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Posts on innovation, user experience, research and design

Practice-based innovation and the remit of the designer

If you design products, you'll love everything about this video.

What people really do with things is different than what they're designed for a lot of the time. They do with them what facilitates their life. And the most simple example I can think of is the crisp packet. And you design a crisp packet so that it holds the graphic, it looks good, it has some pockets of air so that you can open it up 
you can hold it in your hand and you can put your hand in it. And the first thing that happens is you go to a bar, somebody buys a packet of crisps, and they very demonstratively and kind of gesturally tear the bag open, place it on the table and then open it up because it's about sharing and they're showing you how good they are at sharing. That bag was never designed to do that.

The remit of the designer has to be beyond just designing things. It has to be involved in looking at the practices of the people who use them are involved in.

We forget that the things that we produce are not simply about packets of liquid or expanded corn starch, they're actually things that let people live their lives. And we need to kind of open up. And for me, that's the next stage in where we go. We call it practice-based innovation, which is looking at the real practices that people are involved in. And It's not about consumption. It's not about the sales. It's about how people digest the products that we produce, take out the bits that are great for them and then get on with their lives with them. And ultimately that may be beyond the control of suppliers and producers and it puts the people who are buying it in control of what they buy.

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Filed under  //   contextual research   ethnography   practice-based innovation   product design   product management  
Posted March 9, 2010
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Multi-touch in the Mercedes F800

While I'm not sure looking over at a screen while driving is totally safe, I really liked the way Mercedes overlaid images of your fingers on the screen to help drivers better understand at a glance where their fingers were on the touchpad (1:30). Also of note are the mini-van style sliding doors (1:20) . Nice ergonomic touch there.

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Posted March 8, 2010
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Foursquare is tracking your tribe


Foursquare is getting set to capitalize on an unprecedented understanding of the tribes that you run in. Tribes? Yes, tribes.

It was Sandy Pentland from MIT has first opened my eyes to the concept of tribes - people of various demographic backgrounds who move in and behave in similar manners. These tribes are not marked by your typical demographic factors like age, salary, marital status, etc. but are represented more clearly and honestly by who its participants interact with. His outstanding book, Honest Signals, covered the work he and his teams did with sociometers, which are devices that his research team wore around their necks to record their interactions and conversations.  Using them he was able to identify a number of powerful insights about how people really interact, who they really run with, who they are most closely related to by their actions and activities. These people were their tribe.

Now that smart phones are increasingly becoming packed with all the sensors you need to measure just about anything, you won't need a sociometer, you just need an iPhone. And now, Foursquare is providing some more information that can enable tracking of tribes:

via Techcrunch

Basically, Foursquare has just turned on a new layer to your location history data. And this layer is very interesting because it goes back in time to show you who you were with at a certain venue when you were there. Now, to be clear, it only shows you the friends you were with — not all Foursquare users. (But this means that they have that data as well.) Still, this data paints a clearer picture around your location history and potentially enriches your social graph. It’s one thing to say you’re “friends” with someone on a social network, but another to have checked-in to the same venue at the same time over and over again. Either you’re torturing yourself, or you really are good friends with that person.

Sure there's some great value here for you and helping you remember who you were with at certain events, but the real power is for Foursquare. With this functionality, Foursquare can identify one key portion of a tribe's behavior - traveling together.Not just who travels together, but also, when that tribe decides to take their business elsewhere by migrating. By harnessing check-in information, Foursquare should be able to know, perhaps even before a business owner does, when a business has started to lose it's popularity.

By monitoring who the tribe leaders are, Foursquare could get well ahead of that curve and provide a business insights that were never before known. If they detected a trend where a tribe leader was checking in at a competing laundry service, for example, they could provide this insight to the other laundry service as a heads up. "Dave has checked in with a competing laundry service 10 times. Because he is a leader in his tribe (i.e. once he finds a good thing he invites others to try that service with him/her) he may take some of your other customers with him if you don't win him back.

Just one example, but the power of tracking and following real behavior is a gold mine for marketing research, business intelligence and many other things that businesses are likely to find extremely valuable. So valuable they will likely pay handsomely for the benefit.

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Posted March 8, 2010
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OK Go: This Too Shall Pass

Just because this is too cool not to share. Plus the Media Lab helped design it, so there's an innovation tie in.

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Filed under  //   cool   humor   Ok Go  
Posted March 4, 2010
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Valuing a design decision

 

As their production costs rise to meet those of rivals, Hyundai is turning to design to generate differentiation from the crowd. However, as is the case so many times, designers are struggling to overcome some hard-baked manufacturing traditions.

From the WSJ:

Inside Hyundai, the designers battled a tradition that gave engineers and factory-process experts the final say in product design. In one recent instance where designers won out at Hyundai, the new Sonata has a thin line of chrome that stretches from the headlights along the hood and top of both doors to the back window. Keeping that lined up in production is a challenge for factory workers and, as a result, engineers resisted it, say company officials.

Now I don't know a thing about car design, but I've been in this same spot in the application development realm more times than I care to remember. However, I've found that one of the keys to being persuasive in these situations is to ensure that the effect of a design decision is measurable if at all possible. Don't just recommend something that's harder to produce, create a plan to ensure its value can be tested and proven. This makes the next conversation you have with that development team much easier (assuming your design was a success). 

Benchmarks/accepted research, multivariate testing, usability testing and other persuasive market research techniques are the way to go here as long as you've baked time into the development process to accomodate performing the test and making adjustments from your learnings . It really depends on your specific product and application. The point is, you need data to back up your design decisions or you'll never effect meaningful change toward the acceptance of your design decisions.

In Hyundai's designers' case, it sounds like they really went to the mats for this chrome strip. I'd be curious to know how they are going to show that this strip was meaningful to the market success of the car. Even if that were the only change to the car, you'd still have trouble with making an apples to apples comparison because of the larger macro-economic issues (global recession, etc) at play. But again, I know nothing about car design. All I know is that you have to be able to prove a design attribute's value if you want to make real progress against an entrenched, legacy culture or process.

All of that said, I'm rooting for the design team. They seem to have a clear idea for what they want to accomplish and are crafting an assertive design vision.

In all three vehicles, strong lines emanate from the front center in a way that's meant to represent the aerodynamic flow of an object in motion, a concept the company's designers call "fluidic sculpture." "We want to create some provocative designs," says Oh Suk-geun, Hyundai's chief designer. "We're not going to design clean and simple shapes. We want to say something." By the middle of next year, Mr. Oh says, "We will have a certain face, a DNA."

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Filed under  //   culture   design   transformation  
Posted March 3, 2010
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Level 60 Living

In what is easily the most interesting 28 minute speech I've seen in recent memory, Jesse Schell provides some thoughts on what may lay ahead for the future of games. One of his central thesis points is that there is a current, large-scale need to seek that which is authentic. From McDonald's selling Angus burgers to organic, locally grown foods, to games like Wii Fit, all of these things are seeking to deliver a more authentic experience to consumers.

We're craving authenticity and it's showing up in our games.
His speculation is that this is due to a backlash against an increasingly virtual society. As we move deeper into virtual worlds and communications, we seek more authenticity in our lives to fill the physical voids left behind.
Sensors take the game everywhere
The real crux of the speech occurs in the final few minutes, when he envisions a world, filled with sensors, which enable us to accrue points for our activities:
  • Brush your teeth in the morning, your toothbrush knows you are brushing and gives you +10 points
  • If you brush for more than 30s, you get another +10 points
  • When you go to eat your corn flakes, there is a game on the back of the box that, if you play, earns you +5 points
  • If you take the bus to work instead of your car, the government awards you +500 points for being more eco-friendly
  • And on an on
Presumably, all of these points would roll up into a master RPG type of account where you could skill up in things like Health, Awareness, Environmentalism, Relationships, etc. The whole point Schell is making, however, is simply that games can be used to drive positive behavior. Without delving into who is actually put in power to decide the right "positive behavior", you can quickly see the power of such gaming systems.
Level 60 Life
Whether or not this degree of integration of scoring could ever occur (i.e. one game to rule them all), the concept of using games to drive more responsible behavior is a really powerful concept that has particular note in health. People are awful at managing their health. How might games improve that?
Imagine if you went to the store and bought eggs, (+100), carrots (+50), bananas (+35) and bread (+5) but also Double Stuff Oreos (-250) and some Bud Light (-40). The scoring would let you see almost immediately the opportunities you had to buy food with more nutritional value much more easily. The goal, of course, would be to encourage people to level up, i.e drive more responsible dietary behavior. 

The same principles could be applied to any number of other difficult to manage or opaque activities. 

I suppose the one very important point to note here is that if you strayed from the positive behavior, you'd level down. This adds, perhaps, too much reality to make a game really appealing.No one wants to lose a game over and over and over. In any case, the video provides a lot of fodder for thought. I still think it's neat to conceive of a whole  whole generation of consumers becoming interested in leveling up their lives and bragging about having a Level 60 diet or a Level 60 carbon footprint.

View Jesse Schell's fantastic speech here:

Photo via Jeff Eaton

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Filed under  //   games   gaming   healthcare   Schell Games   WoW  
Posted March 2, 2010
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Dutch Bicycle Company: Building A Better City Bike

I recently gave a presentation in which I used the history of the automobile as an example of how a strong customer focus is key to creating breakthroughs in product design. Often times technology enables this change, but the one common success factor across breakthrough innovations is that the product or service better fulfills a need for the customer. So that was fresh on my mind when I came across this article on Dutch Bicycle Design, located outside of Boston. While their product may not be a breakthrough in the sense of Ford's Model T, it is a great example of customer-focused design.

 In designing the Swift, the Dutch Bicycle Company’s solution for the urban commuter, Sorger wanted engineers to keep a few things in mind: The bike had to be able to handle hills and snow; it needed to be designed for speed and maneuvering through traffic; and it had to be light enough that a rider could carry it up several flights of stairs to his or her apartment. The Swift also needed to be high quality, especially since it comes with a lifetime guarantee.  
 
“What’s most unique about a Dutch bike is the way they ride, the handling characteristics. Anyone who hops on one for the first time is usually very surprised how stable, comfortable and upright they are to ride in a city, which provides really great visibility,” said Piper. “You can look around your shoulders and be aware of your environment versus a lot of bikes we’re used to here in this country; they’re taken based off of racing technology and geometry.”  

Bonus: Check out the video of bike designer Brian Piper. Who knew so much went into bike design?

Most commuting bikes have about 71 degree angles. By researching a lot of the existing bikes offerings, we found, literally mathematically, there are holes in the market we can fill. Our bikes sit at about 64-66 degrees.

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Posted February 25, 2010
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Flyfire

I'm sure there are some non-commercial and useful applications of this but I just can't think of any right away. (Please just no helicopter drone-based ads for Celebrex covering over the few remaining stars I can still make out through Atlanta's ambient light.) Still, the attempt at bio-mimicry is is noteworthy if only because the natural phenomenon is so captivating.


Flyfire aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment.It sets out to explore the capabilities of this display system by using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each helicopter contains small LEDs and acts as a smart pixel. Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.

I have to think that non-linear wind gusts might wreak absolute havoc on any attempt at tightly synchronized aviation/displays, though.

Image via MIT

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Filed under  //   biomimicry   co-cocooning   Flyfire   MIT  
Posted February 22, 2010
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The View from the Naugahyde Barcalounger

The speed at which technological innovation is taking place and humans' and humanity's ability to cope with the resulting change is at the heart of so much of what we read int he papers today. Overexposure and overload are two words that capture much of that sentiment for me. But in my small world that often refers to keeping my Outlook Inbox clean, keeping my Google Reader feeds up to date. You know, maintaining and improving bit literacy as the streams of information become ever more prolific.

Reading this article in the LA Times about the lives of drone pilots who lead strikes in Afghanistan while sitting in nondescript buildings outside Las Vegas really paints a clear picture of this growing technological/psychological challenge. Now, I've known that we piloted drones like this for a long time, and Avatar is about the logical extension of this, but I guess it never dawned on me how hard life for these drone pilots is psychologically. As the article points out, it's one thing to ship out and go to war. It's a very different thing to commute 45 minutes and "go to war" and then commute home in the evening and go to your daughter's soccer practice. 

Of course, from an innovation standpoint, this is simply amazing but then military application has long been among the primary drivers of technological innovation. Often times the goal of that innovation is to remove soldiers from harm's way. Whether that mean crafting bows that can shoot arrows further, creating bigger artillery so you don't need to deploy as many troops to get the same job done, developing airplanes that can keep soldiers out of reach, or stealth technology that can make them invisible. All of this technology has been about removing bodies from harm's way.

The drone technology simply takes this to the extreme, although with an interesting change, which the article touches on. Drones have simultaneously moved soldiers to extreme physical safety while dramatically increasing their psychological proximity to actual action.
 
Locked in on a mission, they often forget they're in Nevada. Capt. Mark Ferstl, a former B-52 pilot, said drone pilots typically feel more intimately involved in combat than they did when they sat in actual cockpits."When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling," Ferstl said. "Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems." Nelson recalled one instance when he received an urgent radio call from a ground controller whose unit was under fire. "You could tell he was running, and you could hear shots being fired at the enemy," Nelson said. He tracked the insurgents and targeted them for two F-16 fighter planes that attacked and killed them, he said."Just hearing the voice of the [controller] running, excited, tension in his voice, just asking for any air support, anywhere, hearing the gunfire, it felt good to be able to help him out," Nelson said.

More to my point:

Though more than 95% of their missions involve gathering intelligence or watching over troops, pilots sometimes must decide whether to open fire The job also involves confirming deaths, by drone or manned aircraft. Then crew members focus on corpses and ruined buildings. "You see a lot of detail," Chambliss said. "We feel it, maybe not to the same degree as if we were actually there, but it affects us. Part of the job is to try to identify body parts.

As someone who periodically works from home, it makes me wonder how long before physical wars might be waged entirely remotely from the comforts of a soldier's home. Such abstractions are hard to fathom from a societal point of view but are clearly much closer than one might think. Is this what the new front line might look like? Is this the army of the future?

Reminds me of Toys, one of my favorite movies, which sadly was a pretty disastrous box office failure.

 

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Filed under  //   Army   Avatar   military   technology  
Posted February 21, 2010
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Products are Afterthoughts

Interesting video of Steve Jobs from a *few* years back, discussing the importance of core values for a company. He accentuates the very clear distinction between selling products as a goal and selling products as a byproduct of a core value. In Apple's case, here's what that meant then:

"What [Apple] is about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done . . . although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better."

Watching this reminds me of the following ad, which I remember having as an .MOV file and transferring from Mac to Mac as I went through college because I didn't want to lose it. If not for YouTube, I'd probably still have it on my hard drive.

 

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Filed under  //   Apple   Steve Jobs   strategy  
Posted February 16, 2010
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