We Need Collaborative Surfaces: The Shared IT Project & Other Research Touched by Yvonne Rogers and/or her Colleagues

Today I came across Doug Clow's blog post, "Tangibles, tabletops or mobiles:  Which is best for collaborative learning?".  In essence,  the post was a "liveblog", written during Yvonne Roger's review of her work of the past 10 years at an IET Technology Coffee Morning session held at Open University in London.

I've been following Yvonne's research for some time now, and I thought I'd take this opportunity highlight her work. (I've provided additional information for those of you who are new to this blog.)

Background (from my perspective)


Back in the early 1990's, I ran a "paired learning" study skills/social skills group three mornings a week in a computer lab, for a crew of fourth grade students referred to me (the school psychologist) for support for behavior, learning, and social skills problems.  Since many of the students needed to work on social skills such as waiting turns, cooperating, and working nicely with others, I decided to pair the students up, two to a computer.

Some of the applications were designed for two students, taking turns, but other applications were designed for only one person,  and for those applications, the student's were encouraged to forget about the "rules" and help each other out,  in other words, one student would control the mouse, and the other would be the "mouse-seat driver".  I spent some time teaching "mouse-sharing" skills.  One of the students was trying to grab the mouse when it wasn't his turn, and his partner whacked him over the head with it!

Moving on...


When I first touched an interactive whiteboard, it was 2002 or 2003.  It was a SmartBoard, and I was fascinated by the possibilities that it held.   Since I used it as a tool for group counseling and study skills in my role as a school psychologist,  I couldn't help but hope that a new version would come out that would allow at least two students to interact with the screen at the same time.

Better yet, wouldn't it be cool to have the group table offer the same sort of functionality?   I realize when people envision a learning environment, they are likely to think of students seated in single desks.  While this is the case in many classrooms, many teachers manage to focus on group work, such as group projects,  collaborative/cooperative learning lessons, or science experiments...even if they DON'T have tables. They push the desks together to form a "table".

In my life as a school psychologist,  particularly during my days at an elementary school,  I spent a good part of my day sitting at a table, with 3-6 students, for the purpose of group counseling, social skills training, and so forth.  (The speech and language therapist worked with groups of children around a table, too.)  You can imagine that something like the SMARTTable or the Surface would have been a godsend, provided that it came with a wealth of therapeutic activities and templates that could be easily customized to meet the needs of the students!

Interactive displays and whiteboards are now common in our schools and workplaces. There are a few classrooms that have interactive tables,  and these tables are also found in museums and visitor centers.  But there is much work yet to be done- in terms of content development,  hardware design, interaction design, and research. 

No one discipline "owns" this problem-space.  Better said, no one owns this "solution-space"!

(For more information about this topic, read "Don Norman's Keynote at the 21st Transmedia Symposium: Transmedia Design Challenge:  Co-creation" and "Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries in Interaction Design", by Eli Blevis & Erik Stolterman)


Yvonne Rogers has been a key player in this arena.  She is focused, but at the same time, takes a big-picture, multi-faceted point of view, something that I find lacking in much of the computer science research that crosses my path.  Yvonne's approach is consistent with other forward-minded thinkers in the field, such as

When she was a professor at Indiana University, Yvonne's team produced a short video to outline the types of problems when groups of people encounter when they share information and collaborate on projects.

What I like about this video is that it works towards solutions.  Although the video is from 2006, it still rings true.   



If you have ever worked with students in small groups forced to share one mouse and computer screen, some of the footage will bring you to a smile.


More about Dr. Rogers and her colleagues:

Dr. Rogers is the lead researcher of the SharedIT Project, an interdisciplinary endeavor that exploring how new technologies, such as multi-touch tables, gesture-based systems, interactive wall displays, and interactive tangibles, can support collaborative activities among small groups of people in a range of situations and settings.

Some of the people affiliated with Dr. Rogers and the Open University Pervasive Interaction Lab are highlighted in the video clip below.  The video was filmed at an event held on June 23, 2009 at th Science Museums' Dana Center (UK), in collaboration with the London Knowledge Lab.  The video highlights the work of researchers, artists, educators, and technologists, all exploring collaborative tangible, interactive technologies and surfaces.  Some of the questions asked:    What sort of new interfaces can support "collective creativity"?  How can these technologies support interactions between people who are in different places around the world?

Surface Tension:  Interactives and Workshops (June 23, 2009)

Surface Tension: Interactives and workshops from Dreamtime Film on Vimeo.


Yvonne was one of the researchers involved in the Dynamo Project,the topic of one of my posts a couple of years ago: Revisiting promising projects:  Dynamo, an application for sharing information on large interactive displays in public spaces.  (9/16/07)

Doug Clow provides a good overview of some of the SharedIT projects in his April 2009 post, "Low-hanging fruit: interactive tables for collaborative learning".    If you are curious and want to dig deeper, below is a link to the SharedIT publications web page, along with an assortment of articles related to Yvonne Roger's work.

ShareIT Publications

Hornecker, Eva (2008) "I don't understand it either, but it is cool" - Visitor Interactions with a Multi-Touch Table in a Museum. (pdf) IEEE Tabletop 2008


Rick, J, and Rogers, Y. (2008) From DigiQuilt to DigiTile: Adapting Educational Technology to a Multi-Touch Table. IEEE Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces. 79-86.

Rogers, Y., Lim, Y., Hazlewood, W. R. and Marshall, P. (2008) Equal Opportunities: Do Shareable Interfaces Promote More Group Participation than Single User Displays? - To Appear in Human Computer Interaction

PDF

Related publications of interest:

Rogers, Y. (2006) Moving on from Weiser's vision of of calm computing: engaging UbiComp experiences. In: P. Dourish and A. Friday (Eds.) Ubicomp 2006 Proceedings, LNCS 4206, pp. 404-421, Springer-Verlag, PDF version

Rick, J., Harris, A., Marshall, P., Fleck, R., Yuill, N. and Rogers, Y. (2009) Children designing together on a multi-touch tabletop: An analysis of spatial orientation and user interactions. Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children (IDC '09), 106-114

Harris, A., Rick, J., Bonnett, V., Yuill, N., Fleck, R., Marshall, P. and Rogers, Y. (2009) Around the Table: Are multiple-touch surfaces better than single-touch for children's collaborative interactions? Proceedings of CSCL 2009

Rick, J., Rogers, Y., Haig, C. and Yuill, N. (2009) Learning by Doing with Shareable Interfaces. Children, Youth & Environments, In Press.

Marshall, P., Fleck, R., Harris, A. Rick, J., Hornecker, E., Rogers, Y., Yuill, N. and Dalton, N. S. (2009) Fighting for Control: Children's Embodied Interactions When Using Physical and Digital Representations. Proceedings of CHI'09, 2149-2152. PDF version

Rogers, Y. and Price, S. (2009) How mobile technologies are changing the way children learn. In A. Druin, (Ed.) On the Move: Children, Learning and Technology. Elsevier. 3-22. PDF version

Rogers, Y. (2008) A comparison of how animation has been used to support formal, informal and playful learning. Learning with Animation, edited by R. Lowe and W. Schnotz, CUP, Cambridge. 286-303.

Rogers, Y. and Price, S. (2008) The role of mobile devices in facilitating collaborative inquiry in situ. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning. 3 (3), 209-229. PDF version

Rogers, Y. (2008) Using External Visualizations to Extend and Integrate Learning in Mobile and Classroom Settings. In J. Gilbert (ed.), Visualization: and practice in science education. CUP. 89-102. 

Rogers, Y. and Muller, H. (2006) A framework for designing sensor-based interactions to promote exploration and reflection. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64 (1), 1-15. PDF version
  

Brignull, H., Izadi, S, , Fitzpatrick, G., Rogers, Y. and Rodden, T. (2004) The Introduction of a Shared Interactive Surface into a Communal Space. In Proc. of CSCW 2004, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, November 6-10, 2004, Chicago, USA: ACM Press. 49-58. PDF version

  

Randell, C., Phelps, T. and Rogers, Y. (2003) Ambient Wood: Demonstration of a digitally enhanced field trip for school children. In Adjunct Proc. UbiComp 2003, 100-104. PDF version

Brignull, H. and Rogers, Y (2003) Enticing people to interact with large public displays in public spaces. In Proceedings of INTERACT'03, Zurich, 17-24. PDF version

Rogers, Y., Brignull, H. and Scaife, M. (2002) Designing Dynamic Interactive Visualisations to Support Collaboration and Cognition. In First International Symposium on  Collaborative Information Visualization Environments, IV 2002, London,  July 10-12, 2002, IEEE, 39-50. PDF version

Of course, there are many other researchers who are exploring collaborative technologies, and I've featured a good number on this blog.  I'll be sure to feature more, from a range of disciplines, in future posts.

I want to play with mice! Microsoft's Multiple Multi-touch Mice Preview

Hot off the press from Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group at UIST 2009!
Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse

"In this paper we present novel input devices that combine the standard capabilities of a computer mouse with multi-touch sensing. Our goal is to enrich traditional pointer-based desktop interactions with touch and gestures. To chart the design space, we present five different multi-touch mouse implementations. Each explores a different touch sensing strategy, which leads to differing form-factors and hence interactive possibilities. In addition to the detailed description of hardware and software implementa-tions of our prototypes, we discuss the relative strengths, limitations and affordances of these novel input devices as informed by the results of a preliminary user study."

The following video is courtesy of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group:



Music:  "Motion Blur", by Bjorn Hartman. (Bjorn is an HCI researcher and electronic musician.)

The researchers on the team: 
Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi, Dan Rosenfeld, Hrvoje Benko, John Helmes, Jonathan Westhues, Steve Hodges, Eyal Ofek, Alex Butler, Xiang Cao and Billy Chen


Here is a video preview/demo of the multi-touch mice prototypes from Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group Lab, courtesy of CrunchGear:

-CrunchGear

Problems with Kindle in Education: Looks as if Amazon forgot to do usability and accessibility homework!

When e-readers first were released to the world, I thought I'd be the first on the block to run out and get one.  But I wasn't, and I didn't.  Why not?   

• They are too expensive.
• They don't provide me with the text/content/concept/nonlinear/multimedia interaction I want (not useful for my purposes.)
  
• Issues regarding usability, accessibility, and universal design have yet to be resolved.

Problem: Not quite useful or usable for students.

Kindles yet to woo University users

Hyung Lee, The Daily Princetonian 9/28/09

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool...It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate...Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.” - Aaron Horvath, student, Princeton
Winthrop professor uses Kindle to spark new age of learning- but response to e-reader lukewarm (Shawn Cetrone, Herald Online, 10/5/09)
"About a month into the semester at Winthrop, the device has yet to garner many fans...
 “I don't really like it,” senior Cindy Satta said after class. “We used to highlight things we read, especially with complicated texts. We can't do that now.”    And Satta prefers leafing through paper pages over fumbling with the Kindle key pad. But, she added, it was nice not having to buy a book."
EDUKINDLE:  Kindle for Educators

Problem:  Usable and useful for reading fiction, but not much else.
I'm delighted to share Jakob Nielsen's reviews of the Kindle- he is an "older" guy, and given his background in the usability field, he's well-aware of factors related to reading text on screens.  I don't need reading glasses yet, but given my age, reading small print will become an important issue when and if I purchase an e-Reader!

Kindle 2 Usability Review (Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, 3/9/09)
"Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content."
Kindle Content Design (Jakob Nielson, Alertbox, 3/16/09)
" Adapting content for the Kindle e-book reader requires that you follow an unholy mix of usability guidelines for other environments........ Given these constraints, navigating non-linear content on Kindle feels much like navigating websites on a mobile phone. Kindle content designers should therefore follow mobile usability guidelines for many user interface issues, including the presentation of article pages."
Kindle DX - Disappointing (Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, 5/2009)
"Reduced crispness means fuzzier fonts, which again means reduced legibility and slower reading speed. Thus, Kindle DX is not likely to replicate the pleasant reading experience of Kindle 2. This is particularly catastrophic since it's intended for reading textbooks which are dense in word count...Seeing only one page at a time will reduce students' ability to learn, relative to reading books that display two-page spreads as the designer and author intended."


Problem: Lacking key features required for accessibility and conforming to UDL (Universal Design for Learning) principles.


NOTE: Somehow I missed the controversy about accessibility and e-Books! Since I don't have an e-reader and I don't know anyone who owns one, it was off my radar.

Apparently e-Books don't come with audio rights, and this issue is much more complicated than one would think. I am sure there are many sides to the story. In my humble opinion, much of this controversy could have been prevented if all parties involved in the eBook revolution had done their homework before the first e-Book came to market!   

National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the BlindFile Discrimination Suit Against Arizona State University: University’s Amazon Kindle DX Pilot Program Discriminates Against the Blind

"The Kindle DX features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud to blind students.  The menus of the device are not accessible to the blind, however, making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX"

"Darrell Shandrow, a blind student pursuing a degree in journalism at ASU, said: “Not having access to the advanced reading features of the Kindle DX—including the ability to download books and course materials, add my own bookmarks and notes, and look up supplemental information instantly on the Internet when I encounter it in my reading—will lock me out of this new technology and put me and other blind students at a competitive disadvantage relative to our sighted peers.  While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me, and these texts will not provide the access and features available to other students.  That is why I am standing up for myself and with other blind Americans to end this blatant discrimination.""
Advocates for the Blind Sue Arizona State U over Kindle Use  (Marc Beja, Wired Campus, Chronicles of Higher Education, 7/2/09)
Blind Access Journal (Darrell Shandrow's Blog)

Broad Coalition Demands Access to Amazon Kindle/Electronic Books: Reading Rights Coalition Urges Authors to Allow Everyone Access to E-books
Author's Guild Statement Making the Kindle Accessible to the Print Disabled(4/7/09)

Reading Rights Coalition

(Direct links to the member groups of the Reading Rights Coalition can be found on the home page.) 
The Kindle TTS Issue
"Shortly after the Kindle 2’s release, the Authors Guild, as an organization that represents some writers, protested Amazon’s deployment of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2. The Authors Guild argued that reading a book out loud, as occurs with the Kindle, requires the specific permission of the copyright holder. It also expressed a concern that text-to-speech could inhibit the development of the market for audio books. On February 24, 2009, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Authors Guild, which escalated media attention on the issue."
















CNN iReport Author's Guild Protest

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?
How Tech for the Disabled is Going Mainstream: Designs conceived for the handicapped, such as voice commands for PCs, often lead to products for the masses 
(Reena Jana, Business Week 9/24/09)
""Companies could look at designing for accessibility as a sales opportunity. Most features that are accessible for the disabled have great value to everybody," says Donald A. Norman, a former Apple vice-president for advanced technology who heads a joint business and engineering program at Northwestern University."

"While VoiceOver helped broaden Apple's reach to the blind, it also became a mini-engine for innovation within the company. "When we created the VoiceOver idea and concept for the Mac, we also realized we could take advantage of it by mainstreaming it," says Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice-president for iPod and iPhone marketing."

"At Google (GOOG), a deaf software engineer, Ken Harrenstein, spearheaded the creation of a captioning tool for videos posted on Google's YouTube site. His original intention was to help deaf users. But the company soon figured out the software could also help translate languages. That idea led in late 2008 to an auto-translation tool that allows people to add captions in 50 languages instantly to YouTube videos they upload, increasing the number of people who can watch and understand the clips" 

Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time) 
(Mark Sigal, O'Reilly Radar, 9/22/09)
In the above article,  Sigal digs into the history of Apple's past visions for the future, visions worth contemplating in 2009.  Sigal that believes the "iPad" could function as an interactive learning device, a chemistry and physics lab, a story-telling narrative vehicle, and an information and reference guide.  

Sigal provides some interesting scenarios that anyone interested in this area should seriously consider!



(Also read Sigal's "Apple, the Boomer Tablet, and the Matrix")

Adam Greenfield's Encounter with Fashionable Urban Screens

Curious?  I posted about it on The World Is My Interface blog, along with links to Adam's blog post and related information:

Adam Greenfield's Encounter with Fashionable Urban Screens: "jnd: An emergent vocabulary of form for urban screens"

Good News for Creative Techies: Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Adds Support for Multitouch!

I sort of knew something was going on at Adobe when I posted the following video clip on this blog a few months ago. Rumors can transform into realities, right?

If you want to cut to the chase, sign up NOW to be notified about the BETA release of Flash Professional CS5 BETA:  Adobe Labs:  Adobe Flash Professional CS5 BETA

Here are the new features as described from the CS5 BETA website:

•  Applications for iPhone — Publish ActionScript 3® projects in Adobe Flash Professional to run as applications for iPhone. Learn more.

• New text capabilities via the Text Layout Framework (TLF) — Get unprecedented text control and creativity with projects created in Flash. Advanced styling and layout, including right to left text, columns, and threaded text blocks, let you work with text in Flash like never before.

• XML based FLA files — Manage and modify project assets using source control systems and enable teams to easily collaborate on files.

• Code Snippets panel — Choose prebuilt code that can be injected into projects to increase interactivity and also reduce the ActionScript 3 learning curve.

• Flash Builder™ integration — Use Adobe Flash Builder software as your ActionScript editor within projects in Flash.

• Improved ActionScript editor — Improve productivity with custom class code hinting and completion.

This will give me a reason to brush up on ActionScript.    I'm a code-snippet queen, so I anticipate that I'll love the Code Snippets panel!



Adobe tries keeping Flash in Web vanguard
Stephen Shankland, CNET news 10/4/09


"Flash Player 10.1 also adds support for multitouch user interfaces, which are all the rage for good reason right now because they can enable an intuitive, direct interaction with computing equipment. There have been experiments with multitouch in Firefox, but it's a complicated issue in general since there's some contention about whether the operating system, a browser, or a browser plug-in is in charge of interpreting multitouch commands" 



 

Don Norman's Keynote at the 21st Century Transmedia Symposium: "Transmedia Design Challenge: Co-creation" (New technologies allow creativity to blossom)

Don Norman was the keynote speaker at the 21st Century Transmedia Innovation Symposium.  I noticed that his speech can be redistributed for non-commercial use, so here it goes!

DON NORMAN'S KEYNOTE

THE TRANSMEDIA DESIGN CHALLENGE: Co-Creation

I agreed to give a keynote address at the "21st Century Transmedia Innovation Symposium". Normal dictionaries do not have the word "transmedia," but Wikipedia does. That definition introduced me to many other words that neither I nor my dictionaries had never before heard (for example, narratological). Strange jargon aside, I do believe that there is an important idea here, which explore in this column.(Intelligible discussions can be found in the books and articles of Henry Jenkins (2003, 2006).)

We live in exciting times. Finally, we are beginning to understand that pleasure and fun are important components of life, that emotion is not a bad thing, and that learning, education and work can all benefit through encouraging pleasure and fun. Up to now, a primary goal of product and service design has been to provide useful functions and results. We should not lose track of these goals, but now that we are well on our way to doing that for an amazing variety of goods and services, it is time to make sure that they are pleasurable as well. Not only does this require emotions to be a major component of design thinking, but we must incorporate action as well, actions that use the whole body in movement, rhythm, and purpose.

In the bad old days we learned that thinking - cognition - was king. Emotion was bad. We were encouraged to memorize, to study, to think abstractly in words: reading, writing, and arithmetic prevailed.

But that is not how people have evolved. We are living animals, creatures with bodies, with legs and arms, eyes and ears, taste and odor sensors, vestibular and feeling systems. We use our bodies to understand the world: we learn from concrete experiences, not from abstractions: abstraction comes last. If cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interacting with it: judging, evaluating, and preparing to engage.

Games are the natural way we explore the world. Modern games are engaging, entertaining, and filled with learning experiences. They require thinking and acting, cognition and emotion, body motion and mental creativity. Games ought to be how we learn in school. Teachers should learn along with students. The key term here is "Engagement."

Transmedia is a strange beast. It comes from the world of commerce, where different people and companies used to own different parts of our experience. Transmedia talks of the new emergence of multiple media in common pursuit of a story or experience. Alas, it still focuses upon corporations, companies, profit making, and ownership. It mainly speaks of how companies tie together movie releases with videos, games, books, and websites. Blogs and tweets, social networking and telephone calls. Yes, this is a clever use of multiple media, but it is still based upon a distorted view of commerce: We make it, you consume it. The media moguls think of this as a one-way transmission: they would have their companies producing, with us everyday people consuming. Why the asymmetry? We should all be producers. We should all have a say in what we experience.

Let transmedia stand for those multi-sensory natural experiences: trans-action, trans-sensory. Let it stand for the mix of modalities: reading and writing, speaking and seeing, listening and touching, feeling and tasting. Let it stand for actions and behavior, thought and emotion. My form of transmedia has nothing to do with companies and formal media channels. It has everything to do with free, natural powerful expression.

There is another side of this new transmedia: co-development, co-creation, co-ownership. In this new world, we all produce, we all share, we all enjoy. Teacher and student learn together achieving new understanding. Reader and writer create together. Game player and game developer work together. This is the age of creativity, where everyone can participate. Everyone can be a designer. Everyone can be involved.

The personal computer revolution has been both liberating and restricting. We have gained access to powerful technologies for communicating with one another, for creating art, music, and literature. Everyday people could do extraordinary things. At the same time, we were trapped by the confines of a keyboard, mouse, and screen. Instead of actively engaging the world, we spent our days in front of keyboards and screens, typing and pointing.

Today, we are moving beyond the constraints of the mouse, screen, and keyboard. Now we can merge all the benefits of the information revolution with the benefits of movement and activity. We can post notes on buildings where only the intended receiver can see them, or we can let everyone see them, whatever we wish. We can play games or hold meetings with people all over the world, moving, gesturing, and acting.

Products used to be designed for the functions they performed. But when all companies can make products that perform their functions equally well, the distinctive advantage goes to those who provide pleasure and enjoyment while maintaining the power. If functions are equated with cognition: pleasure is equated with emotion: today we want products that appeal to both cognition and emotion.

CONSUMING VERSUS PRODUCING: SPECTATOR VERSUS CREATOR.

There is a major difference between the experience of consuming versus producing, or if you will, between being a spectator and being a creator. In the traditional view of media, most of us are consumers. Artists and companies produce, the rest of us consume. We are spectators.

There is nothing the matter with being an audience, a consumer, or a spectator. It is how we have come to enjoy the great works of art and literature. We go to galleries and view, theatres and watch, libraries and read. We can be casual or engaged, watching from a distance or becoming deeply embedded in the events of the painting, music, opera, video, or book. We can become emotionally involved, weeping or laughing as the scenes unfold.

But there is a great difference when we are actually engaged in the activity, whether as producer, participant, or creator. When playing a musical instrument, I am producing and all the senses are involved. I am engaged with the music and the playing. I feel the sound pulsating through my body. My mind is completely engaged with the music, not only with the emotional aspects and the sound, but also with the physical and cognitive complexities of the mechanics of playing. To me it is simultaneously frustrating and pleasurable. To the listeners, it is probably awful, but I am not playing for them, I am playing for myself.

The same holds true for the objects of our lives. We can purchase them in stores, bring them home and either display or use them. They may give pleasure. But contrast this with objects that we ourselves have created or, perhaps, co-created.

Consider the old story so beloved in introductory marketing courses about the introduction of cake mix. When the Better Crocker Company first introduced a cake mix, so the story goes, it was supposed to revolutionize the making of cakes. Instead of hours of toil, one only had to open the package of cake mix, add water, and bake. The result was a simple, satisfying cake. But the product was not a success. Housewives (which at the time was the target audience - college students and single people were not then considered a market) rejected it. After a bit of market research, the Betty Crocker Company realized that they had made the mix too simple: there was no pride of ownership. The cake could have been purchased at a store. It tasted fine, but it wasn't truly made at home, even if it was baked at home.

The solution was to modify the recipe to require the addition of an egg. This worked: sales soared. Requiring a bit of extra labor gave the cook some feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of being the producer.

Today, a reasonable number of products are designed to require work and effort on the part of their possessor. IKEA furniture has to be assembled by the recipient. Harley-Davidson motorcycles are customized by their owners: many take their bikes straight from the dealer to the custom house, and even though they themselves do not do the customization, they spend considerable time and thought specifying just how the finished bike shall look and behave. Similarly, many home electronics devices are customizable, with personalizable "skins," adjustable features, add-on components, and hand-painted exteriors. So too with automobiles. One could argue that part of the popularity of social sites is that they are personal: one is sharing personal ideas and thoughts.

But how much of this is creative? How much requires commitment and concern, deep thought and effort? Most of this is the simple following o instructions, whether for a cake or a chair. Or customizing an automobile by choosing among predefined options such as color and fabric. None of this is truly creative, none of this is truly meaningful.

Adding an egg to a mix that didn't really need one makes use of the clever psychology, but it is not what I call being truly creative. The cake mix, with egg or without, is mindless. Read the instructions and follow them: everyone's mix produces the same result. Following instructions to assemble furniture does not qualify, but mixing and matching furniture parts to create something personal, something special does. So too with the customization of the Harley bike. Even though the customization is actually done by the specialists in the shop, the specification and design relate to the specific needs and aspirations of the bike owner.

Music mashups qualify. Here, one takes samples of existing music and mixes them to create a truly novel experience. The result may sound awful or wonderful, but that is not nearly so important as the act of creation that is invoked. The world of "Do it yourself" or "make" relishes in creativity and imagination. Mashups work across all media, sometimes producing spoofs and satire, sometimes truly useful and valuable results.

Here is a simple example of a mashup that, although not deep and profound, does reveal cleverness and a sense of humor, creating a clever spoof of two very different events. The first event occurred during the televised presentation of an MTV Video award. Just after one award had been announced, someone (Kanye West) jumped on to the stage to complain that a better performer, Beyonce, had been passed over. The second event was a major speech on healthcare by President Obama to the United States Congress. Obama's speech was interrupted by a congressman who shouted "you lie." An enterprising mashuper recognized the similarities of the two interruptions and quickly combined components of the two videos so that the complaint about Beyonce was inserted into President Obama's speech. As a result, now one can watch president Obama delivering a speech on healthcare with a heckler interrupting to say "I'm a let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time," to which Obama calmly responds, "not true." That is mashup as satire. Mashups don't have to be satirical, of course: when someone takes census data, overlaps it with police reports, and enters all on to a city map, that is mashup as meaningful and important.

Good games can also create meaningful participation, meaningful experiences. Whatever the form of game - athletics and sports, cards, board games, video or computer - the players are simultaneously creating the experience. Perhaps this is why they are so engrossing. They provide a transmedia experience where people are simultaneously spectator and performer, and in the case of many games, using all of the senses, all of the body.

New technologies allow creativity to blossom, whether for reasons silly or sublime. Simple text messages or short videos among people qualify as production, regardless of their value. This new movement is about participating and creating, invoking the creative spirit. This is what the transmedia experience should be about. All of these experiences are allowing people to feel more like producers and creators rather than passive consumers or spectators.

THE DESIGN CHALLENGE: ACTIVE, PARTICIPATORY TRANSMEDIA

Transmedia experiences are not particularly new. Consider an opera, a musical comedy, a Hollywood (or better, a Bollywood) extravaganza, or an amusement park. All of these are experiences that cut across the media: sight and sound, motion and emotion. But all of these involve a transmitter of the experience and a passive audience. Creation is not new. Artists and craftspeople create. Amateurs artists and musicians create. Game players create. But in all of these activities, there are still creators and viewers. Moreover, the creativity is often limited, much as it is limited in so-called "personalization" of software or IKEA furniture: it is limited by the desires of the manufacturer. What is needed is meaningful, thoughtful creation and participation.

Jon Kolko examined this point in a thoughtful essay in Interactions Magazine. Assembling IKEA furniture is not a display of creativity, nor are any of the standard selections of items from a menu that go along with simple personalization or customization choices offered by manufacturers or websites. A simple, mindless twitter is not creative. True creativity requires some thought, some work, some effort. It has to be reflective, even if only after the fact. Mindless creativity has its place, but the real challenge before us is to unleash the substantive creativity inside most people.

The new design challenge is to create true participatory designs coupled with true multi-media immersion that reveal new insights and create true novel experiences. We all participate, we all experience. We all design, we all partake. But much of this is meaningless: how do we provide richness and depth, enhanced through the active engagement of all, whether they be the originators or the recipients of the experience?

How will this come to pass? What is the role in everyday life? Will this be a small portion or will it dominate? Will it even be permitted within the confines of contemporary commercialism? Those are the significant design challenges.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, Visiting Professor at KAIST (South Korea), and author, his latest book being The Design of Future Things. He lives at jnd.org

• Jenkins, H. (2003). Transmedia storytelling: Moving characters from books to films to video games can make them stronger and more compelling. Technology Review. http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/13052/

• Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

• Kolko, J. (2009). On creation and consumption. Interactions, 16(5), 80-80.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. The definitive version will be published in Interactions.

 Thanks, Don Norman, for this inspiring discussion!