Entries categorized as ‘retrospective’
was the title from my recently completed dissertation.
I was inspired to conduct this research after reading Hertzian Tales, a book by the acclaimed industrial designer Anthony Dunne in which he argues for an alternative future in the development of electronic products that is focused more on metaphysics, poetry and aesthetics than on performance or technical functionality. His argument stems from the lack of cultural speculation in the design of electronic products today.
presense, my major practical project from my masters in Interactive Media, a communication device for emotional communication, was inspired by this alternative reality that Dunne speaks of. Presense is just one part of a huge area of research done in academia over the past 20 years into so called “phatic technologies,” which are devices that allow people to communicate in more subtle or emotional means. They are born out of the concepts of ubiquitous computing, first realised by Mark Weiser in his seminal 1991 paper “The computer of the 21st Century” and phatic communication, which was first coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who defined it as communication “whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to convey information”
Despite the abundance of research in academia into phatic technologies there is little evidence that this has crossed over into commercial development. I started my research with the assumption that there was a lack of communication or a divergence between the goals of innovation in academia and innovation in industry. I hoped to find out whether this was the cause for a lack of post-optimal products in the marketplace or if there were other factors at play.
I decided to focus my research on three phatic communication devices developed in both academia and industry. By analysing the motivations of the people behind them and the resulting impact they subsequently had, I hoped to gain an understanding of what is preventing these products from entering the mainstream of consumer culture and if and when this will change.
Please download the thesis here and send me your comments and thoughts…
Connectibles! developed by Jeevan Kalanithi at the MIT Media Lab
Emotion Communicators Developed by Philips Design
Social Mobiles Developed as a collaboration between IDEO and the artist Crispin Jones
Categories: Dissertation · retrospective
Tagged: anthony dunne, Dissertation, innovation, post optimal
I think the usability aspect of this project was a challenge, firstly the vast majority of literature on usability testing is based around web based development and does not allow for the complexity of actual physical development
Secondly these kinds of “post-optimal” products such as Presense, do not follow the conventional forms and idea’s of “traditional” electronic product development. They are not rational products therefore cannot be designed by purely rational means and in this way designing them specifically round a user can often prove wrong for the product. I think areas of functionality around a device are aspects that can be tested by users and judged on the results but when designing products hat are intended to alter people perceptions of, in this instance, the way they communicate, this is something that in many ways does not suit this style of development.
For this reason I think the usability tests like the participatory design and the more “experience” based prototyping is what suits this kind of product best
Categories: retrospective
Tagged: ma, Usability
Testing is only as good what results you get. You to have tangible changes that you can make or a change of perception or direction for your product as a result. This also means that testing is only as good as how you record it.
Development is always more complex and time consuming than you think it is going to be, but you should always keep testing, so you need to think of perhaps more abstract ways that you can test and not just wait for it to be at the stage that you thought it be in your plan.
Always leave questions very open ended, in that I mean that it is very easy to push people to say what you want them too which can lead to very skewed results
Categories: retrospective
I think my biggest failure in terms of the usability testing was focusing all the tests far too much on the big picture, i.e. all of the test stages were trying to find out how users felt about the concept of emotional communication. It is obviously very useful to find out how potential users feel about communicating in this way but I think to truly get peoples real views they should actually interact with something as opposed to you just describing it to them; they are then more likely to give you constructive criticism. So I think I should have focused the tests more on developing an effective display, ie ask how relevant it is to see the other device, input regarding the controls of the device etc. Then once we would have a more effective display, we could get better feedback on the concept.
Though this to be fair was partly a result of us having unrealistic ambitions about how far we could prototype…
Another area that this also contributes too is that it was very hard to implement findings from the testing into the development process, as often findings were very high level and our development was very limited due to high technicality and a short length of time in which to do it.
Categories: retrospective
