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Don’t think I posted it here but this initiative about mapping and analyzing design process is of tremendous value. Hugh Dubberly collected “over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes, from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development“. All this material is a great way to understand how people design and how they describe what they do. The process are often presented in a “designerly” way, mostly with graphics and process representations.

Why do I blog this? material for teaching as well as my interest towards representing designers’ process. A must read.

• Interactive Artifacts and Furniture Supporting Collaborative Work and Learning [Springer]
  Participated in writing the introduction

straup posted a photo:

What? A quickly found picture to celebrate the 5000th post on this blog.
By Pierre la Police of course, depicting an imaginary sport elec competition.

Weird devices, electricity and strange people. Surely a good summary of this blog.

straup posted a photo:

Two intriguing examples of prototyping in the urban environment. The two pictures above (taken in Geneva and Lyon) depict another form of trying to represent the upcoming colors of a building. Different colors are presented (stand-alone or with a combination of others) to the people who will take a decision.

The pictures below that I’ve already shown here is a basic model of how a soon-to be skyscraper would look like in Zürich, Switzerland. An intriguing steel structure that represents the volume which will be occupied soon by a new building.

Different range of representations using shapes and color. Although the color example quite minimally shows the future of the building, the steel structure is impressive.

Why do I blog this? interesting documentation of a certain design process and how certain elements can be prototyped to evaluate people’s reaction to a certain change. These elements acts as a sort of prototyping the near future of the urban fabric using shape and color probes. Very important in terms of user acceptation since colors and huge shapes can be problematic for city-dwellers (say, in continental europe).

Tangentially, it also shows that physical and situated artifacts can also be employed to design the city of tomorrow. It doesn’t mean however that digital techniques such as 3D modeling or augmented reality cannot be employed.

straup posted a photo:

A lot has a been written about augmented reality - is that really a sizable tree growing out of a chimney or has it been photoshopped? To what extent will tomorrow's urban architecture be designed to be digitally augmentable? as opposed to being inherently augmentable?

Technology is evolving to the point where LED based pocketable projectors will be bringing digital content to a surface in front of us (imagine a variation of this from Afghanistan but for a wider range of moving content). Because of its inherent immediacy - the wow effect, pocket projectors will go through its moment as the gadget de jour, but ultimately use will restricted to use due to poor lighting conditions, sub-optimal surfaces on which to project and unstable surfaces on which to rest the projector. They will potentially include some form of data capture like duh, a camera turning the one way flow of information a form of proximate broadcasting (data transfer via, say, LED based street lights being already feasible). Throw multiple projectors to the mix and a new medium is born.

Related: a solid piece by Kevin Kelly in the NYT on screen literacy (& ta Sara for the pointer).

Photo from a day on the back of a bike in Bangkok.

More about present and near future sci-fi with this interview of Cory Doctorow in The Guardian. It practically addresses “why he’s not interested in predicting the future using science fiction, but influencing it“.

Doctorow describes himself as a “presentist”, that is to say someone who writes metaphorically about the present (something every sci-fi writer do as he points out) and therefore “comment on the now” to “extrapolate the future”. He then contrasts this with other forms of engagement with reality:

“The job of a science fiction writer, historically, has been to understand how technology and social factors interact,” he says, “how technology is changing society. An activist’s job is to try to direct that change.“

Why do I blog this? simply find intriguing this sort of meme lately about the “near future”. It’s therefore interesting to observe what sci-fi has to say about it: an intriguing locus of interaction between the social and technologies. The reason why I am digging this down lately is that fiction plays an important role in both shaping our imagination towards various inventions and setting up the scenes about possible alternatives.

• Nokia premieres its newest research laboratory, in Hollywood, USA [Nokia]
  Nokia today announced its newest research laboratory has been established in the Hollywood area of California, US. "The laboratory will explore new entertainment experiences that combine the physical and digital worlds. Our research work will focus on mixed reality experiences, with a strong community flavor. We will develop new user interfaces that fully explore the role of the human body and human motion for more natural forms of interaction. Mobile devices will play a central role in this," commented Rebecca Allen, Laboratory Director of NRC Hollywood.

straup posted a photo:

Meal delivery in Tokyo above and Shanghai below.

What meals are currently off-limits for home delivery and why? To what extent do changes in local delivery norms alter consumption habits? Whilst a shift from motorised transport extends the likely delivery range, how does the additional speed affect the meal's appearance? How the food tastes? The customer's level of anticipation?

Fast forwarding to a distant future perfect - how will teleportation or other ways of matter-location-shifting affect the home delivery business? The most likely business model? Customers and restaurants will receive a home teleportation device for free and the service provider generates revenue charging for every meal delivered. The home food delivery industry will go through a revolution with consumers being able to select meals from anywhere. When you can have anything what decisions will affect your choice? (And by the same token - right now you could be reading any website, why are you here?) If there was a good catch of Tuna in Sado today - you might go for fresh sushi. Your Indian take-away will arrive from India, naturally. Whilst the market for take-away food will become hyper-competitive i.e. competing with anyone whose ever picked up an egg whisk, brands will matter more as consumers turn to trusted sources of food and suppliers that are able to translate international and intranational foods for the local palette.

Some will prefer to have the raw ingredients teleported over, wanting to prepare the food themselves and you'll never go without an ingredient again. Asking a loved one to pick up the milk on the way home (and for that matter taking out the trash) will be things from our past. Globally popular TV chefs will be the new-power brokers in society - capable of shifting a year's supply of Kenyan butter beans or [insert name of any foodstuff] in a matter of minutes through a single broadcast, through not before buying low and selling high. Everyone needs to eat - it just takes a little direction to get them to buy from you.

Whilst you might think this scenario is far far off there are elements that are already here and more that are just around the corner, if not for food then for other tangibles. Fax machines create a tangible output based on the tangible or digital command from a remote someone. Who will be the first to offer a free internetworked home printer where the sender pays to print? At what point do internetworked 3d printing technologies arrive in the home?

straup posted a photo:

A guest over from South Korea - warm but wearing her coat for the duration of her stay inside the cafe. For every context the likelihood that you're going to remove layers of clothing. Korean weddings are renowned for the numbers of guests and the speed at which the guests arrive and depart. The cultural implications of taking of a jacket, coat or shoes.

I was one of the international keynote presenters at this year's Dansk IT Usability and Design conference. I would first like to thank them for the invitation: it was a pleasure to spend a couple of days in Copenhagen and an honor to present to such a distinguished organization (they're an IT organization that just turned FIFTY!).

In my presentation I rolled up a bunch of my ideas from the last six months and added some examples of some new projects (such as Disney/TechnoSource's Clickables-PixieHollow product line) and I talked about the iPhone's applianceness.

You can download the presentation (792K PDF) with extensive notes.

The gist of this keynote, as with many of the presentations I've been giving over the last six months, is that a combination of ubiquitous computing, wireless networking and item-level identification is changing the nature of people's relationship to everyday objects. This change, in turn, creates a number of deep user experience design challenges as objects become intertwined with services and as computation becomes a more ingrained part of how the object is designed. In other words, objects that we find familiar now dematerialize into services, while abstract ideas that had been services before materialize as new, and unfamiliar, appliances. This crossover is pretty alien and implies a rethinking of relationships and design processes.

I'm still working on the practical implications that these big ideas boil down to, but I'm beginning to see the outline of what it implies for the world in which design is going to happen for the next 5-10 years.

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