I am now reading Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning. I shall see what I can glean from it. This post will get updated with bits and pieces of things I find of value in the book.
One of the first things that struck me as useful and serendipitously timely was his general tips for presenting deliverables. However, these tips are also just useful reminders when involved in any kind of meeting. For example, page 11: “For new clients, assume the first meeting won’t go well.” Essentially, the first meeting should be just slightly trivial in an effort to test the waters with new clients and get a feel for how they think and operate. Let them criticize and analyze something small and/or near trivial to get a read on them. As time has taught me, this is sound advice.
I have started in on the writing personas section of the book and this was one of the reasons I bought it in the first place. I have never created personas. It is something I am interested in, but I also approach them with some trepidation, as I have seen the results from some rather useless persona exercises in the past.
I will write more after I’ve read more.
Arduino + Breadboard + Wiring + USB Cable + Box = Sweet
I have finished all of the wiring I can without the Flex sensors. The sensors have been shipped, so I am waiting for them to arrive. I have everything else all set up. The image here shows the Arduino and breadboard in the open container. The plastic container has a lid and is seal-able. I have that part finished too and I like the overall “punk rock” sensibility the thing has. I can’t wait to get the sensors so I can finish this project up.
I have the feeling that a lot of testing and debugging await me once I set up the sensors and get the software running. Stay tuned and stand by.
I am currently reading Architecture and Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard. It is a thrilling read. This is a look beyond the sizzle of the “wired home” to thinking about the networked, meshed urban environment. The complexity and problems resulting from entire environments wired and “aware” are monumental and mind-numbing. Lots of food for thought and I am only about halfway through.
One of the other memes of the pamphlet is the idea of Ambient Informatics - something that I am keen to learn more about. I looked at an, as yet, unreleased book on the topic but $257 is way out of range for what I am willing to pay to learn more. I may be able to track it down later at one of the local universities but I doubt that I will. I have no shortage of unread books readily at hand, the thought of taking time and energy to actively pursue more reading material at this time is unappealing.
Anyway, Adam Greenfield states that there will require a move “towards transactional structures - each party to the interaction provides the other something of value. Give the environment something it can use, and you get something of equal or greater value in return.” This is essentially the core of ambient informatics. The trick is in creating equal or greater value for both parties involved in the interaction.
Tags: books, informatics, interaction
For one of the projects I am working on I needed at least one stuffed animal… with arms.
One of the guiding design principles for the projects is to keep it cheap. That is, keep costs down as much as possible: to design things using inexpensive materials and inexpensive alternative solutions. To this end, I have been begging and borrowing things from people. A co-worker gave me a bunch of dried up markers I will use to make some light pens. I bought a microcontroller casing from Dollarama for, well, a dollar (it is a clear plastic Tupperware container). Friends and family have lent me tools and given me materials. Friends and co-workers have lent me their programming expertise and ideas. These things are out there for the asking and for the finding.
Back to monkeys. So last night I bought a couple of stuffed animals from the Salvation Army. 99 cents each + tax. A total bargain. I then went home where I proceeded to chop one up and frankenstein it back together. Only to find out that the long sensors I was worried about are, in fact, the wrong kind of sensor for the project. I had purchased force sensors when what I really needed were flex sensors. Sigh. The correct parts have been ordered and I now have a legless monkey with really long arms. I cut the legs off, cut the hands off, and then sewed the legs on to the arms to make the arms extra long to accommodate the length of the force sensors… the wrong sensors. Like I said, sigh.
Know anyone who needs a freakish stuffed toy?
Just read a very interesting article about the future of the web and the desktop and how they will be merged together to create the Webtop (see tinyurl.com/5msdvj). I think what most people mean when they say one of the new browsers will end up being the new OS, what they really mean is that the browser will replace the existing desktop. This is true, that is exactly what will happen, the desktop metaphor will fade away. The OS is not going anywhere, at least not any time in the near-future (5-10 years). However, web 3.0 and the webtop are well on their way to arriving on your devices soon. That’s right, the key to the future is understanding that your data will live in the cloud and will be accessible and workable across your devices. Think starting work on a file on your mobile device on your way to work, then doing work on the same file from your office workstation, then working on the file some more on your way home on your mobile, and then finally working on it some more on your personal laptop at home. That is the future. Well, that an a whole lot more I don’t have time right now to get in to. But the OS is not going away any time soon but you can say good bye to the desktop within the next 5 years.
I just finished reading Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy. I enjoyed it. It covers mostly physical shopping spaces and I found it all very interesting, although I am more concerned about Internet commerce. So, I was reading the book at two levels: at one level I enjoyed learning about how the physical shopping environment affects shopping behavior; at another level, I kept trying to think of online analogies, comparisons, and differences between the physical shopping experience and the web experience. The later is of particular importance for a couple of reasons. One, as an interaction designer I am trying to help both user and client get more out of any online transaction. The client wants to sell more and the buyer wants an easy, enjoyable time spent shopping and buying. Two, I deal with clients who are far more versed in physical shopping environments than they are in virtual ones. These clients often believe that best practices in the physical environment translate directly to the online environment. These direct translations are often incorrect and inappropriate. Understanding these clients should enable me to guide them to comprehend online design decisions.
Lastly, of all the things I read in the book, the one that hit me as particularly interesting and insightful came on page 76:
People slow down when they see a reflective surface. And they speed up when they see banks.
So, I have an open question: on a website, what are mirrors and what are banks? What sorts of things get people to slow down and look around? What things are the banks? On a website, what makes people speed up, put the blinders on, and keep moving (in what would seem to be a detrimental fashion)? Note that there can be good reasons for building both mirrors and banks into a site. Building metaphorical banks might be a good way to help people get from A to B without dalliance; also, banks may discourage certain behaviours (i.e., slanty design). Mirrors (metaphorically) on a site would try to purposefully slow a user down, mostly in an effort to get them to notice something important. Anyway, food for thought.
Work on the first true physical computing project has begun and it was the first time I have worked with a breadboard. It is a learning experience to be sure. I am hoping that my project works as planned. I don’t want to say too much about it until I have it up and running. It is quite the learning experience, learning electronic schematics, microcontrollers, programming, and working with tiny electronics. There is so much to learn, it sort of feels like I am taking a self-directed college course on the topic.
Last night I fired up a little sketch that allowed me to talk with the microcontroller. I typed in one character and then the Arduino would send back the next character in the sequence. It was interesting, I believe it was using the ASCII code set to determine the next value to return in a sequence. For example, after I entered the character “z” the Arduino sent back the “(” character.
Alright, alright! I got the Arduino board hooked up and loaded a simple sketch that makes an LED on the board blink on and off. That means that I got the Arduino software kit downloaded and installed, set up the USB drivers on the Arduino, and uploaded a sketch. A blinking light… who knew I would get so excited over a blinking light. A flashing LED: the symbol of a project launch. Now, onward to more interesting things. This is so cool!
Yup. I finished the blog design. I am rather proud of it. I really like the header image. The logo looks good and I like how the Arduino schematic worked out. I took the schematic, cut it up, set each section colour to grey or blue, and then dropped the layer transparency for each section down to 5%.
I suppose the last thing to do now, design-wise, is to create templates and stylings for the rest of the site outside the blog. But that can wait, I want to start work with the Arduino board now. Enough muckin’ about.
