the gallery of incredible notions

Talking Carls and the Vegetable Principle

arvind — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:09:01 +0000

At a lunch the other day, someone introduced the Talking Carl app for the iPhone, which has the delightful feature of repeating what it hears (after a slight delay) in a suitably humour-inducing manner. Carl (who is essentially a simple sound processor/modulator) can also be tapped or poked to produce sounds congruent with his character. This being a meeting full of designers, iPhones were promptly produced, Carls downloaded, and a chorus ensued.

What the designers did not probably anticipate was the way a number of people at the table decided to put their Carls together as in the photo above, thus creating a self-sustaining feedback loop with unpredictable sounds, and consequently, much experimentation. Two things coincided to create this happy racuous system of Carls: the fact that Carls 'speak' after a slight delay, allowing a person to 'activate' their Carl and having time to move it into position; and the fact that the iPhone's microphone & speaker are at the same end of the phone.

This is a moment of emergence, wherein the ant becomes the anthill. Here, a set of people have taken objects (for that is what running apps are, after all) designed for single-person use, and combined them to create a group behaviour that is completely different from the individual one. Insofar as this is much like how Unix is constructed or how computer software collaborates, this is nothing new. However, in that this act of composition is being performed without any acts of construction (programming), this use of digital interactive objects as tools for creating yet other kinds of interaction - because the Carl you engage with alone is not the Carl you 'prime' for the symphony - is exceedingly rare (because rarely designed to afford). The symphonic Carl is not mediating the interactions between people, but is a tool with which people have different kinds of interactions, and a tool which enriches interactions.

Two lessons: first, that it's better to create tools for experiences instead of trying to create experiences (i.e. give me the vegetables, not the processed soup). Second, that technologies (through use) can interact to create unpredictable outcomes, which might not always be as benign as our lunchtime cacophony.

the dangers of universal design

arvind — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:13:27 +0000

In a café (Tully's). The thing you throw away most often (coffee cups) are no more distinguished than things you would probably never dispose off here (chinese takeout boxes). This design runs the danger of being designed for everywhere and being good nowhere. Unless, of course, the person trying to figure out whether the item they have in hand already knows what 'compostable' means - in which case the sign privileges cultural knowledge of a category ('compostable'). Or, as in my case, there is a helpful store employee who notices my confusion and helps identify the right bin.

reified categories and process structures

arvind — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:00:43 +0000

a ticket counter held by a San Francisco MUNI ticket assistant/checker

The mechanical ticket counters above are worked by an old gentleman who waits at a MUNI tram stop in the morning and hands out tickets to commuters before their tram arrives, so as not to overload the driver and create a payment queue on the steps of the vehicle. I didn't have time to take a detailed set of photographs, but it appears that one of the counters is used to track normal tickets, and the other to track (cheaper) ones sold to seniors.

Note the construction: two separate devices lashed together and to a roughly machined acrylic sheet with rubber-bands and cable ties. Also note how the counter buttons are on the same side (because they're identical), necessitating placing one below the other so as not to block access, and forcing left-handed use; presumably they were not designed for this use by what appears to be the International Register Co. This is either a hack by the ticket seller to make accounting easier, or something issued by the transportation company and

fixed later by the ticket seller or someone like him
in the original state of construction, but conceived and constructed to accomodate new categories (seniors?) or roles (ticket sellers at the bus stands to help increase throughput for an increased commuter population?)
in the original state of construction and conceived & constructed to a plan (“here's how we'll help our new ticket sellers keep track of how much money they should have at the end of their shift”)

In any case, the categories in use (‘adult’ and ‘senior’) have become reified in the construction of this equipment, which is only necessary because there are two categories. If there was only one kind of ticket, the ticket seller could simply note the serial number of the first ticket and multiply the ticket price by the difference from the last serial number left at the end of the shift (with minor procedural modifications in the case of multiple ticket books having been consumed). With two categories, however, accounting becomes a little harder, especially when people queue up for tickets fast. Note how the ticket seller has a cache of tickets cut to the correct time cut-offs to make it easy to hand out tickets quickly.

While this is a technology for accounting, it is not necessarily a technology for accountability (whereas a electronic ticket vending machine could do both). One would guess that fully electronic ticketing in the Promised Land of Ubicomp would obviate the need for this hack. In case this is a grassroots innovation, it shows how policies from above collide with the messiness of processes as they are actually carried out, making people create work-arounds in response.

The lesson? Categories & processes interact: if you create or change categories, you might possibly be affecting processes downstream somewhere, and someone might have to invent a way of dealing with it. So before you create personas & segmentations, pause and think about what they'll make people do, and what they are for: accounting or accountability?

(Now would be a good time to read Geoffrey Bowker & Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification & its Consequences. Complex, detailed, but much recommended, especially if you want an interesting perspective on why health insurance costs are so high).

on context & interaction: an email case study

arvind — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:38:42 +0000

[the following is a response to a thoughtful and provocative essay by the wonderful folks at Johnny Holland, where Stephen Anderson attemps to outline an informatics-based behaviour influence/modification system for email, and I contend, arguing that it's technology, not behaviour, that needs to be fixed. you should read the article, followed by my comment and Stephen's response in order for the following to make sense.]

Stephen writes:

If I was designing a new email platform from the ground up with these things built in, the execution would probably be different– I’d build some of these ideas into the architecture of the system– take a “break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess, ” to quote the article. But, that would introduce a bigger problem: asking people to change their email platform (which is a much, much more daunting challenge than the gaming I describe in the article!)

Yes, its a tricky business¹. Create a temporary fix on a broken system and risk cementing it even further, or create an entirely new system and cause upheaval? I don't have any good answers, but I suspect a redesign of email needn't cause much upheaval at all, and in fact might make things even more invisible.

Stephen further comments on context:

Your comment about context seems to me the more challenging one– and a critical consideration.

Context is a tricky business. Paul Dourish has written extensively on context; if you can survive his invented terminology ('technomethodology'?!!) - and 'where the action is' is an excellent read - he has interesting things to say about context, the most consequential of which is that context is created through interaction. What this means for our email quandary is that email software could become much better at knowing what to support by paying attention to its interactions with the user.

To elaborate: most (desktop) software at present is usually state-ful but path-agnostic. If you think of software as something that's a set of states (displaying email, writing email, downloading attachments etc), then interaction is a path through software states. [most web software is actually stateless on the server side, which is why cookies are used to track state on the client side].

Most software doesn't actually track the path through a particular state was reached. For instance, when composing a new email, it doesn't matter if you are replying to an existing email or starting a new thread, whether you were just viewing a project folder or your inbox. The email compose window functions the same way, and what it does and presents to you are largely identical in all cases (if you use the postbox email client, the sidebar always shows all attachments, regardless of who is involved in the email.)

But if email software were to act differently depending on the path taken to the current state, then each state has actually a lot more information to act on, and this makes for opportunities to better understand what the user is doing and adapting accordingly. So, if you were viewing a project folder and composed a new email, that email could get automatically put in the project folder. Or if an email is referred to repeatedly during the course of a day to then suggest showing it in a more persistent view. Or when responding repeatedly to emails from a particular person, to prioritise new mail notifications from that person. (these are just crude examples: actual behaviour would probably have to be a lot more sophisticated)

These are ways to be path-sensitive (and hence interaction-sensitive, and context-sensitive) within an application. But the notion of context extends a little further than that - full context-sensitivity must, I think, consider:

interaction paths (whether within or across applications)
contemporaneity (what else is being interacted with/running/happening)
tendencies (what happens more or less often - this is where most personal informatics focuses, and its the idea behind gmail labs' ‘Bob’ features - ‘Don't forget Bob’ and ‘Got the wrong Bob?’ and Firefox's awesome bar)
interaction patterns (sequences that are semantically meaningful, even if not constantly repeated)
organizational structures (or information relationships)

[This is not even taking into account the place (say, a meeting room), the people involved (and their relationship to you), and the actual content of the email (or whatever else) itself. Which is a discussion for another day.]

This is where we can return to the central quandary posed by the personal informatics behaviour modification system Stephen proposes: bandage a broken system or force re-learning? I think that this may be a non-issue: if email clients are ‘smarter’ in this sense, we might be able to use the same interface to deliver much more complex behaviour. So, when Stephen writes

For one person, 10 emails a day is the norm. For someone else, juggling several 100 emails a day may present no problem

he's actually thinking of how to make an interface that has to work for different people with different behaviours. But this notion of context-sensitivity suggests interfaces that behave differently depending on, say, the number of emails a day, and so work for the same person when they receive 10 emails a day equally well as when they receive a hundred. (That's within-subject, not across-subject variance, for you psych geeks).

Which also brings us to the issue of whether normative behaviour modification when it comes to email is a good idea in the first place: email use co-evolves with the existence of other collaboration & communication tools, and some of the reasons for behaviour modification (or context-sensitivity, for that matter) might no longer exist, and the associated behaviours might simply cease to be.

This is a worthy experiment. Are there any interaction designers, inspired engineers or tinkerers who want to take this on? I'm interested in developing this further.

Notes:
1. Gratuitious arguments using the Chandler Project will be summarily ignored.

the politics of the artificial

arvind — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:06:59 +0000

[with apologies to Victor Margolin]

Don Norman recently wrote an essay claiming that “design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs”. Towards the end of the essay, he says "The inventors will invent, for that is what inventors do."

The central thesis of the essay is a list of inventions that changed human life: the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, the personal computer, the internet, sms text messaging, the cellphone. Norman claims that the creation of these innovations (note the linguistic sleight-of-hand - we will return to it later) were not influenced in any way by design research or market research.

Big Straw Men

This is a straw man, for two reasons. The simpler one is that there wasn't any design research around at the time, and it is even now a discipline that's in its infancy and is learning its place in the world and in industry. The second and more important one is that that has never been design research's claim! Design research does not invent technologies: it merely points the way towards opportunities for doing, creating, serving, and making things. It does not even create the conditions for inventing new technologies, because innovation is a social process, firmly embedded in the exigencies of the corporation's structure, organizational culture, power struggles, competencies and finances. Design research is not a secret sauce for product success (even if some design researchers claim it is).

In addition, as an objective statement on the nature of product development, as Nicolas Nova points out, it is simply not true.

So the point of this essay is that only technologists can invent technologies that change the world, because inventing technologies is what technologists do? Let us, instead of focusing on the truth of this tautology, take a look at the subtext of the essay and the discussion surrounding it.

A Theory of Consumption

Consider Norman's statement about how the automobile changed human society. It did indeed, but how: cars&car-based ways of life destroy landscapes, create landfills, increase distance, decrease sociality, pollute, help bring about global warming, and are the most dangerous consumer technology invented, killing more people per year than anything else. Were automobiles brought about by design research? Nope. Did cars bring about important changes to human mobility? Sure. Could paying more attention to people's lives & the consequences of the proliferation of cars have changed the way this technology worked for the better? You bet.

Underlying this is a theory of needs & consumption. Norman says "Consider the cycle. First comes a new technology..." and later "... the technology launched the products. The products discovered needs. People slowly adopted them, leading to more changes in the products." Naturally, this perspective leads him to believe:

Where does design research fit into this cycle? Design research has many definitions, but within the product cycle, it consists of studies aiming to understand the activities, desires, and needs of the people for whom a product or service is desired. Design researchers use a wide variety of methods, but all of them, whether it be ethnographic observations, systematic probes, or even surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups aim at one thing: to determine those hidden, unspoken needs that will lead to a novel innovation and then to great success in the marketplace.

This is old hat. We, as a community, have matured beyond this perspective a while ago. (Norman appears to have missed the debate around "implications for design".) By framing design research in this narrow manner, he ignores all of the other ways design research can impact business: by reframing worldviews, discovering problems unrelated to product development & design that nevertheless impact those domains of people's lives, informing branding & messaging, and most importantly, changing corporate culture. (I'm certain I'm leaving out many other things).

This leads Norman to cite an example that actually counters his argument:

Why did the Macintosh almost fail? Was the world ready for the concept? Not really. Apple didn't help with its advertising campaign that snubbed business as dull, dreary, and not worthy of a Macintosh, yet business should not only have been Apple's biggest customer base, but families wanted to buy their children the same computer they would be using in business. As a result, a far inferior computer, the IBM PC, running a command-line, baroque operating system (MS-DOS), swept the market. Within Apple itself, the Macintosh caused huge internal disruption between the Lisa, Macintosh, and the Apple II groups. The Apple II was where Apple was making its money: the other groups were losing money. Internal politics? Massive. Interdivisional rivalry? Yup.

That is, one reason that the Mac almost failed was that it had a misguided marketing campaign that applied the wrong meanings to the product. (This is precisely the sort of thing that good market research or formative design research can uncover.)

The other explanation here is the 'ahead of their time' notion: which essentially functions as a euphemism for a good idea implemented insufficiently well (usually because the available materials were not good enough). While this is not the fault of the people who made the various products Norman cites as having failed due to this reason, it does not detract from the fact that they were either simply not good enough (read usable) or could not be turned into a successful business. If, as Norman says, the Apple Newton was ahead of its time, why didn't Apple simply start making the Newtons again soon as pen-based devices started appearing in the market?

Built on Abstractions

In fact, there are some other fundamental assumptions in his piece:
- Innovation is a new thing, an object, or a technology. (This is a rather narrow perspective, to put it mildly. Recall the linguistic switch between innovation & invention: this is what makes it possible.)
- If you do design research and find opportunities, innovation must happen. Innovation doesn't happen so often, so the design research claim must be false. (Completely ignoring the sociological truths of product development)
- The impact of a technological invention comes solely from the invention itself. (See 'technology giveth and technology taketh away' for one examination of the tortuous relationship between media technology & society. Or just learn a little bit about Twitter and how it's evolving.)

All of this paints a picture of the relationship between design, design research and technology based largely on a set of abstractions instead of the messy complexity of real life (much like Roger Martin claiming that businesspeople don't engage in abductive reasoning). To sum it up, it looks like this:

all the technologies that had massive impact were driven by 'technologists'
when technologies succeed hugely, it's because of their inherent qualities
when innovative technologies fail, it is because the world wasn't ready for them
'needs' are created by technologies. (or, consumers are created by products)

This is a remarkably techno-centric worldview. The reactions to it seem to largely sidestep this issue, either trying to make a case for a seat at the table, pointing to the complexity of the process, or showing how all good invention uses the very activities of design research (while possibly stretching the definition of the term somewhat).

Upsets & Reframings

Contrast this with Norman's closing sashay “Technologists will... get the grand ideas running, but their implications are apt to be complex, overwhelming, and just plain horrid. Horrid applications? Yes, but that's good news: we will forever be indispensible.” Mr Norman wishes to be a purveyor of commodities. He has given up hopes of power: he wants to be a fixer, a second-class citizen in the glorious country of makers. And, by claiming to speak for the design research community, he endangers the community's ambition to bigger things. This is upsetting, naturally.

Or is it? As we have seen, there is little in this essay that is substantive (provocativeness alone does not a good argument make). Other than chorusing "We can, too!", there is little to be gained from responding to it, other than to perhaps limit misunderstanding arising out of extreme statements made by famous people.

What seems to me to the greater issue is of addressing the underlying techno-centricism of this worldview. In a year which has seen much havoc & pain caused by misbehaving social institutions (which seem to have arisen out of a similar pattern of belief in financial technologies), it is ironic to encounter writing and discussion around issues of participation in world-making that completely ignores everything else but the possibility of telling people what to make next. (I strongly suspect Don Norman still lives in the world of rockstar designers). Aren't there other ways to contribute? After all, as Jon Kolko argues, we're in this to make the world a better place.

Here, for instance are some questions to consider about our practice:

how do we participate in the life of the things we help create beyond their release cycles?
what are ways to tell clients not to make things?
how do we move from being product-focused to being organization-focused?
how do we increase our presence in industries that don't currently employ us?
how do we enable systemic changes?
how do we enable endeavours that need to happen across organizations for systemic changes to succeed?

tribes of contingence

arvind — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:02:41 +0000

The Brotherhood of the Bike originally uploaded by steelmonkey

The bike car on the Caltrain trains is at one end of the train. That is, there is only one place on the train for bikes [as far as I could tell], and its an entire car. Thus, if you want to bring your bike on the train, it's likely you will be in this car (to remain close to your bike, to get to it easily & quickly when the train stops at a station). It's also likely then, if you are a frequent/daily rider, that you will tend to see the same people repeatedly. And, like you, they will also be riders.

bike car. caltrain originally uploaded by luckyklover

Which means you will probably identify with them. And you will have stories to share. You will experience aspects of the day in similar ways ("oh man, that can't have been good in the rain!"). You will trade hacks, fixes, workarounds, secrets. You will commiserate, and look for each other, and wonder when people are missing. Some of you will be more gregarious, popular, visible, more contributing than others. There will be quiet, morose types. There will be lurkers - people who never become visible, but who participate nevertheless, just by being present and taking it in. After a while, you will look forward to being in the bike car.

In short, you will probably form a tribe, after a fashion. (I'm speculating, of course. Evidence is lacking. Would you like to get me some?)

Now there is something peculiar about this tribe. It is created by the architecture of the train. It is contingent upon just the right people coming together in the same place, but not in a manner of their own design or intention (perhaps we can call them 'tribes of contingence'?). This tribe will, if it forms, have been created due to policymakers and the operations people at Caltrain. It will be the outcome of decisions made on entirely other grounds: efficiency, safety, comfort. But lo and behold, decisions made in boardrooms and committees create this cluster of people who find themselves having something in common with each other.

This is the opposite of Meetup. Here, you did not have to seek out others of your kind. The world architected your meeting. You didn't plan it, you came into it.

This is something technology can do really well, but has only taken hesitant steps into. It does not, as of yet, create coincidences (without your express effort - else it wouldn't be a coincidence) that well. These coincidences are wonderful things - they bring us human contact and sociality without any effort. It's built into your life, no sign-up or registration required.

Maybe Facebook should be taking a page from the Caltrain.

11 simple ways to improve Microsoft Office's spell & grammar checker

arvind — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:48:50 +0000

recognize proper nouns, especially when followed by ’s, and treat them appropriately when using "change all"
detect and correct word variations during a spell-check session without having to add them to the dictionary; especially important for occasional proper nouns
detect delayed shift-release capitalization errors, especially for proper nouns (e.g. "my name is ARvind")
detect typing error patterns within a document and adjust spelling/grammar suggestion accordingly
use phrase patterns to refine suggestions ("in touh with" is probably "in touch with", not "in tough with")
detect spacebar order errors ("this is n ot the case")
infer multiple whitespace usage conventions from the document (don't ask each time you encounter e.g. "and so , we can" to change to "and so, we can" once I make the change)
show me what "change all" will change, especially if it's a grammatical suggestion and/or there are variations
turn off "resume" mode when clicking into the text area after loss of window focus
detect compound grammar & spelling errors (e.g. "she is alectureer" should suggest "a lecturer" instead of just "lecturer" to avoid introducing a grammatical error)
detect typing errors based on keyboard button proximity patterns (e.g. "traip" is more likely to be "trail" than "train")

[update: the Office Natural Language team has a post on the issue]

urban architecture and recycling practices

arvind — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:17:29 +0000

sustainability

architectures of control

persuasive design

Chatting with a friend about throwing plastic bottles out the window into her recycling bin (and missing). And a friend of hers who has a house on a hill: so their recycling bins are directly beneath the deck and they can drop bottles down a chute into the bins. Brainstorming ways to rig a carriage & basket down from a kitchen to the bins across the yard to be able to roll your recycling down a chute/rail and have it tip over into the bin automatically. And realising that this would be a major patchwork & hack job.

the architecture of homes influences recycling practices. are there common pathways we can optimize? can we build fun recycling experiences into the home? what about dumbwaiters for your glass bottles? what architectural principles would make a home conducive to recycling?

only in experimental psychology

arvind — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:38:05 +0000

thoughtless acts

only in an experimental psychology paper can you find...

"The media were demonstrated by having the participants solve three simple communication tasks by means of video telephone, hands-free telephone, and text chat. Face-to-face (F-t-f) was assumed familiar."

Schliemann, T., Asting, T., Følstad, A., & Heim, J. (2002). Medium preference and medium effects in person-person communication. In CHI '02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 710-711). Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: ACM. doi: 10.1145/506443.506559

you don't have to look at all the data

arvind — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:49:17 +0000

designresearch101

design research

methodology

design research 101: you don't have to look at all the data. given a compromise between examining and categorising every transcript, photo, answer or looking at the data in different ways, pick manipulation & representation over organization every time.

Having lots of data points doesn't mean you have greater understanding: it simply means you have lots of data points and more chances to prove a statement true or false. Having fully organized data is great if you want to test conclusions, but it's easier to check hypotheses than to find a new, more powerful, more insightful way of looking at the phenomenon being studied. Finding a good explanation for behavior usually involves multiple rounds of trying to make sense of something. That takes time.

If you're short on time, forget trying to organize everything and spend more time interpreting and deriving conclusions from the data. After all, that's what you were hired for, isn't it?

the ugly, polluting side of cause marketing

arvind — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:30:37 +0000

Today I came home and noticed this package lying on the porch (I vaguely remembered having seen it for a few days now). Turned out it was a promotional campaign for Dunkin' Donuts, in aid of cancer research. And, oh, we'll sell you a free bagel.

And a free drink if you come in. In this nice sturdy plastic cup.

Only problem is, I didn't ask for a coffee cup!

So, in order for the Stefanie Spielman Cancer Research Fund to get $1, I have to buy 13 bagels from Dunkin' Donuts. No wait, it gets worse.

In order for me to buy 13 bagels so that the Stefanie Spielman Cancer Research Fund gets $1, Dunkin' Donut:
# pays for 1 coffee
# pays for the production of one coffee cup (for which there is no market demand)
# pays for the design & printing of a magazine-quality information sheet
# pays for the (non-reusable) plastic bag it all came in
# pays for people to bring this to my doorstep

In addition, I am forced to deal with junk I didn't ask for, and the planet is awarded one ugly and unwanted coffee cup that is too hard to destroy. Now I hate waste, so I'll try to recycle it. Which means that Dunkin' Donuts is forcing me to pay some of the costs of their marketing campaign. (And you, and your children, too - plastic takes forever to degrade).

By now I'm finding it hard to believe that the true unit cost of all this is less than a dollar, in which case more - probably much more - than a dollar was spent to increase the coffers of the cancer research fund by $1, and the coffers of Dunkin' Donuts by the profit from the sale of 13 bagels.

Outrageous. Things that Dunkin' Donuts could have done instead of this horror:
1. Advertised the promotion in-store
2. Offered a free coffee if you brought your own cup
3. Just given the Cancer Research Fund $1 multiplied by the campaign's estimated rate of conversion. And then have advertised the good deed.
4. Advertised it online (update: they did)

Instead, this comes off as a desperate attempt to get me to give my money to Dunkin' Donuts instead of a kind, charitable gesture. And one that does more harm to everyone than good.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to put dollar-values to each of the above costs. If you know how to investigate this further, please drop me a line. Also, there must have been some set of conditions under which this sounds like a good idea: if anyone can throw some light, I'd be much obliged.

connecting back and front channels

arvind — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:04:59 +0000

social media

twitter

a post on presenting with an active backchannel: but what if you were twittering during your own presentation? you could create a depth of interactivity that wouldn't otherwise exist... participating in the backchannel to unpack your ideas, reveal sources, create connections, explain uncommon concepts. twitter plugin for powerpoint: where are you?

PS: this is why we need activity-based computing and a more nuanced awareness of context.

ethnographic unpacking

arvind — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:02:28 +0000

a newspaper dispenser for the Columbus Dispatch, outside a Subway

Here's an example of one my favourite ethnographic analytic moves: 'unpacking'. Unpacking is one kind of interpretation, where an observation is examined for unstated (or implicit) assumptions, consequences, and meanings. Here's how it works.

Consider the above image: a newspaper dispenser outside a subway. Here's what we're going to assume about it:

It is intended to sell newspapers
It is designed to support this intention

Now, notice the statement on the bottom of the dispenser: "We capture history every day". Unpacking this involves finding premises that give this statement meaning:

"History" happens every day
Some things are Historic and some things are not
History can be identified as it happens
"Capturing" history - by identifying what is Historic and what is not - is a non-trivial task
the Dispatch performs this non-trivial task every day

Taken together, the premises make an argument for how value inheres in the Dispatch, and why you should buy it. Note that in order to accept the statement, you have to accept the premises, but in order to unpack, you only have to notice something and wonder what makes that thing work. What, one asks, has to be true to make this true, to make this believable? The insight is in the unpacking, the discovery of assumptions.

The insights here have to do with the claims being made about the nature of history: if one wanted, say, to counter-advertise, one could devise an advertising strategy designed around these claims. For instance, one could reverse the time-orientation and claim value in reporting and making sense of the present, and pointing towards the future.

But unpacking doesn't happen in a vacuum: in order to perform this particular instance of unpacking, I had to have cultural knowledge - (that the statement is an advertisement, that advertisements are stories that help sell something, and so on, that advertisements can appear on newspaper dispenser). This is what makes unpacking a particularly ethnographic move: after all, that cultural knowledge had to be acquired somehow. In this instance, advertisements & newspapers are common enough and shared enough that I could do this analysis without having to do research (although you could count my living 5 years in the US as a process of gaining cultural sensitivity; just growing up as a city-bred person counts too, I guess).

In cases where the things being noticed are in less public or familiar contexts - a McDonald's in India, or on the shop floor of an oil rig, or in a hospital - cultural, contextual, and procedural knowledge has to be learned, and often the quality of the learning depends on the amount of exposure one has to that context (what we call 'research'). This is why anthropologists and ethnographers prefer longitudinal participation - the longer one stays in a place, the more one learns, the more things one can unpack and find the premises of, the more powerful the insights. This is also why the ethnographic method has little to do with mere observation alone - you have to do a lot more than that to interpret and find meaning.

alert redundancies for the real-time web

arvind — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:30:02 +0000

The real-time web is producing interesting developments in how information is pushed to a variety of devices and through different channels (twitter, email, RSS, iPhone/Blackberry push notifications). What seems to be missing, however, is an attention to alert redundancy: when the same information is pushed through multiple channels simultaneously, creating more information management interactions than are strictly necessary (e.g. Mint.com alerts pushed to email & iPhone reached my email first, and was seen there before the iPhone notification arrived.

What is needed is a way to mark alerts as 'read' across channels when they are seen on any one channel, and ways to not send notifications after they've been read on any one channel. This, of course, will need the development of a unified notification infrastructure, ecosystem-aware APIs that allow a person's suite of channels and applications to act in concert, models of network performance, and techniques for context-sensitivity that can make judgements about the appropriateness of generating alerts.

Of course, this is a problem that no one organization can solve, but unless it is, we stand in danger of a worse case of information overload than CrackBerry's ever represented.

brown sugar flash

arvind — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:08:54 +0000

brown sugar flash originally uploaded by steelmonkey

left: on-camera flash
right: on-camera flash with a packet of "sugar in the raw" slipped on (it's made of brown paper)

this is part of an ongoing obsession of mine to understand how to do photography under varying light conditions with a minimum of additional equipment, and possibly reusing available materials

worn tar

arvind — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:02:57 +0000

Worn tar originally uploaded by steelmonkey

The portion of the road that cars drive on shows greater wear (and hence repels water less) than the curbside portion that cars park on

all your conversations are belong to us

arvind — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:18:07 +0000

social media

economics

twitter

when ideas become the foundation for social value claims, discussions become evidence of value. note the urge to 'render' permanent a diffuse ephemeral conversation, thus making it easier demonstrate the 'influence' (and thus value) of that idea.

a.k.a. all your conversations are belong to us.

imagine doing this in real life: "can you come over here and talk in my notebook, please?"

fictional facts and the construction of personas

arvind — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:39:10 +0000

Personas are composite constructions that serve two distinct purposes: to act as aids for design decisions, and to generate empathy. The two can easily get in each other's way: people looking for information that they can act on might consider all the additional texture of people's lives "fluff", whereas people for whom a persona doesn't represent a specific set of information but, rather, a set of contexts and behaviours might be disappointed if the persona had "just the facts, ma'am".

Within corporations, personas are an intensely political artifact: claims on what they should contain are made by many different groups of people: marketing, product planning/management, designers, researchers, engineers.. Each has their own set of questions they want a persona to answer, and each has their own claims on what the persona means. Our poor hardworking persona, then, has to act both as an embodiment of consensus and as a coordinating artifact - something that various kinds of people can look to for guidance as they go about their work.

Regardless, personas are usually composites: rarely in research are personas constructed from one perfect respondent - they are amalgams of many stories and many situations. This is (hopefully) not the case for personas that are entirely behavioural, and who are being constructed for a highly specific activity or around a particular product; the necessity for composition arises when generating personas for a wide variety of activities or products, and especially the case when personas are created as part of generative research, which tend to include attitudinal and aspirational data (to use marketing terminology) in addition to behavioural data. The point is to create a person who embodies the entire range of behaviours and attitudes for that class of people - so that the resulting design covers as much range as possible.

It is at this point that something like the following occurs:

"Does he have a car?"
"Uh, I don't know. I mean, he has an iPod.. isn't this the persona who doesn't like CDs because he wants access to his music all the time?"
"So, ok. He has a car, and he listens to his iPod in it and his FM connector keeps getting interference but his car stereo is old so he has no other way of connecting it"
"Yeah, that sounds about right"

If you're a ux/design researcher you've probably had a conversation very much like this. This is the act of composition: when the essential stories & features have been picked, and they have to be woven into a single story. In this sense, personas are a collection of fictional facts: the stories come from different places, but they have to be made part of this person's life, reflecting their desires, their interests, the conditions of their life and so on - and in the process are given a fictional form. At all times the data speak, but through the voice of this character. In this sense, defining personas seems remarkably similar to writing a novel...

To see this, we turn to the most excellent Umberto Eco (and it is worth reading in full):

What I mean is that to tell a story you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details. If I were to construct a river, I would need two banks; and if on the left bank I put a fisherman, and if I were to give this fishermana wrathful character and a police record, then I could start writing, translating into words everything that would inevitably happen. What does a fisherman do? He fishes (and thence a whole sequence of actions, more or less obligatory). And then what happens? Either the fish are biting or they are not. If they bite, the fisherman catches and then goes home happy. End of story. If there are no fish, since he is a wrathful type he will perhaps become angry. Perhaps he will break his fishing rod. This is not much; still, it is already a sketch. But there is an Indian proverb that goes, "Sit on the bank of a river and wait; your enemy's corpse will soon float by." And what if were a corpse were to come down the stream – since this possibility is inherent in an intertextual area like a river? We must also bear in mind that my fisherman has a police record. Will he want to risk trouble? What will he do? Will he run away and pretend not to have seen the corpse? Will he feel vulnerable, because this, after all, is the corpse of the man he hated? Wrathful as he is, will he fly into a rage because he was not able to wreak personally his longed-for vengeance? As you see, as soon as one's invented world has been furnished just a little, there is already the beginning of a story.

Eco, U. (1994). The novel as cosmological event. In The Name of the Rose (1st ed., pp. 512-515). San Diego: Harcourt Brace.

Exactly. Of course, if you're creating a persona you're working off of data, and the construction of the world is not random but is informed by your data (though there may be a few judgement calls along the way for clarity's sake, or to include perspectives). Importantly, the more constraints (user stories, situations) you add, the more formed your story (persona) gets.

Eco continues:

The problem is to construct the world: the words will practically come on their own. Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow

Indeed.

cultural capital and measures of attention

arvind — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:17:16 +0000

YouTube blogs today about how their ratings system is broken, and not doing what they thought it should be doing. The nub is: people tend to rate either 1 star or 5 stars, with the majority rating only 5 stars. This indicates that people tend to rate when they like a video enough, or less commonly, when they dislike it enough. The comments, of course, open up the whole can of worms around whether to use like/dislike indicators only likes, both like/dislike and ratings, and all sorts of other scale systems.

Which totally misses the point.

YouTube is a cultural resource. As a freely usable platform for expression, passing the time, making jokes, commentary, finding & sharing culturally meaningful events - and so on - YouTube generates enormous cultural capital. But the ratings systems don't capture that cultural capital - they merely capture one indicator of interestingness. The debate around ratings systems & scales is essentially one of classificatory accuracy: how do we get people to tell us how much they like something, so we can make a good judgement on how large masses of people like that same thing? The elephant in the room - the one not being addressed - is what exactly is the point of rating? Who benefits? What is YouTube trying to identify? A common enough answer is: the videos that are interesting. But that doesn't hold up: YouTube currently has 4 systems for new video discovery: network-based delivery, a viewing-trail based similarity & recommendation system, a curated set, and a current-activity view. None of them really use the rating system (or at least not visibly so.)

Answer 2: to separate the wheat from the chaff. But that doesn't stand up on scrutiny, either. Even if people had perfect agreement on ratings scale (they don't), any ratings system would still suffer from selection bias. Also, accurate classifications are only one of several use cases: for selecting a video to watch when having to select between multiple similar choices (picture quality, possibility of interestingness). Most of the time - especially with Facebook sharing and embedding and so on - the portability of YouTube videos means that they are in a specific context, and either watched if they seem interesting, or not at all. (In which case the static screenshot might be a much better signal of interest).

But neither of these have much to do with cultural capital: knowing what gets people attention and their engagement.

Culture is created through interaction. Stands to reason, then, that cultural capital - the amount of attention something gets - should also be measured through interaction. Here, then, based on thinking about the interactions one has with videos on YouTube (and taking into account the fact that YouTube videos are not really social objects within YouTube), are a few measures of cultural capital

- no. of times favorited
- no. of times embedded
- no. of times linked to / blogged about
- no. of times replied-to
- no. of times remixed
- no. of times removed due to copyright violations
- no. of times downloaded
- no. of variations uploaded
- no. of times re-uploaded after removal
- no. of times commented on per view
- no. of times added to a playlist

Of course, for some of these we're going to need object descriptors beyond just IDs and URLs, but Google & YouTube have a bunch of smart engineers, and I'm sure they can figure something out, eh?

aggregators without queues

arvind — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:59:26 +0000

interface design

information management

social media

looking at online media services it strikes me: what use is an aggregator without a queue? why is instapaper not part of youtube and google reader and twitter?