YakShaving

Does anyone else find it absurd that there’s no button to turn on full screen view in the MacOSX version of Firefox?

Get on the ball Mozilla.

Overheard at the Foster El stop in Evanston between two [seemingly] college-aged students, one donning a black hoodie and the other slightly larger built wearing a red coat.

black hoodie: I didn’t even finish my homework for this class, I was addicted to second life last night talking to Erica and I fell asleep.
red coat: Are you serious? I can’t believe you use second life. Seems like the nerdiest thing ever.
bh: What do you mean?
rc: Just shoot me the day I stop having social interactions with friends to go on some online world. It’s just not the same.
bh: and how often do you check your Facebook?
rc: Oh, all the time. but that’s different..
[train approaches]

Why do we ostracize second lifers as pariahs that “can’t fit in” to the real world, but twitter away to our heart’s content and update our Facebook status on an hourly basis? How many of us (if we consider ourselves early adopters) have seen the number of friends who use social networking sites increasing dramatically within the past year or so?

I’ve been interested lately in the exploration of virtual communities (and particularly games) as a venue for researching users. I started thinking about this first during my research I conducted for MacArthur’s Electronic Learning Record project. Those of us in the design community acknowledge that understanding patterns of behavior is important before synthesizing modes of use (products, services, experiences) for those people. We invent detailed methods into gaining insights about human lives, and routinely practice these methods to get better at eliciting the golden nugget that will transform an industry.

There are five main reasons why I think that observation of interactions in the virtual world may be even more interesting than ones in the meatspace:

1 Acceptance. As I alluded to earlier, the “nerd” stigma around using social networking tools has diminished. We can certainly see how with the addition of higher and higher fidelities of applications (e.g. scrabulous) that plug into these tools, we are in essence approaching a virtual world. In other words, it’s entirely plausible that it won’t be long until you log into your regularly scheduled social networking site and take a stroll in the park having a conversation with your friends about how “superpoking” them was so 2007.

2 Suspension of Disbelief. Just like watching movies, virtual worlds are a vehicle for the suspension of disbelief. Even more than movies or traditional entertainment, virtual spaces give inhabitants free rein to try different things they might be unwilling to do in reality. Games and virtual worlds are designed (and thus bounded) only by people’s imaginations. Edward Castranova, who’s an expert in the field of virtual worlds, has pointed out accurately that people mention getting “addicted” to a game. He uses economic reasoning to posit that the virtual world is thus a more attractive environment to many than the real world. People gain more social acceptance and possibly more utility out of their virtual lives than their real ones. One reason might be that the agents in a game or virtual world are essentially created with equal sets of assets (so society, being more egalitarian is more agreeable).

3 Reach. There are a more and more people trying out virtual worlds. Oftentimes, many of these people live in rural or suburban isolation. Though very much a part of the economy, their social connection to the global community is increasingly through a virtual world. Isn’t the easiest way to learn about these people through their normal modes of interaction, when the alternative is driving a van with expensive video equipment and your research team to Iowa? Moreover, these normal modes of interaction are during a period of play. We already know that humans learn and create during play. Doesn’t it make sense to learn about people through this natural observation, instead of interview them?

4 Prototyping is cheap. Relatively speaking, it is cheaper to produce a digital good than it is a physical one. I am aware that you can’t prototype everything for a virtual world (who would want to clean with a Swiffer in the virtual world? It’s bad enough to have to clean your real kitchen). Increasingly, however, as we create more digital interactive goods, the virtual world modality is a perfect test bed for prototyping. Prototyping things with potential consumers early and often and learning from it is absolutely fantastic when the costs to validate are almost zero.

5 Participatory and Co-creative. Virtual worlds, by their definition, are participatory. Second life owes much of its digital assets to a robust and imaginative developer community. What a great place to get people to make stuff.

Perhaps more important than any of the reasons I already mentioned, is that reality and virtuality are on a crash course to intersect soon. Our perception of online personas is changing rapidly; Our tendency to relinquish the physical and embrace the virtual (while variant by age perhaps) is accelerating.

A futurist I truly respect, (despite his ego I might add), Ray Kurzweil, has this to say:

In virtual worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is real reality.

It makes complete sense. When you change your relationship status on the Facebook or ‘throw spaghetti’ at a secret crush, you are sending a message to a world of very real people using a virtual medium. Why diminish it as being an artificial interaction?

The next time you think of doing research, why not consider the metaverse? I look forward to future projects like the Electronic Learning Record that will encourage us to invent new design methods for this exciting new medium.

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There’s nothing quite like installing a piece of software and seeing more and more tiny green blocks on your screen is there?

I can’t say I miss the days of installing windows applications since I made the Switch(tm). I’ve gotten kinda used to doing the old drag-and-drop into my “Applications” folder.

In any event, I witnessed Alexis today installing SolidWorks on her computer when we noticed the CEO’s picture on the install screen, with associated message: “We are committed to your success. Thank you for your support!”. I get it, it’s a personal message straight from the CEO.

I do feel though, at some level, messages such as the aforementioned should be implied and intrinsic to the actual product itself. The installation process is a pain in the arse for any product, and it’s appropriate that people might want to be entertained somehow during the process. More than likely, people will leave and come back later (but this is merely because they have a certain expectation that the install will be boring.

Why do these passive processes insist on being so boring and unengaging? Why not use the movie credits analogy and at least advertise the names of the developers and creators of the software? Or, if it’s an esoteric software program that only a developer is likely to install, hire John Cleese and Graham Chapman to introduce some comedy to a rather drab process. After all, it is part of a customer experience.

We salute you.

Hang on tight, this year will see tons of great iPhone applications.

For aforementioned independent study project, we’re looking into using the iPhone developer’s kit as a quick and dirty way to prototype interfaces. I’ll let you know how it goes soon enough.

If anyone has some insight or experience into using the bluetooth stack in conjunction with the iPhone dev kit, I’d love to hear about them. It’s been a while since I’ve done stuff with the Widcomm bluetooth stack (I vaguely remember tinkering back in senior year design project in Soloway’s class. Fun times.

tags:
iPhone

Larry Lessig

flickr: Peter Kaminski

It’s pretty rare that I use this blog as a place to help campaign for a political candidate. If I did that too much, you might run away and never come back. But this time, it’s worth it.

I’ve been staying away from the Presidential election because I don’t want to get sucked in to it.. I feel like I have better things to do with my life. But from the first time I saw Larry Lessig speak on some youtube video about creative commons after undergrad and read one of his short books, I thought he was amazing. And SUCH a dynamic speaker — I just love his presentation style.

Larry announced that he might be running for Congress- but for completely different reasons than most people run for Congress. As a matter of fact, he’s NOT EVEN SURE he wants to run…. (watch the video.. You’ll see what I mean)

So I’m not advocating that you jump the bandwagon and cheer for Larry. But the fact that it’s 3 am Chicago time and I’m sitting here writing this of all things should be some testament to this guy’s aptitude.

As most of my friends and some of my readers may know, design school [graduate school in general] is an incubated environment for me to test out new ideas with great people, every day. To find people that I would love working with on a regular basis on interesting projects that are meaningful and, dare I say, fun.

In an independent study class, I’m working with a partner to commercialize a product from concept/inception to production. Thus far, it’s been a blast. And I can say it’s this continuously thinking-doing process that has been the most engaging and representative of what I’d like to do after graduating from the ID. As a personal learning experience, this is unparalleled and I am assured it will only get better.

It’s come to my attention that my use of language, perhaps body language and unspoken signals that I may send to others do not demonstrate my confidence in a particular endeavor. Which amuses me, because I always think of myself as an overly optimistic person– If there’s anything you need when starting something up, like, say, a company, its staunch belief in your team and mission and the strongest conviction that you are incapable of failure. Which I have. I really do (c’mon guys, remember squidbag and dollars&sensei?) . But sometimes I feel like I have to balance that with my sense of design “evaluation”– Ultimately we both want the best product out there in the market. We’re both spending lots of time on it, and we both are passionate and excited about the journey. But as soon as I start “evaluating” in my head and thinking about costs or engineering considerations, my language actually signals that I am doubtful.

I’ve noticed that changing my language from “I’m concerned about the implication of abc“, to framing as “I’m thinking about the introduction of abc… AND I think …xyz” is so utterly powerful. It’s not even so much about me– It’s about not turning off someone else’s spigot.

So, as lame and cheesy as this sounds, I wrote something down in my Moleskine to refer back to when I get stuck communicating in this “engineering” mode. I’m going to ask Sri to remind me when I forget— I’ll call it the “actDO” model: Always Communicate Thoughtfully Dogged Optimism.

The cheesy slogan will fade once I’ve completely internalized it’s ethos. And it will.

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