Computing chic hiccups: the Prada store case

Back to failing technologies… this piece on CNN Money from 2004 gives an intriguing snapshot of the problems encountered by “users” of the Prada building designed by Rem Koolhaas. As described in this article, this cutting-edge architecture was supposed to “revolutionize the luxury experience” through “a wireless network to link every item to an Oracle inventory database in real time using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on the clothes. The staff would roam the floor armed with PDAs to check whether items were in stock, and customers could do the same through touchscreens in the dressing rooms”.

Some excerpts that I found relevant to my interests in technological accidents and problems:

“But most of the flashy technology today sits idle, abandoned by employees who never quite embraced computing chic and are now too overwhelmed by large crowds to coolly assist shoppers with handhelds. On top of that, many gadgets, such as automated dressing-room doors and touchscreens, are either malfunctioning or ignored
(…)
In part because of the crowds, the clerks appear to have lost interest in the custom-made PDAs from Ide. During multiple visits this winter, only once was a PDA spied in public–lying unused on a shelf–and on weekends, one employee noted, “we put them away, so the tourists don’t play with them.”

When another clerk was asked why he was heading to the back of the store to search for a pair of pants instead of consulting the handheld, he replied, “We don’t really use them anymore,” explaining that a lag between the sales and inventory systems caused the PDAs to report items being in stock when they weren’t. “It’s just faster to go look,” he concluded. “Retailers implementing these systems have to think about how they train their employees and make sure they understand them,”
(…)
Also aging poorly are the user-unfriendly dressing rooms. Packed with experimental tech, the clear-glass chambers were designed to open and close automatically at the tap of a foot pedal, then turn opaque when a second pedal sent an electric current through the glass. Inside, an RFID-aware rack would recognize a customer’s selections and display them on a touchscreen linked to the inventory system.

In practice, the process was hardly that smooth. Many shoppers never quite understood the pedals, and fashionistas whispered about customers who disrobed in full view, thinking the door had turned opaque. That’s no longer a problem, since the staff usually leaves the glass opaque, but often the doors get stuck. In addition, some of the chambers are open only to VIP customers during peak traffic times. “They shut them down on the weekends or when there’s a lot of traffic in the store,” says Darnell Vanderpool, a manager at the SoHo store, “because otherwise kids would toy with them.”

On several recent occasions, the RFID “closet” failed to recognize the Texas Instruments-made tags, and the touchscreen was either blank or broadcasting random video loops. During another visit, the system recognized the clothes–and promptly crashed. “[The dressing rooms] are too delicate for high traffic,” says consultant Dixon. “Out of the four or five ideas for the dressing rooms, only one of them is tough enough.” That feature is the “magic mirror,” which video-captures a customer’s rear view for an onscreen close-up, whether the shopper wants one or not.“

Why do I blog this? It’s a rather good account of technological failures, possibly useful to show the pain points of Smart Architecture/Cities. The reasons explained here are all intriguing and some of them can be turned into opportunities too (“otherwise kids would toy with them.”)

That said, it’d be curious to know how the situation has changed in 7 years.

Neal Stephenson on failure and innovation

A good excerpt from a text by Neal Stephenson:

“Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields.“

Why do I blog this? This kind of situation echoes with my feeling in certain meetings and projects. Besides, I find interesting to rely on failures in order to move forward, as described in this excerpt.

About the influence of failed products on technological change

Design failures and recurring non-products is of course a favorite topic of mine. Hence, a paper entitled “The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer: Products and Non-Products in Design History” by Paul Atkinson appears clearly promising for a Friday afternoon train ride between two European countries.

I wasn’t disappointed. This article takes the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, a futuristic computer product that never sold, as a starting point to ask questions concerning design history, the significant agency that non-products can have and the role of a period zeitgeist in design.

The Honeywell H316 was a so-called “pedestal computer”, a sort of miniature computer compared to the mainframes, released in the 1960s. They were meant to be used for scientific and engineering calculations, processing business information, file handling and access to pre-punched computer cards. The design of the various models is quite radical with this intriguing pedestal form. As pointed out in Atkinson’s paper, “the final result was a futuristically styled, red, white and black pedestal unit that looked as if it could have been taken straight from the set of Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey“.

(Image of the Kitchen Computer from Life magazine, 12 December 1969. © Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)

What I found interesting in this article is the description of how a non-product such as his Kitchen Computer can influence technological change:

“As a ‘real’ product, the adoption of a science fiction-inspired form provided the means for Honeywell to promote itself as a progressive company, to differentiate itself from its more mainstream traditional competitors such as IBM, and to align itself with younger, more innovative companies such as Data General Corporation. The fact that actual orders were received for the product despite its being purely a marketing ploy is a reflection of its success and the acceptance of such iconography amongst at least some of its customers. As a non-product, the Kitchen Computer had even more agency. It created a huge amount of publicity for Neiman Marcus and, because of its price, reinforced the position of the company as an exclusive retailer to the upper classes. It also reinforced popular cultural representations of the domestic kitchen as the focus of family interactions with technology in the home, in a variety of fora. In addition, it inspired those working at the forefront of computer developments to realize that, despite the limitations of technology at the time, there was real value in seriously considering a domestic market for computer products. Finally, despite the fact that both the product and the non-product were consumed largely as a piece of visual culture, as a part of the cultural milieu or zeitgeist, they provided very pragmatic, positive results for both Honeywell and Neiman Marcus, as well as having a direct influence on the future direction of the computer industry itself.“

Why do I blog this? Yet another great reference for my research about technological, product failures and their significance. Which, by the way, recently led to a French book about this very topic.

Series of articles about failures

There’s suddenly a surge of interest in failures (technological, entrepreneurial, social) in the press. Curiously, I encounter various of these last week when traveling.

First, it was a piece on the Wired UK 05.11 issue which gives an account of various entrepreneurial stories and approaches. The article shows the importance of failures and the cultural lessons one could draw out of them (“Fail fast”…).

More specific and full of interesting details and analysis is the April issue of the Harvard Business Review. Although this is a journal I don’t read very often, the material was kind of inspiring. The articles addressed several aspects such as the reasons to “Crash a Product Launch”, the reluctance from entrepreneurs to learn from failures, the failures-that-look-like-successes, effective strategies to learn from failures, ethical issues, etc.

What struck me when comparing both the Wired issue and the HBR articles was that the entrepreneurs/innovators’ testimonials were rarely interesting and pertinent… compared to external analysis (meta or not). As if there was some sort of blindness that prevented people from analyzing the problems at stake.

The Economist’s Schumpeter gives a quick overview of this HBR issue with the following excerpts:

“simply “embracing” failure would be as silly as ignoring it. Companies need to learn how to manage it. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School argues that the first thing they must do is distinguish between productive and unproductive failures. There is nothing to be gained from tolerating defects on the production line or mistakes in the operating theatre.
(…)
Companies must also recognise the virtues of failing small and failing fast. (…) Placing small bets is one of several ways that companies can limit the downside of failure. Mr Sims emphasises the importance of testing ideas on consumers using rough-and-ready prototypes: they will be more willing to give honest opinions on something that is clearly an early-stage mock-up than on something that looks like the finished product
(…)
But there is no point in failing fast if you fail to learn from your mistakes. Companies are trying hard to get better at this. India’s Tata group awards an annual prize for the best failed idea. Intuit, in software, and Eli Lilly, in pharmaceuticals, have both taken to holding “failure parties”. P&G encourages employees to talk about their failures as well as their successes during performance reviews.“

Why do I blog this? I just completed a book (in French) about recurring technological failures (title and cover are provisional, to be released at the beginning of June)… and it’s interesting to see that there’s a kind of momentum on these issues.

Workshop about Failures and Design Fictions at the Swiss Design Network symposium

Last Saturday, Julian and I gave a quick and punchy workshop called Using Failures in Design Fictions at the SDN 2010 in Basel, Switzerland.

What’s better than a broken iPhone screen in a workshop about accidents and failures?

Here’s the workshop abstract we proposed to the conference committee:

“The notion of ‘Design Fiction’ is an original approach to design research that speculates about the near future not only with storytelling but also through active making and prototyping. As such, design fictions are meant to shift the interest from technology-centered products to rich and people-focused design. There are of course various ways to create design fictions. One of them we would like to explore in this workshop consists in relying on failures.

We hypothesize that failures and accidents can be a starting point for creating rich and meaningful speculative projects. Think for instance about creating props or prototypes and exhibiting failures within it to make them more compelling. Or showing something as it will work with the failures — so anticipating them somehow rather than ignoring the possibility. What will not work right? What problems will be caused? What does it mean?

Based on short and participative activities, the workshop will address the following issues:

• Can we include the exploration of failures in the design process? How to turn failures and people’s reaction to failures into prototyping tools?
• How can design fiction become part of a process for exploring speculative near futures in the interests of design innovation? What is the role of failures in creating these design fictions?“

The 2-hours workshop started with an introduction about the wide range of failures, accidents, malfunctions and problems that are related to designed objects. We basically relied on the presentation made in Torino for that matter. The point of this intro was also to set the objectives: build a failure literacy (taxonomies, categories…), discuss their role in design using design fictions, fictional storytelling to discover new possibilities/unknown unknowns. We then splitted the participants into 6 groups for 3 short activities.

Activity 1: Listing of observed/existing failures

Given that the participants had a very diverse background (industrial design, fashion design, service design, media/interaction design), the point of this was to cast a wide net and observe what people define as failure. No need to write down the whole list here but here are some examples that reveal the range of possibilities:

• Wrong hair color, not the one that was expected
• Help-desk calls in which you end up being re-reroute from one person to another (and getting back to the first person you called)
• Nice but noisy conference bags
• Toilet configuration (doors, sensors, buttons, soap dispensers, hand-dryers…) in which you have to constantly re-learn everything.
• Super loud and difficult to configure fire alarms that people disable
• Electronic keys
• Garlic press which are impossible to clean
• On-line platforms to book flights for which you bought two tickets under the same name while it’s “not possible” from the company’s perspective (but it was technically feasible).
• Cheap lighter that burn your nose
• GPS systems in the woods
• Error messages that say “Please refer to the manual” but there is not manual
• Hotel WLAN not distributed anymore because hotel had to pay too many fines for illegal downloads

Activity 2: Description of anticipated failures (design fictions)

In the second activity, we asked people to craft two stories about potential failures/problems caused by designed objects in the future. By projecting people into the near future, we wanted to grasp some insights about how failures can be envisioned under different conditions. Here again, some examples that came out:

• Identity and facial surgery change, potentially leading to discrepancies in face/fingerprint-recognition,
• Wireless data leaking everywhere except “cold spots” for certain kind of people (very rich, very poor),
• Problems with space travelling
• Need to “subscribe” to a service as a new person because of some database problem
• People who live prior to the Cloud Computing era who have no electronic footprint (VISA, digital identity) and have troubles moving from one country to another,
• 3D printers accidents: way too many objects in people’s home, the size of the printed objects has be badly tuned and it’s way too big, monster printed after a kid connected a 3D printer to his dreams, …
• Textiles which suppress bad smells also lead to removal of pheromones and it affects sexual desire (no more laundry but no baby either)…
• Shared electrical infrastructure in which people can download/upload energy but no one ever agreed on the terms and conditions… which lead to a collapse of this infrastructure
• Clothes and wearable computing can be hacked so you must now fly naked (and your luggage take a different flight)

It was interesting to notice that the “observed failures” (activity 1) were about a large range of designed objects (without necessarily Information Technologies). In this second case, ICT were always involved in the anticipated failures. It is as if we had trouble projecting other possibilities.

Activity 3: Towards failure taxonomies/categories

The last activity consisted in building a taxonomy of failures based on existing and anticipated ones (what the group came up with in Assignment 1 and 2): kinds of, categories. Some categories and parameters that emerged were the following:

1. Short sightedness/not seeing the big pictures
2. Failures and problems that we only realize ex-post/unexpected side-effects
3. Excluding design
4. Bad optimization
5. Unnoticed failures
6. Miniaturization that doesn’t serve its purpose
7. Cultural failures: what can be a success in one country/culture can be a failure in another
8. Delayed failures (feedback is to slow)
9. When machines do not understand user’s intentions/technology versus human perception/bad assumptions about people (“Life has more loops than the system is able to understand”)
10. Individual/Group failure (system that does not respond to individuals, only to the group)
11. System-based failures versus failures caused by humans/context
12. Natural failures: leaves falling from trees considered as a problem… although it’s definitely the standard course of action for trees)
13. Good failures: Failure need interpretation, perhaps there’s no failure… alternative uses, misuses
14. Inspiring failures
15. Harmless failures

Why do I blog this? This is of course a super quick write-up but we wanted to have these ideas written so that could build-up on them in other workshops. Also, what the groups worked on is close to the literature about accidents and problems in Human-Computer Interaction (I’m thinking about Norman’s work) but it went beyond the existing lists. In addition, what was interesting, especially in the last assignment was that the list of categories reveal some important norms and criteria of success that designer have in mind.

Thanks to all the participants!

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!

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?

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!

Those Magnificent Men in Their Failing Machines

…or how a “litany of failed aircrafts” is a good metaphor of design iterations.

Read in “Hailing, Failing, and Still Sailing” by Richard Saul Wurman, a chapter of “Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned“:

“It made me think about the beginning of that wonderful film, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, in which you see a litany of failed aircraft. You laugh, but you also see how seriously involved everybody was in trying to fly. All the failure, all the things that didn’t work, make you realize that the Wright brothers were really something. All the paths taken, all the good intentions, the logistics, the absurdities, all the hopes of people trying to fly testifying to the power we have when we refuse to quit.

There should be a museum dedicated to human invention failure. The only problem it would face would be its overnight success. In almost any scientific field, it would add enormously to the understanding of what does work by showing what doesn’t work. In developing the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk spent 98 percent of his time documenting the things that didn’t work until he found the thing that did.“

Why do I blog this? Preparing a speech about failures led me to revisit my bookshelves. This chapter is great and I remember this very excerpts in the movie. As a kid, I used to watch this part again and again as I found it hilarious. More seriously, this excerpt is important in the sense that it reveals the notion of iterations in innovation.

A museum of human invention failure also strikingly connects with Paul Virilio’s Museum of the Accident.

Common artifacts from the future

Source: played a little bit with Graphjam to describe some artifacts generally viewed as de rigueur in *teh future*

Of course, this is definitely not based on existing data (someone could actually select a big corpus of sources such as movies and ads and count the occurrences).