1. Introduction: The Hidden Middle of Moore's Law
People typically read the Moore's Law chart as a trend in the number of transistors. What's implicit in the trend, however, is that it is the product of a conscious decision in the context of a semiconductor marketplace. The prices of new CPUs has stayed roughly the same over the last 25 years, generally between $500 and $1000 at the time of introduction. Thus, another way that to read the chart is that as transistor density increases, the price of older technology proportionally decreases.
This price drop means that ubicomp, first postulated in the late 80s/early 90s has just become a practical reality: the price of a new CPU in 1990 was $1500 in today's dollars, the equivalent amount of processing power can now be purchased for 50 cents. This means that the CPUs that brought us the Web explosion'ones that have the power to operate a multitasking, networked computer'can be put into just about any device at virtually any price point.
PART ONE: Frameworks
2. Broad Concepts
This chapter will introduce the background issues that underlie some of the broad conceptual frameworks
The relationship between industrial, interaction and service design
The importance of context
* When designing ubiquitous computing devices, suddenly your frame is no longer the chrome around the browser window, but the world. It's an inversion of traditional computing attitudes, moving out into the world.
The design of social devices
* Networking means that devices can communicate with each other, and people can communicate with each other through the devices.
Technology adoption patterns
* Each new class of ubiquitous computing devices is essentially a new tool. People react differently to these tools than new pieces of software, which'even if new new'essentially exist in a familiar box. Tool adoption takes a while and follows a familiar pattern. When designing devices in this field, it's valuable to understand whether you're designing something new or extending something existing.
3. Information is a Design Material
Embedded information processing acts like a material and creates new capabilities, and imposes new constraints.
Behavior as competitive advantage
When a designer can include information processing in a product for very little cost, the calculation becomes not one of engineering complexity, that's relatively cheap, but one of competitive advantage. Including a CPU to produce behaviors becomes a line item in the competitive analysis of making an object, just like the calculation about what to make it out of. What you do with that CPU becomes part of the design of the product and needs to be designed with the same attention to the other parts as any of the materials being used.
Toys leading the way
* Many new toys depend not just on their physical appearance, but on behavior created by information processing, for their competitive advantage.
* Example: Cuddle Chimp
Some qualities of information as a material
* Real-time change
* Responsive behavior
* Can manipulate symbols that have meaning, but not meaning
* Requires power, storage
Embodied interaction
* The difference between a virtual object and a physical one
4. Information as Material Case Study: the Whirlpool centralpark Refrigerator
The history of the screen fridge
* Starting in 1998, one screen fridge introduced every couple of years
* All suffered from the same problem: they stuck what amounted to a tablet PC to the front of a fridge, with little understanding as to how people would use it
* Very little adoption, since the model didn't fit people's life practices
Whirlpool's third try
* The centralpark uses a plugin architecture that allows a variety of different applications to be plugged into it. Each is a self-contained computer, but they're not presented as computers, but as digital picture frames, calendars, etc.
5. Information Shadows
Nearly everything manufactured today exists simultaneously in the physical world and in the world of data.
* A digital representation is the object's information shadow.
* Information shadow can be examined and manipulated without having to touch the physical object.
Coates' "Age of Point-At-Things"
Examples:
* Amazon ASINs
* Mutanen's Thinglink
* YottaMark/CertiLogo
* Sterling's wine bottle
RFIDs and fiducials
* These are the hooks that connect the everyday object to its digital representation
* Once hooked, they can be mashed up
6. Information Shadows Case Study: Disney Clickables Princess Charm Bracelets
Description
* " When a girl touches her band to her friend's and presses a button, her band will glow to confirm that a Fairy Friendship has been made [in the online community Disney has set up for the purpose]."
A short history of smart bracelets
Design of a physical/virtual social network
7. Devices are Service Avatars
Networking brings dematerialization
* The same information can be accessed and manipulated through a variety of devices.
* Value shifts to the information, rather than the device that's communicating it.
* Devices become secondary, they become temporary representations of information-based services.
Devices become projections of services
A number of familiar appliances--cell phones, ATMs--are worthless without the networks they're attached to. They are physical manifestations, avatars, projections into physical space of services, but are not services themselves. You really start to see this in purely information entities: what's a plane ticket? what's money? what's a book? They become subscriptions and agreements, for which a device becomes a nearly disposable channel.
Service design
When designing user experiences for ubiquitous computing, the design of the service becomes as important as the design of the device. The iPod is an avatar of the iTunes Music Store. The Amazon Kindle, as questionably designed as it is, is a physical manifestation of the Amazon Kindle Store.
Objects become subscriptions
Right now most of these services are information or media related, but that's changing.
* Example: City CarShare
8. Service Avatar Case Study: the iPod
Description
The MP3 player in 2001
The iPod as an iTunes avatar
The iPhone
Design process
9. Applianceness
Defining applianceness
* When computation is cheap, we no longer have to make general-purpose computers.
* There is no longer the need to think about a one-to-one computer-user relationship that terms like Human-Computer Interaction imply.
* One human to a multitude of appliances, some of which use information processing.
Applying applianceness
* Focus in functionality
* Analyzing the relationship people have to existing appliances
Sidebar: "Information appliances," the lost generation, and what went wrong
10. Applianceness Case Study: RoomWizard
Description
Design Considerations
Process
11. Applianceness Case Study: Plasma Poster
Description
Research
Design Considerations
Process
12. Granularity
Ubiquitous computing devices can come in all sorts of sizes and the user experience design for them must take this into account.
General purpose computers traditionally have interfaces that are person-scale. They're designed to be used in a wide variety of ways, and what typically makes sense is to make the input device about the size of your hands and the output about the size of your head.
A powers-of-ten scale ubicomp experience design
Example: comparing an ambient environmental display and a handheld tool
Location-Based Services
* When the whole world is your palette
13. Granularity Case Study: Nokia Sensor
Background
Description
Design
Process
14. Interaction Metaphors
Why metaphors?
Sidebar: Magic Cap, when metaphors are taken too literally
Calm computing
* Weiser's original vision
* Computers disappear into the fabric of life
* The problem is that although people may want infrastructure technology invisible, they don't want their tools invisible
Home Automation
* Typically portrays the house as a domestic factory
* Misses the point of home life
Magic
* Using the concept of enchanted objects to generate ideas about interaction and as a way to create user experiences that are easier to explain.
* We can use natural associations between objects that exhibit behaviors and culturally traditional enchanted objects to design ubiquitous computing interactions.
Examples
* Ambient Orb
* Wiimote, phones that have accelerometers in them.
* Wearables often take the form of amulets.
15. Magic Case Study: Nabaztag
Background
Description
Design
Process
PART TWO: Techniques
This section talks about how although ubicomp UX design shares many values with other design practices (it's ideally sensitive to users' and companies' needs, it is iterative and focused on producing good products, etc.), there are design techniques that work particularly well with ubicomp UX design, or are particularly valuable.
16. Design from Field Observation
Introduction
One of the key ways to know what should be emphasized in the design of a technology, and whether that emphasis is accurately communicated in a sketch or prototype is through observing users in their familiar environment. More than Web design or application design, because the products of ubicomp UX are often so embedded in the environment, that's where research about them has to happen.
"Design Ethnography"
* It's not ethnography
Observation techniques
* In-situ observation
* Using Flickr ("Instant visual ethnography")
* Diary studies
* Focus groups
Design Probes
* Technology probes
* Culture probes (critical design)
Example: Learning from DIY culture
* Visible and invisible technology
* Learning from vernacular technology modification
* Casemods, the hot rods of the digital world
* Casemods are not prototypes
Cross-disciplinary precedents
* Art
* Industrial design
* Appliance design
* Medicine
17. Rapid Iteration
Intro to rapid iteration
* Comparison to waterfall
* Discussion of agile methods
* Advantages in terms of incorporation of new user insights and technologies
Sketching in Hardware
Sketching in hardware is the application of agile software development principles to the design of ubiquitous computing user experience design and development.
* Fast, flexible, disposable, historical: why sketching is important
* Sketching on paper vs. sketching in hardware
* Buxton's sketching versus prototyping
* Sketching as agile software development brought to design
Hardware Hacking
* Tracing paper for electronics
* Hacking strategy
* The Wiimote as example platform
* Other toolkits
* Design hardware hackability into final devices (example: Roomba, Linksys routers) for others to extend functionality.
Video Prototyping
* "As if by magic": abstracting technology to focus on experience
* Techniques for prototyping
* Learning from video prototyping
Sidebar: Interaction Vocabularies
* Developing vocabularies is important to understanding and codifying interaction possibilities
* The vocabulary may not be ideal, or cover all situations, but a reasonable vocabulary, especially a standard vocabulary that exists elsewhere, can greatly increase comprehension
* Multi-touch gestures
* RFID interaction methods
* Tradeoff between specialized knowledge and functional flexibility. Musical instruments on one end, ATM on the other.
18. Augmentation of Existing Objects
Intro
Since the concepts are so new, one particularly successful way to create new Ubicomp UX is to take an existing object and augment its functionality through technology.
How much to augment
* At what point does new functionality overwhelm old?
* Anti-Example: feature-bloated digital dictionaries
The right kind of augmentation
If you add something from left field, it's going to be much harder to make it work
* Choose the right affordances to add based on observation
* Anti-example: all of the products for separated lovers (ComSlippers, Lovers' Cups, Hug Shirt, etc.)
* Example: Sparkle Labs' teledildonics, OhMiBod
* Disclosure of internal functionality (it's not magic, even if it's using that as a metaphor)
Functional versus decorative augmentation
* Appliances versus environments
* Ambient display
Physical->Web Mashups
* Working with the Web as an existing object and creating avatars for existing information sources.
Smart Furniture
* Anti-Example: The Smart Table, an often reinvented failure
Wearables
* Example: Adidas_1 shoe
19. Future scenarios
10X
* What if you had 10 times as many of these?
* What if they were 10 times cheaper?
Tracking demographic shifts
Mapping behaviors between domains
Sidebar: Inspiration Cards and Innovation Games
* Appliance Studio Cards
* IDEO Cards
* Batya Friedman's cards
Sidebar: Self-disclosing products for future repurposing and disassembly
20. Simulation
Wizard-of-Oz techniques
Looks-like/Works-like prototypes
21. Common design challenges
Configuration
* Out of the box state needs to be changed, but it's hard to do that using the internal capabilities of the device. Adding hardware just to create an initial configuration experience is wasteful.
* Treat the Web as your screen: everything should have a web server, if it has the power
* Example: Apple/Nike pedometer
Device Interconnection
* Device-to-device communication is person-to-person communication when the devices are the medium, so the interfaces between devices are as important as
* Use standard communication protocols
* Example: Wiimote
Experience consistency between devices
* How do you show the same interface or information on a variety of devices?
* Operational consistency
* Visual consistency
* Conceptual consistency
* Match functionality to specific device use context and capabilities
Introducing novel interactions or functionality
* For the most part, your product can only introduce one new thing at a time: it can either have a new way to interact with existing content or new content to interact with
* Remove non-critical functionality, save the flash features for the second version or a firmware update, when people have understood the basic feature
* If you must include it, stay focused, keep it simple. De-emphasize noncritical functionality in the interface.
* Example: audio recording capabilities in Pentax Optio Cameras. Yes, you can use them as audio recorders, but they hide the functionality so that you trip on it when you use the camera as a camera. It's 99% camera, 1% audio recorder.
Tom Igoe's "Physical Computing Greatest Hits (and misses)"
* A list of projects that have been done repeatedly, as an example and warning
22. Explaining disruptive technologies
There's a lot of potential for disruptive technologies in Ubiquitous computing, and explaining the potential disruptions to relevant stakeholders and potential customers is a challenge.
Is a new technology genuinely disruptive?
* Don't believe the hype, especially your own.
Designing for disruption
* Proceed from deep analysis
* Move slowly: like with novel interactions, fundamental technological shifts should shift either the form or the content, but not both
* Example: the iPod took 3 generations to be successful, initially focusing on being an MP3 player, an already-established genre
* Anti-example: Sony MagicLink
Explaining disruption to stakeholders
* Timing, choice of language, strategic approach
* If services-focused company, speak about building infrastructures and connecting them with devices
* Examples: Microsoft is becoming a hardware company, Nokia, a services company
Explaining disruption to customers
* Example: TiVo
23. Conclusion: From calm computing to everyware
* Ubiquitous computing is here
* As user experience designers we have a responsibility to think about how to design for it explicitly, rather than trying to use methods from Web design or industrial design.
* In the last 20 years, the understanding of what ubiquitous computing means has likewise grown significantly, and has moved from the idea of office-based productivity that disappears into the background to encompass just about everything except the office.
