Royal McBee interface

Another week-end encounter. A Royal McBee computer/typewriter, heir to one of the non-human participant of the “The Sory of Mel“.

Why do I blog this? documenting different sorts of interface. There was a time when human-machine interfaces were not so homogeneous and you had both keypads, switches, potentiometers and stuff. I am often fascinated by the proximity between the input and the output (with the green/red switches on the right) and how it can change the task at hand. I don’t mean here it’s better to have that setting (it’s certainly less flexible) but there is strong link between input/output (not to mention the device aesthetic).

Talking with the person who operated this machine, she said there was a pleasure of immediacy when using it and a limited flexibility which was appealing to her. “no diversion” as she reported.

design+future+optimism

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Richard Seymour has this good piece entitled “Optimistic futurism” in which he articulates an interesting vision of design+foresight.

After discussing how a wave of relevant innovation stopped around the 70s (“what the hell happened to the future”) people realized that the future dystopia represented in pop-culture may happen (although people though it couldn’t possibly happen): “shrinking ozone layers, global warming, airplanes into buildings, rising fuel costs etc.” The good point of the articles comes when Seymour states that “It’s something we all need to see” (visualize the future!) and the role of designers in this, as in this excerpt:

“Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. It just doesn’t go with the job. We’re supposed to be defining the future, aren’t we?
(…)
There’s nothing on the planet that can’t be made just that bit better (rather than just that bit different). But before you do it, you need to have an idea of where you want all this to go eventually, a vision of the future, with a set of stepping stones to let you get from the now into the future in an effective and efficient way. ”
(…)
that’s what we should be doing: leading the way by visualizing and articulating achievable futures that get us out of this hole.

I’m pretty sure the folks at Apple don’t call themselves optimistic futurists, but that’s exactly what they are. My favorite Steve Jobs one-liner is: “It’s not the consumer’s job to know about the future; that’s my job.” And he’s absolutely right.

Jurassic corporations need to learn from the mammals. The secret of the “next big thing” isn’t lurking inside the consumer’s head, waiting to be liberated by some well-paid focus group. It’s inside the heads of the dreamers, the futurists, the utopians.”

Why do I blog this? some good thoughts here about the design+foresight issue and how both are connected through this notion “optimism”, which correspond to a direction given to the future.

Also, the “beyond-focus-groups” design stance is important as shown by the quote from Steve Jobs; I guess some people may mistake it with a “don’t pay attention to the user” but I don’t think it’s contradictory with having a user-centered approach by any means. It just reinforces the role of designers, who can him/herself base the work on informed opinions/educated guesses about people’s life/motivations/desires/needs through field observation.

don’t touch my touch screen

Taken today while visiting a big industrial factory. The left sticker says: “touch screen: no BEWARE: don’t touch the screen… except me: I am the operator” and the right one says “Don’t touch my screen”. It reads like a Kraftwerk song.

I found interesting the existence of these stickers which gives order about ownership of touch-screen. There aren’t any sticker about keyboard ownwership but in that factory, it seems that touch screens make me people willing to touch/interacti with the device.

How to refer to people

As discussed by David R. Millen in Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research

“Even the terminology used to describe the research sample belies different research perspectives. For example, psychologists refer to subjects, HCI researchers talk about users, market researchers refer to consumers or segments, and anthropologists refer to informants. “

Geography of cloud computing

The ever-growing need of relying on server infrastructure caused by cloud computing is an interesting recombination of space and technology. The Economist has a good piece about “where the cloud touches down”, i.e. where to locate data centres and server farms. The fact that these facilities spring up in unexpected places such as old bunkers or shopping malls is an interesting indicator that their whereabouts is a serious concern and less an afterthought at it use to be.

“Now this haphazard landscape is becoming more centralised. Companies have been packing ever more machines into data centres, both to increase their computing capacity and to comply with new data-retention rules.
(…)
with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy.
(…)
So will all data centres end up in remote places like Quincy or Iceland? Not necessarily. For many applications (…) firms want to have access to trading data in real time, which explains the high density of data centres near New York and London. And fast-moving online games must be hosted near their players.“

As described in the article, the criteria that companies use to pick a site keep evolving. It’s not only market economics but also local incentives (e.g. tax breaks). And we’re heading to more complex recombination of technologies and space:

“In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.“

Why do I blog this? a sort of fascination towards the friction between the digital (allowed by such infrastructures) and the physical. In a way, this is a concrete example of how technologies physically reshape the material environment through new building typologies and new places colonized by technological facilities. This notion of “cloud computing” is intriguing as there is a clear paradox between the ethereal idea of a “cloud” and its very fixed geography.

Some sort of side urban computing issue that has lots of relevance anyway. Or perhaps given the remote location of some data center site, it’s an example of “countryside computing”

Status of objects

Encountered in a french hotel lately. With the flat affordance of screens, TVs can get a status update through this sort of frame. Supposed to be classier? or to fade in the background.

On a more ironic glance, it can look as the deification of TV.

Miyamoto on alternative controllers

A recent interview of Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto by Chris Kohler (Wired) deals with alternative game controllers employed with casual/sport applications:

“I’d always wanted to try to find a way to make a game out of that, and I felt that with the Wii, that’s something that I would normally do in the bathroom is weigh myself. But, with the Wii, if there was a way that we could take that into the living room and turn it into an experience that everybody takes part in, then that might be fun.

What about the timing of this device seems auspicious right now? Does it have to do with the acceptance of alternative controllers now?

I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that at this point the Wii is wireless, and so I think the fact that it’s wireless certainly makes it easy to use. For me, personally, also, in this NES era, I myself didn’t really think that weighing myself and tracking my progress every day is something that I could turn into a game. (…) initially we created the Balance Board in order to create Wii Fit, and it was essentially designed to enable that experience. And, then after we finalized the design, we looked at it and realized — or as we were finalizing the design, we realized it could potentially be something that could be used for other games, as well. And, so in finalizing those designs and finalizing the final Balance Board, we ultimately tried to do it in a way that would enable other developers to also take advantage of it. The other thing that we found is that actually in the sports world there are devices that are somewhat similar to this that are used for training athletes.
(…)
there’s actually a game out already called We Ski. It’s a skiing game that uses the Balance Board that’s developed by Bandai Namco. (…) Using a Wii remote, you could track the timing of the swing and the shifting of the balance on the Balance Board to calculate kind of how good the swing is. Of course, there’s still the question of whether or not the mass market would want a game that perfectly replicates that type of an activity. But, in terms of golf training, you could certainly do something like that.

Is there a danger of maybe burning people out on extra controllers?

we are creating a number of different controllers and peripherals for the Wii, as well, so in that sense, I can see your point of how having so many different controllers can be a little bit inconvenient. But, at the same time, we feel that the videogame audience has gotten to the point now where it’s so broad that there are different tastes and different needs within people, within the audience of people who are playing the videogames.
(…)
when we’re designing games and designing peripherals, we’re not designing them for the purpose of simply creating more devices to use with the Wii. We’re trying to create devices that are creating a more streamlined and intuitive approach to gaming so that a broader audience can feel that they’re able to interact with and better use the device.“

Why do I blog this? great lessons here, with good connections to some current research about tangible interactions. There are good things to wonder about concerning the relationships between the user experience and different use of tangibles interactions. For instance, the “direct mapping” rule is often perceived as the best solution for intuitive apprehension of games. Using the same movement in the physical space as the one rendered in the digital world is indeed a relevant approach but is it that simple? is it that fun? is the movement so physical that it becomes less fun? And what about the overemphasis on gestures, playing soccer by doing gestures which are not a direct translation from the physical to the digital (yes I am thinking about PES on the Wii with its click-and-drag system)?

On a different note, the scale-turned-into-game-platform reminds me of 2 projects which focused on transforming everyday objects into game controllers: Everyday games by Are Hovland Nielsen and Control Freak by Haiyan Zhang.

Everyone has a [private] monitor

So, as it seems, the new “big thing” is consider “everyone as a monitor” as attested by this article in the Economist. Some people now claims that “The sheer ubiquity of mobile phones amounts to “the biggest leap in history, bigger than the printing press, which, after all, stayed in the hands of very few people,” (Katrin Verclas from MobileActive.org). Although I am not sure about this, it does not dismiss the whole issue.

The article interestingly addresses the different modalities of such a “monitoring” feature: be it explicit (people take pictures, shoot videos, send messages, etc.) OR automatic. As they say in the E, “this is now on the horizon” for the good (participatory urbanism for instance) or the bad (“a coming surveillance state”). Funny enough, this article appeared in my RSS feed reader right next to this other one by Bruce Schneier on Wired which basically states that “What happens to our data happens to ourselves / Who controls our data controls our lives“.
Why do I blog this? quick references for later. It’s again the tension between explicit versus automatic sharing of personal information, a topic I am interested in.

Architecture and game design

Reading this interview of Daniel Dociu on BLDGBLOG, I was intrigued by a comment from Greg Smith about the relationship between gaming and architecture:

“Seeing real discourse about gaming in an architectural context is very exciting for me. Architecture tends to have stock discussions about gaming: the eternal resuscitation of the Situationist International and the expected conversations about 3D modeling. The winfall in thinking about gaming is much bigger when you consider the medium without being crippled by these limitations. While I do appreciate the fine art of “level design” I think the real prize in comparing gaming and architectural design is the exploration of simulation, interface and play (the latter of which is to gaming as programme is to architecture).
(…)
what interests me the most is how the medium ties into the history of architectural representation. Given the intimate relationship between architecture and “viewing apparatuses” (from the panorama through orthogonal projection on the drawing board) gaming can be read as the latest in a procession of technologies and techniques for constructing images and ideas“

In an insightful blogpost, Greg Smith also discusses this topic. He mentions two interesting projects relevant for that matters:

1. Echochrome: a puzzle game created by Sony’s JAPAN Studio n which the player must direct a mannequin through a series of Oscar Reutersvärd’s impossible constructions. You have to control a character figure traversing a rotatable world where physics and reality depend on perspective (See for example this video).
2. The Orange Box expansion pack for Half-Life 2, as Smith points out “ the player finds themselves immersed in the familiar architectural trappings of the stock first person shooter space. The key difference with this game from your run of the mill FPS is the tools at your disposal. Portal revolves around the use of the “aperture science handheld portal device”, a tool that allows you to shoot a pair of wormholes into surfaces and then pass through them allowing you to cut through game space in a non-linear manner.“

(A example of Echochrome)

Why do I blog this? I find this topic interesting and touched it last year during my year at the Media and Design Lab. It’s good to think in both directions: what urbanism/architecture can bring to game design and how game design can influence urbanism/architecture. And it’s not only about aesthetic concerns. The “Space Time Play book is a good resource about this topic.

Also, what does this mean in reality? are there signals of echochrome-like structures in the physical space that would allow parkour-like interactons? See for example the following example that I’ve already mentioned in this blog:

Report about “real-time city roundtable”

Fabien wrote a comprehensive summary of his “Real-Time Cities Round Table“. He basically gathered a good bunch of experts that influence the visions of real-time cities with whom they talk about “the issues, promises and implications inherent to their development“.

The whole report is a valuable+pleasant read and I would only highlight the conclusion as it uncovers an interesting approach:

“The very diverse attendance at the round table clearly reveals that the real-time city touches many disciplines. Yet which trans/inter/undisciplinary skill sets will allow the researchers and practitioners present to understand how to shape the cities they intervene in? It could start by offering alternate hypotheses instead of ignoring the input of colleagues across the table. For instance, most of the research works discussed around the table are going beyond blindly pursuing technological possibilities. They take their source of get informed by social research to define the computational problems and potential solutions. To form a coherent research avenue, there is a need to go beyond bringing together researchers from different disciplines to work in multidisciplinary teams. It could languages of multiple disciplines“

Why do I blog this? because the table sets the agenda for interesting research projects I’d like to work on, and because the proposed approach in conclusion is refreshing.