Petroski’s “The Evolution of Useful Things”

Reading about technical objects evolution for the game controller project led me to The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are by Henry Petroski.

Focused on forks, paper clips or spoons, the book asks this basic-but-interesting question: “how did these convenient implements come to be, and why are they now so second-nature to us?”. It basically try to seek answers to “provide insight in the nature of technological development“, and by approaching it with an evolutionary lense:

“Putting implements such as the common knife and fork and chopsticks into an evolutionary perspective, tentative as it necessarily must be, gives a new slant to the concept of their design, for they do not spring fully-formed from the mind of some maker but, rather, become shaped and reshaped through the (principally negative) experiences of their users within the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they are embedded. The formal evolution of artifacts in turn has profound influences on how we use them.“

Based on a wide array of illustrative examples, he debunks the “Form Follows Function” myth:

“Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a “form follows function” argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating.

What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom we today might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that implements used to effect it.
(…)
The form, nature, and use of all artifacts are influenced by politics, manners, and personal preferences as by that nebulous entity, technology, manners and social intercourse.
(…)
it is really want rather than need that drives the process of technological evolution“

Although I found the argument a bit too mono-causal, it’s highly interesting to read this kind of assertion from an engineer. While I agree that form may follow failure (and my interest in design failure is certainly related to this opinion), it is as if Petroski was too quick to dismiss other kinds of influence. There are *other” divers of innovation.

It’s also relevant to see him acknowledging, after G. Basalla, that the existence of continuity in technical objects “implies that novel artifacts can only arise from antecedent artifacts – that new kinds of made things are never pure creations of theory, ingenuity and fancy“. This is a favorite topic of mine, that I already addressed here. Petroski illustrates it with the example of the paper clip:

“the invention of a new paper clip will not occur in some amorphous dream world devoid of all artifacts save imaginative shapes and styles of bent wire or formed plastic. Rather, any new clip will come out of the crowded past of reality.“

Another aspect of the book I was interested in is the vocabulary employed to refer to evolution of technical objects. The evolutionary metaphor is exemplified using the following terms extracted from geography, genealogy or biology:

“a route, detours, layovers, wrong-turns, retracings and accidents, paths… antecedents, ancestors… variations, new models… a vestigial trait/feature, a survival form… precursor… the idea of XXX long survived in such diverse applications“

Why do I blog this? Some interesting insights here about the evolutionary metaphor in the design of technical objects. The book gives plenty of details about interesting examples and is a bit short on theories. That said, given its origin (Petroski is not an STS researcher), there are some good points and pertinent elements we can re-use in the game controller project.

Delicate protection

An interesting assemblage observed recently, certainly influenced by the length of the iPhone charger cable.

Superimpose various urban realities

Received today my copy of You Are the City: Observation, Organization and Transformation of Urban Settings by Petra Kempf, definitely a gem in my collection of books and artifacts about urbanism. Made of 22 transparent slides in a folder, and a 16 page brochure, as described by the author:

“this publication offers architects, urban planners and general readers interested in city design and growth a novel approach, a mapping tool that creates a framework for understanding the continually changing configuration of the city. With the aid of themed transparencies, the tool allows one to superimpose various realities in layers in order to create new urban connections, thus inviting readers to immerse themselves in the complexity of our cities.“

Readers interested in Petra Kempf’s work may be interested in this interview, from which I took the following excerpts:

“there are many ways to represent cities and each of the mapping technologies available certainly have their value and importance. However the technologies that are currently available, are mostly based on numbers and facts, not personal experiences. But to really experience a city one must be part of it. This is an analog process, by which we engage with a city’s intricate fabric. To re-create that analog process, in this project, I needed to use a tool that helped me simulate that experience. The limitations and computational restrictions of a computer program did not allow me that opportunity.
(…)
Mapping human flows in cities is a daunting task. I have mixed feelings about mapping these flows, since it could easily shift into ‘the big brother is watching or tracing’ the flows of people. Examples are already at hand with tracing people through their mobile phones, personal GPS security devices, ISP addresses, debit cards or passports. I think one needs to be very diligent with this subject. When I think of mapping human flows I think of Michel de Certeau or Henri Lefebvre, to name just two. They thought of the urban inhabitant as someone who could never be traced, since he/she always slips away from the ‘official’, traceable path. In this way each individual creates their own path, which can not be traced—even though they shape the city and the city shapes them.“

Also about how cities have always been informed by the traces we leave here and there:

Why do I blog this? What I find intriguing with this “instrument” is that the transparent sheets enable readers to perceive the city by isolating and superimposing different urban components. Doing so, one build his or her own representation of what a City can be.

Beyond the author’s purpose, these sheets remind me of Dan Hill and Andrew vande Moere’s workshop exercices. As you may notice, it’s perhaps the use of transparent and overlays that made me think about it. I like this project both for its aesthetics (and how it reshape the notion of maps) and as a methodology to observe and discuss about the urban fabric. The manipulation of transparent sheets (superimposing various versions) enable to trigger interesting conversations and I am pretty sure that the design of similar maps for a specific neighborhood can also be a curious tool in workshops.

Matt Jones on mujicomp and mujicompfrastructures at Technoark

Two week ago at the the “New Digital Spaces conference at Technoark in Sierre, Switzerland, Matt Jones gave a talk called “people are walking architecture“. You can see the video here.

(Fabien’s picture of Matt Jones at Technoark)

In his presentation, he introduced the notion of “Mujicomp”, a portmanteau word made of “Muji” (the japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods) and “Computing”. What does it mean?

According to Jones, the idea of “mujicomp” revolved around the notion that ubiquitous computing needs to “become sexy and desirable… able to be appreciated as cultural design objects rather than technology… they should be tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary, affordable in order to be invited into the home“. If designers and engineers want to “make smart cities bottom up with products and not academic ubiquitous computing which are always postponed“, he argued that ubicomp will need some “muji”. And of course, as shown by Jone’s use of the quote from Eliel Saarinen, “always design a thing by considering it in its larger context… a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment“.

Starting from the ground-up can lead to some “almost mujicomp” products he mentioned ranges from energy monitor (Watsson, Wattcher) to more curious devices such as Availabot or Olinda that they develop at BERG. The fon phone is also an example here.

As computing requires not only artifacts but also infrastructures, there’s a need for “mujicompfrastructures”:

“could you create infrastructures with desirable things?
the importance of threshold: how could we look at the spaces where we used our devices in a same way architect look at things? like bottom-up urbanism?
different elements/gray shades between the private and the public: street, sidewalk, pavement, porch, home
this connects to jane jacobs: intervening is not just about creating big infrastructures but sidewalk-scale system that could leak out into the home“

Also in his presentation, Matt talked about the “patchy homebrew equivalent of the nearly-net that would work”, relying on Clay Shirky’s Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data:

“Call the first network “perma-net,” a world where connectivity is like air, where anyone can send or receive data anytime anywhere. Call the second network “nearly-net”, an archipelago of connectivity in an ocean of disconnection. Everyone wants permanet — the providers want to provide it, the customers want to use it, and every few years, someone announces that they are going to build some version of it. The lesson of in-flight phones is that nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.“

Why do I blog this? took some time to sort my (messy) notes that highlight interesting aspects of ubicomp evolution and the role of designers in this.

Famous user figures in the history of HCI

Marketing people, engineers and designers often rely on persona, i.e. fictional characters created to represent the different user types within targeted characteristics that might use a service or a product. In the history of human-computer interaction, some user figures have been so prominent that it is important to keep them in mind.

Two of the most prominent characters are Joe and Josephine, a fictional couple described by Henry Dreyfuss, in “Designing for People” with plenty of simplified anthropometric charts. Dreyfuss introduced what has been called “Human Engineering” in the form of this couple, his common denominators for all dimensions. Simply put, Joe and Josephine representing the numerous consumers for whom they were designing:

““if this book can have a hero and a heroine, they are a couple we call Joe and Josephine…. They occupy places of honor on the wall of our New York and California offices…. They remind us that everything we design is used by people and that people come in many sizes and have varying physical attributes…. Our job is to make Joe and Josephine compatible with their environment… consider josephine as a telephone operator”. It wasn’t too long ago that she had the mouthpiece of the phone strapped to her chest and the earphones clamped to her head.”

Another good example is Sparky, the “Model Human Processor“, introduced by two HCI researchers: Stuart Card and Thomas Moran in 1983. In this case, Sparky was less a persona than a model of user interaction with the computer. For these authors, the goal was to build a model of computer users based on their perceptive, motive and cognitive abilities to interact with digital artifacts.

Perhaps the most caricatural is Sally, the fictional secretary from Xerox PARC. You can find the following description in a conversation with Douglas Englebart:

“But fashion shifted. XEROX PARC was formed. The ‘inn’ thing to do was to focus on the ‘real’ user – personified at PARC by ‘Sally’ the secretary. She need to have a computer she could figure out how to use quickly and have her paper-based work on, after all, XEROX was a ‘document company’. The thinking was very far removed from augmenting the executive ‘knowledge worker’.“

As discussed by Thierry Bardini in his book:

“the real user was born, and her name was ‘Sally’ (…) Two main characteristics defined this new model of the user: Sally was working on paper, on her Royal, but in the professional business of publishing, and she was a skilled touch typist. (…) Sally, “the lady with the Royal typewriter,” once and for all validated Licklider’s conclusion that the real users, “people who are buying computers, especially personal computers, just aren’t going to take a long time to learn something. They’re going to insist on using it awfully quick – easy to use, easy and quick to learn.”

You can also traces remnants of Sally in this research paper where she’s back with a guy called Bob.

Why do I blog this? This is only a limited list of classical persona in the history of HCI, I am pretty sure there are others. There were helpful in my presentation (in french) about how networked objects are designed with limited models of targeted users. As you surely realize, these fictional characters tend to exhibit important bias and flawed representation of human beings. Thanks Emmanuelle Jacques for pointing me to this line of work! What is of interest here, is simply to trace reasons of design choices made by certain “innovators” over time.

Object evolution

A recurring topic on this weblog is the evolution of technical objects. The game controller project is of course one of the reason for this interest but it goes beyond this category of artifacts. Some examples of genealogy trees we are inspired of in the project below. They come from a book by Yves Deforge, a french researcher, who produced lot of material about this topic. His book “Technologie et génétique de l’objet industriel offers an interesting introduction to theoretical constructs (based on Gilbert Simondon‘s work) and a good series of examples:

mapenvelop: post it from the exact place

mapenvelop is a project by beste miray dogan that I like a lot: the inner walls of the envelope are blanketed by a Google map that indicates where the sender’s address is. As described by the designer “post it from the exact place”.

Why do I blog this an interesting low-tech approach to adding locational information to a message. A sort of locational information that adds subtlety in communication given that a map can be perceived as “richer” than a written address. It would be even more intriguing to have such envelopes for places you visit… you would buy a map of barcelona and pinpoint where you wrote the letter… so that your contact can be aware of where you thought about them. Surely something that is possible with digital communication through location-aware devices but that is even more curious on paper.

There are unused icons on your desktop

Seen the other day at the airport in Newark, USA. When the reality of Windows OS is brought to the foreground for non-obvious reasons. Why would we care, as users of this display, to see this message?

ixda interaction 2010 in Savannah

Back from interaction10, the annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Savannah, Georgia. A good occasion to visit the deep south (aka “dirty south 2) that I did not know at all. More observation on this at the end of this post, let’s focus first in lessons learned at the conference.

Before coming, I was not sure about the whole thing, wondering whether the talk/audience would be into web-stuff or other concerns. After three days there I have to admit that I am really happy with the quality of the talks as well as the diversity of the conference formats. As opposed to lots of events, it seems that the venues have certainly contributed to the quality of the interactions (definitely no big hotel-chain lobby with their cheesy carpets). Furthermore, I was also glad to present my talk about failures and get some interesting feedback to go further.

Instead of a selection of semi-automatic writings of the talks as I’ve done after the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, I tried to put together a selection of insights I collected at interaction2010. Overall, I was struck by the following three elements:

Incentives and rewards

A recurring topic was sur toutes les lèvres: the notion of providing “incentives and rewards” for the use of certain services. Be it about changing one’s behavior to reach a more sustainable development model or as a way to let people use applications they wouldn’t otherwise. This was a term I’ve heard in talks, conversations, participative activities and side activities. The break-out group about Foursquare at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium the other day also connects to this discussion because I think 4^2 epitomizes by-products of incentives. Simply because one the rewards the interaction designers of this location-based system created turned users into point-addicts. Although the design community has always talk about this, my impression was that design was more about creating “affordances” than incentives. Where the former lies in perceptual and cognitive psychology, industrial design and human–computer interaction, the latter stemmed from economics and sociology. I don’t judge anything here, I just see a pattern, perhaps design is well qualified to use both metaphors in its creative repertoire. The very notion for service design is perhaps useful here to understand this shift and I’ve heard someone arguing that an incentive was an “immaterial affordance” (which made me frown).

(someone typing notes without bothering looking at the blue-glow display)

About models

In addition, one of the theme I was interested in was the way designers work, achieve their projects and think. Which is why I paid close attention to tools, methodologies and abstractions. Fortunately, most of the presentation I attended showed some interesting examples of “models”. See for instance the two examples below: Nathan Shedroff‘s model of experience/meaning (see his presentation for more) or Timo Arnall‘s interesting model of the 3 levels for designing networked objects, and the one presented by Mike Kruzeniski.

Shedroff’s model was descriptive: as he explained, it helped him to show how meaning works in experience and the 6 dimensions of what constitutes an experience: significance, breadth, intensity, duration, triggers and interaction. As shown on this checklist, the role of the model is also prescriptive because it helps practitioners making decisions and acting upon other insights (i.e. user research).

Timo’s model is different, it originated in the categorization of experiences with networked objects, which can be:

1. Immediate tangible experiences: glanceable and that do not take too much attention as the Nabaztag, Nike+ or Chris Woebken’s animal superpower
2. Short term connecting and sharing: where the purpose is to share/get immediate feedback from friends such as the on-line component of Nike+
3. Long term service, data & visualization of the data produced that become social objects

What was interesting in Timo’s talk was that he showed afterwards how these three central aspects could be used to evaluate existing objects AND as a basis for designing new artifacts that could be used as an iterative cycle. The model is therefore evaluative and generative.

A third sort of model was the one showed by Mike Kruzeniski in his talk. In his work at Microsoft, his purpose is to connect engineers with a more emotional vision of innovating. The problem they encountered was that developers tended to cut features and design elements with a specific rationale which did not take into account emotional factors. The first model/metaphor they chose was the tree (cutting two many features of a product may lead to a weird tree) but it was not efficient. Thus, they adopted the “Body, Heart, & Soul” framework to qualifies, validates, and prioritizes the intangible qualities of design work alongside the more practical concerns of our Engineering partners. To put it shortly, categorizing features as “heart” or “soul” was a more legible way to prioritize (and suppress design elements). The soul is untouchable, the heart elements support the soul and the body is the rest. Each of this component has certain rules (“no more than 5 “soul” features) and it was a more humane way to prioritize than “p0″, “p1″ and “p2″. This kind of model was metaphorical in the sense that it helped engineers talk in a different way, a “beginner’s design vocabulary to start with an grow from”. Additionally, doing the simple work of categorizing features in these 3 topics was about articulating what matters emotionally to users (and then making choices). In this case, the model is both metaphorical (to convey this emotional sense) and operational (to enable easier prioritization).

These three examples are interesting given they exemplify the use of abstract models by designers from the ixda community. It as if the notion of model had been re-appropriated in a flexible way to serve the designer’s purposes, which is a relevant locus of observation. Make not mistake here, these are only examples I’ve seen and I won’t generalize from this sample. I am pretty sure you would also find predictive abstractions in designers’ work. However, it’s curious to point them out to show how models here are more seen as “tools to give structures to help you think” than explicative elements. The difference between designers and scientists in the way they build and use models, some epistemological comparisons may be intriguing here and I feel I am just scratching the surface.

(Wifi data points on a post-it in the washroom)

Showing products or not?

My third comment on the conference was the surprising lack of examples/products/services in lots of the presentation. I expected a design conference to be much more evocative in terms of design examples and it was not the case. Of course there are exceptions (as if Matt Cottam, Timo Arnall or Dan Hill’s presentation were exceptions) but it’s as if all the potential examples had been vacuumed and resurfaced in Paola Antonelli’s talk.

The interest in objects

The mention of Antonelli’s work allows me to make a smooth transition to a trend I find interesting: the increasing interest (or the resurgence of interest) in technical objects and a way to talk about them, to analyze them (Timo’s model is inspiring for that matter) and how the history of digital artifacts matter. In her talk, she described how objects have always spoken to her and she summarized an upcoming MOMA exhibit that will cover the evolution of new media/digital technologies. Perhaps it’s just me reading The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (Henry Petroski), Carl di Salvo’s new blog about objects, discussions with my neighbor or the game controller project with Laurent Bolli, but I am feeling a renewal of interest in analyzing objects (rather than users).

Not so much time for a write-up about the city itself but some pics are always worth a thousand words.

(The intriguing repartition of green pockets in Savannah)

(The pervasive presence of a local design school)

(Savannah has remnants of old shops)

(Luxuriance on the street, lovable pipes and nature around)

(Cultural shock for me maybe)

(Gorgeous brick buildings to be rented, a common feature in this town)

(Evocative drain pipe)

Slides from interaction2010 talk

The annotated slides from my talk “Design and Designed Failures: From Observing Failurs To Provoking Them” at ixda interaction10 are now available on Slideshare. The video of the talk is here as well.

Failures are often overlooked in design research. The talk addressed this issue by describing two approaches: observing design flops and identify symptoms of failures OR provoking failures to document user behavior.

This talk was actually a follow-up of my introduction to the Lift 2009 conference a bout the recurring failures of holy grails. It was very much inspired by Mark Vanderbeeken (Experientia) who pushed me to go further than pointing out product failures and exploring why it’s important as a design strategy.

There was a good crowd of people and someone interestingly commented on the fact tat I may have made my presentation intentionally a failure to make the crowd react.

Thanks for the ixda interaction 2010 committee for letting my present this work!