target is new

Monday January 30 I attend the kick-off event of the Dutch branch of the Singularity University. I had to miss the first two speakers but the rest of the program managed to deliver a pile of information that presented the visions of the Singularity University.
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What the reason is, I don’t know, but in a couple of events I visited last weeks the main topic seemed how we see our future, and more in particular, how we lost some of the bright images of the future we used to have. The Club of Amsterdam event was completely dedicated to the future of the future. It was not a positive story. Andrea Wiegman of Second Sight gave an overview of the industry of futurists as first speaker and sketched a new era that already started in 2008 with books like the Black Swan. Arjen Huisman of Gendo went even further, like in this concluding slide. And the last speaker – Anders Sandberg of Oxford University - went through a bunch of biases we have in looking to the future. From probability biases, status quo biases to hindsight biases. “We like to shape the future like unrealistic scenarios because that is why we like the future.”

It was also one of the themes of the conference Playful. Brendan Dawes used a quote from William Gibson to express that feeling: “Upon arriving in the capital-f future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower case now.” We are living a middle aged future as Marcus Brown put it. All our dreams for the future as we were children are fulfilled, and there are no new futures to dream of, except for more optimized worlds.

Never before I attended Playful, a sweet conference “all about games and play — in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape”. The reports on the conference by Kars and Nicolas make a extensive report almost obsolete, I agree at large in their observations. The theme of the lost future also resonates on the evening on Visible Cities of last week. During the first presentation of Lorenzo de Rita focused on our need to keep imagination. The future of today has more to do with preparation than imagination, he said. His complete talk was build around this theme. He connected the movement to ultimate visibility to this lack of imagination; total transparency don’t leave any room for imagination. Literally.

The idea of the lack of new imaginary images of the future seems to be true. That does not mean there is no interesting future ahead. Also just in this week an Interesting new product was introduced: the Nest Thermostate. Made by some designers from the iPod it is the ultimate example of the future products. It is super simple to use, but at the same time super complex under the hood to enhance our experience. And besides the beauty of the smart experience, it is also a product with a story, initiated to stimulate a better use of our house hold energy use, because this is a big spoiler of energy.

The Nest Thermostate fits a category of smart products that is introduced the last month. Also brand new is the Lytro camera that let you take a shot with one push without worrying on focusing the image; the camera captures all different focus points so you can adjust the right focus afterwards. And you can even keep changing that.
And there are the earlier introduced products like the Peel remote control that creates smart guides based on your behavior, and Sifteo and Cubelets that make interactive toys in a robotic way. At Playful Chris O’Shea showed us the post digital world we are entering with what he called the appcessory-concept; how the digital services get tangible accessories to operate them. Everything is going to talk back to us said another.

Are these products the bright new inspirational future or just the preparable future? For me it is inspiring, but at the same time I see the development emerging to the danger of a relevancy paradox as I described this at PICNIC earlier. If we go on with making our life completely adapted to our projected wishes, room for unexpected experiences will disappear. And in the end it will be even hard to have a good profile to make stuff relevant. I think that we will see a lot of deliberate disturbances in the ideal relevant world to let you make choices to improve the profile. Play will in that sense be the tool to create these experiences. And therefor it was so interesting to see how Playful was dealing with this ideal relevant world.

Matthew Ward showed how you can use our imagination to create a great experience with a balloon that is disarmed like a bomb. Green=boom is a great project that shows how we build our own world based on perceived behavior fed with the consumed media context. Media mediate reality in that sense.
The experiment resembles our future world where we get more disconnections between the actions we play and the consequences they have. We need this playful layer to stay in touch with the consequences.

As Loise Downe said; we will have more intimacy with machines. That requires trust that the machines think in the same way as we do. The reliance depends on the way we can predict the complexity. We will make up rules to deal with the new products.

At the Visible Cities event Michiel de Lange announced an interesting conference coming year on the social city. Inspiration is the development of the smart city, and the fear that we will focus on this smartness and create unlivable perfect worlds. The city as a platform for social behavior is however the driver for the technologies.

So, is the future one where everyone has his own shed to fabricate stuff, like Brendan Dawes describes in his story on the invention of his iPhone photo button device. Do we get the shift to a future where we get ultimate personalized products. Where the haves been able to have their own factory at home and the have-nots will use the prefabricated stuff. The concepts of interactive production are numerous this weeks. Like Myrobotnation and the sweet Twitter Snowmaan Frstee.

Our (near) future could be a world with a second layer under our tangible life that steers us, or in a more positive manner, are at service for us. Playfulness will be give us tools to deal with an impulse-less hyper relevant context. Both Playful and Visible cities showed the importance to create an inspiring model of the future to lead us in the developments.

For our work I think that these playful interactions are a key element in creating the user experiences of the future, the smart experiences. A future where smart products and shared services rules are a great inspiration to develop on the coming online ecosystems. Let’s take the statement of Anders Sandberg as an inspiration: “Make the future, do not predict it”.

Friday October 14 the fifth edition of the Design by Fire conference took place. Like in other years, the conference offered a nice mix of talks giving an insight of contemporary topics that are important for the interaction design community. Not a lot of surprises were presented, but it is still a nice source of inspiration to pinpoint some trends.

Design with the context. The first speaker of the day, Didier Hilhorst of Flipboard pleaded for looking beyond the input box as main start for interaction. To underline this he showed the app into_now where the sound of a tv serie is the start of a social service. Comparable with Shazam, but with a different goal: to share and have a second-screen experience.
Design the context is the most important trigger for use. “Create a context for interaction and the use will follow”. Social is a standard part of new services and a trigger for usage. Turntable.fm is a good example, but his statement that the essence of Flipboard is to be a social too, can be questioned: the most appealing content of that service is the social stuff itself of course.

Talking context. Jamin Hegeman introduced the concept of service design to the audience. Not so excited for long lasting service design-minded folks like we are, but once again it stressed the importance of designing for more than the touchpoint for those who were not aware of that yet.
Seeing his talk I was again convinced that a common danger for designers is to go for a full design, godlike experience. Designing the complete context is not the aim of service design, and impossible also. Designing the fundaments and rules for the use is the name of the game.

Design for tangible experiences is another theme that is getting hot. Since a major part of the user experience designer community has a background in industrial design engineering, the Internet of Things is always of special interest. In his talk, Jordi Parra focused on our need to design for this tangible experiences. He quoted Hiroshii Ishii: “the digital world is not using all the richness of our senses”. Something Didier Hilhorst was talking about earlier when he explored the different interaction means like sound. The Teague radio showed how different interactions can make exiting products.
Jordi was openly searching for the product and service focus, and showed with his Spotify Radiohow you can make an online service with tangible interactions. In the end his talks remained a bit on the surface. There is a difference in a tangible product that contains the service and a real tangible experience of a service.

In the little game that was played with all the people in the audience we had to work on an upgrade for the Dutch OV Chip card: how to make this an appealing service. We used some techniques from gamestorming, which was fun. The case did especially combine some of the aspects like thinking on the total context and making a virtual service tangible (or the other way round). Putting the chip in the shoe laces as one of the presented solutions did, or like our group; adding a game layer where a collecting game of virtual animals was added to the journey experience. The animals where a means to make that experience tangible. Using hidden gesture check-in moves for extra animals, dating with other animals in the coupe and adding animal sounds to the check-in points.
It would be a great exercise to see if this little game layer really adds meaning to the service, helping passengers not to forget to check out for instance.

This makes a bridge to the design for social responsibility, another theme of the day. It started of with Nynke Tromp, with her design for social dilemmas. The metaphor of the gun was nicely chosen; is a gun responsible for killing a man? Or is it the man using it?

You can ask the same question as a designer. Are you the one that can take responsibility for the way people make use of your designs? Or are you the facilitator of good behavior? If you want to increase social behavior, you need to stimulate solidarity. An example to design this solidarity is the experimental project Solidshare in the Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam. In this project, people were stimulated to get in touch with their neighbours by introducing a sharing service for domestic tools. It creates a context for possible social behavior, without garanteeing that it change the behavior in depth of course.
Nynke stated that designers are the new politicans, that you have a responsibilty by making choices. Something Eric Reiss reflected on a lot in his finalising talk. He made a interesting case for the political role.

In his statement, he used the talk of Matt Sheret as counter point. If you play with the data, use will emerge, Matt said. Or as Eric put it: finding uses of the data drop out of a service is like playing with your own shit. An interesting point, but too easy. Matt Sheret had a very solid talk on the way youdesign with data. He is a so-called data griot and looks to the uses of the data within the Last.fmservice. He presented three elements that are important to his work: reveal the human input, create playful data and set a new tone of voice with the data. Always create stories, because you need stories to make date accessable.

A story is something the guys of Catalogtree had in mind for sure when they designed the Money & Speed app on the flashcrash. An appealing app, but not the most interesting of the work they showed. The research of New York diplomats parking tickets and the way they made the collected data accessable, showed the true craftmanship of Daniel Gross and Joris Maltha. Important is also that their approach is not to design the visualisation only, but to attempt to create the tool to visualise this.

After all, the Design by Fire conference showed a great mix of topics that count now in our design field. With a important role for the power of big data as design material, and the starting point of big design for context. And with a clear message to us all: don’t forget your responsibilty as designer for shaping meaning.
It is a pity Yohan Creemers and his team decided that this was the last edition of this conference. They did a wonderful job in composing some inspiring conferences.

September 2 happened another edition of dConstruct. A conference I visited before in 2008 and always follow because of the interesting mix of makers culture and design thinking. This edition was interesting again. The struggle with reality turned out a big thing, if you can consider these talks as the barometer for the times ahead.

The closing talk of Kevin Slavin was one of the most clear in that sense probably. I saw his talk earlier this year at Momo in Amsterdam, where his plea against AR was even more subtle and direct at the same time because of the presence of the people of Layar, one of the subjects of his talk. He pinpoints that we don’t need a augmented reality to live a better life, even worse; it makes our life poorer. As the example of heads-up display in cars illustrates; the tool is for a jetstream pilot the complete reality because of the lack of notion of the outer context, in a car it is the other way around; focusing on the augmented knowledge in the head-up display limit your view on the world.

notes on the talk by Boon Chew

The vision of Slavin is great and very true. The question though is interesting how it works the other way around; can we enrich our established digital lives by connecting reality? That is something most of the other talks where about in direct of more distinct way. In several talks reality is connected to the aspect of time. In the sense that we want to connect memories to things, a theme that was very present also at FutureEverything earlier this year. If we can add memories in the context of a service or product, this product will be more real.

Frank Chimero was talking on these memories; the web has a past now. We need an architecture of arrangement to create value. Take a step back to find the value. Start is the difference between digital and analog. Where the digital world is invisible, not visible; and the digital world we forget, not remember as the analog things. And where we find stuff in the analog world while we search in the digital context. In this comparison you find this hunger for realness by pointing out what we miss. With three rules for design decisions for revisiting. How we sort. thinking of LATCH (location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy), and 2nd: how we move throught time; think of the postponed experiences Instapaper offer us. And third: what media is supported. Culmination. Biblion of New York.

Notes by Boon Chew

Matthew Sheret used another angle. Our digital self translated to a pocket scale. A pocket scale that is bigger on the inside. He was talking also on the object that carry memories. We are not creating mass personalisation but real personalisation transforming our data trails with different meaning. The difference between the ‘old products’ containing lots of visible stories, like a set of keys. Compared to an Oyster card that hides it past in the data.
We need intimate, meaningful objects that humanise networks make time travel a bit more fun. His self-made remote control beam made his points very tangible. Hacking as way to personalize things.

Notes by Boon Chew

Those memories are the way to connect the realtity to the digital products, and that is the important thing as it seems this day. Don Norman started the morning by calling for a focus on designing for memories in stead of experiences. Designing with time as material and with good and bad experiences to create memorable stories, turns out to be present in a lot of talks.

The quest for this reality check in our digital life was challenged the most by Kars Alfrink. In his highly engaged talk he tried to find explanations for the riots in England of last times. He compared the alienation between the classes, and the conscious avoiding of interactions in these neighbourhoods where rioters were let alone with other inhabitants. Like in the brilliant novel of The City & The City and showed in practice with the example of schizophrenic town of Baarle. You can say that our moving into a digital life accelerates those gap with reality, and is especially the provider of a system for avoiding each other. He argues to use gaming to reconnect, like the game of Nomic where defining the rules of the game is part of the game. This talk turned out the ultimate urge for getting the reality back into our digital life’s and create a new elan in self governing.

Notes made by Boon Chew

Without any doubt I think this focus on reality connected to our digital life will be a big theme the coming times. Conceptual by creating new contexts of time and memories, and literally by using the possibilities of the Internet of Things to enhance our digital services with tangible qualities. It will be interesting next year to have also designers of psychical products share their existing knowledge and build some new bridges.

I attended the Annual Internet of Things Europe conference in Brussels last week. The conference gives an overview of the current state of the development towards an Internet of Things where not only computers and mobile phones are connected to the world wide network, but also all kinds of other objects become part. And just like computers make the Internet by being the hubs, this will happen in the Internet of Things where object are hubs in the network. This generates lots of new challenges and opportunities. The conference discussed both societal as technical consequences with an important role for standards and enabling technologies. I was invited to a panel and talk on the way this developments influence the design of online services ecosystems as we make them within Info.nl.
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Last Monday This happened #11 took place at Theater Kikker again. Another great event in the series. It was also a bit special because we at Info.nl did support the event together with Springtime. But that of course does not influence the event, the fine ensemble of speakers did the trick again.

First of was Roy Gilsing, the designer and iniator of Grabbit. A handgrip for the iPad. It do free your movements with your tablet, as Ianus shared from his own practice. 
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This year I attended the conference FutureEverything for the first time. The event is in a way more a festival than a conference, with a combination of music, art and ideas. FutureEverything had a nice exhibition on data visualisation and some art installations in town, and a extensive music program in the evening, my primary reason to visit was the conference, I heard some good recommendations from a.o. Bruce Sterling at SxSW.
The conference did deliver its expectations with some good presentations and inspiration. Main conclusion after this conference, it is clear again that 2011 is the year of the algorithm context. FutureEverything touched different aspects, from bots to the way to play this new context.

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Last week I visited The Next Web conference. As the conference aim to look to the coming trends in Internet and tries to show the best of Internet start-ups from Europe, it is interesting to see what the general feeling is after the conference. It is however not that clear to say. But there is a connection to some broader developments of the last month, where we see an increase of the awareness that the new data driven context will have serious impact on our life.
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This year I attended togehter with colleague Joris for the first time the conference South by SouthWest Interactive (SxSW or South by in short) in Austin Texas. It was quite a experience, a huge number of attendants (about 20.000 they say) and more than 1000 sessions to choose from. It felt more of a festival than a conference sometimes, which certainly add to the experience.

The conclusion from the sessions I saw and heard about from others is that the big trends are still on track. The things I preach for some time were confirmed: moving from web-experience to ecosystem of apps, big data (science, visualization), and above all: gamification, which can be seen as the buzz word of this edition. Location and context are still big, just like social media dynamics. Group services apps turned out very popular.

The focus in the conference seems to be a bit more on one app wonders than building a complete service experience, so let see if that will get more focus the coming year. The mixing up of digital and real world is just touched a little. It will be a good check if these trends will have landed next year.

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