Earlier this year we discussed Volkswagen’s superbowl ad and some of our observations around emotions and design. Now, the innovative automobile company does it again, this time with a mobile application. (Note, you cannot access the application through iTunes in all regions).

The application is quite simple in design – offering a brief description of a vehicle and details around some of Volkswagen’s innovative technology. As their video describes though, it is difficult to simply describe the function so the remainder of the application allow customers to test drive the functionality. By selecting a function, one may place their phone over the printed ad and steer their avatar – in this case a Volkswagen vehicle. Depending on the feature selected – lane assist, adaptive lights, and adaptive cruise control, the car reacts differently when the mobile device is placed over the street in the printed ad. Watch the lights follow the curve of the road, the vehicle vibrate when touching the edge of the lane, and more.

While augmented reality isn’t new to the cell phone, with applications allowing you to type while still seeing what is in front of you, superimpose social network information over people’s heads, and more, this is one of my first experiences with it as a strictly marketing technique. In reality though – this goes beyond marketing. The Volkswagen ad is a simple prototype. As interaction designers we spend a lot of time talking about sketching, prototypes, and development. Often that is defined as a tangible representation of a model. In this case though, holding a phone is nothing like driving a car. Still, this simple prototype, or tool, demonstrates a complex interaction, can inspire conversation, and excite people to invest in the product, and ultimately purchase a vehicle. Aren’t these the same goals we aspire to when developing websites and software? What tools can be used to create prototypes outside of the screen to communicate what a technology might be like, without building the entire system, or by building a different one entirely?

_{Images from VW Innovations}

Portable computing, including tablet PCs,  has been the hot topic since Apple’s unveiling of the iPad in January. While the iPad has gained a lot of press and generated conversation about its intended audience and potential use, other tablet devices have been overlooked. Microsoft’s Courier is one such device. Courier—the soon-to-be production version of the Codex, a rumored tablet device widely discussed in 2009—provides a tablet platform for the student, techie, and slide-show-loving grandparent alike.

Apple's iPad

So why should this matter when the iPad has made it clear they intend to be the everyman’s casual Internet device? In reading the commentary on the device there is much being said about who the device is not for. It is not for the techie. It is barely for the student. The device’s lacks the processing power or input devices for programming or graphics editing. No cameras or stylus limits the device’s use as a social and note-taking tool. The iPad is intended for the non-techie to surf the internet, read eBooks, and share basic media with friends and family.

This is where Courier steps in. Rumored to have built in camera(s) and stylus input, the device features two seven inch touchscreen monitors, making it the techie and student’s dream. Connected through a WiFi or possibly 3G network, the device can be used to coordinate chats multiple devices. The dual screen offers opportunities to have a personal and shared workspace during a chat, during which documents can be transferred from one screen to another for collaborative work. With its stylus, it’s possible to take notes with simple handwriting recognition and to track which user is performing what action on a screen.

The Courier is not the cure all, though. In their demo video, Microsoft leans too heavily on physical metaphors. Needing to flip over a picture to view the notes is a cumbersome and unnecessarily literal translation from the physical world. Tack on excessive animations and the device becomes more of a showpiece than a utility. This is, of course, a demo  to show the device’s potential—but, like Apple with the iPad, I think Microsoft is selling itself short on the device’s potential.

Imagine having a Courier or iPad next to the door in every room in your home. Connect it through the WiFi to the HVAC, lighting, and entertainment systems and you have an integrated smart home. Want to change the lighting or turn the heat on? Dont get up. Forgot to preheat the oven? Set the temperature from your living room without having to pause the YouTube video you’re watching.

As mobile devices become more powerful, a shift is occurring as manufacturers look at how they can apply this mobile technology in our everyday home-life. The iPad and Courier are just two devices that show the possibilities of a computer not limited to the desk or lap—a mobile device not constrained by our mental models of phones, PDAs, or portable devices.

Header image via gizmodo

I’m probably not the only one who likes the feedback from tangible shapes over digital ones, they give me a lot of valuable feedback. Today, I’d like to introduce two concepts that represent useful values with their own shapes.

Pie Chart Coins

I don’t like to own credit cards. The thickness of a wallet and the number of bills and coins in it can tell me how much I own, while the thickness of a credit card won’t. I’m a compulsive shopper and I know what will happen if I have a credit card with me… So it’s really important for me to be able to know my current financial status.

I happened to take a trip to Singapore the other day. As is often the case with me when going to a country I’ve never visited, it takes some time to get used to the coins used there. But I have a possible solution: the pie chart.

“We all know about the pie chart. The circle represents the whole, and the size of wedge represents a percentage of that whole. Together, those represented values, add up to 100 percent. Use this only if you’re comparing a few value..” – FlowingData

In my concept, the percentage of the value of the coin is represented as a pie-chart shape (e.g. 25% of 1 dollar is 25 cents). There are at least two great benefits I can think of. One is for travelers and other people who are not accustomed to the currency. They can easily get used to the value of them. The second is for kids. They can learn both percentage and currency at the same time.

Hungry USB Memory Stick

I like to think of funny USB memory sticks and have designed many. This is one of them: a USB memory stick that looks hungry when there’s no data in it. When the memory is full, it also looks full with the inflated belly. Thinking of the proximity of the usb ports, the size of the figure must be reconsidered, but I think it’s able to tell the necessary value with its shape in a funny way.

If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change I believe this must apply two ways. While it’s true that design can influence users and engender cultural change, this is always a product of our more tangible work: changing the behaviour of technology. As a user-centred designer of technology my goal is simple: to make its behaviour humane. But how should I approach this?

Humanity implies emotion and, beneath that, personality. These areas lie beyond the frontiers of classical HCI and usability. Fortunately, as often happens, we view the distant summit and see others have already planted the flag. Toymakers, for instance, have explored the art of bestowing personality on products for years. The results are fairly crude, but I defy anyone to watch the torture of a Pleo and successfully suppress a twinge of guilt. Even in its moments of crisis, Pleo has a distinct personality; that is to say, it conveys emotional information

Channels for personality

Perhaps the most obvious conduit for emotional content is appearance.

From BMW's grill to Pixar's Wall-E

The designs above show acts of visual anthropomorphism, where gesture and expression alone convey personality. They create empathy through closure, a projection of the self as explored in Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics. Pareidolia, the brain’s propensity to recognise faces everywhere, is a powerful trick. Even an oval, two dots and a line create an unmistakable expression; with detail we can add further emotional nuance.

Closure: excerpt from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

We can also convey personality through message. In the words of Russell Davies, the rise of devices with personality will lead to a surge in “bubbly writing and objects talking to you in the first person”. Here, an Innocent smoothie prudishly asks us to avert our gaze from its most vulnerable area.

Innocent drinks carton with text "Stop looking at my bottom."

But anthropomorphism needn’t be visual. Consider how R2D2 conveys personality through sound alone – his shrieks and bleeps mapping to human expressions of emotion (See Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff at dConstruct 2009 [mp3, 43 minutes]). Similarly, IM programs happily announce incoming messages with a rising fanfare and send replies with a descending farewell.

These can be effective ways to communicate personality, but I’ve recently been reflecting about the fuzzier area of expressing personality through behaviour.

According to psychologist Kurt Lewin behaviour is product of the person in question and his environment (check out Lewin’s equation). Our behaviour changes with context. This suggests that we can only form an opinion about someone’s personality through exposure to various scenarios; a single interaction isn’t enough. However once we’ve formed this mental model, we believe it so thoroughly that we become blinded by it, believing that someone’s personality causes their every action – the fundamental attribution error.

Behavioural variance – acting differently according to our environment – is a celebrated part of being human. Anyone who lacks it is boring. Myself, I act quite differently as a Cardiff City fan than as a grandson, since the contexts are very different. At a party you’re expected to drink beer and flirt with girls, not quietly read a library book, if you expect to be invited back.

Dreary technology

This is why I look at modern technology with mixed feelings. As a tool, it’s unsurpassed. But when we engage with it on any human level, it doesn’t respond in kind. Technology has no behavioural variance and very little personality.

Yes, predictability is a key tenet of usability. High-risk systems must respond to input in forseeable ways: an air traffic control system, for instance, needs to be entirely unwavering. But as we’re learning to appreciate the power of play and emotion in our design activities, is there scope for non-critical technology to display behavioural personality?

Mobile devices, for instance, are increasingly a medium of sensory input as well as informational output. We’ll soon carry devices capable of reading our fingerprints, calculating our position and learning our closest social ties by analysing our SMS and email habits. Adding further richness, recent declarative technology encourages users to publish information that designers can use to build emotional responses:

Google map showing current location as Alton Towers theme park

Facebook status showing a user's engagement

So let’s imagine a Twitter client that asks if you really want to send that drunken tweet (maybe you should have read that library book after all). A mobile that loves going on rollercoasters. An MP3 player that longs to play (and listen to?) a new album for once.

Getting personality wrong

Looking, sounding or acting like a human is desirable only if the human is one we like. Some of our early forays have been spectacular failures. For an archetypal example of botched anthropomorphism, look no further than our most hated paperclip.

Designed to save labour and improve UI learnability, Clippy instead came across as smug and invasive. Not only did his brash tone rub many up the wrong way, but he was irritatingly clingy, appearing on simple tasks where users didn’t need or appreciate help.

The despotic HAL illustrates the other extreme of dislikable machine personality. Clarke and Kubrick created a terrifying villain for 2001 simply by highlighting the unflinching rationality of computation. HAL’s cold-bloodedness is the opposite of humanity. Our heroes are irrational, given to senseless acts in the name of compassion. We can all empathise: who hasn’t done something stupid when in the grip of emotion?

Appealing machine personality lies somewhere between the shores of impassivity and fake friendliness. Social psychology research tells us that we like people who share a similar personality to our own, and people who like us (reciprocal liking). Servile flattery isn’t the answer, of course, but through deep user understanding and reliance on our trusty companions trial, error and feedback perhaps designers will uncover a sweet spot.

We may speculate a few guidelines for conveying personality through behaviour (any additions would be welcomed):

• Personality should be easily overwritten. If you need to make an emergency call, your handset must revert to functionality above all else.
• Personality should be secondary to function. Clippy was disproportionate: his personality overruled his potential usefulness. Not only does this reduce usability, but we risk giving users false expectations of a system’s capabilities.
• Personality should be appropriate to the medium. It may be that desktop computers aren’t an ideal platform for behavioural personality; we still regard them largely as tools of business or home organisation. Mobile phones operate in our intimate space and it’s well known that people form emotional connections with their handsets. Could the mobile arena provide sensible starting points for exploration?

This is largely a thought experiment for now, and it’s clear that behavioural anthropomorphism would raise practical questions. How should users tell devices to stop their shenanigans and get on with the task at hand? Do I want my computer, and whatever systems it’s connected to, to know that I spent the night at my girlfriend’s flat? Would a machine object if I do something it doesn’t approve of?

Any attempt to give technology personality will be divisive. Succeed and we make the technological world a slightly more humane place. Fail, and we create an army of Clippies.

Related resources

• Why is that thing beeping? A sound design primer
• Russell Davies “Materialising and dematerialising a web of data” (mp3, 44 minutes)

Special thanks: Rebecca Cottrell
Photo credits: Duncan, estoril

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.

Our entire lives we’re busy protecting everything around us, ranging from our children’s health to the car we drive. It’s not always made easy for us to do this. So, being a product designer, I’ve come up with some possible solutions that could make our protecting lives easier.

Shacklie

Among all the belongings I’ve ever had, the item I’ve lost most must be the umbrella (except for love). So I decided to start protecting it. I thought the half circle of the handle could extend more to make a complete circle, which works as a handcuff like lock…

Smoke Detecting Maternity Badge

In Japan, there is a “maternity mark” used for asking for courtesy towards pregnant women in public places. It’s widely used in badges, cell-phone straps, posters, signs, etc., but unfortunately there are still some people who are ignorant about it. I’ve even seen a few men who started smoking even when there was a pregnant woman around.

This white badge actually does exist, but it’s for the people around her to know that the lady with it is pregnant. So how about using it also for herself? It detects smoke and tells you glowing blue with a sign “Don’t smoke!” and the annoyed faces. It would be good for the expectant mother so that she can quickly notice smoke and get out of there.

Crooked closure

Everybody must have once opened a snack bag in such a way that it won’t close via the bag closure anymore. Yeah, you can eat up the snack and there’s nothing to worry about. But when you want to leave some, what do you do with it?

So how about a crooked closure so that you can seal it?

Are there ways to have better and more interesting interaction with your lights? That’s what I tried to investigate when I came up with two new inventions, the Touch Switch and Desktop Lamp. Let me know what you think.

Touch Switch

Nobody likes switching on and off all the wrong lights in order to find the right switch. Could a light switch that looks like a trackpad of a laptop solve this? Where you just drag your finger towards the light you want to turn on/off. I thought so…

And could all the relative positions of the lights appear on a screen like this?

Desktop Lamp

One of the biggest annoyances with lamps it that you can’t always control where the light falls. You always have to make a choice between a focused or general light on your desk. But what if you could constantly change this? If a very light material could be used for the light, a desktop lamp like this might be possible.

The lit area can be controlled with the usual “pinch” gesture.

To turn up/down the light, draw a circle clockwise/counter-clockwise.

I like merging completely different things into one, stealing a fun aspect of one item and adding it to another. Or even better, I love finding a solution to a problem from something that seems totally different from it. Thinking seriously of how to solve a problem (sometimes) leads me to the most fun moment of concepting. That’s why I can’t stop creating weird things, no matter what others say.

iAcqua

Anyway, this is a fountain + iPhone speaker stand + projector kind of fusion. Place your iPhone in the doc and use it as a faucet to run photos, songs and music as water. You can have fun with them on this transparent touch screen, but to have more fun, tilt the stand to spill the images on the floor (or just turn up the faucet). The projected images on the floor look as if they were spilled from the dish.

When you play music, you can see the visualizer working. Spill the visualizer on the floor and you see “full-screen” projected visualizer!

PMS Toaster

Another crazy combination is this toaster. I thought there should be a toaster like this: no matter how long/short it takes to toast a slice of bread, I don’t care… just toast it until it becomes my favorite color.

You just choose your favorite color first before toasting. Then it automatically stops toasting when the bread becomes the specified color.

One of the biggest annoyances in our technology driven world must be the remote control. It always has to many buttons and feels like it comes from the stone age. We don’t know why the remote hasn’t been challenged until now, but we did find some challengers for the future.

One of them is the Apple Remote, designed by Jason Roebuck. His idea was to create a device that is pleasurable to look at, even when it’s not used. Every member of the family has his or her own apple, which contains personal settings… like favorite shows, volume, etc. When a family member picks his Apple from the container the TV is automatically set up accordingly (I wonder what happens if several apples are taken). The apple has sensors which detect movement, by doing this you can control the TV.

I have to admit that the concept still has a lot of flaws and open ends, but that’s just one part. On the other side the concept of your own remote control is really interesting. I can imagine that it also holds the key to my recorded movies. I personally find the choice for an apple really interesting. Because it then becomes an art object which I don’t have to hide anymore.

The other remote control was designed as a graduation project for Bang & Olufsen, by Dutch designer Joris van Gelder. The idea was to create a remote control that could be used in the kitchen, without having to actually touch the device. This resulted in a beautiful concept that is beter viewed then explained:

What makes this concept remote so interesting is the elegance. You get the feeling that it is thinking for you by moving alongside your hand movements. It almost seems like you are making hand gestures in thin air, without being aware of the device.

Hopefully these, or other concepts, will become reality in the near future. It would be interesting when the current remote will finally be challenged.

It has been around since 2005, but is still interesting: the Nissan Pivo Concept Car. This weird looking vehicle owns some nifty technologies, changing the way we interact with the car. One of them is the ability to turn the cabin around in the direction you are driving, making parking a pleasure. And yes, the car can drive sideways. To make this driving experience work they integrated an ‘Around View Monitor’ which constantly generates a 360-degree view of the car’s surroundings on the dashboard.

But what makes it really interesting for Johnny is the way you interact with your navigation system, audio player and other technology. At Nissan they came up with the “Magic 4″ concept, which is a new type of interface. Your hardware isn’t physically controlable anymore, but integrated in the car. Through a central display screen they can be controlled, but this display doens’t have a touchscreen or physical buttons… You simply have to point your finger at the IR system, while keeping your hands on the steering wheel. Pointing one finger will activate the first feature, while pointing three fingers will activate… the third (how surprising). And when you want to make the music louder, you simply motion your finger upwards. The display on the first Pivo was integrated directly below your windscreen, into the dashboard. While on the Pivo 2 it is a special screen again.

The dashboards of the Pivo 2 and Pivo: