Joe Lamantia.com

"Designing Post-humanity" Live at UXmatters (Blogged by Bruce Sterling)

Wed, 27 May 2009 05:11:55 -0500

What happens when *everything* is designable? When the boundaries between humanity, technology, and the larger environment disappear? Designing Post-humanity: Everyware In the Far Future, the latest installment of my column on user experience and ubiquitous computing in UXmatters, takes a look at these questions. Post-humans, ubicomp, and science fiction may seem like strange territory for user experience professionals, but by considering these kinds of futures today, we make many important decisions about who we will [all!] be tomorrow.

**Update: Bruce Sterling just posted about it in his Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired. Thanks for noticing, Bruce!

Search Me: Designing Information Retrieval Experiences

Fri, 15 May 2009 10:50:58 -0500

I just posted slides from my talk at the recent Enterprise Search Summit in NY "Search Me: Designing Information Retrieval Experience"

Here's the abstract from the session:

This case study reviews the methods and insights that emerged from an 18-month effort to coordinate and enhance the scattered user experiences of a suite of information retrieval tools sold as services by a major investment ratings agency. The session will share a method for understanding audience needs in diverse information access contexts; review a collection of information retrieval patterns, look at conceptual design methods for user experiences, and review a set of longer term patterns in customer behavior called lifecycles, and consider the impact of organizational and cultural factors on design decisions.

This session will presents reusable experience design tools and findings relevant for contexts such as enterprise search and information access, service design, and product and platform management.

Thanks to everyone who came by!

Search Me: Designing Information Retrieval Experiences

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New Ubicomp Podcast & Everyware Column

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:53:47 -0500

Two quick updates on things happening other places.

First, the latest installment of Everyware: Designing the Ubiquitous Experience (my column for UXmatters) was published back in March. It explores the world of Vernor Vinge's story Synthetic Serendipity from the experience design perspective. Vinge is justly reknowned as an SF author, but what makes Synthetic Serendipity worth reading closely is the dense collection of ideas it shares: augmented reality, wearable computing systems, a network-based co-creation economy open to all participation by people of all ages, the games vs. reality inversion, generational differences in adaptation to technological change, etc.

Mostly, I like Synthetic Serendipity as an entry point into the ubiquitous computing space because it presents a picture of the future from the viewpoint of an ordinary kid, who has ordinary concerns; go to school, play video games, stay out of trouble with friends.

In the companion piece in draft now, I look much further ahead, exploring scenarios that consider what happens when the boundaries separating humans from the environment blur and dissolve, and humanity itself becomes an object of design.

Second, and related, Jeff Parks just posted the podcast of a group discussion on ubiquitous computing that he organized at the IA Summit in Memphis. You'll hear me along with Jeff, Steve Baty, Will Evans, Matthew Milan, John Tirmandi, Joe Sokohl, Todd Zaki Warfel as we share examples, ideas, and questions about the intersection of user experience and ubiquitous computing. Thanks to Jeff for making this happen - it was a fun session, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Designing Frameworks For Interaction and User Experience: IA Summit Workshop Presentation

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:00:34 -0500

I've posted my slides and materials from the Beyond Findability workshop Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Matthew Milan and I put on at the IA Summit in Memphis recently.

This set of materials addresses some of the most important questions for practitioners considering a framework-based approach to design: why framewarks matter for user experience and interaction design, what frameworks are useful for, and how you can work with them effectively.

Why *do* frameworks matter? As I'm arguing, look around and you'll see profound shifts changing the structural makeup of the digital environment, the contexts and boundaries of the experiences, and the role of professional designers.

For designers, very complicated and interesting problems are on the way: think of Mike Kuniavsky's work defining some of the fundamental concepts behind the 'smart things' that will inhabit this new design environment, such as information shadows and service avatars. It's plain that this world will require new tools, and I believe frameworks are part of that toolkit. (See my column Everyware: Design for the Ubiquitous Experience for ongoing perspective.)

And check out the slides for the rest of the workshop :)

Nothing better than blues, barbecue, and Building Blocks!

Designing Frameworks For Interaction and User Experience

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On Modularity: "Always Look Both Ways When Componentizing the Street"

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:52:48 -0500

That's the title of my just-submited guest contribution to Nathan Curtis' forthcoming book "Modular Web Design." (I'm in good company; Todd Warfel and Andrew Payne are two of the other contributors.) When Modular Web Design comes out (follow on Twitter for details), you can turn directly to chapter four, 'Variations', and read my cautionary tale.

What about the rest of the book? I've seen the complete outline, and let me say that if you like modularity as much as we do and you're designing interfaces, this is the book for you. Maybe you're even working with some variation of the building blocks, or a similar design framework? And the cover features Legos!

Of course, if you *don't* like modularity, there's no need to sweat about it: the future has a place for everyone [We'll be busy playing with our Siftables]. Just don't be surprised if it turns out to be smallish, dry, and bit - uhh - box-like...

The Architecture of Fun: Massively Social On-line Games

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:57:59 -0500

Here's my presentation from the Italian IA Summit on Killzone.com as a leading example of the next generation of Massively Social On-line Games.

As usual, I try to share some of the best thinking on these ideas; in this case I quote liberally from Nicole Lazarro. (I hope she takes this as a compliment.) Her insights into the emotional drivers for social and game experiences and the nature of cross media are - no surprise - right on, and coming true years after first publication.

Some of the more eye-opening material I discovered while looking into the design of this game / community hybrid concerns the direct connection between game mechanics (a design question), the space of possible choices for players, the emotions these choices inspire and encourage, and the resulting experience of the game environment.

From the functional to the psychological, it seems there really is an 'architecture of fun' for both games and social experiences. It is just another example of how architecture of any (and all) kinds is an enormous influencing factor on peoples' experiences.

This is the first of two parts - stay tuned for the follow-up, once we clear the disclosure question.

A slidecast will follow shortly, now that my laptop is back in working order, and I can fire up ScreenFlow.

Massively Social Games: Next Generation Experiences

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Join Me For 'Beyond Findability' the IA Summit 09 Workshop

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:40:59 -0500

If you're keen to help shape the way that the user experiences of the future are conceived and defined, join Andrew Hinton, Matthew Milan, Livia Labate, and yours truly in a full-day workshop / seminar titled "Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times" at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis.

We've got a lot of great material to share - and shape - on where this new[ish] discipline is headed, from four complementary but distinct professional perspectives (digital agency, in-house services group, management, design consultancy), shared by leading practitioners.

Here's a quick description:

"Changes are happening fast in technology, the economy, and even the various User Experience professions. In the midst of such turbulence, conventional Information Architecture can have trouble seeming fully relevant. Some may see it as a commodity, or a narrow specialty that has little to do with the game-changing emergence of social media, ubiquitous & mobile computing, and the rest.

This full-day workshop will address such concerns with a boundary-pushing foray into IA craft and strategy. We'll show how core IA skills are more relevant and strategically important than ever, and we'll explore how we can extend IA to its full potential in 21st century UX design."

Read more about Beyond Findability here. Register here.

See you in Memphis!

Speaking About Massively Social On-line Games In Italy

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:30:28 -0500

I'll be speaking at the Italian IA Summit next week on some of the exciting work MediaCatalyst has been doing in the area of massively social on-line games. We're the digital agency behind Killzone.com, the integrated on-line community for the Killzone game series, which is just about to release it's second installment (selling well - KillZone 2 is #10 on Amazon, in pre-orders alone).

I think hybrid experiences that combine games dynamism and sophisticated social spaces are a very important part of the future for interactive experiences, and the organizers have been kind enough to offer us the opening keynote, so if you can get a ticket to Forli, we'd love to see you in the audience.

Here's the full description of our talk:

Co-evolution of a Socially Rich Game Experience and Community Architecture

What form will the next generation of interactive experiences take? The exact nature of the future is always unknown. But now that everything is 'social', and games are a fully legitimate cultural phenomenon more profitable and more popular than Hollywood films, we can expect to see the emergence of experiences that combine aspects of games and social media in new ways.

One example of a hybrid experience that combines game elements and complex social interactions is the cross-media environment formed by the popular Killzone games and their companion site Killzone.com. By design, the Killzone games and the Killzone.com site have co-evolved over time to interconnect on many levels. In the most recent version (planned for public release in early 2009), the game console and web site experiences work in concert to enhance gameplay with sophisticated social dynamics, and provide an active community destination that is 'synchronized' with events in the game in real time. The hybrid Killzone environment allows active game players and community members to move back and forth between game and web experiences, with simultaneous awareness of and connection to people and events in both settings.

Leading games researcher and designer Nicole Lazzaro calls these hybrid experiences 'Massively Social On-line Games'. In these types of interactive experiences, players build meaningful histories for individual characters and groups of all sizes through competitive and cooperative interactions that take place in the linked game and community contexts. Game mechanisms and social architecture elements are designed to encourage the accumulation of shared experiences, group identities, and collective histories. Over time, designers hope shared experiences will serve as the basis for a body of social memory.

This case study will follow the co-evolution of Killzone and Killzone.com, revisiting major business and design decisions in context, examining the changing nature of the community, and considering the lessons learned at each stage of the development of this early example of the next generation of massively social on-line game.

8 Waves of Change Shaping Digital Experiences

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:21:59 -0500

I've been focused on understanding future directions in the landscape of digital experiences recently (which nicely parallels some of the work I've been doing on design and futures in general), so I'm sharing a summary of the analysis that's come out of this research.

This presentation shares an overview of all the major waves of change affecting digital experiences, some of the especially forward-looking insights around shifts in our identities, and the implications for those creating digital experiences.

The 8 waves discussed here (are there more? let me know!)

Digital = Social
Co-Creation
Digital Natives
Itʼs All a Game
Take Away
Everyware
Convergence
Seeing Is Believing

Waves of Change Shaping Digital Experiences

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: keynote avatars)

Discount Code for Indi Young's 'Mental Models' Webinar

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:04:03 -0500

Designers, product managers, and anyone who aims to create relevant and beautiful experiences would be wise to check out Indi Young's upcoming webinar, Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy, on December 11th. Indi literally wrote the book on mental models for user experience - read it, if you haven't yet - and this webinar is part of the Future Practice series produced by Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media, so expect good things for your modest investment.

Even better, our friends at Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media are offering a 25% discount on registrations, which is good for these tough times.

Use this discount code when registering: LAMANTIAWBNR

Enjoy!

Proud To Be American (Once Again)

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:47:59 -0500

Launching "Everyware" My New UXmatters Column

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:31:32 -0500

First Fictions and the Parable of the Palace is the inaugural installment of "Everyware: Designing the Ubiquitous Experience," a column exploring user experience and design in the era of ubiquitous computing. 'First Fictions' considers the profound design implications of foundational visions of ubiquitous computing imagined by technologists such as Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, and finds precedent for these sorts of techno-social futures in the poetic parables of Jorge Louis Borges.

"Everyware" will be a journey through the expanding wavefront of the ubiquitous experience as it impacts design, covering topics ranging from ubiquitous computing to near-field communication, pervasive computing, The Internet of Things, spimes, ubicomp, locative media, and ambient informatics.

I hope it's as good to read as it has been to write. And keep the comments flowing!

Effective Portals Article in Intranets Today

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:17:16 -0500

Readers active in the enterprise, intranet, portal, and syndicated content & functionality spaces might be interested in The Building Blocks of Effective Portals that appears in the November / December issue of Intranets Today.

Intranets is one of the leading publications focused on these topics, with regular contributions from the likes of Rachel Alexander, Jane McConnell, and James Roberston.

You will need a log-in to read the complete article on-line, but perhaps you were thinking of subscribing, and this will pull you in.

Ubiquitous Computing and Borges' "Parable of the Palace"

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:52:27 -0500

I've been looking at ubiquitous computing for the past few weeks, working on the first installment of what will be a recurring column in UXMatters, and it's had me thinking a lot about Borges' enigmatic Parable of the Palace.

I'm not exactly sure what the resonance is -- it literally popped into my head a few weeks ago -- but the connection has stuck with me. Maybe it's the quantum uncertainty of the tale? Or the ambiguity of the symbols. Are designers the poet? It feels that way some days. Is the palace the world around us? Maybe we're also the emperor...

Without further ado, I present the parable in it's entirety.

Parable of the Palace
by Jorge Luis Borges

That day the Yellow Emperor showed his palace to the poet. Little by little, step by step, they left behind, in long procession, the first westward-facing terraces which, like the jagged hemicycles of an almost unbounded amphitheater, stepped down into a paradise, a garden whose metal mirrors and intertwined hedges of juniper were a prefiguration of the labyrinth. Cheerfully they lost themselves in it -- at first as though condescending to a game, but then not without some uneasiness, because its straight allées suffered from a very gentle but continuous curvature, so the secretly the avenues were circles. Around midnight, observation of the planets and the opportune sacrifice of a tortoise allowed them to escape the bonds of that region that seemed enchanted, though not to free themselves from that sense of being lost that accompanied them to the end. They wandered next through antechambers and courtyards and libraries, and then through a hexagonal room with a water clock, and one morning, from a tower, they made out a man of stone, whom later they lost sight of forever. In canoes hewn from sandalwood, they crossed many gleaming rivers--or perhaps a single river many times. The imperial entourage would pass and people would fall to their knees and bow their heads to the ground, but one day the courtiers came to an island where one man did not do this, for he had never seen the Celestial Son before, and the executioner had to decapitate him. The eyes of the emperor and poet looked with indifference on black tresses and black dances and golden masks; the real merged and mingled with the dreamed--or the real, rather, was one of the shapes the dream took. It seemed impossible that the earth should be anything but gardens, fountains, architectures, and forms of splendor. Every hundred steps a tower cut the air; to the eye, their color was identical, but the first of them was yellow and the last was scarlet; that was how delicate the gradations were and how long the series.

It was at the foot of the penultimate tower that the poet (who had appeared untouched by the spectacles which all the others had so greatly marveled at) recited the brief composition that we link indissolubly to his name today, the words which, as the most elegant historians never cease repeating, garnered the poet immortality and death. The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it consisted of but a single line; others, of a single word.

What we do know--however incredible it may be--is that within the poem lay the entire enormous palace, whole and to the least detail, with every venerable porcelain it contained and every scene on every porcelain, all the lights and shadows of its twilights, and every forlorn or happy moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons that had lived within it through all its endless past. Everyone fell silent; then the emperor spoke: "You have stolen my palace!" he cried, and the executioner's iron scythe mowed down the poet's life.

Others tell the story differently. The world cannot contain two things that are identical; no sooner, they say, had the poet uttered his poem than the palace disappeared, as though in a puff of smoke, wiped from the face of the earth by the final syllable.

Such legends, of course, are simply literary fictions. The poet was the emperor's slave and died a slave; his composition fell into oblivion because it merited oblivion, and his descendants still seek, though they shall never find, the word for the universe.

The Internet of Things - Or The Internet of Whens?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:22:34 -0500

I just requested a copy of The Internet of Things pamphlet by Rob van Kranenberg from the Network Notebooks series (by networkcultures.org / Geert Lovink - who's basically around the corner now that I'm here in Amsterdam). In combination with a read through Everyware, it's got me thinking about some of the basic assumptions we're relying on to frame the future of computing as it impacts our lives.

One of the key enablers underlying The Internet of Things is the IPv6 standard, whose address scheme has an unbelievable range of possible addresses - 2 to the 128th power - so many that attempts to make it comprehensible by analogy strain the boundaries of the absurd.

All of these comparisons beg the essential question of what exactly we will be addressing. So far, the general class of objects 'Things' is the most likely that I've heard posited. All of more specific suggestions - such as all the grains of sand in the world, or every plant in every farm field on the planet - remain in the category of the simply fanciful.

I think this focus on objects as the dominant type of addressed node in the new network lacks imagination. [At the IFTF suggests the Internet of Verbs]

The theory of relativity unified space and time, so why not use IPV6 to address moments of time as well as huge collections of things?

Massive cloud storage arrays and ultra-wide-band data transfer infrastructures may make it feasible to record the cumulative sensory experiences of entire human lives, or groups of people, or whole crowds; why not give each discrete femtosecond slice of these aggregate experiences an address for easy archiving, retrieval, and manipulation?

Going back 13 billion years to the beginning of the universe would give us The Internet of Whens.

Mapping every decision made by people during the course of their day (200 on food alone), or their life, would give us The Internet of Whys.

Labelling all the locations in the four-dimensional coordinate scheme would create The Internet of Wheres.

Addressing all the cells in all the human bodies would result in The Internet of Whos.

We must be better attuned to the possibilities afforded by all this 'space' we're giving ourselves to play with.