Blog (page 54)

Update (Monday 9 July): We’ve had some incredible people get in touch, thanks all! We’re now speaking with a couple of potential interns… more of that later. We’re also still nosing about for Windows developers. Get in touch if you fancy a project.

From the silence, you might have guessed we’re busy. So in the name of making more time to look after this here blog, we’re hunting for someone to work with us for the next two months on a couple of projects–one physical product prototype for the BBC, and one that’s our own R&D.

Doing what? We need another pair of hands on the electronics. That means breadboards, soldering and understanding vague datasheets. It also means experience coding PIC microcontrollers or Arduino boards. It may well include PCBs; we’ll see.

We’re a start-up so we can’t promise swanky office or a chair that sighs when you sit in it. But we’re also small, so there’s a lot of influence and broad experience to be had.

This is a suitable summer intership for an interaction design or electronics undergraduate based in London, over July and August, possibly a bit of September. We generally prefer to work with friends of friends, but y’know, we’re open.

If you’re interested and available, drop me a line at matt at schulze and webb dot com with what you’ve been up to and what you can do, and we’ll take it from there.

On that note:

More speculatively, we’re also after a Windows software programmer who knows their way round USB (not drivers, just chatting to peripherals), GUI, plug-in architecture and installers, for a small project. Mac too actually.

I’m willing to look at contracting companies for this project (which I estimate at two months) but – again – would prefer a friend of a friend out of university, looking for a project to start on. The project’s not complex but the code should be tight, if you know what I mean.

Drop me a line at the same address as above, and we can figure something out.

Pass it on!

Thanks.

Shockingly, we’ve not posted in two months. We’ve evidently been taking on too much work.

Before we get back on the wagon, another pointer for visitors here because they came to a conference presentation: I gave the closing keynote at reboot this year, and put forward an approach to product design that takes its lead from experiences and stories. There’s a look back at social software, adaptive design and engaging technology as some of my key influences too.

The slides and talk notes are online: Products Are People Too.

(I also gave the XTech 2007 closing keynote a few weeks back. Do these conference organisers know something I don’t?)

Just a quick pointer for visitors who were at my Emerging Tech Conference keynote: The slides and talk notes are now online, From Pixels to Plastic.

(For those visitors who weren’t there, here’s a photograph.)

Jack and I were in Helsinki last week and he was educating me on comics. I’ve finally read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, in which McCloud presents the Picture Plane, a triangle with pictures on the left, text on the right, realism at the base and iconic at the apex:

We were debating whether it was totalising or not and so to demonstrate an alternative scheme, we used comics at the centre of a Greimas semantic rectangle. Aside: I didn’t know before, but Greimas was a Lithuanian semiotician. I don’t know if you’ve ever handled Lithuanian currency, but the coins are aluminium and disconcertingly light, like plastic. Holding them is a peculiar experience, as it highlights how much we – well, I – associate weight with worth. Recommended.

Here is a semantic rectangle, from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars:

The idea is that you start with the inner rectangle and fill in the S first. Robinson’s example is ‘allowed: marriage.’ Then you fill in the opposite, which Robinson gave as ‘not allowed: female adultery.’ The contrary – the stronger negative – is next, and that’s ‘forbidden: incest.’ The bottom left is the hardest, generally. Robinson picks ‘neither forbidden nor not allowed: male adultery.’

The trick is that all the four have to go together like cogs, so if you can’t fill in the bottom left then you’ve probably got one or two of the others wrong.

Then you make combinations of each pair of corners, and create the outer rectangle.

I like to start with the four points of that main rectangle, do the combinations, and then work inwards one step (to find the underlying concepts), then work outwards again, to see what we reach. So that’s what we did. Comics are at the top-right of the third rectangle in (and, below the image, translated out of handwriting):

It’s a bit hard to read.

• Comics, literature, cinema and shouting are on the main rectangle.
• These are underpinned by a regular 2-by-2: words vs pictures, crossed with read-by-approach vs endure/accosted-by.
• The first level of combining yields: Russian iconography; Powerpoint; adverts; graffiti.
• Recombining yields: Signage; clipart; 2-second understanding; public space.

A sample route is that comics (which are pictures that are read by approaching) combine with literature to make Russian iconography, which itself combines with Powerpoint to make clipart.

I don’t know what it means!

Our Yahoo! talk from this January (also hosted by Adaptive Path for an evening performance) is now online, with slides and notes.

Read The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, jokes about nuns and all.

(Apologies for the silence here recently. On top of the SF trip, we’ve being working in Helsinki, had a couple of consultancy and user experience gigs on, and it was time for accounts. That’s all done now though… finishing off a RFID research and prototyping project is next.)

We’re making our trip to San Francisco in a few days, and speaking at Yahoo! at the end of next week. But if you’d like to catch a public variation of that same presentation, the evening rather than the matinée version if you will, read on…

Adaptive Path are generously hosting us on the evening of Tuesday 30 January for a talk about:

How a new generation wants social, creative, networked products, and how design can help not by identifying tasks to be productively performed, but experiences to be deepened and made fun. All told through some of our favourite things, and a series of increasingly tenuous references to The Sound of Music.

The talk is called The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design and, if you’re coming, you should sign up at the upcoming.org event page. See you there!

I’ve just finished Cities by John Reader, on the history of cities, and it’s chock full of information and great stories.

This story, on Japanese manufacture, is lengthy but so good I have to quote it in full:

Bicycles were extremely popular in Japanese cities at the end of the nineteenth century, when the import of goods that Japanese manufactures could not compete with on price — or could not make at all — was damaging the national economy. Clearly, if bicycles could be made in Japan, both the massive demand for an individual means of transport and the national economy would be server at the same time. As Jane Jacobs points out in her book The Economy of Cities, Japan could have responded to this challenge by inviting foreign manufacturers to establish plants in the country — though this would have brought little profit to the Japanese themselves. Or they could have built a factory of their own — which would have required large investments in specialised machinery and the training of a skilled labour force. The Japanese followed neither of these options. Instead they exploited an indigenous talent for ‘economic borrowing’ — or imitation, as non-specialists would call it. It worked like this:

Not long after the importation of bicycles had begun, large numbers of one- and two-man repair shops sprang up in the cities. Since imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles too valuable to cannabalise, many repair shops found it worthwhile to make replacement parts themselves — not difficult if each of the shops specialised in making only one or two specific parts, as many did. In this way, groups of bicycle repair shops were in effect manufacturing entire bicycles before long, and it required only an enterprising individual to begin buying parts on contract from the repairmen for Japan to have the beginnings of a home-grown bicycle manufacturing industry.

So, far from being costly to develop, bicycle manufacturing in Japan paid for itself at every stage of its development. And the Japanese got much more than a bicycle industry from the exercise. They had also acquired a model for many of their other industrial achievements: imitation and a system of reducing complex manufacturing work to a number of relatively simple operations which could be done in small autonomous workshops. The pattern was applied to the production of many other goods, and underwrote the soaring economic success of Japan during the twentieth century. Sony began life at the end of the Second World War as a small shop making tubes on contract for radio assemblers. The first Nikon cameras were exact copies of the Zeiss Contax; Canon copied the Leica; Toyota Landcruisers were powered by copies of the Chrysler straight-six engine.

Here are the reasons this is great:

• It’s distributed manufacture, a network of independent units operating as a single factory, but in a more agile way.
• It reminds us that the idea of interchangeable parts is relatively new–and was a world-changer. It parallelised and distributed manufacture. Are we at the level of interchangeable parts in software yet? Despite common protocols like HTTP, I don’t think so, not quite.
• It points to an alternative to the mass manufacture and assembly line of Fordism. The parts can be accessed separately from the assembly, we can build our own neighbourhood factories for custom goods! Mass manufacture doesn’t imply treating workers like interchangeable parts too! What’s more, it bootstraps off mass manufacture and makes something different out of it.

The most exciting reason?

This pattern is happening, right now, in India with mobile phones. 100s of small shops repair and rebuild phones with generic components and reverse-engineered schematics, supported by a developed training and tool-production infrastructure.

How long before we’re seeing cheap-as-chips kit phones, assembled by entrepreneurs harvesting the market stands of Delhi?

Yes, it’s really happening this time. S&W will be speaking at Yahoo! in the TechDev Speaker Series on Friday 2 February. That means talking about the future of products, media, web apps, and what-not with some brilliant people… and hanging out in California too.

We’ll be in town for a week! Jack and I are in San Francisco from 24 January, available for meetings from Thursday 25 January through Wednesday 31.

Fancy meeting up?

Here’s what I said before:

I’m happy to do re-runs of previous presentations, or discuss previous work (read our work page for both), and Jack has a good line in maps and graphics that isn’t online yet.

We’re especially curious to speak with folks in product and interaction design, toy companies, physical computing, and R&D in consumer technology hardware and software. Oh, internet/mobile companies too who have interesting social, interaction or interface challenges–but you knew we’d be up for that (read more about our specialities).

So if you’d like to meet up to share ideas, or explore how we could work together in user experience, creative development, or near-term product R&D, please do get in touch.

(Isn’t that a great image? It’s from the NASA Earth Observatory, found via an extremely apt comparison of San Francisco and Sim City.)

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.

vod:pod is the newest video sharing and aggregator site on the block, and it has a few twists. Three of them:

First, the primary focus is a video collection (a pod) rather than a single one. Collecting can be done by individuals or together. So, for example, here are 4 people collecting indie music. You can scrub over the videos for a rank and rating preview before watching, and the sparkline at the top right gives you an idea of the popularity of the pod.

Second, VodPod lets you upload videos but doesn’t ask for an exclusive relationship. It reaches out into the Web–you can include videos from YouTube, Google Video, and so on in your pod, and keep all of them collected alongside your own ones. These highlighted pods all mix-and-match from different service.

Last is something Mark Hall just told me about: Each video has a low-threshold response widget next to it, so you can say quickly that you loved, just watched, or laughed at what you saw. If you add your Twitter details in your vod:pod profile, that response will also be announced to your Twitter buddies. Simple, social and (importantly) deliberate every time.

There’s a lot more to come – really big features – but I’ll leave it there.

vod:pod is the first service I’ve watched all the way from early concept through to launch. S&W did some very early product ideation and experience work – on how people find videos to watch online, as Mark discusses – and I’ve been following progress since. While the shape of the solution has changed considerably, the core values have been maintained: Organising, socialising, and being part of the Web.

I find that promising, and so vod:pod‘s what we use to host videos for this blog.