by David Pereira
Digital Money
Money as a social and cultural driver is more and more a relevant subject this days.
About this matter an interesting workshop is going to happen in University of California, Irvine September 18 and 19, 2008 on the subject Everyday digital money:
Rather than replacing cash and coin, or arriving at one new general-purpose form of money, these changes in ICTs and multiple agendas for innovation in money are accelerating its pluralization. Quasi-moneys and para-currencies operate alongside bank-based electronic moneys as well as telecommunications-based currencies that may have only a tenuous or indirect link to state-issued legal tender. These multiple currencies commingle in people’s wallets, restructuring people’s experience of money as well as their everyday practices of budgeting and accounting.
Not that money is an interesting subject but the experience of earning, using and loosing money without seeing it is the existing reality. In Japan paying a burguer with a mobile phone is already in use: “Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo is teaming up with McDonalds to offer electronic payments and special promotions for mobile users.” Several behaviors will emerge from the use of the mobile to pay for goods. Plastic money is in this sense substituted by a form of personal connection to friends, family, acquaintances and the rest of the world in the daily coordination. And this in fact will produce change.
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You, Me, & The Other Guy (ReConstitution 2008) from Sosolimited on Vimeo.
OpenFrameworks
made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.
Low-fidelity prototyping
Prototyping is at the core of Interaction Design practice from ideation to the final product. Even though prototypes can be a long way from the intended look and feel they are relevant to the design process for many different reasons. They provide means to learn from the problem, weigh solutions, gather information, evaluate designs, originate feedback and engage the team, clients and stakeholders during the product development life cycle.
In the beginning of a project prototypes are useful to bring together the exploration of concepts with the definition of the system’s behavior. Working with low fidelity prototypes at this stage is a way of empathically understanding a user’s experience of a specific system; in terms of service design it means prototyping the touchpoints so to understand the user journey (or customer experience, if you prefer) and provide a tangible view on what is going to happen. In the case of starting production design it means prototyping existing ideas and designs, test, gather feedback and improve.
Low fidelity prototypes are relevant at the beginning of a project when many ideas or directions need to be tested and discussed. For the team this is an opportunity to experiment with ideas by making them tangible and for the client to have a clear understanding of what the product is going to be right from the early stages.
Prototypes are as much about the solution as they are about the problem. Prototyping a possible solution reflects one’s existent knowledge of the problem. As prototypes start to be tested the problem unfolds and the team becomes more informed about what to think about and the brief to design to. In this learning by doing practice - creating, testing and modifying - prototypes are a resourceful way to gather requirements and inform the next design iteration.
At another level, prototyping is a useful way of working around a user’s mental model and the mental model implicit in the designs. Don Norman elaborates on mental models in the “Design of Everyday Things” as a way to understand how users develop an idea of how a given system works, by what it affords to, what are the patterns of use, what is the outcome of actions, where to go next while doing a specific task.
Alternatively, sketching is also a common approach but in terms of defining the user experience different outcomes will arise in the design process from using sketches or low fidelity prototypes. Bill Buxton refers to this, saying: sketches present questions, prototypes provide answers; sketches suggest, prototypes describe; sketches explore, prototypes refine; sketches propose, prototypes test; sketches provoke, a prototype resolves.
also posted here
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More from troika at: http://www.troika.uk.com/bbc.htm
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Great article by CLIVE THOMPSON on New York Times:
“Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.
But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.”
The full article: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
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Open studio
Younghee Jung is an antropologist working for Nokia in a team that works on exploratory design research focusing on personal and mobile aspect of technology. Their approach is to learn from people so to inspire design. Also Interesting in their approach is the concept of the open studio more in a sense of a design competition so to learn the specific needs and have some sort of validation from the consumers at the edge of their market.
The playfull competition is an interesting way of getting personal views in the results, that in some sense is why the door is open to, and on the other side seems to be a productive way for users to get their thoughts about in the blue and achieve some recognition of their ideas while having fun. Again were innovation is seen as collaborative, these users with strong bonds in the selected community have well defined individual views on how technology can help them in the context of their lives.
The full video with some results out of the sessions:
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Past Friday projects session was very interesting: discussion as usual on innovation, augmented reality, social media, the living room experience, designing prototyping systems as well as participatory design in Madushani’s sound project. Pictures here.
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Paper prototype, originally uploaded by dpereira.
This picture shows Madushani’s first protoype during a session of role playing. The paper tags serve has objects to be used on the circular area so to produce a sound specific to a tag and its position. Andy was testing the initial concepts by using the system and its rules. With a bunch of tags you will get a bunch of unorganised sounds or a cadence or a composition. Great fun!
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