technogoggles

Wallpaper

Du Pont from the 60s still with its original sticky backing.  2 rolls came yesterday courtesy of the excellent Superbuzzy. Odd to think that this stuff was stored for 40 yrs.  Kennedy was being shot the last time this stuff was being used. 

Instruction Manual

Came across this  Thames and Hudson sketchbook  or doodlebook in Foyles.  I like the tacit  understanding that it's hard to know where to start  to sketch, that a blank canvas requires you  think not unlike the paradox of choice when faced with near unlimited possibilities to consume.  But sometimes you just want to be given a brief, a task, a defined thing to do [crossword puzzle etc.], a curated set of things from which to choose or work from. From there creative things can happen. Anyway, a simple way to redefine a practice and a product by simply changing the proposition from a noun to a verb, from a description to an instruction.

Not-so-random-flickr: Explicit IA

3 modes, originally uploaded by JamesB.

known item; browse/exploratory and don't know what you need to know? 
The thing is it's all well and good them making these things explicit but shouldn't the bookmarks actually be a driver for enquiring, reading or discovering rather than just stating that's what libraries are there to cater for?  Still, I think they're pretty.  Would make a good IA geeks T-shirt.

On the subject of IA DonnaM has a good presentation [with audio] around Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things which is so powerful [but weighty and pretty dry] on 'categories' and the way they define our existence.  Slide 7 makes me think that the TV programme Family Fortunes is probably Lakoff's least likely cultural signifier for this sort of categorisation but probably the most obvious.

Designing data...

"... with a view to informing decisions and taking action." Maps are perhaps the oldest and best forms of visualising data.

Met up with Danny Dorling last night, Professor Danny Dorling to you, master of maps which actually kind of underplays the incredibly important role he has in defining social policy, especially in the UK.  Anyway, aside from some mutually supportive moan on why you just can't win trying to be a new dad and all this modern man business is a cynical attempt by feminists to allow us to believe we're empowering ourselves when [tailed off into drunken half-baked rubbish...] we discussed World Mapper, one of the most fantastic map resources on the web and a product of Danny and his team which they're due to complete very soon.

Map of those living on less than $1 a day

And each of the maps has fantastic  notation:

The first Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who live on the equivalent of US$1 a day, or less. In 2002, an estimated 17% of the world population lived on this amount. They lived on less than or equal to what, to be precise, US$1.08 would have bought in the United States in 1993.

In over twenty territories more than a third of the population lives on less than US$1 a day. All but two of these territories are in Africa.

The largest population living on US$1 a day is in Southern Asia, most of whom live in India.

It's a fairly exhaustive attempt to map the key data that defines 'us' in the world and in the process get you to think!  [Maps are such a great stimulus for visually representing data.  It's probably no surprise that so many information architects / designers  are map freaks]. 

The main issue for World Mapper and the people behind it, is how to make better use of a resource which is probably, according to Danny, the last of it's kind because, going forward there will be such an abundance and a variety of data that mapping it will be so much more difficult.

So how to make better use of it?  If you have an idea either Danny or myself would love to know.  There's no API, though to be honest it's difficult to know what this could allow anyway, the real value is in the imagery but there is a partial RSS feed.  The data itself is available to use in xls format [and someone could do a job in making this machine readable...] as are the images, released on an attribution, non-commercial share-alike license though the website is far more ambiguous about this [it isn't creative commons because that could inhibit some major media exercise with partners etc].  Thoughts on how this could be more useful...

Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before

Ebay: Designing for convenience

John Sanbourne has just talked through ebay express [which was news to me] at the [otherwise pretty disappointing] BTWEEN forum in Bradford.    His slides should be on the BTWEEN site later.  The development of express has been prompted by the market for 'convenience' purchases, instant gratification, rather than an auction, this is "buy now" as a sub-brand to capture those searching for products via search engines and make the process of purchasing a simple one.  It's interesting to see how they strip away the 'experience' that has made ebay such a phenomenon, the social, 'frictional'  experience  and replace it with standard, homogenous experience in the form of style guides and shopping basket processes; go from the car boot sale of bric-a-brac to the retail store, from emotional, experiential purchases to more functional purchases - the sorts of things that you can search around and buy instantly [and of course price comparison sites are massive drivers for this development].  However, to do this is a massive job.  Think of professional photographs for the things you may want to buy.  Think of 11000 photographs of things you might want to buy at a category level!   Express then serves to reinforce ebay as a key sales platform  putting it up against direct sellers to gain some of the affiliate marketing so key to web revenue models.

Express comes to the UK later in the summer.

Gaming the event

The 'life beyond the broadcast' for BBC Weekenders seems quite healthy.

Moylesy taken from kc_mcfen's on flickr.  See the pool which with 222 members and over 2300 pics as of today is up there with the Japanology pool!  Woohoo.  See also the weekender tags and a rather wonderful set of from ruu as well as Radio 1's own polished yet somehow dull set [perhaps because it feels more 'produced' amidst the more edgy images from the audience].

The distributed media malarky allows us to experience and engage with the event in so many different ways as they 'folded' back into the event and then existed as a life beyond it.   Of course that brings some teething problems, not least is distributing resources to the edges where the communities have distributed to! Following conversations to manage any potential problems is one of the key issues with an 'open' and inclusive media strategy like the one the BBC employed here.    This open approach was exposed somewhat by the use of flickr discussion groups to get answers when the postie scam hit .  It would seem that flickr is the pre-eminent platform for  extending mainstream social experiences online.  Perhaps Flickr's move from 'beta' to 'gamma'  [lol] is recognition of this fact, that and their re-design.

It's not just flickr of course.  The big news from the Weekend was simulcasting the event in Second Life.  Despite the PR, actually perhaps because of the PR from the Second Life experiment I'm left a little disappointed by the fact that it seemed so, well, er, dull.  Am I allowed to say that?  The seeming adulation afforded MMOGs is almost cult like and as an outsider looking in it can't match the hype.  Innovative, sure in the sense that it utilises a different platform to showcase the event.  But where's the playout from the 'event' in game? The 'ripples' don't seem to have a different 'life'.  And where's the social innovation in game?  Perhaps I've missed something.  Oh. No. There it is, there's the Daleks! :-)

BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend VirtualFestival uploaded by Louise from the makers of the BBC Second Life event RiversRunRed.   

Perhaps I'm expecting too much but it would have been great if there had been some offline playout of the game at the event [there was a screen apparently].  This could have simply been in the form of  a conversation to develop between those at the offline event and those in game, so that the 'tension' between the experiences were exposed introducing a reason for dialogue.  It wouldn't be easy but a rather crude model like the subservient chicken shows how calls to action from both communities could be initiated.  The big screen relaying the Second Life event exposes messages to the people watching at the offline event "dance like a dalek" etc etc.  There's a level of sophistication in the creation of the experience that I clearly haven't had time to work through :-) but you get my gist.  Shortcodes to txt back into the game and send images of "dancing like a dalek" could all work.  It's just one very simplified thought.  More interesting ideas start to come through in gaming an event itself... cues set in game that people have to solve in the physical environment of the event to determine which acts perform, when, what etc... or making a mainstream viscereal experience akin to that shown by Blast Theory  in Uncle Roy All Around You early last year.  Experience design on that level gets really really exciting. 

Designing for everyday use

Now we're in an age of ubiquitous connectivity [or near ubiquitous] and PCs are more about being intermediaries in a social network, why are we still stuck with machines that take little account of the context of use? 

Forget the plethora of web 2.0 services that spring up by the hour to take care of every conceivable need.  What about the brick itself!  How many times have you needed to check an email / IM / blog whatever whilst getting your breakfast, feeding the kids, or doing the gardening that won't result in ruination? How inappropriate is a delicate laptop for these situations?  I mean we can create a $100 laptop for people in developing countries to resource and a hole manner of supplmentary digital lifestyle add-ons without a real purpose but we can't think of more radical and yet mundane use cases closer to home.



I'd forsake chip speed, looks, screen size for a tough machine that could withstand knocks, crumbs, jam, soil.. everyday life shit. I'm not one of those early adpoters that fetishes over design. No, I don't fetishise my machine so much as the desire to communicate... so come on Mr. Ives et al let's have some thought to the 'commonal' everyday situation as use case not a ultra modern geekified desk.
 
addendum - just seen Intel's ruggedized PC.  Why India?  Why not Surbiton or Swansea?  The rugged need isn't exclusive to 'poor people in developing countries'.

Foot Work

"upmarket" slipper mop, originally uploaded by superlocal.

Superlocal has a good eye for the material culture of South East Asia.  I find his work together with Jan's quite compulsive.

Anyway, Korean floor slippers that serve to clean those immaculate floors they have there. 

What other everyday mundane objects are we overlooking to design for some 'extra' utility?

The loo

I've been prompted to look at the common loo lately, mainly because of some client work.  But loo's have been front of mind recently because I've also been looking at public, private and intimate spaces for some other research and discovered that many people value the bathroom / toilet space as somehow sacred - it allows them time and to territorialize space.  Many working people especially parents find that the loo is the only space in the house where they can have some sanctuary from other duties.  Public loos in privatised spaces - e.g. airports, train stations, universities, corporate offices etc. are increasingly used as media spaces - "toilet media" - undermining that sense of sanctuary.  The use here seems far more functional. 

But the public loo has it's own history - as a space of subversion, be this in the form of sexual activity or inscription / graffiti.  Perhaps due to this public loos are increasingly subject to measures of control and territorialization.  Payment being a key mechanism - filter out the loiterers.  But new 'sanitory' tools and products are deployed to control 'us': how much loo paper we use; how much time we spend in the loo - design of flows of movement; how much water we use etc.  This is often so that facilities managers can measure and predict cost per use and manage their resources effectively [which is fair enough as one estimate says we use around 83 million rolls a day around the world].  Promoting these developments often as improvements in 'hygiene' is just a convenient way of packaging  control. Electronic sensors on hand driers, taps and even all-in-one sanitory solutions - those hole in the wall things which give you soap, then water, then hot air whilst you desperately try to gauge where each is coming from next - are popular in Yorkshire. The message is: we're not trusted to wash our own hands, we need to be controlled and managed along with the resources we use. The cult of hygiene allows us to perceive this as a benefit and sell the odd product - 'sanitary seat covers' anyone?

A new product we're working with attempts to control the amount of paper people use and manage hygiene factors.  As part of the research I've just done around toilet paper I find a proliferation of interest around whether people scrunch or fold their paper [I fold].  But this isn't just a fun question for student forums - it's a fundamental design issue for new products.  Dispensers of toilet paper have also had to deal with the problem of replenishing supplies before the paper runs out.  I found an article which actually analysed the problem of placing two rolls side by side and found that they both ran out at the same time.  This due to the fact that people generally take from the roll that has most paper on [and confirmed by our own dispenser at work which has two rolls and always runs out simultaneously].

I find it interesting that the recent use of 'open loos' in central London - due to the problem of people urinating in public late at night - ha s proved to be quite successful.  But this is the only innovation in terms of the 'experience' of using a loo that I have seen in recent years.  How could the experience of taking a shit  / urinating be improved?  Is it too taboo to take seriously?

 

Addendum:

I'd forgotten about the "fly in the urinal design" in Schipol airport, Amsterdam, by influenza, as commented on by Kim Vicente as an  example of 'intuitive design'

"If you go to the men's washrooms at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam
you may notice there's a fly in the urinals. So what do you think most men do? That's right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don't even think about it, and they don't need to read a user's manual; it's just an instinctive reaction. The interesting feature of these urinals is that they're deliberately designed to take advantage of this inherent human male tendency."

Also, Bathroom Mania's 'kiss' urinal is one fun approach to innovation. 

The social life of information

the social life of information, originally uploaded by JamesB.

I'm digging digg at the moment particularly seeing news 'move' in real time.  It's quite compelling - not particularly radical, in the sense that there are so many ways to see information now - search by tags; search by popular tag or post etc etc that the very life of information seems laid bare, ready for forensic examination.  In this information 'ecosystem' to what extent is the message actually the metadata, the context that we're reading?