Philip van Allen

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.

For the U2 ZooTV tour in 1993, I and my MusicWorks team at Philips Media (Brett Spivey, Randy Picolet, Mike Diehr) created two interactive projects for the band to use onstage. It’s fun to think about what it was like to make interactive media back then. Keep in mind, this was the year NCSA released the first real web browser called Mosaic, before Photoshop had layers, and when a 650 meg (gig) SCSI hard drive was $2500 and the size of a breadbox.

This experiment allowed the band members to interact with the big video screens as they stood on stage. In the first project, Welcome to ZooTV, Bono selected a region, then the city, and then one of four versions of himself to welcome the audience to the show. The second project was BeatBox, and was run by Edge. He picked a song, and then played around with the beat by changing tempo and selecting between 3 different sound sets (including a zoo version with animal sounds for the kick drum, snare etc.). 

Apparently the band only used the projects on a couple gigs, as it turned out to be a bit too time-consuming for them to run it. If anyone has any stage pictures of them using it, please let me know. I think one of the shows where they used it was in Texas.

These projects were created using CDi technology developed by Philips and Sony. This was the first commercially released set top box that used CD media. My MusicWorks group produced several music titles for this medium. These were called CDi-Ready discs, and they played on normal CD players, but were the first music CDs ever to include multimedia content as well. Titles included James Brown, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, and Luciano Pavarotti.

Later, when I started Commotion, we went pretty far down the road on a proposal to create an interactive project with U2. It would have been developed on either CDi or the 3DO platform.

[View with PicLens]

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.

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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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View Video (95meg)

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).

My visit to the Maker Faire was briefly covered on coolhunting.com

I’ll be at the Maker Faire this weekend (May 19th & 20th 2007) demoing the new version of the NET Connect software. This software allows designers to create interactive objects and spaces projects without programming, using the familiar enviroment of Flash. I’ll be in a booth with Moto Development, and we’ll also be showing re.moto, an open-source wireless sensor system. For more info on NET Connect, see the website:

newecologyofthings.net/netconnect/

See you at the show!