Designing Interactions: Futures and Alternative Nows

Chapter Takeaways

• There are many viewpoints from which to approach the future (e.g. artistic vs technological).
  
• Creativity may simply mean becoming more aware of the unique objects/events around you.
• Even unscientific research based in reality can serve to provoke important discussions.
• Design leaders can be born from groups or as solo practitioners.
• Small computers may not fit into a traditional GUI model and will need to develop their own equivalent standard.

Introduction

Instead of need being purely functional, we are looking at the idea of a more emotional and psychological need. - Dunne and Raby

• The "alternative now" that Dunne and Raby offer is something beyond the obvious functionality of the consumer product: they look for more complicated pleasures that hover on the border of the subversive and artistic, but always offering some comment on humanity.
• Perhaps a digital parallel to the Arts & Crafts movement in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.

Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne

• Exploring something between reality and fiction.
• Founding members of the Computer Related Design (CRD) Research Studio at the Royal College of Art in London.
• Work in three overlapping areas: technology as medium, as a product, and as critique.

Complicated Pleasures

• Always looking for example of reality that is stranger than fiction.
• With physical products, our pleasure are sensual and physical. With digital, they are more imaginative.
• Leave room for interpretation.

Placebo Project

• Developed a collection of electronic objects to explore mental well-being in relation to domestic electromagnetic fields.
• Wanted to explore how people would relate to these fake fields.
• Findings grounded in reality but not in science.

Existential Design

• See the role of design as a medium for debate,
• Encourage designers to think up both positive and negative scenarios.
• Energy Futures, London Science Museum: created 3 potential scenarios for the future of energy.
• Teddy bear blood bag: use the meat/blood of animals to power everyday objects.
• Poo lunch box: children bring poo home from school to be used as energy at home.
• Hydrogen: every home and family is responsible for contribution hydrogen. Even have a brand around the family hydrogen output.
• Consuming monsters: big, perfect and infectious: an existential shopping mall concept that contain biotechnology map.
• Utility Pets: xeno-transplantation. Raise a pig with personalized DNA from the time it is an embryo.

John Maeda

• An interaction designer, computer artist, and teacher.
• Wrote Maeda@Media.
• Studying engineering at MIT.
• Product Design at Tsukuba University.
• Created work that was both artistic and technical.
• Professor at the MIT Media Lab, directing Aesthetics & Computing Group.
• Archived works at www.maedastudio.com.
• Maeda Studio is not a big company, merely his desk at home.
• His vision of the future: simplicity.

Simplicity

• Naomi Enami, Japan's pioneer of interactive media: "You have to go into education to build the people who will one day come and destroy you."
• Maeda@Media was completely written and designed only by John Maeda.
• Wants the arts to be more appreciated, because he sees it as a necessity for our future.
• Leading towards "simplicity" by creating a new Arts & Crafts movement.

Jun Rekimoto

• Established Interaction Laboratory in 1999 at Sony to investigate the future of HCI and digital lifestyles.
• Interested in designing interactions for portable computers, situated in the real world and augmented by computer-based information.
• Small computers may not fit into a traditional GUI model and will need to develop their own equivalent standard.
  

The Interaction Laboratory

• Lab full of prototypes.
• Description of 4 projects:
• ActiveInk computational ink: will put clouds on the drawing if you choose to draw the sky.
• BlockJam interactive music cubes: build like Lego to create musical compositions.
• ToughEngine tactile feedback for touch panels: vibration in response to your touch.
• Time-Machine Computing navigation system: organizing your files by time.

Augmented Reality

• Rekimoto thinks that AR is more than just augmented view has an overlay.
• Sees it as any computer that can be aware of the real world, this includes the cell phone.

Ubiquitous Computing

• Pick-and-drop: pick an object up in one computer and drop it in another. Building on the concept of drag-and-drop across platforms. Example - walk in front of a projector screen and begin to control it with your cell phone.
  
• Gestural interfaces: likely to be the preferred method of input, but has the problem of recall instead of recognition. Gestures should be mimetic rather than symbolic.
  
• Ubiquitous computing enabled by sensors and receptors: context aware and adaptive systems. People are not trying to find the equivalent of HTML for physical objects.