End of week notes and 3 (approx) interesting things, new or old, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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Two proposals we’ve been working on last week were about interactive installations for events. I always find these pleasing to work on, as there’s space to be more playful and conceptual and also because this is the kind of work that brought me close to Interaction Design in the first place, before I’ve started to be interested in designing and prototyping products.

And working both in installations and products, it’s especially interesting to compare their user journeys. If the methodologies for developing products and installations experiences are the same, there’s one fundamental factor that make them differ radically: time.

With a product you can account that some time will be needed by user to learn how to use the product, you can expect features to be discovered gradually by the user, and you are expected to think of reasons why the product would be still useful over time. And these experiences often are expected to occur over days or months.

But for interactive installations the whole experience needs to be over in seconds, minutes at most. There’s only a limited space for illustrating how the installation would work: the experience needs to be as much self-explanatory as possible. And the experience ends in one iteration: no further interactions with the installation is expected.

The way we approach interactive installation proposals is by reducing the experience to the bare minimum. Focusing on the main event in it - the emotional highlight - and removing everything that doesn’t contribute to it. In this brutal process of reduction, storyboards are still a key aiding tool. But good installations’ storyboards should look more like gifs than films: a detailed choreography of movements to make sure that each step that the user is required to getting to the experience main part was absolutely necessary.

Findings

1. Airbnb’s Backyard (2018)

Airbnb’s has a project called Backyard in which they are planning to produce and sell houses.

The spaces will be designed to be shared, from the ground up.

The spaces will be designed to be shared, from the ground up. What exactly that looks like remains to be seen, but the suggestion is clear: They will be optimal Airbnb rentals to anyone who is interested in hosting, or perhaps even investing in the big business of backyard cottages.

The spaces may also support co-living,

(On a side-note, the project is developed by Airbnb’s internal research studio Samara, which was funded set-up after the acquisition by Airbnb of Lapka, in my opinion the producer of the most beautiful product from this side of the millennium).

here

2. Doodle Master (2018)

Somebody did an implementation of that near Airbnb’s Sketching Interfaces concept: turn UI sketches into real (web) code. Looks neat.

here

3. Paperclip Maximizer (2018)

Hi! That’s me sharing a small experiment with genetic algorithms I’ve been working on.

Here’s the simplest definition I could find of a genetic algorithm

The genetic algorithm is a method for solving both constrained and unconstrained optimization problems that is based on natural selection, the process that drives biological evolution. The genetic algorithm repeatedly modifies a population of individual solutions. At each step, the genetic algorithm selects individuals at random from the current population to be parents and uses them to produce the children for the next generation. Over successive generations, the population “evolves” toward an optimal solution.

here

End of week notes and 3 (approx) interesting things, new or old, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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We had a quick workshop and one of the outcomes was an interactive prototype to demonstrate our idea.

When the requirement is to have an experience prototype, focussed on a single feature to be tested or demonstrated, and speed (1-3 days), I found planning how much to modularise being the most crucial aspect of the whole development.

To turn one application block into a reusable module is time consuming, but if the module is used often enough throughout the application, it will definitely save time after. On the other hand, without the requirement of maintainability of a prototype application, writing ad-hoc code(hard-coded values, copied and pasted functions and other software engineering aberration and spaghetti coding trade-marks) can be just good enough for the job.

And the most effective way to decide what to modularise and what to code ad-hoc is a lot of scribbling. Having at hand the focus of the prototype clearly stated and visible on a piece of paper, and then, iterations after and iterations of flow-charts and code structure drawings (which for me, regardless if I’m working with modules in javascript or object-oriented programming in Openframeworks/C++, is some simple version of Class diagrams).

Once the diagrams are detailed enough in terms of structure and it looks like something that can be done fast and that would be effective for the demonstration or testing, just then is time to code. Every extra minute spent sketching and refining the diagrams, is countless time (and frustration) saved during development.

Findings

1. HyperSurfaces (2018)

HyperSurfaces uses vibration sensors and AI algorithms to turns any surface into an interface, recognising gestures and objects colliding onto the surface. From the CEO of the company Zamborlin:

it is difficult to imagine what the applications of HyperSurfaces technology might end up being, in a similar way as it was difficult to imagine 10 years ago all of the applications a mobile phone could enable. The most immediate ideas include the possibility of creating technological objects made of materials that until now haven’t been associated with technology at all, such as wood, glass and different kinds of metal etc.

I love the potential of this, and I’m also excited about the big design challenge of this technology: to turn a feature-less surface/object into a usable interface. To say it with Don Norman’s definition of affordance: the “perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.”

here

2. Privacy Not Included (2018)

Mozilla’s shopping guide for the privacy minded. Nicely done website, accessible and informative

here

3. Thingscon conference (2018)

New sleek website for the organisation, and the 2018 Rotterdam conference is out, with our AI personas workshop too!

here

End of week notes and 3 (approx) interesting things, new or old, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

... read more

End of week notes and 3 (approx) interesting things, new or old, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

... read more

End of week notes and 3 (approx) interesting things, new or old, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

... read more