weblog June 11, 2009   Making the invisible visible. From Time online's "How Nintendo's boss Satoru Iwata rewrote the rules of the game": "Our meeting closes with a personal demonstration of Iwata’s latest new thing: the Wii Vitality Sensor. Wii Vitality, which is expected to ship next year, is a small electronic thimble that sits on the end of a forefinger. It uses light sensors to measure the flow of blood, extrapolating information about the internal workings of their bodies. It is a natural complement to Nintendo’s existing health-oriented products such as Wii Fit and Brain Training. 'This is me in the office last Friday,' Iwata says, pointing at the video. 'I’m checking my relaxation levels. This can also sense whether you’re breathing in or out by the blood flow.' A visual representation of a human silhouette fills slowly with blue water to chest level to show that Iwata is slightly stressed. The sound of a metronome appears on screen, with breathing exercises. 'Now look how my relaxation level has changed.' The human silhouette is now slightly more full, of greener water. This is what I find interesting, Iwata says. 'The idea of making something that is invisible, visible is fascinating.'" Posted by fabio sergio | 1:54 PM | permalink ............ June 10, 2009   Singing the body electric. I recently had the pleasure of speaking at Frontiers of Interaction V, the 5th instance of the conference conceived and lovingly produced by Matteo Penzo and Leandro Agrò, held in Rome this year in a spectacular setting. As in the past it was a precious opportunity to share ideas about fascinating topics with interesting people, and to do so in Italy - where such occurrences are rare - was an added bonus. This year the theme of the conference was "Social Networks, Internet of Things and Smart Cities", and as expected my personal highlights of the day were Adam Greenfield's "Elements of a networked urbanism" keynote, Matt Jones' "The new Negroponte switch", and Andrea Vaccari's presentation of the work he's done at the MIT's Senseable City Lab. It was a pleasure to finally hear in person Adam articulate with his trademark clarity the (in-progress) key concepts underlying his upcoming new book, while Matt riffed on his recent joining of experimental design wunderstudio Schulze & Webb to talk about the current shift that sees products become less and less tangible as services actually follow the opposite path. A few random words that will surely find their way back in my conversations in the upcoming weeks: the Gershenfeld-Negroponte switch, physical snap-on APIs, Thingfrastructure. All in all it was a long and rewarding day, filled with stimulating conversations that will keep me creatively fueled up for a while. What more can you ask for? Given the themes of the conference and who was speaking after me I decided to steer clear of potential irrelevance, and had fun superficially exploring an area actually at the frontier of the day's very themes. When the smart city of interconnected things will come to be – if it has not already – what will be the implications for its human inhabitants? Even more vertically: what will living in such a techno-cultural milieu do to people's first-life avatar - to their body - and to their very perception of it? I briefly touched upon "the body as a terminal" and "the body as a node", and left "the body as a conduit" for a longer timeframe. What you'll read below (other than the ice-breaker intro, which I removed) is what I had originally set out to say. Of course what I did say in the end was different. I think. I always like to have a fairly solid narrative structure to follow for such events, but then I never rely on notes while I speak, to keep things open for the unexpected and leave enough tension to keep me on the edge a bit. Yes, I know, who cares. In any case: you can use the words below to try and make sense of the slideshow just above them. If you really like getting bored you can also watch the video of my talk. Singing the body electric I’ve been asked to be the first “in-person” speaker today, and tasked to somewhat open up the conference, so let’s start with a question: where is Ubicomp, metaphorically and physically? We’re all familiar by now I think with Mark Weiser’s vision for it, and we all somewhat agree that we live today in one possible – and possibly embryonic – expression of that vision. Thanks to our mobile phones, and laptops and wirelessly ubicomputing whatnots we live surrounded by things connected to The Network with a capital “n”. This “subset” of Ubicomp is what I refer to as Ubi-conn, and it’s nicely summed up by a quote I’ve used many times. "We are now in an era of pervasive networks and are thus more properly “in”, not “on” the network. Careful choice of prepositions helps to think more clearly about not only the stakes of cohabiting with things within the networked world, but also for thinking about how to design experiences for this very different mode of occupancy." Julian Bleeker, 2006 To paraphrase a famous European Vodafone campaign, Ubiconn is “all around us”. Invisible, but present. Recently Timo Arnall created a video that beautifully visualizes this constant immersion in an all-pervading, invisible flow of bits. Arguably the most tangible result of Ubiconn today is Ubi-comm, where things connected to The Network have us in turn communicate with one another, and now also increasingly with things themselves. We live immersed in always-on conversations across channels and media, and if you have been a first-day Jaiku or Twitter user, or now run a Facebook app on your mobile phone of choice and use it often you’ll know what I mean. In 2002 I had called this techno-cultural context “Connectedland”, and I had imagined that this constant connection to The Network would eventually become addictive, and that being detached from it would generate anxiety. More recently Kevin Kelly gave a fascinating talk at TED 2008 titled “The next 5000 days of the web”, in which he spoke about the Internet evolving into the "One Machine", and pointed to the fact that we will be fully co-dependent upon it (and thus upon the tools that will sustain that very connection). Yes. Now within this context here’s the space I’d like to superficially explore today: how is this techno-cultural evolution changing our body and our perception of it? The body as a terminal You could say that this whole train of thought started a few years ago, in November 2005, while reading a Wired article written by Michael Chorost - “My Bionic Quest for Bolero” - which later became a book. The author describes his own descent into a world of silence, and how he decides to undergo the most invasive treatment currently available to regain his hearing and experience again Ravel’s famous Bolero as he remembers it. “A cochlear implant, as it is known, would trigger my auditory nerves with 16 electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear.” Michael Chorost, 2005 What I found extremely fascinating about the unfortunate experience described in the article is that it basically talked about software augmenting the senses (a diminished sense in this case, but still). As the author loaded different software releases into his high-tech hearing aid he could hear various sound ranges differently, until he found one combination that enabled him to experience his favorite music again the way he remembered hearing it naturally. In other words, the article talked about mediating and enhancing our (auditory) perception of the world, through software. Think about that for a second. Many people would say that all our perceptions of the world are mediated though software, but I am talking about human-coded software in this case. Weirdly enough though the question that came to mind there and then was: “When will we start to consider having a face to face conversation over the phone?” See, I think we’ve all been there, overhearing somebody else’s conversation because other people were simply talking too loudly, because of the context. Maybe they had no choice, they had to have that conversation right there and then, maybe they did not care, who knows. But still. Now enter the Jawbone. This is not just a beautiful (Yves Behar-designed) Bluetooth headset, it also comes loaded with what they claim to be state-of-the-art noise-suppression technology. This is software that basically eliminates all ambient noise and leaves your voice to be the signal. Now. Would you consider using this tool to talk to somebody face to face, if it allowed you to hear them better or if you just wanted more privacy? Think about this for a minute. I actually think I would. I actually think I will, one of these days. This is not an isolated example of course, as many hearing aids come with similar features. For example Phonak – a swiss hearing-aid manufacturer (full disclosure: Phonak is one of frog design's current clients) - has a feature in their high-end products to fine-tune sound settings for specific contexts (even more interestingly hearing aids for kids need to leave “noise” in to get them to learn how to hear, but that’s completely off-topic). Now bearing all of the above in mind consider Lyric Hearing. This is a revolutionary (read: invisible) in-ear hearing aid, intended to be worn 24/7, for 30 days or more at a time. Did anybody think “implant”? Did anybody think “what if this was Bluetooth-enabled and it could connect to my mobile phone”? Did anybody think "what about a version with noise-suppression for people without hearing disabilities"? So did I. Talk about “I am hearing voices”: such a combination might up the ante when it comes to making it difficult to tell global village fools from people that are just talking on their mobile phone. We might soon all be hearing voices: our own conversations, relayed by the One Machine. Contemplating your own discomfort Time to switch sense and move to sight. Visions of smart cities and spaces have shaped our collective imagination around augmented reality, an invisible digital layer overlaid on top of a visible physical one. Common scenarios to reveal the hidden data layer usually involve “glasses of true seeing” of some sort. Take for example the interesting work of Japanese designer Mac Fuminazu. On his website - Petit Invention - he has created a series of concepts along these lines. The idea is fairly simple: an invisible physical layer that makes the invisible digital layer visible. Got it? Physically invisible makes visible the digitally invisible on top of the physically visible. Anyway, these concepts are, well, nice, cute even, and their early commercial applications are already available. For example Wikitude, an Adroid-based application, uses GPS and the camera of a mobile device to show Wikipedia entries overlayed on top of the physical landmarks they refer to. Now. Let’s look at another execution of the same idea. Not so cute. Quite the contrary even. I will thus ask you for the first time today to do something I had to do myself when I first saw this concept, and others that will follow as well. Play Buddhist and try to "contemplate your own discomfort": suspend judgment for a few minutes and ask yourself why that discomfort comes to be, and if it is just cultural – and thus could change – or if it goes deeper. The reason why you should think about it is that I believe something like this mask will come, whether we like it or not, and it’s essential to consider implications sooner, rather than later. This mask is a “mixed reality visor” designed by Ralph Bremenkamp, a talented colleague of mine at frog design. The whole idea here is of course immersion, immersion in an alternative digital reality, but also of course disconnection, disconnection from the physical world surrounding the wearer. It is basically a product to live full time in the "invisible digital layer" rather than in the "visible physical one". It is also something that looks like it’s been grafted onto the face of the wearer. Obviously it’s esthetically meant to appeal to current “extreme” communities and to a specific age range, but still. Disabled enablement (more along the lines of the Wired article) Of course at this point any Science Fiction fan will have zeroed-in onto where I am heading. It’s been described in movies, comics, novels, you name the medium. One reference to rule them all, following up on the mask you just saw: William Gibson’s Molly Millions and her vision-enhancing implanted mirror lenses. Disturbing but cool, right? Well... I’d like to avoid that tangent and follow another one. When it comes to augmentations and cyborgs more realistic images like this one come to mind. These are mid-90's self-proclaimed "borgs" (read: geeks) at the MIT, overloaded with PC paraphernalia and looking – quite honestly – pretty ridiculous. Of course these visions have evolved in the meantime, and just last year the tech world was abuzz with videos of Pranav Mistry’s 6th Sense, showing that cyborgs have gotten themselves better tools now. Too bad that they are still wear(abl)ing things that bounce around their necks and hide in their backpacks. Let’s now sit again on our discomfort for a second, and ask ourselves a question that’s just plain weird: “Would you give away an eye, to have it replaced with a camera?” Anybody in their right of mind would (or should) answer a loud “no”. But what If you were missing an eye in the first place? As you might have read Rob Spence, who lost his right eye in a childhood accident, has been developing with a friend of his a prototype camera that will replace his artificial eye, and wirelessly beam video to a nearby screen or hard disk. I think we’re all familiar by now with the concept of Lifelogging – capturing multimedia information about every single moment of one’s life – but this is something entirely different. This is invisible technology built into the body that requires no effort on behalf of the wearer, following his every gaze and recording everything he sees unbeknownst to others around him. What will this do our perception of one another? What will this do to our memory-shaping practices? Time to move on: here’s another video, which will have us focus away from our senses and onto our outer boundary, our skin. This is what Philips Design calls a “design probe”, and it shows how some sort of nano sub-dermal e-ink will react to touch and pressure, enhancing our body and making it a dynamic surface for self-expression. Somewhat sensual, and somewhat disturbing. If you think this is science fiction you are of course right, but here’s a quasi-realistic implementation of what you just saw (it is a concept again, so I am cheating a bit). This is a Bluetooth-enabled sub-dermal black & white screen. Imagine using your phone, or any other Bluetooth-capable device, to beam images to it, so that they will show from under your skin. Cool? Creepy? Yes, Indeed. The body as a node We've been briefly exploring the body as a terminal, as a destination for digital information if you will. Then there's the body as a pulsating active node on The Network. Of course there's the banal: the body's location in time and space turned into an always-on stream of bits. Google Latitude comes to mind. Still in the same realm there are companies that build their service models on tracking data produced by the body as it's exercising, companies like Suunto, Polar or Nike. Heart-rate monitors and pedometers and GPS watches of all kinds, now ready to stream biostats to a portable networked device. Lately also Nintendo jumped into the melee with its Wii Vitality Sensor, which promises to use the gamer's heart rate to change playing conditions. Maybe. I don’t need to tell you that healthcare is the field were most of these visions come with real business models and tangible economic incentives. I am of course talking about constant monitoring of one's heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen and glucose levels etc. Frog Milano is currently running with a few partners a research program called E-monitors that precisely looks at this opportunity area, and will result in the working prototype of an open platform for integrating a network of biosensors. Here's another example along these lines, one where again we might all feel somewhat uncomfortable, but also an example of something that can make the difference for people suffering from diabetes, promising to greatly improve their quality of life: the Dexcom diabetes management system includes a self-implantable sensor, a small data-emitting pod that attaches to it and a glucose meter that can make sense of the data or drive an insulin pump directly. The overall apparatus is still quite clunky to be honest, but you can easily see it as a promising first step towards nimbler executions. In addition the whole idea of performing what is for all purposes self-micro-surgery is mind-boggling to say the least, but again just a glimpse of what lies ahead. What all of the examples above point to it's clearly a basic product/service architecture that will likely be the reference for the near future when it comes to the body as a node. Something sensing and implanted transmitting wirelessly to a larger wearable hub, which distributes data to other nearby devices and aggregates it, making it take the long jump straight to the One Machine for long-term storage and mining. Mass-market enablers for this product/service infrastructure are already in place. Devices like Apple's iPhone are now powerful enough to process massive amounts of data, and come with Bluetooth enhancements that enable them to act as bridges between “sensors” of all sorts and The Network itself. The most interesting aspect here is that all of these scenarios see the body becoming for all purposes an always-on, always-connected, always-communicating source of biodata, pulsating bits with its every heartbeat. Infamous last words One last consideration, one last reference and one last (weird) question. Here’s the last consideration. Remember Timo Arnall’s video at the beginning? In the future that thing absorbing and beaming invisible bits won’t be a device you’ll be wearing. It will be you. Here's the last reference. In one of the latest evolutions of the Iron-Man character Tony Stark controls his all-empowering metal suit by interfacing with it directly through a membrane on his bones, no interface strings attached. At one point he reveals: "I can see through satellites now." We know how that feels by now, right? Here’s the last question. “How quickly is a digitally augmented, mixed reality leading us to feel the need for an augmented body to fully take advantage of it?” In other words: would you give an eye to see through satellites? Posted by fabio sergio | 1:53 PM | permalink ............ April 21, 2009   Davide. Our baby boy Davide was born today, at 10:12 AM. Welcome to the world little one, our hearts instantly expanded to house double the love. Posted by fabio sergio | 10:12 AM | permalink ............ March 11, 2009   LIFT 09, future-proof design. I recently had the luck of spending a few stimulating days at LIFT 09. As in the past the pre-conference workshops and two full days of interesting conversations flooded my slow brain with ideas that have started sedimenting, hopefully to then resurface in my thinking patterns in the upcoming months. I found many talks to be particularly relevant - Nicolas Nova's thoughts on how to learn from "failed futures", David Rose's musings on basic human needs and leveraging magic as a metaphor for connected products, Matt Webb's usual mix of genius and madness and Anab Jain's fantastic video reportages from Little Brinkland - but it was Dan Hill's presentation that stood out as my personal highlight from the whole conference. What made Dan's talk great was not just the content - a rich introduction to the upcoming challenges and opportunities posed by Urban Informatics - but also the way in which he supported his argument with almost-real-time storytelling layered over a masterfully orchestrated sequence of images and quotes interspersed with videos. Favorite quote: "No matter how good the hard infrastructure is, it’s the soft infrastructure that defines the experience.". An added pleasure for me this year was also getting to speak in front of LIFT attendees in the "Design thinking for the future" session. When first offered this opportunity this is what I had sent in: "An old project management saying states that "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable". Something along the same lines could be probably said about future-shaping practices. Visions of the Future are often useless, but the act of envisioning them is not. 3D flying virtual assistants, 1984-like nightmares, Asimov-inspired robots, videophones and even flying cars are here, they are just not evenly distributed, and they might never be. Truth is that many designers dream of spending their professional lives telling stories about the Future, and shaping systems of products and services that populate those stories like props in a movie. Historically Design-at-large has been the discipline arisen to help the industry-at-large give form to artifacts fit for a given cultural milieu, artifacts that in turn usually end up influencing and changing that very cultural milieu, and thus its future. What's interesting is that the sheer amount of these stories today vastly overwhelms their "rate of absorption": the necessary cultural humus for a vision to grow onto is continuously washed away by the next wave of seducing - albeit often utopic or dystopic - hypotheses. In other words the potential culture(s) of use that could take shape around any and all of these visions simply cannot keep up with the ever-accelerating production of competing images depicting the next "perfect" - and often branded - future we will be living in so-very-soon. Perhaps part of the problem stems from a model of time that's still very Newtonian: an infinite horizontal Cartesian axis pointed right. Within this model the Future appears to be an infinite resource. Recently we have been forced to ask ourselves if that is actually the case. We live on a planet that shows worrying signs of weariness. We live in a world where economies recursively crumble under their own unsustainable weight. We live in a world that has by now realized that technology solves as many problems as those it creates anew. In addition to this our fixation with pro-jecting ourselves "beyond the beyond" into possible futures also appears to be strangely at odds with technologies that give us superhuman memory accrual capabilities. Our always-on devices and servers never, ever forget. What we might be starting to realize is that to create something new we need to still have an "empty" space for it to take shape, and that space might be reducing. Should we teach our digital tools to forget, so that we can as well? Maybe. Design with a capital D is changing and reshaping its practices and philosophies to face these new challenges. Form is on a new quest for meaning, rather than just function or emotion. In the meantime the people formerly known as consumers and users have stopped listening to somebody else's tales from the future, and are now actively telling their own. What's emerging is a dynamic dialogue, an ever-evolving conversation among all parties involved, with designers (hopefully) gearing up to act as maieutic catalysts of change." After all was said and done this is what I presented: frog design's Tim Leberecht's LIFT 09 report kindly included also a nice summary of my brief talk, and I will shamelessly re-post it here: "(Fabio) used the case study of Project Masiluleke (a large-scale initiative that leverages mobile technologies to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa) to illustrate a model of design that 'is not just about creating compelling visions of perfect futures but rather shaping presents that are betas of a future we want to live in'. Quoting an Italian bus customer ("In the past you had to stamp the ticket, now you simply have to caress the machine."), he spanned the arch from 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion' to 'form follows meaning' (design that resonates with people's value systems). Empathy, technology as 'a material to sketch with', people-centered user experiences, and social impact – these are the characteristics of 'meaningful design'. Empathy, in particular, is not only the foundation for meaningful social innovation projects (pro-bono or for-profit), it is also the very prerequisite for every act of human cooperation." Could not have said it better. Also much kudos and lots of respect to Robert Fabricant and the rest of the frog NY team that worked on Project M: I undeservedly basked in the light you guys cast with your good work. Thank you. Chapeau to Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova for once again putting together a flawlessly-organized unconference, for the crazy 700+ people fondue and for LIFT's famously relaxed atmosphere that encouraged precious conversations with lots of interesting fellow t(h)inkerers and old pals like Anne Galloway, Fabien Girardin and Stephen Blyth. Posted by fabio sergio | 3:32 PM | permalink ............ February 15, 2009   Designing for the Segment of One. In June 2007 I was kindly invited to speak at From Business to Buttons, an interesting design conference that this year will celebrate its third anniversary. My talk was entitled "Designing for the Segment of One", and looked at networked handheld devices in relation to the specific needs of individuals. I realized I never got around to link to the presentation, which I immodestly believe is in many ways still relevant. "People increasingly expect products and services not only to fit their specific needs and desires, but also to adapt to how they evolve and change over time. Companies have tried to provide an answer by putting "users" at the center of the development process, and offering customers opportunities to influence at times some - and other times most - of a product's characteristics. Networked handheld devices, the objects currently known as mobile phones, are quintessentially personal tools, tools that have become essential to many of our daily activities. Strangely enough most of these devices still lack structural ways to fine-tune their specifications to the needs of individuals, and commonly offer only superficial opportunities for customization. What will be required to give networked handheld devices the level of dynamically adaptive flexibility increasingly expected by their users? How to achieve simplicity, and not just simplification, in the process?" For those that are reading this late at night and have already counted more sheeps than they care to remember there's also a video of yours truly from the conference. Guaranteed to deliver much-needed rest in 5 minutes or less. Posted by fabio sergio | 5:25 PM | permalink ............ September 19, 2008   A gentle self-reminder. Good design is innovative It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product. The possibilities in this respect are by no means exhausted. Technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions. Good design makes a product useful A product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose – in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product. Good design is aesthetic The aesthetic quality of a product – and the fascination it inspires – is an integral part of the its utility. Without doubt, it is uncomfortable and tiring to have to put up with products that are confusing, that get on your nerves, that you are unable to relate to. However, it has always been a hard task to argue about aesthetic quality, for two reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to talk about anything visual, since words have a different meaning for different people. Secondly, aesthetic quality deals with details, subtle shades, harmony and the equilibrium of a whole variety of visual elements. A good eye is required, schooled by years and years of experience, in order to be able to draw the right conclusion. Good design helps a product to be understood It clarifies the structure of the product. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory and saves you the long, tedious perusal of the operating manual. Good design is unobtrusive Products that satisfy this criterion are tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained leaving room for the user’s self-expression. Good design is honest An honestly-designed product must not claim features it does not have – being more innovative, more efficient, of higher value. It must not influence or manipulate buyers and users. Good design is durable It is nothing trendy that might be out-of-date tomorrow. This is one of the major differences between well-designed products and trivial objects for a waste-producing society. Waste must no longer be tolerated. Good design is consistent to the last detail Thoroughness and accuracy of design are synonymous with the product and its functions, as seen through the eyes of the user. Good design is concerned with the environment Design must contribute towards a stable environment and a sensible use of raw materials. This means considering not only actual pollution, but also the visual pollution and destruction of our environment. Good design is as little design as possible Back to purity, back to simplicity. (Dieter Rams) Posted by fabio sergio | 10:39 AM | permalink   Heaven. "From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie." "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... just another five more years, then I could become a real painter." (Hokusai) Posted by fabio sergio | 8:19 AM | permalink ............ May 07, 2008   Through the glass. He watched the paper cup fall on the dusty sidewalk. Dirty little liquid fingers, forced by the incline to ebb towards the gutter. Hurried feet, tip-tapping across the flood. He looked at the cup in his hands. At his own feet. Posted by fabio sergio | 12:01 PM | permalink ............ May 06, 2008   Finding beauty in the everyday. Mike Bukhin interviewed on Nokia's N-Series blog: "A number of my projects iterate on the same theme, finding beauty in the everyday and giving new perspectives to the ordinary. I want my participants to reevaluate the exceptional moments in their lives - I want them to feel that their everyday life is in fact exceptional. And if they don't feel that their everyday is exceptional, I want to provide them with tools that will help them change. While we are caught up in the minutia of the everyday, we tend to lose perspective and close ourselves off to other possibilities. My work tries to remedy this condition. I try to build tools and mobile experiences that are low overhead and low commitment. With the applications I build, you don't have to step out of your life to get an alternative perspective on your everyday. It is either presented to you automatically or is alongside you, available whenever you are interested in something new." Could easily be my current manifesto. Posted by fabio sergio | 12:01 PM | permalink ............ January 15, 2008   The beauty of the world. "He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of divergent equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower." (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses) Posted by fabio sergio | 12:07 PM | permalink ............ March 02, 2007   Andrea. Our baby boy Andrea was born today, at 4:00 PM. Welcome to the world little one, we love you. Posted by fabio sergio | 4:00 PM | permalink ............ February 25, 2007   Selfish sovereign posture artifacts. From twitter: Adam Greenfield: "@ = an indicator that Twitter is stretched to its limits as an application" Matt Webb: "The @ tips twitter from ambient-people-nearby into a constant-thread-to-follow. i like ambient, so i have to unfollow friends who use it :( " Elsewhere: Khoi Vinh: "Twitter — and most any Web site — is something of a sovereign posture application, programs that are best used full-screen, monopolizing the user’s attention for long periods of time. Twitterific, by contrast, takes the exact same functionality, and presents it in an auxiliary posture, where it occupies much less screen real estate and only partial attention." Elsewhere still: Jan Chiphase: "The electric toothbrush is a selfish object - it demands to be held the whole time it is used, and the alternative that works with regular tooth brushes - to be clasped in the mouth for those moments when you need both hands - is not an option. How well will two-handed devices fair in what is more many people a one-handed multi-tasking world?" Posted by fabio sergio | 3:33 PM | permalink ............ February 24, 2007   The product (is the system) is the culture of use. I've been reading with increasing interest the distributed conversation around why it's essential to consider systems and not just products when what really matters in the end is the user experience. Adam Richardson started it all by coining the mantra "The product is the system": "For a product to feel harmonious, the system that surrounds it must be harmonious.". Peter Merholz, picked the ball and ran with it in his "Stop Designing Products" presentation (PDF, 1.2 MB). It was then the turn of Brandon Schauer to point out, the hidden implications of the re-design of the Target pill bottle: "The Target pill bottle isn’t a bottle, it’s a system." Adam Greenfield then put an Everyware spin on the whole thing, in his unmistakable style: "You can no longer safely assume that your product will stand alone. Your product needs to tell me what it can do, and what I can do with it." Finally it was again up to Peter Merholz to do a bit of useful aggregating: "If you want to deliver on an experience, as opposed to simply a set of features, it’s becoming clear you must take a systems view." And that's where it's at in the end: if you want to get your hands dirty with experience design you'll have to take into account the whole socio-economic context within which that experience will be situated. Still I was left wanting for more, because the inherent implications of the very definition of the term "experience" set the bar quite high: "The conscious events that make up an individual life. The events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally. The act or process of directly perceiving events or reality." One word of caution before we proceed. What follows carelessly disregards the fact that my understanding of the subject matter is superficial at best, so if you proceed expecting anything other than seat-of-the-pants reasoning please think again. Readers forewarned. What I find myself recalling when it comes to systems and products is a conversation I had a long time ago with Anne Galloway about the chicken-and-egg relationship between human cultures and the tools they produce. I distinctly remember resorting to, ahem, Star Trek to fuel my feeble argument. In one of the most memorable episodes of the second season Captain James T. Kirk and his (non-red-suit-wearing) posse survive visiting a planet where a whole culture has evolved out of one artifact left on the planet by a previous careless group of human visitors: a book about "Chicago Mobs of the Twenties". Over the course of one hundred years the influence of the book on the alien culture caused the whole civilization to become a de-facto replica of the gangster-ridden city: just think cult of an "Al Capone bible" gone planetary. Albeit the basic assumption of the episode was clearly an over-simplified dramatization at best, it always struck me as oddly fascinating. If you are still wondering what I am after please consider the iPod, or the aforementioned Target pill bottle. The iPod-iTunes ecosystem is undoubtedly one of the current best examples of "the product is the system" designed right, but what we are also seeing though is the effect over time of a culture of use where existing weak signals have been amplified by tools and services shaped by that very culture. While the key value proposition of the original iPod - "all your music, always with you" - was disruptive from day one - October 23, 2001 - it's probably safe to say that the ecosystem that evolved over time around it would have fallen on deaf ears if it had been offered in its current incarnation on that same day to the same customers. When the Music Store module of iTunes was launched in April 2003, the iPod had already created a culture of use that had replaced the album with the song as the new atomic experiential unit. In other words it took a couple of years to create a culture of use around the iPod that made its success and that of its ecosystem possible, and even then it took another year before sales started to show signs of what was about to happen: today's apparently unsheakable market domination. A cause amplified in return by its effect, a cultural Larsen effect of sorts. Similarly the new Target pill bottle is another good example of the redesign of a whole culture of use, with the artifact acting as the catalyst that speeds up the process. The reason why I tend to prefer the term "culture" to "system" in this context is because I find it less abstract and much more closely related to us, to human beings, but I also like it better because when it comes to experience, and designing conditions for an experience to take place, what designers are ultimately after is the creation of meaning: a newfound assessment of reality, a change in value systems. This also brings me straight to another consideration: in what way is what I am saying different from Don Norman's famous curves of adoption of innovative technologies? The identical component is the role that time plays in this context. Time is an essential ingredient when it comes to a change in cultural paradigms, and thus also when designing systems and cultural stratifications of meaning. What is different is that Don Norman's diagrams seem to assume that the enabling factor is the level of maturity of the technology, but in this context what's just as important is the level of maturity of the potential culture of use related to that technology. As participants to the "Designing the Future workshop heard at LIFT 07, even disruptive innovations that seem to appear out of nowhere are often rooted in specific existing cultural models, or have cyclically surfaced in different incarnations without finding the appropriate substrate to grow upon. It's not just just the maturity of a technology that counts, it's also how strong the cultural weak signals that specific new technology is going to amplify are. Who knows, maybe even the videophone will have a chance, one of these days. Another consideration is that many parallel cultures of use exist around the same product. Take Digital Rights Management for example. There was a time when DRM was actually a product, a product invented specifically to migrate a previous value system into a new socio-economic scenario that was already showing signs of a possible singularity. The funny thing about DRM is that those who today suffer from it (us) probably shared its underlying values at the very beginning, then over time the culture of use around new tools like the iPod changed their beliefs, and today we're at the point where the CEO of the most successful online music retailer writes a (much criticized) open letter asking its partners to get rid of the same feature that is currently bundled with each and every one of many of his products, and even music industry execs admit that they actually don't believe in the effectiveness of what they officially endorse. DRM will probably disappear, and all seems to hint it will go in the worst way, leaving a rotting carcass everyone in the ecosystem will have to climb over to move ahead, but that's the way things go when culture is involved. Changes take time, and value systems are stratified and evolve at different speeds, and that needs to be accounted for when designing systems. What is required is a shift in scales: from tasks and mental models to activities and cultural models. I am almost ready to pass the ball over again to the people listed at the very beginning of this entry - who will probably show me the error of my ways first - but there's time for one final consideration. Many of these discussions would benefit from the opinion of people active in the service design community. People like Chris Downs of Live | Work or Simona Maschi of CIID. As Dan Saffer has recently noted there are so many distantly close design galaxies out there. We need to get better at designing cross-disciplinary telescopes. Posted by fabio sergio | 2:00 AM | permalink ............ Not bored yet? Visit freegorifero's weblog archives for more useless words.

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