I've been reflecting on how much I do things differently, now that I'm surrounded by digital devices throughout the day - and also surrounded by other people, who are also linked to more than one device or screen. More often than not, we are all connected to the web, or at least one person/device away! I don't think we've figured out the "seamless digital lives" part!
Luke Wroblewski is a digital product/interaction/interface designer who has written about mobile computing and web design. His presentations provide a good summary of how smartphones are functioning in today's world, how they might be used in the very near future, and what designers/developers need to consider. "The tools are in our hands to really design experiences in a different way."
Presentation: First Person User Interfaces (pdf) "The design challenges and opportunities of interfaces that allow people to interact with the real world as they are currently experiencing "
I will be devoting a few upcoming posts to tablets, larger smartphones, and other mobile computing devices. I'll be hearing from the folks at Stantum later today. This morning I woke up and turned on the TV as I was getting ready for work, and the first thing I saw on my local station was this cute family-focused ad for the new Google Chromebook, which at $249.00, is affordable: I especially like the scene were a toddler stomps on a Chromebook left on the floor.
After my recent post about graduate research opportunities at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable, Connected Cities, I came across additional information about the project. The following is quoted from Charles Sheridan's 5/24/12 post, Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities:
"We aim to create new, cross cutting inter-disciplinary “Systems of Systems” Cities research methodology to understand key city challenges and technology opportunities."
Charlie Sheridan is the principal investigator of the ICRI Sustainable Connected Cities project, described in more detail in the following video:
Some of the questions the Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities plans to investigate, as outlined by Sheridan (below), are ones that probably need to be articulated for the general public, not just techies. By taking an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to research, this might just happen.
"How can technology “sustain sustainable behaviours”?"
"How can technology enable ubiquitous integrated services?"
"How do we protect privacy, security and disconnection in a city of a billion sensors?"
"Who pays? Who repairs? Who Profits?"
"How can you design and evaluate connected and sustainable services and user-centred information for diverse needs of city dwellers?"
"How do you engage city communities to participate in developing technological innovations that will improve their environment, transport systems and local services?"
My favorite:
"What novel interfaces and interactions are required to encourage participation of citizens, business and government?"
This is a serious, large-scale endeavor. I planned on wrapping up this post with a few pictures from my vast archive of examples of technology "out-and-about", but in doing so, came across a few photos that demonstrate, in a slightly humorous way, why this research effort is important:
Let's throw up a large-screen display to make the recycling process at the food court less complicated!
Let's stick these kiosks and displays over there and watch what doesn't happen!
Let's throw up everything on this display and see if it makes sense to the mom with a toddler in tow!
Let's get great-grandma (my mom) and the toddler (my grandson) together for some Internet-connected HDTV DVR DVD family viewing experience!
Let's just give toddlers iPads and see what happens!
(This little one gets to "play" with an iPad just once a week.)
I see endless possibilities here for the future of our cities!
Every little flower I planted yesterday came with a QR code. Are these biodegradable or recyclable?
I quickly learned that garden dirt and QR codes don't mix. It was much easier to read the informational text about my vincas on my iPhone, but I wasn't sure about exposing my iPhone to all the dirt, water, and beating sun. FYI: Gardening: QR Codes can be a Gardener's Best Friend
T-shirt slogan:
"This was supposed to be future: Where is my jetpack?"
I've been wrapping up the loose ends of the last few weeks of what turned out to be quite a busy school year, so I haven't posted in about 10 days! I have lots to cover, including interesting updates about a variety of tech companies I follow.
Today, I'm sharing a video from Sony that highlights the features of the company's iPad-like tablet in a creative way:
The video is the first of a 5-part campaign to promote the S1 and S2 Android tablets For more information:
"Here's a preview of our two tablets - codename S1 and S2.With the S1 designed for comfort and S2 built for safe portability Sony enters the Tablet arena with two very distinct offerings."-Sony
Note: If you are a new visitor, I work as a school psychologist in my "day job", which can spill over to evenings and weekends at times... I returned to school to take computer and technology courses back in the '00s, and started to blogging because it was a requirement for one of my courses.
I never stopped.
My blogs still serve me well as on-line filing cabinets, since I have a fairly wide range of interests and I like to drill down deeper into topics that strike my fancy. I'm curious that way. Because of my interest in interactive multimedia technology, most of my posts include video clips, photos, and links to interesting websites.
COMMENT Designers and developers need to think about off-the-desktop technologies as a new form of the web/internet. Information architects who understand interactive media/transmedia, cross-display/device, cross-platform, and interaction design within a broader context are sorely needed in this space.
The presentation below, by Chris Thorne, Lead Information Architect and User Experience Consultant working for the BBC, provides a good overview about this topic:
Over the past months I've been gathering video and photos of my encounters and interactions with digital signage as a consumer/customer/user during my every-day activities such as shopping, traveling, vacationing, and so forth, which will be included in a post or series of posts in the near future.
I have content related to interaction with various QR tags, interactive kiosks, interactive displays and TV on a cruise ship, an interactive touch screen at J.C. Penny, and more. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that my interests include user experience of DOOH, interactive displays in public spaces, and so forth.
Note: Despite all of the technological innovations in this converging field, issues related to context, usability, and accessibility are not consistently addressed from a broader systems point of view.
Albrecht Schmidt posted a link to the following video on his User Interface Engineering blog -
watch how the multi-touch surface is built from ice blocks:
The Touch Project is based in the Interaction Design department of the Oslow School of Architecture and Design in Norway. "Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Touch consists of an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural enquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions." -
reTouch is part of the Touch project, and it " brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch—all categorised according to actions related to touching. Using quotes from ethnographic accounts written between the late 1800s and the present, re/touch encourages designers and researchers to explore how touch is used by people to relate to one another and the worlds in which we live. Browse re/touch to create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios, devise game play, or otherwise think, make and do things touchrelated." -reTouch web info, Anne Galloway.
One of the members of the research team is Anne Galloway, a social researcher and the author of the purselipsquarejaw blog, which she recently resurrected after taking a year off from blogging.
Anne also contributes to the space and culture journal. I've followed Anne's writing for a while. Over the course of her Ph.D. studies, she has thought deeply about the intersections of technology, space, and culture, including cross-cultural meanings of touch.
Note: Nikolas Nova's Pasta and Vinegar blog is worth taking a look at if you are interested in design, UX, emerging technologies, pervasive/ubiquitous computing.
About Nikolas and his blog: "User Experience researcher at LIFTlab. My work is about studying how people use various technologies and turn them into insights, ideas, prototypes or recommendations to inform design and foresight.This blog is a selection of the material that I collect, especially in fields such as mobility, urban environments, digital entertainment and new interfaces. I am also part of the near future laboratory."
"Social review service Yelp has snuck the first Augmented Reality (AR) iPhone app specifically for the US into the iTunes App Store. The undisclosed new feature allows iPhone 3Gs owners to shake their phones three times to turn on a view called "the Monocle." This view uses the phone's GPS and compass to display markers for restaurants, bars and other nearby businesses on top of the camera's view...Blogger Robert Scoble discovered the hidden feature and posted about it on FriendFeed today. "
Video (in French, but easy to understand by the demonstration)
"Both GPS and a compass are used to determine location and direction being pointed at."
Kiosks have been around for a while, but with the increase interest in anything "touch", it looks like business is going well. As you can see from the pictures below, there has been a push to innovate the design and function of the utilitarian kiosks we've come to love (or hate) over the years:
As you can see, kiosks are multiplying and finding homes in all sorts of places. One example is TouchMate's SchoolDefender kiosk, designed for K-12 settings:
"TouchMate’s SchoolDefender is an interactive touch-screen kiosk system designed for use by K-12 schools to implement Visitor Management policies. After the visitor registers, the kiosk provides a stick-on badge that shows his name and picture, what areas of the school he may visit and when the badge expires."
You can even read the news on a touch-screen kiosk. Forget about newspapers or your Kindle!
Here are some kiosks featured at IBM e-business centers, created by Imaginary Forces in collaboration with Design Office:
Note: Design Office is now known as Jason King Associates, as George Yu, Jason King's partner, passed away, sadly, at a young age. George Yu was highly regarded as a pioneer in the field of digital architecture.
"On his own, and in partnership with Jason King, Yu completed more than 65 projects, many of them for companies involved in new media and innovative design technologies. This felicitous pairing of clients and architect meant that each could learn from and teach the other. For example, in a trio of “e-business centers” for IBM, located in Chicago, New York City, and Atlanta, Yu and King—whose firm was called Design Office—designed a conference table that used projected images and interactive technologies developed by IBM. In a more recent project, the Honda Advanced Design Studio in Pasadena, California, Yu borrowed an innovative fabrication technology from the automotive industry and used it to create a sensuously curved interior wall."
The academic year is coming up, and a new wave of students will be searching for good resources pertaining to human-computer interaction and related areas of study.A couple of months ago, I shared the following information on a blog post, but thought it was worthy of recycling.
The list is useful to HCI students, but also to people who have little background in HCI who find themselves working on real-life projects that require a good amount of this knowledge.
Dr. Jan Borchers' (Annotated) Top Ten List of Books on Human-Computer Interaction:
1. Alan Dix, Janet Finlay, Gregory D. Abowd, and Russell Beale: Human-Computer Interaction, 3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 2004. Currently the best, most well-rounded book I know to teach introductory HCI if you need to limit yourself to a single title. Technical enough, good breadth, not too fuzzy for a CS curriculum, very current, with a web site that includes resources such as sample programs, slides, etc.
2. Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant: Designing The User Interface, 4th ed., Pearson Addison-Wesley, 2004. Best overall reference book for all areas of HCI, providing an introduction and great up-to-date pointers to most sub-fields of HCI research and practice, especially different interaction techniques. His Golden Rules of User Interface Design and sample questionnaires for user testing are very useful in an introductory class. Unfortunately, the companion web site costs money after an initial trial period.
3. Donald A. Norman, The Design Of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2002. A classic text from 1988 with an updated introduction that, while some of the technologies described or envisioned seem somewhat outdated now, still provides the best introduction to the spirit of good human-centered design. A not too technical read with hilarious stories of badly designed everyday technology, it provides some very useful basic models for human cognition, such as the Seven Stages of Action. This book also introduced the fundamental concept of affordances to HCI. Changed my view of the world of technology around me, and is probably the best initial brainwash for engineering students to "get" user-centered design.
4. Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, and Helen Sharp: Interaction Design, 2nd ed., Wiley, 2007. This title focuses more on the process of designing good user interfaces, and is less technical, but excellent and up-to-date in the area it addresses. The companion web site has slides, case studies, and other materials.
5. Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions, MIT Press, 2008. A truly beautiful "coffee-table style" book on interaction design, also covering product and industrial design of digital technology (Moggridge is a founder of IDEO). It has wonderful short essays about seminal digial product designs, from Engelbart's mouse, to the Mac and Palm, to Google and other internet services, as well as articles on digital product design theory. My own Sweet Sports and Baroque Technology article was based on one of the theory articles. Special treat: video interviews and chapters are available for free, on a weekly rotation, at http://www.designinginteractions.com/.
6. Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences, Elsevier, 2007. Similar to Moggridge's book in style, this book focuses on the early stages of product design. It also includes very interesting stories of key interactive products, such as Apple's iPod. And of course it's written by one of the long-time key players in HCI. More at http://www.billbuxton.com/.
7. Terry Winograd (ed.): Bringing Design to Software, Addison-Wesley, 1996. An excellent and very well edited collection of contributions from key players in HCI, from Kapor's Software Design Manifesto to Rheinfrank's Design Languages. Its particular value also comes from the profiles that link chapters and give an insider's view of how some of the most seminal UI designs came to be, from the Xerox Star to VisiCalc and HyperCard. Terry has some information about his book at http://hci.stanford.edu/bds/, and I used it with great success when I had the fortunate opportunity to teach an introductory HCI class in his program at Stanford in 2002.
8. Brenda Laurel (ed.): The Art of Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley, 1990. While ancient by today's standards, this book is another carefully compiled and very coherent collection of highly relevant articles on HCI by some of the most influential people in the field. I particularly like the article by Scott Kim on interdisciplinary design, and Tom Erickson's chapter.
9. Apple Computer: The Apple Software Design Guidelines, latest edition 2005. OK, I'm a Mac head, but then many HCI people are because Apple has such an excellent sense of doing the right thing when it comes to user interface design. These guidelines have been around since the 90's, with several new editions since then, and especially Part I ("Application Design Fundamentals") contains excellent, system-independent, hands-on advice for anybody developing interactive software, especially desktop applications. And it's free! Apple's developer website has the latest version both online and as downloadable PDF. I often recommend this as a quick read for engineering types that just want the bare essentials to help avoid major UI design catastrophes.
10. Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, Addison-Wesley, 2000. Similar to Norman's book above, but more recent and more technical, this is another good first read to start thinking about user interface design, written by the father of the original Apple Macintosh. Some of the ideas presented here are quite unusual, and that's intended. Some related materials, such as demos of his Zoomable User Interface and The Humane Environment are at http://www.jefraskin.com/.
"So that's my top 10 list. I may add some more in the future. But I figure it's more important to restrict myself to those books I think are really outstanding than bother you with additional titles that don't really have that special something....For a good current PhD-level HCI reading list that is based more on papers and individual chapters than single books, see Terry Winograd's HCI reading list at Stanford University." -Dr. Jan Borchers
While you are at it, Dr. Borchers has a list of HCI hardware toolkits for physical user interface prototyping.
(I want to take more HCI classes and play with this stuff!)
According to the Ambient Information Systems Workshop (Ubicomp 08), ambient info systems are "a large set of applications that publish information a highly non-intrusive manner, following on from Mark Weiser's concept of calm technology.".
"The current research in pervasive and ubiquitous computing suggests a future in which we are surrounded by innumerable information sources, all competing for our attention. These information sources may manifest as both novel devices and as devices embedded in common objects, such as refrigerators, automobiles, toys, furniture, clothes, and even our own bodies."
"While this vision of the future has prompted great advancements in context-aware computing, wireless connectivity, multi-sensor platforms, smart materials, and location-tracking technologies, there is a concern that this proliferation of technology will increasingly overwhelm us with information. Our belief is that information should move seamlessly between the periphery and the center of one’s attention, and that good technology is highly transparent. We see ambient information systems as a way to support these ideas."
Ambient Information Systems Pics linked from Infosthetics:
Real-time data panoramas: "Once the stock market opens, our 3D simulation comes to life & people start 'breathing' business information"via Bashiba.com
" BASHIBA Panorama exploits the visual perceptual capabilities of the human brain. It harnesses untapped brain power."
Ambient Devices Energy JouleviaAmbient Devices "Save Money. Help the Planet. Track energy prices and your energy use with a simple night light." This device provides you with the weather forecast for the day, the day's high temperature, tthe current cost of electricity, your current energy usage, rewards for using less energy, and signal strength.
Affective Diary:
The sensor based Affective Diary is a collaborative project between Microsoft Research and the Interaction Lab at SICS. You can download the code from the application page. The source code is available as a Visual Studio 2005 solution.Here is a screenshot:
"To expand on the ways in which we creatively engage in diary-keeping, we have designed an affective diary that captures some of the physical, bodily aspects of experiences and emotions—what we refer to as “affective body memorabilia”. The affective diary assembles sensor data, captured from the user and uploaded via their mobile phone, to form an ambiguous, abstract colourful body shape. With a range of other materials from the mobile phone, such as text and MMS messages, photographs, etc., these shapes are made available to the user. Combining these materials, the diary is designed to invite reflection and to allow the user to piece together their own stories."
Ambient Mug Ambient Persuasive Mug via Ads of the World "The external surface of the cup is printed with a second layer of heat sensitive ink that is revealed when hot water is poured into the cup."
"a system comprised of a series of physical objects designed as individual playthings, but wirelessly networked via RF to act as both input and output devices for a collective visualization of distributed activity. These hand-held, translucent silicone toys have embedded sensors (for input) and 3 colors of LEDs (for output) which allow them to be reactive to both sound and touch. Action around one of the nimios will cause the others to glow in different patterns and colors. The interaction design is deliberately open-ended, in order to allow the emergence of distinctive patterns of collaborative engagement in real groups." Interactive Waterfall Interactive waterfall -Charles Forman, from Setpixel. (includes a video with nice ambient music.) The project was produced for the Children's Center at the Hackensack University Medical Center.
Wearables from the Reach project at the Interactive Institute, Design Goteborg: Scarf that reveals messages when it heats up.
Temperature changing scarves
Bag with sensors that measure sound level, light, and temperature.
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