Update: Night Beacon is the winner of the 2010 CHI Student Design Competition.

Night Beacon is a project developed during my Interaction Design course as part of a team of five. As part of the CHI student design competition, our team was challenged to think about the problem of walking. Early in the process, we decided to narrow the problem of walking into that of walking at night. By narrowing the problem, the potential solution could tackle the reconstruction of notions about trust and safety in city spaces. We completed a contextual inquiry, created personas, conducted field research with paper prototypes, and came up with lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes for an Android application that included user testing for feedback.

The paper we wrote drew on this design experience, and was named as a finalist to be presented in the April at the CHI 2010 ACM conference (along with our peer group, mibo).

Re-imagining the site(s) comes at a time of change for our organization, which records and archives lecture materials, making new kinds of knowledge available to the public. The availability of these resources invites predictions and visions for how it may be used.

In initiating this kind of site redesign, A List Apart’s “The Content Strategist as a Digital Curator” is a good place to start, and it addresses the relationship between digital space and physical space that has become more and more important for content specialists to understand.

Without diverging too much, let me say that my field jump into HCI started as my fascination with a troubling metaphor back in my new media studies classes in undergrad. At the time, digital media theory introduced the idea that digital space is like physical space, and must be navigated in cognitively similar ways. I noticed a conflict in treating the relationship of digital space to physical space as a metaphor and a reality, and I wanted to investigate further.

I didn’t know then that Information Architecture was a burgeoning field, and it bears mentioning that I once saw the relationship as a metaphor, and now, as a practitioner, I see digital space as a real, albeit different kind of space. Much like the terms “calculator” and “computer” once referred to the clerical professions of people and used those models for building the machines we use today, digitization has created a vast information landscape that exceeds the human resource of attention. The limitation of attention makes the problem of getting through information a problem of navigation (among many other kinds of problems).

So in re-imagining the archive, I decided to visit the newly expanded University of Michigan Museum of Art, this time while thinking about its goal to present and preserve a collection within the limitations of a physical space.

In doing so, I realized that UMMA recently solved a problem of limited space for a too-large collection by doubling the size of the exhibition space with the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Wing.

Physical space directs attention. When inside the UMMA, you see doorways leading to rooms, and in those rooms you can actually see the exhibition’s contents. While a user landing on a website can judge in a very short time about if they will stay or where they will go next (well under a second), and will not likely scroll down to do so, in a physical space a visitor can make that kind of decision just by looking through a doorway. UMMA augments this by providing information on the walls, guiding the way from exhibit to exhibit.

It’s a totally common strategy, but the limitation of information (only the nearby wings are shown, and information is reduced relative to the user’s position in the museum) within the physical space helps people get through it. And these decisions have been made in part by my SI colleagues, so you can bet they were well considered.

Physical space can hint at what’s next door. One interesting update to the museum were the “open storage” galleries. In these galleries, related objects were placed together on shelves with much less context than the exhibited objects. The related objects were sorted by collection on different shelves. And the structure of the shelves was suggestive of how physical space enables perception– the shelves were lit and separated by door dividers with opaque, vertical beams. However, when leaning in close to see the objects, you can still see into the adjoining shelf space, perceiving both separation and relationship at the same time. I took a picture:

When designing, a digital space must provide relationship cues in places that are available to the user to understand. Finding meaningful relationships between stored objects– in my case, lecture objects– and presenting them as neighbors may make an archive more browseable. What I’m talking about is grounding what we call recommender systems in a navigation scheme that takes its cognitive cues from physical space.

I’m a brand new designer, and it’s therefore just the time to wax philosophical in order to create extraordinary future design. How do we imagine our ability, as humans, to see and understand our vast landscape of information? If we best extend our ability to do so, what will we see? What will we learn? The question precedes understanding the difference between seeing the information landscape from a horse and buggy and seeing it from an airplane. And yes, that’s a metaphor.

Game Boy Classic

The past few weeks I’ve been getting an education in affordances. This is not to be confused with having Norman’s Design of Everyday Things assigned, followed by a brief discussion, conclusion and let’s move on. Rather, we’ve been getting into the nitty-gritty details of why affordances matter, and how they work.

Two weeks ago, we were asked to make an affordance matrix and bring it into class. We took pictures of everyday objects that afford pushing, squeezing and twisting and arranged the pictures into a matrix.

I decided that a good place to start was with the very classic and tactilely pleasing Game Boy. Yes, because I am old school.

It’s hard to find objects whose interactions rely solely on pushing, squeezing or twisting. More often, we interact with objects on a procedural basis. For example, think of a wheelbarrow. We squeeze the handles, then pull up, then continue to squeeze in order to push. We could think about the interactions procedurally, or we could think about the sum combination of interactions in terms of accomplishing the object’s desired function. This is what got me to the triad– the desire to try to introduce a new scale to our perception of affordances.

There are some problems with the triad– the concentric circles imply continuity between interaction styles, and the styles themselves are nominal. In other words, the interactions don’t flow into each other. However, if we think about the overall object in terms of task, the triad works better.

Yesterday I met with two classmates in order to brainstorm an affordance device. That is, we have to plan and build a cube-shaped device that affords pushing, squeezing and pulling and that disregards outcome. Pictures are forthcoming, pending completion of the assignment.

Update: here’s some pictures of our “affordance cube.” We chose to work with soft and tactile materials. Sponges fit the bill. Other materials we used include paint, pink duct tape, a child’s tile, and …glue!

My teammates and I decided to focus on the problem of “bad” links– links you want to purge from history. During this process, I began thinking about the metaphor of clothing storage. To some extent, I hypothesized, link storage is like storing clothes in a closet– some you use every day, some you never pull out, some you want to get rid of, or never wanted in the first place.

This falls in line with the research that says frequency of visitation falls into 3 categories (described in This Presentation by U-M SOCHI, Slide 9):

• Fast (short term, high volume, sites like shopping)
• Medium (regular hourly checking, Gmail, Facebook)
• Slow (rare but regular visits, personal interest sites)

I did some sketching to see how useful the clothing storage metaphor might be use for browser history interactions. Here’s what I came up with:

Clothing storage sketch

Ultimately, I’d like to work with my group a little more to see if the metaphor is useful. We want to find a meaningful way to get “bad” or unwanted links out of the browsing history.

A major problem of this design is a lack of parameters around “Fast,” “Medium” and “Slow” interactions.

After an initial obligatory self-searching, I noted that part of what makes the installation so intriguing is the flow of crawled text as it builds into a final representation. The installation displays partial stories before pushing the information derived into a category.

Here’s Nelson Mandela:

Nelson Mandela Persona

And here’s Nelson Mandela being built by Personas (to get a good look, you might want to watch the video full-screen):

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Okay, so we have one interesting public figure who became the President of post-Apartheid South Africa and who arguably was a positive force for change in the world. So what about the baddest of the bad?

Charles Manson:

Charles Manson Persona

It’s reassuring to see that “Illegal” is the largest category for Manson, but “social” is among the second largest category, and prominent categories like Sports and Management are downright confusing. Furthermore, it is strange to see the name Manson afforded categories like “art” and “professional” at all.

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Okay, we’ve done good man and bad man now. I decided to try out my current favorite comic (and person to follow on Twitter), Russell Brand. Here he is:

Russell Brand Persona

Here his largest categories make sense; online, movies and social. But Sports and Military make less sense.

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And finally, I didn’t have any girls. Jezebel did a nice piece a little while back about prominent women in the Media (What Do People’s Online Personas Say About Them?), which offers more visualizations if you don’t want to DIY. But I decided to try out Gwen Stefani, general rad chick and lead singer of No Doubt since as long as I can remember.

Here’s Gwen:

Gwen Stefani Persona

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Conclusions

After watching the growth of these fine (well, 3/4ths of them) folks, as well as observing the construction of my own persona, I recognized that the project might show just as much, if not more, about the body of data from which the personas are derived. For example, all of these personas, none of whom are athletes, include substantial sports sections. Maybe this has to do with the way that language is constructed to organize information about sports. For example, many sites have sports pages or sections, and there are many opportunities for vocabulary that falls within the umbrella of sports.

I’m actually not trying to go into deep analysis mode, so I guess I’ll leave it at that. It’s hard not to draw some conclusions. But if you found this post in the least bit interesting, you’ll want to read up on Personas. The explanation of the installation notes that the project was “not supposed to be utilitarian. Instead, it was meant to expose a process that often happens behind the scenes.”

Witty Comedies Featuring a Strong Female Lead (a la Baby Mama and Juno)

Ballet & Modern Dance

Dysfunctional-Family TV Dramas (a la Dexter, Six Feet Under and I imagine Arrested Development)

However, when I browse on demand movies, I often begin watching as a form of browsing. If I don’t like a movie, I stop it and look for something else, usually within the first 5 minutes or so. However, my recommender system thinks I watched the entire movie, and provides recommendations based on movies I flat-out didn’t like. Usually I end up disliking them for reasons that can’t be described with text– for example, I don’t like the lighting, the acting is bad or it isn’t what I thought it would be based on the description. Furthermore, upon login, Netflix tells me:

“You watched: [title of the movie I didn't actually watch]”

This is both inaccurate and annoying. Netflix should keep track of whether or not people finish on demand movies, perhaps by finding a sweet spot at which most people continue or navigate away.

But that’s just my two cents. Netflix can, of course, do what they want.

You can go to my portfolio page about the project to read more about our project, The CVGA Archive Visualization, which used data from the GiantBomb website as the backbone for an interface design that allowed for the exploration of video games in new and meaningful ways.