Blog (page 50)

I’m excited to be opening the final day of UX Week 2009 with an exploration of what we can learn from the Web about smart products.

Smart products bring their own design challenges. Internet-connected devices and plastic filled with electronics behave in unexpected ways: what does it means for a physical thing to side-load its behaviour, or for a toy to have its own presence in your social network? What we’ve learned about user experience on the Web is a great place to start: social software, adaptation, designing for action creating action — these are principles familiar on the Web, and still valuable when design is not on the screen but in your hands.

We’ve learned a lot in the recent couple years about designing when there are a lot of moving parts: software, plastic, mechanics, embedded electronics, multiple teams and languages, standards, component costs, fulfilment… it’s a lot to put together and still retain a focus on user experience, and user adaptation. There’s no single project where we’ve got it all right — but there are a load of lessons, and I want to share some of them.

The talk is called Design is in your hands.

I’m in town 17—20 September, so if you’re at UX Week or in San Francisco the day after, let’s hang out.

Matt J’s two design strategy projects of last week continue. One is at illustration and document design stage, and the other is feeding into a bigger process through docs and meetings. Tom A continues work on the new website, and we’ll be having some friends of the company over for drinks on 19 August to help us launch. Jack Schulze is working on our new stationery and typography, and on moving us into a new studio with friends.

Schulze also has a new prototype in hand from the model maker we work with — the feasibility test has come back well. The project is codenamed Ojito. We name a bunch of our projects with place names from the Colorado Plateau. Jack leads new product development and prototyping internally and for clients. His main client project, a toy car for AHO, wasn’t supposed to be a priority last week, but Andy H was able to come in and work on the electrical engineering so there was more progress than we expected. We’re hoping there will be more of that this week.

My week is costings, admin and closing projects. Matt J and Schulze have each put out proposals this week, and I’ve helped with costings for both. I’m working on a financial model and some user scenarios with Jack; a visual/interaction design project in Germany and an education project in London, both at contract stage and requiring a little shepherding towards signing; and an iPhone project we need to get to a letter of intent this week to keep timings sweet. I was hoping to gather material for the preparation of our year end accounts, but it looks like that’ll have to wait until next week… because instead I’ll be putting together a contract:

Tom Armitage has been working with us four days a week for the last six months, primarily on Shownar. This week is his first week full time. He’s been doing ace work as lead developer and a kind of embedded journalist/design researcher, and I’m super pleased to make this permanent.

I thought it’d be interesting to start giving a weekly update here of what we’re up to in the company.

We have weekly design crits inside, on Tuesday mornings, where we all talk about our plans for the week and crit a single project, so in the future look for these updates just after those meetings.

Let’s see… Matt Jones is leading on two big design strategy projects on at the moment, both oriented around workshops. The shorter is more about concepting, and the workshops are complete so it’s about writing up products, the ideas behind them, and illustrating. The longer is just starting and more focused on facilitating and synthesising.

Tom Armitage is leading on building out our new website. The old one hasn’t been updated in, oh, four years or so. Look for that in the next couple weeks.

Otherwise we’re focusing on business development. There are two projects we’re hoping to move to first draft contract this week or early next, and Jack is in Amsterdam for a few days developing a proposal for a third. His travelling means two other projects (ongoing new product development and a prototyping gig) aren’t burning super bright this week. And of course the usual following up leads.

It’s an exciting summer, doubling in size, new studio soon, lots of work and project, lots of stories to tell… but more of that in weeks to come.

Oh, the week 217 thing: Schulze & Webb Ltd isn’t the original name of the company. Jack and I renamed an off-the-shelf company we bought — that’s often the easiest way to start up in the UK. So for a while the company was called Z.V.B. Ltd. “What does that stand for, Zero Version Behaviour?” said Jack’s dad. And that particular company was formed 1 June 2005. I like that it pre-dates us, if only by a few weeks.

When I wrote about Text In The World over on my personal blog a few weeks ago, our colleague Matt Jones left a comment:

“preparing us for AR” (augmented reality)

And this got me thinking about the ways that design and media can educate us about what future technologies might be like, or prepare us for large paradigm shifts. What sort of products really are “preparing” us for Augmented Reality?

A lot of consumer-facing the output of Augmented Reality at the moment tends to focus on combining webcams with specifically marked objects; Julian Oliver’s levelHead is one of the best-known examples:

But when AR really hits, it’s going to be because the technology it’s presented through has become much more advanced; it won’t just be webcams and monitors, but embedded in smart displays, or glasses, or even the smart contact lenses of Warren Ellis’ Clatter.

So whilst it’s interesting to play with the version of the technology we have today, there’s a lot of value to be gained from imagining what the design of fully-working AR systems might look like, unfettered by current day technological constraints. And we can do that really well in things like videos, toys, and games.

Here’s a lovely video from friend and colleague of Schulze & Webb, Timo Arnall:

Timo’s video imagines using an AR map in an urban environment. I particularly like how he emphasises that there are few limitations on scale when it comes to projecting AR – and the most convenient size for certain applications might be “as big as you can make it”. Hence projecting the map across the entire pavement.

Here’s another nice example: the Nearest Tube application for the iPhone 3GS:

This is perhaps a more exciting interpretation of what AR could be, and what AR devices might be (not to mention a working, real-world example): the iPhone becomes a magic viewfinder on the world, a Subtle Knife that can cut through dimensions to show us the information layer sitting on top of the world. It helps that it’s both useful and pretty, too.

Games are a great way of getting ready for the interfaces technologies like AR afford. Here’s a clip I put together from EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space, illustrating the game UI:

Dead Space has no game HUD; rather, the HUD is projected into the environment of the game as a manifestation of the UI of the hero’s protective suit. It means the environment can be designed as a realistic, functional spaceship, and then all the elements necessary for a game – readouts, inventories, not to mention guidelines as to what doors are locked or unlocked – can be manifested as overlay. It’s a striking way to place all the game’s UI into the world, but it’s also a great interpretation of what futuristic, AR user interfaces might be a bit like.

Finally, a toy that never fails to make me smile – the Tuttuki Bako:

This is Matt Jones playing with a Tuttuki Bako in our studio. You place your finger into the hole in the box, and then use it to control a digital version of your finger on screen in a variety of games. It’s somewhat uncanny to watch, but serves as a great example of a somewhat different approach to augmented realities – the idea that our bodies could act as digital prosthetics.

All these examples show different ways of exploring an impending, future technology. Whilst much of the existing, tangible work in the AR space is incremental, building upon available technology, it’s likely that the real advances in it will be from technology we cannot yet conceive. Given that, it makes sense to also consider concepting from a purely hypothetical design perspective – trying things out unfettered by technological limitations. The technology will, after all, one day catch up.

What’s exciting is that this concept and design work is not always to be found in the work of design studios or technologists; it also appears in software, toys, and games that are readily consumable. In their own way, they are perhaps doing a better job of educating the wider world about AR (or other new technologies) than innumerable tech demos with white boxes.

Next week is Develop in Brighton, the UK’s premiere games industry conference, and I’m going to representing Schulze & Webb in two sessions there.

The first session is part of “Evolve“, a single day before the conference proper combining their old online and mobile tracks into something more focused on the edges of the games industry – so now including social and casual gaming as well.

With a panel of industry experts, I’ll be asking the question “What Do Social Networking Sites Have To Offer The Games Industry“:

Facebook and Myspace each have over 100m unique users. The users of these sites are not only coordinating their leisure time through them, but spending their leisure time on them, and even playing games on them. What does that mean for the games industry? How can traditional games and game companies engage with the social networks – their users, their platforms, and the core gamers already using them? Are Facebookers casual-gamers-in-waiting? This panel invites representatives from top social networks to explain what gaming means for their products, and how they can support your efforts as games developers.

Hopefully, given the panel’s strengths and expertise, we can come up with some wide-ranging – and interesting – answers.

In addition to that, as part of the conference proper, I’m going to be talking about Games As A Service: what service design is, what it means for games and products of the future, and how some of the territory Schulze & Webb has been exploring when it comes to unproduct might apply to games. It’s called Beyond The Box: Games As A Service:

The effort and finances needed to build full retail games is growing unsustainable. But what if you weren’t making a product? What would Games As A Service look like? Services encourage loyalty; they turn products into platforms; they empower users; they play well with others and connect to existing services; and at the large scale, they wrap other products and become super-products. Using examples from inside and outside the games industry – from tiny, open-source Davids to console-licensed Goliaths – Tom Armitage examines already successful notions of service design and explores what it will mean for your games, big or small.

If you’re in Brighton for the conference, do say hello; alternatively, if you stumble across this after the talks, do drop us a line – it’d be great to hear from you.

This is the Bayer Didget:

Didget is a blood sugar monitor that plugs into a Nintendo DS, and interfaces with its own game cartridge. Bayer explain that it ‘converts test results into reward points that children can use to unlock new levels and buy in-game items‘. Cheap, too, at only £30 (plus the cost of a DS, obviously), but what a great idea: turning a serious health issue into both visualized data and fun. And it fits a much more pressing need than Nintendo’s own Vitality Sensor pulse monitor:

Still, other companies are also experimenting with toys and games built out of simple feedback loops driven by peripherals. Uncle Milton Industries have the Force Trainer (with obligatory Star Wars tie-in branding):

which “monitors brainwave activity and allows [the player] to control a small ball that moves through a 10 inch training tower using focus and concentration“. To clarify: you don’t think about moving the ball; the ball moves based on your brainwave patterns, and so the trick is to learn how to control the output of your brain at a very general level. The effect is still close enough to magic, though, for the purposes of entertainment.

Mattel are also getting in on the neurofeedback toys with Mind Flex:

which Engadget explains as requiring ‘players to concentrate really hard in order to power a fan that’ll float a ball through the hoops‘. Perhaps underwhelming as a game or toy, then, but the novelty factor of the neurofeedback loop has got to be worth something. Mattel reckon it’s worth $80.

More fun in the world with your DS: Tecmo’s Treasure World turns every wifi hotspot in the world, locked or otherwise, into a potential source of treasure – and you can hunt for treasure with your DS closed. And, on top of that, there’s a remarkably comprehensive web integration. Brandon Boyer at Offworld has got an ultra-detailed writeup, but if you’re short on time, the trailer video should do:

And finally, some text design from videogames and movies.

A screengrab from the forthcoming Splinter Cell: Conviction, which turns the mission objectives into text overlaying the world for only the player to see. I take a quick historical tour of the idiom of representations of text within 3D space over at infovore.org.

Just a little obvious aside, this – but something that only struck me this morning as I was heading to the studio. I mentioned it to Webb, and he said “write it down” so here we are.

It’s been said that 2009 is the year that e-books go mainstream, with the industrial and service design of Amazon’s Kindle and Stanza on the iPhone doing the same for the format as the iPod and iTunes did for MP3/digital music.

Maybe – but 2009 could be said to be the year that one-handed reading became enjoyable for the first time since we invented the form-factor of the book when the codex arrived about 2000 years ago.

Since then, we’ve made all sorts of gizmos and gadgets to enable one-handed reading.

And machines too!

Look at this handsome fella for digitising entire volumes quickly:

It features SureTurn™ Advanced Page Turning Technology!

I guess that’s no-handed reading, but… anyway…

We’ve invented technologies to deal with the form-factor of the book and change our bodies’ relationship to it, but now we’ve separated the wine from the bottle, we’re free to try different ways of reading.

As I say, it’s stating the bloomin’ obvious, but the freedom to read in short bursts and constrained situations that the UI of Stanza gives is transformative.

Reading on trains, tubes, buses, queues becomes not only possible, but a pleasure.

That’s perhaps the thing I’m trying to get to.

We just did something it took 2000 years to figure out. Amongst all the talk of disrupting business systems, revolutionising access to knowledge etc, ergonomic innovation is being overlooked in the discussion of the e-book future.

What’s next?

Some weeks back, halfway through the development of Shownar, I saw a whole bunch of messages on Twitter about a mix on BBC Radio 1. That was the Jaguar Skills Gaming Weekend mix — it’s no longer on iPlayer, but that turned into an ace afternoon with ace music.

More recently the Reith Lectures have been on Radio 4. Shownar’s finding a load of blog posts about the lectures, really insightful ones. I didn’t realise the lectures were on until they popped up on the site one morning.

This is a website I now check daily…

Shownar

Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months. We’ll learn a lot having it in the public eye, and I hope to see it as a key part of discovery and conversation scattered across BBC Online one day.

Dan Taylor tells the story on the BBC Internet blog, so I won’t say more here except for a few thanks…

Dan calls out our colleagues at the BBC. I’d like to thank especially him and Kat Sommers. Our data partners at Nielsen, Twingly and Yahoo!, as well at the LiveStats team inside the BBC — it’s been a pleasure to work with you. Major kudos to the folks behind the BBC Programmes database and system for creating such a fundamental piece of infrastructure. And to everyone working for and with S&W: Max Ackerman, Jesper Andersen, Nick Ludlam, Jack Schulze, and most especially Tom Armitage, Phil McCarthy and Phil Gyford, great work and well done all! I’m proud to work with all of you.

The idea of using computers to watch and reflect audiences, to find not just what’s popular but what’s surprisingly popular, turns out to be a number-crunchingly heavy task. I hope that Shownar, during this phase of its development, becomes a site people genuinely use daily to join in talking about and with the BBC, and to widen their consumption to previously undiscovered, engaging programmes. There’s a feedback address on the site — please use it! We’re after stories of where it works and where it doesn’t, and some insight into whether this kind of product really does change habits. It has mine.

We go public today: Shownar.

Schulze & Webb worked as part of the team producing a unique service for the world’s biggest furniture and design event: Salone del Mobile in Milan, this year.

The British Council usually maintains a presence there, promoting British design and designers through an exhibition. This year, they had decided they would rather present some kind of service offering rather than a physical exhibition in a single venue.

Daniel Charny, of Fromnowon contacted us early on in the project, when they were moving the traditional thinking of staging an exhibition of to something that was more alive, distributed and connected to the people visiting Salone from Britain whilst also connecting those around the world who couldn’t be there.

From the early brainstorms we came up with idea of a system for collecting the thoughts, recommendations, pirate maps and sketches of the attendees to republish and redistribute the next day in a printed, pocketable pamphlet, which, would build up over the four days of the event to be a unique palimpsest of the place and people’s interactions with it, in it.

Åbäke, a collective of graphic designers who came up with the look and identity of the finished publication, alongside a team from the British Council ventured out to Milan to establish a temporary production studio for The Incidental, while S&W provided remote support from the UK, and the technology to harvest the twitter posts, blog mentions and flickr photos to be included in the edition, overlaid on the map to be produced overnight.

One thing that’s very interesting to us that is using this rapidly-produced thing then becomes a ’social object’: creating conversations, collecting scribbles, instigating adventures – which then get collected and redistributed.

As author/seer Warren Ellis points out, paper is ideal material for this:

“…cheap. Portable. Biodegradable/timebound/already rotting. Suggestion of a v0.9 object. More likely to be on a desk or in a pocket or bag or on a pub table than to be shelved. More likely to be passed around.”

The Incidental is feedback loop made out of paper and human interactions –  timebound, situated and circulating in a place.

Here’s the first edition from the Wednesday of the event:

There’s some initial recommendations from the British Council team and friends, but the underlying abstracted map of Milan remains fairly unmolested.

Compare that to the last edition on Saturday, where the buzz of the event has folded back into the artifact:

The map now becomes something less functional – which it can probably afford, as you the visitor have internalised it – and becomes something more emotional or behavioural: a heat-map-like visualisation of where’s hot and what’s happened.

The buzz about TheIncidental during the event was clear from the twitterfeed, which itself was feeding the production.

We were clearly riffing on the work done by our friends at the RIG with their “Things our friends have written on the internet” and the thoughts of Chris Heathcote, Aaron and others who participated in Papercamp back in January.

Since then there’s been a flurry of paper/map/internet activity, including the release recently of the marvellous Walking-Papers project by Mike Migurski of the mighty Stamen, which we talked about briefly in The New Negroponte Switch.

As well as coverage from more design-oriented blogs such as PSFK and Dezeen, there was also some encouraging commentary from our peers – many of whom saw this as the first post-Papercamp project.

Ben Terrett of the RIG said:

“Over in Milan at the Salone di Mobile they’ve created a thing called The Incidental. It’s like a guide to the event but it’s user generated and a new one is printed every day. When I say user generated, I mean that literally. People grab the current day’s copy and scribble on it. So they annotate the map with their personal notes and recommendations. Each day the team collect the scribbled on ones, scan them in and print an amalgamated version out again. You have to see it, to get it. But it’s great to see someone doing something exciting with ‘almost instant’ printing and for a real event and a real client too.

The actual paper is beautiful and very exciting. It has a fabulous energy that has successfully migrated from the making of the thing to the actual thing. Which is also brilliant and rare.”

To quote the patron saint of S&W again, Warren Ellis said:

“This is a wonderful idea that could be transposed to other events.”

Aaron Straup-Cope of Flickr, and author of many thoughts on what he calls the Papernet said:

“they are both lovely manifestations of Rick Prelinger’s “abundant present” and a well-crafted history box, something that people can linger over and touch and share, for the shape of the event.”

Our neighbours in East London, and brand identity consultants Moving Brands said:

“What a great way to create international conversation and connecting the tangible with the digital.”

Russell Davies said:

“I love the way it gets past digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia. Digital stuff is used for what it’s good for; eradicating time and distance, sharing, all that. Analogue stuff is used for what it can do well; resilience, undestandability, encouraging simple, human contributions. It’s properly ‘post digital’, from a design team and a client who are fluent in the full range of media possibilities. Not just digital, not just print. It integrates media in the same way real people do; knowing what it’s like to send a twitter and knowing what it’s like to scribble a note on a beermat at 3 in the morning.”

All credit to the team who were in Milan. They worked some punishing hours producing the paper each day, partly due to the demanding nature of the event itself and of course the demanding nature of trying something completely new. Huge and hearty congratulations to them for pulling it off.

As we didn’t attend Salone, it was only recently when we got together with the British Council team to discuss what worked and what didn’t that we saw the finished artifacts.

It was fantastic to see and touch them. In that moment, it became obvious that their dual-role was as both service and souvenir.

…is the title of a talk I gave at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome yesterday, primarily about the territory of “the Internet of Things” moving from one of academic and technological investigation to one of commercial design practice, and what that might mean for designers working therein.

It mentions a few of Schulze&Webb’s projects along the way, but really it’s trying to continue a conversation that Matt Webb started in his talks “Products are people too” and “From Pixels to Plastic” about the evolution of product in the era of the web.

It was a short talk, that perhaps asked more questions than it answered, so I fully expect to return to this subject in the near-future here on Pulse Laser or perhaps at future events…

Finally, thanks very much to Leander, Matteo and the Frontiers team for the invitation and hospitality!