See how the world looks to a baby’s eyes.

What is our psychology of time? Read The future is nonlinear on Mind Hacks to learn more.

Drool drool love the visual style in the My Drive Thru music video.

Air Ape art.

If you only ever subscribe to one podcast then I cannot recommend WNYC’s marvelous Radiolab enough. Over the last few months I’ve been listening to their back catalogue – science radio at its very best. A dash of depth, a dash of humor and lots of interesting diverse topics. It always leaves me delighted and wondering could I do research in that field, and that field, and that field. Boo, there’s never enough time for all the interesting things in the world!

What’s cooking in Research and Development at IBM, Microsoft and HP.

Blog-a-licious 3 Quarks Daily – An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature.

Zoomii reminds me of my old MLE project Media Dive. Media Dive was a graphical and audio ZUI for browsing large collections of music, where I played around with integrating zooming with controlling exposure to multiple spatially arranged audio sources. One feature of Media Dive enabled you to zoom towards a song/album to select what music to hear while also increasing (or zoom out to decrease) the music’s volume.

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, misses and ones to watch.

Sit back and watch the addictive flickrvision. flickrvision is a spatial photo visualisation that shows photos on Google Maps as the photos are uploaded to flickr.

Jump around jump around and smile Where the Hell is Matt?

Neat – Kickable self-reassembling robots. (thanks Graham)

Get some insight into how Google approaches usability and HCI in the talk The Art and Science of User Experience at Google.

An amusing ad. Have you ever felt like that forward thinking little girl when explaining some far out research and design concepts?

Affordances – a common usability term. Do you mean Gibson’s or Norman’s sense of affordances?

Just a quick blog note: For the last few weeks I’ve only posted a weekly Link Bucket. A lot of my time and energy is going into writing up my HCI PhD (woohoo!). Every week I’ll continue sending interesting links your way BUT for the next while I won’t be writing longer speculative and reflective pieces. Got to keep focused.

Very neat – A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods from Visual-Literacy.org. Hover your mouse over any of the entries and up pops the related visualisation.

Excellent, the 2nd Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference is going to be on on the 19th and 20th of September in University College Cork, Ireland. Submission date is June 13th, 2008. Get writing! For more details keep an eye on the 2008 iHCI website.

Get a very brief glimpse Inside Microsoft’s Research Labs. If you want more depth wander over to Microsoft Research’s website – while there have a look at the recently released report Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on Science 2.0, especially wondering what my research practices will be post-PhD. Science 2.0 (or whatever its getting called this month) is a much more open approach to science. Scientific America has a good introductory article explaining it. For example Science 2.0 scientists put their lab books online, writing about failures as well as success’ while making early stage research work (pre-publication) available for all to read about. Like others I suspect that the rise of the Internet inevitably leads to the emergence of Science 2.0, with a corresponding increased fluidity of idea exchange and cross pollination. There’ll probably be some of the same kind of issues occurring as in other digital media industries, i.e. ignore the openness, then fight the openness and finally embrace it. Admittedly the process of figuring out how to make Science 2.0 work fairly is going to interesting.

Scientists have created an entire synthetic genome. Another important step towards making biological nanobot “machines”, which would be extremely useful as smart malleable materials.

Very very blog relevant and interesting Call For Papers: Imagining Domestic Interiors. This is one CFP I’ll definitely be working towards! Robots are set to play an increasing role in our everyday lives, particularly in our domestic interiors. Already, they have found their way into vacuum cleaners, sweepers, mops, and other automated service machines for the home. Looking beyond these largely predictable developments, advances in self-configurable and adaptive robots promise some radically new possibilities. Our furniture, for example, may be host to interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can re-configure themselves to suit different purposes, events, or even moods. An adaptive home interior might also physically age with its occupants, conforming to their changing needs and operating to support their states of development and health. (rest…)

What Kind of Genius Are You? Slow burn or short fast bright bright bright.

This post is dedicated to Molly “Isn’t it only natural”.

Time for another Creativity Knowledge. Today I’m pointing you towards Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), aka. Calm Technology.

How could you make shopping for food easier?

Imagine making a shopping list on your computer. As you head out the door to the supermarket the shopping list automatically stores itself on your mobile phone. Of course you’re always forgetting to buy milk. So your phone talks to the fridge and makes sure you’ve enough milk for the rest of the week. When you walk into the supermarket your phone gives the shopping list to the shopping trolley you’ve grabbed. Now you can easily see your shopping list on a small screen built into the trolley. As you put items into the trolley they are removed from the on-screen list.

In the meantime the trolley has talked with the shop and figured out the optimal route to get around the shop with the least congestion and fastest time. As you push the trolley around the trolley wheels subtly vary resistance, so it becomes easier to move the trolley in one direction or another. By dynamically varying wheel resistance you are unconsciously guided in different directions, such as towards a special offer and away from paths other customers are moving along.

Your shoes have also downloaded a layout of the store. While you walk around the height and softness of the shoe soles varies subtly enough that you don’t consciously notice, but they lean (and maybe lead) you away from the sweet and fast food sections. Yep, your partner has told your phone to tell your shoes that you are on a diet!

The above design scenario captures many of the ideas of Ubicomp. Background non-intrusive technologies making your life easier by weaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it (from The Computer for the 21st Century).

While there is much to admire in the Ubicomp vision I often dislike one possible implication: We may become automatons of clever technologies that guide, steer and influence us “for our benefit” without us being aware of what is happening.

Mark Weiser laid out the original vision for Ubiquitous Computing in The Computer for the 21st Century, and in the essay he co-wrote with John Seely Brown, Designing Calm Technology. Both essays were, and in many ways still are, an inspiring human centered vision of the less-traveled path I (Mark Weiser) call the “invisible”; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it.

Mark identified Ubiquitous computing as the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.

His introduction to Designing Calm Technology convincingly describes an installation art work that embodies what he envisioned:
Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the “Dangling String” is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive. It is fun and useful. The Dangling String meets a key challenge in technology design for the next decade: how to create calm technology.

A collection of Mark’s essays, papers and presentations about Ubicomp are available on this website. Separately there are many research papers available online from Ubicomp conferences, e.g. Ubicomp 2008, Pervasive 2008.

So where are we now? How has the field progressed since Weiser first coined the term Ubiquitous Computing in 1988?

A very good critique paper is Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish. In that paper they outline some of the failings and opportunities due to the massive influence Mark’s original vision had on Ubicomp. I particularly like their observations that in many ways we are already living in a Ubicomp world – technology and our lifestyles have merged over the last decade. Also of interest is their observation that Ubicomp environments are inherently messy.

Break out the champagne. Today User Designer is 1 year old!

I’m happy with how the blog has developed over the first year. Though it took a while to settle into writing weekly. Two posts a week has become my regular rhythm. For the 2nd year my posting target will continue to be one post a week featuring research analysis and synthesis, and a second weekly post packed with stimulating and fun links.

Of course not forgetting :) Thank you all for reading and for your great suggestions. Over the last month more than 2000 visitors, or 2500 depending on which counter I believe, came to the website. The feed subscriber count is now between 200 to 300 regular readers and its increasing faster each month.

Anyway…wanna collaborate?

I’m delighted to announce I’m looking for a talented undergraduate student to spend their summer in Ireland on a 3 month paid scholarship working on a new research project. The project is very relevant to User Designer – it is exploring the intersection of individual customization with presence.

The project title is Ambient Jewelry: Be part of your friend’s desktop – Individually designed presence avatars for social connectedness. Prof. Paddy Nixon and myself (Mike Bennett) will be supervising. This project is part of the ODCSSS (Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School) summer research internship which is part funded by an Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge grant (UREKA) from Science Foundation Ireland.

Visit the ODCSSS website for more details. There are 15 other funded projects in this years program, all around the theme of Technologies for Social Connectedness. In previous years we had talented and enthusiastic students from all around the world. If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, the application process is now open. If you have any questions about this project you can contact me directly via the contact form.

Project outline:
Ambient Jewelry seeks to explore the intersection of individual customization with presence. The aim is to enable the creation of more personal and richer forms of presence, with the aspiration that this will allow us to more deeply connect with our friends and family in a non-intrusive manner.

Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence enhances our sense of connection with geographically separate friends and colleagues. For example when you use an Instant Messaging (IM) client you see which friends are currently online or away, and when engaged in IM chat you are also told whether the people in the conversation are typing. On social network sites, such as Facebook, presence has a more explicit form. We are told what the people in our social network did, e.g. Mark joined the Ireland network, Eimear and Mike are now friends, etc.

As of yet presence tools don’t enable us to control how our presence is represented. We don’t have little coloured jewels (ambient presence avatars) spinning on our friends’ desktops to show how fast we’re typing, nor do we have a flower opening and closing in the jewel when we move the mouse, etc.

The outcome of this project should be parts of a framework that easily lets people create and share their presence avatars. There will be a desktop client like an IM client. The client watches whether you type, move the mouse, open windows, close windows, play music, etc. The specifics of what you type aren’t recorded, instead your activity is used to update a presence avatar / Ambient Jewel. Your jewel updates, changes and transforms based on your actions. For example imagine everytime you open a window a flower blooms in your Ambient Jewel.

Ambient Jewels are tiny. You share your ambient jewel with your friends. When you get a jewel from a friend you can hang it off your mouse pointer, use it to decorate your GUI windows, place them on the side of your screen, etc. Groups of friends are able to work together to group their jewels into larger jewels, and they can then coordinate how the collaborative jewel looks and behaves based on what they do on their desktops.

The core functionality is:

- Ambient Jewels (presence avatars) encode action
- people can create relationships between jewel transforms and their actions
- people can share these jewels with their friends
- jewels can be used to personalize GUI desktops

Potentially the jewels could be shared on people’s blogs, websites and social network profiles.

Some research questions that arise:

1) Does enabling people to personalise the presence avatars affect the importance and value people place on sharing their presence?
2) How should the interface be designed for simplifying the process of creating relationships between user actions and how the avatars update?
3) Does enabling people to decorate their desktops with their friends’ ambient jewels make desktops less socially isolated? By turning them into shared private spaces?

Previous coding / hacking experience writing GUI’s and networking code is desirable. Candidates should be interested in learning about research in Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design. A creative streak, whether technical or artistic, is also useful.

Would you like one of these futuristic disappearing car doors? Here’s an online video of it in action.

At Ellyssa Kroski’s InfoTangle read about the leading forms of information design and navigation structures for the web. Non-technical and clearly written – perfect.

Here’s lookin at you, human. Golan Levin and co’s art piece Opto-isolator is going to stare you down. Time to plonk two of those eyes on top of every TV to cure us of TV addiction?

Help yourself by helping yourself while helping yourself. Ouch. Play the temporal-tastic Cursor * 10. Interesting game idea that could be extended to other forms of interaction design. Reduce task complexity by timeshifting collaboration with yourself?

Many many years ago myself and friends went through a short phase of playing Tic-Tac-Toe (TTT), also called Noughts and Crosses. You win this simple two player game by forming a horizontal, vertical or diagonal straight line of three Xs or three Os. If both players play properly then neither player can win and the game finishes as a draw.

Early in the 90s Jiajie Zhang, as part of his PhD, did a number of experiments where he tested how well people could play TTT against a computer. What he wondered was whether different visual representations effected people’s ability to play the simple childhood game of TTT. Below are four (A to D) different graphical and conceptual layouts of TTT. If you play the (C) Shape version of TTT would you win more or less than if you play against the computer on the (D) Colour version of TTT?

Each of these graphical representations is called an isomorph of TTT. When you use these isomorphs to play TTT you are trying to solve the same problem as in TTT except the problem is presented differently, i.e. to win you still need to create a group of three items.

When playing (A) Line you colour three circles in a line to win, (B) Number you colour three circles so the numbers add to 15, (C) Shape you colour three circles so they share at least one shape in common and (D) Colour you colour three circles so they share at least one common colour.

What he found was that people’s ability to play TTT, this simple childhood game, was seriously effected by what isomorph version of TTT they played on! In one experiment he found that more than 50% of the players failed to get 10 draws in a row in the first 50 games when they played on the (B) Number version.

Depending on the computer’s opening moves (he did a number of experiments where he controlled what sequence of opening moves the computer could make) he showed that (A) Line was easier than (D) Colour, which was easier than (C) Shape which was around the same hardness as (B) Number.

Not only did the visual representation effect how well players did, but what options they had for their next move on the visual representation also effected their playing ability.

For the full paper with far more details about the experimental results you should download at least one of Zhang’s papers about the research The Interaction between Perceptual and Cognitive Processes in a Distributed Problem Solving Task.

A good starting point for learning more about this area is to read about representational determinism and distributed cognition. Mike Scaife’s and Yvonne Rogers paper External cognition: how do graphical representations work? is a good introduction.

Do you think people’s ability to play the isomorphic versions of TTT was affected by their familiarity with the graphical layouts? If a player was given enough practice would they play TTT as well no matter how the game looked? If they could practice would the speed at which they learn to play better be due to the visual representation? Why would one visual representation be easier to learn with than another?

The benefit of this research is it highlights an interesting danger of an individual centered user experience: People could end up shaping and creating tools that make it subtly hard to use the tools for thinking and problem solving. For example if you were an accountant or scientist looking at lots of numbers there is software that makes it easier to create visualisations of the numbers: How do you know that your visualisation isn’t playing with your mind by making it harder to think about the numbers?

In today’s Creativity Knowledge post I’m focusing on a series of research projects from Patrick Baudisch, who is affiliated with the VIBE group in Microsoft Research and DUB in the University of Washington. Over the years Patrick and co-researchers have developed a range of innovative interaction techniques focused on enhancing people’s ability to move content around screens.

Interactive displays surfaces are getting larger – for example checkout these exciting demos of Multi-Touch and Surface (thanks to Cormac and co for the link). A usability problem is that content, such as icons, is moved around these large display surfaces using the same techniques as on desktops. We grab an icon with the mouse, we drag the icon by moving the mouse a physical distance proportional to on-screen distance, we then place the icon where we want it to go by letting go of the icon.

The desktop interaction model, which is designed for small displays, has been kludged to work on large surfaces. Imagine moving the icon with a large wall sized display: we grab the icon, we run half way across the room to drag the icon to a desired location, we let go of the icon, we catch our breath then run half way back across the room to where we started.

How would you make it easier to move content around large displays? How about when you can interact with the displays using your whole body?

Check out this interactive online flash demo where you can play with drag-and-pop. Instructions for the demo are here. Drag-and-pop is designed so when a “user starts dragging an icon towards some target icon, drag-and-pop responds by temporarily moving potential target icons towards the user’s current cursor location, thereby allowing the user to interact with these icons using comparably small hand movements”. On the drag-and-pop website you can find videos and papers explaining the interaction technique in detail, along with material explaining push-and-pop, drag-and-pick and Mountaz Hascoët’s push-and-throw. Yep all this pushing, dragging and popping is confusing! Enjoy.

On a related point: I’m regularly drawn to research around innovative interaction techniques but is there too much focus on novel interactions in interaction design research? Are we like moths to the flame of novelty? Does novelty distract from the development of deeper theories? Or does it highlight that HCI can and should also be practiced as an applied field of research?

For when you’re in a dancing mood and craving some eye candy: lots and lots of music videos “that overlap the music video format with architecture, landscape and/or urbanism”.

Get lost in a world of great Human-Computer Interaction, Usability and Interaction Design resources with the excellent HCI Bibliography.

Of course, not forgetting a big welcome to all the new blog subscribers. There’s a load of you! I’m all ears for your interesting links and suggestions.

During the week I was at the first Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference (IHCI) in the University of Limerick in Ireland. Thanks to Luigina Ciolfi and members of the Interaction Design Centre (IDC) for organising it and thanks to Liam Bannon for chairing the event.

The purpose of the conference was to bring together researchers and practitioners involved and interested in Human Computer Interaction in Ireland. There was a great turn out with lots of interesting presentations. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but there was around 40 people from all over Ireland.

I think one of the really pleasant surprises for everyone was finding out about the amount and diversity of HCI research going on in Ireland. For example Hyowon Lee talked about the research into interfaces for interacting with large collections of videos and images at the Centre for Digital Video Processing in DCU. Aphra Kerr from NUI Maynooth talked about some of her research into digital games and also touched upon some of the fascinating work they’re doing in the School of Sociology, e.g. social networks, etc. John McCarthy, Ian Pitt, Niamh McNamara and numerous others from Cork talked about research into People and Technology, Auditory/Speech Interface Design, Educational Game Design and Usability Evaluations. The IDC people gave overviews on some of their contributions to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Auditory Displays, Haptic Interfaces and Software Development Tools. We also heard from TCD’s Gavin Doherty who talked about Games for Mental Health and Speech Interfaces. There was lots more interesting work presented but I’m not going to try and stuff it all into this post.

One of the talks that struck a strong chord with me was Mark Magennis’ presentation about what they do in the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology, where they work towards helping make the information society accessible to all.

Of course I babbled about my own work (view slides) on haptics, spatial cognition, information visualisations, embodiment and helping people with colour blindness or low visual acuity see complex visualisations.

As part of the conference there were discussions about what next for the HCI community in Ireland. There’ll definitely be a IHCI 2008 and over the next few months there’ll be a number of other initiatives including a mailing list, workshops, networking and educational events, etc. As I hear about them I’ll post about them on this blog.

Update: There’s a new wiki for carrying on the discussions at http://www.idc.ul.ie/idcwiki/index.php/IHCI_SIG

An interesting Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides (Psychology) and John Tooby (Anthropology), University of California Santa Barbara.

Want to take part in a short online research study into the connections between music and personality? If you’re interested and live in the UK or Ireland you can pop over here for more details.

Are you for or against Customisable UI’s?

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.