In her panel yesterday at South by Southwest, Genevieve Bell posed the following question: “What might we really want from our devices?” In her field research as a cultural anthropologist and Intel Fellow, she surfaced themes that might be familiar to those striving to create the next generation of interconnected devices. Adaptable, anticipatory, predictive: tick the box. However, what happens when our devices are sensitive, respectful, devout, and perhaps a bit secretive? Smart devices are “more than being context aware,” Bell said. “It’s being aware of consequences of context.”
Here’s a lovely quote from Genevieve:
“[Today's devices] blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device [in the future] might know when NOT to blurt out the truth.”
These are the titular instruments – marvellous contraptions!
They’re a set of machines to fool context-aware devices and services – to enable you to tell little white lies with sensors.
For instance, cranking the handle of the machine above simulates something like a pattern of ‘walking’ in the accelerometer data of the phone, so if you told someone you were out running errands (when in fact you were lazing on the sofa) your data-trail wouldn’t catch you out…
It was a thought-provoking talk, and as a result my notebook pages are filled with reactions and thoughts to follow-up rather than a recording of what she said.
LIREC‘s work is centred around a academic deconstruction of human emotional relations to each other, pets and objects – considering them as companions.
With B.A.S.A.A.P. in mind, I was particularly struck by the animal behaviour studies that LIREC members are carrying out, looking into how dogs learn and adapt as companions with their human owners, and learn how to negotiate different contexts in a almost symbiotic relationship with their humans.
Alex pointed out that the dogs sometimes test their owners – taking their behaviour to the edge of transgression in order to build a model of how to behave.
Which led me to my question to Alex at the end of her talk – which I formulated badly I think, and might stumble again here to write down clearly.
In essence – dogs and domesticated animals model our emotional states, and we model theirs – to come to an understanding. There’s no direct understanding there – just simulations running in both our minds of each other, which leads to a working relationship usually.
My question was whether LIREC’s approach of deconstruction and reconstruction of emotions would be less successful than the ‘brute-force’ approach of simulating the 17,000 years or so domestication of wild animals in companion robots.
Imagine genetic algorithms creating ‘hopeful monsters‘ that could be judged as more or less loveable and iterated upon…
Another friend, Kevin Slavin recently gave a great talk at LIFT11, about the algorithms that surround and control our lives – that ‘we can write but can’t read’ the complex behaviours they generate.
He gave the example of http://www.boxcar2d.com/ – that generates ‘hopeful monster’ wheeled devices that have to cross a landscape.
As Kevin says – it’s “Sometimes heartbreaking”.
Some succeed, some fail – we map personality and empathise with them when they get stuck.
I was also reminded of another favourite design-fiction of the studio – Bruce Sterling’s ‘Taklamakan‘
Pete stared at the dissected robots, a cooling mass of nerve-netting, batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin.
“Why do they look so crazy?”
“‘Cause they grew all by themselves. Nobody ever designed them.”
Katrinko glanced up.
Another question from the audience featured a wonderful term that I at least I had never heard used before – “Artificial Empathy”.
Artificial Empathy, in place of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Empathy is at the core of B.A.S.A.A.P. – it’s what powers Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots, and it’s what Byron and Nass were describing in The Media Equation to some extent, which of course brings us back to Clippy.
Clippy was referenced by Alex in her talk, and has been resurrected again as an auto-critique to current efforts to design and build agents and ‘things with behaviour’
One thing I recalled which I don’t think I’ve mentioned in previous discussions was that back in 1997, when Clippy was at the height of his powers – I did something that we’re told (quite rightly to some extent) no-one ever does – I changed the defaults.
You might not know, but there were several skins you could place on top of Clippy from his default paperclip avatar – a little cartoon Einstein, an ersatz Shakespeare… and a number of others.
I chose a dog, which promptly got named ‘Ajax’ by my friend Jane Black. I not only forgave Ajax every infraction, every interruption – but I welcomed his presence. I invited him to spend more and more time with me.
I played with him.
Sometimes we’re that easy to please.
I wonder if playing to that 17,000 years of cultural hardwiring is enough in some ways.
In the bar afterwards a few of us talked about this – and the conversation turned to ‘Big Dog’.
Big Dog doesn’t look like a dog, more like a massive crossbreed of ED-209, the bottom-half of a carousel horse and a black-and-decker workmate. However, if you’ve watched the video then you probably, like most of the people in the bar shouted at one point – “DON’T KICK BIG DOG!!!”.
Big Dog’s movements and reactions – it’s behaviour in response to being kicked by one of it’s human testers (about 36 seconds into the video above) is not expressed in a designed face, or with sad ‘Dreamworks’ eyebrows – but in pure reaction – which uncannily resembles the evasion and unsteadiness of a just-abused animal.
It’s heart-rending.
But, I imagine (I don’t know) it’s an emergent behaviour of it’s programming and design for other goals e.g. reacting to and traversing irregular terrain.
Again like Boxcar2d, we do the work, we ascribe hurt and pain to something that absolutely cannot be proven to experience it – and we are changed.
So – we are the emotional computing power in these relationships – as LIREC and Alex are exploring – and perhaps we should design our robotic companions accordingly.
Or perhaps we let this new nature condition us – and we head into a messy few decades of accelerated domestication and renegotiation of what we love – and what we think loves us back.
P.S.: This post contains lost of images from our friend Matt Cottam’s wonderful “Dogs I Meet” set on Flickr, which makes me wonder about a future “Robots I Meet” set which might illicit such emotions…
Earlier in our involvement with Touch, Timo and I held a workshop with Alex Jarvis (currently at moo.com) and Mark Williams (now at Venture Three) to explore notation for RFID and the actions hidden in the readers.
It shows how far we were reaching for metaphorical handles – around which to characterise the technology, relying on the verbs associated with the result of the interaction: to Pay, to Open, to Delete etc.
Physically the systems are very different and are more frequently represented by their envelope packaging, like the Oyster card. Branded systems have chosen to use characters, my favourite is the Suica Penguin.
During the visualisation work, the cross sections in the readable volumes that emerged began to feel very strong visually. They capture an essential nature in the technology which is difficult to unearth with symbols based on metaphors.
Timo and I experimented with forms which have an almost typographic nature ranging to a more strictly geometric shape.
We settled on this most geometric version. It would be terrific to see this picked up and used as a symbol for the technology in public.
Last week Timo and I finished filming and editing Nearness. Earlier in the year BERG was commissioned by AHO/Touch to produce a series of explorations into designerly applications for RFID (more to come on what that means). Over the coming weeks BERG will be sharing the results of the work here and on the Touch blog.
The film Nearness explores interacting without touching. With RFID it’s proximity that matters, and actual contact isn’t necessary. Much of Timo’s work in the Touch project addresses the fictions and speculations in the technology. Here we play with the problems of invisibility and the magic of being close.
The work refers fondly to the Fischli and WeissThe Way Things Go film and its controversial offspring The Honda ‘Cog’ commercial. There are of course any number of awesome feats of domestic engineering on YouTube. Japanese culture has taken the form to its heart. My favourite examples are the bumpers in the kids science show Pythagora Switch. Here’s a clip.
Our twist is that the paired objects do not hit or knock, they touch without touching.
Most of the design and conceptual work for the radio is finished now. We are dealing with the remaining technicalities of bringing the radio into the world. To aid Tristan’s presentation we drew up some slides outlining how we expect the core functionality to work when the radio manifests.
Social module
This animated sequence shows how the social module is expected to work. The radio begins tuned to BBC Radio 2. A light corresponding to Matt’s radio lights up on the social module. When the lit button is pressed, the top screen reveals Matt is listening to Radio 6 Music, which is selected and the radio retunes to that station.
Tuning
This detail shows how the list management will work. The radio has a dual rotary dial for tuning between the different DAB stations. The outer dial cycles through the full list of all the stations the radio has successfully scanned for. The inner dial filters the list down and cycles through the top five most listened to stations. We’ll write more on why we’ve made these choices when the radio is finished.
Earlier this year we hosted a workshop for Timo Arnall‘s Touch project. This was a continuation of the brief I set my students late last year, to design an icon or series of icons to communicate the use of RFID technology publicly. The students who took on the work wholeheartedly delivered some early results which I summarised here.
This next stage of the project involved developing the original responses to the brief into a small number of icons to be tested, by Nokia, with a pool of 25 participants to discover their responses. Eventually these icons could end up in use on RFID-enabled surfaces, such as mobile phones, gates, and tills.
Timo and I spent an intense day working with Alex Jarvis and Mark Williams. The intention for the day was to leave us with a series of images which could be used to test responses. The images needed consistency and fairly conservative limits were placed on what should be produced. Timo’s post on the workshop includes a good list of references and detailed outline of the requirements for the day.
I’m going to discuss two of the paths I was most involved with. The first is around how the imagery and icons can represent fields we imagine are present in RFID technology.
Four sketches exploring the presence of an RFID field
The following four sketches are initial ideas designed to explore how representation of fields can help imply the potential use of RFID. The images will evolve into the worked-up icons to be tested by Nokia, so the explorations are based around mobile phones.
I’m not talking about what is actually happening with the electromagnetic field induction and so forth. These explorations are about building on the idea of what might be happening and seeing what imagery can emerge to support communication.
The first sketch uses the pattern of the field to represent that information is being transferred.
The two sketches below imply the completion of the communication by repeating the shape or symbol in the mind or face of the target. The sketch on the left uses the edge of the field (made of triangles) to indicate that data is being carried.
I like this final of the four sketches, below, which attempts to deal with two objects exchanging an idea. It is really over complex and looks a bit illuminati, but I’d love to explore this all more and see where it leads.
Simplifying and working-up the sketches into icons
For the purposes of our testing, these sketches were attempting too much too early so we remained focused on more abstract imagery and how that might be integrated into the icons we had developed so far. The sketch below uses the texture of the field to show the communication.
Retaining the mingling fields, these sketches became icons. Both of the results below imply interference and the meeting of fields, but they are also burdened by seeming atomic, or planet sized and a annoyingly (but perhaps appropriately) like credit card logos. Although I really like the imagery that emerges, I’m not sure how much it is doing to help think about what is actually happening.
Representing purchasing via RFID, as icons
While the first path was for icons simply to represent RFID being available, the second path was specifically about the development of icons to show RFID used for making a purchase (‘purchase’ is one of the several RFID verbs from the original brief).
There is something odd about using RFID tags. They leave you feeling uncertain, and distanced from the exchange or instruction. When passing an automated mechanical (pre-RFID) ticket barrier, or using a coin operated machine, the time the machines take to respond feels closely related to the mechanism required to trigger it. Because RFID is so invisible, any timings or response feels arbitrary. When turning a key in a lock, this actually releases the door. When waving an RFID keyfob at reader pad, one is setting off a hidden computational process which will eventually lead to a mechanical unlocking of the door.
Given the secretive nature of RFID, our approach to download icons that emerged was based on the next image, originally commissioned from me by Matt for a talk a couple of years ago. It struck me as very like using an RFID enabled phone. The phone has a secret system for pressing secret buttons that you yourself can’t push.
Many of the verbs we are examining, like purchase, download or open, communicate really well through hands. The idea of representing RFID behaviours through images of hands emerging from phones performing actions has a great deal of potential. Part of the strength of the following images comes from the familiarity of the mobile phone as an icon–it side-steps some of the problems faced in attempting to represent an RFID directly.
The following sketches deal with purchase between two phones.
Below are the two final icons that will go for testing. There is some ambiguity about whether coins are being taken or given, and I’m pleased that we managed to get something this unusual and bizarre into the testing process.
Alex submitted a poster for his degree work, representing all the material for testing from the workshop:
The intention is to continue iterations and build upon this work once the material has been tested (along with other icons). As another direction, I’d like to take these icons and make them situated, perhaps for particular malls or particular interfaces, integrating with the physical environment and language of specific machines.
Last term during an interim crit, I saw the work my students had produced on the RFID icons brief I set some weeks ago. It was a good afternoon and we were lucky enough to have Timo Arnall from the Touch project and Younghee Jung from Nokia Japan join us and contribute to the discussion. All the students attending showed good work of a high standard, overall it was very rewarding.
I’ll write a more detailed discussion on the results of the work when the brief ends, but I suspect there may be more than I can fit into a single post, so I wanted to point at some of the work that has emerged so far.
All the work here is from Alex Jarvis and Mark Williams.
Alex began by looking at the physical act of swiping your phone or card over a reader. The symbol he developed was based on his observations of people slapping their Oyster wallets down as they pass through the gates on to the underground. Not a delicate, patient hover over the yellow disc, but a casual thud, expectant wait for the barrier to open, then a lurching acceleration through to the other side before the gates violently spasm shut.
More developed sketches here…
I suspect that this inverted tick will abstract really well, I like the thin line on the more developed version snapping the path of the card into 3D. It succeeds since it doesn’t worry too much about working as an instruction and concentrates more on a powerful cross-system icon to be consistently recognisable.
Verbs
The original brief required students to develop icons for the verbs: purchase, identify, enter (but one way), download, phone and destroy.
Purchase and destroy are the two of these verbs with the most far-reaching and less immediate consequences. The aspiration for this work is to make the interaction feel like a purchase, not a touch that triggers a purchase. This gives the interaction room to grow into the more complex ones that will be needed in the future.
This first sketch, on purchase, from Alex shows your stack of coins depleting, something nice about the dark black arrow which repeats as a feature throughout Alex’s developments.
Mark has also been tackling purchase, his sketches tap into the currency symbols, again with a view to represent depletion. Such a blunt representation is attractive, it shouts “this will erode your currency!”
Mark explores some more on purchase here:
Purchase is really important. I can’t think of a system other than Oyster that takes your money so ambiguously. Most purchasing systems require you to enter pin numbers, sign things, swipe cards etc, all really clear unambiguous acts. All you have to do is wave at an Oyster reader and it costs you £2… maybe: The same act will open the barrier for free if you have a travel card on there. Granted, passengers have already made a purchase to put the money on the card, but if Transport for London do want to extend their system for use as a digital wallet they will need to tackle this ambiguity.
Both Mark and Alex produced material looking at the symbols to represent destroy, for instances where swiping the reader would obliterate data on it, or render it useless. This might also serve as a warning for areas where RFID tags were prone to damage.
I like the pencil drawing to the top right that he didn’t take forward. I’ve adjusted the contrast over it to draw out some more detail. Important that he distinguished between representing the destruction of the object and the data or contents.
Mark’s sketches for destroy include the excellent mushroom cloud, but he also looks at an abstraction of data disassembly, almost looks like the individual bits of data are floating off into oblivion. Not completely successful since it also reminds me of broadcasting Wonka bars in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and teleporting in Star Trek, but nice none the less.
Drawing
This is difficult to show online, but Alex works with a real pen, at scale. He is seeing the material he’s developing at the same size it will be read at. Each mark he makes he is seeing and responding to as he makes it.
He has produced some material with Illustrator, but it lacked any of the impact his drawings brought to the icons. Drawing with a pen really helps avoid the Adobe poisoning that comes from Illustrator defaults and the complexities of working out of scale with the zoom tool (you can almost smell the 1pt line widths and the 4.2333 mm radius on the corners of the rounded rectangle tool). It forces him to choose every line and width and understand the success and failures that come with those choices. Illustrator does so much for you it barely leaves you with any unique agency at all.
It is interesting to compare the students’ two approaches. Alex works bluntly with bold weighty lines and stubby arrows portraying actual things moving or downloading. Mark tends towards more sophisticated representations and abstractions, and mini comic strips in a single icon. Lightness of touch and branching paths of exploration are his preference.
More to come from both students and I’ll also post some of my own efforts in this area.
S&W is here in Oslo with Timo Arnall’s Touch project for an RFID hacking workshop (check out that hand-drawn antenna field map). Yesterday was introductions, learning about RFID as a technology, and some preliminary explorations.
The work group met for breakfast today, and we discussed promising interactions and potential projects. One of the topics that came up was RFID tag visibility.
I know it’s obvious to state it, but RFID tags are generally hidden. To read a tag, first you have to find it with your reader. Design can make the location of the tag obvious… but wouldn’t it be interesting to embrace the invisibility constraint? Could we take advantage of the seeking behaviour that has to occur?
Consider a car showroom. Imagine no salespeople there, and no prices on the cars. When you entered the showroom, you would be given a RFID reader. There would be an RFID tag, holding the price, hidden somewhere on each car. You’d have to find the rough location of the tag to read the price.
Okay, this would be enormously annoying. But it would force you to step closer to the car, to examine the wing mirror to see if a tag was there, get up close to the paint-work on the door. What would happen?
When you get bright lights and noises in films, you feel excited whether the narrative of the film is exciting or not. Playing Project Rub on the Nintendo DS, the blowing interaction forces you to get adrenalised. Your body is tricked. Maybe getting really close to the car would be a kind of forced intimacy. You would feel better disposed to the car whether you liked it or not, simply by virtue of almost hugging it.
Okay, that’s car showrooms. What about parties for teenagers? We made up a Spin the Bottle type game. Oh, and gave it a pirate theme.
The scenario is this: Everyone who comes to your house party gets a token that looks like a gold coin with an RFID tag in it (holding a unique ID). People at the party take turn with the RFID reader. They have to wear a pirate hat, and the reader looks like a buccaneer’s sword. Let’s say you have the sword. You press a button on the handle, and it chooses a random RFID tag. This is the tag you have to find, by going round to everyone at the party and sweeping them with the sword.
Now let’s say you’re a person with a coin. If you’re not too keen on the person wearing the pirate hat, you’d put the coin in your pocket, or under your collar, so it could be found quickly. But maybe if you fancy the person with the hat, you’d conceal the coin a little, to make it harder to find. Gosh. I think it could get a little bit sexy.
I like this game because it celebrates the invisibility of the RFID tags, the fact they have a short detection range, and that the range can be shortened with material. It’s a treasure hunt game, but it doesn’t matter whether you have the chosen coin or not–it can be flirty in any case. It supports social interactions (ahem) rather than displacing them.
We had other ludicrous game ideas: Croquet where the hoops had tags and the balls had readers, where the balls would speak what you had to do next. “You have taken 4 hits. Now get through hoop 2,” your ball would say. You wouldn’t need the rule book. We also considered playing penny football with RFID tags, the readers snapping onto the edges of the tables and recording the number of goals. They could show the score on LCD screens, and play cheering sounds whenever a goal was scored.
Both of these games feel as silly to me as Slapz, the electronic game that replaces the children’s game Red Hands (or “slaps”).
The forced intimacy treasure game feels just as silly, but much more fun.
My favourite television ad at the moment is the Coca Cola one where the chap pushes his money into the vending machine and it triggers a sequence of magical adventures in a fantasy world, culminating in the fireworks-accompanied delivery of a cold bottle of Coke.
I like to think that all vending machines look like this inside. It’s a great way to make special the purchasing act.
Aside from product-specific events, like drinking for Coke, almost all our interactions with products are punctuated with moments like this: encountering, selecting, purchasing, showing off, selling. There are more. Each moment is an experience that good product design and advertising can make special, and use as a hook for brand communication. Each is a threshold at which, while the mere physical reality of the world doesn’t change, we’re taken us from one life to another–perhaps from being content with our lot to feeling covetous, or from not owning something to having it. These thresholds may appear small but they carry tremendous weight and meaning for us, are important in our individual and social lives, and are opportunities for design.
Some companies understand this very well. Apple make products that are legendarily pleasurable to unbox. The laptops have a charged battery from the get-go; the iPod box opens to reveal the device like a pearl. Unboxing is a weblog celebrating precisely this experience. Tiffanyuse high quality packaging to protect the jewels–but also because the glamour of passing over this ownership threshold reflects back on the glamour of the jewellery. (Tiffany have also clothed models in the packaging paper, which builds up the glamourous associations.) As a very different kind of business, Amazon understands that it’s not just about selling books. It’s about being present for customer for the duration of the life-cycle of the book, during browsing, discovering, learning about, wanting, purchasing, reviewing and finally selling on to someone else.
I think that discerning consumers – and we’re all more discerning now – delight in products when these acts are delightful, not because a product is like a cool big brother to us, or has a particular lifestyle we want to associate with.
