15 things Ray and Charles teach us

There's an awesome essay by Keith Yamashita called "15 things Charles and Ray teach us" (PDF), that I found via SwissMiss. I wanted to share it with you and summarise the 15 points here for those who don't have time to read the whole thing, but I encourage you to have a gander, because it's really beautifully presented and well written. I've applied the 15 points to experience design of course :) 01. Keep good company

Surround yourself with other awesome people, it will inspire you. For us experience designers it means brilliant people from different backgrounds, areas of expertise, industries...Making the effort to get out and meet them, and spending some time learning and sharing.

02. Notice the ordinary

Notice the simplicity in people's desired interactions and design them in that same way. If someone wants to drag and drop an item with a finger, don't make a complex dropdown menu. Use patterns that work well and are familiar to people where appropriate, so the learning curve stays manageable. Don't over-design things, keep it simple.

03. Preserve the ephemeral

Don't be afraid to design something that will work for a while and then be replaced by something new. I keep notes on things that I made to serve a purpose for a little while (lean start-up style), and then replaced and redesigned as I discovered more about the user needs. Those things in turn get redesigned again. As the user's relationship with the software evolves, so should the design. In the same vein, keep note of fads in experience design. They reflect a culture and a need at a certain time. There are interesting patterns there.

04. Design not for the elite but for the masses

Design things that will work on all sorts of devices, make your designs responsive, and cater for all kinds of connection speeds. Make your interaction design easy for most people to grasp, and allow your visual design to tell a story that many will appreciate. Ironically, observing extreme users will help you identify needs not so easily spotted in the average user. The designs you craft as a result will delight the majority of users.

05. Explain it to a child

In the same way that toddlers are able to pick up an iPad and use it immediately, your should strive to design software that is so simple to use that even a child could pick it up. I think this can apply to accounting software as well as games and anything else. This is not to say that it is designed for children, mind you. Your product/service/process ideas be solid enough that you can explain the essence of them to a child and have him/her understand with no difficulty. In fact you might get some pertinent questions!

06. Get lost in the content

Reach out to subject matter experts, read up on the new industry you are designing for, immerse yourself in the needs of users and the lives they lead...understand what their world is like, how it looks form the inside of their world, and what they aspire to. Understand the technology, speak to developers, try it out.

07. Get to the heart of the matter

Make sure you are solving the right problem, and articulate it clearly and concisely. Don't make documentation for documentation's sake. Just what you need, when you need it, aimed at the correct audience, and get to the point swiftly.

08. Never tolerate “O.K. anything.”

Fight for great design, in your work and in others too. If you are working in a lean way, ensure that your product is a great MVP, not an ok one. "Just enough design", does't mean "ok design". If you think something isn't good enough, that it could be better, say so.

09. Remember your responsibility as a storyteller

Collect user stories, tell them in a convincing way, either through role-play, customer journeys, a video clip,  presentations, illustrations...Tell the story of the design clearly, and in appropriate detail. Get good at storytelling. Read up on this and practice, it's a really useful skill.

10. Zoom out

Never fail to see the big picture.

11. Switch

"Never get Bored". Don't restrict yourself to designing websites, apps or whatever. Expand your horizons and apply your skills to whatever you can, whatever comes your way. Design a garden, a process, a book, a shop,  a shoe, a room, a city, a bus or a spoon. Anything.

12. Prototype it

And early on.

13. Pun

Have fun. Play on words, play with ideas, with software, with images, with objects...can you use something in an unusual way? Have fun for fun's sake and share it with others.

14. Make design your life… and life, your design

It is awesome when you are lucky enough to find a career path that you love so much that the line between work and play ceases to really exist anymore. I think that's when you can say that you're in the right job. Make your own design for life, your own philosophy, and live it.

15. Leave something behind.

Our work lives through the people we work with, those who use our products, our clients, our friends. Beyond our craftsmanship, we should have the kind of positive presence that allows everything we stand for to emerge and remain once we have gone.

WIFI painting: NFC awesomeness

This is a beautiful piece of work from the TOUCH project: "Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices."

The WIFI light painting project:

"This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting."

Haunting, beautiful, clever, creative....awesome stuff!

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

Tangible wireframes: "the wirefoam"

The Situation:

Designing in an Agile development environment requires transparency, clear communication and frequent delivery. Teams will work in sprints (typically 2 weeks) with a focus on making software rather than documentation. Wireframes are useful for designers to work out interactions, potential pitfalls, communicate design ideas, and are very useful to the development process. They are a visual representation of the layout of features and content of a user interface or website, and I would also add, in many cases how things in it get used and behave.

They are however considered documentation, and we should always prefer working code over docs. This means that it's not going to be very efficient to lock the UX team away for a few weeks to design a whole load of stuff that the development team can't actually build, because of limitations and restrictions. These can be technical, or financial, or even related to resources available amongst many things. The planning of the user experience might be awesome, but it's useless to user and the stakeholders unless it is functional. Although this is true, it doesn't mean that there isn't a place for them and that they shouldn't be used. There are more efficient ways to make use of them and get answers quickly, rather than how they are traditionally presented.

The complication:

As experience designers we are often not the ones to have total sign off on the end solution. A lage team of people will have a say and add their 2c before anything is signed off to be developed and later, deployed. It's time consuming to get round to presenting ideas to everyone, it's hard to get all the relevant parties in a room together because they're inevitably very busy, and it can create a lot of extra work as well (collecting different team member and stakeholder concerns, needs and ideas). Additionally, presenting on a screen, although it gives everyone a good idea of what you're talking about, can fail to get the message across. The reason for this is that a wireframe does not look like a finished product, and is static. Even if your wireframe is an interactive Axure prototype, it's still a picture. It isn't as engaging as as it could be and isn't easy to use in a collaborative environment.

"Plant a seed, grow a tree"

Often, we will not launch the final version of a software feature, but a functional version, designed to be improved on and evolved. This is very useful to us as experience designers, because we get a chance to collect live data and user impressions on the stripped down functionality before adding bells and whistles. This means that we add the bells and whistles that are actually required by users, rather than guessing what may be best in advance. A stat that gets thrown around a lot is that 80% of users use 20% of features. All those extra bits appear like a barnacle effect over time, the more people get involved and the longer you have in my experience. It's good to start with just what is needed, before discussing any further features.

A resolution: tangible wireframes

Instead of showing your design on a screen, even projected onto a wall, make it tangible. It's pretty easy. All you have to do is print it out, stick it on some foam board, and then use a box cutter to make it into jigsaw-like pieces.

For your team:

Stick some blutack on the back and stick each feature up on the wall for the whole team to see. This allows people from your team to come up and move things around to get a feeling for the experience. You can stick up some poster sized paper up there too and allow people to write their thoughts, ideas and concerns up. I have a separate one for technical concerns.

For stakeholders:

In a stakeholder meeting, you can bring the "wirefoam" along and introduce each feature bit by bit and pass it around the table for everyone to have a good look at. The fact that they can hold it and piece it together with other bits will make it an easier, more productive conversation. On the back of each piece of wirefoam, you can write down the name of the stakeholder who requires the feature, and for what reason. This is particularly useful for forms for example. Taking a piece of wirefoam off the table and putting it back in the bag (or even the bin), is a very effective way of moving the conversation on to the next thing, now that it has physically disappeared.

It's also quite good fun, so you're likely to have happier people around the table and more interesting outcomes from those meetings! It's easy to add and take away features. It makes it easy to role play interaction. It's a great documentation tool, because you can take photos of all the different combinations of pieces that people come up with, or show how it evolved for example.

Have fun :)

5 innovations you need to know about

One consequence of innovation is that the technical landscape is in constant flux. Creative technologists need to stay on top of new technological developments and inventions. It's part of the job, and it requires technical ability and understanding and research skills. For everyone else, it can be a stretch to stay on top of such a technically challenging and ever changing space. This post is designed to focus in on 5 really interesting innovations that you should know about, whatever your role. (This is not an exhaustive list of course, there are a lot of cool things happening right now.) 1. Mobile payments

2. RFID in everyday life

...and in social media

3. Electronic skin

4. Graphene

...this is what it means for consumers

5. Augmented reality

Also check out Michael Schrage's top 6 innovative ideas for this year, good post!

What are you looking forward to?

TGIF - 640k

Welcome to yet another edition of TGIF, here on i-thought. I hope this finds you having had a fabulous week full of amazing new ideas and ponderous thoughts. Some pretty awesome projects must have been initiated and a lot of new directions embarked upon. I sometimes wish I could visualize all of that, to fully appreciate how dynamic and resourceful we are as a whole. Have a cracking weekend, and make sure you disconnect and have a little boogie too (even if it's in private). Without further ado...

Stuff I really liked this week:

Grove Bamboo iPhone cases - I love these so much I nearly didn't share the link :)

Xiaofei Wang's Glider Camera - I want one. I really do. It's my brithday soon. Please send.

RoboEarth - The robots are getting their own web

Nicole Gastonguay's wool art - Very cute wooly creatures

Charlotte Mann's Murals - All hand drawn with a black pen

Facts:

"Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

"TYPEWRITER" is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

In the 1980s, an IBM computer wasn't considered 100 percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood.

E-mail has been around longer than the World Wide Web.

Quotes:

"Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague... The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise". (E. Dijkstra)

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough". (A. Einstein)

"640K of main memory ought to be enough for anybody" (B.Gates)

"Inside every well-written large program, is a well-written small program" (C. Hoare)

"If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete" (J. Kornfield)

App of the week:

Fooducate allows you to scan the barcode of any packaged food, and it will tell you what's good and bad about it, what to watch out for, compare products and suggest better alternatives. I haven't seen it in our Aussie app store yet, but I look forward to it.

Video footage of the week:

This is a little bit of fun with RFID tags; I think it's simple and imaginative. Enjoy.

What is a creative technologist?

photo credit: RDECOM

There are a lot new roles and job titles emerging from our changing times, especially in this technological landscape. The one I have seen around most of all these last few months in particular is "creative technologist". There's a good few advertising agencies, digital shops, start ups and other organisations all requesting this new breed of technologist. Everyone seems to have their idea of what it is which is fine, but I'm also seeing marked inconsistencies. We're getting to the point slowly, where companies are saying "I want one of those!" but will they really know what to do with a creative technologist when they get one? Would you?

Creative technology

First of all we should cover off what we mean by "creative technology" to begin with. It sits at the intersection of science, technology, humanities and arts. The entire goal of this discipline is the pursuit of innovation. It may well feature a collection of difference technologies that work to achieve something useful, artistic or fun for example. Innovation comes from addressing a need, or from getting a wide range of different ideas from a highly multidisciplinary team. This isn't a new idea, creative technology has been around as a concept for many years. Some of the areas we commonly work in are social innovation, Eculture, digital arts, computing, robotics, psychology, basically anything that can contribute to a new invention (be it social or technological). "Creative technology" doesn't exist as an academic discipline in its own right. It's not really in our interest to make it one, because we need experts from different fields to come together to work on different projects, some completely out of their usual remit. Collaboration is probably the most important keyword in creative technology. In fact, we talk of "extreme collaboration".

Claudia Eckert uses the department of trade and industry's definitions of "creativity as a thought process, design as an articulation of creativity and innovation as an output of the process" to explore the wisdom of separating technical design domains from artistic ones. She says in this article:

"Artistic design domains, such as graphic design, furniture or fashion design, have a very strong artistic component in the training designers receive and sell their products largely on their aesthetic appeal, rather than a functional distinction to other products. Technical domains, such as engineering or software development, have scientific and mathematical foundations. Products are usually distinguished by their functions or features. Many design domains and projects combine both aspects. For example architecture and construction span everything from the purely artistic to the functional and good buildings need to excel in both".

Creativity

I define creativity as " having ideas and solutions that are completely novel", so in this I include discovery of new knowledge (in science, medicine, law and so on), technical innovation, insightful analysis (in any field), composition of art and music in new ways. My experience is that few people tend to think about lawyers or scientists when they think about creativity. To properly understand "creative technology", these associations are fundamental.

Sternberg's Theory of Creativity shows us that the most creative people have a particular type of intelligence and abilities:

- Synthetic intelligence (the ability to combine existing information in novel ways)

- Analytic intelligence (the ability to evaluate ideas and recognise truly novel ones and the ones that need a whole lot more work, and also the ones that aren't worth pursuing)

- Practical intelligence (the ability to communicate the ideas, make things, test things and so forth)

They also have knowledge, in that they have enough context and history around something to be able to avoid reinventing the wheel. They also know when to stop taking in knowledge, to avoid blocking their creativity. They also question everything. This style of thinking can put them into situations of conflict, which is something they need to be resilient to. They're not afraid to take risks, be it looking silly or trying something very hard. Creativity is a full-time job, it's not something you turn on and off depending on what you're working on. We've just looked at some important skills and attributes that make a person creative, regardless of what field they work in.

In this paper, Sternberg says that if you're really creative you "Buy low, sell high" in the realm of ideas. He means that you pursue ideas that are unknown or out of favour, but that have high potential. This is another area where he mentions that the truly innovative encounter resistance.  A quote that I always remember when I think I've hit the jackpot on an idea and nobody else thinks so:

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." (Howard Aiken - computer scientist)

Creative technologists

The creative technologist has a strong technological background (read computing, engineering, or whatever is appropriate for the organisation). They have a very logical, rational, analytical, scientific and objective outlook and are highly left-brain active. They are however also very right-brain active and are intuitive, subjective, holistic, and synthesizing. This sort of combination is partly learned but I believe you are also naturally pre-disposed to it. Interestingly Prof. Ronald Standler says that highly intelligent and creative people often get average grades. I think that a certain amount of distraction is natural, because you are able to look at something in such a large number of ways.

In many agency environments, the creative technologist bridges the gap between "creative" and "technology". Personally, I don't think this is the best use of these excellent skills, and this unique viewpoint. I think that bringing together people who are capable of having lots of ideas at many different levels, and who can also be very practical about them necessitates a certain kind of freedom from a set recipe. IDEO and Jump Associates are the prime example of innovative companies that bring together multidisciplinary teams in an ideal way. I would argue that everyone from the psychologist to the engineer is a creative technologist there (to some degree). The briefs are around pure innovation and everyone's ideas are taken into consideration. Often the outcome of a project is a good mix of everyone's ideas from what I can tell.

Creative technologist Mark Avnet has a nice definition of creative technologist:

"CTs understand the business of advertising, marketing, and branding, take a creative, strategic and people-centric view of how to connect people and brands, and understand the kinds of mediating technologies that can best be used to make those engaging experiences where the connection happens. They sketch with technology, just like a visual creative can sketch with a pencil. They’re steeped in strategy, so the things they come up with make sense – it’s not about technology just for the sake of technology. The experiences they design address real needs of people and brands".

On the iAB blog, Randall Rothenburg interviews RG/A chairman Bob Greenberg:

"There are critical creative needs that didn't exist in the old advertising," says Mr. Greenberg, who counts 130 technologists in his New York office. "Advertising is no longer just about the display ad or the TV commercial or the banner; it's about creating meaningful tools and architecting user experiences. Our technology group, they can keep up to speed technically with the top people at HP or IBM. But they also understand how to work with others to create an application that will lead to community."

It's good that agencies across the board are recognizing the advantage of hiring creative technologists, and their importance in a fast changing ecosystem. We're in a place where innovation is key to the equation and where technology is the main driver. Start ups and idea incubators are popping up all over the place, putting pressure on the older, more established creative agencies worldwide. The focus however needs to remain on innovation and extreme collaboration rather than an industrial race.

None of these things are new for the field of computer science in particular, and also physics for example. The best scientists are all right-brain + left-brain dwellers. Einstein played violin, Richard Feynman the bongos, and Leonardo da Vinci was probably an early example of a master creative technologist. Science is only about discovery and innovation.

Looking after your creative technologist

Here are 5 things you should do to ensure you get the best out of your CT.

Once you get a CT in your team, ideally you'll be looking to find him/her a fellow creative technologist to hang out with and bounce ideas off. The danger of having a sole person responsible for creative technology in your team, is that they are likely to get overloaded with projects that need to be done, and:

- Do not get them involved in production and operations (you'll burn them out on tasks not requiring idea generation, which is what you want)

- Let them read, research, and ponder to their hearts content (Good ideas come from having knowledge, remember?)

- Don't try and measure their output (4 bad ideas can combine to produce one awesome idea)

- Don't rush them (well, not all the time. A little pressure can be beneficial, but requesting things by yesterday is just going to shut down their creativity)

- Do send them to conferences (the more exposure they get to different people, ideas and technologies, the better)

And lastly, if you can create a positive, interesting, fun environment to work in, you'll keep them.

Here is the team at IDEO re-inventing the shopping cart

10 Computational Linguistics blogs

photo credit: quinn.anya Here is a handy list of those essential CL blogs for those of you out there with an interest in the topic. They're not in any particular order, I read all of these.

LingPipe (very technical and practical, but very useful information and tips for building these things)

The Mendicant Bug (full of interesting ideas, a thoroughly god read)

Information Retrieval on the Live Web (nice essay style posts with graphs and details)

NLPers (a classic in the CL blog space!)

The Noisy Channel (another well loved classic)

Daniel Lemire (a steady stream of CL goodness)

The Lousy Linguist (not all about CL but worthwhile nonetheless)

Extras:

Thought Process (I loved this, but it hasn't been updated in a long while)

Language Log (it's UPenn's blog and it's pretty good)

CSAIL News (from the MIT labs)

Also, I follow the conversations on Quora around Computational Linguistics.