John Kestner. Honest objects.

"June comes, and a new iPhone is introduced to the world, creating a shock wave of..."

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:27:40 -0400

“June comes, and a new iPhone is introduced to the world, creating a shock wave of obsolescence….yet the materials of which it is made have ultimately all been abstracted from nature, resources consumed in the long chain of the manufacturing process, very few of which — apart from the packing materials — have been recycled.”

- The Half-Life of Phones, New York Times. Think of the energy extracted from the earth and thousands of people in order to design, manufacture and transport your phone. The staggering work of creation is not well represented by the physical object. The miracle of the tiny box in our pocket is that we take it for granted.

When I read the sales reports, I see 3 million existing phones looking for a new purpose. Yet with the App Store, repurposing a consumer electronic device has never been so easy. Did you keep what you had, hand it down, sell it, or put it to a new use? What app gives your phone a stay of execution?

Listen to my soothing baritone on public radio

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:11:36 -0400

I will be on NPR Marketplace Money this weekend discussing the Proverbial Wallets, Internet-connected anti-computers that help you watch your spending through timely information. Your local air time: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/stations/

Design literacy in sound

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:26:49 -0400

I have been quiet, mostly basking in the post-thesis glow and transitioning to the next thing, but also because I spent a week in Helsinki attending a product sound design workshop.

It’s been inspiring to vocally “sketch” interactions with aural affordances, or analyze how the audio track of a movie supports the main narrative, or reveals something deeper. It’s good for designers to exercise this muscle — we’re not trained to work with sound as we are with visual output. We’re quick to use sound for attention-getting measures, but audio is well-suited to more nuanced and ambient uses. I will explore this in future posts.

I can’t stand the way we’re slaves to the screen even when we’re walking around. Sound is part of the solution to this. It often goes hand in hand with touch, and so is frequently designed into electronic objects to emulate physical interfaces, like the “clicking” touchwheel on nearly every non-touchscreen iPod. But there’s also pleasure in the sound of baseball cards stuck into bicycle spokes, and the sh-chunk of the Viewmaster shutter. Whether you’re a digital or physical designer, consider the palette that sound affords you.

"Invisible technology needs a metaphor that reminds us of the value of invisibility, but does not..."

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:15:06 -0400

“Invisible technology needs a metaphor that reminds us of the value of invisibility, but does not make it visible. I propose childhood: playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults. Our computers should be like our childhood: an invisible foundation that is quickly forgotten but always with us, and effortlessly used throughout our lives.”

- Mark Weiser, The World is Not a Desktop

Tableau: bridging the analog-digital photo-sharing gap As our...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:09:00 -0400

Tableau: bridging the analog-digital photo-sharing gap

As our social circle spreads across a wider geographic area, we look for meaningful ways to share experiences. Technology has reconnected us to some extent, but the interfaces are not as simple as handling physical media. My great aunt Olga loves writing letters and shuffling through photos. I, on the other hand, write emails and share photos on Flickr, and as a result, we don’t communicate nearly as much as we’d like.

Tableau is an refinished heirloom nightstand that stores and retrieves memories using a Twitter account. It acts as a bridge between users of physical and digital media, taking the best parts of both. The nightstand quietly drops photos it sees on its Twitter feed into its drawer, for the owner to discover. Images of things placed in the drawer are posted to its account as well.

Tableau is an anti-computer experience. The nightstand drawer becomes a natural interface to a complex computing task, which now fits into the flow of life. I lovingly refinished it while respecting its history, and removed the trappings of electronics except for a vestigial cable “tail” that hints at what lies beneath. But it doesn’t just look long-lasting. Having its basic functions exposed through Twitter allows it to be repurposed with new cloud applications. This wards off the obsolescence that typically befalls turnkey consumer electronics. Tableau’s physical charms encourage the owner to prolong its life, while its software provides the means to doing so.

Social Networks for Lonely Objects: the novelization

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:44:53 -0400

It’s been a century of posts since I started writing here to get velocity on my master’s thesis in Media Arts and Sciences. I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been finishing that to a point where I’m proud of it. Now I present it to you:

Visions of ubiquitous computing describe a network of devices that quietly supports human goals, but this may also add complexity to an already frustrating relationship between humans and their electronic objects. As we move from vision to reality, there is an opportunity to rethink how we interact with our objects and networks of objects, and close the communication gap between man and machine.

This thesis defines social and super-mechanical affordances for products which may consist of many physical and digital objects. These new objects will not look like stripped-down contemporary computers, but augmented ordinary objects that are focused on input and output, exposed on Twitter. Apps in the cloud use Twitter to marshall the appropriate objects to execute human tasks. Using a social network as transport allows apps and their owners to manage a large network of computing objects with the same constructs that we use to manage many human relationships.

From this direction, we take a step toward a consumer-amenable implementation of ubiquitous computing.

Download Social Networks for Lonely Objects (25MB PDF). To abstract the abstract: The next computing experience will consist of familiar objects working in social networks—creating a simple, yet flexible, translucent human interface.

It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering wordcount that product, interaction and systems designers will enjoy. I will also continue to post material adapted from the paper here. Or if you’re in a real rush, insert 1,395 “the”s into this wordle and you’ve got it. Enjoy!

craightonberman on exposing the scratchpads of digital...

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:14:24 -0400

craightonberman on exposing the scratchpads of digital objects:

After browsing a new exhibition called “The New Simplicity”, I came across the excellent work of Alexander Hulme. In addition to being graphically striking, his calculator prototype also has two features that I’m surprised are not more common in calculators (both digital and physical): an inline display that shows the entire calculation & a visual memory display that also doubles as an entry key.

This simple innovation of exposing the hidden brought my thoughts to the “copy-paste” command on computer operating systems. Why does such an important & ubiquitous tool so often obscure its contents?

When we want to remember a bit of information in the real world, we scribble it on a scrap of paper, in the margins of our notes or newspapers, and even on our hands. This sort of informal and intuitive note-taking is basically the copy-paste of the physical world.

The digital world lacks these kind of informal places for scribbling things to remember in the short term. There are probably thousands of note-taking applications out there, meant to capture small bits of information—but I have yet to encounter any that match the spontaneity of the tangible world’s solutions, or the casual ability to place bits of info in a visual manner. Where is my digital version of the desk blotter, the back of a receipt, or painter’s palette?

This reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s observation that programmers need a quiet environment to run the program they’re coding in their head, keeping track of variables in memory. Modality sucks. We need to rethink memory aids.

My gadgets are disruptive. That's the problem.

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:20:56 -0400

Remember when I criticized the unimaginative electronics manufacturers looking for Disruptive Mega Trends™? Me neither. I had to drink enough to forget the presentation that triggered it all. But before I blacked out, I apparently wrote down some real Disruptive Mega Trends™—now yours for free.

Keep it in your pants.

I see everyone wandering around staring down at a tiny screen. It’s inhumane and rude. But because we’re addicted to mobile communication, we need a way to break the constraints of operating physical devices.

Visual interface is a cop-out. I want a mobile UI designed from scratch to be non-visual. (My group dabbles in this.) Voice control is promising but limited. We’re used to voice menus on customer support, and the Bluetooth car speakerphone I got my mother has voice instructions telling you what to press. But talking to devices is even less socially acceptable.

What about a connected experience that uses Bluetooth I/O and software tailored to piping your tasks through them? I thought we had reached consensus that cords suck. I’m shocked that more people don’t use stereo Bluetooth headphones. I feel like I’m in the future when I wear mine. It’s even got controls right on the ear. Maybe this suggests a gestural interface for electronics. Maybe the only time I need to take my phone out is to look at the picture someone tweeted.

Ad-hoc sharing of experiences.

Not to get all Zune here, but this is totally disruptive. Microsoft’s squirting failed because they couldn’t sell enough squirters to get the power of the network, and DRM made squirting an unsatisfactory activity: Are we compatible? How long will it last? Am I going to get pregnant?

So make it open, and open. If songs (with micropayments!!!) can’t be done at first, there are still plenty of other things to share. And in keeping with the spirit, whatever’s on the screen—song or playlist, photo or photo album, web page—you toss to another device with a gesture. (Bump Technologies already patented the bump, but I’m sure there are better ones. Twist? Squeeze? Tilt and tap?) This is not just for sharing files, but experiences. If you share a call, it’s a party line. If you’re listening to a song and they’ve got their headphones on, you’re listening together.

It has to be done on an OS level to be excellent. It’s like copy/paste or pub/sub. It could be one of those things that’s so natural you try doing it on other devices, like kids now poke and pinch every unfamiliar screen. When it gets under your consciousness like that, you know it’s a Disruptive Mega Trend.™

"There are going to be 100 companies making LCD tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building..."

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:14:00 -0400

“There are going to be 100 companies making LCD tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution.”

- — Jeff Bezos (via WSJ).

I’m calling ebooks for Amazon. The biggest selection, a client for every screen that matters, and now its purpose-built axe has been sharpened to kill. The new $139 Kindle can last an entire month on a battery. That’s not electronic, that’s supermechanical.

E-Ink is beating the middling expectations it first set and getting better at what it does well, rather than trying to be an LCD. This model is more readable, faster, smaller and lighter. Its browser now uses WebKit. And controls have been refined.

This is all in the service of reading, whenever, wherever. Amazon is honing its tool — the third-generation Kindle adds no new features, only improved existing ones. How many new gadgets do you see doing that?

Ordinary objects made super-mechanical

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:33:00 -0400

One important advantage of [tangible user interface] is that users receive passive haptic feedback from the physical objects as they grasp and manipulate them. Without waiting for the digital feedback (mainly visual), users can complete their input actions (e.g. moving a building model to see the interrelation of shadows).

— Hiroshi Ishii, Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels

In The burden of pushing, pixels I discussed the frustrating step backwards we’ve taken with computers. The lack of a native physical interface causes more friction than we care to admit. But how do we realistically make physical computers?

My answer is to make the objects in our everyday lives super-mechanical. ¹ Through their form and interface, they strive to shed the negative connotations that electronics now carry. While computer companies are trying to shoehorn the complexity they know into new forms, this approach starts with familiar objects and maps digital functions to their physical affordances. Computer interfaces today require translation between hand and eye and button and screen. These provide a tighter feedback loop through passive physicality. Embedding computing into the objects already in our environment can be invisible computing as Weiser saw it: “…playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults.”

Meaningful mappings from digital to physical

We used to associate seven to ten random digits with a person, but we got that portion of our brain back with the invention of the cellphone address book. Humans demonstrate an amazing capacity for learning arbitrary interfaces, but making them more intuitive nevertheless allows us to spend more of our cognitive effort doing the task. So we’ve developed the desktop metaphor for computers, a visual language of push plates and handles for operating doors, and the task-based automatic transmission that abstracts away the gears.

The richer the context — cultural, spatial, situational — the less interface that is needed. Being familiar objects, super-mechanical devices carry a lot of history that can be used to create a strong association with the super-mechanical higher function. A wallet has a stronger relationship with money than does a general purpose device such as a cellphone. This allows a Proverbial Wallet to drastically reduce the interface overhead to get personal financial information. The wallet tightens as you open it, representing a tighter budget. The wallet expands in your pocket to convey your overall (financial) assets.

Honest objects

A danger with adding intelligence to dumb objects is that you create a usability minefield common to electronics. If the machinery between cause and effect is too mysterious, users will get anxious and lose confidence in the device’s reliability. This too often doesn’t have anything to do with the actual reliability, but with the expectations of the user.

Super-mechanical devices are honest objects. They retain the interactions of the original object, and any additional functionality should not disturb the essential experience. One way to go about this is to overlay the natural affordances of the object with the digital interface. In particular, the smart object should be as animated as the “dumb” version. Thus, the Proverbial Wallet has a hinge that resists the user’s action passively. The Nervous Chairs illustrate this exactly by subtly adjusting the amount of give that they present in response to the user’s weight. If objects stray too far from their true selves, we’re back to causing anxiety in users.

Post-electronic objects

Electrical power is inevitable in a networked object, but we can work to minimize its negative characteristics. As part of the move away from overt electronics, super-mechanical devices use as little power as possible. Nothing produces frustration like a dead battery or a misplaced power adapter. There are thresholds at which the relationship changes. Every ~~two weeks~~ month, charge your Kindle. Every year, clean the heat exchange coils on your refrigerator. Every two years, replace the battery in your wristwatch.

Even better is a watch with a wind-up mechanism. Ideally the super-mechanical device is battery-free even if it is electronic. The wireless self-powered switch harvests enough electricity from the use of a button to operate. Likewise, the wallet could generate energy each time its hinge is opened.

Do any of these characteristics sound familiar? Super-mechanical objects populate the world of Harry Potter — the media player that feels like a newspaper, the videochat service that looks like a pair of mirrors, the annotated Tivo in the form of binoculars. They’re all invisible computing, wrapped in a playful presentation that salutes the user and the machine. Call it practical magic, sufficiently advanced technology, or super-mechanical — this is what makes good tools and good computers.

1. Thanks to my friend David Carr for coining the term.

Remember when we made a connection by handing someone a photo?...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:37:26 -0400

Remember when we made a connection by handing someone a photo? Now we fiddle with too many cables, menus, and communication channels, and the person on the other end fades away. Can we return to sharing experiences intimately while retaining the power of digital communication?

Tableau is an Internet-connected nightstand that stores and retrieves memories using a Twitter account. It quietly drops photos into its drawer for the owner to discover. Images of things placed in the drawer are posted online as well. This is a humane alternative to the consumer electronics experience.

The inspiration for this is my great aunt Olga, who loves writing letters and shuffling through photos. I, on the other hand, write emails and share photos on Flickr, and as a result, we don’t communicate nearly as much as we’d like. Tableau acts as a bridge between users of physical and digital media, taking the best parts of both.

The Scoop was designed to immediately convey it’s function...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:23:48 -0400

The Scoop was designed to immediately convey it’s function while being inviting and alluring to the user…. I wanted to created an object that reflects the energy of our modern era, and be classic in form to last into generations to come.

This is everything I hate about product design.

(via Design Milk)

Mobile hapticons from Hunter Sebresos’s thesis on...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:12:44 -0400

Mobile hapticons from Hunter Sebresos’s thesis on touch-based communication. An excellent exploration of the kind of qualitative information that tactile feedback is good for, that we miss in standard channels. (via monotask)

"Disruptive Mega Trends"

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:59:00 -0400

This phrase comes up a lot in a strategy deck I’ve seen by a certain consumer electronics company you’ve heard of, one that is not Apple but wants to be. One slide says “Mobile Phone Business is disrupted so that it is getting more like desktop PC business.”

True. The no-muss no-fuss app model is getting chipped away by bloatware you can’t remove from some of the newer Android phones. (Oh, “open”? That means the source code is available for the carriers to lock you down.) The equivalent of “Punch the Monkey” ads are cluttering up the App Store. Even adding folders and a task manager in iOS 4 seem like a step backward.

If Apple’s swinging back to more complexity, I don’t hold out much hope for the other consumer electronics companies. As Gizmodo might as well have said about any of them: “Sony is rife with good ideas. Too afraid to commit to each one fully, Sony instead releases a ridiculous number of products in an attempt to see which might take hold, making many that seem like one-off oddities that even Sony doesn’t believe in.”

We can no longer live without these devices. We love them for their potential, we hate them for their complexity. Manufacturers don’t understand what we need. They all just throw shit on a wall and hope it sticks. If it does, it’s still… shit. They sell to the techies, and everyone else wanders into a store and gets the one that looks the most like an iPhone. These companies need to be confident of what is valuable to people and hone that. It doesn’t even have to be the thing that people don’t know they need yet. They’re engineering companies — let them optimize an experience. Technically, that’s what Apple’s done with a bunch of things. FaceTime, iPod, freaking UNIX.

Where Apple’s weak, is playing well with others: social networking, cloud blah blah, third-party interoperability. (I’m shocked Apple hasn’t created a self-congratulatory social networking site yet. It’d be like going to church.) That last one, no one’s good at; interoperability is the bane of consumer electronics. Everyone knows that you use open source and standards as a lever where you need to overcome a stronger opponent. Go open, there, and simply — you’re playing with our lives here.

"When you’re using a laptop away from a desk, there’s so much ceremony involved - opening..."

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:35:08 -0400

“When you’re using a laptop away from a desk, there’s so much ceremony involved - opening it up, clearing a space for it and always, always making sure that you’re not too far from the wall socket into which you will soon have to insert that hefty charger.
The iPad is such a wonderfully low-ceremony device. It requires only just a little more care than a book.”

- Fraser Speirs reviews a backpack and concludes, “It turns out that the ideal computer bag is not a computer bag at all, but making the computer so that it doesn’t need special love and care.”

This is the route I’ve taken with the iPad. Pristine so far, but when the first scratch comes, hopefully it looks good. I’m tired of serving my devices. It’s a weakness with electronics, that they are powerful in a way that mechanical engines can only dream of, but still physically fragile. Does this reflect the fragility of software not written by NASA?

Maybe my computer is durable, but we like cases because we’re not used to the idea of an expensive precision machine being tough. If so, this is a design opportunity to disabuse users of that idea, to make a computer look best when taking a beating. Make it say “I’m loved” in the wear on its skin.

Computing will never be invisible as long as we coddle it. Name your laptop Sue and make it tough.

"I use technology in order to hate it more properly."

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:00:00 -0400

“I use technology in order to hate it more properly.”

- Nam June Paik

30 pencil icosahedron lampshade, by Michiel Cornelissen. Not as...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:04:14 -0400

30 pencil icosahedron lampshade, by Michiel Cornelissen. Not as photogenic as his pencil bowl, but the connectors are a better object-to-repurpose-objects. At least in a designer/artist household, you probably have a lot of building blocks for this in a coffee can somewhere. With some different angles or bendier connectors, you could use all your stubs and create a bigger variety of objects.

(via Design Milk)

Baton 8-bit gestural sampler for interaction designers. In doing...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:10:00 -0400

Baton 8-bit gestural sampler for interaction designers. In doing research on interaction designers, I found that hands played a critical part in communicating the character of an interaction. Drawings and gestures might convey to a programmer the pattern of an LED or the snap of a transition. The translation from hand movement to code, though, is frustrating. I think this is why so many electronic objects feel digital instead of analog — it’s just easier to program a light to blink on or off than to get it to pulse like a heartbeat.

Baton lets you use your hands to create expressive output — instead of coding it, tap on the keyboard or use the mouse to generate samples. The program will export an array of values along with sample code to playback on an Arduino board. You can play back input as a waveform, sound or directly through your serial-attached Arduino device. I used it to quickly prototype the motion for my dashboard hula girl project. Of course, it could be handy for games or any software that you want to give character.

Download the Mac app. The source code is included so you can compile it for Windows or Linux yourself using Processing. A Wii controller would be the ultimate baton, obviously, so either wait until I have the time or contribute the code yourself.

Relief lets you feel data. It’s an actuated tabletop...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:59:54 -0400

Relief lets you feel data. It’s an actuated tabletop display by my friend and sometimes partner-in-crime Daniel Leithinger. It projects images onto a dynamic surface. The user can feel data (it’s not just a visualization, it’s a tactilization), but also pull and push the surface for a really tight feedback loop. That kind of immediacy you don’t find in computers, except maybe the iOS devices.

The burden of pushing, pixels

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:24:47 -0400

The repertoire of actions has become very narrow: the only action required is pushing. Movements have become very precise and take place at a finger level rather than a hand, arm or body level. Feedback is nearly all visual and provided by displays. The form of the product and the controls do not change: ‘form’ changes are limited to changes on a display. There is no longer any perceptually meaningful link between actions, form and feedback. Regardless of function, products feature the same ‘display + push button’ interfaces. These rely mainly on the users’ cognitive skills, stretching their abilities to learn and remember.

— Tom Djajadiningrat, Easy doesn’t do it: skill and expression in tangible aesthetics

We experience much of the world through computers because they are extremely adept at connecting the scattered human colony. Most of the information computers deliver is visual, I suppose because we have well-developed ~~GPUs~~ visual cortexes. But we’ve got at least four other senses. Hell, we’re covered in a touch sensor, and still barely any of our digital interfaces can be felt. Touch adds a critical dimension to human communication. Only the blind are ahead of the curve, and Braille “displays” prove that humans have a a very capable sense of touch. Meanwhile, the role of touch in operating machines has been reduced to binary button pressing.

Objects in the physical world give us plenty of information which we absorb without thinking. That information is usually about the object itself, of course, but some objects relay abstract concepts just as pixels do. The size and heft of coins in our pocket gave us ambient information about how much we could buy. A grandfather clock gave us information about time, not just in the chimes every quarter hour but also in the rhythm of the pendulum marking the steady march forward.

Now our world is distributed across space and information must be virtualized to be delivered. Our money exists in a computer’s memory in Delaware. We get the time from our devices that are synchronized to a time-keeping computer in Colorado. Pixels have taken over, but they’re lossy — especially when there are so many that we have to tune them out. Ideal would be an interface that combines the manipulability of digital bits with the subtle richness of physical attributes, and managing that combination with grace.

Tom Djajadiningrat’s quote above is from a section titled “The historical neglect of the body in interaction.” Research by the likes of Durrell Bishop and Hiroshi Ishii has made progress in moving the needle back. But wiring explicit information to objects is only part of the interface. Electronic objects carry baggage that we deal with in the real world, things like durability, portability and power. To improve upon the whole computing experience, these must be addressed with both engineering and design prowess. So what comes next?