the gallery of incredible notions
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?
The Brotherhood of the Bike originally uploaded by steelmonkey
The bike car on the Caltrain trains is at one end of the train. That is, there is only one place on the train for bikes [as far as I could tell], and its an entire car. Thus, if you want to bring your bike on the train, it's likely you will be in this car (to remain close to your bike, to get to it easily & quickly when the train stops at a station). It's also likely then, if you are a frequent/daily rider, that you will tend to see the same people repeatedly. And, like you, they will also be riders.
bike car. caltrain originally uploaded by luckyklover
Which means you will probably identify with them. And you will have stories to share. You will experience aspects of the day in similar ways ("oh man, that can't have been good in the rain!"). You will trade hacks, fixes, workarounds, secrets. You will commiserate, and look for each other, and wonder when people are missing. Some of you will be more gregarious, popular, visible, more contributing than others. There will be quiet, morose types. There will be lurkers - people who never become visible, but who participate nevertheless, just by being present and taking it in. After a while, you will look forward to being in the bike car.
In short, you will probably form a tribe, after a fashion. (I'm speculating, of course. Evidence is lacking. Would you like to get me some?)
Now there is something peculiar about this tribe. It is created by the architecture of the train. It is contingent upon just the right people coming together in the same place, but not in a manner of their own design or intention (perhaps we can call them 'tribes of contingence'?). This tribe will, if it forms, have been created due to policymakers and the operations people at Caltrain. It will be the outcome of decisions made on entirely other grounds: efficiency, safety, comfort. But lo and behold, decisions made in boardrooms and committees create this cluster of people who find themselves having something in common with each other.
This is the opposite of Meetup. Here, you did not have to seek out others of your kind. The world architected your meeting. You didn't plan it, you came into it.
This is something technology can do really well, but has only taken hesitant steps into. It does not, as of yet, create coincidences (without your express effort - else it wouldn't be a coincidence) that well. These coincidences are wonderful things - they bring us human contact and sociality without any effort. It's built into your life, no sign-up or registration required.
Maybe Facebook should be taking a page from the Caltrain.
- recognize proper nouns, especially when followed by ’s, and treat them appropriately when using "change all"
- detect and correct word variations during a spell-check session without having to add them to the dictionary; especially important for occasional proper nouns
- detect delayed shift-release capitalization errors, especially for proper nouns (e.g. "my name is ARvind")
- detect typing error patterns within a document and adjust spelling/grammar suggestion accordingly
- use phrase patterns to refine suggestions ("in touh with" is probably "in touch with", not "in tough with")
- detect spacebar order errors ("this is n ot the case")
- infer multiple whitespace usage conventions from the document (don't ask each time you encounter e.g. "and so , we can" to change to "and so, we can" once I make the change)
- show me what "change all" will change, especially if it's a grammatical suggestion and/or there are variations
- turn off "resume" mode when clicking into the text area after loss of window focus
- detect compound grammar & spelling errors (e.g. "she is alectureer" should suggest "a lecturer" instead of just "lecturer" to avoid introducing a grammatical error)
- detect typing errors based on keyboard button proximity patterns (e.g. "traip" is more likely to be "trail" than "train")
[update: the Office Natural Language team has a post on the issue]
Chatting with a friend about throwing plastic bottles out the window into her recycling bin (and missing). And a friend of hers who has a house on a hill: so their recycling bins are directly beneath the deck and they can drop bottles down a chute into the bins. Brainstorming ways to rig a carriage & basket down from a kitchen to the bins across the yard to be able to roll your recycling down a chute/rail and have it tip over into the bin automatically. And realising that this would be a major patchwork & hack job.
the architecture of homes influences recycling practices. are there common pathways we can optimize? can we build fun recycling experiences into the home? what about dumbwaiters for your glass bottles? what architectural principles would make a home conducive to recycling?
only in an experimental psychology paper can you find...
"The media were demonstrated by having the participants solve three simple communication tasks by means of video telephone, hands-free telephone, and text chat. Face-to-face (F-t-f) was assumed familiar."
Schliemann, T., Asting, T., Følstad, A., & Heim, J. (2002). Medium preference and medium effects in person-person communication. In CHI '02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 710-711). Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: ACM. doi: 10.1145/506443.506559
design research 101: you don't have to look at all the data. given a compromise between examining and categorising every transcript, photo, answer or looking at the data in different ways, pick manipulation & representation over organization every time.
Having lots of data points doesn't mean you have greater understanding: it simply means you have lots of data points and more chances to prove a statement true or false. Having fully organized data is great if you want to test conclusions, but it's easier to check hypotheses than to find a new, more powerful, more insightful way of looking at the phenomenon being studied. Finding a good explanation for behavior usually involves multiple rounds of trying to make sense of something. That takes time.
If you're short on time, forget trying to organize everything and spend more time interpreting and deriving conclusions from the data. After all, that's what you were hired for, isn't it?
