Super busy at the moment but I’m delighted to announce “BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined” (my project in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen) is back online after being offline for 4 years! So now is your chance to join the email community that had most people scratching their heads and wondering what happened to email as they knew it.

Join the list here!

We’ve put it back online because it’ll be showing in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as part of “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now” from November 8, 2008, through February 8, 2009. Press release for the show is here.

Other artists in the show include “bramović/Ulay; Vito Acconci; Francis Alÿs; Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb (former members of Ant Farm); John Baldessari; Joseph Beuys; Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke; George Brecht; Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett; John Cage; c a l c and Johannes Gees; Janet Cardiff; Lygia Clark; Minerva Cuevas; Maria Eichhorn; VALIE EXPORT; Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin; Fluxus Collective; Jochen Gerz; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; Matthias Gommel; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Dan Graham; Hans Haacke; Lynn Hershman Leeson; Nam June Paik; Allan Kaprow; Henning Lohner and Van Carlson; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Tom Marioni; MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates); Antoni Muntadas; Yoko Ono; Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv; Raqs Media Collective; Robert Rauschenberg; Warren Sack; Mieko Shiomi; Torolab; Wolf Vostell; Andy Warhol; Stephen Willats; and Erwin Wurm.”

Enjoy, next week regular blog posting will resume.

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?

Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

More sketching Phun. Another very pretty sketching “game” like those I mentioned in Sketch & Draw = Create & Design Interactive “Things” and Link Bucket: Crayon Physics, Optical Illusions, Design Is & Rocky Origins. (thanks Ross)

Design lovely – 16 of the Most Extreme & Modern Beds You’ll Ever See. Especially relevant to User Designer is Animi Causa’s malleable Feel Seating System bed (pictured above).

Read about morphological liberty in the essay Plateaus of Completeness on The Speculist blog. Should people be forced to use tools that are designed to augment their abilities? For example should you be required to use a computer and credit card to book an air flight? What about more futuristic “tools” that are implanted in people, such as FDA approved RFID Tags?

Graph your favourite website in your web browser using a spring / force directed layout. (thanks Baz)

There’s only going to be one UD post this week – lots of holiday days in Ireland this week so I’m chilling out and eating Easter Eggs! Yum.

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.

Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance.

Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks)

Gimme gimme one of the Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface headsets. No contact gel required. Of course you could always build your own based on designs from the OpenEEG project.

Neat video of a time fountain optical illusion. Looks like water is running backward defying gravity and hanging in mid-air.

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.

Have a look at Yahoo’s Design Innovation Team project website for some interesting visualisations and interactive concepts.

we make money not art writes about creating art with living materials. There’s something about that kind of bio-art that tickles me.

Neat concept: Spy planes to recharge by clinging to power lines

Just a small heads up: At some stage over Christmas I’m going to turn back on blog comments, once I’ve got the right comment and spam filters installed. It shouldn’t take long but the blog will be briefly offline during the update.