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NEC's Future Designs

aesthetics, design

April 04, 2004, 02:26 PM

Jodi sent me a link to some product concepts developed by designers at NEC. A couple of them are kind of similar to two of my IID projects from last semester; the "tag" device reminds me of my scheduling snake (look at the first picture on the page especially), and the flacon is vaguely similar to the "Keep in Touch" application I did with Elizabeth and Chun-Yi. Not that I'm claiming NEC are culling my weblog for ideas or anything, but it's sorta neat to see that the technology that will make designs like these possible is actually in the works, and that professional designers coming up with concepts that are similar to the ones we're coming up with here.

I feel all designy.

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A New Year and a New Look

aesthetics, announcements, internet

January 01, 2004, 01:11 AM

The witching hour has come and gone and the year 2004 is now upon us. In this spirit of newness, I've been working on a new design for roBlog as well as the rest of this site, which I'm calling "Heimdall" (the name of the current design is "Odin", in case I never mentioned that). These changes will (hopefully) include:

1. More useful categories
2. Monthly and comprehensive archives
3. The "looking forward / looking behind" feature I mentioned a long time ago
4. Proper print versions of every page
5. Numerous usability-related tweaks

The information architecture of the site shouldn't change much, but I have come up with a proposed new visual design template for the site. Note that this sketch is intended to give a sense of the visuals only, and thus I've left out some page elements like some of the sidebars and the comments sections. In the interests of participatory design, I humbly submit this sketch to you, dear readers, for comments and criticism. If you love it, hate it, or have thoughts on how it could be better, please leave a comment below or send me an email.

Heimdall, I should note, was the Norse god who slew (and was slain by) Loki at Ragnarok, the end of the world. In hopes that it won't spell the end of me, I'm making a New Year's Resolution to complete this project by this time next year at the very latest (and hopefully soon before); a feat which is far from certain since I'm at least as bad as Kevin at completing all the projects that I undertake.

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Usability and Creativity

aesthetics, software development, usability

November 10, 2003, 02:55 PM

At the last SSS, MHCI student Jesse Kriss gave a talk on digital music and live performance, focusing on the technologies available for changing the way musicians perform. The important feature of all these technologies, according to Jesse, is that they separate the instrument's input from its output. With a regular instrument, like a violin, the form of the instrument is more or less dictated by the sound you want it to make. You can't make a violin with a substantially different form that is played in a substantially different way without changing the sounds the instrument is capable of making. But with digital technology, the "input" (the way the instrument looks and is played) and the "output" (the sound the instrument produces) are entirely separate. This opens up whole new possibilities for instrument design.

While listening to Jesse's explanation, it struck me how similar these concepts are to software architecture patterns like Model-View-Controller, which emphasizes the separation of input, output, and processing responsibilities into three separate components. MVC aims for this separation for exactly this reason; many types of systems require frequent changes and recombination of the input, output, and processing components, and separating them into three distinct modules helps facilitate this change. Jesse also mentioned how important it was to be able to plug together many different devices to build the kinds of instruments he envisions. He prefers Macs because they make plugging things together easy by requiring a minimum of setup hassle. It's easy, of course, because the Mac device architecture supports device discovery and auto-setup very nicely; more evidence of the impact of architecture on usability.

But it's more than just plugging together hardware. Jesse's work also involves reconfiguring that hardware to map behaviors to sounds. The software he uses to do this allows him to build processing capabilities using audio filtering components and logic controls. Essentially, this is a domain-specific programming language that reminded me of LabView's G. The flexibility and complexity of digital audio technologies is astounding.

All this got me thinking about a question I've pondered before (and in the context of digital music, no less): how do we design interfaces to support creative tasks? As I discussed in the previous post, classic user-centered design techniques focus on designing for the user's goals by distilling these goals into tasks that the interface can support. But the very nature of creative endeavors ensures that the users' tasks are difficult to define; after all, creativity by definition involves doing things that have never been done before.

Bill Fulton, the head of Microsoft Games, gave a talk here at CMU last fall and was asked this very question. His answer was that he was no expert, but that he suspected the interface should just "get out of the way" and let the creator work as directly as possible with their medium. This is good advice as far as it goes, but I suspect it's more complicated than that. After all, many programs that support creativity have some of the most complex interfaces available on the market (think Photoshop, sound editing tools, and programming IDEs). Generally speaking, however, the user populations for these tools are willing to put up with this complexity (to an extent) for the power and flexibility that comes with it. Is there even a user-centered design problem here?

I hypothesize that there is, and that we can make these interfaces better by thinking about those aspects of an interface that are essential to creativity. In general, I suspect supporting creativity is related to supporting exploration and problem solving, two aspects that are relatively well understood in interface design. Here's a few rough guidelines:

1. Make plugging things together easy, both in hardware and software. This involves building software abstractions that are robust enough to support current modules as well as future ones, and that can hide the technical complexity of configuring hardware and software interfaces to work with one another from nontechnical users. Plug-and-Play (PnP) technology has partially solved this problem already, and upcoming protocols like Jini, Rendezvous, and UPnP will hopefully take this even further. What we lack is usable equivalents for software components. Some component frameworks like J2EE try to tackle this problem, but we still have a long way to go.
2. Make problems visible and obvious. When users get creative, they tend to make mistakes like configuring the system in ways it wasn't meant to be. The system needs to provide users with sufficient feedback for them to evaluate the problem and correct it. Even better, create interfaces that make the state of the system continuously visible so users are able to diagnose potential problems before they even occur.
3. Make it easy to undo mistakes. Tog's guidelines on explorable interfaces, as well as Nielsen's heuristics and several other sources, emphasize the importance of creating an environment where users feel safe exploring by allowing them to back out of any operation they choose by accident. This is especially important in interfaces to support creativity, where almost every action the user takes is exploratory. In fact, many interfaces may benefit from a more sophisticated version of this feature than the ubiquitous "Undo" menu option. Programming IDEs have long offered integration with full-blown change management systems; perhaps its time for other applications to take a cue.
4. Allow for data sharing across applications. I brought this up in my earlier rant. Creative users may need to step outside the bounds of your application for some of their tasks, no matter how well designed your system is. Support copy & paste and import / export functionality.

This is, of course, just a first attempt. More thinking and research needs to be done to generate a list that can even resemble completeness.

It's worth noting that all of these features may impact the software architecture design of the system. See our U&SA technique for further information, especially the scenarios on Maintaining Device Independence, Supporting Undo, and Reusing Information.

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Logos

aesthetics, personal

November 04, 2003, 08:05 PM

A couple evenings ago, I put together this design to serve, henceforth, as my personal logo:

The design was inspired partly by Raymond's proposed hacker emblem and partly from some playing around with pennies I did a couple months ago in the MHCI labs, then was refined by the usual iterative process. I'm quite pleased with the result, and so far the other people I've shown it to seem to be as well.

The image makes a good logo for the usual reasons; it's simple and reasonably aesthetically pleasing, it has very few colors so it's cheap to print and display, it looks good at both large and small scales, and thus it's effective in a variety of mediums such as a web image, a t-shirt or coffee mug print, a watermark, etc. But in addition to all this, it has a number of semantic meanings as well.

The meaning becomes more clear when you think of the design as made up of four intersecting gliders. As I said earlier, the concepts behind the glider pattern (simple, effective design) resonate with me, and having the "hacker" theme run through the design is not unattractive either. The intersection of three elements provides a visual metaphor to my own professional persona, which is recently very much an intersection of the hard-nosed, problem-solving engineer, the rigorous, data-oriented scientist, and the creative, holistic designer. The logo also conveys a sense of rotation, cycles, and eternal motion, concepts that I identify strongly with. Finally, the single red dot (the color of passion) provides a subtle break in the otherwise perfect regularity of the design; a visual metaphor for my own philosophy on understanding and accepting the workings of society while still clinging to slight, but true, nonconformity.

The design alone doesn't communicate all this, I realize. But after much thought I decided this isn't such a big problem. After all, it makes for a good conversation starter.

I plan to integrate this logo with these web pages just as soon as I get enough of a breather to devote sufficient time to it.

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On Constrained Diets

aesthetics

October 14, 2003, 10:15 AM

There's an article on K5 written by a guy who's giving up vegetarianism after 8 years. It presents an interesting perspective on what it means to be a vegetarian in our society. As a vegetarian of 9 months (and the only one in my immediate social circle), I'd say my experiences with anti-vegetarian prejudice aren't nearly as bad as the author makes his out to be, but they are there, and noticable. He makes some other good points, too. I especially liked the following paragraph:

The longer I was a vegetarian (and the longer I studied diets) the more I realized how complex the issue was. My very rational decision to give up meat highlighted the irrationality of our society's relationship to food. After 8 years of dietary exile, one thing is clear: not only is our diet bad for our health, our environment or the animals, and it isn't even very tasty. When people say they like the taste of meat, I wonder if they ever eat anything else satisfying. Odds are better than even that their veggies, if something other than potatoes, are always served terminally limp, that their desserts are mostly fat and sugar, and their salad base - if they eat salads - is an uninspiring iceberg lettuce.

For a society that consumes as much as ours, we generally have a pretty boring relationship with food. The solution to mass-producing "tasty" food is to load it up with fat, salt, and sugar. Quite contrary to my expectations, I've found that when I gave up meat my diet got significantly more interesting, because I was forced to stray from the "standard fare" of steaks, burgers, chicken patties, etc. Certain connoisseurs may argue that you can have this experience with a conventional diet as well. This is entirely correct, but for many of us, constraining ourselves to new ground is the only way to encourage exploration.

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Keep In Touch

aesthetics, design

October 05, 2003, 09:03 PM

As a follow-up to my wicked-cool scheduling application design, I've been working for the past few weeks on a new assignment, this time a design for a situationally-appropriate interface for helping people keep track of long-distance friends, lovers, and family. Jodi teamed me up with Elizabeth Windram, a very talented graphic designer, and Chun-Yi "Grace" Chen, a skilled industrial designer / product illustrator.

The basic challenge was to produce an application that could help remind users of the people they needed to get in contact with while also not demanding their full attention (i.e. popping up a dialog box that proclaimed "YOU HAVEN'T CALLED YOUR MOM IN 10 DAYS!" was unacceptable). The interface also had to involve components that could 1) be understood at a glance, 2) be understood entirely aurally, and 3) be understood without the use of vision or hearing.

We never came up with a name for our design solution, so for the purposes of this post I'll call it "Keep In Touch". You can view our design presentation if you have Flash Player (warning: ginormous 13.5MB SWF file).

The Flash movie was intended to be supported by our verbal discussion, of course, so I'll try to cover what might not be clear from just watching the SWF. Our goals for this design were:

1. Not to demand the user's full attention (dictated to us by Jodi).
2. Take advantage of more of the user's senses than just sight (also dictated by Jodi).
3. Encourage, not force, the user to contact their friends and family.
4. Give the user enough context about what was going on in their friends lives that they would actually have a reason for contacting them.
5. Help the user avoid spending too much time talking to friends, so that they can also get other things accomplished.

Our solution is basically a screen saver that displays a collage of pictures of your friends whom you need to contact. Along with the pictures are a few images that are intended to give some context about what is going on in your friend's life right now. For example, the girl in the movie with the airplane next to her picture may be planning a trip abroad. At the same time, the system plays songs that are intended to remind you of the person who ranks highest on your "get in contact with" list (for instance, the song might be a favorite of the individual in question, or it may be one you often listened to with that person).

The second component of our system is an intelligent mouse that warms up to alert you to the fact that you need to get in touch with someone. It also plays the person's song, to remind you of who its alerting you about and to provide a link between the tactile and visual components of the interface. Additionally, the mouse tracks how much time you spend talking to someone (on AIM, for instance) and produces small bumps that give a rough measure of how long its been. This is intended to help you manage how much time you spend with each friend in a subtle, unintrusive way. The mouse is cordless and portable, so that you can carry it around with you and receive reminders when you're away from your computer.

The system determines who you need to get in touch with using a complex and largely-unspecified algorithm, but here's a few of the things it takes into consideration:

• How long it has been since you last contacted the person (determined through monitoring email, phone calls, IMs, etc.)
• What an "appropriate" amount of time would be before contacting the person. For example, you can and should allow much more time to elapse before contacting distant business acquaintances than you should for close friends.
• Whether an important event, such as a birthday or wedding, is occurring in your friend's life.
• Whether your friend is in a situation where they might want or need you to contact them (if they are feeling depressed, for instance). These last few might be determined by monitoring your friend's weblog or online photo journal, and thus our interface might be considered a futuristic news aggregator (Newsable 8.0! :)

So that's "Keep In Touch" in brief. All in all, I think we did a bang-up job on the project. Special thanks to Elizabeth and Grace for their great ideas, their awesome visual design skills (this project would be 10 times uglier if I'd had to do it myself) and for generally being great group members.

As usual, Dan has some great content demoing his project, BreakAway, if you want to read about more awesome products that you can't buy.

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Redesigning Scheduling

aesthetics, design

September 22, 2003, 11:58 PM

Our first assignment in Visual Interface and Interaction Design (a.k.a. "Jodi's class") was due last week. This was my first attempt at real, live interaction design (well, my first intentional attempt), so I'm documenting it here for posterity or something.

Our assignment was to design a new type of "scheduling application". The first thing I learned was that Jodi's concept of an "application" is much broader than mine. Most of the examples she showed us were entire products and not just software running on a standard computer. The implicit message was that, to an interaction designer, it is the experience of the user that counts, not the form of the design solution. Jodi placed no constraints on this form; software versus hardware wasn't an issue.

Instead of a fully fleshed-out product specification, Jodi wanted a refined concept for the application that could demonstrate how a user would schedule an appointment, remove an appointment, and handle double-booked appointments using the interface. As part of our familiarization stage, we developed the product taxonomies and mood boards that I mentioned earlier. I found the taxonomies useful insofar as they helped me really focus on how the form of a product impacts the way we use it. They got me thinking about affordances again, which I hadn't really focused on since reading Norman's book so many (four) years ago. I didn't get into the mood boards quite so much, but I did take from them some general thoughts on how human senses and emotions might relate to my interface, as we'll see.

I set aside all this work for a bit when I came up with the initial concept, however. To do that, I reflected on the scenario I articulated in my Visions of a Distributed Future post; I thought of a world, not too far removed from becoming reality, where physical location is less important, we are far more mobile, and where work and play blend together into a single concept of "living". What would a scheduler look like in this world? Despite the advances in mobility, people still can't be in two places at once, so it would have to be heavily time-focused. I threw up some thoughts on my whiteboard:

Around this time I decided to focus on a particular type of user. Since I had no data on what other people want, I focused on creating a scheduling app for people like me; i.e. students / lowly technical staff. I drew a picture of how I conceive of time on a day-to-day, operational basis (its on the left of the whiteboard); essentially, time consists of "now", a past that I care little about since its already over with, and a future that is segmented into slots that I can fill with meetings or other engagements. This concept, combined with the drawing of a fancy armband I doodled next to it, essentially turned into my initial design. It struck me that it resembled a snake, and I started thinking up some ideas for how it might work.

The next morning, I built a low fidelity prototype of the concept so Jodi could critique it:

As you can see, I strapped this monstrosity to my arm and walked around with it for the better part of the day. Strange thing was, this actually really helped me come up with refined ideas for the product; having the snake really sitting there on my arm gave me a new sense of what it might be able to do were it really functional.

For the second iteration, I developed a higher fidelity prototype using modeling clay and a real watch:

The interaction design didn't change much, but this prototype helped communicate the vision for the scheduling application more clearly (I hope). To describe the functionality of the inert prototype, I put together a small product spec sheet and a scenario-based description of how the product handles the functions Jodi asked us to demonstrate. Looking over these might give you a better sense of how the snake works than the photographs alone do.

The knurling and basic product design came largely from my exploration of the taxonomies. The anthropomorphic reactions of the snake came (in part) from reflecting on the concepts that appeared in my mood boards. The general design concept came from the distributed future scenario, although I realized as I was finishing the product that it was really a fairly realistic device even for the near future. It's odd, but I felt that considering an "out there" scenario helped me come up with some interesting ideas even for a product that didn't wind up being as futuristic as I initially thought it would be.

I wish I had the chance to explore more options with this product; once I came up with the general form of the solution I kind of stopped exploring. However, our second project has already begun, and for it we're required to go through a much wider exploration phase. I'm also still a little unsure how much I used the familiarization artifacts (the mood boards and the taxonomies) in my final design. They were helpful, but maybe not helpful enough to justify the large amount of time I spent on them.

If I'd had the time to refine further, I would have liked to produce an even higher fidelity inert prototype (that was thinner, for one, and possibly made of metal rather than modeling clay) as well as an interactive flash movie that demonstrated how the interaction with the snake's screens would work. But all projects have a deadline, and this one's is past.

Dan discusses his design on his weblog if you just can't get enough.

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Of Moods, Taxonomies, and Exploration in Design

aesthetics, design

September 09, 2003, 10:55 PM

For the last week and a half or so, I've been hard at work for my Visual Interface and Interaction Design (VIID) class developing two sets of artifacts: four mechanical product taxonomies and seven "mood boards". In theory, all this work is supposed to lead to ideas for our first assignment: to develop vignettes for a new scheduling application. There are very few constraints, but Jodi seems to want us to explore radical ideas instead of sticking to old hat; for instance, last year Abby did a "schedule ball" that let you set appointments by turning its two halves in different ways. Another student made a piece of ribbon that represented time and that you could pull from its spool and mark with pins to represent appointments.

If you take a look at my taxonomies, you'll find we were asked to examine a few physical, mechanical products and describe how users interact with them, how the products' parts responded to this interaction, what sort of affordances they provided, etc. I found this really forced me to sit down and think about these common artifacts in a way I generally never do; I started to realize why we know (or don't know) how to use them fairly intuitively.

For my mood boards (warning: ginormous 9MB pdf), I took the seven words Jodi gave us, then brainstormed some other words that came to mind when I thought about those concepts. I picked four of these "attributes" for each board and searched for pictures that I thought exemplified their meanings. In the end, I found that three pictures wasn't really enough to capture the meanings of these broad concepts (duh), so instead I put in images that I felt gave enough of a sense of the contrasts within each attribute that I could reflect on the range of thoughts and emotions I associate with each.

So far going through the process of doing these exercises hasn't helped me to come up with any brilliant ideas for the actual scheduling application. Abby, however, assures me that this will come in time. The extent of my thinking so far is that I want to come up with some ideas for a scheduling application that might appear in my Distributed Future scenario, but whether that will pan out or not, I can't yet say.

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Quality, Quantity, Progress, and Design in the World

aesthetics, design, society & sociology

July 29, 2003, 12:51 AM

Once again, CDF has reset itself and we've procured a new teacher. This week its Craig Vogel, an industrial design teacher with a penchant for waxing philosophic on the nature of design and its place in society.

Craig described the design problem as a process of understanding the existing world and then envisioning the world in a new, preferred state. Progress, then, is moving from the first to the second. I've described something similar in my definition of design. Yet people have different definitions of "preferred", as I hinted at in my earlier post. Some argue that modern society's concept of a preferred state of the world, and perhaps even its understanding of the existing state, is short-sighted, misled, or even downright inhumane. Craig mentioned an environmentalist architect (whose name escapes me) who felt this way. I thought of an old roommate back in college, Eric, who passionately believed that architecture and urban planning could be conducted in harmony with the environment, leading to a better world for all, except that society didn't value these things and thus they never entered into these visions for a preferred state of the world. Maybe he's right, maybe we need to develop such a vision. Alexander had lots of ideas along those lines back in the seventies, maybe its time for more people to listen to him.

Next, Craig discussed qualitative versus quantitative methods. He argued that qualitative methods have been deemphasized, when not actually reviled, in modern society. Our society values quantitative methods and skills such as mathematics and "hard" science. Our educational system emphasizes these skills and even defines intelligence (the primary educational value) in terms of these skills, while paying small heed to more qualitative skills like art and design.

So far so good. Personally, I'm very interested in merging quantitative data gathering with qualitative design and decision making, since I strongly believe both have great value for different purposes and both are essential for a healthy society. Along these lines, Craig discussed the cultural divide between engineering and design, which perked up my ears since I see my work on U&SA as one facet of bridging an instance of this divide. However, although Craig preached for bringing the two perspectives together on equal footing, the rest of his talk, I felt, had a definite "design has got it right; engineering is so materialistic!" slant to it. Over dinner, Matt remarked that it seems every area of study he encounters preaches interdisciplinary unity at first, then turns around and argues why their particular discipline is the best and should ultimately be in charge.

All too often, such discussions turn into power games. Perhaps its due to our tribal ancestries, but we humans always seem to want "our people" to be the dominant ones, whether our people are defined by nationality, race, gender, or discipline. Too few of us genuinely see ourselves as truly multidisciplinary, as having a foot firmly planted in two or more such cultures at once. Yet the disciplines must cooperate, and to do so they must see the other's point of view. Sometimes I'm amazed that anything ever gets done...

Craig also discussed the MAYA principle of design, which stands for "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable". A powerful concept, that speaks to the need for progress to proceed in digestable portions. Too many sweeping changes, and you've developed a product, interface, or system that is unusable, aesthetically displeasing, or otherwise rejected by the populace. Sometimes we refer to products and ideas of this ilk as "ahead of their time" (if they're lucky). Which is very visionary and avant-guard and all, but such ideas, almost by definition, never pan out, never make a significant difference. Keeping this principle in mind is especially important for us intuitives, who are always seeing the possibilities of the future and risk losing touch with the here-and-now reality our fellow humans live in. Perhaps here is where the quantitative methods come in.

Craig contrasted the design of two cars, one of which he held up as a better example of design. He mentioned that buyers know there is a problem with the second car but can't necessarily articulate what the problem is. They're likely to say "it just looks ugly" or something similar. This reminds me of the maxim of HCI that "the user is not always right". The designer's job is to define, articulate, and respond to the problems the users "know" are there but can't quite grasp, let alone offer solutions for.

As we talked more and more about these two designs, I couldn't help but feel how ironic it was that, after all that initial high-minded anti-modernity talk, we wound up discussing cars. If ever there was an example of a poor definition of progress, I'd argue its embodied in the automobile. They're dangerous, bad for the environment, expensive (on both the personal and societal level), and yet our society keeps demanding more of them, with more features and better designs. And thus our designers fight with our engineers over how to make the cars pretty and cheap at the same time rather than confronting the larger issues. Do we even need these things at all? Why is the only alternative an overpriced fancy scooter?

Unfortunately, all people, even designers, work within frameworks. Cars are so much a part of the framework of American society that people either take them for granted or dispair at ever improving on them. And no matter how convinced you are that you're discipline should rule the world, you still should recognize that its culture lives within a larger culture that dictates a surprising array of its values in deviously subtle ways.

I guess no one has all the answers, be they engineers, designers, or HCI people. But hey, if there weren't all these important unanswered questions out there, there'd be nothing for people like me to write about.

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Redesigning My Space

aesthetics, design, life & times, personal

July 25, 2003, 04:07 PM

I've moved into a new apartment recently. I moved in two weekends ago and spent last weekend cleaning and redecorating. All my Pittsburgh friends will (hopefully) get to see it in person soon since I hope to have a housewarming party, but in the meantime (and for those who won't be able to attend), here's a few pictures I took.

Street View

Front Porch

Kitchen

Dining Room

Dining Room Wall

Living Room

My Center Of Operations (a.k.a. Desk)

Reading Area

Patio

Backyard

All these pictures are partially to make Micah happy, who has always frowned at me for having too much boring text on this weblog :).

As I was redecorating my apartment I couldn't help but think back to the design process we learned about on the first day of CDF. I went through the familiarization phase while looking for apartments and while moving all my junk, then the development phase when I decided where the major furniture would go, then finally the refinement phase when I positioned all the little things on the shelves and tables and desks. And sure enough, there were "architectural" issues; it would be prohibitively expensive for me to move to a new place just because I didn't like the way my stuff fit into it.

Looks like the basic pattern (along with its consequences) fits to even the most mundane design tasks.

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Expressive Type, Visual Structure, and Human-Centered Design

aesthetics, design, usability

July 21, 2003, 07:59 PM

This past week in CDF we studied Expressive Typography with Dan Boyarski, head of the School of Design and typographer extraordinaire. Our running assignment was to arrange a quote on a page in a way that expresses its meaning. For the first couple iterations we were constrained to just positioning the text, for the rest we could also change the font size and stroke weight.

First off, I was amazed at how much emotion and meaning you can communicate using only type (no color, no images, and no shapes other than letter-forms). I'd seen typographic presentations before, both static and kinetic (kinetic typography, or videos of moving type, is one of Dan's research interests), but viewing someone else's piece doesn't quite drive home the point as much as actually sitting down and doing one yourself. The sheer number of variables and choices was daunting, to say the least, when the position, size, and weight of every word (or even every letter) necessarily conveys meaning across even small visual differences. And this is just type. When I imagine trying to put together a piece using the full range of colors, shapes, drawings, pictures, time (if the piece is a video), etc. my head starts to swim. Yet from the design perspective, interaction design (what we do to design software systems and other interactive experiences) is all these and more; its like kinetic design minus the strict sense of control the linear flow of a video gives its creator, like a movie where the viewer rather than the director gets to choose the next set of frames to play every few seconds from potentially hundreds of options.

This "design perspective" is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world. The visual designer learns to give their full attention to how something looks, to its visual representation. Programmers, philosophers, writers, and (usually) interface designers generally think quite differently; to them the underlying ideas are more important than the visual presentation of those ideas. Yet perhaps the visual designers have something here; after all, we know that the appearance of a web site is the most influential factor in determining whether users trust the content. And that's not all it affects.

We humans are visual creatures; sight is our primary sense and thus it is integral to the way we think. In many cases, people can suck in and process a lot more information when they can see it all laid out before them than they can if they have to view bits and pieces in sequence or, even worse, read a linguistic description of it. This jives with some of the studies I've done for Newsable; I found that all of my users were quite adept at visually scanning for interesting content, but they were much worse at describing what they were looking for. Likewise, Dan preached about the need for large walls in project rooms so designers can post their work up for easy comparisons. Visual comparisons of design artifacts are much easier when you can see all the artifacts you're comparing at once.

Another interesting lesson, both for this expressive type week and the more mundane hierarchy week, was how much the visual presentation dictates the structure people ascribe to the content. This is pretty clear when you compare my final version of the first assignment with the raw text; this shouldn't be new to anyone. But it was interesting to see that visual presentation isn't just important for sound information design; it even proved critical for the "fuzzier" quotes. Take a look at my classmate Jennifer's piece and you'll see what I mean; the quiet meditation of her quote comes out clearly in the small size of the text, its position in the bottom corner of the vast whitespace of the page, the natural grouping of the words through line breaks and indentation, etc. (The papyrus piece is © 2003 Jennifer Anderson. All rights reserved. Used with permission.)

This approach to visual design as a communication medium that enhances (or even completely changes) the meaning of the content is very much in line with the philosophies of information design and technical writing that I'm familiar with. So far, the professors we've had have talked a lot about communication and what message our designs are sending to the viewers. I've been impressed by how much attention these expert designers pay to the viewer (dare I say the user?) of the artifacts they produce (or are asking us to produce), because it means their basic values are very much in line with ours over in HCI. Dan even outright said "We believe in human-centered design". Insofar as this holds in practice for both camps, we'll always have a common base we can stand on to collaborate. Most designers don't do user tests, and most usability practitioners don't do critiques, but these are just differences in approach, and both approaches are valuable in their own ways. There seem to be many opportunities for synergy between these two cultures and bringing them together, as we're ostensibly doing here at CMU, is a tremendously good thing.

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Architecturally Sensitive Visual Design Scenarios?

aesthetics, software development

July 21, 2003, 12:38 AM

Last week Dan Boyarski, the head of the School of Design, was our instructor for CDF. More on what I learned from him shortly; I have to check up on an intellectual property rights issue first.

In the mean time, though, I wanted to mention a comment he made in our last class about software design and limitations for designers. He made the (quite correct) point several times throughout the week that computing as a design medium was still quite immature; we've only had a couple of decades or so of computing "for the rest of us" as compared to hundreds of years since the development of the printing press. As a result, we haven't yet had time to explore the capabilities and limitations of this medium. In particular, he mentioned the "square windows" phenomenon; most desktop UIs only allow windows to be rectangular boxes. He implied this was a silly limitation, and if it was too difficult to code a non-square window he'd find someone else who was willing to do it.

I have a couple thoughts on this. First off, my immediate reaction was that this was another architecturally-sensitive usability scenario for U&SA. It also made me wonder if we weren't possibly missing anything by not having a visual designer like Dan in the U&SA research group. Bonnie, Len, and I have been mostly considering visual design concerns to be solved by the separation patterns (MVC, PAC, etc.) but maybe this isn't true. Maybe we're being as shortsighted as the software engineers who assumed the separation patterns solved the only usability-related architectural issue. What would it take to make windows have arbitrary shapes? What are the benefits to the user that would convince toolkit and application programmers to implement such a feature? These are questions we may need to consider.

Having said all this, I now want to pick on Dan for a minute. His comment does ignore several basic truths about software development; the "all windows are rectangles" rule was an important architectural decision made by interface developers back when non-rectangular windows would have been too much for current hardware to handle. This is no longer true, but it has become so ingrained in the architecture of major windowing systems that changing it is difficult, to say the least. Like all architectural issues, this is a fact about the world, not a failing of software developers. Architecturally-sensitive changes are hard to make any way you cut it, and as I've argued before, this truth is based on the structure of how software systems (as well as systems in general) must be constructed. It is as ingrained in the fabric of reality as the shape of the universe, the nature of time, and the mystery of quantum states. Because of all this, it will take time for us to move to toolkits and frameworks that support non-rectangular windows as well as a number of other features that may prove important to designers. Meaningful collaboration between software designers and visual designers may speed up this process, but in the meantime, patience must be our primary virtue.

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Photography as a Communication Medium

aesthetics, design, writing & communication

July 17, 2003, 11:29 PM

I've been learning lots of interesting things in CDF recently; sadly, since I moved last weekend and lost my broadband internet access at home for a couple weeks, I haven't had time to post about all of them. So this is my best shot at trying to play catch up.

By the end of last week, we'd finished up the photography section of the class that Charlee was teaching. Our final assignment was to combine a photograph with text to create some communication piece (Charlee likes wide-open assignments). I did a public service announcement poster type message, which I thought turned out okay, although several other people in the class put together some things that were much better, in my opinion. It was amazing to see how good everyone's was after only a week of practice and critiques.

For mine, I actually started the project intending to communicate a different message. I wanted to take a picture of an interesting but run-down street and compare it with a quote from the philosopher of art Jerome Stolnitz about the aesthetic attitude that inspired me to write Aesthetic Mornings a few years ago. But I couldn't find the right subject or the full quote, so I wound up wandering around East Liberty (a relatively poor neighborhood here in northeastern Pittsburgh) for a couple hours taking pictures of various subjects, including this bottle. At first, I wasn't too fond of any of them, but after returning home and looking at it on my screen, I decided the bottle picture wasn't too shabby, especially in black and white. But I had no idea what text to put with it. I tried a number of semi-depressing captions (I was in that kind of mood at the time) but none seemed to fit. Then I hit on "Just Another Broken Window" (a reference, possibly too obscure, to the "zero tolerance" program adopted by New Jersey in the 70s), which I thought was neat especially since the visual presentation allows you to read it as "Just Broken Another Window" as well. And so it became a public service announcement, although I couldn't quite bring myself to turn it into a just a "pick up litter" message (it seemed too trivial for the weight of the photo), so I tried to work in a larger social message as well.

I guess the point of all this rambling is that the design process is messy. Sometimes it's hard to know ahead of time exactly what you're going to wind up with, and walking into it with too precise of an idea may just end up wasting you time or (even worse) leading you away from good alternative ideas.

On a bit of a tangent, while we were doing the crit (design critique session where everyone comments on everyone else's work and suggests improvements) for this assignment we got into a discussion of how photography can be used to evoke emotions and suggest certain responses to subjects, especially when combined with text. Andy remarked that it was amazing how easy it was to misrepresent a situation you are photographing, even though you're supposedly taking a completely accurate image of the real world. There are many design variables available to the photographer, the greatest of which is the shutter itself, the box around the world through which the viewer must look. Photographers can decide what portions of the truth to show their viewers and (sometimes quite literally) what light to present them in. Thus, it is just as possible for the photographer to introduce his interpretation of reality into his work as it is for a writer or a painter to introduce theirs. But in a way this is obvious to anyone who knows anything about journalism. The interesting (sometimes dangerous) fact about photography is that it seems so real; it looks as though it is a completely accurate, objective presentation of the world. I have a suspicion that most people don't think through all this when they see a photograph; they don't ask what "spin" the photographer was trying to put on his subject as they might ask about a prose article or a painting. This makes photography a powerful medium for communication and persuasion, both of true propositions and untrue ones. It's worth thinking about the next time you're reading the morning paper.

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Photographing Miss Bodine

aesthetics, people, personal

July 08, 2003, 12:42 AM

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But Is It Art?

aesthetics, philosophy

July 07, 2003, 09:29 PM

This week in Communication Design Fundamentals we got a new instructor, Charlee Brodsky, who is going to give us a crash course in photography (which I feel very lucky for getting; apparently last year CDF was almost entirely focused on typography and the students didn't work with images hardly at all). In class, Charlee brought in several photography books as an introduction to the medium; one of these, a book called Shopping, sparked some controversy as well as an interesting philosophical discussion on the definition of art.

Shopping is a series of photos taken from inside a number of department stores in a shopping mall, including several of partially or fully nude women in dressing rooms. The controversial bit is that the photographer took these pictures from a hidden camera in her purse. As far as we could discern, she did not get anyone's permission to take these pictures or to publish them. The faces of the subjects are not hidden in any fashion.

Charlee's position was that, although this was objectionable, it was less of an invasion of privacy than the "reality tv" shows that are so popular nowadays. Kerry took issue with this statement (being a fan of reality tv herself), and pressed Charlee's claim that Shopping was "high art" intended for an elite group of social critics whereas reality tv was "low entertainment" intended for popular consumption (my paraphrase, not her exact words).

This lead to an interesting digression into what makes art "art". Here's a few of the points my fellow classmates made:

• Shopping was created as a piece of social criticism; the photographer was depicting her disgust with the crass commercialism of modern shopping malls (or something similar; I don't want to get hung up on the subtleties of art criticism). Reality tv only exists to get ratings. But Matt pointed out that many reality tv show producers claim they are "examining the beast" and that their shows are a form of popularized social criticism. Hard to believe, I know, but it raises the interesting point that it isn't always easy to make distinctions based purely on intention; different people will see the same work different ways. Maybe there are people who gain some sort of deeper social understanding through watching reality television...
• Katie proposed that the distinguishing feature is that reality television is "staged". The producers deliberately seek out participants who will put on a good show, whereas Shopping's author recorded the world as it really was. But others pointed out that much of fine art photography is similarly "staged" since the participants pose for the pictures, but this makes it no less a form of art.
• There is no significant difference between reality tv and Shopping, except that one is more high-falutin' than the other. In fact, Shopping is more objectionable on a moral level because the subjects did not consent to participate; at least with reality tv the participants go into the show willingly (if not always fully informed, perhaps...).

All this reminded me of the course in philosophical aesthetics I took back at Virginia Tech. In that class, we examined questions such as "What makes an artwork an artwork?". The most plausable theory we examined in my not-so-humble opinion was George Dickie's institutional theory of art, or the "Art World" theory. Dickie argues that art is defined purely socially, and an object becomes an artwork when a member of the "Art World" calls it an artwork. I was never entirely clear on the qualifications for membership in this Art World, but as near as I could tell pretty much anyone interested in art could qualify as a member of the Art World. Thus, although my left shoe is just a shoe right now and not a work of art, if I were to call it a work of art and got it into the Museum of Modern Art with a nice little placard and everything, then suddenly it would become an artwork, and not just a shoe.

If you buy Dickie's theory, then in essence Charlee's original argument is correct, although she couched it in unnecessarily biased language: Shopping is art because a certain group of people who consider themselves to be in the business of creating and criticizing art have decided to call it art and treat it the same as all the other art they create and criticize. Reality TV is not art because no one has treated it in this manner. But this is the primary relevant difference; no intrinsic characteristics of either work directly matter in determining its artistic or non-artistic nature.

On a side note, after the discussion ended Charlee asked us to give a "thumbs up or thumbs down" for Shopping (intermediate angles of thumbage were also acceptable). I gave it an in-the-middle-thumb, up from the thumbs down I would have given it purely because it served to launch an interesting philosophical discussion. It's been awhile since I've come across any work of art I could say that about :).

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Online Publishing, from the Trenches

aesthetics, internet, society & sociology, writing & communication

April 28, 2003, 08:15 PM

There's an interesting article over on Kuro5hin about localroger's experience with publishing his book online and the success (or not) of the "tip jar" economic model for freely available online works.

For those of you who don't read K5, localroger (Roger Williams) is a member there who also happens to be an excellent amateur (in the not-getting-paid sense) writer. Awhile back, he posted a short science-fiction story called "Passages in the Void", which I've read and highly recommend. It went over so well that Rusty (K5 founder and proprietor) created a fiction section to house such content. Roger mentioned in the comments that he'd written a novel called "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" but was unable to get it published via conventional means, so several K5 users convinced him to publish it online and Rusty agreed to host it. I haven't read it yet (although I intend to). From people's comments I expect it will also be quite good, although apparently it contains some content that many may find disturbing (rape, violence, etc.).

Roger's analysis of his online publishing experience is thoughtful and objective, and his conclusions, although not unexpected, are worth pondering. Basically he found that he has attained a much wider distribution and rate of feedback through the web publishing medium than he ever would have through conventional publishing. From the tip jar he made around 760$, which, although not insignificant, is much less than a typical publishing advance and not something that he could quit his day job over. And he admits that his is really a best-case situation; he had the backing of Rusty and the benefit of two appearances on Slashdot, which is more than the average budding author is likely to get.

Roger's experience highlights the fairly obvious fact that many people still fail to admit: artists just can't make money by giving their work away and relying on audience generosity. On the other hand, Roger was approached by an agent who is now interested in publishing his work via conventional means. So we see a pattern which crops up frequently where the internet is a good way for budding content creators to get "known", but one that they quickly must switch out of and lock up their content into for-pay conventional schemes if they want to make a living. And maybe this is a fine role for the internet to play. However it doesn't take full advantage of the potential of the internet's highly efficient content distribution systems (which provided Roger with the wide distribution and quick feedback he discusses) and may not even be a viable option in a future where all content is digital and copying is quick and easy.

As a society, I think we're going to have to get over this "content on the 'net must be free" mentality. Someone's going to have to pay, one way or another, and that someone is going to be determining what the economic incentives for artists, writers, and other content producers are. Do we the people want to be determining those incentives, or are we willing to leave it to advertisers who are more interested in selling their products and services than in appreciating art and literature? To me the answer is clear. How about you?

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CHI Report, An Emotional Closing

aesthetics, design, usability

April 12, 2003, 06:53 PM

The final activity of the conference was the Closing Plenary, which was delivered by Don Norman on Emotion & Design. Don's speech was definitely one of the examples of a good use of the presentation format, which I briefly discussed earlier.

Don's plenary had three main points:

• Emotions are an important part of the user experience, inseparable from cognition, and are all too often ignored by usability professionals to the detriment of the profession.
• Science has begun to unveil the inner workings of emotion. We can confidently separate emotion into three main levels: the visceral level where we experience instinctive emotional reactions, the behavioral level where we act on our emotions, and the reflective level where our values, rationalizations, and emotional influences reside.
• Usability professionals should learn more about emotion and its relation to product design. If we continue to ignore emotions, we will continue to become irrelevant insofar as we are not directly affecting the desirability and emotional attractiveness of products that is so important in customer buying decisions.

Don illustrated these points with several examples of good product design. He admitted that people have different emotional reactions to these products and that designing for emotions are subjective. His response was to "deal with it". There is no reason to believe that products can be designed for everyone; often the necessary response is to design solely for a given target market.

The speech served to deliver several excellent points and an encouraging call to action. I've begun to see the seeds sown here at CMU for a more thorough understanding of this important new area; even within the MHCI program there are some who are interested in emotion and design. Kerry, for instance, is interested in fashion design for wearable computers, which definitely ties in to the emotion and self-image themes Don discussed. And I already mentioned several promising examples of work I heard of in the earlier panel session.

I'm looking forward to hearing more from this field, and maybe even having the chance to contribute.

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CHI Report, Emotion and Design

aesthetics, design, usability

April 11, 2003, 08:01 PM

When I got in I went to a panel on Emotions and Design chaired by Jodi Forlizzi, a HCI and Design professor from CMU. Don Norman also showed up, since his new interest is in emotions and design. He opened the panel by discussing how emotions are tightly coupled to cognitive mental activities; he brought up a study that products that are more aesthetically pleasing are actually easier for people to use, even when all other factors are constant. More on Don later.

A number of interesting topics came up that I'd like to pursue in more detail. Here's a few of them:

• Gibson's theory of affordances which is intended to unify all aspects of the user, including cognitive and emotional responses.
• Jodi mentioned how emotions can both heighten the experience of using a product and get in the way of its effective use. How do we ensure we get the former and not the latter?
• Sometimes different emotions are coupled in ways you might not expect; for instance, disgust is frequently coupled with fascination, which explains why many people will linger so long over a disgusting scene, and talk about it at length afterwards.
• HCI as a field has a much higher percentage of women than many other technology disciplines. Someone asked if this accounted for the current attention to emotion. The panelists seemed to feel this was quite possible although emphasized that we shouldn't overgeneralize that "men are bad at emoting, women are good at it".
• I also recall a discussion at the Weblogs SIG about expressing emotions in weblog posts. I feel like these two areas relate, although I'm not sure how just yet.
• We have a tendency to anthropomorphize our products. One person wondered if we should design for this, the conclusion was that it could be good if it was done right. Little guidance was offered on what "right" meant though.
• Kees recommended educating designers in understanding and "getting in touch" with their emotions. I wondered, however, how easy this would be, since western culture in general tends to discourage display of many emotions and considers them "irrational". I was pleasantly surprised to find that Norman agrees.

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The Ghosts of Past "I"s

aesthetics, philosophy

April 05, 2003, 06:43 PM

I went to an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) thesis exhibit at the Regina Miller Gallery with Adam and Kate and Kelly today to look at an exhibit that Adam had worked on (as a technical assistant; he was not the artist). It turned out to be a video camera / projector setup that had a screen that you viewed by standing in a circle of light in front of it. The system recorded video of anyone who stood in the circle of light, then played back the video clips of all the people who had previously stood there at random. The images were overlaid on top of one another and had a ghostly, ethereal quality that was both mesmerizing to watch and rather disconcerting at the same time. Though I didn't think much of it at the time, it was strangely unnerving to see all the shadows of people who had stood before the screen in the recent past, moments in time that are now lost beyond all recall. But the machine remembers.

There are philosophical theories of consciousness that claim that our "self", the part of us that makes us self-aware, is not separate from the rest of our mind but is instead a result of the whole elaborate system that is our current mental state. If this is true, then in each moment that passes our old self "dies" to be replaced by a new self, since our mental state changes at the speed of neural synapses. Continuity of self is thus an illusion; we are actually different people from one moment to the next.

Watching this exhibit, I could really feel this abstruse theory become a fabric of reality. The ghostly images of past selves floating before you is a strange thing to actually encounter in waking life. Even stranger was when Kate pushed me into the circle and I had my own self (or selves?) remembered by the machine, ready to be rotely reported to future audiences.

The artist was there, but unfortunately I was in a hurry to make a lunch appointment and didn't speak to her other than a nod and a smile. Now I'm curious why she created this system, and what her interpretation of it was.

At any rate, I do recommend seeing the exhibit for yourself if you're reading from the Pittsburgh area. The gallery is across The Cut from the University Center on CMU's campus. I don't know for how long, though.

One last point; CMU is nifty largely because of the large amount of interdisciplinary collaboration that goes on. In this case, the collaboration was between artists and technologists, and I think the results were impressive. I've posted about this issue before.

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