Muji Chronotebook is a new dayplanner that uses an analog “clock” metaphor, with each page arranged around a circular center. The left page is AM and the right page is PM.
So, my first reaction was really positive. We desperately need more design that grounds our daily experience in the physical, and this appears to be beautifully expressive of circadian rhythms and the subjective experience of time, but…
… is it really so natural? Looking at the layout, I feel pretty uncomfortable. Sure, our experience of a sequence of days is cyclical, but I think our experience of the flow of a single day is much more linear.
I also wonder about writing around a circle. Maybe this works better for character-based languages, but it seems awkward for, say, english.
(Please note that I haven’t actually used the thing. Maybe it’s awesome ;)
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
from Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Alex Wright gave a talk based on his book down at Google and it’s probably the longest video I’ve ever watched with full attention start to finish on the web. The Web That Wasn’t is an accessible and inspiring series of biographical sketches of historical visionaries of the web and web-like constructions. Alex describes the visions and significance of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and others who foresaw the current www (and more) over the past 100+ years. And, in so doing, he points out the ways the current web falls short of their various visions as well as describing the gestures in the current incarnation towards such things as two-way links, and visible trails through hypertext. Well done, Alex.
Just as the basic tools (if not necessarily the high aesthetics) of visual communication have been thoroughly democratized, tools for data visualization are moving to the mainstream. The most recent example I’ve seen, and it’s a lovely one, is The Gapminder World 2006. The exciting thing to me is not so much that the information design clearly and simply reveals unsettling truths (people in Africa live 30 years shorter lives than people in the US; think about that for a moment) but that the tool makes play out of the work of visualizing the ubiquitously invisible patterns of the world. Along with such as Stamen’s Trulia Hindsight and others, these tools are not only leaving the academy and the messy basement desks of government analysts and moving out into the world, but they are becoming more playful, more narrative, and more polemical. Let the spime wrangling commence (can people be Spimes?).
Lots of change around here. I have a new job and Giant Ant has a new site. As part of this transition, I’ve moved my personal weblog to a new domain (http://www.decipher.org/). I’ve gone and set up some mod_rewrite rules (thank you Apache!) to redirect old Antenna posts seamlessly, but I’m sure lots of stuff will fall through the cracks. Please bear with me and if you see something messed up or missing, I’d appreciate a quick email letting me know. Thanks!
I’ve been meaning to write up my experiences with a couple of mobile phones for a while. I used a Nokia 6682 for a year or so and recently switched over to a Sony k790a.
My experience with the k790 is a great lesson in why product managers and designers continue to fight about whether features or experience should drive product development. I bought the phone primarily because I wanted a phone with a “real” camera and at the time it was (arguably) the best cameraphone out there (3.2 megapixels, auto-focus, xenon flash, etc.). I did lots of research and so on and bought it primarily on a features basis. After using the phone and camera for a few weeks, however, I realized that while the k790 has an amazing camera for a phone, especially for stills, it’s going to be a while before any cameraphone is going to hold a candle to a decent dedicated point-and-shoot camera (e.g. Canon Elph) let alone a digital SLR. So much for features.
So, you’d think I would have been disappointed but in fact I had already grown to love the phone based solely on the software interaction design. It’s among the most impressive pieces of small-device UI design I’ve encountered (and that includes the iPod which is obviously amazing, but has a much, much easier job description). It’s far from perfect, of course, and there are some patently silly things as with all phones (for example, when looking up contacts, you can only search by first name rather than first or last, so typing “JO” gives me “John Zapolski” but not “Oliver Johns”). But, there are so many places where the designers got it right. And, what I mean by getting it right is that they understood the context the phone would be used in, figured out the most likely thing or things that you’d want to do, and then designed the interface to make those things either extremely easy or automatic. I regularly find myself pleasantly surprised by the interface which is rare indeed, as we all know from countless bad experiences. And, as an interaction designer myself, I can tell you that it is incredibly difficult.
It’s the little things like when scrolling vertically through a list of your contacts you can then scroll horizontally through their different contact methods (home phone, work phone, email) and choose the one you want. It (mostly) just feels incredibly fluid.
By contrast, the Nokia suffers from having to support a lumbering, generalized operating system so that I have the option of downloading lunar calendars, golf handicapping systems, and all kinds of other pseudo-useful Symbian applications but at the expense of doing the things that matter with any degree of subtlety.
(Note: This was all written pre-iPhone, which generally out-fluids the Sony.)
I heart culture jamming: Sniggle Net has lots of good stuff, including a bit on one of my favorite culture hacks ever, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO).
I’ve long assumed that the Macintosh conceptual design model is spatial while Windows is conceived by its designers as a tool. Well thanks to Peter, here’s evidence I’m right. This may seem like a small thing, but I believe it goes a long way to explaining why Mac users are so, um, zealous in their allegiance. The way it feels to be “in” the Mac “world” is personal in a way that Windows just isn’t. Peter’s posting of the original Mac manual also reminded me of how the first Macs felt like little houses or secret boxes for all your personal stuff. I remember people keeping diaries on them and they’d carry the Mac onto their dorm room beds. This sort of emotional content is what great design (if not necessarily market success) is all about for me.
A while back I was thinking about the overlapping layers of context within which mobile interactions take place (more on the word “mobile” in another post). I quickly sketched out a visual model to help me (and other designers working on situated experiences) keep these various layers in mind. Here’s the resulting paper (200k pdf), which my collaborator, Jared, will be presenting later this year at Mobile HCI in Singapore.
And, here’s the abstract:
Designers of mobile applications have long understood that mobile devices are operated within a context of significant constraints and environmental distractions. Despite this knowledge, however, many mobile applications are designed as if they were merely shrunken desktop or Web applications.
To encourage consideration of the specifics of context for mobile interactions and to highlight new user-meaningful opportunities latent in always-on, always-carried devices, this article describes a context model for mobile interaction and a set of design heuristics for successful mobile interactions.
Feedback welcomed!
Matt’s closing keynote at reboot, Products Are People Too is easily my favorite idea bomb of the past 5 years. See also: Clifford Nass and, more disturbingly, this McLuhan quote:
…man in the normal use of technology…is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires….
This will surely come in handy: Blasting the Myth of the Fold.
Jared and Yue have written a nice overview of our ongoing Mobile China research for UIGarden. From their conclusion:
In contrast to the expectations of many of our technology clients, we have found in our research that youth discourse about telephones focuses much more heavily on emotions rather than technology and features. The implications for designers of mobile devices and services is to focus more on the human side of this emerging technology, new youth identities, and popular desire for entertainment, fashion and companionship.
It occurred to me the other day that Scott McCloud’s point about the web’s infinite canvas applies (and is vastly more important) to annotating physical space. Any given physical location needs both multiple categories of information (e.g. basic information, reviews, history, etc.) and also infinite instances of each. And it’s going to get real messy real fast, given both the variety of data (where’s the nearest bathroom vs. Mark Twain slept here vs. I love this place vs. danger: asbestos!) and the imprecision inherent in this kind of layering (did Mark Twain sleep here or over here or maybe right there?). I don’t see any way to do that other than to open it up and let the world have at it.
The brilliant Alex Wright has just published his first book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages.
In Alex’s words:
The book is about, roughly, the history of information: exploring the ways people have collected, organized and shared their intellectual capital [over] the years. It delves into, among other things, early oral traditions, the invention of writing, classical libraries, medieval alchemy, Victorian bibliography and early computer networks. Ultimately, the book is about the relationship between information technology and social change.
From the early draft I read, I recommend the book very highly. Anyone working in or around information (i.e. you) will undoubtedly learn something new and valuable. Congratulations, Alex!
I’ve been bothered by the raft of mobile informational services that don’t take into account the real context of use. When would I ever want to find something as generic as “pizza” in a given location? OK, maybe ice cream, but still while walking around a city I either want something really specific (e.g. where’s the nearest Blue Bottle coffee) or something more general but of an editorially (or socially) vetted quality (e.g. show me a cool place to read for an hour near here). So, I have to give a shout out to MizPee, which is an old idea (and probably not implemented right), but at least it’s something immediately useful enough to get me to bother with the mobile web.