In case you hadn’t noticed, the design community is starting to realize it has a key role to play in moving toward sustainability. There’s an interesting opinion post in the NYTimes about how a designer helped popularize a polyurethane replacement made from soy that has a lot of advantages. Why hadn’t it made it to market? Consumers don’ t know to ask for it so manufacturers had no reason to change.
We’ve argued before that it’s the designer’s responsibility to figure out the sustainable options so we’re not relying on billions of consumers with more on their minds. One way is to improve a product’s cradle-to-cradle impact like the article talks about; definitely critical. The flip side that I’ve written about before is to influence awareness and behavior through design. We’re trained to look at what users need to accomplish and what they prefer, but we also need to determine how products can be used in a more sustainable way and encourage those choices. We’ve kept working since the last blog post and we’ll share some new ideas soon.
The User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) Conference introduced a bunch of amazing new work that’s coming out of research right now demonstrating new ways of using sensors to command different types of interactions. One in particular was interesting: the muscle sensing system. Ph.D Candidate at the University of Washington, Scott Saponas, in collaboration with Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto showcased how an array of muscle sensors on the forearm can map gestures like pressing your thumb and index finger together as an input to do things like change the track in a playlist, open the car trunk and even rock out to Guitar Hero. Really cool stuff. Check out the video to see for yourself!
Paper Abstract
Previous work has demonstrated the viability of applying offline analysis to interpret forearm electromyography (EMG) and classify finger gestures on a physical surface. We extend those results to bring us closer to using musclecomputer interfaces for always-available input in real-world applications. We leverage existing taxonomies of natural human grips to develop a gesture set covering interaction in free space even when hands are busy with other objects. We present a system that classifies these gestures in real-time and we introduce a bi-manual paradigm that enables use in interactive systems. We report experimental results demonstrating four-finger classification accuracies averaging 79% for pinching, 85% while holding a travel mug, and 88% when carrying a weighted bag. We further show generalizability across different arm postures and explore the tradeoffs of providing real-time visual feedback.
If we had to attempt to reduce the entire two-day conference into one sentence, we’d summarize the DRC this way:
To remain relevant and to overcome commoditization, design researchers in the future must learn to influence organizations and their intentions using emotionally charged story telling with diagrams to reveal deeper insights through measurable testing using prototypes on an ongoing basis with real, breathing, feeling humans to create new ideas that solve real problems.
Whew. Now for the details.
Major themes
Changing Role of Design and Design Researchers
If anything stood out the most to us, coming from our technophilic enclave in the Pacific Northwest, it was the focus – for the most part – on people. Understanding different types of people, telling their stories, and making a difference in their lives. This isn’t limited solely to the end-users of the products/solutions that we design; in addition, we need to understand the people (clients) whom we are working with or for.
One of the biggest themes at DRC09 – in speaker presentations, the panel discussion, and in the workshop we attended – was around the role we must play as designers and design researchers. Specifically, it was the exhortation that we move beyond gaining user understanding and designing solutions to actually changing and influencing the organizations (e.g., our clients) delivering the solutions. In other words…
half of our job is to gain insights into end users’ lives, their needs, aspirations, etc. and then successfully synthesize those insights into viable solutions; the other half is about making organizational impact, by communicating the users’ situation and building alignment and buy-in from the organization, in order to catalyze and mobilize action.
Marc Rettig, principal of Fit Associates, talked about this as a journey of change, one that is both personal and collective, and deeply emotional. Kim Goodwin of Cooper advocated the value of storytelling, both as a way to extract rich information from end users during ethnographic studies and as a tool for communicating in a compelling and visceral way those insights from the field back to the organization and the interdisciplinary design team.
Sometimes the client organizations will be slow or stubborn to change. Our job in making this impact and influencing organizational alignment may require us to “go slow to go fast,” as Ben Jacobsen of Conifer Research nicely put it.
The Outlook for Design Research is Good (and Bad)
Another theme was the outlook for design research, both in a world currently in an economic downturn and a world of rapid commoditization. Robert Fabricant and Jon Kolko of frog design presented complementary talks where they outlined some things we can do to remain relevant. Fabricant began his talk by outlining the explosive growth in spending on design research and ethnography services in the economy, with the sudden acceleration in the curve occurring around the same time that Nokia’s Jan Chipchase began his famous design research globetrotting and blogumentation on his future perfect blog. He seemed to be suggesting an imminent bursting of the proverbial bubble. Sharing his “top 5 myths of design research” (see below), the outlook was painted in somber hues… unless, he advised, we do a number of things:
move beyond the search for insights to having more extended conversations in the communities we serve
translate the insights we do gain into meaningful and actionable ideas
make these ideas tangible quickly and push them out into communities to initiate the feedback process faster
remain engaged and immersed in these communities and activate/motivate change
Kolko added, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that short of moving to Asia, giving away our services for free (nothing wrong with social design!), or making it really really really expensive, in order to remain relevant we need to:
make meaning out of data (the challenge, for many of us practitioners, resides in the challenge of sensemaking and synthesis)
build frameworks for emotional experiences
have empathy
draw more diagrams
Conifer’s Jacobson was more optimistic in the panel discussion. Smart organizations, he argued, will double their R&D spending during economic downturns in order to have new products ready to be launched as soon as economic conditions turn for the better.
Fuzzy Wuzzies: The Everlasting Quest to Define What We Do
Patrick Whitney, the dean of the IIT Institute of Design, in his opening remarks at the conference, mentioned the problematic confusion and ambiguity that continues to trouble our industry and those that might benefit from what we do around the meaning of “design.” This issue of language and the struggle with ambiguous definitions resurfaced during the lunchtime roundtable discussion that Artefact hosted on the second day of the conference.
Our topic for the informal conversation was in which other industries or fields does design research have the greatest opportunities to be used, and design thinking applied. Three of the participants in our discussion were approaching design research from “the outside,” specifically from the worlds of government, the fine arts, and advertising/marketing. There was some discernible discomfort and struggle apparent in the confusion over terminology and the use of loosely defined terms (e.g., “design,” “design thinking,” “experience,” etc.).
It seems that we still have a long ways to go to address this seemingly persistent, vexing problem around clarifying what design is and how its methodologies can be applied to a broader set of arenas to solve complex problems.
But Of Course, It’s Still About Empathy. Deeper, Longer, More Immersive Empathy
Empathy and deep immersion into the communities and lives of those for whom we design was, of course, a major theme as it is one of our most fundamental approaches to user-centered design. Richard Saul Wurman – though not exactly advocating empathy! – repeatedly reminded the audience of the importance of “listening” to each other, and that “understanding is power.” Rettig impressed upon us the importance of diving deep in order to cause a “sea change.” Goodwin advocated storytelling and narratives as a way to identify with user pain.
But, the most captivating appeal came from social anthropologist Stokes Jones, Principal of Lodestar, who passionately presented how ethnographic fieldwork helps uncover the embedded innovation that is always and continuously brewing from the bottom up. Leveraging the “knowledgeability” of users and communities helped him and his team innovate in ways no one else on the Vicks VapoRub team would have imagined. After visiting 12 – a mysterious, empirically successful magical number – homes in South African townships, Stokes discovered a mortar and pestle sharing shelf space with the collection of medicine. To these families, “healing” possessed two specific properties: action and sensation. Their “knowledgeability” about medicine led to this DIY approach of combining not only the appropriate active ingredient, but also a component that allowed the patient to feel the medicine. Proctor and Gamble used this knowledge to create products that satisfied both the feeling and effects produced from the observed DIY approach for the South Africa market.
Fabricant’s call to design researchers was to get truly immersed in communities, observe emergent behavior, participate in conversations, and create rapid experiments which are pushed out into these communities for iterative feedback. Fabricant once asked Chipchase about how to keep those connections alive and strong between his team and those research subjects who turned out to be absolute gems of insight. Chipchase responded, “You just hire them.”
Prototyping Faster, Smarter, Earlier
In addition to maintaining extended conversations with communities, the importance of producing tangible artifacts quickly and putting them out there was stressed.
Start producing tangible things (e.g., solutions, parts of solutions) quickly in order to speed up the end-user feedback process. Prototype and experiment quickly. Learn and iterate. Robert Fabricant and, to some degree, Jason Fried of 37signals touched on these principles of consistent, early feedback.
When Fried and his colleagues were building Basecamp, they started off with just one line of text as a way to communicate. Then they added in titles to messages to allow disambiguation with each message. Slowly, they would roll out features that were absolutely necessary to complete a task. Each build would be tested and iterated fully before the next feature would even be considered.
Marc Rettig also shared a fairly typical “eureka” moment during his workshop when he asked some developers to create paper prototypes of their ideas and present them to their significant others when they got home at night. After 3 nights, the developers received the feedback they needed to build the system confidently.
People to People: Service Design is a Huge Opportunity
Just as the IDSA conference closed with Jeneanne Rae citing the size and dominance of the services sector of our economy versus the product sector, the DRC was capped by Ryan Armbruster’s presentation on the business value of service design, where he also cited our economy as consisting of roughly 78% services (note: actual, according to BEA NIPA data, it’s actually about 68% of personal consumption expenditure that is spent on services in the last quarter). Armbruster’s inspiring keynote was all about his experience and dedication to the improvement and design of services in the healthcare field, informed largely through design research and ethnography.
In Conclusion
To summarize, the speakers at DRC09 addressed the critical importance of designers and design researchers wearing more and more “hats” going forward. You have to be many things in order to stay relevant and add value:
a listener
an observer
an analyzer
a translator
a synthesizer
a curator (learn to say “no”)
a storyteller
a mobilizer
a tweet-oholic (this is still up for debate)
Musings & Miscellany
The conference was mostly good, with only a couple duds. The entertainment factor was high this year, as the organizers brought in a wide range of speakers, from the rambling and misanthropic – but brilliant and hilarious – curmudgeon, Richard Saul Wurman, to the well-known and oft-reviled founder of 37 signals, Jason Fried, as well as the stoked oratory of social anthropologist Stokes Jones. Here are some of our unofficial awards:
Most Unapologetic: tie between RSW and Jason Fried
Most F-bomb Droppings: RSW
Most Unusual Usage of Vicks VapoRub Cited: Stokes Jones
Most Inspiring Reminder that We Need to Think More About People Interacting with People: Ryan Armbruster
Most Low-key Yet Profound Purveyor of Pithy Quotes: Ben Jacobsen (“Sometimes, you have to go slow to go fast.”)
Most Snarky Tweet: Jon Kolko (“#drc09 Jason fried speaking about his software dev fundamentals; no wonder basecamp is such a piece of garbage”)
Thank Yous
Tal Shay and Kate Pemberton for organizing a great event
IIT Institute of Design for teaching design research, innovation, design thinking, and producing great future leaders
Spertus Institute for providing a great venue for the event
The Wieners Circle for the late-night entertainment and artery-busting char dogs
David Armano (@Armano) for the photo above of us Tweeting the hell out of #DRC09
The gaming industry is missing the boat. Kids are super engaged with video games, but their excitement and expertise hasn’t been leveraged to help acquire new audiences or influence parents to buy more games.
Let’s consider these data from a recent survey we fielded with about 50 kids ages 7-13:
Kids learn technology faster than anyone in their house. Both parents and kids agree: 64% of kids said they learn faster while 59% of parents said kids do too.
Although both kids and parents admit that parents know more about technology overall, they also agree that parents and kids know unique things about technology. Kids know more about entertainment type technology like playing games, working game consoles (Wii, Xbox 360), using iTunes, iPods, and iPhones, and social networking using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and cell phone texting. Parents know more about things for work like email and word processing, financial things like buying stuff online and banking, and how to fix the computer when it is broken.
Observing kids teach their parents new technologies also shows that kids can be good teachers too. This video shows Ronan, a 7 year old, employing known educational psychology teaching methods to teach his mom how to play the Wii.
So, given all this, why hasn’t the gaming industry leveraged kids’ knowledge about gaming, ability to learn fast, and teach gaming to capture new audiences or influence parents to buy new games? To capture parent audiences, game makers could:
Create teaching modes within games that would help kids teach their parents how to play in a fun environment
To influence new games purchases game makers could:
Allow kids to get trial versions of games so they can learn them quickly and then use what they’ve learned to ‘demo’ the benefits to friends and family.
Kids could review games online, make recommendations to friends and even recommend ones their parents would enjoy.
Think: “Most Valued Player” programs for kid gamers. Think: converting users into spokespeople and trainers. Think: ka-ching.
Us Artefactians regularly dabble in new user experiences outside of our daily client work that explore areas such as unfamiliar target audiences, new technologies, new UI mechanisms, or themes that spark our curiosity. As part of our experimentation platform, we recently added a shiny new multitouch display to our toolbox and were quickly inspired to set it up and start experimenting with it. Here’s what we did…
Musical Forest: an experiment in play and discovery
We have been doing a lot of work for a variety of kid age groups, so we decided to explore multitouch solutions for kids ages 3-5 years old for our first experiment with the new display. With this age group in mind, we designed and built a variety of features that helped facilitate “play” and “discovery” as the experience themes, invited kids to play, and asked them what they thought.
The experience
We set out to build a “Musical Forest” that included a variety of single-touch and multi-touch interactions. We wanted to focus on playful colors, sound and simple graphics that enticed our audience to play and discover what it can do.
As a result, we built a few main features:
A fruit tree that wiggled, popped, and enabled you to flick the fruit off of the tree.
Flowers that opened, closed, and encouraged you to “play” their petals like musical instruments
Background trees that allowed you to drag them around and discover the “fruit people” on them
Sound input, that allowed you to make the fruit fall off the trees if you increased the volume of your voice
Our learnings
Kids aren’t afraid to dive in
The kids that we interviewed were not afraid to dive in and start exploring the life-sized display from the get-go. Annet, one of the children we spoke to who is 4 years old, was excited at first glance and began to tap on the screen from the moment she saw it. She quickly started tapping every element that she could see with very limited hesitation.
Young kids don’t rely on multitouch
We originally set out to explore multitouch features such as two finger zoom. However, the kids who used our experiment never even attempted to use multitouch, so they never discovered these features. The only time multitouch was “technically” used was when multiple kids were using the system at the same time. Individually, however, they were interacting with the system using only 1 finger or their hand as a single touch point.
Kids love sound
Sound was used in a variety of ways in the experiment. One of the successes was using playful sounds as interaction feedback along with visual feedback to help the kids discover interactions. For example, when Annet tapped on a fruit element, it made a popping noise. She giggled and “popped” many fruit elements until she discovered that they could be dragged and thrown around.
The experiment also used the kids’ voice as input. The volume of their voices determined the size of the fruit. And, if the kids held their voice at a certain volume for a period of time, it would make all the fruit fall off the tree. This was wildly successful and one of the kids favorite features. In fact, they played with this feature throughout the entire session.
Kids are physical
Kids like to move around and use large physical gestures. During the interview, Annet would periodically stand up, then sit down, then stand up again. She also discovered that when she turned around, she could use her butt to “tap” on items and did this periodically throughout the interview.
Young kids like to learn from other kids
The youngest of the interviewees, Moritz, was 2 ½. At first, he was not as aggressive as the older kids in discovering what the system could do, but was very receptive to learning from them. For example, Annet would show Moritz how to use loud voices to make the fruit fall off the tree and she would show him how to make music with the flower petals. He would mimic her interactions, laugh, and enjoy the reaction. Ultimately, he was more apt to discover new things with Annet by his side showing him the ropes.
Starting from the 1990’s, this video walks through the evolution of special effects used in motion picture. Really cool to see how far along we’ve come. Also, check out our post on 3D by Rob Girling and be sure to follow as more on future visualization techniques becomes available.
Designers shape the relationships between people and objects or environments. Therefore, we should be leaders on issues of sustainability. Sustainability is broad and there are many ways to influence through design.* For now I have a thought on influencing people’s consumption behaviors.
It seems like every day we hear about a new technical advancement that promises less waste and more efficiency. But any technology advancement has to contend with our ever-growing appetite for resources, which is the true root of the problem. I would argue the larger challenge - or imperative - is in changing behavior. There’s a menagerie of devices and services appearing that are designed to help you monitor your energy usage. They’re getting a lot of attention but I think there’s a more effective way to create broad behavioral change.
The Monitors, and How They Fall Short
These designs show your usage in real-time and historically, and some provide a cue when electricity prices are high (in areas where pricing varies) or when you’re using more than usual. Great stuff - and smart to tie in financial benefits of conservation. Links are at the end. Some incorporate design “nudges,” popularized in a recent book, that help people make better choices.
But my enthusiasm faded as I kept looking. These are mostly special-purpose designs made just for awareness. The early adopters who use them are a small group of people who already have intrinsic motivation to conserve. There’s a big gap between them and the rest of the world. A more ambitious goal should be to influence more people, because even small changes - if mass-adopted - will have a bigger impact than the best efforts of the small group of devotees. To get there, sustainability must be a design factor in everyday products, not a special goal for extra devices.
Another thing that struck me is how isolated some of the nudges can be from the related behaviors. Imagine seeing an angry red glow and trying to find the culprit in your home; it’s too abstracted from the behaviors that set this usage in motion. For broad change, discovering the connection between information and behavior shouldn’t require extra work or it’s less likely to succeed.
An Alternative: Contextual Intervention
There is a great opportunity to make contextual interventions during people’s behaviors. The intervention might be a change in affordances or simply information. It’s like a nudge but the key is to design influences that are tightly coupled with specific user behavior, making a feedback loop that takes advantage of the way we naturally learn. Thus, it isn’t helping analyze your utility bill, it’s suggesting that you turn off the faucet while you’re not using it. Here are some examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about.
The “Faucet Buddy” shows you just how much you’re wasting while you shave or brush your teeth. I’d bet this is all the cue many people need to stop the tap while they’re not using it. That saves both water and energy from the water heater. My landlord recently installed compact fluorescent bulbs and I could easily see him lowering his water costs (he pays for water) by giving these to tenants. I only wish it used a less formal unit than liters - something that connects the quantity to its source or destination perhaps?
The Honda Insight comes with a speedometer that changes color. Efficient braking and acceleration lead to a rewarding green glow. The Prius has something similar. Nissan has a force-feedback pedal coupled with visual cues that provide more resistance with less efficient acceleration. It’s one thing to show your MPG but better contextual intervention provides immediate feedback explicitly tied to current braking, acceleration, or idling to influence it in the short term and teach over time.
The Disappearing Pattern Tiles have a pattern material that vanishes in the heat of the shower. The longer the shower, the less pattern. With this particular pattern, I think that’s actually a reward, but the idea is sound. It’s a simple but obvious cue that just might keep your fingers from wrinkling and your bill from soaring. Plus, no extra power cost - it uses waste heat. It doesn’t convey impact but could be a good reminder.
The Gravia lamp runs for 4 hours powered by a falling weight. You must manually start the weight at the top to get it going again, like the process of winding a watch or clock. It’s very difficult to conceptualize energy like we can with material resources; equating it to physical effort is a great idea. The connection is reinforced every time you charge it.
Amazon.com offers the default option to “Group my items into as few shipments as possible.” Similarly, when you schedule your deliveries from one UK grocer, you’re shown all the times their trucks will be nearby already. They both miss an opportunity to complete the feedback loop with information on the impact of the choice, but they’re influential designs at the time of choice.
Design Principles for Successful Contextual Intervention
So what’s contextual intervention? ‘Contextual’ means a cue that occurs at the time of a behavior - it also implies that the cue is built in to a useful function, not a design meant solely to provide the cue. ‘Intervention’ means the cue exposes a desired choice with an effective influence, and also teaches over time. It does not mean choice is removed, but rather that the consequences are conveyed. Here are a few principles to make the most of these designs.
Ideally, the solutions require little or no extra consumption. I love the idea of using waste energy itself to provide information about the usage, like the tiles.
Use impact as the cue. It might work to just default to the preferred choice, but drawing a connection to quantities and consequences helps raise awareness that goes beyond your design.
Minimize extra steps for the user. The Gravia is a great concept in connecting behavior to energy but if it fails in broad acceptance, this is why. People won’t easily sacrifice convenience.
Minimize new purchases and material impact. As McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” If your design has a big material footprint while encouraging sustainable behavior, people will notice the hypocrisy.
Be familiar. Characterize impact in an accessible way. Kilowatt-hours aren’t valuable feedback until you understand their relation to your behavior intuitively. Start with something easy to relate.
Be encouraging. Positive reinforcement tied to a good choice has been shown to effect behavior change; chastising is counter-productive (and probably won’t sell).
Be honest. Don’t exaggerate. Green-washing is a serious impediment to informed decisions for change.
Do you have other examples of contextual intervention? Add a comment below.
*Learn more on sustainability elsewhere [sustainability, ‘triple bottom line’]. Why should you care? There are lots of reasons. Social, ecological, national security [123]… Besides, you may miss a new wave of consumer demand or find yourself unprepared when clients ask for your perspective.
by Dave McColgin, posted November 2nd, 2009
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