Frank Chimero provided an inspiring talk on our relationship with the trail of digital artefacts we have personally collected over years of internet use. How can we make these collections more personal? How can we make them tell a story and reflect their owners in the way a diary or commonplace book would in the 19th Century? (Spoiler: he doesn’t know. But that’s what makes this an exciting challenge)

Delightful design

Left a trail of stuff I have tagged, starred, etc.

Analog vs digital

Visible – invisible Remember – forget find – search own – access

Analog = or Digital = and

Digital Extends into the services we use. Analogue is The Palpable stack

Digital is a phantom pile. Still a presence to it that burns cycles to my brain There is a latent potential in this collection of stars.

It’s valuable to have stuff. In one place. They can co-mingle.

Commonplace books used by gentlemen of past. The book becomes stamped with your personality.

“Curation is authorship.” – Paul saffo Produce and consume in the same act.

Missing one key thing with digital. The architecture of serendipity. Have to find the content in a book. A YouTube hole does this.

Architecture of arrangement.

Curation. Find and collect. On the web we are missing arrangement. Need to take a second pass to make a narrative experience.

Tools are optimising for getting things in.

Stars can be constellations. Connecting separate things, creating a shape and imbuing it with a meaning.

Som big design decisions – reassess how we sort stuff.

Searching vs finding for old or new stuff

How do we arrange things spatially? Linear blocky layout is limiting.

The properties of digital. Infinitely mutable.

how we move through time

Content can timeshift. Eg. Instapaper. Postpones. It’s aspirational. Instapaper is a time machine. It goes both ways. Future and past.

There are enough footprints that we can bubble it up and bring it to the present.

See. Photojojo.

media supported.

We need to be multi media See the NY Library Biblion iPad app.

Why not Biblion my own collection too?

Ancient Greeks used the flattened surface of the sky to tell and overlay stories. Can we do the same with our collections of stars?

Kelly Goto is a design ethnographer. She had a lot to say about designing things, approaches to finding the emotional charactersitics that make people respond, and many interesting examples. She almost had too much to say… She rushed the last part of her talk, just as she was bringing all the threads together into an explanation of a coherent design research methodology.

Here is some of what she covered:

empathy

We are trying to be connected to the materials we design.

She tells the story of her children going through a hospital experience, and how that made her really want to make a difference to medical interfaces.

Connected experiences

Connections between things, devices and lifestyles and products for creating change in behaviour.

Connection=meaning, Systematic and connected. Systems are connected things

addiction and fun

We want you to create addictive experiences

How can we evolve back from stooped computer beings to people with open, good posture? Open to real physical interaction, being physical together is being connected. Posture.

Functional, usable, pleasurable.

Understanding people’s rituals is the key to understanding an addictive experience.

devotion

Example of the fun and effortlessness of driving a mini. Mood is so important. Context is everything. Experience, trust. Relates to brand. Human machine communication. Efficiency. Usability.

Challenge is to make machine to human communications fun.

research

Focus groups don’t give accurate information. Observation in context provides more rich understanding of complex things like lifestyle and emotion.

Break down the experience into emotional functional comfort.

beyond usable

We are now at the point that things should at a baseline, function. We have moved up mazlows hierarchy of needs. Usability is covered, we can start thinking about some of the higher values.

sensory engineering

(And this is where it started getting a bit rushed)

Kensei engineering.

People Input sensory and knowledge. Moved Demographics Psychographics Emotional

Contextual interviews

“Deep hanging out” allows researchers to discover emotions.

experience mapping

Identity public private Satisfaction wonder comfort connection Context timeline Understand hidden needs

Kensei Aware, unaware.

We have to understand the spacing in between things and understand connections and lifestyle.

I hope she posts her slides sometime, it was hard to get the last 10 minutes of her talk, but plenty keywords to thing about.