Me getting xtranormal

Having fully decompressed from the constant stimulation of tacos, panels and sessions, demo Chevys, iPhone-weilding pedestrians and a barrage of FREE stuff, I’m ready to post my notes. I’ve tried to come through them and add links and references and fix my dodgy grammar and so forth, but pretty much what you see is what you’re gonna get. Note that in many cases I use the first person ‘I’ when referring to the speaker (a convention I borrowed from capturing affinity notes), and I’ll interject any of my own commentary in brackets.

#1. The Connected Car: Driving Technology

Howard Wright (Chevrolet), Jessica Steel (Chevrolet/Pandora?), Joe Berry (Verizon), Nick Pudar (Chevrolet)

(Here I mostly captured questions from the audience because I know the panel subject pretty well!)

standardized API? When’s that coming?

Telematic transmission of diagnostic info instead of through obd module.

-there has to be developers creating reasons to come aboard

Geographic data: is tech like that on the horizon? Ie predicting traffic jams

Ford Sync: 1ya they were talking about putting out best practices. Are [you guys] gonna be managing that? I think asked to chevy/onstar

-As if the auto companies brought the mobile apps into the car… They’re coming in on the phone. So rule to make safer/better: do no harm

From a rep for Washington post company: the business model for these platforms. What’s the business model beyond widespread adoption?

An independent engineer: We want to implement exactly what you described: I received a text message and I want to translate. What can I do to go home and develop this app?

Speaking of security, a rep from icontrol: are you considering letting your car integrate with your home security?

#2.  How Print Design is the Future of Interaction

Mike Kruzeniski (Microsoft)

Gutenberg's Bible

Savion Glover

#3. Your Mom has an iPad: Designing for Boomers

John McRee (Effective UI)

Boomers <3 technology! The boomer generation, older adults, is something to focus on.

Boomers spend the most on technology because they have the most $.

Too young to have any personal memory of ww2 but remember postwar American high school. Like Steve Jobs. 36-64

How to design for Boomers?

Don’t. Design for goals and behavior, aptitude and attitude, not generation.

This is our perception of boomers

Forget age. Patterns to consider:

Boomers like new technologies: make it easy to enter (affordances)

“]

The Kickass Curve [Looks a lot like Flow Theory

Flow Theory

want it to be safer: provide feedback, retractable steps, strong visual designs.

Build trust with your user.

Boomers want tech that’s easier to use: consistent navigation and behavior.

Consistent nomenclature, choose your horse & ride it.

Boomers see tech as a tool: you can’t keep adding features to make em better.

Increasing features doesn’t make em more compelling. Give a boomer a way to see their grandkids, they’re willing to learn it.

Boomers expect tech to adapt to them. Augmented reality, mobile projectors, virtual environments, voice commands, has to be useful.

Accessibility: touchy when it comes to boomers. Don’t want to feel pandered to.

Designing for this, all benefit from the software tech for the 20%.

‘Disability’ a huge turn-off. External labels on forms (good for screen readers), meaningful links, watch contrast.

#4. The Crisis of Trust in a Social Age: Issues and Opportunity

Guy Gould-Davies (SapientNitro)

The audience is probably 2/3 women! Different!

Trust: based on impressions over time. is it safe to trust? What are the forces that are in play?

Trust in people we know has eroded in the past 2 years (tv news [which], radio news, newspapers, friends/peers). 60% of ppl need to hear something 3-5x to think it’s true.

What is trust? Confidence in the future when something of value is at stake.

Trust exists to protect what’s valuable. Hierarchy of risk shapes trust.

Trust is an aggregate (a gestalt), a balance between expectation and delivery.

An economic gale: ww2 ends, era of readiness. Economic risk present. Mid 80s era of indulgence: risk thought to be managable with high tech macro economic tools 2008: era of consequences

… “you gotta put on the big boy pants”

#5. Design Across Disciplines

Ben Yarrow (West Wing Writers), Brett Lider (Google), Elaine Wheery (Meebo Inc), Matthew Robbins (Matthew Robbins Design), Stephen Atkinson (studiokinson.com)

-A Day in the Life

Architect: business-oriented, hoping end product ‘flows’. This guy recommended ‘Lolita’ as a book… To inspire emotion?

-Event Planning: filled with emotion. You need the element of surprise embedded in the experience. Impt for the guest. I spend a lot of time creating editorial content for blogs.

Interaction Design: showed gmail app for iPad– ex of speculative design, added a connection bar bc users kept refresh. Added a delete button. This guy seems to understand users very well, talking through them, not himself.

Speech writing: we all want to force our heads into audiences; we want to get into peoples’ heads. Talking about rhetoric, ethos. Creative challenge: how am I going to get a mostly Indian, male audience to listen to my female speaker? I started researching Hyderabad. Tollywood. A Tamil robot movie… Writing 30 words that telegraph that she can relate to them through this movie.

“]

Endhiran [I think this is the movie he was talking about

Logos, ethos & pathos: build a reference point by personalizing. History is impt.

Event planning: what user research he does: in my meetings I like to dig deep. I like to learn what people don’t like. They’re not so good with what they like, but when you get to the root of what they don’t like, it helps you offer more to your clients.

Architecture: i collaborate with the clients, they are who I have an emotional relationship with. My friend calls it an iterative process. The more I show them the more they’re able to comment back. I’m finicky and I don’t like competition, why would I collaborate w/ other architects.

Event planning: i like collaborating with other kinds of professionals, but I need to have the master vision.

#6. Sausagefest: Getting More Women Into New Media & Tech

Alexa Tsotsis (TechCrunch), Rachel Sklar (Change the Ratio)

A #panky is a sausage covered in pancake.  This will be our hashtag.

#7.  Radical openness: growing TED by giving it away

June Cohen (TED)

A case study in what happens when you open up and give away. Ted was a closed, elite conference founded in 1984 bought in 1994 by Chris Anderson. In 2006 they began releasing the talks online for free.

Open translations

Tedx

2011: opening API.

A philosophy of ‘radical openness’… For all of our worry about unintended consequences, the results of our intended consequences have been explosive.

When you have a luxury brand, you want to restrict access and keep prices high, right? We found attendance exploded after opening…

Goal: reach ppl everywhere, geographic and in terms of media habits

Embrace open models: released Ted talks under a creative commons license. We relinquished control. Enabling an embeddable player is the single most impt thing you can do if you want a video to spread.

Design for the (very) small screen: immediate and emotional, ecus. Most lectures are filmed like a high school musical.

Start strong: doesn’t include an introduction (though in a room you do). You have 5 secs to grab people.

Evoke contagious emotions: you want to share moments that evoke feelings of awe or ah-ha moments. People want to share videos where people introduce tricky concepts and explain them. Introduce storytelling into this space. Here’s one of the most well known examples:

dramatic growth… Has a price: find visionary sponsors when you’re doing anything involving great content, you need a great team.

Ted open translation project came out of requests. Transcript & subtitles are timelinked…

You can go anywhere in the translation and jump to that part of the video. How do you ensure quality? Every time you launch something new you don’t understand, talk to anyone you can who has done this before. This is not ‘moshpit style’ translation like wiki style- more of an editorial model. Have a single person assigned to the talk and give them credit.

Have a feedback loop, written guidelines and principles

There are still barriers like literacy, access bandwidth… Part of why we launched

When you go to an actual conference, you have shared experience, we want to complete that experience for people online.

TEDx: we couldn’t go everywhere, so we put out a program so people can organize one anywhere. We put out guidelines, don’t charge, tedx organizers can’t make profit. Less than 1/2 the events are held in English.

A global audience becomes a global team.

Unintended consequences: the most extraordinary speakers in other languages that we didn’t know about.

Flash event of TEDx Cairo.

#8.  People as peripherals: the future of gesture interface

Lee Schupp (Cheskin Added Value)

Speaker is a ‘futurist’: understand the process of change. Gap between what technology can do and what people are ready for. Challenge is to create acceptable change.

“the problem with computers is that there’s not enough Africa in them” -eno.

We are headed toward thought computing, where our brains can manipulate interfaces.

1 person in this room thinks we will be using a mouse in the next 50 years.

The mouse evolved into a peripheral plus gesture (wiimote).

Touch. More natural, don’t need to sit, good for mobile. But smudges… Ew. Righthand advantage. The more complicated gesture, the fewer ppl will be able to do it.

These are kind of like language with dialects.

Gesture. hack: aeron parrot drone. Surgery. Sixth sense device. Advantages: more natural, allows distance, kinetic activity. Issues: clumsy, latency.

Fine tune w voice, eye movements, facial expression. SNIFF interactive projection.

SNIFF time lapse from karolina sobecka on Vimeo.

Bio signals. Xwave lets you control iPhone apps w/ brain. Controlling brain waves will be like learning a new language. Army ‘thought helmet’ to streamline communications.

Army Thought Helmet

Intel brain implants. 80,000 ppl have(?) BrainGate. ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.’

Brain is complex, focused concentration, multitasking, brain does not have an innate connection to machines, if people can’t read ppl, how will computers?

Kurweizel singularity stuff…

What happens then? Depends on your assumptions about intelligence. Computers just ‘booksmart’

Extropians: people who want to merge with machines. Trans humans are taking this very seriously.

How do we feel about our relationship with our machines? Gesture is new and fun.

What would make it essential?

#9. The Future of Touch User Interface Design

Amish Patel (Microsoft), Kay Hofmeester (Microsoft)

Touch is a language.

Where things go wrong. What happens when you take touch and map it to an old language like mouse (PowerGlove).

Input languages develop in stages.

3 stages of media (Randy Pauch)

1. New technology – film, muybridge
   

   Muybridge's galloping horses

2. Copy old language
3. Develop own language

Touch: 1972 Plato IV touch screen terminal. Has been around for public systems, and this company has basically been in charge.

PLATO IV touch terminal and lady with fancy haircut

Touch is still using scrolling and scroll bars… Is it a touch concept or a GUI concept.

We are in stage 2, moving to 3.

Shall we copy real life? This is just a stage 2 mapping to real life [is real life just a language? No!!!]

Body-aware. Our language today doesn’t account for most human factors. This language needs to know about the shape of my hands and fingers.

So the pc can see paper or a hand bc each pixel is a camera.

Multi-touch. Removes concept of focus.

They are showing an office of the future.

Multi-modal. Touch & pen, touch & speech, touch & air. Speech is good for commands, but when combined you can say ‘move this bottle over here’.

Touch in pen: repositioning hand contextualizes type of behavior that could be controlled/manipulated by dominant hand.

Proximity. Computers are kind of rude. They don’t realize you’re around, just that you’re there.

#10. Love, Music & APIs

Dave Haynes (SoundCloud), Matthew Ogle (The Echo Nest)

New music ecosystem: gigwlate, echo nest, song kick, 7digital, sp0tify, musicbrainx

Infrastructure services: amazon, github, heroku

Presenter is not sure why he has ‘taste the cloud’ in his notes

Music Hack Day – we are talking about happy, kind hackers. They like staying inside because they like making things. – 24 hours to build something. This works because of the common bond of music.

We mess with hardware, software, really anything to do with music.

Invisible instruments- iPhone + wii mote = neat! (http://www.timsoo.com/?page_id=836)

Piracy: location based way of picking up tracks on the street

City sounds:

Scrobbyl:

Bragging rights: to settle arguments about who liked a band first.

Find you some vinyl: scraped data and got a list for vinyl.

JSONloops:

The Swinger: uses time-shifting techniques to add swing

Speakatron, iSteelPan with drum sticks, iSticks, 6 degrees of black sabbath, song

shirts, memento romance, artikulator, vib rib off

With this new ecosystem, people outside of the industry come & innovate. These seem to be split off into these categories: failed, project fulfillment, commercialized and collaboration

Tastebuds and discovr

#11. Robot Art Lessons #robotart

Alan Majer (Good Robot), Steve Guengerich (Broadbrush Ventures – Appconomy)

What is a robot? Some things exhibit behaviors of a robot without the intelligence.

Elevator panels have autonomy and make decisions, but they don’t look like robots.

A robot is a machine that has lifelike characteristics.

But why define it? Why limit?

We’re at a unique moment in time because we have open platforms like arduino…

Suddenly a low barrier to entry in terms of embedding intelligence into machines. 5th graders show us how it’s done.

Vivid interactions despite the limitations. Can I create a new level of immersion? I’m looking to involve movement in a visceral way. If you give the right kind of cues, even the most basic robot can become amazingly human.

‘We expect our online environments to be customized to our will, but we don’t ask that of our physical spaces’

Articulated hand: Majer’s project. Bring lifelike qualities to a nonliving object.

Hylozoic Ground

:: flight. Maybe robotics requires a different approach to be successful (ie not just to imitate birds to get airplanes).

Designing enchanted objects: a switch that turns itself off. Gorbitt design: solar energy gathered into arms that can be collectively controlled.

Art triggers interaction w/ observer. What the next wave of that is: sensation optimization (thought helmet again).

Cochlear implants, car that detects that you are falling asleep [!!!]. Neroplasticity.

North paw will Ambienty vibrate in the direction of magnetic north. Our brains are flexible enough to ‘shoehorn’ in all kinds of new senses into our perceptual array.

Maker faire, google lunarxprize, FES: trying to build bridges for control between brain and hands for paralyzed people

‘language allows us to stitch our brains together’ – we’re open source. An auctioneer can speak at 250 wpm, or 75 bits per minute.

Jessica field: robot zoo

Question from the audience: so you’re involved in the humanities. How can you learn how to do this stuff if you don’t have an engineering background? Answer: attend open hack nights, get more and more involved in the heavy lifting.

Cantyvalley [?]: something sufficiently different from being human that it’s not creepy.

Pure Volume on trinity robot exhibition

12) behavior design: stop being neutral, and start influencing decisions. #sxbehavior

Brad Nunnally (Perficient), Chris Disdon (Adaptive Path), Nicholas J Disabato (N/A)

Goooo @nickdpi

Design Decisions – Chris Disdon

Weight gain when I moved from ny-> atl

How cities encourage certain activities… Dan ariely: predictably irrational

Active Design: the idea that we can design buildings to encourage more exercise.

People choose what is convenient & enjoyable, not what is rational.

Data: Nicholas Felton. Value of this data is that it tells a story. BJ Flogg: Persuasive technology/ Fogg Behavioral Model.

The 90999 # for disaster relief. Trigger has to be easy to do for ppl who have low motivation.

Persuasion vs aiding cognition… Tryability. Amazon One Click. A design pattern to influence behavior.

Behavior changes: primary value proposition is as utility or aid. -to help you reduce spending or end credit card debt. Will tell you what to do based on the change of data, and the behavior is measurable, whether binary or progressive.

System does not make explicit recommendations:

Behavior is self-determined: if you want to stick with it, you have to use it a certain

way

Robert Cialdini: 6 weapons of persuasion (before tech but applicable): social proof.

Commitment & Consistency: we are more likely to follow up when we make a commitment that others can see. …so, target a specific behavior or goal (1-3 discreet behaviors max) keep it simple (use less laundry detergent vs decrease your carbon footprint), create a story

Nick’s Portion:

Techniques

Interlock in ATM

Mandatory requirements: automatic transmission. Break before you reverse.

Fake affordances: green-go, social proof (other customers also bought), 1-click

Distinction between product that changes your behavior as a one off and a product that changes to your routine. Routine changers offer more of a nudge than a push

Bj Fogg: motivation, ability, trigger

Sleep cycle & wake mate, google power meter, mint.com, bedposted.com

Summary feedback: persuasion by simplicity.

FitBit: what it does and why it does it that way

Passive vs active data: passive is easier to collect. Autocomplete would help. When you put in active data, it helps them to engage in the product more. Broadcasting behaviors. One of the elements of social behavior is that if other people are viewing your behavior, that is going to change your behavior. Your friends will call you out.

Readyforzero.com: helps you get down to zero. Exhibits trustworthiness, helps estalish surface credibility, which can strengthen or weaken over time.

Give clear targets and show boundaries. Progress -> pay -> do.

What happens when you scold ppl: donothingfor2minutes.com makes you feel bad.

Personal vs social:

Self-impositions like project 365, nanowrimo. Social vs sociological. Yelp is sociological, it’s not really a forum so much.

Use hipster.com… Mass interpersonal persuasion: persuasive experience, automated structure, social distribution, rapid cycle, huge social graph and a way to measure impact.

Cities: our collective urban impulses influenced by online. Adam Greenfield.

Foursquare, gowalla.

Empowering people (from zappos): uses great copy

Whenshouldivisit.iamdanw.com

One Step Signup – but users might ignore you. Behavior design is mostly products

giving advice and users being prepared. Golden rule behavior design [cite].

City data: everyblock (has an API).

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So that’s the end of the notes, folks! I had a hell of a time in Austin and took so much in that I’m still in the interpretation phase. My ‘geek camp’ buddy and I want to make sure to get more people together to go next year… so stay in touch with me if you decide to sign up.

Sources

1. Gutenberg’s bible

http://www.dclab.com/digital_gutenberg.asp

2. Savion Glover

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/magazine/03PUBLIC.html?pagewanted=6

3. Baby Boomers

http://www.age-in-place.com/

4. Kickass Curve

[speaker's presentation]

5. Flow Theory

http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/remurphy/2008/02/the-psychology-of-immersive-le-3/

6. Tollywood

http://excitebox.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html

7. XWave

http://www.gizmag.com/goodbye-touchscreen-xwave-brainwave-interface-for-idevices-unveiled/16296/

8. Army Thought Helmet

http://www.physorg.com/news141314439.html

9. Muybridge’s Galloping Horses

http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0309/lm20.html

10. Plato IV Touch Screen Terminal

http://www.library.illinois.edu/archives/archon/index.php?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=1478

You can see if I stick to my guns and chart my progress on Flickr: Project 365 Set.

Here I go!