Pierrick Thébault, Soirée *di*/zaïn #4… par soireesdizain

Objects can wheter:
– remain the same and need a terminal. Most researchers and manufacturers of connected objects currently adopt this approach. Mobile or computer mediations are leveraged to allow users to configure or interact with the capabilities that cannot be accessed from the physical user interfaces.
– become docks for terminals. By making technologies converging into one device, smart phones have already replaced many objects. Alarm clocks, radios or music players are not as popular as before. This leads manufacturers to redesign such objects as docks that are used in combination with terminals.
– become a touch interface. The success of touch interactions leads the industry to integrate touch screens into objects’ form factors. This tends to reduce the place of physical user interfaces to the benefit of graphical user interfaces that can be refreshed with a single
tap.
– disappear in the environment. With the ongoing research conducted on flexible and very thin displays that can be embedded into walls or windows, companies illustrate a future where information and services are delivered by the environment. This would bring people to own and use fewer objects than today and interact with services through multiple surfaces.
– be redesigned with physical and virtual users interfaces. Concept products as the Olinda radio6 demonstrate that services instantiated on top of objects can be materialized with dedicated buttons, displays or interactors. As mentioned in part 4, projected or mixed reality interfaces can be used to avoid overloading the physical user interface.
– explode in several modules. Researchers of tangible computing have already explored the concept of graspable building blocks that can be combined to produce (e.g. especially in tangible programming) or interact with systems. Such approach can be adopted to create modules for each core feature of a given object.
– be reinvented to allow shape shifting. A more prospective vision consists in picturing objects as dynamic entities capable of changing their forms according to the context of use or to the associated services. This approach can be considered as the most disruptive since it does not follow any pre-established standards regarding the shape of objects.

What do the alarm clocks do?
The features of the alarm clocks are augmented by 6 applications: an agenda app that automatically sets your alarm, a traffic jam app that modify your alarm according to specific events, a music app that streams a playlist instead of the radio, a podcast app that downloads and plays your favorite show, a social app that blogs when you wake up and a weather app that reads you the forecast.

Why did you choose these applications?
We created the most simple use case scenario in order to open up the discussion with people and let them envision the new mechanisms brought about by the Internet connectivity. These ideas are very basic, but, when combined, they allow supporting some of your daily activities (or at least the one that came up during the focus group we conducted!). You could imagine creating the application you want, as you soon as it deals with the way the alarm is set, the moment you switch off the alarm and the period of time that follows.

How did you come up with these 3 form factors?
We tried to answer that question: how can we make the applications that augments objetcs more tangible? Apps can be made visible using mobile mediation (external representation) or can become part of the device (embodiment). In the same way, we can imagine the object as being stationary or modular. The three mockups we created explore a different dimension of the problem.

How are they working?
We used Arduino boards to hack or build the alarm clocks. Depending on the configuration, the objects are operated by a computer (a Processing sketch to handle the communication and logic parts) or by a web service exposing objects (in that case we use an ethernet shield). One of the alarm clock use a Seeeduino film board along with RF digital chipsets (built on a home made shield).

Why do they look so cheap?
Because they are built with paper! We were looking for a quick way to prototype and evaluate our ideas!

What kind of research do you conduct with these mockups?
This project is only a part of the research we conducted about the design of Internet of Things applications. It allowed to work on criteria to improve the intelligibility and control of applications and to answer a part of the issues related to the design of new augmented objects. Before that, we explored the topic of Internet of Things applications from 3 point of views: the object, the infrastructure and the environnement. Each times we relied on co-creation methods to generate insights and build a descriptive framework.

Who is « we »?
- Pierrick Thébault, interaction designer & PhD candidate at Bell Labs
- Camille Lefer, product design intern (from L’Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique) at Bell Labs in 2011
- Robert Huynh, strategic innovation intern (from ENSCI: les Ateliers) at Bell Labs in 2012

P. Thébault & T. Lehmann : Pré-lancement du séminaire « Blobjects » from lecolededesign on Vimeo.