Bosch have enhanced the night vision system system in cars, so that it provides smartly enhanced high contrast images of the road ahead at night. Clever but would you trust it to properly identify which parts of the road are critical for highlighting?

For the last few years I’ve been using and really liked Sony’s eBook Reader, the PRS500. Yup, I was an early adopter and altogether unsure whether I wanted to give up paper books! Recently there’s been an explosion of electronic readers, lead by Amazon’s Kindle. Within the next few years we’re going to see bendable, foldable and colourful electronic paper. For those of you who are design minded and interested in using E-Paper to invent new kinds of interactive visual displays and devices, here’s a handy guide for learning more about E-Paper technology.

Fascinating The Secret History of Silicon Valley – just over an hour long but well worth watching.

Have you ever gotten into one of those silly arguments about the colour of something? You know where you’re sure that a t-shirt is red, while your friend is 100% sure its redish yellow. Frustrating isn’t it.

Strange as it is, both of you can be utterly right.

You both “see” a slightly different colour because of individual differences in physiology. The receptors in eyes that help convert light into colour often have slightly different sensitivities between people. For most people the differences are so slight they’re not usually noticed, but people with colour blindness experience a world where colours appear very different. Go here for details about the Ishihara colour plate image, which is used in testing whether people are colour blind.

There are thought to be women who are the opposite of colour blind, they are tetrachromats who are able to see more colours than most people (who are usually trichromats). Damn Interesting has a good introductory article about tetrachromats A Life More Colorful, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a good article with a little more science background, Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes.

Previously I’ve touched upon individual differences in genetics for Personalised Medicine and the Psychology of Individual Differences.

There are many other kinds of subtle physiological differences, such as variations in taste receptors and densities on the human tongue. Here’s an introductory article about taste blindness.

Individual differences in physiology can be measured. These measures can be used to shape the design of objects. For example measures of your taste receptors could be used to automatically adapt a collection of cooking recipes to enhance the flavour for your tongue. Or TVs could have inbuilt smarts that adapt football game colours so a person with red-green colour blindness can more easily see their favourite football team. No more struggling to see a team wearing a red outfit running around on a green pitch, or a red snooker ball on a green table.

If the above is to become possible then self-mallable / re-shapable objects that adapt to the individual physiology of users need:
1) measures of user physiology
2) predictive models of the impact due to physiological differences, i.e. if an object is adapting to a user how does it know an adaption has a positive or negative effect?

This builds on implications from When Toothbrushes Mate: Form & Function DNA. Malleable objects and artifacts need to be:
1) self-describing
2) user describing (predicting the impact on user experiences due to physiological differences).

What would happen if your toothbrush could mate with another toothbrush?

Would you end up with an even better toothbrush – the best of both toothbrushes? How about if your toothbrush mates with 5, 10 or 15 different toothbrushes, with each new toothbrush in turn mating with another new toothbrush?

If you could decide which toothbrushes get to breed would you eventually end up with a toothbrush that’s perfect for you? Its form and function, its colour, feel and shape all bred into the toothbrush children generation by generation. The toothbrushes you dislike don’t breed so don’t pass on their “Form & Function DNA” to the next generation.

How would you tell a toothbrush to mate? Maybe to start the mating process you exchange design DNA by physically rubbing your toothbrush against another toothbrush. After that your smart malleable material toothbrush turns into a lump, which then self-forms into lots of little baby toothbrushes. To decide which mini-toothbrushes breed you crush the ones you don’t like, and rub the ones you do like off each other. Then repeat again and again, till eventually you have a baby toothbrush that you stretch into full size and begin using as your day-to-day toothbrush.

The method I’ve described for breeding toothbrushes is a Genetic Algorithm (GA) search. GAs are very powerful for exploring a large search space. In this case our search space is the potential designs for toothbrushes. Seeing each design generation could be a great way of helping people explore and imagine design possibilities.

Dryad, from Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, is a related example of software for exploring the design space around 3D trees. You can cross breed different kinds of 3D trees. Dryad is freely available for Windows and Macs, go play.

It’s easy enough to speculate about reshaping toothbrushes by cross breeding them, but what about more complex artifacts. Such as doors that slide or TV remote controls. How would you control the cross breeding of what a button does? Functionality is more abstract than form. For example if you cross breed two door handles where one door handle works by turning and the other by pulling…you could end up with a nightmare child door handle that works by turning, then pulling, then turning again.

How can the person doing the cross breeding place limits on what forms and functionality are explored? Maybe by only cross breeding one specific part of an artifact at a time, e.g. only cross breed the handles on the toothbrushes.

For artifact cross breeding to be possible objects and artifacts will need some kind of DNA. At the most abstract level the DNA would encode form, functionality and the relationship between both. Or putting it another way: malleable objects and artifacts need to be self-describing.

Smart Lego (New Scientist article), from CMU’s Computational Design Lab, is an example of a physical / virtual artifact that is able to self-describe. Also for many years various computer languages have been capable of different amounts of self-describing, which in computer science is called Reflection.

Of course now I’m wondering what would happen if you cross breed a door handle with a toothbrush?

Isn’t it strange the way faces look so different? Yet we easily recognise that a face is a face. Imagine waking up tomorrow and everyone’s face has disappeared. Each face is replaced with a blank unexpressive blob. Don’t worry about the eating, seeing, speaking and breathing bits – in this brave new faceless world we can still speak and eat, etc, all without a face.

In Faceless Land would you be more or less easily able to tell when someone is lying to you? Think how many times you’ve chatted with someone close who says one thing yet you know from their eyes, lips, nose and cheeks that they mean the opposite.

For a fascinating article about the science behind our ability to read faces checkout The Naked Face (free download) written by Malcom Gladwell, published in the New Yorker a few years ago.

From the article I learnt that most of us are absolutely terrible at telling whether people are lying. We’re so bad that when it comes to strangers we might as well flip a coin as guess whether they are telling the truth or not. Less than 1 percent of people are extremely good at telling whether others are lying.

How do these the super face readers do it? What do they see in the human face that normal people don’t notice? Psst, Gladwell’s article provides a few answers.

Paul Ekman is one of the pioneering researchers into understanding facial expressions. In the 1960s he helped establish that facial expressions are universal. He also found that in a limited way if you physically arrange your face to mimic an emotion then you begin to feel that emotion! There’s lots more brain food on Ekman’s website via his freely available articles and book chapters.

Ok, that’s it for now with the science – I’ll be back to this topic again as its very relevant, interesting and has lots of potential, e.g. Affective Computing (MIT Media Lab Group), HCI + Emotions (paper discussing applications), etc.

How does face reading relate to User Designer? Computers and other digital tools are currently face blind, to them we are all living in Faceless Land. Cutting edge research has begun to crack the problem of facial recognition but we are still a long way off from having systems that recognise facial expressions with the same accuracy as super face readers.

What are the implications when we can design digital artifacts that read our faces as well as super face readers? Add in a dash of smart materials that can intelligently re-shape themselves, and out pops ideas such as self-reshaping comfort blankets that reassure a child by mimic’ing the movement of a parent’s face. The blanket might be able to “smile” without looking like a face – it creases itself here and it creases itself there.

Or make-up that stimulates your facial muscles to induce you to arrange your face into a smile…smile on the outside so you smile on the inside.

Or a sales technique where the salesperson’s office furniture, cups, chairs and any surface begins to look a little bit like the potential buyer’s face. If it was done subtly enough it might be more reassuring than creepy. Here’s lookin at an office chair lookin like yourself, human.

How can we help people easily create and explore the design space around physical / virtual objects? I’ve touched upon this before when I wrote about physical objects that are designed to be easy to re-shape by physical manipulation, e.g. Snap Cups and Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me, etc.

With that question in mind have a look at this video showing off Magic Paper. Ain’t it cool! The researchers behind Magic Paper created a tool that tries to simplify the process of creating an interactive physical “thing”. With Magic Paper you create a virtual mechanical system by simply sketching it. You don’t have to spend ages creating 3d CAD drawings of a car, you don’t have to program complex models of gravity and other forces, etc. You could imagine an extended version of Magic Paper where when you’re happy with how your sketch behaves it is automatically built as a real-world object.

What excites me about Magic Paper is that anyone can (reasonably) easily create a very complicated physical mechanical system. You can create it by drawing, which we can all do – some better than others. You don’t have to worry about complex programming or physical modeling because Magic Paper has a lot of in-built smarts. The complexity of building a physical object / system is hidden, with the trade off that there are limits to what you can create.

Magic Paper is freely available for download, enjoy.

James Landay’s DENIM is a great example of another sketching tool. Over the years Dr. Landay has contributed a lot to sketch research, for example early in his research career Brad Myers and himself published Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design. With DENIM (download) you sketch out websites. Your sketches are interactive – for example you can draw links between web pages, sketch a website button that really works, etc. Try out this example of a DENIM created website. The website sketch is crude but its a good way of creating a sense of what the website would be like to navigate.

Magic Paper and DENIM are powerful examples of enabling people to build by building on what they can already do, i.e. draw. Sketching to create prototype designs potentially enables a tight feedback loop, i.e. draw, test, tweak, understand, repeat. Sketching also ties into an attempt to make designing, interacting and building “natural”. I’ll come back to natural / reality-based / haptic interaction in the next few weeks.

One potential issue with sketching interactive “things” is the fidelity of the sketch. How realistic is the interactive sketch? If its a low-fidelity sketch then the sketch (no matter how interactive) won’t be very like the end product, though it should still help you think about the end artifact in the early stages of designing and creating. There are also medium and high-fidelity prototyping approaches, where high-fidelity prototyping often involves building versions that are much closer to the finished design.

How does this tie into Snap Cups & How To Make (almost) Anything? With sketching we potentially have a way of enabling people to shape interactive objects to their needs without requiring considerable technical know how. For example sketch out how your clothes transform shape over time, how your door opens, what trails the “Follow Me” robot ant overlords take, etc.

Three final examples: Teddy and Smooth Teddy are brilliant examples of research into tools and approaches for simply drawing and creating 3d models. Line Rider is a dangerously addictive game that involves fun sketching to control a little you in a virtual physical world.

You can find out more about their research at the LEURRE project website, where they wrote about their work experimenting with Artificial Life Control in Mixed Societies.

Separately MIT’s Rodney Brooks and others have been speculating about controlling insects and other creatures via brain implants Can cyborg moths bring down terrorists?

There are also examples where social behaviours, such as altruism, occur in other species Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people.

Now imagine designing a living space, a house, where tiny robot (overlords) carry out constant pest control. Not pest control practiced in an aggressive kill-everything-that-isn’t-human manner. Instead take a subtle holistic approach, which may be more sustainable and environmentally sounder than spraying all kinds of chemicals into our living spaces.

Pest control could be carried out by having the robots exert peer pressure on the insects. Reshaping / redesigning the behaviour of the insects by fooling them into doing what we want, i.e. have a set of tiny ant robots create Follow Me trails that lead away from inside your house. Or get spiders with robotic brains to encourage other spiders to build webs around your porch light. So at night moths are snagged in spider webs rather than swarming into your house when you open the porch door.

There are lots of other possibilities of adapting / redesigning group behaviours by controlling and influencing a few individuals in a group. For example encourage swarms of fish to swim into waiting nets, or encourage animals to eat food waste from dumps so the waste gets “recycled naturally”.

Of course there are negative implications, such as potentially throwing the ecological balance out. Or it’d become possible to literally send a plague of locusts to attack your annoying neighbour’s farm.

Insects and their behaviours as design materials!?

In the above photo you can see an example where a streak of lightening can be seen on a model’s t-shirt when the t-shirt is viewed via a mobile phone camera. The lightening is printed on her t-shirt but the “colours” (wavelengths of light) used for printing aren’t perceivable by the human eye but are picked up by digital cameras. There’s more details about the technology here.

There’s a number of usage suggestions for the techology on the kameraflage website. You could imagine extending their idea but without digital cameras. Imagine multiple people sitting around using a shared surface computer (such as a DiamondTouch). Each person is wearing glasses with slightly different colour tints, so each person would be able to view a “personal” image on the surface that the other users won’t see. Or you’re going to the cinema and depending on which glasses you wear the film has a different age rating because different parts of the film are “cleaned up” for younger age groups. Alternatively wear these glasses during the film and get in for cheaper because you’ll see inserted advertisements on-screen?

Recently I came across JennyLC’s Intimate Controllers project (via the always interesting we-make-money-not-art). She writes that the project involved “building game controllers into undergarments so that games are played through players physically touching one another. The goal of this project was to research and create objects that challenge the traditional notions and orientation of video game play”. Her demo video is worth watching and if you’ve a bit of time to spare her thesis presentation video is online.

Her work touches on some ideas that have been running around in my head for years. A world where it’s easy to create arbitrary relationships between actions and effects. I wonder could you generalise her controllers so they can be used for creating arbitrary mappings?

For example imagine a product where you buy a box of flexible, durable and reusable controllers that easily attach to clothes, walls, floors, etc. Once the controllers self-network you start creating relationships between controller activations and resulting actions, i.e. press a controller and it turns on a light, or lay out a bunch of the controllers on the floor and walls to create a 3D dance mat for your game console.

Will people move away from buying physical artifacts with pre-build physical interfaces to buying artifacts that can have controls easily attached to them based on their preferences?

Imagine buying a cooker / stove that has heating elements but no buttons, controls or feedback for setting the temperature. When you get the cooker / stove home its up to you to stick a bunch of controllers onto the cooker. If you like you could setup a touch sensitive controller where you adjust the cooking temperature by sliding your hand instead of twisting a knob, or setup controllers so you increase the temperature by dancing fast on a dance mat in front of the cooker :) You could build your physical interfaces for mobiles phones, door handles, etc, in the same way and potentially with the same controllers.

How could you simplify creating a relationship between controller activations and resulting actions? Maybe by fusing Visual Programming Language, e.g. Toontalk, with Programming by Demonstration. That’s a hard but important question.

What kind of easily composable output / feedback / display components would you have? Maybe build souped up versions of LED throwies.

Will we ever have malleable physical interfaces?

Shape-memory alloys (SMA) are woven into the fabric. The SMAs change shape when power is applied and remember the shape after the power is disconnected.

Above are two images from Hussein Chalayan’s Spring 2007 fashion show. The image on the left shows a close up of a dress before it automatically altered its shape into what you can see on the right. There’s a video of the fashion show here – jump two minutes in for wonderful examples of clothes altering their shape while worn.

I wonder what will the first temporal fashion be? Will there be fashionistas wandering around wearing clothes that all change in the same way at the same time across the face of the globe? Or will hip be that which repeatedly and smoothly deforms with three twists left, one twist right and shows a brief hint of orange?

In the Wired article “Where’s My Personalized Medicine?” you can read more about existing methods that enable personalisation of drugs. In the longer term it should be feasible to create drugs that are optimally adapted based on individual differences in genetic makeup (Pharmacogenetics).

Most of the research and projects I’ve mentioned so far have tended to enable the user to have more freedom by giving them more control. The user is in charge of personalising and adapting.

In personalised medicines we find an example where it probably isn’t feasible or acceptable to let the user design and adapt the (non-recreational) drugs. Are there certain objects that should be adaptive to the user without letting the user explicitly adapt them? Are there certain things that should be fixed in form and function? If so what are the characteristics of adaptive (that which adapts to the user) but not adaptable (that which the user can alter) objects?

On a separate but related point: I wonder what home medicine cabinets will be like in the future? Will they have a spit here slot which when used causes the cabinet to quickly sequence your genome and then pop out some individualised pills? Or could it be far more subtle where when you use the restroom the toilet paper gets automatically infused with personalised medicines? Wipe your way to a healthy lifestyle!

The seat has drawn lots of attention in the blogsphere over the last few weeks. I wonder what draws people’s attention to it? Are they interested because the seat is different? Do they imagine how they’d use the seat in their living spaces? Would it solve a problem, i.e. maximizing seating room when visitors call around? Does its attaction lie in letting people realise aspirations of designing and building their own furniture?

From the videos it looks like the range of possible physical designs is limited but it is very very easy to reshape. As we move towards smarter materials, such as shape memory alloys, can we retain that ease of alteration? The flipside of ease of alteration is there’ll need to be some way of locking things into a shape.

Bean bags are an example of a readily reshapable seat that has no shape memory. I’ve a bean bag at home and every now and then I find that sweet spot where its really comfortable and feels fitted to my body shape. When I get up I know that by the time I return to the bean bag it’ll have “forgotten” my shape. This makes me loath getting up. Though a potentially beneficial side effect of the shape forgetfulness is a form of subtly enforced stillness and calmness.

A few years ago I came across “User analysis in HCI: the historical lesson from individual differences research” by Andrew Dillon and Charles Watson, which was published in 1996 in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 45, 6, pp 619-637. The paper reviews key findings in 100+ years of Differential Psychology (Individual Differences) while discussing the relevance of individual differences research to Human-Computer Interaction.

A quote I particularly like is “One implication of all these analyses and re-analyses is that measures of ability can account for approximately 25% of variance in performance. They are not unduly limited by situation specificity and thus can be used for most selection applications with appropriate caution. ”

For me this paper raises lots of interesting questions, esp. when thinking about cognitive & physiological individual differences applied to users creating and shaping their interfaces and their tools. A few questions that spring to mind are:
1) Will users tend to adopt and create designs that cater to their individual differences?
2) How can we help users to know their individual differences, to know their strenghts and weakness’?
3) Can we guide users towards creating designs that take advantage of their individual differences?

In an attempt to tackle these kinds of questions I’ve spent the last few years focusing in on understanding individual differences in the human eye while trying to tease out how those differences could guide the creation of individual centered information visualisations.

I haven’t played with Ning (yet) but based on the video and from reading around it sounds like the commoditization of software infrastructures for social software.

The implications of Ning and cohorts are that we can expect to see lots of small social networks. Are there certain thresholds for small social networks? Will there be too much choice in a small social network? If you have a bunch of friends, say around 20 connected people, will they drown in too many options?

By giving people so many avenues of communication and interaction you could reduce the amount of shared virtual space between a group of friends. For example I often come across quiet web forums with lots and lots of different sub-forums. Each of those sub-forums commonly only has a few threads consisting of a scattering of posts made by different users, and often the posts are widely spread out in time. If you count the total number of posts on the forums there is activity but because the posts are so spread out between different sub-forums and threads the forum feels empty and devoid of participation. Will the same thing happen with small social networks? Do too many ways of contributing and interacting encourage small social networks to die?

Related to that I wonder will people become overloaded with update choice? Should they update their blogs, their photos, their videos, their profiles, leave comments on members blogs, or respond to comments on forums, etc, etc? All that content creation via so many paths sounds like time consuming work.

Mind you automatically pulling together and mashing together (via Ning, RSS, etc) people’s online contributions might help create a community and sense of focus – a village square.

What a lovely idea – a simple and elegant way of shaping the functional design of such a common tool. The handle, cup and stems are separate components which you connect as you choose.

How far can the idea of producing small lego-like parts be pushed? What are the limitations and problems posed by pre-made sub-components?

I’d imagine it’d be much easier to mis-place disconnected handles and cups. Though if there is a generic connector you could easily replace the missing parts. If you had the parts long enough you’d end up with a number of different styles built up over the years, with associated stories and memories. Mix and match as the mood strikes you.

Of course when you chip a handle, cup or stem you no longer need to replace the whole cup. Hmmm, are certain parts of cups more prone to chipping? Would it be possible to design a cup where the chippable locations are easily replaced? Cafes and restaurants would no longer order whole cups. With it be worth the cost?

Found via apartment therapy

Update: Snaps Cups were created by Angela Schwab of INV / ALT design.