October 2010
12 posts
This isn’t working for me. I’m going back to one blog.
More on self-driving cars
From the Official Google Blog:
Our cars are never unmanned. We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By mapping...
The Cultural Significance of Down Time →
Sam Ladner calls for designers to understand and respect “down time”.
Death of the Uncool →
This seems important.
3 tags
How about no, Eric?
Techcrunch reported last week that Eric Schmidt, Google’s Creepy Executive Officer said “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers”.
Schmidt noted that it’s ridiculous that humans and not computers drive cars. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense.”
Schmidt has previously said1 that computers should do what computers are good at and people...
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The Bad Plus - Everybody Wants To Rule The World
...
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“Two things struck me about this album. The first was that it contained not a...”
– Are the best pictures on Facebook or Flickr? (via iamdanw)
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Bruce Schneier is a Ren Faire Geek →
Too, too perfect. You really should click through. There’s a photo.
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September 2010
8 posts
“Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He...”
– President Obama about meeting Bob Dylan when he did a performance at the White House to celebrate the civil rights movement. (via warispeace)
This is perfect.
(via apsies)
“No such thing as a bad photo only a bad crop.”
– Attributed to Guy Featherstone of w+k by Ben Terrett, Photo advice (Noisy Decent Graphics)
Having just got my first roll back from my ’60s Minolta Hi-Matic, this is spot on.
Young and Brilliant: Readings... →
Nina’s “readings” are always interesting.
Thanks, Nina!
ninakix:
Blah blah blah. This is for most of September. Readings from the last week will be up in the next day or two. Enjoy!
The Peanut Solution was one of my favorite articles I read in the past few weeks. A few things I was struck by: how simple solutions can be with just a little thought and…
June 2010
6 posts
“Ubiquitous computing’s vision, however, is over a decade old at this point...”
– Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish, Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision.
Gatwick airport announced that they’re changing their logo to a “signature” because
“we want the airport to feel very personal and that we absolutely care about passengers having a good time going through the airport”
Will Wiles is distinctly unimpressed.
Want to make people happy, Gatwick? You can’t. Want to help people enjoy the airport? Minimal...
Week 182
Ah. Marking and writing.
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1 tag
Week 181
Writing. Writing. Writing.
Also poking at the OZCHI website; marking; solving various computer problems around the office; avoiding attending staff meetings; writing; marking.
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Week 180
Things were written. Data was considered. Graphs were made. More was written and, yes, rewritten.
Also, making slides counts as writing, too, right?
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Week 179
It was what it was.
Projects on the Go
Writing long paper for OZCHI
Preparing presentation for commercial research partners
Reading one of my PhD student’s confirmation reports
Projects on the Backburner
Accursed journal paper
Workshop proposal on “Service Design” for OZCHI (Tentative title: “What isn’t service design?”)
Presentation for DRS2010 paper...
May 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Week 178
Yep. That was better than last week.
Things were achieved. Small things. But achieved nonetheless.
Onward. Upward. Twirling. Etc.
1 tag
Week 177
Dear Week 177,
We’ve had a nice time, you and I. And the problems we have are mine, not yours. I’m going to be moving on, 177, to a week that I think understands my needs.
178 doesn’t make me go to meetings that should never have been called or sit through “training” that would have been better delivered as a three-bullet point email.
I’m sorry, 177....
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Week 176
Work Completed (for now)
Abstract submitted for book chapter
Annual report to Hospital Ethics board for stethoscope project
Work in development
Self-service technology in Airports research has really ramped up. This could not be more full of win.
Really. I’m going to complete this journal paper.
Other threads
OZCHI is coming up. Must complete workshop proposal on “service...
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Week 175
Hmm…
Sorted some more of the Sekrit Project.
Sorted the slightly kludgy calendar we use for sorting out booking the research lab.
Sorted spending lots of money to upgrade the lab.
Saw my great PhD students who are going along nicely.
Went to Toowoomba to for a project management meeting for the Stethoscope project. Went surprisingly well.
Teaching on Friday.
Met with the Complex...
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Lucy Kimbell's Design-as-practice and...
I can’t say how great I think Lucy Kimbell’s recent paper “Beyond design thinking: Design-as-practice and designs-in-practice” (pdf) is. Beginning with an overview of design research it describes a way around the problems we have talking about design and introduces a new way of thinking about design, what is designed, who designs and how it’s done.
If you’re...
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Mental Models are neither mental nor models
I don’t like the concept of mental models. The idea of a mental model priviledges the mental aspects of how people understand artefacts and glosses over the others. The idea that the model-in-the-head is completely representative of the act-
in-the-world is kind of weird.
Let’s say that you have a “mental model” of reading a book. The model is not just in your head....
Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech... →
Robert Fortner writes on the epic history and doomed future of speech recognition.
The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers—which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer...
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Week 174
Monday
ANZAC day holiday
Tuesday Very Important Meeting with industry representatives for current large research project.
Wednesday
Completed nigh-compulsory moderated learning experience (if it was delivereed web 2.0 style it would have been called an “extended webinar” or something. But it was decidedly web 1.0, so it wasn’t.)
Thursday
Feels like a lost day.
Friday...
April 2010
7 posts
1 tag
Week 173
The week began with preparation of paperwork for DRS2010. I hate travel paperwork. There was also paperwork for buying new equipment for the research lab — a few new PCs and upgrades to our qualitative research software.
I attended a PhD confirmation seminar on machine vision. I learned more about how the engineers here do their research than about machine vision.
There was marking this...
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“We’re increasingly surrounded by smart things, but it’s not their...”
– Peter Morville, on Ubiquitous Service Design.
He goes on to say,
It’s an era in which information blurs the boundaries, enabling multi-channel, cross-platform, trans-media, physico-digital user experiences. To succeed, we’ll need teams that are multi-disciplinary and individuals...
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Weeknote 172
For reasons to do with research ethics, I can’t really tell you why I spent quite a while figuring out how to blur peoples faces in video. Blurring faces is pretty easy if you have professional-grade video software. It turns out that blurring a static region of a video is fairly easy in iMovie 08 and iMovie 09.
I also learned how to find my biblometric data in various horrible but powerful...
Natural User Interfaces are Not
In my PhD thesis I said, quite early on,
The largest problem with interfaces that use a recognition paradigm is that they are error-prone in their interaction. This is not to say that it is easier for users of recognition systems to make mistakes with such systems but that the systems themselves make mistakes.
Compare with Steve Ballmer in the Huffington Post of January this year:
But I...
“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members...”
– The Collapse of Complex Business Models » Clay Shirky (via aboveandbeyond)
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Week 171
I feel I did things
Yet I have nothing to show
Now it is Autumn
Contrasting Scenarios: Embracing Speech... →
Last year I submitted a book chapter for a new collection of Human-Computer Interaction papers. It’s about using scenarios in a particular way for thinking about designing stuff that’s really hard to prototype.
Caricatured scenarios are a tool that designers and researchers can use to explore the use of disruptive technologies and communicate the implications of introducing...
March 2010
7 posts
1 tag
Week 170
This week fas been about the stethoscope project. Data collection on Wednesday loomed over the week. Two cameras, two charging packs, six folders of ethics and consent documentation and I took a drive up the range to Toowoomba hospital to observe and record anaesthetic preadmission clinics. What we’re most interested in is the role stethoscopes play in consultations as we’re part of a...
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Week 169
Oh, so late again…
Monday: Fixing research ethics submission.
Tuesday: Fixing research ethics submission. Helped PhD student work with Atlas.ti.
Wednesday: Handed in research ethics submission - yay! Received feedback on research grant submission and learned how process will inevitably change next year. Prepared to go out on Thursday.
Thursday: Went to Toowoomba, 2+hrs drive south...
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You can't get there from here
Roberto Verganti has written an article for HBR where he says “User-Centered Innovation Is Not Sustainable”.
Verganti argues:
But one thing is certain: User-centered innovation has helped conduct us into an unsustainable world. The reason is sustainability is not embedded in the anthropology of our existing culture, society, and economy.
He says that Toyota’s Prius was...
“In the end, people don’t buy content or plots, they buy physical or...”
– Jason Kottke on the new rules for reviewing media.
File under: Everything is a service
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Week 168
I have no idea what I accomplished last week. Stuff happened. There were very few actual milestone deliverables. In fact, there were probably none. I attended what I think was my first pre pre-meeting meeting. In my defence, I was unaware as to the pre-pre nature of said meeting until near to the end.
Oh, yeah. And classes started in earnest which meant consulting with 11-or-so really great 4th...
Passengers in the airport: Artefacts and... →
Papers from OZCHI 2009 are now available at the ACM Digital Library including mine, which was about some of the research I’d done with my colleagues Vesna and Phil about what passengers do in airports.
This study addresses the ordinary activities of passengers in airports. Using observational techniques we investigated how passenger activities are mediated by artefacts, in this case the...
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Week 167
I like Chris Butler’s headings from his weeknote so I’m going to adapt them here for this week. And I’m about half a week late, so this gets done in bullets. I’ll do prose next week.
Work Completed (for now)
ARC Grant application completed and submitted. Surprisingly good feedback from important people.
Work in Development
Ethics applications for the Airport Project....
February 2010
3 posts
1 tag
How is Service Design different from Management?
An article on GOOD about Zipcar catalogues some of the elements that make Zipcar a success, including “RFID” and “wireless technology”. (Let’s ignore that RFID is a wireless technology.) The article also notes how much of what makes Zipcar great is their attention to details of the service including how parking works and car insurance and the maintenance of the...