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.

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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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 “bullet-time” scene in The Matrix dramatically slows down time while the camera pans around Neo, allowing us to see how he expertly avoids bullets as they fly by. It seems to me that, at it’s best, interactive media can be like this, with the important addition of user control. Rich, productive interaction enables the user to freeze things, examine the topic in detail, move through the content, and have control over what they perceive–time, perspective, focus, sight, sound, juxtaposition, etc. Further, having taken control of perception, the user can move and change elements, affecting the meaning directly, and creating a personally meaningful version of the work.

I’m not arguing that interaction should be cinematic, as Steven Spielberg recently suggested to students at USC’s program in gaming. Film is one medium, interaction is another with it’s own grammar, character, and means of communication. What I am suggesting is that interaction designers should provide users with the sense of magic, power, and real-time manipulation implied by the bullet-time technique.

Designers often struggle with the distinction between design and art. Perhaps one is instrumental and the other is not. Or design is for a client, and art is for oneself. I’m beginning to see the two more as points on a continuum. Early filmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov wrote that the possibility for film was “making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted; making falsehood into truth…” I think that this is the goal of both art and design, but that the emphasis is different for each. We could look at art and design along these lines:

art: making the invisible felt
design: making the invisible known

Of course, art and design strive towards each other in varying degrees. A landscape painting reveals a truth in a known as well as a felt manner. And a poster design reveals its topic in both an explicit and felt way. But I think it’s fair to say that the emphasis in art is the felt, and the emphasis in design is the known.