Hippo Dignity

Yesterday, I heard the mother of two young kids talk about how her kids played with European-made toys, and educational games, and anything electronic or beeping was banned from her house or had the batteries removed.

After I put her on a mental “no fun at parties” list, I found myself thinking about those kids, and the difference between them and my nieces, whose playroom is full of stuff that beeps and whirs and responds to button pushes, often to the point where I feel overwhelmed by it and say “hey, how about these stuffed animals? Or a book?” So it’s not like I don’t understand where that mother was coming from. But at the same time, I’m awed by how normal smart devices are to my nieces and small cousin.

To these kids, most of the things that AT&T promised in those “You will” ads a decade ago, the ones that seemed wildly futuristic back then, are just the way the world works. Of course the car tells you how to get where you’re going! Why wouldn’t it? And of course there are toys where you push a button and it says a letter or a number or a word. I’ve seen all three kids figure out how to work complex stuffed animal interfaces (push this button for a lullaby! push this one for a morning song!) well ahead of the adults in the room, and look absolutely delighted at their accomplishments.

It seems to me that in trying to protect her kids from the supposedly brain-rotting effects of toys that do some of the work of play for you, not to mention protecting herself from the godawful noise, that mother I heard might actually be hampering her kids in a way, by keeping them from developing an interface literacy that’s going to be second nature to all of their peers when they get to school. It’s like the kids I grew up with whose parents wouldn’t have a TV in the house — except, instead of not getting shared-reference pop-culture jokes, those kids won’t get interface conventions that will be as obvious to their peers as breathing. Assuming we make it that far, of course, the makers of the smart devices of those children’s adulthoods will presume that deep interface knowledge, and build on it, and surround them with it, and there won’t be someone there to take out the batteries.

(Of course, I don’t think that’s a problem these obviously well-cared-for and thoughtfully-raised children won’t be able to live with, and parents should make their own choices about raising their children. Standard disclaimers apply!)

At the end of a long research project: we’ve logged something like 20,000 miles in the air so far, and that’s before the two trips out west to present our results.   I want to do a full-on Jan Chipchase and post about the pleasures and terrors of doing user research far from home, but for now I’ll leave you with this vivid warning sign from the Milan subways.  Never attempt to have sex with the train doors, people, and have a good weekend.

I’m in DC today doing user testing, and I’m grooving on the walk/don’t walk signs with the one-minute countdown that gives you fair warning when the light is going to turn red.

I’m torn between wanting them installed in New York immediately, and thinking that if they were installed, they’d just become another way for pedestrians and cars to play chicken with one another.

An RSS tool created by an English geek lets me track my new computer, designed in Cupertino, from its origin in China to its destination in New York. And it does so with something resembling grace:

What I love best about the intarweb is, in the end, its humanity — the little touches of humor or elegance in which you see the atavistic traces of the maker’s hand.

(Also, you know, new MacBook. Whoooo!)

Here is how crazy last week was — there was something even better than seeing the Pogues live in concert.

And that was the launch of the IQ MAX, the new turret (a specialized financial trading-floor communication system) from IPC. I was lucky enough to be part of the team of industrial and interaction designers at frog who spent most of 2005 working with IPC to understand and design for the intense communication needs of financial traders. The whole frog team was invited to the launch party, which was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner building, and everyone who we’d worked with on the IPC side was there as well. (Missing in action were the extremely flattering David, who was lured west by the call of the open road and new information visualization problems to solve, and Ian, who was en route to a meeting on another continent.)

It’s a rush to finish a project and see the final result go live. It turns out that it’s even more of a rush to see a final physical product: the difference between an appearance model and the final object is so much stronger. It’s three times the rush to be at a fancy party, listening to salespeople touting the improved user interface as a sales point.

(The Hats reading this will be amused to know that one of the sample names on the prototypes we produced was Ewan Kirk, Goldman Sachs. Which reminds me, I owe him an email.)

IPC’s user-centered development process, and their work with frog, is already getting press: Businessweek Online interviewed Michael Speranza from IPC and frog creative director Robert Fabricant for a piece that went live the day the turret launched. A white paper on our internal process is, I know, being written, and if it’s made public I’ll post the URL here as well.

For the “please come up with a name for my profession” files, from a posting to the NYCCHI list: “whether you call yourself an information architect, experience planner, interaction designer, or customer anthropologist, we’ve probably got a position that would fit you well.”

Sadly, I probably could make an argument for all of those as separate positions in the right sort of organization, though I hope I never, ever use the title “customer anthropologist” unironically.

Check me out on today’s Gizmodo:

Question (is) Everything: Design that answers unimagined questions

Note please the Half-Life shout-out at the end (hi, Harry!).

If you want to read Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, cited in the essay and a major inspiration for my own thinking on the topic, it’s available from his site under a Creative Commons license.

The essay began as some idle thoughts, while drawing several variant sitemaps for the same project, about everyone’s favorite theoretical trope, the problematic (defined by noted Marxist-structuralist wackjob Louis Althusser as “the system of questions commanding the answers given.”) There is no sign of Althusser in the final version, or indeed of sitemaps, in case you were worrying.

Today, information design is a chi-chi professional trade that is so rarefied it has split into a series of subdisciplines with names like “user experience design,” “library and information design” and “user interface design.”

(Cory Doctorow, “Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips,” NYT 12/7/05)

“Chi-chi”? Oy vey.

In my experience, the User Experience Designer, the Information Designer, and the User Interface Designer are all the same person, working at different firms or agencies. I’ve been a user experience specialist, an information architect, and a design analyst, and I just keep doing the same wireframes and sitemaps and card-sorting tests.

The irony that a field whose basic mission encompasses naming and categorizing cannot decide what to call itself we shall, of course, pass over in silence.

(Cory’s piece, by the way, is an interesting take on the same custom-fabrication trend Clive has written about, focused on home-toasting computer chips. Tasty.)