Continuing on from yesterdays post:
Orange Bus UX team at dConstruct 2011 - Part 1 >
Oh God, it’s Full of Stars - Frank Chimero
Frank Chimero addressed the ever growing issue of content curation and the data we’re putting out there. In the real world our CD collections and books are tangible objects we can sort and arrange, we remember where we left them (most of the time), we must go to them in order to find them and we feel we have ownership of the object. In contrast, digitally we have invisible items which are easy to forget, items become sear
chable so they come to us rather than us go to them, we often pay for access (e.g. Spotify) and don’t feel any sense of ownership.
Digital content is vast. Our tweets, tags, downloads, bookmarks, Instagram photos, Facebook likes etc are all adding to the content out there. This content is multiplying with retweets, sharing and the ease of creating digital copies into an unknown vastness like the million of stars out there.
Frank explains that curation is not just the finding and collecting of items but the arrangement of them - getting something out of all that information to create meaning. Normally our digital products be ordered chronologically, but if we look beyond the meta-data the stars can start to align to constellations, to map a particular thought or expression within time and space.
What to take from this:
- Provide meaning when collating data
- Users expect digital data to come to them, not have to go to it
- Relevant content is increasingly important - suggesting appropriate content and collections
Web: frankchimero.com Twitter: @fchimero
Storytelling, Play and Code - Dan Hon
Dan Hon starts with some great examples of storytelling and play through unconventional use.
However, Dan points out some platforms lend themselves well to stories and play, others do not. Heello is a platform for pretending. When it first launched, many fake accounts were created for celebrities where the audience could play and tell stories. Quora is not a service for pretending, it is for facts, answers which are valuable, where the community does not react well to time wasters.
What to take from this:
- Know when to encourage play and storytelling - its not for every product.
- Think about how we set expectation to the audience.
Web: danhon.com Twitter: @hondanhon
Slides:
The Transformers - Kars Alfrink
Kars, from Hubbub, specialises in physical, social games for public space which he believes can break down boundaries in the social groups we create for ourselves. Kars explains that he believes games provide a perfect platform to test out new ideas and see ‘what sticks’.
Kars references the recent riots in the UK. Civil disorder is nothing new, but what made the the riots in the UK a bad thing, versus the riots in Egypt which were perceived as a good thing? Kars answers - rules are what differentiate the two. In the UK we perceived the riots as breaking the rules, ie ‘do not loot in your own neighbourhood’.The use of games models in design are not new, Kars refers to Gamification, where challenges and rewards are used to encourage use. Kars believes this focuses too much on rewards and should also consider conveying the rules.What to take from this:
Kars outlines some key rules games which can change our social awareness:
- Need to be part of everyday life, fit into daily routine.
- Rules as memes like bookcrossing.com (a physically viral game where books are passed round the world and their progress tracked on a website).
- Self governing – No gamesmaster, with simple rules everyone understands.
- Need to be easy to digest, shareable and discoverable.
Web: leapfrog.nl Twitter: @kaeru
Pocket Scale - Matthew Sheret
Another favourite speaker of the day, Matthew Sheret from Last.fm covering personalisation and providing intimate, meaningful objects that humanise networks making time travel more fun.
Matthew starts with the history of the pocket watch, where time became portable and accessible to the masses which made them the first real network as they connected people together through the ability to sync time, plan and communicate with each other more efficiently.To Matthew, the items in his pocket are very valuable to him and he often finds out a great deal about a person by the items they choose to carry with them everyday. The Items in our pockets are very intimate and demonstrate connections to our networks. By designing to connect to our networks we can really personalise an experience for someone. For example connecting your Last.fm account with your Oyster card can offer a magnitude of personalisation from song choices to suit the journey, or connecting songs to places - it has great potential. A great example Matthew used was Chromaroma which uses Oyster card data as a gamescoring mechanic, plotting your daily journeys on a map to provide a new level of value for your journey - it now earns you points and turns something mundane into something new that you get value from.RFID tags are the chips in an Oyster card which identify who you are, number of tube journeys, where you got on, where you get off, how much money you have left - a wealth of information. Matthew is very excited for the possibilities of using this data with RFID tags and combining networks to create personalised experience.At the end of his talk, Matthew reflects of what is being lost from the humble pocket watch - personalisation and memory. iPhones are replaceable every 6 months, we no longer have physical devices we can pass on, personalise and share. Matthew believes the devices which will matter most to use will be the ones we can make personal to use.What to take from this:
- Usability testing - ask people to empty their pockets or bags - you can find out a lot about them.
- Harness the networks and data out there to provide meaningful content and reflect useful data back to people.
- RFID and similar technologies are going to be a huge gift for interaction to provide pocket experiences.
Web: matthewsheret.com Twitter: @mattsheret
Reality is Plenty - Kevin Slavin
Kevin ended the conference on a high and challenged augmented reality, which was hyped to have taken over our lives by now. Kevin talks us through the pitfalls of augmented reality today, that we face a world of lost GPS signals, batteries dying, and a multitude of devices and apps. Kevin aimed to interrogate augmented reality today, with the aim of getting us to ask ourselves where can we go instead? and why augmented reality?
Augmented reality aims to add to the world around us adding information, context and reality to supplement what we can see. However, Kevin argues that the focus on what makes something ‘real’ or adds value is sometimes misdirecte. For example, AR baseball cards where a 3D player pops up on the front of the card, does not make the player real. It’s the information on the back of the card, the stats, story and history which provide the context the user can relate too.Kevin explains, Jim Henson understood that it wasn’t the realism that made things real, but the movement, character and behaviour which made the Muppets real. Another great example from Kevin was the Tamagotchi which took the world by storm with its incredibly lo-fi graphics, the complete opposite to the industry at the time which was racing to achieve realism. The Tamagotchi was a success, certainly not for looking real but by becoming real through behaving real.Working on a mobile game called Crossroads where a character, Papa Bones would display on a map in relation to your location and move randomly around the city. Kevin explains he found game players physically ran away from the virtual character and confessed to being surprised of his reaction himself as the character swept through the office and vibrated all the phones off the table. There is power in the invisible.What to take from this:
- Ask what will really add value.
- How can we humanise and create an immersing experience.
- Ask what can add to the world around us not just what we can already see.
Web: areacodeinc.com Twitter: @slavin_fpo
