Pre-Internet of Things Objects ID

One of the current obsession consists in observing the meta-data given to things in the physical world. They’re generally used to give an ID to a certain artifact (in order to performance maintenance acts) or its status. Some examples recently encountered:

Power plugs at London Heathrow:

Extension chord at the local design school:

Switch at Lift Conference offices:

Why do I blog this? I use this as an example in talks/courses about innovation to show that so-called “breakthrough” (such as the Internet of Things) should be pondered… and the evolution of technology is a:
- A slow movement: the idea of giving an ID to objects is not coming out from the blue, it existed before the IoT,
- Technology is not the only underlying factor here: the “social” (here: a decision between a group of people to name artifacts to keep track of their status) and the “technological” (here: the thing itself as well as meta-data systems/reading devices) are closely intertwined.

Randomly juxtaposing diagrams of two everyday objects

The Creatomatic by Nova Jiang:

“The Creatomatic is a piece of software designed to accelerate the imagination and prompt new inventions. It works by randomly juxtaposing diagrams of two everyday objects from a selection of hundreds. Through free association, the two objects can prompt the invention of an entirely new object, which can be practical or nonsensical. Inspired by the accidental nature of creativity, the Creatomatic uses the technique of surprise to overcome habitual ways of thinking and short circuit rational control.“

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the way a piece of software can integrate such a design tactic (creating chimera).

“Practicing Theory or: Did Practice Kill Theory?” symposium

An interesting follow-up to the Swiss Design Network Julian an I attended last year is organized in Geneva on November 25 at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD). It’s called “Practicing Theory or: Did Practice Kill Theory?“:

“The Swiss Design Network 2011 Symposium Practicing Theory aims at understanding what are the real theoretical contexts of designers practicing design research, how these theoretical backgrounds are formed, explored and broaden, and what use is made of them in the everyday practice of a research project in design. Not only will we seek to understand where from designers think, but also in what directions their research could possibly push the activity of thinking. At the end of each Paper presentation session, a round table will mix design researchers and theoreticians from various related disciplines, in order to discuss more deeply the interconnections of design research and theory.“

Why do I blog this? The presentations will address the relationship between theory and practice in design research. Writing research projects related to this topic, I’m curious to see what can come up out of this.

Visual representations of Primer’s plot

Some visual representations of Primer‘s plot written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth:

Meerkat and Tuba: serendipitous presentation of digital content

Having a large quantity of pictures on my Flickr account, I enjoy using Photojojo time capsule, a system that send me twice a month photos from a year ago. I like this kind of almost random selection of my past appearing in my (boring) Mail app.

Which is why I was intrigued by this design prototypes described in “Meerkat and Tuba: Design Alternatives for Randomness, Surprise and Serendipity in Reminiscing
by John Helmes, Kenton O’Hara, Nicolas Vilar and Alex Taylor:

“People are accumulating large amounts of personal digital content that play a role in reminiscing practices. But as these collections become larger, and older content is less frequently accessed, much of this content is simply forgotten. In response to this we explore the notions of randomness and serendipity in the presentation of content from people’s digital collections. To do this we designed and deployed two devices – Meerkat and Tuba – that enable the serendipitous presentation of digital content from people’s personal media collections. Each device emphasises different characteristics of serendipity that with a view to understanding whether people interpret and value these in different ways while reminiscing.“

Meerkat is aimed at exploring the notion of getting the user’s attention to push content to him/her:

Unlike the previous one, Tuba requires the user to deliberately pull content of the device:

Why do I blog this? I find it interesting to see how time and asynchronous interactions can be embedded into tangible artifacts such as these two examples.

Video games with less video

Discussion with colleagues here at the design school about “screenless interaction design” led me to present some projects that I find interesting in the field. It seems that there’s starting to be a cluster of projects that aim at creating playful and digital interactions with less emphasis on the visual senses. Some examples I find interesting:

SAP (for Situated Audio Platform) a “Barely Game prototype” by Russell Davies:

“The Situated Audio Platform, a browser for geotagged audio files. The idea is that it only has one button, the whole screen, which you use to switch it on, and then you never have to look at it. You can leave it in your pocket, monitoring the world for tagged files, quitely pinging, while you listen to your music. Then if it detects something, you hold it at your side and sweep the area until you home in on whatever it’s found. You could browse AudioBoo with it, or get it to read geotagged wikipedia files to you.
That’s the useful bit.

But if you wanted to do some pretending, and some stupidness, it could turn into a social fighting game. Where the files you explore are mines and traps laid by other people and you sweep and destroy them to stay alive. All while never looking at your device.“

Oterp by Antonin Fourneau (development by Kevin Lesur):

“Oterp is a mobile phone game project using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player’s position on Earth. It generates new melodies when travelling. The objective of Oterp is to mix the reality of our everyday environment with a video game. This is a new way to imagine our movements in a society increasingly on the move and dependent on mobile interfaces.“

Papa Sangre:

“Papa Sangre is a video game with no video. It’s a first-person thriller, done entirely in audio by an award-winning team of game designers, musicians, sound designers and developers. We’ve created an entire world using the first ever real-time 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device. Which was BLOODY HARD.“

It seems that there’s a continuum based on the degree to which the user need to look at his or her own device: from no need to do this to a quick glance once in a while. Interestingly, this connects to another interest of mine: asynchronous interactions between the user and digital realms… which led me to this kind of design space (teku teku angel is a Nintendo DS game in which you have to walk with a pedometer to raise so tamagotchi-like creature):

Why do I blog this? This is just a quick note for myself about the possibilities of non-video pervasive games (what an ugly term). Food for thoughts for the laboratory!

Crosswords – QR – Game of Life

Lighweight QR code (as suggested by Paul Baron)? Game of Life (as suggested by Matt Jones)? or simply a red hand-drawn crosswords structure… as this kind of artifact fascinates me recently. I wonder if some people already thought about crosswords generated by game of life algorithms (beyond this.

Why do I blog this? I’m just mesmerized by the visual proximity between crosswords, QR codes and Game of Life rendering.

“the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life…”

The interview about SVK by Berg London is insightful but I was fascinated by this quote:

“I think the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life – that it’s something inventive, hopefully something that has some cultural importance – but mainly to have fun, make stuff y’know? When you can make that kind of thing achievable, when it gets some kind of independence from the client work so you can do it yourself, that’s really interesting.“

Why do I blog this? this is exactly the sort of direction we are trying to aim at.

“Mobile 3D” projects

Currently working on a project about the user experience of 3D on mobile displays, I am fascinated by these two projects that came up in a discussion with Etienne yesterday:

Hasbro MY3D Viewer:

“Designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch, the MY3D Viewer lets you experience 3D games and 360-degree entertainment in a brand new way. Simply insert your device into the viewer to enjoy a variety of 3D and 360-degree-enhanced apps, many of which are free from the App Store.
The MY3D Viewer includes four adapter trays sized to fit iPhone and iPod touch devices. Your device quickly snaps in and out–no wires or batteries are required.“

Sensor Girl, an old stereoscope customized for iPhones by David-Olivier Lartigaud. This project has been shown at Mode:Demo (Lift Experience 2010):

“SensorGirl is an artistic experimental application that aims to question the new interactive relationship a user can have with represented objects on nowadays mobile screens. Embedded sensors like accelerometers and gyroscope are opening new modalities of interaction with images : the user’s hand changes the screen physical orientation which can be used to interact with the represented object without any third party device. The screen itself and its relative state can then be directly connected to an object image, linking both in a new way that common controllers like mouse or joysticks don’t permit on usual, non-mobile screens.“

Why do I blog this? I’m accumulating examples of curious experiments like this for a project and wonder about people’s reactions, the design possibilities and the value of 3D in mobile context.

Funfaircomp: game interfaces

Some examples of game interfaces encountered at a fun fair in Nantes last week:

Why do I blog this? Fun fair and amusement park offer peculiar kinds of constraints for interaction design: noisy environment, presence of a crowd, cash-oriented money, balancing success and failure with regards to the reward at stake (toys, etc.) The crafting of sound user experience in this context is intriguing and lead to solutions as shown above.

It would be good to spend some time and observe more people’s reactions when using these huge buttons and joysticks. That being said, fun fair interfaces and amusement parks experiences seems to be a forgotten realm in human-computer interaction. Apart from research about amusement rides, I haven’t seen may occurrences of such endeavor. That can be an interesting lead for future projects.