Also Plants Fly

The Last of the Flying Plants

It has been quite a troubled time recently for me, which partially explains my prolonged absence from this blog.

After some hesitation and thinking, I have decided to permanently shut down the blog Also Plants Fly. So, this is going to be my last post here - the last of the Flying Plants, to put it ironically.

After about 3 years and more than 200 posts, it is time for an objective evaluation and seeing where we are at: Also Plants Fly gets about 10 readers a day, of which more than 90% are random bouncers from google or blogger, sadly a similar figure to the one I reported a couple of years ago.

However this is not the main reason for shutting down this blog. If we exclude the great learning experience I had while writing for Also Plants Fly, I cannot really say I got much out of it: as the low readership proves, I was not able to share my thoughts about every-day's interfaces, nor to build or join a small interactive community around this topic. As it is now, Also Plants Fly is just an isolated blog where I post some thoughts like on a personal diary online. The time invested on this project did not pay back and I think it is about time to admit it.

I am of course the only one responsible for this failure: I guess that my irregular postings didn't really help, nor my choice of topics. As I do not like unfinished work, I am writing this last post to put the word END to this project.

Also note that this blog will remain online under the address alsoplantsfly.com until the end of the year 2011, but then I will relocate it in a sub-directory (probably blog.alsoplantsfly.com). Feel anyway free to contact me for any question you might have in the future about the posts.

"The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck."

It was a great journey.

Andrea Bianchi

Never Judge a Book by Its Cover

They say not to judge a book by its cover, and the manufactures of the book vending machine in the pictures above took this advice literally. Book vending machines are very popular in Korean subway and train station (this one in particular is in the subways station of Wolpyeong, Daejeon), as they provide probably the last chance to get a cheap book just before a potentially long journey.

Differently from other machines though, this particular one has motors that are moved at fixed intervals of time in order to turn the first page and give to the customers the chance to pick inside the book. Looking inside a book before buying it is a common practice for customers in a bookstore and has also been widely used by online retailers, who created a virtual metaphor for "looking inside a book" by browsing a pdf file (Amazon's Look Inside feature is probably the best example).

Since customers usually want to peek inside a book before buying it, it is natural that also the manufactures of this vending machine tried to mimic this action. My question though is why they preferred to create a physical interface actuated by motors to turn the pages, rather than relying on a LCD screen, with a software that virtually allow people to see some content of the book.

One simple explanation is that perhaps this approach would be too expansive, or that this company doesn't have enough know-how to deal with custom software and external LCD screens. Another explanation is that the physical book is able to convey information that a virtual representation cannot transmit, and since the product sold in this case is a physical and not virtual object, customers might be as well interested in the physical qualities of the object and not only in the written content (the quality of paper, for instance, is an important aspect that affect the pleasure to read).

We are basically facing again the physical VS virtual representation of objects, as we have seen it many times in this blog. My 2 cents on this matter is that the physical representation is dominant and unavoidable. Even when you read an ebook, which apparently is not physical at all, the physical properties remain dominant, but this time they shift from the book, to the particular device you use as reader (the feeling of reading a book on the iPad vs a Kindle).

Above, Amazon's LOOK INSIDE interface.

Further readings: A comparison of reading paper and on-line documents by O'Hara and Sellen.

When Much Is Too Much

I arrived to the Yuseong (유성) bus terminal around 2 pm last friday, a bit too early for catching the bus to Seoul, which was scheduled for 30-something minutes later. I sat on one of the few available seats, just next to an exit door, but quickly realized why it was unoccupied: for every person opening the door, cold air from outside blew right on me.

As more and more people was continuously passing through the door, with a bit of malice but also genuine curiosity, I have start counting for how many seconds the door remained closed before another person would open it. I played this mental game for the entire time I was waiting, realizing with stupor that in only one occasion the door remained closed for about 60 seconds: on average it would remain close for less than 20 seconds.

You might be thinking "so what?", but if you genuinely think about the situation - a door that remains closed on average for less than 20 seconds- you might understand that we are facing a design problem: why do we even need this door?

Acknowledging that I stayed in the station for only about 30 minutes, on a friday afternoon which is supposedly to be a reasonably crowded day (it was not, but I cannot say the terminal was empty), and that my sampling method was far being accurate or scientific, at the intuitive level we can still recognize that there is a problem. A door that is opened so often is inconvenient, requires a lot of maintenance (e.g., oiling), it is expansive by making the air-conditioning system ineffective (the room was freezing) and is potentially dangerous.

So why was it open so often? This door was not the only one in the terminal (there were other two) but people seemed to prefer it in order to acces the bus platforms. People who just wanted to go outside to get some fresh air, make a phone call, smoke a cigarette, put their stuff on the bus and get back to the terminal to access the conveniency store, buy a ticket (the ticket booth is located in the waiting room), or pass across the building would pass through this door.

Perhaps a better space layout where the ticket booth is not in the waiting room would partially solve this problem. Alternatively, here other possible solutions:

the conveniency store could have its own entrance from the platform
arriving and departing passengers could use different doors
smoking could be prohibited on terminal platforms
buses could stay at the platform just for few minutes before departing, so that people could compactly get on the bus
in the case where preserving the temperature inside of the room would be the priority, a second room could be used as a layer between the room and the platforms. Alternatively, a revolving door would also work.

We could go on with alternative solutions (many of which introduce new problems), but the point I am trying to make in this post is simple: the door described above is a design-bottleneck, and the fact that is clearly over-used is a symptom that highlights a space-layout problem.

Labeling Scientific Data

Having been working these days on a new type of interface based on electromagnetism, I had to use in several occasions a Gaussmeter (a.k.a. magnetometer) in order to measure the strength of magnetic fields.

I used the Gaussmeter in the picture above from AlphaLab Inc. but I found at first difficult to decipher the meaning of one of the labels used for the knobs. The label for the left knob states "off" to indicate that the device is off, "19,999" to indicate a low precision reading useful for large magnetic fields, "1999,9" to indicate a high precision decimal reading preferred to measure small magnetic fields. The labeling also tell us that, because of the limited number of characters that can appear on the screen, the first option will be able to display results up to 19999 G (Guass) and the second option up to 1999 G.

The problem that I had with this notation is that using the number "19,999" and "1999,9" to exemplify the "low res / high res" is not very intuitive or informative. In fact, it actually implicitly delivers the idea that the unit scale will shift of 10, weather instead is only a matter of representation: a 12 recorded with the first option might be something like a 12.4 on the second option, but the unit is always the same one. This is an obvious finding if you play with the device, but quite confusing at a first glance.

A better option could have been to write down the unit of measure ("Up to 19999G" and "Up to 1999,9G"), or not changing the scale of the values ("1G" and "1.0G"), or using descriptive text ("Coarse" and "Precise"), or simply getting rid of the distinction (as it seems the new models do). Bottom line: scientific devices should always carefully label their data, always including the unit scale of their measurements.

Drain Cap Pop-Up button

In the pictures above you can see a curious drain cap that works as a pop-up button: you press it to close the drain that holds the water in the basin, you press it again to open the drain letting the water flow. In this design there are no levels or pull systems used to raise or lower a metal fixture and hence to open or close the drain: the interface and the interaction are simplified and comes to the single movement of pressing a button.

Having seen this interface for the first time, I find it amusing. Honestly, it took me few moments to decipher how to open the drain (the geek part of me was looking for switches on the wall, as if the drain was electrically powered), but despite the confusion for the first-time user, I like a lot the simplicity of this design. The sink seems also easier to clean, as one controller (the drain level) is not anymore necessary. On the other side, I can anticipate how might be problematic to open and close the drain if there is very hot or cold water in the sink.

This interface is a good example of how less is more and it can be applied in designing everyday's objects. Haven't seen though this product elsewhere before, I also wonder how hard would it be to change current standards and users' practices, even when the newly provided method is better.

Two Forks

As a follow-up to my previous post, here another interesting cultural interface, or better, a cultural usage of a common interface.

I went out eating fried chicken in Seoul, Korea, and the waiter brought me a dish with two forks: the forks were meant both for me, as everyone else at the table had a pair of forks in their plates. Having seen this way of serving food for the first time, I have asked what was the reason for having two forks for eating chicken (we were not having a multi-courses Western meal).

A friend explained me that one fork is to hold the meat, while the other one is used to tear a piece, as a substitution for cutting it. I personally don't see a great advantage of using two forks rather than a fork-knife set, and my suspect seems confirmed by the fact that I haven't seen before this way of eating. I can imagine though that two forks might be easier to handle for people accustomed to chopsticks.

More importantly, however, I suspect that the choice of using two forks rather than the fork-knife set is also the result of a conscious attempt to distinguish Western food from Korean food. In fact, using a fork with a knife is a very codified interaction, which might implicitly remind people that they are having Western food (as for Western people, eating with chopsticks can emphasize that they are eating Asian food). Hence, the choice of two forks underlying the the message that the audience is eating a Korean food in a Korean restaurant, and not Western food in a fancy foreign restaurant. In some sense, the two forks might contribute in building a cozy or homey mood. (This is the same reason why we want to have chopstick when eating Asian food; the mood does not feel authentic otherwise).

Without going too far with my speculations, it remains interesting to note how the same interface (the fork) has different usages in different countries.

Beyond Paper Cups

In a recent trip I ate a delicious Korean traditional pancake (호떡) for the first time. Because the pancake is fried and hence very hot, the vendors served it in a paper cup, which wrapped it as an insulating cone-holder (see picture above).

In Korea, I have seen several times people using paper cups as food holders instead of plates (beside the above example, I have also seen people serving portions of birthday cakes in paper cups), so basically adapting an interface used traditionally for drinking to a different usage (serving food).

This is an obvious choice in absence of alternatives (i.e. disposable plates) and, in my opinion, a better choice than using paper napkins. It is also somehow a cultural reinterpretation (or adaption) of the cup interface. For instance, Koreans eat many food in bowls, including ramen (라면) which is nowadays also served in paper cups. Finally, chopsticks better adapts to bowls and cups than not forks ("picking" rather than "forking"), suggesting me that the usage of paper cups as food holders is not just a coincidence but has its roots in the local culture.

Shifting the Complexity to the Controller

In my lab at KAIST, a colleague's working desk is located precisely under the air conditioning grille. During hot and cold days, we turn on the air conditioner and consequently the fan, just over my colleague's head, blows air on his neck causing him annoyance. He hence came up with a solution to the problem, by making a shield with cardboard and taping it on the ceiling in front of the air conditioning grille (see the image above).

Also Plants Fly is not new to this type of hacks (see here another example), and I am a big fan of this type of creative solutions, because they (involuntarily) make the users part of the design process. The designer cannot possibly anticipate all the problems with their work, nor all the customizations that users will require, so a top-down design approach most of times will fail, but an iterative approach that leaves room to spontaneous user-made customizations will provide a good-enough compromise.

Nevertheless, sometimes problems of a particular interface can be anticipated, and I believe that it doesn't take too much imagination to predict the problem caused by this air conditioner. As a matter of fact, I believe that the designers anticipated this problem and built a function to let users control the fan grilles independently (note that I cannot be sure about it because all buttons and menus are in Korean).

Thus, the complexity of the device is -as often happens- shifted to the controller, where the absence of physical affordances contribute to steepen the learning curve of the particular interface. As a final result, my colleague preferred to invest some time to build a hack-shield, rather than trying to figure out how to use the control panel of the air conditioner. He offers us an interesting lesson.

DALSMA 2011 - 4 June, Seoul

This year I am organizing with a group of capable people the second edition of DALSMA, a conference-style event about Digital Architecture and Large Scale Media Art. The event will be held on June 4, 2011 in the Seoul Art Space Mullae, Seoul, Korea.

If you are interested, check out the event site and make sure to register soon your seat, as this year we will probably have only 200 seats for the public. The event will consist in 5 speakers giving a keynote presentation and a discussion with the public, moderated by a super partes expert.

I will remind you later on this year about DALSMA, but I also invite you now to get involved by providing us with valuable feedback so that we can make this event amazing! We are also still selecting some speakers, so if you know somebody who could be interested that you would recommend, please let me know. Finally, we are also looking for volunteers that will help us out on the day of the event to organize the venue and support the audience: let me know if you are interested or have any question!

Thank you very much.

Bags in the Age of Cupcakes

In the age of disposable coffee cups paper holders and carry trays , it is now finally the turn of cupcakes. The images below show a plastic shopper bag with two pockets where people can nicely accommodate two cupcakes, so that they do not tip over. The design in its simplicity is functional and pretty.

Being a big fan of finding specific solutions for specific needs (tailoring interfaces according to their applications), I am happy with this solution, on the condition though that it does not contribute to an extra cost for the society (having to handle with more plastic garbage is not the way to go).

True Wind Power

I once asked to a Korean friend of mine what is the major source of electrical power in Korea (nuclear, oil, gas, hydro...): the answer was that Korea sustains its economy on renewable source of energies such as wind, solar and water.

Some time ago I went to a mountain excursion near the city of Daejeon and in the woods I took a picture of -what I believe to be- an electrical transformer panel (the box in the picture below). On the surface of this box there is an iconographic picture of an open land with wind-powered turbines, unconsciously suggesting the eco-friendliness of the energy in this electrical box.

Surely energy is one of the major issues that mankind is dealing with and we are quickly reaching the point in which we have to find reliable and environmentally sustainable energy sources to power our human activities. Forms of energy alternative to oil and nuclear (such as solar, wind, hydro, gas and geothermal power sources) might particularly be valuable for those communities that live in remote places and have no access to the major power grids, and they might also be indispensable tools for the public opinion and media to sustain the cause of environmental sustainability, but I serve some doubts that they can really impact on the production of energy.

In the case of wind energy, I do not want to get into the merit to discuss if the cost of turbines, their maintenance and the impact they cause on the territory are reasonable costs that justify their usage, but the fact is that the images of wind turbines are one of the primary choices to represent clean energy, as in the Korean box above. If you ask me why, I would say because they look pretty in a picture: a turbine in the background and few cows in the foreground seem an image coming out from the Beethoven's Pastoral or Virgilius' bucolic poems. However, wind is probably the least representative of the eco-friendly power sources when we talk about real energy production.

The image below is a graph from the International Energy Agency showing the energy production of Korea. The renewable sources of energy (that my friend claimed to be the primary source) account roughly the 0.2% of the total energy production (87% is nuclear), of which wind is about the 6%: if my math is correct, wind hence accounts only the 0.012% of the whole national energy production (data from 2008).

I hence argue that using wind-power iconography, despite any good intention, is a misleading way to represent reality, because some people will live in the illusion that we can run a country over wind power, when it is obviously not the case.

Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction

In the past few months I have been posting about robotics on the Lift conference website. These posts are in preparation for the upcoming Robolift conference and attempt to tackle the issue of interaction with robots under different point of views, such as design, AI, business, art, social sciences. These posts are also the main reasons why I wasn't able to keep up with blogging on Also Plants Fly. If you are interested in robotics and would like to know about my thoughts, go ahead and read my articles here.

Any feedback is highly appreciated. Thanks!

Touch Screen Vending Machines

A new type of vending machine made its appearance in Japan these days (it is so new that Japanese people themselves take pictures of it). The vending machine is made of a large touchscreen where products are displayed graphically and can be selected by tapping on them, as shown in the picture below.

Although I like the final result and I can foresee many opportunities to display interactive content on the screen to better inform users about the products they are about to buy (e.g., display on the screen details about the product, relative advertisements, reviews of other customers, etc...), I can also see some limitations or possible abuses of this approach. Moreover, it is worth noting that while Japanese adopted a virtual visual representation of the products, in Korea they choose a diametrically opposite approach: they display the real physical products in a small glass-made cabinet (see also this post).

Although both alternatives are valid solutions, I personally like better the idea of displaying the real product, both because makes the purchase more transparent and because I believe that the real product can convey more information than a virtual representation (e.g., the same difference that exists between looking at the picture of a Big Mac and the real one). I also wonder about the cost-effectiveness of these new vending machines: are they able to better persuade people to buy their products? Nevertheless it remains an interesting approach.

Thank you to Jean-Charles for sharing these images.

Becoming Han Solo

I have just watched this video from the NY Times and I have decided to share it. This is not a video about technology, nor a praise to the Apple's iPad: it is mainly the personal story of two parents' daily struggle to overcome with technology their youngest child's physical disability. It is a touching story and I wish all the best to this family!

What I would like to point out in this short post, it is the way the parents select the best fitting technology for their child: they iteratively test it out. They keep what works well, they discard what doesn't work. Apparently, this approach matches well with the iPad model of downloadable apps; the iPad with its apps, in comparison with expansive specialized assistive technology equipment, not only is cheaper (and many apps/contents are free), but also allows for customization.

The key point, though, is not to praise the iPad or the AppStore. The key point is to understand, as Amit Pitaru has already very clearly pointed out in this post, that Assistive Technologies shouldn't be specialized (and hence more expansive) equipment and should not target a niche market adducing as excuse the need of "human centered design". Assistive Technologies, in order to work, should be commonplaces technology that everyone has: the technology itself should not change, rather it is the personal usage of such technology that can change and adapt to the particular needs of any category of users.

Biometrics for Punching the Clock

Biometrics are often associated with secure authentication systems, such as bank ATMs and door-locks, or with identification and background security checks at the immigration of some countries (e.g., USA and Japan). Although I find fascinating the applications of biometrics to security, I would like to show another possible usage for biometric scanners, as I have seen it applied in Korea.

The picture above depicts the identification session that a Korean public school teacher has to go through when arriving and leaving work: the teacher is identified through fingertip recognition and the work starting and ending times are recorded and saved in the system (basically this system does what once was done by punching the clock).

For those of you who don't know it, the biggest limitation with biometrics is that they are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets (as Bruce Schneier's pointed out in this post): fingerprints are just physical properties, like the color of your eyes or of your hair, and as any other physical trait, they are intrinsically disclosed to the public. Moreover computer can do a good job in recognizing and classifying them, even though a human would not be perhaps able to tell two of them apart by just looking at them.

Nevertheless, biometrics are a good and fast way to ascertain someone's identity, especially if the features extracted (i.e., from fingerprints) are matched with those from a limited population (i.e., only the workers of a school): in this case, false positives can be drastically reduced and the identification process can be very accurate and fast.

If you are interested in the theme of biometrics for security I also suggest you to take a look at Bruce Schneier's On Security book, a very thoughtful collection of security gems.

Evolution, Art and Design

Last weekend I went to see Theo Jansen's exhibition in Seoul where I could finally admire in person his beautiful creatures. Theo Jansen is a very well known kinetic artist, whose works consists mostly of large animated sculpture that resemble skeletons of animals and that are able to walk using the wind on the beaches (if you don't know him, check out his BMW commercial).

It is needless to say that his work is very impressive, both under the artistic point of view (i.e., creating and classifying the creatures according to different evolutionary traits) and the technical point of view (i.e., engineering the motion, storing the wind energy in bottles, sensing the water to avoid creatures to drown). There is much to say about these topics, but we redirect the readers to his TED talk.

Because of my interest in interfaces, in this post I will only briefly talk about the engineering of "feet" (or should we say paw? claw? hoof?).

Since all these creatures live on beaches, the evolution shaped their feet to adapt to sand, and water, making possible for them to walk in the rain or in windy days, as well as on the dry sand or the shore-line. The initial design of the feet, as I understand it, was meant to create small and minimal feet, because the creatures themselves were small and light, and could not really sink in the sand. However, larger and heavier creatures leaded to the need to feet resembling snow rackets to avoid that the sand could swallow the feet in the ground and hinders the motion.

Eventually the design of the feet evolved in various directions, but their shapes consistently became more round, thin on the tip and larger at the ankle (like a U or V shaped feet) in order to adapt to the majority of terrain conditions. Ironically though, the evolution played an evil trick to these creatures. In fact, these beautifully designed feet were meant for outdoor environment and beaches, not museums, so they couldn't get a good grip on the slick floors and tended to slip during the walking demonstrations. Indeed these creatures were not meant for being caged in a museum!

For this post I have uploaded several pictures of various feet design that i could observe at the museum. However keep in mind that these pictures and my comments are not meant to be an exhaustive explanation of Theo Jansen's work; they are rather meant to be an invitation to think of how evolutionary design can be applied to a great variety of products, situations, and artistic artifacts.

How Biometrics Could Impact on our Routine

The female dormitory at Chungnam Natioanl University (Daejeon Korea) have been recently equipped with biometric security interfaces; a friend has been so kind to send me a picture of the authentication process.

Basing my observations on to the picture above, I can tell that the system is a a VeinID reader produced probably by BK System. Such reader works by scanning and encoding the pattern of veins on the back of the hand. The shape of the paths of the veins are, in fact, unique features and a proper analysis of their pattern could guarantee a good level of recognition. A successful reading leads to the recognition and authentication of a user, granting her access to the dormitory.

I have said that the system "could lead to good recognition" intentionally, because in practice the user's authentication with such system is often denied (a false negative occurs). That happens every time the user's vein configuration is altered; for example, physical activities like running, or excessive usage of substances such as alcohol or caffeine temporarily changes the size of the blood vassels, causing slight variations of the vein patterns on our hands and compromising the authentication on the VeinID scanner.

Biometrics is an interesting topic not only for the security and ethical implications of their deployment, but also because of the way they might impact on everyday's life, activities and routines. Long story short, the girls at Chungnam who indulge in drinking alcohol with friends outside school, might now have to consider alternative ways to get back safe to their dorm.

For further readings, here another example of device based on palm vein patterns.

A Common Language for Public Interfaces

My friend Guilhelm sent me some time ago a very interesting picture he took during a trip in South Korea. The picture shows a quite confusing sign indicating the direction for a public toilet. The confusion is generated by the non-standard icons chosen to represent men and women. Not only the colors green and orange used for the the icons are not quite commonly associated with gender distinctions, but also the shape itself of the icons lead to confusion: supposedly, the man is represented by a stylized face with short hair (looks more like a tennis ball, as my friend commented), while the woman is represented by a face with long hair or braids.

Without trying to start a debate on the origin of this choice (which I would simply call a "bad design choice") I would like to point out that probably the designer recognized that the message was not well communicated and felt the need to clarify it by adding the subtitles "MEN" and "WOMEN" underneath the icons. Differently from more abstract design choices for bathrooms that we discussed before, this sign is simply confusing because of its choice of visual alphabet (non standar color and shapes). Surely the damage it might cause is very small, but it highlights the importance of thinking about a shared-common language (a design koinè dialektos) for public displays.

Less is More

In Korea, simple and minimal packages with small capacity like the one shown in the picture above are very common: these packages usually contain fruit juices or soups in small quantities (i.e. 100 ml) and for this reason they are very convenient to store and then to dispose once they are empty.

Incredibly, these low capacity containers have been since long used as an effective way to implicitly advertise the quality of the product, subconsciously implying that the scarcity of the content defines its quality. In fact, as for those products which are often packaged in small containers (think about perfume samples and cosmetics), the packages are used as a way to highlight the preciousness of the content ("it is natural and organic juice").

In my opinion, these packages represent a good example of how the "less is more" principle has been applied in interface design not to increase the usability but to boost the image of the products contained.

Computerized Fortune Teller

An unusual Hi-Tech computerized fortune teller in the streets of downtown Daejeon, South Korea. I should have stopped and asked him to read my future just for the sake of looking at the way he interacts with the computer in order to read tarok cards -- I only hope he doesn't use the solitarie on Windows for that :)

Definitely what is interesting here is to observe the spontaneity of adoption of new technologies even for historically not-technology oriented tasks, like fortune telling. This behavior well represents the tendency to search and quickly adapt to "new trends" that in my opinion characterize many Asian societies. Among these, Korea is probably one of the most prominent examples.

We Are All Designers (reprised)

We are all designers: as in my previous post, I would like to highlight a user modification of a commercially available product to better fit his own special needs. The user I am referring to is my father, who uses his iPad for reading the newspaper in the morning while having breakfast. While he is eating with one hand, he uses the other hand to zoom, pan and turn the virtual pages of the newspaper; because the back of the iPad is actually slick and tends to move on the table, he modified it by simply applying rubber cushion tips to avoid slips.

The lesson learned here is that designers and engineers don't need to try to forecast and fix all the problems in their design, because no matter what the final product is, users will have their own preferences dictated by the way they use the technology, the way they learn and understand it, the way they internalize it. We are all designers, and as long as we understand the problem we deal with, we can find a quick solution to it on our own and perhaps end up loving this product also because of our tweaks: "now, it works exactly as I wanted!", we all have heard.

RFID Antenna Design

In Lisbon airport baggages are tagged with RFIDs like the one pictured above. As immediately noticeable, the shape of the antenna is quite long, causing the overall RFID size to be larger than usual. The antenna design is pretty and the larger size of the tag needed to accomodate it allows larger text to be displayed. I believe that the reason for this antenna design is just aesthetic (the plastic of the sticker is transparent probably to emphasize this artistic design), but I could be wrong: I invite the audience to correct me on this.

Madeira Rally: the B-side

Few weeks ago, Madeira hosted the annual IRC rally competition. The organizers, remembering the huge crash in the 2002 Madeira rally in which the pilot Peter Bijvelds was involved, adopted a very strict crowd-control policy and spent a lot of efforts promoting safety measures.

Among the efforts to publicize safety during the competition, they distributed fliers with the maps and timetables of the courses one one side, and the safety instruction on the other side. The choice of distributing simultaneously information about the rally and the instruction to follow in order to guarantee safety during the event is not only a suitable and wise choice, but also a natural combination which we should expect in any public event. Imagine buying tickets for an event hosted in a public space (from a soccer game to the Independence day's fireworks) and finding on the B-side of your ticket/map the instructions in case of emergency.

Trust, Automation and Catalysts

A lot has been said and written about trust and automation (check out this great paper from Lee and See) but I would like to add here my 2-cents of how technology impacts on the way we perceive the quality of a service, such as public transportation.

In Funchal (Madeira), as in many other cities in the world, the local public transportation company (Horarios do Funchal) adopted electronic panels to inform users how long they should wait for the next bus (picture above). The underlying assumption is that transparency and availability of information can provide a better service for customers, and technology (the bespoken panels) are the way to make this service concrete.

I personally agree with the premise, but not with the conclusion.

From my perspective, technology is neutral and can benefit or harm a service in equal way. Technology is a catalyst, which impacts positively on customer satisfaction where the service is already good, or negatively where the service is not good, but it doesn't add any value per se.

This statement is particularly evident if you consider for instance the local context of Funchal, where the public transportation is -at least in my opinion- not very reliable. I have often been waiting at the bus stand for more than half an hour, while the panel was indicating that next bus would be arriving in 1 minute. Obviously I knew that the bus was not about to come any soon, but after you wait for more than 15 minutes you can't help but waiting a bit longer: the bus must be on its way!

There are two obvious consequences. On one side, the unreliable service (the public transportation) makes another service (the schedule on the electronic panles) look unreliable as well. On the other side, the technology amplifies and even negatively distort the perception of how bad the transpiration service is: although only sometimes the bus arrives not in time, the technology makes this fact evident and visible to anyone, putting it right under the spotlights.

If you are a service designer, don't think that technology provides a better service per se. Technology just amplifies -in good or bad- the perception of quality of your service.

Under the Surface

Some time ago I had the chance to setup and test Microsoft Surface: that was before Apple release the iPad, when still tabletop surfaces where "trendy" (or at least there was more media coverage) and they were not yet intended as mass-consumer products. I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft's Surface customers at that time were primarily big hotels and casinos, who were interested in placing tabletops in their receptions halls and cafes to entertain the public. The Surface I used was located in a Swiss University (EPFL).

In this short post, I am not much interested in talking about the technology or its usage, but about the setup process we went through in order to get the Surface operative. This process was very convoluted and time consuming, partially intentional, I believe, and partially not. At first, it might sound reasonable that the process is made intentionally complex, mostly for security reasons: the Surface is basically a public kiosks and customers should not be able to alterate its behavior easily, not even being able to turn it on and off, for what it matters. However, at that time it appeared to me that some of the process was a bit over-clunky. Here just a brief description of it. Comments are up to the readers.

The first thing you are required to do is to to find the control panel and computer ports, located behind one of the lateral panels. To open the panel you have to use a screw-driver and unscrew the panels form the bottom. Evidently, the only way you can do so is to pull the Surface (very heavy!) and have it laying on one side. You might want to do this with the help of someone else, in order to avoid to break the glass on the top. Unfortunately, the 2 panels on the side of the Surface are identical and there is no sign whatsoever which can tell you behind which one the control panel is placed. You might end up as we did, unscrewing both the panels because we were not lucky at the first shot.

Done with that you can plug a mouse, a keyboard and an external monitor in the ports of the control panel. Needless to say that none of these comes with the factory hardware and you have to own yours. You might wonder why you need a mouse, a keyboard and a monitor, and the reason is because the Surface is just a regular computer and the touch functionality is not embedded. You turn it on (after spending quite few minutes laying on the ground searching for the power button, somewhere under the table) and then Windows starts up. At that point you can run a sandbox application which enables the touching functionality. Obviously, the touch won't work outside the application: you wont' be able to use Windows or any other program running on the Surface by touching the tabletop. For that, you need a regular mouse and a keyboard. The use of monitor was stated as a requirement in the instruction booklet, but I cannot tell why: it seemed to me that the external monitor is only useful when you are developing applications for the tabletop.

Finally, before doing anything with your new table, you need to run a series of updates (as usual for Microsoft products) in order to get operative your applications which run on the Surface's sandbox: I remember having had to install microsoft SQL database and other updates in order to use the built-in applications!

As I mentioned before, I don't want to comment in details about the process of setting up Microsoft Surface, but I would like to insinuate a doubt in the reader: is the process of setting up Surface intentionally complex for security reasons, or some bad design was simply added to it?