IDEO and The Deep Dive

It’s been over 10 years since US TV show Nightline first aired an episode featuring the inner workings of a Palo Alto based design company called IDEO. The episode became an instantaneous hit, and it is often cited as one of the most requested videos (by viewers) which ABC has ever produced. IDEO was then a well known name within and indeed outside of the design community, but what was so special about this profile of the company?

Whilst the product design produced during the program was far from flawless, the program did allow outsiders a front-row seat into an exploratory process and a working environ a million miles from those of a traditional business.

It provided the viewer with a intimate view into the workings and structure (or non-structure) of a truly creative environment. It demonstrated how radical thinking coupled with an involved prototyping process can produce many ideas.

Despite many businesses and individuals having since watched the program, it would be fair to say that not many were able to replicate such a process successfully. This is in part because many businesses still presume they do not require this level of innovative thinking and secondly because they may not feel comfortable in allowing the seemingly chaotic process of design to occur within a company, and indeed lead a company strategy.

Granted it’s a fantastic showcase for IDEO and indeed parts of it may seem a little contrived or calculated but for a company to allow such an intimate glimpse into a creative process is rare. One which is not afraid to show all the ‘messy-stuff” – that is the mistakes, the stupid ideas, and the inherently fuzzy place from where a good idea is born and more importantly the manner in which it is allowed to breathe and grow.

For me this is one of the better demonstrations of what a user-centred design process is and nicely captures the imagination, empathy and effort that’s required to create such a design. For these very reasons ‘Deep Dive’ is always worth a viewing.

Reiterating the maxim that “It’s all about the journey, not the destination”.


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This Is Spatial Tap

Of recent I’ve come to the conclusion that the one defining characteristic that is so fulfilling about using appropriately designed tools is that they become an extension of the user themselves, be it their body, their hands, or indeed their mind. Apples more recent device is a case in point, the iPad reduces the user interface to the extent that one feels as if they are actually ‘holding’ a webpage or application – and to all extents and purposes they are. However if one was to take this notion to the next logical level surely we would find that for many circumstances the ultimate interface would be no interface at all, and in turn the minimal physical interaction necessary, excepting neural and thought based interfaces, would be a simple and discrete gesture.

However many of the gestural interface implementations we have seen recently are concerned with how we as users might interact with a digital reality or unreality as the case may be. Projects such as Microsoft’s Natal demonstrate how a Natural User Interface (NUI) may be used to enhance our gaming environments by using our own bodies and actions as the proverbial input device in order to control a corresponding digital self or avatar.

In a recent re-reading of Don Normans excellent book the ‘Design of Everyday Things’ I was prompted to consider the real-world scenarios whereby a gesture based system would be advantageous in interacting with physical objects.

What implications would such changes have on our lives?

Many of the interactions which strike me initially would be scenarios where one is somewhat reticent to touch a shared surface, however by affording the modification of such behaviors would we be facilitating the creation of a generation physically averse to many everyday interactions which we as humans currently take for granted?

As our interactions with objects head in a direction visibly reminiscent of something approaching telekinesis how will this affect the way in which our everyday artifacts function and in what ways will designers harness gestures to influence behavior.

Which interactions or physical devices do we encounter on a daily basis which might benefit from such an interface?

Doors

An obvious choice surely? Maybe not. Many public facing doors in buildings are already using motion sensors to detect a person as they approach. Would they benefit by requiring a directive gesture to open? Probably not, although many of us would be familiar with two scenarios in which such solutions fall short.

a) The first we’ll call ‘Playing Chicken’ – When one walks towards an ‘Automatic Door’ with the intention of entering the building, yet the doors fail to open with sufficient time, forcing the individual to either break stride or stop, face the glass and wait patiently for the doors to acknowledge their presence.

b) ‘Getting Smart’ – when the flow of people using an automatic door is out of step with the sensors timing. Causing awkward uncertainty and nervous approaches by those who wish to enter, daunted by the prospect of getting sandwiched between the unforgiving glass panes.
The name of which is my tribute to an old spy TV show Get Smart in which the character confidently faced the prospect of simliar door malfunction.

However if a simple hand gesture were required would people feel socially awkward ‘waving’ to an inanimate object, or would it only be a matter of getting used to this slight change in behavior. For instance only 15 years ago a person may have avoided the prospect of having a full-blown conversation in a public space over a mobile device, yet nowadays many feel obliged to do just that not only by necessity but mostly by choice. Social conventions regularly accommodate technological advances with a unforeseen pace.

Toilet Seats

Use of a gestural command to lift and close a toilet seat would be of great benefit hygienically speaking, particularly in public spaces where one would be much less inclined to touch a toilet lid. When I researched this idea a little further it transpires that some other designers have had ideas along similar lines.

TV & Audio Systems

Use of a hand wave to change channels would initially seem useful, yet imagine a scenario where there are several people watching TV who might have differing opinions on what exactly to watch. Moving a simple single-user interface such as a remote control into a to multi-user scenario may unnecessarily complicate an otherwise straight-forward situation.

Imagine your next home audio system being able to recognise your gestures such as snapping your fingers to switch it on, a wave of your right hand to play and raising ones hand to raise the volume correspondingly. Would we want for such a thing or a would it be more a hindrance than a help.

Taps

I also remember thinking that taps would also benefit from having a non-touch interface. Again we are already familiar with motion activated taps but what about one where we facilitate greater control, allowing a user to turn it on/off, modify the flow and adjust the hot/cold streams – this could be achieved through use of gestures. Until this morning I had forgotten my thoughts on such interactions, that is until I received a message from Jasper Dekker, a product designer with Flankworks in The Netherlands who for his graduation project designed a tap which is controlled via spatial interaction.

You can view a demo of this tap in action below. There is also a more polished conceptual demonstration available here but the initial prototype spoke to me more, for some reason.

Neat huh? Seeing this prototype in action, it again struck me that the potential for gestural interfaces is vast and, if you excuse the pun – untapped, and we have only seen the beginnings of the impact such a subtle, virtually invisible technology can and will have on our daily lives.

As children we watched movies such as Star Wars where Jedi characters used their innate ability to manipulate objects at will, such behavior seemed magical at the time. However as man-machine interfaces continue to advance and their applications broaden, our interactions with the world and the objects within will accordingly becomes less intrusive and more natural.

Where else can you see gestural interfaces adding value in our day to day life?


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On Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 1:01 am 2 Comments »


Bill Buxton on Natural User Interfaces

Bill Buxton is Principal Researcher with Microsoft Research, he is a noted expert within the HCI field and was a pioneer of multi-touch interfaces back in the seventies.

He has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design, in particular. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc. – where 2003 he was co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement.


Get Microsoft Silverlight

Buxton works from the assumption that sketching is fundamental to all design activity, and explores what it means to sketch a variety of possible user experiences. His approach is aggressively low-tech and eclectic. He argues that although you can use software tools to create fully-realized interactive mockups, you generally shouldn’t. Those things aren’t sketches, they’re prototypes, and as such they eat up more time, effort, and money than is warranted in the early stages of design. What you want to do instead is produce sketches that are quick, cheap, and disposable.

“Now that we can do anything, what should we do?”

Bill Buxton

His book Sketching User Experiences – Getting the Design Right and the Right Design is an absolute must read for anyone working on software/hardware concerned with creating an engaging and usable experience. Last year he gave the first keynote presentation at MIX 09 conference.

Recently at CES, Microsoft spent time alot of time speaking about the ‘Natural User Interface’ or NUI, and how this gesture based, human oriented approach could represent one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s.

Touch, face, voice-recognition and movement sensors – all are part of an emerging field of computing often called natural user interface, or NUI. Interacting with technology in these humanistic ways is no longer limited to high-tech secret agents and Star Trek. Buxton says everyone can enjoy using technology in ways that are more adaptive to the person, location, task, social context and mood. Microsoft’s XBox technology ‘Project Natal’ incorporates face, voice, gesture, and object recognition technology to give users a variety of ways to interact with the console, all without needing a controller.

Larry Larsen’s lenghty (38 min. 42 sec) but fascinating interview with Buxton can be seen above in which he discusses his work with Microsoft on NUI technologies and the implications and impact such advances in human-machine interaction will have on our daily lives in the near future.

Further Reading.

Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved
Natural User Interfaces: Voice, Touch and Beyond
Now, Electronics That Obey Hand Gesture


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NYC ♥’s Data Visualisation

The field of data visualisation appears to be the ‘Plat du Jour’ of recent. It continues to gain great popularity as more and more people recognise the value of visualising data of any nature in a more aesthetic form, be it as part of a narrative, a news-story or as standalone interactive piece. Indeed as an antidote to the constant information overload we encounter everyday it makes for a welcome alternative.

There’s a lot of amazing work going on in the field at the moment, and sites such as Flowing Data, information aesthetics, Visual Complexity, Data Visualization.ch and Information is Beautiful do an excellent job of covering the trends of what’s happening on the scene, and indeed whats on the horizon.

“The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures”

Ben Shneiderman (1999)

However three pieces of work have caught my attention over the past number of weeks, which I’ll briefly describe in this post. They also share a common theme, in that they are either made about, made in or made by a person who lives in NYC. Perhaps a somewhat tenuous link, but one none the less.

Gray Lady

While the entire newspaper industry sits around debating whether the internet will bring about their demise and how they may avoid such a fate, The New York Times bucks the trend by embracing it. The work carried out by the inhouse team known as the Interactive Newsroom Technologies at ‘The Gray Lady’ has been making headlines of their own for quite a while now, and justifably so. Their combination of visualisation and data is leading the field in an emerging digital storytelling domain.

dataviz_i

Interactive Newsroom Technologies are the minds behind the online pieces which have captured the eyes and the attention of online readers, works such as their ‘Word Train ‘- a mood database which appeared on the home page for Election Day and ‘Casualities of War: Faces of the Dead’ and ambitious project which merged photography, databases, audio, and graphics – this project marked the date U.S. military fatalities in Iraq reached 3,000.

Emily Nussbaum wrote an excellent piece ‘The New Journalism – Goosing the Gray Lady’ earlier this year which details how & why this team was put together, also examining some of the fruits of their labor.

The recently launched The New York Times – Innovation Portfolio aims to showcase the work carried out by the team and is itself a excellent piece of interactive design work, incidentally it was carried out by the uber-talented Jon Dobrowski. The pieces are visually represented by color-coded bubbles under the categories Virtual, Multimedia, Personal Tools, Interactive Graphics, User-Submitted and Applications. They also provide some insight into user engagement by showing the actual page-views along with the average time spent with the feature.

Well worth a visit.

Gray Maps

Next up is an interactive map I came across which shows the income & rent data by New York City neighborhoods.

It poses the questions - Who lives here? Who can afford to live here?

This visualisation stands out for me though, in that is is beautifully executed. It enables one to view income demographics and rents in the neighborhoods of New York City. When you click on particular neighbourhood, it maps the number of families in each income category on the multicolored bar residing at the foot of the interface.

Who Lives Here? Who Can Afford To?

Web & Information design was carried out by by Sha Hwand, Zach Watson and William Wang with concept and project direction by Rosten Woo and John Mangier of The Center for Urban Pedagogy.

As Tim O Reilly already pointed out this type of visualisation should be part of every city’s eGovernment toolkit, indeed every countrys. A highly functional yet simplistic visualisation that exposes the potential for applications as a means of explaining the numbers by way of the pictures.

Anthropology + Mapping Application + Data Visualisation = Awesome.

Check it out at http://envisioningdevelopment.net/map.

Gray Matter

I first stumbled across the work of Jonathan Harris back in 2005, which happended to be an interactive piece named Phylotaxis it aimed to be an expression of the space where science meets culture. He designed it in collaboration with the one and only Stefan Sagmeister and it was commisioned by SEED magazine who recently hired another guru, namely Ben Fry to head up their data visualisation group.

Returning to Harris, his work aims to comibine elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean.

Phylotaxis was/is an impressive piece of work and his output has continued to impress since – however a year later he released a new work named ‘We Feel Fine’ which set out to be ‘ an exploration of human emotion.’

“It continually harvests sentences containing the phrase “I feel” or “I am feeling” from the Internet’s newly posted blog entries, saves them in a database, and displays them in an interactive Java applet, which runs in a web browser. Each dot represents a single person’s feeling. We Feel Fine collects around 15,000 new feelings per day, and has saved over 13 million feelings since 2005, forming a constantly evolving portrait of human emotion.”

Jonathan Harris

We Feel Fine

Just released is a book which is based on the project, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion. With lush, colorful spreads devoted to 50 feelings, 13 cities, 10 topics, 6 holidays, 5 age groups, 4 weather conditions, and 2 genders, We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, It is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it’s like to be human.

Check out the interactive, installation and print versions of this amazing project at ‘We Feel Fine’.


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On Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 8:57 pm Comments Off


Innovation at Pixar

It goes without saying that Pixar are one of the most innovative companys around today. From the very outset they have made creative thinking an artform and have created a working-environment that encourages their employees to explore and embrace ideas on an ongoing basis, in turn ensuring that the innovation so critical to their success is both maintained and nurtured.

Brad Bird, whom Pixar hired after seeing his animated version of The Iron Giant, recently discussed in an interview the innovation process at Pixar. In this interview he stresses that for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money cannot be the focus. He then goes on to discuss 9 key lessons which give great insight into the companies culture and the approaches they use to ensure they remain at the top of their game. Those lessons on fostering innovation are an absolute must read and can be found here.

Steve Jobs hired Bird, because after three huge box-office successes, namely Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2, he was worried Pixar might struggle to stay innovative. Jobs told Bird: “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out”.

Jobs had stated in a letter to shareholders in 1997 that

“We believe there are only two significant brands in the film industry– “Disney” and “Steven Spielberg”. We would like to establish “Pixar” as the third.”

Disney purchased Pixar earlier this year for the princely sum of $7.4 billion so it could well be argued that Jobs has seen to it that Pixar achieved its goal of becoming the third significant brand.


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On Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 9:23 pm Comments Off