Mark Vanderbeeken

Filling much needed holes
“We need more unmet needs, not less. How many times do the never-ending ethnographic studies coupled with ever-eager design groups lead to unwanted, unnecessary, overburdening, and environmentally insensitive products? How many times are these unmet needs best left unmet? Why must we rush to fill the essential voids in our lives?”

There is an automobile in HCI’s future - part 2
“The automobile industry is badly in need of guidance on human factors. Excellent people already work in the companies, but they suffer the problems faced within the consumer electronics and computer industries over the past few decades. This is an important arena, one where human-centered design skills are essential. But success will come only when our discipline can provide seasoned managers who know how to work across disciplines, with engineers, designers (stylists), manufacturing, marketing and, of course, upper management. There should be an automobile in HCI’s future: but to make this happen presents a challenging problem in management, politics, and diplomacy.”

High-tech gadgets and futuristic robots which Japan had hoped might lend a hand when the population turns gray haven’t caught on with the elderly, who according to forecasts will make up around 40 percent of the population by the middle of the century.

“Most (elderly) people are not interested in robots. They see robots as overly-complicated and unpractical. They want to be able to get around their house, take a bath, get to the toilet and that’s about it,” said Ruth Campbell, a geriatric social worker at the University of Tokyo.

Japanese manufacturers have learned the hard way that the elderly want everyday products adapted to their needs — easy to read for those with poor eyesight, big buttons for people with trembling hands and clear audio for the hard of hearing.

Read full story [Reuters]

The French Association of Mobile Operators now published the full study (pdf, 630 kb, 156 pages), as well as a three-page press release/synthesis.

For a number of reasons I decided to spend (quite) some time translating the report synthesis:
- The study is strong and the results insightful, refreshing and highly innovative;
- Little is known internationally about anthropological research on mobile technologies in France;
- There is a barrage of coverage coming from the Anglo-Saxon world, and only a trickle from elsewhere.

Translating the study itself is unfortunately beyond my capacity and I can only hope that the French Association of Mobile Operators itself will one day make the study available in an English translation - feel free to put some pressure on them by contacting them at info@afomobiles.org.

MAIN CONCLUSIONS OF THE NEW SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY ON THE MOBILE PHONE IN FRANCE IN 2007

The French Association of Mobile Operators (AFOM) asked the Discours and Pratiques studio to conduct a study on the mobile phone in the French society in 2007.

Five researchers in information and communication sciences [sociology, information sciences, communication sciences, philosophy and literature], all members of GRIPIC (the research group of the CELSA school), worked on the study for six months, conducting about one hundred in-depth interviews, as well as anthropological observations in various locations (Paris and its suburbs, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Creuse and various ski resorts) and various situations.

The researchers tried to understand the ways of “doing and being” that go with the use of the mobile phone on the street, cafe terraces, restaurants, public gardens, train stations, apartments, vacation homes, companies, libraries, and transportation means, and this without falling back on traditional social categorisations. And to really cover the symbolic dimension of the mobile phone, the research also covered areas that up till now were not covered by research: the movies, television shows and literature.

The study was lead by Anne Jarrigeon and Joëlle Menrath, two researchers who were already involved with a previous GRIPIC study on the mobile phone in French society, conducted in 2004 and 2005.

The main points of the 2007 study are:

1. The mobile phone is no longer just a personal device. In 2007, the phone is integrated within collective practices both in the family and between friends.

Mobile phone are increasingly objects that circulate within a group. The owner of the mobile phone is no longer the only one to touch it, check it and use it.

Mobile phones can allow for exchanges based on the amount of credit left before the end of the month and on the range of hourly allowances when calls are free. This can also lead to a collective choice of operators, of discount plans and of prepaid cards, with the sole aim of optimising cost within the group.

Within the family, mobile phone reinforce the asymmetric role and character of the parent-child relationship: whereas parents do not think about money when calling their children, the children themselves try to save money by “beeping” their parents, in order to be called back.

The mobile of the child is a jointly managed tool and a transaction device. It is experienced by the parents - and mainly by the mothers - as an opportunity for exchange with their child and as a way for children to learn to manage a financial budget.

Within a group of friends, mobile phones serve to define roles and affinities. One can find the expert, and the user with difficulties, the “banker” who always has some credit, and the “borrower” who always asks for text messages and minutes (without ever giving them).

Beyond these roles, the mobile phone created relations of exclusivity with those whom one calls most often based on the tariff offers and their compatibility.

2. The French have ambivalent and changing relations with their mobile phone. In 2007, the mobile phone goes from being personal to transitory, from intimate to visible.

If the mobile phone is a “signature object” that one gets emotionally attached to and reflects the identity of its owner, it is also a “transitory object” that one can easily detached from, because it’s after all a device that young users see as something that will in the end be either replaced by a new model, or end up broken, lost or stolen.

If the mobile phone is an intimate “black box” where one stores the archives of one’s life (contacts, SMS, photos…), it is also:

• for adults, the album that unites all the photos previously kept in the wallet and the object where one keeps its secrets from intrusion (partner listening to messages or checking on call history…),
• for teens, the place where one keeps personal collections (images, ringtones, …), that one shares and shows like a museum.

3. New social conventions are being established around the mobile phone.

A mobile phone call can easily be interrupted (”I have to go now”, “I can’t hear you anymore”, “I am out of battery”, “I just arrived”). With a mobile phone, ending a call is allowed without this being considered impolite.

Calling someone on a mobile means living it up to him/her to answer or not. The mobile phone is increasingly seen as a non-intrusive tool of reachability.

New rules are also developing about money, with regards to “limit expenses”, or “pick up the tab” such as in a restaurant, or on the impoliteness of extending a conversation because the call is free anyhow.

4. The use of the mobile phone is governed more by example than by rules and prohibitions.

Nowadays there are many rules that prohibit the use of the mobile phone, be it at work, in public spaces or at school. Very often these rules are not followed.

In many contexts that were observed (office, train, waiting room…), use is self-regulated in terms of what people consider to be tolerable and appropriate.

At school, the mobile phone is added to the series of tools of those that are not interested in a class or have fun at creating some disturbance, something that more “traditional” tools were used for before. It becomes another challenge for the teacher to manage during his class.

Confiscation seems to be most effective sanction in school even if the user of the confiscated phone is no the owner (because phones often circulate in groups) and even if parents are opposed to this sanction because it prevents them from reaching their children (including - for some - during classes).

Because rules are usually not followed, example behaviour is often more effective than prohibition. When someone decides not to use his/her phone when on holidays, at dinner, during meetings or while with the family, this is often the best way to dissuade others from using it.

However such example behaviour requires constant vigilance because any use of the mobile phone quickly becomes a breach that others quickly take advantage of.

5. Several dominant sociological and philosophical lines of thought are consistent with the behaviours that were observed and the results that were obtained during the study.

While the mobile phone is often presented as the token of an individualistic and atomised society, in reality one observes collective and collaborative behaviours around the mobile in the family and between friends.

While the mobile phone is often thought of as creating a bubble around the people engaged in the call, excluding them from their immediate environments, in reality one increasingly observes conversations where those around the “caller”, allow themselves to intervene, to interrupt the caller or to speak to him/her about something else.

While the mobile phone is often portrayed as filling a void or a lack, one increasingly observes situations where the phone provides resources to act and react, allows to capture what one experiences et to bring an “extra value” to what one experiences that can be described with wellbeing or pleasure.

And while the mobile phone is often, also outside of expert research, mentioned in current discussions on improper behaviour the people that were interviewed do not speak about this and one observes increasingly less signs of exasperation or of cases of embarrassment in public life.

6. The mobile phone is seen as a “average medium” that renews amateur photo and film practice.

Mobile phone images are viewed as precarious images, often of uncertain quality, not to be printed and not be shared between devices. These images always call up a description of something one should see. They serve to create memories and to prove that one really was present at the event one is talking about (e.g. a concert, a celebrity passing by …).

Mobile phone images are integrated within several reference frameworks that preceded the phone: the journalism of the everyday and one’s own life, spontaneous family images as opposed to fake happiness, the sensationalism that comes with having to set up brief, clear, efficient and striking acts.

More spectacular scenes can raise the challenge by bringing in the grotesque, the playful, the macabre, even violence. This is what lead to the videos gags, the MTV Jackass and the so-called ’snuff movies’. The aggressions filmed on a mobile phone are one of the most recent expressions of this (although the expression ‘happy slapping’ was not used by any of the people interviewed within this study).

Our friends from InternetActu, who also report on this study, highlight that the authors of the study conclude that “the mobile phone of 2007 is no longer exactly the same phone as it was in 2007:

“Its current massive and seemingly irreversible presence in all spheres of life would make one think that its uses would become trivialised or neutralised. None of that can be observed. […] Whereas the conventional uses of the mobile phone are more stable now than they were in 2005, they are now shared with new uses that are either linked to innovative technologies that are appropriated by users, or created by themselves in daily practice.

[…] What struck is, is that the mobile phone hasn’t ‘bursted’ under the effect of the successive additions of new functions, but continues to make sense to people as a “phone”, even though they use it in manifold ways. It goes even further than that. The mobile phone is no longer fully conceived or ‘experienced’ as a Swiss Army knife of aggregated functions but instead reinvented with each use as a ‘fully conceived object’: a machine to write text messages, a photo camera, a voice mail system… It is an object that is endowed with the capacity of metamorphosis. When seen in the context of the other devices it relates to, the mobile phone seems today to be part of an augmented collection [or ‘ecosystem’] of communicating devices, including the devices of others […]. Research on the effects of the phone on others therefore seems more relevant today than an investigation on how to optimise the performance and complementarity of the different tools.”

The very lengthy presentation (there are two slides on each of the 124 pdf pages) is organised in two parts. The first one looks at research topics, such as stakeholder interviews, in-depth case studies, user research, field research, defining the information architecture, content analysis, whereas the second part is an overview of all the various aspects of interaction design.

Download presentation (pdf, 12.7 mb, 124 pages)

Now they also published a background report to that study.

The purpose of this background report is to map the growth potential of the Danish design industry. Is there a particular type of growth-oriented companies working with the combination of innovation and design? And if so what characterises this type of company?

The analysis shows that the design industry’s potential goes far beyond the traditional focus on product design. Design is an important discipline to concretise innovation and to create new products and services - this implies that the companies’ increased focus on innovation has opened new opportunities for the design industry.

It should be stressed that design cannot drive company innovation on its own. Other industries including advertising and consulting use disciplines that are important to the development of innovative solutions. Companies assisting other companies with innovation must therefore work with tools from various professional disciplines. These are the companies referred to as concept design companies throughout this study.

Chapter 1 highlights the general structure, size and importance of the Danish design industry and maps the Danish concept design companies. The chapter also introduces a point system for ranking individual companies in terms of their ability to carry out concept design.

Chapter 2 maps and describes internationally leading concept design regions and compares results from the Danish survey with the results from the international mapping. In continuation thereof the chapter compares the identified companies based on the system introduced in Chapter 1.

Chapter 3 describes a range of trends that impact concept design companies and their potential for growth. These trends include choice of business strategy, how to combine concept design competences and finally how large industrial companies are moving into concept design.

Download background report (pdf, 990 kb, 75 pages)

The research, which involved six months of field observations and interviews, was commissioned by the French Association of Mobile Operators and managed by researchers of Gripic, a research group of the information sciences school Celsa at the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne.

Here are some of the insights, as reported in Le Monde (and translated by the author of this blog):

“The mobile phone is more and more used in a collective way,” says Joëlle Menrath, one of the researchers. “Real collective strategies are developing, with teens often passing their phone on to their friends to take maximum advantage of the prepaid calling plans and the discounts these offer.” Those who have not fully used their own discount options, let others profit from it. In fact, these users often juggle with the tariff options of their close friends. They might take advantage of the free calling hours of one of their friends, or will choose a plan based on the plans that other friends have chosen. Sometimes, a group of friends might subscribe to different mobile operators so that they can extend their geographic coverage.

These strategies can also be found within families. Children “beep” their parents to save on communication costs: it works as a code, with one or two rings before hanging up, and lets people know that you want them to call you back. “This way parents are reassured, they maintain their hierarchical position, but they also have to pay for the communication,” notes Mrs. Menrath. Children have in a way largely subverted the initial attempt at constraint to their own advantage…

The shared use of the mobile also leads to the disappearance of its function as a private object containing intimate secrets. “It servers more and more as a tool to express oneself,” says Anne Jarrigeon, another of the researchers involved. When a teen is momentarily absent, friends often take the phone to read out recently sent text messages or to view recent photos.

Such a transparency can of course backfire. “Within couples, spying on the mobile of one’s partner is very common,” says Mrs. Menrath. The call history and text and photos in the phone’s memory can have devastating effects. “The mobile phone plays a key role in many break-ups,” admits Mrs. Menrath.

Whatever may be the case, the device has become indispensable and people use its many new functions is ways that were not anticipated. “The music or the photo functions do not transform the device into a digital Swiss Army knife,” says Mrs. Jarrigeon. “It remains a telephone that allows for some other secondary uses”. The research shows that the mobile phone is no substitute for an MP3 player or a digital camera. But it lets people create a photographic notebook of daily life that one can show to close relations to illustrate a story being told, or to let people listen to one’s exploits.

These new ways of using the mobile orginate more often from the imagination of the subscribers, than they do derive from the manufacturers. “In Japan, the users of the metro system always keep their travel card and mobile phone together,” reminds Mrs Menrath. “It is by observing them that NTT Docomo decided to integrate this function into their phones.”

The new research, which is not yet available online, builds on a previous research project on the social use of the mobile phone, published in 2005.

CHI 2008 focuses on the balance between art and science, design and research, practical motivation and the process that leads the way to innovative excellence. It is about balance in our rapidly evolving field, the balance between individuals and groups, collocated and remote, stationary and mobile, in both our local and global communities.

CHI 2008 will be held in Florence, Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance, and home to great artists and scientists. This is the city of Leonardo Da Vinci, who spoke of balance in saying “where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”

They will jump start the conference with two days of workshops, the doctoral consortium, and a small subset of courses. Within these CHI venues, attendees will interact with friends and colleagues in an intimate academic setting. The main technical program begins on Monday and will run for four days again this year. Within this program, attendees can look forward to a myriad of presentations designed to convey new findings and methodologies, elicit interaction, and stir your creative juices. Numerous breaks and social activities are also planned in order to further promote the exchange of information and ideas within the CHI community.

The submission deadline for papers is 19 September 2007.

(via Designophony)

User Experience: Towards a unified view (pdf)
Proceedings of the 2nd COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop (October 2006, Oslo Norway) - “The concept of usability has been evolving, along with the emerging IT landscape and the ever-blurring boundary of the field of HCI. Specifically, the so-called user experience (UX) movement is gaining gound.”

The Art of the Conceptual Prototype [Blink Interactive]
“Conceptual prototypes are often very interesting projects because the ideas are leading edge. But they also present some unique challenges compared to more traditional projects where we are designing for actual implementation.”

XcD
“The scope of human-computer interaction design has widened to include concerns with fun, emotion, beauty, aesthetics and values. There is an increasing emphasis on holistic approaches to user experience and what is now called experience design. A number of frameworks and theoretical approaches to experience design have been developed and a range of methods and techniques have also been proposed. This website is part of the work carried out on the EPSRC grant Theory and Method for Experience Centred Design. This site links to our own work and that of others on theory and method for experience centred design or XcD as we seem to have started calling it.”

Design for the Dream Economy [uiGarden.net]
“After the eras of the Commodity Economy, the Manufacturing Economy, the Service Economy and the Information Economy, we have now entered the era of the Dream Economy.The key to success in the Dream Economy is an in-depth and holistic understanding of people. It’s not only about meeting people’’s practical needs, but also about meeting their aspirations and providing a positive emotional experience.”

Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved [Bill Buxton]
“Since the announcement of the iPhone, an especially large number of people have asked me about multi-touch. The reason is largely because they know that I have been involved in the topic for a number of years. The problem is, I can’t take the time to give a detailed reply to each question. So I have done the next best thing (I hope). That is, start compiling my would-be answer in this document. The assumption is that ultimately it is less work to give one reasonable answer than many unsatisfactory ones.”

Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned [UXmatters]
“Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.”

Conducting Successful Interviews With Project Stakeholders [UXmatters]
“A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I’ll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews. (And I’ll come back to that word, insights, a little later on, because it’s important.)”

A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory [Boxes and Arrows]
“After giving it some thought, I find that the thing I like most about the map is that it is pure, stripped down navigation. Harry Beck decided that including streets, districts and other geographical information on his underground maps was distracting and added little value. All you need to know is how to get from A to B. I suspect that the same may be true in information spaces.”

Social Networks And Group Formation [Boxes and Arrows]
“Humans suffer from information overload; there’s much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend upon each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how or know-why information has become most crucial. It involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person.”

The Tagging Growth Curve [tagsonomy]
“The apparently irregular growth and spread of tagging is simply example of the real nature of how innovations spread. Professional analysts and other meaning makers tend to draw smooth graphs to depict these things. But in reality, natural systems (and the tagging / technology landscape is a legitimate ecosystem) are noisy, cyclical, chaotic, complex, fuzzy, non-linear, and unpredictable. They only appear to follow smooth curves at a high level of abstraction, or a low level of resolution.”

Looking Back on Data-Driven Design Research Personas [Todd Zaki Warfel]
“The primary goal of the tutorial was to show people how to work data into developing personas and how they can be used for more than just design.”

Now they have repeated their method to assess the UX consciousness of mainstream business publications.

So, what was the degree of “UX consciousness” among business publications?

• The Harvard Business Review is most interested in knowledge management and information management
• The Economist is quite focused—at the expense of all other UX topics—on branding
• Business Week seems to have the most balanced coverage, with six terms accounting for at least 5% of the results each (branding, content management, industrial design, information management, knowledge management, and user experience)
• Fast Company is the leader in industrial design focus and in branding, trailing only The Economist in that category
• Business 2.0 seems to lead in many areas that have started to gather attention relatively recently: experience design, information design, interaction design, interface design, search analytics, technical communication, usability engineering, and user experience (9.9%). It’s also the most balanced in its coverage, after Business Week.
• Inc. has a strong information focus: content management and knowledge management are by far its largest categories.
• Entrepreneur focuses exceptionally on graphic design and ergonomics
• Strategy + Business hewed most closely to the overall averages, showing stronger focus on branding and weaker on content management.

Full results

The study focuses on how design can be utilised together with other disciplines to create new solutions to the global challenges faced by the private and public sectors in the twenty-first century, and is a follow-up to the report entitled “Et billede af dansk design” (A View of Danish Design), which was published in April 2007. It draws up a map of the proliferation of concept design companies and their areas of work.

Today’s companies are seeking answers to the question “what?”.

What should companies focus on? What problems should the companies’ innovation solve?

In the past companies wanted answers to the question “how?”. How do we develop a new product? How should it be designed? How should it be marketed, and how should the company be organised to achieve the best solution?

When companies seek advice and answers to how questions they can turn to consulting engineers, designers, advertising agencies or management consultants. Until recently, this has provided a reasonably clear division of labour between different consulting offerings.

In terms of answering questions related to what a company should innovate and produce, companies have no obvious place to go. For that purpose consulting engineers, design companies, advertising agencies and management consultants could all be involved. However, none of these companies are single-handedly able to answer the question “what”. Hence, we are witnessing industry break-up and gliding.

The study will contribute to shed light on this dynamic and fascinating development – with a particular focus on possibilities and consequences for the design industry.

Downloads:
- Concept Design [August 2007] (pdf, 17.9 mb, 115 pages)
- Et billede af dansk design - udfordringer og perspektiver [April 2007, in Danish only] (pdf, 11.1 mb, 118 pages)
- Design Denmark [July 2007, Danish government white paper on the direction for design policy in Denmark] (pdf, 320 kb, 20 pages)