by Gabriel Biller, posted October 27th, 2008
categorized under design, natural ui, trends
Like most people (presumably), we at Artefact have us some serious Election Fever! Nervous with anticipation and wishing for the most directly participatory part of the democratic process (i.e., citizens voting for their leaders and representatives) to play out with as little voter suppression and electoral fraud as possible, we found the following sketch from Fred Armisen at Saturday Night Live to be a welcome and much-needed dose of comic relief:
Surely, you all can appreciate the SNL folks’ lighthearted jab at CNN’s John King, cable television’s reigning wizard of the Perceptive Pixel multitouch display. His skills with tapping, panning, zooming, rotating, and coloring are indeed formidable, but we can’t help but think that sometimes he just likes to monkey around.
As big advocates of surface computing and natural user interfaces, we know that multitouch surfaces and displays lend themselves to many wonderful moments of surprise and delight. Besides enabling powerful, new experiences which allow us to manipulate all kinds of data and media in order to better understand information and be incredibly productive, these impressive technologies can be a lot of fun too.
But - on a more sober note - there are certain times and places for fun, and there are others where we need technology and systems to perform their functions accurately, reliably, and intuitively for all possible users.
Like in the voting booth, for example.
According to Clive Thompson, “new voting technologies tend to emerge out of crises of confidence.” In 2000, we experienced such a crisis with the infamous “hanging chad” debacle in Florida. Since then, government and election officials have scrambled to avoid similar disasters by investing in technology “upgrades.” But so far, these experiments aren’t making anyone feel any better. Electronic touchscreen voting systems are falling out of favor, and this November’s general election is showing a significant shift back to paper ballots and optical scan technologies.
In the upcoming days, we will share our thoughts on how technology has shaped the voter experience, not just in the actual or figurative “booth,” but in the months or years before and the days or weeks after. We’ll take a brief look back at where we’ve been, then look ahead to what might be in the year 2028. We will speculate on how trends in technology, society, and culture may affect the future of the voting process – from the moment citizens register and become involved in educating themselves, to participating actively in democracy, to what happens when votes are being counted and results are being reported.
We believe the voter experience will become more user-centered (it already has, to some extent, with things like mail-in and early voting), but how exactly? Will the next generation voter experience be limited to outside the polling place or inside as well? Will the polling place be physical or virtual? Will Americans be voting online following Estonia’s lead? Will we add more transparency to the process by creating open-source code for our voting machines like the Aussies have already done? Will we cast our votes using RFID or via text message? Will it all be telepathic?!
In the meantime, though we still have dumb or suspicious machines recording our votes and possibly illegal efforts to purge voter rolls, do the Web 2.0 thing and participate, co-create, mash it up, get social, and monitor and capture your experiences (but check your state laws to make sure you aren’t breaking them!). Here are some suggestions:
by Kevin Wong, posted October 23rd, 2008
categorized under artefact, design, press
Hello! We hope you guys like the changes to the blog. We have taken the blogging component out from the Laboratory Frontier site and turned it into the official Artefact blog! This is really exciting for us now that each page feels much more coherent. Please email us if you find any strange things going on, or errors popping up. I’ll be happy to fix them immediately. Otherwise, we feel this will be a smooth transition for everyone.
We’ve added a few extra goodies to make this a little more engaging. At the bottom of every page you can now submit stories to different social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Facebook and Twitter. Related posts are now populated at the end of every entry so you can find similar posts based on tags. Categories are now promoted into the byline as well to help you find other stories that may interest you. As we continue to update this blog, these things will become increasingly more useful over time. Finally, additional links to the left sidebar are included so we can stay connected with you all on a more casual basis. We’re always eager to hear and learn from you. So give us a holler!
Some may wonder what has happened to the Laboratory Frontier site? Well, it is currently being moved to its new home: http://labs.artefactgroup.com/
The mission remains the same: To continue exploring new experiences through hands on experience by blending the practices of rapid prototyping and ethnography. We feel it is a big part of our culture here at Artefact, and so we felt it was appropriate to give it its own home, with its own set of pages/blog. We will be cataloging more experiments that we are currently planning for, as well as keep a log of our trials and tribulations through the Frontier blog.
Stay tuned because things are going to get more exciting around here!
Ivan Tihienko had a vision where the world was exactly like Second Life. Actually, his vision was really about designing a new interface that went beyond on screen displays. His final project at the Bezalel academy of Arts and Design is a life size projection of commands and contextual information, which can be initiated by hand or foot gestures. It’s quite nice to see it’s potential for way finding and gaming purposes. However, the keyboard part is still up in the air for me. I’m not sure I’d want the rest of the world see my emails to my mum about her trip to Barcelona, or if they even want to bother with that either. His work is still very inspiring and maybe we’ll see something like this someday!
by Kevin Wong, posted October 22nd, 2008
categorized under events
Just wanted to give a friendly reminder that the Seattle IxDA October Event will be hosted by Office Labs in Building 33. Three speakers will join the event to discuss how interaction design can learn from the challenges game design face everyday. It is also a great opportunity to network with other designers in the area who are passionate about what they do.
This month’s topic is ” Lessons from game design”
this is a chance to learn where the fields of interaction design and game design overlap. It’s a chance for IxD to learn more about how games challenge, reward, and engage players. We’ll hear how game designers use prototyping and sketching (Daniel Cook), about User Research on Social/Party Games(George Amaya ), and how narrative and storytelling immerse players in experiences (Mark Long).
If you haven’t already, RSVP through Upcoming now!
Folks, we will be attending the Forrester Consumer Forum 2008 next week, Tuesday October 28th until the 29th. As we finalize our prepartions here in the studio, we wanted to give you a heads up that we will be live blogging during each presentation. It’s going to be an exciting event with lots of great insights and demonstrations of what’s going to happen in the future.
If you want to learn more about the event, you can visit the Forrester site. The basic premise is on social computing and mobile technology. These are two hot topics that we’ve had the pleasure to research and design solutions for our clients. This will be a great opportunity to build on our learnings and discuss with other brilliant minds the kinds of things we went through to innovate in a crowded market.
So check back in with us! I will be following the consumer research track, while Agnieszka focuses on product strategy and processes.
We’ll be uploading photos along the way on our Flickr account, dropping tweets on our favorite blue bird application, and serving up fresh entries here on the blog with commentary on what we’re hearing.
For those of you who are attending, add us, follow up, friends us, or all of the above! See you there!
One thing that we want to do around here is help spread the word of all the amazing work that is going on out there. Some of it might be a revolutionary tech breakthrough, a researcher uncovering a new behavior in telecommunications, or a designer who mocked up a sustainable laptop. Luckily, most of it is captured somewhere on the web. The result is what we’re calling the a-List, a weekly series where we share our interests with you. Our hope is that you find it just as inspiring. a-List postings will be served up every Monday so that you have something to revisit every day for the rest of the week! Plus, if we posted on Friday, we figured you would have other things to think about, like the weekend. So without further ado, here’s the first round of the a-List:
Log Bowls
Wonderful work by Doha Chebib who turns fallen trees into colorful bowls.
Design Engaged 2008
Nicolas Nova has a nice cover post on the activities that went on during Design Engaged. He points out a lot of the main speaking points each person had during the event, which have all been centered around future experiences from a blend of practical and theoretical perspectives.
90 Mobiles in 90 Days
Rachel Hinman quest for creative recovery with 90 mobile [designs] in 90 days. She finished a couple weeks ago, but we still wanted to give her a congratulations!
by Kevin Wong, posted October 17th, 2008
categorized under design
The desktop metaphor has long been understood and used for decades. We’ve touched it, we’ve clicked it, we’ve even made it into a panorama! Well Shock Desktop 3D takes us one step closer to this model of computing with their version of what some of you may be familiar with, BumpTop.
It basically turns your desktop [Windows only folks] into a 3D environment where you can bump your files around in space like physical objects. It’s a fun idea that doesn’t require heavy amounts of computing resources to run.
If you haven’t already done so, take this short quiz. The Answers are at the bottom of this page.
If you got more than two right, you’re my hero. When I tested this quiz with folks at Artefact, the results were appalling. The commoditization of e-commerce experiences is an industry-wide phenomenon, to the point where even the patriotic use of red, white and blue doesn’t make much difference. The sites miss obvious opportunities to articulate their brand values or provide deeply engaging user experiences, a sense of wonder and exploration. Perhaps retailers are hesitant to invest in a great user experience, given low stickiness of online users – after all, it is possible that in search for a better price users will abandon a no-matter-how-compelling online experience in favor of another e-retailer who carries the same goods at a lower price. But without developing compelling experiences, isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy?
So why should retailers care to differentiate their online retail experiences? Here are a few facts:
According to Shop.org and Forrester research, online sales account for 7% of all retail and are growing faster than the overall retail market at 17-24% year over year (and while slowdowns in retail growth have been projected, they are expected to affect online retail less than the traditional retail).
For retailers, the 7% revenues from online purchases translate into significantly higher percentage of their profits. That’s because margins are thicker for online stores due to lower costs of not having to maintain a physical presence.
Many users tend to do online research even if they actually later purchase the item in the physical store. So the 7% of actual revenues translates into a lot more first impressions.
Despite these fairly promising trends in online retail, e-commerce sites are facing some tough challenges. As noted before, user loyalty is low. “Brand defectors” – the people who make the purchase in a physical store of a different company than whose site they visited for the research – are a common phenomenon, and as many as two-thirds of online buyers say they prefer to make the actual purchase at the physical store, according to a Forrester Research study. It also turns out that online shoppers are becoming more and more cautious. Even if they do complete a purchase online, the time between the initial visit to the site and the actual purchase has gone up from 19 to 34 hours since 2005, according to a large study by ScanAlert. What are they doing between the initial visit and the actual purchase? Likely more research and reaching out to the community of other buyers. After all, two-thirds buyers believe that the same items should be cheaper online, to quote Forrester again.
When presented with a design challenge, our goal at Artefact is to innovate. In looking forward, we’re constantly looking back to learn what’s been done before and questioning how to further simplify and improve upon ways to accomplish a goal or a specific task.
Innovative design is transparent, even mundane by some standards. That is, when something is so well-designed that it just works as you expect or easily becomes integrated into your life, the design feels simply obvious.
Thinking about how things work and wondering why things exist as they do often leads to inspiration. Take the celebrated toaster. Surely every home with a kitchen must have one. There are even toaster museums around the world. Yet even something so obvious as a toaster might very well lend itself to something different.
The future is endless possibility and constant reflection. Stay tuned for more links to inspiring projects and questions, definitely more questions.
by Gabriel Biller, posted October 27th, 2008
by Kevin Wong, posted 
