It was hard to write that, but it’s true. It was a very interesting summer and I feel like I learned a lot. It’s weird not to have to be somewhere every morning. I guess I’m starting the transition from working to schooling. I planned to do all my reading over the past three months and have a clear framing of what I wanted to work on for my thesis paper and project. That didn’t really work out, so I’m back to square one re-thinking everything. It’s hard for me to focus down onto one particular situation to spend time on, so I will probably need to start drawing some boundaries. Right now I have some very broad topics for my project, which I will be whittling down into one proper proposal within the next week:

Spontaneity and fluid interactions: One thing that mobile and ubiquitous technology can potentially allow for is interactions that are happen naturally. This could mean products that are simply low-attention or products that let people do what they wish. A simple example is the camera phone. Whereas before people had to intentionally bring a camera somewhere, now things like citizen journalism have emerged where people only have to be at the right place at the right time. The challenge here might be finding a specific context or group of people to design for. So maybe its for journalists, for public events, for the environment, for education. Essentially I would want to find out how people already do spontaneous and fluid things and how a product could be designed that takes advantage of those needs.

Social cooperation: We already have lots of situations where we are in the same physical setting with others and we are cooperating. It would probably look at a type of people: construction workers, restaurant workers, bands, offices, groups of friends, people traveling together, etc… understand how they work and communicate and how a product could serve them. This could also look at people who are strangers and who cooperate. Reminds me a bit of Fred’s goPlay project. That said, it could be related to gaming a bit.

Representation of digital media: I’ve always been interested in how the representation of different media changes and how people interact with it and value it changes as well. Do we as people just adapt to new forms or is there something inherent in older representation that should be preserved? I think it’s fascinating because it’s something that is constantly changing and has an effect on how we interact with each other and society. I would probably focus on one type, like photographs or music. The only “drawback” is that we have kind of dealt with media in two previous projects already, so I might just want to try something else.

Privacy and notifications: With the potential for all kinds of recording of data in the future as well as stuff that is being recorded right now, what are people comfortable with? In terms of privacy… is it something people will just get over and accept that they are already being tracked and traced? Do we have a responsibility as designers to let people know what information is being collected about them regarding the products they use?

In terms of notifications… with all this information, how do we let people know about things? What’s the proper way to let people know something. How much control do you give people over notifications? How are the notifications manifested or visualized? Especially related to relevant contextual information. How do you find out what people care about and what they are willing to be bothered about? Ie, how do you design for those things? An incoming call is a notification. Today we represent that using obnoxious ringtones. A text message is a buzz. How are you notified if your friends is near? How are you notified if your bank account is low. Again, I feel like I need to focus on a specific context of people or situation.

While these are only a few of tons of other topics, I feel like they are the most relevant and have been on my mind. So I hope I can do something interesting with one of them.

Documentation and Process
The other thing I’ve been doing is setting up some system of documentation for my thesis. I was looking at google docs, which is nice, but maybe not as straightforward as a wiki. So I’m using pbwiki for now. The 10mb limit is kind of troublesome, so if I have time I might go through the hassle of installing my own wiki on this server. Otherwise, I’m leaving it open to anyone. I’m a fan of having a transparent process, especially in school.

It’s a little scary relying on an online service, but it might be more trustworthy than my janky laptop that is slowly dieing. Hopefully I’ll post worthwhile consolidations of my notes every so often.

Classes
Another anxiety inducing issue is choosing the two classes to go along with thesis project and paper next year. There are so many good classes to take, but I don’t want to jeopardize my thesis by getting in over my head. I think I might be set on taking Graduate Typography since I find myself always wanting to improve my visual design skills. For the second class it’s a toss up between Jodi Forlizzi’s Advanced Interaction, Shelley Evenson’s Designing for Service, or Osman Khan’s Circuit Bending. They all seem fascinating, so it’s going to be a hard decision.

As the summer is coming to a close, I’ve finished reading two books that I’ve been chipping away at since the beginning. One is Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold and the other is Everyware by Adam Greenfield. They are both surveys of current technology and the possibilities for the near future.

Smart Mobs
This book, while it varies a lot, is mostly about mobility, networks, people and what is happening with all that. It’s a look at what happens when people as a group interact with technology, what we have done with it, and what we will be facing in the future. It dips into a lot of philosophical discussion and talk of ubicomp.

Everyware
Similar to Smart Mobs, it’s talking about the future, but the focus is more on technology that we are using and will use in our daily life. It’s a very good overview of recent research and ideas that are out there, with a greater sense of urgency than Smart Mobs. As a designer himself, Adam Greenfield takes a stab at some initial principles.

Smart Mobs using Everyware
The books are similar enough that I have trouble distinguishing my thoughts about them. Both of the authors call themselves futurists, and spend most of the time talking about the future state of things as derived from current technology and intentions by research groups and companies.

The most valuable thing I’ve gotten from both of them is a deep pool of resources that they bring up. They both bring up a lot of philosophical trains of thought, researchers, manifestos, and books that help to understand what’s around the corner. I think it’s great because a lot of them are confirming stuff that we already learned like Goffman’s various writings on the presentation of self.

 They also bring up and explain technologies that are enabling new ways of interacting with each other that we don’t really have time to cover in school. Knowing about what is going to happen with data networks and embedded technology will probably help to ground design ideas a little better

The other thing I liked about both books is the balanced approach they take. They are cautiously embracing the new, which is probably a healthy thing to do. They bounce back and forth, describing utopias and dystopias of the future. Both authors really want to preserve human dignity and use new technology to benefit us rather than just because we can, much like we are taught throughout school.

There is a strong sense of urgency in both of the books. They are talking about the inevitable and we have to be prepared to deal with complex situations that are very different from what we are used to. I think their sense of urgency is already being answered through user-centered design, I hope.

Not to go on too long, but I think both of these books are important for designers of all kinds, especially with mobility where it’s at today. I have heard lots of people distance themselves from anything technical because of the connotation that interaction design already has, but I’ll reserve my thoughts on that for later.

Criticism?
I don’t have anything that critical to say about the books. To people who are already familiar with this stuff, the books might not be so useful. For designers, they don’t offer many answers, but mostly questions and considerations we need to understand.

Smart Mobs came out in 2002 and Everyware in 2006, so sometimes it feels like Adam Greenfield is simply updating the state of things with his book. Smart Mobs takes a very massive approach and covers a lot of different topics, whereas Everyware is a little more focused and organized in bite-sized chunks. In terms of a knowledge resource, I found Smart Mobs to be a little deeper, and I plan on actually buying it just to reference. There are a lot of great quotes and references. There’s also the Smart Mobs blog which updates with news relevant to stuff that is talked about in the book. It’s a shame Everyware doesn’t have something similar, unless I missed it. Either way, both were well worth it, and are easily skimmable.

PS. No, I haven’t started reading for my thesis project yet.

Social Proprioception
Speaking of monitoring what people are doing, there has been a lot of talk recently about micro-blogging, especially in the form of twitter. Essentially they are ways of people leaving traces of their lives online with little effort. There was an article in wired about a month ago talking about it and why they are useful:

“It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.”

It’s an interesting description of it, and justification for why twitter-related stuff might be around for a while. I’ve been trying out the different ways of doing it, and I don’t know if I’ve found something satisfying yet. I kind of stumbled into doing it on Facebook. I used to just send people links and videos through email or IM, but posting it on Facebook was a more passive way to share without bugging people. It was up to them to click on something if they were bored.

Too many accounts
By way of doing research for various projects I forced myself to sign up for things like Twitter, Jaiku, and Tumblr just to see what they were all about. Twitter is nice and simple, but won’t work on the phone I have free texting. Jaiku is great because you can import feeds from anywhere into your own feed. It tends to clog things up a bit, especially if you are bringing in Last.fm or a news site. It also limits what you can see in one post, so images and videos are just links, which is good in some respects. Unfortunately I forgot the password for the Jaiku account that had my phone linked to it, so I had to start a new account and my phone number is “in use by another account” that I can’t get into.

So that leaves me with tumblr. I like it because it’s a little more focused on showing the actual content. So when I post a photo or video it is shown. It’s essentially a lightweight blog that makes it easy to just throw your content into it and also allow for feeds to be imported. Because of this, it’s a little less focused on the “social” part of micro-blogging.

In the end, I really wonder what will become of these sites. The link to mobile is what I think will keep them afloat for a while. It was very liberating to be able to snap random pictures and have them sent directly to a new post (although using way too many button presses). I don’t know if the average person has a need to use them or if they just aren’t aware of them. Maybe the younger generations that will see the usefulness in the same way that they gobble up Facebook and MySpace features.

Infinite Loop
One last point, when I was signing up for these, the idea of being able to clog these micro-blogging sites with feeds from anywhere was kind of ridiculous to me, so I tried an experiment. Just like you might put one mirror in front of another, I fed a tumblr feed into jaiku and a jaiku feed into tumblr to see what would happen. At first, nothing, but when I pulled in a third feed (it was randomly Herbert’s flickr stream) it started echoing forever. It’s kind of a play on the idea of people updating these things constantly and automatically.