POINT ONE: Presentations are about IDEAS, not TEXT.
POINT TWO: READING from SLIDES is a heinous crime.
POINT THREE: PEOPLE cannot COPE without some kind of visual STIMULATION.
Presenting the abstract pointillist powerpoint toolkit. 20 slides that can be used for any presentation. Cut, paste, copy, crop the slides to create an abstract of your ideas that you can then talk to and through.
WARNING: This is an ADVANCED powerpoint technique, for which you will need to be CONFIDENT in your argumentation. It should not be used by minors or those without the appropriate powerpoint LICENSE.
Download here
EXTRA BONUS: Why spend minutes trying to get the projector to work whilst showing your slides? Add the powerpoint testcard as your first slide, and check that colours, resolution and aspect ratio are correct. You can even check that your font size is readable (if you have to have words).
[7]
I’ve just come back from the social media conference at Futuresonic (the arts and music streams continue – unfortunately the rail system takes the bank holiday off, so I’ve unfortunately had to miss Agaskodo Teliverek and Wire).
I gave three talks, all in all, as did Matt Jones, and it was great to meet and talk with Justin Hall and Aleks Krotoski, similarly giving a number of talks or presiding over proceedings.
It felt a bit like intensive exams in ubicomp and social technology. The talks were all quite different, to different audiences, and I hadn’t had time to really produce my argumentation before the conference. This could be a good thing – they’re distillations of my current thinking. My notes are a bit sparse to maybe make complete sense of (I use more of a jazz style of presenting, riffing during a slide, being pulled back to the beat for the next) – but I’ve put the two ‘Point talks up on slideshare – see the comments on each slide for my notes.
The first was for Manchester Digital, a local trade group of new media companies. It’s great to see such organisations spring up around the country, and it felt like both the companies and the council were really trying to create something good for Manchester. My talk was about ubiquity of media, if not ubiquity of (Internet) connection. Most of it lays out the dimensions that I think are important when considering online media. It’s my first presentation in a Chinese restaurant.
The second was five minutes about social networking. I’m quite fundamentalist about supporting real world social contacts first, so I told a story about what happens when the line between online and real life blur:
My name is Chris Heathcote, and I am not an Internet celebrity.
However, twice in my life, a stranger has walked up to me in public, and said, “You’re Chris Heathcote, aren’t you?”
At conferences like these, I’d accept that maybe someone might possibly know who I was. Out on the street, it’s an odd situation.
The first time was 12 years ago, in a silly nightclub called Cruz 101, here in Manchester (I googled it last night, and it still exists, which is surprising, and even better, now bills itself as “the premier gay nightclub in the North West region”). At the time, I was prolific on a lot of UK newsgroups, and at some time, various groups had met up. Someone had taken pictures with their new expensive 0.3MP digital camera, and put them online. In public. And someone had seen them, and then seen me.
The second time was 3 weeks ago, in Tokyo. Someone else who was visiting Japan had known I’d probably be in town due to my delicious links. He knew me from when I wrote a lot about location, including a few pieces in Mapping Hacks.
On both occasions, I was terribly British, mumbled Hello, had a few minutes of small talk, and ran away.
I’m fascinated by social etiquette. What struck me in these situations was that the information (and therefore power) was one-sided – I had no idea who they were, yet they knew a lot about me – even what I thought, where I’d been, and who I knew. (I must say, they acted extremely nicely and properly, and any hang ups are entirely mine).
The bloke in Tokyo actually added me as a contact in Flickr afterwards, which struck me as a very nice thing to do – if you’re reading this, thank you, and good to meet you.
I’m interested that normal people will start having to deal with new situations, that maybe only true celebrities had to deal with before. There’s a slight difference, in that, I’m actually interested in meeting the people who want to meet me, whereas real celebrities, I would guess, aren’t.
This applies online as well – the death knell for many blogs has been when a stranger has comment on their blog or flickr for the first time. People think they’re writing or talking to their friends, an illusion that remains until the feedback loop is completed. I got freaked out in a similar way when someone used my open wifi for the first time – even though I’d opened it explicitly for that purpose.
So, what new social etiquettes will technology cause?
The third talk was about urban media, and I particularly focussed on context, data and metadata and the mobile experience for my take on the future.
It was really great to be back in Manchester. All of the time, save a quick walk from Piccadilly, down Canal Street, to Princess Street, was spent in the Manchester University end of Manchester, where I didn’t spend much time when studying in Salford. Everything seemed strangely similar, if very different, given 10 year off: a reality uncanny valley. There was a frisson of positiveness and creativity (and, well, youth) that was palpable and exciting, and I hope to get back to Manchester soon to do a proper explore.
The conference was interesting, but I felt pretty out of my depth with so much talk from a media art and critical academia take on life. I am, inevitably, seen as The Man in these situations, and was accused of flippancy in discussions about privacy. I worry about such topics more than most, so it’s a bit gutting. I do believe you can only see the problems once you build and try (and iterate) new things, rather than talking and discussing possible outcomes. I guess that will always be a difference of opinion with some, especially academics.
The Best New Thing I saw at the conference was Shannon Spanhake’s Squirrel pollution monitor, that connects to mobile phones to provide data points for a ubiquitous pollution monitoring network. The best thing is that she’s built it, and it works (it could even detect changes in carbon monoxide when a smoker breathed on it). Now she’s looking at visualisation and scaling the project up. Great stuff.
Oh, that, and RZAmaths…
Thanks in particular to Drew Hemment, Tullis Rennie, Tapio Makela and Matt Locke.
[1]
Psychogeography is an overview of the… movement(?), feeling(?) that’s quite popular at the moment. Russell had mentioned the book to me, and, like him, I’m uncomfortable with publicly handling the hot potatoes and sharp minds mentioned in the book. For me, it filled in a lot of back story, particularly pre-Debord, and has acted as a reader, introducing me to the following books:
Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
The Man of the Crowd (available in Selected Tales) by Edgar Allen Poe
A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe
Things Near and Far by Arthur Machen
The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen
Sorry to break the regular silence.
A quick note to say I’ll be speaking at Futuresonic. Say hello, etc. I really should work out the 3 positions I’m meant to take. They’ll probably take the form of “what I did on my holiday”.
Also, I wonder about the generally euphoric reception of Clay’s talk at Web 2.0, stating that, paraphrasing, if we just stopped watching a little TV, we could spend that time doing something more useful. We could build thousands of Wikipedias.
A few thoughts come to mind: I’m a bit shocked at the general protestant work ethic undercurrents. It’s not a cognitive surplus; it’s a way of coping. The real question is why these people are creating Wikipedia when they could be sleeping instead. We’re processing hundreds, if not thousands of times more information per day than previous humans – how are we meant to make sense of it all if we have no downtime?
There’s also a weird anti-consumption spin. Nothing is worth creating if it isn’t consumed (yes, yes, there’s gain in the process of making, or craft, also). What about if all those people reading Wikipedia spent their time writing it instead? The ratio of active to passive users, consumers to creators, will always be high, and may be pretty immutable, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be great if people did create more, and especially felt empowered to create, change, edit, curate, but we can’t expect them to do that without consumption and reflection. Time spent on the Internet (mainly consumption, remember) is overtaking that spent watching TV in some countries/certain segments – is that time really better spent because you’re clicking on things?
I’m a big fan of TV, too. I find it a flimsy argument that grinding in World of Warcraft, watching Youtube videos, or I dunno, playing Sim City for 40 hours straight (Spore is going to kill me) is in any way better than watching TV, merely because it’s ‘doing something’. There’s good TV, and bad TV, but I refuse to even make a value judgement of bad TV being worse than good computer games or web browsing. It’s just leisure activity. Passing the time. Taking a break. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You might even learn something in the process.
And I like gin. More gin! Gin.
[3]
(for World’s Best Urban Spaces & Places)
Not a standard urban space, more one that stitches London’s best together, The Thames Path slices through the city from the Thames Barrier to Surrey and beyond to the river source.
Other national walks, like the Capital Ring, are man-made; the Thames Path just officially links the many towpaths and embankments that have been trod for centuries. It tells the story of London, from the docks and heavy industry of the East, through to the palaces of royalty and the landed gentry – and the reinvention and reuse that any old city has to embrace. Pockets of modernism spring through, though: the Thames Barrier, Millennium Dome, South Bank. 21st century follies to those from the 14th.
It’s a path for walking, exercising, meandering, cycling, boating, eating, talking, remembering and forgetting; those wanting quick respite from the city surrounding, to those rambling from end to end. It’s London’s dichotomy at its best, a densely packed city with constant access to nature and the countryside.
I can’t think of any other city that can offer both the long deep history of a river like the Thames, nor the public right of way from one end to the other. The best cities have a river running through, but none offer the diversity of city life like the Thames – industry, folly, work, pleasure, greenery, countryside, but still unmistakably urban.
(original photos here)
Don Norman is a hero. Two of his books – Design/psychology of Everyday Things, and The Invisible Computer – remain touchstones: they led me into the murky worlds of user-centred design and interaction design. So it’s gutting that his last book, Emotional Design, and his new effort, The Design of Future Things, feel weak, unconvincing and without rigour.
It’s frustrating, as there are some interesting ideas here, both good and bad, but they remain unexplored, often thrown away in half a page, as again and again the book veers towards rehashing the same thoughts about intelligent cars and smart homes. Arguments seem muddled, often seemingly both for and against technological intelligence, and commits my cardinal sin: criticism without a proposal of a fix. It feels like 50- and 60-year old football commentators, complaining about the speed or intelligence of some player, when the game has changed since they ever competed.
It’s a quick book, but certainly not essential, and presses many of my hot buttons throughout – robots, education, virtual reality – and it’s a shame, as there are moments of interest along the way.
p5-7: Two Monologues do Not Make a Dialogue
...Tom dislikes his navigation system, even though he agrees that at times it would be useful. But he has no way to interact with the system to tailor it to his needs. Even if he can make some high-level choices – “fastest,” “shortest,” “most scenic,” or “avoid toll road” – he can’t discuss with the system why a particular route is chosen… What if navigation systems were able to discuss the route with the driver?
This is one of the most interesting ideas in the book. I’m a great fan of trying to let people play with their data (or, in my shorthand, Stamenize it). In a conversation with Eric a few years ago, I remember saying something like – we shouldn’t (and probably can’t) provide a view of data that answers the question, but a number of views that a person can use to answer the question for themselves.
p9: So-called intelligent systems have become too smug. They think they know what is best for us. Their intelligence, however, is limited. And this limitation is fundamental: there is no way a machine has sufficient knowledge of all the factors that go into human decision making.
I’d posit that these smug systems may have resulted from use cases, and traditional user-centred design. We’ve been taught to design systems for a purpose – preferably one purpose – collected through use cases and designed against them. Use case collection never really includes crazy ideas or tries to foretell unexpected and unplanned uses. Good design, in my mind, is designing enablers or tools that include the use cases given, but have breathing room, rather than designing strictly to the use cases. It could be said that this reduces usability, and it often does, but with the flipside of user value.
p59: Natural Interaction
Although simple tones and flashes of white or colored light are the easiest ways for designers to add signals to our devices, they are also the least natural, least informative, and most irritating of means. A better way to design the future things of everyday life is to use richer, more informative, less intrusive signals: natural signals. Use rich, complex, natural lights and sounds…
Like what? This is one of the most irritating passages. The only example is ‘the sound of boiling water’, which is trite, as it’s actually water boiling in a kettle. If you start using ‘natural’ notifications, they aren’t natural to the task in hand, and are therefore a learnt association. This is just how it has to be for intangible interactions. Even the most natural – a ringing bell of a phone call – is a learnt sound, from over a century of use. Notifications are a Hard Problem, given the palette of interactions we can use and the design constraints.
p66: Physical marks provide another possible direction. When we read paper books and magazine, we may leave marks of our progress, whether through normal wear and tear of by deliberate folding of pages … In electronic documents, all of these cues don’t have to be lost… why not make wear marks on the software?
Argh. No. This isn’t digital art. And again, it’s unnatural given the situation. If we have wear marks, we should really use the metaphor of real paper, and real books. The natural marks of electronic text are the links to, the referrers, the views, the links out: the hypertext, the associations, and the metadata. These can be visualised to provide implicit signals.
p98: When the day comes that the steering is under the car’s control, the car might very well decide to take you to the restaurant of its choice, possibly even preordering your favorite food for you. “what,” the car might say to you, “you mean you don’t want your favorite food every day, every meal? Strange – why is it your favorite then?”
What about an overload of advertisements or viruses inserted into the telephones, computers, and navigation system in the auto? Is this possible? Never underestimate the cleverness of advertisers, or mischief makers, or criminals.
There’s a lot of use of ad absurdum reasoning in this book. However, I get the point – I’ve been having discussions with a lot of people about the future of advertising recently, and there is a small minority of people who would see the scenario above and think it’s a great thing.
p114: Situation awareness… refers to a person’s knowledge of the context, the current state of things, and what might happen next. In theory, a person could still be in the loop, stay fully aware of the situation… being ready to step in when needed. This passive observation is not very rewarding, however… In experimental psychology, this situation is often called vigilance, and… studies of vigilance demonstrate deterioration in performance with time.
Noted mainly for the word, to look up more about, but it’s interesting paired with the notification stuff earlier. Thinking about mobile phones, you’re always in a state of vigilance – is someone calling me? have I received a message? – and you get odd psychological results – the fact everyone checks their phone when they hear a phone ringing, even if not their ringtone, the imaginary pocket vibration, etc.
p118: Consider the mundane task of making a cup of coffee… The result is that I have replaced the mild tedium of making coffee each morning with the more onerous need to maintain my machine… the automation lets me time-shift the demand on my attention: I trade a little bit of work at an inconvenient time – when I have just awakened, am still somewhat sleepy, in a rush – with considerable work later, which I can schedule at my convenience.
It’s an interesting trade-off, and one that would be hard to quantify.
p152: ((6 design rules))
I’m not going to list them here, as I guess they’re the nub of the book. But what I will say – there’s no proof that this list of 6 is canonical, irrefutable, final, and finished. It’s just 6 design principles to think about, 5 out of 6 of them being incredibly basic user-centred design or common sense. They join the hundreds of principles and drivers that most designers unconsciously think about when designing.
p172: Designers must be generalists who can innovate across disciplines. In turn, they must be able to call upon specialists to help develop their designs and to ensure their components are appropriate and practical.
I’m not going to get into the hoary question of What Is A Designer?, but I’ll say I almost agree – good designers are specialists, great designers are generalists who have a specialism. And lets not even go down the route of design vs. Design, design thinking, design strategy, or just plain common sense and business.
p172: It is time for a science of design… To date, engineers have attempted to apply formal methods and algorithms that optimize the mechanical and mathematical aspects of a design but tend to ignore the social and the aesthetic. The artistic side, on the other hand, fiercely resists systematization, believing it will destroy the creative heart of design. However, as we move toward the design of intelligent machines, rigor is absolutely essential.
Poppycock. I think we’ve already explored the fact that you can never ever break down problems into a complete set of use cases? Applying scientific rigor, such as old-skool usability, suffers from reaching local maxima: you will refine, but never fundamentally change an idea. Any attempt at providing the “science bit” only works if you have great designers who know when to break the rules (this is the slight-of-hand that Ideo play – provide a seemingly rigourous process to pacify management, then use designers who don’t need to follow the process to produce good results).
p174: ((a picture of Norman in a three-dimensional virtual space))
You have to question anything that ends on 3d spaces.
[6]
It’s been a busy year, as you can tell from the lackadaisical nature of this site recently. Like at this time last year, I’m about to undertake a new challenge once again – we do like reorganisations – but thankfully without the physical move this time. Anyway, time for a few days off – have a happy holiday, and I’ll see you on the other side.
Truth, Lies and Advertising was recommended to me by Russell, as I wanted to get a better idea of how the advertising system worked, what planners do, and how research was used. It’s actually a fun read, but what it boils down to is that good advertising is often about luck, and good planners can push luck in the right direction. Sometimes.
I have a long standing bafflement about the advertising industry, in that they can never ever say to the client that the product is wrong. I guess it’s just not what ad agencies are meant to do, even if the research says otherwise. Coming from a product-meddling background, it feels like lipstick on a pig.
There are a lot of similarities between design and advertising, notably the treatment of real market feedback and the opinion of the client, and I think this book nails when and how to do proper user research. There’s also something useful about selling the idea to people who don’t really care about the creative process. It’s also crystal clear from this that you’re only as good as your client.
p44: “..If planning is a new business tool at all, I would argue that its greatest contribution is indirect, by helping the agency assemble a more impressive portfolio of results for its existing clients.” ... “‘the consumer opinion is the only one that matters’ (This is a phrase that reappears in.. the book. ... What both parties mean is that ‘consumer opinion matters when it endorses my own.’)”
I’ve never seen truly objective research, or a research agency say in big letters that the product sucks.
p50: “A planner’s job is to provide the key decision makers at both the agency and the client with all the information they require to make an intelligent decision. It’s not up to the planner to make that decision for them.” ... “The kiss of death for any planner, however, is to claim credit for [their] ideas if they find their way into the advertising. Some of the most satisfying experiences I have ever had … were … when I subtly suggested something to creatives, and next day they told me that they’d had the idea I suggested to them the day before. Of course I would never let on.”
This stuck for me as it’s often what happens to me, and I used to be a bit narked about it. Now I realise it’s a good thing.
p62: “The first reaction of many advertising … professionals on being asked a difficult question is to say, ‘let’s do some research’. ... Do we really need research at all? ... The agency and client might be able to answer it themselves, without recourse to research, using some combination of their own experience, intellect or instinct.”
Very similar to design – and I feel that a lot of design is even harder to get a reaction to (interaction design even more than product design). A good designer know when it feels right, and hopefully the ‘rightness’ is right for the users too.
p68: “a client … responsible for a chocolate-covered biscuit called Club … briefed the agency one day on a product improvement, the result of a new technology that allowed an extra half-mm of chocolate to be added all around the biscuit… He waxed lyrical about the technology … and talked of a response from the British public to this great advance that would be little short of life changing … He was abruptly pulled out of his fantasy by one of the agency planners, who said ‘John… it’s only a fucking chocolate biscuit’”
I’ve been known to utter something similar. Most people are so involved in their products, they can’t see the context in which it’s being sold or used. Jones always used to say that our diagrams always put the phone in the middle, when for most people it’s really not.
p77: “Behind that mirror, which is of course not a mirror at all, but a viewing window, an assortment of agency and client staff are eating M&Ms, making telephone calls, and making fun of the ugly respondents. From time to time, these jokes result in uproarious laughter that, believe me, can be heard through the glass by the respondents.”
Been there (done that). The book has changed my antithesis to focus groups slightly. It’s also argued that the planner should be conducting the market research, which I think is close to letting the designers in the room with the real people – which in my experience is most useful during concepting and initial design.
p110: “One aspect of any qualitative research project that is rarely spoken about is the need to experiment in the first one or two groups… It is thus important that a moderator has the latitude to deviate from a discussion guide… or to introduce a completely new idea if it seems that [they] may stimulate a more interesting conversation.”
The best researchers I’ve seen have done this – and collated the changes and got them to everyone before the second day of research.
p212: “Planners are much more likely than outsiders to be able to work with a creative team to implement findings from creative development research… A successful debrief on this type of research does not take place in one meeting and a document, but in a series of (usually informal) conversations that are obviously not possible if the moderator and creative work for different companies.”
Again, backs up the planners doing the research themselves. One beef I have with research agencies is the inevitable two or three slides where they try to suggest how to change the product or ways to mitigate the findings. They are, unanimously, wrong. They have no background to how the product got that way… I guess that backs up the idea that agencies shouldn’t meddle with the product.
p226: “‘You’ve gone too far.’ said [the client]. ‘You’ve gone too far’ said the focus groups… others were able to see beyond [the visuals] to the bigger idea that Simpson had been trying to communicate, and they loved what they saw. This campaign polarised people as much as any campaign we have ever exposed… I have come to believe that a campaign needs to polarize people if it is going to be effective. It has to elicit an emotional response… if people are going to notice it and think about it.”
This is true for advertising, but is it true for design? Do you want a notable product that creates media uproar, or one that sells 10 times as many that no-one talks about? Depends on the product, I think, and what the product is meant to do and appeal to.
[3]
The new Google Mobile Maps is quite amazing, with its LocateMe function. In practice, I’m finding it somewhat frustrating, and I’ve appeared at the edges and outside the error boundary it displays on the map. It’s great, however, for getting you to the right part of the world to then pivot round a search request.
The question that surprisingly no-one is asking is – where did they get the data? The main stumbling block for cell ID based location has been the lack of an open database containing this information.
There are possibilities:
a. they did a deal with the operators and bought access to their databases
If Google have done this, they’ve pulled off the deals of the century, given the international reach. The operators consider this commercially-sensitive information, and also liked selling this data to users for 40p a pop.
b. they used a database created by someone else
There are only a few apps I can think of that have a database like this – the ContextWatcher research project, and Jaiku (but the Jaiku database of location lookup doesn’t include precise co-ordinates, just location names entered by the users). I’ve not seen a comprehensive enough database of this.
c. Google are collecting the data themselves
Two possibilities here – the cars they drive around collecting info for Google Maps also collect cell ID data, or they’re using customers to collect data. My suspicion is that enough Blackberry and N95 users were using Google Maps v1, with GPS enabled and recording corresponding Cell IDs, to collect enough data points in a few months to make this possible. It’s so hard to tell what data is being sent to Google when it’s making map requests, and the data is so small it seems viable to collect it this way.
I’m not too much of a conspiracy theorist, and believe if they are collecting this info, it’s only to make the whole maps experience better. This information could be tied to your IMEI or phone number, at most. This interesting thing will be when they hopefully tie together the web version of Google Maps and the mobile version (think My Maps automatically transferred to your phone). Then your Google ID would be tied to your in-the-world location requests. And presumably stored, for your own context and history.
[7]
Not dead.
Busy.
And in my spare time –
I’ve been pondering several things. Firstly, what design, and the design process, can learn from account planning. I’ve had a natural affinity with planners for a long time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of “experience design” is actually just designers doing people-grounded marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve generally found ‘design research’ to be rather woolly, so I’m interested in the research and analysis techniques from advertising.
At the same time, how to blend user centred design, experience design and interaction design with agile programming processes. A lot of the dogma of interaction design is about big grand design up front. Time to slay some dragons.
Seemingly very different problems, but in reading around I noticed a key thought in both – “you act as the conduit of real users needs into the process… you are the customer”.
So, I’m looking for any thoughts, any examples, any learnings from anyone reading this. Does any of this work in design? Is trying to tie the two together along with a design process just too much? What is agile account planning?
Questions, questions.
Away from computers with lots of paper and books for a few days to think and ponder more. Will attempt to think this through in public, so everyone can help and see what works and doesn’t.
[2]
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