Gillian Crampton Smith – Research?

Gillian Crampton Smith is regarded as one of the pioneers of interaction design. In 1989, she established the Computer Related Design Department at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2001 she set up the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, a graduate school and research institution sponsored by Telecom Italia and Olivetti which gained wide recognition as a leading centre for interaction design research and education. She is also the Chair of Convivio EU Network.

She is now developing together with Philip Tabor a graduate programme of interaction design in the faculty of design of the IUAV University in Venice.

The craft of Interaction Design has developed through experience without thinking too much about rationalizing it. Like Bauhaus’ work in the ’20s, the new grammar of film making developed by Eisenstein, it can be a platform from which those coming after us can build upon. Many designers work in a very intuitive way. So far any attempt to systematize design has proved inconsistent. The only way to research design is by doing design.

Design as research.
– Argument 1. Design isn’t research: design has no theory, no fool-proof methods, design is intuitive and overrationalism will ruin it.
Design reflects on what has been done and draws on it. It’s risky to apply paradigms of science to design. Theories about architecture have been around for centuries, design is much younger. There are thousands of interaction design projects and only a few are really relevant for research. She reminded how hard it had been years ago to convince the Design Council that what interaction design was doing was relevant for research. Now it’s much better accpeted and understood. Research projects seek to provide knowledge and insight. If a research project fails, there is still a gread deal that has been learnt by doing that research. This doesn’t apply to design, you can’t say to a client: “it didn’t work, but we’ve learnt so much in the process!”

Argument 2. All design is research. Each design problem is unique. Design progresses through exemplars. Design repertoires.

Argument 3. Includes the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances and artefacts, including design, where these lead to substantially improved insights.

Looking for 3 types of insight:
– Medium: what is possible within the constraints of technology;
– People: ways technology could better support people’s needs, values, desires;
– Process: improving the way systems, products and services are designed.

What is possible to do with technology? How can we communicate it in implicit and explicit ways?

Examples.
Victor Vina and Massimo Banzi‘s Box. The platform allows non-technical people to experiment freely with designing interactions between physical devices and their wireless networking. These networks could connect objects in different rooms of a building-or even in different countries or continents.

Each cardboard box can do one simple input or output thing. Each box knows where it is, the time and where the other boxes are. Interactions can take place anywhere in the world; for example, a box in Ivrea can have a switch that turns on a light in Tokyo-all done via the Internet.

Gilian Crampton-Smith then showed several projects from Strangley Familiar, a series of explorations into physical computing by ex-students of Ivrea. The first rule the students were given was “No button.”

Message Table, for example, is an answering machine that forces you to have a clear desk.

The cord connecting each of the Tug Tug telephone to its base is a shared interactive object, allowing each person to affect the distant phone physically by pulling the cord. If you pull the cord, the receiver at the other end falls of the hook.

Hardware platforms developed at Ivrea that build on processing: Wiring and Arduino.

Need to make a difference: after some 20 years of interaction design, we still spend a tremendous amount of time staring at a screen and typing with two fingers. Good ideas need to be sustainable, understandable and not just implementable.

Aequilibrium is an interactive environment developed for the Rialto fish market in Venice. The project shows how to use a technology without loosing the quality that makes the city so special. The fish in Aequilibrium react to your presence: they get scared and avoid your arrival but they become your friends when you are quiet. Four columns on the sides show predictions and pollution. The prediction can change accoring to your behaviour, by interacting with Aequilibrium you get a sense of how your actions can influence nature

Bad pictures of the slides.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 10:05AM

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

Tobecontinued

Myspace as an interactive platform

Tobecontinued is a group exhibition in progress that starts with some students of the Fine Arts Academy of Rome. Using Myspace as an interactive platform, Tobecontinued is based on the concepts of open art-work, cause and/vs effect, and free association of ideas; where the last art-work is always inspired to the previous one, in order to generate an open art-work in continuous evolution that never completes itself…

The process is constituted by the single works as video, animations, photos, music, net projects, and shows details, nuances and ideas of the whole art-work’s project. Let’s continue, joining with us and sending your art-work (max. 3 mb per email) at tobecontinued.tobecontinued[at]gmail.com” Random

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Mar 2, 2007, 4:22PM

Pixelated Pulse Art Fair

A prominent motif at the Pulse art fair in NYC last week, pixelation was evident in a number of works in various mediums. From afar, these works can be read as a whole, but close up, the image starts to break down and the individual elements of the composition become more dominant. Here are a selection of some of our favorites. Click on any of the images for a more detailed view.

The buzz around the Catherine Clark Gallery booth had a lot to do with “The Morning After Portraits” by Andy Diaz Hope. Made of gel-caps, the series shows images of people in front of their medicine cabinets or in their local pharmacies with hangovers, headaches and other illnesses self-inflicted or otherwise. (Pictured above right.) A more literal comment on our pill-popping culture than Damien Hirst’s similar work, Hope comments, “We are no longer a sum of our natural history, but a sum of our natural history plus our self selected recreational and medical regimes.”

At first glance, the installation by Devorah Sperber presented by the Marcia Wood Gallery, looks like randomly arranged different colored spools of thread. However, a clear acrylic sphere placed in front of the work shrinks and condenses the thread spool “pixels” into an easily-read image of a masterpiece—in this case Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring”—and the convex shape flips the imagery 180 degrees. A mimicry of how the brain and eye process visual data, Sperber’s work plays with ideas about the past, craft, visual theories and art itself. Check out more of her work at the Brooklyn Museum until 6 May 2007.

Referencing cubists like Picasso and other early 20th-century painters, Isidro Blasco, recently exhibited at DCKT Contemporary, turns the 2-dimensional media of photography into a 3-dimensional experience by piecing together multiple photos. Using board-mounted photographs, he combines multiple angles and architecture to explore perception in relation to physical experience. Blasco’s sculptures draw the observer into the piece, so that the experience of it feels new rather than a straight portrayal of the scene. The photographic sculpture pictured (right), “Side Building,” measures 107 x 120 x 72 inches . See more of his work here.

More of a dot-matrix than pixels, William Betts of the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, re-creates surveillance camera images by carefully dripping acrylic paint onto canvas. Using digital information, he creates work that is abstract, organic and realistic. Again, a macro view (above right) becomes an abstraction but a step back (above left) reveals a realistic surveillance camera shot. Also on Cool Hunting, Betts’ work from last years Scope art fair uses digital information (and in this case techniques) to create graphics. See more from this series of work here.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, presented by Margaret Thatcher Projects, exhibited sculptural works made of small canvas-covered blocks. Estrada-Vega considers each square as its own distinct painting, hence show titles like, “4000 Paintings/14 Compositions.” Given the modularity of the pixel-like pieces (they’re attached with magnets), the mini-paintings have the potential to be rearranged infinitely into new compositions. The colors, inspired by the artist’s Mexican heritage, look somewhat monochromatic from afar. Only up close do the ultra-saturated colors reveal themselves, an aspect further accentuated by the topographic nature of the blocks. Maceo (far left) is composed of wax, oleopasto, oil, limestone and pigment on canvas and measures 18 x 18 inches. More effective in person, these photos do not do the works much justice.

Originally from Cool Hunting by Tim Yu
reBlogged by michael on Mar 1, 2007, 9:07PM

Documents and performances

This week, many students presented their thesis projects at the Berlin University of the Arts’ digital media class. Since all of them were quite good, we will cover them over the next couple days.

Lisa Rave has created a beautiful two-fold project which takes a look at the relationship between performance art and its documentation, strongly referring to works like Chris Burden’s Shoot.

For the first piece “Oak Frame”, Lisa cut down an oak tree (which would have been felled anyway) and photographically documented the tree, the process and the void that the tree left behind. These pictures were put into frames which she crafted from the same tree’s wood and put up on the wall. Since the wood is still fresh, the frames will warp as they dry and eventually destroy the panes of glass in front of the photographs, somewhat obscuring the images of the tree. For the presentation, she got a humidifier from a Berlin museum which was actively working against this process and in a sense stretching the time-span of this part of the performance.

The second piece, “Zählen von 1 bis 3000 in absoluter Dunkelheit” (To count from 1 to 3000 in absolute darkness), plays on a similar idea – it is a photograph of Lisa who was standing still as long as the camera had collected enough light to produce a properly exposed image. The duration of the creation of the performance became the time of the creation of its documentation and vice-versa.

Related: Safari by Lisa Rave.

Originally from we make money not art by Sascha
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 6:58PM

Like Watching Paint Dry. Really Beautiful Paint.

Just got a press release from The Exploratorium (the best place on earth, btw, period), announcing the win of an AIA award for the design of the “Wave Wall,” a kinetic skin on the surface of the new Science Education Center at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, Louisiana. Super-apt for its context of course, but there was only a small pic in the email. Hopped over to YouTube, did a search, and presto. You get some Rockettes-style action at the 2:30-minute mark, but we suspect that this thing is even more wonderful when it’s only slighly moving. [more]

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Feb 16, 2007, 4:35PM

Interactive Manhattan

[Image: Via Interactive Architecture dot Org].

New Yorkers! Be sure to stop by the Eyebeam/Interactive Architecture dot Org event tonight in Manhattan:

Organised by Ruairi Glynn of Interactive Architecture dot Org, Eyebeam is pleased to co-host, with the Bartlett School of Architecture, an evening of presentations on interactive architecture. Presenters will include Phil Ayres of Sixteen Makers, Eyebeam residents Carmen Trudell and Jennifer Broutin, Marek Walczak of MW2MW and David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of the NYC architecture firm, The Living. Presenters will discuss their work for 15 minutes followed by a panel discussion moderated by Professor Stephen Gage of the Bartlett with a reception from 9-10pm.

It’s all going down at 540 W. 21st Street – if you go, tell Ruairi I said hello.

[Images: 1 and 2].

More info on the event; more info on architecture at the Bartlett.

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 6:53PM

news-controlled rice cooker

a rice cooker that tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice. for each new report about GM rice, a quarter cup of rice is dispensed into the cooker. when the cooker has enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically, the cooker is switched on & an email is sent out to inviting people to eat the rice.

the project is designed to create awareness to issues surrounding genetically modified organisms by producing excessive amounts of cooked rice & attempting to feed people with it.

see also news casualties as candy.

[link: mit.edu|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2007, 1:30AM

Seeking examples of design informed by user research…

…but not just any user research. A while back I posted some thoughts on how user research might begin to take a more complex and therefore more real view of people. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how to go beyond tasks and goals and incorporate meaning, culture, and context. I’ve also talked about this at a few conferences as well. Every time I bring it up, there’s a lot of discussion and general agreement. I think on some level this just feels right, especially to those of us who have made careers out of being advocates for users.

But how much evidence do we have that this really makes a difference in design outcomes? When have more nuanced or more complex understandings of users been instrumental in creating successful designs?

One good example of this might be Ziba’s work for Lenovo. They clearly moved beyond the task/goal framework and had a very successful design as a result.

I have a few other examples like this, many internal to AP, but would really like to find more. If you now of any, please post them in the comments. And please give as much detail as you can.  What did you do? Why?  How did it make a difference? We will all be able to benefit from these either for improving our craft or just making our case to clients or managers.

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Originally
from Adaptive Path

by Todd W


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 11, 2007, 3:29AM

Pornography and Technology

My notes from Tina Lorenz’ talk at 23C3 in Berlin: Pornography and Technology.

I wanted to comment on what the presentation was like in general but Polas has done it already and i can only agree with just everything he has written (and will therefore remove from the title of my talks any term that might put off the audience, such as “art” or, well… “art”). I enjoyed the talk a lot. I just wondered if there was any point in blogging it because the content looks a bit like a wikipedia entry on, say, the History of erotic depictions but that doesn’t make it less fun, at least for me. ‘k, now the talk:

1. History of media until the birth of “modern porn”

Porn emerges with the first ability to abstract. Representation of sex first created for religion and later for arousal. Porn becomes mainstream only when the media is cheap enough to distribute sex representations widely. The cheaper the media the more porn copies can be distributed.

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing. Shortly after that erotic literature started to appear even if it was illegal to distribute or even to own it. The situation was quite different in Asia, they have a longer tradition of erotic representation and literature.

The first porn engravings appeared in the 16th Century. I Modi was a kind of Kama Sutra, an illustrated book of 16 “postures” or sexual positions. Their objective was to arouse but it was also a social commentary on the situation of Catholic Italy at the time.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerreotype, an early type of photograph in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. It was the first commercially viable photographic process. However the material used was very heavy and required very long time of poses for the model of a portrait. No possibility to take any “action shot.”

The realism of photography made the authorities quite uneasy. So erotic photos or nude portraits were only authorised as “painter’s aids.”

The only way to reproduce a daguerreotype was to photograph them again which made them rare and priceless. Besides, they were quite fragile. The first erotic photographs and the first experimenters in stereo photography utilized daguerreotypes.

Etude

Stereoscopy made the technology more popular. Only problem was the rigid poses of the models.

William Fox Talbot patented processes which made it easier to reproduce photography and thus spread images to the masses. One of the patents shortened the posing time.

During 19th Century, the Postal Service became more reliable and safer to use internationally. Porn producers could then send erotic pictures to clients worldwide.

The Kinetoscope, developed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892, suddenly gave some movements to these images of erotic scenes. This early motion picture exhibition device was designed for short reels to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components. It created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. Viewers could listen to the soundrack through headphones. It was developed as an attraction for fun fairs.

Kinetoscope and Carmencita

While reading the wikipedia entry for the kinetoscope, i found out that shortly after its launch came the first recorded instance of motion picture censorship. The film in question showed a performance by the Spanish dancer Carmencita who “communicated an intense sexuality across the footlights that led male reporters to write long, exuberant columns about her performance.” When Kinetoscope movie of her dance, shot at the Black Maria in mid-March 1894 was screened in the New Jersey resort town Asbury Park, the town’s founder, James A. Bradley was “so shocked by the glimpse of Carmencita’s ankles and lace that he complained to Mayor Ten Broeck. The showman was thereupon ordered to withdraw the offending film, which he replaced with Boxing Cats.”

Lorenz later explained that early movies were not an attraction on their own. They were part of a circus show or screened at the end of a theatre play representation. Reels had to be bought, there wasn’t any effective rental system.

The first erotic films date back to the beginning of the last century. Given the usually clandestine nature of the filming and distribution, many of them are lost. Most of what remains has been archived at the Kensey Institute for Sex Research. Europeans were pioneers in erotic films. She mentioned the first German erotic movie: Am Abend in 1910. Germans became quickly known for their fetish movies. And France “of course” (that’s how she put it) was fast to jump on the erotic movie bandwagon.

The first erotic movies were also called “stag films”. Their main audience was made of men who belonged to closed societies. As the entry fees to belong to those private societies were high, only rich men got to watch the films. The films were also shown in brothels to arouse punters. The stag films didn’t have any real plot. The novelty of seeing naked women was enough to make the gents loose their head.

The first erotic movies were better produced than shooted which might indicate that they were done by professional producers from Hollywood who wanted to make extra money on the side. Narrative elements were then introduced to eliminate repetition.

Erotic movies reveal a lot about the culture that produced them.

For example, Free Ride, believed to be the oldest surviving porn film made in the US (and haha! directed by Will B. Hard and A. Wise Guy), was made at a time when cars started to be “affordable”, they were a symbol of freedom.

In times of war, while women were working in factories and their men were soldiers, erotic movies depicted women as passive and submissive. They looked bored during the intercourse.

The introduction of sound allowed for the development of more complex plots. “Yes, there ARE plots in porn!” explained Lorenz.

The narrative brought even more morale and references to the culture of the day. According to Lorenz, pornography has always been more interesting than sex to get to know about our world.

1968: Denmark is the first country to legalize pornography. Copies were quickly smuggled out of the country.
1969: First sex expo “Sex 69″
1970: first modern porn, Mona, the Virgin Nymph that was the first porn film with a plot that received a general theatrical release in the U.S.

Porn wanted to go mainstream and merge with the Hollywood industry. So they increased the budget, put more effort in writing better plots and hired professional technicians.

2. Definition of pornography

Difficult to define. What is obscene and perverse for one person, say a feminist, might be acceptable for a philosopher. A common criteria is that porn seeks to arouse customers. But then again, what is arousing for you might be disgusting for me.

Lorenz believes that porn has to fill some technical criteria:
– porn is media-bound. It’s all about the layer of abstraction;
– porn is fictional, imaginative, iconic. Porns are staged, have a scenario. Grey area: house porn;
– porn is produced for an audience. If my friend organises an orgy and films, edits and credits it but doesn’t show it to anyone else than the “actors” and their close friends, the degree of abstraction is lessened. But if the video is uploaded online and seen by net surfers who don’t know any of the actors, then it becomes a porn movie. With an informed audience, it can even become art.

VHS vs Betamax. An urban legend wants that the format war was won by VHS because of porn. It fact the battle might have been won by something as simple as the length of the tape (2 hours for VHS and 1 hour for Betamax.) Porn adopted VHS to lower production costs. In its quest to go mainstream, the porn industry wanted to make feature films and thuus needed longer tapes. VHS allowed people to watch porn at home. They didn’t have to face the humiliation of buying tickets to see a smut movie.

The rise of the internet has allowed for an even larger and swifter distribution.

Stats: 60% porn in p2p now. In 2006, about 1% of random sample websites were sexy.

3. Teledildonics and Interactive Porn

Second Life: avatars programmed to have virtual sex. Sex in Second Life happens through a combination of poses, animations, scripts, and typing. The main ingredient is known as pose balls, objects with scripts in them that trigger a user’s avatar to play certain animations or poses. For sex, poseballs are placed close together, with titles above them that say the position the user will take.

Just out when she made the talk: Wiibrator, a Python application that interfaces the Wii’s Wiimote and the PS2’s Trancevibrator.

Lorenz concluded by saying that we’ll see more and more of these gadgets that mediate virtual and real life sexual activities. “And remember, porn is not bad!”

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 2, 2007, 8:00AM