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).

To those of you who voted in the poll about HCI tutorials, thank you. To those who didn’t bother (there’s still time) I mutter a future curse: May all your solar panels develop self-awareness and go on strike.

Anyhow, previously I touched upon the idea of objects and tools that enable us to more easily create physical objects (How To Make (almost) Anything), or allow us to more easily reshape existing objects (Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me). In both cases we do the creating and reshaping, we give objects their physical structure, we are the shapers.

How can the physical structure of an object or artifact reshape itself?

Imagine while drinking a coffee you rush out the door to catch a bus. As you run to the bus stop the coffee cup changes into a sealed heat preserving flat container that easily slips into your back pocket. No more splashing coffee everywhere and your coffee is still hot. Then while standing in the packed bus the flat coffee container runs a straw from your pocket to your mouth so you can continue drinking coffee.

If a smart self-reshaping cup is going to be possible we need malleable materials that can change shape anytime we want. Or even better, they change shape when they realise that’d make life easier, e.g. your soup spoon turns into a straw so you can suck up the last drops from a bowl of soup. These kinds of self-reshaping and self-assembling materials are commonly envisioned as the result of nanotechnology research and development.

Now have a look at this video showing a shaping-shifting robot forming from a magnetic swarm (New Scientist article). The research into programmable material shown in the video is part of Carnegie Mellon and Intel’s Claytronics project. Neat ain’t it – yep, its still a young research area but online you can find a bucket load of research into self-reconfiguring modular robots. If the robots where made small enough then millions of them working together could become self-reshaping materials.

Xerox PARC’s Lattice is another example of interesting early stage research into modular robots for smart materials (esp. Proteo). If you have a chance play around with the Proteo RDSim (Rhombic Dodecahedron Self-Reconfiguration Simulator). The researchers who created the simulator were trying out different techniques for enabling lots of small robots to form themselves into different shapes.

To play with the simulator your web browser needs to run Java. When the simulator loads click on “New Goal”, then select “Disk”, set the Radius to 4, click “OK”, then click “Start Run”. In the main area you’ll see a flat disk form out of the white cubes. The white wireframe is the target shape the cubes are to self-organise into. If you’re feeling brave you can new try another “New Goal” of a Cup, try with a Radius of 6.

Another more recent simulator, which I haven’t tried yet, is DPRSim: the Dynamic Physical Rendering Simulator from Intel Research. DPRSim is a platform on which Researchers can develop and test new distributed algorithms for large ensembles of Catoms. Catoms are tiny robots with no moving parts that have internal computation and magnetic actuation.

Finally, if you want a quick review of previous modular robot research have a read of the review paper Design of a Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot.

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.

On Donal Reddington’s excellent MadeForOne.com website Mass Customization is defined as “enabling a customer to decide the exact specification of a product or service, and have that product or service supplied to them at a price close to that for an ordinary mass produced alternative”. This definition is elaborated upon in the article What is Mass customization?. Donal’s MadeForOne blog is definitely worth checking out.

Mass Customization & Open Innovation News is a very interesting blog from Frank Piller, who has spent many years thinking about Customization. One of his blog posts particularly stands out for me User Manufacturing: Amazon’s Next Twist: Will the Online Retailer Become a Key Enabler of User Manufacturing? In this post he discusses the relationship between Mass Customization and User Manufacturing (a.k.a. User Designer).

There is a treasure trove of content in todays links, enjoy.

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?

During the talk he discusses the implications of some experiments which demonstrate that giving people choice doesn’t necessarily lead to increased satisfaction, and can even have the opposite effect. More choice may impact upon the formation of Synthetic Happiness.

In one (free-choice paradigm) experiment people were given a choice of six Monet prints. They had to rank the prints according to desirability. Then they were told they could have one of prints ranked third or fourth. A few weeks later the same people were asked to re-rank the same set of prints. Lo and behold the print they had was ranked higher than the one they originally preferred most!

They were happier with what they had than what they didn’t have. Some follow on research established that if there was the possibility they could change their choice they would be less inclined to be happy with what they had.

In an Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance there’s a more detailed description of the first free-choice paradigm experiment run by J.W. Brehm in 1956. If you’re interested you could have a look at the related “spreading of alternatives”.

I wonder what are the implications of a malleable world for the generation of synthetic happiness? Will people be more dissatisfied because they constantly have a choice about altering the physical and functional form of their objects (e.g. phones, door handles, etc) and tools?

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.