Blog (page 40)

A while back, in 2007, I wrote about ‘a lost future’ of touch technology, and the rise of a world full of mobile glowing attention-wells.

“…it’s likely that we’re locked into pursuing very conscious, very gorgeous, deliberate touch interfaces – touch-as-manipulate-objects-on-screen rather than touch-as-manipulate-objects-in-the-world for now.”

It does look very much like we’re living in that world now – where our focus is elsewhere than our immediate surroundings – mainly residing through our fingers, in our tiny, beautiful screens.

Andrew Blum writes about this, amongst other things, in his excellent piece “Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change”:

Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global.

Recently, of course, our glowing attention wells have become larger.

We’ve been designing, developing, using and living with iPads in the studio for a while now, and undoubtedly they are fine products despite their drawbacks – but it wasn’t until our friend Tom Coates introduced me to a game called Marble Mixer that I thought they were anything other than the inevitable scaling of an internet-connected screen, and the much-mooted emergence of a tablet form-factor.

It led me to think they might be much more disruptive as magic tables than magic windows.

Marble Mixer is a simple game, well-executed. Where it sings is when you invite friends to play with you.

Each of you occupy a corner of the device, and attempts to flick marbles into the goal-mouth against the clock – dislodging the other’s marbles.

Beautiful. Simple. But also – amazing and transformative!

We’re all playing with a magic surface!

When we’re not concentrating on our marbles, we’re looking each other in the eye – chuckling, tutting and cursing our aim – and each other.

There’s no screen between us, there’s a magic table making us laugh. It’s probably my favourite app to show off the iPad – including the ones we’ve designed!

It shows that the iPad can be a media surface to share, rather than a proscenium to consume through alone.

Russell Davies pointed this out back in February (before we’d even touched one) saying:

[GoGos]’d be the perfect counters for a board game that uses the iPad as the board. They’d look gorgeous sitting on there. We’d need to work out how to make the iPad think they were fingers – maybe some sort of electrostatic sausage skin – and to remember which was which.

Inspired by Marble Mixer, and Russell’s writings – I decided to do a spot of rapid prototyping of a ‘peripheral’ for magic table games that calls out the shared-surface…

It’s a screen – but not a glowing one! Just a simple bit of foamboard cut so it obscures your fellow player’s share of the game board, for games like Battleships, or in this case – a mocked-up guessing-game based on your flickr contacts…

You’d have a few guesses to narrow it down… Are they male, do they have a beard etc…

Fun for all the family!

Anyway – as you can see – this is not so serious a prototype, but I can imagine some form of capactive treatment to the bottom edge of the screen, perhaps varying the amount of secret territory each player revealed to each other, or capacitive counters as Russell suggests.

Aside from games though – the pattern of a portable shared media surface is surely worth pursuing.

As Paul Dourish put it in his book “Where the action is” – the goal would be

“interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.”

Designing media and services for “little-ass” rather than “big-ass” magic tables might propel us into a future not so removed from the one I thought we might have lost…

We’ve just rolled out a new version of Schooloscope. The June releases contains both minor fixes and major new functionality. You can find more about what’s new for June over at the Schooloscope blog.

…wrangling photons as only he can.

This photo he took of Schulze is looking out the studio window down Scrutton St.

The strange, stormy light, the jumbled-geometry of our neighbourhood and the lens combine.

Lovely – and reminds me somehow of an old BERG favourite – David Hockney on perspective and perception…

It’s a hot afternoon in the studio, and the weekend is just around the corner; time to wrap up the week with a selection of links from around the studio.

So good it appeared on the studio mailing list twice: a printer made out of Lego and a felt pen. Jack really liked the little workmen all over it: working hard to make your document.

From the Information Aesthetics blog comes news of Bing’s Destination Maps. Automatic rendering of sketchy, vague maps – almost pirate maps – based on an address and an area to focus on. The end results are entertaiing, but also surprisingly useful: reducing the complexity of traditional digital maps down to the level most people require.

Some lovely graphic design linked over on Monoscope: these beautiful covers of Pan Am City Guides, designed by George Tscherny in the 1970s.

From the esoteric But Does It Float, a series of beautiful old Scientific American covers.

Via Phil Gyford comes Johnson Banks’ Phonetikana: a typeface that adds pronunciation guidelines into the strokes of katakana, helping make the phonetic script more approachable to foreigners.

And finally, with the World Cup soon upon us, something football related. James Governor sent us a link to these lovely shirts for the Dutch football supporters organisation. The picture explains everything; delightful.

And that’s a wrap. Matt J’s got S Express on the stereo, which it’s probably time to head out into the glorious evening outside and get the weekend started. Have a good one!

Project update time.

Client work. Trumbull (a little project with the BBC) is heading towards prototype. The production tools on the back-end of Mag+ are about to have a significant improvement, and the app is soon to have its next feature release — after a particularly tough development cycle. Schooloscope is a week or so away from its next feature release.

Internal work. Availabot is physically and electronically coming together. My mind is turning to software and to fulfilment. Weminuche has slowed due to sourcing delays. It needs to get to end-to-end demo before we proceed.

Opportunities. We had to turn one big possibility down. But July is pretty clear for us concentrate on a particular other (I’m sketching system diagrams to prep). My mind is on what client work we have in for August — we’re at only about one half capacity for that month so far.

I’m enjoying my personal less hectic pace. On my desk at the moment I have the old El Morro project proposal, written overnight on January 28th, and I realise that basically, since that evening, I’ve barely seen friends and colleagues, barely replied to email, and not had time to sit and consider at all. Time to re-connect with the community, and to do a bit of thinking.

I’ve been invited to speak on a product-design panel with the theme of “Display”, alongside Martin Blum of Black-Blum, Miles Hawley + Diane Fox-Hill of 1HQ
and Matthew Cockerill of SeymourPowell.

The talk is at the Liverpool School of Art, 5.30pm-7pm on June 2nd, and it’s free. You can book tickets here – hope to see you there!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a weeknote. It’s been busy!

Mag+ continues. The first iPad app on the platform, Popular Science+, got a cracking write-up on the Apple website: The magazine of tomorrow.

Nick and Lei are working on the next version of the app, and on scaling up. James is working on the authoring tools, aided by Loz and Simon who are making it easier for first-time users and laying the foundations for better InDesign integration. Campbell is our production expert, both helping James and answering queries from a few different magazine production teams. Together with Jack and Matt J, he’s also designing features for the version after next.

Schooloscope moves towards its second feature release! Tom’s working on that, while Matt B works on designs for the planned third release. Kari is replying to queries and feedback. Ben is helping us with data. (Here’s the Guardian’s write-up of Schooloscope.)

Both Mag+ and Schooloscope are now in operations. Ops is pretty new to us, and the continuous involvement it requires doesn’t play well with the clear open space you need for free inventive work. We’re using Tender for a helpdesk, and Codebase to track bugs and allocate features to releases.

The Michel Thomas iPhone app press releases will go out this week (get the behind-the-scenes tour). Matt B and Nick have done great work.

Trumbull is working towards demo: that’s Matt B, Paul and Matt J.

Jack and Matt J were in Amsterdam last week with Layar.

Andy continues working towards end-to-end demo for Weminuche. He’ll rope Tom in this week. Jack continues working with electrical engineers on Availabot. A previously unnoticed requirement about USB power draw led to a small design change, which led to a bigger opportunity to simplify the bill of materials, which had an impact on the industrial design. It’s utterly fascinating how all the different bits link together.

The last few months have been so busy. I completely underestimated the real impact of “Scenario 4.” (In short: it was that everyone’s been too busy to even think.)

But the nice situation now is that, with our capacity slowly coming back over the next month or two, we have the chance to speak with prospective new clients in a considered and practical way. So: lots of having coffee with people. Good good.

Project Kendrick is in the world! As Matt Webb mentioned before, it’s a new iPhone app for language learning we produced with our friends at Hodder Education, and is the latest addition to a best-selling range of language learning products called the Michel Thomas Method.

Michel Thomas was a celebrity linguist with an amazing life story. Escaping from concentration camps during the Second World War; tortured by the Gestapo; teacher of celebrities such as Doris Day, Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand — it even says his “last known identity” was that of Michel Thomas. Awesome. What a brief to work with. I’ll come back to him in a sec. Here’s a little clip of the finished app in action:

The mighty Nick Ludlam and I brewed it up together, with direction, input and advice from the rest of the BERG crew. And I’d like to tell you a little about the behind-the-scenes stuff — the craft of making and thinking — that went into it.

Kick-off

Nick and I began the main building work late last year. As you can imagine, we had a brilliant brief to work with. Schulze, Webb and Jones presented us with a huge swathe of thinking. The big-picture strategic vision; the sites, situations and contexts these apps could find themselves in (“can we make this as useful for 30 seconds on the bus as it would be for 30 minutes of concentrated listening at home?”); even little napkin sketches of UI details. All gourmet brainfood. Now all we had to do was get it into the world.

The Learning Room: beautiful, ambient, immersive

One of the first things that struck us (and probably you, if you’ve ever tried one of the CD box sets) was Michel Thomas’ voice. It’s utterly captivating, and can feel quite hypnotic at times. Have a listen again, without the visuals:

Immediately, we all agreed that whatever user interface we came up with would have to complement — even celebrate — this listening and learning experience without getting in the way. The idea of a ‘Learning Room’ quickly emerged — somewhere ambient, immersive, and hypnotic, where you could concentrate for substantial lengths of time without getting bored or distracted. And of course it would have to be a pleasure to use. Matt Jones came up with a cracker of a challenge by asking us to “Make The Best Pause Button In The World.” Brilliant.

Here, I was doing some drawing while listening to Michel Thomas’ voice for the very first time. Looking back, this one pretty much laid the foundations for the next few months’ work.

Look at the notes. KITT from Knight Rider immediately came to mind. A talking play/pause button. Products as People, I guess. And it’s interesting that those little geometric doodles started to happen straight away as well. I imagine there’s a really primal link between hearing sound and seeing patterns, and this was probably something I hoped we would touch on later.

Immediately after the first drawing, I put together a little animated sketch of how the Best Pause Button In The World might work.

The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.

Then we tried this. A kind of pastoral landscape with a floating, talking pause button. And speech bubbles. Too much.

And then an idea about using generated bokeh effects and imperceptible zoom effect that never reaches a climax. Too strange.

Here, we were exploring how to use animation and interactivity in a small portion of the screen (to save precious processing power), and make it seem to be operating in a bigger space than it actually was.

Originally, we wanted to use a pond-like rippling effect (that one below on the left), but it turns out drawing transparent, overlapping filled circles, as well as streaming audio and animating the pause button, took too much juice. The little blue flower at bottom right was the first step toward the final design.

Here we developed the little blue flower, adding texture and depth to give it a bit of tactility.

And here’s how you draw a procedural petal.

The pause state was really important to get right too. Here you can see us getting a bit too Bang & Olufsen before dialling it back to something more approachable, shiny and Apple-y.

And of course this is where we ended up:

Materials and tuning

Every so often we’d catch ourselves talking solemnly and straight-faced about some detail involved in building the Learning Room. Then we’d take a step back. “Dude. It’s a talking flower. How the hell did we end up here?” Looking back, there’s no real process or rationale I could outline. It’s a product of many things — our personalities, references to things we like; doodling; tinkering; sketching; prototyping and so on. But, overall, it was born from the material itself.

How much CPU did we have left after streaming audio and making the pause button animate in response to Michel Thomas voice? Not much, it turns out. We spent a lunch hour thinking and drawing, came up with thirty-odd ideas, tried a few of them out, and the flower ended up sticking around, for a few reasons: Nick could draw it procedurally in code; animate it efficiently at a decent frame rate; the symmetrical, primal pattern looked striking; the visuals adapt to different languages; the flower scales down to icon size nicely, and most of all, using it feels completely unique, yet strangely appropriate. Our friends from Hodder were closely involved right the way through, and ultimately, it was their faith in this design-led approach that allowed us to get these ideas into the world and into your hand.

Overall, I’d say the whole UI — from the Learning Room, to the Store, to the Flashcards — went through five or six complete iterations before we settled on something that felt simple and smooth enough for a release. Then, we tuned, tuned and tuned. Matt Jones has talked about Disney’s idea of plussing before, and again I don’t think it’s possible to describe it as a discrete thing. It just seems to happen when you really get a feel for the material (or rather immaterial) you’re working with. You develop a laser-like focus on ‘rightness’, and devote yourself to getting rid of anything that doesn’t make the experience as delightful as possible.

It’s been a brilliant product to work on, and hopefully it’ll help more people discover the strange, hypnotic magic of the Michel Thomas Method. Why not give it a try? – we’d love to know what you think of it.

When the Michel Thomas Method language course CDs arrived at the studio, we played them on the stereo immediately. But the post was late so it arrived only the day before we were due to speak with the publishers. We tore up all our ideas and started again.

Michel Thomas teaches with no homework and no repetition. Listening to him, it’s a little like being in a classroom with other students and a little like being hypnotised.

You don’t learn, you flow.

As a design studio, we knew we had to carry the same experience onto the phone, using just the regular audio and a decent respect for the philosophy.

We designed and produced the brand new iPhone app. Check it out in the App Store: Learn a Language with Michel Thomas.

You can learn French, Spanish, Italian and German. It’s free to get the app (you get a preview of each language), and then you buy hour-by-hour as you improve.

In the flesh, the screen on the right is animated. It draws you in as you listen to the voice.

Do a pulsating pause button and tactile flower petals have a place in an audio language course app? Yes. (You have to hear Michel to understand why. I’m not kidding.)

Because mobile phones are, well, mobile, you might want to keep that learning flow going while you’re on the bus. So there’s a flashcard game. You can play one of dozens of preset decks, or make your own from favourite phrases.

This one is from the Spanish course.

There’s also the shop. I like that the “pay as you learn” store is in the exact same place as where you thumb through the course contents. I think we went through 4 iterations until it felt this smooth.

Product invention?

Between this, Popular Science+, and Schooloscope, you can see a little of our philosophy about product invention.

Work in the popular market, and be inventive, beautiful.

Respect the materials. I believe with Michel Thomas we’ve taken what’s best about the experience and made a hybrid with what’s best about the iPhone. We’re best when we partner with people who are just working out what they want to do, and we can discover together.

But what I’m proudest about is that this is a design-led product in a commercial marketplace. This isn’t just for Michel Thomas fans (though there are many). By bringing the feeling of Michel to the iPhone, his courses can find a whole new audience, and a whole load more fans.

Michel Thomas is available for your iPhone and iPod Touch now, at the App Store: Learn a Language with Michel Thomas.

See the official site for more pics and videos.

Congratulations to the team, Matt Brown, Nick Ludlam, and Matt Jones! Thanks also to Guy Moorhouse for the microsite. And, especially, thanks to Vivian and Helen and the whole Hodder team. It has been a pleasure.

It’s taken me a while to get the notes cleaned-up and post this, a talk from January this year that I gave over in Sierre, Switzerland at their TechnoArk event. Thanks very much to Nicholas Nova and Laurent Haug of LiftLabs for their kind invitation.

I’ve been keen to post it as it’s a pile of ‘beginnings’, rather than a self-contained thought.

It’s a bunch of thinking about how designers (and BERG in particular) might start thinking through making products for ‘smart cities’ (as they’re known for good and for ill) including the qualities that these products should possess in order for them to be invited into people’s homes – something we’ve started calling ‘mujicomp’ as shorthand in the studio.

Also it talks a little bit about how the aggregation and combination of smart, connected products could build into bottom-up infrastructures rather than giant top-down municipal approaches to augmenting cities with technology.

It draws on themes from my ‘Demon-Haunted World’ talk at Webstock, from 2009, but also it entangles some thinking from the MSR Social Computing Summit I attended back in January.

Specifically, looking at doorways and thresholds as rich places to investigate with products and services – something which at the summit we called with-tongue-firmly-in-cheek ‘Porch-Computing’…

People Are Walking Architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp, January 2010