What if you had a ton of cheap, commodity screens lying around? The MIT Media lab is exploring just that with Siftables. They have a demo application where they sort and manipulate photos, with each photo on a Siftable.

Or what if you had a ton of mice? Microsoft Research India realized that tons of kids huddle around one computer in Indian schools. Only one kid has control of the mouse, while the rest are relegated to be mere onlookers. Solution: give every kid a mouse, and make educational games that are multi-mouse aware.

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Categories: Uncategorized

I was going to write about how awesome my Sony alarm clock was. But somebody has beat me to it. Around 2001, after being late for school several days in a row because I had mis-set am/pm on my alarm clock, I decided I had to get a better one. I searched for days and finally found it. It’s almost the same model as the one talked about in the link, but mine has buttons instead of knobs to set the alarm time. Also, mine has an “alarm off” button. It’s no bigger than any of the other buttons, but unlike the rest has an indentation, so it’s super easy to find eyes-free.

By the way, I’ve used that alarm clock referenced in the link before, and the knobs aren’t real. You can’t turn these knobs, they’re really centering, three-state switches. To increase the time, you flip the “knob” up, pushing the internal “up” switch, and likewise for down.

At about the same time I bought that alarm clock, I sketched my own:

Best feature still not in commercially available alarm clocks? Jog dials.

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Categories: Uncategorized

There’s lots of ebooks on the market already like Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and iRex Illiad as well as examples from research like Xlibris. Say you’re tasked with designing an new and innovative ebook that’s different than the ones already on the market. Here’s a way to get some inspiration: list all the characteristics of regular paper books. Here’s one possible list off the top of my head:

• Books have bindings that protect them
• Books are bought at bookstores and on the web
• You can borrow/receive books from other people/from libraries
• You can write in books
• Bookmarks / dogears
• Thickness shows length of book
• When you open a book up, you see two pages at once
• You turn pages by flipping them to see more of the book
• You can flip pages one by one or many at a time
• You store books on bookshelves, this is a way people express themselves to others
• Coffee table books are big and for showing off photos and as a conversation starter
• There’s pocket-sized books, like Readers’ Digest or mini-travel guides
• There’s books about everything, grouped into genres
• Books often have chapters to organize them

Now you have to decide which of these characteristics are interesting/important/novel. To do this, you could write these things on post-it notes and make an affinity diagram. Also note that I listed descriptive characteristics (”Books have bindings” as well as details about interacting with books (”You flip pages”).

There’s one particular ebook designed by Nicholas Chen at the University of Maryland. It’s hard to explain without seeing the video (9.15 MB). But Nicholas Chen seems to have chosen the characteristics:

• When you open a book up, you see two pages at once
• You turn pages by flipping them to see more of the book

and created a very interesting new concept (watch the video!). These characteristics might seem like very obvious features for ebooks, but over their ten year history, Chen is the first to create an ebook that has these features. I think this says something for the value of being systematic by making lists to map out the design space.

Of course, new designs should not only be inspired by existing artifacts (books) but should also take advantage of new technology. So in Chen’s work, you can detach the two pages (screens) of the ebook and use them independently, something that you wouldn’t want to do with normal books.

So, use my list of dead-tree books characteristics or add your own characteristics. Can you think of innovative ebook features from that list? Here’s one idea for an ebook business model. How about an integrated dead-tree book/ebook bookstore? So you’re at this bookstore with regular books on their shelves carrying your ebook reader. If you want to buy the book, you can either buy the physical copy or scan the barcode on the physical copy with the ebook reader which downloads the e-version onto your ebook reader.

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Categories: Design transformations

 My other entries have been about physical things and today I’ll talk about a design transformation that can be applied to software.

The Magic Ink paper says that there are three types of software:

1. Information software (that facilitate learning in the broad sense)
2. Manipulation software (that allows users to create things)
3. Communication software

And argues that that designers should approach the design of information software as a graphic design problem. In other words: make Tufte-y graphics for information software. It’s ironic that for a paper arguing that graphic design should play a bigger role that the paper is very long and wordy. I recommend skimming the paper while paying the most attention to the images that show before and after redesigns.

As an aside, I think Tufte overdoes information density. He’s a big proponent of cramming as much information into available space. While sometimes the result can be both beautiful and extremely informative, sometimes the designs he espouses take too long to comprehend on first encounter. Often you just want a little data and you want it quickly. About halfway down the page there’s a redesign of the Southwest Airlines online booking website. It took me maybe 5-10 seconds to understand the redesign of the flight selection page. In addition the author’s redesign recommends a map to allow users to select their departure and destination cities over an alphabetical list. Given what I’ve heard about many Americans’ ignorance of geography, I’m not sure this would be an accessible design for all. So consider your users and the context in which they’re going to use your product!

So…what software or website that shows information in textual form could be transformed to be more graphical?

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Categories: Design transformations

I’m going to take a temporary break from writing about design transformations to writing about designs that I like, dislike, or find strange. This entry is about the latter.

This is a picture of the washing machine in my apartment in Bangalore. As you can see, it has “fuzzy logic” control. I seem to remember that fuzzy logic was a buzzword, what 8 years ago? Since no one who’s going to buy this washing machine actually knows what fuzzy logic means it’s purely a marketing term. I wasn’t sure of the meaning myself. My guess before looking it up on wikipedia was that it had something to do with machine learning or heuristics. Well, surprisingly enough the wikipedia article has a whole section of the application of fuzzy logic to washing machines, and I was partially right. It seems that fuzzy logic is a set of heuristics that map from non-discrete sensor data to actions. I think in the US we’d call this “Auto”.

The Water Level button cycles between High, Medium, Low, and Extra Low (what’s the difference between Low and Extra Low?) and the course button lets you select between Fuzzy, Speedy, Rinse, and Spin. I can just think of the user thinking “Hmm, I don’t need my clothes washed speedily (will that compromise on quality?) so I’ll just have them washed fuzzily. But will this cause more lint?”

Another weird thing is that the pressing the Water Level button cycles upwards among the water level options while the Course button cycles the other way.

Lastly, this washing machine has a Power button which is separate from the Start button. Mechanical washing machines never had the need for this. Is it to save electricity?

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Categories: Bad design

This design transformation takes something complex, something with a lot of precision parameters that need to be adjusted and makes it into a simple design with imprecise controls that is more fun to use.

Let’s start with view cameras.

These things offer the utmost in photographer flexibility. Besides being able to adjust the aperture and shutter speed, the photographer can move the film around with respect to the lens, focusing and distorting the photo in ways not possible with normal cameras. Doing this is very intuitive: photographers simply move the “film” around and can see immediately the effect of the movements in the huge viewfinder.

Although view cameras are intuitive, they are heavy, bulky, and expensive. Along comes the 35mm camera. Due to its design, you can’t move the film around, so they created movable lenses (tilt-shift lenses) instead. These are commonly used to make big things look miniature (see an example).

Because these 35 mm cameras have a much smaller viewfinder (making is harder to judge focus) and are designed to be handheld, they had to add fiddly little knobs to these tilt-shift lenses be able to adjust each degree of movement freedom precisely and independently. This is far less intuitive than moving the film plane around wholesale as with view cameras but has the same end result.

To tilt-shift lenses, we’re going to apply the transformation and the result is…LensBabies!

Basically, these are lenses that you can move around wholesale just like in view cameras in the package the size of a tilt-shift lens. But of course, something had to be compromised and that was precision. Since your hand is holding the flexible lens and you’re looking through a small viewfinder, it’s much harder to get what you want in focus. But that doesn’t really matter, because the LensBaby is made to create wildly distorted images:

Skating Kids

©
Sergio Bertolini

Lensbabies are fun, quick, and intuitive to use. It’s a quick and dirty tilt-shift lens. (Or so I hear, I’ve never used one. Actually I’ve never used a view camera or a tilt-shift lens either). But I think I’ve still been educational in this blog entry…

So…what complex and precise things can you make quick and dirty, but fun and intuitive?

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Categories: Design transformations

The Aquaduct is a mobile filtration vehicle, in other words, it’s a bike with built-in water tanks and a water filter. When you ride this bike, some of your pedaling power goes towards pumping the water through a filter.

I think it’s a interesting and cool design. But I heard a talk from a guy today who makes water purification devices for developing nations and he thinks it’s completely impractical. The bike would be quite expensive along with the filters, which would need replacement. In fact, there are much cheaper to purify water such as using UV light or chemicals. These methods are also reasonably fast.

But nevertheless, it’s a elegant design. It won the grand prize for the Innovate or Die design competition. I’m interested in question of why this design is elegant. (Hopefully in your work, you’ll create designs that are both elegant and practical).

Let’s say that the designers of this bike went out into the field and observed people retrieving water. A hypothetical task analysis would run like this:

Leave house with water bucket->go to water source->retrieve water->go back home.

They knew that they wanted to add water filtration to this set of steps. But what’s makes this design interesting is that they didn’t add an extra step. Adding an extra step is a hassle for people. They’ll be less likely to adopt the practice. Instead what the designers did was they piggybacked water filtration on the “go back home” task. And that’s why this design is a winner.

So, what other designs can you think of that introduced a new practice that piggybacks on an exisiting task?

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Categories: Design transformations

Douglas Engelbart, one of those many Oregonians who did their best work in California, invented the mouse in 1963 as a part of NLS (video, demo app).

The first mouse worked by having two turning discs mounted perpendicularly. It works very differently than the ball or the laser mice we’re used to today. But suppose the first mouse did use a ball…

Now onto trackballs. Little known fact, but the first trackball was invented around 1950 by University of Toronto grads for a sonar application. (An aside: researchers at UofT can also say they invented multitouch in the early 80s—long before Microsoft or Apple or Jeff Han. So it really bothers me when articles such as this one in Wired do not mention Toronto’s contribution at all.)

Look at the photo of the first trackball. Really, all Engelbart would have hypothetically had to do to invent the mouse would have been to turn a trackball upside down.

So that’s the first design transformation: turn it upside down. What are other designs that can be created from previous designs by turning them upside down?

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Categories: Design transformations

I’m starting this interaction design blog as a way to document, for lack of a better term, design transformations.

Design transformations are ways of changing knowns, such as existing products and user data into new designs. Here’s what I mean: suppose I’m designing a product and am currently in the brainstorming phase. In this early stage of design, I’ll survey the predecessors and competitors to the product I’m designing to see how my product can be differentiated. Then I can apply a set of design transformations to these existing products and see if the resulting designs are interesting. Hopefully these will inspire me to create something innovative.

One of the most difficult parts of interaction design I think is making the jump from user research to a design. I hope show you examples where design transformations can bridge this gap.

In order to come up with a list of design transformations, I’ll pick some product and think of ways the product’s designers could have come up with that design given some bit of user research and/or knowledge of previous designs. For my purposes, this does not necessarily have to be how the designers actually came up with the design; I’m less interested in the history of a design and more interested in coming up with a list that designers today can use for brainstorming purposes.

Along the way I might point out a particularly good or bad design for fun. I hope to do more pointing out of good designs, as it seems like one of an interaction designer’s hobbies is complaining. But who knows, I might not be able to escape my fated tendencies…

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