Collection of really useful other blog thoughts

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

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

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

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...

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...

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 Dan Saffer who is 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 ?

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 Dan Saffer who is 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 Dan Saffer to 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:

1. Can I solve the problem I have set?
2. Do I like what I get when I solve this problem?
3. Have I made the situation coherent?
4. Have I made it congruent with my fundamental values and theories?
5. 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."

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-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)