Noel Dickover — Senior New Media Advisor, Office of eDeplomacy, U.S. Department of State — introduced Speed Geeking and ran the event with an iron fist!

FrontlineSMS

Demoed by Sean Martin McDonald, Director of Operations
http://www.frontlinesms.com

Main Point: SMS is cheap data that is easy to structure and moves over cell networks (without Internet)

Yahoo

Demoed by Gil Yehuda, Director of Open Source Product Management at Yahoo!
Gil talk about the use of Flickr for journalism, human rights, and keeping people safe. He raised the issue of copyright.

KIVA

Demoed by Beth Kuenstler, VP of Marketing & Communications
If you haven’t heard of KIVA yet, it’s time. They are in the forefront of micro lending industry — linking regular people around the world: lenders to entrepreneurs. Check them out:
http://www.kiva.org

MapBox

Demoed by Eric Gundersen
This is a for-profit company in Washington DC. It’s the first custom maps generator — on the fly composites of real-time citizen generated updates.

http://www.mapbox.com

Nexleaf Analytics

Demoed by Nithya Ramanathan
This is low cost sensing technologies: $30 per wood/coal/liquid fuel burning stove. The idea is to monitor in-door pollution. But it seems like the price is a bit high for the population they are going after…
http://nexleaf.org/

MedicMobile

Demoed by Josh Nesbit
This is a non-profit venture, located right here in San Francisco. The day after the presentation, SFGate.com came out with an article about them:

Tech firms offer solutions in developing countries

Main idea is to use mobile phones in rural villages to deliver healthcare — give access to medical care. They are using SMS — programing the sim cards for medical use. The most interesting thing about them is that they are using parallel sim cards: two cards in one slot! Not parallel, dual sim card cell phones, but sim cards one on top of the other. This is pretty cool!
http://medicmobile.org/

esri

Demoed by Carmelle J. Terborgh, Team Lead for the Federal/Global Affairs
and by Bronwyn Agrios
esri is about geo information systems — simple map-making and data sharing technologies. They are for-profit. The application works on the iPad. There was an educational presentation on the coral reefs. Carmelle showed how by layering information on the map, they were able to expose logging data with overlapping protected gorilla habitats. This allows the local government to act. Simple data manipulation visually exposes relationships hidden in tables and reports.
http://www.esri.com

iisd: International Institute for Sustainable Development

Demoed by Langston James “Kimo” Goree VI, Director of Information Services
This is a sustainable development group out of Canada: “provides a variety of multimedia informational resources for environment and sustainable development policymakers, including daily coverage of international negotiations, analyses and photos.”
http://www.iisd.ca

SoukTel

Demoed by Jacob Korenblum, President
This is a for-profit group. Their mission is to link unemployed youth with jobs. They use mobile phones SMS. They developed a service for job seekers to post qualifications. The employees search the database to find perspective hires. When I asked about privacy and security, Jacob said that they keep the names of anonymous and hide contact information.
http://www.souktel.com

NetHope

Demoed by Tina Lee, Associate Director of Strategic Relationships
NetHope is a hub for NGOs. It’s used to identify problems using technology. They provide the means to share capacities, share services, communicate needs. They are enablers — they can deploy, but usually pass on the information and infrastructure to the group on the ground.
http://nethope.org/

SamaSource

Demoed by Martin Anderson, VP of Engineering
They create batches of “jobs” that they pass on to workers in Kenya, who are having trouble finding a job. They are digital yentas — uniting work with workers. The people get money and reputation. They also provide training and education. They are non-profit.
http://SamaSource.org/

Ushahidi

Demoed by Heather Leson.
Ushahidi is a non-profit from Kenya. They provide technology — an open source platform — for fast, geo-temporal tagging. If you don’t know about them yet, go check them out.
http://www.ushahidi.com

Solar Sister

Demoed by Kathrine Lucey, Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Solar Sister is a business opportunity for rural villages without regular electrical power. They sell solar-powered lamps to local women, who then turn around and sell them inside their communities. One of the interesting comments made at USRio+2.0 was the power of light to reduce population: light at night allows women (and men) to do other things like cooking, sewing, reading. Sex is not the only game in town. Even in US, when there’s a massive power outage, all the hospitals prepare for the baby boom 9 month later. Imagine if it was a continuous power outage? Definitely a worthy cause! And it supports economic development in the community, by not only providing merchandize to sell but by allowing women to work after sun set (6 p.m. in equatorial regions year-round).
http://solarsister.org/

Development Gateway

Riccardo de Marchi Trevisan, Product Manager
“Development Gateway is a non-profit organization that delivers information solutions to the people on the front lines of international development work.”

http://www.developmentgateway.org

Open Mind — QuestionBox

Rose Sarita Shuman, Founder
Low-tech solution to providing information in areas of high illiteracy.

http://www.QuestionBox.org

gef: Global Environmental Facility

Gustavo A.B. da Fonseca, Head of Natural Resources
“The Global Environment Facility (GEF) unites 182 member governments — in partnership with international institutions, civil society organizations (CSOs), and the private sector — to address global environmental issues.
An independent financial organization, the GEF provides grants to developing countries and countries with economies in transition for projects related to biodiversity, climate change, international waters, land degradation, the ozone layer, and persistent organic pollutants. These projects benefit the global environment, linking local, national, and global environmental challenges and promoting sustainable livelihoods.”
http://www.TheGEF.org

Mountain Hazelhut Venture Limited

Presented by Daniel K. Spitzer, Chairman & CEO
and
Teresa G. Law, Chief Financial Officer (and founder)
The idea here is to grow hazelnut trees in Bhutan for economic development. They are using cell phones to track each tree’s progress with photos and data. This translates into a lot of data collection on the ground. There’s an opportunity for partnership with an organization that is interested in data from Bhutan: medical? civil? other?
http://www.mountainhazelnutventure.com/HOME.html

World Resources Institute

Nigel Sizer, Director of Global Forest Initiative and Deputy Director of People and Ecosystems
“The World Resources Institute is a global environmental think tank that goes beyond research to put ideas into action. WRI spurs progress by providing practical strategies for change and effective tools to implement them.”
http://www.wri.org

There were other groups presenting, but these were the only ones I got to meet personally during the Speed Geeking session at US Rio+2.0. To read my other notes on this event please click here.

On the closing note, Michael Jones, Chief Technology Advocate for Google, delivered a great Closing Keynote address. You can watch all of the presentations at the US Rio +2.0 site. I leave you with the last slide:

US Rio+2.0
Breakout Session
Education: Environment and Conservation

Attendees:

Prof. Anthony D. Barnosky: Professor and Curator, Department of Integrative Biology at University of California Berkeley

Wali Modaqiq: Deputy Director General (DDG), National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Dr. Khalid Naseemi: Chief of Staff & Spokes Person for National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Julie Noblitt: The Green Ninja — Climate-action Superhero

Prof. Robert Siegel, M.D., Ph.D.: Associate Professor, Microbiology & Immunology Human Biology/African Studies at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences

Dr. Beth Stevens: Senior Vice President, Corporate Citizenship Environment and Conservation at Disney Worldwide Services, Inc.

Madam Anyaa Vohiri, M.A., J.D.: Executive Director, Environmental Protection Agency of Liberia

Olga Werby, Ed.D.: President, Pipsqueak Productions, LLC.

Mostapha Zaher: Director General (DG), National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Our breakout group was partly the result of the conversation started the day before in the Environment session. Some of the members of our breakout group were present in that session as well. The main discussion the day before focused on the need for eduction: we have to give the people the reason to support the drive for conservation of environment. There are a lot misconceptions and mythology surrounding environmental science. Big media (movies, TV, etc.) has not done enough to change pre-conceived notions, and we can work with them to advance the cause of environmental education.

Saturday breakout session picked up the conversation from the day before.

Here are some of the themes that came up again and again:

1. Community Focused Education

Environmental education can’t be always directed top down–teacher to student; government agency to community. 

In the schools, we have to start early: elementary age students. 

Since parents often volunteer at the schools and classrooms of their young children, early grades provide a unique opportunity not only to teach the students, but also the parents. As parents help their children at school, they are getting “second-hand” education. In some communities (San Francisco as well as rural Afghanistan), parents never received formal science education. By teaching environmental science and conservation to young children, we also have an incredible opportunity to teach and engage adults.

So we want to develop curriculum that is teacher-focused, student-focused, AND parent-focused. We want to move information from kids to the broader communities in which they live. 

2. Culturally Appropriate Curriculum

There are subject areas which are deemed politically and religiously controversial. Sex education, family planning, even history education pose problems in some communities. In particular, rural villages in Afghanistan would have problems teaching some of these topics. So all educational materials have to take into account cultural differences and preferences in order to be adapted into the educational systems and to be supported by the local communities.

Madam Vohiri talked about the need to connect with the community, with people in the villages. She wanted education that would change the local perceptions.

Mostapha Zaher talked about Afghanistan being an agrarian society, with deep connection to the land and the environment. He pointed out that Afghanistan has 700 years of history. And materials created need to be respectful of that history and that culture. 

Fortunately, environmental education is one of the subject areas that fits in well with both religious and historical needs — protecting the environment is not a controversial subject.

Professor Siegel pointed out that we have to be careful when we talk about embedding cultural practices into environmental education. What worked to protect the environment 100 years ago is not working today. The population is much greater. The rate of pollution and the pollutants themselves have changed. Professor Siegel told an apocryphal story:

“He and a group of scientists trekked into the deep tropical forests of Papua New Guinea. After sharing a feast with local population, the scientist tried to collect their garbage (plastic wrappers and such) to take it out of the jungle and dispose of them appropriately. The local people insisted on dealing with garbage themselves. They took the wrappers, wadded them up, and through them as far as possible into the forest.”

The moral of the story: what worked for small groups and bio rubbish, doesn’t work for large populations and modern garbage. It is dangerous to fall back on methods that local communities were resorting to protect their environment in the past. We have to teach new ways of thinking about conservation and the environment.

Mostapha Zaher described a few problems that he is facing in Afghanistan. Most of the agricultural land has been contaminated with land mines and is currently unavailable for planting. The small percentage of agricultural land that can be cultivated has to produce a high-cash crop in order to feed the local community. Thus puppy crop is popular. While Mr. Zaher doesn’t believe that the local Afghani population has a drug problem, he sees the problem that opium export causes other communities.

The other problem Mr. Zaher mentioned was poaching. In particular, he talked about the skins of snow leopards fetching as high as $2,000,000 each on the black market.

The moneys from poaching and drug trade is being used to support terrorism.

As a group, we discussed affordances — you can’t push to stop poaching and opium production without providing other means for the local population to feed their families.

In Afghanistan, the government is very serious about environmental education. The government produces TV spots on conservation; writes in dailies, weeklies, and monthly publications; and the president personally gives a televised address twice a month to the whole country about the need for environmental conservation.

Mr. Zaher pointed out that his agency, National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA), has been able to accomplish in 5 years what took other countries 10 or even 15 years.

Afghanistan hopes to reduce the post war violence through education.

Most important point: public environmental education has to reconnect to local traditions and culture.

3. Use of Technology for Education

Both Mr. Zaher and Professor Barnosky brought up mobile phones as a tool to deliver education.

There are 26.7 million people in Afghanistan, there are 17 million cell phones. Most of the population 12 years and older has a cell phone. Afghanistan has almost no infrastructure for land line phones–it has leapfrogged directly into mobile technology.

An example of Bhutan — the cell phone reception in most of that country is better than around Stanford! But…a person might need to walk 2 days to get his phone charged.

Overall, everyone agreed that cell phones as a technology to deliver curriculum is an important tool for advancement of environmental education.

4. Curriculum Content Ideas and Examples

Julie Noblitt is developing a set of materials based on The Green Ninja — a superhero who saves the environment through conservation. Some of the materials can be seen at www.greenninja.com

Ms. Noblitt talked about the importance of good stories — stories are memorable and trigger emotional memories as well providing moral underpinnings to the environmental science. She pointed out the need to move from curriculum to behavioral change. Compelling storytelling is one way of doing that and The Green Ninja is an example.

Dr. Stevens raised the issue of effectiveness: how do we measure the effectiveness of a particular environmental education curriculum?

We discussed gaming as an educational tool. Mr. Mostapha Zaher told us that gaming is not what the youth of Afghanistan spend their cell phone time on. The “game” in his country is dating — the use of cell phones to find a suitable marriage partner. Again, we got back to the idea that all curriculum materials have to be culturally viable.

Prof. Siegel mentioned iNaturalist. This is a project that allows anyone to take a cell phone photo of a natural object and send it up to a “cloud”. The phone tags the geo-location of the object. The iNaturalist participants from all over the world help identify and name the object in the photo. 

iNaturalist allows kids to do real science — the focus is on “authentic” activities. We want to equip kids with the tools to do science — to discover ideas through exploration: don’t teach evolution — make the discovery of evolution inevitable by giving the community tools to assess data.

I brought up the Cost of Chicken project. The project is ran by high school students in San Francisco. They are using Ushahidi platform to collect geo-temporal data on the true costs of food: the price, quality, place of sale, place of origin, etc. Some food is expensive, some is sourced from far away countries. Kids discover the ecological consequences of their family food choices by collecting the data themselves. India, Greece, Russia are some of the countries where kids are participating by collecting data points.

Here are the URLS:

http://costofchicken.com
https://costofchicken.crowdmap.com/

(Note: the kids that started this project are my sons, Tim and Nick Werby)

I also mentioned Supermarket Science — a project we, Pipsqueak Productions, ran in a local elementary schools in San Francisco. The idea was to use parents as volunteers and local resources to teach hands-on science. As an additional benefit, immigrant parents were learning about the scientific method along side their children.

Roots of Peace was an organization I’ve brought up to the delegation from Afghanistan. Heidi Kuhn is a local social entrepreneur from Marin County. She works with kids to raise money and to help remove land mines in Afghanistan. She helps local communities plant grape wines. Heidi gives economic and educational opportunities to local communities and links them to communities back here at home. Her organization can be found at http://www.rootsofpeace.org.

5. Conclusion

While we covered a lot of ground in 45 minutes, there’s still a lot of work to do. Environmental education has to be culturally specific and focus on the needs of the population which it targets. There are small and large projects. Some can be launched right away, some take time. Some are already in progress: The Green Ninja and the Cost of Chicken. With a little support and ingenuity, we can get a lot accomplished before Rio +20.

Notice how she is able to quickly identify a Nike logo. And Disney’s D. And what’s really amazing is that she knows what a logo is in the first place! This little kid has developed a brand p-prim! And she has a well-developed comprehension of visual symbols.

I wonder how the same interview would play out in a different culture…

It’s impossible to accommodate everyone. A chair that is the most comfortable sitting for one person might not work for another at all (some people are short, some are tall, some are wide, some are narrow, some have back problems…). And even a beloved chair only works for in some situations for some particular time in our lives — the rocking chair that we used to read to our kids when they were little…

I talk about a chair because we can all relate: my “homework” chair, my “lucky” stool, my “lazy afternoon” stoop, my “theater” lounge, my “reading” nook, my “power” throne… It’s easy to see how my reading nook would be different from your reading divan or surfing seat. I can come up with compensations: I can add pillows or use the little knobs to adjust the hight. But the more things I have to do to make the sitting arrangement more comfortable, the less likely I’m to do so. There’s an interesting study that shows the results of office chair inspections — most individuals use the factory settings! And the more knobs and adjustment buttons there are on the chairs, the less likely they are to be used. We seem to just know when we like something or when we are comfortable. I know people who devoted a life-time to finding just that special reading chair — the quest is part of the experience.

So when I hear from clients the talk of “we want to be everything for every user”, I get a bit discouraged. I try to let them imagine a chair from hell — buttons, levers, pulls, knobs, straps, velcro, additional covers and cushions, wheels and locks, levels and indicators, monitors and readouts, remote controls and environmental adjustments, computer assists and internet support, limited life time warranties and customer relations databases… The wider the imagined audience, the more accommodations have to built-in and the more complex set of compensations the users have to learn how to navigate. And each user has a particular goal for the chair, particular use that they are thinking about…

I want to design great products, for the narrow band of users, who really want to use the features I’m developing. I want my design to fit the goals of the users for this product. Sure, some of my products might get wildly popular. But the more people will use them, the less perfect my product will be. So ultimately, product design is a careful balance between a super wide user group and one that is carefully targeted. Somewhere in the middle there, there’s just the right set of individuals — enough users to make the product profitable, but not so wide that the feeling of custom tailoring is completely gone. Accommodation versus compensation… a product design waltz.

In the past, when we googled something, we got results based on the relevance to our query. This relevance had little to do with us personally and focused on the topic of interest. Google results to a politically polarized question looked the same whether one was a democrat or a republican:

It didn’t matter that democrats tended to socialize with like-minded individuals — meaning other democrats. And republicans preferred other republicans, creating segregated social circles. In each such circle, people met, talked, and reinforced each other’s beliefs. BUT the Google results were the SAME for each group, regardless of what politics or religion they practiced.

All this is changed with the introduction of Google + data into the search results.

Now the search results will be different depending on who your friends are! The results are no longer unbiased, but heavily favored towards what you already believe in and who your friends are and what they believe in.

While some might find this reassuring — it’s great when the world agrees with you — I’m extremely concerned. I want the truth, irrespective of what I personally believe in or want to believe in. Truth independent of the observer.

Sometimes, emotions are just the right thing to focus on — to pay attention to. How does this painting makes me feel? Do I like this person? This music feels good… But if you are taking a math test, focusing on how much you really hate test-taking takes away from your ability to take the test. It is very common for individuals to “get” the subject matter, but fail the test. Some people are good at dealing with anxieties and some have trouble controlling their attention controls away from fretting. That’s one of the reason some educators are talking about doing away with summative assessments (final exams) in favor of continuous assessment (assessment as part of learning) — the on-going observation of students’ work tell us more about what they really know and what they are capable of than performance on one massive test.

But what if you had to function during stress? (Think nuclear power plant accident.) What if anxiety was part of the job? (Think repainting the Golden Gate Bridge or directing air traffic.) Or what if you simply had more trouble controlling paying attention to emotions (perhaps because your personally was more emotion-oriented)? How can we as designers accommodate a more restricted working memory as a result of emotional processing?

Emotional Scaffolding

Just like cognitive scaffolding is used to assist product use by providing contextual actions, for example, emotional scaffolding can support individuals and improve performance by providing emotional support. Many product designers use humor as a way to relieve tension and free up working memory from the grasp of anxiety. Humor is a legitimate emotional scaffold. There are others.

Color and Lighting. Interior designers, architects, and fashion designers know how to use color and lighting to effectively create the desired mood. Dramatic lighting can focus attention on a particular object (like a painting). Lights can signal emergency (red flashes). Bright colors can lift emotions and make people feel better despite somber circumstances.

Consider this little example of color use in hospitals and doctors’ offices. There was a time when doctors and nurses wore white — color meant to signify cleanliness and sterile conditions. But patients quickly learned to associate white with anxiety. Babies cried when people dressed in white walked into the room! White equaled pain! So now nurses rotate the colors and patterns they wear — Disney characters on bright backgrounds replaced starched white uniforms. Kids no longer could learn the Pavlovian Response of white = pain. The anxiety level was reduced for patients. Lower patient anxiety and stress meant medical personnel didn’t have to deal with emotional outbursts as much during treatment. More working memory all around of important tasks like saving lives and following prescriptions.

Music and Sound. Just as color and light set the mood, so do music and sound create an emotional atmosphere. In the movies, music signals the emotions we should be feeling in advance of the unfolding story. In effect, music sets expectations for the audience of the experience they are about to have. Play any scene without music, and the loss of information is very profound.

And it’s not just music. Think of the sound the dentist drill makes. Feeling anxious? Just this buzzing sound can reduce our cognitive capacity. No wonder that sound can be used as a torture weapon. But sound can also act as an emotional scaffold. White noise is commonly used to reduce environmental distractions. The sound of a heart beat helps calm babies and lulls them to sleep.

Surprise. A strong emotional reaction can aide memory. Storytellers (movie-makers, song writers, authors) use surprise to make a plot point more memorable. You walk into a museum, turn a corner, and a giant T-rex fills your view. You jump. You laugh. You will remember the visit and the experience of wandering through this exhibit almost in direct proportion to how high your heart rate went up at the sight of the ancient bones. Surprise is emotional. It trigers the amygdala, which in turn makes a strong emotional memory of the event. Want to make something stick with your user group? Surprise them.

Pre-visualization. What makes most people anxious is the unknown. By setting user expectations, designers can ease this anxiety and again free up space in working memory for the task at hand.

So here’s to using emotional scaffolds to help our users!

Affective Computing, I feel, is only recently became part of the “vocabulary” of computer-based developers. When I first started working in this field, graphics were non-existent, thus Pong.
In the early nineties, my business partner and I met with the president of Organic, a web design firm in San Francisco, who promptly informed us that his business had no need for Interaction or Interface Designers, that’s what graphic artists were for. Now, psychologists, sociologists, and sociologists are routinely hired by creative firms to help solve design problems. Times change!

There are a lot of posts on emotional design on this blog:

• Creativity, Perception, and Public Art
• Using Positive Emotion to Change Behavior
• Design for Emotion, for Empowerment
• Intel i5 Core Commercial: When a company just doesn’t get it
• Rewired Brain
• Cultural Differences from the 4th Dimension: Time
• Fun, Functionality, Flow: the 3 F’s of Product Design
• Media and Fun
• Creative Use of Media to Advance a Message
• Lost in Translation: Cultural Differences in Advertising
• The Haptic Feel of Books versus eBooks
• Good Idea, Bad Idea
• Empathy on the Brain
• Demonstration of Wealth
• Evolutionary Theory of Beauty
• Entropy & Design
• Knowledge, Context, and Expectation Part II
• Knowledge, Context, and Expectation Part I
• Cultural Difference: Kids Stories
• Trolls, Dolls, and Poupees
• Thinking About Value
• Toilet Games
• Emotional Design — Because Products Should Be Fun!
• ICT & Human Rights: A Round Table Discussion at IADIS 2011 Conference
• TSA: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• e-Waste & Product Design
• Branding & Emotional Design: The Culture of Sneakers
• Emotional Design

This is a very diverse list with an emphasis on product design — more general than Affective Computing. My main focus when I discuss emotion in design is that it is always there, whether by design or by accident. We, creatures of evolution, have always used emotion to guide judgement. Amygdala’s response time is far faster than any reasoning process. Thus we tend to make an emotional judgement first and than try to reason out why we made a particular decision with logic. Emotion comes first, be it on a computing device or on a playground or choosing the next car we’ll drive: emotion over reason every time.

And as product designers, we have to pay close attention to the working memory limitations — there’s only so much to go around. Emotional thinking takes up working memory just as much as logical thinking. When we talk about why students do worse during test environments (as opposed to less stressful occasions), we are really talking about the diminishment of working memory for problem solving by using it for stress: “I’m so worried about his exam…my stomach hurts and my hands are wet…what was that problem again?”

When we do user testing for critical applications, we have to test in stressful, emergency environments as well as calm easy going scenarios. Nuclear emergency is very different from buying coffee — a worker trying to find an exit sign when the world is flashing red might not get out in time, might not figure the door affordances, might get stymied by the door handle.

Recently, Siri — the AI voice on iPhone 4 — has been demonstrating the importance of getting the emotional tone right for the computing device. For us, Siri is low-voiced female. For the French, it is a male guide. Cultural differences matter to emotional tone.

The focus on affective computing is not new. But the explosion of research and desire to find the right solution for the right product has grown in the last few years.

Interaction-Design.org put together a nice introduction to Affective Computing. Below is an introductory video from that chapter. Enjoy!

How did we get here? This is a very complicated question, but it might help to examine how things use to be. Below are medications as they were packaged and sold all over America in the previous century.

Bottle of Heroin (1890-1910) by Bayer, sold as a non-addictive substitute for morphine

Cocaine Drops for children with toothaches

Cocaine Tablets (1900) was given to actors, singers, teachers, and preachers for "smooth" voice and maximum performance

Coco wine was recommended for mood elevation

Maltine Coca Wine manufactures, produced in New York, recommended a full glass with every meal (half a glass for kids)

Mariani Cocaine Wine (1875) endorsed by Pope Leo XIII who awarded it a Vatican Gold Medal

Opium solution for newborns suspended in 46% alcohol

Opium treatment for Asthma

Paperweight "Swag" for a German factory producing Quinine and Cocaine

The images below span thousands of years in dates of creation. The artists used light and shadow, perspective, and clever geometry of space to add meaning to their work. All showed an amazing amount of imagination, all provide commentary on current events or a point of view.

Happy holidays to all! Enjoy!

Not much to add here — how many other cool video games are there for visually disabled? Using tactile clues instead of visual signals is a nice interaction design solution. Well done!

But how does one go about “considering” user needs and then come up with a design solution that works? Oscar Wilde famously said: The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Pure and Simple design is similarly rarely pure and never simple to develop.

I my class, Cognitive tools for Product Designers, we explore what users bring to usability. We all arrive at the scene with different baggage — our experiences, education, perception, memory, and so on are unique to each of us. No two individuals interpret an experience in exactly the same way. While this sounds daunting, we shouldn’t give up on design all together. We all have some things in common. To examine differences and commonalities, we need to examine how people think. Cognitive science and psychology provide some answers.

In particular, in class, we focus on design as a problem solving approach. Users’ experiences, education, perception, memory, and skills are just a set of variables that make up part of the design problem. Business constrains, material science, environmental conditions, and so on are other variables. As product designers, we want to come up with a best possible solution to the design problem.

But this is just one side of the coin. The other is thinking of users as solving problems. Again, users’ experiences, education, perception, memory, and skills are what they bring into a problem solving situation: How do I turn on this light? Which TV is a bargain? How do I make an entree on my iCalendar? The environment and the product provides users is contextual clue — just the right information at the right moment to make the right decision and bring the user closer to his goal. Good interaction design makes this easy and reduces the number of errors that users make with the product; bad or indifferent design places most of the burden of problem solving on the user.

Interaction-Design.org did a nice job on their newest chapter of product design textbook: Chapter 11, the Philosophy of Interaction. We have a special early preview of the materials.

My favorite part is the video of Don Norman explaining the action cycle. What Dr. Norman is demonstrating is problem solving in action. This video is below, but more materials are available on the Interaction-Design.org.

The discussion on what happens when end users develop for themselves is fascinating. Most times, these users are experts in their own fields and are not software developers (some have no and some have little formal training). Thus there are cultural differences between “real” programmers and end users that take up programming to achieve their own goals, often because they can’t find what they need out in the world. These end-user designed products have strengths and they also have many weakness. In particular, these products are tightly focused on the needs of those that developed them and they are the products of the programming skills that these people have (or lack of those skills).

As an educator, I often point out that being a teacher is not the same as being a curriculum developer — the latter requires a different skill set. When the burden of curriculum development is placed on the shoulders of teachers, the results are very spotty. And the teachers don’t have the time to develop curriculum — teaching is a full time job. I’m bringing up teaching and curriculum development because there’s a parallel here between product developers (particularly software) and curriculum developers, and end-users and teachers. [Teachers have also been known to develop software.] After the product is finished, a professional product development team works hard to keep it up to date and up to standards, releasing updates, plugging up security holes, etc. End-users tend not to have time for up keep. The product works for them on their system, and that’s all they really need.

End users also tend not to document their code: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.” That was a saying when I first started to program back in the early eighties. Mostly, though, it’s about lack of interest in documentation — “I know what I did, I don’t need to explain it to others, it’s for my use only.” Such attitudes are common and lead to short product shelf life.

But the beauty of end-user development is that their products are usually great at the thing they do and they are very tightly targeted to their users and their environment of use. Commercial products have to be more general, end-user products are all about customization — products for one.

I wish we had more great, easy-to-use tools so that many people can take control of their environments by designing for themselves. Andy diSessa, my dissertation advisor at UC Berkeley, developed BOXER — a system that allowed end-user development. It was a great educational toy.

Interestingly enough, WordPress can probably be considered another end-user development system…

I could go on and on this topic, but instead, I’ll introduce you to Interaction-Design.org materials on this subject. Enjoy!

To watch the rest of the free videos and to read the chapter on end-user development, please visit here.

In the Galaxy Far Far Away…

What if sentient being evolved on a planet with permanent cloud cover? What if these being never saw stars? Would they still be able to discover the laws of nature?

These kinds of hypothetical thinking questions — the Gedankan Experiments, as Einstein put it — are very useful in science. I’ll try to use them here for analyzing product design and communication.

So what senses do we need to communicate? And what body appendages are necessary to produce this communication? Note that it helps keep track of these separately.

Aroma-bet

When I was little, I “designed” a language based on smell: each smell was assigned a character in an alphabet and, strung together in sequence, my smelly letters transcribed into words — the Aroma-bet. There were several problems with this:

• It was difficult to get an alphabet-worth of distinct odors;
• Arranged next to each other, the odors started to blend into each other, making “reading” difficult;
• I got a very bad headache;
• My mom didn’t like her expensive perfumes used in such a creative way…
• And I couldn’t remember what letter each smell stood for, requiring the creation of a smell-o-dictionary, which in turn used a lot more of my mom’s perfume, which led to more trouble…

But other then that, I loved the idea.

I haven’t thought back on my smelly language in years. But it came to mind again when I was trying to work out the boundaries of communication problem: what are all the possible ways we can communicate with our senses given the environmental and social limitations?

Audio

We use sound to communicate — we’ve developed sound-based language, where words can be composed of phonemes which are stung together to make thousands of possible combinations of sounds to represent concrete and abstract ideas. To do so, we need two things: ability to generate sounds (just the right kinds of sounds) and the ability to receive and comprehend sounds.

There are many different ways sounds can be made. Humans use only a subset of what’s possible. We tend to stick with what we can produce orally: phonemes, clicks, whistles, pops, and the like. And modern languages limit this range to mostly phonemes — ancient click and whistle languages are mostly gone now.

But other alien civilizations can use sound to communicate in different ways. Multiple body parts can be involved: clapping, stomping, whistling (ala whales and dolphins). And the acoustic range could be wider or narrower or simply different. Different environments allow for better transmission of certain frequencies.

And of course to use sound for communication, there needs to be a receiving organ. Humans need ears to register sound and audio-processing centers of the brain in order to comprehend the information streaming in this format. Some individuals with audio-processing disorders have problems processing sounds fast enough to understand them, unable to tell the difference between “b” and “d” — turning “dad” into “bad”.

Advantages of Sounds Communication:

• don’t have to be touching or facing the each other to communicate;
• there’s a limited range of communication — individuals around the globe don’t have to be participants in every conversation;
• can use and intermediary device to carry sounds to extend the range of communication — think phone, radio, TV, the Internet;
• can use different materials to change the speed of transmission — sound travels at different speed in different mediums;
• communication can be conducted in total darkness.

Disadvantages of Sounds Communication:

• limited range — have to be within certain distance to hear;
• sound is easily barred by walls and doesn’t do corners well;
• communication is serial — sounds are strung one after another in time, requiring a certain amount of time to give and receive a message;
• privacy is easily compromised;
• multiple streams of audio information are very difficult to follow — common problem in a noisy environment.

Visual

We also have visual communication — we use visual symbols as phonemes. We can string together an infinite combination of letters and words to express ideas.

But an alphabet is not the only method of visual communication. We can use images, as in photos, graphs, movies, cartoons, illustrations, symbols, logos, etc.

We also use visual information to gather data on emotions — during face-to-face conversations, the emotions expressed on the face and those projected by body motions and stands add an enormous amount of additional context to the spoken words. This is why telephone conversations and radio plays require more concentration from the listeners — there’s only the audio stream of information, which is very limiting.

Visual communication can also be serial without being written down. Sign language is an example of using gestures to communicate visually. Semaphore is another system for communication at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held flags, rods, paddles, or other devices.

And of course we have light signals that are used for directing vehicles: red for stop, green for go. This is also an example of visual communication.

There are many possibilities for visual communication.

Advantages of Visual Communication:

• the receiver of information can get the whole message at once — while books require time to read and the reader doesn’t get to “see” the whole story at once; illustrations allow for the whole to be viewed at once (even if it takes time to carefully examine the visual message);
• can superimpose multiple messages within different frequencies;
• allows for interesting comparison of data when presented in non-serial way;
• can be transmitted via different media: TV, computers, paintings, photographs, etc.;
• can be used to communicate at a longer range than audio (consider lighthouses);
• light travels through vacuum.

Disadvantages of Visual Communication:

• requires a source of illumination — can’t read in the dark — either external or internal (think backlit);
• privacy is easily compromised;
• has to be in the direct line of sight of the message — visual information does corners even more poorly than audio messages;
• data can be easily missed (that’s why eye-witnesses are so unreliable);
• can be cloaked by poor atmospheric conditions like fog or smog;
• the receiver of communication requires skills to understand the transmission of information (true for all forms of communications).

Haptic

Haptic are all other human-possible forms of information transmission: body movements (kinetic), facial expressions, hand signals, pheromones, smell, surface changes (touch). Aside for pheromones and smell, most of these require that the receiver (not the sender) of information is capable of getting visual signals.

But there’s one more sense that doesn’t require sight or hearing — touch! The most common example of touch communication is brail — a system of raised bumps on the surface that allows a person to “read” the message like one would read an alphabet. Only the reader of brail can use finger tips to gather more data at once than a visual reader of the alphabet by moving both hands from sides to the center. The reading of brail is still serial in nature, but more two dimensional than sight reading.

There’s also a form of sign language that is communicated through touch — Tactile Signing — think of the story of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.

There are advantages and disadvantages of haptic communication, some already explored above in the Visual and Audio communication paragraphs. The most serious disadvantage of tactile communication is the need for proximity between the conversationalists. But what are the advantages of this mode of informational transfer?

• can converse in the dark and in noisy environments;
• there’s no mistaking who the message is intended for — the people are in direct contact with each other during data transmission;
• can use more than just changes in the surface texture to communicate: electrical charges, temperature variations; weight differences; shapes and grooves within the materials; orientation in space; and even sound can all be felt through touch;
• for dyslexics, the serial nature of tactile communication can provide support and reduce error transmission.

Touch is a very rich medium of communication. Inca Quipu/Khipu culture used a complicated set of knots as a system to record information — the “reader” felt-up a string with knots and extracted data from the recorded message. Clearly, there are many interesting ways that touch can be used to conway information.

Back to Aliens & Gedankan Experiments

The range of possibilities for sensory-based communication is limited by the physical laws — telepathy is great in sci-fi novels, but is not possible in real life (although, direct brain stimulation as a way of transmitting data is possible). And the options of which senses are most useful for communication are depended on the environmental conditions under which communication takes place. Alien life living deep in the ocean would have issues with visual communication without internal light sources — thus we have wonderful bioluminescence.

Looking to our own oceans again, we can see the use of sound, electricity, and the slight variations in the “taste” of water to extract data from the environment and to communicate. What else? What other variations in the environment that are easily generated and consistently duplicated can be appropriated for communication?

These Gedankan Experiments are not simple flights of fancy. Think about possibilities, freed from excepted norms, can help product designers find novels ways to communicate. Gestural interface has its roots in sign language. What can smell and taste do for us and our devices? How can we use easily generated and consistently duplicated variations to conway a message? And would this message expand the range of possibilities for device uses?

Here are two examples of using fun to change people’s behavior, to make us do something we ordinarily don’t particularly want to: climb stairs and recycle.

November 17th Update

A fellow member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), David Watts, recommended the following:

Social Media Definitions & Ideas

Social Computing: this is really about groups working together using ICT (Information Communication Technologies). I think this is a broader definition then the one offered by Thomas Erickson, as it includes all forms of ICT.

Social Scaffolding: we all have a set of social scripts — culturally-specific, socially constructed norms of behavior — that help us navigate group interactions and allow for self-organization of crowds, at least shot-term and for a limited goal (like crossing the street). [Please watch Dr. Erickson's example of street crossing in "Video 4.3: Social Computing video 3 - Face-to-face Interaction as Inspiration for Designing Social Computing Systems".]

Product design needs to create opportunities for social interaction — these scaffolds have to be built into the system: meeting spaces, places to sit down, well-lit areas, easy communication tools, games, social events, voting opportunities, markets… Users need tools with which they can reach out to each other, engage in communication or other social activity. And users need context that gives reasons to be social.

I particularly liked Dr. Erickson’s point on manners and politeness: “Allow people to lie.”

Opportunistic Behavior: we all engage in opportunistic behavior, using tools for what they were not designed to do, solving problems creatively with tools that are available on hand. For a more detailed discussion of opportunistic behavior and product design, please read this: Advancing the New Machine UCLA Law Forum Presentation.

Conversational Interaction: social interaction where people negotiate information and its accuracy. Dr. Erickson gives Wikipedia as an example of Conversational Interaction.

Market Place Interaction: social interaction where people negotiate value of products and services. Dr. Erickson gives eBay as an example of Market Place Interaction.

Familiarity Continuum: social interactions form a continuum of degree of closeness between individuals. On one side, the interactions are Intimate — all parties know each other, share a history of socializing, have a short-hand for common experiences, even posses language short-cuts to express ideas or invoke concepts. On the other side of the continuum, there’s Anonymity — people enter the social interaction without prior knowledge of its members and without access to the true identity of individuals involved. Different social scaffoldings have to be built for different points on the Familiarity Continuum in order to support successful social interactions.

Time and Duration of Interaction: social interactions can be synchronous or asynchronous. Again, this is a continuum: how spread out are the asynchronous communications? In order to be meaningful (support the goals of individuals that are engaged in the social interaction), asynchronous communication tools have to be carefully designed. For example, it should be easy to recap the gist of the communication and individuals’ positions. For more on this, please read Jury & Group Dynamics.

There’s much, much more in this special preview and I encourage you to take a look at all of the videos — a time well spent!

Enjoy!

What I don’t have is an “old woman” cane — the kind you buy at a pharmacy. I’m just not that old, and plan never to be that old. I want funky, I want things that match my outfits and my moods. And I want them functional: the right hight, the right feel of the cane handle, the stability of the tip, the light weight, the structural security. I want it all and I want it sexy.

Cane is a product — a very personal one. But most are stuck with poorly designed, boring, ugly, you-make-me-feel-like-an-invalid cane. Why?

Aimee Mullins is a beautiful young woman, an athlete, a fashion model, an actress, and a double amputee. Please watch this TED video presentation and think about product design.

So it’s good that Google made a nice, unthreatening video (note the pink tee-shirt) explaining its position on SEO — “It’s not spam!” — (good to know), that can be shown to clients. Google’s authority on this matter helps alleviate some of the clients’ fears and makes developers’ job a bit easier…

Enjoy:

Intel has a history of making a particular type of commercials — “the power inside” commercials, I call them.

Intel marketing people use the following mental model: people/men like muscle cars; people like powerful things; thus if we emphasize the power “on the inside” people would like our computers. And so their current commercials for Intel i5 Core look like this:

So what’s wrong with this? It’s all about them, it’s not about me. I don’t care what’s inside the machine, I care what it can do for me. Or, more accurately, what I can do with it. It’s about my performance.

Imagine going to a car lot and the car salesmen tells you: “It got huge pistons. I mean HUGE. You’ve got to see those pistons!” Perhaps some car buyers would get inspired by such language, but I bet most would find it puzzling. Why should I care? Does it drive well? What’s the performance like? Maneuverability?

Intel’s commercials about its chips are just like a car manufacturer’s fetish remarks about pistons. Sure some would care, but most what to imagine how their lives would change if they owned the car (or computer). The reason Steve Jobs was so successful at selling his products was that he focused on us: what does this mean to us, the users?

Intel does make great commercials, but all of those focus on smart people doing smart things.

When it’s about people, it works. When it’s about chips, not so much…

That certainly took a while. And, amazingly, the bumper pads are still for sale by all major baby room outfitters, and parents are still buying them and using them with their beloved offspring. Why? Why would parents knowingly endanger their children? This is an interesting case of Mental Model Traps, Mirroring Errors, and Cognitive Blindness.

Mental Model Traps

Let’s start by Mental Model Traps that parents fall into in this particular case. To do this, we need to back up in time a bit.

The design of children’s beds had undergone considerable evolution over the last few centuries. Cribs used to be just large baskets with tightly woven sides. The weave didn’t allow baby’s arms and legs to stick out or get stuck between individual strands, and parents didn’t have to worry that they might accidently break or bruise the baby by bumping into the basket. This is a very practical design that is even used today for the very young infants and sold at a high-end baby stores (we call it wicker, now).

Similarly, cribs made out of a single, hallowed-out log or closely interlocking planks didn’t pose a limb problem. Babies didn’t have any “holes” to stick anything through.

The cribs, in the way that we imagine them today with vertical slots on the sides, are relatively new. But even these modern cribs have undergone a lot of redesign in the past few years.

A few decades ago, the vertical railings were very far apart, and limb containment was one of the main reasons that bumpers were included in crib bedding design. Today, the space between slots is mandated by law and is set to 2.5 inches — close enough to keep everything in, but far apart enough to see through and allow lots of air circulation.

One of the driving force behind the redesigns is the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). This is an independent agency created by the United States Government in 1972 via Consumer Product Safety Act. The job of the agency is to consider consumer reports, test products for safety, identify dangerous products, and make recommendations on safety. CPSC also creates guideline for safety standards. If a company creates a product that fails to comply with those guidelines and there’s an accident, the company will stand lose a lot of money in civil damages and may be charged with criminal negligence. CPSC has a lot of power to shape the design of every day products.

As a corollary, we trust CPSC and assume that if a product is out in the marketplace, it must have passed the CPSC safety standards. We trust that dangerous products wouldn’t be sold to us, and especially to our children. While some may question this trust, I would say that it would be very difficult to live our lives if we didn’t have such trust in the products we consume. There’s simply not enough time or energy to do personal research about every item we buy. When we go to the store, we hope that someone has done this work for us.

And this the first Mental Model Trap: we trust in the product we buy to not kill us or our children, because we assume the “government” wouldn’t allow the sale/production of items that could/would kill us.

But that’s not all. Safety is an ever moving target. What we considered safe yesterday horrifies us with dangers today. So the same cribs we loved when we were babies are now too dangerous to bed our own children. The target moved.

Mirroring Errors

Way, way back, parents slept with their children. There were no “cribs.” The infants were kept close to parents bodies for both warmth and soft comfort. Now, babies don’t only get their own beds, they also tend to sleep in separate rooms (at least in American households). Over the years, the babies mattresses got harder and harder. The pillows got pulled out all together. There were strong admonitions against the use of blankets. And toys were too dangerous to be kept in the crib.

How would you like to sleep all alone? Without pillows? Without blankets? Without even the comfort of a teddy bear or a bunny? Lonely. Cold. Uncomfortable. Unloved. We project how we would feel in the baby’s stead, and we don’t like it. We want to surround the baby with all of the comforts we can think of. Unfortunately, due to undeveloped motor abilities, those comforts seem to be killing the kids.

Yet, it is still difficult to let go of how we would feel in their place. This is a typical Mirroring Error. And thus the baby stores do brisk business in comfort items.

Cognitive Blindness

Baby furniture stores use the emotional reaction of consumers to push items that are not only unnecessary, but dangerous. There are ribbons and pillows, blankets and bed skirts, bows and curtains, bumpers and bunnies. All are potential hazards and all are sought after by new and perspective parents. As these parents imagine themselves in place of a baby — normal empathic reaction — they buy the items that they feel would make them comfortable (Mirroring Errors). They do this and yet they know about the suffocation warnings. They are blinded to the danger in their need to create a comfortable nest for their offspring.

And modern parents are not alone. Here’s a crib made out of gold and precious stones from the 18th century Ottoman Empire:

Those parents suffered Cognitive Blindness, too. But what they craved was different.