Phd pathway of thoughts and ideas

iPhone 4: Triumph of the Design Nerds

2010-07-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Source: ComputerWorld, 1 July 2010

By Mike Elgan

The creation of a consumer electronics product involves input from a wide range of people, including marketers, engineers and usability experts. The task of product leadership is to pick and choose among competing agendas to arrive at the best product. It's difficult to do, because often there is no way to solve a design problem that pleases everyone.

The design priorities of the products we buy often reveal the internal power dynamics of the companies that built them. By understanding the design decisions a company faced, and looking at its choices, you can figure out which types of people are influential in the internal give-and-take leading up to a final product design, and which types are relatively powerless.

WHY THE iPhone 4 REVEALS DESIGNER POWER
The iPhone 4 is a marvel of industrial design. Form and function are united beautifully, and it's an incredibly useful phone. I bought one. I love it. But three design decisions by Apple demonstrate a new boldness, a new level of power by hard-core designers inside Apple - and a corresponding weakness by engineers and usability specialists.

In these three design areas, Apple was presented with a clear decision between design elegance and usability and chose design elegance every time.

Associated Link: More: iPhone 4: Triumph of the design nerds

Ferrari F10 steering wheel is usability horror

2010-05-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

Every year, Ferrari fields a team in the Formula One championship, and dumps around $400 million into developing and racing the car.

So, says Cliff Kuang in Fast Company, you’d think that the steering wheel–perhaps the car’s most crucial point of contact, where a human turns all that R&D into championship trophies–would be a masterpiece of interface design. And you would be wrong.

Kuang calls it a “comedically disjointed, confusing mess” and “amazing that the drivers don’t crash these things twice every lap” (and even the people at AutoBlog agree).

Read article (with video)

from - http://www.experientia.com/blog/ferrari-f10-steering-wheel-is-usability-horror/

The great Norman debate

2010-01-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

Caused a variety pf interesting discussion again..

Technology First, Needs Last - http://jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html

"Necessity is often not the mother of invention. In many cases, it surely has been just the opposite. When humans possess a tool, they excel at finding new uses for it. The tool often exists before the problem to be solved." Nye, D. E. (2006).
I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn't happen.

New conceptual breakthroughs are invariably driven by the development of new technologies The new technologies, in turn, inspire technologists to invent things, not sometimes because they themselves dream of having their capabilities, but many times simply because they can build them. In other words, grand conceptual inventions happen because technology has finally made them possible. Do people need them? That question is answered over the next several decades as the technology moves from technical demonstration, to product, to failure, or perhaps to slow acceptance in the commercial world where slowly, after considerable time, the products and applications are jointly evolve, and slowly the need develops.

Are flush toilets, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, automobiles, airplanes, or modern telecommunication essential needs? Civilization got along quite well without them for thousands of years. Today, many consider them not just needs but essentials. And every one of these was driven by technology.

Revolutionary innovation is what design companies prefer, what design contests reinforce, and what most consultants love to preach. But if you examine the business impact of innovation, you will soon discover that the most frequent gains come from the small, incremental innovations, changes that lower costs, add some simple features, and smooth out the rough edges of a product. Most innovations are small, relatively simple, and fit comfortably into the established rhythm and competencies of the existing product delivery cycle.

Successful revolutionary innovation is rare. In any given arena, it happens only a few times per decade. Why? In part because it is difficult to invent a new concept that truly fits people's lives and needs. In part, it is because existing products already satisfy most people and when the new concepts appear, the older, existing technologies have a remarkable way of rising to the challenge and sustaining themselves for years - decades even - long after people thought they would disappear. How long did it take the train to overtake the canal as a means of shipping goods? How long did it take the automobile to overtake the horse and carriage as a means of transportation? Think decades. Even simple innovations take decades to gain market acceptance. The path of diffusion of innovation has been well studied, well documented. Most radical innovations fail. Those that succeed can take decades before they are successful.

The grand, breakthrough innovation is what professors love to teach their students, love to write about, and to discuss. But not only is it rare, even the occasional brilliant concepts are difficult to pull off. Yes, it is exciting to contemplate some brand new concept that will change people's lives, but the truth is that most fail. The failure rate has been estimated to be between 90 and 95%, and I have heard credible, data-based estimates as high as a 97% failure rate.

In reality, innovation comes in many shapes and forms. Most new product development is innovative, but at a very tiny, incremental level. Costs are trimmed. Manufacturing and distribution efficiencies are introduced. Costly features of little use are removed, new features thought to enhance competitive value are introduced. Simple, small, yet very important in the life cycle of a product.

Myth: Use ethnographic observational studies to discover hidden, unmet needs

To achieve major conceptual breakthroughs, we should do ethnographic field study to understand the hidden unmet needs of our potential customers. Right or wrong?

It all sounds logical: study people. Discover hidden, unmet needs. Fulfill those needs, and leap ahead of the competition, producing yet another wondrous advance. This is the mantra of the design research community. The research community does a wonderful service. It investigates the way people live. It makes voyeurs of all of us, and the results of their studies provide important titillations to our understanding of human behavior. And it's fun to do: you get to go to exotic locations, to watch people do intimate acts, and then to come back and tell the world what you have seen, carefully disguising the identity of the "informants." Oh yes, I know it can also be dull and dreary, exhausting and depressing, and sometimes even dangerous: but even these aspects can serve to embellish the final story.

But the real question is how much all this helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people's lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.

Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors. They create for the same reason that people climb mountains: to demonstrate that they can do so. Most of these inventions fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives.

Take a look at the powerful inventions that have changed society and ask what role design research played:

The Airplane
The Automobile
The Telephone
The Radio
The Television
The Computer
The Personal Computer
The Internet
SMS Text Messaging
The Cellphone
What role did design research play? What role did marketing research play? No role. All were driven by technology. In his recent study of technology, the economist Brian Arthur reached a very similar conclusion: technologies evolve from earlier technologies, driven by science, driven by engineering, driven by tinkerers of all sorts. Needs follow so slowly, that Arthur does not even cover them.

Consider the cycle. First comes a new technology. Perhaps it is a new idea or perhaps an old idea that has finally reached a commercially viable state where inventors can consider it. Note that the time here varies. Edison launched his first phonograph company within months of his invention: he never questioned the need. He had invented the paperless office, he announced, and launched his product. The notion that the phonograph was better suited for playing back pre-recorded music came much later, and from Emile Berliner, a competitor (whose company morphed into RCA Victor and succeeded whereas Edison's several attempts all failed). Technology first: needs last. Multiple-touch interaction with displays took roughly two decades to move from the research laboratory to its appearance in everyday products, and even so, it is not yet common outside of a few limited product categories.

New ideas face two different kinds of hurdles. The first is in the company. Brand new ideas are strange and foreign. If developed within a company, they often do not fit. They compete for scarce resources with other, proven products. New ideas have to fit into the competencies of a company, they have to fit the product schedule, the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution chains. Any new idea that goes outside of the norm has introduced more barriers to success: the innovator's job is not over until all these other barriers have been taken account of, so that the entire system will work smoothly. Innovation is a systems issue; it is not about product or process: it is about the entire system.

The second hurdle is outside the company. If the idea is done outside of a company, then the same hurdles exist in trying to convince people to fund the development. It is risky, unknown, untested. Why should anyone invest? Especially when the data show that most such investments fail. The history of innovation is filled with the stories of those grand inventors who persisted in the face of severe doubt and near financial ruin before they finally succeeded: The xerographic copier, early automobile companies, the development of television, and then color television. The videophone. For that matter, history would be filled with the even greater story of all those who followed similar paths but had to give up for lack of finances: they didn't make it to the history books.

A revolutionary product is fraught with peril: it may not fit people's life or work styles. It probably is too expensive, too limited in power, at least in its initial instantiation. Within an established company, it probably is disruptive of the orderly method of product development, manufacture, and development. It causes strains within the organization.

When I was at Apple, I watched many innovative products fail. Badly done? No, simply ahead of their time. For example, from 1992 to 1994 Apple developed one of the first commercial digital cameras, the Apple QuickTake 100, one of the very first smart pen-based computers (the Newton), and innovative software applications (e.g., CyberDog, Activity Based Computing, OpenDoc). In my consulting practice I helped develop the first digital picture frame and an extremely high quality distance education system for MBA courses. All failed. Were they bad ideas? No. Were they badly implemented? No. All were excellent concepts: they were ahead of their time. The first company to make automobiles in the United States failed. The first commercially sold computer that used a graphical user interface and that helped develop many of the ideas now central to today's world of computing, the Xerox Star, failed. The second commercial attempt to use a similar philosophy, the Apple Lisa, failed. The third attempt, the Apple Macintosh, almost failed, saved only by the fortuitous arrival of Adobe's development of Postscript and Canon's introduction of low-cost laser printing.

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.

New technological advances inspire inventors to dream of applications, from the silly to the reasonable: examine patent applications over the last century and most are mundane, many are silly, and some hint at broad breakthroughs. New products arose through the tinkering and experimenting of inventors. Most fail. But some were accepted as people discovered their value. Often they had to be nurtured, tamed, modified, but over time, a small number found their niche: the technology launched the products. The products discovered needs. People slowly adopted them, leading to more changes in the products.

Technology first, invention second, needs last.

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.

In the product world, innovation comes in many forms. The least interesting innovations to the university and company research community are the small, slow enhancements that gradually lower costs while improving performance. But in fact, not only is this where most product enhancement takes place, it is also where the research community can add the most value. This is where ethnographic observation can be powerful, discovering the difficulties people have in everyday use, the workarounds and hacks they invent that suggest product modifications. This allows existing products to be modified at low cost, low risk, yet making them ever more attractive, ever more valuable to the customer base.

But even though incremental improvement is the most powerful and important mechanism for a company, all the excitement revolves around the dramatic breakthrough. And yes, the payoffs from these inventions are so large that their success cam compensate for the risk. But the initial products are almost likely to fail, so it takes a company with money and patience to succeed in these markets. And in these domains, although creativity and imagination are essential, design research, market research, and our beloved careful assessment of people's needs, whether visible or hidden, are largely irrelevant. The inventors will invent, for that is what inventors do. The technology will come first, the products second, and then the needs will slowly appear, as new applications become luxuries, then "needs," and finally, essential.

Once a product direction has been established, research with customers can enhance and improve it. Beforehand? Leave it to the technologists. They 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.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, Visiting Professor at KAIST (South Korea), and author: his latest book, Sociable Design: Why Complexity Is Better Than Simplicity is scheduled for publication in Fall 2010. He lives at jnd.org.

READINGS

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The nature of technology: what it is and how it evolves. New York: Free Press.

Kaplan, J. A., & Segan, S. (2008, July 18). 21 Great Technologies That Failed: The most innovative tech doesn't always succeed. Here we present 21 great technologies from both Apple and Microsoft that were simply too far ahead of their time. PCmag.com.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2325931,00.asp

Nye, D. E. (2006). Technology matters: questions to live with. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. The definitive version will be published in Interactions.

musicking....

2010-01-07T15:08:00.000-08:00

Interesting point on musicking...

Musicking - taken from http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2007/01/musicking.html

"I have amended the tagline of this site from 'the politics of dancing' to 'the politics of dancing and musicking'. On this site I don't want to just focus on dance music scenes in the narrow sense, e.g. soul, disco, house etc. I am interested in other kinds of scenes - for instance I am planning to write about anarcho-punk - but on the other hand I don't want to focus on bands and songs. I am interested in what happens when people come together in a particular place and move and socialise to music - whether or not they are actually dancing, and whatever the soundtrack.

That's where the term 'musicking' comes in. It was coined by musicologist Christopher Small in the context of defining music as a verb rather than a noun: 'To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance'.

Small's intention is to critique the idea of music as a one directional process from performer to passive audience. For him 'musicking.. is an activity in which all those present are involved and for whose nature and quality, success or failure, everyone present bears some responsibility. It is not just a matter of composers, or even performers, actively doing something to, or for, passive listeners. Whatever it is we are doing, we are all doing it together—performers, listeners (should there be any apart from the performers), composer (should there be one apart from the performers), dancers, ticket collectors, piano movers, roadies, cleaners and all'. Musicking is not just about live performance: dancers in a club, somebody walking down the road with an iPod and people whistling in the bath are all musicking too in Small's definition.

For Small, musicking is no small matter - it helps constitute our social world: 'The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world'."

Source of quotes: Christopher Small, Musicking: the meaning of performance and listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

Some relevant quotes

2009-08-25T09:29:00.000-07:00

Some relevant quotes to help with the positioning of the PCA.

If interaction design is considered only at the end, software is driven by engineering design, of which users are rightly unaware, rather than by representations with which they interact. -- Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor, in Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996

We encounter the deep questions of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being. -- Winograd and Flores, 1986, p. xi.

[...] mastery resides not in the master but in the organization of the community of practice of which the master is part. -- Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 94

Coopers vision of agile

2009-08-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

Alan Coopers view of Agile by Alan Cooper on July 31, 2009

"Lots of ivory tower software experts cheerfully follow their own muse, but in the world of business, the dreams of money-makers are usually in conflict with the dreams of geeks.

In the business world, software developers have always been the whipping boy. In commerce, the delivered-software never matched the envisioned-software, and the technologists got the blame. Executives have always been unhappy about their inability to effectively direct and exploit software development. The only tool that seemed to get results for managers was to keep programmers on a ridiculously short leash by allocating resources in tiny increments. The results weren’t good, but they tended to prevent colossal disasters, which was, apparently, good enough for business.

Over many years, in self defense, programmers increasingly hunkered down to protect themselves. They aggressively lowered the expectations of their managers. They tried to commit to the least possible performance to avoid blame. All they really accomplished was to avoid good performance.

Nobody was really very happy with that situation, but it was good enough to provide most programmers with a decent living and some self-respect.

But many programmers are more ambitious than that, and most of them are used to higher levels of achievement than just “good enough”. All of that mediocrity has generated a lot of frustration for many programmers. Extreme programming was one method whereby developers could force business people to view the consequences of their decisions.

Extreme programming showed developers that there was power in self-determination, and in reaction to all that old defensive stuff, many programmers have finally said “Enough is enough”. They emerged from their bunkers to become proactive in *guiding* the development process rather than just doing what they were told (and then getting blamed for the failure that results). And agile is the mechanism they used.

I’ve long been an advocate of such technological-craftsman-self-determination. It’s just that I advocated it via the “interaction design” point of view. Therefore, agilists and I are on the exact same wavelength.

Now, there are some agile programmers who think that they are dealing with *technical* issues rather than social ones. If you ask me (no one ever seems to actually ask me), these people are trying to take TWO steps backward: they don’t want to return to the hunker-down phase, so they want to reinstate its ivory tower antecedent, that small-world-coding-happy-place that existed before software went big time. That place has never existed in the commercial world.

To my mind, agile means taking responsibility for making a good product. Even if you used test-driven-development, pair-programming, retrospectives, stand-ups and all of the detritus of “agile” but then built a product that nobody liked or wanted, then it wasn’t agile.

One of the responsibilities of software development is to assure that the right product is being created, and then to create it in the right way. The only way to accomplish this is to apply the best practices of programming, design, and all of the other associated disciplines and crafts. *TRUE* agile means integrating these crafts into a joyful, unified, productive whole."

Values in Software Design Practice

2009-07-15T10:24:00.000-07:00

A really useful post from Autodesek on the values required for software design practice, this I feel links in with the values outlined out in the IE.

Values in Software Design Practice

by John Schrag on July 10, 2009

Every user experience (UX) designer who practices in a corporate setting knows the breathless whirlwind that is modern business. We designers manage relationships with developers, business managers, and customers, and still have a full-time production role researching, designing and validating features and interactions. We rarely have enough time to do everything we should, and therefore have to carefully choose where to spend our time and resources. Some designers don't even have the luxury of such choice, and instead are tasked with specific deliverables, which are sometimes not the best use of their time. In the face of this industry-wide problem, it's no surprise that dysfunctional design practices can arise and even become so common that they are seen as normal, or at least inevitable. But I don't believe they are.

In 2001, a group of software developers, development managers, and consultants created the Agile Manifesto, a document that outlined a set of simple values that they believed were the foundation of good development practices. What is interesting about this document is that it makes no reference to specific practices or buzzwords -- instead, it outlines principles and values against which any particular practice can be evaluated.

In the same spirit, my co-workers and I spent several hours considering the question of UX design practice. We weren't considering the question of what makes good design; there are innumerable books on that topic. We were considering the question of what separates a healthy, effective design practice from the horror stories we hear about when talking to others in the industry. We came up with two lists; the first list (below) talks about doing certain actions in the right order. Reading the list, these orderings may sound obvious, but they are by no means standard practice:

Setting Goals before Taking Action
Understand Problems before Generating Solutions
Designing before Writing Design Documents
Validating Designs before Investing in Code
Steak before Sizzle

The second list is one of relative values. While all of the items on both sides of this list have value, we value the items on the left more than the items on the right:

We Value:

Validated Data over Expert Opinion
Quality of Data over Ease of Data Collection
Complete Workflows over Long Feature Lists
Achieving Results over Writing Reports
Collaborative Design over Design by Referendum or Design by Fiat
Ease of Use over Ease of Coding
Well-designed Critical and Common Workflows over Complete Coverage of Every Possible Workflow

Of course, a few words in a list doesn't capture these ideas all that well. In future blog posts, I'm going to talk about each of these items in more depth, show examples and talk about what can be done to keep your design practice healthy, even in the face of the whirlwind.

More maps

2009-06-05T14:20:00.000-07:00

Another really intersting map visulisation from Pasta & Vinegar

About digital and paper maps

Mapping is a favorite topic of mine, not only because I worked on locative media, but also because I find they are fascinating objects. Maps are really interesting these days as they exemplify one of the design trend I spotted recently: the transformation of non-digital objects by design techniques coming from the digital world. To some extent, lots of artifacts from the material world can be re-designed by applying insights learned when creating weird interfaces and new sorts of interactions.

This is what happens currently with paper-maps which design is reshuffled by people who grew up with video-games and on-line mapping tools, or by designers who consciously want to apply techniques coming from the digital. What is highly captivating in this context is that it also reshapes the user experience of the object at hands. Maps are a good example of such phenomena.

One of the most advanced project along these lines is certainly Jack Shulze’s Here and There. Although I don’t have the poster version, the Wired UK version will do to exemplify what it is:

Here is the idea:

“Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands. As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer’s local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.“

There is more on S&W’s on-line web log where Schulze describes how he wanted to “exploits and expands upon the higher levels of visual literacy born of television, games, comics and print“. More specifically, he wanted to tap into the satellite representation as a symbol of omniscience and the reason why a platform such as Google Earth is so compelling. The point was to have “a speculative projections of dense cities (…) intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward“.

Reading this in the train yesterday made sense when few minutes after, arrived at my final destination in the city of Lyon (France), I encountered this curious map:

The map depicts the city of Lyon from the train station at the bottom (in this white area) and the city itself in the upper part of the picture. There is a lot to discuss here and I won’t comment about what is not represented (can the white part be absent because it may have been perceived as not interesting for tourists?). What I find relevant there is:

The sort of bird eye’s view, as if we were in a video game, where the landscape is represented in plan over distance
The color overlay that shows the subway, tram and bus lines is also curious. It basically maps the public transport infrastructure on the perspective
The map is fixed and located in the train station, it’s only drawn for this specific viewpoint (the station) and definitely match the context of use.

Can the method provide such measurable insight?

2009-06-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

Taken from http://www.ryanjacoby.com/

What if your users wrote your business plan?

"Waiting in the lobby of my hotel yesterday in Cambridge, this headline caught my eye.
What if your users / fans / customers actually wrote your business plan or ran your long-term strategic planning process?
How would they change your estimates?
What would that mean from the businesses you'd be in and how you'd invest your money?
Oh yeah, Go Caps!"

2009-05-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

Map incompleteness

Map incompleteness is something that I am very intrigued about. As shown in the example above taken in Paris, the city itself is well represented but as soon as you leave the “périphérique” (the highway-like infrastructure that surrounds the french capital), it’s a blank grey void as if no one leaves beyond this limit. It’s a phenomenon you also encounter with weather maps as you can see below: weather forecast generally stops at the border (clouds don’t go through the customs, do they?). You can see the swiss map as if it was a stand-alone territory (lots of countries do it anyway).

Why do I blog this?

Some very useful issues to be thinking about and when and where to use for my own work, if appropriate? Taken from Pasta & Vinegar

"Map incompleteness is understandable in terms of information design: the use of “white space” can be relevant to “balance composition and induction properly”. Designing maps and signage is a matter of simplification so that people could easily grasp the situation at hand. However, in both situations above I am often bothered by the simplification; not that I need to go across the border and would be happy to know the temperature, rather because it discretized phenomena that should be represented as continuous."

Chipchase photo Fare Maps

2009-05-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

Fare Maps

Thoughts on Data, design…and soul

2009-05-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Some key thoughts from the blog post ghostinthepixel.com,
it is useful to think of where a model would position itself in relation to this discussion -
Does the model have to be data driven? I would hope not... As pointed out “It is more from engaging with users, watching what they do, understanding their pain points, that you get big leaps in design.” This again is pointing to how a model may lead to such discussions - with the value of data and value of data taken from the context ?
The full discussion is below:

Data, design…and soul

Following up on the initial posting on Google’s “data-driven” ethos by web designer extraordinaire Doug Bowman, and the subsequent heated debate on data vs. design (on ixda, etc.), another web design guru, Luke Wroblewski has published a beautifully compact articulation pointing out the falsity of the debate (which the NYTimes even used in their article title over the weekend–hmm!). Indeed it’s not a conflict, but a parallel dialogue of approaches and viewpoints, working together.

As Luke says:

1. Data informs design
2. A handle on design builds credibility
3. Data is not the only way to make decisions

Nice!

On the same topic, Luke Stevens published this lengthy read teasing apart the issues of “data vs. design”, largely defending data-driven design with thoughtful explanation, but avoiding the typical holy war of righteous indignation.

Ok, that’s fine. However, my issue isn’t really that data drives design or not, but the following:

1. What is meant by data? Seriously. This may sound like a naive question but certainly in light of ethnography, affective studies, personal storytelling, etc (and more from Jane Fulton Suri, Liz Sanders, Brenda Laurel, among others). I’d say the parameters of what constitutes “data” are broadening. I fear there is such rigid attachment by researchers, marketers, engineers to just numerical studies that there is a blind spot to other kinds of data…

In addition to the conventions of web analytics and statistically quantifiable numeric studies/surveys/measurements, there must be room for the data of past professional experience, evolved and applied patterns/principles/guidelines, and yes personal intuition via judgement and thoughtful insight (developed over time with exposure to projects, clients, etc.)

I suspect that a rigid adherence to only numerical data is actually just a snub of contemptuous disrespect for trusting a learned and experienced designer’s judgement, which is multidimensional and dynamic…and evolving.

2. What about the soul of a design? How does extensive numerical data studies enable the aesthetic character, the humanizing quality, the elusive wonderment that makes a design resonate with one’s dreams and desires? “To light a fire in the mind and breathe life into the heart”, as former Sony head of design once described some compelling design concepts, is not something numbers can do. It takes a genuinely inspired and talented human being to elicit forth such qualities in pixels and matter, through a complex messy amalgam of culture, expression, arts, language, style, and so forth. There is an ineffable quality that transcends mere numbers, suggesting a poetic graceful elegance…a kind of equipoise if you will. Hundreds of numerical studies will not provide this no matter how rigorous or detailed. Some of it may be of value, but as Doug Bowman says, “But we take all that with a grain of salt.” And remember… as Jared Spool said once, “any piece of data can be whipped to confess to anything.” It takes the judgement, inspiration, experience, and temperament of the designer(s) to resolve a cohesive blend of the rational and the imaginative into something that people will emotionally connect with and effectively use.

Marissa Mayer may unapologetically say “We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,” but doing so only confesses the lack of humanity and soul in Google’s products, only a raw Terminator-esque ruthless efficiency embraced by triumphant engineering-centric glee. (Google Analytics–ironically–may be an exception, as is Google Chrome. IMHO per the recent bayCHI talk)

And finally, since when did a numerical quant study alone lead to some of the grand paradigm-shifting, breakthrough products of our time: the iPod, the Dyson, Tivo, Prius, twitter, youTube, blogs and of course the iPhone. Those dramatic jumps of insight more often involve multiple kinds of “data” mentioned above, and the recently recognized skills of abductive thinking (as Frog’s Jon Kolko described at Interaction’09)…with some curiosity and inventiveness and a good measure of perspiration, to hint at Thomas Edison’s old saying. Indeed, from the NYTimes article: “It is more from engaging with users, watching what they do, understanding their pain points, that you get big leaps in design.”

How to get better results from developers

2009-04-28T04:38:00.000-07:00

A somewhat topical discussion with the change of location for the the work - there really is a great point of re-addressing the us vs them approach. We are all in software development together, how much of an aspect of this is really discussed in the UCD approach?

Overall, I think you have some valuable insights, but the way you express them belies what I think is a wrongheaded approach to interacting with devs. The subject line as well as numerous things in the text imply a goal of manipulating and controlling and conflicting (and even condescending) with devs, which I think is not the best way to create an effective team. More inline. My reason for taking the time to respond in depth is in the hopes of creating more empathy and a better way [trim] Ambrose,
Right on the mark.The "us" vs. "them" attitude never works. We're all in this together.

I think the methodology has to really capture this aspect, but as said further down in the thread

Much of this assumes you are all working to the same objectives towards something better. Often teams don't and that's where the problem lies.

So is this something that can be captured?

The full post below How to get better results from developers

Earlier this week at the local Utah IxDA meeting and over the last while at various places I've heard the topic of how to deal with developers come up. I was thinking about it and realized I had a lot to say about it. Sorry for the length : )
I currently work at a very small company, less then 20. But compared to the other stories I've heard lately from Interaction Designers like myself in Utah, our company gets surprisingly consistent results from our developers in regards to design. Following are my 13 lessons that have helped me get better results from the developers I've worked with.
1. Be a developer
I can't stress this one enough. Development isn't something that can be appreciated, it has to be experienced. HTML and JavaScript don't cut it, you have to go out and actually do what your programmers do. Write SQL statements, create classes, build an application. When you can follow along and contribute intelligently to all the technology discussions, the developers will start to trust you that you understand them. Let alone the fact that you will be able to call them out on their bullshit, and yes they bullshit a lot.
2. Get in bed with the business people
At the end of the day the business people run the company and they control what the developers do. At my company I spend a great deal of time with our project manager, VP and CEO. I try to develop personal relationships with them. I make it obvious that my goal in life is to help them articulate what they want to the development team. Then when I present something to the development team, it's not my idea, this is what the boss wants so you better get it right. There is nothing more powerful then presenting a finished interaction document to development and saying that this is 100% approved by the CEO. And in the end the developers are actually happy you managed all that back and forth crap with the business guys so they don't have to.
3. Ease their pain
Developers just want to develop. They don't want to worry about requirements gathering, deadlines, art, research, politics and all the stuff that goes into running a project and a company. So the more you take responsibility for all these things they don't want to do, the more reliant they will become on you. When they need something from you, do it fast and with a smile. The more enjoyable you make their lives the more responsive they are going to be when you ask them to do things.
4. Force business to iterate in design, not in development
There's nothing a developer hates more then spending months on something that once the business guys see it they realize they want to do something else. I won't hand anything off to the developers until I have thought it through and iterated through it with the business guys as much as humanly possible within the time I was given. There are many decisions that can be made off of drawings rather than programming it. And business will quickly realize that getting the designers to change their designs is a thousand times cheaper than paying those expensive developers.
5. No one gives a rip what the artist thinks
The irony is they hired you to be the design expert, but they never listen to what you say. And guess what, they never will. You have to get over the illusion that they will do what you say because you know better, it doesn't happen. To be happy you have to accept the fact that you will never get to design what you want. Instead you have to learn to enjoy the reality that you are there to facilitate and assimilate everyone else's ideas into a single coherent whole. If you need an artistic outlet, do it at home, or you'll always be bitter.
6. But you do get to do what you want
Once you've checked what you want at the door, something amazing starts to happen. The funny truth is most business guys and most developers don't want to think about the details, so you get to! Other people on the team only care about their pet features, no one wants to take all that time to think through the rest. So as long as their pet issues are represented, you get to fill in the rest with whatever you want.
7. Write it down!
The beautiful thing about writing is it's the universal standard for communication. Yes a picture is worth a thousand words, but you cannot draw interactions as well as you can write them. My documentation is a mix of what we call "stories" with supporting graphics at key points. My friend is an html guy at a large company and his biggest complaint is that he gets handed a large photoshop file with no documentation. Somehow he is supposed to read the mind of the of the designer to figure out what actually happens in ui when the user interacts with it. The designer has failed to communicate the interaction. Writing is a royal pain in the ass, but it is incredibly effective at communicating the interaction to the developers and the QA team.
8. Get in bed with the QA team
The QA team is the group of people whose job it is to tell the developers they did it wrong, they are your enforcers. The better they understand what you wanted from the developers the better they are going to be at telling the developers what they did wrong. It's critical QA has the right kind of documentation to do their job, and you want to be in charge of that documentation. The cool little secret about QA is that they like checklists. I write my documents so that they are essentially checklists that the QA team can say, hey dev, item 3.i.b is wrong, fix it.
9. You have to have a middle man
Developers do not like to do HTML. It's a fact of life that will never change. As much as they think HTML is easy, it takes just as much concentration to do HTML as it does any other kind of development. In my experience the very best scenario is to hire a UI developer to be the middle man. In the web world this is called a Web Designer. A Web Designer is someone who cares about the visual details, but they can also code. If you don't get this guy you'll always be fighting a losing battle with the developers because they don't want to do HTML, they don't give a rip about visual details and you don't have the time to program the HTML either.
10. Sit next to them
There is a direct correlation to your physical distance from the developers and how effective you will be with them (remember Fitts' Law?). Currently I sit right next to my developers. I hear everything they say, I'm accessible, we go to lunch, I know what they are doing and saying. If you hide in an office or work off site, you're screwed plain and simple.
11. Spend time with them
This one should be obvious, but there's a basic rule that the more time you spend with someone the better you are going to be able to interact with them. Be friends with the developers, kick their ass in Team Fortress, go to lunch, carpool, whatever it takes. Get in their face and take as much time to figure them out as you do figuring out your customers. Do you even known your developer's names? Have you spent enough time with Derron to understand why he is such a grumpy prick?
12. Learn to articulate well
This is where studying design comes into play. Design is difficult to communicate verbally, it's naturally an intuition and feeling thing. But the cold hard fact is no one is going to trust your feelings, people will always want reason and logic to make decisions. So you have to learn to verbally articulate your feelings. The good news is there actually is logic and reason to art, but the bad news is it's one of the most complicated things on this planet. Learning to verbally articulate design takes time, there's no way around it. You simply have to study it. Study how other designers talk, learn patterns and read design literature like a mad man. And what will start to happen is you'll actually be able to argue for a design and win.
13. Good design is always hard to program
I finally realized this universal truth. What makes sense to a computer does not make sense to a human being. It takes a lot of hard work to get a computer to speak human. This is what you are trying to do as a designer. Developers are incapable of this because of the very fact that their job is to speak computer. Your job then is to force the programmers to make the computer to do something it was not meant to do. That will always mean that have to personally generate an incredible amount of extraneous code, blood, sweat and tears, everything they hate. This is why there will always be an eternal conflict between developers and designers, because your job is to make their life difficult, plain and simple.
That about sums up what I've learned so far. I hope this is helpful in some way. The painful truth is that design is a pain in the ass, and getting developers to do what's right for the users is like standing against a raging river. It's not natural for developers to do good design, it goes against their nature. Your job as a designer is to deal with this fact and somehow still get those developers to produce something human beings enjoy using.
What do you think? What have you found to be effective?

Cooper on Cooper vs Beck

2009-04-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

A really useful piece from IxDA on the Beck (XP) vs Cooper (agile) of the discussion that was requested in a post. The most interesting post was from Cooper himself, who stressed how the discussion is no longer relevant with the changes that agile has come through both with the development of interaction design and agile community.

What I find really interesting is the point:

"Agile is a significant and positive movement in the world of technology, just as the movement for design has been. They are NOT AT ALL MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE and I'm actively working with a broad range of agilistas to find effective common ground."

This is where my research research also lies in finding this common ground.

And although Cooper says

"Please don't listen to this recording.It was made a long time ago and it is NOT representative of anybody's current thinking."

From a research perspective, I think this helps to highlight the changing and evolving process of agile and so helps to emphasize the demands placed upon interaction design to mange and cope with finding and understanding where the common ground lies.

Cue a methodology...

For the full IxDA Cooper vs Beck post
http://gamma.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=41166

Alan Cooper

Sunday 9:29pm

Apurv,

Please don't listen to this recording.

It was made a long time ago and it is NOT representative of anybody's current thinking.

At the time, Kent Beck was pushing pure XP, which is decidedly NOT the same thing as what is currently known as "agile". My opinions about XP are NOT the same as my opinions about agile. In the years since that recording was made, much has been learned by both the interaction design community AND by the agile community about what the world of software needs and how our two practitioner communities can provide it.

Kent's innovations such as pair programming and test driven development are powerful and effective tools. When they are paired with the agile concept that I call "responsible craftsmanship", the synergy is fantastic. While Kent and I still have significant points of departure in our thinking, I'd wager that he would not take the same stance today that he did in 2004, and I know that I don't (would you?) . Over a year ago I asked Kent to record our "debate" anew, and while he was game for doing it, the logistics never came together.

Agile is a significant and positive movement in the world of technology, just as the movement for design has been. They are NOT AT ALL MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE and I'm actively working with a broad range of agilistas to find effective common ground.

Please don't dredge up old arguments and mis-apply them to new ideas.

Thanx,
Alan
cooper | Product Design for a Digital World
Alan Cooper
alan at cooper.com | www.cooper.com
All information in this message is proprietary & confidential. "Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly, I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it." - Theodore Roosevelt

Original Message
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Apurv Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 5:35 PM
To: discuss at ixda.org
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Content of Cooper vs Beck

Hi all,

While looking interaction design in an agile context, I'm constantly coming across a certain very landmark public discussion from 2004 between Alan Cooper and Kent Beck (of Extreme Programming) mentioned across the web. It seems this was a very insightful discussion and I am very curious to read it.

The original link to the content however is dead - http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/default.asp

Would anybody have a copy of it stored with them and be able to share it with me? I'd be humongously grateful!

Here's the link to the Cooper vs Bech discussion on IXCD years ago - http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=1079

Cheers,
Apurv

Service design as the design of activity systems

2009-04-12T03:23:00.000-07:00

A useful article on the application on the design of activity systems from the blog putting people first

Jeff Howard draws attention to a recent service design paper by Daniela Sangiorgi of Lancaster University:
“Dr. Daniela Sangiorgi’s 2008 presentation from ISDN3 just came across my radar. It’s on Service Design as the Design of Activity Systems (pdf 2.1MB). [Audio]

Here’s Sangiorgi on a key distinction:

I like to consider the origin of Service Design field with the introduction of the Interaction paradigm. Meaning moving the conception of services as complex organisations to the one of services as complex interfaces. In my opinion the perspective that looks at services from the interaction point of view, is different from the one that was trying to define services as ‘products’ and therefore as objects of a design process.

It sounds like she’s framing service design as a third order rather than a second order problem. By “interaction” she’s referring to services as complex interfaces between providers and users. A system of subjects, artifacts, roles and norms.

Here’s a recap of her talk by STBY.

I stumbled across an earlier paper (pdf) of hers on the topic of service design and activity theory a while back. Translating it from Italian proved incomprehensible so I put it aside.

This newer presentation clears up a lot.”

Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport

2009-04-12T02:34:00.000-07:00

A useful piece on Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport - by Peter Merholz Experience Matters - useful to think of in drawing on for my own methodology for the dynamics of working with agile development. A interesting point how the apple process of the continual iterations acceptance of end -

"So how can you avoid the blinking "12:00" products and the fragmented efforts that produce them? In the world of products, we see that focused, multidisciplinary teams deliver the best experiences. I interviewed Margaret Schmidt, Vice President of User Experience and Research for TiVo, for our recent MX Conference, and she stressed how the engineering, product management, and user experience teams eschew departmental hand-offs and reviews. Instead, product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, and user advocates work closely on a single project.

In his book Inside Steve's Brain, Leander Kahney explains Apple's design and development process: "Under Jobs' guidance, products are developed through nearly endless rounds of mockups and prototypes that are constantly edited and revised. This is true for both hardware and software [and their retail stores, it turns out]. Products are passed back and forth among designers, programmers, engineers, managers, and then back again. It's not serial."

In the world of services, make sure your project teams are multichannel. Coordinate in-person, online, phone, and mail interactions and communications. Recognize that your customer doesn't distinguish between channels they way you do, and make sure she's satisfied no matter how she chooses to engage.

Without such coordination and collaboration, companies will either deliver slapdash experiences, or, due to the gauntlet, nothing at all."

It concludes

"make sure your project teams are multichannel. Coordinate in-person, online, phone, and mail interactions and communications. Recognize that your customer doesn't distinguish between channels they way you do, and make sure she's satisfied no matter how she chooses to engage.
Without such coordination and collaboration, companies will either deliver slapdash experiences, or, due to the gauntlet, nothing at all." - I need to bulid further a wider the background collection of informaiton of socio-technical issues in knowdge communication.

- A further useful follow on by piece by Margaret Schmidt - TiVo VP Margaret Schmidt on Redesigning.

- And another piece on information technology and knowledge management.

Why information technology inspired but cannot deliver knowledge management.
Article Abstract:

Recent developments in information technology have inspired many companies to imagine a new way for staff to share knowledge and insights. Instead of storing documents in personal files and sharing personal insights with a small circle of colleagues, they can store documents in a common information base and use electronic networks to share insights with their whole community, even people scattered across the globe. However, most companies soon discover that leveraging knowledge is actually very hard and is more dependent on community building than information technology. This is not because people are reluctant to use information technology, rather it is because they often need to share knowledge that is neither obvious nor easy to document, knowledge that requires a human relationship to think about, understand, share, and appropriately apply. Ironically, while information technology has inspired the "knowledge revolution," it takes building human communities to realize it. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

author: McDermott, Richard
Publisher: University of California Press

UCD considered harmful...

2009-03-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

Why blog this?
A very important thought for UCD by Don Norman and where and where not the focus and actual context should be for UCD.
Whether or not it needs to be called 'ACD' is open to debate but the importance is that the context should be recognized, Norman puts forward how this is not so when the term UCD is used. This helps form an argument of what my own design framework is to propose.
- Question the history of 'context' in design methods?

In addition I can foresee how the scenario and persona discussion and existing UI tools may plugin to such a framework method as they 'should be' able to draw upon the context around them. This is now the thoughts and basis in how my own framework and how I should acknowledge the wider fundermentals of context. Own questions again on how and if and what to measure for this within suitable reason...?

- note follow up article HCD harmful? A Clarification just as useful Don Norman further explains why he made such a statement.

Follow up :Plenty of scope to follow up on who else has spoke out of the dangers of the UCD approach?

Article below

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful
Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2005. This is the author’s version of the work, the same as the published version except that I have corrected several typographical errors. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. The definitive version was published in Interactions, 12. 4, (July + August, 2005). Pp. 14-19.

NOTE: Please also see the clarification to this article: HCD harmful? A Clarification.

Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior.
KNOW YOUR USER

If there is any principle that is sacred to those in the field of user-interface design and human-computer interaction, it is “know your user.” After all, how can one design something for people without a deep, detailed knowledge of those people? The plethora of bad designs in the world would seem to be excellent demonstrations of the perils of ignoring the people for whom the design is intended. Human-Centered Design was developed to overcome the poor design of software products. By emphasizing the needs and abilities of those who were to use the software, usability and understandability of products has indeed been improved. But despite these improvements, software complexity is still with us. Even companies that pride themselves on following human-centered principles still have complex, confusing products.

If it is so critical to understand the particular users of a product, then what happens when a product is designed to be used by almost anyone in the world? There are many designs that do work well for everyone. This is paradoxical, and it is this very paradox that led me to re-examine common dogma.

Most items in the world have been designed without the benefit of user studies and the methods of Human-Centered Design. Yet they do quite well. Moreover, these include some of the most successful objects of our modern, technological worlds. Consider two representative examples:
The Automobile

People all over the world learn to drive quite successfully with roughly the same configuration of controls. There were no systematic studies of users. Rather, early automobiles tried a variety of configurations, initially copying the seating and steering arrangements of horse-drawn carriages, going through tillers and rods, and then various hand and foot controls until the current scheme evolved.
Everyday Objects

Just look around: kitchen utensils, garden tools, woodworking tools, typewriters, cameras, and sporting equipment vary somewhat from culture to culture, but on the whole, they are more similar than not. People all over the world manage to learn them — and manage quite well.
ACTIVITY-CENTERED DESIGN

Why do these devices work so well? The basic reason is that they were all developed with a deep understanding of the activities that were to be performed: call this Activity-Centered Design. Many were not even designed in the common sense of the term, rather, they evolved with time. Each new generation of builders slowly improved the product upon the previous generation, based on feedback from their own experiences as well as from their customers. Slow, evolutionary folk design. But even for those devices created by formal design teams, populated with people whose job title was “designer,” these designers used their own understanding of the activities to be performed to determine how the device would be operated. The users were supposed to understand the task and to understand the designers’ intentions.
Activities Are Not the Same as Tasks

Do note the emphasis on the word “activity” as opposed to “task.” There is a subtle difference. I use the terms in a hierarchical fashion. At the highest levels are activities, which are comprised of tasks, which themselves are comprised of actions, and actions are made up of operations. The hierarchical structure comes from my own brand of “Activity Theory,” heavily motivated by early Russian and Scandinavian research. To me, an activity is a coordinated, integrated set of tasks. For example, mobile phones that combine appointment books, diaries and calendars, note-taking facilities, text messaging, and cameras -- can do a good job of supporting communication activities. This one single device integrates several tasks: looking up numbers, dialing, talking, note taking, checking one’s diary or calendar, and exchanging photographs, text messages, and emails. One activity, many tasks.
What Adapts? Technology or People?

The historical record contains numerous examples of successful devices that required people to adapt to and learn the devices. People were expected to acquire a good understanding of the activities to be performed and of the operation of the technology. None of this “tools adapt to the people” nonsense — people adapt to the tools.

Think about that last point. A fundamental corollary to the principle of Human-Centered Design has always been that technology should adapt to people, not people to the technology. Is this really true? Consider the history of the following successful technologies.
The clock (and watch)
An arbitrary division of the year and day into months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, all according to physical principles that differ from psychological or biological ones, now rules our lives. We eat when our watches tell us it is meal time, not when we are hungry. We awake according to the harsh call of the alarm, not when we are rested. University classes are taught in one hour periods, three times a week, in 10 – 15 week sessions, not because this is good for education, but because it makes for easier scheduling. The extreme reliance on time is an accidental outgrowth of the rise of the factory and the resulting technological society.
Writing systems
Consider printing, handwriting, and typing. All are artificial and unnatural. It takes people weeks, months, or even years to learn and become skilled. One successful stylus-based text input device for the Roman alphabet is Palm’s Grafiti -- yet another unnatural way of writing.
Musical Instruments
Musical instruments are complex and difficult to manipulate and can cause severe medical problems. Musical notation is modal, so the same representation on a treble clef has a different interpretation on the bass clef. The usability profession has long known of the problems with modes, yet multiple staves have been with us for approximately 1000 years. It takes considerable instruction and practice to become skilled at reading and playing. The medical problems faced by musicians are so severe that there are books, physicians, web pages and discussion groups devoted to them. For example, repetitive stress injuries among violinists and pianists are common. Neither the instruments nor the notation would pass any Human-Centered Design review.
Human-Centered versus Activity-Centered: What’s the Difference?

What is going on? Why are such non-Human-Centered Designs so successful? I believe there are two reasons, one the activity-centered nature, and two the communication of intention from the builders and designers. Successful devices are those that fit gracefully into the requirements of the underlying activity, supporting them in a manner understandable by people. Understand the activity, and the device is understandable. Builders and designers often have good reasons for the way they constructed the system. If these reasons can be explained, then the task of learning the system is both eased and made plausible. Yes, it takes years to learn to play the violin, but people accept this because the instrument itself communicates rather nicely the relationship between strings and the resulting sounds. Both the activity and the design are understandable, even if the body must be contorted to hold, finger, and bow the instrument.

Activity-Centered Design (ACD) is actually very much like Human-Centered Design (HCD). Many of the best attributes of HCD carry over. But there are several differences, first and foremost being that of attitude. Attitude? Yes, the mindset of the designer.

The activities, after all, are human activities, so they reflect the possible range of actions, of conditions under which people are able to function, and the constraints of real people. A deep understanding of people is still a part of ACD. But ACD is more: it also requires a deep understanding of the technology, of the tools, and of the reasons for the activities.
Tools Define the Activity: People Really Do Adapt to Technology

HCD asserts as a basic tenet that technology adapts to the person. In ACD, we admit that much of human behavior can be thought of as an adaptation to the powers and limitations of technology. Everything, from the hours we sleep to the way we dress, eat, interact with one another, travel, learn, communicate, play, and relax. Not just the way we do these things, but with whom, when, and the way we are supposed to act, variously called mores, customs, and conventions.

People do adapt to technology. It changes social and family structure. It changes our lives. Activity-Centered Design not only understands this, but might very well exploit it.

Learn the activity, and the tools are understood. That’s the mantra of the Human-Centered Design community. But this is actually a misleading statement, because for many activities, the tools define the activity. Maybe the reality is just the converse: Learn the tools, and the activity is understood.

Consider art, where much time is spent learning the vagaries of the media. If you want to do oil painting, then you need to understand oil, and brushes, and painting surfaces — even how and when to clean your brush. Is this the tool wagging the dog? Yes, and that is how it always is, how it always shall be. The truly excellent artists have a deep and thorough understanding of their tools and technologies. It isn’t enough to have an artistic sense. So too with sports, with cooking, with music, and with all other major activities that use tools.

To the Human-Centered Design community, the tool should be invisible, it should not get in the way. With Activity-Centered Design, the tool is the way.
WHY MIGHT HCD BE HARMFUL?

Why might a Human-Centered Design approach ever be harmful? After all, it has evolved as a direct result of the many problems people have with existing designs, problems that lead to frustration, grief, lost time and effort, and in safety-critical applications, errors, accidents, and death. Moreover, HCD has demonstrated clear benefits: improved usability, less errors during usage, and faster learning times. What, then, are the concerns?

One concern is that the focus upon individual people (or groups) might improve things for them at the cost of making it worse for others. The more something is tailored for the particular likes, dislikes, skills, and needs of a particular target population, the less likely it will be appropriate for others.

The individual is a moving target. Design for the individual of today, and the design will be wrong tomorrow. Indeed, the more successful the product, the more that it will no longer be appropriate. This is because as individuals gain proficiency in usage, they need different interfaces than were required when they were beginners. In addition, the successful product often leads to unanticipated new uses which are very apt not to be well supported by the original design.

But there are more serious concerns: first, the focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves; second, too much attention to the needs of the users can lead to a lack of cohesion and added complexity in the design. Consider the dynamic nature of applications, where any task requires a sequence of operations, and activities can be comprised of multiple, overlapping tasks. Here is where the difference in focus becomes evident, and where the weakness of the focus on the users shows up.
Static Screens Versus Dynamic Sequences
We find that work in the kitchen does not consist of independent, separate acts, but of a series of inter-related processes. (Christine Frederick, The Labor-Saving Kitchen. 1919.)

The methods of HCD seem centered around static understanding of each set of controls, each screen on an electronic display. But as a result, the sequential operations of activities are often ill-supported. The importance of support for sequences has long been known ever since the time-and-motion studies of the early 1900s, as the quotation from Frederick, above, illustrates. Simply delete the phrase “in the kitchen” and her words are still a powerful prescription for design. She was writing in 1919: what has happened in the past 100 years to make us forget this? Note that the importance of support for sequences is still deeply understood within industrial engineering and human factors and ergonomics communities. Somehow, it seems less prevalent within the human-computer interaction community.

Many of the systems that have passed through HCD design phases and usability reviews are superb at the level of the static, individual display, but fail to support the sequential requirements of the underlying tasks and activities. The HCD methods tend to miss this aspect of behavior: Activity-centered methods focus upon it.
Too Much Listening To Users

One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their complaints and critiques seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their software gets more complex and less understandable with each revision. Activity-Centered philosophy tends to guard against this error because the focus is upon the Activity, not the Human. As a result, there is a cohesive, well-articulated design model. If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.

Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the suggestions and evaluate them in terms of the requirements of the activity. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Paradoxically, the best way to satisfy users is sometimes to ignore them.

Note that this philosophy applies in the service domain as well. Thus, Southwest Airlines has been successful despite the fact that it ignores the two most popular complaints of its passengers: provide reserved seating and inter-airline baggage transfer. Southwest decided that its major strategic advantage was inexpensive, reliable transportation, and this required a speedy turn-around time at each destination. Passengers complain, but they still prefer the airline.

Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” The case of Apple Computer is illustrative. Apple’s products have long been admired for ease of use. Nonetheless, Apple replaced its well known, well-respected human interface design team with a single, authoritative (dictatorial) leader. Did usability suffer? On the contrary: its new products are considered prototypes of great design.

The “listen to your users” produces incoherent designs. The “ignore your users” can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision for the product, what I have called the “Conceptual Model.” The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don’t always do what they say.

Now consider the method employed by the Human-Centered Design community. The emphasis is often upon the person, not the activity. Look at those detailed scenarios and personas: honestly, now, did they really inform your design? Did knowing that the persona is that of a 37 year old, single mother, studying for the MBA at night, really help lay out the control panel or determine the screen layout and, more importantly, to design the appropriate action sequence? Did user modeling, formal or informal, help determine just what technology should be employed?

Show me an instance of a major technology that was developed according to principles of Human-Centered Design, or rapid prototype and test, or user modeling, or the technology adapting to the user. Note the word “major.” I have no doubt that many projects were improved, perhaps even dramatically, by the use of these techniques. But name one fundamental, major enhancement to our technologies that came about this way.

Human-Centered Design does guarantee good products. It can lead to clear improvements of bad ones. Moreover, good Human-Centered Design will avoid failures. It will ensure that products do work, that people can use them. But is good design the goal? Many of us wish for great design. Great design, I contend, comes from breaking the rules, by ignoring the generally accepted practices, by pushing forward with a clear concept of the end result, no matter what. This ego-centric, vision-directed design results in both great successes and great failures. If you want great rather than good, this is what you must do.

There is a lot more to say on this topic. My precepts here are themselves dangerous. We dare not let the entire world of designers follow their instincts and ignore conventional wisdom: most lack the deep understanding of the activity coupled with a clear conceptual model. Moreover, there certainly are sufficient examples of poor design out in the world to argue against my position. But note, many of those bad designs are profitable products. Hmm. What does that suggest? Would they be even more profitable had Human-Centered Design principles been followed? Perhaps. But perhaps they might not have existed at all. Think about that.

Yes, we all know of disastrous attempts to introduce computer systems into organization where the failure was a direct result of a lack of understanding of the people and system. Or was it a result of not understanding the activities? Maybe what is needed is more Activity-Centered Design, maybe failures come from a shallow understanding of the needs of the activities that are to be supported. Note too that in safety-critical applications, a deep knowledge of the activity is fundamental. Safety is usually a complex system issue, and without deep understanding of all that is involved, the design is apt to be faulty.

Still, I think it time to rethink some of our fundamental suppositions. The focus upon the human may be misguided. A focus on the activities rather than the people might bring benefits. Moreover, substituting Activity-Centered for Human-Centered Design does not mean discarding all that we have learned. Activities involve people, and so any system that supports the activities must of necessity support the people who perform them. We can build upon our prior knowledge and experience, both from within the field of HCD, but also from industrial Engineering and Ergonomics.

All fields have fundamental presuppositions. Sometimes it is worthwhile to re-examine them, to consider the pros and cons and see whether they might be modified or even replaced. Is this the case for those of us interested in Human-Centered Design? We will never know unless we do the exercise.
Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, and author, his latest book being “Emotional Design.” He lives at www.jnd.org.

NOTE: Please also see the clarification to this article: HCD harmful? A Clarification.

Some useful process related notes

2009-03-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Konigi - process Notebook

Schedule and Cost Summary Calculator Template

How Software is Built: Interview with Liz Danzico

The Language We Use

20 Steps to Better Wireframing

Is Good Design Replicable?

Designing by Writing

User Centered Design Work Process Toolkit

Doing Sketch Iterations

Software Tool Design: Design by Sketching

How do you design? Ebook

What Goes into a Well-Done Critique

Cockburn's Basic Use Case Template

The what, when and why of wireframes

Bill Buxton Lecture on Sketching and Experience Design at Stanford

Problem Analysis is Not the Key to Successful Design Process

Difference between iterative and incremental development and a bit for agile

2009-02-26T04:06:00.000-08:00

A really useful perspective on iterative and incremental development from JanBlog

"Do you sometimes also have problem to make clear distinction between iterative and incremental development? What if you should explain difference to customer or friend?

Hopefully these two pictures taken from Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it will help you understand it.

When you work incrementally you are adding piece by piece but expect that each piece if fully finished. One picture is worth of thousands words :)
When you work iteratively you create rough product or product piece in one iteration, then review it and improve it in next iteration and so on until its finished. One picture is worth of thousands words :)
So is Scrum incremental or iterative?

It is iterative by the definition as we are running sprints. We are improving application iteration after iteration.

But I believe it is also incremental because user stories finished in sprint should be of shippable quality and therefore we should not return to them in next iterations.

So Scrum is iterative incremental process.

Is this your opinion too?"

I currently thinking scrum/agile must draw on a iterative incremental process.

This links with a a recently read question asked to Alan Cooper on
asking “Is incremental design the wave of the future, or just a flash in the pan?”

"As agile methods take over the programming world (and they will), EVERYONE else will adjust accordingly. The old paradigm of everyone hunkering down and protecting their turf from everyone else is what gave rise to the "traditional cycle" (which is, by the way, uniquely ill-suited to software construction and design).
The new (agile) paradigm isn't at all defined yet, but it characteristically includes a) Generation Y programmers; b) a refreshing belief in the potential for change; c) the understanding that satisfying human users requires special efforts and probably special skills; d) a belief that software should be built in continuous increments; e) a corresponding belief that everything else in the world relating to software would benefit from such continuous increments; f) that building software is a team endeavor; and g) that nobody has solved these problems before.

It's very reminiscent of the way I felt in 1976. At that time, all computers were multi-million-dollar affairs, residing in specialized corporate bunkers, owned only by large corporations, and used to perform operational business functions. I, on the other hand, had just purchased my first computer.

It was a 1MHz, 8-bit microcomputer with 8" floppy drives and 64K of memory. All of the then-current assumptions about software development, creation and use were marked for death as we Boomer Generation programmers began to invert the dominant paradigm.

Within 15 years, we had utterly changed every aspect of software and computing, and today's agile, Web 2.0, open source, Gen Y programmers will do the same, only faster.

Interestingly, the changes we wrought were almost all bottom-up. The only influence large corporations had on the great microcomputer software revolution were to obfuscate and delay it. And, of course, the reason why we study history is so that we can chuckle at the irony of its inevitable repetition. Today's changes are also coming up from the bottom, and big companies are doing little to help and much to hinder.

Thanks,
Alan"

Is there more scope now for understanding and demonstrating how the agile process should be without such hinder with the understanding how it can be used with UCD ?

The role of software design

2009-02-22T04:52:00.000-08:00

A useful quote to draw on for how the act of a designer for software should
be perceived - is this where the role of the interaction designer defines itself to exist within?

"Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience"

. -- DavidLiddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996

A Communications Primer: a Film by Eames (1953)

2009-02-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

A inspiring talk on conveying information narrated by Charles Eames himself

The Eames’ “A Communications Primer” from FI$H 2000 on Vimeo

What is Information?

2009-02-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

A very neat and original animated infographic film about the concept of information. It was created by Maya Design, a design consultancy and technology research lab. Although most of us think we know what we mean when we say "information," the movie claims we sometimes confuse the medium with the message.

What is Information?

What is Systems Design?

2009-02-16T03:19:00.000-08:00

An useful definition to be aware of for my own process and the overlap that software developers have found themselves in. The lack of clarity that has gone before and continues to go on in the understanding of the system design I feel is connected to the thoughts of Alan Cooper and the goal directed design process. (More thoughts on Goal directed design documented in the next post)

The following text is the pre-edited version of an interview of Hugh Dubberly by Dan Saffer. The interview was performed via email in February of 2006, and was later published in Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices.

What is system design?
Systems design is simply the design of systems. It implies a systematic and rigorous approach to design—an approach demanded by the scale and complexity of many systems problems.

Where did it come from?
Systems design first appeared shortly before World War II as engineers grappled with complex communications and control problems. They formalized their work in the new disciplines of information theory, operations research, and cybernetics. In the 1960s, members of the design methods movement (especially Horst Rittel and others at Ulm and Berkeley) transferred this knowledge to the design world.
(This can be used in the background in the literature review)
Systems design continues to flourish at schools interested in design planning and within the world of computer science. Among its most important legacies is a research field known as design rationale, which concerns systems for making and documenting design decisions.

What can designers learn from system design?

Today, ideas from design methods and systems design may be more relevant to designers than ever before—as more and more designers collaborate on designing software and complex information spaces. Frameworks suggested by systems design are especially useful in modeling interaction and conversation. They are also useful in modeling the design process itself.
This is significant to the IEAT process in order to ask and further test my own ideas against how system design communicates the information in the design process?

What is the most important thing to be aware of in system design
A system design approach asks
For this situation, what is the system?
What is the environment?
What goal does the system have in relation to its environment?
What is the feedback loop by which the system corrects its actions?
How does the system measure whether it has achieved its goal?
Who defines the system, environment, goal, etc.—and monitors it?
What resources does the system have for maintaining the relationship it desires?
Are its resources sufficient to meet its purpose?

A initial comparison draw from this and applied to the IEAT process?
A systems approach to design asks: - to help provide questions/perspective for a developer ?

For this situation, what is the information ecology?
What is the ecology?
this asks what goal does the system have in relation to its information ecology?
What is the feedback loop by which the system corrects its actions?
How does the system measure whether it has achieved its goal?
Who defines the system, environment, goal, etc.—and monitors it?
What resources does the system have for maintaining the relationship it desires?
Are its resources sufficient to meet its purpose?

Is system design incompatible with the user centered design approach?
A systems approach to design is entirely compatible with a user-centered approach. Indeed, the core of both approaches is understanding user goals. A systems approach looks at users in relation to a context and in terms of their interaction with devices, with each other, and with themselves.

What is the relationship between system design and Cybernetics?
Cybernetics (the science of feedback) provides an approach to systems and a set of frameworks and tools. Among the most important ideas for designers:

Definition of a system depends on point of view (subjectivity)
We are responsible for our actions (ethical stance)
All interaction is a form of conversation
All conversation involves goals, understandings, and agreements

Are there times when a system design approach is inappropriate?
A systems approach to design is most appropriate for projects involving large systems or systems of systems. Such projects typically involve many people, from many disciplines, working together over an extended period of time. They need tools to cope with their project’s complexity: to define goals, facilitate communications, and manage processes. Solo designers working on small projects may find the same tools a bit cumbersome for their needs.

- A difference noted here is that system design deals with 'projects involving large
systems or systems of systems.' With the information ecology the purpose is to reduce down the complexities and have the focus upon the information movement within the ecology.

Will the IEAT process required similar identification to say when and when not it is
appropriate for the perspective of selling the idea to a software developer, interaction designer?

IA Summit Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design

2009-02-13T07:53:00.001-08:00

A interesting presentation from Jared Spool that is talking of some interesting aspects for the evolving concept of UCD.
(seen on the usability engineering website )

Here’s the description of the talk:
"Journey to the Center of Design User-centered design was born in the 1980s, amidst a world filled with frustration with blinking VCR clocks and computer command lines. Up until this time, developers focused on making the devices work, giving little heed to how they’d be used. Terms like “user friendly” and “easy to use,” buzzwords for the UCD movement, soon became as common as “new and improved” on laundry soap. Fast forward 25 years and it now seems the foundations of user-centered design are now disintegrating. Notable community members are suggesting UCD practice is burdensome and returns little value. There’s a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Previously fundamental techniques, such as usability testing and persona development, are now regularly under attack. And let’s not forget that today’s shining stars, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPod, came to their success without UCD practices. Is it time for user-centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Should something else occupy the center of design? These are just the questions that this year’s keynote presenter, Jared Spool, likes to answer. Especially after a few drinks. And while a Saturday morning keynote may seem early for the kind of heavy drinking these particular questions demand, Jared will have just arrived from Italy, a nation with a long tradition of philosophical intoxication. This will set the perfect stage for an entertaining and insightful presentation to open our conference."

Journey To The Center Of Design

View more presentations from Jared Spool. (tags: paradigms design)

Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?

2009-02-12T07:44:00.000-08:00

A really useful article from the blog - graphpaper

Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?

February 11th, 2009

One of the problems faced by designers trying to integrate their work with most software development processes, even (or possibly especially) with Agile development, is that the literature makes no distinction between software development and software design, or at least no distinction that makes any sense to dedicated user experience designers.

The common complaint among interaction designers working with Agile is that, with some important exceptions, the design of the “user interface” is seen as a cosmetic final stage in the overall software development process. The fundamental designing of the software itself, however — the interactions, the mental models, the metaphors and behaviors — is built-in to the overall Agile process, woven in with with and indistinguishable from the software architecture and code development.

In Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto, originally delivered in 1990 and included in Terry Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software (1996), it’s clear that this ambiguity has deep roots:

Software design is not the same as user interface design.

The overall design of a program is to be clearly distinguished from the design of its user interface. If a user interface is designed after the fact, that is like designing an automobile’s dashboard after the engine, chassis, and all other components and functions are specified. The separation of the user interface from the overall design process fundamentally disenfranchises designers at the expense of programmers and relegates them to the status of second-class citizens.

The software designer is concerned primarily with the overall conception of the product. Dan Bricklin’s invention of the electronic spreadsheet is one of the crowning achievements of software design. It is the metaphor of the spreadsheet itself, its tableau of rows and columns with their precisely interrelated labels, numbers, and formulas—rather than the user interface of VisiCalc—for which he will be remembered. The look and feel of a product is but one part of its design.

On my first read, the whole terminology of this felt alien to me. Is the paper spreadsheet metaphor not the “user interface design”? It seems “look and feel” is being equated with “user interface” here, but I think he’s implying that what I consider the user interface is, in fact, the software itself. I suppose this is a more glorified definition of the word “software” than what I am accustomed to, one in which the software design included the mental model of the user’s approach to the software.

On my second read, though, it became clear that Kapor is in fact laying the early groundwork for what we now call interaction design. He still sees it as closely bound with programming, although he is clear that it’s not the same thing. He is also working in a climate where user experiences are far simpler than they are now — graphic capabilities were primitive, network interactions were almost non-existent, and interfraces had few modes, even few features. Today, with the high level of complexity of both computer code and user interfaces, it’s easier to consider the two challenges (user experience and code) separately — or even better giving primacy to the user interface — the part that people actually see and use.

Design and Technology

It’s obviously important that interaction designers are well-versed in what the technologies they are designing for can actually do. I wonder, however, what interaction designers today would think of the degree of technical expertise Kapor requires of designers:

Technology courses for the student designer should deal with the principles and methods of computer program construction. Topics would include computer systems architecture, microprocessor architectures, operating systems, network communications, data structures and algorithms, databases, distributed computing, programming environments, and object-oriented development methodologies.

Designers must have a solid working knowledge of at least one modern programming language (C or Pascal) in addition to exposure to a wide variety of languages and tools, including Forth and Lisp.

In preparing the syllabus for my upcoming course this fall at SVA, I am quite certain that I don’t share Kapor’s technical requirements for a software design education, neither specifically (Forth?) or generally. Instead, I think a firm grounding in a broad range of designed experiences far outweighs any need for hands-on experience in the deepest challenges of technology implementation.

Yes, some designers will delve deep into technology, being hands-on coders and fabricators of interactive artifacts. In fact, some great interaction designers already spend most of their days thinking of themselves primarily as technologists. Others, however, will focus on the design parts of interaction design. These people will most often work closely with other individuals and teams to implement their designs.

In short, great design will come from great designers, and great technologists will make those designs happen. Sometimes these skills will be found the same person, but increasingly not. An interaction design education should support both models, of course.

Interfaces and Software

Despite my difference with Kapor’s admonition, I still think that in a way we are coming full circle. The recently-articulated idea that the “interface is the spec“, or even “the interface is the product“, isn’t so different from Kapor’s thinking. The metaphors, mental models, and processes that users experience using the software are, in both cases, the most definitive and salient qualities of the “design” of the software (not, as many software development processes presume, the architecture of the code or the technical features that happen under the hood).
The important thing that Kapor left out, however, is that the “user interface” — the stuff that comes between human beings and cold hard technology – should be thought of as including graphic design as well as the underlying conceptual models of the interactive experience he rightly praises. In fact, the “user interface” concept should also include the software’s motion graphics, its sound and music, the copywriting, voice and personality, the community that builds around the product, and so many other qualities of software design that, frankly, had not really come to maturity yet in 1990.

We are only recently starting to appreciate the idea that interaction design is really about the intersection of the behaviors of systems and people (a favorite word of mine for obvious reasons). The explosion of new and innovative software experiences brought on since 1990 by the World Wide Web and console video games, I think, has fundamentally changed our understanding of what software can be.

Open source user experience - IxDA discussion

2009-02-12T02:39:00.000-08:00

A useful thread from IxDA on Open source user experience useful to use for the further discussion of OSS with ID and the way in which this may continue to be developed further.

"Q - I've been thinking about the open source movement.
I know very little of the UX community's involvement, so firstly I'm posting to ask what has been happening so far. Mozilla, Open Office and some others must have had serious UX involvement. Secondly, if it doesn't already exist, I wonder if there's the potential for us to structure some kind of virtual agency that would allow us to engage effectively.
Few thoughts
- In my opinion, several OS projects are incredible achievements that are hampered by small usability problems or even just language issues. I really believe in the movement. I think some corners of it need our help.
- UX involvement, unlike coder involvement, might be more effective if the people weren't aligned to a single project, so maybe the movement doesn't naturally structure itself to include us.
- Be a good way to spread the UX word, and a good way for us to collaborate and learn from each other. Might be especially useful for people trainign in UX. Maybe meetings like the book club but instead the topic is an open source project that everyone's looked in advance.
Any thoughts? Knowledge of UX involvement so far?
Tom "

And some further comments from the thread

"I just ran into Paula Bach's work on UX and Open Source, in particular:
"Designers Wanted: Participation and the User Experience in Open Source Software"
http://cscl.ist.psu.edu/public /users /pbach /paper1367 -bach.pdf
A nice read ..."

"For more linkage, see http://delicious.com/andyed/opensource+usability The openusability.org site Adrian referenced is a sort of "virtual agency". The Mozilla efforts are I think the culmination of a rising trend here, capping work in Usability sprints, along with more dedicated projects in GIMP, Drupal, and Wordpress.
There's more to the Mozilla picture than described here so far — "Test Pilot" aims to get a representative 1% of the firefox user base for instrumentation aided remote usability exercises:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/01/test-pilot-vision/
Cheers,
Andy "

"andy at polaine dot com

Monday 1:57pm

I haven't gone and read those links yet and maybe the answer is there, but I would be interested to hear about how interaction/user- experience design can be worked into the open-source model.
I can't help feeling I'm being naive here, but the checking in and out of code, branching and patching and the control of that process seems to suit code way more than it does, say, wireframes or design concepts.
The latter are, by their nature, rougher than finished code would be, yet would need to go through a typical open-source process of being added to the 'build' in some way and good ideas, or too rough ideas might get killed off in the process.
How have people gone about this workflow and process in existing open- source projects? The Yahoo! pattern library process seems like it could be a good model: http://tinyurl.com/by4bq
Best,
Andy Poline "

"While bring UX to open source is not impossible and there are great people putting up a great fight. These are more the exceptions than the rule.
We need to realize that until the culture of OSS evolves from one where code contribution is king, to one where idea contribution (in ALL its forms, including code) is king, it will remain difficult.
I think there needs to be a bit of a revolution and one I'm hoping to have something to do with (maybe even with Aza's help) . In the spirit of Carpe Diem, I really want to "just do it" and create an OSS project, even if only experimental that starts out with attempting to answer the question, "What would a designer led open source software project look like?"
The goal isn't to negate the developer, but create a space totally different from before. The outcome is not to learn how to lead developers, but to create a space for exploring design in its relation to development in a new way and see what succeeds and what fails. The ultimate goal would be to work towards modeling a new culture where business, development and design can co-mingle/lead OSS initiatives/projects.

-- dave "

A great and useful point made here with how to lead developers to a new space for the design and development of software - this is a perspective that the IEAT process for me is having to incorporate and provide a bridge for the development process into the design/design ethnography process and vice versa.

Again more about dealing with the multiple perspectives that technolgoy design is facing.

Usabilty of the post-it

2009-02-10T03:47:00.000-08:00

A great piece on why computers have such a long way to catch up on the usability of the
post-it, can the argument of Activity Centred Design be a way in that the usability of technology can edge closer to such integration in understanding.

MIT researchers argue that computers need to become as easy to use as those yellow sticky notes.
Office workers are like electricity: When they want to get something done, they follow the path of least resistance.

Which is why, say researchers at MIT, the Post-it note continues to flourish on every surface of the contemporary office, despite all those expensive computers ready and willing to help.

David Karger helps lead a group at MIT exploring the way people work with computers. A recent paper from his team chronicled the attraction of “information scraps” like Post-Its, which, says Karger, are actually near-perfect data base tools. They’re accessible and easy to use, and they take advantage of the brain’s facility to remember an object’s location in the three-dimensional world."

A further great point from David Karger recent paper
"We started out asking what people do with Post-it notes, and it spiraled into something much bigger -- a study of how people intentionally misuse all of those systems that are supposed to help you," says Bernstein, who has worked closely with graduate student Max Van Kleek on the information scrap project.

In a similar manner I can think about how my own work own work evolved from the focus of paper use in the lab to the larger issues of how to design for such scientific software systems in the context of understanding the information workflow.

Follow up research to be presented at CHI 09 - to read

What do you think should be the 3 primary roles/objectives of an interaction designer?

2009-02-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

An interesting discussion on the role of an interaction designer - interesting how the context
for the role would be very different from my own 3 primary roles/objectives within the context of the IEAT.

What do you think should be the 3 primary roles/objectives

of an interaction designer?

"I've been asked to update a job description for the purpose of performance reviews, etc. over the coming year. I'd be interested in hearing what you think the primary 3 roles of interaction designer should be. For a bit of context, the role sits in the IT projects team along with project managers, business analysts and the in-house developers. The organisation is small-medium but with multiple international presences and would be best classed as a membership body / service provider"

Thoughts on the Relation between concept design and visual design

2009-02-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

A useful thought for me from the blog "transforming grounds" and stressing the importance of portraying the ideas in a simple fashion can just be as effective to begin and once known then it can then be made beautiful aka iPhone....

"In their patent application for the iPhone, it is interesting to see the sketch from Apple that shows the interface. It is very clear that it is the iPhone as we know it, even though it is a very simple sketch without any efforts made to make the appearance aestheticlly pleasing. For interaction designers there is a lesson to be learned here about the relationships between ideas and manifestations, between sketches and final designs. Almost anyone could have made this sketch of the iPhone with the purpose to portray the ideas. This is comforting for those of you who are afraid that you do not have enough visual skills. If you can do this, you can then get help from someone to make this into a full and beautiful deisgn."

2009-01-19T02:45:00.000-08:00

Some interesting visualization charts from the information aesthetics blog, with some interesting linear, tree representations and social-spacial:

1 ) The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Perception of Time Series Visualizations

Data visualization consultant Stephen Few has just posted an excellent article [perceptualedge.com] about a recent time-series visualization called the Horizon Graph. Originally developed by data visualization software firm Panopticon, Horizon Graphs can display about 50 sets of time-series values on a single screen. This particular visualization technique was the focus of a detailed evaluation study described by Jeffrey Heer, graduate researcher Nicholas Kong, and Maneesh Agrawala. The results are described in the scientific paper titled "Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations" (PDF) [berkeley.edu].

In the paper, 2 different experiments are described. The goal of the first experiment was to determine the impact of the band number and horizon graph variant ("mirrored", flipping the negative values around zero, versus "offset") on value comparisons between horizon graphs. The goal of the second experiment was to compare normal line charts to horizon graphs and investigate the effect of chart height on both.

Want to know the dry results? No significant difference was found in either estimation time or accuracy between the different chart types. However, both estimation time and error increased as more bands were displayed. In the 2nd experiment, the estimation error increased as chart size decreased; layering increased estimation time, and mirroring did not; and lastly, the estimation time decreases with chart height.

More interestingly, from the results, following 3 design guidelines were proposed:

Mirroring Does Not Hamper Graphical Perception. Mirroring a chart (that is flipping the negative values around zero) neither slowed estimation time nor hurt estimation accuracy, but cuts the size of the chart in half.

Layered Bands Are Beneficial As Chart Size Decreases. Dividing a chart into layered bands increased the estimation time and increased the estimation error at constant chart heights. Therefore, the use of 4 or more bands is discouraged, as this resulted in increased time and error, while subjects complained that interpreting 4-band charts was difficult and tiring

Optimal Chart Sizing. For both normal line charts and 1-band mirror charts, they found a chart height of 24 pixels to be optimal

2) TreeViz: Visualization of Large Tree Structures

TreeViz [randelshofer.ch] is an amazingly small and elegant application (working on all OS platforms) that is able to visualize large data structures organized in a tree by 7(!) different interactive data visualization techniques: Hyperbolic Tree, Circular Treemap, Rectangular Treemap, Sunburst Tree, Icicle Tree, Sunray Tree and Iceray Tree. The project currently consists of a file browser demonstration, which visually represent your computer system's file structure.

3) If the World were a Village of 100 People

A gigantic isometric eBoy-like infographic, based on the concept of summarizing world statistics as a village of 100 people [binsworld.com]. As a result, all the objects and characteristics within it become a percentage: 6 cars, 24 televisions, 9 English speaking people, 10 homosexuals, and so on. The village is divided into 5 navigable zones: Economy, Life, Food, Danger and a World map.

However, somewhere the concept became a bit lost, as I suppose the 300 million bottles of wine and 2500 million cups of coffee are not destined to be consumed by a meager 100 people?

On Abstraction and its thinking

2009-01-18T16:42:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on the reflection on abstraction:

“to me there are some things which cannot be expressed with traditional ’symbols’ within the bounds of that which is ‘representational’ and these are the things that I find in the abstract, expressions that are boundless ” -Zo
From Quotes on “The Philosophy of Modern Art”

"There is only one road to follow, that of analysis of the basic elements in order to arrive ultimately at an adequate graphic expression."
A quote from Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)

"One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great."
Edward Hopper Quote

"I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." Mark Rothko Quote - In a simlar principal my own interest is in the IEAT to be able to express the abstract of peple, practice, values and technology.

Visual image to frame the software development problem

2008-12-09T10:43:00.001-08:00

Some quotes to capture the IE direction

2008-11-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

3 quotes that in some essence capture the research

1 The nature of the problem

"The prevailing computer-human interaction (CHI) model of interface design has been partly responsible for the current state of the desktop computer. The breakthrough on which the field emerged was the admission of psychological principles. The resulting graphical user interface has been the focus of the field of computer-human interaction for nearly 20 years. This interface is a virtual control panel whose design has remained quite technology-centered. -- Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground, 2004"

This in a way for me is drawing on the reason why the metaphor of the ecology and move towards the information ecology concept is significant - as we need ways in which to re-frame the technology centric view is designed.

2 The software design challenge

"Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience. -- David Liddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996"

This really captures the nature of the design challenge and from the 1st quote sets how this process must move towards a user centric approach.

3 What the research must accomplish
"Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures. -- Jeffery Veen, 2000"

The question now of how the information ecology can form the communication to allow for clearer understanding of the environment.

Visualising work postion

2008-11-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

A really useful diagram to aid with the background literature review and positioning of the work

From the paper - An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research
Liz Sanders

Abstract

Design research is in a state of flux. The design research landscape has been the focus of a tremendous amount of exploration and growth over the past five to 10 years. It is currently a jumble of approaches that, while competing as well as complementary, nonetheless share a common goal: to drive, inspire, and inform the design development process. Conflict and confusion within the design research space are evident in the turf battles between researchers and designers. Online communities reveal the philosophical differences between the applied psychologists and the applied anthropologists, as well as the general discontent at the borders between disciplines. At the same time, collaboration is evident in the sharing of ideas, tools, methods, and resources in online design research communities. We can also see an increase in the number and quality of global design research events and a growing emphasis on collaborative projects between industry and the universities, particularly in Europe…

One to continue to contemplate....

2008-11-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

Where that ACD thing fits ? -http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=35466

I am not sure if such a distinction needs to be made, but if practitioners need clarification then....? An aspect that may be further validated and clarified through the literature review.

The concern at this point and my interest is in that if there is a need for such a distinction then the understanding I aim to provide of activities within the information ecology is an an argument for further justification of the work.

Some thoughts...
I would argue that ACD is more part of the evolution of UCD. Design is about framing problems, and ACD is more of an evolving perspective of UCD to frame problems.

I would agree with following view point made
On 11 Nov 2008, at 02:51, Livia Labate wrote: [snip]Dan Saffer differentiates ACS and UCS in his Designing for Interaction book very similarly/succinctly. His best point is that the PURPOSE of an activity is not necessarily a user goal, meaning looking at a design problem with a user goal in mind may be too esoteric and not necessarily helpful (which is the pro argument for ACD).[trim]

Fundamentally for me ACD for me draws on the principles framework set out in Activity theory and so for this reason I would argue that it is much more that a modern day task analysis to design. At its core activities consist of the tools people use, the subject the people themselves and the material object that can be tangible or totally intangible.

There are also several interesting point made by Josha Porter on the blog post
http://bokardo.com/archives/activity-centered-design/. A particularly interesting point is a point raised by Don Norman in the article ‘Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful’.Norman says:
“Many of the systems that have passed through HCD design phases and usability reviews are superb at the level of the static, individual display, but fail to support the sequential requirements of the underlying tasks and activities. The HCD methods tend to miss this aspect of behavior: Activity-centered methods focus upon it.”

To this I would ask how much of ACD and USD methods differentiate and overlap in design practice?

The notion of the real world....?

2008-11-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

Again another great post from Pasta & Vinegar

The notion of “the real” as user research is meant to bring material concerning the real world, what users really do, what are their constraints and needs, and in fine why they do what they do. The literature in HCI, especially about the use of ethnography, has a wide take on this but I was more curious to see what designers have to say about it. Reading User research at IDII: Three case studies, 2002-2004 by Simona Maschi, Laura Polazzi and Jay Melican, I ran across this interesting quote:

“Everything we learn from user studies has the great advantage of being “true” (although not in an absolute way), because it comes from the real world and from real experiences. This makes it somehow believable and graspable for our audience, both within and outside of the design team. In other words user studies provide the design team with “live material” that can be used to share thoughts and ideas and to communicate the project effectively to the world.“

(The document is btw a relevant set of case study and quick description of research methods employed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea).

This notion of the “real” as the cornerstone of the exchange between UX research and design was also interestingly tackled at the recent EPIC conference. See for example how this weblog highlight the “real issue” in the discussion about how ethnographers can build and exhibit the authority necessary to be able to sell and provide ethnographic insights:

“Simon Pulman-Jones argued, ethnographers in industry are seeking to establish themselves as an authority on The Real - what it is really like out there in order to commoditize our insights, our epiphanies to help the organisations that we work for and with.
(…)
Ethnographers are indeed ‘brokers of the real‘ - they have themselves attained a sort of gatekeeper role between the designers and the engineers and the real world where real people actually use the products. They help the engineers meet and understand the users, in order to change the way the engineers think and feel about them.
Why blog this?
The writing has particular relevance in the how to understand and bridge from the real world of the science lab to the development/system view.
Is a design ethnographer more of an important gate keeper? In the sense that they hold vital information for the design process.
And as the process of communication is key, what of the ways to clearly communicate the real, to allow the engineers to understand the users, in order to change the way the engineers think and feel about them?
I think this should and I can propose a two way process also, so the design ethnographer can have insight in the engineering process to see how the real world work is reflected technically in the engineers model.

Paper dashboard

2008-11-05T07:04:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts taken from the blog post Pasta & Vinegar

A fascinating stack of notes with numbers, additions and corrections encountered recently in a very old-school french grocery store. This awfully nice pile of duct-taped paper looks very pre-computing and surely plays more role than calculations: it’s clearly as dashboard for the salesman as he told me he uses it as a reminder for customer credit “emprunts”.

The importance of paper, again.

Why blog this?

The importance of paper has resonated through the work I have been conducting, this I think again only highlights this importance of paper and the activities it supports.

This is useful in the current the thinking of and understanding activity theory in how paper is able to work and function in the environment (ecology of the french grocery store)

Some initial thinking with this is how the initial 'tests' for the information ecology could be in looking at the ways successful tools/artifacts in the information ecology function.

Could suitable analysis of the ecolgoy expose how and why they are successful?

Activity theory thoughts...

2008-10-28T03:39:00.000-07:00

With the thoughts of the research being aided by the theoretical framework of activity theory, the following statement has particular significance for my thinking of how the concept of tools does not describe all technologies, and so if not all artifacts are tools "can the use of artifacts that are not tools be described as mediation?"

[Artifacts] mediate activity that connects a person not only with the world of objects, but also with other people. This means that a person's activity assimilates the experience of humanity. -- Leont'ev (1974)

Thoughts on tools to accomplish tasks...

2008-09-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

We use tools to accomplish tasks, and we abandon tools when the effort required to make the tool deliver exceeds our threshold of indignation. ... (... the threshold of indignation (is) the maximal behavioral compromise that we are willing to make to get a task done.)
-- Paul Saffo, in Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996

Why blog this?
The information ecology discusses how to move away from the tool centric approach, the interpretation and thoughts that the information ecology puts on the above statement is how
a tool is abandoned when it "exceeds our threshold of indignation" I would cite this as being down to the context/environment that the tool is being used in. So that the tool has not been fully thought of in the context of its information ecology - can question if this can begin to explain the behavioral compromise that people are willing to make to get a task done.

A key here for me is recognizing what the information ecology is and what it can mean for a new tool with what it is part of, in order to be able to start to explain and question the "behavioral compromise".

Looking back and forward..

2008-08-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

Some reaction from a post on 'Transforming Grounds ' on a post looking-back and-forward

Why blog this?
I have found this useful in the sense of why I need the lab book requires such a rethink. The thoughts are on a slightly more abstract level with the thinking from the articles, but I think in a way and as mentioned in the Transforming Grounds blog post of the concern for society and the use of the analogy of who is actually looking at the front of the train in terms of technology development. This is in terms of

"It means that very few are thinking about what is coming and what we want to see in the future, since most people are struggling with understanding the ongoing reality. If that is the case, we are living in a society where people are looking backwards to get signs that can help them to understand their situation, like people looking backwards on a train, trying to get a picture of the landscape...then, who is at the front of the train, looking forward?" looking-back and-forward

My own initial thoughts with this are a design researcher needs to be able to look for the front of the train but at the same time produce real designs - through suitable awareness of the context of environment. This is seen as a key aspect where the design practice must be applied.

Thoughts on current interfaces illustrate how many computer scientists are biased toward efficiency with technological resources rather than human att

2008-08-11T03:31:00.000-07:00

"Current interfaces illustrate how many computer scientists are biased toward efficiency with technological resources rather than human attention; or to put it bluntly, toward convenience for computers before convenience for people." -- Malcolm McCullough, in Digital Ground, 2004

Why blog this?
The thoughts are with how the quote links with idea about design as a composition that is discussed in the book 'thoughtful interaction design'. In the book it discusses how as a designer measurement can be made by creativity and innovation - I think innovation is particularly relevant in the above quote, in the way there can be a focus to develop technological resources without sufficient human attention.

Question to think about is this what may be present in the ideas about developing new technology with the elab book? - so focus on creating the technology and not upon the environment and ecology that the device works within?

So the thinking for the research is leading to thoughts of how the use of the information ecology may allow for a clearer composition of ideas for the design and development of the elab book. With the aim to allow for a clear concept through the use of the information ecology, for the design and development of scientific software/elab book work.

The background point to thinking about composition as an idea.
"Composition is a delicate task involving balance and contrast. The purpose is to compose whole entity out of existing and not yet existing reality. There is a need for balance between old and new, technical and non-technical, and function and form."
Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology by J Lowgren Pg 32

Is it time to embrace the e-book....?

2008-08-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

A really interesting article from the bbc web site on the use of the ebook, some really interesting comments too from users of ebooks in terms of preferences and scenarios of use for ebooks.

- Extract from article
Could printed pages one day be a thing of the past?
When electronic books first came onto the market, some thought it spelt the end for the printed page.

But following a flurry of headlines, and prophesies of doom from the publishing industry, the revolution in downloadable literature failed to materialise.

However, despite scepticism from some technology experts that the tactile satisfaction of the paper book has not been successfully replicated, it now seems that the e-book is starting to take off.

Full link to article - Is it time to embrace the e-book?

Useful interview also with Prof Kathryn Hughes and author Naomi Alderman on whether ebooks will threaten the printed word - Link

Why blog this?
Interesting to draw comparisons upon the design and general problems being experienced with the development of the ebook, what can be learned from the work with ebooks and be used to help identify and understand the continuing work with elab books?
Are there also significant similartities and differences between ebooks and elab books with the problems that they face which may help inform the continuing work? - this is especially thinking about the context of the information ecology.

Writing thought

2008-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what--these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence

. -- William Zinsser, On Writing Well, pp. 7-8. Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction

Further to this

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may
speak" -- Hans Hofmann

Is this captured in his own work? Hofmann Gallery

How to sell a kindle.....???

2008-07-10T04:51:00.000-07:00

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments and over 130,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more

Something to think about amazon sell the kindle as a new wireless reading device...

A new wireless reading device... Last time I checked a book was a wireless reading device?
I would raise this as at the point in the research in being related for the following reason
- The kindle is a new piece of technology - should not be viewed to have to compete with books but instead provide a different experience. (has though it been designed with this in mind...?)

Your not going to have the affordances of a book but instead have new the new benefits that technology offers - this is the reason for adoption. Is this not then what it could be sold on?

In a similar way would face similar challenges in a lab book - and similar with the editor.

This may be open to continued questions and although may be a bit condescending towards amazon I think at this point can be questioned.

The selling point....

2008-06-30T03:09:00.000-07:00

A great article taken from Scientific American on Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?

The following quotes have been taken from the article as the quote taken from another source has been

Web 2.0 technologies open up a much richer dialogue, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and author of a three-part survey on open-science efforts that appeared at 3 Quarks Daily (www.3quarksdaily.com), where a group of bloggers write about science and culture.

“To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day,” Hooker says. “That’s an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you’ve done. But I don’t know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It’s those little details that become clear with an open [online]notebook but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient.”

The above scenario I think sets out more clearly the selling point as such for the research - I also see it linking with the point of how technology and paper are complementary for the reason that if the paper is obscuring a communication/workflow path because of the affordances it has as mentioned in the scenrio. I would see then exploration of if/how the elab book can enhance the workflow and most importantly be part of the workflow.
This is what must be achived must ensure not a focus on what a lab books functionailty is, but instead on actually what it is.

Finally the last quote below I think captures a selling point, as well as highlighting the risks and dangers that scientists are so wary about. Taking the position as an advocate for the research, it is important to have a wider perspective in order to fully appreciate the workflow.

"That jump in efficiency, in turn, could greatly benefit society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.Of course, many scientists remain wary of such openness—especially in the hypercompetitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. For these practitioners, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: putting your serious work out on blogs and social networks feels like an open invitation to have your lab notebooks vandalized—or, worse, your best ideas stolen and published by a rival.To advocates, however, an atmosphere of openness makes science more productive. “When you do your work online, out in the open,” Hooker says, “you quickly find that you’re not competing with other scientists anymore but cooperating with them.”

The argument of now with a move towards science 2.0 that your not competing but instead co-operating may require a full social culture change. Question if such instances have occurred before in work environments. Is this something that has to be forced upon people to be really effective ?

“Designing is not a profession but an attitude”

2008-06-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

A post taken from 37signals By Matt

“Designing is not a profession but an attitude” is an excerpt from László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 book “Vision in Motion.”

The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated…

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.

We often put “designers” and “creatives” in special silos. But when you look at it from this “design for life” perspective, everyone is designing: writers, programmers, managers, CEOs, HR departments, parents, etc. Design and creativity don’t belong exclusively to people who use Photoshop.

Why blog this?

I think the quote correctly captures a perspective on how to view the many forms and

challenges that design can take, the concept of how design is an indivisible experience I think may have a link with understanding the design of the lab information ecology.

A further poignant quote that is useful for thinking about fieldwork:

" The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes" - Macel Proust

Multiple thoughts

2008-05-27T08:15:00.001-07:00

Last week Genevieve Bell, a highly respected anthropologist and Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group, gave the 2008 commencement speech at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

She filled it with “anthropological advice” about how to approach the world like a fieldwork project.

"I hope you can achieve a balance of online and offline encounters with the people, spaces and practices around you. I hope you can be fully engaged with local issues and the ways in which global ones are manifested around you. And I hope you experience moments of profound dislocation and discomfort – when things aren’t familiar – because I firmly believe it is in those moments that we learn the most about ourselves and what we truly value."

http://www.experientia.com/blog/genevieve-bells-anthropological-advice-at-berkeley-commencement/

Some food for thought:

Working Knowledge: Inside the Kindle E-Book Reader

LIBRARY TO GO: Amazon's Kindle E-Reader
AMAZON.COM

More and more people are gazing at electronic-book readers—lightweight slates about the size of a thin paperback that can store up to 200 downloaded books. Although prior generations fizzled, Sony’s Reader, introduced in 2006, and Amazon’s Kindle, which debuted last year, are both selling well. The key difference is the screen.

Interactive: View the insides of the Kindle E-Reader

Researchers had wrestled with e-book readers for decades, but most sported power-thirsty, backlit LCD screens that glared in low light or were drowned out by bright sunlight. The breakthrough this time is a screen made with “electronic paper” from E Ink Corporation in Cambridge, Mass. Sony, Amazon and other makers worldwide are using the material.

E-paper displays are reflective: ambient light bounces off them, so they look and read like ordinary paper. The screens are very energy efficient, too. “The only power used is when you turn a page,” says Isaac Yang, manager of software product development at Sony in San Jose, Calif. No current is needed to sustain the characters on a page once it has been called up. Yang says about 7,500 pages can be turned on a single battery charge. Downloading books consumes additional power.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=library-to-go&sc=rss

Product ecology as a design framework

Extract taken from Pasta&Vinger blog

Recently, in my daily data farming, I ran across several sources mentioning the notion of “product ecology”. It generally refers to how (interaction) design broaden its focus from systems targeted on one person to more socially or culturally situated products. Among the sources about this, Jodi Forlizzi’s work struck me as very relevant.

In this article in the International Journal of Design, she focuses on the interesting notion of “product ecology” and how it can be employed as a theoretical design framework:

“In the Product Ecology, the product is the central unit of analysis. (…) The functional, aesthetic, symbolic, emotional and social dimensions of a product, combined with other units of analysis, or factors, in the ecology, help to describe how people make social relationships with products. These include the product; the surrounding products and other systems of products; the people who use it, and their attitudes, disposition, roles, and relationships; the physical structure, norms and routines of the place the product is used; and the social and cultural contexts of the people who use the product and possibly even the people who make the product. “

(image taken from Forlizzi’s paper)

But how does that help designers? Forlizzi highlights few key ideas about the assumptions of the Product Ecology framework[I recommend reading the whole paper here]:

“First, each product has its own ecology, resulting in subjective and individual experience in using the same product.
(…)
Second, the factors in the Product Ecology are dynamic, and interconnected in several ways.
(…)
Third, changes in product use cause changes in other factors of the Product Ecology.(…) When a product no longer plays a key role, it is marked by events such as people changing roles, or going in and out of the ecology;
(…)
Fourth, the Product Ecology can be delimited by a group of people in close proximity, or a group that is spread out over a great distance.
(…)
Factors in the Product Ecology can be examined in isolation or in combination at the level of a single product, to understand what particular product features will inspire social use, or at the system level, to understand how a particular product will have an impact on a system of products retained for similar functional, aesthetic, symbolic, social and emotional factors. Similarly, behavior of individuals or groups using products can be studied.“

So, to some extent, the “product ecology” can be employed to study variety of products/services. An interesting example of such use can be found in this article (from CSCW 2006) about how robotic products become social products. The paper basically shows how different people within a houselhold formed different social relationships with Roomba vacuum (and not with the more classic vacuum). The classic vacuum, in this ethnographic study, affected significant change in the families, while the stick vacuum did not: people cleaned more often, more members of the family participated and there were more prone to make social attribution to the roomba. The author then draws some design implications concerning the importance of social attribution: “when simple social attributes are part of the design of robotic products and systems, people may adopt them more readily and find them less stigmatizing“.

http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/05/26/product-ecology-as-a-design-framework/

Why blog this?
Particularly interested in the concepts discussed in the Product Ecology design framework. May have help in understanding the direction and assistance needed to aid in the application for the information ecology as set out by Nardi.

Interesting and useful piece on the uptake now of the Amazon Kindle and how there is still
uncertainty over e-books and readers and if they will ever become truly ubiquitous.

Finally

Why blogging is good for you

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-healthy-type&sc=rss

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

2008-04-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts from the post Here Comes Everybody -
Clay Shirky

TV, Cognitive Surplus, and Wikipedia

A talk by Clay Shirky called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Following on themes from his book, Here Comes Everybody, he tells a story that goes like this:

" We gained lots of free time (a "cognitive surplus") in the 40s and 50s because of shorter workweeks. We squandered the surplus by watching TV sitcoms and the like. Now we're finally waking up from this "collective bender" and putting our energies into better things, like editing Wikipedia.

I have a number of problems with this story. First of all, did we gain free time in the 40s and 50s? I'm not an expert, but what I've read about work life has said that Americans are working more hours now than they did at the beginning of the 20th century, not less.

Second, is the time now spent editing Wikipedia or doing other things online really coming from time formerly spent watching TV? In other words, even if there's a negative correlation between TV viewing and online activity, correlation doesn't imply causality.

Third, who's to say which of these activities is more valuable? Shirky has a couple of fairly simple rules for assigning value. Producing is better than consuming -- so writing a blog or posting to a mailing list is better than watching TV or reading. Activity is better than inactivity or passivity -- playing World of Warcraft is more valuable than watching a movie.

I think those rules are awfully simplistic and don't seem to get at the heart of what's valuable. Some TV shows and movies are far more sophisticated works of art than are most video games. Reading a book can be a much more efficient way to deepen one's understanding of a topic than debating it online. Even an adolescence wasted watching Gilligan's Island (an example of Shirky's) might reward you later with the creative juice to launch a career writing postmodern novels.

It's wishful thinking to believe that all of these new technologies will bring forth some great creative and intellectual bounty. We've already got hundreds of millions of blogs -- how much have they really changed things? How important is Wikipedia, really? If it disappeared tomorrow would anyone be truly inconvenienced? I doubt it -- Google would turn up another source or you'd go look in the library if it really mattered. Yet think of all the energy and hours that have been put into Wikipedia. The return on investment just doesn't seem that impressive."

Why blog this?
Its interesting perspective of the social move of free time and maybe in a way not to take technology as the great hope but as a tool. For me its the perspective of understanding and acknowledgment of technology as a tool that is important for my own work.

Quote to capture work upgrade & other pieces

2008-04-22T02:35:00.000-07:00

"[The] dynamics of computational artefacts extend beyond the interface narrowly defined, to relations of people with each other and to the place of computing in their ongoing activities. System design, it follows, must include not only the design of innovative technologies, but their artful integration with the rest of the social and material world. The value of artefacts on this view lies less in their intrinsic features, than in their contribution to particular social-material landscapes." " -- Lucy Suchman

Some useful discussion from the IxDA site:

Some thoughts on Interaction Design and the Agile Environment from IxDA may have some useful points and diagrams for continuing work

Interaction Design in an Agile Environment -This may also be useful also for future evaluation of research use

Metaphors- A discussion with some of the books in the area and some current PhD work, may be useful in providing insight in when and when not too use metaphors and the cognitive process behind it.

Measuring User Experience - With a discussion on best practice to Measure User Experience,based on 4 key pillars: 1) Branding; 2) Usability ; 3) Content and 4) functionality. Can ignore branding, remaining 3 may prove useful for evaluation later on.

Stumbled across a very good blog, entitled “The Restless Mind through putting people first feed useful posts from blog.

The design of everyday relationships

MIT Professor Donald Schön [observed] that design is a “conversation with materials.” In many ways users have become “materials” as much as participants. We not only engage them explicitly through interaction design to create discrete features, but also in aggregate as social systems and platforms amplify their implicit actions to create value.

The siren call of the system
Well-designed systems are not, in fact, designed. They are the product of evolution. […] Systems, like narratives, take time to reveal themselves to their authors. Changes in technology, consumer preferences, and markets take years to play out. It’s not clear from day one where the system will go or how it will adapt. […] Systems are so rarely produced because they take time and time is one resource companies don’t have. Most die long before the system is revealed.

Apple and the enigma of innovation
What makes Apple special isn’t design. Or process. Or talent. It’s fear. Fear of the man who is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. (And sheathed in titanium. An engineer slaving away on the iPhone SDK isn’t concerned about the industry, his peers, or his boss. His relentless pursuit of “system elegance” is simply an animal’s instinct to avoid pain, manifested largely during the senior management review.

And insight into a designers mind....?

View from Microsoft on the future of human computer interaction

2008-04-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

A agenda set out from Microsoft research in line with some thoughts of my own
Blogged on/from Putting people first link

Report from Microsoft Research and the future of human computer interaction

"Moving into the 21st century, there are murmurings in the research and design communities signalling the need for a change: a change that puts more emphasis on placing users –people—front and centre in that agenda; a change that is less about pervasive, “smart” computing and more about technology that enables and recognizes human values.

This new agenda raises all kinds of key questions: What is the role of technology in the 21st century, or what would we like it to be? How as researchers, designers and practitioners should we orient to this role? What are the key questions for Human-Computer Interaction as we move forward? What are the new paradigms and research agendas that emerge as a result? What are the human values we are designing for, and what does this mean for the evaluation of technology?"

Why blog this?
How can I can address and understand these type of questions and the nature of them in context of my own work, lots more to think about....

Fantastic quote from front of report

"The question persists and indeed grows whether the computer will make it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it now is."

Norman Cousins – The Poet and the Computer, 1966

Also On the website of Microsoft Research Cambridge you can read a really good interview with Richard Harper, the conference organiser.

Harper on developing technology: “For many years, technology has been developed, and then society shapes it and polishes it. Now, society’s hopes and goals and people need to be involved in the process of developing technology from the outset, because it makes a big difference to what the technologies end up becoming. There’s no longer a line between technology and invention and development and society, no longer a line between what the technology might do and what the user can do. What human endeavor might be and what social endeavor might be must be considered from the very bottom of the firmware in devices and in the infrastructures that link different devices right through to the GUI on the outside.”

Post from Fade to play

2008-03-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across a post from the blog fade to play caught my eye as ties in some nice ideas with Sellen & Harpers book the myth of the paperless office from a research study conducted in 2006

"This 2006 research paper entitled “Our Lives in Digital Times” by G. Sciadas from Statistics Canada has just been released. It discusses how the notion that we have become a paperless society is a myth as the use of office technologies such as email have actually increased paper usage.

Statistics Canada found that:

Not only is the notion of a paperless society defeated by existing data, but a visit to any modern office workplace will confirm that printers everywhere continue to spit out massive amounts of paper, and paper recycling bins are full,

There are also social behavioural trends in ICT and communication that are discussed:

The pattern of communication and interaction has changed. The reality is that people are talking to other people – whether to the person next door or to someone thousands of miles and time zones away. Thus, it is not that people are becoming anti-social; it is that people are becoming differently social.

In summary, key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in shifting behavioural patterns everywhere, with real consequences. Moreover, the pattern of communications has changed, something exemplified by the rise in long distance and the explosion in international calling made possible by
liberalized markets and falling prices. Such expanded circles of communication have found an even better expression through e-mail that knows no boundaries. People make the choice to expand their associations and move from geographically defined communities to communities of interest. As well, they are willing to pay for their choices. ICT spending is on the rise and, within this higher spending, substitutions take place in favour of newer ICTs, such as the Internet, and against older ones, such as the telephone. The willingness of people to pay can also be seen by the fact that many low income households choose to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income on ICTs.

A summary of the report can be found in this CBC news report.

This report confirms finding from Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen who wrote The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001) and found that paper usage increased on average 40% because of email in an organisation).

Relevance: Although offices are using paper more, I wonder about whether students are printing more in universities. I would say that they are printing less. I spend a significant time with my laptop around undergrads that I see reading papers in pdf form online on their laptop rather than printing them out. This may be due to convenience and a desire for cost savings. Perhaps, older people just feel more comfortable with paper."

Also the blog has recommended the book

Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) (Paperback) - but only on American amazon!

Why blog this?

A blog to keep an eye on as holds some really interesting points, and research paper mentioned above may hold some significance for future reference .

DEFINE: Affordance

2008-03-21T09:01:00.001-07:00

DEFINE: Affordance

URL: DEFINE: Affordance

In the discipline of IxD, the word has been used to define a possible

action perceived by a user within some environment (Norman 1988). In the

classic example, the affordance of a door with a flat metal plate is

"push." The affordance resolves to a verb, an action to be performed.

However, of late, I've seen the word used loosely to describe the clues

that suggest an object's possible actions. Applied in a colloquial sense

to the classic example above, the "affordance" is the flat metal plate.

Another example of this usage would be gloss applied to the visual

design of a UI button. The gloss itself is the affordance, as opposed to

the action "click".

I'm curious as to the community's opinion on this matter. How do you use

the word in your day to day discussions? Is it appropriate to use the

term both ways?

Appreciate your opinions?

Why blog this?
Evidence of the misinterpretation of the word within the field useful to throw out some ideas and gather how it is being used in the field or not...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Collection of thoughts

2008-02-16T16:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of posts captured from RSS feed and a comment from Wendy Mackay e-lab paper

Delver Reinvents Search

URL: Delver Reinvents Search

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user. The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using "normal" search engine.

But don't call Delver a "social search engine."

"That name belongs to services like Mahalo," says Liad Agmon, Delver CEO. "We prefer the term 'socially connected search engine'." That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine, but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its results. Instead of just looking at a web site's popularity, Delver looks at information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it's found on their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for who a person is and what they find valuable.

Agmon adds, "People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user's network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests."

Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though, you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and specifically indexes people's social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process will be provided as well.

Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network

Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace and facebook who aren't into using all the latest and greatest web apps and technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social graph are indexed.

No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search results.

This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your friends would join. I don't know about you, but I still have plenty of friends who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn't matter. They can stay on MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.

Privacy Concerns?

It's important to understand that Delver doesn't display anything that isn't already publicly available. "If Google can get to it, so can Delver," says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access people's social information with such ease that anyone who hasn't been good about setting their profiles to "private" (or who doesn't know to do so), may be surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.

Using Delver

After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to your friends and your "friends of friends.

- Why blog this?
Insight to how social search could be thought of, and how in fact may provide the desired insight for scientific work ?

Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

URL: Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

Social networking has begun to make inroads in the scientific community. The Scientific American recent article, Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk, discusses wikis, blogs, and other technologies and how their usage by researchers could be transforming how science is researched, published, disseminated, and viewed. Research work is beginning to become available through blogs, wikis, and social networks by a small but growing group of researchers.

In Eric Schell's post, Evidence of the Value of Blogs as Scholarship, he mentions a case where a postdoc geneticist received credit and acknowledgement for his blog entries. Reed Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005. One year later after reading the post Luca Comai, a plant geneticist, contacted Reed. He and said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis, and was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. Comai said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.

Of course this method of information and knowledge sharing is not without controversy. While there are researchers praising the transparent and "open notebook" approach citing various success stories like OpenWetWare, UsefulChem, Chembarkothers, there are others worried about potential minefields. The fear of being scooped and the lack of attribution and credit can be huge barriers to overcome in a system where being the first to report a discovery, publishing peer reviewed journals and having heavily cited articles is the foundation for promotion within scientific community.

I like what Bora Zivkovic said in the Scientific American article, "It's a Darwinian process. About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread." I think that not only sums up the evolution of these tools in science but other disciplines as well such as medicine, education, and libraries.

Why blog this?
Raises some of the issues of the potential of Web 2.0 and the areas of sharing and collaboration where may need consideration, think enforces the link with Bruno Latours model of creditability and how scientists search for this in their work. Question in how to overcome this for collaboration?

Extract from The Missing Link: Augmenting Biology Laboratory Notebooks Wendy E.Mackay

"This project is one of a series that examine settings in
which attempts to replace paper artifacts have failed
[16,17,18,19,20 ].We observe and work with users as we
try to understand their interaction with both paper artifacts
and on-line systems.Then,through a series of
brainstorming and prototyping participatory design
sessions,we create prototypes that integrate paper and on-
line documents,attempting to integrate the different media
and benefit from the advantages of both.Each setting poses
unique design challenges,but when examined together,
they begin to offer a more complete understanding of how
to effectively manage the link between physical and on-line
documents and questions the assumption that documents of
the future will exist solely in electronic form."

16.Mackay,W.(1998)Augmented Reality:Linking real
and virtual worlds.In Proceedings of AVI'98 ,L'Aquila,
Italy:ACM.p.1-8.
17.Mackay,W.(1999)Is Paper Safer?The Role of Paper
Flight Strips in Air Traffic Control.ACM/Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction,6(4),p.311-340.
18.Mackay,W.and Pagani,D.(1994).Video Mosaic:
Laying out time in a physical space.In Proc.of
Multimedia '94 .San Francisco:ACM,p.165-172.
19.Mackay,W.,Fayard,A.,Frobert,L.&Médini,L.,
(1998)Reinventing the Familiar:Exploring an Aug-
mented Reality Design Space for Air Traffic Control.
In Proc.of CHI '98 ,L.A.:ACM,p.558-565.
20.Mackay,W.,Pagani D.,Faber L.,Inwood B.,
Launiainen P.,Brenta L.&Pouzol V.(1995).Ariel:
Augmenting Paper Engineering Drawings.In CHI '95
Video Program ,San Francisco CA:ACM.

Why blog this?
Think the extract captures the way in which existing e-lab book work has gone and focused upon the action of emulation of paper, where must acknowledge the evolutionary process of paper as a technology and so open a direction to open up for new technology to strive too.

Collection of really useful other blog thoughts

2008-02-10T03:40:00.000-08:00

Great post on Recursive affordances - post from Past&Vineger

These two ash-tray found in Geneva and Lausanne are two impressive examples of an object affordances:

Why do I blog this? This is utterly curious from a design perspective. the artifacts designed to received trashed objects looks like the object itself. A sort of recursive affordance to some extent. What does that mean? It’s actually not that recursive and the second example if maybe more self-explanatory since the two different garbages are next to each other. Besides, the first one has a little hole that only allow to receive small things like cigarettes.

Style of posting taken from this blog
- The "Why I blog this?" point is a great way to capture the reasoning behind the post and so I will look to adopt this approach as think it could provide more clarity for reasoning behind each posting of thoughts.

Why do I blog this? - recursive affordances

I have some thoughts to draw up a table of the range of affordances of the lab book as I have provided/put forward an argument that the affodances of paper and so lab book is the foundations of what makes it a ideal mobile ubiquitous artifact, with the ability to fit int work practice.

Some thoughts now maybe with gather the existing range of affordances from Gaver, Sellen & Harper etc to collectively put forward which of these are why the lab book works and where the shortcomings have been in existing technology.

Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

URL: Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

There is a great interview of Steve Portigal in influx. Some excerpts I found relevant:

“A great design strategist (…) someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what’s going on around them and they’re good at listening to people. And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book “Accelerando”, describes the profession of a “meme broker” and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this. Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy.
(…)
The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed.“

Why blog this ?
Some good insights here that rings a bell with personal thoughts, especially concerning the messiness of reality and the need to uncover quirks, peculiars situations, extreme users as well as exceptions.

Love the idea too of what design strategist should represent and what I think the different perspectives that are required to allow for insight - nice to point to think on for my own work as would like to look for a final position to allow for recommendations to be made in a design strategy context - drawing on use from work and in particularly table of affordances from lab books.

I agree massively with too:

"The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed."

Feel the methods selected for my own research will be part of the comment by Bruce Sterling:

"Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy."

- Feel this relates to the conversation that was had with Richard Coyne from Edinburgh and his talk on design tunning - do have his slides to verify/support this.

Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization?

"On the UK's Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. "If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization," she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook's Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It's a marketers dream and it's really not far off from the definitions we've come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb. We've written about web 3.0 and attempted to define it many, many times here over the past year. One of the common themes between almost all of the posts is that Web 3.0 and the vision of the Semantic Web are joined at the hip. Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O'Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a "decentralized asynchronous me." "Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me," he wrote. "[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don't want to participate in the world. It's about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!""

Why blog this?
My own work is directed to both web2.0 and incorporating its concept so I am particularly interested where the next step is with the web 3.0 direction - in order to give further power of a tool for scientists, especially when a concern for scientists is about privacy of their own environment and the background to what 3.0 is building towards is "control of my environment particularly who I let in."

Finally -Quote of the day, Feb 3rd, 2008: Interaction-Design.org Quote-of-the-Day

"On the one hand, design must be firmly rooted in the work practices of both users and designers; on the other it must confront these practices with their existing shortcomings and introduce new artifacts such as mock-ups, prototypes, or metaphors, and potentially cause breakdowns. This is how we may lean to transcend our own tradition as users and as designers. -- Boedker, Greenbaum and Kyng, p. 147-148 in "Setting the stage for design as action""

Why do I blog this?
My interpretation of this quote is to take the best of both worlds work practice of users and designers & then how must have ability to confront practices with shortcomings I think this is where continued research questions lie...

Social affordances

2008-01-13T15:34:00.000-08:00

A really interesting article on the concept of affordances from affordances evoked by social interaction highlighted several points to some of the current thoughts/reading/ideas.

" The concept of affordances, as introduced by Gibson (e.g., 1979), provides a way to describe the world that cuts across traditional subject-object dualities. Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. At the same time, they go beyond subjective interpretations (e.g., associations, schemas, or social conventions) by describing meaning relative to an objective physical world.

Affordances are primarily facts about action and interaction, not perception."

As technology is becoming more ubiquitous the concept of 'social affordance' , at first thought may provide an avenue of awareness to move towards the concept of 'invisible computing' as discussed by Don Norman. In such a way though that the step before this must be in an understanding of the situated actions per se as discussed by Lucy Suchman.

"Affordances exist not just for individual action, but for social interaction as well. Research on “social affordances” (e.g., Still & Good, 1991; Goldring, 1991) focuses on the possibilities for action that people offer one another and on the role of other people in pointing out new affordances (e.g., to babies). These are not social affordances, as defined above, but affordances for sociality."

I think this may be a start to inform the way in which I can think about the design environment/ecology by questioning the design of social affordances based upon an understanding of the ecology.

"Perhaps the most important affordance of the everyday world lacking in media spaces is the ability to move. As Gibson (1979) emphasised, movement is fundamental for perception.
We move towards and away from things, look around them, and move them so we can inspect them closely. Movement might allow people to compensate for the discontinuities and anisotropies of current media spaces (Gaver, 1992; c.f. Heath & Luff, 1991). Social interactions in media space would be better supported if people could explore remote sites as easily as they can move around their own rooms.

The ecological approach is useful in the design process because it describes perception and interaction in terms of the properties of the environment, as well as those of people, and design is fundamentally about manipulating the environment for people. Thus the ecological approach challenges researchers to avoid the temptation of using memory and inference in explanations of perception, and encourages them instead to discover the possibly high-level physical attributes that serve as information about the world."

And so my impression from this is that the 'Ecological approach' can look to challenge the way ubiquitous computing is perceived? And social interactions both with the artifact of the e-lab book and is ecology it operates within could be a way which to move forward with the e-lab book concept should operate.

Some thoughts from the book Thoughtful Interaction Design

2008-01-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

The following is taken from the book 'Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology' by Jonas Löwgren & Erik Stolterman

" We live in an artificial world. It is a world made up of environments, systems, processes and things that are imaged, formed, and produced by humans. All these things have been designed, and all new things have to be designed. Someone has to decide their form, function, and structure as well as their ethical and aesthetical qualities. In this artificial world created by humans information technology is increasing becoming not only common but a vital and part. Our design world world is full of digital artifacts, that is things built around a core of information technology. We can find them in our workplaces, in our meeting and public spaces, and in our homes. Digital artifacts have a direct impact on our everyday lives. "

Although very abstract in terms of the nature of 'digital artifacts' the nature of design questions that I think the paragraph looks to open is very much within the direction of my own work for the fundamental reason that

"Digital artifacts have a direct impact on our everyday lives"

And so if the concept behind the fundamental design is not clearly directed and understood in the working practice(even more so within the working practice of a complicated domain of scientists) then there will be fundamental flaws - This may lead to thoughts of a potential question towards the understanding of the present way of working(with paper) and existing technology and how it is and actually used - with this I feel there is a lead with some of the thoughts on ubiquitous computing and the concept of invisible computing, in that ubiquitous computing can in some scenarios be a collection of broken processes where the ideal solution would a scenario based around the invisible computing concept (I would interpret the invisible computing concept as the way someone can work with technology and not have to consciously think about using the technology - similar to the way a scientist will use and write in a paper based lab book now.- reminder to check the name of the research paper for the discussion of this debate. )

Again initial thoughts would point to how such a design strategy would provide how to move forward with the development of technology to the invisible computing concept ?

The thinking from the above book has been inspired by some thoughts from the blog by david roedl materiality-in-languages-of-interaction where several more interesting points are raised

"Lowgren and Stolterman present their notion that interaction design works with a ‘material without qualities’. By this they means that digital artifacts can take on so many different forms–and the forms possible are constantly shifting due to technological advances–that is very hard to pin down a set list of qualities to describe the medium, as say a sculptor could describe their stone. They make this point more clear by suggesting that we think of bits as our material. Pondering this for a minute, I begin to realize that are an infinitum of possible physical forms and consequently qualities that bits can take on as they are presented to a user."

The following is then pointed out which I feel is closely linked with the understanding and concept of what an e-lab book is as a 'digital artifact'

"However, all digital artifacts have an aspect that doesn’t seem miles away and of which qualities can be quite easily pinned down: hardware used for display and input. While there are vast possibilities in this area too, for most part digital interaction to date has consisted of some basic elements of monitor, keyboard and mouse. It occurs to me now that there a lot of limitations in this configuration, and that by switching it up we might greatly reduce the percieved ‘distance’ between the physical and virtual world. G. Smith talks about the 4 dimensions of previous traditions that interaction design draws upon. I might argue that the 3-D, that is the language of traditional product design, has been the least utilized. With hardware advances this is changing a lot though, and the result is the introduction some much needed physicality to our overall language of interaction."

The final thoughts from david roedl materiality-in-languages-of-interaction lie with Lev Manovich who through his own approach of digital materialism and how analysis to these newer forms of interface hardware could/can question how the conception of the medium change?

This I think is a step towards the right type of questions that can be asked for my e-lab book , in a similar manner I wish to question how the concept changes from a working paper based artifact with clear affordances to the medium of technology and so how the concept of an e-lab book can be more clearly defined.

- the thoughts to do from this is to create an affordance list of the paper based lab book, this can be further enhanced by the information from the interviews - a further thought to raise is I still don't believe or have read any reasoning to believe an electronic version should be in any way a copy of a paper lab book and so such a design can simply borrow the best bits of the mental model of paper and maybe even the situated action to the various way of working(a more complete understanding would be required to demonstrated this part- maybe such a strategy for future designs can be informed by such existing mental models &/or situated actions of the work environment - which would have to be dependent on if the mental models &/or situated actions are effective ways of working - if not then this is where the continued development of technology can be designed more clearly to addressed the nature of poor/ineffective ways of working with the technology - instead of what continues to appear to be technology for technologies sake and not effectively directed at actually helping real peoples/scientists working problems (do need an an analogy and examine existing further research to help understand and demonstrate this )

Some quick thoughts towards design thinking

2007-12-18T17:01:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts taken from Mindspace blog discussing the article More from Mentors to the Masters

With some particularly interesting points on design thinking that I think is more than relevant

"The extent of overlap between design thinking and social-sciences and research thinking. I particularly found mysef nodding at this first note by Yves Behar, Founder, fuseproject - Design thinking is about filtering culture. To do that, you have to put yourself in the broadest possible context to understand from all different angles how people live and work. It’s not enough to be an observer, even an empathic one. You have to observe at the intersection of things."

And again very useful thought from Charles Eames

Charles Eames was asked the question,

"What are the boundaries of design?"

He answered,

"What are the boundaries of problems?"

- Charles Eames

Some thing to keep a careful eye on...

2007-11-25T07:05:00.000-08:00

I am particularly interested in the new ebook reader by Amazon - Kindle and any potential future success it may or may not have, from the initial brief reports it seems it may have captured in the design some usability?? Although it shall remain open though to capture more reviews and more long term use as points such as the inability to read PDF documents has been raised as some what frustrating.

A selection of some reports follows:

Taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7101392.stm

Online retailer Amazon has unveiled an own-brand wireless electronic book reader called Kindle.

The paperback-sized device is on sale immediately in the US for $399 (£195). It can store up to 200 books in its onboard memory.

Kindle does not need a PC to be loaded with books, blogs or papers - instead content arrives via wireless.

Amazon said 90,000 books, including bestsellers priced at $9.99, were available for Kindle at launch.

New addition

"We've been working on Kindle for more than three years," said Amazon boss Jeff Bezos in a statement.

"Our top design objective was for Kindle to disappear in your hands -- to get out of the way -- so you can enjoy your reading," he said.

I am particularly for the reason that the objective design was/reads that Amazon wanted the
device to disappear in the users hands - much like a book would ?

- BBC update link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7107118.stm

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader has sold out despite skepticism about whether the device will prove popular.

A notice on the Kindle pages on the Amazon web store said "heavy customer demand" for the device meant it would be out of stock until 3 December.

Since its launch on 19 November the device has been widely examined but opinions about it are mixed.

It has won praise for being easy to use but many have criticised the way it forces people to pay for free content.

- The Kindle and its design and its usability will be tracked to capture reviews to understand and gain some insight into its workings as may be helpful to provide some insight ?

- Some more reading
Newsweek story - The future of reading
http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

And again a particularly interesting blog post from Erik Stolterman which is most helpful in my own thoughts for my own blog post too.

- The Amazon Kindle

By Erik Stolterman

Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com offers a new digital book reader tool. It is called the Amazon Kindle. Just by looking at the descriptions and videos you get quite a good idea about the design. I think this is a design that deserves examination. The Kindle has some new technology, such as the use of e-ink. I have no idea if and how the Kindle will work as a reading tool. But from a design point of view it raises some interesting questions. It is for instance clear that the design is intentionally not aimed at adding as much functionality as possible. There are several serious limitations, but they are all intentional and based on a clear design idea, which is that this is first of all (and maybe only) a reading device. It is not a phone, a pda,it does not contain a browser, etc, it seems as if it is not even a calculator! Does it have a clock :-) It comes with free wifi but only to the Amazon e-bookstore and Wikipedia. Anyhow, is this a sign of what we will see in the the coming years of interaction design? Devices and tools that are designed for very specific purposes, ignoring opportunities and features that would be so easy to add? Well, we'll see. There are no real good reviews yet of the Kindle, mostly descriptions, so we will wait and see....

The identification of what a design problem is continued...

2007-10-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

Again the following has been taken from from the book - Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action and the blog/book review of the book by an Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path and the author of the book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices.

This last section captures what it means to be a reflective practitioner and in my own view a way in which interaction design can be so open to different frames depending upon what the problem is, so need to be able to use a selection of different frames as you would for different tools for a job and where the concept of frame analysis is so relevant.

"What does it mean to be a reflective practitioner? Schön says

[E]ach individual develops his own way of framing his role. Whether he chooses his role frame from the profession's repertoire, or fashions it for himself, his professional knowledge takes on the characteristics of a system. The problem he sets, the strategies he employs, the facts he treats as relevant, and his interpersonal theories of action are bound up with his way of framing his role.

This is why, I think, we see so many clashes on the various design mailing lists about what to call ourselves, what our roles should be, and where the boundaries are for disciplines like experience design and interaction design. It is different frames colliding. One practitioner thinks interaction design is interface design, another thinks interface design is a subset of interaction design, and on and on. Schön suggests that rather than fight about which of these frames is the correct one, we simply practice "frame analysis."

When a practitioner becomes aware of his frames, he also becomes aware of the possibility for alternate ways of framing the reality of his practice. He takes note of the values and norms to which he has given priority, and those he has given less importance, or left out of the frame altogether...Frame analysis may help practitioners to become aware of their tacit frames and thereby lead them to experience the dilemmas inherent in professional pluralism. Once practitioners notice they actively construct the reality of their practice and become aware of the variety of frames available to them, they begin to see the need to reflect-in-action on their previous tacit frames.

Schön is basically saying, Put down your arms. In all professional practices, there are different schools of thought which often result in very different personal frames for practice. If we instead look at them as frames, we can consider and even move between them as necessary. For some projects, it may make sense to step outside of the frame of "interaction designer" and instead take on the frame of "interface designer" and visa versa."

The questions from the previous posting need to look to still be addressed and a summary of further thoughts of framing problems for my own context to be added....

The identification what a design problem is ?

2007-10-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

The following has been taken from from the book - Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action

and the blog/book review of the book by an Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path and the author of the book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices.

http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/new_archives/2007/09/review_the_refl.html

The attraction of this book has been the way in which the design problem is set out to be understood and then defined, which in the context of complex design problems would be applicable.

The aim/relevance of the following is to just to bring about the thoughts of Donald Schön and the views of understand in such a way which may have application to my own design problems and to highlight and actually be able to fully understand the problem which has to be a key issue before attempting any real design in such a complex environment that the lab book exists in.The book summary is also to be used to pick my own way through the book so will leave open to be able to come back to.

The Reflective Practitioner was written in the early 1980s and took as its premise that the world of work was changing rapidly, that there was a group of people (Richard Florida's Creative Class mostly) who, unlike doctors, engineers, and scientists, didn't rely on technical knowledge for their expertise. Schön calls these people "practitioners" and their ranks include everything from social workers to city planners to architects and designers. People who, in the words of Charles Reich, "can be counted on to do their job, but not necessarily to define it."

Practitioners, Schön says, have "an awareness of complexity that resists the skills and techniques of traditional expertise" and are "frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests." (Much like ever project I've ever worked on!) Being a practitioner means that the traditional methods and techniques of analytical thinking and scientific process simply don't work. Problems in the messy world of practitioners "are interconnected, environments are turbulent, and the future is indeterminate." What is called for under these conditions, Schön argues, are professionals who can, as Russell Ackoff says, "design a desirable future and invent ways of bringing it about."

Really think the next section is applicable

Schön says,

In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations that are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense.

Problem setting is where we "name the things to which we will attend and frame the context to which we will attend to them." This cannot be achieved by Technical Rationality, because Technical Rationality depends on understanding what the end is. Only through naming and framing, which do not depend on applying general scientific principles, can these complex problems eventually be solved.

This, however, doesn't stop practitioners from looking for tried-and-true methods and techniques that will solve all their problems in a neat way. You see this all the time with designers at conferences and on mailing lists, searching for the next great method. Schön says that for practitioners, replying on methods and techniques will leave them solving problems of relatively little importance, for both clients and society at large. It is only by "descending into the swamp" where the practitioners must forsake technical rigor that the really important and challenging problems will be found

the concept of giving up technical rigor not so sure in terms of validity of results but would agree it would provide a more useful insight, could you have a balance between the two?

- The concept of Reflection-in-action

The everyday life of practitioners involves "tacit knowing-in-action," that is, we instinctively know stuff and know how to do stuff, even if we can't explain how to do it. We make judgments, evaluate situations, and recognize patterns without much thought.

Reflection-in-action works, according to Schön:

"When the phenomenon at hand eludes the normal categories of knowledge-in-practice, presenting itself as unique or unstable, the practitioner may surface and criticize his initial understanding of the phenomenon, construct a new description of it, and test the new description by an on-the-spot experiment.

How do practitioners know if they have chosen the right frame? Schön lays out the criteria:

Can I solve the problem I have set?
Do I like what I get when I solve this problem?
Have I made the situation coherent?
Have I made it congruent with my fundamental values and theories?
Have I kept inquiry moving?

Thus, Schön, says, practitioners judge a "problem-setting by the quality and direction of the reflective conversation to which it leads. This judgement rests, at least in part, on his perception of potentials for coherence and congruence which he can realize through his further inquiry."

The criteria set out is of real interest, and could look to understand own problem ? May also like to look at exist work to understand/evaluate how the existing e-lab book systems
are defined in actually understanding the problem?

The concept and benefits of framing design problems from the criteria is captured in the next section

Framing a problem means making a hypothesis of the situation. But you need to test the frame somehow, and that is where experiments come in.

Reflective practitioners perform on-the-spot experiments to see if they have framed the problem in the correct way, meaning that the problem can be tackled in a manner that is agreeable to the practitioner and that keeps the "inquiry" moving ahead. The practitioner takes into account the unique features of the problem in crafting the experiment, drawing on "a repertoire of examples, images, understandings, and actions."

Unlike scientists, practitioners undertake these experiments not just to understand the situation, but to change it into something better. Experiments consist of "moves" like in chess. Any hypothesis has to "lend itself to embodiment in a move." A practitioner makes a move and sees how the situation "responds" to that move, each move acting as a sort of "exploratory probe" of the situation.

Here is Schön on how the experiments work:

The practitioner's hypothesis testing consists of moves that change the phenomena to make the hypothesis fit...The practitioner makes his hypothesis come true. He acts as though his hypothesis were in the imperative mood. He says, in effect, "Let it be the case that X..." and shapes the situation so that X becomes true.

Schön calls the experiments "a game with the situation." Practitioners try to make situation conform to the hypotheses, but have to remain open to the possibility that they won't.

If a move doesn't work, practitioners should "surface the theory implicit in the move, [critize] it, [restructure] it, and [test] the new theory by inventing a move consistent with it." When practitioners find the changes to the situation created by their moves to be satisfactory, that is when they should stop experimenting, and/or move on to the next part of the situation.

By creating these in-the-stuation experiments, Schön notes, rightly, that "practice is a kind of research."

By creating these in-the-situation experiments, Schön notes, rightly, that "practice is a kind of research."

Point wish to explore further here from the book more directly, for the reason that from the discussions with scientist the nature of what is described above very much relates to the nature of research work that is being conducted
So point is to clarify what scientists as defined by Schön and clarify if what Schön notes defines to be a practitioner would relate to the concept of what scientist that I am observing would be defined by myself in my own work. (slightly off concept of setting what the design problem is but using to gain if any insight can be gained about nature of what a scientist can be perceived to be)

Book postings

2007-09-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

Some notes and points taken from the book ‘Making Use: scenario based design of Human Computer Interactions’ Some points picked up more as linked into the interviews with several scientists that have conducted this week as observed several scenarios of use of the lab book which have been insightful, but have found several useful points from chapter 2 of book, which captures some useful points on design.

- Design problems never completely satisfy their starting conditions, a critical step in design is identifying the relevant description of the current situation in the world that is to be altered by the design work. Problems can be caused by the design description of the current situation of the world that drives the design reasoning, can be incomplete, inaccurate or irrelevant.

- A second characteristic of design problems is the possible move that designers can take in reasoning from a description of the current situation, a need to be able to understand what steps are possible, relevant, and productive none is given in a design problem.

- A third difficulty is design problems will no specify the goal or solution state, the initial understanding of the problem does not specify precisely how to provide the solution of better access for example. When the solution state is specified the design work is complete.

These initial 3 problems are captured in the work by Walter Reiteman (1965) cognition and thought: (Follow up note to pick up this book and read though, as the work is described to take concern in contrasting design problems with puzzle problems studies in academic psychology, which might be a different useful perspective however it is mentioned that the approach may mask several design properties particularly important in the design of new technologies.)

- A fourth design problem characteristic is the trade off of problems among many different elements, each of which may constrain resources and the design for the other, must be able to decide the priority when conflicts arise.

- A fifth property of design problems is the requirement of a diversity of skills and knowledge, it is in this that bringing together various experts of their fields that the design problem can be clarified and a solution proposed. Again trades offs among the design elements and the need to marshal diverse knowledge and skills(is this a knowledge management issue ?) could be surely be important factors in the design.

- The sixth characteristic of a design problem is the impact which the design has on people, a design problem leads to the transformations and so alters human activity and experiences often in ways that transcend the boundaries of original design reasoning

Some points also from the book ‘The inmates are running the asylum’ by Alan Cooper.

- Concept of the dancing bear – taken from pg 27

Scenario of a man which leads on a dancing bear in front of the towns people, considered a wonderful sight as the bear shuffles around and so in reality is a terrible dancer, but it is the wonder that the bear dances at all.

This is problem of the interaction with the technology, people are prepared to put up with technology that is able to work at all, interaction problems are accepted in order to gain some benefit. The difficulty of devising a better interaction isn’t what makes the so intractable, it is instead our/my universal willingness to accept bad interaction as an unavoidable cost.

It is this judgement on cognitive friction is avoidable and that the cognitive friction does not come from technology it comes from the controllers of technology.

When the interaction and interface is expressed more in terms of implementation products are designed more in accordance with an ‘implementation model’, this is not a positive direction as it is effectively away from the human user.

- Notes on goal directed design taken from pg 149

I had wanted to get this down as would see it possible linking to the initial 3 characteristic problems of design as mentioned above,

Before the digital age design was in principle an aesthetic thing based on views of quality, with the digital age cognitive friction comes with the interaction and the interaction is necessary as there is a goal. It is based on this light that the nature of design evolves for the reason that the design must be able to meet user goals in addition to understanding the aesthetic component.

This has lead to the quality of design being able to be measure more based on the ability to achieve user goals.

Good interaction design has meaning only in the context of a person actually using it for some purpose.

- You cannot have purpose without people

The two are inseparable these two element are the basis of the design process of personas and goals - people and purposes.

The essence of good interaction design is to devise interactions that let users achieve their practical goals without violating their personal goals.

Personal goals – don’t feel stupid, no mistakes, efficient in working, enjoyable to use.

Corporate goals – these are organisational based goals, can questioned/ developed for lab environment , based on initial interviews is to produce research papers and obtain research grants

Practical Goals – bridge gap between corporate and personal goals again can questioned/ developed for lab environment

False goals – false goals are essential tasks they are a means to an end but not the end of the process, examples are save memory, easy to learn, increase graphic beauty

A note on goals and tasks:

– A goal is the end result.

– A task is a step which is taken to get to get to the goal.

In summary too be able to come back and continually reflect of the nature of the issues raised by both of these authors could help provide some useful insight.

Note quotes left out as large extracts taken from both books used page numbers as reference.

Scrolling Forward

2007-09-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

Some reflection on the book of
Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
by David M. Levy - all quotes taken from book

A collection of thoughts picked out from the book in essence has been used to gain insight into the use of paper documents and the way documents could move to be digitised.

To ensure a simple break down and to understand what a document can offer the world, for this a simple receipt is broken down in order to understand what it portrays

The crucial perspective is the document captures a story a very selective one but in essence a story, in this scenario a simple proof of purchase is the function. In the context of the global economy a little receipt is pretty useful in terms of recording a transaction, more now so done digitally but the author raises how it is able to do this in a credible manner. To understand this the author recommends that you must take a step back from the receipt and actually look at the way the receipt is situated in the "web of human practices and knowledge distribution through space and time." -pg18

And so a document regardless of whether a book or receipt it is something which is able to capture a persons thoughts or ideas or some information that otherwise would be lost in time.

the discussion then takes account of how to view documents and their enabling technologies may well need to see how form, content and medium are not to be fully separated constituents in our lives and in the richness of the experience - p58

The relevance of this links in my opinion directly to the hardware research observations in how classification attempts to capture a portion of what a physical lab book offers, and what has been observed that without the entire experience (effectively all the affordances of a physical book ) then this may well be an indication to the shortcomings of the designs ?

It is also captured how digital technologies are littered with crashes, and believes a physical book will always hold a place because of what it is - an artifact of human creativity. This emotional attachment I personally think is far from how scientists potentially would see their lab books so part of the design consideration could lie in overcoming the hurdle of an attachment with paper based working ? I don't think any technology should change work flow but understand it

The author goes on to capture the problem in a nutshell "In the world of paper , documents are realised as stable, bound physical objects. Once a paper document comes into being it loses its dependence on the technologies that were used to manufacture it" - pg 152
The scenario then given how a photocopied memo loses any attachment to the technology and essentially has a freedom to be used as desired.

In addition to this an account must be made to understand the way in which technologies work this is viewed as " the service of human social aims " but my interpretation and the additional information from the author is with us(people) and how technology can work to and maintain the world.

Finally the author captures what could be viewed as a fundamental problem for the reason "When we fixate on particular forms and technologies, taking them in and of themselves to be carries of what we want either to embrace or resist.Not only do we fail to see the forms and technologies in their full complexity but we use them in their symbolic simplicity, as blunt instruments which we use to beat one another over the head. "

The author goes on to highlight how further mistakes are made we an assumption is made that one form of technology must replace another

The modes of operation only conflict when we insist that one or the other is the way to operate and what is most in need of is a balance , this is stated by the author as a depersonalised discernment of ways, whether the nature of this is questionable in the context of the lab book is one which can go on to be questioned.

Scientist interview

2007-09-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

A brief summary of a just by chance informal interview I was able to have with an student scientist from the area of oceanography, the scientist uses lab notebooks so was just purely curious how they view and use a notebook. (I think the PhD has officially all my thoughts as was too good an opportunity to turn down)

Just a few points to consider and wish to be aware of how is this information interpreted through myself and how I would look to interpret in such design, how would the central points be selected from with what would be view to be important, I think also it can just be helpful in terms of thoughts of understanding how to be able to gain information from interviews

- Initial Overview
Scientist O has studying oceanography uses a laboratory book to record experiments made in a laboratory environment and has made several field trips where a field book is used to record information from the field.

- Scenario 1- field trip in Wales

Field trip involved observation of rock formations on the coast, was particularly stressed by scientist how was in some difficult places such as high up on a rock ledge to take notes.

The structure of the field notebook was set out in very particular way, this was noted to be enforced from the lectures as the books are known to laid out in a particular way

For this field trip the structure was as follows
introduction information - this contained information such as the date, longitude and latitude of the position of study, the aim of the study, transport how you got to the position and your own personal mood eg happy sad this was recorded as it is noted to effect the way the study is done.

The central observations were then made and recorded, diagrams were very common in this part, (one diagram was marked by a teacher to ensure it had the correct labeling)

Finally a summary of how the aims have been met, a clear page is kept between each observation/experiment to show clarity.

This was enforced by Scientist O as actually stapled in a extra page as did not have enough room in on page so the notes would have become slightly unorganised, but wished to kept all the relevant information together and would have broken the structure.

Strong point made too notes would be elaborated on when back home for the evening sat at a table, as easy to write compared to making notes in the field.

- Scenario 2 - field trip in Scotland on boat

Very similar type of structure, but with the major difference that different of information.

Scientist required to make the same observations though through the entire journey, this can be dependent on the factors that are going to be controlled or observed for the duration of the trip, a major one noted for the particular experiment was cloud cover , so each day scientist observed the cloud cover from a particular point on the boat and measured and recorded the information.

It was noted too that practices are made in terms of how the procedures should be followed, the example given was experiment would take samples at point 1 to 5 through the lake but due to changes with boats course the samples were taken in a different order, subsequently the paper based book was flexible to allow for this type of change in how the samples were taken.

With this field study there was a particularly large amount of data that had to be entered into spreadsheets, strange issue raised with this as on a boat and this has the ability to effect so the research could be affected if table had to be drawn out and a persons mental state the tables are pre set out so scientist just has to add a reading.

-General comments

With the context of the work there is a noticeable difference with the use of two lab books, there was a general structure of how the books should be laid out, this in my own view was enforced by the lectures to ensure good practice and when the scientist was asked if you could pick up any lab book it was easily answered yes, it was shown how diagrams are marked for the correct annotations and labels too all with the aim it appeared to show sufficient information, there seemed to be little concern with readability of someone else's notes as the structure would allow and assist with understanding how a person has gone about an experiment.

general observation of how they are personal document of the scientists thoughts, it was observed how additional information was added such as a post it note of relevant web site that was particularly useful for the work being carried out

Pictures were taken and glued in the back of the book of the Wales field trip, of particular wider views of the rocks as provide a more general overview of the rocks, these are then use in combination with the diagrams made once back and the results are analysed in the laboratory.

Is significant differences between lab books concerned with and oceanography based books, but in terms of how they are used would at this stage think may be similarities between them the structure seems to be an interesting aspect from the interview although would need to question further if such structures are enforced in lab books concerned.

Does the enforced structure ensure good practice? and so allow and make it easier for other scientist to be able to pick up some Else's work and be able to read it ?

The ability of a paper based book for what is required for the task is well suited and the aspect of affordances introduced by the work of Sellen & Harper can be understood further, can go back to Sellen and Harper to question if a task/actual work flow could be seen to have affordances in what would be ideally required - as alternative way of viewing what would be required from any object that would have to document the process?

Some other thoughts from relevant papers which have been read (ACM references)

Ron B. Yeh and Scott Klemmer. Field Notes on Field Notes: Informing Technology Support for Biologists - this paper also generalises how scientists formulate ideas which may be useful to think of in terms of structure

Yeh, R., Liao, C., Klemmer, S., Guimbretière, F., Lee, B., Kakaradov, B., Stamberger, J., and Paepcke, A. 2006. ButterflyNet: a mobile capture and access system for field biology research. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006).

- Abigail J. Sellen , Richard H.R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003

A collection of thoughts post...?

2007-08-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

Some more thoughts on design and the understanding of the context interaction design as just wanted to clarify some thoughts and tie design understanding into the interaction design process, and in addition to tie the reading that is on going .

The article analysed questions what puts the design in interaction design and have just wanted to reflect and pick through some of the points made.

"Interaction design is a blended endeavor of process, methodology, and attitude. Discussions of process and methodology are pervasive in the interaction design milieu and often revolve around a perceived tension between process and methodology and the role of design within this discipline. To be clear, process is the overarching design framework."

What puts the design in interaction design? To answer this question, we need to think about the purpose of design. Design is a loaded term that has a pliable meaning. In a moment of clarity, Christopher Alexander defined the purpose of design: “The ultimate object of design is form.”

- Based on this statement the role of design is understood by describing its form and then to identify the need for design. "Form does not always result from a new design process."

"To address new problems through innovation or the modification of existing patterns, you must design. A pattern is a solution for a particular context.Designed behavior is not invisible. Sometimes it is obfuscated; at other times, it is apparent or even obvious.

Most importantly, designed behavior dictates the flow between action and reaction, which is the basis of an interaction. A user takes an action through an affordance, which in turn causes a reaction in the presentation layer.

- The article ties up with 5 dimensions to interaction design

1-D—words—which are interactions
2-D—visual representations—which include typography, diagrams, icons, and other graphics with which users interact
3-D—physical objects or space—with which or within which users interact
4-D—time—within which users interact—for example, content that changes over time such as sound, video, or animation
5-D—behavior—including action, or operation, and presentation, or reaction

- I think these can be thought on further as not sure if agree with all and some of the remaining points raised in the remaining of the article, intend to compare and contrast between several more views in order to gain clearer perspective.

Things to think on further ?

- The major point from this is that interaction is central to the action made either directly or indirectly - again questions in the line of how/does the affordance link to the previous action made in an old system?

for references above article from uxmatters http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000209.php

- This discussion centres around heavily the ideas discussed by Paul Dourish in "Where the action is" particular intriguing how to embodied interaction is formed as such with social and tangible computing - is the way in which embodied interaction design move towards designs of systems cover all that is required from understanding the actions and affordances of the actions involved?

- A second and as interesting article which ties in coupling, which again is discussed by Dourish
and talks of coupling idea between actions and tools in which the meaning is created, again to take apart in next post and again will benefit from reading several more perspectives.
coupling between user action and functional information

- Finally so can design just be simply a two piece puzzle ???

“Understanding the context of a design problem and creating a solution that fits are two pieces of the same puzzle: design.”

Tagging with electronic labbooks

2007-08-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Just to tie up and create some thoughts with the existing work with tagging an the electronic lab book the notes taken from the paper Skidmore (1998) and the collaborative investigation work on lab books.

The ViNE project provides scientists with a web-based equivalent of a traditional paper notebook extended with support for notebook sharing, security, and computational tool access and management, the paper identifies several enhancements for future development

- a framework for integrating editors appropriate to a variety of data content, allowing
users to directly manipulate images, data, and text without leaving ViNE.

- For the scientist with very large amounts of data, we will provide more sophisticated ways to organize it,

A general issue which needs to be considered is how such a design could allow for full integration within OMERO as well the above points and the additional points to be added that will arise from the future work

Paper reference
Skidmore, J. L., Sottile, M. J., Cuny, J. E., and Malony, A. D. 1998. A prototype notebook-based environment for computational tools. In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (Cdrom) (San Jose, CA, November 07 - 13, 1998). Conference on High Performance Networking and Computing. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1-15.

Some visual thoughts…

2007-07-26T13:15:00.001-07:00

A diagram to get some clarity on the direction and thoughts some what shortened down to be managed on one page but has provided some clarity and would recommend it to anyone. A mental note for my own study is that I wrote it out on paper several times first before transferring to digital format which can be said are an affordance of paper which I required for the initial process.

The first notes on the diagram is that it is very much open to change and further expansion and more detailed questioning of the areas as I continue to read round and develop some ideas. I am sure these concepts will develop over time in the diagram and I expect they are open to further interpretations.

Some extra notes on the diagram there is a two specific areas of social and tangible computing which form embodied interaction, this concept is taken from the book ‘Where the action is’ by Paul Dourish. I have particularly like the aspects of social and tangible computing and how this forms embodied interaction, it is defined as “Embodied interaction is the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artefacts”

With the major aspect that there is a relationship between action and meaning, I have taken the parts of the book which examine the action which is conducted through social perspectives and talks of and going I am going on to read on further to pick out the meaning. Other reading influences have come from ‘the cult of information’ where the following I think is an important question “Information is what information processing technology processes; but if we have no clear idea what information is and what it is not, what questions it can and cannot answer, what relationship is to other intellectual faculties- if we are not certain as to whether there are any other intellectual faculties besides the processing of the information – then we can have no clear idea what authority this technology should hold over our lives” All of this above is may not hold relevant to the problem in mind but again looking to see what bearing this may hold?

From the diagram also there maybe has some intertwine with content visualisation (this aspest is more central to the OMERO project) and the way in which this can be managed, this is just being picked up upon at this stage in order to understand if there is any relevance and links that can be made, the fundamental link in my initial thoughts is with regards to usability and presentation of the content of information.

With this collection of information I am generally curious on the application if the theories and philosophies which are discussed in ‘Where the action is’ curious to question how they may have application in the context project on very abstract level at the moment, but also at the same time the following text made more aware to ensure to incorporate the design aspect

“Being able to move around in the world and interact with pieces of the world enables learning in ways that reading books and listening to words do not.”

(taken from How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design Hartmann & Takayama 2006)

Which I think is the merging of the design aspect of the interaction design which I am interested and wanting to take on board too, effectively drawing on a multiple of areas to understand a problem.

Finally stumbled across this too which I found very interesting and thought was very relevant.

Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork. Paper submitted to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences, Brisbane, Qld, Australia, September 27 - 30, 2006:

Could this help provide more insight into an ethnographers work and so provider link to inform the design process ?

The simplicty of paper...

2007-07-04T17:58:00.003-07:00

For the understanding of the electronic development of a notebook I have spent some time understanding and effectively breaking the notebook concept down into what is actually is which is organised paper. (Its has also been noted that some scientists actually keep their notebook this way, simply a collection of paper notes)

The background reading began with the work by Sellen & Harper(2003) and work and understanding of affordances and what paper can physically afford I think is what makes it so usable, the idea of affordances can be traced back to the work by J Gibson and the book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception"

I think that being able to understand this concept and look for the technology affordance can be an important aspect to be able to consider, and so I am looking to explore this further.

behind its upon like this it really does make the electronic age somewhat less In looking to understand this further I picked up "Scrolling Forward" by David Levy which looks at understanding the history of paper and writing, with this reflection you can begin to understand that the pen and paper have been able to evolve since is creation as it has centuries development, the book highlights also that inventions explode onto the scene and this is not so and is so with paper, as has evolved from walls and animal skins.

A further point taken up by the book was the point upon its analysis of a receipt and its understanding has been considered in terms of its history, yet its own cultural time and place in terms of the present is a key aspect in understanding its relation to its immediate surroundings

"What kind of thing is it? What work is it doing, and why is it doing it? "

These simple questions I would like to be able to ask of the notebook, with the purpose of breaking down the problem and being able to develop an understanding in a basic form.

My own key thoughts with this is the social and psychology of writing on paper as some what of a head start on the electronic medium, to be able to understand the problems and context of the environment looks to be a key factor, which has been picked up from the reading.

In continuation of the paper theme my supervisor recommended the Getting Things Done ‘GTD’ concept. - http://www.43folders.com/

Taken from web site -

In what can be only considered some what of a major turn around in the technology based users have effectively had enough

· Getting Started with “GTD” - An introduction to the system based on the popular book

· Introducing The Hipster PDA - The web’s most famous “outboard brain” is cheap and flexible

· Building a Smarter To-Do List - Learn the techniques to generate actions that actually get done

and stumbled upon this too

http://pocketmod.com/

Initial thoughts on this is kinda mixed, seems even the geeks have had enough of complex and bad designs of PDAs etc, and so now looking back at paper and want to be able to geek this up a bit, but have some interesting ideas, and have few ideas to be able to chase up.

A final point with PDA'S as conversion with lecturer in the department happen to raised that he tried a PDA for the purpose of benefiting his secretary, and this lasted for only two months. My judgement on this was it only partially met the secretary’s needs in knowing when where he was etc but in no way meet the needs of the lecturer and so was not used it in the long term. There was a mention also of how now he uses his paper based dairy and when in meetings he has the notes made before the users any of the electronic versions.

Some on going questions and related reading is actually to gain some insight and understanding into the importance of communication and social interaction in interaction design, as already strongly believe is a key factor and both for my own PhD too, as one of the more general aspects picked up in OMERO meeting will gather some further reflections for next posting.

The reality of interaction design..

2007-06-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

A news article from the BBC's web site part of a series inviting some of the world's leading technologists to speculate about the future, Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems, calls for technology and design to be married to people's needs.

just a few key extracts that show I think can show how interaction design along with the aspect of user centered design techniques can move technology forward the way which is so clearly discussed by Greg Papadopoulos

As a technologist, when I look at the artefact's that we're thrusting onto the world they contain a lot of historical baggage and biases because we simply carry on the assumptions from the past. Things really could be a lot simpler.

All too often, it's like we're asked to care for these things that we really shouldn't care about - and that ranges from mobile phones to personal computers - rather than asking the technology designers to build tools with us in mind.

Think about the voicemail system on your cell phone. It's really bad.

You get the messages linearly, you are told that you have five new voicemails and you don't know what's from whom or the content of each message.

To organise your messages, you have to dial through with ridiculous key sequences. Making it worse, you can't choose a better system as you have to take voicemail from your mobile service provider.

But that's just one example of how the legacy of design holds us back. PCs are full of old designs.

He goes on to conclude..

Take a comparison between a Swiss army knife and a suite of kitchen tools as an example of something that's well designed.

If I really had to open a bottle of wine with a multitool, I would. But mostly, I'll have a corkscrew, a good chef's knife, scissors, and a nail file. Each one is a separate object, with incredibly simple interfaces. Each was designed for a specific purpose.

Rather than making our technologies increasingly complex to use, the same kind of design should be done on the technology we use.

There could be all kinds of computing behind something I use on a daily basis, but at basic level, that's not what I'm interested in. Instead I want an appliance that has a very well-defined and simple function.

Today we're asked to care about things that we really do not want to care about. I don't want the technology artefact or its management to be one of my objectives.

I would say that there has been laziness or a lack of courage by some technology developers, because we could go and redesign our entire system of computing.

But to do that upsets a whole bunch of assumptions and even more technological ecosystems, like the software makers who sell us software to run on PCs.

It is this that a reflection on what has been done with the design of technology, and so with this can question how technology can become closer and be able to integrate more fully with the actual requirements of the users.

the full article link - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6225398.stm

The understanding of Design...

2007-06-19T04:05:00.000-07:00

In order to have a strong foundation (I hope) thoughts and questions have been reading to understand what design is and what it means to be involved in interaction design, this will be an on going process but have a collected an initial few interpretations of what design is and read through several points which I can relate to and at this point in time agree with.

Some of the thoughts I have I have come across which I particularly liked.

“design… deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation.”
Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin.

“Designers solve problems for clients. Artists solve problems for humanity. The latter is the greatest problem.”
John Maeda.

“Design addresses itself to the need.” - And is this why bad design just lets the needs of users Charles Eames. down ?

This has also lead to questioning of understanding design, and have come across several interpretations as expected. Though have been most intrigued by a designer called Charles Eames and his thoughts, the following is extracts from an interview with the designer.

Q -What is your definition of design ?
A - A arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose

Q -Is design an expression of art form?
A -The design is an expression of the purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art

Q - What are the boundaries of of design ?
A - What are the boundaries of the problems ?

Q - Does the creation of a design admit constraints ?
A - Design depends largely on constraints.

Q - What constraints ?
A - The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the of the few effective keys to the design
problem - the ability of the designer to recognise as many of the constraints as possible -
his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints - the constraints of
price, of size of strength, balance, of surface, of time etc.;each problem has its own
peculiar list.

Q - does design obey laws ?
A - Aren't constraints enough ?

I am pretty sure that there should be no hard and fast definition as design in itself is a complex and unique problem in each context to which it is applied and always open to interpretation

but can also understand how design should be about form and function running in parallel
and not form following function, which is why I like the following.

"Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”
Frank Lloyd Wright.

Understanding from chapter 10 of Designing interactions Bill Moggridge

The begining

2007-06-11T02:41:00.000-07:00

From starting my PhD on 23 April 2007 a brief overview of my of my status so far ....

Initial investigation into a physical and electronic lab book and an initial investigation into the research - currently ongoing.

An investigation into my own personal note taking methods, conducted as have been making a large amount of notes on research ideas, so study was to make notes in a notebook for a week and then an electronic notebook the following week - helped provide useful personal insight
into the ways which electronic and physical note taking are very different. Write up of findings for a short report in progress.

Heuristic evaluation of existing lab book software, the original idea has changed slightly as had problems in order to understand the perspective of how to evaluate effectively, in order to aid and help over come this a persona and scenario have been constructed to help to give a more objective evaluation.

- other thoughts at the moment just looking how can help document ideas further, initial idea using memory mapping and looking at finding some appropriate software.

Phd pathway of thoughts and ideas

iPhone 4: Triumph of the Design Nerds

Source: ComputerWorld, 1 July 2010

Ferrari F10 steering wheel is usability horror

The great Norman debate

musicking....

Some relevant quotes

Coopers vision of agile

Values in Software Design Practice

A really useful post from Autodesek on the values required for software design practice, this I feel links in with the values outlined out in the IE.Values in Software Design Practice

More maps

Can the method provide such measurable insight?

Taken from http://www.ryanjacoby.com/

Chipchase photo Fare Maps

Fare Maps

Thoughts on Data, design…and soul

How to get better results from developers

Cooper on Cooper vs Beck

Service design as the design of activity systems

Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport

- A further useful follow on by piece by Margaret Schmidt - TiVo VP Margaret Schmidt on Redesigning.

Why information technology inspired but cannot deliver knowledge management.

Article Abstract:

UCD considered harmful...

Some useful process related notes

Konigi - process Notebook

Difference between iterative and incremental development and a bit for agile

The role of software design

A Communications Primer: a Film by Eames (1953)

What is Information?

What is Systems Design?

IA Summit Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design

Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?

Design and Technology

Interfaces and Software

Open source user experience - IxDA discussion

Usabilty of the post-it

What do you think should be the 3 primary roles/objectives of an interaction designer?

Thoughts on the Relation between concept design and visual design

On Abstraction and its thinking

Visual image to frame the software development problem

Some quotes to capture the IE direction

Visualising work postion

One to continue to contemplate....

The notion of the real world....?

Paper dashboard

Activity theory thoughts...

Thoughts on tools to accomplish tasks...

Looking back and forward..

Thoughts on current interfaces illustrate how many computer scientists are biased toward efficiency with technological resources rather than human att

Is it time to embrace the e-book....?

Writing thought

How to sell a kindle.....???

The selling point....

“Designing is not a profession but an attitude”

Multiple thoughts

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Some thoughts from the post Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky

Quote to capture work upgrade & other pieces

Measuring User Experience - With a discussion on best practice to Measure User Experience,based on 4 key pillars: 1) Branding; 2) Usability ; 3) Content and 4) functionality. Can ignore branding, remaining 3 may prove useful for evaluation later on.

View from Microsoft on the future of human computer interaction

Post from Fade to play

DEFINE: Affordance

Collection of thoughts

A couple of posts captured from RSS feed and a comment from Wendy Mackay e-lab paper

But don't call Delver a "social search engine."

Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network

Privacy Concerns?

Using Delver

Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

Collection of really useful other blog thoughts

Social affordances

Some thoughts from the book Thoughtful Interaction Design

Some quick thoughts towards design thinking

"What are the boundaries of design?"

He answered,

"What are the boundaries of problems?"

- Charles Eames

Some thing to keep a careful eye on...

The identification of what a design problem is continued...

A really useful post from Autodesek on the values required for software design practice, this I feel links in with the values outlined out in the IE.

Values in Software Design Practice

Some thoughts from the post Here Comes Everybody -
Clay Shirky