LIFT07: Jumping Jack Flash: new forms of interaction, Jan-Christoph Zoels of Experientia

What would be the mobile equivalent of someone tugging your arm to get attention? Would you like to take over your friends phone? How can a child leech time from its parents account when it runs out of credit?

2 concept projects for Nokia's Innovation and Foresight group: new devices for mobile device ownership and exchange of content.

1. Dominant games: nice video of a little girl playing a game, she runs out of time, and her mother allocates her some of her airtime so she can continue playing on. 2 hours later her mother notices that she's overrun her credit and stops her daughter playing.

Right now 6-8 year old children are the fasted growing market segment of mobile phone users. What apps let kids to participate, whilst parents can keep a level of control?

2. Friendly intrusion ("make yourself heard"): invade your buddies desktop for just a second. Marco needs to know Angie's phone number so he sends a message to 3 friends, interrupting them all.

Our attitudes to mobile use are changing. Right now a message from a friend pops up an icon on your screen: what if you could do more, dominating your friends screens?

"Design predicts the future when it anticipates experiences" - Augusto Morello

Move from usability to focusing on delight, from usability to playability.

Person-to-screen interactions, person-to-device interactions (e.g. Wii), person-to-responsive spaces interactions, interactive architecture, person-to-person interactions.

"My Social Fabric" by Steven Blyth: your social world on your mobile. Not replacing the address book, but keeps you subtly informed about prospering or neglected relationships. Lets you cluster your contacts into groups, the gestures of doing this is a form of "body language". Creates a sense that opportunity to act within a respectable window is finite: your contacts turn their back on you if you don't call them for ages.

Oren Horev: "Talking to the hand", how shape-shifting objects suggest new narratives; tactile status updates.

"Phony Star" by Soren Pors: part of a fast concept development in 2 weeks: first week work up the concept, second week prototype. Lovely video of a couple miming a cheesy song karaoke-style over video calling.

Exploring responsive spaces: Dario Buzzini, "Not-So-White-Walls", with an interactive wall-space that can change itself. In this example, the wall displays a message received on a mobile.

Gestural interactions: Smart Retina, Mossa Libre and Artissima but Yanniv Steiner, Riccardo Strobbia and Jan-Christoph Zoels.

Smart retina: a box detects hand movements and gestures to interact with Google Earth. Fairly simple, translates hand shapes ("zoom", "stop", "rotate") into commands.

This used to be done with expensive equipment, not can be prototyped with Flash (tho presumably there's still hardware).

A lot of this stuff isn't necessarily practical, but it points the way to new forms of interaction.

Q: Where do you get the gestures?

A: In Italy there are 30-50 gestures used in everyday life.

Q: (Adam Greenfield) Have you given thought to standardising a library of gestures?

A: What is the interaction design language of gestures? Part of it will be contextual and culturally based. I don't favour a totalitarian approach; these playful learning applications are good for encouraging mistakes.

LIFT07: Going virtual in proportion to being actual, Sister Judith Zoebelein

Franciscan sister of the Eucharist. Tries to play some video but it doesn't work. I bite off my tongue. She's a mac user :)

The power of the internet relies in a great part on symbol and subliminal effect.

Internet permits us into a global reality. What I have to say applies to a certain setting, but I think it also applies globally.

Opened a single-page Vatican site Christmas 1995. The church has been a network around the world for centuries. The idea of a local parish centring people through worship and outreach is fading in North America and Europe. Sometimes when I'm using Skype and see how many others are there, I feel part of a community. And at the same time threatened by "rangerdude", who keeps trying to call me.

In SimCity, I can go online and become what I dreamed of: a professional baseball player (I think she means The Sims).

Any community should give a greater sense of personhood.

Talks about an e-learning course they ran, on suffering. But the group for this course meets face-to-face. "The anonymity of the internet must lead to the desire for an actual human encounter". It's a basic lesson of the church: "there must be a sacramentality to our lives". A supporting module lets viewers walk with Pope John Paul.

Q: The vatican site preaches. Why is it not more "web 2.0" (conversational)?

A: It was initially planned as an archive, and what's up there reflects that.

Q: Are you looking at other models like MySpace, SecondLife, etc?

A: Yes. We want to establish sub-groups for different areas of the world.

Aside: is anything more virtual than God?

LIFT07: Everyware, further down the rabbit hole, Adam Greenfield

The terms for this stuff ("tangible media", etc.) are ugly, associated with funding sources, etc. He prefers term "Everyware".

Everyware: post-PC, information processing in objects and surfaces of everyday life. Mark Weiser of Xerox Parc: "invisible, but in the woodwork everywhere around us", and "the most profound technologies are those which disappear". (This is what I like about mobile)

Characteristics of Weisers ubicomp: embedded, wireless, imperceptible.

Information processing turns up in new places and takes on new tasks. e.g. iPhone (don't get this one), Nike iPod. People aren't thinking carefully about the ramifications.

Internet of things: "I can query a chair". These things can then talk to each other: personal biometric monitors, RFID transit passes, floor sensors, etc.

A class of systems that tends to colonise everyday life: leading to, e.g. Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Everyware does something to surveillance: there are sensors of all sorts everywhere. e.g. the Internet toilet which reports details of your turds to (e.g.) your doctor. But it could go to Youtube! Surveillance is now a product not just of our willed actions, but of actions which we take without knowing it.

Things that were latent are brought to light (e.g. the enforced rating of your contacts as a friend, contact or family in Flickr: you have to choose!), just as things that were visible (machinery) are being made invisible.

This isn't science fiction. Ubiquity is latent in technical standards: IPv6 allows 6.5 x 10^23 addresses for every square metre on the earth's surface. By 2004, 95% of the Hong Kong population aged 16-65 were using RFID-based Octopus system. It's there now.

Designers of PC-era informatics don't worry about engaging their systems in the absence of an active decision to do so. With everyware, implicit actions can trigger activity. But people make mistakes: we press the wrong button, click the wrong link, etc. If I transmit my location information to everyone instead of just my friends... that's awful. Inadvertent unknown and unwilling use need to be addressed by designers: how can I choose to opt out of this infrastructure if I wish to - what are my rights? None of this stuff comes up with PC computing, but a serious concern for Everyware.

You can derive meaningful knowledge from inference by machines. But how I, as a participant, determine how these inferences were made or signal that they are invalid?

There are no longer any standalone products. Anything might talk to to anything. What can we do to accommodate unpredictable and undesired emergent behaviours?

Q: Is there a place for fake information, for masquerade in this world?

A: I don't see any way to avoid that. Metadata in the wild is rarely useful for long - look at P2P networks and the quality of information in them. People in MySpace list their age as 99,999 to be funny. We need a higher quality of interaction design to cope with this.

Q: Does investing physical space with a digital aura change the nature of that space?

A: Yes. The place where I first kissed my wife in Tokyo is meaningful. If I expose that it might have meaning. What about crime data - tagging locations where murders occur. Do you react differently to a space if you know there have been murders there? Of course.

• iPhone Cake - Cool! : MobileWhack
  Ribot's worlds collide.
  (tags: iphone cake)

LIFT07: Collaboration and Innovation in Workspace that Works - Clark Elliott

CE starts the session by getting us all to stand up and touch hands with 5 other people in the room.

"What's work in the 21st century? I think Dilbertville is dead. I'm a space planner, a workspace strategist. Studied social psychology. The french word "travail" comes from the Latin word for "torture". The word "labour" has connotations with pain. In the 21st century, this word has nothing to do with knowledge work - we're not doing physical labour."

CE shows coloured map of a network of communications within a real company - not an organogram, a real documentation of what's there.

"So how might you organise office buildings?"

CE goes around the room asking attendees what they want out of the session. Most interesting ones I heard were a couple of Swedish industrial design students studying crowded spaces and queuing strategies - wow - and a Swiss guy who, in a strong French accent, talks about how he cannot concentrate at work because "my colleague, she eez so beautiful..." :)

CE: Themes there were collaboration, virtual collaboration, obstacles to change, relationships, enjoyable, interacting with human beings (even when somewhere else). It's all about the intersection between technology, people and space. Communicating properly over virtual methods (e.g. video-conferencing) is difficult.

CE: There's a lot of resistance to change: closed-office workers don't want open space. Senior managers see loss of offices as loss of status. Concentration and interruptions are a factor. On Lake Geneva is a beautiful building but useless office: many closed rooms. People send emails to someone 3 feet away. The phsyical space stops communication. At the UN you have issues of status (certain grades get the right to numbers of windows). But the goal of the business is to produce results.

(So far so good: people don't like change and you need communication in office spaces. Nothing particularly ground-breaking here)

CE: If you create modern office environments you should change everything. You don't get teamwork between a group of folks who are all compensated radically differently. Space-planning strategies need to understand the organisation. Cultures are driven by cost and quality control. Creative thinking is what this is about: we're knowledge workers.

(Wondering to myself what %age of the global working population are "knowledge workers". Definitely over-represented in the LIFT07 delegates ;))

CE: Trend: activity based design. Shows example of a large company with different "zones": printing area, confrence room, mobile workers, etc. 600 mobile staff, 600 fixed staff, lots of desk-sharing. 200 workplaces for the 600 workers, but lots of other areas to work on. There were no reservations for workplaces: first come first served. If you do desk-sharing there has to be enough space that no-one can't find somewhere and going home.

CE: Trend: 80% of meetings take less than 8 minutes. Shows slide: "when time spent reviewing a project with co-workers starts to feel more like good friends making plans and sharing stories, we'll know that effective workspaces have hit the mark". Talks about desk-sharing: you can theorise about it, people will get all sorts of "yeah but" reasons. Just try it, and give people the reason for doing it: not to save space or money, but to get people communicating better.

CE: People don't like moving furniture around.

Q: how do you stop people going to old habits, marking out their territory and keeping it?

CE: It happens. Over the years in Vienna we created a user guide, handbook and groundrules. You say "mobile desks are for everybody". The cleaners clean the desks completely - there's no paper kept around.

Q: But personalisation is everything?

CE: Every worker had their own storage area for filing, mobiles, etc. I didn't take away your desk, I gave you a bureau buffet. The whole floor is your office.

(I like bits about this, but confess to being cynical about it in its entirety for, say, a company like FP: though I can see the value in physically arranging project teams together)

Q: What about working from home?

CE: It brings up a series of issues. At DEC, Compaq, HP, and Cable & Wireless, we did not push home working. In the UK it's pushed to a high level because of commuting, traffic, and environmental impact of travel. In Geneva people don't have large houses, there's no space for it. What's the insurance impact of folks working at home? How do you stop people getting isolated or disconnected from their co-workers?

Q: How do you fight management resistance to not being able to see their staff?

CE: Through illustration and showing results.

Q: Trend: "the new R&D lab is the break area".

Q: Trend: "Ideas come from everywhere. Share what you can."

(Shows a diagram for a weird "mobile coffee drinking table" which quite frankly scares me)

Q: You say that you've had proposals on the table for the UN but not gotten anywhere. Are there ways of improving an environment within existing physical structures?

CE: Yes: first thing, start with an open-door policy: leave doors open unless you're in a meeting. Drilling an "oculus" in doors so passers-by can see in if they need to and get visual feedback. "Management by walking around".

CE: Trend: "Walk away from noise and focus". People in Paris use speakerphone a great deal, for some reason - which is impolite and disrespectful, it's a source of distraction and so something which needs to be handled when creating the overall environment.

CE: Average work hours per day in the knowledge sector are now 9.1h. We have a need for privacy within this time and for general business dealings.

BREAK

CE: Dividers within offices should be low enough to see other folks' eyes - so you can see whether you can interact with others. (i.e. to allow glancing). Open space, visibility and interaction is what this is about - but different zones within an office area allow for privacy.

Q: How do you approach ergonomics?

CE: With adjustable desks and chair heights.

CE: What are the supposed benefits of open space? Communication, easy collaboration, easy knowledge sharing by osmosis. In Zurich, a bit objection to mobile working was "how will I find my boss"?

CE: What are the obstacles for collaboration?

Audience: Managers can use open space offices to get cheap space and do watch staff, which leads to a lack of innovation (err apparently - not sure I follow that, but maybe I'm one of those managers that loves stifling innovation ;)).

CE: Shows off Herman Miller offices in Bristol. Knoll+DEGW (architects) office in London. Shows off ludicrous tricycle desk.

Q&A follows. I mentioned our lovely Nabaztag CC plugin as a means of exposing virtual state physically.

CE: Chairs at desks are in use 35% of the time on average. Even fixed workers move around; that real estate isn't used 65% of the time.

CE: Stress is not caused by too much work, or buried fight-and-flight reflexes: it's about arbitrary decisions which aren't explained.