All you interaction design students out there get ready to show us your goods.

This year I’m co-chairing the Interaction 11 Student Competition with Liz Danzico and we want to see you thinking laterally. The competition brings forward exceptional and engaged undergraduate and graduate students in both critical thinking and hands-on experience over the course of the conference. Itʼs an opportunity to present work in a way that shows rather than tells, and a unique opportunity for students who may be seeking to connect with new colleagues, potential employers, funders, or new networks.

This yearʼs focus is based on the concept of “Use, not own.” Great interactions can connect people to create opportunities for experiences that outweigh the “joy” of ownership. How we you reduce our environmental footprint by sharing products or services? Students selected by the team of mentors will be invited to the conference where theyʼll compete on the remainder of the competition.

The entry deadline is December 4th, 2010, so head over to the site and get yourself registered.

Oh, and do the sporting thing – reblog and retweet the announcement so that your student colleagues know about it!

There is an interesting piece over at Johnny Holland by Rahul Sen titled Archetypes and Their Use in Mobile UX. It’s probably worth reading it and coming back here, but the introduction gives you an idea of where he’s headed:

“Have you ever needed a user manual to sit on a good chair? Probably not. When we see a good chair, we almost always know exactly what to do, how to use it and what not to do with it. And yet, chairs are made by the thousands, and several challenge these base assumptions to become classics in their own right. The chair is one of the most universally recognized archetypes known to us. In light of recent events in the mobile realm, I believe that the stage is set to probe notions of archetypes in the mobile space.”

As does the last pull quote:

“Thinking in archetypes gives us a unique overview of interaction models and their intrinsic behavior patterns, making it possible to ask interesting what if questions and examine consequences.”

There is lots to like and he makes some great observations here, but hanging them onto the term “archetype” is problematic. Rahul gives a brief nod to the differences between metaphors and archetypes, but muddies rather than clarifies. This moment of slippage defeats the whole archetype argument, but if you replace the word archetype with metaphor in the piece, then it all makes great sense.

The reason why metaphors are so important to understand in interaction design is precisely because there are very few, if any, archetypes. It’s easy for us as savvy users and interaction designers to presume there are original ideas or symbols universally recognised by all, but they’re simply not. It’s the reason why so many people don’t ‘get’ interfaces that should be blindingly obvious. They don’t understand the mental model behind it, thus it’s not an archetype.

Metaphors are useful because they bridge this gap. One thing to note is that metaphors are not “analogies between two objects or ideas, conveyed by the use of one word instead of another,” as Rahul says. Those are similes. I’m not saying this to be grammatically pedantic, but because there is an important distinction. A metaphor isn’t saying “it is like“, but “it is“. It helps you understand a concept you don’t know by expressing it in the form of a concept you do know, not just saying it’s like the other one. Life is a journey, it’s not that life is like a journey.

An interaction design simile would say, “this file on the desktop is like a real paper document on your desk”. A metaphor is saying, “this file on your desktop (in fact, the icon of it) is a real file”. It makes a difference because it makes a difference to how we interact with those things and to the mental models we form. It makes a difference to how much we can stretch and/or break those metaphors. Delete your most precious file and decide whether it was like a file or really was one.

Lakoff and Johnson’s work on metaphors is essential to bring in here, because they demonstrate that our entire language and understanding of our experience in the world is based on embodied metaphors. When you start to pick apart language, you realise it’s all metaphors (such as “pick apart” – the metaphor being that language is a thing made up of other things that you can pull apart).

They also talk about how metaphors collapse into natural language without us thinking about them anymore, but they’re still metaphors. When we say we’re close to someone, we learn this metaphor from actually being physically close to someone (usually our mothers). Physical and emotion closeness are the same thing at that point. Later, we use the metaphor of being close to someone to express emotional closeness, but it because so commonplace and universally understood (in most languages) that we cease to perceive the metaphor anymore.

On the other hand, poetic metaphors, such as “the sun was a fiery eye in the sky”, are designed to make us perceive the metaphor and appreciate its discord or imagery. Most interface design is still on the poetry side of things, screaming out the metaphors, which is why they are far from being archetypes.

The interesting thing about multitouch devices is that the interface seems like it disappears. You feel like you are just interacting with the content in many cases, such as scaling or moving around digital photos that have never had a physical form. The interface is still there, of course. You’re not really stretching or pinching anything, you’re just making those movements with your fingers over a piece of glass, but the direct manipulate feeling that it affords tricks us enough. This still happens to a lesser extent in desktop metaphors – it really does feel like you have lost a file when it gets accidentally deleted, but actually it was never really a file, but a bunch of pixels on the screen pretending to look like a file and in fact just being a visual reference for a scattered set of magnetic impulses on a drive. Like theatre, we willingly suspend our disbelief in order to believe in the metaphor because it’s easier that way.

The strength of Rahul’s piece is in the various examples of something-centric “archetypes” that he gives and the “what if?” questions he asks about them. They’re insightful, but they’re just not archetypes by the definition he sets out. Ironically, having pointed out in a note right at the start of the article that he his not referring to Jungian archetypes, I think Rahul’s examples are much more closely related to Jung’s understanding of archetypes than the other definitions he refers to.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Photosketch: Internet Image Montage provides a simple way to make image composites by doodling a picture, adding labels and then letting the engine scour the Internet for suitable photos. Once it has found the most appropriate matches, it composites them together.

I can see lots of awful e-cards and Powerpoint presentations coming out of this, but it would be very useful for putting together prototype sketches for installations and services and it is a pretty remarkable bit of technology.

(Via Richard Banks)

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction design group that explores natural communication between people and technology) is a charming example of how we think about computers and interfaces from a human perspective.

Whatever we might know about the technology and how it works, we talk about the “server having some trouble” or our computers “having a bad day” or “going crazy”. We’re so biologically programmed for interaction to be with other beings, it’s very hard not to think of the little man in the box.

(Via @LukePittar and all the little people who run messages back and forth in the intertubes.)

Touchwall Demo from Joel on Vimeo.

Joel Johnson’s exclusive (on Vimeo?) video and interview with the folks at Schematic about their new touchwall shows them dealing with some interesting public multitouch issues. I hate the marketing crap that goes with it and the inevitable Minority Report reference (please, stop making that reference multitouch people), but the idea that what they’re really interested in is “the social interaction in front of the screen” is spot on.

Apart from the fun of playing with what looks like a giant iPhone screen, the key thing about large multitouch screens is that more than one person can use it at once. If it just replicates a bank of individual screens it’s missing the point of having one big one. Connecting people together in social play and interaction can be really engaging and it will be interesting to see what developers and designers explore in this area.

The other issue that they talk about in the video is how to solve the identity problem on such a device so that you don’t have to walk up to it (or “into it” as one of the interviewees says) and type in a log-in. RFID tags come to the rescue, which means the wall knows who you are as soon as you’re close enough to use it.

If we’re going to make comparisons to Minority Report, that screen was an individual experience operated alone by Cruise’s character. By contrast a multi-user multitouch screen feels to me to be much more Star Trek or James Bond to me and about using collaborative workspaces with the added layer of data feeds.

I’m going to be giving a talk over at Interaction Forum ’09 at the Design School in Hildesheim next week (Tuesday 26th). If anyone is in that neck of the woods, come and say hello – maybe send me a tweet and we can catch up.

I’m going to be talking about play as guiding principles to interactivity, but I’m much more looking forward to listening to the other two speakers, Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Mark Hauenstein from AllOfUs.

Great to see magneticNorth’s new website live. Brendan gave me a sneak peek of it yesterday and I love it.

The navigation is very playful and intuitive. Actually it is intuitive because it is playful. You basically scribble a doodle and this makes a mask into which a piece from their portfolio opens. You can then click on that item to view more info about the work or simply make another scribble to look at a new piece. The navigation across the top is a history that you can move back and forth through or reset.

What is nice about the whole thing is that you just don’t have worry about doing anything ‘right’. You can scribble any shape and you can scribble over the top of other scribbles and everything automagically sorts itself out.

Go and have a play yourself and tell me what you think.

[UPDATE: Quite some debate started about this, which I'm very happy to be part of. I wrote a long response, which is almost a post in itself, but decided to leave it in the comments.]

OpenFrameworks, the “C++ library for creative coding”, is starting to get a lot more use in interactive installations.

I haven’t had the time to have a dig around and play with it yet, but those I know who are using it seem to be producing some great work. I also haven’t dipped my toe into the lake of C, though apparently you can learn it in 5 days (ahem).

The new release is quite a restructure and includes several new libraries, but the biggest news in the latest release is that it now officially has support for the iPhone. More details and guides from Jeff Crouse and Memo Atken (who made the Jackson Pollock iPhone app in the video above).

No more excuses. Time to get my hands dirty with XCode.

Pattie Maes is a smart woman. She’s behind some research projects that I wish I had been part of. But the above presentation at TED of Pranav Mistry’s ‘Sixth Sense‘ system gave me flashbacks to bad VR demos in the 90s and Steve Mann’s sad exploits as a cyborg.

Sometimes the focus on technology for the sake of technology just gets in the way of thinking about how people actually live. Any mobile device I carry around will have a screen and a camera, whether it be an iPhone or a projection onto my retina. There are ample uses and opportunities for augmented reality with these, so why would I want to carry around a tiny projector too?

In the ‘Sixth Sense’ set-up, I would need to keep my body still to keep the projected image from moving all over the place and I need to have some kind of tracking blobs on my fingers too. Let’s assume the devices are combined. Again, why the projector when I already have a screen? So that I can wave my arms about as a gestural interface? In public?

Like VR, the central paradox of ‘augmenting the senses’ is that the technology cuts back the senses. We’re not just heads floating around without bodies, we interpret the world through our entire bodies. Anything that reminds you that you’re using a mediating technology gets in the way of those senses and what you’re trying to do.

The success of multitouch interfaces is that they make the interface invisible. It’s still there of course – someone has to set up the metaphors of ‘pinching’, etc. – but when it works well, you don’t think about it. But they have to work well too – the slightest lag or misinterpretation of a drag as a click soon becomes a frustration.

Clever(ish) as it is, Sixth Sense doesn’t make much sense. I get a bit sad when I see these kinds of demos get such a big response at TED, because it’s an audience who should know better and should be in front of the curve, not behind it. This should be especially true from Maes, whose MIT page quotes her as saying “We like to invent new disciplines or look at new problems, and invent bandwagons rather than jump on them.”

(And Pranav should spend some time working on his MIT Web page).

The Holodeck remains a fantasy for Trekkies and we’re still not yet jacked into The Matrix (or are we? Oooh.). Guys going to enormous lengths to build stuff for their girlfriends, on the other hand, has long been part of the human condition.

World Builder by Bruce Branit is about a guy who builds a holographic world for the woman he loves. There’s a reason it is holographic, which you find out when you get to the ending, so I won’t spoil it here. The film was shot in a day, but then took two years of post-production to finish off. Who says computers make things quicker?

The main reason for blogging it is because of some of the gestural interface elements in it. The overlay buttons and keypads are the usual fare and I remain unconvinced that jabbing at a floating holographic keypad button would be a useful UI approach, although it always looks good on screen. There are also some controls like spreading the fingers to enlarge and object and using the fingertips to rotate a virtual control knob that are already in use in gestural interfaces.

I’m not sure I have seen the idea of being able to pick up things like colours and textures on your fingertips and apply them to objects yet though in an existing multitouch interface. A few desktop applications use that kind of sticky mouse idea and 3D and 2D applications kind of use it with tools and colour/texture chips, but I still haven’t seen it all that smoothly done. Adobe seem to screw this up further and further with every release rather than making it easier. (Does CS really stand for ‘crappy shit’ rather than ‘creative suite’?)

The main issue with a gestural or multitouch interface would be keeping track of the identity of a particular finger tip once it has left the touch panel, it seems to me. But maybe someone has already solved this and it is in use – let me know if you know more.

(Thanks to one of my ex-students, Nico Marzian for mailing me the link).