Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect Where’s The Phone

This essay presents data from a series of Nokia street surveys conducted between 2003 and 2006 that explored where people carry their mobile phones and why. The first study in this series, conducted in Helsinki during the summer of 2003, was designed to understand the extent to which people noticed incoming communication. Since then the study has evolved to encompass the carrying location of other objects, collect a visual snapshot of mobile phones and their ‘owner’s’ and has since been run in eleven countries across four continents.

New experience design school in the Netherlands

The Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands will be starting a new bachelor degree in experience design [website in Dutch only] as of September, the first programme of its kind in Europe, and is now recruiting students. The four-year degree programme is lead by Rob Van Kranenburg, who used to work at Virtual Platform, De Balie, the New Media Department of the University of Amsterdam, and Doors of Perception. He published on RFID and Ambient Intelligence. The programme has a strong focus on the design of ambient devices in a wireless world. It is introduced as follows (my translation): Experience Design is a new study programme at the Utrecht School of the Arts that teaches designers in a new, emerging professional field that brings together (computer) technology, the physical environment and a positive-critical design practice. An Experience Designer develops communication applications that will involve people without them having to sit behind a computer screen. Well known of course are mobile phones, digital organisers, navigation systems in cars and handheld game consoles, but in the coming years we can also expect intelligent clothing, smart spaces (that know who and where we are) and doors that automatically open for some people but not for others. The applications that an Experience Designer develops will add to the quality of life by creating ‘meaningful experiences’ for people with the help of wireless technology. Interestingly, it has a rather idiosyncratic way of differentiating itself from interaction design (that one can also study at the Utrecht School of the Arts) that is not too clear and I don’t really agree with. Interaction Design has a much broader orientation on human-computer interaction, and focuses in particular on graphical interfaces, multimedia design, game design and physical/experimental interfaces. Experience Design deals with the (individual) user experience, has a more social focus, and hardly deals with the graphical interfaces of ‘classical’ multimedia such as websites or interactive cd-roms. But maybe this definition has more to do with internal politics at the Utrecht School of the Arts than anything else, and we shouldn’t focus too much on it. Good luck, Rob

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Apr 14, 2007, 6:59AM

IFID: Mike Richter’s talk

Mike Richter‘s talk launched the second day of the Innovation Forum Interaction Design conference. Richter is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt focusing on media system design; his other job is iconmobile -a design, technology and content provider company for “the mobile world”- which he founded in 2003. The company grew very quickly and has now headquarters throughout the world (LA, Tokyo, London, Sydney, etc.)

He started by saying that the day before had been mostly about “innovation” and “explorative approaches”, he has to be much more down to earth. His work at iconmobile has to move within set borders, there’s innovation but it has to be do-able and marketable.

Very few people use data services: there’s way too much time investment and not enough return. Iconmobile is more interested in experience. A mobile phone is embedded into a value chain (device itself, GUI, services, network, operators, and third parties.) All these channels have to converge so his company cannot focus on the mobile aspect or the phone aspect only: it has to take other domains into account.

The company has to keep the balance between innovation and the objective to be commercially successful. Take for example QUAM. It was a 40 bilion disaster. The operator made it from scratch, it was very innovative. Too much innovative: the market was not ready.

Successful examples: Paris Hilton Mobile; TIMTou, a mobile variety of mySpace where TV, mobile and web converge; Starbucks selling music for mobile phones (pre-listening, coupons, backstage passes in exchange of 5 latte).

Technology is an enabler not a driver.

The most important criteria in mobile telephony for Richter is the user. They try to understand who he or she is and develops stereotypes scenarios. Helped by what they can find online. A website like “Hot or Not” provides them with precious demographic data for free.

Not the world of mobile phone is gigantic. You can take pretty any element of your life and add the term “mobile” to it: mobile keys, mobile tickets, etc. hard to keep the pace and look ahead. Besides any element in the mobile chain reacts with the others. You can’t focus on just one, you have to get the global picture. Even the music segment has to be sub-segmented. Iconmobile solution is structure, a kind of “industrial flow” where each one knows his or her place and role.

He ended by showing one of their successful projects, a mobilnovela called Mittendrin. Protagonist are aged between 14 and 25. Each of them have their own blog so that fans can interact with them, they are also reachable through SMS or MMS.

Bad snaps of his slides.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 9:10AM

Reactive Environments: Gestural Control for Navigation and Understanding

In the words of a recent song, I’m not dead, just floating. After a busy travel period, I settled in to get some reading and other writing done, hence the pause in Smartspace content. Spring is here, and content will now bloom like the trees outside my window.

BusinessWeek carries an interesting feature on motion and gesture technologies in its latest edition. The article ties together threads that have been ongoing in the area of gesture-controlled media and interfaces (particularly in the area of advertising), motion capture for film and games, and new innovations such as multi-touch, which has gotten hot since the announcement of the iPhone.

Of course, most folks are all excited about the applications in marketing, such as with the interactive ads from adidas and Target the article describes. Less talked about but more interesting in the long-term are public infrastructure uses for gestural interfaces. Imagine being able to use a gestural interface to find your way around a foreign city or airport, based on your own orientation, not that of a flat map (could have used this when I went to Switzerland and back recently – the Geneva tram maps were a pain to understand to me). Or in public health care environments (show the doctor where it hurts, particularly if its inside – a first step before a costly MRI to locate a problem in 3D space). Or in museums (flick through a catalog of art, skip along a timeline, or explore an ancient building).

More and more, interface designers are looking at how to use gestural control to get around issues of literacy and language, and also age and ability. Most of us can point, and move an object to find another. Hopefully interface designers looking into this area will get together more often with information designers to collaborate on projects such as those I mention above. 

Originally from Smartspace by Scott Smith
reBlogged by michael on Mar 26, 2007, 2:30PM

Interview with Anthony Dunne

Recently i stumbled upon a survey in some posh English art magazine. The journalist was asking readers whether they had already travelled only to see an exhibition in a foreign country. As you can guess i ticked the box “Yes, at least once a year.” If there had been a question asking “Have you ever travelled just to see one single piece in an exhibition?” I would have answered “Yes, i did that once.” It was in 2005, i took the plane to Paris just to see one work in the exhibition D.Day Modern Day Design at the Centre Pompidou. It was Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne‘s Evidence Dolls. The dolls are hypothetical products that could be used by single women to store DNA samples from potential partners, gaining thus an increased sense of control in the dating game. Any reason to go to Paris is always welcome anyway.

If you follow the blog, you must be familiar with the work, and writing of Dunne & Raby.

Dunne is the Head of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. As demonstrated during the recent Work in Progress Show of Design Interactions students, the focus of the department is shifting. While electronics and computing remain essential elements of the course, his students are also exploring how design can connect with other technologies, such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. The result is a wide range of projects, often speculative and critical, which aim to raise the debate on the human consequences of different technological futures.

I actually first thought this interview for World Changing (where it’s been posted… with a less lazy introduction) and i realize now that if i had prepared the piece for wmmna, the questions would have been slightly different. But mister Dunne is a busy man, i couldn’t ask him to face two interviews, could i?

Placebo: The Electro-draught Excluder and the Nipple Chair

Your works express the belief that design shouldn’t just be used to turn technology into something eye-pleasing, sexy and easy to use. What other role should design play then?

It could make us think and encourage us to ask more from industry! There is no need to rush into the future frantically styling up new technology and getting it to market as fast as we can. We need to reflect a bit more and ask some questions, I know this is completely at odds with the industrial system we have today, but I think as a profession we could take on more social responsibility and use some of our time, resources and know-how to explore alternative ideas about everyday life to those put forward by industry.

I think there is a real need for design to address the public as well as industry, and to explore new ways of getting discussions going about what people really want and how industry can help us achieve it, rather than the other way around.

Teddy blood bag and Meat eating products

Your installation about future energy sources at the Science Museum in London is extremely surprising. The scenarios you picture there are deeply grounded in scientific research, yet they are miles away from our dreams of solar-powered cars and hydrogen-based cities: “poo” is envisioned as a resource, a radio is fuelled by blood kept in cute teddy-shaped pouches, and churches, school, even families are developing their own energy brand. Why didn’t you follow the trend and show more positive and bright visions of the future?

The exhibit is aimed at children between the ages of 7 and 12. Everywhere they look they will see images showing how bright our technological future will be once we embrace new energy sources like Hydrogen. But things are not so simple, with every new technology there are of course other consequences — economic, cultural and ethical. With this project we wanted to encourage children to think about the implications of 3 different technologies, all real, but some more likely to happen than others. The first is Hydrogen, here we wanted to deal with economics by portraying a scenario children could relate to — having to produce a certain amount of hydrogen in order to get their pocket money. Human Poo as energy was about a major cultural shift where something once thought of as dirty would become valuable, so people would want to keep it, disconnect themselves from the sewage system and even offer it as a gift. And with the blood scenario, we wanted to show that often, reality is stranger than fiction, there is a growing area of research looking at how microbial fuel cells can be used to make self-sufficient robots and other products; pacemakers that run on the blood in our own bodies for example. In this case we wanted children to think about ethics: where would the blood come from? Of course we slightly exaggerated everything to make them more engaging.

Why do you think that biotechnology, synthetic biology or nanotechnology, like electronics, are areas in which design should play a role?

All of these technologies, separately, and in combination, are going to have a huge impact on our lives in the near future. I think it’s important that designers, start thinking about how to get involved. It’s not just about new skills or a new medium, but very different ways of thinking. What does it mean to design living or semi-living materials and products? It’s important too that design, with its powerful visualisation skills, makes abstract concepts tangible and discussable. It can help us debate different futures before they happen. Otherwise the ‘future’ is just going to happen to us and the products and services we get will be driven by economic and technological factors rather than human needs, let alone desires.

I think it would be a great shame if designers stayed on the margins while these technologies begin to shape the world around us. The time it takes for science to turn into technology and then products is speeding up. There is no comparison with the trajectory electronics took so we need to start getting involved now and exploring what impact these new technologies will have on our lives.

Interaction Design grew out of the meeting of digital and cultural worlds and the need to make computers more useable, it will be interesting to see what other forms of design will emerge over the coming years.

Can you give us one example of a student(s)’ project that best represent the “design for debate” approach?

I think the best example has to be Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott’s Biojewellery, partly because it has evolved so much over the last 3 years. They started it in response to the first bio brief we set at the RCA in 2003. Later, with bioengineer Ian Thompson, they followed it through to a really impressive level. I particularly like some of the documents they produced on the way exploring the ethics of the project and whether or not it would be OK to operate on someone for basically poetic reasons. The project has generated debate and discussion throughout its life at all levels — aesthetics, practicalities, business, design, methodology … I don’t think all projects need to reach this level of resolution to be successful, but it’s a good example of what’s possible.

Test samples and Previous prototype of a ring using a combination of cow marrow-bone and etched silver

Two years ago, you showed Evidence Dolls at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The plastic objects were created to provoke discussion amongst a group of single women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle. Can you tell us more about that project?

What was the impetus for this project?

Valerie Guillaume, a curator at the Pompidou Centre was very keen to have something about critical design in an exhibition she was curating so she commissioned the project. We had already sketched out the idea in BioLand and we thought this was a nice opportunity to take the idea further and also explore how it could be used to produce some new insights.

In the projects we ran with students about biotech, there would always be something to help men avoid leaving DNA behind so that they wouldn’t be implicated in future paternity cases. We, well Fiona, thought the woman’s perspective should be represented too. We were inspired by the story of a famous English actress who hired a detective to rummage through an ex-lover’s bin looking for material that could be analysed for DNA and used to prove he was the father of her baby. The detective found some dental floss and it provided enough DNA to prove he was the father. Fiona thought this process should be made a little easier. The doll is effectively a storage device for DNA from a woman’s various lovers. It would be collected in the form of toenail clippings, hair and other bodily materials. Later, if necessary, they could be analysed. The material is stored in a S,M or L penis drawer. The dolls can be personalised to represent each lover. For the exhibition we worked with Ã…BÄKE who interpreted the interview transcripts through drawings on each doll. the interviews with the women were included in the exhibition.

And how did the women understand, react to and welcome this unconventional project?

This was all done behind closed doors. As you can imagine, the conversations were quite intimate as each woman spoke candidly about her past lovers. But most of the women reacted to it as something they could imagine using, I found this strange to believe myself, but that was the reaction. The project was not about whether they would want or even use one, it was more about finding a way to explore the impact a new technological possibility might have on ideas of love, romance and dating.

Anxious Times: Hideaway Furniture, Huggable Atomic Mushroom

You’re now Head of the department of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. A year ago, the department was still called Interaction Design. What motivated such change?

The name interaction design is beginning to mean something quite specialised and focussed on designing interfaces for electronic and digital products and systems. This is probably a very good thing if you are trying to establish a discipline or a group within a company, but it’s not so good if you are interested in pushing boundaries and exploring new ways designers can make technology relevant and meaningful to everyday life. Designing better interfaces is one way of doing this but not the only way.

I think originally, the interesting thing about interaction design was the emphasis on designing interactions rather than things. We changed the name of the department around to emphasise this. But by changing the name we also hoped to decouple interaction design as a design approach, from purely digital and electronic technologies, and to allow it to continue to mutate and evolve in relation to design challenges created by a whole range of other technologies like bio- and nanotech as well as new social and cultural developments.

Our intention is to broaden the technological focus of the department so that new design contexts, methods and roles can begin to emerge, and possibly, even provide new perspectives on how we design interfaces for digital technologies.

To work in such and open space can be quite challenging and students need to have a very strong sense of self, but we think that ultimately, this will prepare designers for working at the cutting edge of a very fluid and exciting area of design.

Your students work closely with people outside the College, some of them are scientists. Or do these scientists see this “intrusion” of designers into their own sphere of research?

This is something we are still evolving. The scientists we have met so far are all dedicated to engaging with people outside science and have been very enthusiastic about student work. I’m sure there are scientists who would see us as intruders, but I doubt we will meet them very often, I think we are moving in different circles and networks.

Which (work) future do you see for students who want to fully engage in “design for debate”?

Often, when I give a lecture and show work from the design for debate projects, designers find it a bit too weird and extreme or try to label it as art rather than design (to defuse it), but always, there are people in the audience who come up afterwards to talk about commercial possibilities and see it simply for what it is, a way of getting a discussion going about the impact technology might have on everyday life by imagining positive and negative future scenarios.

The Design for Debate project is only one of 6 we run in first year each exploring different design approaches, roles and contexts but it produces some of the most striking results. I think for most students it’s an interesting learning experience, but I’m not sure how many of them plan on taking this approach further when they graduate. For those who do, I think there are several possible directions. The most natural is the exhibition route, showing in various venues and crossing between art and design worlds. But other possibilities are emerging.

Last summer, two of our students did internships in the Department of Trade and Industry‘s Foresight Group working with scientists and civil servants on a project about obesity. The students enjoyed it and the DTI wants more this year. So there also seems to be a place in organisations, government or otherwise, for this kind of design. Companies like Philips are very interesting, they have a small group looking at the cross over between biological and electronic systems in relation to new products and interfaces, and I could see possibilities there which I guess are more research orientated. They do projects called probes which are intended to provoke and open up new possibilities, design for debate projects would prepare students well for this role. And then there are all the yet to be discovered possibilities.

ARK-INC installation at the 2006 RCA Summer Show

Last year, at the RCA Summer show, one of your students presented a project that i liked a lot, it was called Ark Inc. Jon Ardern looked at our ineffectual attempts to live a truly sustainable life. His project suggested that we adapt our life style to life “after the crash”, to the time when our actions have exhausted the resources of the Earth upon which we depend. Can you comment on this particular project?

Only that I really like it. I think it’s very interesting to design organisations as well as systems and services and Jon worked hard to avoid the usual forms of ‘evidence’ these projects can generate. One thing we struggle with is how to communicate work like this in a show with 200 other designers. Having said that, you found it and enjoyed and I know many others who did too, but it would be good to reach a wider audience with work like Jon’s. We have two students this year building on Jon’s approach one is looking at “11 solutions to an impending apocalypse“, and the other is designing communication and other systems for a group of extreme eco-guerillas that places the survival of the planet above all else.

What are you working on now?

Well the new course is taking up a lot of my time, but besides that we are working on a few new things. We did a small project for an exhibition at the Science Museum about spying which we enjoyed working on, Noam Toran, Troika, and Onkar Kular did some work for it too.

We’re working on a collection of electronic prototype products with Michael Anastassiades that extends the Fragile Personalities project into the electronic realm for an exhibition in October, and we’ve just finished some work for an exhibition at z33 in Hasselt, called Designing Critical Design that’s just opened. We are showing with two designers whose work we really like, Marti Guixe and Jurgen Bey. It consists mainly of existing work but the curators have commissioned some new work as well which I will say a little about as we really enjoyed doing it.

After a trip to Tokyo in November we became very interested in Robots and developed some conceptual products for the show, as well as a video with Noam Toran and some sounds with Scanner.

All the robots (Image by Per Tingleff)

Robots are destined to play a more significant part in our daily lives over the coming years. But how will we interact with them? What kind of new interdependencies and relationships might emerge? The objects we developed are meant to spark a discussion about how we’d like our robots to relate to us: subservient, intimate, dependent, equal? We presented 4 ideas.

Robot 1: This one is very independent. It lives in its own world getting on with its work. We don’t really need to know what it does as long as it does it well. It could be running the computers that manage our home. It has one quirk; it needs to avoid strong electromagnetic fields as these might cause it to malfunction. Every time a TV or radio is switched on, or a mobile phone is activated it moves itself to the electromagnetically quietest part of the room. As it is ring shaped, the owner could, if they liked, place their chair in its centre, or stand there and enjoy the fact that this is a good space to be in.

Robot 2: In the future products/robots might not be designed for specific tasks or jobs. Instead they might be given jobs based on behaviours and qualities that emerge over time. This robot is very nervous, so nervous in fact, that as soon as someone enters a room it turns to face them and analyses them with its many eyes. If the person approaches too close it becomes extremely agitated and even hysterical. Home security might be a good use of this robot’s neurosis.

Robot 3 and Robot 4

Robot 3: More and more of our data, even our most personal and secret information, will be stored on digital databases. How do we ensure that only we can access it? This robot is a sentinel, it uses retinal scanning technology to decide who accesses our data. In films iris scanning is always based on a quick glance. This robot demands that you stare into its eyes for a long time, it needs to be sure it is you.

Robot 4: This one is very needy. Although extremely smart it is trapped in an underdeveloped body and depends on its owner to move it about. Originally, manufacturers would have made robots speak human languages, but over time they will evolve their own language. You can still hear human traces in its voice.

During this project we also became very interested in microbial fuel cells that use bacteria to break down ‘food’ such as slugs, meat, rotten apples and flies. In the future, some robots will have stomachs. How will the way we interact with them be affected when we have to feed them rather than recharge them?

And finally, I think our big interest right now is exploring how a critical design approach can be applied to future scenarios and emerging technologies in relation to public engagement and debate, this work is more theoretical and ongoing, and hopefully, will eventually result in a new book.

Many thanks for your time, Tony!

You’re welcome, and thank you for your questions.

Images from the websites of Raby & Dunne, Design Interactions, Jon Ardern, pictures of the robots by Per Tingleff.

Look out for their books:
Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne (UK – USA)

And the recent re-edition of Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales – Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Mar 12, 2007, 6:09AM

Seven Days Hotel

There’s a fantastic exhibition by Fabien Verschaere at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon until 29th April.

Born in 1975, Verschaeren has spent very long periods of his childhood in hospitals due to some mysterious disease. That’s where he started drawing his first pictures and developed a very poetic mental universe that allowed him to go beyond the daemons of his illness.

For the project Seven Days Hotel, Verschaere has transformed the first floor of the museum into a hotel. The reception is bathed in red light, monsters, ghosts and witches are painted on the walls… Welcome to a space where you’re going to constantly shift between dream and nightmare! The walls of the hotel 7 rooms are painted in black and red and the light is a bit dim. Each room is tracing the initiating journey taken by a sick child to face the world.

In room one, there’s a bearded man, sitting on his hospital bed, while a little train is turning on the floor; elsewhere dozens of little ceramic fairy creatures fligh above your head and the one of an angel who seems to be absorbed in prayers; here the curtains are moving and the big head of a devil is uttering words you cannot understand; the walls of another room are covered with bones, each of them “wearing” a watch, etc. Everywhere there are evil looking creatures (even Batman and Mickey Mouse look nasty), but also princesses and characters that look like the artist himself. You’re never sure whether these figures you meet are threatening you or just captive of the hotel (maybe both).

The soundtrack of this journey into horror and awe is by Liquid Architecture. The rock band has composed 7 tracks, they are played loud but not too much and complete the experience in an admirable way.

Once you’ve closed the door on the hotel, you might wonder whether you have dreamt or hallucinated. There are two more rooms, there’s no music there and the walls are white, they display the preparatory drawings of the exhibition. Some of them are black and white, others are illuminated like manuscripts from the Middle Age.

I made very few images. Can someone please explain me why you are allowed to make pictures of any exhibition during its opening and are treated like a dangerous criminal when you want to take a photography after the opening party?

More links about Fabien Verschaere: CIAC, Galerie Michel Rein, Parker’s Box and on myspace.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Mar 3, 2007, 8:59AM

Second Life: the new Disney or vaporville?

Originally from This Blog Sits at the by Grant McCracken
reBlogged by michael on Feb 10, 2007, 4:27PM

The target pill bottle isn’t a bottle, it’s a system

It’s unfortunate that the 2005 design of the Target pill bottle has too often been treated as just a product design and graphic design solution. Yes, it received much earned respect for being a collaboration of graphic design with industrial design and for its sensitive approach to addressing sometimes life-threatening circumstances. But perhaps because it’s been put on a pedestal at the MoMA that we forgot to check out what’s going on behind the scenes at Target.

Target appropriately calls the bottle ClearRX, describing it more broadly as a, “prescription distribution and communication system.” That’s because it required quite a bit of work on the back-of-the-house to make the pill bottles work on the front-of-the-house.

Let’s take one aspect of the design as an example. The bottles have rings that fit around the collar of the bottle which are color coded to identify different members of the family — 7 colors in all. The concept is simple enough: Make sure you’re not accidentally taking someone else’s prescription just because the bottles look similar. However, the implementation is much more difficult because Target has to ensure the right color ring is going around the right subscription. Therefore Target’s Pharmacy IT system has to track which family member has which color ring so the colors are not accidentally switched when prescriptions are filled.

From listening to Deborah Adler tell the story of working with Target, it’s clear that considerable (if not more) design effort went towards the processes and systems surrounding the pill bottle. It was, “an enormous undertaking… a huge collaborative effort,” she said. Here’s a hint of some of the overall system that had to be coordinated:

“I work with the pharmacy team, pharmacy operations… the Target technology team to build the software to accommodate the new labeling system, the marketing team… there were major training sessions to train all the pharmacists on how to use this new system because they were the most important people to us… they were the front line… they had to explain how to use this new system, and they had to learn how to use it.. there was a bit of a learning curve involved.”

I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.

For me, the inspiration of this story is how a design artifact and a compelling story from Deborah Adler could spark the evolution of Target’s drug delivery system. When the-way-things-should-be aligns with a competitive advantage, great design ideas are more likely to come to fruition. In these cases, design prototypes and good storytelling can show the way things should be, and allow a productive discussion around what’s necessary to make things happen.

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Originally from Adaptive Path by Brandon Schauer
reBlogged by michael on Jan 27, 2007, 12:43AM

Web App Summit: Learning from Social Web Applications

At the UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, Joshua Porter walked through what designers can learn from the success of Social Web Applications:

• Most people tend to focus on visual design when evaluating the quality of Web sites. However, several highly successful Web sites (My Space, Craig’s List, & Amazon) are not designed well from a visual or interaction design perspective.
• These sites, while lacking in visual & interaction design, have great social design.
• When conducting a large-scale e-commerce study, UIE found that users often went to amazon.com before buying something on another e-commerce site to research their purchases. They called this the “Amazon Effect”.
• The content people used on Amazon was highly social: user reviews, recommendations, user-generated shopping lists, and more. In fact, Amazon had 11 social features on each & every product page.
• Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.

Design Elements: the lowest-level building blocks of design that can be used to form higher-level structures.

• Visual Design: line, size, color, shape, texture, pattern, light, value
• Interaction Design: button, input, link, screen, navigation, cursor, check box
• Social Design: messaging, sharing, collaborating, rating, reviewing, gossiping, recommending, voting, arguing, networking

Design Principles: higher-order guides that deal with the relationship between elements.

• Visual Design: contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity
• Interaction Design: anticipation, autonomy, consistency, readability, learnability, metaphor, explorability, etc.
• Social Design: motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, emergence
• Motivation: identify primary motivation & create a golden path to achieve it. (del.icoi.us bookmarking)
• Identity: let people manage their identity online like they do offline (MySpace profile)
• Control: Users want control though they may never take advantage of it (Facebook news feed)
• Independence: a necessary part of enabling the wisdom of crowds. If achieved, then popularity is valuable.
• Privacy: different for everyone but a key consideration for application design.
• Authority: built up over time based on agreement on who is right or in charge.
• Gaming: it is human nature to compete and a site can benefit (digg)
• Community: it is not a feature set. It is a feeling people get with shared interests or experiences.
• Emergence: effects over time & effects at larger scales.
• Personal benefit always precedes social benefit: the Delicious lesson.

Tags: social software, web2.0, interaction design

Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by LukeW
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM

Interview with Art Orienté objet

Very few artists have intrigued me as much as Art Orienté Objet, a French duo concerned with issues of environment and animal experimentations. Art Orienté Objet means “art oriented object” but it can also be read as “art oriented by objects.” The projects of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin aim to raise the debate on what’s going on behind the closed doors of laboratories and in our society.

Their work, deeply grounded in current research, explores the inter-related fields of science and art. On some occasions they use the same tools as scientists. For one of their most iconic works, Culture de Peaux d’Artistes, they asked researchers of the MIT skin production laboratory in Boston to take biopsies of their epidermis. Then they got samples deposited on a pig’s dermis which they tattooed with animal motifs, mostly of endangered species or those used in biology. The skin became the site of a symbolic alliance and a questioning of the ‘species barrier’.

However, Art Oriente Objet’s work also demonstrates that, when engaging with biotechnology, the most challenging artistic metaphors do not necessarily require bio-reactors, sophisticated instruments and hig-tech procedures. The main component of Rabbits were used to prove, for example, is the taxidermied body of a white rabbit found in trash. Its insides have been replaced with entrails knitted out of wool obtained from the Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to have been cloned from an adult somatic cell. The piece questions the relationship between ethics and aesthetics and comments on the correlation between certain aspects of art and science.

Their series of doll museums recall Box in a Valise –Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum of favourite works– and the cabinets of curiosities so popular during the Renaissance. The em>Museum of Natural Horrors

, the Museum of Mental Horrors and the Museum of Human Horrors look like adorable doll houses but expose upsetting scenes of vivisection, animals in bell jars that are delivered electro-shocks, pets in cage, battery hens that have some human characteristics, etc.

The fact that the house and its inhabitants are tiny and cute makes the reality that the objects evoke even more disturbing. One of the artefacts displayed in The Museum of Natural Horror is the “Wire-Mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother” that recreates one of Harry Harlow‘s experiments on the “science of affection.” In the ’50s, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers. The young animals were “raised” by surrogate monkey mother machines, both equipped to dispense milk. One mother was made out of bare wire mesh. The other was a wire mother covered with soft terry cloth.

Another striking project is Pioneer Ark, a hanging mobile inspired by a visit of the Pioneer Farm. This Australian center collects animals victim of mutations due to human activity (toxic chemical and radioactive pollutants) or naturally occuring factors. The artists were granted the authorisation to visit but not the right to take any picture. After their visit at the Farm, AOo gathered all the descriptions of mutant animals they could find into scientific publications and made a gigantic Noah’s ark inhabited by transgenic porcelain species.

AOo was formed in 1991. Did you have the objective to explore issues raises by biotechnology, experimentation on animals and ecology right from the start? Did your objectives and approach evolve over the years?

We decided right from the start to work on the manipulation of the living, the vegetal, the animal and the human, by society and science. As we were very involved in ecological groups, it seemed only logical to engage with issues realted to biotechnology and experimentations on animals.

In fact, we never strayed from those issues, we just broadened the approach according to the fields of experimentation we immersed into in order to make arise visionary images and processes. I use this term on purpose as it expresses adequately the logics of our work: let the vision emerge after having dived into knowledge.

What is your background? Has either of you been trained as a scientist?

At the beginning, i was the only one who had made scientific studies, for family reasons, i have a master’s degree in physics-chemistry, which i earned in paralled with art studies and later on i studied ethnology and clinical psychology jusqu’au troisieme cycle. Benoit’s background is more in literature. He studied scenography, theatre, literature and history of art.

When dealing with research centers how open can you be about your motivations and the fact that your perspective is one of artists? I’m thinking in particular about the project “Cultures de peaux d’artistes”. How did you convince researchers to help you achieve your goal?

It is very difficult to find research centres open to artistic approaches… We are artists first and foremost, the research proposals we suggest are extremely astonishing compared to the protocols they establish. Besides, our proposals have to meet with a particular curiosity they might have. In fact, the research is a bit of a boot camp and the result of a long negociation. I narrate in detail the story of “skin culture” in an article published in the Fall 2006 issue of the Canadian magazine “inter art actuel”.

Culture de Peaux d’Artistes

How do the works Museum of Natural Horrors and the Museum of Mental Horrors respond or are related to a previous project called Museum of Human Horrors?

The initial project involved the creation of an anthology of the three research fields on manipulation that motivated us: the ecological field (Musee des horreurs naturelles/Museum of Natural Horrors), the biological field (Musee d’horreurs humaines/Museum of Human Horrors), and the psycho-scociological field (Musee d’horreurs mentales/Museum of Mental Horrors). The three museums were put together at the request of galleries and collectors who wanted more coherence from us. We reacted by showing them how our past and upcoming works could co-habit with ease.

What could artists and scientists gain from more frequent collaborations?

Artists present original approaches which scientists may not be able to follow due to the logics of productivity of current laboratories. Quite often such approaches meet with desires scientists might have to experiment the “in-experimentable” and the artist becomes the medium that opens up heavy protocols. However, it’s often a difficult process. From the artists’ point of view it’s a win-win situation. That’s if they want to enter the scientific codification… which might seem quite heavy.

Could you explain us what you were trying to achieve with Pioneer Ark? What was the impetus for this project?

Pioneer Ark is a revealing work, it presents a scientific reality well-known but which hasn’t been documented with images, because images generate polemics. This reality is the rise of spontaneous genetic mutations and aboratory hybridization. Because there wasn’t any proper images of such realities well-known by the scientific press, we have created a kind of gigantic Noah’s Ark. Animal figures belonging to this genetically modified reality are walking inside its tubes. The work is meant to be both revealing and fascinating so that each person can freely decide what is his or her own position in a world in perpetual mutation. However, it is a disturbing work. The complete installation has only been exhibited once…

I remember reading in a magazine that TC&AP‘s Victimless Leather Jacket disturbed the public. Some would rather wear the skin of a slaughtered cow on their back than imagine that one day they could donne such leather coat even if it didn’t require any animal to suffer. I suspect the Roadkill coat, a garment made with the fur of dead animals found on the road, generated the same kind of reaction. How did the public react to it? Do artists need to shock and disturb in order to get their message through?

Reactions to the Roadkill Coat were more in the order of fascination than horror. The work has been interpreted as a finger pointed to the damage that the urban world is causing to the natural world. Everyone was trying to find out which animals the coat was made of. They seemed to admire it.

The coat was more political than horrifying and its shape highlighted the beauty of a sacrified wild world. People tended to interpret it more as a call for increased awareness than as a provocative object, and that’s exactly what it was. In reality, what shocks us most of the time is not provocation but the fact that provocation leaves one indifferent… It’s the pure message of reality that disturbs most. That’s why we’ve always worked with it, producing objects embedded with a fundamental antagonism: repulsion and fascination.

Who are the artists whose work you find particularly inspiring?

Talking about inspiration would take us too far back in time… *grin*

We work in a very autonomous way. However we like plenty of artists. They range from Chris Burden to Jeffrey Vallance, Jun Takita and many others.

Are you working on new projects or preparing exhibition?

Yes, we never stop. We are working now on ethological delusions, on vegetal biotech works and smells, on architectures of the physiological memory and i write… I’m the author of a novel about creation, “Premiere peau” (“First Skin”) which has been published in Germany, under the titled “Dreigestirn” at Piper Verlag.

Merci Marion.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Jan 8, 2007, 7:50AM