Adaptive Path Blog

Last fall, we did an activity called The Wand in the World aimed at opening up thinking about the potential of mobile devices and services. We had a set of 7 teams take a physical object (aka: a “wand”) on a walkabout in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco. Armed with their wand, a diary, cameras, curious minds and intentional observation skills, the teams used the wand as a proxy device to brainstorm new interactions capture new thinking about how to engage with the physical world via a mobile digital device.

The wand objects varied widely, from abstract to oddity: a wooden egg…an oversized plastic magnifying glass…a koosh ball…a paintbrush. The physical form factor made a difference in the assumed affordances of the device, so it turned out that having a wide variety of form factors worked extremely well.

The observations that resulted were rich with presence and context-based learnings, as well as new possibilities for physical interactions. The exercise allowed us to have conversations ‘way beyond the “feature set”; we were able to move the discussion to a larger framework about engaging with the world around us in new and interesting ways.

So whenever I hear about some new use for a digital device, I think about the experience of the wand in the world and how everyday life is on the fast-track to a complete mobile make-over. Which begs the question…how is all this going to really feel?

What will life be like when our mobile devices open our front doors, get us on the train and filled with fast food, let us into public restrooms and even remind us to pray?

Mobile manufacturers and developers have a vested economic interest in creating new ways for mobile devices to fit within our lives, but what are we, as individuals, consumers and participants in a mobile future, doing to prepare for it? What will a fully instrumented future feel like? What will be included in the feature set for a cell phone at the center of the universe? And how will we adapt to it? These are not technology issues, these are social and cultural questions.

I do know this…things that proactively try to engage me irritate me. The TV screens at the gas pump that provide “infotainment” when I gas up? Hate ‘em. The obnoxious PharmAssist kiosk in my local drugstore with the creepy cartoon doctor on it that verbally assails me with a booming “Can I help you!?!?” every time I trip its digital proximity alert? Hate it.

Neither of these are actually bad ideas…I’m sure some people love them or find them helpful. But when I imagine my mobile device doing this kind of thing, prickles run up my spine. How will I react to a device that nags at me or pings me with “great deal opportunities” when I’m strolling down the street? Gah.

How will it feel to find a parking spot with my device? To remember to get my shoes fixed by taking a snapshot for a visual to-do list? To use it to scan products on the shelf so that I don’t buy decaf coffee by mistake?

So I’m doing an experiment in mindful awareness for mobile. For the next week, whenever I’m doing something mundane…I’m going to ask “how can my digital device do this for me/ help me do this / enhance this?” and then to take a moment to think about how that would feel. Was it helpful? Invasive? Fun? Creepy?

You’re invited to join the experiment. Please post comments on your observations!

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I found myself at a design conference listening to still another demand that clients give us designers that coveted place at that legendary table where all the big decisions are made. Sitting next to me was one of my favorite clients, someone I treasure for her levelheadedness and good humor. “I’ve spent hours at that table,” she whispered to me. “It’s not that great, you know.”
Michael Bierut, You’re So Intelligent

Adaptive Path’s MX Conference is about to kick off. Design managers and executives are descending up San Francisco to learn and talk about how to make their designs more effective, to speak to management better, how to innovate their organizations. Part of these discussions I’m sure will be the perennial talk of How to Get a Place at The Table. I’m here to offer an alternate view: our place as designers isn’t at The Table. It’s to smash The Table.

Perhaps the natural state of design—and thus designers—is to be outside the circle of power, and thus better able to tell the truth to power. At The Table, it is easy to have other concerns instead of just creating the best products possible: political concerns of gaining and retaining power, or financial concerns of running the company, or resource concerns about personnel, or the million other details it takes to run a business–many of which fight against putting out great products. Yes, a seat at the table can guarantee that a product gets made, but it doesn’t guarantee it will be good. Witness: Foleo, which Jeff Hawkins was able to push through but was so roundly criticized, it was pulled before it was even sold.

And of course, yes, we want and deserve respect (we’re changing the world, dontchaknow??), but that respect should flow from the products we create, not the number of meetings we’re in with the CEO.

Designers work better outside, looking in, the wise fools at court. The view outside is clearer, more open to other influences, less susceptible to groupthink and myopic viewpoints. (This outside viewpoint is why so many companies hire consultants.) Being outside allows designers to be advocates: lobbyists for what is the right thing to do for the users, the integrity of product itself, and even in some cases for what is best for the business.

This idea of Designer as Outsider is nothing new. In the 1950s, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss had brown suits made so that he would stand out from his corporate clients in their blue and grey suits.

As Dreyfuss knew, sometimes it benefits us to be more like artists than scientists. Design is, after all, a combination of science and art, and it is often art’s job to shine a light on what is uncomfortable or hard to do: the strange and unusual. The Truth with a capital T (which also means Trouble). We just need to draw on that legacy more often. Telling a CEO her vision of the product is the wrong one is not easy. It requires two things: courage and allies.

Rather than expend energy to get to The Table, it’s better to have allies there. People who know how to read the room, who can seem impartial but also lobby for you and help you make your case. The best clients, Tibor Kalman rightly said, are smarter than you. We need to cultivate these allies through the strength of our work and our ability to explain our work in terms of the value it brings to the users and to business. Only then will our voices be heard and respect given. We don’t need a seat at The Table for that. We just need allies there.

And here’s the most subversive thing: if we do our jobs right, The Table will change. It will get bigger, move, transform, and, yes, even get smashed. The best products change companies, markets, and, yes, possibly even the world. And when that happens, attention will be paid, respect given. You will be thanked for smashing The Table and giving them a new one.

And then you will go and do it again.

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In our forthcoming book, Subject to Change, we close with a chapter titled “An Uncertain World,” about how the approaches we suggest will help businesses manage no matter what comes at them. In it, there’s this passage:

One key opportunity driven by this uncertainty is how the old categories will break down. David Weinberger discusses these trends and their implications in his excellent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. Though the book is ostensibly about the nature of information in a digital world, the forces underlying that miscellany pervade all aspects of society. Google and Yahoo!, once technology companies, are now media players, and their advertising-based business models mean they compete more with Los Angeles and New York than their Silicon Valley brethren. Apple began as a computer company, but has morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV) and the third largest music retailer in the United States, which means its competitors are not only HP, Dell, and Toshiba, but also Sony, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.

Oh, the perils of book publishing! Word is coming out that Apple is now the premier music retailer in the country, having surpassed Wal-mart and Best Buy.

What industry are you in, again? Who are your competitors, really?

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It is no secret that a lot of us were science fiction geeks growing up, so it was with sadness that we learned of Arthur C. Clarke’s passing yesterday. In our own ways we remembered his influence on our lives:

Jesse James Garrett:

Not the year, but the movie. Arthur C. Clarke died today — yes, but did you know he invented the communications satellite, complete with math, decades before it was technologically possible? — and I’ve seen this link in a few places about the creative process behind the film:

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0073.html

As you probably know, I love hearing about the dead ends and abandoned concepts in any creative project, and this diary is rich with them: he describes their initial schedule as “hilariously optimistic”, recounts working through at least two Christmases, and the blow-by-blow accounts of directions considered and abandoned (and crucial last-minute rewrites) show that even the path to great work requires innumerable wrong turns along the way.

Jeff Veen:

His Three Laws are still inspiration to me, even if contemporary usage
has pushed them to cliche:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to
venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_law

Kate Rutter:

That last one [Law #3] is still my favorite. During one recent project, the similarities between what we were designing and the World Of Harry Potter kept me up at night.

As for me, books like the 2001 series, The Songs of Distant Earth and short stories like “The Nine Billion Names of God” have remained with me in many ways. Last weekend I unpacked my books after my 14th move in 12 years. Arthur C. Clarke’s books have been with me for every one of those moves. They remain some of my favorite stories and they even got me through college astronomy. Not only were they factually correct on the particulars of our solar system, they were way more entertaining than the stuff the professor assigned.

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In my mind, it seemed perfect: Technologists and transit-enthusiasts coming together to rethink the transit experience. A chance to bring the experience design gospel to an industry in need. Brimming with missionary zeal, my transportation planner husband and I headed off to the Bay Area TransitCamp.

I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock. My idealism was greeted by a ragtag bunch consisting of khaki-clad engineers, frumpy transit riders and suit-wearing transit officials. The engineers preached the possibilities of open-source data. White-haired transit riders screeched frustrations about their particular pet issues. And the transit officials defended cuts to bathroom-cleaning with the hard, cold facts of their bureaucratic reality.

Welcome to TransitCamp.

Could this possibly be the crowd that would transform transit? It felt like anarchy. “No complaints without solutions” was the only rule, and organizer Tara Hunt had to reiterate it again and again. Yet as idealism and realism collided, something impressive happened. We learned from one another. iPhone app developers learned that 40% of riders are below the poverty line. Cost-conscious officials learned that dozens of techies are eager to develop solutions — for free.

I realized that making a difference requires a humble and listening posture. Transit is an interdisciplinary problem that requires interdisciplinary understanding. While it produced interesting ideas, TransitCamp’s greatest triumph was fostering an atmosphere of learning and collaboration between unlikely bedfellows.

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Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger received scant notice compared to its attempts to acquire Yahoo! But I find the news more interesting. Microsoft, intentionally or not, is moving to establish itself across a range of platforms and form factors… They’re moving more strongly into the “ubiquitous computing” space than any other major company.

They are active in:

• desktop PCs
• laptop PCs
• tablet PCs
• mobile phones (Windows Mobile before, and now the hardware, too)
• portable media devices (Zune)
• wall/table computers (Microsoft Surface)

And Microsoft has a big pile of cash it’s sitting on, which will give it plenty of opportunity to figure out how to make these pieces work together. And allows for plenty of mistakes (SPOT watches, etc….)

It’s so easy to dismiss Microsoft as the lumbering has-been of technology, but no one else is engaging in such a range of connected technologies…

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“Is there such a thing as sustainable experience design?” In our internal discussions of The Designers Accord, Jesse posed this question. Not being industrial designers, we generally aren’t qualified to address product life-cycle issues such as materials & processes or transportation logistics in any meaningful way. But, as Jesse suggested, perhaps we can bring a new perspective to the sustainability conversation that other disciplines haven’t yet considered.

Experience is closely tied to sustainable behavior: People act un-sustainably because it’s often much easier or results in a better experience than doing otherwise. (It’s much more convenient and pleasant to drive my car wherever I want.) Thus, experience designers are uniquely-poised to encourage sustainability by capitalizing on what we know about human behavior as well as business strategy. We have the capacity to:

Make sustainable experiences more compelling than the alternatives. How can we make doing what’s best in the long run more attractive in the short run? (e.g., Make transit a better experience than driving.)

Understand and appeal to people’s motivations, values and aspirations. As ethnographers, we know how to tap into the subconscious motivations that unwittingly shape behavior. How can we appeal to these tendencies at points of decision so that right choices become the most natural choices?

Harness the power of information to help people make better decisions. As information designers, we know how to make the abstract concrete and make hidden costs visible, visualize the future, and tell stories. The right information can not only influence decisions when presented at critical moments, it can also shape underlying attitudes and values — a necessary component of lasting change.

Promote a service-mindset vs. a product-mindset. As Liya Zheng put it in her post on Service Design and Sustainability: “Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services.”

Communicate the business value of sustainability. Green sells! Businesses for whom green is central to their identity, value proposition or business strategy are more successful than businesses that adopt a cause just because they ought to. As design strategists, we can help companies find ways to turn sustainability into profitability.

But while it’s easy to identify how we COULD contribute, the tricky part, especially for us as consultants, is finding real opportunities to exercise these skills. While design educators can shape future generations of designers and business-people, and in-house designers can shape their company’s culture and product/service strategy, we’re often brought in for specific, often screen-based projects that seemingly have nothing to do with sustainability.

Does it really make sense, as the Accord calls for, to have a sustainability conversation with every client? How can we avoid coming across as pretentious do-gooders?

What best practices can we promote in our interaction design work (e.g., strive to reduce computer use by promoting more energy-efficient means of information access such as mobile)?

How can we identify clients and projects where the skills outlined above can be applied?

These are the questions we’re left wondering about and debating. If anyone has any thoughts or perspectives, we’d love to hear them.

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Just before the holiday break, I was driving on the 24 freeway right at the Caldecott tunnel when I saw that someone had put up one strand of Christmas lights in the dirty window of the little office that sits at the base of the tunnel. When I thought about it, I realized that someone did that intentionally to create a little holiday spirit in an otherwise bleak location.

When we talk about experience design, we discuss it in terms of intentional efforts to create an experience for a product or service. There are meetings, decisions, consultants, plans and well-made executions – all of this with an eye towards producing a purposeful, desired experience for an individual or group of people.

But, the person that put those Christmas lights did all those things, too. Maybe not in a conscious or thought-out manner, but there was an intention to create an experience.

So, my question is, do human beings always intentionally design experiences – even unknowningly?

Outside of acts of God or nature (things that we cannot control), we create experiences for ourselves every day. We organize our closets in a certain way to make dressing in the morning efficient, we walk certain streets because we find them pleasant, we cook our food for taste, we decorate at holidays to create a mood and tradition.

What causes us to do this? Do we simply like it? Or is there a deeper need?

As experience designers, are there ways to build upon this trait? Can we somehow expand on this assumed, basic human behavior? Are there ways to recognize these natural tendencies and leverage them when we design experiences?

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Ever since I got back from the monster IDSA conference and looking towards some of the speakers at Interaction08, I’ve been thinking a lot about the worlds of interaction design and industrial design. Far apart, yet so close. Far apart in that there is still a gulf in that, for the most part, many interaction designers don’t know what industrial designers do and how they do it. And visa versa. From an interaction designer’s perspective, the hardware is just a container for the UI. From the industrial designer’s perspective, the UI is just the screen that gets put in after their design work is done.

Except this is a horrible way to design products. We’ve all suffered through these kinds of devices for years. Look at the Razr. Awesome industrial design, terrible interaction design. Or take most laptops. Decent interaction design, lousy industrial design. For the best experience design, the hardware and software need to be integrated in profound ways. In the same way interaction and visual designers work together for digital projects, with physical products that have a digital component (which is to say, behavior that a microprocessor affords), industrial and interaction designs should work closely to create the best possible experience for the products’ users.

Apple realized this years ago, of course, and insisted on control of both the hardware and software–a risky gamble that nearly took the company down, but has yielded some serious dividends in the last decade. And not just profits: some really enviable, desirable, beautiful devices that work well and feel holistic. Devices that, as we know, have changed markets and how we think about devices in general.

I have heard some amazing statements lately–on both sides of the industrial-interaction design divide–that sound to my ears just painfully ignorant, especially considering the amazing industrial/interaction design devices around now, like the Wii. “So you think industrial designers should work with interface designers?” one industrial designer asked me in all seriousness a few months ago. “Industrial design is just a commodity service,” was a comment I heard just two days ago. The truth is, both disciplines have a gun to the other’s head. “My interface can ruin your form!” “Oh yeah, well, see what happens when I leave out the jog dial, jerk! Let’s see them navigate your menu now!” “If you are going to be that way, I might just forget to put in the controls for your lovely speakers there.” And so it goes. We need to work together or everybody loses.

The fact is that the division between the digital and the physical is slowly but surely being erased. “One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible,” noted William Gibson recently. And it’s true. Is your laptop physical or digital? Your mobile phone? Your…house? (Go find it on Google Maps before you answer.)

We need designers on both sides (and in the middle!) who understand this. We had the “luxury” of having separate design worlds for a while now, which is in fact no luxury at all, as we both could have learned a lot from each other. It’s time to dissolve the artificial barrier. We’re all in this together.

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We recently had an opportunity to visit the Current TV studios here in San Francisco. They were gracious enough to give us a guided tour of their operations.

Current TV started in 2005 and bills itself as the world’s leading peer-to-peer news and information network. They are the only 24/7 television network and site produced and programmed in collaboration of its audience.

I’ve been watching them off and on over the past couple of years and have always liked how much emphasis is placed on covering stories that young adults care about. It reminds me of what MTV could’ve done had they not gone batshit crazy.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived at their studio was the amount of people they have in the building. From the outside, it seems like a small space, but once inside, it goes on and on. They have about 300 employees in the SF location with more in Los Angeles and abroad. Their offices are as unique as their programming – everywhere you look there was an individual personality to the place.

We were shown rooms where the teams edit, produce, film and write. It was also amazing to see one room dedicated to managing and collecting all the feeds that come to the network.

What really struck me though, was the vibe of the place. It truly felt like people were there to make a difference – that they were dedicated to their jobs beyond just a paycheck. Current talks about “democratizing” TV and internet content. I get the feeling that it’s more than a marketing ploy.

It’s interesting that their site is so intrinsically tied to the content on television. They strive for a 2-screen experience and they tell us that everything featured on the TV network is available on their site. I imagine that most of their audience watches TV with their computer on their lap, so why not build an experience that caters to this displayed need?

I’m really curious to see how far this goes. There are plenty of examples of user-submitted content successes in the business world today. You only need to look to the many video sites and even CNN’s I-Report project to witness how media has already been changed. Current’s dedicated network and content-rich site provides a much more focused implementation of this trend. I hope they succeed and teach us all a thing or two in the process.

Find what channel they’re on in your city here.

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