From October 2008 to January 2009 the Milwaukee Art Museum hosted the first exhibition in an art museum. It was an intuitive, digitally developed interactive art. Here are two video’s to give you an impression of the exhibition.

What I find wonderful about interactive art is the fact that next to being art, it’s often also an area of play and discovery. It’s a great source of inspiration for everyone who designs human-computer interactions. So hopefully there will be many more exhibitions like this to come.

More about the exhibition can be found here on the website of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University) came up with a way to use any flat surface as a gesture based input device (Scratch input). An absolute breakthrough which makes extraordinary interactions, like for example controlling your television or music player with your wooden kitchen table, possible.

Scratch input is specifically designed to use augmented existing, passive surfaces as an input device. Using a simple sensor which is sticked on the surface, the sound-waves are captured. Due the fact that every movement produces a different sound-pattern, gestures can be recognized.

Interesting about it is that in a lot of cases this will make an interface redundant. And if you do need one, you can design one that looks and feels much more natural and organic.

I could go on explaining how it works but this video does a much better job at that:

What has been explained in the video, and a bit more, can also be found in the paper they published which can be downloaded here.

Chris Harrison, is a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Scott Hudson is a professor at the same institute where he directs the HCII PhD program.

In an attempt to feel modern and appeal to the 21st century tourist New York City has developed a new tourist information center. They decided that the human factor was highly overrated and replaced most of their functions by interactive screens featuring Google Maps.

As you can see in the video this resulted in a very interactive space. People can play around with the map of New York and see where they are and what’s around them. The center can act as a good starting point for exploring the city. By giving the system input of your interests and perhaps the maximum distance things can be will result in a digital advice.

Suddenly the visit to the center itself has become an experience. But we must not underestimate the importance of contact between humans. This system may look nice for younger people, but elderly are probably scared away. And besided that it’s also a good thing to have actual contact with people who know their way around the city.

At the same time they launched their new website nycgo, which is also nice… but not as special as the information center. Online they also have a good Google Maps tool.

Augmented reality is hot… new uses seem to pop up every day. In the last months we’ve seen augmented Japanese slaves, Mini cars driving in magazines and many other interesting solutions. This time it’s LEGO’s turn to try out this interesting technology worldwide in toy stores.

While many uses of augmented reality leave me in doubt of their success, this one is interesting. Everybody knows the frustration of being in a toy store… all the LEGO looks nice. You’ve got all these cool boxes with photos of the product inside. But what does it look like on the other side? Is it really that big? Metaio developed a digital box which will solve these questions. They will place this box in a store. When someone walks up to it, with the packaging facing the box, a 3d-model appears which can be manipulated by twisting and turning the packaging.

This is one of the first times this technology is applied on such a large scale (another product is the PS3 game ‘Eye of judgement’. Thanks Stephen Cox for mentioning it). After applying it in various more or less experimental ways, this finally looks like a match which really adds value. This because it shows something which we can relate to, something which we can confirm later on.

I hope they’ll be putting on in a toy store nearby. This will give me a good excuse to go inside.

We should feel ashamed of ourselves. According to a recent research people get angry and frustrated by the complexity of modern mobile phones. We, experience designers, are stupid… We’ve got the greatest job in the world, full of endless posibilities to make people’s lives better, easier and happier. And we still manage to only make things worse.

According to a research done by Mformation (with 4.000 participants) modern mobile phones are too complex. “Operators and device manufacturers need to remove barriers to service uptake and unlock the true power of advanced mobile technology. The message from consumers is that phone setup is simply too complex. Clearly, this needs to be addressed.”

It doesn’t come as a surprise that people find phone complex, but it’s still shocking to see it in these hard numbers:

• two-third of the mobile users find phone setup just as frustrating as changing bank accounts
• 65% of the respondents agree “that mobile operators are losing out, as people will not buy a new phone because of the time it takes to set up”
• 78% would change handsets more often if the setup wouldn’t be a bitch
• 88% doesn’t use additional services because the setup is to complicated
• 61% stopped using mobile apps because they couldn’t solve problems with them

According to the article people feel it should take no longer than 15 minutes to get your phone up and running. They get frustrated when this isn’t true and irritated when they must setup services through several steps. It should a smooth ride in the park: opening the box with your phone, starting it up and start using it. Along the way you should be asked simple questions so the phone knows what you want. In the background it can set these things up and sometimes ask if it’s doing the right things.

Why is it so hard for us to create a good experience? Personally I think to many mobile phones are still being developed with engineers in the lead instead of experience designers. Technology and features overrule experience.

Use patterns, stop innovating
On of the biggest problems in my eyes is the total lack of direction. Every single phone has it’s own way of interacting with it. All companies try to be innovative, coming up with new design patterns to make our lives ‘better’. But in the end we still have to learn how to work with them… and since these patterns don’t show up on any other device, we don’t really get to understand them. When the manufacturers do come up with a general pattern, like T9 for SMS, they immediately see the benefits. People have time to learn and understand the pattern and can use it over and over, blindly. But when every single phone of HTC or Nokia gets it’s own way of navigating, setting up services, etc…. people lose focus and get frustrated. This is one of the reasons I’m so enthusiastic about Samsung’s decision to create one interface for all their products. And it would be even better if the manufacturers sat together with a good cup of tea and choose some patterns they will all use. Patterns for all the basic features of a phone, which have proven to work. If they start innovating from that point on, building upon those patterns… people will be happy.

And no, I don’t want to kill innovation. There should still be phones that go over the edge and challenge the way we interact with mobile devices. But there should be more phones that don’t do this, then those who do.

photo Torbert Timson
via BBC News

Do you know about phenomenology? If you’re an interaction designer, you should. It’s a branch of philosophy that will change the way you work, especially if you’re used to the idea of ‘invisible interfaces’. But it’s highly likely you don’t, as up until now phenomenology has been one of academia’s best kept secrets. I hope to change that by giving you a quick guide to this thought provoking field and its relevance to interaction design.

The basics
Phenomenology is, as you might guess from the name, the study of phenomena. To be exact, according to Stanford, phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.

Though it’s a branch of philosophy, it also owes a lot to psychology. In particular, if you know about Gestalt psychology you’ll see a lot of parallels.  However, the most important difference is that phenomenology does not see a person and any object they perceive as being completely separate (for those who know Descartes: the subject-object paradigm). Instead the two are fundamentally linked, we are never just conscious, we are always “conscious of …” something, and so on.

Phenomenolgy is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.

This “conscious of” gets more relevant when Martin Heidegger explores using tools. In an example from “Being and Time” known as “Heidegger’s hammer”, he describes the hammer shifting between being “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand”. When we pick up the hammer, it’s “present-at-hand”: we can feel its weight, texture, and perceive it as being something separate from us. Once we start using it to hammer a nail, it becomes “ready-to-hand”: we act through it, and in a way forget that it’s there. Once we stop, it’s “present-at-hand” again. What’s important is that it disappears through use but can always come back.

However, using the body comes to the fore with the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his book “The Phenomenology of Perception”, he describes us as perceiving the world as we do because of our bodies (two eyes facing forwards, standing upright etc). What’s more, our perception of our body isn’t necessarily the same as our body itself: when we use an object, it becomes part of our body:

To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world… (p 143)

This may seem pretty much the same as Heidegger, but there’s an important difference: the object does not disappear. Instead it becomes part of us. Take the example of using a car. No one who drives would ever say the car disappears. Instead, through sitting in the seat, putting your hands on the steering wheel and your feet on the pedals and starting the motor, it becomes an extension of you. The car doesn’t become invisible, your bodily awareness expands to include the car.

The final aspect of phenomenology most worth touching on is about learning. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both agree that there is no such thing as a priori knowledge; knowledge from a higher consciousness (it may sound strange now, but a lot of philsophy assumed this!) and that instead we learn through doing, and in doing so create flexible ways to carry out actions. Hubert Dreyfus describes these as ‘purposeful without purpose’.

How it is relevant
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the way people relate to digital devices completely change. Thanks to the popularity of laptops and smartphones, people are no longer using one eye, one finger and their ears to interact with their computers. (See my previous post for more about that paradigm)

How do we design for this new way of using devices? In the desktop era, many designers used semiotics (the study of signs) to help inform their work. But now, as we use more of our bodies to manipulate computing devices, we need another framework. That is phenomenology. It helps us get away from the idea of the “invisible interface”, and instead look at the how our interactions are “embodied” (Paul Dourish) or “coupled”.

Taking a phenomenological approach, it’s easy to see why the Wii has been such a runaway success: the controller is pretty much Heidegger’s hammer gone digital. (However, it’s worth noting that it is almost a gestural device, which is something different altogether).Portable devices require a bit more thought – unlike Heidegger’s hammer or Merleau Ponty’s blind man’s stick, they have the extra layer of the virtual domain. In these cases, it is how the physical interactions relate to the virtual ones that can be considered by phenomenology.

Schultze and Webber explain that with the Palm, it’s the action of taking it out of its holster:

When you unholster a Blackberry, you don’t need to turn on or unlock the keypad. Perhaps this makes it easier to “act through” the physical device to directly manipulate the data of emails and appointments.

From a more computational perspective, it also helps us understand how we learn things through doing. Hubert Dreyfus, arguably the world’s best interpreter of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, showed this in the 1970s when his book “What Computers Can’t Do” correctly predicted that artificial intelligence would be a failure. He used phenomenology to show that assuming people learn using rigid systems of knowledge was wrong.

More information
For those who want to try and find a quick way into phenomenology, Hubert Dreyfus has a number of readable articles (his paper “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment” is particularly useful). For more of a design bent, Paul Dourish’s (albeit academic) book “Where The Action Is” looks at social computing and tangible interaction along with phenomenology. Those who are interested in mobile communications should look at Myerson’s “Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone” (though the book is beginning to date as mobile phones become more like computers).

For those who want to deep dive into phenomenology, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are where to go: Heidegger’s “Being and Time” lays the groundwork, while Merleau-Ponty’s “The Phenomenology of Perception” deals with the main area that Heidegger did not cover, namely the body. However, be warned that neither are easy going (Dreyfus suggests that Heidegger is dense to the point of being cryptic and Merleau-Ponty is badly written!). If you choose to go that far, for Heidegger at least there is a great resource to help you: Hubert Dreyfus’s Berkeley lectures are freely available from Berkeley or iTunes.

Everybody wants to design perfect products. And to do this a lot of designers think they’re applying user centered design. But most of the time they’re actually using themselves as reference. Fortunately there are several methodologies which can help you to really understand the target audience. One of them is the creation of mental models, of which Indi Young wrote a book called Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.

With Young’s approach to mental models we’re forced to not only understand the audience, but also to only design features that they might want.

Mental what?
The idea behind mental models isn’t new. It has actually been around for some time. “Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behaviors made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.” They are “a tool to help you conceptualize your product, before prototyping and testing something.” It forces you to really understand what moves the target audience. What are their needs? And what is their mission?

Young translates this research in a model which combines two kinds of data. On the top you see a visualization of the behavior of the targeted audience. For example showing what the ritual of people in the morning is. It’s really important to depict the importance of each individual part, because some are more important than others. Below this visualization you map solutions/features you came up with during the design process. Every feature can only be mapped against one behavior. If it matches more, it means you probably have to split up the feature. And features that can’t be mapped should be put aside, since they don’t match the behavior they are useless.

Features and strategy
With this model you get a good feeling of the behavior of your audience. You see what’s more and less important. But what’s even cooler is the mapping of the features I just mentioned. How often does it happen to you that you end up in an endless discussion about features? Something like this:
“This feature is an absolute must. If we don’t use it we’re definitely not going to win design prizes.
“Kill this feature. Nobody wants it. I wouldn’t use it…”
“But how cool would it be if we could have this feature.”
“No.”
“Yes..”
“No.”
“Ok, you’re the senior.”

This discussion happens at every design studio . Designers want the best for their product, but are also proud of their own features. But with Young’s approach to mental models we’re forced to not only understand the audience, but also to only design features that they might want. The importance of a behavior and the number of features mapped should match in some way. If a less important behavior has more features than an important one, something is wrong. It sounds so logical, that it just has to be true…

It feels difficult to integrate this methodology in smaller projects, where they can be just as useful…

The complete process
The mental model I just explained is the end result of an entire research process. It takes several steps to gain enough knowledge and insight to create this model. In the book Young takes you along every step needed. She uses the example of going to the cinema to visualize her method. There are eight steps you should take:

• Define task-based audience segments
• Specifiy recruiting details
• Set scope for the interviews
• Interview participants
• Analyze the transcripts
• Look for patterns
• Create the mental model
• Adjust the audience segments

As you can see a big part of the methodology is preparing and doing the interviews. After this you analyze the transcripts and look for patterns. According to Young this is a very intense process. In the book she describes a.o. how you should handle interviews, how this can go wrong and how you get something useful out of it. The honesty and directness with which she writes is wonderful. She doesn’t claim to know it all and admits that some parts can be boring. In a lot of other books you often find a very clinical approach, where only the perfect situation is explained.

Big projects only?
The good thing about the book is the practicality. Young gives a lot of examples and tips. She writes about the ideal scenario and at the same time writes how you can do things fast. But the process she describes still takes a lot of time, even in the smallest form. Of course I totally see the use of the methodology and am very willing to get my hands dirty on it, but I also have to be realistic. Almost all customers I currently work for will not have the budget (or time) for this kind of method. And even with all the tips Young gives, it’s hard to create a light-version that’s thorough enough to make a true difference.

On the other hand I have to say that the idea is glued in my mind. In several conversations within design teams I did use examples from the book, which is a positive sign. I’m really convinced we should create mental models and map the behavior against product features/solutions.

When using Indi Young’s mental models in your process you will without a doubt improve the quality of your products for the target audience.

Strategy
The book is interesting for different audiences. It helps designers define which way to go, and what features they should and should not implement. When you have a good mental model it’ll help you through a lot of discussions. But the discussions won’t only go better in a design team… it will also help on a higher level. Product strategists and executives can use the model to convince the management which route to take. And if we have to believe Young it works for over 10 years…

Conclusion
The first thing I liked about the book is the enthusiasm with which Young writes. From the beginning until the end you feel that she really believes in this methodology. She writes in an easy to understand way, giving practical examples. The book can both be used to read in the train and used as a practical handbook.

The book gave me a lot to think about regarding the design process. I think it is a must read for design teams. When using Indi Young’s mental models in your process you will without a doubt improve the quality of your products for the target audience. But I do have to make a not that it feels difficult to integrate this methodology in smaller projects, where they can be just as useful. The moment Young comes with practical solutions for this situation I’m completely sold.

Book details
Mental Models: Aligning Strategy with Human Behavior
author: Indi Young
publisher: Rosenfeld Media
details: 299 pages, paperback

This February is the second annual Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Interaction 09 conference which is being held in Vancouver, British Columbia in conjunction with Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Dave Malouf, one of the founder’s of the IxDA, was kind enough to allow me to interview him recently about a workshop he will be giving, his take on the field of interaction design, and some thoughts about where the field is going.

[Will Evans] How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?
[Dave Malouf ] Well, I started in the web world. Back then doing HTML 1.0 meant you were a designer. I bounced from technologist to producer/project manager for a few years until I found User Experience and fell in love. The last 10 years has been a personal journey of discovering from the outside what “D”esign really means, how it is really meant to be practiced, and now how it is to be taught. Then I connect that to my passion for technology and human beings which combine to me into  Interaction Design.

it is important for future (if not current) interaction designers to be educated in design foundation in order to connect more and be taken more seriously

[WE] Who/Where do you look to for inspiration?
[DM ] What a great question. My greatest inspirations come from the Cooper Hewitt Triennial. Companies like Antenna Design where two people do amazing work spanning so many disciplines of design. Other designers who span multiple planes of design particularly architecture. I’ve also been trying to look deeper into game design theory and practice and I’m really excited that my new position at SCAD will put me in closer contact with some of the best educators of game design anywhere.

[WE] I’ve said to many people that a lot of us have not come by our current roles honestly. That is, many–like you and I, weren’t formally trained as interaction designers – coming from a formal design program (like SCAD or CM). Do you have an opinion on where the interaction designer of tomorrow will evolve from?
interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up–the notes that are played by the musician.

[DM] Despite my own lack of pedigree, I really feel strongly that for the sustainability of the discipline of interaction design, that most people will need to go through a formal design school education to become contributing parts of the interaction design practice community (community of practice?). But it is also important for future (if not current) interaction designers to be educated in design foundation in order to connect more and be taken more seriously by the rest of the design community including industrial, architectural, communications, and interactive media.

[WE] I have heard you talk quite a bit about drawing from fields like Industrial Design – do you think people equate interaction design with web design? Do you think that limits how we as a profession are seen and how do you think we can grow out of that perception?
[DM] I don’t think that people equate interaction design with “web design”. I think they falsely equate it with “software design” at least inside the United States. And even then that doesn’t speak to what is the more exciting practice of IxD in the US which is most directly connected to the Industrial Design world, which–ironically enough, doesn’t really get interaction design as a community.

But I draw upon Industrial Design as I think it is the older, more established design discipline that most speaks to interaction design. Having worked in an industrial design studio for a bit, I really learned how far ahead they are in understanding and executing the basics of design foundation practices and having an established communication protocol amongst their peers. This lesson more than any other drives me towards education and towards my work around communicating a foundation of interaction design. Something I feel is sorely missing and needing.

[WE] Following up on your your previous answer – People are sometimes confuse or conflate interaction design with interface design? How do you see these as different?
[DM] Part of my gut tells me that they are the same thing. I’ve heard people define both terms in such a way that they are so similar that they might as well be the same thing. But where I usually take interaction design out of interface design is that interface design requires visual interfaces and not all interaction design has visual points of interaction. But even then, there are VUI designers (voice interface designers), so that blows my initial assertion out of the water that UI is only graphical. 

If I dig deeper, though, and if I hold to my own guns, I believe that UI is about presentation of interfacing points, but interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up — the notes that are played by the musician.

[WE] I know you were very politically active this past year during the election and I think a lot of digital ink was spent discussing the role of social media/internet in this recent election of Obama as president – do you think the effectiveness of the Obama website including the My.BarackObama website brought more focus to the interaction design community and to the importance of good IxD in general? Tell me what you think about how Obama’s call for greater government transparency will impact the IxD community.
[DM] I’m not sure it called attention to the IxD community because it is unclear what role the IxD community played in the creation of all these tools. But it is clear that the tools themselves did make a big difference, at least for me. I think that my.barackobama.com gave me an outlet to express myself and to turn thoughts into actions both online and offline.

On the issue of transparency, I have been using the work I’ve been a part of in this campaign as a source of inspiration in thinking about IxDA. So it isn’t so much about effecting interaction design as it is effecting the interaction design community and possibly even more so the Open Source community.

[WE] One issue that at least I haven’t seen addressed in the IxD community is ethics – could you reflect a bit on the issue of ethics and the role of the interaction designer in an enterprise? Will you be incorporating anything into the curriculum SCAD?
[DM] I am lucky in my career in that many ethical issues haven’t really come up. I’m actually sure — there is something about “forcing users” down paths that I felt were unnecessary, or schlocking wears that only contribute to the downfall of the world on so many levels. 

The more serious answer to your question is that there are so many levels of ethics and concerns, but a point I want to make clear is that interaction design has as much application to pornography and gambling as it does to changing behavior towards sustainability and raising money to end poverty in Africa. 

But personally, I do lean to the left more than the right (understatement) and the design community as a whole is so intent on applying its methods and processes towards “transforming” those elements of society that seem to be in imminent collapse.

Interaction Design… can be applied equally to gambling and pornography as it can in creating a service used to advocate for or change the behavior around positive change for the world.

A point I’d like to make about ethics is that as a discipline Interaction Design is not bound by ethics. This is true because the discipline of IxD is about the methods and rules of designing behavior. It is like a hammer. What you do with that hammer can be used for good or bad. It can be applied equally to gambling and pornography or to creating a service used to advocate for or change the behavior around positive change for the world.

[WE] Along those same lines – your new role as professor of interaction design at SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design), how hard has it been developing a curriculum? What are some of the key disciplines you will be focusing on this year?
[DM] SCAD is a design school. Everything in the industrial design program is project and studio oriented from as far as I can tell and my courses are no exception. I’m inheriting so far the curriculum of Jon Kolko. It is a minor program to the Industrial Design major for undergraduates. The crux of it is very sound: HCI, Interactive Product Design, Information Architecture, Contextual Research and a senior studio. But as I’m teaching the courses, I’m hungry for more theoretical depth. I’m lucky that it is a minor in industrial deign because  I know these students all went through foundation and get to really hone the crafts of ID (3D, graphics, etc.) 

On the flip side, I’ll be putting together a Masters degree curriculum soon for Interaction. I can’t go into too many details here but I’m very excited with looking at what US programs like CMU and SVA are doing and comparing that to what Ivrea, RCA, Domus, Delft, Umea and Malmo are up to. I think bridging the European-North  American divide is key for future education programs.

[WE] Many top tier universities like Standford and MIT are opening up all their classes including lectures, notes, syllabus to the public – do you think you and SCAD will be following suit?
[DM] Not sure about that, yet. I  think it is a false hope, thinking that interaction design can be learned from watching video’s on the web, even accompanied by course materials and syllabi. The key for most design practitioners is studio work. You can’t fake it. You either have to find an environment where you live it, or you have to go back to school to gain access to it. Almost no software environments run as studios.

 I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot though and I think we need to be inventive about continuing education. Events like AP‘s and UIE‘s week long multi-workshop experiences are interesting, but in their attempt for breadth they miss depth. Cooper‘s practicum is also too wide. What we need are week long courses that are deep and intense and that bring together different levels of practitioners into the same studio space. I’m working on some programs with SCAD but until I can get them off the ground, I can’t really talk about them yet.

[WE] Finally, What should the audience take away from your workshop at Interaction ’09?
[DM] The main purpose of the course  is not to teach students everything they need to know to be an interaction designer, but rather teach them everything they need to know to build a framework for plotting their career path and their own self-education. My biggest lessons have always been ones that inspired me to hunt for more knowledge as opposed to false attempts to impart knowledge itself. 

The workshop is going to present a framework of what interaction design is, how it is practiced and what leads to success. It is also going to be lessons on critique and non-linear thinking tools. Finally, it is going to be a chance for participants to think about their career, their current practice and what type of practice they want to be doing in 5 years. Visualizing that goal will allow them to choose a path. 

The most important thing I tell my students is that the path’s are like design itself. The flow of ideas head towards a horizon point, but there are many opportunities for disruption along the way. At any given point on the path, the direction of the horizon can and should change, influenced by the past, but put in motion by the present.

[WE] Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview.
[DM] You’re welcome.

About Dave’s Workshop
This half-day seminar will provide a solid background in Interaction Design (IxD) for those who are coming to the practice of IxD from other areas, such as information architecture, software engineering, business analysis, project or product management, technical writing, architecture, industrial design, visual design, and interactive design.

For more information about Dave’s workshop at Interaction 09, go here.

About Dave Malouf
David Malouf is currently a Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Before taking this position, David was a Sr. Interaction Design for Motorola Enterprise Mobility where he designed software, webware, and hardware interactions and interfaces. Motorola was the last in a 15 year journey of practicing interaction design, information architecture, ui design, project management and other roles and positions working almost exclusively with think client technologies.

David is also one of the primary founders and first Vice President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). David’s passion for evangelizing and teaching interaction design, came to a climax in 2008 when he co-chaired the first Interactions conference, Interaction 08 | Savannah.

Ever since the social web started emerging, the internet became a  collection of highly personal data. This data already ends up at companies and governments, but they merely use it in their design process or to determine the direction in which they develop their policies instead of making it a part of the actual product or service itself. This made me wonder; is this it?

For the first time in history our day-to-day emotions, thoughts, decisions, discussions, experiences etc. are being collected in one centralized place, and all we can do with it is use it to create guidelines?

When you talk to people about the internet being one big collective diary, then most of them will agree; it really is something extraordinary. But that’s often where it ends. There are already people who ‘play around’ with this data in a different way than just using it to create guidelines. Jonathan Harris for example, is intrigued by the hidden stories of the internet and has tried to uncover them in projects like ‘we feel fine‘ and ‘I want you to want me‘. Within these projects emotional trends are made visible and when you place  them on a timeline combined with historical events, interesting things start  to happen. You can see how ‘the world’ experienced a lot of negative emotions around the attacks of 9/11, and a lot of positive ones after Obama won the elections. But in the end, projects like these only put a greater emphasis on the potential of the data, instead of actually doing something with it.

I believe this data has the potential to change both human-computer interaction and human-human interaction tremendously. For now I want to shoot at human-human interaction. Though the thoughts behind it are much more conceptual than the ones behind human-computer interaction, I also find them to be much more exhilarating and I believe they will have a much more profound impact on society. I’m not trying to explain a bulletproof theory here in any way, but merely illustrating one of the many points of view which one can have upon this matter.

Social cohesion
One of the things in which the internet excels is exposing the social cohesion (the common ground) amongst groups of people, and bringing them together in one place. This is what happens in online social networks. As a consequence people who are completely unknown to each other are often seen having a wonderful conversation just on the basis of for example their taste of music. (a friend of mine is now even in a terrific relationship with someone he met on last.fm) This is an example of how personal data has been made relevant for more people than just you and your friends.

Nowadays, mobile internet is booming and wifi spots are popping up everywhere. Once you’re connected we know who you are (not just your name but think of all the stuff you left on facebook, flickr, youtube, twitter , the things you bought on amazon etc), and where you are. Now imagine going out for a quick lunch by yourself. How would that be different if you would know that the friendly looking fellow sitting next to you went to the same concert as you last night, or just became a father just like you? Would you start a conversation just as easy as you would online? Off course a lot of other factors play a role when you decide wether to start a conversation with someone or not, but could it aid in lowering some thresholds?

Let’s take it a step further. Tv-commercials are very different in each country, but the commercials from charities like Unicef or Novib all have some characteristics in common. Often they contain tragic images from children or amputees in third world countries (or other tragic images alike). Why? Because we can relate to those images. After seeing them we feel compassion, some people even experience a feeling guild. These are strong emotions and if experienced strong enough we act upon them.

Now what would happen if you could evoke those emotions amongst the people in a soccer stadium when riots break out. What if everyone goes ballistic and suddenly family pictures and pictures of kids who are currently present in the stadium show up on the screens accompanied by a strong message. Would the riots die down quicker? Could all the personal data of people collected on the internet serve as a tool for crowd management? Simply by showing people that they’re not so different from each other or by trying to let them relate to others around.

A couple months ago I gave a presentation at the Next Web Salon (a intimate version of the Next Web conference) in which I talked about these ideas. Someone there asked me the question if this could mean the end of war. Now I don’t believe that’s the case. But what can we achieve by uncovering the right common ground at the right time? Would we be happier when feeling more related to each other? Would our behavior change as a consequence of this? How will the biggest collective diary known to mankind change our behavior in our future society?

Image: Visualization of the internet made by students from the university of Birmingham

There are a lot of moments when you try to complete a task, looking for something. Most of the times this is boring or at least you’re not really aware of the moment. This moment could also be changed in something fun. Isn’t it the best way to find a situation where you wait for something while feeling excited/thrilled/interested. Here are some inventions trying to follow this course.

Car fireworks
Looking for your car parked somewhere in a parking lot can be fun. If you remember exactly where you parked your car, you’re lucky… but if you don’t, you’ll have a lot of trouble. Wouldn’t it be fun if your car projects an image of fireworks above your car so that you can locate it easily? 3.. 2.. 1.. fire! It’d be not only exciting to wait for it to happen, but also fun to see the fireworks for you and other people.

Fun way to avoid trouble
Or, what about finding an interesting trick that can help you avoid a lot of frustration? You are at a party and you look for your drink out of 20 paper cups. Most of the times you just decide to take a new cup. But you could also personalise your cup, so that it can stand out from others. What if a paper cup has lots of squared cut-off lines around its handle? You can customize your handle as you like. It’d be really fun when you make it with your creativity. I’m sure you won’t forget what you created this way.