By Ian Curry - May 16, 2007
If you find yourself strolling up by the park on New York's Upper East Side, you may find yourself puzzled by the presence of what appears to be a small refugee camp, set incongruously in a corner of the palatial Cooper-Hewitt design museum's well-groomed lawn. Have the squatters returned to the not-so-mean streets of post-Giuliani New York? Don't be ridiculous! This is "Design for the Other 90%" - the Cooper-Hewitt's collection of products designed for, well... parts of the world that seem extremely far from the Cooper-Hewitt.
Given that most of the products in "Design for the Other 90%" (DFTO9P) were created for use outdoor use, the show's location out on the back lawn is actually fairly appropriate, even if the backyard placement does make it seem like a bit of a sideshow to the more luxe wares inside at the Triennial. However, after clawing your way up through the Triennial's design dogpile - you'll be happy for DFTO9P's simple, practical pleasures. Unlike the Triennial, DFTO9P is well organized around understandable and important themes such as education and energy. The objects in the show give solid proof to the notion that great design often comes in response to the hardest problems.
Included in the exhibit are frog friends Design that Matters, whose brilliant Kinkajou projector was on display (though sadly not turned on) in one of the shelters. Design that Matters developed this low-cost, rugged projector as a way to teach children reading in places where poor lighting and harsh conditions make books impractical. Nearby, the museum had set up a small garden to show off IDE's treadle pump - a simple stairmaster-like pump that has made extended growing seasons possible for thousands in the developing world. The OLPC was there, though not turned on, as was some kind of WIFI-providing moped similar to what Yuri Gitman made for New York residents a few years back.
This branch of product design interests me immensely, especially when done in the way IDE does it. IDE's pumps are not charity handouts, but real products manufactured and for-sale in developing countries. Projects like IDE's create entire markets for manufacturers and resellers that, in addition to the economic advantage they give farmers, stimulate local economies and create jobs.
One thing I would have like to see a lot more of is the sort of indigenously generated design that seemed evident in only a few of the products in the DFTO9P show. It's always a complicated situation when a developing country simply drops something from the sky, however brilliant and helpful. MIT's guerilla fab labs, which have been set up in several developing countries, offer an interesting alternative path - giving people access to tools that can be used to make things themselves. I'd like to see this concept taken further - perhaps by setting up design schools specifically for these kinds of products in the developing world. I suspect there's a lot of innovation, borne of necessity, waiting to be tapped.
By Ian Curry - March 27, 2007
First John Edwards' Second Life campaign HQ was smeared with e-excrement. Then there was the whole Hillary 1984 thing on YouTube. It's been a rough few weeks for those in that very, very long jog to the White House. What's glaringly apparent in all this is just how far we've come since the last election when Dean was heralded as the first candidate of the Internet just for using Meetup. Barack Obama has his own social network. Edwards has his own Twitter page (and a huge cleaning bill to pay in Linden dollars). Every candidate is trying to harness the power (TM), but the web is a tiger you mostly cling to loosely by the tail. These people, trained to operate within a system of government designed to guard against the volatility of public opinion, need to ask whether they are ready to weather the web's unique, unfiltered, and often very brutal version of democracy. And we should ask whether we really want the person who comes out on top.
Of course, the reality is that the web is not unique as an unruly democracy. Democracy is unruly by definition. Going back all the way to the Federalist Papers, James Madison described it thus:
... there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. (The Federalist Papers, #10)
Which is why we are theoretically a nation ruled by laws (a constitutional republic), instead of a nation ruled by the people directly (a democracy). While there are laws that pertain to campaigns, the worst aspects of democracy are in full effect: mob rule, demagoguery, Fox News. The volume on these has been turned up significantly since the advent of the web. I'm not referring to the actual election mind you, but the war for weekly opinion polls that dominates the campaign season. The campaign is a little democracy that is designed to self-destruct and remake itself anew with each election. It has no care for self-preservation. The ability of even more people to participate online makes for even greater instability, not to mention the sheer unregulated meanness.
On one hand, it's easy to by cynical about the kind of person who could win at this game. The candidate with the loudest voice and the biggest warchest traditionally has come out on top. And this has been reasonable preparation for the kind of partisan screaming match that the government has largely become. These qualities, unfortunately, have very little to do with the kind of qualities I'm hoping for in a leader.
Fortunately, media was easier to manipulate before we were all making it. It's possible that the demands of Campaigning 2.0 are actually good preparation for life as a public servant. Ideally, only the most transparent candidate will survive. I have little doubt that the run for the 2008 White House will be the among the most volatile and nasty on record. I wouldn't want to be in any of the candidates' shoes as they are flayed bare by YouTube and the blogosphere. But whoever limps in in 2008 will be someone we know very well, and hopefully have every reason to trust.
By Ian Curry - March 12, 2007
One of the most inspiring organizations I can think of, Architecture for Humanity, has recently launched the Open Architecture Network, an online platform for architects to collaborate on housing design solutions for developing nations. The site's FAQ outlines their mission:
"One billion people live in abject poverty. Four billion live in fragile but growing economies. One in seven people live in slum settlements. By 2020 it will be one in three. We don't need to choose between architecture or revolution. What we need is an architectural revolution."
The site contains tools, specs, and other documentation that allows architects from around the world to collaborate on open source solutions to designing housing and other structures for the developing world. Their work is quite often amazing - taking simple, local materials and building homes and clinics substantially more livable and beautiful than my New York studio.
As I understand it, the OAN represents a kind of return to the roots of Architecture for Humanity, which I once heard its founder Cameron Sinclair describe as the result of simply going out to the web and asking people to help solve the kinds of housing problems that traditional architecture had been unable to deal with.
There does seem to be a small but encouraging trend of open source ideas jumping from the digital to the physical world. One of the most promising that I've heard of recently is the Institute for OneWorld Health - to my knowledge the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company (about time). There is of course a difference between open source and simply nonprofit - as OneWorld Health's original drug product came from scouring databases of drugs whose patents had expired it does, in a sense, encompass both.
What gives me the most hope about these initiatives is only partially their direct benefit in terms of products. I am more excited by the fact that one of open source's main side-effects is education. If you need proof, how many of you learned HTML from hitting the 'view source' button? I don't think anyone can predict what kinds of revolutionary innovation will occur when millions of people in emerging economies are able to hit 'view source' on the institutions that hamper development.
By Ian Curry - February 26, 2007
I will admit, I never answer my cellphone. I'm all for communication, but if I'm out with someone, or working, or doing anything that requires my attention, I don't like how much an unexpected call takes me away from what I'm focused on. I'm apt to try all manner of communication technologies - always hoping something will simultaneously support my desire to stay in touch with people I like, and not to be distracted. Tall order, I know. But it was with such optimism that I signed up for Twitter, a new messaging platform by Obvious, whose founders created some of the original blogging technology, and more recently, Odeo.
Twitter is perhaps the best example of a new kind of blog that some are calling a "tumblelog." The tumblelog is a bit like the old link lists: quick one or two-line entries - sometimes just a picture. Twitter in specific allows you to post, through a variety of means (IM, phone, web), short messages meant to describe what you are doing at any given moment. By establishing contacts on the site, you can also get a collected list of what all of your friends are posting.
In addition to all the established channels for posting, Twitter's API's have also made it possible for others to create tools for posting. One tool that has done a lot to make Twitter flourish is called Twitterific, by IconFactory. Camping out quietly in the toolbar, Twitterific pops a small window up whenever someone in my Twitter contacts list has posted something new. Like Outlook, or any Growl-integrated product, the window fades out and I can go back to what I was doing without having to act on anything. All day, I get nice little messages like "Thinking of summer art retreats" and "Rhododendron extract is the answer."
Twitterific is an interesting solution for someone like me. It's basically blogging reduced to what the Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin referred to as "the phatic function. (see note below)" Like saying "what's up?" as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up, the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur. It made me think of the light, low-content text message circles Mizuko Ito described existing among Japanese teens - it's not so important what gets said as that it's nice to stay in contact with people. These light exchanges typify the kind of communication that arises among people who are saturated with other forms of communication.
Is Twitter the future? Will it become the one address I use for hassle-free communication? Or is it, as one of my co-workers pithily put forth, merely "Dodgeball for people who don't go out." Ouch! You decide.
By Ian Curry - February 14, 2007
Every Wednesday night, I teach a class in the Communication Design Department over at Pratt. One of the great joys of doing so (you may be surprised to hear) is the homework I get. Many of my students are illustrators, animators, and other types of people who can draw much better than me. Often, perhaps finding my assignments a bit boring, they take it upon themselves to produce creative and beautiful things that make me glad I teach. While sometimes nearly unrecognizable as what I assigned, the best ones are things I keep around and look at well after I have marked grades and largely forgotten what the other students made. Apart from making some nice desk decorations, it's also gotten me thinking about the permanence of the deliverables we give our clients.
Last semester, one of my weekly assignments was to create site maps for the small portfolio sites the students were building. When a student handed me the object below, I wasn't sure what to make of it at first. You will notice that it bears very little resemblance to any kind of OmniGraffle or Visio document. If you look closely, you can see however that it is actually a kind of site map: each panel is a different area of the site with a pretty clear breakdown of what is on it. The backgrounds, behind the vellum, are collages of what each section contains. I've had it on my desk since last semester and am proud to talk about how surprising my students are with anyone who asks about it.
I'm not sure it would ever fly as a client deliverable for a place like this, but even recently I saw how a well-made book we put together to augment a digital presentation managed to circulate around the client's offices and did a lot to keep messages and enthusiasm from the presentation alive. I have no doubt that the book will have a much longer run in the client's offices than any deck.
I have thus officially listed "inventing new deliverable formats" as one of my goals for work this year - maybe I'll start with an, um, accordion folder sitemap or something. Love to hear the kinds of things other people do in this area. And, to give credit where it is amply due - the map was made by the very talented Lisa Diehl - who is graduating this year.
By Ian Curry - February 5, 2007
By now, you've probably all heard of the LEDs that shut down Boston last week. Today, Turner Broadcasting and Interference Inc., the companies responsible for the stunt, paid the city two million dollars. Ostensibly to cover the cost of a rush hour panic that gridlocked the city, it may also go down as the best media buy in history. After all, international front-page coverage isn't cheap, and it certainly didn't do anything to hurt Aqua Teen Hunger Force's irreverent image.
What has gotten less coverage is the stunt's tie to a local cell - Eyebeam's "Grafitti Research Lab." Dedicated to the evolved embellishment of the city - GRL are the inventors of the "throwie." Essentially an LED taped to a lithium battery, taped to a magnet - the throwie can be thrown at anything metal, where it will stick, and glow. This simple but brilliant idea evolved into larger sculptures, including a luminous Jesus left on a lightpost.
Interference credits GRL as inspiration for the stunt at the end of this video. GRL was somewhat ambivalent about the compliment - posting the following on their website:
"Just more mindless corporate vandalism from a guerilla marketer who got busted. Interference Inc, welcome to the world of being misunderstood, scapegoated, demonized and wanted by the law. Still wanna be a graffiti artist?"
It's an interesting situation, caught between creativity and corporate interests, that both GRL and Interference find themselves in. It is, however, nothing new. Street culture has always had an uneasy relationship with commodification.
The question is, would this have been as big a story if it were simply an art project that caused the stir? How much of the ire is that Turner's marketing department, by proxy, cost the city a bundle in emergency services and Rolaids? How much is embarrassment that we were fooled by something that in the end was literally cartoonish - like those toy pistols that fire nothing but a flag that says 'bang!' And, this is what makes the Interference stunt ultimately different from what GRL does. Instead of being puzzled, or inspired, we feel fooled. In the end, we are captivated as much by the potential danger as the sheer, comical banality.
By Ian Curry - January 22, 2007
I follow developments in news aggregators because they often serve as a bellwether for how we are collectively dealing with the task of finding important things in the vast information infinity of the web. Strategies differ considerably between the many companies in this space, but most offerings fall on what is becoming a well-defined continuum. In one corner, there is Google News representing the robots. On the other end is Digg, representing thousands of bored-at-work geeks. Both ends of the spectrum offer clear reflections of an important shift in journalism. While once upon a time there were editors to determine tone and journalistic "brand," the critical factors in determining the editorial vision of an aggregator are decisions about its technology.
My pattern of news checking throughout the day takes both ends of the spectrum into account. In the morning, I do a quick sweep of something like Google News. At this point, I'm not looking for angles, just the big stories. Once I've absorbed those, I switch gears. I'm now looking for perspective and small surprises. This is the kind of thing it's much harder for an automated reader to pick out. Google's traffic ranking used for picking out news wasn't designed to troll the long tail. Finding something unique and surprising is pretty hard for even a human to do - which is why sites like The Drudge Report get huge amounts of traffic. As it turns out though, it's something that thousands of people can do if their responses are filtered and weighted correctly, and that's what Digg is all about. Digg is not about to tell you exactly how they do it, but it's reported to be a calculation between momentum (tons of votes) and influence (user often submits highly ranked links).
The important difference is that while Google News presumably reflects the vox populi, it seems voiceless. The top stories are repeated there as elsewhere, and since they're all redistributing the same AP stories, whether you get the news there or on CNN is relatively unimportant. Digg, by contrast, has as much of a voice as single-editor news blogs like Drudge Report. Digg can surface anything, but the news it does surface is a clear reflection of a particular community's interests. Digg's voice is not the best thing to listen to if you want deep political insight or serious cultural critique. It is, however, extremely good at picking out stories that are just interesting. It's very rare that I go to Digg without clicking on something.
Last year, bbc.com held a contest to inspire their redesign. The winning idea was something called "BBC Malkovich" - which (taking its cue from the movie) contained a slider at the top that would shift from news suited to your perspective, over to news from the perspective of someone very different than yourself. The design is hypothetical, but if it were possible, it would avoid the danger of overpersonalization that Andrew Shapiro warns about, while preserving the ability to find the kind of things you want to know about. Shapiro's idea, that the middleman we've eliminated online might have a valuable perspective, gets complicated in a situation like Digg in which we're all essentially middlemen.
I'd like to see a news aggregator that took the same idea as BBC Malkovich and applied it across the spectrum of news readers we've been referring to. On one end, you'd get the automated headlines, but then are able to slide some control over to get increasingly vernacular, community-surfaced views on the news. Users would be able to apply the bias of particular technologies like filters over the news. Thinking about it in this way might also encourage us to develop more niche algorithms, such as highly unpopular news, to add as a point along the slider. Dipping a toe into science fiction, imagine if we could do a sort of motion capture on great editors now, translating their vision into algorithms that we can preserve forever. Will the day come when we can do an algorithmic reconstruction of Horace Greeley? Not that he would have much to say about the iPhone and the latest Linux distros, but who knows?
By Ian Curry - January 16, 2007
While the connection between violent behavior and games is still being debated, there's little question that games do teach us, if nothing else, how to play games. I've spoken with educators who feel that games engender a kind of "game mentality" in children - a trait that probably used to be known simply as being manipulative. With this in mind, I was amazed to see the following headline: "Script For Escaping Cingular Contracts Without Fee, Based On New Arbitration Clause."
What you'll find there is a step-by-step walkthrough of how to get out of a cellphone contract, complete with everything from the CEO of Cingular's phone number, to legal citations ("In Cunningham vs. Fleetwood Homes of Georgia... the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that..."). All the arguments are structured there with relevant citations. Presumably all you'd have to do is call up Cingular and, well, run the script.
In a way, this is just a more edited, practical version of the old self-help step-by-step program. It would be interesting to see if this broadens though. I could see an entire collection of such scripts - everything from lowering your car insurance to breaking up with your significant other. Do you ever get the feeling we're adapting to computers faster than they are adapting to us?
By Ian Curry - January 7, 2007
As with any marriage, designers and information architects put a lot of effort into making it work. There are highs and lows - ultimately, we need each other. But set us down together on the therapist's couch, or the project post-mortem meeting, and the same old grievances are aired. It's goes something like this: clients want to see something they can sink their teeth into as early as possible; IA's need to organize information on and across pages. Wireframes result, and despite even the most earnest admonitions against doing so, clients begin to get attached to the wires. By the time visual designers come in, the job has been stripped down to not coloring too far outside the lines. Someone turns a crank, and on a spigot towards the back of this rusty machine, a middling design drips out. Shrugs ensue. That's just how it is, right? Wrong!
In a number of meetings I've had that center on improving the designer/IA relationship, the humble wireframe, sitting quietly in the corner, almost immediately begins to get some cold stares. And, in recent history, there have been an array of efforts to supplant (or supplement) the functional role of wireframes in design. While often driven by the scenario described above, the more dynamic interaction possibilities allowed by AJAX and Flash have also strained the seams of the wireframe, not to mention blurring the line between IA's and technologists.
Dan Brown, addressing the potential for heavy-handedness in wireframes, has proposed a very useful documentation solution with the 'page description diagram.' This is essentially a prioritized list of components. The components can than be detailed on subsequent pages but it is really up to the visual designer, working within the constraints of the prioritization, to arrange the components for maximum effect on the page. Your clients are going to have to use their imaginations a bit here, but that's good for everyone. The most important part if you're going to experiment with a novel format like this is to either use it solely as an internal tool, or do it in parallel with traditional wires. Regardless, you should acculturate your clients to this system as early as possible. You're messing with an expected deliverable here, and having something that vaguely resembles an interface can be important for your client's internal sales process.
Andres Zapata has an alternate solution in 'the guided wireframe' - a solution that addresses the design of more dynamic interfaces. This is a good solution for narrating an interaction to clients, and not really a huge modification to the traditional process of wireframing. At frog, and probably elsewhere, we've experimented with a number of ways to document dynamic interactions. In the New York office, we had developed a tool which would allow for easy specification of HTML components that could then be easily swapped in and out of pages. This had the advantage of being able to create real links that can move through a series of simulated states. It also allowed changes to ripple out into whole systems of documents very easily. Quick and dirty Flash animations work - and I've found you can never underestimate the importance of making a well-chosen sound effect with your mouth to illustrate how something works. The difference between an object "bloop"-ing or "merrrrr"-ing into place, is actually quite profound.
If you haven't tried an alternative documentation system, it's worth it. It's worth it even if only to expose deficient areas in the way you work that may have been masked by adherence to a single way of doing things over the years. However, I've found that a well-considered process is as or more important than almost any documentation. Obviously your process is going to be suited to the particular dynamics of your team - here are a few points on process that I have found helpful though:
1) Get the visual designer on board with the project as early as you can, and get as much information into his or her hands as possible. If you did ethnographic research, make sure the designer knows how the target customers decorate their apartments. I've often found design insights to hinge on very specific details gathered about the people who are intended to use the product. While these details may imply interaction possibilities for an IA, for a good visual designer these same details can be a treasure trove of cultural cues to inform visuals. Everyone works better when they have a more complete sense of the challenges and opportunities.
2) Make a description of the priorities and components, then let the designer come up with a rough grid for the components. This can require some negotiation. One of the biggest flaws of over-IA'd design is a lack of consideration for the timeless wisdom of the Muller-Brockmann grid system and the potential to create dramatic space with it. Over-IA'd grids tend to be regular, or scaled on a fairly smooth continuum wherein the most important thing is about 15% larger than the next-most-important thing. I like to let the designer shoot first here. If well briefed, the designer will probably get close to the mark IA-wise in the initial round, and you begin with something that's had a little room to breathe. Once you can compromise on a grid that is both dramatic, well proportioned, and appropriately prioritized, you're more than halfway out of the swamp.
3) In my experience, once you have a smart grid, you can pretty much write the name of each component in the appropriate box, and this is enough to communicate the most basic gist of your plan to your client. More detail will undoubtedly be expected in short order, but you've pretty much abstracted a lot of what needs to be talked about in the first round. This is very lightweight prototyping in a way, but I've been surprised how good people's imaginations are when they see a box with just the words "video player" in it.
If you're designing a highly dynamic Flash or AJAX application, you can iterate on this process quickly and generate a series of lightweight grids whose function is not unlike a story board. Ultimately, what I've learned from my explorations is to pay more attention to the process and relationship. It seems simple enough that when good collaboration happens, good work follows.
By Ian Curry - December 19, 2006
When my sister came to visit me in my second year at NYUâs Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP), she described it as "kind of like Hogwarts, but with computers." I've always thought that was a pretty good description of the place. There's a lot of magic, and now, there seems to be a bit more polish and sophistication to the projects as well. Itâs hard to say whether the development tools are getting better, or humans are just getting smarter. Either way, Iâm not complaining â there were a larger percentage of really engaging projects, fewer video mirrors, and no shortage of things that cause you to have to grab your mind and twist it back into place.
Many of the real standout projects involved cellphones. ITP has set up an server that makes it possible for students to develop the kind of phone trees you run into when you call the bank, except much more interesting. Students are using the phones as a sort of offloaded universal UI device. In many cases, two people can dial in to a central number and can then compete against each other up on a screen using their respective phones as controllers. The best example of this was the Megaphone 3000 by Christopher Kairalla and Jury Hahn- a series of very short, playable, Nintendo-like games that can be played up on a remote screen by two people holding phones. Another project which took a similar tack was Speed Dial by Christopher Paretti, in which users yell into their phones to control the speed of two toy slot-racing cars zooming around a track. What I really liked about all these projects was their intuitive maximization of the phone as an interface: key tones, microphone levels, and text-input all figured in to the interactions.
I was also impressed by Urban Sonar by Kati London, Sai Sriskandarajah, and Kate Hartman. This is essentially the kind of proximity sensors that higher-end cars have attached to a human. All the data is fed over a cellphone via bluetooth to a central computer. I'd love to check back and see what kind of data they come back with in a few months.
It was hard not to be charmed by Ben Brown's Network Topology Twister. Ben had put a number of sensors on the ground and built a central unit to specify a hidden connection pattern between them. Users had to step on the sensors and in many cases hold hands to reveal the hidden network topology. If I ever teach kids about how networks work, I want Ben's toy.
I also liked Zach Eveland and Kati London's Spooky Action, a client which permits shared control of the mouse between two networked computers. It's projects like this that just by shaking up a UI convention slightly make you realize how wedded you are to the way you expect computers to work. As you are navigating away, a force pulls the cursor away from you, and you have to fight a bit (or negotiate with the person at the other terminal) to get your mouse back.
frog's own, Dmetrie Tyler, had one of the quietest pieces in the show, but also one of the most striking. Dmetrie's Hypothetical Drawings About the End of the World presented panoramic towers of algorithmic drawings. The scrolls have a very hand-done quality and complexity that reminds me a lot of Mark Lombardi's work. These in particular displayed the results of web queries concerning the apocalypse.
If you missed out, definitely put the Spring show on your calendar. A lot of New York frogs are ITP graduates, and it's always a good place to catch a raw glimpse of the brightly flashing future.
