Category Archives: Research

DIS 2010 Day 3 Liveblog

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Yvonne is taking the stage, thanking the organizers for inviting me.  Yvonne was worried about using her old power point so Richie Hazlewood helped with the slides.  There will be no pictures of slides yet.

A History of Turns

A turn to the social, to the home, to design, turn to emotion, and a turn to fun.  We need to take into social and not the cognitive.  It is legitimate to say we’re going to study how we put technology in the home, the work at Intel for example.  In the turn to design she cites Terry Winograd and others.  She credits Norman with the turn to emotion among others.

A turn to the wild.  DOing THINGS in the real world from the lab to the outdoors, made at least partially possible by ubicomp technologies.  Putting sensors outdoors and see how people use them.  It’s expensive and messy and unpredictable.  Why go wild? make a big differfence. 1) Creating something novel 2) Invading the real worlds 3) changing people’s behavior 4) Exploring what ie means to be human.  Yvonne wants people to go out and make a difference and in order do that she says we need to get out of the lab and do things that are not just incremental.

The Hunting of the Snark from DIS 02 Two research aesthetics technology inspriation and ludic engineering in the equator project between sussex, Bristol, and Nottingham universities.  It was to promote a playful learning experience based on the poem by Louis Carrol.  Explore physical and digital spaces by hunting this elusive creature.  Use a PDA to find things and then the digital found item is then something physical that was ‘food’ for the snark that they could use feed him and the snark would respond.  As they fed the snark they would capture its emotional response.  If the snark liked the food it would either be happy or unhappy and makes sounds.  Combining all these playful things together\, and because it was novel it made the kids question it, how it was done etc.

Invading real worlds. Cambridge Tourist Centre: enabling new group interactions which is an ongoing project.  This was based around an MS Surface.   Paul Marshall is the researcher doing.  He did an ethnographic study of groups that came to the visitor center.  What he found is that when the group goes in people go in for inspiration and one will go to the queue and the rest will kind of fan out and forage for some information.  Groups who go to the counter the encounter is often suboptimal in terms of who gets the information and the interaction.

So the assumptions of the project were there is a need for group planning tool.  They got an idea of who a typical group is, and based on the lab studies they had a good idea on how groups might collaborate.

So the solution since they weren’t designers they hired an Interaction Design, so they hired Matt Davies.  Aesthetics were very simple and easy to use.  When they showed it to MS Research they weren’t impressed because they weren’t taking advantage of the cool gestures or interactions of the surface, but to yvone and team that was the point.  There is an individual choosing phase where you pick cards of what you want to do and then there’s a group reviewing phase where you can see what everyone wants to do.  A plan is printed with a map, who wanted to do what etc.  The tourist centre was impressed however.  The local news did a piece on it and that is being shown now.  It’s a bit dark though.  There was quite a bit of coverage on it.  Paul then did an in the wild study.  It was an instant success with the staff, but the visitors didn’t go over to the site, so they had to provide signage and tweaking on the site.  They had to add cues as to where they needed to touch in order to start.  The amount of use varied.  They also discovered how wrong they were about their assumptions.  How people approach multitouch.  Often one person would join and the other brother won’t approach but will look on.  Slowly the second boy approaches after watching.  They also didn’t expect was that even strangers use it at the same time.  This guy is using it and another girl walks up and when the guy wants to print his map she gets a pop up saying are you ready and she keeps pressing no.  He swipes at the table and then leaves she then takes over.  Another thing is that often people don’t talk to each other as they use it, they are concentrating on the interaction.  They hardly ever got groups of 4 using it, but they did get a group of 2 who came and used it in just the way they had designed it to be used.  They had a donation box and they actually got quite a bit of money so Yvonne thinks that shows it may be economically viable.

Encouraging stair usage.

Richie is in central stage on the video showing how the carpets will subtly try to get you to take stairs.  There are a series of pressure pads in front of each elevator door and the start of each set of stairs.  Most people enjoyed the leds on the carpets, it made them smile.  The balloons were more vague though people didn’t realize what they would do or what they meant but there as a buzz about it.

There was conflict in the data, people reported some change in behavior, but not a lot, though there were some clear indications that the average changed after it was installed.  They don’t know for sure.

Next up is change, a collaboration between Open U and Goldsmiths w/Bill Gaver.  They are using the idea of social norms.  This is a powerful effect on behavior.  If the avg # of beers is 3 the person drinking 6 may reduce, but the person drinking less may increase, this is called the boomerang effect.  Household energy effect, householders were told what they were using and if it was more they decreased, and just the same the under increased, so instead they used happy and sad faces and this didn’t cause people to increase if they were doing well.

The Tidy Street Community

A cohesive neighborhood, but they didn’t want to have avg energy usage displayed publicly as it could be divisive.  Gaver didn’t like the idea either so theyh settled on using the national grid as a comparison instead.   There’s something like this called can I turn it on already.  So a kind of two dial approach is being used that is aesthetic and ambiguous but perhaps too ambiguous.

How do we inform our designs when changing people’s behavior.  Theory-based approaches may not be socially acceptable.. .and the slide wizzed by.

Why go wild? Explore what it is to be wild.  Extending sense, the e-sense project with Andy Clark, Hon Bird, Simon Holland, and Paul Marshall.  The final project is the question, a current project.  An immersive theatre experience for both the sighted and blind.  Maria Oshodi is the artistic director.  A haptic device directs people to oases of sound in a dark space.  Interesting differences in how different kinds of people used the performance.

Research in the wild, do it, it makes a difference even though it’s messy and expensive and unpredictable.

Paul Dourish is chairing this session and first up is John Zimmerman presenting for himself, Jodi Forlizzi, and Erik Stolterman on An Analysis and Critique of Research towards a formalization of a research approach.

Abstract: The field of HCI is experiencing a growing interest in Research through Design (RtD), a research approach that employs methods and processes from design practice as a legitimate method of inquiry. We are interested in expanding and formalizing this research approach, and understanding how knowledge, or theory, is generated from this type of design research. We conducted interviews with 12 leading HCI design researchers, asking them about design research, design theory, and RtD specifically. They were easily able to identify different types of design research and design theory from contemporary and historical design research efforts, and believed that RtD might be one of the most important contributions of design researchers to the larger research community. We further examined three historical RtD projects that were repeatedly mentioned in the interviews, and performed a critique of current RtD practices within the HCI research and interaction design communities. While our critique summarizes the problems, it also shows possible directions for further developments and refinements of the approach.

Research through design in HCI can be good as it’s holistic and designerly, it can deal with wicked problems, and more intentional constructors of a preferred future that is also possible.  The bad is that science and research is counted as equal.  There are breakdowns in the design research community.

Types of design research from Frayling: research into (on about) research for design, and research through design.

What is the intention of research, it may be connected to action research.  hrough Design: tThere is less agreement on whether it is scientific or not.  In general researchers choose methods that they know not what is best for the situtation (from Edmondson and McManus 2007).  Nascent and mature.  Nascent is when they do not know what phenomena are important, explore, theory as proposition.  Mature is increasing knowledge of a situation, works to investigate, condifm and refute.

Theory in HCI, in traditionally cog sci the thing must come before threory.  Moust then the theory of how hte mouse works.  So to see how this works they interviewed 12 leading IxD/HCI design researchers. Goals were to state of design research, design research and theory and what the challenges are.

Man he is moving fast, I justg can’t capture what is going on.

Frameworks, philoisophies, and implications for design.  When asked for cannonical examples they hesitated.  Maypole, Equator, and Designing Quality in Interaction were mentioned.  Beautiful things that can actually be put into the world.

A romantic view of design.  The genius designer is still alive in the HCI research community, there is a notion of design as a black art, something that will corrupt work.  There are not enough venues and there is no funding the NSF in the USA doesn’t fund this kind of thing.  There is poor service by design researchers, we need to review 10 papers for every one they submit.

We need a poper research methodology.  Better documentation of cases including evolution of and rational for the problem framing. Deatils on how outside theory is intefrated, agreement of types of problems Research through Design can best adress, agreement on what it means to be a high quality.  Not everyone agrees with this.

Q&A One person wanted to know who was interviewed, and we’re not going to say says John, but he characterizes it.

Bridging Designers’ Intentions to Outcomes with Constructivism by Kevin Muise & Ron Wakkary, Simon Fraser University
Abstract: This exploratory study investigates the value of constructivist theory for the field of interaction design. In this paper we explore how designer intentions and outcomes can be expressed in constructivist terms, and how constructivism can describe the relationship of design intentions to outcomes. This study’s findings point to the potential of an emerging constructivist framework. The authors present the findings of two case studies of designer intentions and outcomes from two museum design projects. The paper presents themes drawn from the analysis that include designing for personal experience, play, and social interaction.

How well do designers’ intentions connect with outcomes? How usefule is constructivism in describing the relationship between intentions and outcomes?  These are the two main questions.  Museums were used for this study.  Case Study 1: Kurio at Surrey Museum. Case 2: Bodywork2 in Vancouver.  MARVEL was used from Griffen et al 2005 to evaluate visitors experience.

Moving to the other session now I’m catching part of TTI Model: Model extracting individual’s curiosity level in urban spaces by Chihiro Sato, Shigeyuki Takeuchi, Takuo Imbe, Shuichi Ishibashi, Masahiko Inami, Masa Inakage, Naohito Okude, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design
Abstract:Recommendation systems have become widespread, however these systems only determine information inputted from the customers through a browser, and cannot be used when actually moving around outside. This paper presents TTI Model, a model extracting individual’s curiosity level in urban spaces on their spare time by collecting behavior data from sensors. It calculates person’s real time curiosity level by analyzing behavior depending on the walking speed within the city, such as window shopping or just hanging around by themselves. This paper evaluates this model with a sensor device prototype, and elaborates possibilities when understanding individuals in detail, by extracting the curiosity predicted from current behaviors using sensors.

By measuring how quickly people are walking in the Tokyo train station they get an indirect measure of curiosity.  They used a sensor in a nicely decorated brooch or something that can be attached to the wrist.  An interesting concept certainly.

Up now Human to Dancer Interaction: Designing for Embodied Performances in a Participatory Installation
by David A. Shamma, San Francisco, CA, USA at Yahoo Research, Renata M. Sheppard, Minneapolis, MN, USA Jürgen Scheible, University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland
Abstract: In this article we describe the creation and exhibit of a participatory installation performance. Graffiti Dance allows the audience to graffiti paint with light onto a building’s side and receive immediate local feedback from a set of dancers choreographed to respond to the movement on the public display. The installation is a holistic experience using a plurality of sources (syndicated news Images and Twitter) and local influences (from mobile uploads) that reflect our understanding of the world around us, how we speak out in public forums, and how we interpret the creative act. We present the results of the performance from the perspective of the audience and the dancers and present new directions for future performances.

A very cool and artful project!  I’m definitely going to go out and watch the videos of this one later today.  I loved that the dancers were able to interact with the audience, something that professional dancers don’t get to do normally.  It makes me think about how little interaction really happens in most traditional performance pieces.

Richie Hazlewood is up now after lunch with Bricolage and Consultation: A case study to inform the development of large-scale prototypes for HCI research. by
William Hazlewood, Indiana University at Bloomington
Nick Dalton, Open University
Yvonne Rogers, Open University
Paul Marshall, Open University
Susanna Hertrich, www.susannahertrich.com/
Abstract: We describe the many challenges faced when designing, implementing and embedding large-scale installations in a physical space, such as a building. A case study is presented of a distributed ambient display system intended to inform, lure and influence people when moving through the building. We outline the wide range of technical, user, aesthetic and practical aspects that need to be addressed; pointing out how many unpredictable problems can surface when going ‘big’, ‘physical’ and ‘out of the PC’, We argue that a different set of ‘non-user-centered’ processes are required. Furthermore, we suggest replacing iterative design – which is at the core of user centered approaches – with a ‘design-implementation’ approach that has more in common with the original Waterfall model, but with the new processes of bricolage and consultation added for progressing the design.

Big and outside the box, like the data fountain connected to the relative price of the dollar, euro, and yen and many others. DIY hardware platforms such as arduino and lilypad and fidgets are all examples. What does this involve? Not many people have studied what it takes to build such things. Normal UCD processes don’t necessarily work especially since iteration may not be possible due to cost involved with large concepts like this. Two skills that are necessary are bricolage (using materials that are at hand) and more poeple (bringing in other people into the process). More examples of large physical installations, and now the example of their project which is to motivate people to take the stairs. There are sensors at the entrance to elevators and on the stairs. There is a cloud or two different color balls with one color being stair climbers and another for those taking elevators. There are organic light patterns subtly encouraged people to take the stairs. The focus of this paper of course is on the process.

Consultation with outside people is the first.  Observation is the next phase, then bodystorming. Prototyping is next, looking at a number of different concepts may play out is what this may look like.  In this case they prototyped the clouds with mushrooms and tomatoes.  Doing this kind of thing quickly.  The next phase is shopping which can be painfully long, and involves going all over the internet and also many different stores.  Tinkering is the next phase.  Next is engineering, specifically physical engineering.  Next is calibration, and lastly is evaluating.

The process is descriptive, not prescriptive.  One person asks if there is ever failure in a project like this, when do you start to say it’s not worth it to keep throwing money at a project.  Richie says NEVER, they will always make it work.

Now I’m switching sessions so we have Do Emotions Matter in Creative Design? by Corina Sas & Chenyan Zhang, Lancaster University
Abstract: A wealth of research has suggested that emotions play a significant role in creative problem solving, but less work has focused on investigating their roles in design. This is surprising given that creative problem solving lies at the heart of the design process. In an exploratory study we interviewed 9 expert designers about their emotions during the design process. We identified several relevant emotions and extended Wallas model of creative problem solving with emotional components for each of its stages. We also identified ways in which expert designers regulate their emotions and concluded with a discussion of the contributions of our work for design methods and tools, design thinking and design expertise.

How do designers deal with their emotions during the various phases of design? A nice interview study.

That’s it for me today, thank you all for tuning in. Remember that corrections and comments are available.

DIS 2010 Day 2 Liveblog

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Sorry everyone I missed the morning session.  I got wrapped in conversations with people.

I’m in session A this morning. Up next is Intuino: An Authoring Tool for Supporting the Prototyping of Organic Interfaces by Akira Wakita, Keio University & Yuki Anezaki, Takram Design Engineering.
Abstract: Recently, organic interactive devices, inspired by shapes and movements of nature and living things, have been attracting attention. In order to implement such behavior, programming skills and mathematical knowledge are essential. Due to this, for the potential users of the devices, such as product designers, it is too hard to apply the attractive interfaces to their works. We propose Intuino, an authoring tool that can prototype behavior through time-line operations, spline drawing, or other visual PC operations. The system enables the designers to concentrate on their essential works of interaction design,i.e., selection of the sensor and actuator, and tuning of their operations. Through various practical examples and discussion about them, we will show that our tool can make the prototyping process stronger and can also be used as the tool for facilitation, debugging or creativity support.

A fantastic video presentation of this organic fabric covered  exhibition piece called Ephyra.  There were a number of hurdles in making the robot.  They used Arduino  with Intuino and now he’s showing a video of Intuino, which looks like the kind of arduino tool I’d need to use I’m not much of a programmer.  Really nice tool, highly recommendable, don’t know if it’s mac only or not.  There’s the answer, Intuino is an AIR application so platform agnostic.  A case study was conducted with 18 students who were stuying product and fashion design.  Now showing a student project by Arisa a flower that opens and blooms and releases a scent, created with arduino/intuino.  Several very nice examples, a therapeutic warmer moving eyes on sticker, a butterfly whose wings moved in an unusual way.  The tool helps with discovery via trial and error and debugging is much easier.

There was a socialization process of the tool.  Tools and activities were embedded into the workshop environment.  There were design workshops with crits, and weekly lectures.  Intuino will soon be available on the internet and they want to connect to MAX/MXP and others.  A good presentation, Q&A is quite good and it looks like they are connecting Intuino to several other platforms including Lego Mindstorm.  I’d love to see this kind of quick prototyping happen more at Philips Research.

Bosu: A Physical Programmable Design Tool for Transformability with Soft Mechanics byAmanda Parkes, Hiroshi Ishii.
Abstract: Physical transformability is emerging as an important element of interaction design as advances in material science and computational control give rise to new possibilities in actuated products and kinetic environments. However, this transition also produces a new range of design problems- how do we visualize, imagine, and design the physical processes of transformation? This paper presents Bosu, a design tool offering kinetic memory—the ability to record and play back motion in 3-D space—for soft materials. It is used for motion prototyping and digitally augmented form finding, combining dynamic modeling with coincident sensing and actuation to create transformable structures. Evaluation from a workshop with architects and interaction, product, and fashion designers is presented discussing the ramifications of physically programming motion with a new soft materiality, moving toward new ideas in body mimesis and material construction for kinetic design.

Why kinetic design? We should have physical kinetic interactions, things that people can really relate too.  Jodi Forlizzi’s study with the roomba is a good example of how peoples interactions were totally transformed by what she is calling kinetic design.  Approach offers kinetic memory the ability to record and play back motion in 3D space.

Stedman’s blanket project is a good example of organic and she showed a number of really great examples together of these kinds of things.  For Bosu they built several prototypes of how you can manipulate the form of the structure and then it plays back that physical manipulation.  Motion design workshops were split into inspirational sessions and building sessions.  Using a triagle part of Bosu she’s developed some fashion concepts.  These workshops were then evaluated.  It was a four day workshop with 11 participants, 6 male 5 female.  They were looking at how the design process would change when introduced to this new kind of design.

Fun video of a participant exploring physical space around the body, using the body as a pop-up book. Other participant videos this one by an architect.  So what are the problems with them? There isn’t a lot of availability of the pieces, and there were problems getting it all to work if you have 100s of actuators.  Coordinating the complexity of all of this was difficult, perhaps moving to a better tools such as Intuino may help.

Up now is LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware’s Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities by Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab & Benjamin Mako Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract: This paper examines the distribution, adoption, and evolution of an open-source toolkit we developed called the LilyPad Arduino. We track the two-year history of the kit and its user community from the time the kit was commercially introduced, in October of 2007, to November of 2009. Using sales data, publicly available project documentation and surveys, we explore the relationship between the LilyPad and its adopters. We investigate the community of developers who has adopted the kit—paying special attention to gender—explore what people are building with it, describe how user feedback impacted the development of the kit and examine how and why people are contributing their own LilyPad-inspired tools back to the community. What emerges is a portrait of a new technology and a new engineering/design community in co-evolution.
Lillypad is an arduino module that lets you make soft sewn electronic or interactive products. It has been used in a lot of different applications, many fashion and art related but also sports and this bag that tells you what kind of line to knit next.
In the long tail of hobbies is where lillypad is compared to more popular things like Lego Mindstorm. Tinkering is for sure in the long tail. She’s exploring this community, who are these people, who’s buying the kits, and who’s building stuff. Is the community a new community? Or is this a community that existed and adopted the lillypad and is this different than other engineering communities etc.
Leah compared the lillypad community with the arduino community. She partnered with SparkFun who sells Lilly Pad. She was able to find out that lilypad users were skewed more towards women. They were only able to document things that were shown online. They hired Mechanical Turk people to collect all this stuff from the net. They then collected age, gender, nationality taken from online profiles harvested from places like flikr and others. Hilarious visual comparison of arduino v lilypad creations, WAY WAY different. So among these builder documenters the arduino is 86% male 2% female and then lilypad is 68% female. Oops sorry missed the rest, but here was a % that is unknown. Now she’s showing the % of people taking these technology and engineering degrees.
So there’s a simple solution, just make different kinds of tools. We are limiting our vision of the application of technology. The images of lilypad, she argues, show what we’re missing from our community, therefore it’s important and possible to do it. Not sure that I really understand or agree with her argument even if I agree with the intent of it.
I’m not really sure where she’s going with this but she’s showing a lot of modifications of lilypad that were made by users solving design problems and one of them is now officially available.
So what does this mean for the larger community of tinkerers and engineers. internet + software + hardware is being remixed just as all the purely digital stuff. Leah encourages the HCI community to study this kind of community as it’s understudied.
If you build it they will come, this has to do with putting tech into different contexts that they understand and relate to they will show up. We’re missing out if we don’t take advantage of that.

Sorry for no reports on the afternoon session we went and enjoyed the fantastic ARoS museum here in Aarhus.  Full liveblogs tomorrow.

Reflections for the day.  Networking is of course the most important part of any conferences.  I continue to meet great researchers doing interesting things.  A big thanks to all my fellow twitterers who helped me get the more used hashtag.  I enjoyed the physical prototyping session a great deal.  It’s interesting because I’ve never put anything together with arduino ever.   I’ve used some demos with them, but I didn’t construct them.  It’s all just very cool stuff and to see some of the communities that are springing up around it is intriguing.  The primacy of the lived experience seems to be coming up for me there.  I’ll blog more about that in the upcoming weeks.

Well the big party here at DIS2010 is happening so I’m going to get out there on the dance floor.

DIS 2010 liveblog Day 1

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Richard Coyne’s keynote has starte, in Architectural design there has been much reductionism via cartesian coordinate systems CAD, CAV (visualitzations) and CAM (manufacturing).  Even when working with meaning in design reductionism was present in goals and subgoals.  Romanaticism reacted against all that.

McCluhan in Richard’s opinion has made many overstated claims, but yet must be quoted.  Talking about the ear vs the eye and how the ear held sway.  Tribe v civilization.  There were still lots of ideas of disconnection and reduction.

What is it to be engaged in cultures of the ear.  In his work they’ve been playing with this idea.  A series of sound boxes.   The main point was the importance and value of looking at sound and understanding the antagonism that’s there.  There the4 (re)turn to the body. Embodiment and gesture among many others. McCluhan talks about sound and gesture.  The gestures according to Ingold is about thinking, embodied thinking.

Tuning as a sonic metaphor, this seems to be the big message here.  Sonic objets trouves, with teapots and cups with sensors.  The line between tweaking, calibrating, and performance was very blurry.  Richard calls that tuning, distuning, or playing around with tuning.

Tuning involves mechanical components, tolerance, adjestment, calibation.  These are all small repetitive invremental movements.  There is a lot of synchronization .  Mumford, who to some extent inspired McCluhan, talked about clocks.  Clocks don’t keep track of the hour but synchronizes the actions of men. (From technics and Civilizations he also goes into historical aspects like Roman water clocks etc).

Calibration is really key in science.  Gallileo talking about all the adjustments he had to make with his early equipment.  So as scince is so dependent on instruments, there is a lot of calibration.  Standardization implicates ideas of small adjustments and coming into alignment.  When we think about interaction design and in computer animation motion capture systems there has to be calibration between the sensors and the system.  In all of these sensor systems there is tuning and adjustments in all of this.

Now back to Vitruvius one of the first design theorists.  Proportions and keep coming up.  There is a word that keeps coming up is adjustment, and can be understood as tuning.  Adjustments for proportions and and other ways of adjusting things.

Tuning in the environment.  Mary Shafer wrote the tuning of the world, somewhat based on McCluhans idea of returning to the world of the ear.  The earth forms the body of an instrument across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand.  We need to find the secret of that tuning.

Heidegger talks about attunment in being and time (Stimmung) and Alfred Schutz talks about mututal tuning-in relationship.

Now we’re moving into what a metaphor is.  The relationship of  ’is’.  Metaphor and misclassification, this is a kind of mistuning.  Ricouer talks about this. Metaphorical truth and literal falsity.

Tuning as a metaphor is where Richard wants to go here.  The mobile device as theatre, globe, navigator, etc.  So mumford’s idea of clocks as syhcronization the mobile device as synchronizing and so we tune our interactions between ourtselves and the environemnt.

Vincente Rafael, the cell phone and the crowd, an essay about how demonstrations in the Philippines were facilitated by cell phones.   This is one example of technology and esp mobile devices tuned and synchronized.  They enabled estrangement, I’m not really sure what he means here.

This idea of practices, and how they change and are tuned with emerging micro pratices and short lived practices with emerging technologies.  Examples of phones in public environements with camera and how things come and go.  We try different things and try different things and tune.  Michael bull talks about ipod culture, creating a sonic bubble.  Using technology to mediate the environment and this is also a kind of tuning.

In museums people take pics with their phones because there is no flash, do this over and over again, and why and for what purpose.  So we take pictures holding the device away from ourselves, and how this has changed from traditional cameras, but we stoop over computers.

Mashups as tuning as well.  Instatracker is an example.  This is reminscent of bricolage, objet trouve etc bringing all kinds of things together and adjusting them.  These adjustments and mashing together is a kind of tuning.

John Urry writes about tourism, and tourism with mobile devices.  The gaze of the tourist renders extraorinary activites that otherwise would be mundane and everday.  Tourist desitinations can be “sensuously other” in everday practices.  We’re hybrid assemblies of humans objecgts and technologies that travel around and configure the environment.

From concentrations of expertise to a demovratizations of inovation, crowd sourcing, shareware, open source, gift society etc.  I’m really not clear how this relates to tuning and metaphor at all.  From mobile phones to fully-featured smartphones.  From users to actors.  These are shifts in metaphor.

Detuning estrangement, defamiliarization, desnsitizations, distinction. difference.  Why tuning, it shifts the focus to the faltering aspects of equipment rather than its idealized seamles operation. Standardization and recalibraion.  MObility and tuning. How individuals use devices to tweak and tune their interactions.  In military terms there is the idea of sending out scouts and getting the information back and then retuning plans, just as technological systems sending out packets.

Malcolm McCullough talks about HCI and ubicomp, and even in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and a few other references I didn’t catch.

Q&A now

Paul Dourish asks about different types of tuning.  Tuning of a group to a single source or mutual tuning within people.  Which of these two kinds of metaphors can/should we use in design?  Architecture it’s often the first one say s Richard.

Geraldine is asking about appropriation, people are surprised when a system is then appropriated and changing the value and meaning of the system.  It’s usually portrayed as a good thing, but it’s a kind of failure of the design too.  Didn’t catch the response on this one.

Q: In design we often go for tuning and harmony, but there is clearly a kind of distuning that can encourage interaction.  Is there a sweetspot there? A: This needs to be played with.

Big round of applause.  Apologies if I messed up parts of it, this is a best effort kind of thing.

Paul Dourish in next.  Always an excellent entertaining speaker. Title: HCI and Environmental Sustainability: The Politics of Design and the Design of Politics
Abstract: Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective solution. Research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism highlight some missing elements in contemporary HCI analysis, and suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI. In particular, I propose that questions of scale – the scales of action and the scales of effects – might provide a useful new entry point for design practice.

The paper has a long history started a few years ago a theme that has been going for a while in CHI DIS and other places combining sustainability and interactive systems. We’ve seen a lot of papers and projects being done on this topic. There are three broad parts of this:Sustainability of our practices, understanding tech use in sustainability, interaction design in support of environmental sustainability.

There are a lot of applications that help people reflect on their everyday life in order to change things that will help make them more sustainable. There is a good paper on mapping all of these in HCI from CHI last year by DiSalvo et al. The assumptions made by these papers is his starting point. Environmental action as individual moral choices. Markets as tool, assuming rational actors, perfect knowledge, self-intrerested choices etc. Environment and environmentalism as stqable, objective, natural facts. This is a kind of idea about the environment used to be something that was going to kill you, now we go out and visit it on the weekends. Scientific citizenship and expertise, Brian Winn’s work in the STS community talks about this kind of thing.

We’re forgetting other things though, the political context of sustainability.  Things such as market regulation, cap and trade offsets and all of these kinds of things to force market economics on this.  Scientific citizenship that has a kind responsible action in the world.  The relationship between individual action and collective action.  What are the implications of focusing on these kinds of things.

In Scandinavia they’ve engaged with design and politics, but in other kinds of HCI we’ve avoided it.  CS doesn’t want to touch politics.  Ferguson, 1994 a developmental anthropologist talks about the anti-politics.

Ecotopianism by David Pepper talks about this in a few papers.  He’s talking about some people who have fairly extreme positions on this.  Change and stasis, local and global, modern and postmodern, scale and action are the four sets of ideas he engages with.

Change and stasis, the regressive nature of ecotopian stasis.  The tension lies in the need to change a series of things in order to get to a sustainable state and once there it must be maintained.  Any deviation from that stasis is not to be allowed.  He equates stasis as regression, and how do maintain all of these things?  Technologies of monitoring and regulation are kinds of things that tend to fit into this category.

Local and global.  Diversity (eco and bio-) and universalism.  What will work in one place won’t work in another.  The forms are universal, but there is a tension what happens on a local level.  We often do an ethnographic study and then we apply it to large groups.  We often

Modern and Postmodern. Polyvocal, provisional v technological progress.  We tend to focus on local needs but we often bring in universal technological solutions.

Scale and action.  Scale is the more important, the relationship between  the knowledge we have and the action that we do.  Scale is both spatial and social.  Spatial is where you can affect things physically, i.e. locally.  Social scale is about how we are all connected socially.  Strategic essentialism in environmentalism, and acting as a member of a collective.

There is a lot of ongoing work.  ”code green” is something that Dourish and his lab have been working on.  Connecting people together through their actions and building a collective frame or frames.  This involves social movement theory.

The design of politics.  Digital media as sites of action.

Rushed through the last bit so I missed it.

Q&A Q:Geraldine asks why he left out the work done in Sweden about ludic ways. A: well the paper already had 60 references and he played with the typography a bit, but he tends to agree there are other ways of doing this.

Q: How are we addressing things on a scale that we don’t really understand.  This was also mentioned by Richard. How are we doing this? A: Playing with notion of scale is something that can be difficult and they’re working on this in the lab now.  Social movement theory again is coming up.

LaDantec et al

Abstract: The design and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now evolved beyond its workplace origins to the wider public, expanding to people who live at the margins of contemporary society. Through field work and participatory co-design with homeless shelter residents and care providers we have explored design at the common boundary of these two “publics.” We describe the design of the Community Resource Messenger (CRM), an ICT that supports both those in need and those attempting to provide care in a challenging environment. The CRM consists of three components: 1) a message center that pools messages to and from mobile users into a shared, persistent forum; 2) a text and voice messaging gateway linking the mobile phones of the homeless with the web-enabled computer facilities of the care providers; 3) a shared message display accessible from mobile texting, voice, e-mail, and the web, helping the two groups communicate and coordinate for mutual good. By democratizing design and use of technology at the margins of society, we aim to engage an entire “urban network,” enabling shared awareness and collective action in each public.

Two publics, Dewey introduced this idea in one of his books.  A public is particular and there are many of them.  Publics form via action on issues.  Technology can be a catalyst to create and organize publics.

The homeless shelter was a first time short term shelter for women and their children.  They had to deal with information overload.  So many places they needed to go to take care of paperwork and dealing with case workers.  This was very difficult.  Maintaining social support was hard because they moved, often it was across the city, but people also came from out of state or farther away.  Building trusted relationships was hard, this was primarily with the shelter staff, but also with other mothers in the shelter.  Transience and impermanence was something that was everywhere.  There were distinct generations of families that went through.  So these mothers and children were one public.

The other public is the staff.  There are lots of other publics they could choose, but these are the two they chose.  The staff confronted the following issues.  Managing multiple relationships, dealing with many different women and in a short period of time in the evenings and mornings.  Coordinating cooperative actions between weekend and weekday activities.  Coping with resource constraints was  a big thing they needed to deal with internally and externally.  No one shelter offers all the services that a person needs.  Ideological alignment is something that was a pervasive problem.  There are different ideas of what good care should be and there was some different ideas and having everyone on the same page helped.

So they took all of these ideas and put them into a “pretty standard design process.”  They created a kind of customer relationship management.  There were SMS parts to this and a community message board and a large display in the shelter.  SMS and voicemail, i.e. mobile phones are the main way they communicate.  Familiarity was very high with mobile phones was the best way to do this.  Apps and web sites and apps just won’t do for them.  All they need to know is how to use their phone’s two basic functions.  Almost all the women had mobile phones, and they provided phones to the few that didn’t.

Stepping back there is a deeply optimistic notion in publics as well as people who design technology interventions.  Publics as a framing for democratization.  The challenge of participation is always there in design, but then there’s new people coming in, and how do get those people to use it.

Q: What makes using the notion of publics different than other ways of involving stakeholders? *by me A: He’s working on it.

Q: Did you think of a non technology solution? A: A bit, but the circumstances led us to believe that technology was the best way to go.
Participatory Sensing in Public Spaces: Activating Urban Surfaces with Sensor Probes

Stacey Kuznetsov & Eric Paulos, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: Recent convergence between low-cost technology, artform and political discourse presents a new design space for enabling public participation and expression. We explore non-experts’ use of place-based, modular sensors to activate, author and provoke urban landscapes. Our work with communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people suggests design opportunities for merging grassroots data collection with public expressions and activism. Members of each community were given probes that represent the measurement of exhaust, smog, pathogens, chemicals, noise or dust, and asked to engage with them as fully functional sensors over the course of one week. Our findings offer insights into participation, environmental sensing, and data sharing within and across four different communities, revealing design implications for future sensing systems as instruments of social currency and political change.

Using “sensors” to see what people think about various things.  People could put them different places.  None of the sensors actually measured anything but made people think about various things.  It can broadcast concerns about things.  Sorry folks I was distracted during this talk, the presentation had lovely pictures taken by participants throughout.  I like the approach, and the idea, but the design implications weren’t particularly clear.

Break for lunch.  My 20 min nap turned into a 40 min snoozefest so I missed a talk. Picking back up with Social distance, mobility and place: Global and intimate genres in geo-tagged photographs of Guguletu, South Africa
by Marion Walton. A kind of mashup of tourist and local photos posted through MMS and other means give an interesting look at space/place and sociality. All early adopters in this system and a very interesting idea.

TouchFace: the Interaction between Cursors and Live Video Images for Casual Videoconferencing by
Yujin Tsukada, Hitachi Ltd. and University of Maryland
Francois Guimbretiere, Cornell University and University of Maryland

This is about adding touch to video conferencing such as skype or ichat. In previous systems there was interaction between images each other images and in games and other applications you can interact between avatars, with Touchface you can do both.  As you mouse over various parts of the generated avatar the cursor changes from pat to stroke, to tocuh, to slap.  Pat is on the top of the head, touch is on the face.  Slap is the sides of the face.  Your own generated silhouette also reacts to the interactions.  It was lol funny to watch the interactions of slapping.  Stroking someones head seems interesting.

Suki Grandhi is next with Telling Calls:Informed Call Handling Decisions. Reducing the negative impacts on one’s local context such as being in a movie, although interruptions can be of potential value. If we provide more information about who is calling and in what circumstances will it help make better decisions on whether to take a call or not. It’s a smartphone application that one uses. 8 types of information one may enter all optional. Subject, location, activity, callers estimated length, people they are with, urgency, and mood. It was implemented on an AT&T Tilt Smartphones on WinMobiloe6. These were determined by a previous survey study. There is a single unified interface between senders and receivers.

Those who received the calls found it very useful, though those who placed the calls found it somewhat onerous.  Design implications: prioritize information presented by caller, make it easy to enter information.

After the break we’re now in Design’s Processional Character by Swan et al.
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the ideas behind and reactions to a prototype online tool designed, in-house, for an art college’s interaction design department. The web-based prototype, the Digital Scrapbook, was initially intended as a tool for tutors to oversee their students’ work. However, our ongoing discussions with the department’s members indicate that it is more interesting to its target audience for a variety of other reasons, including its role in design inspiration; group representation and collaboration; and as a repository for documenting the creative process. We speculate on the reasons behind this by further reflecting on the reactions to the tool. We come to the conclusion that members of the department value the Digital Scrapbook because it is seen to reflect the processional character of design. That is, we suggest the system is seen as promising because it reveals the often messy, unintended and meandering routes design can follow. In closing, we suggest how we might support further ways of displaying design’s processional character and discuss the broader implications of displaying collective processes.
The processional from Ingold Walking the Plank (2006). In walking every step is a development of the one before and preparation for the following. The same is true of every stroke of the saw. Like going for a walk, wsawing a plank has the character of a journey that proceeds from place to place, through a movement that–though rhythmic and repetitive–is never strictly monotonous.

The aims of the talk are: 1 use of a design tool the digital scrapbook 2 a distinvtive design culture, 3) implications of design (?). Reflection in action by Shoen. Because Swan was asked NOT to do ethnography in the department she stared using digital scrapbook. It’s made to help the staff and faculty know what the students are working on. Students were posting things all over and in all kinds of formats. The technical coordinator thought this could be improved and so the digital scrapbook brings together all of these things from all over via RSS and other technologies and it aggregates them together visually. Tutors could use this to monitor students, but it was unexpectedly appropriated to let everyone know what each other are doing. Looking at each others work is what people ended up using it for the most.
Though they has places to go to including a shared space where everyone worked the digital scrapbook made it all accessible in a different way. People expressed repeatedly in using the scrapbook as a source of inspiration. It allowed view into works-in-progress and the process that wasn’t available on a day to day basis. Documenting process is something that many students struggled with and the faculty wanted more. The tutors found that one students photos helped them explain things to other students and eased the burden of documenting. There was unexpected juxtapositions from thing in the department and also showed links to things that were happening in other departments. There was a sense of process, seeing what was happening. I couldn’t capture the lessons and Implications, but they are in the paper. Swan emphasizes that it did these things by accident. It proved very compelling to use, so we may not know to design for emergence.
In conclusion: The department 1) Collective displays of the processional 2) Demonstrations of creativity.

Investigating the Relationship Between Imagery and Rationale in Design by  Shahtab Wahid, Stacy M. Branham, D. Scott McCrickard, Steve Harrison

Abstract: Artifacts can be used to inspire, guide, and create new designs. As approaches to design can range from focusing on inspiration to formalized reasoning, we seek to create and study artifacts that combine the use of images and rationale. In this paper, we contribute an understanding of the relationship between imagery and rationale through an investigation of an artifact made of both. Through a study of group design sessions, we find images can provide access to rationale, moments of inspiration can be balanced with rationale, and differences between images and rationale must be reconciled. We conclude with thoughts on how such artifacts might be leveraged by the design community.

McCrikard is presenting, but Wahid is looking for a job, please hire him.  Hilarious plug by McCrikard.  Starting with definitions of images and design rationale.  Meaning of imagery has to be determined.  Avoiding discrepancies in how the image is interpreted for the system being designed, e.g. spontaneous notification card being used as a phone card. Rationale is used to check interpretation and link to other cards.  Rational often triggers the use of other cards. Conclusions: the key relationships between imagery and rational are access, balance, and reconciliation.  Must provide rationale in a designer digstible and highly accessible format.  Must balance vontrol over design with design to reuse. Ongoing directions: tools for connecting imagery and rationale, real-world usage and more.

Ideation Decks: A Card-Based Design Ideation Tool

Michael Golembewski & Mark Selby, University of Nottingham
Abstract: Ideation Decks is a project that explores the development of a methodological tool for design ideation. It involves the creation and use of bespoke project-specific card based systems which help to define constrained design problems within a broader overall problem space. Use of this system is intended to support the practice of parallel design by design practitioners, and to help more effectively explore specific problems by aiding in iterative design explorations.

Designers can create their own decks of cards that will help them in ideation and exploring a design space. This looks like a very nice idea. This is not meant as a criticism of the method, because I quite like it, but I wonder what the appropriate venue is for things like this. Honestly I love coming to a conference and hearing about new methods, but is this scientific knowledge? Especially considering the number of card-based ideas that are out there. I’m not going to ask this question to the speaker but I ask it to myself. I aspire to creating a new method or way or working as well, but don’t we need to then talk about what we learned from it, how it changes how we work? Do we need still more of that to make it scientific? I’m not sure. Good question in the Q&A about how the making of the cards is actually the most valuable part of the process, not necessarily using the cards in the process. This reminds me of the idea that so much of what we do is not about the product we create, but rather what we learned as we go through the process.

And we skipped this one, they withdrew apparently.

Now we’re on to Open-ended objects: a tool for brainstorming
by Virginia Cruz & Nicolas Gaudron of IDSL
Abstract:This paper describes a new tool for use in the process of brainstorming workshops on HCI called “Open-ended objects”. It is more of a conceptual presentation of the methodology than an experience report. Open-ended objects are open-ended interactive experiences that are used to introduce a brainstorming session. Their aim is to lead participants to reflect on emotions, human desires and make them forget about their expertise often centred on technical questions. These Open-ended objects are a tangible translation of the brainstorming brief to inspire participants beyond words. They are like interaction seeds that people can use to generate ideas. Besides, this shared and playful exercise sets a gentle and participatory atmosphere. In this paper, we describe the features of this tool that we have created and an example of how we have applied it to an innovation

Some reflections on the day

As usual for me the keynotes are inspiring and then the next most valuable thing is the opportunity to meet new people and old friends and talk about what kinds of things are happening in the field.  The presentations are often decent, but it seems like academic audiences and presenters tend to be very straight laced, like we’re not allowed to have too much fun in presentations.  Why should that be so?  I felt like I was the only one really laughing at the one really entertaining presenter (McCrikard, who was great, thank you so much Scott).  I in fact got a kind of stare from a couple people for laughing out loud.  Maybe we just had similar kinds of humor.  I agree that the presentation time slots are quite short, especially for papers, but I doubt that making them longer would really help much.  How one presenter yesterday at the design conference approached it was in his my words this: “I’m not going to present the paper, I’m going to present the topic in such a way to convince you to read the paper.”  Perhaps this is the approach that we could take.

I enjoyed Chris LaDantec’s presentation, and I spoke with him during a break a bit about the question I asked, but we didn’t get to talk much I’ll follow up more.  The notion of a public is an interesting one.  To be quite frank anytime you can pull a concept out of a “older” philosopher (in this case 80 years old, and I’m also alluding the gaffe of one presenter who called participants older than 30 “older”) and apply it into our work is cool, at least to me.  Chris said he’s really engaging with this idea more and had developed it more in a paper he submitted elsewhere, but it’s still something he wants to work on some more.  What struck me however is that I got kind of sucked into this idea of publics, but it’s like so many things in HCI, we borrow something from some thinker or researcher in another field and we only do it halfway or it’s just window dressing.  I am by no means saying that Chris and his co-authors are tricking the audience or just dressing up an otherwise boring paper with this idea because I genuinely believe he is taking this line of inquiry farther and I see this as his first iteration of using, understanding, and engaging this concept in his work.  I do think however it happens in HCI where we just import things willy nilly and we do it half way without understanding.  This has been written about previously (though I’m not at this time going to link to the papers as it’s at the end of a very long day).  It’s certainly food for thought.

In my own work though I think I see where I bring a concept into a project in a later stage and then it ends up framing much of the outcomes of the work.  Is it fair to say that I used this idea fully?  If it really shaped the analysis or conclusions of my work does it count?  How much different could the study have been if I had used it from the very beginning.  Well, without some concrete examples this is all tired ramblings.  Comments and corrections on content are very welcome below.

thoughts on iPad

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So I’ve had an iPad for the last two weeks, the wifi 32GB model.  Because we need the money for something much more worthy, I’ve decided to sell it, and because they are not generally available here yet in the Netherlands, making a few bucks on it will be easy.

I’ve enjoyed making great skype calls when I was abroad, there are a number of fun games, Harbor Master in particular I’ve found addicting.  I’m a bit vain so I’ve enjoyed the looks I get from people when I pull the iPad out, and it’s especially fun to let people play with it.  I thought the keyboard would suck, but honestly I was able to use it in short bursts and a fairly high speed without too much to learn.  The WiFi reception is better than my 1st generation iPod touch, but not a lot, and not nearly as good as most laptops.

There seems to be a few things that stand out to me about the iPad and why I think it will have a decent amount of success: The User Experience (UX) of getting to the content you want to consume or create is fast, applications are so easy to get and buy, and there are a lot fewer problems of upkeep.  There are a few problems though and a lot of that has to do with it’s size and form factor.  Overall though it’s a win.

From though to action in seconds

From the moment that you think you may want to do something online to the time you are doing it is just a few seconds depending on how close at hand the iPad is.  For those coming from a windows environment this is especially astounding and appreciated.  How does it take your windows based laptop to start up from being closed (which means either sleep or hibernation as a state)?  The fastest I’ve ever seen is 30 seconds.  With most OS X products it’s 5 seconds or less.  This is why smartphones are being used more and more for quick sips of internet content and certain content creation tasks that are fast and easy (like twitter), it’s just easier.  Letting people do what they want to do quickly and easily is a key to a great user experience and has been a key tenet to usability for 20+ years.  Apple has understood that, many others have not.

Yeah there’s an app for that

The app store makes it easy for people who see needs, both large and small, to be able to fill them and make money doing so.  Creating the AppStore and demanding that you link your device to your itunes account in order to use the device (which I personally found very annoying) makes a tremendous amount of business sense.  The experience of the user is seamless and easy.  The experience of the developer is not so much so, but the rewards can be great so people are willing to do it, and once you’ve jumped through Apple’s hoops and given a third of the money to them you have the chance of having your app catch on like wildfire in your chosen market.

I hope my mom gets this

And my dad, and several of my friends who often look to me as tech support.  There are fewer ways in which to do any kind of software damage to an iPad.  Losing files is an impossibility, messing up the OS is really hard to do for most people, and malware and its ilk don’t yet exist and even when they do pop up eventually 95% of it will all be theoretical vulnerabilities.  If all the worlds computing devices were like the iPad (not that I’m saying they should be) then I think we’d see a lot fewer tech support calls and a lot less frustration.  For those concerned about user experience making the life of those who use your product easier because they have fewer problems with it is a big thing.  The balance between the power user who has a certain list of demands and those who just want something to work has been played out many times and in many products.  There have been countless technology oriented pundits who have predicted the failure of this device because of this.  These are a certain brand of techies, geeks, and engineer.  This device, by and large, is not for them.  They will be happier with their android phone, the rumored android based tablets, and their netbooks.

But how do you hold it

I sat playing a game or two or checking my email for 20-45 minutes, constantly shifting the way I held the device or trying to balance it properly on my lap, on a pillow on my lap, on the table so it’s tilted in the right angle, or holding it in one hand and having it get tired and switching.  If I had a cool keyboard this would solve some of the problems, but what about when I want to play a game for a while, and not just 3 minutes?  What about when this is my main computing device for several days and I need to be productive (which generally means reading, writing, and email for me)?  Reading is fine, it’s comfortable, but doing anything more than swiping pages or scrolling and after a short while you’ll get tired or uncomfortable.  My wrists started hurting in strange places.

Thoughts for the UX designer

If you’ve identified, as Apple has, the three top tasks they think people will do (you can’t do user studies on a device that doesn’t exist) then you need to make that experience as pleasurable as possible.  Apple thinks photos, email, and web browsing are the three big things.  Making it fast to get to those things is key.

Email: I admittedly have not used the mail client because the custom iPad gmail interface made me not ever want to attempt that.  Why? Because I need my archive button.  Sure moving things into folders isn’t the best thing ever, but it’s still decent.   In the past we would have talked about number of clicks to a page, now I’m talking time from pushing the power button to being in my email.

Photos: It’s really easy to imagine using this device in the house or in the office as a lightweight computing device that is kept on display as a photo frame, then you just grab it and do something.  The button that turns the iPad into a handsome digital photo frame is prominent.  Syncing to iPhoto is painless and with a fairly large storage, putting many if not all of your photos is very possible.  Sorting through them and looking at them is fun and interesting.  It connects people and puts your photos in a place where they are MUCH more accessible than your computer.

Browsing: Mobile Safari is no Firefox (which is not a compliment) and because it identifies itself as a mobile device and there is no way to turn that off, some sites may not show up as you would like them to.  This is the techie in me speaking.  I don’t think my mom would ever care that she couldn’t change options in google checkout and update her credit card for payment there.  Windows phones have the option of turning this on and off, I would suggest the same here.  Getting rid of tabs and having a palette of open windows seems like a good idea, but there are problems with this for the way I use the device.  First is the button one uses to open other windows or a new one.  It’s totally baffling.  I struggled with it for a minute, pushing every button to see get it.  Even after I knew which one it was I constantly had to remember it as the icon is SO generic and doesn’t indicate what it is.   It’s also placed in an awkward position, and as far as I’m able to tell you can’t move it.  There is also no visual indication of how many other windows are open.  All of these relatively easy to fix problems are not the case on my iPod touch.  I have to say that when I compare the experience to a “real” computer I find it lacking, when I compare it to my iPod, I don’t find it much better besides having more space on the screen.  To me this is not “the best web browsing experience.”  Add to this the fact that content creation is significantly harder in many cases and this becomes a major point of failure for the iPad.

Thoughts for User Researchers

Of course Apple doesn’t really do a whole lot of user research, or if they do it’s not publicized, but what if you were approached by a company launching a product that is really “blue ocean” creating a new market, and they wanted to know what they should do?  It depends on which stage of the product development phase they were in, but let’s assume they have a working prototype.  Do what Apple did: find what you think the top three things are and make those three things amazing.  Post-launch pay A LOT of attention to the way people use the device.  Set up expectations with both product managers and engineers that there will need to be a number of small incremental and very fast updates to the product once you see the device in action.  User observation and studies will reveal a number of issues quickly.  Find ways to funnel all of the feedback on the product back to you and those involved so it can be acted upon.  Your role will be 30% curator/collector of that information and 70% interpreter and evangelist of that information.

The field without a name

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After speaking with my friend and co-conspirator Matt Snyder about how his job search and how he’s selling his position (see his post on design thinkers not design keepers here).  He said he doesn’t think people will be talking about UX in a couple of years, but we’ll call it something else.  If historical trends are any indicator then he is right.

Then today I had a request on our Philips Yammer network about “how do I get started in User Experience?” In response to that question I wrote this overly long response.  So the context is responding to a newcomer who was ready to jump in but had no idea how, and he needed to continue in his current job function while jumping into it.    This is the context of the post.    I am cutting and pasting that response wholesale as the rest of this blog post.  here it is:

——–

So you, Sridhar, are now enterering a field that doesn’t have a proper name.  Right here we call it user experience design (or at least that is one of the very highly popular names).  You could draw venn diagrams of the following “fields” or “schools of thought” and while there is a lot of overlap, it’s not total.  Some people use them interchangably.  Here they are. IxD (interaction Design, see http://www.ixda.org) UCD (user centered Design), Usability (try http://www.nngroup.com for the best known company/people, you mentioned don norman, the other partner is Jacob Nielsen), UXD has already been mentioned, UI Design (user interface), HCI (Human computer Interaction), IA (information architecture), and I think I must be leaving some out.  Then there are the variants like Human-centered design or human-system interaction or what have you, mostly differences in semantics.  To those outside the field all of these things may seem very much the same, and to some extent that is true.  I would say that each has their own distinct personality though, and some are more distincly academic so it may be less helpful for you.
I could talk about how UI Design is more about the look/feel of an interface, or how IxD is more about how an interaction works and how it fits into a flow of work, IA talks more about site or application wide standards and structures, but it also clearly talks about consistency of look and feel etc.  Usability focuses on testing users, usually in very specific ways and it’s fantastic for coming to design decisions, but this approach has shortcomings for unfamiliar designs or introducing new interaction paradigms (they basically say to avoid it, which in some measure is not bad advice).  I think you get the picture.
In short there are a lots of ways of approaching this whole big bundle of methods, but I really think it all boils down to an attitude, and that attitude is that people are more important that technology.  If a person can’t figure it out, if the thing being used for a purpose constantly calls attention to itself and interrupts the task, if it forces people to conform to the system and not to the other way round then there’s a problem.  What part of that you want to approach is up to you.
One way to do that will be to start reading books and blogs and talking to people who are doing it.  I guess it’s the kind of career exploration advice anyone could give you.  Let me say this though: there is a great demand for people who still retain “hard” coding skillz who also have an appreciation and some experience with user-centered methods.  I see job openings every day for such people.
Getting involved with a community can help.  The IxD community for example has a lot of active discussions on their website as well as their linkedin group.  There are a number of popular blogs that have good discussions, or at least a very thoughtful and well written posts.  By becoming an active member of a community in a thoughtful reflective way you will start to understand all the terminology, the “important people” to have read, and get an understanding of the trends.  This community within Philips is not terribly active, in fact your thread is the most active one and it’s just the three of us contributing to it.  THat’s fine, but you may find other more active communities that will be better.
Nielsen and Norman are some big names in my opinion, and worth reading.  Observing the user experience by Kuniavsky is a very good hands on book (http://www.orangecone.com/ is his blog)  If you are interested in other ways of studying users I have some other recommendations.  Dan Saffer’s books on designing interactions are recommendable as well, though he is not as well known.  And the really really short version of why usability is important and how you can implement it and get a better design NOW and without much time is indeed “don’t make me think” by Krupp.  Bill Moggridges book is big and expensive, but gives a series of vignettes and interviews that can give you a good overview.
OK clearly this has gotten out of control on length.  I’ll be the first one to admit I can be long winded (which is not terribly usable sometimes). I’ll post the blog list sometime later.

So you, (newcomer to UX), are now enterering a field that doesn’t have a proper name.  Right here we call it user experience design (or at least that is one of the very highly popular names).  You could draw venn diagrams of the following “fields” or “schools of thought” and while there is a lot of overlap, it’s not total.  Some people use them interchangably.  Here they are. IxD (Interaction Design, see http://www.ixda.org) UCD (user centered Design), Usability (try Nielsen Norman Group for the best known company/people, you mentioned Don Norman, the other partner is Jacob Nielsen), UXD has already been mentioned, UI Design (user interface), HCI (Human computer Interaction), IA (information architecture), and I think I must be leaving some out.  Then there are the variants like Human-centered design or human-system interaction or what have you, mostly differences in semantics.  To those outside the field all of these things may seem very much the same, and to some extent that is true.  I would say that each has their own distinct personality though, and some are more distincly academic so it may be less helpful for you.

I could talk about how UI Design is more about the look/feel of an interface, or how IxD is more about how an interaction works and how it fits into a flow of work, IA talks more about site or application wide standards and structures, but it also clearly talks about consistency of look and feel etc.  Usability focuses on testing users, usually in very specific ways and it’s fantastic for coming to design decisions, but this approach has shortcomings for unfamiliar designs or introducing new interaction paradigms (they basically say to avoid it, which in some measure is not bad advice).  I think you get the picture.

In short there are a lots of ways of approaching this whole big bundle of methods, but I really think it all boils down to an attitude, and that attitude is that people are more important that technology.  If a person can’t figure it out, if the thing being used for a purpose constantly calls attention to itself and interrupts the task, if it forces people to conform to the system and not to the other way round then there’s a problem.  What part of that you want to approach is up to you.

One way to do that will be to start reading books and blogs and talking to people who are doing it.  I guess it’s the kind of career exploration advice anyone could give you.  Let me say this though: there is a great demand for people who still retain “hard” coding skillz who also have an appreciation and some experience with user-centered methods.  I see job openings every day for such people.

Getting involved with a community can help.  The IxD community for example has a lot of active discussions on their website as well as their linkedin group.  There are a number of popular blogs that have good discussions, or at least a very thoughtful and well written posts.  By becoming an active member of a community in a thoughtful reflective way you will start to understand all the terminology, the “important people” to have read, and get an understanding of the trends.  This community within Philips is not terribly active, in fact your thread is the most active one and it’s just the three of us contributing to it.  THat’s fine, but you may find other more active communities that will be better.

Nielsen and Norman are some big names in my opinion, and worth reading.  Observing the user experience by Kuniavsky is a very good hands on book (here’s his blog)  If you are interested in other ways of studying users I have some other recommendations.  Dan Saffer’s books on designing interactions are recommendable as well, though he is not as well known.  And the really really short version of why usability is important and how you can implement it and get a better design NOW and without much time is indeed “don’t make me think” by Krug.  Bill Moggridges book is big and expensive, but gives a series of vignettes and interviews that can give you a good overview.

OK clearly this has gotten out of control on length.  I’ll be the first one to admit I can be long winded (which is not terribly usable sometimes).

——

So my only comment on that post I made is that of course we do have a name, but it’s not something everyone agrees on.  The other quandary is explaining what you do to your family.  Yes, grandma I’m a user experience designer…. Then the last part is the part Matt originally brought up in his job hunt, but is something we dealt with in our Internal special interest group meeting again this morning: How do we explain and sell our value to the other parts of Philips?  Coming up with a good, easy to understand answer to that question would be extremely valuable.