Mark Fuller was #54 on Fast Company's most creative people list

WET (Water Entertainment Technologies) is not a typical web design firm. They specialize in fountains and architectural art involving water. Fuller’s first water works was the “Leapfrog” fountain at EPCOT, a particular favorite of my sons when we went to Florida a couple years ago. Formed in 1983, WET Design has done a number of impressive water installations, including the Bellagio (1998), the Olympic Cauldron (2002), and the Dubai Fountain at the Burj (2009).

One of the things Fuller pushes for at WET is an organizational commitment to life-long learning. A full-time curriculum director manages courses in three classrooms. One of those courses teaches how to do improvisation. Although it took a while for the employees to get used to it, the improv course now has a waiting list.

The value improv brings to an organization is that it creates a workforce of listeners. As Fuller describes it in the interview:

You’re in an emotionally naked environment. It’s like we’re all the same. We all can look stupid. And it’s an amazing bonding thing, plus it’s building all these communication skills. You’re sort of in this gray space of uncertainty. Most of us don’t like to be uncertain — you know, most of us like to be thinking what we’re going to say next. You get your mind into a space where you say, “I’m really enjoying that I don’t know what he’s going to ask me next, and I’m going to be open and listening and come back.”

We’ve got graphic designers, illustrators, optical engineers, Ph.D. chemists, special effects people, landscape designers, textile designers. You get all these different disciplines that typically you would never find under one roof — even making a movie — and so you have to constantly be finding these ways to have people connect.

With improv, it is important to have good partners, people who are equally committed to the success of the interaction and the development of the tacit knowledge that makes communication easier.

The most important ingredient you can bring to effective improv is commitment. The adrenaline that comes with putting yourself in a situation where you don’t know what is coming helps sharpen senses, but that fear can also prompt a self-defense instinct to distance one’s self from the experience. If that happens, not only will you leave your partners hanging, but what you say becomes less convincing. The mindset you must take into improv is “Yes, and”—in other words, validate what you just heard and try to contribute something useful to improve the sense in the situation.

It is easy to imagine how these skills can be useful during brainstorming sessions, as well as transactions between different departments in an organization.

The courses are just one part of Fuller’s intentional crafting of a company culture. There is a lot of work posted on walls (to share ownership and invite early feedback), low tolerance for blame, an immersion program (to give people job experience in other parts of the company), and hiring interviews that look closely at hobbies.

Phillips—whose work includes the Institute for Human Continuity (IHC), an extension of the 2012 movie about global cataclysm—talked about things to consider when creating alternate reality games and transmedia campaigns. In her solo talk, “Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction,” she gave examples from The Onion, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, lonelygirl15, Martin Aggett, Zona Incerta, Toyota Matrix, Dell, Shelby Logan, and The Haunted Apiary to illustrate the risks and consequences that come with ultrarealism.

Narrowing her definition of transmedia, Phillips focused on pervasive fiction—stories that use the real world as a platform and make fiction almost indistinguishable from what is really happening in the world. This is the wheelhouse of Improv Everywhere and Andy Kaufman, but organized around marketing campaigns or participatory immersion games.

Andy Kaufman would have played well on the Internet

Phillips’ IHC campaign rubbed NASA the wrong way. After thousand of people called to verify that the world was going to end—including teenagers who preferred to commit suicide than endure the End of Days—the Astrobiology Institute denounced Sony as unethical. “It is easy to be condemned by the Vatican,” she notes, “but it takes a certain special something to be condemned by NASA.”

She also recalls the die-hard gamers from The Beast, an ARG for the movie AI that ended in August 2001. The “Cloudmakers,” which numbered in the thousands, reacted to the 9/11 bombings by considering reuniting to take on actual terrorists, something Phillips doesn’t condone. “This is the thing that has made me uneasy about pervasive fiction ever since,” she says.

Being able to separate fiction from reality is a cognitive milestone most people will hit by the time they are five, says Phillips, but transmedia experiences today can make things difficult. The Landover Baptist Church is fake but plausible. Gene Ray’s Time Cube is crazy but real. “The Internet is not optimized to help us distinguish what is true from what is fictional.”

On ARGnet, Brandie Minchew’s analysis of the talk is well worth a read. She highlights a few key themes from Phillips’ talk, which I’ll paraphrase as:

1. The reality-fictional threshold flips on a dime. You can go too far with the deception.
2. Anonymity isn’t really an incentive to participate. “Rabbit holes,” mysterious entrances into the game world, can risk players not caring, or lumping you with people with whom you don’t want to be associated.
3. Context is important. Hoaxes can become frauds or attacks if the right people don’t know it’s a game, or can’t see all of the game. (“Puppet-based transmedia is ethically safe. Ish.”)
4. Imagine the worst thing that can happen when you put the game in the world. Plan for that.
5. Games will be commandeered, and boundaries broken. Designers should consider building a kill-switch.
6. Create worlds that are so amazing that people don’t care if they are real or not.

With SociaLens entering this arena over the next two months, these are some things to keep in mind as we play our own games with reality.

BTW, Phillips has a nice blog about this domain, Deus Ex Machinatio. She writes about games, storytelling, digital culture, and gender issues.

Sustainability and Futuring: Collaboration over distance

Carbon dioxide is not a bad thing. To the plants using it for photosynthesis, it’s a great thing. Too much of anything can be toxic, however. The earth had to work a long time before the planet achieved a balance necessary to sustain life:

[T]he present amount of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere every year by plants is almost perfectly balanced by amount of carbon dioxide put back into the atmosphere by respiration and decay. The carbon dioxide produced in this manner is part of a cycle in which new carbon does not enter the system, but rather it keeps changing in form.

source: “CO2 Pollution and Global Warming” by Barbalace, R.C. (2006)

In addition to decay, deforestation not only releases some carbon dioxide but it takes away some of the planet’s ability to remove it from the atmosphere. Warming oceans also contribute, releasing trapped carbon as their temperatures rise. The biggest hit, though, is the burning of fossil fuels, releasing all at once what would have taken millions of years to add to the ecosystem. This is largely what has accounted for the dramatic increase from 280 to 380 parts per million by volume between 1800 and 2005.

Of all the ways we burn fossil fuels, air travel is the worst. Internationally, it accounts for up to 5 percent of carbon dioxide emissions that are released. To help our planet remain or regain its life-supporting balance, addressing the problems of flying modern aircraft is the first, best target.

Telecommuting

George Monbiot’s book, Heat, claims that to meet (British) environmental targets for 2050, almost all flying will have to stop. That’s how bad air travel is for the environment. Climate groups have calculated that, in a sustainable world, each person can contribute no more than four tons of carbon emissions each year. One long flight uses almost all of that allowance.

The quickest way to slow down carbon imbalance is to stop flying. For many businesses, it isn’t practical, but it is possible to look for more ways to leverage computer-mediated communication to collaborate. Skype is just one of the tools that would allow for face time (through video chat) and file sharing between two people at remote locations. Finding more and better ways to work together over great distances is a big area of interest for HCI designers.

Solar Planes

The inevitability of air travel is underscored by the fact that passenger demand has continued to increase dramatically, despite the threat of terrorism and economic downturns. There are many changes airlines can make to improve fuel efficiency—including wing design, supplemental jet fuel, in-flight refueling, formation flights to reduce drag, and artificial intelligence to optimize flight performance.

In 2010, André Borschberg piloted a solar plane—Solar Impulse—for more than 26 hours, throughout the entire night. Solar power, harnessed through large paneled wings on light aircraft, is a young but promising path of innovation toward reduction of reliance on fossil fuels. Imagine commercial planes powered by the sun, providing all of the advantages of long-distance travel with none of the costly carbon emissions.

Carbon Offsetting

Until a variety of technologies exist to allow one to comparison shop based on carbon footprint, travelers don’t have many options for avoiding fossil fuels at the airport. Acknowledging the fact that our tech cannot yet support the increasing need for air travel, several organizations now offer registries to allow people to pay in advance for the carbon they will add to the environment by flying.

With carbon offsets, organizations can offer ways to financially support projects that reduce as much greenhouse gas emission as an air traveler would add to the atmosphere. These credit bundles allow the traveler to alleviate the guilt of flying by simultaneously supporting something that directly contributes to restoring some balance in the ecosystem. Recognized carbon offset companies that can be trusted include: The Gold Standard, The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), Green-e, and the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance.

There are questions about how effective such programs are. Some believe the guilt relief leads to more flying, compounded by offsets that do not reduce carbon emissions enough.

Students in my HCI Design class this semester at the School of Informatics & Computing HCI program are being asked to work up weekly components (research or a grounded concept) to gain experience in making and communicating good design choices. I’m going through the process with them, devoting the minimal amount of time (2-3 hours) that I expect of them each week.

Although I’m excited to read their book, I have to wait a while. The book is due out in 2012. However, it was introduced at MacWorld last month:

“Make It So” was introduced at MacWorld 2011

In their planned book Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons From Science Fiction, Shedroff and Noessel intend to glean practical lessons from the many interfaces depicted in science fiction television shows and movies. They take a perspective that the production designers of these entertainment projects are empowered to develop “blue-sky” systems that require some consideration of how humans (or aliens) interact with these fictional devices. This can translate to real work insights about the design of mobile, online or other pervasive interfaces. “SciFi is a design tool like any other,” they argue. “All design is already fiction, until it gets built.”

The MacWorld talk covers the introductory content they plan for the first chapter, including defining their area of concern, how the real world and science fiction inspire each other, and comparing timelines of technology advancement in both worlds. They narrow the focus down to interaction design culled from 3D and live-action, screen-based science fiction. To begin, they catalogued and tagged 10,000 images from science fiction shows fitting this definition to generate a tag cloud that described the entire corpus of interactive artifacts. The biggest term was “glow.” The best insights, though, came from the interweaving timeline showing how these two worlds—real and fictional—work together to advance design. “The real world establishes the paradigm that science fiction then extends,” explains Shedroff. (The video is well worth an hour of your time, btw.)

Noessel is a Director at Cooper, designing for a variety of domains that include museums, health, and counter-terrorism. A pioneer in experience design, Sherdroff is chairing the Design Strategy MBA program at CCA, aimed at applying design to business practices. Through their publisher (Rosenfeld Media), the authors will be blogging their progress as they write their new book.

Songwriting uses technology to help the creative process

These assignments are intended to be ambiguous, to encourage some ownership of its interpretation. My initial inquiry focused on how music connects people as a social object. I identified three possible tensions to explore: Mobile vs. Fixed; Creating vs. Consuming; and, Public vs. Private. As I thought about how songs moved through the music ecosystem, I began to evolve this into a study of those who create the songs.

On Sunday night, I was able to interview Five Year Mission, an Indianapolis band with the goal of writing a new song for each of the 80 episodes (including pilots) of the original Star Trek television series. While the impetus for the interview was to support a forthcoming article in Wired‘s GeekDad blog, I devoted a little time asking them about their creative process as it relates to these three tensions.

The group divides up the season among 4 songwriters. The details of how they each approach the assignment vary, but in general they go through a process of watching the episode, re-watching it for notes, composing musical themes, and then writing lyrics. At some point, the result is a demo tape shared with others, for later collaboration.

Personal—Private composition is a product of available time. The band members talked about times when they write music just for their own pleasure, but that time to do so is limited by the number of other things they are doing. Between other jobs, families, and playing in multiple bands, time is scarce for personal projects. When such music is created, it eventually will find its way into a social sphere, such as transitioning from private to public music by uploading to Last.FM.

Creative—Listening is as vital to the creative process as performing. Every songwriter has a unique creative process, but more than one touted the value of iPhones. With voice recording applications, the iPhone allows for quick capture of music and lyrics for later playback and remixing. This is valuable both as a means of sharing (the recordings are used to create demo tapes or send as a raw example of work-in-progress) and for cognitive offloading to help remember ideas. Not everyone has an iPhone; some work with paper, which is as portable but less expensive. Though they work individually at first, the band continues to work through ideas by iterating on the initial demos, sometimes dramatically changing the song. New insights about the songs are learned through live performances and recording sessions as a group.

Mobile—Music making gravitates to familiar spaces. Retreats for working on new songs are constructed by convenience—this is where the equipment is housed—not necessarily for reasons of comfort or solitude. In some cases, due to a combination of time scarcity and pervasive thoughts about music, the songwriting takes place throughout the day in a variety of places. The instrumental work, however, is dependent on having the equipment at hand to perform. Keyboards, drum sets, and even guitars are not easily transferred from place to place. Even to transition from an interview to a practice session in the next room, the setup (equipment and soundproofing) took about 30-40 minutes. Controlled and predictable spaces also accommodate those not in the band, whether it is neighbors or family members, to allow them to anticipate noise levels and change behavior (e.g., leaving the vicinity).

Resources:

1. Original photos by Kevin Makice, taken at a rehearsal (2-13-2011)
2. Interview with Five Year Mission band members (Noah Butler, Andy Fark, Patrick O’Connor, Mike Rittenhouse, and Chris Spurgin), conducted during a rehearsal on February 13, 2011.
3. Five Year Mission website banner (downloaded with permission at http://fiveyearmission.net/ on 2-13-2011)
4. “002/365 Time,” photo by Venn Diagram (downloaded at http://www.flickr.com/photos/venndiagram/4238905532/ on 2-13-2011)

Students in my HCI Design class this semester at the School of Informatics & Computing HCI program are being asked to work up weekly components (research or a grounded concept) to gain experience in making and communicating good design choices. I’m going through the process with them, devoting the minimal amount of time (2-3 hours) that I expect of them each week.

Our Wednesday classes are split into three sections of about 40 students. They discuss the week’s design assignment in great detail and then promote two students from each group to present a final version of the project the following Monday. Without this middle step, the public critique—already a challenge in a class of 120—loses meaning.

The compromise was to conduct our practice sessions virtually.

The Prep

Pity my associate instructors: there wasn’t any prep. We briefly discussed the weather conditions and made this decision just two hours before class. While they are all tech savvy enough to have participated in computer-mediated discussions, it is a different matter to try to run a discussion session with that many students. I gave them some suggestions and high-level goals, and left it to them to shape the experience how they thought best.

Finding a platform was tricky. After experimenting with Zoho (not enough platform crossover) and Meebo (difficult to invite outside of your contact list), we stuck to OnCourse’s chat room. This lowered the initial participation barriers considerably, since everyone knew where to go and already had accounts. This tool wasn’t ideal, but it was surprisingly well-suited to our purpose. OnCourse also offered easy access to files the instructors would share and the class wiki we wanted them to use.

Varied Strategies

All three sections had different experiences. In one, the instructor was very structured, essentially applying the in-person class process to the chat room. Each student was asked to write and post a short explanation for everyone to read as they followed along the same PDF file. They voted on their two favorites, and then spent the remaining time (about 15 minutes) discussing those two.

In the other two, the bulk of the time was spent helping students to edit and interact with the wiki. They guided students in how to add a summary of their projects to a new page, and then comment on the projects others had posted. After that was done, they asked some questions to spark discussion, with mixed success.

The voting methods differed, too. One collected votes via email, and the others used a surveymonkey poll. The latter sections had their winners immediately, while the email method required a larger window to collect and process.

Observations About Content

Here are two sample posts of interest from the chat rooms:

I’m not sure how the wiki works…I’ve been trying to post my script but it never seems to register…any tips?

What made this process fulfilling was that students both asked and answered questions like this. Successful first-hand experience with bigger tasks—like troubleshooting a wiki post—and smaller things (e.g., “where is the survey monkey link?“) turned into a peer network. In a formal class setting, the instructor tends to be the target and source of such information.

Which space should we post our scripts? Comfort Spaces or Comfort Control Systems or Both?

Semantics and order are two things that are always in flux in a wiki. They are a response to what members of the community feel are appropriate, and those who disagree are free to attempt to make their corrections to voice their preferences. The above question is one I hope is part of the process of interacting with our course wiki, and a form of critical thinking that is vital to success as a designer. Even as I recognize that this question was meant to be procedural (i.e., what is the right way to do the next thing?), we want these students to get good at critiquing both the artifacts of design and the motivations for why it should be in the world in the first place.

It would be great if we can have similar discussion in the class.

I learned a few things about where these students are in the process of becoming designers, some of which I intend to consciously bring into the Monday sessions. I don’t have the luxury or the logistical speed to get to three different physical locations (the norm for our Wednesday sessions) and get a pulse of the class. While I rely instead on my instructors to pass that information along, some of the things I found enlightening may not make their radar. I need to make a point, as one of the other instructors did, of reassuring everyone about the nature of critique (“Even when you all do your best, a bunch of people will still find fault in your work.”) and the work that is valued in this course. I also need to continue to iterate on the way in which our public critiques are held. There is never enough time, but I can do different things with the time I do have.

Issues

OnCourse may have met several needs for us this week—most notably, an archived chat discussion and low barrier to entry—but the system also had its flaws. Having 120 people (well, probably closer to 60 after we factor in attendance and the one section that didn’t mess with the wiki at all) try to edit the same page in a wiki causes a lot of confusion. Students edited a page only to find their links overwritten. To a lesser degree, file downloads and even use of the chat room suffered somewhat from heavy use of the same resources.

There is also no mechanism for small group discussion. The chat room is more like a single-topic forum, where every post is part of the same thread. Some of the in-person sections had been breaking up their 40 students into smaller groups to let more project get attention. Related: the scroll position would automatically jump to the latest post. That made the multiple conversations and sidebars difficult to follow, especially if the posts came quickly. Readability was difficult with a large active group, which is exactly what we wanted to facilitate online.

Finally, there is a definite need to properly prep instructors about strategy. Even little things like how questions are worded came make a big difference in the level of engagement. “Anyone want to talk about what patterns do you see?” can be answered with a simple yes or no. “What patterns did you see in these concepts?” at least forces the respondent to articulate an insight. If questions are left unanswered, the experience suffers. Those things are correctable with more lead time.

Lessons Learned and Other Benefits

In an online class, one important element is to clearly define the collaborative task at hand. If it isn’t clear why the chat is being used, there isn’t a reason to invest in its success. In one session, the task was a chat version of the regular class (present designs, vote, and discuss). In the other sections, it was to individually post wiki content and comments, and then vote on a favorite. The chat room has a different kind of supportive function in both circumstances, as it would if the task were something completely different.

If I were to run one of these myself, having lurked on the online sessions yesterday, I would …

• … give the attendance credit by asking them to do some task or series of small tasks that they could only get from the room. It is the same mechanism kidnappers use on their victims in movies, having them run from payphone to payphone and dropping the bag of cash in a particular trash can. If it is separate from the learning tasks (e.g., the wiki work and discussion) then it is easier to get involvement all around.
• … assign the legwork ahead of time. Imagine if everyone had already created their wiki page, and the entire time could have been spent in discussion. The OnCourse servers would have appreciated that, certainly.
• … take advantage of the online format. Having everyone in the same room has its advantages, but access to other information on the web and empowering people who wouldn’t ever speak in a class with 78 eyes looking at them are not among the benefits. Use the chat for focused critique with the larger group, and let other forums—like the comment thread on wiki pages—be used to facilitate small group discussion.

A big perk for this storm-induced switch to online is that we got to deviate from our stated protocols. I didn’t require anyone to post to the wiki as part of their grade, and as a result we’ve had only a handful share their work in that form. With the online session, it was appropriate to make that part of the requirement for attendance. Everyone who participated now has at least the minimum exposure to creating pages, which makes it more likely we’ll get online content in the future.

Sound consultant Julian Treasure’s TED talk

Treasure’s consultancy is attempting to take this insight and turn it into increased sales, customer satisfaction, and productivity for businesses. At one point in the presentation, the speaker mentions that the noises in open office spaces can reduce productivity to one-third (recommending the use of earphones to decrease cognitive load). This is interesting to me not for possible gains in business efficiency, but because of the way Treasure treats sound as a material for the design of shared spaces.

When we consider how physical space is designed, the focus might be about objects to sit on or how much light the windows allow into a room. Designers are showing interest in sound as material, however, exploring aural systems and how they impact human experience. The Intelligent Street, for example, was an installation that allowed people walking through a public space to text commands to change the audio playing there.

According to Treasure, sound affects people in four ways:

• Physiological—chemical reactions to kinds of noises, such as the release of cortisol when hearing a fire alarm.
• Psychological—emotional reactions spurred by music or sounds from nature (i.e. birdsong makes us feel reassured)
• Cognitive—we have trouble following two conversations at the same time
• Behavioral—our tendency to do or not do something are, in part, a reaction to sound

Knowing who is planning to use a space and what they intend to do there is important to understanding how sound can be used to support activity. That’s one thing Treasure’s productivity advice does not seem to consider: the context of productivity. Individual task-oriented folks may be distracted by background noise, but creative or collaborative activities may be inspired by ambient noises.

There is also an important distinction to be made between common spaces that are physical and those that are digital. Sound in a physical space is the norm, whether it’s a mechanical hum of machinery or the rustling of wind and insects. Like when the birdsong disappears, there is something unsettling about truly silent places. Websites, though, are usually without sound. When you arrive at a cyber-place and are greeted with sound, that may be off-putting. On the computer, we often choose our own soundtracks through iTunes or other media play that has nothing to do, typically, with our choice of digital space.

It was an interesting TED talk and worth five minutes of your time. In addition to writing a book about sound and business, Treasure occasionally blogs on specific aspects of sound, such as his insights on silence and the negative impact of Muzak.

We are currently looking for people to play with an early version of the web site and complete a short survey to help direct the next phase of development. A $50 Amazon gift certificate will be given to one lucky participant, randomly selected from everyone completing the survey. This online user study is open through Sunday, October 18.

The Alpha release is ready for testing

One of the principle inspirations for this design concept is Bill Gavers and his work with ambiguous design. There is a spectrum of data representation where one end is precision (universal truth) and the other is art (personal truth). Somewhere in between, precise data is presented in an ambiguous way, so as to force the observer to become a co-creator of its meaning. Imagine a house tricked out with sensors, collecting data used to generate an abstract digital painting. As the data changes, only those in the house who are aware of how the painting has evolved will be able to interpret what it may mean and how valuable that information is.

Our project leverages this same insight to encourage people to create arrangements of photos from a pool of images they have never seen. There is an interesting long-term value that emerges from a community of people creating these social objects, but that aspect of the project is several months away from being realized. For now, we’re focusing on how people are experiencing the core interaction.

The online study will inform our understanding of how the interaction is perceived. Participants will be asked to explore our proof-of-concept web site before returning to the survey to complete a few questions about the experience. I hope you can take a few minutes to help us out.

One of the side-effects of a recurring competition, however, is rivalry. For the past two years, in particular, the feel of the final round presentations and aftermath has shifted. The focus on “winning” something fosters behavior (killer on-site work sessions, project comparisons) that seem more destructive than constructive. I speak from experience on this, having successfully participated in this track in 2005.

Last week, I wrote to the co-chairs for the SDC—Mike Glaser (Drexel University) and Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow)—to ask them to consider a couple small but critical changes to the format. I was idealistic enough to send it, but practical enough to realize it doesn’t stand much chance of changing the 2010 event. However, I thought the ideas were worth posting, perhaps for some discussion leading up to reforms for 2011.

What About Winning?
There is no doubt that winning the SDC had some positive effect. It opened some doors for our team, including enhanced stature in our program. More importantly, it validated the insane amount of work we put into the project after it was accepted to CHI. We even overcame a faulty projector and answered some tough questions to sell our fringe interpretation of the design challenge.

However, the more final sessions I see, the less important that victory becomes. The process is somewhat arbitrary, and the evaluation format changes as frequently as the judges. The more experienced I become, the easier it is to see holes in everyone’s designs that make it difficult to truly rate one above all others. Four years later, I feel more lucky than good.

The big question is, what is to be gained by ranking the top projects in some order? I’m arguing: “Nothing.”

A Chance to Experience
The beauty of this event is the opportunity for students to be challenged with a real-world problem and apply their developing skills to address it. It is framed as a competition to make it attractive for entrants, but competing is not the main value. By participating, students get a taste of academic publication, poster talks, and (if fortunate enough to advance) a chance to present in a CHI session. This is great sample experience of what successful academics strive to do.

What is unrealistic—and as it is turning out, counterproductive—is the ranked judging of the presentations, something that wouldn’t occur in later professional work in industry or academia. I believe the competition would generate a significantly more constructive atmosphere with two simple changes:

1. Eliminate the project judging and ranked order of the final presentations.
2. Replace one of the final four team presentations with an open panel to discuss the design challenge.

These changes should have three important effects.

First, the focus of the presentations moves from strategies for “winning” to ones built for innovation and sharing. Full paper presenters do this when approaching their long talks. This shift also takes the pressure off of inexperienced speakers. Most of our finalists (myself included) spent a good chunk of their time at CHI iterating and practicing their talk, sacrificing the normal activities of the conference, such as attending sessions. That may be the wrong way to make use of an expensive week of professional networking.

Second, eliminating ranking will de-emphasizes the specifics of “a” solution and finds strengths in many solutions. The final panel can mix professional experience (judges) with practical experience (students who did the work) and allow us collectively to learn from each other.

Finally, the changes allow the session to be more about community. Even those teams not selected to present would be able to contribute to a discussion about their experiences and process. The discussion that arises from the panel Q&A would certainly focus on interpretation of the design challenge and the methodology to support it, rather than the strengths and weaknesses of a few select concepts. The final beat will be about collaboration and shared experiences, not celebration and sour grapes.

If a ranked order is mandated for reasons I cannot see, then allow it to occur when the presenters are announced after the poster session, based on the paper, visuals and oral defense of each project. If awards are necessary at all, perhaps they could mimic those of the full CHI conference (best paper, best poster) and leave presentation out of consideration.

I would love to see the SDC feature three teams selected to present a range of high-quality solutions to stimulate discussion. Then, everyone wins.

After a successful viral spread through the twitosphere fueled by auto-posts reporting a member’s score, many people ultimately concluded Twitterank was a twishing site. This idea was helped by some prominent articles leveling that charge, but suspicions were already raised by a number of cues—the poor presentation, use of Internet speak, no attribution or ownership by the developer, and a rating completely without context.

It took some quick reaction from developer Ryo Chijiiwa to calm the masses. The web site has changed, with more accountability, a more polished design, and a re-working of the programming to eliminate the need for users to enter their Twitter password. Had this been the model that was put out into the world, the reaction would have been quite different.

The second incident was the new ad campaign for the over-the-counter pain-relief drug, Motrin. The slick looking ad is very well produced, bringing to mind the great “Le Grand Content” by Clemens Kogler, Karo Szmit, and Andre Tschinder. However, the content was, at best, out of touch with the consumer group they meant to persuade.

Motrin’s ad targeting baby-carrying moms

… and the #motrinmoms response to seeing that ad.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great synopsis of the biz-tech dynamics that evolved, including several screen shots of tools that show how quickly this reaction developed on Twitter. While Owyang focuses on the reaction and impact on the Motrin brand, both of these are great examples of ways to mess up a design.

In a human-centered approach, the designs arise out of a real need that can be identified only by understanding the person or group of people who are meant to benefit from the outcome. In the case of Twitterank, the user group was largely unstudied and the process was decidedly technology-centered. Ryo built the code, and paid a price for its initial form being incompatible with his intended audience. For the Motrin ad makers, it seems only a superficial understanding was gained of its intended market audience. It is only speculation but plausible to think that the idea for this particular ad came from studying business spreadsheets with an enterprise goal of wanting to get more moms to buy Motrin. Even if the aftermath reveals focus groups and vetted ads, it will be easy to question the methodologies used by the company in light of the highly-motivated opposition to the 30-second spot.

It is clear, too, that the rules of engagement are changing. The swiftness of response and the willingness to become active in opposition made some quantum jump in the past several weeks. Personally, I’m not sure if the Motrin ad is offensive, even if it is flawed and misaligned, but enough people made enough noise to catch the attention of the company, who pulled the ad campaign with apologies. Blink, and the world changes.

Plantware creates structures out of living trees

Tel Aviv University professors Yoav Waisel and Amram Eshel—who literally wrote the book on plant roots—are pushing the boundaries of eco-architecture through a bio-manipulation technique developed at the Sarah Racine Root Research Laboratory. Their work in aeroponics stems from a desire to engineer plants that are better equipped to find water. In the process, the researchers found ways to manipulate the growth of large plants into living sculptures.

This research has found a business application in the form of Plantware. The company was founded by CEO Gordon Glaze, a biotech inventor holding two worldwide patents for plant genetics. Glaze worked for several years on software supporting the Human Genome Project, turning to plant genomics in 2001 and founding his company the next year. Plantware completed construction of their aeroponic growth facility in 2005.

Plantware

One of their prototypes—a living bench—has been donated to a children’s playground at a Tel-Aviv hospital. The bench is held in shape with a removable wooden framework to keep the growing roots in place. The only permanent deadwood is the seat bench that will become embedded in the tree.

Pilot projects underway in the United States, Australia and Israel include playground structures, streetlamps and gates. “The approach is a new application of the well-known botanical phenomenon of aerial root development,” said Eshel. “Instead of using plant branches, this patented approach takes malleable roots and shapes them into useful objects for indoors and out.”

KinderForest – Growing a Playground

The first home prototypes will be ready in about a decade. While the method takes years, the result is a long-lasting architecture with other benefits, such as producing oxygen.

Sarah Racine is the first large-scale aeroponics lab in the world, founded 20 years ago by Waisel through funding by an Israeli family. Other projects include cultivating Euphoria tirucalii, a latex-producing shrub which can easily be grown in the desert as a source for biofuel.

Linux, WordPress and now Laconica are examples of products built through communal effort by eliminating the proprietary nature of the code. Freely distributed, these systems improve more and more rapidly over time on the strength of the tinkering of a community of developers. Those practicing user experience and design, however, typically aren’t invited to the party, unless they also program.

Mozilla introduces design to open source

On Monday, Mozilla Labs—one of the early adopters of open source philosophy—issued a challenge:

Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.

You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.

We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

In the lingo of Mozilla, concepts include simple idea statments, iterated mockups, or functional prototypes. Everything submitted to this project is released into the wild for further exploration by the community, redistributable under Creative Commons (ideas & mockups) or Mozilla Public License (prototypes).

The intended purpose is not to produce a commercial product but to facilitate inspiration, dialogue and collaboration. This is a project opportunity built for the IU School of Informatics.

Featured Concepts
To kick-start the communal design fun, Mozilla offered up three initial concepts by design consultancy Adaptive Path, Mozilla intern Wei Zhou, and the head of Mozilla UX Aza Raskin.

Aurora

Bookmarking and History Concept Video

Firefox Mobile Concept Video

At present, Mozilla doesn’t have a mechanism to collect new concepts, although there is a forum to announce and discuss ideas. They urge use of existing semantic systems, like Flickr or blogs, to publish ideas, concepts and prototypes under the tag mozconcept.

An opportunity for Informatics
If ever there were a project screaming for participation from Informatics students, this is it. The concept series is relevant to our program areas of human-computer interaction, cybersecurity, computer science, social informatics and complex systems. To establish a cross-program team or teams of current students, faculty and alumni might prove to be a great community building project and one that will serve our greater marketing purposes well.

Carter answers questions meant for Charles Eames

Charles Eames, best known for his architecture and furniture, explored film extensively with wife Ray. Design Q&A consists of 29 clever and concise statements about design, part of Eames’ contribution to the “What is Design” exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. Madame L’Amic of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs interviewed the designer for the piece.

The five-minute film is not available online, alas, and even the transcription of the interview can be difficult to find. It remains part of a multi-volume collection of short films by Charles and Ray Eames that include a personal favorite, Powers of Ten.

Carter did two takes answering these same 29 questions. In the first, I read the questions verbatim, getting a string of similar responses (“Yes, sometimes.”). In the second take, I paraphrased the intended meaning of the question into more accessible terms, prompting Carter not only to answer but to explain why he answered as he did. The resulting video, edited for content, more than doubled the length of the original film and had to be further trimmed to get under the YouTube limit of 10 minutes.

To prepare for her part, Amy did some research to practice her French accent, ultimately channeling Inspector Clouseau and the visiting dignitaries in The American President. Il était parfait.

My favorite response was to the question, “Is there a design ethic?” Carter replied:

“One code that they must follow is that they can’t go beyond needed.”

Indeed.

The Process

The funny video was tweeted to my attention by Mike Stelzner, a white paper guru with some experience operating in this world. If it isn’t true, then it feels true.

But, seriously …
Even though Team Stop Sign worked together in a group, they were still operating in isolation. Demographic surveys aren’t a replacement for getting the end consumers involved with the process of design. Businesses may be embracing collective wisdom, but it still seems from a business perspective, developing a user experience up front—with the user—is a luxury.

The video reminded me of a blog draft that has been sitting idle for a loooooong time about a now two-year-old article by Scott Berkun, “The ideal designer & project manager.” Berkun is also the author of great O’Reilly book, The Myth of Innovation, that came out on my birthday last year.

In the blog post, Berkun asks what is the ideal designer. What I liked best about the answer was that it focused not on the individual but on the relationship with the team, in particular the project manager. The ideal designer is a thought leader, communicative collaborators with well-rounded ideas. The other side to that coin is the dysfunction of ego without a practical track record (we tend to build concepts, not products). Project managers are built for deadlines and balancing resources, but they can also succumb to power plays and emphasize team control at the expense of good collaborative decision-making. Success is attributed not to finding the ideal but in working the relationships.

Experience is still a hard sell
At the IU School of Informatics, the human-computer interaction group has made a point of emphasizing design and leadership as the key parts of our training. There are some graduates who will opt for usability or continue to construct systems and web applications. Even at the masters level, though, there is a strong emphasis on research and doing the legwork up front to better define that development space.

There have been some successes among the HCI alumni in changing business culture with this approach, but most will still tell stories of struggle to validate a true UX strategy toward the creation of better products and services.

Undoubtedly, it will get easier with each class of new alumni hires. The best argument, however, is to be able to translate early user involvement into that world of deadlines and bottom lines. That may be more efficient to do with a startup company.

Any startup will tell you how strapped they are for resources and how pressured they feel to get a product to market, particularly if investing has begun. That situation isn’t ripe for “experimenting” away from the perceived straightest and fastest line to completion. However, startups by nature are much more open-minded and willing to look for an edge. Those lucky few who start new companies with some financial security may be the best places to send our graduates to prove our process, rather than to the larger corporate organizations that might suffer from over engineering the stop sign.

BlogSchmog is on its seventh design in over eight years of publishing.

The web is rich with resources to help you spruce up your site. Starter kits are readily available for everything from CSS templates to color schemes. One interesting tool is JumpChart, an application for web site prototyping. JumpChart allows you to build working code through an online interface. While this doesn’t translate directly into a blog theme, it is a nice platform for trying out your ideas for structure and creating a foundation of solid markup to adapt into a WordPress theme. Similarly, you could go to Design Shack and browse for existing CSS layout templates.

Advice is plentiful. Expert tips help educate you on web design style, vertical rhythm, permalinks, and search engine optimization. SEO is somewhat controversial, but there is an indispensable plug-in for WordPress that takes care of the work (… as long as you remember to fill out the extra fields in the blog post form).

A byproduct of its huge user-developer community, useful blog themes and plug-ins are available for WordPress. Denver developer Alex King, for example, offers a suite of plug-ins built from the open source platform. Singapore programmer Lester Chan has his own list of tools.

Among my favorite plug-ins currently used in BlogSchmog are:

• aLinks—automatically link keywords in your blog post.
• All-in-One SEO Pack—out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• FeedWordPress—simple and flexible (and scalable, it turns out) Atom/RSS syndication.
• Get Recent Comments—display the most recent comments or trackbacks.
• Google Sitemap generator—generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your blog.
• Permalink redirection—redirects all crap away from the end of the URL.
• Search Meter—tracks use of the search engine to see which terms visitors are using to search your blog
• Twitter for WordPress—displays your latest public Twitter message on your blog.

Of course, no favorite plug-in list would be complete without Akismet, which comes as part of the WordPress installation. Rather than rely on manual detection and the redundant actions of individuals, Akismet pools all of the comment data and applies the collective wisdom of blog administrators to filter most of the 88% of all comments that turn out to be spam.

What I like most about this particular theme is how it treats our eclectic content on the home page. Each of our main content categories has its own thread of recent posts situated above the fold. The scrolling below the category columns isn’t overwhelming, taking readers first to “The Next Generation”—with links to quotes from our two boys—and further down into a very useful tag cloud, a recent addition to the core WordPress installation.

The overhaul isn’t completely finished, however. BlogSchmog seems to have passed through a check with Graybit, an accessibility tool to detect problems with color blindness and contrast. It has some validation errors, though, and needs some editing to fix the hiccups found by W3C in the HTML and CSS. I’ll run it through various browser tests in the coming week or two.

What do you think?

This main theme of disconnection between theory and practice was meant as a call to HCI theorists to improve both the communication and the pragmatics of technique, moving new ideas from abstraction to doable activities. That disconnection applies in the other direction, too, in how we perceive and intervene in the evolution of the World Wide Web. This article explores the role design has in what comes next.

What Version Are We Using?
The term “Web 2.0” arose with a conference held in San Francisco in October 2004, featuring an A-list of speakers that included Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Mark Cuban (HDNet), Marc Andreessen (Mosaic, Ning), Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons), and David Sifry (Technorati). A year later, the term had reached such a state of confusion—is it a philosophy, a paradigm shift, or a marketing buzzword?—that Tim O’Reilly attempted to sort out with a summary article describing the various flavors of definition.

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly provided some examples of how applications evolved.

Web 2.0 is a term that has been misappropriated in many ways. It is a production process and a consumer participation paradigm, a phrase with marketing cache and a justification for new startups to claim a spot on the envelope. Fifteen months after O’Reilly’s definitive guide, the term was refactored into the following:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”)
source: O’Reilly Radar, “Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again” (December 10, 2006)

This fall, O’Reilly returned to the origins of the term—as a proclamation that the Internet had survived the Dot Com crash, not to represent an iteration of the brave new world.

The impetus for that clarification was a blogstorm of discussion around “Web 3.0.” Given its predecessor the term was inevitable, but credit is awarded to Jeffrey Zeldman, whose critique of Web 2.0 did the honors. What is not as certain is what this next phase of the Internet will look like.

Before exploring some of these new visions, it is important to do two things. First, we must recognize that the discussion seems to be led by practitioners looking to create theory—the opposite problem described by Rogers for the field of HCI. Second, before we can answer the question of what is to be designed, we must tackle the more fundamental question of why design at all.

Why Design?
Phillipe Starck’s spring lecture at TED was made available earlier this month. In it, Starck explained the reality of our existence:

Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in 4 billion years.

He goes on to explain this is his motivation to continue to design comparably trivial items, such as toilet seats and toothbrushes. Take the context you have now—the materials, the knowledge, the resources, the social structure—and do the best you can to create wonderful things. The past is embedded in everything we do, and the future is completely unknown. “Now you have a duty,” Starck tells the next generation of designers. “Invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story.”

Whether or not Starck’s answer is correct, the question has merit. Why design? The fields of HCI and design are filled with attempts to answer the question of What to design. We study methods and techniques, ways of take a design from grounded concept to profitable product. We shift our focus on where the design resides. But the best we can do to answer the question of Why is to speak vaguely about personal passion or the noble goals of selecting a future. Why is the foundation for What.

We clearly don’t design for the purpose of creating opportunities to press buttons or pull down menus. Given any system, the motivation of a user is not to interact with a machine. Ultimately, the goal is connection with others.

In her 2006 book This Changes Everything, author Christina Robb details the history of three pioneering women whose groundbreaking work might transform psychology, and thus all the things that discipline touches. Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller and Judith Lewis Herman learned their trade in a man’s world, where the basic assumptions about behavior were blind to the experiences of everyone who isn’t white and male. Gilligan’s landmark work—In a Different Voice—challenged the established understanding of morality by showing that differences exist between the genders in how they deal with and evaluate responsibility to self and others. By the mid 1980s, a number of feminist psychologists had managed to find each other, listen to each other’s experiences, and plant the seeds for a new way of thinking about health.

Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) describes a healthy relationship as one that is capable of moving in and out of connection. Rather than strength being defined as overcoming interactions with others to become self-sufficient and independent, our strength resides in our ability to share dependence with each other. RCT proposes that growth-fostering relationships—defined by their cultural context—are a central human necessity throughout our lives; chronic disconnections are the source of problems.

When Brandon Schauer described the long wow this fall as “achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again,” he is describing business in terms of connection, disconnection and reconnection. The design of business is not about promotions, discounts or the widget itself. It is about growing an authentic relationship. When Sharon Lee writes, “A good website is built on two basic truths—that the internet is an interactive medium and that the end user is in fact human,” she is acknowledging that the purpose of web design is to connect the humans on the back end with the ones facing the buttons. The mutual empathy of RCT is the user experience of contemporary design.

The Why of design is simple: to facilitate human connection.

What Do We Design?
With connection as our foundation, our concept of design shifts. Design can be defined in many ways, from visuals to widgets to interaction and experience. Throughout the history of computer-based design, however, the common theme has been to express design as either an object or a process to produce an object.

When computers were young and enormous, their entire reason for being was computational. The code-breaking problems of World War II placed a premium on algorithms and functionality. The only users were experts, so all of the design attention was given to the machines and the technology that supported them. The constraints of the early days would quickly be overcome, but that was not known to the engineers designing computers and programming at the time. The result was a period of establishing persistent norms that defined our patterns of design in the future. Design was the object at the end of the process.

Human-computer interaction emerged in the 1980s out of a need to design for the user. As computers shrunk from rooms to desktop terminals, the problems became less about solving equations and more about improving business efficiency. The expert users gave way to the professional ones working as cogs in the wheels of the company machine. Human factors and ergonomics were created to deal with the physical limitations of these biological parts, as design attention shifted from the tool to the controller. Even by the time HCI was realizing that people should enjoy their experience using a computer, the design still considered the user an object to be manipulated through heuristics and bigger buttons. Design was the person expected to use our tools.

User Experience (UX) picked up on this notion of pleasurable state of mind in the 1990s—thanks in no small part to the influx of theory described by Rogers—and shifted the focus of design from the usability of windows, icons, menus and pointers to how a person might feel as the interaction takes place. Computers had moved well beyond businesses by this point and past the tethered desktop into mobile devices and appliances. Individuals, increasingly unable to fit into a nice demographic bucket, each had their own needs and requirements, reacting to the same tools in very different ways. Erik Stolterman has suggested that we objectify the interaction between the user and the artifact, turning the design into the interaction itself but leaving it in an object-oriented paradigm.

From a relational perspective, it is neither the artifact nor the individual that is as important as the interaction. This clearly distances design from the first two views of design-as-artifact and design-as-user. It is also potentially distinguishable from the Stolterman notion of design-as-interaction, provided the interaction continues to be defined as the relationship between the user and the tool. If the reason we design is to facilitate human connection, then we must also see the interface as the medium between people. This is perhaps a bit nuanced, but it is a powerful distinction to make. Design is setting the stage so beneficial interactions can occur, not about the players.

A physicist named Michelson once tested the existence of an invisible substance that filled the universe, always at rest and permeating all matter. Although ether was disproved as a physical property, it may still have life as a metaphor for design. The interaction ether is filled with any number of people, artifacts, tools and constraints. It has context dependent on time, sequence and cultural awareness. It is a space in which interactions and experiences occur. Design as ether requires that we understand not the specifics but the dynamics of the situation. People flow in and out of connection with each other. Strength comes in being able to reconnect, to have both the resources and the experience in how to wield them. Designers, by knowing well the relationships between objects in this environment, can help shape opportunities for quality interaction. Design facilitates a connection through an intentional change in the interaction ether.

What’s Next?
From Zeldman’s iteration in January 2006 to last month’s blog debates, the two dominant views of what the Web will become are technology based. In one camp, the future Web is as an evolution of artificial intelligence—computer collaborating with other computers in a semantically tagged network of information—and in another, it is a massively open database, tied together through special domain names, web services, and open standards. Perhaps Nova Spivack‘s all-encompassing vision of a third generation web—ubiquitous connectivity, open technologies and identity, distributed computing, intelligent web—is the next evolution, Starck’s “next story.”

If the Web were viewed only as a network of machinery serving documents, those might be good bets. The Web, however, is merely the infrastructure for human connection. Web 3.0, then, might be more about the people than the architecture.

Of all the answers the major players have offered over the past few years, the one that comes closest to placing humanity in center stage in the evolution is from Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo! In Dan Farber’s coverage of TechNet’s Innovation Summit in November 2006, Yang was credited with the following (boldface added):

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium…the distinction between professional, semi-professional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.

That is a message of co-creation. Of empowerment. Of placing the design of interaction spaces above the design of objects, no matter the form they take.

Patterns for early solutions become constraints for later ones.

With the intention of exploring non-traditional thinking about computing, Spafford began by sharing a half dozen exercises meant to illustrate several themes of his current work:

• Beware conditioning
• Be alert to ambiguity
• Don’t assume context
• Be sure you understand boundaries
• The usual is not the rule
• What computes is not the same as reality

These take-home statements set up Spafford’s main message: examine the current context of computing and come up with new best practices that make sense.

Much of the time spent updating computers deals with security problems owing to an outdated set of rules for how software and hardware are best built. Spafford notes when the first computers started using transistors, the challenges of computing were quite different than they are today. Transistors cost 1/500,000th of a dollar today compared to about $60 (current value) back in 1958. 2005 marked the first year that we produced more transistors in the world than grains of sand rice. Disk storage maxed out at 200 bits per cubic inch in 1958, costing about a dime per byte. Today, we can store 425 GB in the same physical space at a cost of about a dime per 100 MB.

“Why are we still using some of the same basic paradigms today that were applicable in 1958?” asked Spafford.

Minimization is tantamount to good security, he added, so the elimination of unnecessary protocols—accepted in the name of efficiency but born out of constraints that are no longer relevant—can potentially reduce opportunities to compromise computer systems. The distinguished lecturer identified several available opportunities to re-think how we design computers: use of memory, paging, programming, stacks, shared libraries and all-in-one operating systems.

Even if Spafford’s thought experiment succeeds in inspiring the creation of a new modern computer, that re-imagination might come with a price. Innovation is a difficult proposition. The time when radical changes are accepted on merit tend to come in early adoption, a phase of the technology life cycle long since passed in computing. Business and personal users alike have invested heavily in a now familiar way of using the technology, and thus are less likely to accept any improvement that requires uncomfortable transitions to a new paradigm.

Likewise, the sustainable design of computers must be considered. The world may not be able to survive a massive replacement of existing toxic hardware, even if the new toxic hardware is superior from an engineering point of view. In the Q&A after the talk, Spafford failed to address the environmental issue directly, suggesting that “we replace our computers now” as an off-the-cuff justification for why it would be OK (or no worse) to do so in the future. The outside-the-box creativity encouraged in this talk needs to be extended to our practices of what we do with the things we make obsolete.

Criticism aside, the ideas Spafford put forth are very relevant to design in general. The moment we create, adopt and use our designs, we establish a set of constraints befitting only the current context, in the best case. Time shifts all situations, helping things to become more powerful and needs to fade in priority. In their place, new needs emerge from the changed conditions. The objects, though, remain fixed. At what point do we fight the unwillingness of a user base to accept change through re-examination of their needs? Can we anticipate common changes and embed that flexibility into the initial design?

Spafford, a professor of computer science at Purdue University and executive director of CERIAS, is known for work in information security and privacy, software engineering, and computing policy. According to the colloquium bio, “Some people consider him a polymathic futurist, and others simply think he’s an iconoclastic crank.”

Doctor Who opening, circa 1963

Doctor Who opening, circa 1974

Doctor Who opening, circa 2006

The current Doctor (David Tennant) is arguably the best of the ten incarnations of the regenerating Time Lord. I grew up on the Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctor’s, re-run in the early 1980s on the Chicago PBS station, WTTW, from the original BBC series. In 1996, I was elated when FOX broadcast a movie with Eric Roberts as the Master, the Doctor’s nemesis, but it never went anywhere. Then, TiVo started picking up the new series on the SciFi channel, spawning two other shows.

The music proven to be robust. Although it has been tweaked over the years, the same electronic tune that signaled it was 90 minutes until the end of my high school Sundays is still essentially the same theme showing up on TiVo. I doubt the throngs of devoted fans would allow significant deviation anyway.

Although David Tennant doesn’t have to put up with the signature low-quality props and sets shot on video—the quality of the special effects is in line with industry standards, taking away some of the schtick—the original concept has stood the test of time: actors come and go, but the Doctor is eternal.

That’s good design.

Using a combination of Census data and information generated by everything from car warranties to grocery store reward cards, the company has characterized 66 distinct types of U.S. households. These segments include such basic demographics as age and household income, but also capture everything from where people buy their clothes to which magazines they read. “Country Squires,” for example, drive Lexus SUVs, read Architectural Digest, and buy furniture from Ethan Allen. Members of the “Shotguns and Pickups” segment, meanwhile, drive Dodge Rams, watch auto races, and drink Bud Light.
From Spirit Magazine (September 2007), by Southwest Airlines

Through a web tool, I conducted a neighborhood search for my zip code. My current neighbors are:

• Blue Highways (#45)
  On maps, blue highways are often two-lane roads that wind through remote stretches of the American landscape. Among lifestyles, Blue Highways is the standout for lower-middle-class couples and families who live in isolated towns and farmsteads. Here, Boomer men like to hunt and fish; the women enjoy sewing and crafts, and everyone looks forward to going out to a country music concert.
• City Startups (#47)
  In City Startups, young, multi-ethnic singles have settled in neighborhoods filled with cheap apartments and a commercial base of cafés, bars, laundromats and clubs that cater to twentysomethings. One of the youngest segments in America–with ten times as many college students as the national average–these neighborhoods feature low incomes and high concentrations of Hispanics and African-Americans.
• Mobility Blues (#53)
  Young singles and single parents make their way to Mobility Blues, a segment of working-class neighborhoods in America’s satellite cities. Racially mixed and under 25 years old, these transient Americans tend to have modest lifestyles due to their lower-income jobs. Surveys show they excel in going to movies, playing basketball and shooting pool.
• New Beginnings (#44)
  Filled with young, single adults, New Beginnings is a magnet for adults in transition. Many of its residents are twentysomething singles and couples just starting out on their career paths–or starting over after recent divorces or company transfers. Ethnically diverse–with nearly half its residents Hispanic, Asian or African-American–New Beginnings households tend to have the modest living standards typical of transient apartment dwellers.
• Red, White & Blues (#42)
  The residents of Red, White & Blues typically live in exurban towns rapidly morphing into bedroom suburbs. Their streets feature new fast-food restaurants, and locals have recently celebrated the arrival of chains like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Payless Shoes. Middle-aged, high school educated and lower-middle class, these folks tend to have solid, blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, milling and construction.

In addition to these descriptions, there is a lot of valuable demographic data, including age, income, ethnic diversity and lifestyle traits.

I also looked at my old stomping grounds of Woodstock, Illinois (60098) where I spent the first 23 years of my life as a resident.

• Boomtown Singles (#35)
  Affordable housing, abundant entry-level jobs and a thriving singles scene–all have given rise to the Boomtown Singles segment in fast-growing satellite cities. Young, single and working-class, these residents pursue active lifestyles amid sprawling apartment complexes, bars, convenience stores and laundromats.
• Middleburg Managers (#27)
  Middleburg Managers arose when empty-nesters settled in satellite communities which offered a lower cost of living and more relaxed pace. Today, segment residents tend to be middle-class and over 45 years old, with solid managerial jobs and comfortable retirements. In their older homes, they enjoy reading, playing musical instruments, indoor gardening and refinishing furniture.
• Up-and-Comers (#24)
  Up-and-Comers is a stopover for young, midscale singles before they marry, have families and establish more deskbound lifestyles. Found in second-tier cities, these mobile, twentysomethings include a disproportionate number of recent college graduates who are into athletic activities, the latest technology and nightlife entertainment.
• Upward Bound (#13)
  More than any other segment, Upward Bound appears to be the home of those legendary Soccer Moms and Dads. In these small satellite cities, upscale families boast dual incomes, college degrees and new split-levels and colonials. Residents of Upward Bound tend to be kid-obsessed, with heavy purchases of computers, action figures, dolls, board games, bicycles and camping equipment.
• White Picket Fences (#34)
  Midpoint on the socioeconomic ladder, residents in White Picket Fences look a lot like the stereotypical American household of a generation ago: young, middle-class, married with children. But the current version is characterized by modest homes and ethnic diversity–including a disproportionate number of Hispanics and African-Americans.

The Claritas marketing demographics may be a great initial step in a design inquiry. Although their use in design is often criticized as being impractical, personas do have the advantage of humanizing abstract data and can stimulate insight generation and interaction debugging simply by allowing the designer to empathize with a potential, albeit fictitious user of the intended system. These Americana personas lack some of the elements in the Cooper version—a user’s context, personal goals, points of pain, and major questions to answer—but they offer an empirically-backed portrait of a possible kind of user. Particularly when designing for a specific community, the Claritas neighbors can help positively constrain the early stages of the process.

For more information, there is a presentation of the research available on USA Today‘s web site.

State-provided housing is expensive, too temporary and can be potentially harmful to residents. A growing number of architects and designers is exploring humanitarian design for people displaced by a natural disaster or other emergency.

Wired published a gallery of the twelve most promising quick-fix shelters. Most emphasize use of readily available or easily transportable materials, ranging from wooden pallets to inflatable concrete tents to polyester on an aluminum frame.

clipped from www.wired.com

California architect Gregg Fleishman‘s portable DH1 Disaster House doesn’t require a single nail to build. Rather, it uses tabs — like a 3-D puzzle — to fit together without fasteners or other hardware. The simple design uses slotted plywood to provide durability and flexibility. Panels arrive pre-cut, and recipients just need to unpack and snap them together to create a 14-foot-square insta-home.

Toshiba is experimenting with gesture recognition engine that might allow a hand to be used as a DVD remote. Internationally renown physicist Stephen Hawking controls his computer through blinking. Bernd Brügge collaborated on a paper that describes Pinocchio, a virtual conductor technology to allow a person to control a CD of an orchestra through gestures. Just yesterday, I read about computer-facilitated brain control interfaces developed by researchers at the Keio University. Thoughts about arm movements are detected as brain waves and translated through a headpiece from electronic signals into commands Second Life can understand, moving a virtual avatar.

Brain waves!

Jonathan Korman of Cooper recently posted an interesting commentary on gesture and how it is both intuitive and pleasurable. Intuition is when something is “easy to explain, powerful in its implications, impossible to forget.” While this can be done in all sorts of interfaces, both digital and physical, there is something special about being able to use gestures to control our tools:

I do the gestures from muscle memory, rather than cognitive memory, just like I do with my typing on my computer keyboard. Most of the time tools that run on software tax our cognitive capacity but leave the intelligence that lives in our bodies relatively untapped, which makes us East African Plains Apes a little uncomfortable; using those gestures makes me a happier animal.

Korman uses the iPhone and his old trackpad devices as examples of how gesture input can be perceived as better than using a mouse.

At the IU School of Informatics, our training in human-computer interaction design is something that doesn’t often go near input devices. We focus mostly on what happens after the input is received (and, the things that prompt the input in the first place). However, there are some people here interested in pervasive computing, which deals not only with non-desktop computing systems (PDAs, mobile phones, etc) but also the components to interact between the digital and physical world.

Design materials are becoming more accessible. Phidgets are “physical widgets” that can detect temperature, position, orientation, pressure and any number of other environmental indicators that something has changed. Nintendo’s Wii remote (a “wiimote”), a versatile game controller that uses an optical sensor and accelerometer, has inspired hacker communities to turn the device into things like email clients. While these kinds of non-traditional inputs—and hey, the computer mouse was non-traditional when it first showed up in the 60s and 70s—make for flashy headlines (Brain Waves!), the real value is in the design philosophy behind why they might be adoptable.

Focusing on gestures is similar to examining the normal routines of the user and placing the technology at natural moments of interaction. If someone is doing something already without the intervention, then fitting the interface to match that existing motion lowers the barrier to use. The flip side to that, of course, is that there is some value to conscious action. Brain-wave controllers are way cool because of the notion that thinking = doing … which is also a reason to fear such devices.

Last spring, IU School of Informatics professor Eli Blevis presented his research paper—”Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse“— to the international CHI community in San Jose, California. This seminal work jump-started formal research about how design and sustainability are related.

The key values of the paper are in its extensive literature review and in providing a framework for sustainable design:

• Promoting renewal & reuse—examining the consequence of discard
• Promoting quality & equality—affect and longevity, motivating prolonged value
• De-coupling ownership & identity—increased importance of shared experiences
• Using natural models & reflection—promote sustainable behavior

Blogger Samuel Mann published a nice synopsis of Eli’s paper, which includes a rubric for evaluating products and an extensive review of existing literature.

Sustainable design isn’t as easy as following a framework or measuring outcomes with a rubric, however. Design is a systemic act, involving many things outside of the control of the designer, such as market economy and practical use.

Going green is made easier by the increasing number of products that reflect an environmental consciousness. But, words like green, environmental and sustainable are in danger being applied too liberally and devolving into marketing catch phrases (like organic before it). A product may use one sustainable component for every two that cause harm. A company may continue profiting from environmentally dangerous items and use a single sustainable item as a gimmick to offset public relations damage. There is a lot of trust consumers have to give to companies to make their good intentions meaningful.

Not everyone benefits from greening the world, either. Saving the rain forests has been a banner of environmentalists since concepts like ozone and global warming were first introduced to mainstream vocabulary. Indigenous communities are affected not only by corporat mining and logging damages, but also by philanthropic efforts to save these special habitats. The Yanomami are claiming mental and physical hardships due to resettlement away from traditional lands, conjuring up images of the Cherokee being forced to trek across our young country to reservations in Oklahoma. They accuse organizations like Cool Earth of “green colonialism” through their practice of buying up rain forest land and displacing tribes.

The mainstream conversation is still focused on asking the wrong questions about global warming. We need to move beyond the if it is happening to when it is happening. The model many people have about the effects of our consumption habits is a broken refrigerator. We think of polar ice caps melting and record temperatures as something that is correctable by changing a motor or turning back on the power after an outage, as if the damages were immediately reversible and salvageable. Instead, we need to think of global warming as a decision made in the past that has consequences that will get worse before it gets better, like being caught on a congested highway and having to endure the traffic jam until either it clears or we reach our final destination.

The purpose of Eli’s landmark paper is not to prescribe a cure for our environmental ills or to suggest that a radical change of practice by designers, companies and consumers will prevent what is now an inevitable planetary shift in ecological balance. His ideas on sustainable design are meant to bring to light the past efforts in these areas as it applies to the design of thing, and to promote ongoing conversation about how we need to incorporate sustainable thinking into the things we make. We need to know at the point of conception of an object that the things we create involve the destruction or displacement of something else. Sustainability is about understanding and incorporating the consequences of such creation into the design.

There are over 14,000 blogs participating in Blog Action Day today. Their estimated reach is over 12 million readers. There is still time left in the day to post your own commentary on sustainability, as it pertains to your areas of interest. Need some inspiration? Try this list of resources, and keep the conversation going.