Baudrillard on the difficulty to grasp people’s needs

A good quote by Jean Baudrillard, Selected writings (1988):

“…he is forced to represent the individual as a completely passive victim of the system… we are all aware of how consumers resist such a precise injunction, and of how they play with needs, on a keyboard of objects. We know that advertising is not omnipotent and at times produces opposite reactions; and we know that in relation to a single need, objects can be substituted for one another… if we acknowledge that a need is not a need for a particular object as much as it is a need for difference (the desire for social meanings), only them will we understand that satisfaction can never be fulfilled, and consequently that there can never be a definition of needs.“

Why do I blog this? Because it encapsulates a lot of the problems I see in the debate around user needs: the difficult to define what it is, the relationship betweens needs and product communication, etc. Surely useful for discussion with students next weeks in my user-oriented design class.

Phone surface

Give people a surface next to a phone… and it’s going to be used for annotations and crazy scribblings. Seen at CERN last week.

GPS failed pattern: wrong door

I think it would be good to start a catalogue of weird “failed GPS paths” patterns. The one above could be called “right way, wrong door”. The other day I Geneva, while going to a seminar, my iPhone GPS gave me this curious set of information that I liked a lot. I was looking for a building I’ve never been into and used the GPS device to help me.

The “path solution” it gave me is the one above, strip naked in terms of urban elements (for some reasons, it’s only a grid as if I was playing “Space harrier“). I simply had to go back on the avenue and find the entrance on the other side of the building. It left me wondering about the way navigation database are aware of building entrance, surely a parameter that add a layer of complexity.

German status

A korean car license plate encountered last week that features the European Union flag and the “D” which corresponds to Germany. It’s of course a german car and I also noticed it on BMW and Mercedes here and there in Seoul. What is intriguing is that the plate shape is also the one from the EU and different from other korean cars. The status of the EU + german industry is thus sported and shown to other people.

Why do I blog this? an interesting sign of a social and cultural status embedded in a mundane artifact. Nothing really new here but it’s funny to document such phenomenon that takes multiple forms.

Digital keypads in Paris

Among the various objects that we touch on an everyday basis, the outdoor keypads always catch my eyes each time. Called “digicode” in France (standing for “digital code”), the examples in this blogpost are a small sample that I ran across in Paris last week-end. The first one (above) is definitely the classic and clean version of the standard model in Paris. The keypad layout, a topic we already addressed here about the iphone is the classical “dial layout” that comes from the telephone set (as opposed to the calculator layout) with 1 2 3 on the first line.

The other examples below reveal some interesting features about touch interactions:

This one nicely shows what happens over time when people input codes. Buttons with dirt and patina on 1 2 3 6 9 A reveal their frequent usage (and possibly inspire stalkers and people who want to sneak in). Nonetheless, it’s inevitable and it’s how things age. But wait a minute, this one has the “calculator layout” with the 7 8 9 above, another intriguing component, which may be caused by the fact that this “coditel” brand could prefer this setting.

At night, Paris doorways features these red (or blue)-lighted versions that aims at helping people to locate the correct keypad structure.

And finally, this one, a bit messed-up for some reasons beyond my understanding depicts a nice and nonchalant design.

Why do I blog this? documenting everyday objects, as usual here. In a time of “touch interactions” craziness (towards iphone and interactive table), I find interesting to revisit existing touch interfaces and understand the whole gamut of design issues.

Personal informatics instances

Playing with personal informatics’ devices lately. Such as Walk with me or On Life.

Walk with me enables you to track and monitor your daily walking routine, set certain goals, rate your day, etc. Onlife is meant to observe interactions with digital services (such as your web browser mailer, IM client, etc.). The two of these services belong to a category of applications called “personal informatics” that track people’s daily activities to eventually allow them to modify their behavior based on trends. Of course, there are plenty of others. Some are more well-known than others.

Why do I blog this? The two aforementioned examples are interesting as they reveal some patterns that people may not have noticed but two things struck me as important:

• Both examples depict a sort of limited visualization of the traces that has been collected. In these two examples the information architecture is very similar (though it represents various things on the y axis) and the Gantt-like aspect could be replaced by other metaphors.
• The overemphasis on quantification: in Walk with Me, most of the stuff here is about counting the number of steps, it allows to see accumulations (per day, etc.), cycles and holes during your days. However, life’s more than quantification, there are single and non-repeated events that can make sense to (weak signals coming from nowhere) and I wonder how they could be taken into account with a certain weight. To some extent… how the quality of traces could be more elaborate and not just represented with a scale. Let’s explore this more thoroughly

User participation

A basic occurrence of user participation, taking the form of a rough message that indicates this stamps machine is broken. User-generated content if I may use this term.

This sort of activity has been taken as potentially transferable to digital interfaces. Think, for instance, about GPS devices that allow people to send over some updates concerning traffic jams and constructions (and sometimes send fake information about non-existing constructions only to prevent other persons to use certain routes). A topic I address yesterday on the french radio “France Culture” (podcast here, french only, sorry about that).

Count on something else happening

The observation of this sidewalk game (three card monte) the other day in Geneva 5 minutes after starting a book by Howard Becker lead me to acknowledge the full veracity of the following quote:

“We can always count on something else happening, another glancing experience, another half-witnessed event. What we can’t count on is that we will have something useful to say about it when it does. We are in no danger of running out of reality; we are in constant danger of running out of signs, or at least of having the old ones die on us.“

Geertz, C. (1995), After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press.

Why do I blog this? this should be at the roots of scouting for insights and elements for design research. An interesting quote to be re-used in one my course.

Yet another weird toilet interface

(Out)

(In)

This toilet door encountered in a french train yesterday struck me as fascinating. On both side of the door (in and out the toilet), you have a remnant of the past (a door handle that has its highly efficient affordance) and a set of button (open/close). As you can imagine, most the passers-by start by turning the door handle, which fails to open the door, they then froze and realize they can press a button. The next step is that they come in and realize that a similar masquerade happens inside. What is intriguing is that when outside of the toilet, the button set is close to the door handle, which is not the case inside (hence the presence of weird yellow arrow-shaped stickers).

What happened here? The combination of two interaction styles (buttons + door handle) is stunning and detrimental to this basic interaction (opening and closing a door uh!). What’s the design rational here? maybe that it’s less physically demanding to press a button and wait that the door automatically closes/opens. However, and you may expect, people IN the toilet are generally anxious about how to close this god damn door. Some even try to grasp and push the handle, which does not allow to lock the door.

Let’s have a look closer:

Besides, the button set is perhaps not the best way to interact but the presence of both is even more confusing. Weird arrows, red circles for emergency opening, what a mess!

Why do I blog this? observing how everyday basic interactions can be transformed into complex encounters with objects. And yes, I always bring my camera when I go to ANY toilets, it’s an interesting place to analyze weird technological innovations.

City quantification devices

A quantification device encountered on a bike path in Marseille last sunday when riding “le vélo” (that’s how they call the bike rental system down there). Two intriguing pieces of strings connected to a metal box. As an aside, the warning sign on top of it could even be re-used by angry punk-rock guitar players if they wish to start a new band.

This artifact led me thinking about how measurement devices could take different shape.

On one side you can have small and portable objects like pedometers or fancy nike+ shoes. You just take the damned thing and put it in your pocket or simply sport it while walking/running. It’s individual, each human who like to have a reflective account of his/her own movement use it. And that’s all good: as a user you can access the data and reflect on them. Of course, there are different levels of access ranging from reading them on the screen to exporting them in a fancy spreadsheet to run statistical computations.

On the other side, it’s also possible to have measurements infrastructures like the one represented above. It’s collective and generally put in place by a city stakeholder (be it a transportation company/institution or the city council). In this latter case, the information is less accessible to the users: it sits rights there in the weird box and some human comes uploading them before parsing the whole thing on the 7th floor of a building owned by his company. Obviously, the granularity of the information collected by this device is way different than our first category. In addition, the aim is also distinct. The point here is to get some insights about the number of cyclists riding on this bike lane. For the record, this is the “sensable city” from the 20th century: situated data-capture at its best, then-turned into a tool for decision-makers about how this place is “used” by people who ride bikes.

Why do I blog this? categorizing different measurement devices is intriguing and contrasting the approaches.