's rather a sober list of principles and hints. Found it curious and replaced the word "architecture" with the term "design".
Being interested in technical objects and futures research, I have listed here various approaches that I find interesting (it's not exhaustive). Artifacts from the future (Wired)
In each issue of Wired magazine, at the end of the book, there's a page called "artifact from the future" that consists in a heavily photoshopped photo of an object supposedly common in the future. These visual elements depicts designers, researchers, pundits' prognostications about how the world "will look like in 10, 20 or 100 years". Yes, it's "will" not "may", as shown in this article. See some examples systematically listed by sceptycal futurist Stuart Candy
There's a lot of alternative ways to create similar account of the future. Think for instance about Future Feed Forward which looks like The Onion. But it's even more interesting when tools are made available to people who would want to create their own narratives with something like this The newspaper clipping generator (as a side note, I love their warning "Please do not use the names of real newspapers or persons").
Artifacts from the past
Of course, creating visual props of the future is one thing but there's a curious other possibilities: looking at present objects from a distant future. Some sort of archaeology from the future: you put yourself in the shoes of an observer who would find an object from the 21st Century and who would try to infer its meaning and usage. If you try to do this, an interesting issue will rapidly arise: how the future from which you have a point of view is like? Indeed, if you want to describe something, you need to have certain values/norms/standards/contextual elements to compare the object from the past to the practices of the future you're supposed to live in. Reading this French graphic novel called Constellations (first volume is downloadable here in PDF), I ran across these two pages at the end of the booklet (the banana is just meant to leave the booklet opened while I take the picture):
After the story itself, the two authors (Daryl and Popcube) invited friends as guest to give their perspective on their work. One of them, called Run, designed these two pages which show how artifacts from the past (a Rubik's cube, a vacuum cleaner, a Winnie-The-Pooh mug) were perceived by people from the future. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which - of course! - things from the past are no always available or in use because the industrial chain has vanished, because electricity is scarce and above all because people forgot about them. Each narrative (in French sorry) can be perceived as intriguing account of how people project a certain meaning based on surface characteristics: shapes, colors, characters, handles, etc. The Rubik's Cube is no longer understood as being a puzzle but the author shows how it is helpful to calculate using colored cubes and shape-shifting. At first glance, it looks very naive and done for the lulz but it's far more insightful than that; and I think undertaking this kind of activity is valuable for both design and futures research. This two pages should IMHO be a mandatory outcome of an exercise for my design students to force them thinking about affordances, form/function dialectics or research avenues.
Besides, this example reminds me that I should really spend more time digging what Michael Shanks is doing at Stanford Humanities Lab because it may be close to this angle.
Objects from the future produced in the past
The last category I find interesting during the sunny sunday morning is the idea of exploring objects from the future proposed in the past (this is triggered by my interest in design failure). Recently I collected lots of material from cyberpunk universes described in the 80s. The most interesting items came from my Role-Playing Games books which presented visually some cyberpunk artifacts to be used by characters. See some examples below (extracted from Cyberpunk 2020):
Why do I blog this? looking for curious exercises to be done in workshops or during my courses next year.
Finally had some time to watch Moon by Duncan Jones yesterday evening. Certainly a good sci-fi movie with different implications to ruminate and ponder. Slow and with a nice music. I found the props quite curious and not necessarily super showy.
One of the most intriguing feature of the movie is certainly GERTY, a robot whose voice is played by Kevin Spacey. Based on the Cog project, there is both a prop for static scenes and CG when it's moving around.
A convincing character, GERTY has a limited AI, as discussed by the director in Popular Mechanics:
"There is limited AI. GERTY is not wholly sentient. He really is a system as opposed to a being in his own right--that was one of the things I wanted to get across. The audience, and the different Sams, bring their own baggage to GERTY. They're the ones who anthropomorphize him and basically make him out to be more than he is. GERTY's system is very simple: He's there to look after Sam and make sure that he survives for 3 years. That's it. When you start watching the film, you're already making unwarranted assumptions about GERTY because of the HAL 9000 references and Kevin Spacey's slightly menacing voice. That's what the Sams do as well. The company itself, Lunar Industries, is nefarious. GERTY is not. He's doing his job. He has conversations with the company but he doesn't tell Sam because he's programmed not to. It's as simple as that. (...) The idea was to create a machine that was incorporating more than one type of sense data. So it had cameras for eyes, tactile fingertips and a moving robotic arm. It had an audio capture system. It was basically taking all of these various forms of data, giving it the eyes to see something and have the arm reach out and touch it in the right place"
See also some interesting elements about him from this interview in fxguide
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of GERTY (IMHO) is its smiley-face display to express its feelings. This little screen is meant to express the robot's emotion in a very basic ways with different permutations. Here again, it's good to read the director's intents:
"I use a lot of social networking sites. I’m on Twitter all the time. I use all these various forms of networking, including the text version of Skype. I tend to use smiley faces to make sure people know that I’m joking. That’s my own reason for using it on Gerty. I also like the idea that Gerty’s designed by this company which doesn’t have much respect for Sam and treats him in a patronizing way. So they use smiley faces to communicate with him."
I really liked the way the smiley are used, a sort of simplistic (and patronizing as he mentionned) representation of an assistant. Very much reminiscent to Clippy. This use of smileys reminded me of the Uncanny Valley and this excerpt from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art:
For McCloud, a smiley face is the ultimate abstraction because it could potentially represent anyone. As he explained, "The more cartoony a face is…the more people it could be said to describe". Besides, it's really curious anthropomorphically because the robot design has two characteristics: the smiley face (with eyes and a mouth) and a camera. It's quite funny because in lots of sci-fi movies/comics, the camera looks as an eye and is sometimes perceived by people as having the same function. In Moon, the combination of the camera and the smiley face makes it very quirky.
Why do I blog this? trying to make some connections between this movie I saw and some interesting elements about robot design.
Looking at interaction design metaphors lately, I've been reading Chris Crawford's "The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software". As mentioned in this other blogpost, I like his approach that uses verbs:
Using linguistics as a metaphor for HCI/interaction design is of coruse very old and other people than Crawford proposed similar approaches. However, the idea of focusing on verbs (what people can do) in design is interesting and used here and there. See for example the recommendation #2 in Jyri Engeström's slides about designing social software ("define your verbs").
As appealing as it is, I found an interesting quote in Howard Becker's book "Telling About Society" that (IMHO) explain my interest in verbs:
"it's a confusing error to focus on nouns rather than verbs, on the objects rather than the activities, as though we were investigating tables or charts or ethnographies or movies. It makes more sense to see artifact as the frozen remains of collective action, brought to life whenever someones uses them - as people's making and reading charts or prose, making and seeing films. We should understand the expression a film as shorthand for the activity of 'making a film' or 'seeing a film'."
(Thanks Basile for pointing this out)
Why do I blog this? Material for my interaction design course about user observations and design. This notion of verbs is interesting given its 2-facets: you can design something by using the verb metaphor (you then define verbs that set what people can do) and study how people employs the designed artifacts by studying what they do (which is defined by the verb). The action, defined by the verb, is more important than the artifact (defined as a noun) itself.
The paper "Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design" by Albena Yaneva is an interesting contribution to the role of Actor-Network Theory in design.
It basically shows how various ANT concepts can be relevant and insightful in the context of designing artifacts. Relying on notions such as scripts or delegation of action to objects the author examines various mundane artifacts (stairs, handrails, elevator buttons, etc.) and show how the way they have been designed triggers "specific ways of enacting the social".
Some excerpts I found interesting:
"If you follow me for a moment, again, in my trajectory, you will witness how the objects from my university mornings (my key, the door lock of the resource room, the elevator buttons, the staircase handle, the conference room arrangement) do not stand for social forces and divisions, nor do they symbolically represent the university’s order, hierarchy or divisions of labor; rather, they perform the social as we use them, and connect us in a new way with fellow colleagues, students and university administrators. (...) expanding the project of ANT to the field of design requires mobilizing this method’s persistent ambition to account and understand (not to replace) the objects of design, its institutions and different cultures. This means we must understand the designerliness of design objects, networks and artifacts, instead of trying to provide, by all means, a stand-in (social, psychological, historical or other) explanation of design, i.e. a psychological explanation of the creative energies of the inventor, a psychoanalytical explanation of the client–designer–user relationship, a historical explanation of the social contexts of design. (...) An ANT approach to design would consist in investigating the culture and the practices of designers rather than their theories and their ideologies, i.e. to follow what designers and users do in their daily and routine actions. (...) we should study the experiences of both users and designers, as well as the numerous connections that this research would reveal."
Why do I blog this? collecting material about ANT and design, a hot topic lately. What I find interesting here is that there the move from sociology to design is similar to the one we have seen in the 80s from psychology. At the time, cognitive psychology moved from explaining individual behavior by internal factors (the brain, a cognitive system bound to the individual) to explaining it with external factors (artifacts in our environment, the importance of context, the situated character of action). This led to the emergence of Situated Action or Distributed cognition. Conversely, sociology moves from the "social" to artifacts (non-humans) and show how social is inscribed in objects.
Another important point of this article is the proposition that Yaneva makes as a research agenda: instead of investigating the influence of external factors (be they economical, cultural, political) on design, the idea is to describe the design process itself by capturing "the movements of artifacts and designers in the design studio".
Yaneva, A. (2009). Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design. Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 3, November 2009
Lift10 is over and I finally found some time to work on my stack of books. Which lead me to this book that Lysianne gave me during the conference: Recherche-création en design. Modèles pour une pratique expérimentale. This book (only in French) is the final milestone in a swiss research project called "CreaSearch" that I discussed a while back. For English readers, some of the material covered in this book can also be found in "Creasearch - Methodologies and Models for Creation-based Research Projects in Design" (from the proceedings of the Swiss Design Network Symposium 2008) by Magdalena Gerber, Lysianne Léchot Hirt, Florence Marguerat, Manon Mello and Laurent Soldini.
The aim of this project is to discuss the different forms of "research" in arts and design practices out of commercial spheres: What's doing research when you are a designer working in an academic institution? How does (academic) designers' activities compare to researchers practices? Can research in the field of design go beyond new product development or sociological/aesthetic studies of designed artifacts? Is there a common thread between all the activities based on creating objects? Fueled by the current debate about doing research in arts and design schools, the questions addressed in the book echoes a lot with my current interest in design research.
In this research project, the authors defines the notion of "creation-research": "research activities, in design and in art, which incorporate the creation process (or the conception process) in a research process". They than maps how it is understood and practised in design/arts communities and to what extent it provides a pragmatic context for developing research models that are methodologically acceptable for designers focused on a creative activity and for the international design research community. As such, it sets off to propose an epistemology of design research by showing the specificity of the knowledge it can produce.
Exemplified by case studies, this proposition revolves around a methodological model for research creation projects in design that is copiously described in the project deliverables and the book. See for yourself:
Why do I blog this? This is an interesting framing to engage (or continue) the discussion about what is research in the field of design. I liked the way the authors did not fetishize too much the idea of a framework. The elements that are defined in the model above can be seen as heuristics, instead of a prescribed step-by-step process.
It's also interesting to compare the discussion about "research in design" with the current debate about "design research" and its role in new product development. The two are very distinct and emerges out of different constraints.
An interesting quote that will certainly frame our current work on the gamepad project:
"the term [transduction] denotes a process – be it physical, biological, mental or social – in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area, by basing this propagation on a structuration carried out in different zones of the domain: each region of the constituted structure serves as a constituting principle for the following one, so much so that a modification progressively extends itself at the same time as this structuring operation. (...) The transductive operation is an individuation in progress; it can physically occur most simply in the form of progressive iteration"
From: Simondon, G. (1964/1992) ‘The genesis of the individual’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds.) Incorporations. New York: Zone Books.
Why do I blog this? This quote struck me as highly useful to frame the evolution of joypads in the game controller project. Will certainly include it in the theoretical framing of the study as it enable to describe how different objets evolves through iterations with "constituting principles".
Yes, phones are mobile and everywhere now. But before that, public phone used to sit inside a booth... and before that they were also out of the booth. People would take the phone and put your head inside this kind of device encountered at CERN the other day (te gent on the picture is Mr. Woebken).
Why do I blog this I wonder when this sort of protection will be re-installed in cities. A a sort of place where it's convenient (and acceptable) to make a phone call. It reminds me of the use of cell-phones in public phone booth.
A bunch of curious input interfaces I encountered at CERN today. Interesting diversity: lots of specific affordances, several distinct constraints that lead to a wide variety of possibilities.
They control information and fluid through mechanical, electric, electromechanical and electronic mechanisms. Some are shiny and colorful, others are dirty and old.
And yes, we've had our fifth Lift conference!
Observing how people read on displays is a fascinating endeavor. One of the interesting interaction mode with on-line media I noticed recently concern the gestures people make when reading. Lots of folks have focused on how people would touch or gesture to interact with information as an INPUT. But less attention is paid to the OUTPUT and how certain gesture may occur. The example below shows an interesting trick I noticed (and now use) when sat in the train in Switzerland. Some people (at least this is what the guy told me) are so overwhelmed by animated advertisements that they put their hand on top of it. In doing so, the guy reported not being "attacked by those constant moving crap" that prevented him to quietly focus on his perusal.
Calm computing to some extent.
Why do I blog this? collecting gestures with electronic content linked with new forms of interaction. This guy's insight could be a good starting point to explore other kinds of gestures linked with new media consumption.
Reading the last issue of "Design and Culture that Basile pointed to me few weeks ago, I ran across this paper yesterday that deals with "homemaking". Working on a small projects about networked objects in the home context, it's quite relevant:
Crewe, L. (2009). The Screen and the Drum: on Form, Function, Fit and Failure in Contemporary Home Consumption, Design and Culture, November Volume 1(3) pp. 307-328.
The aim of the paper is the following:
"this paper explores consumers’ connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how functionality is intimately infused with form, how design informs the consumption of everyday domestic objects and how both function and form can fail, deceive and trick."
I found it interesting as it describes the complex relationships people have with their domestic appliances. Based on studying two specific artifacts (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the researchers explores 3 dimensions of this relationship: "the role of product branding, representation and design; the significance of consumer agency and desire; and the influence of commodity form and function in shaping home consumption".
Here's a summary of their conclusion:
"commodity meanings are mobile and diffuse; they are configured, inscribed and appropriated by consumers through placement and use and not just at the point of production. (...) commodities require emotional, sensory or performative investments by consumers in order that their value be realized. Brand value needs to be retrieved, or excavated through consumer practice – quite literally brought alive by consumers. (...) this is important as it suggests that the material qualities of objects may take on a far greater significance than those who produced them could possibly have envisaged. (...) what emerged from the research was how some of the most ubiquitous and ordinary domestic objects were those with the most interesting stories to tell. The important point here is that the normative assumptions one might hold about the aesthetic and technical conventions imputed to everyday objects are largely just that – scripts, projections, imaginings and conventions that are rarely, if ever, evident in practice."
The paper is full of interesting examples such as:
"Another focus group participant – Laura, the vacuum owner who had just left her husband – revealed her intentional destruction of an unwanted vacuum cleaner in order that she could purchase a Dyson. Such sabotage is clearly willful and goes beyond the mere incompetence of users who fail to read operating and maintenance manuals. Laura cut the cord of her old Electrolux, thereby disabling it. (...) One participant discusses how he uses an old conventional vacuum cleaner in the student house he rents out as a mechanism to ensure that his tenants vacuum the house once a week. Here we see how the traditional bagged vacuum cleaner serves a particular purpose that would be impossible with a Dyson. As their landlord, Henry prohibits the students from emptying the vacuum cleaner bag: he visits the house once a week and changes the bag (...) The vacuum bag thus becomes an instrument of surveillance at-a-distance, a tool for the external management of approved cleaning practices and a weapon of financial punishment where necessary."
Why do I blog this? Both the theoretical aspects and the concrete examples drawn from the field are important. In the context of the consulting project I am working on, it enables to broaden the scope of the very notion of networked objects.
(A broken interface that would certainly need a digital plumber, seen in Amsterdam)
An interesting article about the deployment of ubicomp at home: Tolmie, P., Crabtree, A., Egglestone, S., Humble, J, Greenhalgh, C. and Rodden, T. (2009) Digital Plumbing: The Mundane Work of Deploying UbiComp in the Home Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10.
The article contrasts the vision of "invisible computing" by Mark Weiser to the concrete deployment of such technologies at home. It focuses on what the author calls "digital plumbing, i.e. the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes". Based on an ethnographic study, it covers the work of installation, the competences involved on the part of users, the practical troubles they encounter, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise which create these systems. What is interesting here is that Ubicomp is here described as "an explicit intervention into everyday life".
(Some wiring installation recently encountered)
Some excerpts I found interesting about the challenges of deploying new technologies in existing home environments:
"Digital plumbing is indispensable to the migration of research technologies out of the lab into real homes. It is a largely ignored area of work however (...) the study has revealed four major areas where the development of support for digital plumbing might be considered:
- The deployment of research technologies in real homes requires a great deal of preparatory work. This includes planning what is to be installed and where in cooperation with household members, and understanding existing technological arrangements that new devices and components will be integrated with. The development of methods and tools that enable the digital plumber to map these may be of considerable use to the work of planning.
- In order to install planned arrangements the digital plumber needs to assemble the right tools and parts for the job. This includes configuring and testing the necessary hardware and assembling the software that will definitely be required and that which will possibly be required. The development of online solutions, including extensive archives of software versions, drivers, updates, patches, etc., and which permit reuse, may be of considerable utility to the work of assembly.
- No matter how well planned an installation is, contingencies inevitably arise. Online archives may go some way to address them, though troubleshooting and faultfinding rely on technical competences that extend beyond the particular technologies being installed. The development of online resources, including FAQs, knowledge databases, and even remote fault diagnosis, may be of considerable benefit in the effort to manage the contingencies of installation.
- Installation occurs over time and often involves more than one digital plumber, whether working consecutively or one after the other. Tracking and managing the changes made by particular digital plumbers therefore becomes a matter of some importance. The development of a ‘record of works’ that detail changes and their implications may provide useful support for coordination and awareness amongst digital plumbers."
Why do I blog this? Although these results echo with existing research about other installation work (from conventional plumbing to fitted kitchens, as pointed out by the authors), this article highlight interesting specificities. Quite handy for a current client project about networked objects in the context of the home environment.
The picture above shows the difference between asking where someone is with an SMS and getting this information automatically with a location-based software such as Aka-Aki. This was a big debate few years ago. A more recent debate concerns the manual check-in versus automatic positioning with mobile social software.
The whole argument about manual check-in on platforms such as Foursquare versus automatic positioning (on Google latitude for instance) is fascinating to me. While some pundits criticize the idea of letting people manually check-in, various empirical studies shows why automation can be problematic. It's crazy how some people get grumpy and think that self-declarating one's location is old-school and passé. Some examples below of academic work about this issue. Of course it's not directly about current applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt or Latitude but it certainly gives some perspective.
Vihavainen, S., Oulasvirta, A., Sarvas, R. "I Can’t Lie Anymore” - The Implications of Location Automation for Mobile Social Applications. Proceedings of MobiQuitous 2009, IEEE Press.
The paper examines a sample of users of Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service bought by Google three years ago. Using this platform, the researchers investigated the appropriation of this service that automates disclosure and diffusion of location information. Here are some excerpts I found relevant in Vihavainen's paper:
"Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on understanding, errors, control, skill, vigilance, and ultimately trust and usefulness. We raise the issue that many current mobile applications involve mechanisms that surreptitiously collect and propagate location information among users and we provide results from the first systematic real world study of the matter. (...) The results reveal both “classic” human factors problems with the automation’s logic and novel issues related to the fact that location automation at times compromised their control of social situations. (...) The results convey that unsuitable automated features can preclude use in a group. While one group found automated features useful, and another was indifferent toward it, the third group stopped using the application almost entirely. (...) These differences highlight the importance of needs, activities, and structures of the intended user groups as factors for acceptance of automation."
S. Benford, W. Seagar, M. Flintham, R. Anastasi, D. Rowland, J. Humble, D. Stanton, J. Bowers, N. Tandavanitj, M. Adams, J.R. Farr, A. Oldroyd, and J. Sutton. “The error of our ways: The experience of self- reported position in a location-based game”. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), Nottingham., pp. 70-87,
In this paper that is a bit older, the researchers studied how users of a collaborative location-based game employed self-reported positioning by manually reveal their positions to remote players by manipulating electronic maps. Results were the following:
" It appears that remote participants are largely un- troubled by the relatively high positional error associated with self reports. Our analysis suggests that this may because mobile players declare themselves to be in plausible locations such as at common landmarks, ahead of themselves on their current trajectory (stating their intent) or behind themselves (confirming previously visited locations). These observations raise new requirements for the future development of automated positioning systems and also suggest that self- reported positioning may be a useful fallback when automated systems are un- available or too unreliable."
Nova, N., Girardin, F., Molinari, G. & Dillenbourg, P. (2006): The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game, International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).
Finally, this is also an issue I addressed in my Phd research concerning the automation of location-awareness, I also address these problems with a different angle. We also used a collaboration location-based game (a quite common platform for running field studies at the time) and uncovered that automating a process such as location-awareness is not always fruitful. Letting people send their own position appears to be more efficient than broadcasting mere location information:
"To some extent, not giving location-awareness information can be a way to support collaboration more effectively; since players may communicate more and better explain their activity and intents. Self- disclosure can hence be more effective since users could express both information about their intents relevant for the task context and their location. They could also send it whenever they want to express either their current or past positions or the intended places they are heading to. Another interesting benefit of letting the users express their position is to give them the control of privacy issues, one of the major issue related to LBS usage. They have indeed the choice to disclose information about their whereabouts, which is of tremendous importance to avoid the users’ perception of privacy invasion."
Istanbul's public transport system features an interesting aspect regarding "touch interfaces". Two validation solutions coexist in the form of:
Why do I blog this? Transition moment between different technical solutions are always intriguing as both are still in use. The new interface is deployed and users will be encouraged to use it. In this case, given the fact that it's an infrastructure, there's a lot to be done (adding RFID readers here and there).
This transition leads to interfaces with several points of entries as shown on the picture above. The current vending machine still reflects the prevalence of the AKBIL: it's funny to notice how the old AKBIL charging system is convenient (right below where you insert bank notes, which makes the interaction flows more easily).
The game controller book project moves slowly but we tentatively wrote a draft of the book proposal that we intend to use. The provisional title is "The Joypad Continuum: tracing the evolution of game pad design" (by Nicolas Nova and Laurent Bolli).
For the record, there's already some interest here and there but we thought it would be good to confront the book ideas with potential readers. The poster above is one of the artifacts that reflect the work we're doing to analyze the game pads. And yes it's a book entirely focused on joypads. Joysticks will be mentioned of course, but we zero in the evolution of pads.
Feel free to comment on this, we already collected lots of feedback, which is very refreshing and insightful (thanks for those who sent comments and emails). The outline is almost there and we have lots of material for the different parts of the book. We'll post stuff later on.
Project description
This book describes the evolution of joypad designs over the short history of video games. It systematically tracks the process of change and how it happened in order to reach two goals. On the one hand, the book sets off to discuss the design decisions behind key interface attributes featured by this apparently banal class of artifact. It primarily focuses on joypad shapes, direction and action buttons as well as various other features that have enriched video game controllers. On the other hand, the book discusses the circulation and modification of such design attributes over time and between joypad models. Doing so, this work exemplifies general principles about patterns of change and highlights the specificities of this class of technical objects.
Among contemporary objects, joypads are peculiar given their existence both as physical artifacts and as interfaces to control characters in digital environments. Unlike joysticks, they correspond to a type of game controller held in the hand where fingers interact with buttons, sliders and tiny sticks. Therefore, observing this unique device enables to highlight critical implications about human-computer interaction and innovation in the field of new media: the intricate relationship between joypads and video game design, the evolution of game interfaces (and upcoming changes) as well as the evolution of technical objects in general.
In terms of theoretical framework, the book adopts an evolutionary perspective (Simondon, 1980; Deforge, 1985; Basalla, 1988) to describe the different paths taken by joypad design and to give the reader a critical overview of the underlying trends that shaped the various iterations of this artifact. However, the evolutionary analogy serves here as an organizing principles to track the iterative changes of objects and does not reflect any teleological assumption of progress. From a methodological perspective, this book is based on the ethnographical analysis of technical objects (Star, 1999), interviews with controller designers or the gathering of second-hand material about the design decisions that led to certain joypads (interviews, books, patents). Instead of adopting the common approach focused on studying usage and people, this work is based on the examination of artifacts. The systematic analysis of artifactual iterations enabled to build genealogies and to foster insights about patterns of changes (e.g. evolution of the number of buttons, evolution of the button/surface ratio). Furthermore, the evolutionary angle posits that objects are not explored independently but as being part of various lineages, which shares common design attributes such as controller shapes or navigation interface.
Such book targets mainly academic researchers in the field of Science and Technology Studies, New Media or Human-Computer Interaction as well as practitioners in the field of interaction design. However, the book is also meant to be relevant for video game fans who are interested in a deeper perspective about game controllers. It is intended to be short (140-180 pages) and illustrated by black and white joypad drawings and diagrams (genealogy trees, histograms as carried out by Deforge, 1985).
Fields of discourse: The fields of discourse adopted in this project are a combination of: - Science and technology studies (Simondon, 1980; Basalla, 1988; Akrich, 1992) for the analysis of technical objects and the description about how mundane artifacts are the product of various forces. More specifically, the work of Zimmermann (2010) about the circulation of cultural elements is informative for the analysis of how design choices about game pads spread and evolve. The book also relies on the work of Star (1999) concerning how ethnography can be applied to physical artifacts. - Human-Computer Interaction (Gibson, 1977; Norman, 1990; Gaver, 1991; Gaver, 1996) for the focus on interfaces and the notion of affordance. At first this term corresponded to the action possibilities present in the environment. This notion evolved in the field of HCI to refer to "the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used." (Norman, 1990). - New media studies and more specifically Platform Studies (Monfort and Bogost, 2009) because of the renewal of interest in platforms/technical objects.
Reasons for writing this book: The first reason to write this book stemmed from the personal collection of joypad we collected in the previous months. This material enabled to analyze and discuss the evolution of these technical objects and serve as the starting point for interaction and game design research in different contexts (workshops with students, seminar with practitioners).
A second reason is that the large majority of books about game interfaces are non-academic and take a descriptive approach with plenty of pictures but a limited analysis of their evolution (see for example Forster, W. and Freundorfer, S., 2003 or Miller et al., 2009). Our interested lies in providing an analytical perspective about joypads instead of a description of all the existing artifacts.
In addition, there is currently a renewed interest in studying artifacts (beyond their usage) in new media studies, as attested by the Platform Studies collection at the MIT press. We therefore believe the analysis of joypads is relevant both from the video game analysis standpoint and also as an introduction to the analysis of technical objects. Compared to other research foci (such as video game analysis or media usage), the joypad is a less-explored element that is paradoxical compared to its iconic nature as a powerful metaphor for video games. Because of the potential appeal of joypad to readers, the book is also an opportunity to exemplify general lessons about the history of technical objects (which generally draws upon artifacts that are less common for todays' readers such as washing machines or car engines).
Finally, from a video game standpoint, looking back at the evolution of game controllers is important given that the console manufacturers are transferring hardware cycle to the peripherals rather than console platforms. Furthermore, the disappearance of the controller in Microsoft Natal's project and its recombination in the case of the Wii and Sony's Motion Controller makes the joypad an interesting object to investigate.
References: Akrich, M. (1992), "The description of technical objects", in Bijker, W.E., Law, J. (Eds),Shaping Technology/Building Society, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.205-24.
Basalla, G. (1988). The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge University Press.
Deforge, Y. (1985). Technologie et génétique de l'objet industriel. Paris: Maloine.
Forster, W. and Freundorfer, S. (2003). Joysticks. Gameplan; Auflage.
Gaver, W. (1996). Affordances for interaction: The social is material for design. Ecological Psychology, 8(2).
Gaver, W. (1991). Technology affordances. Proceedings of CHI, 1991 (New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, April 28 - May 2, 1991) ACM, New York.
Miller, F., Vandome, A.F., McBrewster, J. (2009). Game Controller. Alphascript Publishing.
Montfort, N. & Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam The Atari Video Computer System. MIT press.
Norman, D. A. (1990). The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday.
Simondon, G. (1980), trans. Ninian Mellamphy, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. London: University of Western Ontario, 1980 [1958].
Star, S.L. (1999). “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral . Scientist, 43: 377-391
Tulathimutte, T. (2005). Controller Mediation in Human-Computer Play. Honors Thesis, Stanford University.
Zimmermann, B. (2010). Redesigning Culture: Chinese Characters in Alphabet-Encoded Networks, Design and Culture, Berg Publishers.
An interesting diagram encountered in London at the 'ergonomics' exhibit (thanks Alexandre Burdin for the two pictures). The horizontal axis corresponds to the duration of use of a certain button, while the vertical axis is meant to represent the frequency of use. Doing this enable to discriminate 3 clusters of remote control features.
As described below, this graphic emerged from an empirical study of remote control prototypes.
Why do I blog this? Definitely an interesting way to analyze a physical artifact. More specifically, this is a relevant way to visualize results from a study of how people use a remote control. It's also interesting (with regards to a design process) to understand how they employed this as a way to work out the buttons arrangement using this kind of data reduction method.
A similar graphic can be designed for joypads, considering the use of various buttons.
Spent two days at the RCA in London. A good opportunity to have some time to discuss with James Auger, Anthony Dunne and their class, give a talk to them and explore the "Impact!" exhibition. This exhibition is another highly interesting example of interdisciplinary collaborations between design and scientific research, as already discussed about this other project. As described on the web platform, 16 researchers have collaborated with designers from the RCA under the coordination of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Designers worked with them to produce conceptual designs (videos, photographs, interactives, prototypes, props and system diagrams and illustrations).
What's interesting here is to reflect upon the role of design. As described by Anthony Dunne, who curated the exhibition:
"Design can shift discussions about the impact of science on our daily lives away from abstract generalities to concrete examples grounded in our experience as members of a consumer society. It can facilitate debate about different technological futures before they happen, create dialogues between different publics and the experts who defines the policies and regulations that will shape the future of technology, and help ensure that we pursue the most desirable, and avoid the least desirable.
The design projects in this exhibition offer an alternative view of how science could influence our future. The purpose is not to offer prediction but inspire debate about the human consequences of different technological futures, both positive and negative.
There are no solutions here, or even answers; just questions, ideas and possibilities. They probe our beliefs and values, they challenge our assumptions, and they help us see that the way things are now is just one possibility - and not necessarily the best one."
Some projects were more revealing to me than others, I guess my choice reflects a personal choice rather than a judgement on their quality. Perhaps the most inspiring to me is the one called "Happylife" by James Auger and 3 other scientists. It basically explore the uses thermal imaging to analyse emotional states in a domestic context. This technology embedded in a HAL9000-like eye of Sauron can detect heat signatures (as shown on a video on the left on the picture below). Doing this, the system assesses a person’s physiological state and turn the changes into movements/dials on a family dashboard (with barometer-like displays). This project questions how imperceptible body parameters could reveal emotions such as guilt. What is highly intriguing (and smart according to me) is that the dashboard does not have any label... leaving its interpretation to the people who will live with it. How would this change social interactions in the family home? Would this electronic device enable family members to infer new things about their relatives? Would the device detect patterns invisible to people? All these issues are suggested by beautiful vignettes that I did not capture with my camera.
This Happylife project evolved from James and Jimmy's ideas about this notion of artifacts that would detect cues about our behavior and pre-empt what we feel and desire. Autonomous and adaptive devices have explored by science-fiction writers and researchers desperately want to implement them (sometimes urged by politics who find it could be a convenient solution against terrorism for instance). In their own words, here is how they frame their design research about this topic:
"The potential for this to go much further with the application of face recognition, thermal imaging and expression monitoring is obvious. The design challenge here is to explore how this might happen. How might products and services react to humans if they were aware of their mood."
Another project I enjoyed as the one called "The 5th dimensional camera" by Anab Jain, Jon Arden and three other researchers. It explores the notion of quantum mechanics and the possibility to access multiple dimensions. The project consists in a fictional camera that can capture "glimpses of 450 parallel universes suggested by quantum physics". By presenting such images, the two designers aimed at highlighting the "the strange processes at work within quantum computation to the wider public, and explore how they might impact our beliefs, our values and indeed our fabric of reality". To understand more the implications of such potential, the exhibit featured different narratives of test subjects who employs the camera in their own different ways.
Why do I blog this? these are quick and selective notes about the exhibit to keep a trace of what echoed with my interests. The two projects I mentioned as well as Anthony Dunne's framing are relevant IMHO in terms of how design research can operate and what sort of artifacts could be designed in such context. We're close to the idea of design fiction here.
People interested in this can also look at other write-ups by Richard Banks or building_space_with_words.
Marketing people, engineers and designers often rely on persona, i.e. fictional characters created to represent the different user types within targeted characteristics that might use a service or a product. In the history of human-computer interaction, some user figures have been so prominent that it is important to keep them in mind.
Two of the most prominent characters are Joe and Josephine, a fictional couple described by Henry Dreyfuss, in "Designing for People" with plenty of simplified anthropometric charts. Dreyfuss introduced what has been called "Human Engineering" in the form of this couple, his common denominators for all dimensions. Simply put, Joe and Josephine representing the numerous consumers for whom they were designing:
""if this book can have a hero and a heroine, they are a couple we call Joe and Josephine.... They occupy places of honor on the wall of our New York and California offices.... They remind us that everything we design is used by people and that people come in many sizes and have varying physical attributes.... Our job is to make Joe and Josephine compatible with their environment... consider josephine as a telephone operator". It wasn't too long ago that she had the mouthpiece of the phone strapped to her chest and the earphones clamped to her head."
Another good example is Sparky, the "Model Human Processor", introduced by two HCI researchers: Stuart Card and Thomas Moran in 1983. In this case, Sparky was less a persona than a model of user interaction with the computer. For these authors, the goal was to build a model of computer users based on their perceptive, motive and cognitive abilities to interact with digital artifacts.
Perhaps the most caricatural is Sally, the fictional secretary from Xerox PARC. You can find the following description in a conversation with Douglas Englebart:
"But fashion shifted. XEROX PARC was formed. The 'inn' thing to do was to focus on the 'real' user - personified at PARC by 'Sally' the secretary. She need to have a computer she could figure out how to use quickly and have her paper-based work on, after all, XEROX was a 'document company'. The thinking was very far removed from augmenting the executive 'knowledge worker'."
As discussed by Thierry Bardini in his book:
"the real user was born, and her name was 'Sally' (...) Two main characteristics defined this new model of the user: Sally was working on paper, on her Royal, but in the professional business of publishing, and she was a skilled touch typist. (...) Sally, "the lady with the Royal typewriter," once and for all validated Licklider's conclusion that the real users, "people who are buying computers, especially personal computers, just aren't going to take a long time to learn something. They're going to insist on using it awfully quick - easy to use, easy and quick to learn."
You can also traces remnants of Sally in this research paper where she's back with a guy called Bob.
Why do I blog this? This is only a limited list of classical persona in the history of HCI, I am pretty sure there are others. There were helpful in my presentation (in french) about how networked objects are designed with limited models of targeted users. As you surely realize, these fictional characters tend to exhibit important bias and flawed representation of human beings. Thanks Emmanuelle Jacques for pointing me to this line of work! What is of interest here, is simply to trace reasons of design choices made by certain "innovators" over time.
Back from interaction10, the annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Savannah, Georgia. A good occasion to visit the deep south (aka "dirty south 2) that I did not know at all. More observation on this at the end of this post, let's focus first in lessons learned at the conference.
Before coming, I was not sure about the whole thing, wondering whether the talk/audience would be into web-stuff or other concerns. After three days there I have to admit that I am really happy with the quality of the talks as well as the diversity of the conference formats. As opposed to lots of events, it seems that the venues have certainly contributed to the quality of the interactions (definitely no big hotel-chain lobby with their cheesy carpets). Furthermore, I was also glad to present my talk about failures and get some interesting feedback to go further.
Instead of a selection of semi-automatic writings of the talks as I've done after the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, I tried to put together a selection of insights I collected at interaction2010. Overall, I was struck by the following three elements:
Incentives and rewards
A recurring topic was sur toutes les lèvres: the notion of providing "incentives and rewards" for the use of certain services. Be it about changing one's behavior to reach a more sustainable development model or as a way to let people use applications they wouldn't otherwise. This was a term I've heard in talks, conversations, participative activities and side activities. The break-out group about Foursquare at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium the other day also connects to this discussion because I think 4^2 epitomizes by-products of incentives. Simply because one the rewards the interaction designers of this location-based system created turned users into point-addicts. Although the design community has always talk about this, my impression was that design was more about creating "affordances" than incentives. Where the former lies in perceptual and cognitive psychology, industrial design and human–computer interaction, the latter stemmed from economics and sociology. I don't judge anything here, I just see a pattern, perhaps design is well qualified to use both metaphors in its creative repertoire. The very notion for service design is perhaps useful here to understand this shift and I've heard someone arguing that an incentive was an "immaterial affordance" (which made me frown).
(someone typing notes without bothering looking at the blue-glow display)
About models
In addition, one of the theme I was interested in was the way designers work, achieve their projects and think. Which is why I paid close attention to tools, methodologies and abstractions. Fortunately, most of the presentation I attended showed some interesting examples of "models". See for instance the two examples below: Nathan Shedroff's model of experience/meaning (see his presentation for more) or Timo Arnall's interesting model of the 3 levels for designing networked objects, and the one presented by Mike Kruzeniski.
Shedroff's model was descriptive: as he explained, it helped him to show how meaning works in experience and the 6 dimensions of what constitutes an experience: significance, breadth, intensity, duration, triggers and interaction. As shown on this checklist, the role of the model is also prescriptive because it helps practitioners making decisions and acting upon other insights (i.e. user research).
Timo's model is different, it originated in the categorization of experiences with networked objects, which can be:
What was interesting in Timo's talk was that he showed afterwards how these three central aspects could be used to evaluate existing objects AND as a basis for designing new artifacts that could be used as an iterative cycle. The model is therefore evaluative and generative.
A third sort of model was the one showed by Mike Kruzeniski in his talk. In his work at Microsoft, his purpose is to connect engineers with a more emotional vision of innovating. The problem they encountered was that developers tended to cut features and design elements with a specific rationale which did not take into account emotional factors. The first model/metaphor they chose was the tree (cutting two many features of a product may lead to a weird tree) but it was not efficient. Thus, they adopted the "Body, Heart, & Soul" framework to qualifies, validates, and prioritizes the intangible qualities of design work alongside the more practical concerns of our Engineering partners. To put it shortly, categorizing features as "heart" or "soul" was a more legible way to prioritize (and suppress design elements). The soul is untouchable, the heart elements support the soul and the body is the rest. Each of this component has certain rules ("no more than 5 "soul" features) and it was a more humane way to prioritize than "p0", "p1" and "p2". This kind of model was metaphorical in the sense that it helped engineers talk in a different way, a "beginner's design vocabulary to start with an grow from". Additionally, doing the simple work of categorizing features in these 3 topics was about articulating what matters emotionally to users (and then making choices). In this case, the model is both metaphorical (to convey this emotional sense) and operational (to enable easier prioritization).
These three examples are interesting given they exemplify the use of abstract models by designers from the ixda community. It as if the notion of model had been re-appropriated in a flexible way to serve the designer's purposes, which is a relevant locus of observation. Make not mistake here, these are only examples I've seen and I won't generalize from this sample. I am pretty sure you would also find predictive abstractions in designers' work. However, it's curious to point them out to show how models here are more seen as "tools to give structures to help you think" than explicative elements. The difference between designers and scientists in the way they build and use models, some epistemological comparisons may be intriguing here and I feel I am just scratching the surface.
(Wifi data points on a post-it in the washroom)
Showing products or not?
My third comment on the conference was the surprising lack of examples/products/services in lots of the presentation. I expected a design conference to be much more evocative in terms of design examples and it was not the case. Of course there are exceptions (as if Matt Cottam, Timo Arnall or Dan Hill's presentation were exceptions) but it's as if all the potential examples had been vacuumed and resurfaced in Paola Antonelli's talk.
The interest in objects
The mention of Antonelli's work allows me to make a smooth transition to a trend I find interesting: the increasing interest (or the resurgence of interest) in technical objects and a way to talk about them, to analyze them (Timo's model is inspiring for that matter) and how the history of digital artifacts matter. In her talk, she described how objects have always spoken to her and she summarized an upcoming MOMA exhibit that will cover the evolution of new media/digital technologies. Perhaps it's just me reading The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (Henry Petroski), Carl di Salvo's new blog about objects, discussions with my neighbor or the game controller project with Laurent Bolli, but I am feeling a renewal of interest in analyzing objects (rather than users).
Not so much time for a write-up about the city itself but some pics are always worth a thousand words.
(The intriguing repartition of green pockets in Savannah)
(The pervasive presence of a local design school)
(Savannah has remnants of old shops)
(Luxuriance on the street, lovable pipes and nature around)
(Cultural shock for me maybe)
(Gorgeous brick buildings to be rented, a common feature in this town)
(Evocative drain pipe)
Yes, there's the iPad but it's a different Apple "pad" product that grabbed my attention. This morning, I received this morning a package from Honk-Kong with this curious gamepad that was designed for the Pippin, a console/multimedia platform designed by Apple and produced by Bandai back in 1995. Pippin was actually derived from the second generation of Power Macintosh computers. It was unfortunately a failure.
The game controller was called "AppleJack" (a name that eventually has been re-used because it's now a command line user interface for Mac OS X). White models like this one were called "Atmark" (for the "@" mark) and were only marketed and sold in Japan. What's curious here is that it features two interesting elements:
Apart from that it's quite common: boomerang-shaped, direction-pad on the left and four action buttons "laid out in the classic Super Nintendo diamond design + the button colors are a match for the PAL SNES controller" as pointed out here. What's maybe relevant in terms of design is the button shape with tiny braille-like dots to indicate the user which one he/she is using without looking at it.
Another curious aspect is the fact that the Applejack controller was sold with a floppy disk that contains the "Applejack Software Developer's Kit" for editing the `pippin mapping resource, and an Applejack 2.2.0 system extension file. Which means that you could customize the `pipp' mapping resource of the Applejack input device drivers.
Why do I blog this? this pad goes straight into the collection/project about gamepad evolution. Although it was a failure, it's definitely an interesting artifact that tried to innovate (trackball!) and its "boomerang" shaped was also the one Sony showed as an early version of the PS3 controller. A sort of evolutionary dead-end to some extent because of the trackball.