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October 23 UX Week 2007 his was the first Adaptive Path conference I have attended and is
the only big conference I have attended this year. I chose this over
conferences like SXSW hoping to get more relevant insights into
research techniques and I wasn't disappointed. Coincidentally, the
Agile 2007 conference was also in DC that week which is interesting
considering how much crossover is happening. Ben Carey has posted some
thoughts ( http://www.thesherpaproject.com/ 
) on that conference. An interesting tidbit about the attendees says a
lot about the profession, of the 200 or so people there were roughly
180 different job titles. I am happy to report that there were no
discussions on the definitions.
General themes? Books mentioned throughout the conference: Conference Site: Pictures from conference: The programming was dual track and I did miss some great presentations and workshops. Not including everything I attended...
Day 11) Deborah Adler - Clear RX "From Master Thesis to Medicaine Cabinet" 2) Kevin Brooks from the research department at Motorola Labs - "Stone Soup: Stories and Storytelling for Collaboration" did a great presentation on power of telling stories. He started with the retelling of a 300 year old story about making stone soup which demonstrates inadvertent collaboration. He spoke about the roles story play in gaining understanding, empowering individuals, and creating a means to bond. But one my biggest takeaways was his views on the purpose of listening through some exercises. I oftern find that I am a poor listener, and that in discussions many people are simply looking for openings, ways to trump the speaker, and as a inequality meter... just where do I stand intellectually in regards to the other participants. Through the exercises, we looked at story patterns and techniques, such as telling the ending first 3) Since I didn't sign up for the stickies session ahead of time I ended up at the Collaborating with Customers session by Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop of eBay. My biggest take away from this was the Hallmark styled video narratives they put together as a communication tool. Reminded me of some of branding efforts Hallmark did while I was there a few years ago. They were Hollywood quality stories of their customers, such as a group of potters in New Mexico. 4) Jesse McMullin from nForm did a very informative presentation on The Designer as Facilitator. 6) Indi Young presentation on capturing the user experience with Mental Models. Whenever I work on diagramming a mental model of an experience, I find that I always do them differently. Indi showed a format and process for using these models to identify areas of an experience to focus on, what to ignore, and ways to gain insight by applying gap analysis. She also went into prioritization and Six Sigma techniques to apply to the model. Using a 4 quadrant scatter diagram (importance - feasibility), she used the standard deviation technique from Six Sigma She has a book based on this presentation coming out this Fall. diagram diagram Day 2 From a hardware perspective, the XO laptop has physical extensibility with external analog devices. Kids can hook up external sensors directly to the computer. Was also interesting to hear that it is often used in communities that have power at the school, but not in homes. So the monitor works as a light as well. It also functions as a rich-media player, web browser, and e-book. A global network of developers are donating time to develop activites and applications that support the learning experience. Project site: Screenshots: Pictures: Related Podcast (Michael Evans/ Red Hat): - Gradual iteration appears as stasis from a consumer standpoint - Toolkit o Restate value o Tell the story o Atomize the features o Tidy the seams With value propositions you must know your audience - benefits, competition, differentiate. Spoke to the elevator pitch as pitched by Geoffrey Moore. Spoke to t focus on iterating the roadmap and not the product. 2) One of the best presentations of the conference form Yahoo's Bill Scott and Karon Weber. Bill is known for his work on Yahoo's UI pattern's library. The presentation was about two large initiatives, Yahoo Teachers and Yahoo Gobbler that came out of "Hack Day" projects. Essentially, it is company sanctioned days for people to work on passion projects and to collaborate across across teams with people you normally wouldn't have a chance to work with. Periodically, over a 24 hour time box, designers take existing yahoo api's, products, and patterns and create something new for users. At the end of the 24 hour's you are timeboxed to a 90 second pitch. It is quick, it is Agile, and it is cheap. Yahoo Teachers is essentially a knowledge collection. Currently in Aplha, it has turned into a 2 year project. It is a system to gather, organize, and share information between teachers. The contextual framework involves distribution of materials and topics within a geographic social network of other teacher/users. The key functionality is around drag-and-drop harvesting of online data instead of explicit meta-data tagging interactions. It leverages the Gobbler, a hack of a bookmarklet tool that lets users copy and paste online information into pre-meta populated containers. It pulls all the related authorship information from the source automatically. The users can annotate the source information as well. It is then all pulled into a rich text editor from which lessons can be published and shared with peer groups. From an IxD perspective, they did everything right, much better than a similar project I worked on 10 years ago. They did deep research on the education system which led to initial prototyping with teacher involvement. Marketing was brought along on ethnographic studies, a common theme of cross silo collaboration at the conference this year.Yahoo gathered a group of teachers for a 7 day workshop from which prioritization was given to features. Had them use stickies exclusively. I believe there were lower fidelity, working prototypes, and they would incorporate changes overnight and have a new build available the next day. This core set of teachers became evangilists for the project and helped build the initial community around the project. 3) Again, double-scheduling made for a tough choice. Dan Brown gave a presentation on UX documentation, probably had a lot to do with his book "Communicating Design" which I haven't read through yet. Went instead to APs David Verba's presentation on "Sketching in Code". He started with a quote which is probably is Agile, "Engineer never more than a stones throw from the physical product". He basically spoke to projects where he prototyped in Rails and then handed the code over to developers in India who formatted it in the appropriate language of the final product (Java). Therefore, user tests were done with functional prototypes. His argument is that this exposes issues earlier in the process and allows for easier by in from stakeholders. It also fosters collaboration among developers,designers, stakeholders, and users. It also helps everyone clearly understand what is and what isn't possible. This is a way to eliminate front-end development documentation which is sometimes difficult to see clearly and is often low-fidelity from an interaction standpoint. I really valued a small diagram he presented, which had lines and nodes of decision points that lead to course corrections, and experiments that branched into dead-ends. This is a great technique I am going to use in the future with mind maps. It would be especially useful in charting and understanding decisions in a large scale agile project where decisions are made "face-to-face" and on-the-fly within distributed teams. David then walked everyone through features of TiddyWiki, MVC frameworks, Open Laszlo, and Axure-iRise. No talk about Serena Composer. diagram 4) More from the Agile UCD camp, Leisa Reichalt gave a new iteration
of her "Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good" presentation... the one
all done with sticky notes. She started things off with debunking the
idea that WW Royce created the waterfall process. From there: Agile UCD Interesting, her conclusions and ideas on meshing these 2 methods is almost exactly the same as my ideal process. She put forth the idea of a "Cycle 0" which needs upfront research, analysis and high level design, and a design strategy. These are all non-existent concepts in Agile. The results of which are ,product goals, a shared vision, contextual research and modeling, and personas/scenarios. She then wraps the idea of "cycles" around stories (something we were calling internal releases). Cycles are where you determine how much design and testing you do on a higher level and execute to inform the next set of sprints. A "mid-project cycle" would have designers testing the previous group of sprints (cycle -1), doing detailed designs for the next cycle, and starting research and design on upcoming cycles (cycle +1). Feedback on design is continous and continually informing the design and development. diagram 4) Doug Lemoine, dorector of design communications at cooper, gave
an overview of Cooper , their process, and how documentation fits into
their projects around a case study on a financial services web
application. He spoke really fast and crammed a ton of content into the
presentation. Much of their documentation looks like things I do with
web apps, and a lot like Studio Archetype layouts. They have around 25
people and typical project engagement, design, is 3 to 6 months. The
process follows: And then onto the beautiful design decks that I really miss doing. Their premise for extensive design documentation is it helps visualize, creates a tangible artifact for discussion, encourages people to commit, and is something engineers can work from. Although a have a rough understanding of Cooper's process, it was interesting to hear a thorough description around the role of an interaction designer and design communicator on their teams. diagram Interaction Designers is to sketch out solution ideations and produce the final "pictures". He associates IxD to Paul from the Beatles Design Communicators synthesis and lead the testing, creates communication artifacts, and challenges designers. They associate themselves with Socrates. Essentially, the documentation they do is "the story" they create to present research findings framed with personas and ideal usage scenarios. They use the idea of "working back from the ideal". Research exposes: Problem - Solution approach - How does the design help persona get their work done? - What is the Scenario - How does behavior work? Screen layout diagrams - What is the essence of the solutions? Why is it good? What are some bad alternatives? Explanation of rationale. - Are the represtnations global? - How do we make this easy to find? TOC, cross-reference - What are the dimensions of the interface elements? Styleguide 5) Emili Ulrich from Steelcase gave a presentation on Elito, my biggest take away from the conference. Developed at the Illinois Institute of Design, it is a very simple research framework with very powerful results. It gets sales and marketing into ethnographic research, helping leverage points of view that normally are not heard and providing a great collaborative framework for discussion. It isn't really revolutionary, just a straight forward, practical way to bridge the synthesis gap between research and design, as well as, creating shared ownership across an organization. In this way, it very similar and fits nicely with Agile methodology. An important Steelcase implementation, and one I have seen done effectively at other organizations, is the separation of a research team as it's own group. This makes it easier for them to work cross-divisionally without perceived biases. From Q+A: Short for "ellie's tool" the quick "features" are: - Values based argument - Separates seeing from thinking - Share insight throughout the organization - Safe space for shared brainstorming - Shared ownership across teams - Captures honest opinion in a "loose fit" structure - Lateral thinking across organization silos that becomes a design process - Bridges arguments between business and design - It is not documentation for the sake of documentation - Opinions are part of the framework The researchers take different stakeholders on ethnographic studies (aka "site visits"). Emili typically uses voice recorders as a documentation method over others, probably because she is fully dedicated to research and can spend quality time parsing information. But of course, video, still images, notes etc are all part of the process. Whatever is appropriate. Following the onsite research, a collaborative session is set up with a leader, typically the researcher. This session is the point in which information is captured. If, for example, designers were on the visit, then they would sit around a table with the session leader and a person projecting and recording information. Images or video is projected on one screen, giving context from the visit, and another screen has a projection of the Elito documentation that is being entered from these discussions. Buy in happens this early in the process because everyone wants to contribute, and is contributing. This technique and environment also mediates any arguments that take place. That's great, how many meetings have you been in where an arguments evolve around abstract thoughts with nothing to bring it back within a context? It let's people see the bigger picture, focuses discussions, and let's everyone have their say diagram So what is it? It is a simple grid structure with these columns: All of these longitudinally creates a metaphor, hooks for a story. (Yes, this ties in directly to Agile stories). And across the research, patterns can emerge that result in themes. She showed a project that went from research to design solution to market using this technique. I believe they were in an architecture or interior design firm. They noticed that there were stacks of resource books lying on the floors around desks. These were items from their large resource library which was tucked away in typical office cabinets. A theme of "access to innovation" began to emerge as an opportunity, and lead to a design solution that was previously unidentified. Another example, and a good example of how this can be leveraged into branding and marketing is Steelcase's Nurture product (http://nurture.steelcase.com/ Elito Day 31) Presentation from Best Buys Kathleen Hoski and research partner Paris Patton from Sachs Insight. They used a combination of usability interviews/focus groups - contextual inquiry - longitudinal ethnography. The one very interesting technique which was very effective was the cinematic styles they used when doing on-site visits. It showed what a profound impact a professional videographer can have in communicating personal stories and testimony. It was a style for styles sake. Most video capture in these environments is still, on a tripod, in a corner. After more than a few minutes, you get bored to death, often missing key insights. You feel like you are viewing a research study, and the people are essentially impersonal lab rats. The up close and personal nature really forced us to pay attention to what was being communicated. So, longitudinal ethnography isn't anything new, but Best Buy is using it to gain insights around purchasing decisions. I believe they were showing purchase decision timelines around large display HDTV, they found it typically spans several years. Basically, the customers capture video and journal entries of their experiences. We watched an entertaining video from a customer turned director who had some fun editing and splicing his videos. diagram 2) Presentation by Marty Gage, head of the Design Research
Practice Group at Lextant (and formerly with Fitch!) lectured on
Participatory Design. He used a case study around Nationwide's campaign
to get more employees involved in community volunteer programs. He had
a slide which showed how research translated into a UX framework which
I liked With Nationwide, they let the "users" define the perfect process
allowing them to see the big picture. Yes, email and news items on the
intranet are not the best way to drive interest, there are all kinds of
communication methods that can be used, you don't have to use the
computer alone. The framework he uses is: Day 43) Separate presentations on IxD by Dan Saffer (AP and CMU) and Bill DeRouchey (Ziba). Both presentations were extremely slick. I enjoyed Dan's discussion on fighting WWAD syndrome. Getting inspiration from Architectural space by comparing the floorplans of and modern suburban houses. Personal space takes priority and our cars (giant garages) become most meaningful. Another highlight was his attention to Mechanical Objects (invisible states, infrequent use, and direct manipulation) and how this can translate into digital interfaces. Reminds me, I haven't hit up his photostream in awhile. From Bill, the ideas of Priority, Clarity, and Purpose in tangible interfaces. I especially enjoyed his rant against over complicated interface language by using terms like "contextual menus" and replace it with a verb. He used the example of TV remote, breaking regions into "select", "adjust", "control" and "pinpoint". He has a background in IA and writing, and this definitely gave me some insight as to how some of my skills can translate into the physical realm. August 09 Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI)The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) provides Design Guidance and controls which allow a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created. This site is aimed at user interface designers, application developers and patient safety experts who want to find out more about the benefits of a standardized approach to user interface design. http://www.mscui.com/Default.aspx With the Microsoft Health CUI you can:
August 01 Contextual Design - Defining Customer-Centered SystemsISBN: 1-55860-411-1 Chapter 20: Putting it into practice The first job of a design team is to design the process that will enable them to collaborate in gathering design, designing a system, and producing the result. The principles on which the process is based fall into 3 categories: 1) Using customer data 2) Running the team 3) Driving design thinking Without a clear understanding of your customers, based on real events rather than anecdotes, and captured explicitly, you have no criteria for deciding on one action or design decision over another. Always ask what data is needed to justify one decision over another and what is the best way to gather that data. Use a process that reveals unarticulated aspects fo work. Contextual Inquiry reveals the hidden aspects of a work practice. Paper Prototyping reveals how a particular design plays out in a real world context. Base interactions on the customers own work situation, where they are the expert, and communicate in their language. In dealing with complexity, use a concrete representation of the customer data to reveal how the work hangs together as a whole. Use representations that reveal both the common structure that applies across customers and also the unique variations that your design will have to account for. This should effectively highlight critical pieces for systems design. Gathering customer data is only worthwhile because it helps make design decisions. It will tell you what matters to make, how to structure your system, and how you are doing on your as you design and build it. External checks alleviates arguments within the team. In collaborative design, meeting facilitation is critical. The Agile techniques for meeting are well suited for this. Drawings representing the customer work practice and the system work model help manage the design conversation and keep the design coherent, but they also manage communication within and beyond the team (i have found this to be the most critical part of an effective design process). Contextual Design uses sets of diagramming techniques (chapter?): 1) What the workplace of the customer is (User Environment model) 2) What the new work practice is 3) How a user will perform a specific task in the new system 4) What the system work model is A design process naturally alternates between working out a piece of design sequentially, then stepping back and considering the whole design as a structure. This alternating between doing and reflecting keeps the design moving forward while remaining coherent (brilliant, much better explanation than using the term "global" design) The system you design is a whole and needs to fit together as a whole, or it won't provide coherent support for your customers work. It shows the whole design in a form that the team can comprehend and manipulate. Design Communication across teams is where things break down. Communicate the consolidated models and the vision in addition to the User Environment Design (here i think the writers are still dwelling in formality... these models need to be more than flat representations, they are taking a baby step with getting people out fo the habit of writing linear text) Build a living online specification with hot links between data, storyboard, user environment, and functional specs. (lo-fi wiki hacks with swf shells that load files exported from InDesign or Illustrator-works great!) On figuring out what to do in a redesign: Do not use Flow or cultural models. Rather than do formal consolidations, use the sequences to generate scenarios of use. These scenarios make a composite of the customers you interviewed to tell the story of a typical use. Build an affinity, scenarios, and models to brainstorm issues and design responses. See work structures by looking for natural clusters of work and artifacts in the physical model. Look for data used in artifacts. Run a visioning session based on key issues you identify, build up the design response, build storyboards based on the scenarios, and go right to UI design and paper prototyping. Artifacts guide the layout and presentation of the UI. Use the structural thinking behind the User Environment Design to help organize the UI, but don't build a User Environment diagram explicitly. This process gets you as quickly as possible from seeing the data to organizing a design response. Such a process could be run in about 2 months by a small group of four to six, drawn from ENGINEERING, UI DESIGN, USABILITY, and MARKETING. 8 to 15 customer interviews should be enough. July 16 Jeff PattonPlaceholder for insights from spending a few hours with UCD/Agile evangelist Jeff Patton The Designer as FacilitatorInterview with Adaptive Path's Jesse McMullin http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/13/interview-with-jess-mcmullin/ This applies to some challenges I have been dealing with for the past year. The collaborative design process they use to flush out a high level strategy and vision makes sense. They have stakeholder's express their design vision by putting it on paper. It is similar to approaches Thoughtworks promotes. Although it isn't a magic bullet, it can be extended to figure out those pesky requirements. February 04 On project failureFrom slashdot: Compare building a house to software. Before you build a house
Schedule times can slip but you still know where you are in terms of progression. If we built this house the way we do software development
===== 3)At any point during construction tell them they are not doing it right. November 19 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Cognitive Stratification in society)From the essay:
"A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part."
The essay starts with the authors experience working at a Washingtom think tank and subsequent abandonment to opening a motorcylce repair shop specializing in vintage models.
It is a comprehensive historical look at how the Arts and Crafts movement morphed into the use of unskilled labor as part of "process engineering knowledge". There are many brilliant insights such as what gave rise the terms "blue collar" and "white collar" and how the later doesn't have, and shouldn't have exclusive domain in what we call a knowledge economy.
I stumbled on this going through a photoblog of a 21 year old in Mumbai and it reminded me of a discussion about why our house in Kansas City is not selling. Essentially, first time homwe buyers these days do not have the knowledge, skills, or patience to maintain a 80 year old house. They were never taught how to fix things and technology in our world increasingly becomes a black box. In India, with millions of people sharing limited resources, you have to be able to hack everything around you. Hard to write a good summary because there are so many great insights on the "information systems" in this esasy. It is a must read. cited books:
1) The Culture of the New Capitalism
2) The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past 3) The New Basis of Civilization
4) The Wheelwright’s Shop
5) Principles of Scientific Management
6) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
7) No Place of Grace
8) Journal of Interactive Media in Education 9) The Mind at Work September 27 New York Times Reader - Beta is liveHere it is: http://firstlook.nytimes.com/?category_name=times%20reader For everyone that isn't running Vista and or the latest version of XP, here is a demo: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20060914/nytimes-reader-screencast/ September 24 Information driven displays - Sorry, it isn't new This is a new R+D product from Microsoft. 8 years ago, I read how IxD/HCI students over in sweden had done graduate work on a dozen new browser designs that pulled web data, images, pages, services, into new interactive models. The students posted the projects and quicktimes and I believe Eye international profiled these projects. I remember sitting in the atrium at CNN amazed that we were stuck with a very ugly information viewer, Explorer essentially. What would happen with these students ideas? Well, none of them had the marketing power of MS. So this data viewer is nothing new. I can't find those original students or projects, perhaps one of them is at MS now. Then there is all the interfaces people have done with Google API's. Here is the guidelines for the project...
To be fare, Seadragon was purchased by MS. I am not sure about the controllers displayed in this view. Are they Formatless Messaging and Bayesian TheoryIt seems I keep turning up Duane Bray as I do research into messaging... Is he still at IDEO?
IBM's NotesBuddy In NotesBuddy, IM dialogs are stored in e-mail in-boxes, and people can search for them by subject or other classifications. The application can also automatically determine whether to send a note as a message or e-mail, depending on the present status of the recipient. Links to the company's phone system also exist.
In the most current version of NotesBuddy, IBM is experimenting with color to signal availability of a person. If someone is available, for instance, his or her name is published in green in both e-mail boxes and IM address lists. IBM's IM tool lets users substitute a picture instead of an IM name. During a demonstration on Tannenbaum's system, a picture of Sam Palmisano--IBM's chief executive--was in black and white, meaning that he was out. By contrast, the chosen picture of one of his colleagues was in color, indicating that the employee was online. Much of the current work on NotesBuddy revolves around better organization to avoid information overload. An italicized address, for example, indicates that a message from that person needs to be received immediately. If the recipient is offline, the message will be sent to a pager. Conversely, if a person is offline, but the message isn't urgent, instant messages are converted to e-mail to eliminate the "stale message" phenomenon. Messages can be typed or left as a voice message. Text messages can be read or heard in simulated voice. With IBM's in-house NotesBuddy system, users can move a cursor over a person's IM identifier, prompting a small window that shows the person's full name, title, the group they work in, their phone number and their current status for availability. NotesBuddy also saves IM in e-mail in-boxes. People can insert a subject line on an IM message that lets them later search for a message by topic, name or date. By contrast, with most versions of IM, the instant messages vanish unless they're consciously preserved, and then they generally get saved as text files in independent folders. "The need for saving messages and retrieving them is going to be a critical factor in the future use of instant messaging," Tannenbaum said. Preservation like this isn't part of Lotus Notes now, but it will be, he said. Another design experiment in NotesBuddy is vanishing windows. Because some people keep five or six chats going at once, their desktops can become cluttered. In NotesBuddy, active dialog windows can be placed under the graphic for the person's address. There isn't a window that clogs the desktop, but the chat continues. Yahoo Messenger Enterprise Edition
Looking for info Treasury on Etsy - Jared Tarbell says they are calling it Shopcasting
http://www.etsy.com/treasury.php Microsoft Live Communications Server
Is this somehow going to be intergrated with Vista and a webservice? Looking for info the MS master plan. From CNet:
One of the more vocal Bayesian advocates is Microsoft. The company is employing ideas based on probability--or "probabilistic" principles--in its Notification Platform. The technology will be embedded in future Microsoft software and is intended to let computers and cell phones automatically filter messages, schedule meetings without their owners' help and derive strategies for getting in touch with other people.
Microsoft Coordinate - Notification Platform Gathers data from personal calendars, keyboards, sensor cameras and other sources to create a mosaic of a person's life and habits. The data gathered can include arrival schedules, typical time and length of lunches, what types of phone and e-mail messages are kept or discarded, how frequently the keyboard is in use at given times of the day, and so on. Such data can be used to manage the flow of messages and other information to people who use the application. If a manager sent an e-mail to a worker's computer at 2:40 p.m., for example, Coordinate could check that worker's calendar program and find that a meeting was listed for 2:00 p.m. The program could also scan data about the worker's habits and discover, say, that the person usually resumed keyboard activity about an hour after the listed start times of meetings. The program might also find that the worker typically responded to e-mails from this manager within five minutes. Based on all that data, and given that the worker probably wouldn't return to the computer for at least 20 minutes, the program could decide to forward the message to the worker's cell phone. Meanwhile, the program might decide not to forward e-mails from other people.
Based on the preponderance of one pattern over another in a piece of unstructured information, Autonomy enables computers to understand that there is a particular probability that a document in question is about a specific subject. In this way, Autonomy is able to extract a document's digital essence, encode the unique "signature" of the key concepts, then enable a host of operations to be performed on that text, automatically. These operations include automatic clustering of related documents, automatic information delivery, hyper-linking of content as well as more traditional short query, or keyword searching. Adaptive Probabilistic Concept Modeling (APCM) algorithms are also used to analyze, sort and cross-reference unstructured information. Autonomy is based on advanced pattern-matching technology (non-linear adaptive digital signal processing) that exploits high-performance probabilistic modeling techniques to extract a document's digital essence and determine the characteristics that give the text meaning - Information Theory. Autonomy software is able to continuously develop and learn, thanks to its unique combination of Bayesian Inference and Shannon's Information Theory. This learning ability significantly reduces the manual input required by other solutions and translates into large savings in time and money for the company. Where other solutions need to be taught new words, phrases or concepts and shown how to categorize them, Autonomy can automatically deduce the significance of these new units of meaning, add them to relevant categories, and create new categories where necessary. Autonomy's technology can also learn about its users by dynamically monitoring the content they view, and then deliver new and relevant content as it is added to the environment.
IDEO's IxD projects in healthcare Software epplication for Medtronic specifically for spinal surgery. 2006
Full case study:
http://www.ideo.com/portfolio/re.asp?x=19006999 Navigation-Structure-Time-Behaviour
Thesis: Approaching Medical Technology Products for Everyday LifeHanna Friberg's Master Thesis in Interaction Design
IT University of Goteborg Dept. of Computer Science 2005 "Approaching Medical Technology Products for Everyday Life" http://www.tii.se/reform/results/publications_2005/2005_hanna_friberg.pdf Abstract: Medical technology products seem to be focused on technology and function. In case of a
sickness we sometimes have to use these things for a shorter period of time, for instance
at a hospital. In some cases we have to live with them throughout life, as for chronic
sickness. When we have to live with this kind of things in our home environment we
might have different demands on them compared to in a hospital environment. We have
to live with them, no longer at the hospital but out there, in the “real” world, in our
everyday life. This puts the objects in new lightning. With starting point in the everyday
life this thesis suggests a reconsideration on designing within the field of medical
technology. An approach was formed, where three crucial points have been made.
Enabling for meaningfulness is vital. Form can be used as base in designing. Function
certainly has to be present, but not as a selfevident or unchallenged point of departure.
Playfulness can expand the scope in designing within this field. This approach implies
that we should design within the field of medical technology from the same starting point
as being used in all other design of everyday things. My personal comments will appear on project wiki http://www.tii.se/reform/results/publications_2005.htm September 23 Behaviourism and InteractionsA Conversation between Dr. Karl Pribram and Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove (1999):
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/pribram.htm
"There are lots of different ways of phrasing this. One is that mental phenomena are emergent properties of how the brain works, and so it's almost like the brain is secreting vision and mind and all that. But maybe a better way of talking about it would be to say that mental phenomena arise through the interaction between brain and body and the environment and -- this is what Karl Popper says -- that whole interactive thing produces an emergent, which we call mind and spirit, and so on. I think that's a better way than just thinking of the brain secreting it." Karl Pribram
David Bohm
Jiddu Krishnamurti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiddu_Krishnamurti September 09 Latest newsNot at Carnegie Mellon.
This has been one of the craziest months of my life. If someone told me I would be living in the Research Triangle in North Carolina 2 months ago I wouldn't believe them. So many things went into this decision and change of course... lots of unexpected things, but that is life. I am seriously disappointed about not being at CMU, I was really looking forward to working on both refining my skills with Interaction Design AND building large scale art installations with the help of Golan Levin. But at the same time, this new opportunity, I am extremely excited about. I am going to be India a great deal over the next few years and will post some of my dives into the local communities there. With Microsoft's new vision of computing opening up to the world it is an exciting time to be designing and doing art. I think traditional design shops are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Places like MAYA in Pittsburgh are poised to capture the new wave of work. Check them out. I am going to shift gears with this blog a little. I have been using it as an archive of resources for the most part. But I have been getting high traffic for some reason, so I am going to start writing and doing research on Interaction Design and a focus on healthcare systems in the United States. I had been gearing up to make a leap into Processing and Jitter in support of the 5 years of installation proposals I have been working on, but I recently realized I will never have the time to do finish them (maybe when I retire). I will post the proposals, perhaps some computational art students out in California can rip off some of my ideas and build them. I would be happy to fund anyone that has the time (seriously). In the past week, I found a kid up in Washington doing some fascinating work using Legos and Webservices and I hope to keep posting information on true art innovators like him. And since I am hoping back into the world of Microsoft, I am going to fight through all the crap with this Live interface. August 04 IxD worldviewThis is from Dan Saffer's new book which I am awaiting in the mail. While it puts me at ease about pursuing IxD at Carnegie Mellon this fall (some things have come up that are making this unlikely, for those that know Emili and I, we really appreciate your thoughts and prayers as we get through this), it makes me wonder how many shops really think this way? It makes sense to me and I have opinions about its perfectness but I really wonder how a software development shop that deals with embedded systems, networks, and services would feel about this?
On a side note, Spaces new redesign doesn't work on a Mac. I started this blog because I was working on design projects from Microsoft dealing with Spaces, but now I am locked into it. I get a headache thinking about porting over to Wordpress. I am glad MS values good IxD now, but will there ever be a day when they get rid of the bugs? MS isn't being public about it, but Spaces has been a huge underground success for them. And here is the chart....
Well, it turns out MS is forcing me to download and install WIndows LIve Photo tool so I can upload a graphic. I am over on a PC now and the ActiveX code wasn't written correctly so even though I would love to add the complexity of a new tool to my life I simply can't download it. This is it. I am going to port everything over to my own tools. I love when the Manufacture's Defect is designed to keep you from buying the product.
Microsoft's user unfriendliness lies mostly in the methodology and structure of it's passport system and the limits it places on the interface. I don't know how many marathon meetings I have sat through with developers at Microsoft aboutthese issues. It is as complex as the process used on the backend of deit card purchases at grocery stores. It is a miracle, with all the networks and kludges that these types of elaborate systems work. Some companies are biting the bullet and starting from scratch, even with the migration issues.
Microsoft, it has been nice working with you. But you have put up to many roadblocks for me to deal with! June 06 Organization Roundup #1Interaction Design Association (IxDA) The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is a non-profit professional organization whose focus is promoting both the field of interaction design and the interests of an international community of practitioners, managers, educators, and students of interaction design. http://www.ixda.org/en/ Design Management Institute DMI is a nonprofit organization that seeks to heighten awareness of design as an essential part of business strategy. http://www.dmi.org $150 per year AIGA The professional association of design http://www.aiga.org/ $75 per year Information Architecture The IA Institute is a non-profit organization that supports the global information architecture community. http://iainstitute.org $20 Usability Professionals' Association http://www.upassoc.org $35 per year Bay Area ACM SIGCHI http://www.baychi.org/ $20 ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, a society for information technology professionals with over 75,000 members worldwide. SIGCHI is an ACM Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction, with over 6,000 members worldwide. BayCHI officially reports to ACM and maintains a close relationship to SIGCHI. BayCHI is the largest local ACM SIGCHI chapter in the world, with 1,200 members. Industrial Designers Society of America http://www.idsa.org/ $50 May 27 Institute of Design - Strategy Conference - 2006Advertising is broken http://id.iit.edu/events/strategyconference/2006/perspectives_mok.php "I see the opportunity to marry Experience Modeling with the smarts of the Information Architect to structure a powerful model in the user's world, whether that be through cell phones or tagging systems. The opportunity is to create a model that ties together the deep ethnographic understanding of the user, the system engineering understanding, and the brand/marketing understanding. Tying these three things together is quite powerful."- Clement Mok That is called "Interaction Design". Designing a marketing campaign with a mental model. I just deleted my long winded expereince with this statement. If you are a designer at an ad agency, you need to go read this article. Small R+D marketing design firms, wave of the future. Related: How iPods took over the world - The end of push advertising "In their book The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin charge that the rising tide of consumer discontent amid material plenty is the result of companies failing to change along with their customers. People are no longer grateful for what companies give them; they want what they want, in the form they decide. Part of the iPod's phenomenal success is that as one of the first of a new breed of products to put customers on equal terms with producers, it begins to respond to this need." But what about food distribution, health care, education/literacy, transportation, government? Why are we so focused on consumer tech right now? The real opportunites (whatever that is) is in these other areas. May 17 Evolutionary computation and Open Source art collectiveLooks like I found some interesting people, concepts and tools: Fastbreeder http://www.pawfal.org/Software/fastbreeder/ An experimental genetic programming synthesiser. This program is free software, developed for linux, using jack for audio. Fastbreeder is essentially a 4 button synth. The idea is to grow code by choosing from a range of automatically generated variations of functions, you don't have to know how they work, but each function creates a sound which can be selected by you. The following generation is then created containing mutants of your chosen sound. You can refine and develop the sound just by auditioning and choosing the best one each time Evolutionary Computation Organization http://www.genetic-programming.org/ Genetic programming starts with a primordial ooze of thousands of randomly created computer programs. This population of programs is progressively evolved over a series of generations. The evolutionary search uses the Darwinian principle of natural selection (survival of the fittest) and analogs of various naturally occurring operations, including crossover (sexual recombination), mutation, gene duplication, gene deletion. Genetic programming sometimes also employs developmental processes by which an embryo grows into fully developed organism. Noise Tools http://www.pawfal.org/Software/livenoisetools/ PatternCascade http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=PatternCascade fluxus is a Scheme interpreter embedded into a realtime rendering engine, and is simultaneously the visual output, and the performance interface for the whole thing. noisepattern is the sequencer which converts ScoreCode into actual note events. noiseweapon and noiselab inherited most of their dsp code from the final version of SpiralModular. The sequencer and audio software works ahead of time, so kitchensync is used both to sync to external clocks, and convert the timestamped note messages into realtime messages for fluxus to act apon. The visuals and performance interface language are written in Scheme, and run inside fluxus. OpenLab http://www.pawfal.org/openlab/ This project provides a meeting place for London based artists who use and develop open source software as their creative tool. As a result, the project will attempt to organize performances, events, meetings in London for the participants to share and exchange ideas. Furthermore, the project will also promote and demonstrate the use of open source software through the performances/events. ![[img]](http://sonicvariable.goto10.org/downloads/openday_talk2+.jpg) ![[img]](http://sonicvariable.goto10.org/downloads/openday_toplap+.jpg) May 16 SketchUp: Google blows away Microsoft.. againGoogle continues to innovate ahead of MS by buying SketchUp and unflattening Google Earth. Slowly, people will start making it all 3D with these tools until someone writes a program that creates depth out of satellite images. http://www.sketchup.com/index.php?id=408 Demo: http://download.sketchup.com/downloads/training/tutorials50/The_Story/The_Story.html May 12 Werkplace: Atlanta lecture, selected slidesI recently gave a 2 hour lecture in Atlanta for students called "Statistical Inference for Spatial Point Processes; Calculating and Cataloging Posterior Probabilites as a Variable of Angular Momentum in Quilt Design". The lecture was about the state of design, werkplace's undocumented projects and the designers relationship with companies. I thought about putting a lengthy explanation in, but it is out of context. Slides: 1 + 2) Werkplace public domain environmental brand remix experiments. End-user circumvention of adverstising. Talked about www.bankofamericasux.com. The software deveopment cycle has turned into a feedback mechanism for marketing and branding. Bank of America would be brilliant if they owned the web site, but it is my understanding they may not even know about it. 3) Title slide. Employees behaviour response to corporate reorgs and layoffs. 4)Jean Tinguley from the book "Meta" -1930s. The Blue Man Group leverages his work in every performance. 5-6)Werkstatte's first site which is now Werkplace. We used dynamic content loading back in 2000 which is now called Ajax (which is overhyped). The sites navigation was done with XML decays. The section links were inthe lower right panel... location and color depended on computational determinations on both the age of posts and the amout of content. 7-8) More Jean Tinguley that is the basis for our machines which are powered by the movment of a body through space (ww.werkplace.com/scottbower - current projects), not car engines. Jean loved dumps and i spend my free time spelunking and dumpster diving which is esprcially good in Kansas City. 9) I have done 5 posters for the AIGA, these are 2 of them. 10) Selected work form my undergrad thesis project. 11)Ben Fry's Valence. I got to see this at MIT in 1999 when he was still working on it. It changed my life. Wanted to put it on CNN's backend. 12) CNN navigation and environmental deconstruction for @20 CD-ROM. Resampled Squarepusher tracks, sold out in a week in the UK. 13) "Nietzche contra Wagner: Remote Fight'n with Historical Peeps" (2001). Just now working on this installation. My dream is to put these projects in children's museums. 14) My first web service art. I worked at a design firm that developed Investor Relations projects, so I was one of the first people to have access to stock data. CNN gave us access to their weather feeds, even after I left, because good companies do that for hard working employees. 15) My first print project (2000) 16) Typographic War on Florida - Kenny and I were the leads on the design and development of all of CNN's coverage of the 2000 election. This was the first Werkplace project where we explored utilitarian themes in software applications.                 May 10 Me on FlickrMaking it public: http://www.flickr.com/photos/swissbankaccount I have a pet Flickr API project I want to do that will give me the skills to do a new installation project. If you are a designer, especially a nerdy one, please make it on over to "Designer Books". I want to do an interactive bookshelf to really leverage Proce55ing. May 09 DIY Die Cutting: CricutThis is the first thing you see entering a Michael's. The web site does not do the branding justice. It comes with a cute green bag and the little frog face is all over the store with overly designed displays. But in a craft utopia like Michael's, it is a welcome sight. It was sold out in the Overland Park, KS location. The fonts you can use on it are of course, horrible. And I remember when I got excited over DIY button kits back in the late 80s. http://www.cricut.com/ Werkplace: Fuse Conference infographicsI recently had the opportunity to design some visualizations for Ben Fry and Casey Reas to come to Kansas CityHard to believe but we managed to talk them into coming here and lecture for the AIGA. Thanks to Kelly Salchow and Brockett Horne for making it happen, they both went to undergrad school with them. I just noticed Marius Watz posted them in his photostream so if you want to a face with thier work, just visit these: Casey Reas: http://www.flickr.com/photos/watz/143547040/ Ben Fry (teaching at Carnegie Mellon this Fall) http://www.flickr.com/photos/watz/143547043/ |
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and do not swap researchers.
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