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Month November 2011

Entries 10 Total

Ubiquitous Coffee

Nov 20, ’11 9:48 PM

Recently I’ve noticed a trend in future visioning videos, ones that attempt to visually describe some kind of future technology enabling and meeting the needs of an increasingly connected and technological society.  It’s a trend that would seem to be designed to appease the future shock in an assumed audience.  It works to help transport a viewer from the present into this new scenario, by placing cues and similar elements to mentally and emotionally tie the two together.  I’ve seen this cropping up in a few different places, and I think it’s worth giving name to.  For the moment, I’m going to simply call it ubiquitous coffee (or ubicof).

from Microsoft’s recent Productivity Future Vision.

From Berg London’s Media Surfaces: The Journey video sketch.

From Berg London’s Media Surfaces: Incidental Media video sketch.

From Microsoft’s Future Vision 2019 video.

From a compilation of Microsoft and Cisco future visioning videos.

Don’t get me wrong, coffee has been consumed for more than 500 years now, so it’s not unlikely to be around in another 10 years or so.  I think the technique at play here is – “look at this futuristic place with new technology, but don’t be too worried, we all still drink lots of coffee”.  A way of tempering future shock with some present-day cultural symbols.  Not very deep, but at the surface level, effective.

Watching all of these augmented media visioning videos is actually quite depressing, the sheer banality and similarity of ideas present (not to mention the prominence of hand-waving and non-meaningful touch gestures) really set the bar low for the future of technology and information interfaces.

So much of what’s shown is either possible today, only a small step in a slightly different direction for the emergence of new technologies.  The major tech companies (RIM, MS, Nokia, IBM, Cisco) seem to spend countless hours telling us what the future could look like, and it’s honestly not very inspiring.  Not to parade the success of Apple, but their vision looks a lot more like this;

Familiar, no? It’s what’s available today. Tested, iterated, prototyped and designed to within an inch of its’ life.  A real device, that will change the way we think about the future.  I expect I’ll follow this post in 6-12 months or so, when RIM, IBM and Cisco decide to copy the reality of Apple with their own “visions” of the future.

But more to the point, the field of research into Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) is so much more rich and interesting, full of design complexity and real world challenges that at least excite the mind.  This glass-half-full future (which ironically is half filled with glass interfaces) just doesn’t sit well with me.  We can do so much better.

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notes on public space, adam greenfield

Nov 18, ’11 3:20 PM

Below is the full video of an Adam Greenfield talk given at Innovation Dublin earlier this year.  It’s full of real-world examples of what Adam (would no longer) call ubiquitous computing.  It’s an interesting and productive exploration of the implications of these devices in the public realm.

A few things popped out, which I’ve hastily jotted below;

The thing that really bothers me.. [about advertising which analyses visual attention using web cams and analytical software] is that I regard it as nothing less than the theft of value from public space.  There will be people moving throgh the background that do not attend to the content on the screen, that do not want to attend to the content on the screen, that want to have nothing to do with the screen.  And they are providing value for the advertiser whether they know it or not.  As a matter of fact, whether you’re aware that the screen is doing this or not, whether anybody’s asked you for your consent or not (and believe me, they don’t ask for your consent), information is being gathered from you, without your awareness, that’s of commercial value to somebody else.  And that value is never returned to the public.

[a series of cameras installed in Wellington upon approval of public referendum] were installed, and then something really interesting happened.  the year after that a new back-end management…new software became available for those cameras, and this one permitted facial recognition.  And so, the cameras, the same physical objects, that had been primarily beneficial and had used for the advancement of everybody collectively before, now began to be used by the police to manage… subjects of interest moving through the downtown area.

This was a radical transformation of the capability of the device but it was never put to a public referendum.

Even I, who have argued that there should be democratic accountability over these systems.  If you know or if you’re familiar with anything about software development you know that we now live in what’s called a ‘nightly build‘ culture, which is to say that the capability of new software advances on a very fast clock speed.  new versions are released all the time and are pushed to users… are you going to have a referendum every week?

~

we can move against the capture of public space by private interst and towards a fabric of freely discoverable, addressable, query able and scriptable urban resources that we could all of us as citizens and as members of a community use, to bring the entire way that we city, the entire way that we do place a lot closer to our aspirations and ambitions for it, to a place where the right to the city is meaningfully underwritten by the design of the public space and the things in it.  And towards a revitalised manifestation of the public sphere: the place where democracy happens and is seen to happen.

Adam Greenfield, @ Science Gallery 2011, via Bashford

Definitely food for thought.

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hope and worry, balanced

Nov 18, ’11 2:02 PM

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you’ll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you’ve done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn’t outweigh your hope, you’ll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?, thereby continuing the cycle.

- Paul Graham, Being Popular (2001), via worrydream.

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a brief rant on the future of interaction design

Nov 17, ’11 10:47 PM

The whole essay is well worth a read, and it definitely has some salient points to make.  I wouldn’t say I agree completely with the notion that all we have today is pictures under glass but it certainly is the main gist of the (rather lame) future vision product videos coming from the likes of RIM and Microsoft.   Bret managed to articulate exactly what it was that I didn’t like about these videos — they’re not visionary at all, they’re just small extensions on the things we can already do today.

This image is just great:

It really hammers home the point about feedback, expression in interface and the limitations of the current raft of technology.  A few years back I was working in the interactivation lab at UTS with the ever expressive Bert Bongers.  Bert’s work is focussed on making computers/buildings/instruments/the world more expressive, and it’s well worth diving into.

Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?

- Bret Victor

Well played, sir.

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Information – A City’s Software

Nov 14, ’11 12:49 AM

The Urban Informatics team here at Arup is in the practice of designing for the best possible experience of cities. This leads to an interesting idea -> developing the software of cities. This software could be defined in the behaviours and the information about how cities work, and the hearts and minds of people using it.

If the buildings, and the physical infrastructure form the hardware, how does the city’s software affect the way we live? What does the digitally connected always on reality mean for the way we can be in and use the world?

Fluid City

It’s exciting to imagine what the future of place might hold. Work place, entertainment place, quiet place, transit place, growing space, or eating place. What could it be like with these layers of soft infrastructure built in?

How will this fluidity of information affect behaviour in the cities within which we reside? Can we move towards communities that meet more of our innate human needs, without leaning so heavily on the world’s resources to get those needs met?

User Centred

In Informatics we think that this is possible, and the key is to make sure that the human impacts of design decisions are keenly kept in awareness throughout the design process. Firstly by gaining a full and measurable understanding of how people use and will be using a space. Then by creating the environment that facilitates human interaction and people’s activities to flourish, the space can naturally be used in a way that is sustainable.

The soft layers of the city, help us to measure the patterns of activity, and then to display and develop patterns of use, to guide people’s behaviour post-occupancy.

Inherently Connected

The nature of these places (be it a single office, a building, a precinct or a whole system) is inherently connected. The design process therefore must use a sort of joined up thinking, an integrated and holistic view of the way this place relates to the rest of the city.

The soft layers that we create for people link them to information and people to guide this understanding of connectedness, physically and functionally. When people come together in communities of understanding, sustainable practices will play out in their behaviour.

 

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what is urban informatics?

Nov 9, ’11 11:16 AM

I’m asked this quite often, what is urban informatics?  It sounds like a mathematical idea, or some kind of scientific concept but the term urban tends to confuse even further.  I’ve been a part of what we’re calling Urban Informatics for just over two years now, working alongside a slew of very incredibly intelligent people on a long list of projects — and even those whom I work with on a regular basis come to me with this repeat question.  What is it that you do?

I should also preface this by giving proper context.  My definition of Urban Informatics relates directly to the work I do at Arup, an multi-disciplinary design firm with a long lineage of buildings and infrastructure projects worldwide.  The list of Arup work in the built environment reads like a who’s who of architecture. The London Eye, Seattle Public Library, the Millenium Bridge, CCTV & the Beijing Water Cube to name a few.  Our first Sydney project was the Sydney Opera House.  To say the people who we work with are at the top of their game is clichéd but the proof is in the architecture, as it were, and the Arup pedigree is certainly stuff of legend.

This conversation ordinarily then, happens over drinks or mid-morning coffee banter, with people involved in more established disciplines such as structural engineering or acoustic design and it often consists of people honestly admitting that they don’t actually understand what it that Urban Informatics does.  For those of you involved in new industries, or even rapidly evolving industries, (which is highly likely, considering the impact of the internet in it’s short lifespan, not to mention the 4 year old iPhone), this may ring true. Traditional and digital design practices are evolving quite rapidly that new job titles are required to allow some semblance of order (two of my friends are known officially as respectively a futuryst, and a catalyst for magic).  But for those involved in traditional disciplines — a fluid, interactive, ever-changing discipline is hard to understand or pin down.

So, to begin.  What is Urban Informatics?  It’s a design practice.  It is a multi-disciplinary practice, involved in the interaction between information, place and experience.  At the micro scale we design experiences, at the macro scale we design strategies to help understand the potential for places.  We think about digital drivers, the changing nature of work, of knowledge, of play.  To put a finer point on it, UI is a design practice which designs for great urban experience.  That’s it.

But what does that mean?  We tell this not without anecdote or allegory, we tell this by pointing to our work as evidence.  But where does one begin to think about experience?  Aren’t we all doing that already?  I would say yes (to the architects, engineers, planners and the like — who of course grapple with the needs of the user), but not as the primary concern of your work.  The product of cities is something which requires understanding.  An understanding that building, the act of creating and making, can and will meet desires/needs/requirements and will also strongly shape and inform experience.

A product of Urban Informatics is a series of activation strategies.  Or a small interactive light robot.  Or a collection of people who are now engaged and equipped to think productively about the future.  Or a group of people who are co-creating ideas for new sustainable and intelligent cities.  We do a lot of different things.

Of course, when you consider the speed of technological development – where 18 months can bear witness to massive change – it’s no surprise to hear that this discipline is evolving.  The conversations we were having in 2008, around the importance of instrumenting the city, or the ones we had in 2009 about great user experience for transport systems, or the ones we had in 2010 about the new transparent governance structure and the role of the CIO+ — they’re all becoming reality.  In one way or another, cities around the world are taking on these ideas (not to imply deserved credit here, more to credit the strength of the ideas), and our urban realm is evolving as a result.  Yet many more places have lagged behind, and are slowly learning from the lessons of their peers.

We are in exciting times, where a small idea can grow and push massive change.  Urban Informatics is at the cusp of this change, we’re pushing it ourselves, as much as we can.  Design first with strategy in mind.  Asking questions.  Asking the right questions and really listening.  That’s what we do.

Urban Informatics cares about great design.  We care about how design affects the fuzzy things, the emotions, the hope and the fear.  We see great potential in looking through the lens of experience and using it to really improve peoples lives, and the state of the cities we live in.  As the saying goes, to shape a better world.

We hope you see this too.

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As noted elsewhere #4

Nov 5, ’11 12:40 PM

A bit of a round-up then, of a few interesting stores and ideas floating about on the web.

First up is Dan Harmon, the creator of a remarkably funny oddball sitcom called Community, who uses a technique called embryonic circles to plot out and resolve story arcs for the characters.

The circles is a neat story-mapping tool, and can be entered/exited at any point. We’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling, or at least the qualities needed to tell one of the many archetypal stories available, it’s very interesting to see the mental mapping of someone behind the scenes.

A different kind of mapping is being done at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.  Seb Chan has posted some of the initial findings from a few technologies in place in the museum (building on a powerhouse iOS app, a free wifi service and wifi scanners), which can generate heat maps of the building showing the density of electronic devices in each space.

We spotted a write-up on the history of travelling libraries, which has this little gem of insight, from a 1930′s Illinois teacher;

As I watched the children it struck me with force: you cannot measure the value of the bookmobile in dollars and cents, any more than you can measure the value of a new scientific discovery, or a new system of philosophy, or the life of a good man or woman. These good, new, attractive, interesting books that the little ones were picking out for the first time and the eager smart minds — they would fuse, strike, fire, open a new vista, and bring deeper ambition and greater awareness to life and people.

Filip also featured this processing experiment on Creativeapplications.net, it’s a map manipulation tool, which allows an openstreetmap set of tiles to be manipulated to reflect a person’s memory of place.  The process is as follows; 1. visit place.  2. draw map of place.  3. manipulate actual map, based on mental map.  It’s a great experiment into visualising mental models, and gets me thinking about situationist architectural manifestos.  Great stuff.  The video which shows it in action is also pretty neat.

Nest also did the internet rounds last week, I think it’s a beautiful attempt to improve an important home interface — although from a sustainability point of view I’d like to see something which encourages users to think about their energy consumption more, not less.  Having said that, it is gorgeous.  Just look at those reflections..

I absolutely love this animation by Richard Swarbrick, featured on The Fox is Black.  It’s sublime, the perfect combination of physical beauty and a classic animation style.  Well worth checking out the video (after the jump).

And finally, the ever interesting Bobulate gave us this;

Want to remember an experience? Don’t move.

That’s overstating it, but a new study shows that just walking through a doorway creates what’s called a “new memory episode,” which makes it difficult to remember the experience in the previous room:

[M]emory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. “Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one’s event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]” the researchers said.
Apparently, there can be these sort of episode markers — “a while later” — in stories as well.

Curious what episode markers mark our digital spaces.

Hope you all have a great week ahead, see you on the other side..

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Bright Hearts goes live

Nov 3, ’11 11:27 AM

Bright Hearts is our first ever iOS app, created for the wonderfully patient George Khut.  We’re extremely proud of the app, not only for the gorgeous visuals it can generate with ease, but the impact we see this having on the real audience — kids at Westmead Children’s Hospital.  We can’t wait to see what happens next, but in the meantime, why not pop by the Bright Hearts installation at the UTS DAB LAB gallery?  It’s on show until the 26th November, don’t miss out!

 

 

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say hello to our bright hearts

Nov 2, ’11 12:59 AM

Today is the soft launch for our latest collaboration with George Khut, Bright Hearts.

brighthearts-mandala-test-494x370

Bright Hearts is a research project being led by George, focussed on human body bio feedback in the hospital environment, specifically children’s hospitals;

The project’s aim is to design and evaluate the efficacy of a heart-rate controlled interactive artwork to assist in the management and reduction of stress and anxiety experienced by children undergoing painful, recurrent clinical procedures. Currently in its design-research phase, the project will piloted in early 2012, followed by a clinical trial in the second half of 2012.

George has spent many years developing bio feedback as an art practice, introducing Cardiomorphologies in 2004.  We teamed up recently to create a modern version of the artwork, which will work on both the Mac and iOS devices.  We’re really excited to see it come to fruition, after some months of testing and experimenting with code.  Building on the amazing work generated in the open source OpenFrameworks community, we were able to create in record time a fully fledged visualisation app for use in George’s research.

cardiomorphologies-v2-beap-headshot-05a

 The original cardiomorphologies installation, from 2004. 

The artwork is composed of a few small components — a heart rate sensor, a MaxMSP patch used to process the sensor data into information, and the iOS apps which create beautiful visualisations of the heart rate data.   I developed the iOS app for George, and Frank designed + built the small sensor case for the installation.  It’s beautiful, make sure you check it out if you can.

 Images from the iOS Bright Hearts app, launching today.

Bright Hearts is launching at the DAB LAB Gallery at UTS tonight, 6pm.  It runs from the 2nd to 26th November.

Level 4 Courtyard, UTS, Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, 702-730 Harris St, Ultimo.

See Bright Hearts for more.

 

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design decisions & ambiguity

Nov 1, ’11 2:56 AM

Daring Fireball on Android hardware buttons;

Looks like they’re trying to fix this starting with the Galaxy Nexus by eliminating the hardware buttons but drawing them on-screen in the OS. Presumably, a future API revision could allow for apps that don’t need these buttons. Anyway, agree with his criticism of these two buttons completely. The Back button taking me somewhere unexpected was perhaps my single-biggest complaint both times I tested an Android phone.

I agree, the designed ambiguity of the ‘back’ button is infuriating, mostly in the android app I created myself!  I’m no programmer, I’m much more of a hacker (which doesn’t help either), but I’m never clear as a user when to hit the home button or the back button (or both).  Home sometimes doesn’t kill an app — why?

Even better though, it goes on to outline a key difference between the apple and google design models;

The other lesson: the importance of getting things right, from the outset. If you’re designing just an app, you can fix many design errors later; if you’re designing an app platform, though, it’s hard to fix system-wide design errors without breaking existing apps.

This doesn’t mean get it right the first time, every time.  It means you should only go to market when you’ve tested your product so thoroughly (iterating over and over again) and can say with complete certainty that not shipping it now is not good enough.

Constantly shipping unfinished, beta software products fools you into thinking you can do the same with hardware.  Unfinished software thinking, applied to hardware, will only result in long term grief (especially if you’re relying on OEMs to provide your hardware for you).

I can only point to the iPod/iTunes experience and years of testing that allowed Apple to say, with certainty, that this v1 product was ready to be released. Google, on the other hand, only had google.com and a long running suite of software products to go by.  Big difference.

 

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