Digilicious blog http://www.digilicious.org/blog/ test description en Copyright 2011 Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:57:07 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Biotech Technology--or rather, particular implementations of it--are like enzymes, dropped into our protein pool of possibilities. They lower the activation energy of various tasks. Our rate of communication is greatly increased by our mobile phones; the energy required to clean our clothes is greatly reduced by washing machines. Lowered activation energy isn't always a good thing. How much time is idly wasted with mobile devices? How much plastic is needlessly created and cast off into the environment? Without these enzymes, would our finite human resources be more satisfyingly spent? As with biological well-being, technological health is a layered process. The enzyme suppliers must be aware of the long-term effects of their product, though the final responsibility lies with the well-informed user. http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/11/biotech.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/11/biotech.html Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:57:07 -0800 Turing, tested Turing Test is an enduring artifact of cybernetics, computer science, and popular imagination. Although it is far from universally accepted as proof of much of anything, I'd like to briefly poke another hole or two in its premises. The original "game" proposed by Turing involved no computers--there was one man, and one woman. A third person (a tester) was able to communicate with them only by written notes, and was tasked with determining the participants' correct genders. The twist is this: the man was instructed to trick the tester into believing he was a woman, and the woman was instructed to behave naturally. Turing then adapted the idea by replacing one participant with a a computer, leaving the tester to determine which was human. If the tester failed to correctly determine which participant was the computer, then the computer could be considered intelligent. I have three problems with this formulation: 1) It is based on deception. In the natural world, deception is practiced by both predators and prey. Successful deception by one means the suffering or death of the other. Likewise in the human, business, social, and ethical realms, we rarely hold deception to be a virtue worth building upon. If accepted at face value, this formulation devalues human intelligence by equivocating it with deception. As a human being, I would like to see intelligence defined in more human, and less algorithmic, terms. (Or in ruthless evolutionary terms: if computers do someday achieve intelligence, we got here first, and we should define the terms in our enduring favor.) 2) It is excessively reductive. Narrowing the channel through which intelligence must be communicated to one of such tiny bandwidth (not to mention a single channel, unlike the human experience of multiple channels and senses) intentionally privileges the computer. I might as well propose that a small box which emitted a human-sounding laugh in response to funny jokes (and no sound in response to bad ones) was intelligent--surely it requires human-like intelligence to understand when jokes are funny? Not at all. 3) It conflates the signifier with the signified. Clever strings of text do not inherently indicate intelligence. We accept text-based communication because it is a sufficient signifier of something more--another human--on the other end. We accept this signifier precisely because, historically, only a human can generate it. If computers can reliably generate that signifier then it will no longer signify what it always has. Rather than prove machine intelligence, a successful Turing test will only prove the insufficiency of the very medium it uses (devaluing it in the process). I'm no Luddite; but we need a much-improved version of the Turing test for it to have any meaning. This will require improved definitions of what intelligence really is. We must make sure that those definitions serve the humanity they come from, rather than its by-product. "[The Turing test] does not necessarily mean that the computer has become more human-like. The other possibility is that the human has become more computer-like." --Jaron Lanier]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/11/turing_tested.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/11/turing_tested.html Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:59:18 -0800 Functionality on Steroids
At what point does an informational tool become so overwrought that it becomes something entirely different from its base form? A standard street sign has a known function and simple premises and affordances. It is intended to provide context within a given city. The example above, while providing some local context, is meant to set the reader within a global context. It is not "usable", but it does provide a function. Overwrought software is nearly always frustrating. Are there cases where it begins to fill a different purpose altogether from what the designers intend? Can such products have repeat usefulness? ]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/11/functionality_on_steroids.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/11/functionality_on_steroids.html Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:34:15 -0800 Everyware "Everyday life presents designers of everyware with a particularly difficult case because so very much about it is tacit, unspoken, or defined with insufficient precision" Social networking sites? PDAs? Maybe even personal finance software? The problem applies to these as well, to varyingly recognized degrees.
"How can we fully understand, let alone propose to regulate, a technology whose important consequences may only arise combinatorialy as a result of its specific placement in the world?" (emphasis added)
Ditto the above examples, and pretty much everything else in the world. He also comments: "We will find that everyware is subtly normative, even prescriptive--and, again, this will be something that is engineered into it at a deep level." While there can be value in saying that certain specific technologies (and their implementations) are more or less normative than others, I would argue that for sweeping statements like this, that the more relevant truth is that humans are normative (and to a hopefully slightly lesser degree, prescriptive) beings. If ubicomp allows us to monitor our blood glucose levels in realtime, then many people will monitor theirs obsessively--even moreso if they can compare it against friends, family, and coworkers. But this won't because of any presumption of the technology. The reason we don't so it right now is more likely because we can't rather than that we wouldn't want to. This line of logic leads to an entire new world of considerations, the 'tyranny of choice' and so on. But--in an ideal world--once designers have ethically designed the information architecture, access mechanisms and so forth to be morally unimpinging, their work is far from finished. Then begins the probably far more difficult job of weighing the implications of human nature, and redesigning with that in mind. But since this is not an ideal world, users will be exposed to poorly designed, ethically challenged implementations, and will have to deal, collectively and individually, with the results--just like we do today.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/01/everyware.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/01/everyware.html Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:44:02 -0800 Norman strikes again A chuckle: Tonight I was out at the local arcade (Gameworks Seattle) doing an initial survey for a small usability study. I made notes in a voice recorder rather than pen & paper, as it was more discreet. As I was walking out the frount door, preoccupied with thoughts of transcribing my notes, I (literally) ran into the quintessential Don Norman usability blunder: a nice big door with a nice big handle on which to grip and pull. The problem being that the door can't be pulled. Only pushed. I tugged twice before laughing at myself and pushing out onto the street. http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/01/norman_strikes_again.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2008/01/norman_strikes_again.html Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:27:39 -0800 Retail Shopping Experience Design retail dressing room experience. My reaction falls into two basic parts: "good point" and "how to improve". Part one: So, so true. The bigger the retailer, the smaller the percentage of floor space needed to devote to dressing rooms, and yet the overall resource expenditure on them appears to match the floor space. Poor lighting is the number one problem, and too-small dressing rooms the second (the nicer stores will often have nice large rooms, big enough for two people to sit, change, and view clothes. Julia's point that a free stylist improves the experience is a great idea for a value-adding service. Part two: I'll go a step further, not on services but on a 'passive' element of experience design via architecture. Ever notice how dressing rooms are almost intentionally hidden, and/or placed in the furthest back corner of a store (again, the larger the store the greater the sin here)? Current retail space design makes it clear that placement of dressing rooms is an afterthought; something to tack on after the 'real' work of designing the floor space. A savvy retailer could make the dressing room a central focus of the store and a positive social experience. Make the dressing room central to the store rather than tangential--literally central, as an island in the middle of the floor. You might even raise it a step or two to visually highlight its importance. Tap into those anthropological associations to altars and stages. Make the dressing room the place to be and be seen, rather than browsing racks on the floor. Of course this model isn't appropriate for every retailer, but might work wonders in younger, hipper markets. Physical centrality and elevation have generally positive psychological qualities, and creating the unspoken vibe that the dressing room is where the real shopping is done would almost certainly boost sales. Sales, and customer satisfaction with the shopping experience.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/11/retail_shopping_experience_des.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/11/retail_shopping_experience_des.html Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:37:54 -0800 Robot Relationships "Love and Sex with Robots," has gathered some media attention recently. The assertion that people will be loving, and (ahem) loving, robots before too long is apparently something of a social shocker, though it should come as no surprise. People are already having sex with life-like dolls, and people already have very strong emotional attachments to man-made objects: their cars, iPods, phones, and so on (and I would argue that, psychologically, this "love" is not so different from the human kind). The more interesting (though less sensational) questions are social. The unity that comes from the bonding of two humans is a certain thing, though there are certainly many variations on the details. But the thing that is the relationship between human and robot will almost certainly be a qualitatively different thing. While it may (or may not) be a satisfying emotional equivalent, it will allow, provide, and mandate a new set of inputs and outputs, metaphorically and literally. Creative and business partnerships, in addition to personal relationships, will have a new frontier for development in combining the relative strengths of man and machine--as, of course, technology as done for centuries. But this technology revolution is likely to be more intensely social than anything we've seen thus far. It is easy to dismissively conceive of robots as ambulatory PDAs, but that's a problem with our vision rather that the potential of the thing. Sex is easy to predict, almost banal. It may even be a motivating force behind the development of humanoid robots. But--as always--what will make the world different won't be what people are doing in their bedrooms, but rather what they can do outside of it.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/10/robot_relationships.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/10/robot_relationships.html Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:46:05 -0800 Federal Interaction Design Is it by design, or happy coincidence that federal income taxes (in the US) are due in mid-April...and that federal elections take place in early November? What would be the effect on national politics if taxes were due on November 1st? http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/10/federal_interaction_design.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/10/federal_interaction_design.html Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:31:39 -0800 My World? the possibility of a Google virtual world.
Google Earth CTO Michael Jones insisted (first comment after the post) in January that Google Earth would always remain true to the real world and not dive into the type of fantasy world that Second Life has become. Therefore, Google's implementation would be more like "First Life," but in virtual form... Instead, it makes sense for Google to mesh a bunch of its tools into one, thus creating a whole new advertising opportunity aimed at people, er, avatars, who are "walking" down virtual (real) streets to check out virtual (real) stores and businesses. And if Google wants, it could incorporate some of its more social ventures, such as social networking site Orkut and Google Talk, in order to motivate users to spend more time there.
But why even have avatars in the first place? I don't see Google trying to nudge in on the MMORPG market, not even into Second Life's quasi-game status. The potential of a serious expansion of Google Earth should be apparent--the ability to experience real places, without being there. The difficulty is that in those real places are real people--a whole lot of them, in places where people are most likely to want to virtually 'be' (Times Square, Shibuya Crossing...). No photographic representation of those places can remove the people from them--nor would you probably want to. Real-time representation of those places would be the holy grail of virtuality, and would be possible with an array of cameras and clever interpolation technology. Personally, I'd rather inhabit (or rather, visit) those places disembodied, in a real-time crowd of the people who are actually there. A disembodied, first-person view more closely simulates the human experience than the third-person camera view common in most games. Social networking on top of this construct could have huge potential--but is a separate consideration. The experience of presence, along with the ability to shop in the actual local retail stores, would be a novel enough lure for me and millions of others. Google won't be focusing on a 'virtual' world, but rather on the real one.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/10/my_world.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/10/my_world.html Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:31:11 -0800 Aspirational value considered recent post, Jan Chipchase makes a worthwhile point about the "aspirational" value that items can have--value created through the interaction of appearance and certain social dynamics. This quality is not much discussed in design circles, but from a sociological perspective it is nearly omnipresent. One reason for this relative lack of design consideration may be that it is considered the proper realm of marketing. Apple, for instance, knows how to play off that aspirational need and the success of the iPod and iPhone may well owe more to PR prowess than to their renowned design aesthetic. But should aspirational value be left to marketing, while designers focus on 'real' use? It may seem obvious to point out that aspirational use is real use, but the designer should consider further, as it has some unique qualities. Some aspirational value can be had in private (buying that gym outfit to convince yourself that you really do intend to get in shape), but much of it is public, and social. In these cases ease of use and quick response may be paramount, as complex interaction and even small delays can create social awkwardness and reduce the perception of mastery. Functionality can be nearly zero so long as the right technical and social cues are hit. Microsoft has often tried to sell new products (or versions) almost purely on a functional basis. This may be acceptable in some established markets such as productivity software, but for novel products like the Surface table, aspirational value needs to be considered for a probably significant percentage of first-generation adopters. That means that not only should the table be "easy to use" (of course), but also that it should be easy to appear to use. If a user (restaurant owner, patron, home owner, client, student, etc.) can easily complete certain satisfying tasks in front of themselves and others, then some bumps in other functions will be tolerated with a smile. Exactly which tasks fulfill this aspirational value is the real trick to discern. It will be different for different demographics, but will have a likely unifying thread. Creations 'wizards' won't cut it, but being able to view realtime utilities data for your home might. A moderately ostentatious display of social (or business) connections might likewise fit the bill. There are signs that MS has significantly improved its approach to design in recent years, and that bodes well. The things that the Surface can do may not be terribly new, but the way in which it does them make this a truly novel device. (Note to MS: the one thing that we should never, ever, ever see on the Surface table is a BSOD.)]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/08/aspirational_value_considered.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/08/aspirational_value_considered.html Sun, 19 Aug 2007 10:56:54 -0800 Who are the Gods of Information Architecture? For much of humanity's history, polytheism was the norm. The nature of the multiple gods, and their relationships with each other, was deeply intertwined with how people constructed the world around them. Their mental models of how the world worked had to be consistent with these personalities. I wonder if anyone has ever studied the many pantheons used by different societies, with an eye toward Information Architecture. After all, what more straightforward record of externalized concepts exists for an entire culture? Comparing Greek, Norse, Mesopotamian, Egyptian (etc.) pantheons might reveal interesting patterns in both similarities and differences between times, places and people. The seemingly disparate qualities which certain gods embodied has always piqued my interest. Athena, for example, was the goddess of both hunting and virginity. Odd, that--though it must have made sense to the Greeks. Even the division of the 9 Muses is revealing. Now, the fact that the modern world has more or less embraced the "one God" belief is not necessarily to be lamented. In fact, it probably says something about mankind's current information architecture. An anthropologist would probably point out that while we may have formally renounced polytheism, we have modern-day pantheons of our own: near-deified Hollywood celebrities, politicians and the like. Unfortunately, getting the IA out of that much messier web might well be impossible. Are there other, culture- (or even subculture-) wide IA indicators today? Something implicitly designed and tacitly agreed upon by very large groups? If it hasn't been already, how can the value of such indicators be extracted and applied to explicit design? http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/08/who_are_the_gods_of_informatio.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/08/who_are_the_gods_of_informatio.html Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:07:36 -0800 Implicit Use before it happens (this is possible because your greetings are so predictable: "Hey Peter, what's up?" "Not much, you?" etc...). This would greatly annoy most of us for highlighting the rule-based nature of our actions. Another example: you've just said something perhaps slightly more callous than you should have, and the charming lady sitting across from you is no longer smiling. In fact, she's holding back tears. As she begins to cry, you offer sincere apologies for having said what you did. But what if, just before the tears began, she had said, "That wasn't a very nice thing to say--I'm going to cry now so that you apologize to me"? The outcome would likely be somewhat different. Even though both parties involved are aware of the rules of engagement, so to speak, having those rules made explicit can seriously detract from their effectiveness. Designing systems to be clear and explicit is a truism of modern engineering. But as technology becomes more social--from today's IM and social networking sites, to tomorrow's agent-based systems and AI--how might this affect the design and use of devices and services? And if you think that this is irrelevant because computers are explicit by nature, why is it that we should adapt to the (lack of) social graces of our tools, rather than vice-versa? I think there is most likely a whole level of design thinking beyond our current horizon, because we're bound within software and hardware habits that were never very human to begin with. If we define "usability" only in terms of mouse clicks and monitor resolution, we're still designing for engineers rather than humans.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/08/implicit_use.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/08/implicit_use.html Sun, 05 Aug 2007 14:18:24 -0800 How Many Hat Racks? Universal Principles of Design, and came across the "Five Hat Racks" principle, which states that:
"There are a limited number of organizational strategies, regardless of the specific application: category, time, location, alphabet, and continuum."
This system strikes me as being simultaneously over-specified and under-examined. Alphabet, Continuum, and Time are all variants of the same theme: ordinal arrangement. These three are important, though far from exhaustive, qualities which a data set might be ordered by. In the book's example utilizing buildings, the Time variable is the date of construction, though it might just as easily be the time which sunlight hits the top floor of each in the morning. Likewise, Continuum uses the height of the building, though number of steps or number of windows could also easily be ordered. Category is a second low-level method, although I think of it as 'grouping'. Grouping is inherently unordered, although in many cases the data points within a group are ordered at the next hierarchical level for easier searching. The Yellow Pages, for instance, are full of (alphabetized) Categories, which are then alphabetized within each group. However, as an organizational technique, grouping is just as valid whether the group is ordered or not. Location is the fifth 'hat rack', and this is the one that is really only the tip of the iceberg. Ordering and Grouping are both 'pure' arrangements, in that the data is compared only against other points in the set. Location is a specific form of what I would call 'mapping'. Mapping is different from the other two in that it cross references data from within the set, to an external dataset. Geographic location is one such possibility, but non-physical sets offer even more potential, particularly in an information-rich culture such as ours. Information states, methods of retrieval, and authorized user groups are just a few such sets. Computer network diagrams are often a hybrid of physical and informational mapping. So my data closet has only 3, rather than 5, hat racks--though each has a multitude of different pegs. In principle, each can be combined and stacked with each other in limitless multiples, although for human parsing there is a practical limit. Simple tools, but--perhaps much like deciding which hat to wear--figuring out when to use which one is not always an easy task! Information Architects take this challenge as a full-time occupation.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/07/how_many_hat_racks.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/07/how_many_hat_racks.html Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:32:28 -0800 World Map in Local Languages I've added my World Map in Local Languages to the Gallery. I became unsatisfied with the contradiction inherent in most world maps; namely that they have global aspirations (for marking territory), but are parochial with their naming conventions (by being biased toward a single language). This is an attempt to reconcile the local and the global, as much as the limited format allows.]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/07/world_map_in_local_languages.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/07/world_map_in_local_languages.html Mon, 30 Jul 2007 09:20:42 -0800 Inefficiencies of Niche Social Engineering Poster prominently displayed near the restrooms at a central Washington highway rest stop. Questions that come to mind: -Is a highway restroom really the best place to lecture people who presumably don't stop at highway restrooms? -Why is the fine for this admittedly nasty practice equal to the lowest possible for "plain" littering? -Is it really worth submitting every tourist and traveller to this fairly disgusting imagery--this being the last thing many of them will see before they return to the road? -Is there a better way to address the issue (assuming that the problem is big enough to merit bureaucratic intervention in the first place)?]]> http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/07/innefficiencies_of_niche_socia.html http://www.digilicious.org/blog/2007/07/innefficiencies_of_niche_socia.html Sun, 29 Jul 2007 12:00:51 -0800