the gallery of incredible notions
The true/LOVE experiment was quite successful: we appear to have tapped into a vein of interest & emotion that we didn't realise existed. Apparently, when you ask people - in so many words - to share what they love about a place, they respond heartily. We were swamped by people practically the whole time (from 8.00pm to 12.30 am).
I'm still analysing the actual map that resulted, but the video above is a good discussion of why this sort of participatory, site-specific engagement works, and what design principles went into it.
More considered, analytic, and reflexive commentary to follow.
I'm trying to estimate opportunity costs based on the number of people bicycling to an event.
so I need help figuring out: what can you do with $2,100? (please base your answers on real-life costs)
Can design research methods be used outside the confines of a project, to throw light on the design of technological/information systems? What can be learnt from an open-ended exploration, sampling events & sites instead of people?
Come by for an experiment: art as commentary on crowd sourcing, web 2.0, and measures of community interest. All of this without a single computer involved.
an ethernet hub spidering over an otherwise "nice" boardroom table
I was recently at a meeting with my friends from the Fuse Factory over at the office of one of our sponsors/board members. When I came in, I saw this tangle of wires, which I later learnt was the only reliable way of connecting to the Internet from that room. Why would this complicated, hard to work system be in place? (only two of us were able to reliably get online, even though there were 4 wires).
Now, this could be because this company's IT department is not very sophisticated (or, being a startup, not really exist), hence the lack of a slick piece of paper with a wireless password on it for us to use (the company did have wireless).
But the circumstances under this which happened complicate the picture a little more
- we were there after hours (there was no one from IT to give us the password)
- we were guests: letting us onto the company's internal network is a security risk
Yes, there are ways to manage wireless networks to avoid this situation - though it has never been claimed those ways are easy :) But there are at least two other things to consider: the way this setup creates cues for action, and the way it is transparent & accountable.
interaction cues
Since we were there after hours, there was no one to tell us what to do. But, seeing this box on the table with wires sticking out of it cued us to how we might get internet access. No one had to print instructions on paper and try to hand it to us, or create signage, or be physically present, or have to be called. Which leads us to...
transparency
This setup is transparent - it is possible to tell, on looking, what it's for, how to use it, whether it's in use, and who's using it. More importantly, anyone can do this act of examination, given sufficient knowledge about technology (and this level of knowledge is pretty basic - all you have to know is that if you plug the cable in, you'll be connected). Contrast this with a wireless network: only the sysadmin has the mojo, and the password to the router. Having transparency (in this sense) makes it possible to have...
accountability
Since anyone can see what is being done with the system, it's also possible to tell a story - an account - around how it has been used or is being used (whatever reason there is to tell such a story). Contrast this with the wireless solution - again, unless you're the sysadmin, it's hard to figure out who is connected and when, and whether they're allowed to be.
So, far from this being mismanagement of technology, this setup may well be a deliberate decision to control & monitor access to the internet from within the office. Considering that it's complex & hard raises questions for how technology is designed to be managed, and how it's really managed. What would a transparent, accountable wireless network solution look like? How can the process of negotiating access (which we all do everytime we try to get onto someone else's wireless network, at homes and cafés and offices everywhere) be made more discoverable?
symmetry
The fact of accountability is also symmetrical: knowing that this setup is transparent & accountable also opens up avenues for altering the story that's told (this is essentially the premise behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation). In this case, the setup affords not only observation, but it also the realization that one is being observed. It also raises questions about the larger patterns that this symmetry (or lack thereof) is a part of - would this exist in a world where liability could not be assigned to a party on the basis of having allowed access through their infrastructure? Conversely, what structural differences do asymmetric systems create on a larger scale?
Further reading:
Greenfield, A. (2006). Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (1st ed.). New Riders Publishing.
Erickson, T., & Kellogg, W. A. (2000). Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(1), 59–83.
There was a wind storm in Columbus in August 2008. There is a street corner in my neighbourhood with two windchimes, one large and heavy and sonorous, and one small. I had a microphone and an iPod.
PS: listen with headphones. nothing else will quite reproduce the sound.
At a lunch the other day, someone introduced the Talking Carl app for the iPhone, which has the delightful feature of repeating what it hears (after a slight delay) in a suitably humour-inducing manner. Carl (who is essentially a simple sound processor/modulator) can also be tapped or poked to produce sounds congruent with his character. This being a meeting full of designers, iPhones were promptly produced, Carls downloaded, and a chorus ensued.
What the designers did not probably anticipate was the way a number of people at the table decided to put their Carls together as in the photo above, thus creating a self-sustaining feedback loop with unpredictable sounds, and consequently, much experimentation. Two things coincided to create this happy raucuous system of Carls: the fact that Carls 'speak' after a slight delay, allowing a person to 'activate' their Carl and having time to move it into position; and the fact that the iPhone's microphone & speaker are at the same end of the phone.
This is a moment of emergence, wherein the ant becomes the anthill. Here, a set of people have taken objects (for that is what running apps are, after all) designed for single-person use, and combined them to create a group behaviour that is completely different from the individual one. Insofar as this is much like how Unix is constructed or how computer software collaborates, this is nothing new. However, in that this act of composition is being performed without any acts of construction (programming), this use of digital interactive objects as tools for creating yet other kinds of interaction - because the Carl you engage with alone is not the Carl you 'prime' for the symphony - is exceedingly rare (because rarely designed to afford). The symphonic Carl is not mediating the interactions between people, but is a tool with which people have different kinds of interactions, and a tool which enriches interactions.
Two lessons: first, that it's better to create tools for experiences instead of trying to create experiences (i.e. give me the vegetables, not the processed soup). Second, that technologies (through use) can interact to create unpredictable outcomes, which might not always be as benign as our lunchtime cacophony.
In a café (Tully's). The thing you throw away most often (coffee cups) are no more distinguished than things you would probably never dispose off here (chinese takeout boxes). This design runs the danger of being designed for everywhere and being good nowhere. Unless, of course, the person trying to figure out whether the item they have in hand already knows what 'compostable' means - in which case the sign privileges cultural knowledge of a category ('compostable'). Or, as in my case, there is a helpful store employee who notices my confusion and helps identify the right bin.
a ticket counter held by a San Francisco MUNI ticket assistant/checker
The mechanical ticket counters above are worked by an old gentleman who waits at a MUNI tram stop in the morning and hands out tickets to commuters before their tram arrives, so as not to overload the driver and create a payment queue on the steps of the vehicle. I didn't have time to take a detailed set of photographs, but it appears that one of the counters is used to track normal tickets, and the other to track (cheaper) ones sold to seniors.
Note the construction: two separate devices lashed together and to a roughly machined acrylic sheet with rubber-bands and cable ties. Also note how the counter buttons are on the same side (because they're identical), necessitating placing one below the other so as not to block access, and forcing left-handed use; presumably they were not designed for this use by what appears to be the International Register Co. This is either a hack by the ticket seller to make accounting easier, or something issued by the transportation company and
- fixed later by the ticket seller or someone like him
- in the original state of construction, but conceived and constructed to accomodate new categories (seniors?) or roles (ticket sellers at the bus stands to help increase throughput for an increased commuter population?)
- in the original state of construction and conceived & constructed to a plan (“here's how we'll help our new ticket sellers keep track of how much money they should have at the end of their shift”)
In any case, the categories in use (‘adult’ and ‘senior’) have become reified in the construction of this equipment, which is only necessary because there are two categories. If there was only one kind of ticket, the ticket seller could simply note the serial number of the first ticket and multiply the ticket price by the difference from the last serial number left at the end of the shift (with minor procedural modifications in the case of multiple ticket books having been consumed). With two categories, however, accounting becomes a little harder, especially when people queue up for tickets fast. Note how the ticket seller has a cache of tickets cut to the correct time cut-offs to make it easy to hand out tickets quickly.
While this is a technology for accounting, it is not necessarily a technology for accountability (whereas a electronic ticket vending machine could do both). One would guess that fully electronic ticketing in the Promised Land of Ubicomp would obviate the need for this hack. In case this is a grassroots innovation, it shows how policies from above collide with the messiness of processes as they are actually carried out, making people create work-arounds in response.
The lesson? Categories & processes interact: if you create or change categories, you might possibly be affecting processes downstream somewhere, and someone might have to invent a way of dealing with it. So before you create personas & segmentations, pause and think about what they'll make people do, and what they are for: accounting or accountability?
(Now would be a good time to read Geoffrey Bowker & Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification & its Consequences. Complex, detailed, but much recommended, especially if you want an interesting perspective on why health insurance costs are so high).
[the following is a response to a thoughtful and provocative essay by the wonderful folks at Johnny Holland, where Stephen Anderson attemps to outline an informatics-based behaviour influence/modification system for email, and I contend, arguing that it's technology, not behaviour, that needs to be fixed. you should read the article, followed by my comment and Stephen's response in order for the following to make sense.]
Stephen writes:
If I was designing a new email platform from the ground up with these things built in, the execution would probably be different– I’d build some of these ideas into the architecture of the system– take a “break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess, ” to quote the article. But, that would introduce a bigger problem: asking people to change their email platform (which is a much, much more daunting challenge than the gaming I describe in the article!)
Yes, its a tricky business1. Create a temporary fix on a broken system and risk cementing it even further, or create an entirely new system and cause upheaval? I don't have any good answers, but I suspect a redesign of email needn't cause much upheaval at all, and in fact might make things even more invisible.
Stephen further comments on context:
Your comment about context seems to me the more challenging one– and a critical consideration.
Context is a tricky business. Paul Dourish has written extensively on context; if you can survive his invented terminology ('technomethodology'?!!) - and 'where the action is' is an excellent read - he has interesting things to say about context, the most consequential of which is that context is created through interaction. What this means for our email quandary is that email software could become much better at knowing what to support by paying attention to its interactions with the user.
To elaborate: most (desktop) software at present is usually state-ful but path-agnostic. If you think of software as something that's a set of states (displaying email, writing email, downloading attachments etc), then interaction is a path through software states. [most web software is actually stateless on the server side, which is why cookies are used to track state on the client side].
Most software doesn't actually track the path through a particular state was reached. For instance, when composing a new email, it doesn't matter if you are replying to an existing email or starting a new thread, whether you were just viewing a project folder or your inbox. The email compose window functions the same way, and what it does and presents to you are largely identical in all cases (if you use the postbox email client, the sidebar always shows all attachments, regardless of who is involved in the email.)
But if email software were to act differently depending on the path taken to the current state, then each state has actually a lot more information to act on, and this makes for opportunities to better understand what the user is doing and adapting accordingly. So, if you were viewing a project folder and composed a new email, that email could get automatically put in the project folder. Or if an email is referred to repeatedly during the course of a day to then suggest showing it in a more persistent view. Or when responding repeatedly to emails from a particular person, to prioritise new mail notifications from that person. (these are just crude examples: actual behaviour would probably have to be a lot more sophisticated)
These are ways to be path-sensitive (and hence interaction-sensitive, and context-sensitive) within an application. But the notion of context extends a little further than that - full context-sensitivity must, I think, consider:
- interaction paths (whether within or across applications)
- contemporaneity (what else is being interacted with/running/happening)
- tendencies (what happens more or less often - this is where most personal informatics focuses, and its the idea behind gmail labs' ‘Bob’ features - ‘Don't forget Bob’ and ‘Got the wrong Bob?’ and Firefox's awesome bar)
- interaction patterns (sequences that are semantically meaningful, even if not constantly repeated)
- organizational structures (or information relationships)
[This is not even taking into account the place (say, a meeting room), the people involved (and their relationship to you), and the actual content of the email (or whatever else) itself. Which is a discussion for another day.]
This is where we can return to the central quandary posed by the personal informatics behaviour modification system Stephen proposes: bandage a broken system or force re-learning? I think that this may be a non-issue: if email clients are ‘smarter’ in this sense, we might be able to use the same interface to deliver much more complex behaviour. So, when Stephen writes
For one person, 10 emails a day is the norm. For someone else, juggling several 100 emails a day may present no problem
he's actually thinking of how to make an interface that has to work for different people with different behaviours. But this notion of context-sensitivity suggests interfaces that behave differently depending on, say, the number of emails a day, and so work for the same person when they receive 10 emails a day equally well as when they receive a hundred. (That's within-subject, not across-subject variance, for you psych geeks).
Which also brings us to the issue of whether normative behaviour modification when it comes to email is a good idea in the first place: email use co-evolves with the existence of other collaboration & communication tools, and some of the reasons for behaviour modification (or context-sensitivity, for that matter) might no longer exist, and the associated behaviours might simply cease to be.
This is a worthy experiment. Are there any interaction designers, inspired engineers or tinkerers who want to take this on? I'm interested in developing this further.
Notes:
1. Gratuitious arguments using the Chandler Project will be summarily ignored.
[with apologies to Victor Margolin]
Don Norman recently wrote an essay claiming that “design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs”. Towards the end of the essay, he says "The inventors will invent, for that is what inventors do."
The central thesis of the essay is a list of inventions that changed human life: the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, the personal computer, the internet, sms text messaging, the cellphone. Norman claims that the creation of these innovations (note the linguistic sleight-of-hand - we will return to it later) were not influenced in any way by design research or market research.
Big Straw Men
This is a straw man, for two reasons. The simpler one is that there wasn't any design research around at the time, and it is even now a discipline that's in its infancy and is learning its place in the world and in industry. The second and more important one is that that has never been design research's claim! Design research does not invent technologies: it merely points the way towards opportunities for doing, creating, serving, and making things. It does not even create the conditions for inventing new technologies, because innovation is a social process, firmly embedded in the exigencies of the corporation's structure, organizational culture, power struggles, competencies and finances. Design research is not a secret sauce for product success (even if some design researchers claim it is).
In addition, as an objective statement on the nature of product development, as Nicolas Nova points out, it is simply not true.
So the point of this essay is that only technologists can invent technologies that change the world, because inventing technologies is what technologists do? Let us, instead of focusing on the truth of this tautology, take a look at the subtext of the essay and the discussion surrounding it.
A Theory of Consumption
Consider Norman's statement about how the automobile changed human society. It did indeed, but how: cars&car-based ways of life destroy landscapes, create landfills, increase distance, decrease sociality, pollute, help bring about global warming, and are the most dangerous consumer technology invented, killing more people per year than anything else. Were automobiles brought about by design research? Nope. Did cars bring about important changes to human mobility? Sure. Could paying more attention to people's lives & the consequences of the proliferation of cars have changed the way this technology worked for the better? You bet.
Underlying this is a theory of needs & consumption. Norman says "Consider the cycle. First comes a new technology..." and later "... the technology launched the products. The products discovered needs. People slowly adopted them, leading to more changes in the products." Naturally, this perspective leads him to believe:
Where does design research fit into this cycle? Design research has many definitions, but within the product cycle, it consists of studies aiming to understand the activities, desires, and needs of the people for whom a product or service is desired. Design researchers use a wide variety of methods, but all of them, whether it be ethnographic observations, systematic probes, or even surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups aim at one thing: to determine those hidden, unspoken needs that will lead to a novel innovation and then to great success in the marketplace.
This is old hat. We, as a community, have matured beyond this perspective a while ago. (Norman appears to have missed the debate around "implications for design".) By framing design research in this narrow manner, he ignores all of the other ways design research can impact business: by reframing worldviews, discovering problems unrelated to product development & design that nevertheless impact those domains of people's lives, informing branding & messaging, and most importantly, changing corporate culture. (I'm certain I'm leaving out many other things).
This leads Norman to cite an example that actually counters his argument:
Why did the Macintosh almost fail? Was the world ready for the concept? Not really. Apple didn't help with its advertising campaign that snubbed business as dull, dreary, and not worthy of a Macintosh, yet business should not only have been Apple's biggest customer base, but families wanted to buy their children the same computer they would be using in business. As a result, a far inferior computer, the IBM PC, running a command-line, baroque operating system (MS-DOS), swept the market. Within Apple itself, the Macintosh caused huge internal disruption between the Lisa, Macintosh, and the Apple II groups. The Apple II was where Apple was making its money: the other groups were losing money. Internal politics? Massive. Interdivisional rivalry? Yup.
That is, one reason that the Mac almost failed was that it had a misguided marketing campaign that applied the wrong meanings to the product. (This is precisely the sort of thing that good market research or formative design research can uncover.)
The other explanation here is the 'ahead of their time' notion: which essentially functions as a euphemism for a good idea implemented insufficiently well (usually because the available materials were not good enough). While this is not the fault of the people who made the various products Norman cites as having failed due to this reason, it does not detract from the fact that they were either simply not good enough (read usable) or could not be turned into a successful business. If, as Norman says, the Apple Newton was ahead of its time, why didn't Apple simply start making the Newtons again soon as pen-based devices started appearing in the market?
Built on Abstractions
In fact, there are some other fundamental assumptions in his piece:
- Innovation is a new thing, an object, or a technology. (This is a rather narrow perspective, to put it mildly. Recall the linguistic switch between innovation & invention: this is what makes it possible.)
- If you do design research and find opportunities, innovation must happen. Innovation doesn't happen so often, so the design research claim must be false. (Completely ignoring the sociological truths of product development)
- The impact of a technological invention comes solely from the invention itself. (See 'technology giveth and technology taketh away' for one examination of the tortuous relationship between media technology & society. Or just learn a little bit about Twitter and how it's evolving.)
All of this paints a picture of the relationship between design, design research and technology based largely on a set of abstractions instead of the messy complexity of real life (much like Roger Martin claiming that businesspeople don't engage in abductive reasoning). To sum it up, it looks like this:
- all the technologies that had massive impact were driven by 'technologists'
- when technologies succeed hugely, it's because of their inherent qualities
- when innovative technologies fail, it is because the world wasn't ready for them
- 'needs' are created by technologies. (or, consumers are created by products)
This is a remarkably techno-centric worldview. The reactions to it seem to largely sidestep this issue, either trying to make a case for a seat at the table, pointing to the complexity of the process, or showing how all good invention uses the very activities of design research (while possibly stretching the definition of the term somewhat).
Upsets & Reframings
Contrast this with Norman's closing sashay “Technologists will... get the grand ideas running, but their implications are apt to be complex, overwhelming, and just plain horrid. Horrid applications? Yes, but that's good news: we will forever be indispensible.” Mr Norman wishes to be a purveyor of commodities. He has given up hopes of power: he wants to be a fixer, a second-class citizen in the glorious country of makers. And, by claiming to speak for the design research community, he endangers the community's ambition to bigger things. This is upsetting, naturally.
Or is it? As we have seen, there is little in this essay that is substantive (provocativeness alone does not a good argument make). Other than chorusing "We can, too!", there is little to be gained from responding to it, other than to perhaps limit misunderstanding arising out of extreme statements made by famous people.
What seems to me to the greater issue is of addressing the underlying techno-centricism of this worldview. In a year which has seen much havoc & pain caused by misbehaving social institutions (which seem to have arisen out of a similar pattern of belief in financial technologies), it is ironic to encounter writing and discussion around issues of participation in world-making that completely ignores everything else but the possibility of telling people what to make next. (I strongly suspect Don Norman still lives in the world of rockstar designers). Aren't there other ways to contribute? After all, as Jon Kolko argues, we're in this to make the world a better place.
Here, for instance are some questions to consider about our practice:
how do we participate in the life of the things we help create beyond their release cycles?
what are ways to tell clients not to make things?
how do we move from being product-focused to being organization-focused?
how do we increase our presence in industries that don't currently employ us?
how do we enable systemic changes?
how do we enable endeavours that need to happen across organizations for systemic changes to succeed?
