Touch

Magnetic Movie

2008-05-08T17:32:00Z

In the same vein as the Bubbles of Radio work from last year, Magnetic Movie is a film that explores visible and audible manifestations of radio fields. The film is by Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor and commissioned by Animate Projects that remains on the forefront of “exploring the relationship between art and animation”.

“Natural magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries… Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?” The stills don’t do the pulsing, crackling, moving visuals justice, I highly recommend that you go and watch the film.

Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments

2008-05-07T20:41:00Z

On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that incorporates Near Field Communication technology. This phone is the fourth NFC-capable phone from Nokia in as many years and it is the first NFC device that supports 3G data connections.

This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has a history of basing its NFC devices on existing models (see the 5140 from 2004, the 3220 from 2005, and 6131 from 2007). The 6212 looks like it is based on the 3120 classic (announced in February 2008) with the addition of an NFC module and a slightly simplified physical design. Compared with the most recent NFC phone, the 6131, the 6212 is slightly smaller and lighter with a smaller display at the same resolution. More notes on the design details below.

The demo

This interview with Jeremy Belostock – Nokia’s NFC Sales & Marketing Director – has a number of cutaways that show some of the new NFC features in action.

There is a discussion about the path towards the mass market: whether to focus on user acceptance or building infrastructural ‘ecosystems’. NFC is discussed as being immediately suitable for developed markets where there is infrastructure already in place (such as RFID ticketing and credit card systems such as Oyster and Visa Wave). Although emerging markets are interesting, there is a particular emphasises on Western Europe and Asia in NFC transport and payment, because of the immediate benefits in these areas. The interview ends with a brief (and rather odd) discussion of the environmental benefits of NFC. I’m not sure replacing a stack of plastic cards with a mobile phone is necessarily an improvement towards sustainability (most of my credit and debit cards outlast my mobile phones by a factor of 2 or 3).

Interaction design notes

Nokia is attempting to focus on features such as sharing content through touch-interactions and using tags as a way of controlling phone functions. Nokia seems to call these emerging interactions “tapping and sharing”. In the demo we see:

Tag access to the system functions: we see a tag setting an alarm
Tag access to files on the system: we see loading and playing of music files
Peer to peer exchange of content: we see the ‘sharing’ of files

The specifications also note that it’s possible to “share business cards, bookmarks, calendar notes, images, profiles, and more” so there is clearly a deeper integration between the Series 40 system and the NFC functions here than with earlier devices (we called for this in 2005 when we had the first look at the 3220). What is not shown is the before/after interactions that are required to set up these sharing actions. How do I set up the transfer? What happens if we simply touch phones together? What are the default events? Where and how are these actions phrased within the menu system? Without seeing these we cannot yet assess the quality of these new NFC interactions.

Touch-based interactions are super-simple, orders of magnitude less button clicks and less security hassles than a technology like Bluetooth. This simplicity stems from the physical proximity required when interacting with tiny RFID fields. The demo shows NFC pairing between two devices working in various physical ways: two phones are tapped side to side, face to face and face to back. Previously these interactions were imagined to work back to back but since RFID works through electromagnetic induction, which creates a field that encompasses both sides of the antenna, other physical gestures are possible.

When the NFC chip is given enough power and when the interaction involves two readers rather than a reader powering a passive tag, phone-to-phone interactions will work in many configurations around the device. Although this seems to be a technical reality, I wonder if it makes sense to visualise and explain NFC in this way? Should there be an active point of connection on the phone that is more like a button rather than an active aura surrounding the entire phone? There is an interesting study to be created here about the user’s mental models formed by these subtly different interaction types. More on touch-interaction affordances later.

This launch is not just about the NFC phone, but points towards a range of NFC appliances: “pairing with a Bluetooth NFC-enabled device, like the new NFC variant of the Nokia BH-210 headset, happens with just one touch”.

At first glance this suggests that new Nokia accessories may have embedded NFC tags, but it seems that “the Bluetooth Headset BH-210 sales package includes a pairing tag that has BH-210 address information in it. Pair the device and headset conveniently by tapping the tag with the device.” When suitable Mifare tags are available down to about 10mm in diameter, why not embed the pairing tag inside the device itself? Perhaps the fear is that pranksters could sneak up to unsuspecting bluetooth-headset-wearing businesspeople and pair with their devices through a sneaky swipe…

Nonetheless, this points in some interesting directions, towards interfaces and control for all sorts of consumer devices. It highlights the possibility of the mobile phone as a ubiquitous controller where it interacts with a multitude of inputs and outputs from games controllers and sensors to printers and screens, and then perhaps a whole host of other devices that require a rich interface but don’t have the physical form or price range to justify one. For more on this see our thoughts on the universal controller and this research paper by Christof Roduner.

The phone is packaged with three tags, one of which is a ‘tutorial’ tag that teaches the use of NFC with on-screen tutorials. This learning mode seems to include lots of animations where phones and tags are brought into contact with each other, perhaps the least complicated part of NFC interactions. Without seeing it for ourselves its difficult to say, but the tutorials could perhaps be more useful for explaining the possibilities inherent in putting URLs, phone numbers, etc. onto tags.

Physical design notes

If we are expected to regularly touch our phones against grubby payment terminals, subway gates and public advertising, the surfaces and materials both on the phone and in the world must encourage this touching action. A robust and rugged shell is essential.

From the very first mobile phones that could be operated with one hand, Nokia has traditionally been good at creating robust, over-engineered devices that play well in the messy, physical world. The challenge with NFC is to create natural, basic touch interactions through material, ergonomic or other affordances. What are the physical affordances that would encourage – as Dourish puts it – ‘interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.’? So beyond ruggedness and a degree of scratch-proofing, what is necessary for these touch-interaction affordances?

The first consideration is the placement of the reader. The above image is a quick excercise imagining where readers might be placed on various phone models. The 5140 RFID kit and the 3220 NFC shell had a ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ form that meant that the NFC reader was placed on the lower back of the device. Apparently this was to separate the various radio antennae (GSM, Bluetooth, etc.) from the RFID antenna, but all of our experiments showed that this was confusing to users. The 6131 solved this by placing the NFC reader at the top of the flip-up screen, away from the other antennae at the hinge.

Somehow the NFC reader in the 6212 is at the top of the device. This is a very good place to have an ‘active area’, it’s outside of the natural hand-grip, and its the part of the phone that most often faces the world, encouraging intuitive pointing and selecting gestures. With this placement the phone becomes a kind of ‘wand’, that perhaps draws on the metaphor of magic in ubiquitous computing. Whatever our thoughts on magic in interaction design, there is no doubt that this gesture is culturally significant and is likely to be a useful model.

More practically, the 6212 features a camera lens in roughly the same position as the reader. This combined with the perforated loudspeaker work against the idea of a robust active area. This is clearly a tradeoff, will scratches and grit getting into these delicate areas hinder touch-based interactions, and will keeping the phone pristine in general be a problem? Would a shiny iPhone ever be suitable for touch-based interactions?

The second consideration is signs and symbols. There was a time when Nokia thought it necessary to indicate the active area of NFC phones with a visual icon, starting with two concentric rings and moving on to the ‘wireless fingerprint’:

But the 6131 and 6212 have no visible indication whatsoever that they offer any sort of NFC functionality. The clear plastic film that protects the 6131 screen had a diagram of a phone-tag interaction but that of course gets quickly removed.

My feeling is that there should be clearer markings for the NFC active areas on these phones, even if it is a change in texture, colour or material, it seems like a functional necessity until NFC is properly accepted and understood in the mass market. It’s also a particularly easy thing to do. When music phones have very clearly marked dedicated buttons devoted to specific media functions, why shouldn’t a significant functional and interactional surface be clearly marked on the device?

A few quick sketches using some of the icons from the graphic language for touch. Whether the possibilities inherent in NFC are indicated through clear affordances or explicit symbology, this is extremely important to get right.

Other technicalities

The 6212 has a slightly better higher resolution camera than the 6131. It also offers a second video camera on the display side (why do they still include these, does anyone actually do video calling? Is there a secondary usage that I’m missing, YouTube?)

The press-release and demos emphasise the new level of integration between NFC and Bluetooth but the specifications don’t list Bluetooth 2.1. Of course it supports the standard contactless communication API (JSR 257) so that 3rd parties like us can develop applications for NFC. We hope that it gives us more leeway than the implementation on the 6131. Includes MIDP 2.1 and a few other Java APIs.

The phone also supports the Nokia Software Market for application discovery and this might be very useful for distributing consumer-focused NFC applications.

Three papers on mobile payments

2008-05-05T13:06:55Z

The weblog ‘Putting people first’ links to three interesting papers from CHI 2008 on mobile payments.

From meiwaku to tokushita!

Lessons for digital money design from Japan. Mainwaring, S., March, W., and Maurer, B. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

“As an example of ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something for nothing.”

Reminds me of Bell & Dourish’s Yesterday’s tomorrows where ubicomp is ‘highly present, visible, and branded’.

Human-Currency Interaction

Learning from virtual currency use in China. Wang, Y. and Mainwaring, S. D. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [PDF]

“Virtual and real currencies can interact in complex ways that promote, extend, and/or interfere with the value and character of game worlds. Bringing money into HCI design heightens existing issues of realness, trust, and fairness, and thus presents new challenges and opportunities for user experience innovation.”

I like the way that money as a constraint within HCI research is seen as a way of strengthening research around realness and trust.

Ubipay

Conducting everyday payments with minimum user involvement. Lehdonvirta, V., Soma, H., Ito, H., Kimura, H., and Nakajima, T. 2008. In CHI ‘08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [PDF]

“The aim is to make paying like breathing: something we are only peripherally aware of unless we exert our resources beyond the usual. This idea has powerful implications for business and design.”

Wow, towards true frictionless capitalism.

Two Touch projects on show at DogA

2008-03-31T18:04:41Z

Two projects from Touch are on show at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture (DogA) in Oslo for the next month. Sniff and Bowl are part of the Unge Talenter exhibition that runs until 27 April 2008.

Both are interactive and are running at the exhibition for you to try them out.

Sniff is also featured in the DESIGNBOKEN 2008 from the Norwegian Design Council.

More press for Sniff

2008-05-05T14:57:59Z

Dagens Næringsliv Norway’s daily business newspaper covered two of the Unge Talenter winners last Friday, including Sniff.

Some quotes:

Vinner Design for alle: Kosehunden og spillet Sniff av Sara Johansson

“FOLSOM HUND. -Jeg tenkte litt på å lage en rotte, men da jeg tok kontakt med Tamtbartun kompetansesenter for blinde for feedback i designprosessen, mente de at det var lurt at det var en hund, siden mange av barna skal forholde seg til en hund senere i livet, sier industridesigner Sara Johansson (34), som fullførte studiene på Arkitekthøgskolen i Oslo forrige semester.”

“Hun har utviklet spillet Sniff, et kosedyr som identifiserer radiofrekvenser. Når Sniff snuser på en gjenstand lager den forskjellige lyder og vibrasjoner. Med denne teknologien har Johansson designet både et Memory-spill og en lek der man kan gjemme klistremerker rundt om i huset. Hunden kan identifisere ulike type stemminger som glede og sinne, takket være RFID-teknologi.”

“Nå jobber hun med å utvikle prototypen, både for å gjøre hunden mer robust og for å få inn en Mp3-spiller som kan inneholde flere lyder. Foreløpig er det mest blipp og blopp. -Jeg synes ikke det finnes noe verre enn dyr og leker som snakker. Jeg vil heller forsøke å abstrahere noen lyder som passer til sniffs karakter. Finne en stemme som kan gi ham liv, sier designeren.”

“Johansson, som kommer fra Umeå i Sverige, begynte å sy forskjellige type kosedyr da hun var 10-12 år. Det er med andre ord ikke helt tilfeldig at bullterrieren Sniffs pels består av typisk syttitallsvelur og cordfløyelprikker.

– Det var også viktig for meg at ikke kosedyret skulle se ut som en teknologisk leke, sier hun. Da Blindesenteret hjalp Johansson med å finne testpersoner for spillet, var de blinde og svaksynte barnas foreldre opptatt av hundens potensial for å uttrykke følelser.

– Noen av foreldrene mente at det kan være vanskelig å snakke om følelser. De kan for eksempel ikke tollke følelser i barnas blikk. Jeg tror Sniffl kan være et nyttig redskap i så måte. Barna var mest opptatt av å kjenne på selve hunden. Det var viktig at den hadde fire ben, hale og snute. Jeg fikk lov til å gjøre noe noe med det, sier Johansson.

– Hva betyr det for deg å vinne Unge Talenter?

– Det er noe av det fineste du kan vinne her i Norge, men det betyr først og fremst at noen har tro på prosjektet. Nå har jeg en god grunn til å fortsette arbeidet. Jeg håper det kan bli enklere å få spillet i produksjon, eller å skaffe en investor.”

Other press (in Norwegian) includes Aftenposten, Østkantavisa, Dagbladet, Dinside and Norske Industridesignere NID. Press release.

Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff

2008-03-17T15:00:35Z

Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at Unge Talenter 2008 (Young Talent 2008) from the Norwegian Design Council. The project is acclaimed for its inclusive design that encourages playful activity, particularly for overcoming spoken or physical barriers to communication between people of different ages and abilities. It also gets praised for its self-explanatory approach to play and its appropriate use of technology.

Previously Sniff won AHO’s prize for Design for all, and has been included as one of Dagbladet’s trends for 2008.

Here is the feedback from the jury, in Norwegian:

“Sniff er et veldig morsomt spill som inkluderer alle. Det er lett å forstå, og stiller krav til barna uten å kreve forkunnskaper eller stigmatisere. Bruk av RFID-teknologi, som sender ut et signal og skaper kommunikasjon mellom kosedyret og figurene, gjør spillet til en innovasjon på sitt område.

“Tilgang til forskjellige brikker med ulike lyder og funksjoner, gir spillet imponerende mange variasjonsmuligheter. Det fins også RFID-klistremerker, som man kan gjemme rundt i huset og lage enda en ny lek med. Sniff er rett og slett en kjempegod idé, som på en nyskapende måte tar i bruk ny og spennende teknologi.”

“Utformingen er tydelig rettet mot barn, men spillet kan utmerket godt brukes av alle mennesker i alle aldersgrupper. Det egner seg svært godt som en døråpner mellom mennesker når språkbarrierer eller fysiske begrensninger hindrer dem i å kommunisere.”

If you want to try out Sniff for yourself, the exhibition will be open from 27 March until 27 April at DogA in Oslo. The Bowl project will also be exhibited.

If you like Sniff you will be happy to hear that Sara Johansson and the Touch project are developing Sniff 2.0 that includes a revised physical design, new feedback and interactional possibilities.

The EU on the visibility of RFID

2008-03-11T10:13:29Z

The EU is conducting a new online consultancy on privacy, data protection and information security principles in RFID applications.

I am happy to see that in Article 5 they begin to address the invisible nature of RFID readers in public space:

“RFID applications can technically operate without any visible or otherwise perceivable action [...]”

They go further to recommend that there be mandated signage for RFID applications:

“Where RFID applications are implemented in public places, RFID application operators should inform individuals on the use of RFID by providing at least a clear sign, accessible by all, that signifies the presence of RFID readers. Information should include, where appropriate, that RFID tags and readers may broadcast information without an individual engaging in any active action, a reference to the policy governing the use of the RFID application and a point of contact for individuals to obtain additional information.”

While this sounds like a lot of information to get across in a sign, there may be ways of creating recognisable levels of security, various levels of private data use, and visible indications of the ways in which that data is stored or used (something along the lines of better food labelling examples). The success of this depends on creating a useful, user-oriented taxonomy of risks.

See also my work on the graphic language for RFID (paper, design brief).

RFID and unique physical form

2008-02-21T15:10:17Z

Lisa Smith is a Masters of Design student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Designed objects. I first encountered her work through pictures of her project ‘Cuteness generator’ on Flickr. This looks like a lovely project dealing with many issues through visual, physical and interactional material.

One of the key aspects of the project for me is the translation of the unique identity of RFID into a unique physical form. Each object in the project has a visual appearance and shape that is generated uniquely for each user. This reflects the unique identity contained in the RFID chip. This is an interesting approach to the visual and physical affordances of RFID technology.

The object above (photo by Lisa Smith) is a rapid prototyped object that has a unique shape:

They’re designed to be artifacts for schoolkids (K-12) that slowly gather informational histories as the kids interact with each other and grow. It’s part of a larger project about turning a school and its artifacts into its own yearbook while also encouraging the development of criticality through annotation.

The unique form emerged from what looks like a parametric model that generates unique shapes:

The cuteness generator is a visual language for RFID. The project uses identity, legibility, and desirability in order to help us sort through the large amounts of information that can be represented by RFID and spatial annotation.

The forms are generated with a small piece of front end software, with partial control from the user (for example, there is a cuteness<->grossness slider, and they can specify the number of eyes, but the form is also linked to their age and other friends/family in the system, etc). It pulls from sticker/graffiti culture, urban toy culture, and also heraldry (allows for the visual expression of human relationships and room for a visual subculture to emerge in the system).

This project shows one way in which fundamentals of RFID technology such as uniqueness, identifiability, recognition and personalisation can be explored through visual and physical affordances.

Teaching Touch II

2008-02-17T17:41:31Z

For the second year we are teaching an MA interaction design course called Tangible Interactions that is driven by the Touch project at AHO. Last year the course was largely successful both for students and for our research interests. It resulted in such projects as Sniff and The Bubbles of Radio.

This year we are building on our experience and creating both a better formal framework and a more focused environment for industrial, product and interaction design with RFID. The course plan can be downloaded here.

For the framework we have created a course compendium that introduces themes from ubiquitous, mobile and tangible computing as well as products and methods. Practically we have taken the RFID platforms from last year and are using them to get the students into interactive prototyping at a much earlier stage. We are also lucky enough to have Einar Sneve Martinussen working on Touch, and he is supporting much of the practical and theoretical side of the course alongside Mosse Sjaastad.

For the first four weeks the students received four short design briefs that explored both the context of mobile, ubiquitous and tangible computing and the detail of with interactions with RFID. This has created great momentum and resulted in various vocabularies, material explorations, evidence and paper prototypes amongst other things.

The students now start a major project based on the Touch design briefs, where they work through a number of iterations in research, ideation, concepting, sketching, prototyping and evaluating.

The students have weblogs again this year: Alice, Christer, Fan Fan, Gudmund, Gunnar, Ingrid, Knut, Kyrre, Marianne, Martin, Natacha and Silje.

More photos in the AHO interaction design pool at Flickr.

50 things, places and people for 2008

2008-01-15T18:01:18Z

On the last day of 2007 Dagbladet rounded up the 50 things, places and people they tip for 2008 (50 ting, steder og mennesker vi tror på i 2008).

Sara Johansson is tipped at number 19 with her Sniff project also featured in Making Things Talk.

Fictional radio-spaces

2007-12-07T07:25:32Z

In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged from the course.

In this project called “the bubbles of radio” Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas used critical, visual design as a way of exploring the perception of many kinds of electromagnetic fields. The project answered the brief Fields and Seams that asks “How can we use the increasingly radio-saturated landscape for creative or functional purposes?”

Inspired by Hertzian Tales by Dunne and Raby as well as other projects including Cell Phone Disco, Ingeborg explored many critical design products or services that would engage with the landscape of radio. Some of these early concepts can be seen on her weblog.

Using inspiration from richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history, Ingeborg arrived at the concept of an encyclopeadia of radio waves that contains a selection of fictional radio ‘species’. Armed with a well researched and advanced knowledge of the use, application and technicalities of each radio technology she created fictional visualisations of the ways in which radio waves inhabit space. These are creative expressions based as much on personal creativity as on technical or scientific data like range and signal strength. Six contemporary radio technologies were visualised: Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi and Zigbee.

Like all good scientific guides, the bubbles of radio includes a visual scale:

The scale of radio is usefully measured at the scale of the device, at the scale of the body and at the scale of the building (see also Everyware on scale). The visualisations are thus placed in this context and we are left with the drawings themselves, where the shape, texture, direction and density gives us a sense of each technology. Click on the following for full size images:

These visualisations are not intended to be technically accurate or to offer actionable information. Instead they provide a playful cue to reflect and consider radio as something tangible and physical to be experienced by other senses, not just through a screen.

Just for fun, here are the latin names of each field:

Bluetooth : Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae
DMB : Spherum Elektrum Multanum
GSM : Spherum Magnea Globalum
RFID : Raptus Arphadus
Wifi : Videus Fidelus
Zigbee : Nevrotis

Ingeborg then hand-crafted a pocket field-guide from these illustrations, in a physical form that even smells like an age-old dusty guide to flora and fauna.

This book also included pattern samples; a mixture of wallpaper, fabric and textile patterns that could act as ways of identifying wirelessly augmented spaces or objects. Here is a pattern for RFID:

And here is a pattern for Bluetooth:

This project explored radio in a unique way. Ingeborg has created visual expressions of radio that are immediately accessible and beautiful. Although their usefulness is harder to define they have provided us with many opportunities to discuss and reflect on these intangible technologies.

Download a poster (PDF) of all the radio visualisations here.

See more student work from the Touch project.

Bowl: Token-based media for children

2007-12-03T15:19:28Z

Bowl is a project by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall and investigated two design briefs: RFID and the everyday and Playful RFID. The concept, technicalities, process and results are described in detail in the paper at the end of this post, read on for a summary.

Simple access to media

The Bowl is a simple media player that can be used by people of all ages, particularly young children. A bowl sits on the living room table and range of physical objects can be placed within it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV.

For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Through this simple interface, Bowl encourages new, engaging and playful activities around the media experience.

Background

The project draws on a long history of research into ‘tangible interfaces’ for media (some examples). But it is distinct from other projects in that it applies the idea of tangible manipulation of media to the very specific context of the home. It also disregards complex editing, browsing or manipulation of media in favour of providing simple interactions that work for young children.

There are very few products which allow access to media in a way that can be used by children younger than four. Although it might be argued that children under four shouldn’t have access to media, there is no doubt that they do and in fact there is an enormous amount of content designed exclusively for this audience (see Teletubbies).

Existing media interfaces are overly complex, allow access to unsuitable content and encourage extended viewing habits. By creating a space for physical and playful engagement where screen-media is only a part of the experience, the Bowl intends to create constrained but self-directed activities that are not only passive, lean-back experiences.

Testing

Einar’s daughter, Anna – who features as our main user in this project – was 2 years old at the start of the project. We saw an opportunity here to design, evaluate and iterate an interface aimed particularly at children of that age.

The prototype has been developed through an extensive user-driven process where the product was tested and developed in-situ. The interface has been refined and the content re-edited as we learnt about problems and opportunities through a series of tests.

A standard platform was built very early in the project, from which many bowls and tokens could be evaluated. It was important for this set-up to be lightweight and dynamic so that important interaction parameters could be tweaked and altered. The early prototype was constructed in wood from a simple 2×4 with existing bowls as the interface. This allowed rapid modifications to the setup and although not aesthetically pleasing, didn’t disrupt the home environment or introduce any explicit new ‘gadget’ to the living room.

Through the development of the physical prototype the technical possibilities and challenges were rapidly discovered. Interestingly many technical limitations inherent in the RFID system that we used for prototyping turned out to be non-issues. Some of these limitations actually turned out to be opportunities in the interaction design of the interface. See the paper below for more details.

Conclusions

This study has been rich in both the details of physical interactions and conceptual possibilities. We have come a long way towards realising a suitable home media interface for children, using everyday objects and containers. The interaction is simple, natural and works seamlessly as a media experience. The interface can be immediately satisfying without guidance or instruction. As a simple interface rather than a ‘gadget’, it doesn’t depend on changing media infrastructures, standards or platforms. We have designed it as a ‘front-end’ that can be adapted to any kind of home-media system, thus its requirements are likely to stay the same over the lifetime of it’s use and even be adaptable to future technologies.

The initial planning involved five user-test tasks but due to the richness of the process, we ended up conducting about ten discrete topics and twenty different tests. We regard this sustained, rich access to relevant people and contexts and essential part of developing new interactive products.

One of our goals was to examine the effects of the changing role of digital technology and content in the home as a result of new interfaces. The long-term testing has offered us an insight into this changing television-based experience. We see increasing connection between playing and watching and more physical activity around media usage.

Further work

Beyond this testing process we are in the process of building the next prototype. It has been designed as a durable product that fits within the home context by using standard components and high quality materials.

Here the project is being extended to look at how it might be turned into a product. How it might be ‘shelf explanatory’ and how it might relate to existing media products and services.

More about Bowl

Einar has posted more pictures and information about his design case study presentation at DUX 07 including an annotated PDF of his very accessible presentation.

This paper contains a full account of the background, the design process, the testing, technicalities and a discussion of the results. Download the full PDF here.

See more student work from the Touch project.

Making things talk

2007-11-01T12:25:30Z

Tom Igoe’s new book Making things talk arrived today, full of lovely projects and code examples. Tom’s previous book Physical computing has been the definitive reference for all hardware hacking that goes on at AHO and in the Touch project. Making things talk is structured into specific projects, and covers technology as part of practical examples.

The section on RFID uses the ever-useful ID12 RFID readers with project examples created using Processing.

The processing code was developed with Sara Johansson as part of the Sniff project in our tangible interactions course earlier this year, and it is great to see Sniff in a double page spread:

From our initial reading the book looks like an excellent introduction to creating physical networked things, using a very wide diversity of technologies. The project examples are well designed and extremely useful in order to move beyond conceptually simple networked things. As a place to start prototyping with RFID this is a great complement to some of the other RFID books out there.

Future (NFC) phone is talk of festival!

2007-10-31T11:37:46Z

The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we created with Helsinki-based Thinglink was a great success. There are a few photos of the event from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. The local newspaper Evening Chronicle wrote a story on the exhibition:

Expect a write-up of the experience soon.

Mapping RFID

2007-10-30T12:21:48Z

RFID: Mapping Future Histories was a workshop that took place at the recent Recalling RFID conference in Amsterdam. The workshop attempted to visually map some of the issues around RFID by using various methods to extract language, location, time and ranking from various web services.

The workshop was initiated by the Digital Methods Initiative that specialises in online research methods:

“The Digital Methods Initiative is a contribution to doing research into the “natively digital”. [...] How does one do research online? What are the new objects of study, and how do they alter pre-existing methods? [...] Which digital methods innovate with and also critically display the recommender culture that is at the heart of new media information environments?”

They have developed a very extensive set of tools that can be used to scrape, crawl and otherwise interrogate online data:

”[A] set of allied tools and independent modules have been made to extend the research into the blogosphere, online newssphere, discussion lists and forums, folksonomies as well as search engine behavior. These tools include scripts to scrape web, blog, news, image and social bookmarking search engines, as well as simple analytical machines that output data sets as well as graphical visualizations.”

The workshop resulted in five visualisations:

The Substantive Composition of RFID According to Folksonomy and the Web

This project asked the question: “which issue language is significantly associated with RFID?” by looking at both del.icio.us tags and Google results.

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Wikipedia Anonymous Authorship Cartogram

This project simply asks: “Where do anonymous Wikipedia edits for RFID originate” by using a specialised Wikipedia edit scraper.

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Drama in Search Space: RFID and Arphid Queries Over Time

This project looks at the relative rankings of sites in Google over time, to find when and what issues emerged or disappeared.

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RFID Imagery: ‘Wet’ and ‘Dry’ Associations Compared

This project asks “Is RFID in its imagery (according to Google Images) largely associated with technonature or technoculture” by visually analysing the results of Google image searches.

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Issue Packaging on the Web: Style Sheets for RFID Sites by Site Type

Looking at the colors and styles on RFID-related websites and trying to cluster them. What patterns emerge?

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It’s fantastic to have such visual material emerging from a one-day workshop. All of these visualisations feel like they would benefit from some dynamic or interactive elements: representing some variable in time for instance, so that we could see shifts and changes in the landscape.

RFID as material in design

2007-10-25T16:14:01Z

Here I am presenting at Recalling RFID (photo by Anne Helmond). I talked about the ways in which Touch is exploring RFID interactions from a design perspective. In particular I looked at the physicality of RFID readers and tags and the ways in which we can visualise RFID fields and applications.

Here is my presentation from the conference, with notes on each slide.

Download presentation: RFID as material in design [pdf]

Anne has a great summary, and there are more notes on the talk here and here.