Andrew Shoben of Greyworld

It doesn’t take much for humans to creatve a narrative. Andrew shows off his work called Trace, at Hampton Court. The point was for people to go in and lose themselves, not to find the centre. Inside there are fragments of sound designed to add to the feeling.

The next project he showed is one they’ve just finished called ‘Words‘. Andrew likes his work to be known as public art, not sound art or any other name you put on it. The BBC came to his company asking for a project and Words was the result. It was designed to see how much a word weighs, e.g. Does the word’s length add to its weight? People were given a box at the installation. As they walk through the box begins to glow, as you walk around the space you realise there are lots of words. You realise in the space you can hear other peoples words (through headphones), words that they’ve left hanging in space. New meanings emerge between your own words and someone elses, they create a third meaning. This project was inspired by the lyrics of David Bowie.

Q. How do you come up with ideas?

They usually come up with them in the space where it will be displayed. The BBC are quite adventurous, but often push the boundaries into technologies that are still developing and may not be able to support the original artistic vision. This project was designed to be rock solid in current technology. It works on computer tracking through visual sensors. Technically it’s not clever, but it’s fulfilling the artistic vision fully. One guy who experienced it said it’s like walking through someone elses dream.

Eva Rucki of Troika

She focusses on the boundaries of technology and design.

One project took a portable projector that was used to display mobile phone text messages on street signs and random objects. Warner Bros. wanted to use it for a concert for the band The Streets. During the concert people didn’t understand what was going on because there were multiple projections. The projectors were trained on any surface, even members of the crowd. They found thst if you restrict people to a format, in this instance a text message, they are much more likely to respond and send texts. The blank canvas scares people.

BA ‘All The Time In The World’

They created an unconventional world clock for British Airways at Terminal 5 (Heathrow). It shows times across the world but by smaller city not the capitals. The idea is to get people travelling in their minds. They wanted to push typefaces, they used electroluminescent material. Their display is very adaptable, they wanted to give it a human touch, it can display caps, small caps, joined up etc. It’s beautiful.

BA Cloud

Individually controllable flip dots, magnetic components. The installation was to be hung in the space between escalators. They compared the space to an aircraft takeoff. It used 7km of wires inside. One of the most rewarding parts of the project: because it was art all the engineers and construction workers who put it in place were cynical, but as soon as it was switched on people started to take pictures and send them to their families, this was important since the art was connecting with people straight away.

Onedotzero

Installaton photo shoot. Was an interesting challenge. Troika’s brainstorming process can be random, it doesn’t work to just sit around a table without any ideas, people must come with them and discuss. Their idea was zoetropes. They figured out they could use different spacings between letters to bring different words into focus at different frequencies. This project is featured in the Decode exhibition.

Newtron virus

Uses the drop detector in the MacBook. Brilliant (however if you want to ‘infect’ your computer and have Snow Leopard, at time of writing you’ll still have to wait). Find out more about the Newtron virus.

Enrico Tessarin of New Treatment

He started by mostly talking about Sophia’s diary, a series on Bebo. However, New Treatment are known for an unfinished project called Block X. Cordless show is a project they started a year ago taking a new approach. Sophia’s diary needed a trailer to get funding from brands. They found Sophia was  compelling to the audience because she was average. Lots of teenagers could sympathise with her. Daily video diaries. The story was directed by the audience, she asks a dilemma on the Friday, then what the audeince wanted happened on the Monday.

Block X

Hammer (the horror people) approached him. It’s another online series. The project is still in development. Some ideas for interactivity include: Secret content to your mobile phone; lots of options for game play; augmented reality games. Advertising is really important to this guy. He wants to incorporate brand selling into a made up CCTV control room which is also part of the website interface, e.g. A room sponsored by Ikea?

How do you survive in a world where big brands no longer invest in web shows? Answer, could be a format like the Cordless show. It’s pretty much T4 for the web. Done on an extremely low budget. The show developed a reputation, 30,000 hits per month. Advertisers can’t ignore that. What the Cordless show unique is their branding and interactivity. “The peoples vote” feature on the site. Create your own profile and vote for your favourite performer. A few universities asked for a live version, this brought in money since people will pay for a live performance. After momentum built they got funding from the BBC.

In any web project the first question Enrico asks is why did you choose the web as the medium? If it’s only because you can’t find the funding elsewhere, there’s no point. It’s telling that the BBC and Channel 4 require an interactive plan for any new series or documentary.

Questions

Q. Will interactivity with film go any further than it has?

The methods of interaction are very different. Inevitably it will all converge. It only depends on how traceable human behaviour is, that’s where the money is going to be. It depends on the target audience, it’s generational. Young people don’t necessarily watch TV anymore. Cinema will stay as it is. The future is definately interactive. Now that we have computers and networks that can transmit a different film for each cinema screen, there’s potential for more tailored content. The big issue is where you draw the line between an interactive and passive experience. A big thing that’s happening is the semantic web (woohoo, someone mentioned it – this probably links in with the Words project).

Q. Does the message get lost? Are there other pressures from technology and commercial considerations?

(This question was mostly aimed at Enrico since he was adamant that a new project must be get financial backing from advertising). Block X, although highly commercially orientated, the story was very important. Enrico was keen to stress if the story doesn’t stay, he’s prepared not to make his project. Is it art or ‘advertainment’? He’s looking at real world considerations. He runs a company and has to pay wages. However, big brands try to influence content shot by shot. Even as a producer you have to swallow hard.

Q. What about the economics on the web, don’t people expect things to be free?

Bebo made the first web series called Kate Modern. However Bebo Originals has shut down because they couldn’t find advertisers to support them. (Personally I don’t think enough was said about funding models other than advertising. What about paying for the service? What about content in closed networks distribution channels such as iTunes?)

Jeff started by describing his childhood in the 1970s and how at the time the world was changing around him. At a young age he came across a pong game encased inside a table at a restaurant. For him, before then media had been a passive experience, suddenly there was interaction. He terms it as society going through a “conceptual progression in how we can communicate”.

He went on to describe how this expectation picked up momentum as data storage became cheaper and computer processing became more powerful. In his view Moore’s Law works across all technologies. The two key aspects vital to this revolution where the tools for participation and the scale of data.

In 1973 the IBM Winchester 3340  was released with a capacity of around 70Mb. On release it cost $100,000. In comparison, Google currently archives 4 – 5TB of data every afternoon. From this we see that the tools have developed massively and so has the scale of data.

Designers must turn this raw data into information. Whether or not this is achieved is a subjective judgement as it relates to perceptions of the audience. Jeff’s example was to communicate monthly rainfall based on the size of a cartoon raindrop. If the audience had been meteorologists, they’d probably have preferred a numeric representation, perhaps in inches or centimetres. So it is the job of the designer to remember to take the design of data from decorative to actionable. Success comes when the designer has managed to “convey promptly to the eye something that would otherwise require mental calculation”.

A great example of this was John Snow’s mashup of Cholera deaths and location (a street map). Just as valid is Charles Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s March to Warsaw. Edward Tufte was another statistician who used chart’s to bring out the story with the crash of the challenger space shuttle. Also of interest is the air and ground traffic visualisations from Britain from Above (although mostly for entertainment purposes). All were designed to get the heart of the story without being untruthful.

Google Analytics was designed to do just this. Jeff’s tactic with this was to shelve any ideas and reassess them two weeks later. His inspiration for the final graph design was a travel montage from the film Indiana Jones. :)

The point is that the audience is all important. In his work with Adaptive Path, he would identify what people want to do, not what people want – an important distinction. They would take transcripts of user interviews and take out sections that sounded like tasks. Charting the mental model with sticky notes helps provide vital communication for designers and managers. To get the product to production, look at all the options and reduce down to only what you need at launch. What we leave out is more important than what we leave in, we must remember to tell the story.

Some further reading: The Ghost Map, Anything by Edward R. Tufte and of course the presentation.

So, this got me thinking about the whole concept of the click. What is a click? How central is it really to our experience on the web? Can we do without it? And if it was taken away, what would that web look and feel like? Read on for my research and opinion.

Background, FYI

(For the uninitiated, which included me to some degree). Computer mice and clicking have been with us for a while. The first commercial computer to include a mouse was the Xerox 8010 Star introduced in 1981 (according to Wikipedia, I was only just on the planet at this point so can’t vouch for it). Since then the concept behind clicking has been adapted to other input devices including trackballs, touchpads (generally used on laptops), touchscreens, graphics tablets etc.

Clicking is bound up in the WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device) approach to GUI’s (Graphical User Interfaces) and relates to the user clicking and selecting a part of the screen to activate a command on the computer. Before the GUI and the mouse, text based interfaces were dominant and the return key would be the usual part of the keyboard that did the activating.

Since its development, clicking has been so fundamental in the WIMP world that input devices such as touchscreens have extended the concept to variants such as ‘tapping’ etc. The terms may change based on the user experience but the general interaction remains the same, again due mostly to the unchanging fundamentals of the 2D GUI.

How does this relate to the web?

Clicking helps to define the overall experience of the web. For example, it’s the last action before making a payment to make a purchase. It’s in the modern psyche as an expression of intention. Amazon patented ‘1-Click’ in 1999 as it ‘refers to the technique of allowing customers to make online purchases with a single click’. A lot is happening behind the scenes, but for the user this is reduced to a single action/concept. Other examples would include the proliferation of hyperlinks with explanatory text like ‘click to proceed’, ‘click to pay’ and the dreaded ‘click here’.

It’s always interesting to me how the popular perception of a thing shapes its explanation. This is because, of course, for some ‘1-Click’ is actually ‘1-Press-Return-Key’ or ‘1-Tap’. Clicking doesn’t naturally enter into the experience of a command line user or someone using certain types of assistive technology. What is universal in these examples is the activating of the command to progress to another web page or buy a product. This is a fabulous example of why the link text ‘click here’ is so nonsensical (and on its own so non-descriptive and just lame).

Of course the web is built on the hyperlink and for most clicking has become central to this interaction. Which brings me back to dontclick.it. What happens if the click is taken away? Well, it’s disconcerting at first. However, even though the website is initially a strange experience, I found myself getting used to it quite quickly. This made me wonder why I’d been such a blind follower of the click for so long. I’d never questioned.

Click-less future?

Now onto a general theme for this blog; Apple. They’ve just released the MacBook Air to predominantly positive reviews and despite its other boundary-pushing features, the one they’re most keen to promote on their website is the ‘multi-touch’ gesture support.

For the first time, they’ve brought multi-touch gestures from their successful iPhone and iPod touch products into their main computer offering. Although these features don’t replace the click, they could point to (pun intended) a future without it. What about a Minority Report inspired interface where ‘point and click’ becomes just ‘point’?

For many years, Apple’s relationship with the ‘click’ has been embroiled in the one or two button mouse debate. Seasoned computer users have derided their choice to stick with one button mice and even now their offering is a kind of fudge.

With the correct interface, could the click be superseded by a gesture? Gestures in computing are nothing new. Again, according to Wikipedia, the first mouse gesture was “the ‘drag,’ …introduced by Apple to replace a dedicated ‘move’ button on mouses shipped with its Macintosh and Lisa computers”.

For most, removing the click would have a fundamental impact on the psychology of human computer interaction, as expressed in this quote from the dontclick.it site:

clicks make me think of isolated segments this is immersive.
01.17.2008 msg# 37833 by ‘roger doonan’.

Apart from the psychology, what about accessibility/usability? By extension, some replacement for the mouse (pointing device) could help those with motor control difficulties. i.e. not having to click on exactly the right pixel on the screen. Take it a stage further, replacing the keyboard with a gesture based interface could revolutionalise computer usage for those of us for whom the standard QWERTY keyboard represents a barrier.

The end is in sight

There are lots of interface design problems that would need addressing before the clicking could ever stop. I wonder how complex a system could get before a gesture became indiscrete enough to place ambiguity between it and the user. I also wonder if computer interface designers will ever get to purely gesture based interaction without a paradigm (I got that word in Rik!) shift from creating more and more complex interfaces, towards distilling it right down to what the user actually needs.

These are just my thoughts on what may be to come. As always I’m hoping to add to any discussion that’s taking place, this is not a bid for revolution (although could you imagine an online petition to abandon the click? “Click here to abolish the click!” – wholly hypocritical).

Update 22 February 2008: “Apple Depicts Advanced Multitouch Gesturing Control Panel in Mac OS X” – an article written a couple of days ago about possible developments using muiti-touch.

This is the first time I’ve seen an introduction to the platform and I must say I think it has acres of potential. Yes it might be later then the rest (Apple’s iPhone has been shipping since the summer, Android isn’t ready for consumers until late 2008), but the same happened with the Wii and, due to it’s unique features, it surprisingly dominates the games console industry. Apple, probably Google’s biggest ‘competitor’ (according to AppleInsider, Google chief Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s Board of Directors), has redefined the mobile experience but their environment is not open (apps development is only available through Safari) which is why unless they release their grip they’ll never win at fighting the tide.

Conversely, if Google’s open platform can keep what looks like an iPhone inspired interface whilst also fostering innovation, it’ll soak up the demand for next generation handsets that Apple kick-started.

Update, 16 November 07: Google’s Dave Burke gave a presentation on Android at the recent Future of Mobile event held in London on 14 November. Mike Butcher blogged his talk. Although apparently he didn’t say anything new, it’s interesting to note that Android is Linux based with Java running on top. During the presentation Dave created a programme in under 8 minutes, it seems Google is trying to emphasise the ease with which programmes can be created.

Design is not like fine art, where there are no boundaries. The challenge for a designer is that there are going to be certain boundaries and you have to work within them. Firstly, you define the boundaries and then you define how you can exploit them. Within the boundaries, you look for opportunities and it’s that process of identifying the opportunities that can make or break a good design.

This piqued my interest and I started thinking how it might be applied to web design. Even in these days of millions of colours and oodles of display configurations the boundaries are there, they just may not be as apparent (in fact, trying to accommodate portability within your design may present a boundary in itself).

So I started a list of general (maybe obvious) boundaries that I think exist:

• Viewport size, accommodating the multitude.
• Colour variance on different displays (despite millions of colours).
• The medium is 2D.
• Web is geared towards using text. Text must be horizontal.
• Page download size (even in a broadband world, it must be considered).
• Usability and Accessibility. e.g. the clarity of text and the design/interface.
• The Grid.
• Browser implementations (limitations).

These are some of the ‘boundaries’ that I think about when I start to design a site. I get satisfaction out of trying to ‘exploit’ these challenges and hopefully becoming a better designer. However, in order to utilise them they’ve got to be identified and understood, so this may be the beginning of a useful (cathartic) exercise.

So currently, one option is to use sIFR (for short pieces of text, e.g. headings). Not used it before? Download the sIFR release and get a good tutorial.

Combine all of these fantastic (free) resources with a bit of responsible web design and more interesting design will hopefully result.

If you’re still not convinced fonts are important, read “Web Design is 95% Typography” by Oliver Reichenstein (OK he doesn’t explicitly make the case for more fonts, but he does assert the importance of typography).

Wow, think what that could do when combined with something like Photosynth & Seadragon (mentioned in a previous post).