Blasting

Stores in South Korea often position speakers outside or blasting loud music outward to the streets. Supposedly, loud music is a way for stores to establish presence in a crowded street, to grab the attention of distant people and to arouse a cozy atmosphere to induce them into shopping. Nevertheless, this peculiar advertising strategy doesn't seem to apply to all types of cultures: in fact, I would argue that most of western people find loud music blasted out of stores just annoying. I also wonder if this marketing technique really even works for Koreans and I would be interested in knowing if it actually plays a significant role in incrementing in-store traffic.

Fire! Fire! Fire! Design by Patch (a bad example)

In the picture, a very unusual fire hose found in the Tecnopolo/University of Madeira, Funchal (Portugal). In case of fire, in order to use the hose you are supposed to break the glass of the metal case, get the key which is hanging from a small hook and use it to open the lock. Evidently, in a situation of panic or limited visibility like in a real fire (i.e. smoke in the room), the amounts of steps necessary in order to extract the hose seem to be too many and too complicated, possibly leading to mistakes (the actions to open the case are strictly sequential and arguably unnatural, like a protocol to follow).

A Portuguese friend, half serious half kidding, told me that the key could obviously not be left hanging out of the case because someone would probably steal it (this is hilarious!) leaving no alternative to the designers than putting it inside with the hose. However, I rather consider this fire hose as a bad example of "design patch" (in contrast to a good example of patch) where the designer, in order to solve a problem, introduce another and more complex problem, which leads to a more laborious interaction. In other words, the overall complexity of the system has merely been shifted from the problem of safeguarding a key to an interaction and security problem: what a good example of the Tesler's Law of the Conservation of Complexity!

Affordances for Garbage Cans

Here some pictures of Japanese garbage cans, taken in the streets and subway stations of Tokyo. Intuitively, the holes on the cans are shaped and sized to let only some type of objects pass through, enforcing with physical affordances what the labels indicate. So you can easily spot round shaped holes to suggest that only bottles are allowed in that particular container, or long holes to presumably accomodate paper.

These slots not only helps people to quickly recognize the type of garbage contained in a specific trash can (it works especially well if you cannot read Japanese and would have to guess or look inside the can to know what they contain), but also it works as a simple physical constraint to enforce specific behaviors. This is a good example of Shingo's Poka-Yoke design principle, which -in the words of wikipedia- has the "purpose to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur". In sums, the old mantra of the idiot-proof interface.

Read here (for men only!)

A very curious message posted in one of the rear wagon of the subway train on the Tobu line, photographed in Tokyo, Japan. The message, also incredibly translated in English, states that the wagon is reserved to women only during weekdays, from 7.30am to 9.00am. Curiously I could find this plate only when I was already inside the train, because although it is posted on the windows, it is facing inward the wagon.

I have been thinking what could be a plausible reason to reserve a wagon exclusively for women during early weekdays' mornings, and I speculate that it is to give some privacy to those women who would like to use long commuting hours doing their make up or getting ready for work.

It still remains mysterious though the choice of having messages facing only inward the wagons (in early morning, jumping on a wagon with only women intended in their makeup would raise the suspect anyways!) and the choice of assigning only 1 wagon to this (yet) unknown purpose: I would love to know in fact, how crowded the wagon is in early mornings, compared with the others. Finally, considering that the audience of this message is supposed to be of men, I really wonder if the pinkish plate with flowers pictured above does the job to attract their attention.

Coffee Lid Stickers

A cup of coffee from a Doutor's shop in Tokyo, Japan. A sticker nicely seals the hole on the lid through which the user can drink his coffee. Although I doubt that such sticker can really make any difference in terms of hygiene (anyone knows anything about it?), it probably makes a substantial difference in terms of the perceived level of courtesy and customer care, brand image, basically all the intangible values which are very well exemplified through various means in the japanese society: this sticker, is pretty much no less no more than the staffs' bows when you step into the coffee store.

Wrap-slap bands for Safety

The city of Funchal in the island of Madeira, Portugal, with the participation of the European Union has released a reflective safety band that can be applied on arms or legs when biking or walking, in order to easily spot pedestrians on the streets at night. They are called wrap-slap bands and you can also buy them in online stores.

Strictly speaking, there is no technical innovation here, since these bands resembles a line of popular bracelets popular in the 90s (at least in Italy). The innovation here is in the usages: these arm or leg bands can be used for safety purpose and, because they are freely provided by the community as a part of a sustainability promotional program, they also serve as communication tool to encourage people to use bikes as primary transportation.

GPS sun-shield

This is an old picture I took in a taxi driver in Daejeon, South Korea and is connected with the concept exploited by Don Norman of "We are all designers" (see his "Emotional Design" book), and then reprised by one of our older posts.

In the picture you can clearly see a GPS navigator on which is mounted a very simple home-made sun-shield: the sun-shield is actually the bottom part of a plastic lunchbox, decorated with few stickers (of which the taxi driver seemed to be pretty fond) and simply put upside down on the screen. It is not my interest here to discuss much about the innovation of this hack (notably all LCD screens are not much visible under sunlight, so it seems to me that a sun-shield is very appropriate for a GPS navigation system which will be most likely put next to the windscreen), but i am interested in emphasizing the importance of collecting data on everyday's hack as natural source of user-centered innovations.

LiftSeoul presents Dalsma

As a general rule, I avoid advertising on AlsoPlantsFly. This time I am going to do an exception for the LiftSeoul event about Digital Architecture and Large Scale Media Art (Dalsma) which will take place next week (Friday, May 14th in Sogang University, Seoul, Korea).


I am doing this exception not only because I am involved in the organization of the event, but also because I think that the event theme is pertinent with this blog. How does the digital world impact on large media, such as public installations, buildings or even whole cities? These are the topics covered by our 6 speakers, from the industry and the academic world. The event will be moderated by Seongtae Park, who is also know for being the curator of TEDxSeoul and the editorial adviser of Space Magazine, one of the most influential architecture magazines in Korea.

Dalsma will be free and gadgets, drinks and snacks will be given away. Finally, our venue is BangBang (in the picture below), a giant balloon by APAP (Anyang Public Art Project). People are going to sit inside and listen to the talks. And yes, you can breath inside the balloon!

See you at the event if you are in town.
http://dalsma.com
http://liftseoul.com

Building Facades in Tokyo

Signs of stores are orderly stacked together as a directory list, next to the facade of a building in Tokyo, Japan. It is interesting to compare this scenery with the typical scenery of Korean downtown districts (see this previous post): using a metaphor, if the former resembles a conversation, the latter resembles people screaming in a market. I indeed don't know if the stacked layout of the signs in Tokyo is a choice or is imposed by legislation, nevertheless it speaks of culture.

Design by Patches

Patches are my new love and my new religion.

Take the two images above, picturing the map of Seoul's subway system, patched with stickers that modify the original design: stations and details are added where needed, according to the new services introduced in the system.

Though this particular example might seem at first pretty insignificant to justify my new love for patches, it actually fits perfectly. Don't look at the stickers, look at what they mean and the underlying design process they describe.

First of all, these patches speak for a system which is in continuous evolution. As the subway stations are added or different services are provided in the subway lines, the map design is updated. The map involuntary becomes the mirror of an underlying evolving system, which keeps growing and improving with the time. Stickers are the signifiers (Norman would say) of this evolution and are valuable because they represent an economical and satisfiable solution to cope with a complex and "undefined" (read "evolving") problem.

Moreover (and even more important!) these stickers speak of the design attitude underneath: in this sense, designers don't try to grasp and metabolize a complex system all at once, in a top-down fashion, but adapt their solutions over time. Stickers are patches shown with no shame; they highlight the value of an iterative design attitude which doesn't attempt to get everything right since the start but accepts errors and modifications as part of the evolution: the design of the map (and not only the system underneath) is a creature that changes over time, and iterations, prototyping and patches are the tools used by its designers to ensure its smooth transition.

Unfriendly VM Interaction

Interaction glitches surround us everywhere. For instance, I find frustrating the experience of buying beverages from vending machines because, considering the way how beverages are dispensed, I am basically forced to bend my back (to bow!!) in order to get my drink, and sometimes even twice if I forget to get the chance. Although most of us are accustomed to vending machines, I find that the simple interactive steps required are at times confusing or inconvenient for users.

Why should we even endure this kind of problems, given the insignificance of the task? In fact, in many circumstances we have no other options than using the systems or machines as they were conceived, with no possibility to change or influence the interaction. Is design making easier our existence in this world, or contributing to enslave the human race under the machines?

Your Car is the Parking Ticket

At the entrance of many Korean parking lots you won't find anymore a barrier with the distributors of paper tickets. Usually these tickets serve as time-stamps, in the sense that they record the time in which you enter the parking lot and are used to compute the length of your staying (with relative fee) when you exit.

In Korean parking lots, a camera reads the numbers on your car-plate, stores them in a database associating them with the current time. At the exit, when approaching the cashier, another camera reads again your car-plate, and the system authomatically computes your fee by recalling the previosuly stored information. No risk anymore to loose the ticket and to pay an expansive fine: your car is, in fact, the ticket!

Fish? No, scone please

Starbucks caught me unprepared this time. I ordered a plain scone and I got it with a fish-knife, a special kind of knife with a spatula-shaped blade designed for eating fish. Etiquette generally imposes never to put the knife in the mouth (not only is dangerous, but also rude and inelegant): fish-knife are an exception to the rule. You can put them in your mouth without causing a stir! (ideally they should server as knife and spoon simultaneously)

What does justify the presence of this type of knife at Starbucks in Korea? Perhaps the intention is to provide a tool which suits better the purpose of spreading butter and jam on the bread (which is the case) and decreases the risks of cuts for improper usages. Nevertheless, definitely this type of knife is associated (for me) to fish and not bread and jam.

This is a good example of interaction history: I grew up associating this knife to fish and using it only in the particular circumstance of eating fish, never thinking (not even for one second) of alternative plausible usages. Here in Korea, where people is not used to this type of cutlery, makes perfect sense for them to use it as an enhanced knife which works better for spreading butter and jam on the bread. Objects which don't belong to the local culture, are stripped of an unnecessary layer of conventions (the interaction history with that object) and new usages are more likely to be found by just analyzing the properties (affordances) of the object.

I wonder though what do those people, who only have experinced this knife as the the butter-knife, think once they travel to Europe, and ordered a fish, they find it is served with the butter-knife!

Expressive Interfaces

It might sound like bold statement, considering that is from someone who is not acquainted to music, but I believe that if we had to select a measure to judge the effectiveness of a musical interface, like a music instrument, expressiveness would be a much better criteria than not usability, ease-to-use or learn-ability.

I would add that one of the reasons -if not the most critical- why purely digital instruments haven't been able yet to replace the acoustic and electric counterparts, is because of the much richer gamma of sounds and moods that an analog instrument can convey, compared with those, perhaps cold and "static" (always the same, repeatable, predictable) of a digital instrument. With analog instruments, the possible sounds are virtually infinite and performances are always different. This is what I mean for expressiveness (beware, though, to take this just as an opinion and not a fact).

I would like to show you a couple of videos by the talented bass-soloist Marco Rodi. What I love of his style is that he is able to step "beyond" the boundaries of traditional bass performance, achieving a great level of expressiveness by fully interacting with his bass guitar as a whole and not only by stroking the strings and fingering on the tabs: for example, he raps on the bridge and he bends the neck of the guitar to create sound distortions. The videos are much more explicative than my words, so I simply suggest you to watch them. I said explicative, but perhaps I should have simply said expressive.

An Afterthought on Robots

After my previous post about robots, Noah suggested me a link to a nice photo-essay blog entry about robots. It is worth looking at it to get a different perspective than the one (perhaps a bit polarized) that I expressed earlier. Some robot ideas are pretty funny, in some respect, like the one in the picture below.

Why Robots Will Never Take Off

This semester I am a Teacher Assistant for a Robotics class. 4 teams today presented the proposal for their final project and 4 teams out of 4 came up with some sort of humanoid robot (or "humanized" as I call them, since they only vaguely recall the semblance of humans: a head with two arms).

One of the teams, came up with the idea of creating an emotional robot which would serve as cocktail-maker in the shape of a humanized creature. The usual: a screen for a face, 2 hands and 2 feet (in the picture).


I suggested the team to re-think about the physical representation of their robot, relying on the (proved) fact that humans instinctively and naturally associate human attributes and emotions to things (called "emotionally evocative") : based on this assumptions, they could in fact try to "get out of the human-shaped-robot box" and experiment with different interaction methods (just for speculating, the robot could look like a shaker but, depending on its emotions, could mix drinks differently... "Angry? You get a pure vodka... Happy? Piña colada". More examples here).

However, my comment generated the exact opposite reaction I expected ("what about using emoticons for the face? What about using bows for greetings?"), for which I have started wondering if it is not a coincidence that all the 4 teams came up with an idea for a humanized robot. How much is the local culture responsible for the conformism in the ideas? How much is education responsible?

Am I the only one who doesn't want to have a robot-pet? Who doesn't care of another dancing or bow-greeting robot? If I wanted Aibo (a success in its category), I would have bought it and so many other people (and not less than 60000 people). Am I the only one who find not interesting "special-made-butler-like-robots for elders and handicapped" (which to me seem not have any practical use but a questionable "novelty" for publications")? Don't get me wrong: I have seen great examples of robots, but have not been made by engineers: they were made by Interaction Designers and Media Artists.

Why robots (in the way are conceived today) will never take off? Because unfortunately robotics nowadays is thought as an engineering field, self-suffocated in technical aspects, with no outside input from other disciplines. It is irrelevant if a robot is emotional or intelligent, what is relevant is the interaction with humans, and emotions and intelligence are only ways to achieve interaction. That is what consumers buy: the interaction, not the thing.

Look for instance at the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community as counterpart: if the evolution of computers was only at the stake of the computer engineers who created the first computers, we would not have today iPhones, not even Personal Computers. We would have very efficient but unintelligible mainframes. The HCI community and industry got a great benefit by associating computer engineering research with fields such as psychology, art, design. The interaction is the main goal, and all these fields contributed in different ways.

This doesn't happen in robotics, because interdisciplinary robot research and teaching doesn't exist, or if it does, it is too little to have any impact. On the top of this, also consumers don't recognize "a car" as a robot, regarding robots only biped, quadruped or wheeled objects (but not cars!) with a face.

Who is killing the robots? My dear reader, I guess you got the idea.

Phone Aggregator

The picture above is a good representative of mobile phones owned by young people in South Korea in these years. Attached to the phone, you can see an universal adapter for chargers (in case you would need to charge the phone from someone else's power adapter), a RFID for secure transactions (a service to use bank terminals or public transportation: T-money is the most common in Korea), some cute straps or lucky-charms.

What I like about this image is what the phone really represents. We are used to use key chains as aggregation point of different activities and related interfaces: for example, key chains usually contains all sort of keys, in many cases including car keys, home keys, security cards (i.e. student ID). However, they only purpose of key-chains is to hold keys (or other things).

It seems that mobile phone are becoming the key-chains of the future, but with the difference that, beside being holders for other things, they also have many other possible usages. Cellphone is slowly replacing key-chains and becoming a new aggregation point of activities (with related interfaces) and data. Soon, we will see phones with attached car-keys, or why not, the phone itself will become the key.

RFID polyphonic confusion

Right now in my wallet I have 4 RFID cards, all for different purposes. The problem with these cards is they all conflict with each other! So for example one card is a Seoul subway card which is pretty much designed with the intent that you would leave it in your wallet or purse as you pass it over the RFID scanner. However with these 4 cards in my wallet I always get an "error, multiple cards detected". Since I most frequently use the Seoul subway card, I have to place that card on one side of my wallet and all 3 other cards on the other side. Then when I pass through I have to open the wallet and scan only 1 side. This works, but really it defeats the purpose and "convenience" that RFID is suppose to give us. With the other cards, I am reduced to removing them from the wallet to use them. What I wonder though, is since RFID seems to be getting more and more popular, whats going to happen when my wallet has even more RFID tags, maybe even the cash will have tags, or my clothing. Besides just different radio frequencies, doesn't RFID have any kind of protocol to recognize or reject tags that are not part of their system? I would hate to have to remove my shirt to pay for a subway ride.

Camera Interaction

It requires quite a bit of skill taking pictures in Jeju Teddy Bear Museum. Glass cages are employed to protect the Teddy bears figuring scenes from historical and fictional events. The poor quality of the glass, and the bright light surrounding the visitors, in contrast to the relatively dark light conditions of the scenes pictured behind the glass-walls, are the two basic reasons for a the mirror like-effect you can see in the picture below.

Although my first reaction would be "why using glass at all?" I have to admit that the thought of touching the cute bears is tempting, probably even more for children. The people of the museum came up with a small poster which attempts to teach to the visitors the way they should take their pictures: basically leaning slightly on the side and taking the picture diagonally.

I find amusing and also instructive the attempt to "teach on the fly" this unusual camera-interaction method. This attempts is ambitious in the sense that tries to override the previous tacit knowledge or behavior pattern. This way of taking pictures is obvious and makes sense, but might frustrate people who without much thinking try to take pictures as they would do in any other environment.

However, despite the poster, there are no other cues in the museum that might induce visitors to take pictures in the way depicted: there are no footsptes placeholders on the ground or other interfaces that would encourage the intearction model proposed or would remind users of it. For instance, glasses themselved could be moutend slightly inclined to tak into account the effects of reflection. Sadly, there is no trace of attempts to solve the problem, beisde the small poster above: I wonder of its effectiveness.

Oxymoron

I love this! We usually want to associate the idea of softness to toilet paper, but the designer of the roll pictured above chose to put a cactus, synonymous of spines and roughness. Cactus have also no leaves, subverting the old joked association of "banana-leaves" and toilet paper.

What makes this design funny, is this contrast: it is a design oxymoron, greek word which litteraly means clever (oxùs) and stupid (moros).