Don Norman has just posted a very provocative and thoughtful piece about the value of design research, or not.

“I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.”

You should read the full article, but he goes on to essentially argue that innovation is driven by technology not needs. This leads him to this: “Myth: Use ethnographic observational studies to discover hidden, unmet needs” and continues:

“But the real question is how much all this helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people’s lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.

“Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors. They create for the same reason that people climb mountains: to demonstrate that they can do so. Most of these inventions fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives.

He then lists several examples, such as the airplane, the automobile, SMS messaging, etc. that arose from technology, not research. Obviously this touches a nerve for me, because it’s a large part of what I do and teach. I think it’s an important conversation to have, especially in academia, which can often be terribly navel-gazing and/or over-zealous about the importance of a certain avenue of research because it’s what is required to get grant funding. But I think Norman is both right and wrong and also viewing needs and technology from an engineering perspective (which has always been my criticism of him, despite his human centred design views). Here’s the clincher:

“Edison launched his first phonograph company within months of his invention: he never questioned the need. He had invented the paperless office, he announced, and launched his product.”

The thing is, Edison did question the need, he just got it wrong. He thought the need for his invention was the paperless office. It turned out it was to record and sell music. To me, this example just goes to show how important it is to have an insight into people’s lives and examine not what they say they want or need, but what they actually need by watching what they do.

It’s also particularly pertinent in service design because it isn’t necessarily product or technology led. Of course Twitter is a service and one that is both potent and that people never knew they had a need for, but Twitter’s technology isn’t complex. Twitter didn’t arise from an innovative idea to build a chat space, Twitter arose from the idea of modifying an existing paradigm for a certain need.

In some ways I’m arguing my way back into Norman’s final point, which is that real usefulness comes from slow, incremental changes – ‘innovation’ that, in his words, is “least interesting innovations to the university and company research community”. He sums this up as, “technology first, invention second, needs last”. Whilst I agree that iterative processes often create innovation, and I also think that the way society uses a technology for things completely left-field to what it was originally designed for (e.g. SMS) is where some great innovation happens, I still don’t see this as technology coming first. Technology is just a medium through which culture expresses itself and with which people communicate, ultimately.

Technology without any application is either an innovation waiting to happen or something useless sitting in the corner like an old Betamax video recorder. If the need isn’t there, no level of technology helps anyone. I would add that this is a particularly American approach to the role and value of technology in a determinist fashion. It also reminds me of Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook’s essay, The Californian Ideology.

Steve Portigal and Frog Design’s Adam Richardson have also written thoughtful responses to Norman’s piece, which is how I came across it. Todd Zaki Warfel has also written a rebuttal. [UPDATE: Good post from Nicolas on this over at Pasta & Vinegar. The comments are valuable too.]

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A selection of RFID tags from Timo’s Flickr set.

Touch is a research project examining Near Field Communication that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.

You will have probably used some of them already in your daily life – Oyster cards, swipe cards, etc. (see above image). It’s an interesting cross-over of cultural and social practices and interaction, product and service design with a whole bowl of technology mixed in.

The interdisciplinary team led by Timo Arnell have been teaching at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

For anyone learning about or teaching interaction design and related disciplines, it’s a great resource and they have also put all their design briefs online.

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Notes On Design invited Rick Bennett and I to talk about our experiences of long-distance and global online creative collaboration within the Omnium Research Group. We suggested that some of the more interesting conversations we have had have been over a couple of beers in informal settings, so we decided to have a public conversation and publish it online.

You can read the first part of The Conversation over at the Notes On Design blog. In it we talk a bit about our first experiences and thoughts about online collaboration from ten years ago (hard to believe it’s been that long) in the context of what now seems commonplace: social networks and online communities.

The second part, concerning emerging cultural trends and Omnium’s outreach projects follows soon – I’ll post an update here when it’s up.

UPDATE: The second part is now online.

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There’s a well-balanced piece from Patrick Wintourin the Guardian today about parents being shown how to protect their children online.

It reports of a government initiative based on a review by Dr Tanya Byron (she works as a consultant in child and adolescent mental health and also presented quite a few programmes for the BBC on the subject).

I’ve only skim-read the main points of the report (which is available for download in full), but it makes interesting reading. The most important aspect is that she goes quite thoroughly through the pros and cons of the use of technologies – from social networks and general internet use to online videogames. It also draws upon a lot of evidence from children themselves.

It’s nice to see Byron is not pedalling the old ‘it rots young minds and they’re all being groomed by pedophiles’ line, by rather she looks at the complexities of the interactions between parents, children, society and technology:

“Ironically parents’ concerns about risk and safety of their children in the streets and outside has driven a generation of children indoors, where it could be argued they are being exposed to a whole new set of risks.”

It’s good to see some of the onus being put back on parents too. The use of these technologies is not inherently better or worse than what children used in previous generations and I’ve lost count of the amount of conversations I’ve had about videogames.

Arguably the use of these technologies are mostly beneficial, especially in the future that children will be growing into. The real problem is that many parents have no idea about how the internet functions, about social spaces online or the culture of videogames and that really needs to change.

It’s good to see this kind of research and well worth a read – it’s well-written too. (There are also quite a few annexed documents about the methodology and brain development research that background the report).

Photo: uncleboatshoes on Flickr

[tags]Tanya Byron, child development, videogames, parenting[/tags]

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Chris O’ Shea recently completed Out of Bounds during his residency at the Design Museum. Chris also writes the very good Pixelsumo from which I frequently steal links draw inspiration and I’ve been a little remiss about blogging this earlier, but Chris promised to also put some video documentation up online (which helps explain the project) and also agreed to do a short interview.

Out of Bounds makes real the childhood fantasy of having superhero X-Ray vision to explore parts of the Design Museum that are normally not accessible to the public. It’s also an extremely playful piece that, as Chris puts it, encourages adults to “relinquish the learnt behaviour of adulthood and reconnect with the wonderment of youth.”

Click the read link for the interview….

AP: Congratulations on the Designers in Residence. What was the inspiration behind the idea for Out of Bounds and can you tell us a bit more about it?

COS: When I was first commissioned they wanted me to create a piece of work that responded to a certain space. My idea was to have a projection on the outside of the building, with an interface that would enable people to look into the museum when it was closed to see what was happening after hours. In the end this didn’t work out, as the projection would only work in the evening of course.

I wanted to create an interface that people would be familiar with every day, not some futuristic xray machine. A torch was an obvious choice.

AP: What has been the reaction to it so far? Is it what you imagined or different (interactive works often seem to take on a life of their own).

COS: I’ve watched people using it for a day. They give someone the torch and they don’t know where to point it. Because its infrared they can’t see the light. As soon as the light hits the wall they are very surprised. 80% of people think its some kind of magic and can’t figure it out. Big groups of school children are especially funny, as they try to block the light or make shapes. Some people have mentioned that its very soothing to use. I found that images taken from the same view point of the wall, rather than close ups or odd angles, work better in giving it a realistic feel. Many people think thats it looking through the actual wall to whats on the other side, until they see the room change when the pull the torch away and put it back again.

AP: Do you have any other projects planned for the Design Museum?

COS: No, the residency was just this one commission. Who knows in the future.

AP: I noticed you coded it in C++ and using OpenCV and also openFrameworks -which is still fairly new and in beta – rather than Processing or Director. How has that process been?

COS: Coming from a background in Director and Processing, I was getting frustrated with my options for computer vision, and knew that I would need to learn C++ to do this properly. openFrameworks (OFW) is a set of libraries and a framework wrapped in one package. Like Processing for Java, OFW provides an easier entry point into programming with C++ for these kinds of projects.

I used version 0.01 at a workshop at Ars Electronica. For Out of Bounds I was using 0.02 and a lot had changed. The process has been enjoyable, as its not too hard to get started. The biggest hurdle is changing the mindset from Lingo to C++. The code is completely open source, and I’ve made lots of changes to the core libraries to suit my project, something I’ll tidy up and release later. Although the community is small, Zach & Theo (the founders) are doing a good job of supporting users on the forum and are working hard on the 0.03 release. I’m using OFW on all of my projects at the moment.

AP: How does Out Of Bounds work technically?

COS: The infrared light is invisible to us, but not to a camera that works in low light. So the camera looks at the wall, using a lens filter to block out the projection. Where there is light, it pushes through a depth map to reveal the room. The virtual space is 1024×768 in size with a depth of 255. As you show pixels at different depths, you get the wall, two layers of brick and then the room itself.

AP: Finally, what did you learn from the project?

Infrared torches are very difficult to find because the US has banned import & exports of illuminator products under counter terrorism. Most torches aren’t robust enough if people drop them and they aren’t designed to be running for 9 hours a day. I’d like to get my own infrared torches built one day.

AP: Thank you.

You can view more images of Out of Bounds on Chris’s website as well as a video of it in action (and, yes, it does look like magic).

[tags]pixelsumo, chris o’shea, design museum, interactivity, installation[/tags]

Brilliant clip of Dan Saffer doing the start of his How To Lie With Design Research talk at the 2007 Design Research conference.

If you’ve ever been to pretty much any conference (but especially design education ones) and heard someone just spout nonsense for half an hour, you’ll enjoy Dan pointing out the elephant in the room. It’s worrying how convincing he is in that first minute…

(The video is by David Armano over at Logic+Design).

[tags]interactivity, dan saffer, conference, research[/tags]

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There’s a great post on Data Visualization: Modern Approaches over at Smashing Magazine.

Some of them are pretty well-known, like Newsmap and (one of my favourites) We Feel Fine, but there are some newer and more unusual ones in there too as well as some good links in the comments.

There seems to me to be two distinct schools of thought about data visualisation – one is about taking a data set and then creating (usually) static images from them. This I find kind of interesting in that it often displays relationships that you wouldn’t see in a spreadsheet of numbers, etc. The data often seem to be used as the raw material for some kind of Processing-esque algorithm that spits out an image (like the Madonna track image from Shape of Song that I’ve used above).

The second, and in my opinion far more interesting, are data visualisations that are interactive in some way. Now, of course I’m going to say that, but I think there is a great deal to be said for being able to play around with the relationships in data and explore. I think it makes what can often be pretty, but pretty boring, interesting instead. It’s one of the reasons I like We Feel Fine so much – it’s a really playful interface with interaction design that relates to the content perfectly.

Musiclens and Diggstack are pretty nice too. Diggstack – a bit like We Feel Fine – I find fascinating for the ‘Internet in real-time’ aspect of it, rather like Twittervision or the more interesting (content-wise) Flickrvision.

What all of them demonstrate is that core principle of interaction design which is about plugging one thing into another and seeing what happens. It seems to me that everything else is built off of that foundation.

(Via Yacco)

I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really interesting projects concerning future ways of working, playing, thinking and learning.

I’ll be presenting the Creative Waves 2007 – VIP project in detail, talking about the using a design process and creative collaboration for cross-disciplinary projects as well as a look at the issues facing the future of education. Much of which I have developed since writing about these issues a while back. I’m planning a bit of a brainstorming session with the attendees too. There will hopefully be a podcast and a download of the presentation on the ULS website afterwards.

It would be great to catch up with any of you there and if you want to get in touch before hand, please do.

Details are: 30 August 2007, 10am – 12.30pm. It’s free, but you need to contact Yvonne Kincaid to register.

I’ve just been introduced to a wonderful book.

It’s called Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them, by Tim Walsh and documents the history and development of classic toys.

The original, self-published, book was called The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys and Tim has a website and blog of the same name. I’m still waiting to receive my copy, but there are several excerpts on the Playmakers site that document the history the Super Ball, The Slinky, Jenga, Pez and Play-Doh (did you know it was wall cleaner?).

All the stories are inspiring examples of people thinking totally outside of the box and putting everything they had into an idea that they were sure would work, even if they had huge fears about it. Most of them are incredibly simple too and plenty were the result of accidents or of playing with materials. There seems to be a real sense of inventing things and then seeing what they might be useful for, rather than the other way around. It’s quite a Google approach to working and a real antidote to all the marketing/functional specification driven projects that are so often part of our daily jobs.

For extra, slightly nerdy thrills, there are also some fascinating patent diagrams Tim managed to dig up. The G.I. Joe one is particularly weird.

Thanks to my PhD supervisor, Ross Gibson, for the heads up.

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I added the link to Michael Schmitz’s Human Computer interaction in Science Fiction Movies to my del.icio.us account a while ago when one of my students showed me the link. I then forgot to blog it.

It’s a pretty interesting account of the interaction (sorry..) between sci-fi and what actually exists or is invented as a result. But the best thing about the essay is that it digs up some really rubbish ideas and some films I had totally forgotten about too.

Johnny Mnemonic is one such criminal. Take a look at Keanu at work here:

But one other thing caught my eye – Schmitz goes right back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and reminds us of the sort of ‘clock’ interface that has lights around it.

The worker has to move the hands to the lights when they light up all day. That’s all he does. Doesn’t it remind you of responding to all those e-mails, IMs and SMS messages all day?