Experientia

Buttons are on their way out.

Five years from now, it is likely that the mobile phone you will be holding will be a smooth, sleek brick — a piece of metal and plastic with a few grooves in it and little more.

Like the iPhone, it will be mostly display; unlike the iPhone, it will respond to voice commands and gestures as well as touch.

“So much of how we understand technology is visually driven,” says Rachel Hinman, a strategist with Adaptive Path, a user-experience and design-consulting firm. “Mobile interface design has to mimic the touch, sight, gesture and auditory feeds that we use to interact with our environment.”

That means speaking to your phone rather than typing, pointing with your finger instead of clicking on buttons, and gesturing instead of touching. You could listen to music, access the internet, use the camera and shop for gadgets by just telling your phone what you want to do, by waving your fingers at it, or by aiming its camera at an object you’re interested in buying.

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(via Usability News)

KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turmoil, what new systems might appear? Global/local, tangible/intangible, digital/physical? On the KashKlash site, you can explore potential worlds where traditional financial transactions have disappeared, blended, or mutated into unexpected forms. Understand the near future, and help shape it!

Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s conventional financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless — or maybe it’s the systems themselves that have gone astray. Yet you still have your laptop, the Internet, and a broadband mobile connection. What would you do to create a new informal economy that would help you get by? What would you live on? E-barter? Rationing? Gadgets? Google juice? Cellphone minutes? Imagine a whole world approaching that condition. Which of today’s major power-players would win and lose, thrive or fail? What strange new roles would tomorrow’s technology fill?

Besides Bruce Sterling, the initial collaborators are Régine Debatty (of we-make-money-not-art), Nicolas Nova (LIFT) and Joshua Klein (author and hacker), who have been collaborating on initiating the discussion.

KashKlash is now opening up to you. You can join and follow the debate of our experts or contribute yourself by leaving a comment on the different matters or fill out our KashKlash questionnaire.

This public domain project is conceived and led by Heather Moore of Vodafone’s Global User Experience Team and run by Experientia, an international forward-looking user experience design company based in Turin, Italy.

Check the project description for more info.

“Self-disclosure has been redefined online. In Web 2.0, it’s led to blogs and Tweets, Facebook and instant messenger, each developed to help users share the inane minutiae of their lives with others.

But another kind of site has evolved — a type meant not to broadcast your life to others but to chart it for yourself, on password-protected sites accessible only to the user. A life examined to the point that Socrates himself might say, “Guys, that’s enough.” [...]

The Internet brims with sites that track just about every task that you perform on a given day (eating, sleeping, exercising) as well as the things your body does without direction (pumping blood, producing glucose, gaining weight).

Some of the seemingly goofier sites have practical purposes: RescueTime was meant to increase time-management skills among business types, MyMonthlyCycles was developed for women trying to conceive, and Basecamp helps colleagues complete joint projects remotely. But dedicated trackers can repurpose these sites for their own self-study — or use them as inspiration for their own, more intricate tools.”

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From the press release:
“Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display information simultaneously in two languages. Behind this rich interface, SMS is used to deliver the critical information to ensure that this service works wherever a mobile phone does, without the hassles of additional settings or the need for GPRS coverage. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, and expand it across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.”

Ken Banks, creator of FrontlineSMS, granted it a long article on PC World (copied on his blog) is enthusiastic:

“What’s particularly interesting from a technical standpoint is Nokia’s snub of GPRS in favor of SMS. With data connectivity still patchy at the best of times, and confusion surrounding configuration and price plans, text messaging once again demonstrates its ability to remain relevant.

So, what next? Nokia develops a mobile payment platform and embeds the client into all of its emerging market handsets? Imagine: A single company controlling the entire mobile technology value chain would make interesting viewing. It could well be the answer to the age old fragmentation problems suffered by the “social mobile” and ICT4D space, but would this give the Finnish giant Google-esque powers?

These are interesting times. And, for once, it’s the users at the bottom of the pyramid who stand to gain the most.”

Clinton Jeff from DarlaMack.com, also posted a big write-up.

She made it last week into the International Herald Tribune, and now you can read another story about her company Participle in Fast Company magazine. Both stories are written by the same author Alice Rawsthorn, but have a somewhat different angle.

Participle isn’t a conventional bunch of social workers or do-gooders. It’s a design team. Participle’s interdisciplinary crew includes anthropologists, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social scientists, and a military-logistics expert, but it is driven by design techniques and headed by Cottam, 42, who also has used such strategies to tackle the shortcomings of Britain’s school and health systems. “Hilary’s — and my — favorite kind of design has to do with making people’s lives better, often taking account of their mundane daily concerns,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Her projects not only work, they give people a sense of hope and strength.”

Cottam is one of a new wave of design evangelists who are trying to change the world for the better. They believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing and that design can help us to build new ones better suited to the demands of this century. Some of these innovators are helping poor people to help themselves by fostering design in developing economies. Others see design as a tool to stave off ecological catastrophe. Then there are the box-breaking thinkers like Cottam, who disregard design’s traditional bounds and apply it to social and political problems. Her mission, she says, is “to crack the intractable social issues of our time.”

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“The word we use to describe this is “Context”, and we feel strongly that mobile devices will play a central role in establishing a context to the places and people in our lives.”

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“The word we use to describe this is “Context”, and we feel strongly that mobile devices will play a central role in establishing a context to the places and people in our lives.”

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During a speech at Mobile Monday Amsterdam, Bruce Sterling announced his next book “The Caryatids”.

According to Sterling, the book which will be published in February, is an “internet of things” book, set in the 2060’s, that “tries to describe what life is like in a working internet of things”.

Promo copy
In the vein of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, The Caryatids looks at the near future and forecasts not just our problems, but incredible solutions using technology currently under development. The caryatids are three identical clone sisters: Vera, a pollution expert who’s dealing with worldwide cleanup efforts; Mila, media star extraordinaire and member of the most powerful family-firm in southern California; and Sonja, a medical specialist stationed deep within China’s Gobi Desert. All three have the brains and the talents desperately needed to save a world suffering from global warning, runaway pollution, and uncontrolled political maneuvering. Too bad their explosive family history has left them hating each other…

“As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness.”

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“When New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center wanted to make the chemotherapy process easier on patients three years ago, it sought help from an unusual place: the design firm IDEO Inc.

The IDEO consultants approached the problem the way they design eggbeaters or CD players: by closely watching patients and testing little changes.

The process delivered surprises. Clinic staffers thought patients disliked long waits for treatments. But patients said other worries were more stressful, so the clinic changed how patients are tested, how they learn about chemotherapy and how they get to the clinics. [...]

Sloan-Kettering’s work with IDEO comes as businesses increasingly tap the design world for fresh ideas on management. Some are struggling with new business models and unexpected rivals; others seek new approaches to old problems.

The article features other examples of businesses working with designers such as the New York public-radio station WNYC, a health insurer develop new products, an Asian telecommunications firm, Mexican cement company Productos Cementeros Mexicanos, and Mattel Inc.”

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