Philip van Allen

A lot of doubters are making a classic mistake in evaluating Apple’s iPad. They did the same thing after the initial announcement for the iPhone, or for that matter the Toyota Prius. The mistake is thinking in terms of existing categories and value propositions. For the iPad, the doubt seems to boil down to: “I don’t like it because it doesn’t fit my ideal for a great laptop.” The critiques don’t always state it those terms, but I think that’s where it’s coming from. No camera, no keyboard, no multi-tasking, no Flash (okay, actually Safari on the iPad really does need that), etc. – these are standard expectations for a laptop.

And the doubters are right, for those of us who want a cool, small, OS X laptop thing, the iPad does not hit the mark (of course, as the iPad matures it will get many of these things – the inevitable 4.0 release of the iPhone OS will likely address the multitasking and app organization issues. And maybe Adobe and Apple will finally make nice for the Flash plug-in. And the 2011 version will have a camera etc.).

But people who want a better laptop aren’t the target audience for the iPad. Just like people who wanted a better Blackberry weren’t the target audience for the original iPhone. And people who wanted a green-washed sports-car were not the target audience for the Prius. Guess what? These products were a success anyway, because they met a new need and found a new audience.

So what is the iPad? Well, that remains to be seen. It will evolve in the next year as developers turn the iPad into a range of completely new things that, once they exist, will be essential for many people. To start all this off, Apple gives us the basic foundation and a decent value proposition:

• Read rich media books/magazines/newspapers
• Comfortably browse the web
• Use interactive textbooks and other learning material
• Work with personal media (photos, music, video)
• Play games
• Shift low-intensity computer stuff off the computer (email, todo lists, calendars, presentations, note taking, etc.)
• And as an add-on value, provide an admittedly compromised level of computer substitution for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. so we don’t always have to drag around a laptop.

That alone is a pretty good deal for $500. But what will come, and will likely make the iPad a major success, is a range of new apps that turn the iPad into an incredible device for doing more specific kinds of activities. For example, recording a song – it can be a complete recording system and tangible interface with faders, knobs, transport controls, etc. Or as remote control for your house and entertainment system. Or as a painting canvas. Or as a device that sits next to, and is an adjunct to your computer - wacom tablet, todo list, email, application switcher, etc. Or to organize your genealogy. Or to do scrapbooking (really, this could sell a millions units alone). Or plan a trip. Or evaluate X-Rays at your patient’s bedside… You get the idea.

I call these devices Slabs. The iPad, iPhone, Andriod, etc. are generic platforms that, via an app, turn into a product. And a 10″ Slab with multi-touch surface can be a lot of different products.

More to come in the following days on my thoughts about SLABS, SOFTDUCTS, and BESPOKE OBJECTS.

This tutorial introduces basic programming concepts using the Scratch language, and was developed to support a live workshop I give to my design students (so it doesn’t have the complete explanations that I give in person). I’ve found that because Scratch is a visual programming language, designers pick up programming concepts faster with it. This is especially true because of the slow single stepping feature of Scratch, which allows the user to watch each line of code work while the code executes.

You should go through all the Scratch examples first to understand the concepts. Then go back and apply the concepts in Flash ActionScript 3.

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I’m back from London and the Sketching09 conference that focused on the practice of “sketching in hardware,” i.e. making quick interactive hardware prototypes as a way to explore a design direction. Lots of great ideas and work presented. A few highlights:

• Conference organizer and ThingM partner Mike Kuniavsky’s talk “Read Write Material Culture” proposed that only the 20th century was mostly Read-only, where before that and emerging in the 21st century, production can be local and accessible to many makers. The economics of industrial production pushed individuals away from making, but the emergence of new technologies and tools (e.g. web-based distribution, 3D printing, open-source hardware and software toolkits) make it once again possible for individuals to produce things and make a living at it.
• Ed Baafi of Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn and the Boston FabLab demoed a web-based visual programming system for putting code on the Arduino. Using the same approach as Scratch, users can drag-and-drop programming structures and watch them run while the hardware responds. Once the code is finished, the system will download compiled code to the Arduino so it can run un-tethered. He hopes to release a beta version soon.
• Along these same lines, David Zicarelli founder of MAX/MSP maker Cycling74 demoed a project where users can create a patch in MAX, and it will run on the Arduino, either tethered or downloaded and un-tethered.
• André Knörig demoed Frizting, a web-based system for visualizing hardware prototypes with the Arduino and other microcontrollers. Once diagramed, the circuit can be shared, and most importantly, Frizting will generate the layout for a printed circuit board (PCB), so you can turn your idea into a more formal project that can be manufactured.
• Jan Borchers of The Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University showed his Luminet project, which is a system of intelligent nodes that talk to each other, and are programmed by infecting the network of Luminet nodes, where the code jumps from one node to the next.

Slides for many of the presentations are here.

A couple days ago, RISD president John Maeda tweeted that “Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.” Perhaps he was kidding, but I have to object. To me, good design raises new questions. If designers simply solve problems, we deaden design and culture by making things that operate at the most mundane level. Instead, we should create things that inspire, challenge, provoke, surprise, satisfy, engage and open up opportunities. The best design changes the context around it and allows people to see and feel the world in a new way. What problem did the Porsche 356 solve? What is the impact of the new Seattle Public Library? Why is the iPhone important? What’s interesting about Paula Scher’s posters? What makes a great hammer?

Each of these play a role in people’s lives with broad effects in terms of activities, emotions, thinking, tactility, social interactions, creativity, work, play, and more. Even the “functional” hammer does more than solve the problem of putting nails into wood – it feels right in the hand, it gains a patina over time that makes it personal, in a pinch it will open a beer bottle, and you can use it to repair a church after Katrina.

In particular, if we think about Interactive Design, the highest goal should be to empower people to create their own meaning spaces, not solve pre-determined problems or even make great experiences. As I’ve discussed in my Productive Interaction paper and in The New Ecology of Things, design plays a greater role than serving tasks and solving problems. The things in our lives communicate, create social exchanges, and enable us to manipulate both the tangible and the idea. They afford creative abuse and invention. Forget solving problems, design things to be productive, embodied, mythological, meaningful.

I just read a couple interesting posts on something called The Implicit Web which relates ideas of the Semantic Web, social computing, “clickstreams“, folksonomies, sophisticated search systems, intelligent software assistants, crowdsourcing, etc. By tracking the activity of people and analyzing semantic content on the web the Implicit Web can automatically discover networks of people and interests without the explicit kind of work one does in Twitter, Facebook, or Google search. 

In other words, by tracking what you and others do and create (emails, blog entries, tweets, browsing activity, shopping, etc.), and by scouring the web and analyzing its content, these systems make sense of the web in a much more sophisticated way than the brute force kind of searching that Google does. So it could find correlations, generate connections, optimize searches, make you aware of implicit networks of interest, and generally act on your behalf to both filter the incoming avalanche of data, and provide better/faster means to get to interesting information that you might not otherwise find.

While this idea is related to the kinds of recommendations that Amazon and other sites do, it is stronger because it aggregates a lot more activity and content beyond the silo of a single site. Plus, the ultimate expression of the implicit web (I hope) is that the user will have more control, and can “dial-in” the criteria of a search or automated task to their specific interests at that moment, rather than being stuck with some company’s idea of your interests. This idea relates to my essay on Productive Interaction, where the design of these systems is not about creating enveloping, persuasive experiences (as experience design dictates), but designing contexts where users are empowered to create their own meaning spaces.

Related LINKS below
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I just wrapped up my The New Ecology of Things class at Art Center’s Media Design Program. The class addressed the design of ubiquitous, massively networked systems – i.e. emerging ecologies of things. Our topic this term was “anti-homogenous” and we looked at heterogeneous alternatives to the mouse, keyboard, screen for specific work and play activities. This continues the idea mentioned in my Microsoft Future 2019 video post, where interactions should adapt to the type of activity, rather than the person adapting to the same type of interaction for every task. The 13 students designed and prototyped projects ranging from a special table for art directors to a lamp that receives and projects video messages from your friends. The projects addressed different affordances as well as the relationships between tangible, embodied things and their meta-data/meta-content. More details and links to project websites below the photos.

All projects are working interactive demos that use the Make Controller in combination with our NET Lab Toolkit (Pen & Book didn’t use the Make).

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The Microsoft Office Labs Vision 2019 video recently shown at the Wharton Business Technology Conference, by Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop (text of speech), does a good job of showing potential modes of interacting with embedded and ubiquitous multi-touch displays. But how original is it? My students in Art Center College of Design’s graduate Media Design Program have been working on ideas like this for many years, and have made speculative videos like this, as well as working prototypes and real projects. See below for several examples, as well as some thoughts on where future interfaces should go – is Microsoft just proposing another version of windows?

Update: Behind the scenes of the making of the video

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Microsoft Office Lab’s Vision 2019 video

MDP Alumni Sebastian Bettencourt’s Beyond The Fold Newspaper Project

Here are links to several of my students’ past projects:

• 2004 – wall – scott nazarian, nikolai cornell
• 2005,2006 – mirror – in search of identity, infiniti interactive - nikolai cornell, phil van allen, others
• 2006 – interactive table – acura oracle – nikolai cornell, jonathan jarvis, phil van allen, others
• 2006 – handheld augmented reality – telepath – matt mcbride
• 2007 – e-paper newspaper – beyond the fold - sebastian bettencourt

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I’m very interested in how tangible objects can be used in interesting ways to interact with information on screens. This video collects together a series of experiments on the use of a range of object prototypes. In making these, I imagined a screen in front of me (in some cases a standard size screen, in other cases a wall sized screen), and manipulated the various objects as if I was controlling and interacting with content on the screen. It was more an experiment in the affordance of the objects in relation to screens than thinking of specific applications.

This project was aided by the help of my graduate students Jonathan Jarvis, and Parker Kuncl.

NET Lab Widgets

There’s a new version of the NET Lab Toolkit. This release adds a new skin, single keystroke to make widgets invisible, play/pause function for VideoControl and several bug fixes. This is in addition to support for Xbee wireless sensors, the Wii Remote, and DMX lighting control that came with the ALPHA version released in July ‘08.

I’ll be speaking about The New Ecology of Things and our NET Lab tools at the flashbelt conference that runs from June 8th to June 11th, 2008 in Minneapolis, MN. This conference focuses on the in-depth issues of designing and developing real interactive applications. Sessions range from experience design from Motion Theory’s perspective, to animation design, sound design, developing in Adobe’s AIR, programming in processing, physical computing, to working with the Papervision3D library in Flash.

On April 25th 2008, Anne Burdick (MDP Department Chair), Nik Hafermaas (Dean of Communication Design @ Art Center) and I gave a talk at the USC Interactive Media Arts and Practice Program to discuss the MDP’s New Ecology of Things research initiative. This talk was webcast, and the web recording of it can be seen on Adobe’s education site.

American Honda and George P. Johnson have donated one of their Oracle Multi-touch Tables to the Media Design Program. We now have it permanently in our graduate studio where it is available for faculty and students to develop new applications. In particular, we’re interested in exploring how large sets of text and image content can be explored in a collaborative way with multiple users.

How can we make computational design and code understandable to design students, and how can they define the designer’s role in regard to coding? I was recently explaining to a student the importance of timing when a project responds to a user – a difference in milliseconds can make a big impact. We were also talking about how designing and developing code requires a different way of thinking and abstraction compared to visual design. In interactive design, the 4th dimension of time and the definition of behavior in code is very different from the see-it-all gestalt one can get from looking at and refining a 2D visual design.

I think the way to go is to cast it in terms of designing behavior.  There are many principles and concepts of designing interesting, rich, meaningful behavior that I think could be developed, some of which is instantiated in code, other aspects in the mechanical design (the turning of a doorknob or the page of a book for example), and others in the conceptual design.  This shift to behavior design as an overarching concept that encompasses computation may make it more interesting and relevant to designers.

The Media Design Program’s new transmedia publication, The New Ecology of Things, is complete. The book, website, poster and mobile phone content address the design and educational issues related to ubiquitous computing and is an ecology of essays, glossary, forum, interactive works, video, and a short story by Bruce Sterling. You can order the book here: The New Ecology of Things (NET).