Dear
We realize you specialize in CGI for film and advertising but you are making the rest of us, across a lot of different industries, look bad. Please do your best to reduce the amount of coolness you exude from your website so the rest of us can put food on the table.
Sincerely,
This site is amazing. We’re still wrapping our heads around how they pulled this off. Hats off to the dev team, whoever you are. When you click the link, choose “North America” and “USA” then skip the intro. Enjoy the delicious particle mayhem.
Last week I attended a conference at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela. The International Congress of Aesthetics (Simposio Internacional de Estetica – Arte, Ciencia es Technologia) brought together philosophers, writers, scientists and others together to discuss the role of written text, ideas and their ability to create aesthetic experiences through semiotic analysis.
Professor Edgar Yanez Zapata invited Aleksandra Giza, a professor of design from Northern Illinois University and myself to give several lectures to faculty and students of the School of Art and Design as well as present at the international congress.
Merida is a town nestled at the beginning of the Andean mountain range and runs along a ridge that is overseen by Pico Bolivar, over two miles above the city. For over 450 years the town evolved into a small city of about 20 square kilometers. The University of the Andes is the main function of the town and its impact is felt at all levels of life and activity.
There were four presentations given:
1) Introduction to Design Methods focusing on a contemporary perspective of design methods building on the original discussions in the early 1960’s and the publication of John Chris Jones seminal 1970 book “Design Methods.” Misunderstood and often maligned as a concept, design methods began as a way to question purely scientific post-war advancements and proposed a more integrated, multi-disciplinary perspective to integrate logic and intuition into a stronger approach to identify and solve problems. The presentation will focus on what design methods means in 2008, and how to structure and apply concepts to both problem solving and problem seeking.
2) Managing Ambiguities : The Role of Decision Modeling and Visualization focused on the development of diagrams and maps that described statistical and geographical relationships and the advancements of cognitive theories of how humans make decisions. The premise of the presentation focused on how the visualization of data through different content lenses can provide humans the needed cognitive and workload assist to provide options when faced with making decisions.
3) Urban Design Assistance Teams : A Different Approach
A Regional Urban Design Assistance Team (R-UDAT) is learning by doing, a type of accelerated practicum/charette to help towns and municipalities in distress. Teams interact with a variety of local stakeholders as well as to regional legislators in hopes of securing resources to implement UDAT recommendations. Randallstown, Maryland, a town of 30,000 residents in northeast Baltimore County was the backdrop where landscape architects, design architects and architects with experience in public policy, a traffic engineer, and a graphic designer mobilized to help Randallstown seek its potential.
4) Chicago : Innovation of the Past, Present and Future focused on the history of Chicago and innovations in architecture and engineering such as the modern development of the steel i-beam skyscraper and the load bearing cassion foundation which transformed a marshy prairie into one of the 25 largest cities in the world. The presentation highlighted the Village of Oak Park, 14 kilometers west of Chicago and home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s early architectural career as well as on key Chicago architectural icons that are not usually highlighted with a short discussion on the city’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The presentation for the congress was attended by about 150 people as there were concurrent presentation sessions. Most of the attendees were focused on written language that describes the world and can generate aesthetic experiences using Sassurian frameworks and models. My presentations focused on Percian semiotics which extended linguistic semiotics into any form of thinking (metacognition, visual and written).
The second presentation to the congress was part of a panel that Edgar Yanez Zapata put together that addressed the role of digital technologies in aesthetic thought. From my observations, most conference participants would read short papers to the audience. A few had electronic presentations that endeavored to share richer stories.
The last night of the conference there was a small dinner at a wonderful bar called Mogambo (Chama Hotel). We had the opportunity to sit next to three philosophers from the University of Venezuela at Caracas. As you may surmise we ended discussing issues of reality, meaning and how subjective or objective reality is (or is not). Over beer and wine (a necessary ingredient) we did not come to any firm conclusions, but it did raise some interesting ideas.
Over the weekend, Aleksandra and I were invited to an evening with faculty from the Art and Design department at the house of Argentinian architect Carlos Caminos and his wife Donna. Their home is nestled on the side of a hill designed by Simon, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate. The simple home is beautifully appointed with artwork, functional objects and the history of this interesting collaborative couple.
We talked late into the evening about design, culture and other topics as Aleksandra and I moved around the house. I would like to thank Leo Chacon, John Villarroel, Carmen Grisolia, Eduardo Araujo, and Julie Colasante for making time out of their hectic schedules to share cultural ideas. We also had a wonderful dinner with Nory Pereira Colls, Dean of the Art and Design school at ULA.
I would like to thank Edgar Yanez Zapata, Director of the School of Art and Design for suggesting the visit, coordinating all activities and making Alexandra and I feel at home in Venezuela.
It was only a matter of time before someone miniaturized eInk technology to become the digital paper all of us Sci-Fi fans (read nerds) have been dreaming of.
Plastic Logic has just announced the release of a new eReader technology that looks very exciting. Not to seem skeptical but we are hoping that their “environmentally friendly” marketing campaign also includes the retraining of the millions of workers currently employed by the paper industry. We love trees more than the next guy but bored, unemployed, angry loggers scare us to death.
I recently attended the Information Architecture Institute Idea 2008 Conference, October 7-8 in Chicago. The theme of the conference was ” . . . on designing complex information spaces of all kinds.”
What was intriguing about this particular conference was the diversity of people, both in professional and geographic terms. There were graphic designers, interaction designers, technical leads, managers, and oh yes . . . “information architects.” What was interesting about the attending information architects was that they came from so many backgrounds to become an information architect. There were actual classically trained architects that became IA’s, there were designers that were IA’s and so on.
When Richard Saul Wurman coined the term Information Architect in the late 1980’s, he was an architect that was designing travel books (Access Press) and came up with a term for designers that created information intensive artifacts. Since we cannot really agree on what the exact meaning of “information” and “architect”, I have come to the conclusion that merging the words into a concept would be difficult having hired several IA’s professionally. There is little agreement of what an IA is, and even what their outputs are. This was evident at the Idea conference, that there was no attempt in defining the term.
The first speaker was blogger David Armano who spoke on “Micro-Interactions in a 2.0 World.” A well-known and dynamic speaker, David took participants down a very rapid terrain of design, marketing and business through technological innovations. His central premise is that we are moving from passive consumers to active participants through existing social architecture technologies – not custom applications. Since all of our devices are internet enabled, the notion of a traditional browser experience is giving way to smaller more intimate digital apps that do one or two things. We as users cross-link these apps together. He used the term “life streams” to name this process of “engage, enable, and empower” our actions through a model of “usefulness, utility and ubiquity.” David also articulated new digital ecosystems such as the Nike Touch which uses “engagement” of “deposits” and “withdrawls” with several micro-functionalities bundled together. Social networks by their very nature amplify communications and he asked the audience what their “passion point” was.
Elliott Malkin, an artist from New York discussed “Information in Space.” His passionate and precise presentation went down a very indirect route that got me very excited. His initial metaphor was the hassidic concept of an eruv, or a physical demarkation between a secular world and a religious world using the same space. He referred to this psychographic space as having strong conceptual power for the intended group and for what for most people would not even notice. Unfortunately, I thought he was going to bring the metaphor back to digital technology and social architecture, but instead he discussed using digital technology to create a virtual eruv that could be monitored without rabbi’s going out to check if the eruv physical demarcations were intact. The implications of this metaphor in discussing how a shared space could have unique “functionalities” for different groups at the same time holds great promise.
Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path presented “Envisoning the Future of the Web.” They worked with the Mozilla Foundation in exploring the future of web browsers. Their concept is called Project Aurora. Now, when dealing with the future of anything, especially technology, it is difficult since we tend to use established conventions and behaviors and link it to a future that people can understand. Star Trek did it best by taking human behaviors and linking them to technologies that did not necessarily need to describe their inner workings. As viewers, especially hooked viewers, we understood the galactic federation model and the value system of the show to put the expressions and technologies in context.
With the future of a browser, Adaptive Path focused on augmented reality, or the overlay of digital information on the real world where there will be data abundance and the question will be how to we visualize, focus and manage all of it cognitively and socially. Processing power, storage capacity, bandwith and graphic capabilities of computers will impact how we interact with each other through the digital cloud. “Context awareness,” “natural interaction,” and “continuity” would allow for more natural collaborations. Each of us would have a semantic profile and with geolocation, would allow for very rich interactions between people where ever they are. Two main questions arose from the audience. What was the time horizon of Project Aurora? Jesse stated they had a 10 year window into the future (this would be the equivalent of 40 years in technological terms). He said they had to balance “compelling” with “plausible” in their vision. My view was that their vision was too contemporary and linked to current “plausible” scenarios. The second question was that their concept could be viewed that the browser was an operating system. Jesse made it clear that they did not want to address the operating system vs. browser question, but in my mind the two converge in their scenario.
Chris Crawford a former game designer for Atari presented an interesting perspective on “Linguistic User Interfaces.” His perspective on intelligent systems is that smart computers that could interact with humans using extensive language patterns is not realistic. This is due to the Sapir/Wharf hypothesis that inside the human mind language and reality exist together. Chris’ interesting take is that with games, a model for a computer to interact with humans is much more manageable since the worlds are much smaller. He further elaborated that software, verbs define the program and is core to the human/computer interface. With most current software, as the verb count increases, accessibility and expectability reduces. 100 verbs is the limit for most users. Chris is currently developing a linguistic user interface (LUI) for programs that can create stories. I found his perspective very compelling.
Alberto Canas, of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) presented a surprising presentation called “From Meaningful Learning to a Network of Knowledge Builders.” IHMC has created the popular language mapping program CMAP, which I have on my computer. What was informative about his presentation on CMAP were examples of its application (pun intended). Knowledge essentially are concepts that are linked together with prepositions to make a relationship (this was a wonderfully simple definition). Humans have created written language to describe concepts that cannot easily be illustrated. CMAP are concept maps linked by phrases to form propositions. I already knew this in principle. Alberto then showed the power of CMAP through an ongoing project with the Panamanian government giving school children CMAP to describe their lives. The power of CMAP is that users can link images and web page addresses to their maps and can also link concept maps to other concept maps. They are essentially mini-websites which are non-linear. I will not look at CMAP the same way and believe that its potential is not fully understood by a large cross section of users.
Jason Fried, founder of 37signals presented a lucid lecture called “Getting Real.” I had not heard Jason before, but am a heavy user of Basecamp and a real fan of its simplicity and how reliable it is. Jason is a real visionary and their development process flies in the face of every convention that most digital consultancies use. They do not “plan” anything, do no “specification” documents, and do not use “actor or personas.” They focus on building things and figure out how to do it over time. Keep things small, use sharpie markers as the finest resolution when sketching ideas, and only have a core set of functions (a simple core). Part of me was aghast, but I quickly saw the logic to their process. If you are designing for yourselves and then find users, the 37signals model is perfect. Unfortunately, if you collaborate with clients to define the problem and then facilitate understanding, then the 37signals model will not work. However (you knew there was going to be a “but”) I totally agree with his concept of “scratching your itch” and doing things with passion.
Aradhana Goel of Ideo gave one of the most thought provoking presentations called “Emerging Trends, Design Thinking, Service Innovation.” We have all heard of IDEO and it is one of the most influential innovative firms (along with Pentagram) merging design and engineering. Aradhana was trained as an architect and has only recently become involved with service design. Her perspective on human factors was clear and in alignment with my understanding. What was powerful was her ideas around linking human factors with trend factors. Human factors focus on digging into context, while trend factors find the context. She went on to compare and contrast these two areas and how service design is a logical next step in productizing intangible experiences.
Bill DeRouchey of Ziba Design gave a very direct and engaging discussion on “The Language of Interaction.” His deconstruction of everyday visual clues that we take for granted and their constant reinterpretation and reapplication to other situations was informative, common sense, but insightful.
Overall, there were several key themes that all speakers seemed to focus upon:
1) Browsers are giving way to other internet enabled experiences
2) Windows, Icon, Mouse, Pointer system is under stress
3) Transaction is more than money
4) Link several apps, not one killer app
5) Focus on experiences, not just interactions
Upon reflection, I found this conference very fulfilling and reinforced certain convictions, challenged others and provided a very positive mental workout for me (which is what good conferences should do). I would like to compliment IAI for the organization of the conference and the lunches with different groups of people was enjoyable. There were twelve speakers in two days, interspersed with group lunches around the Chicago loop.
The IAI did not go down an exististential vortex of what an information architect is or is not (though it came close at times), which would have been a divisive and somewhat unimaginative exercise. Instead they linked together several strains of interesting ideas and left the participants to decide what it meant to them.
All video presentations are available at Boxes and Arrows.
I was listening to NPR and they had another story about crowd sourcing and a gym shoe company in Seattle that was using these communities to develop surface design on standardized gym shoes. This got me thinking about the role of people in designing products and services directly vs. trained designers facilitating observations and discussions with users to gain insights in both articulated and unarticulated needs.
Crowd sourcing was recently discussed by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine in June 2006 with his article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing“. This concept is not necessarily new. I read a few years ago “Murder, Insanity, and the Writing of the Oxford English Dictionary” and there was a global call to contribute to the first modern dictionary.
However, the deep spread of the internet has allowed people to directly interact with companies to provide feedback and help design existing products and services. Focusing communities of interest around their knowledge and expertise and iterating variations with standardized components (like surface design on t-shirts and gym shoes) and having online voting or based on purchasing behaviors, have the “better” strains rise to the top is an intriguing trend:
Threadless, a Chicago-based T-shirt maker whose design process consists entirely of an online contest is a good example of this trend.
DaWanda’s Style Lab section, consumers can create products with their own individual style and have them made to order. (from www.springwise.com)
Crowd sourcing does need to be managed, and is not as ad-hoc as it may sound. Companies manage these communities for maximum impact of user-centered innovation. There are more sophisticated strains of focused crowd sourcing around more complex opportunities:
RedesignMe is a great Dutch website that is now engaging with product manufacturers to establish “RDM Challenges,” through which a new product concept is presented and the site’s 1,000 or so active members are asked to react to it. In exchange, they are rewarded with RDMs—RedesignMe’s online currency, which is convertible into products in the online RDM Shop such as mp3-players, game consoles and gift cards. (from www.springwise.com)
Elements, an eatery being planned to open next year in Washington. Crafted by a “beta community” of some 400 participants, Elements will serve raw and organic locally grown vegetarian food in an environmentally sustainable way. (from www.springwise.com)
What does this mean for designers? Precedent had positioned the designer as the arbiter of function and form. Rehabilitated or new products were completed by designers and brought to market. Crowd sourcing is in certain ways disintermediating the role of designer by going direct to customers to have them create new or revised design strains.
An interesting company that is taking crowd sourcing to another level is Kluster. They have created Private Klusters designed to enable collaborative brainstorming on myriad different questions by allowing invited participants to share their opinions on a relevant, customized set of criteria. (from www.springwise.com)
Spot.us a nonprofit that lets any individual or journalist post an idea for an untold story in the local community. Professional journalists then write pitches based on those ideas and place them in the site’s wiki, where members of the community can view them and vote—via micro-pledge—on the stories that are most important to them. (from www.springwise.com).
Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using the wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas.
Designers have embraced ethnographic and observational research to create new objective skills to experience what is and look for pattern and opportunity. With crowd sourcing, the role of the designer will need to be delineated as a type of reasoned broker to sort and prioritize a community’s ideas.
Are the aggregated power of crowds a wise resource for companies? For simple solutions, creating different variations can provide needed diversity for products where customers want many alternatives. For more complex problems and ideas where there are many variables, I believe that this model can easily fall apart. There are too many levels and ways to interpret and approach something to bring desired value.
I have not really heard the design community address the effect and challenges of crowd sourcing. When Larry Keeley edited a Society of Typographic journal named “People, Not Markets”, he emphasized that designers need to address the real needs of people not the marketing needs of companies.
Twenty years later, we are moving in the right direction. The question is in what direction?
Nate Burgos sent me a link about a new institute that is being created between Stanford University and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute to investigate design thinking. They defined it as a methodology that “melds an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative improvement to produce products, services or experiences.” Their theme is – innovation – which is no surprise.
This got me to think about how this term has fluctuated since I heard it twenty years ago. My approach to the topic was around several attributes:
Wicked Problems
A Focus on Customers/Users
Finding Alternatives
Ideation and Prototyping
Qualitative Performance
The question is how is design thinking different from other types of thinking? If we take a Western European approach to thought, then critical thinking models revolve around observation, asking questions, research, making new connections and creating a model that integrates new insights.
If you agree with this foundation, then there would be little differentiation between design thinking and other forms of thinking. Can non-designers do design thinking? What is the role of the designer if design thinking is practiced by a wide variety of disciplines and professions?
What has remained constant about design thinking is linked to an improved future. Victor Margolin, in his book The Politics of the Artificial stated “Design is continuously inventing its subject matter, so it is not limited by outworn categories of products. The world expects new things from designers, that is the nature of design”
I used to have conversations with fairly progressive designers twenty years ago about design thinking and that design was as much about frameworks, strategies and approaches as about media artifacts. At the time, they were not ready to embrace this idea and only wanted cursory approaches that could add more legitimacy to the making. Contemporary designers have finally embraced in enough of a critical mass that design is as much about thinking as making.
A few years ago John Thackara proposed to the London Design Council the Project Red Initiative which would have the UK design community address specific social, political and economic issues facing the United Kingdom. The backlash from the design community that the initiative was not in the bounds of design.
The good news is that design thinking, design methods, and design management are all coalescing to create new opportunities for designers to collaborate effectively with other professions around wider areas of interest that are not discipline specific.
Designers have an ability to interact with the the unknown, and the shifting relationships between the meaning of things. This new type of designer is linking design (as a plan) to outcomes that are not necessarily objects. It is here that methodology can help and this is where design thinking comes into play.
Maybe there is hope after all.
At DUX this year one of the first presenters started their presentation by stating, “Let’s not call it innovation anymore, let’s call it relevance which is really what it is.” The ‘it’ he was referring to were the aggregate insights found during ethnographic analysis.
Ethnography is all the buzz these days because it has been repeatedly shown to provide deep insights into consumer behavior and it’s cheap. Unfortunately, what he was really saying was that observation provides insight and from that relevance was the desired result.
Relevance, simply stated, is finding the way a system most naturally fits into the target consumer’s current lifestyle. The iPod is relevant because it is extremely easy to use (both to get media on it and to play that media), beautiful, and a status symbol to some extent. Relevance is very important when dealing with consumer acceptance.
Unfortunately, relevance only deals with current patterns. Innovation occurs when leaps of faith and creativity are socialized and patterns change or new patterns are created. Innovation changes the world. Let’s agree to strive for changes for the better. Relevance is nice, but innovation is excellence.
Pilots are interesting creatures that offer us a lot of opportunities to learn if we observe them in their natural habitat. I recently spent several weeks locked in a bunker covered in camouflage observing their ritual behaviors. Ok… not really, but I have been working closely with Naval pilot Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and during a recent user testing exercise I was faced with an interesting discovery. Boy I should have seen this one coming.
Pilots don’t like innovation.
When we started our charter to evolve the pilot cockpit interface I had heard the infamous stories of the unanimous rejection of life-saving technologies based simply on the fact that they didn’t look cool. I can’t say why I didn’t pay more attention to these stories except that I thought they were talking about electrodes on the skull and giant diaper shaped gravity suits. Surely a pilot would eagerly accept a new and better way to read the information his cockpit was providing him. I am here to say this is not the case. Pilots are the quintessential expert user. They spend no less than 2000 hours of training to become experts of an information system that is a metaphorical nightmare. It follows logically that they are a little apprehensive to reinvest their time in a new, albeit seemingly simpler, set of informational metaphors. During our first concept reviews for our Ev1 prototype we presented the “Combined Metaphor,” an interface that took all of the various information displays in the pilot cockpit and combined them into a single congruent presentation. Simply put, we removed gauges that tipped opposite directions to illustrate the same event and placed them all into a single top-down display of the craft in its environment surrounded with performance statistics and trend indications. What could be better, right? I knew I was in trouble when a pilot asked me if I had my instrument rating (I don’t yet, but am more than half-way finished with the training). He went on to tell me that the gauges we combined were showing completely different things and that they were fine the way they were.
I was dumbfounded… How could he not see that this system was better by far than the hundred year old aggregate in production today?
It was simple really, he couldn’t see it because he had spent 2000 hours learning to love the old interface. He, like every other expert user we encounter, has made an investment in learning the vocabulary of the system we hope to evolve. The difficulty by which his learning came is directly proportional to the resistance he has for its change. Believe me, there aren’t a lot of users that have a larger investment than pilots.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. I had to figure out what our new interface could offer pilots that they truly desired. A little ethnography and a whole lot of interviewing later I had my answer.
Pilots Love Workload Reduction.
Don’t get me wrong, pilots aren’t lazy but sometimes they have to do a lot of work to get something done. A perfect example is the process of entering waypoint coordinates into a flight plan. You’d be surprised how many attributes are used to describe a waypoint in a flight plan and entering or editing them can be tedious even when you’re not being fired upon. When we showed that our combined metaphor could facilitate single touch flight plan correction we got their attention. Even more exciting to them were our cognitive assistance features. When we discovered that pilots were often tasked with being at a specific location at an extremely precise period of time and were tasked with repeatedly calculating their performance to meet that objective, it was easy for us to design a system that did the same calculations dynamically. User testing recently proved that pilots showed a significant improvement in acquisition of Time On Target (ToT) when using our Ev2 interface. We had pilots laughing with joy as they executed their scenarios because it was so easy to monitor their performance. Best of all, once they saw how the new Ev2 interface could make their life easier they very quickly got over the metaphor shifts. Several of our recent flight testers would pout (in a tough and cool way of course) when they had to execute a mission on the “old” interface.
Mission successful, users engaged.
So what can we learn from this? You don’t need to be a pilot to make an investment in an interactive system and see that investment as valuable. As we architect we must always consider the costs of adoption and make sure we involve the user in helping us find their solutions. In doing so we’ll make some friends and maybe even fans.
International AEP firm CUH2A partnered with us to create a web site that represents the innovation and passionate thinking of their firm. Collaboratively we developed a site that I like to describe as a beautiful harmonic tag cloud. While I’m hoping this site will gain recognition in the design community for its unique interaction and elegant presentation, I’m writing this post to talk about some of the things that are happening behind the scenes that make this site truly cutting edge. Great technology is invisible and this site has a lot of invisibles to talk about.
I want to give kudos where they are due; Lance Rutter, Glenn Blicharz, Timothy Mills, Mike Bingaman, Alex Lemanski, Nate Striedinger, and Jeff Vandenbussche all did a fantastic job with the innovative development of this application. Nice work guys!
Welcome to the spill. The overflow buffer for the passion we have for interaction.
Spill is the blog from Tanagram, Inc. a user experience (UX) innovation and design firm based in Chicago, Illinois.
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