PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Photosketch: Internet Image Montage provides a simple way to make image composites by doodling a picture, adding labels and then letting the engine scour the Internet for suitable photos. Once it has found the most appropriate matches, it composites them together.

I can see lots of awful e-cards and Powerpoint presentations coming out of this, but it would be very useful for putting together prototype sketches for installations and services and it is a pretty remarkable bit of technology.

(Via Richard Banks)

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(Photo credit: xrrr on Flickr)

Amazon’s entire offering really boils down to two things.

The first is to facilitate a person in a warehouse somewhere picking a book off a shelf and sending it to you. Every other part of the service and online experience is essentially about making that happen ideally as swiftly, effortlessly and enjoyably as possible.

The second is to recommend books to you that you are either considering buying or didn’t even know existed. That part is what all the collaborative filtering (people who bought this also bought that), reviews and rating mechanisms are for. Usually the second point leads to the first – you make a purchase and they send it to you.

Key to this entire service experience is time. It’s quick to find things, quick to find alternatives and quick to get the book once you buy it. If you want to take longer to meander through a bookstore that is one of the (few) advantages bricks and mortar bookstores have. Time is important there too, but in the opposite way, hence the preponderance of cafés in bookstores or café/bookstores. If you feel hustled and harried by the staff to make a purchase and get out, that’s poor service.

If it takes ages for something to arrive from Amazon a large part of the point of Amazon is lost. By ages, I mean more than about a week. That’s the Amazon equivalent of going into a physical bookstore and asking for a book only to hear the response, “We don’t have it in stock, but we can order it for you – it will be here in about four to six weeks”. (Incidentally, does any bookstore worker not think at that moment, “They’re thinking Amazon.com right now”?). Delivery time for Amazon makes almost the entire difference – it’s one of the key advantages along with the enormous inventory that is the pay off to the disadvantage of not being able to browse the physical books.

Amazon is a classic case of a service that is deeply susceptible to the level of service its partners can provide. The Royal Mail, once the envy of the world’s postal services, has gone from bad to worse over the past couple of decades and today the Guardian reports that they have just lost a £25m contract with Amazon because of the current strike. They already lost a smaller £8m contract in the last strikes.

So much is fairly obvious albeit sad. What was particularly interesting from a service design perspective is that the Home Delivery Network (a private, rival service to the Royal Mail) have said, “We are seeing a number of our customers preparing to start marketing their deliveries as free of Royal Mail risk”. When your service is so bad that avoiding using it becomes a selling point for another service or product, you know you have big problems.

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Regular readers of Playpen may have notice things have been somewhat quiet around here recently. There are two reasons for this. One is that Twitter has made an unexpected impact on my blogging. I was quite surprised by this, because it is somewhat of a symbiotic relationship, especially as my tweets are over there in the sidebar. I am yet to make a judgement about whether it is a positive thing that I can comment on something in 140 characters or whether it shows an ever diminishing level of caring about putting together a coherent piece of writing. I’m sure this has affected others out there – has twittering bled your blog dry?

The other, rather more exciting reason, is that I started a new post as a Research Fellow/Lecturer (professor with a small p to you folks in the USA) in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, part of the Hochschule Luzern in Switzerland. As the title suggests, it is a mix of research and teaching. I am predominantly teaching on the Masters of Product Design and Management, but dip into a couple of BA courses too.

So, expect the posts here to tend a bit more towards services, but I have long seen interaction/experience design with the broader lens that service design affords, so I don’t imagine the content will radically change. Diving headlong into the bureaucracy that working in a public education institution, in another country (especially Switzerland) entails is in itself a pretty good opportunity to experience the complexity of service offerings both good and bad.

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(Click to enlarge)

I’m very pleased to have been asked by AGDA to speak at the first Design A Better World conference in Sydney with the tricky topic, “How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet?”

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what my position on that question is yet. I think it’s basically, “no”. But it depends on whether you emphasise the “help” part or “save the planet” part.

Graphic design alone can’t save the planet, but graphic (and other forms of design) can contribute to the process. Design can influence small behavioural shifts that amount to a big change when multiplied and that can be a powerful mechanism.

Most of the problems we have now are accumulations of many small behavioural changes – everything from packaging to energy usage. The standby light and mode on a TV is a design feature. It’s small and must have seemed like a great design decision at the time. Now we know it leeches small amounts of power in millions of homes and is a terrible waste of energy. So whilst it seems like designers only have the power to make minor changes, we’re in a position to influence behaviours (a highly debated topic at present) that magnify into big change.

Design can, however, make a big difference to individual people’s lives and that has a knock-on effect that is perhaps under-estimated. I plan to talk about some of those ideas and examples.

I hope that will be something different – it’s pretty scary being lined up against the excellent range of other speakers, many of whom are real graphic designers. As an interaction and service designer I think I might have different views, so it will be interesting to see how that conversation turns out.

In any case, it’s not really about saving the planet but our own species. This rock we’re spinning around on will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone.

How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet? is going to be held at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney on the 3rd August and all the details are on the Design A Better World site.

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Philips Design has created a boardgame called Spark to help generate insights. It looks like it is a pretty simple premise – there are a set of characters (basic personas) and a set of situations. As you roll the dice and the characters land on the situations, you have to brainstorm the implications.

According to Slava Kozlov, Senior Consultant in Strategic Futures Design at Philips Design:

“You can experiment without taking risks. Suspend your values and beliefs and adopt different roles which allow you to consider issues from a different angle. Learn how to deal with new situations effectively. Think more unconventionally while remaining relevant. And, in the process, enjoy yourself more!”

In many respects it’s not all that innovative. Personas and scenarios are often used in brainstorming sessions. But one of the aims of this approach seems to be to take the activity away from the slightly forced nature of some brainstorming sessions. In theory (as much research shows) the more participants’ minds relax into a playful state, the more laterally creative they should start to think.

There is a quite a bit of talk in the PDF article about “serious games” and a mention of The Serious Games Institute. I’m not a fan of this kind of terminology, the same as the idea of serious play. I understand why people use this, but it is an immediately apologetic framing of play. Play is play and it is important – it doesn’t need the prefix of being serious to make it so. It doesn’t do much to advance the value of play.

As for the game, I can imagine in a corporate culture that this could be a useful tool allowing people to enter into a suspended-judgement, creative idea generation space because is “only a game”. Of course the flipside could also be the case – that it or its outcomes are not taken seriously because it’s a game. It is good to see these ideas becoming more accepted and mainstream though.

There’s a video of Birgitta ten Napel talking about the game on the Philips site too.

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Information from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Lovely video from design and research consultancy MAYA on the difference between information and the form we give it.

I came across this on David Sherwin’s ChangeOrder blog in a post about moving beyond words for better brainstorming, which is also and interesting article. He asks why it is so hard to break people out of their regular ideation habits. Words are one problem, but it is also an issue of corporate and company culture, even within design agencies.

The rules of brainstorming are pretty much the opposite of what a usual business culture is. Working in a company that has a traditional hierarchy encourages sniping, competitive, uncooperative, pressured and role-based behaviour. It’s the way people “fight to the top”, create “creative competition” and so on.

It’s very hard to convince people to take suspending those habits seriously if they’re not taken seriously at a company culture level and we have come to consider that the normal way of working. Companies like IDEO or Pixar spend a lot of time and effort on not working this way. It’s no surprise that they are successful in this area and why so many other companies fail to bring ‘innovation’ into their culture, despite bringing in consultants who specialise in ‘innovation training’ or whatever the latest business buzzword is. The consultants, of course, are temporary blips, outside the main culture of the company, so easily dismissed after they have gone.

Much like MAYA’s video, you have to re-think what it is and means to work together, what the purpose and idea of a company is to really change its culture. A company is the form given to a group of people working together, but it is by no means the only, nor the best, form.

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Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction design group that explores natural communication between people and technology) is a charming example of how we think about computers and interfaces from a human perspective.

Whatever we might know about the technology and how it works, we talk about the “server having some trouble” or our computers “having a bad day” or “going crazy”. We’re so biologically programmed for interaction to be with other beings, it’s very hard not to think of the little man in the box.

(Via @LukePittar and all the little people who run messages back and forth in the intertubes.)

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Touchwall Demo from Joel on Vimeo.

Joel Johnson’s exclusive (on Vimeo?) video and interview with the folks at Schematic about their new touchwall shows them dealing with some interesting public multitouch issues. I hate the marketing crap that goes with it and the inevitable Minority Report reference (please, stop making that reference multitouch people), but the idea that what they’re really interested in is “the social interaction in front of the screen” is spot on.

Apart from the fun of playing with what looks like a giant iPhone screen, the key thing about large multitouch screens is that more than one person can use it at once. If it just replicates a bank of individual screens it’s missing the point of having one big one. Connecting people together in social play and interaction can be really engaging and it will be interesting to see what developers and designers explore in this area.

The other issue that they talk about in the video is how to solve the identity problem on such a device so that you don’t have to walk up to it (or “into it” as one of the interviewees says) and type in a log-in. RFID tags come to the rescue, which means the wall knows who you are as soon as you’re close enough to use it.

If we’re going to make comparisons to Minority Report, that screen was an individual experience operated alone by Cruise’s character. By contrast a multi-user multitouch screen feels to me to be much more Star Trek or James Bond to me and about using collaborative workspaces with the added layer of data feeds.

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I’ve just finished up a chapter in my PhD about social play. Most of it is about online interaction, but quite a bit is about how to bring strangers together to make connections in public spaces.

Serendipitously, Iain just posted this clip thanks to Knotty’s. If you don’t get why social networks work, watch this:

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Don Tapscott has a piece in Edge today called The Impending Demise of the University. In it he takes the same line that I have been for some time in Designing Education’s Future, The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be as well as the idea that Google isn’t making us dumb, smart is changing. (Not that I’m saying Tapscott nicked my ideas, of course, but rather than great minds, etc., etc.)

The basic issue is that traditional education is broadcast – you tell a group of people to be in a certain place at a certain time and spray information at them. This is something that really hasn’t changed since the Victorians stopped beating kids and putting them down mines and stuck them in classrooms instead. The dressing has changed, but the pedagogy hasn’t. The culture of students has changed radically, however.

From the Edge piece:

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge sweeney both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

When my colleagues and I wrote a paper about dispelling some myths of online education we touched upon some of this and it has guided our views ever since. I always had the feeling my other colleagues were mildly interested before mildly dismissing it as a fad and moving on. But a set of converging issues – declining student numbers, rising fees, an aging population, private institutions and more – are a very real threat to universities who are already closing down large departments and becoming ever more mainstream and homogenous. Although many academics scoffed at the idea of McDonald’s offering A-Levels the danger for them isn’t a dumbing down of education, it’s that McDonald’s end up doing it far better.

Many universities are already looking pretty empty on campus because they simply don’t offer a decent learning environment. Instead they’re intent on building grandiose teaching spaces, which nobody turns up to.

My prediction is that it is a race between two generational shifts – the student body and the faculty either expiring or retiring. Universities are notoriously slow at cultural change and tend to promote the dead wood. The prognosis doesn’t look healthy.