Gestures from the 21st Century: train ticket control

Seen yesterday in a Swiss train. Digital device to iPhone interaction for visual marker recognition. Yet another curious situation to observe in the train (after train sensors) because there are sometimes some problems for the system to read the 2D code. As usual with new forms of interactions, it leads to lively discussion with the other passengers (who have their own stories about the problems caused by this).

Game maps evolution and level design

A map of Zelda found at Atari2600.com

Last week in the Guardian gamesblog, I ran across this insightful piece called “The lost art of video game cartography“. It’s basically about “ the homemade map remained an important navigational device” and the importance of map (hand) drawing on a notepad while playing back in the early days of the video game era.

A map of Loco Roco found at Quickjump

The article describes the different approaches (“naturalistic approximations of the game environments, creating miniaturised ordinance survey maps” versus “more diagrammatic approach, inspired by the topographic purity of Harry Beck’s tube map“). It also reflects upon the evolution of game design.

Any game/interaction designer might find interesting the discussion about the influence of level design on drawing maps manually:

“while early Japanese RPG titles like Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda initially required some mapping skills thanks to their burgeoning use of open world ‘overmap’ environments, later iterations brought in a variety of navigational aids (…) world maps that opened up new sections as the player gained fresh abilities, (…) teleportation zones, and the ability to set waypoints across a map screen – somewhere along the line, travel became an inconvenience rather than the point of the game.
(…)
CD-Rom technology allowed the birth of the cinematic adventure (…) The whole concept of exploration has changed; we no longer need to explore to progress, we explore to find power-ups and hidden extras, and in this overtly stage-managed form of freedom, cartography isn’t really necessary. The pictorial map has been replaced by the didactic walkthrough.
(…)
Even so-called ‘open world’ titles are map-free experiences. There will usually be a mini-map or radar display in the corner as well as an HUD that paints your required destination with big arrows and a distance read-out.“

Why do I blog this? This is related to my interest in video game spaces (see some earliers posts about it here or on the Terra Nova platform). I have always been fascinated by vernacular maps like these and find interesting to see how the game design features influence the production of such artifacts. From a design standpoint, I think it’d be curious to envision games that would force people to create maps (or games that would force people to use external material such as notepad, pens, figurines or whatever seems interesting).

Speech at the Swiss Design Network about Science-Fiction and Design

Here are the slides of my talk, which concluded the Junior Research Day at the Swiss Design Network 2010 in Basel. It was about the relationships between Sci-Fi and Design… which allowed me to introduce some of the concept that Julian Bleecker or James Auger would address later on in the conference.

Thanks Laurent Marti and Martin Wiedmer for the invitation!

About African science-fiction

An interesting text by Jonathan Dotse about African science-fiction:

“There are also artistic reasons to look forward to an African science fiction renaissance. African storytelling tradition contains the very sort of metaphysical themes that science fiction is best equipped to address: themes of identity, self and community, and relationships between generations in time. There is no shortage of inspiration for science fiction within African life today, as the pervasive reach of technological development is being witnessed even by those in the most remote regions of the continent. Aesthetically, science fiction gives the writer power to create landscapes that blur the distinction between the literal and metaphorical interpretations of a story to produce an absolute representation of a complex idea. The writer can freely traverse the continuum of time, placing the present time in its right context by clearly framing it between the future and the past. This freedom could yield invaluable additions to the classics of African literature by tackling critical new issues while opening radical new dimensions to existing ones.“

Why do I blog this? preparing my speech about sci-fi and design for the Junior day at the Swiss Design Network requires some examples

Density of information

The density of information on the back of a Polaroid camera, observed at the flea market in Geneva.

Components of Science Fiction #scifi

As claimed by Fredrik Pohl “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam“. Just thought it would be good to play with a LOLtechnology such as graphjam to exemplify this quote.

Problems about car automation #techusage

Wandering around the Internet, I stumbled across this website about a car technology, which has an interesting flow of comments about how people feel towards it. It’s about the “ECO pedal”, i.e a pedal system that uses onboard electronics to determine when the driver is excessively accelerating (and therefore wasting gas and emitting more emissions) and can actually push back on the driver’s accelerator foot.

Some comment examples.

“Now your gas pedal will be able to say, “Shame on you, you wasteful person!” I’d like to see how well the GT-R runs the ring with this technology added.

NO! GOD, NO. i don’t want to argue with my car about how fast i should be accelerating. i get in enough arguments about that with other people.

That’s unnecessarily intrusive. Lighting up an indicator in the instrument cluster should be the most the car can do to tell you how to save gas.

What ever happened to KNOWING HOW TO DRIVE??? We managed to make it through nearly an entire century of the automobile without parking-assist, radar cruise, lane-keep assist, and now a freaking accelerator nanny? If people want to drive greener, then leave it to them to decide to accelerate slower when they’re able, yet still be able to haul ass if it’s life-or-death necessary. Please auto companies, stop making it even easier for people to drive while dicking around with their iPhones.“

Brilliant! One of them made me think about this insightful quote by Mark Weiser back in the days: “I don’t want to argue with my car about where I want to go. And of course, it can be traced back to Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

Why do I blog this? collecting examples of tech automation/assistance for an upcoming lecture.

Accidents, mistakes, failures and malfunctions, a talk at Share Festival (Torino)

Last Wednesday I went to Torino. I was part of a “Warm-up event” for the Share Festival, which focuses this year on a topic called “Smart Mistakes”.

The talk was called “Accidents and failures as creative material for the near future” and slides can be found on Slideshare. It was actually an updated version of an earlier talk I’ve given at Interaction 2010.

The talk starts with a presentation of how accidents are cool and funny (on the Internets)… which lead me to a sort of typology of failures and a discussion about how problems, accidents and malfunctions are actually important for design. I then move to how failures, problems and limits of technologies can be employed as a design tactic.

Thanks Simona for the invitation!

Bruce Sterling on robots in acm interaction

Some excerpts from an interesting interview with Bruce Sterling about robots from acm interactions in 2005:

“AM: What do you think of as the most successful or surprising innovation in robotics in the past?
BS: Well, robots are always meant to be “surprising,” because they are basically theater or carnival shows. A “successful” robot, that is to say, a commercially and industrially successful one, wouldn’t bother to look or act like a walking, talking human being; it would basically be an assembly arm spraying paint, because that’s how you get the highest return on investment out of any industrial investment make it efficient, get rid of all the stuff that isn’t necessary. But of course it’s the unnecessary, sentimentalized, humanistic aspects of robots that make robots dramatically appealing to us. There’s a catch-22 here.

You can go down to an aging Toyota plant and watch those robot arms spray paint, but it’ll strike you as rote work that is dull, dirty, and dangerous—you’re not likely to conclude, “Whoopee, look at that robot innovation go!” When it’s successful, it doesn’t feel very robotic, because it’s just not dramatic.
(…)
AM: How do you think robots will be defined in the future?
I’d be guessing that redefining human beings will always trump redefining robots. Robots are just our shadow, our funhouse-mirror reflection. If there were such a thing as robots with real intelligence, will, and autonomy, they probably wouldn’t want to mimic human beings or engage with our own quirky obsessions. We wouldn’t have a lot in common with them-we’re organic, they’re not; we’re mortal, they’re not; we eat, they don’t; we have entire sets of metabolic motives, desires, and passions that really are of very little relevance to any- thing made of machinery.

AM: What’s in the future of robotics that is likely very different from most people’s expectations?
BS: Robots won’t ever really work. They’re a phantasm, like time travel or maybe phlogiston. On the other hand, if you really work hard on phlogiston, you might stumble over something really cool and serendipitous, like heat engines and internal combustion. Robots are just plain interesting. When scientists get emotionally engaged, they can do good work. What the creative mind needs most isn’t a cozy sinecure but something to get enthusiastic about.“

Why do I blog this? Currently working on the program of the upcoming Robolift conference in France next March… led me to accumulate insights like these. Might also be interesting in my design course and for research projects about human-robot interactions.

About a voting device

A voting interface encountered last week in Lyon at the local city council. It’s interesting to note:

• The possibility to interact with the room using the micro feature (which stands to “microphone”),
• The arrow on the right indicate a LED that is switched on when the person enter a identification card in the device… which enable the participation in the voting process,
• The range of possibilities (from ++ to –, via the neutral 0), which surprised me as more complicated than a “yes/no” system,
• A LED (at the top) that indicates whether the person already voted.

To some extent, this device partly embeds a small portion of the representative democracy. As you can see it’s fairly asymmetrical (the only feedback the user can get is the LED that show if she/he voted).

Why do I blog this? Local observation of a curious object. It would be intriguing to re-think such a device in different ways (more symmetry, open to third-parties and citizens, etc.). Pressing one of these buttons is important given that the person who is entitled to do so “represent” a bigger number of people (“citizens”). Could this be reflected in the design of the interface?