This time around we will look at videos that hardly involve any prototypes or scenarios. In these examples, designers are using video as a tool for research, inspiration and cultural probing. This article will probably be the thinnest in the series because examples like these are hard to find. But they needn’t be as these videos are technically less complex than all the rest we have seen.

Yellow Chair Stories

Yellow Chair Stories is a project by Anab Jain at the Royal College of Art. It is a “live service design intervention” conducted outside her apartment. She placed a yellow chair and a sign that read “My Wi-Fi network is open for neighbours and passersby. Free access from the yellow chair.” What resulted was an interesting and fun study on community, public spaces and network technology which became material for her to design future scenarios involving wi-fi.

Domestic Gubbins

“The Domestic Gubbins are a series of four fictional objects, designed as video probes, in order to enter in conversations with people around their everyday ideas of intelligence.” It is another project by Anab Jain with Alex Taylor at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. None of the objects from this project were functional, but the video prototypes were enough for their team to have meaningful conversations with people about such hypothetical products.

Microsoft Mojave Experiment

Although this video plays out like a viral marketing campaign, it’s interesting to see Microsoft combining video and user research to make a point about its products.

Snowbird Video Ethnography by Artefact

There is actually nothing exciting about this video, but I enjoyed it for what it is — a really nice example of video ethnography. Be sure to check out the Artefact blog where they have published the first of three articles about how to film customer insights.

Dispatch

I am currently working on a student project which is a service to help friends coordinate social activities with their mobiles phone. One way I have explored this area is by conducting small social experiments involving my own friends and their phones. Using video allowed me to document their experiences while gaining immediate feedback through interviews. Insights weren’t the only goal, I was also looking for stories, quotes or even footage that could be reused in fictional video scenarios when I present the final service at the end.

This collection of user experience videos will take the idea of concept videos, which we saw examples of last week, even further by showing us future scenarios that involve a range of new products and technologies. These scenarios are opportunities for designers to focus on storytelling and communicate ways that new technology will be a part of people’s everyday lives.

The following videos could have been commissioned for a variety of reasons – to envision how emerging technologies will reshape consumer products, to understand how customer needs will change in the near future, a conversation point about future directions, branding and PR, etc.

Intel/IDEO UMPC Vision

To help Intel imagine new applications for it’s technology and possible future contexts, IDEO created this three part video scenario that envisions user experiences made possible by Intel’s advancements in ultra-mobile PC technology. It’s high production value of depiction of everyday situations makes it a video that anyone could enjoy watching and discussing. I love the collaborative playlist in the party at the end, but what’s up with the silent headphone-rave?!
To see a video prototype by IDEO, check out Vocera.

Microsoft Productivity Future Vision

In a previous article Jeroen already wrote about the Microsoft videos, but they’re still worth the mention. Microsoft video’s always have superior production quality but often come off as gimmicky advertisements. It would be great to see this videos incorporate a narrative and start to explore how these slick interfaces and high tech products will actually help people be productive.

System Hauzen by Samsung

This future vision from Samsung takes the form of a commercial, focusing on specific products for the home. Unlike the last videos, System Hauzen follows a single narrative of a family going about their day. Unfortunately this narrative is broken and becomes a cheap infomercial when the actors address the audience and say things like “this is the future…”. But what’s most striking about this video is how creepy this ethnically ambiguous family is! A comment on the video’s YouTube page compared it to Horizons at Disney World’s Epcot Center, a future vision built in the 80s. System Hauzen is so campy, cliche and borderline anti-utopian that it immediately becomes a parody of itself. It’s fun to watch though!

Nokia Design Views of the Future

Connect is one part of a video series by Nokia Design. Each video explores a different lifestyle and tells a short story while exploring new mobile phone designs.
“The videos are not showing prototypes of actual phones or devices that Nokia is currently working on or plans to launch. They are exploring futuristic concepts and potential new ideas that may or may not be produced in years to come. They are designed to inspire and stimulate discussion around how the mobile device of the future might look and function in our lives.“

Little Brinkland

This is a video from Anab Jain’s Little Brinkland project and is quite different from anything else that we have seen. Anab was asked by a company that designs office products to explore the future of work and workplaces. Anab did this by creating a fictional town called Little Brinkland, set it in the year 2012, and made documentary videos about the people that live there. In this video we meet Andrew, who owns a ‘pet implant consultancy’ and Luka, a ‘networked dog’. What I really enjoy about this video is the way it mixes a fictional story set in the future with situations recorded on the street with real people. Read more about this project and see all the videos at littlebrinkland.com.

STARFIRE

“Showing a day in the life of a knowledge worker in the far-off distant year, 2004.” A classic corporate vision of the future, from Sun Microsystems. You can read more about this video at http://www.asktog.com/starfire/

While last week’s installment showed examples of designers using video as a tool for prototyping new products and services, this installment will begin to look at the way designers are using video to tell stories. The examples below will show designers using the most basic video production tools with a little creativity to create compelling scenarios. We will also look at how larger companies are using professionally made video to tell stories about their own concepts.

Aurora

Aurora is a concept video created by Adaptive Path for Mozilla Labs that sets out to “define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve inthe future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.” This video succeeds at both dazzling you with new interface concepts and giving you believable scenarios about how people will actually use it. While the detailed interfaces and the well thought out storytelling give it a more professional feel than any of the video prototypes we saw, the production is still low budget and not beyond the skills or tools of most digital designers.

Nokia Morph

While the Aurora concept video focuses more on context than it does on glossy production, many go the route of this Nokia video. They place a large emphasis on technology and product features but are thin on storytelling and context. They also spend a lot of money and effort ensuring the final video (or animation in this case) is of superior quality. In Nokia Morph, we see a super advanced mobile device built with nanotechnology, but the best thing it can do is…. clean itself?

Participatory Sensing

This video was created by the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), a group very much focused on technology, but they do an excellent job exploring the benefits of such technology by using video as a storytelling tool. Admittedly, the opening dialogue and the voiceover throughout give the whole thing a sort of infomercial vibe.

Apple Knowledge Navigator

Knowledge Navigator by Apple is a classic and probably has the highest production quality of all the videos we have seen so far. It’s great to see older examples like this because they make you consider what is the point of these videos… are they discussions points for the here and now? Attempts to predict the future? Marketing gimmicks? Should they be like classic movies that tell universal stories or are they destined to become outdated and irrelevant?

GreenHouse CPH

Green House CPH, another student project at CIID, is an example of how designers can exploit different filmmaking techniques. Because this video has to be done fast, had to tell a story, and had to demonstrate a service with all its’ touch points, the students decided to do it documentary style and they found several benefits for doing it this way. They could be forgiven for having a video that was technically rough around the edges (shaky camera, lots of cuts, etc.) because that’s how documentaries often are. And since since the designers themselves were acting in their own video, it was easy to stand in front of a camera and explain how it works. Finally, by setting it in the future when they service had already been launched, they could demonstrate how the service works in a more believable context. In the end, they presented it as a “mock user-research study” which made sense to their audience of designers.

Pop some popcorn, recline in your favorite recliner and rest your laptop. In five articles I will share with you some of the more interesting user experience videos on the web. They represent the importance of video as a tool for any designer working with new behaviors, emerging technologies and complex systems that unfold over time. From low-res, techfree prototypes to science-fiction-like future scenarios, this collection of videos will survey the various ways that designers are using this linear medium to explore possible functions, experiences, contexts and values afforded by new technology driven products and services. And we begin with: prototyping.

Video Prototypes

Video prototypes are used for the same reasons any prototypes are – testing, evaluating, iterating, communicating, etc. But video is an especially useful tool for designers who have to quickly represent design concepts that often involve complex relationships or require a high level of technology. It’s fast, cheap, easy to share and allows lots of space for faking it.

The Economizer

The Economizer is a three part video scenario created by Cooper, a design consulting firm in the US. This series is a great example of low-fi prototyping with video. In fact, it’s not even video, it’s still frames with a voice over. You have to love the hand drawn interfaces.

KeyLess

At the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, one of the fist workshops the students take is on the subject of video prototyping. Over the course of a week, students had to represent a concept as a low fidelity, low resolution prototype and then represent the same concept as a high fidelity, high resolution prototype in an empathetic scenario. Each student was given the concept for a service called KeyLess which would replace lost keys anywhere in the city in under 30 minutes. You can watch all the videos here.

Sketch-a-move

Sketch-a-move is the concepts for a toy car by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. While the concept for the car is technically feasible, this video prototype allowed the designers to answer the most important question – is it fun? – without having to worry about building a functional prototype. This prototype is a great example of how video opens up new possibilities for smoke-and-mirrors techniques. In this case, one can presume, someone behind the camera is controlling the cars with a remote control.

The RaMo System

The RaMo System is a network of portable devices for elderly homes. This video prototype, also made at CIID, explores the interface of these devices, how they work together, and how they work in the context of elderly homes. It even goes as far to explore how it can be a tool to involve family in the everyday lives of elderly people in the home. For a course about GUI, it was a great decision to use video and capture everything happening around the devices.

Next time: concepting