Feel free to use them:

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Sent from my NordicTrack Elite 9500 PRO Treadmill *

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Sent from the Airbus A380 Entertainment & Communication System

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Sent from my on-bike device

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Sent from my internet-enabled refrigerator

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Sent from my wi-fi vacuum cleaner

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Sent in lean-back mode on-the-go

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Sent on the bus, standing shakily, written under somebody else's jacket

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No physical keyboard has been harmed to type this email

* http://www.nordictrack.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_-1_10301_12401_5...

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Circumventing the conventional steering wheel is mostly a cultural problem. Cars have had these wheels for a hundred years, and changing such a fundamental control mechanism upsets people’s ideas of what a car is, or should be. Then again, that’s exactly what digital technology is in the process of doing, so it is entirely appropriate that people’s notion of rightness is being challenged.

http://www.cooper.com/journal/2011/07/will_ford_learn.html

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In the past, I used to buy my tickets for public transport at the ticket machine. I take the train to work sporadically (too cold, snow, too lazy …) and I'm trying to force myself to rather use my bike – so a monthly ticket wouldn't really be worth it and most importantly, it would undermine my attempt to discipline myself.

And then I discovered there's an iPhone app offering ticket purchase. You just install a service called Handy Ticket (link to a German website), register yourself including your bank account for monthly withdrawal and there you go. I'm using it since quite a while now and didn't run into any trouble yet (apart from general connectivity problems, so it's actually better to buy a ticket before entering the train or bus). Some bus drivers are still quite irritated and funny enough, I ran into a ticket inspector the time I used the mobile ticket for the very first time. All in all, the service is very convenient.

Probably too convenient – or not convenient enough?

What I figured is that after getting used to it, I tend to forget to buy a ticket quite often. That's what monthly tickets are good for, you might think – but as mentioned, it would still be more expensive after all and also, I didn't forget to buy tickets when I was still using the ticket machine. This might be due to the fact that I'm at least unconsciously still conditioned to the need of having an interruptive interaction, a minor time lag before starting transportation. My mental model of taking a bus or a train probably hasn't yet adapted to this new form of fee-based locomotion.

But shouldn't a modern service, offering a more convenient way to pay for transportation also be able to help me adapt to such new behaviour without running into complications (no ticket + ticket inspector is particularly nasty if you're for a moment not fully aware of your punishable act – and there's just no valid excuse; of course, even no connectivity or empty batteries are your own fault).

I have no elaborate solution in mind. But my first thought meandered towards the whole discussion about "auto checkins" for services such as Foursquare. Foursquare allows you to "check into" places so your friends know where you are (and also to enable local marketing activities such as special deals and coupons for eg. store owners), but you have to take your device out of your pocket, launch an application and actively choose the appropriate location from a list. Since these check-ins are of course optional and you might not want to check into certain places sometimes, there's good reasoning against enabling auto check-in just for the sake of more convenience.

But what if "check-in" is not optional – or in other words: what if "check-in" does not mean "I'm here" but "I'm here and I paid"? I'm not at all talking about the social level – nobody needs to know about it except the system. But wouldn't this added convenience of some kind of sensors doing the interaction instead of your finger, avoid the inconvenience of forgetting to buy a ticket?

Isn't that exactly what monthly tickets are here for?

Even if they're a bit more expensive sometimes, one could consider these extra bucks for added convenience. And meeting the ticket inspector without a ticket in your pocket or on your device is also quite expensive. That's partly true I'd say, but it doesn't draw the full picture nor does it utilize the full potential.

On one hand, you still have to manually buy a ticket, even if it's just once a month. But also, there's a two way connection between service and customer, allowing for real-time interaction beyond traditional one-way ticket transactions: the system could know where you are, how often you use the transportation, how long and for how many stops you're using it etc.

Couldn't this also lead to new and more precise – "performance based" – pricing models? If technology is mature and accurate enough – and usage data are available in real-time, why should 2 stops cost the same as 8 stops? And if I use the train every day, always on the same trip with 14 stops but not during "rush hour" – why shouldn't I be automatically granted a discount? Although to me the badges earned for certain check-in patterns on Foursquare are not really meaningful or don't have any actual benefit, I see quite some potential here if they could have more drastic implications on one's overall expenses. Being close to that next badge, announcing a 10% discount for the next month could seriously make me consider use the public transportation system more regularly.

And then, what about taking my bike more often?

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Together with some developer and designer friends, we'll have our first "TV Hack Day" here in the studio the next two days – as part of the Research School for Versatile People. We'll keep you posted.

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exciting → reactable mobile

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I found a good comment here:

... What IDEO does so well is ask "When and why do people read?" vs. "What can technology do to enable a better reading experience?" When the first question drives the second, then book solutions will be highly relevant to people's lives. So "People read when they are in a Doctor's waiting room" might yield a very different solution than "2nd grade Teachers read to their pupils in class." ...

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... In order to support the sales of the book, Tucholsky and Szafranski, who had illustrated the tale, opened a "Book Bar" on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin: anyone who bought a copy of his book also received a free glass of schnapps. This student prank however came to an end after only a few weeks.

Source: Wikipedia

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No matter if physical books are going to be replaced by digital books as the dominant form within a few years, I love the idea there will always be a place for book stores.

Places such as described by Ray Oldenburg in his very informative sociological book about american society and culture, The Great Good Place: "… Most often I refer to such places as "third places" (after home, first, and workplace, second) and these are informal public gathering places. These places serve community best to the extent that they are inclusive and local".

No matter if printed matter or virtual goods are being sold, if there are reasons to visit a store, people will always go there – be it for discovering new interesting stories (independent from being print, ebooks or audio), for getting valuable advice and service, for entertaining and informative events around stories and reading or for an enjoyable social environment. 

Some challenging and thrilling questions will be:

• How can a pure "point of sale" be extended with extra services beyond sales? And how can digital enrich the real world store experience in a meaningful way?
• How can ebooks and similar digital goods be made tangible in a real world environment? How do transactions for virtual goods work in local context?
• How can exploring and shopping books in a store be linked to online commerce? How can stores benefit from online mechanisms such as recommendation algorithms, user reviews or home delivery?
• etc.

Anyway — there's a book store here in Hamburg that does a lot of things quite right, which is called Stories (yeah!). For example, they're offering a "reading saloon" with a library feel and coffee and they're organizing events around publications, authors or all kinds of topics related to reading on a regular basis.

But the most remarkable thing is how they offer a feature known from the digital world in an analog form and context: in the shelf shown below, there are not only books, but added printed reviews from different kinds of publications. They are from newspapers and magazines or things like that, but from a technical perspective, they could also be user reviews. 

I'm looking forward how this place is going to evolve over the next few years. As suggested some lines above: I see a bright future for book stores – if they notice the turn of the tide and act.

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When we visited my parents the other day I found a game I had almost forgotten: Blinki – an electronically augmented board game from the 80s. 

It contains a dozen of printed sheets with nicely illustrated motives. They are aligned in two columns, and you have to find pairs. Here's how you explore: there are two cables with some sort of connectors at their ends to touch right below the items – one in the left, one in the right column. If you found a correct connection, a green LED is flashing.

Touchscreen games are cool, but the tactile feel of paper, the beauty of well printed illustration and something as unpretentious as this very simple cause and effect interaction with two plugs, cables and a LED are hard to beat.

Since things start to get really interesting if real objects are being digitally augmented, imagine this kind of game (the "display" and interaction part) combined with a device, for example the LED replaced by an iPhone, adding some additional flavor (which could be everything from just giving visual feedback for correct answers to tracking and visualizing your gaming behaviour). Can you imagine exciting scenarios, or is this dumb green LED just part of the charm?

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The conversation:

The close-up:

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A few days ago I was asking my social networks if there's a specific term for "user interfaces assisting human-to-human interaction — in a sense of eg. group learning, (cardboard) game play, reading books to kids, doctor vs. patient, salesperson vs. customer ..."? I was actually looking for a technical term a la GUI, TUI or NUI or such …

So far, I have no concrete indication for a field like that, already being explicitely labeled eg. CUI (Collaborative User Interfaces) – because a first thought was it must be something with "collaborative" (which was confirmed by my friend Sonja in my Facebook thread). The only thing I'm missing in this is that it is too generic, or too open-ended. In a way, things like Facebook are also collaborative user interfaces, though interaction between people is mostly virtual (although it might lead to real-world interaction, but in best case, Facebook in its current form then doesn't make an appearance anymore ;-).

I found one paper that talks about "synchronous collaborative user interfaces", which is indeed longer, but also more to the point. Although "synchronous" could still refer to Facebook – at least if you're online together with some friends, doing a lot of wall-to-wall posting or chatting – it still refers more to a group of 2 or more people, sharing the same real-world location at the same time.

If you're stumbling across something related or have some thoughts around the topic, please let me know. We're currently researching and developing in this field as we're confident that there's a lot of room and perspective for ideas with all these new mobile devices such as smartphones and mainly tablets (here are some thoughts on the iPad as a shared device). And of course there's plenty of open ground on the horizon if you think beyond today's devices and screens (huge immersive multi-touch screens are quite appealing, though ;-) – interaction involving tactile everyday objects, things that are becoming intelligent with added sensors and microchips. When computing is finally becoming ubiquitous, when digital is seamlessly woven into the real-world.

Think of interfaces that are actively assisting any form of collaboration between at least two people in a face to face constellation. Think of that interface not being too immersive to distract your counterpart away from you (or both altogether), but instead enhance your face to face interaction, help you fulfill the task you're currently into together.

Update: Moritz has pointed me to an academic field called computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) that is being researched since 1984. According to the Wikipedia entry, CSCW "addresses how collaborative activities and their coordination can be supported by means of computer systems" – which describes pretty well what I was looking for. I find the title a bit too cryptical and dated though, but really great to see there's a lot to read about. Now it's time to find – and work on some good examples.

On the Wikipedia page for CSCW there's a graphic called "CSCW Matrix". The aspects that I find most interesting about it are the ones in the upper left – face to face interactions, same place (colocated), same time (synchronous). When talking about a device such as the iPad for that purpose, that might be "single display groupware":

Here are two academic papers I found touching the topic of "collaborative user interfaces" in the broadest sense:

Model-based development of synchronous collaborative user interfaces (PDF)

This paper undertakes with collaborative software development taking into account requirements emerged from recent progress in technologies relevant to networks and computing devices. Considering this technological breakthrough, especially under the light of the consequently sharply growing online virtual communities, we can deduce that a new substance is given to the software supporting collaborative practices for multiple environments. In such cases, one important aspect to consider is the user interfaces (UIs) design supporting group work appropriately. The results today offer a rich insight to the desired groupware functionality and the features devised to facilitate such functionality (i.e., replication models, object sharing, floor control, etc). On the other hand, very little is known about their capability to facilitate generation of multi-user interfaces to groupware applications. With the advent of model-based user interface engineering, which signifies a move towards transformation-based approaches to generating the user interface, one challenge is bridging across these two perspectives. The current work seeks to contribute to this goal by identifying the type of models needed to capture collaborative behavior in synchronous multiple user interface settings as well as generating the collaborative user interface by making use of suitable platform-oriented architectural models.

Designing Collaborative User Interfaces for Ubiquitous Applications Using CIAM: The AULA Case Study (PDF)

Abstract: In this article we explain how we apply the CIAM methodology based on the CIAN notation in order to generate user interfaces in collaborative applications. CIAM has been applied successfully in the development of desktop applications, such as Domosim-TPC, demonstrating its effectiveness in the definition of user interfaces for collaborative applications where a shared context is required. We present the AULA system modeled by means of CIAM. The results in the application of this Methodology show the necessity to include those aspects closely related with context modeling and the synchronization of contents; that is why we make an outline of the way to take into account these characteristics as a future work.

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Some time ago I wrote a posting called Strategies for "digital self-control"?, giving "some general examples of where I think a certain concept or feature of a digital environment is – by design – having a profound impact on the user's perception and behaviour". Without mentioning the notion once, what I was surely (and unconsciously) hinting to was the idea of persuasive design.

It apparently took me two years and meeting the author in person to find out about these two stunning presentations around the topic. Make sure to watch them both – 246 slides, all worth your clicks:

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Photo by Yukino Miyazawa

I just came back from using Stadtrad Hamburg the first time. It's a pretty new rent-a-bike service here in Hamburg, offering around 1000 bikes at currently 71 stations all over town. There are a dozen bikes per station and anyone can instantly rent a bike with a  touchscreen terminal, calling a number or using your smartphone instead.

It is a good example for connecting a digital service to the real world. No advanced techno-magic, no circumstantial visit-our-website-and-print-out-your-data disillusion – it's just there and works. There's an iPhone app you can download for free (I'm sure there's also something available for other platforms), enter your credentials once and then handle the full process of renting a bike. It tells you where the next station is, how many bikes are available and let's you unlock a bicycle of your choice on location by providing you with a 4 digit pin code you only need to enter into a tiny touchscreen that is mounted on the bike.

When I first heard about the service, I was a bit sceptical – I guess we're just used to find a catch in such things. But today I'm quite excited about a few aspects they have done just right for an urban mobility offering:

1. It's quite simple and can be used instantly (you pay €5 for registering, getting cleared with your first bill).
2. There are plenty of stations and bikes available all over the city. You can go pretty much from anywhere to everywhere, it's very likely a station is nearby and they're planning to extend this ubiquity even more over time.
3. The first 30 minutes are free of charge.
4. You can rent two bikes at the same time, so you can always take a friend on your ride with you.

It is also a good example for a service, or product being an advertising campaign itself. You can see the stations and bikes pretty much everywhere and you hear a lot of satisfied customers as well as good press, so there's effective word-of-mouth recommendation going on. Which in turn casts a pretty good light on the Hamburg senate and even their operational partner Deutsche Bahn, the German railway carrier, a brand that is not very liked among customers.

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We're currently working on a new room in our studio. Here are some work in progress photos.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Via Ohdeedoh.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

These slides are taken from this compelling presentation by Paul Adams, a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. Within user research, they let people map their real life social network with post-its and this is how this could look like.

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