All about design

Here continues the thought sketching for my graphic design project.

If say interaction design shapes the relationship between technology and human, then what goes into the shaping process?

understanding of situation:  where does the relationship exist? what makes this space different, what constraints are there? specific user context? broader social context? what kinds of people are related to this? users? programmers? users’ children? users’ boss?yourself?

Empathy of users: feel users’ pain, discover hidden needs.  It is more than understanding.  This part is fundamentally phenomenology, where designers get insights from the fusion of their life-worlds with users’ life-worlds.  It sounds like magic!

Ideas: a lot of alternatives that potentially address the relationship.

design development & iteration: ideas are cheap. They’re only ideas without further development.  From abstract to concrete, incorporating other ideas, idea evolves into something tangible.

Communication: without communicating the design argument and design itself, who should we persuade to build the design?

My next graphic design project is to design a poster for a group or an organization to deliver a message or announce events.  Since I have no association to any club or organization, I’m planning to design a poster to convey what interaction design is for HCI/d program here at Indiana University.  My two year Masters’ study is coming to an end here, and I cannot express enough my gratitude for what this program offers.  The notion of interaction design this program advocates is also what I truly believe and what I’m working towards.  So this graphic design project is a great opportunity for me to reflect on this sophisticated topic “what interaction design is” and communicate it effectively and clearly in a visual way.  I’ll put some thoughts sketching here to get me started.  It is by no means universal truth, but should be contribution to the way of thinking.

area where interaction design works in

I would say that interaction design is part of experience design.  The whole package including the product itself, functionality, usability, physical form, aesthetics, services, price, and even the relations with other products is the experience.  Interaction design is part of this whole package, and it defines how humans interact with the product. It shapes and reflects the experience in the direct usage of things. Where the design will be at? mobile phone, web? what the design would do and why? how would the design do this? form? list? drag and drop?  Interaction design deals with all the way from the product vision, to concepts, mockups and prototypes, iteractions, to actual deliverables and design specifications.

(to be continued…)

Introduction

The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design industry is undergoing the emergence and development of the third wave of design thinking and practice, which is characterized with experience design, emotions, design for non-workplace, etc.  With the growing attention to the human experience of technological products, competent experience designers are of great value in the process of designing and developing technological products.   Read the rest of this entry »

The project 3 in Marty’s class last fall was about “finding your core, finding your WOW”, and I still remember how we failed in that project and how upset we were.  Since then, the core of design constantly remind me of how crucial it is to grasp the core in design.

The design of Vietnam Memorial can be approached in all kinds of different ways: politics, success or failure, masculinity, death, etc.  It could be anything until Maya Lin grasped the core: The death Read the rest of this entry »

The school starts tomorrow.  After my long and colorful summer, I really need to sit down quiet, look back, think ahead, and put myself into the mindset for a whole new phase of adventure.
My intern and Imagine Cup final in Egypt this summer made me think design from very different perspective.  I probably need two separate posts talking about my experience and reflection.  However, now I prefer to write more about what kinds of attitude and mindset I need to have for the incoming school year.
1. Facing design abyss again.  Anytime when I look back at a satisfying project, I always feel that there is luck there helping me out.  I’m not even sure if that is luck, or it is as Chad mentioned, the judgment and professional abilities you developed in constant training, practicing, and reflecting.  No matter what that is, design is such a precarious and messy process for me.  After going in and coming out this abyss or swamp,  the courage I need to have is not any more the courage last year before I started this program.  Back then, I was fearless because I knew nothing.  Now, I need the courage to jump into the one year abyss-capstone knowing how messy and uncertain the design is. Wislawa Szymborska said in her poem “love at First Sight that “Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.”  I’ll, and I require myself to, sincerely and honestly face my capstone, and really think about what group of people I care about, how do they live their life and how to help them for a better life.
2. Job hunting.  It is time to prepare myself seriously for jobs now.  First, finish my new portfolio site by the end of September.  Then, I need to do research about different companies, what they are looking for, what I can offer, what I’m looking for, what kind of life I want to have, and how to prepare myself to my dream jobs and dream life.
3, As usual, keep optimistic, hard working and reflecting.
Good luck to myself!

Bill Buxton articulated how sketching is used and supposed to be used in HCI design(of course he said more than that). last week, Matt brought up the notion that sketching is the preparation phase of doing any thing.  You write a book, ’sketch’ the chapters in your blog; prepare a presentation, ’sketch’ the slides out on whiteboard and acting; and so on…As Bill Buxton said sketching is communication between designers, designer and non-designers, which also helps designer to form ideas, and facilitates thinking. Yes, the ’sketching’ in other area provides the same thing. Now, I’m sketching my thoughts on sketch, without which the thought is only abstract, shallow and scattered. If you see everyday things as design, then you will of course do ’sketch’ all the time, no matter it is writing, presentation, discussion session plan or something else.

We have been dealing with “sustainability” issue for the whole last semester(Eli’s class topic and CHI student design competition), which made everyone burnt out including me. I cannot believe I’m still dealing with the topic NOW for imagine cup and another paper. I was asked to present our work on the imagine cup and paper in Discussion Circle, but was explicitly asked to reword the topic so that there won’t be “sustainability” “green” sort of stuff, because, we are really, sick of this topic.
However, this doesn’t mean that this topic is crappy or this issue is not important. I believe the fact is just the opposite-this topic is very important, and of course extremely difficult. We spent a whole semester but didn’t come up with any impressive concept, instead, lost in this messy topic.
Now, when I pick up this topic again, I suddenly found that I’m able to develop much deeper understanding of this topic and more clear vision of design. I kinda have a sneaky feeling that this is the value of persistant effort.After discussion with lots of people, tons of research, experienced excitment, lost and desperation, I can finally have a little better understanding. Here are some summary of my thoughts.
Sustainability design should first target on “the product and service itself is sustainable, which requires little effort from users.” For example, no matter what cool persuasive technology you come up with to persuade people save electricity, the lights turns off itself when there is no one in the house is much more effective in terms of saving energy. But this path is very difficult. It is very hard to design a green manufacture process, turn-self-off device, intelligent trash bin, reusable “everything” etc. Also, even if you can think of those brilliant solution, it takes way too much effort to put them into practice when the current system has exsiting “forever”. And it requires the effort not only from design, but also from politics, education and other social elements.
The best way to solve energy problem is of course being able to use other resources such as wind, nuclear, solar and even air, like the first path for sustainability issue. But we cannot get it before we extinct from lack of energy. So, we call for people to save energy. The same for sustainability design, lots of people focused on another path: change people’s behavior. Persuasive technology, saving energy competition, various incentives, newsletters, fliers, ads…etc. Well, this is not easy to do either because it involves too much human nature that includes prefer convenience, reluctant to change or make effort, like newer stuff and etc. It is very daunting to think there are so many people who still don’t care. But the basic logic in this path is “change one, change many.”(which is I learned from our focus group) You start with some people who are easier to change, then let them influence others. That’s why young generation education should include this issue.(Why we didn’t do this sort of work for CHI is because it takes forever to get HSC approval……)
Both of the path are very important, and require lots of smart brains. But any little changes might make bigger change. Sustainability issue requires much responsibility, intelligence and persistent hard work.

The topic of our first design club is to redesign twitter. There are some problems of twitter to solve, or you can come up with your own problem. Then we got 15 minutes to design,15 minutes to build prototype, then do usability test and redesign. Finally, we go over each team’s work and do critique. It is pretty fun to work in such limited time constraint, though my brain is really exhausted afterward.
From what we did, I found some common opinion of twitter. And our design shows common pattern in terms of addressing the problem. We all realized that Twitter is not only a place to broadcast your status, but also a place where public conversations are going on. Current Twitter doesn’t support following conversation very well.  This is the problem most of us addressed.
In terms of design pattern, we came up with many similar mechanisms to keep track of conversation, such as using colors to differentiate, moving twits to rearrange, accordion organization and etc.  However, most of us had one common question that was not answered well which is how to define a conversation. The twits use @reply to each others? What if some twits don’t use it but also talk about the some topic? What if some twits use @reply but talk nothing related to the topic? Who are going to sort out conversations? Twitter.com?How to let Twitter.com know there are conversations going on? Users? How do we do to filter our conversation?Do we want to bother ourselves to recognize a conversation and tag it? ……
OK, questions are endless but our design club is only an hour and a half. The point is the intense 90 minutes exercise made us think about everyday things, design, problems and solutions. This twitter redesign even makes me think about the impact of twitter to social dynamics, the psychological needs of twitter users, and the same questions in terms of other online social applications such as facebook. The more you think, the messier the topic is, but the more interesting it is, which to me, is the charm of design.

It seems that designers or design learners are likely to consider everything as design: portfolio is design, resume is design, bedroom decoration and so on. I recently realized that I plan my discussion session in designer’s perspective too.
This semester I’m the Associate Instructor for Social Informatics. The main part of my job is leading a 50-minute discussion session with another AI-Julie, who is also a HCI student. We were excited! We really care and want our discussion session interesting and helpful.
We’re supposed to attend the lecture session, which is a perfect opportunity for  “Ethnographic Observation” and “Contextual Inquiry”. We read all the readings and sit among students as we are two of them. We tried to experience what they experience in this course. We found that:
1, large part of the students are freshman;
2, only 6-8 out of 75 students talked in lecture, and they made very good point. They sit in the front rows.
3, the rest of the class are bored…
4, The intonation of the Instructor is plain and flat, which is not intriguing;
5, the content of the class is only discussing readings in the most common way: instructor says, ask question, students answer….;
6, readings are difficult, esp. for freshman;
After attending two lecture sessions, it was our turn to make our discussion session. We were both euthusiastic about it! We got a sense of our “user”-students, and the context during our initial “research”. We got several insights that led to our “design solution”. The insights are:
1, create a friendly, helpful and relaxing environment.
2, help them gain learning methods.
3, let them learn and understand things through class engagement.
4,let them care and be friend with each others.
Our design solution is:
1, introduction phase: We introduce ourselves first. let them pair up, interview each other(about name, major, hobby etc.),and introduce each other to the class.
2,  “study tips” phase: Everyone writes down one tip, get into 4-person group, tell your group what you write and why you think that is important, then every team has one person to share we the rest of class. We share our tips with them too.
3, Discuss course material: what is social informatics? technology determinism? We let them write their own definition on the board, and summarize key points with them.
What we need to do next: questionnaire, interview and survey to get to know what they think about this course. How hard they think the reading is, how do they feel about the lecture session, any confusion, frustration, or suggestion, how they think about our discussion session….
Every new discussion session is a new design problem, because the materials changes, students change, we change, and the whole context change too. We’re still excited and confident that our discussion session will be better and better.

Mixed Reality: Mixing physical world and digital world

Introduction
In the tide of the third wave of Human-Computer Interaction, the design focus has started to expand from work environment to domestic and entertainment space [1], which results in the changes of both the interaction form and design value.  In terms of interaction form, instead of limiting to screen, keyboard and mouse, there are more and more digital devices involving physical movement such as Microsoft Surface [2] and Wii [3].  In terms of design value, efficiency and accuracy is not the universal value any more.  But rather, openness to interpretation [4], ludic aspects [5], engagingness and intuitiveness are considered more and more important.
Some of the interactions that involve physical movements such as Adobe interactive wall [6], simply map physical movements into digital representation and reaction. But in terms of engagement of both physical and digital elements, simply mapping between the two is not enough for design consideration, especially for products with functionality. How to mix physical and digital to optimize user experience, and how to consider the relation between digital and physical need further discussion.
In this paper, I present comparative critique on two interactions that incorporate physical world elements, in order to provoke further discussion and critique.
One of the interactions is Siftables from MIT Media Lab [7], and the other one is mixed reality 3-D book: Earth Structure [8]. Siftables are a pile of cubes (approximately 3 inches square), each of which has a LCD screen. They can react to external manipulation; interact with each other and with computer according to different position and movement. 3-D book consists of a physical book (with sensory cards), a video camera and a screen. The screen is like a mirror reflecting the reader, physical book and environment image transmitted by camera. When putting sensory cards in some certain area in the physical book, there will be a 3-D image or animation shown above the virtual book in the screen, illustrating text content such as earth structure [8,timeline0:09].
The two interactions do not only incorporate physical world elements into digital media, but also take advantages of what physical and digital media can do best, providing users with seamless experience between physical and digital world. Respectively, Siftables integrates the analogy of natural interaction with physical artifacts, and 3-D book involves physical materials themselves.
Engagingness And Intuitiveness
Both of the interactions promote engagement and provide intuitive affordance by taking the advantages of physical world and digital media into account.
First, the interface style of the two interactions encourages users to interact. “All interfaces inherit styles from their predecessors and from the normative guidelines in the HCI field.[9]”As a digital interface, the  style of siftables inherits common LCD screen display that can be found in most digital artifacts. But, my grandma who absolutely doesn’t dare to touch the computer at home is highly likely to touch the siftable cubes. What makes siftables different is that the LCD screen is integrated very well into a small simple toy block-like cube, which is very familiar to my grandma. In her eyes, the siftables are barely more than toy blocks, instead of high-tech digital technology. As for the 3-D book, the interface encourages user’s engagement even better because the interface actually is just a physical book putting in front of a screen and a camera [8,timeline 0:10]. The style of the two interfaces utilizes physical world elements to blur the boundary between human and digital devices.
Second, they both provide engaging sensual and emotional experience. Mixing the physical and the digital provides the magic-like feeling that neither one of them individually can provide that well. “It is through sense organs that living creatures participate directly in the world about them.[10]”The sensory experience of 3-D book transcend traditional book by involving vivid animation as illustration. You can actually see the earth being cut apart just above your book to show the inside structure [8,timeline1:16]. It reminds me of the mirror in Harry Potter in which one can see one’s own desire, which is not only in the fiction now. As for the siftables, you can “pour” color from a “color barrel” into a picture[7,timeline1:26], seeing the hue of the picture gradually changes. The sensual engagement evokes pleasant emotional experience, which is “always becoming[10]” as more and more interaction unfold.
Third, both of the interactions feature in intuitive affordance. Siftables utilizes the analogy between interaction with physical artifacts and with digital information. How we sort physical photos is almost the same how we sort digital photos using siftable cubes[7,timeline2:46-3:07], in which the immediacy quality of siftables makes it as if we are only sorting the photos, not the cubes. Reading 3-D book is also extremely intuitive because the interface itself is the common physical artifact that has existed in hundreds of years-book. The only difference is the involvement of sensory cards, which is indicated clearly by the simple interface[8,timeline0:23-0:28]. The screen is a mirror of the physical reality, so that you can change angel of virtual 3-D animation simply by tilting the physical book in your hand, which is reflected instantly in the “mirror”[8, timeline0:29-0:34]. You don’t need to drag mouse or click buttons, instead, how to change angle in real world is how you do that with 3-D book.

Mixed Reality As Transcendence
As mentioned above, siftables and 3-D book take advantages of physical world interaction and provide engagingness and intuitiveness. The mixed reality of digital and physical world transcends either of them by complementing the drawback of one media with the advantages of the other media. The 3-D book remediates and transcends traditional book, while siftables remediates and transcends toy blocks.
When I was reading science book as a kid, I had some hard time understanding the complex science knowledge that was only explained in text and illustrated in some rough pictures (if any). The animation lecture materials my teacher made really helped me understand those abstract things. I was wondering how cool it would be if the animation is actually in the book. And now my dream comes true. In the 3-D book, the stable 2-D pictures are replaced by 3-D animation utilizing what digital technology can do best.  When reading the text, you can still read on physical book, which is exactly what physical media can do best. The 3-D book remediates traditional book by drawing advantages of both physical media and 3-D animation digital media, and enhances learning and understanding. As for the siftables, it is remediation of toy blocks, which suggests innovation as mentioned in Bertelsen’s paper[9] that” innovation occurs when the materiality of the interactive artifact is used in new manners or when old media are remediated in new ways.” Here, old media-toy blocks, is remediated in new ways such as sorting and tagging pictures, utilizing the strength of digital media.
The mixed reality combines the advantages of physical and digital media and transcends either of them, and also changes our notion of those old media such as book and toy blocks.
Development  Potential
The mixed reality promotes promising future of seamless experience between physical world and digital world suggesting new ways of interactions and expansion of our capability. 3-D book enhances our capability of learning and understanding, and also expands our perception. For example, if product catalog is in 3-D book form, by putting a sensory card on the physical book, we can see the 3-D presentation in the screen; if menu is 3-D book, we can see the food when ordering. Thus, we are able to perceive things better in short time. The siftables have much more possibilities since it is programmable device. Many other uses can be seen in [11].
But there are many other factors need to be considered. First, “each new medium has to find its economic place by replacing or supplementing what is already available, and popular acceptance, and therefore economic success, can come only by convincing consumers that the new medium improves on the experience of older ones.[12]” The material and economic dimensions of remediation suggest that new medium needs a balance between the user experience it provides and economical affordability it requires. The price of siftables and the dependency on other devices(screen and camera) of 3-D book are obstacles in terms of reaching the balance.

Conclusion
Siftables and 3-D book, respectively incorporate physical world interaction and physical artifacts into digital media, provide engaging user experience and intuitive affordance. They take what physical and digital media can do best into account, provide seamless user experience between physical and digital worlds, remediate and transcend either physical or digital media. Both of them have great development potential.
References
[1] Susanne Bødker, When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges, Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles, p.1-8, October 14-18, 2006, Oslo, Norway   [doi>10.1145/1182475.1182476]

[2]Microsoft Surface Youtube Search Result http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=microsoft+surface&aq=0&oq=micros

[3]Wii Youtube Search Result http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=wii&aq=f

[4] Phoebe Sengers , Bill Gaver, Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation, Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems, June 26-28, 2006, University Park, PA, USA   [doi>10.1145/1142405.1142422]

[5] William W. Gaver , John Bowers , Andrew Boucher , Hans Gellerson , Sarah Pennington , Albrecht Schmidt , Anthony Steed , Nicholas Villars , Brendan Walker, The drift table: designing for ludic engagement, CHI ‘04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria   [doi>10.1145/985921.985947]

[6]Adobe Interactive Installation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NRdyUx8Lc&feature=related

[7]Siftable  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbwzBBHtNGI

[8]3-D book: Earth Structure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RuZY1NfJ3k&feature=related

[9] Olav W. Bertelsen , Søren Pold, Criticism as an approach to interface aesthetics, Proceedings of the third Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, p.23-32, October 23-27, 2004, Tampere, Finland   [doi>10.1145/1028014.1028018]
[10]McCarthy, J. & Wright, P.(2004).Technology as experience. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
[11] siftables TED presentation, http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-siftable-co.html
[12] Bolter & Grusin, “Networks of Remediation” in Remediation: Understanding New Media (64-87)