How you go about selling a product rarely figures in the creation of it. But Gladwell makes an interesting point regarding pitching in product design, in reference to the VCR:

Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers–not once or twice but three or four times–and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.

Thinking about how someone will use a product is wired into most design processes.  However,  there is, as far as I know, only one company that follows this through into the selling of the product and one person who’s synonymous with this; Steve Jobs who owes his pitch process to the Popeils.  Look at his keynote from the iPad launch earlier this year:

Forget the superlatives, I now know how it feels to use this thing, I can connect with the product. Here is Arnold Morris (one of the last of the old Pitchmen) selling the Dial-o-Matic food slicer (an old Poeil product) to Gladwell:

“Come on over, folks. I’m going to show you the most amazing slicing machine you have ever seen in your life,” he began. Phyllis, sitting nearby, beamed with pride. He picked up a package of barbecue spices, which Ron Popeil sells alongside his Showtime Rotisserie, and used it as a prop. “Take a look at this!” He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase. He talked about the machine’s prowess at cutting potatoes, then onions, then tomatoes. His voice, a marvellous instrument inflected with the rhythms of the Jersey Shore, took on a singsong quality: “How many cut tomatoes like this? You stab it. You jab it. The juices run down your elbow. With the Dial-O-Matic, you do it a little differently. You put it in the machine and you wiggle”–he mimed fixing the tomato to the bed of the machine. “The tomato! Lady! The tomato! The more you wiggle, the more you get. The tomato! Lady! Every slice comes out perfectly, not a seed out of place. But the thing I love my Dial-O-Matic for is coleslaw. My mother-in-law used to take her cabbage and do this.” He made a series of wild stabs at an imaginary cabbage. “I thought she was going to commit suicide. Oh, boy, did I pray–that she wouldn’t slip! Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother-in-law. It’s her daughter I can’t figure out. You take the cabbage. Cut it in half. Coleslaw, hot slaw. Pot slaw. Liberty slaw. It comes out like shredded wheat . . .”

This could be Jobs doing the slicer pitch, it’s the same empathic pitch style focused on the stuff you would use the product for. Why are there not more products being pitched this way?

There’s a video of it here too (about 1:30 in).

What’s interesting for me is that video game / platform gaming design is starting to permeate physical worlds (and there are few more emotive objects than the car) not necessarily because we’re increasingly wired to those screen based worlds, but because they offer a means, as Russell has said, to pretend, to play. The GT-R is a $60 000 super car, an expensive thing to start building childlike, playful experiences into.  But it’s highly unlikely that anyone buying this car will go near a race track, more likely they’ll trundle along the A338 in rush hour, so helping them to believe they’re a racing driver can only improve their enjoyment of the car.  If it was easy to get this data out of an engine I’m sure we’d have hybrid Wattson / Tom Tom style dashboards stuck to the windscreen of most cars driven by men with a mental age of 17.

Tom refers to Instapaper in his tweet but I think this tool is illustrative of a broader move toward web services that create value from an ecosystem.

Instapaper relies on:

• our desire to defer reading to a time when we’re not as connected, not as distracted.
• easily ‘bookmarking’ stuff we we come across

Without being plugged in to the stuff we read, where we read it, and also spitting out the stuff into the spaces where we want to read it it wouldn’t work.  This is not a destination service so much as a distributed service, which exists in different states in lots of places such as on my mobile as Insta Fetch, an app made by a third party.

The only way to achieve this sort of distributed service is to have it as an API, a coral reef that people can build on and that is trusted and used because of it’s underlying functionality, in this case taking URLs and making the text readable offline on a platform of your choice.  Your platform is the web (or the internet in many cases).

This gets interesting as it starts to allow micro-economies to develop around experiences. For example I have set up my Pinboard account (a barely social bookmarking service) to save as “Read Later” any URLs in the tweets that I favourite.  I tend the use the twitter ‘favourite’ functionality as a means to bookmark because it’s easier than resolving the URL to save in my time when I’m out and only have 3G connectivity. The pinboard read later items are then polled by Instapaper.

And every week I print out 24, 000 of those URL words to read over the weekend.  I get my own personal newspaper every week.

This ecosystem creates value.  And what would extend this ecosystem and this move to a paper, that has a bit more attention longevity than a screen, is if this newspaper could itself be a URL (or have a URI) which I could share (instapaper doesn’t provide the printout as a defined URL).  Stickybits allocates barcodes to things and so rather than the URL for the newspaper I could use stickybits barcode.  It’s a bit of a stretch, but then I have a means to share my newspaper, or even create a newspaper of shared favourites from my peers where any comments can be aggregated. This is essence is the automated newspaper for friends that I’d like to see Newspaperclub facilitate.

This talk was given at Lovebytes on the 12 Feb 2010.  Thanks to Lisa for the invitation.

Tom Armitage gave a talk a few years ago about manners and etiquette which has stayed with me and which, with the recent meme around playfulness and Russell’s talk at Playful last year, got me thinking about how we ‘design’ engagement.  I want to argue that ‘social’ as it’s conceived by people designing a lot of web applications and services isn’t very helpful and I want to suggest through a series of half baked thoughts, that we think of it differently, in terms of friction.

This is a very broad question and somewhat meaningless, in that people think of the social in lots of different ways I’m sure.  But it’s a word that’s used a lot to describe what we do and what we design.  So it might be useful to have some common ground. From my work social is that which deals with generally accepted norms of behaviour, a coming together of behaviours; patterns.

And behaviours change.  You can go from a football loving student to…

… an ageing  biker dude and in the process see your behaviour and outlook change.  But it’s not just relationships and behavioural norms that ‘social’ encompasses.  Technology is central to our behaviour which is just as well because that’s what we design and play with, right?  I don’t mean technology as anything with a plug, but the codes, signs, materials, that enable effects and enable us to behave as we do.  Bruno Latour is probably the person I’ve found to be most influential on my own view of social, where the social is made up of more or less durable networks of things and these networks ebb and flow (much like the notion of desire in the work of Deleuze) and power and agency are effects of these networks, rather than networks being the effect of will or agency on the part of the individual. It’s a compelling argument, though not always a comfortable one with humanism still a dominant belief in the West.  My notion of friction draws on the notion of the relationships between things emanating out of Latour’s work..

Anyway, I digress (which I do a lot).

Back to social and what it means to be social online.  A lot of this is, I believe, down to accepting the ‘norms’ of behaviour we take for granted.  And those are bound up in manners and etiquette.  Increasingly web apps, services and sites understand that manners and etiquette matter and we’re building good manners into what we make.

The poster child for a lot of development in social manners has to be flickr.  It pioneered a friendly and more nuanced approach to how it dealt with its audience that we now see replicated in lots of web services. The “hello” in different languages is still polite and thoughtful…

So increasingly web apps are understanding the control, communications and context required to foster stronger ties with the audience and build trust.  In the talk I reference Google Buzz as one example of a service that had got this right (but I’d failed to see the privacy backlash occurring in the last 12hours before I talked), where the more granular control over ‘publicness’ of content was a welcome development over the blanket public / private profile that twitter offers.  But I like the thought that went into Buzz if not the execution, particularly the greater visibility afforded friends of friends (which should go hand in hand with the ability for you not to be seen as a friend of a friend, doh!).

However, I still think that Buzz represents a means through which to break out of the address book paradigm that most social web apps and phone companies end up perpetuating.

And this is important because research we’ve done shows that teenage peer groups are relatively impervious; there is little osmosis.  Online peer groups closely mirror offline networks and yet whilst our peer networks evolve the design of online social networks is relatively static.  Once a friend or contact, always a friend or contact, barring some cat fight or major faux pas.

We see a rather clumsy acceptance of our changing relationships in this Facebook notification, which is polite and pleasant, gently suggesting that I’ve not been very communicative with Louise and I should “catch up” but it doesn’t give me a ‘hook’ around which to start the conversation (such as her recent status update).  It might be more engaging to say…

You know, just being a bit more direct.  Now, this isn’t particularly polite and I’m not sure guilt is the best place to start in fostering a friendship, and it could well be that I’ve just been away for a while, or perhaps I communicate with Louise regularly in some other context, but the simple thought remains: relationships evolve and we’re not doing much to reflect that with what we build.

I’m thinking that we should perhaps build in a half-life to relationships, like we develop character ‘engines’ in games.  Because some relationships do decay don’t they?  Some ebb and flow.  Perhaps we should create a sort of transparency over their avatar around some basic algorithm for relationships, like frequency of contact, type of contact etc.

Anyway, I digress. So, with the exception of Teenage Boys we don’t mix well.  Many teenage boys over the age of sixteen (and er, some social ‘outliers’) are willing to risk the embarrassment and awkwardness of contacting and introducing themselves to strangers in the context of social networks for the potential reward it offers.  You know.  From research we’ve done we also see that playing platform games with strangers online also increases boys social confidence (and it is primarily boys that play online with strangers).

What was interesting about this research was how the boy’s forward-ness caused friction amongst girls in the peer group. They’d discuss and debate this boy – class, taste, values, looks, communication.  He’d be a “play thing”, virtually tossed around and tested.  The unintended consequence was that the girls talked a lot more; he was their ‘social object’, if only temporarily.

If you’re not a teenage boy then the only time you’re likely to extend your network and mix is on joining School, Uni, getting a new job, travelling or going clubbing.  These are the touchpoints for mixing and engaging with strangers, when we are receptive to new patterns, new behaviours, new ways of doing things. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that our social networks are now more stratified and impervious than ever (no, not necessarily the well educated geek community, I’m talking more generally).

So, what’s the value of mixing, of having more varied peer groups and communities? Well, there’s the possibility of better recommendations, greater serendipity, and of being more tolerant and understanding (and there must be other less worthy and more fun stuff too).

I’ve mentioned mixing between peer groups and communities being very limited but there’s far far more fluidity within peer groups.   Relationship status changes very frequently, especially amongst younger people (we grow more tolerant and more risk averse as we age). Amongst a study of instant messenger we found that girls especially have quite sophisticated category systems (taxonomies) for representing their relationships with others.  They change daily, as “cute boys” become “bleurgh” and “BF” (best friend) changes to “bitch”.  Whilst this seems extreme, it’s just a more explicit and amplified representation of the way our own relationships evolve and change.

But this fluidity isn’t represented in the way we manage relationships online.  There’s little negotiation.  These are “auto-friends” or “auto-contacts”.  Plugged in.  Always there.  The address book paradigm again.

Designing in friction and negotiation may not be something you’d want in spaces with high rules and norms. For example banks.  It’s not going to work well for traditional banks, or even market lending sites like Zopa. It’s just a bit wrong. Ecommerce sites may also be unsuitable… the product to checkout process flow is sacrosanct. But in creating new services for our internet enabled world of things, we’ve got an opportunity create better relationships and interactions and some of this thinking has about friction in the urban context has already been documented by Nico Nova, amongst others.

Where do we look for examples of friction, negotiation and playfulness that could act as stimulus for designing better services?

Folksy is an offshoot from Rattle (the company I work for). It’s a craft marketplace.  One of the unintended consequences of allowing lots of people to come together is that they choose what they want to do and in the last week they’ve been doing a swap, a like a secret santa, only around Valentines and mainly female to female.  I’m not sure there was any underlying reason other than surprise, serendipity, group reciprocity and being pleasant.   This type of thing builds trust in behaviours and communities. Surrendering control. Good Friction.

Taking this idea of surrendering control into more intimate zones, and rather than try and make recommendations, just use ‘fuzzy’ recommendations of others to state the obvious.  Wouldn’t this be so much more interesting than just seeing who was watching what?  You’d have some room for negotiation, for engaging.

I’m sure you’ve seen tweenbots. Alien-ness, getting lost and asking for help:  “Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal. [...] As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining its destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.”  Fab.

Clifford Nass from Stanford Uni has found that when things appear to behave in even slightly human ways, we assume they are human-like.  So, when we know something is a dog, we know it’s a dog.  When we see something that isn’t from a species we know about but it exhibits some human trait, moving for example, or has a rudimentary face, we’re polite.  We have manners!

Disorientating people and networks has all sorts of benefits, as any fan of JG Ballard will be aware, and it could take many forms, but exposing relationships to being reliant on others to complete a task is really interesting.  What would we be willing to do that for?

I want to suggest that humans actually just like dumb stuff more than clever stuff (the paperclip!) for lots of reasons but mainly because it gives us a point of negotiation, we can project, we can imagine.  The implication here is that the mechanism that drives engagement and friction can be dumb, like the cardboard ‘robot’.

Some relationships are really brief and seemingly inconsequential. But they’re actually really quite significant in providing a sense of the social, of the community and of norms of behaviour.  We come up against people and things every day. They offer points of friction. I know that the waitress in my local cafe knows my name.  I also know she’s unlikely to ever be my friend. That’s OK. Ephemeral relationships offer the chance to engage with people without any expectation of it having to progress.  What can we do with this?  Perhaps place specific contacts then become significant, bounded by near field technologies or other boundary defining tech?

The queue offers a similar offline example of friction.  Queueing is interesting because of the manners, the explicit sense of politeness that it signifies.  It’s also bloody annoying.  But it offers the chance to have conversations with other people and we can glean as much intimate information from a stranger in 15 mins as from a friend in 15 years.

Of the back of that, we build up a knowledge of others’ by seeing their patterns.  Of the people I know quite well (i.e. I communicate with fairly frequently) I know where they will be, at least city they’ll be in.  So my consumption of Dopplr is laregly about confirming what I already know. How could we introduce friction here?  How could we create negotiation and engagement from this?  For example, try and ascertain where your friends will be going next, see how existing patterns of behaviour are replicated going forward.

This is an experiment in engineering engagement. A team of artists created LED gender signs on the bathrooms of a bar and changed the signs over frequently.  It created socially awkward situations, a reason to talk, a reason to engage with someone.

It’s quite radical and only suitable for a context that is already quite playful (the bar), but nonetheless disorientating people could create some interesting forms of engagement.

And this is the “obligatory diagram” to create a scene of pseudo scientific endeavour… I feel like Charlie Brooker.

A lot of the examples I’ve just pointed to are not necessarily appropriate, they’re just cues, but you get the idea of how you can start to think about friction as the basis for ‘social’, about how you can start to question existing patterns of behaviour, and play with our manners and our etiquette.

]]> http://www.technogoggles.com/2010/02/we-are-friction/feed/ 2 http://www.technogoggles.com/2009/11/the-road-to-playful/ http://www.technogoggles.com/2009/11/the-road-to-playful/#comments Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:17:05 +0000 James http://www.technogoggles.com/2009/11/the-road-to-playful/

The Way To Playful from JamesB on Vimeo.

Am in Newcastle at Thinking Digital today and tomorrow (thanks RIG) hoping to see Tara Shears from CERN / Large Hadron Collider, and Dan Lyons (should be fun) and a heap of others mostly drawn from the non-web.  I’m hoping to meet a few ‘doers’ too.  There are enough talkers on the conference circuit.  Shame it co-incides with FutureSonic as I’d like to have seen Adam Greenfield talk.  Hey ho.

It’s also an opportunity to digest a heap of stuff that I’ve been reading and trying to make sense of like probability theory and randomness and how that’s useful in presenting information and actually, designing services; search and particularly support for ‘browse’ behaviour (as Muddy, Rattle’s new product prepares for launch this is a big deal) and the stuff coming out of searchology; and getting up-to-speed with domain driven design.  I’m also excited about receiving a copy of the Schulze and Webb horizonless map which has made me wonder (and S&W always make me wonder) about ‘seeing’ and using Sky Map has made the idea of representing things you’re currently looking at, even more exciting.  For example, I’m a bit short sighted and I don’t like glasses (taking them on and off in different contexts bugs me – where do you put ‘em?) and hate thought of contact lenses scratching my retina, so when I need to see things far away I often use my mobile phone camera / camera.  It brings things into focus.  It’s my better eyes.  But It’d be nice to overlay that “better eyes” view with a point-of-focus where other elements in the frame go out of focus, like peripheral vision, they bend and morph around a focal point not unlike the horizonless map of a fish eye lens (thought the distortion on the ‘centre’).  Just a thought.

Anyway, if you’re at #tdc do say hello.

Be nice to get your thoughts on it.  

Kettles seem to be (becoming) a standard measure for power consumption don’t they? It’s like anthropomorphism only instead of objects taking on human traits we have intangible stuff like electricity taking on the form and activity of objects. Objectifimorphism?

As a lifestream for a programme its got some value to start to describe the effect of the programme.   Using that stream of comment and annotation as a way to deliver semantic value on the programme itself could create interesting ways into programmes especially as programmes often suffer from a lack of meta-description, a lack of hooks with which to snag you in the long tail of their life (most broadcast stuff seems to disappear into the Long Tail rapidly).

So what could you do?  You could look for the tensions in the data. For example, undertaking term frequency analysis on the tweets and the transcript could show how the programme and the listeners’ experience coincide. You could also start to look at the frequency of the comments themselves, do they relate to the contentious aspects of the programme?  They may be good proxies for “interestingness” in the timeline.  Parsing this data through something like Daytum would provide a first means to test if it is indeed interesting.   

This is all good.  But the thing that has been playing with me since I took part in this was how it brought back a sense of the “watercooler” effect.  That Holy Grail of social phenomenons that define a programme as an event.  In this case however, as the listeners provide a commentary to accompany the programme (like SMS text message tickering on acid especially when viewed in a UI like Monitter), what is being created is a “social TX”, a reason to take part in the original broadcast.  This is critical because as programmes are increasingly subject to time shifting the social ‘value’ is dispersed to.  Bringing people together around a TX enables value to coalesced, the scheduled TX is a trigger and the Good Radio Club is an example of a Proximity Fuze. 

A Proximity Fuze  is a fuze which triggers close to something rather than on impact (and which itself is based on the Doppler Effect) and it strikes me that it could be a useful way to thinking about designing for programmes.  Not sure about the military overtones but I like the idea of proximity being a trigger.  Proximity, nearness, as defining a relationship is nice.  And #goodradioclub is nice because it starts to provide some value to the TX (transmission date) based on your proximity to it.  The twitter feed or #goodradioclub is representation of a Proximity Fuze, a trigger to provide value around a social TX.  The anticipation and involvement of listeners starts to create ‘ripples’ into the programmes and out to other audiences who are at different proximities to the TX.

Of course there are issues. Scaling is a bit messy.  The #goodradioclub exercise on Clever.com was mentioned by Stephen Fry at the top of the programme which meant the ‘club’ was larger than anticipated and it did limit the ability to engage with other people around the content.  But it’s a relatively minor issue.

Building programme experiences around existing social technologies, forcing the ‘overhead’ onto the users (in this case through the use of the hashtag) means you can innovate and be flexible in creating those experiences rather than trying to create bespoke, proprietary experiences.