Mariann Unterluggauer, Vienna, interviewed Aaron Marcus and others at CHI 2013, Paris, about their views of the conference. The broadcast took place on Austrian radio 19 May 2013, 22:30 AT time, http://oe1.orf.at/programm/337710. The broadcast was available on demand for 7 more days at: http://oe1.orf.at/konsole?show=ondemand.
AM+A Blog
Journalist Interviews Aaron Marcus about CHI 2013 on Austrian Radio
Mariann Unterluggauer, Vienna, interviewed Aaron Marcus and others at CHI 2013, Paris, about their views of the conference. The broadcast took place on Austrian radio 19 May 2013, 22:30 AT time, http://oe1.orf.at/programm/337710. The broadcast was available on demand for 7 more days at: http://oe1.orf.at/konsole?show=ondemand.
CHI 2013 Grows Up
CHI 2013 took place during 27 April through 2 May 2013 in Paris’ Palais des Congrès, not far from the Arc de Triomphe on the western edge of the city center. Besides being notable as the first CHI conference ever to be forced to turn away eager participants because they simply could not take on more visitors (I was told they planned for about 2100 to 2400, but they had to stop at 3400!), the conference was memorable, for me, because the contents of many presentations, posters, and consequent discussions seemed more, well, grown up, or mature, than I remember from many conferences in the past three decades.
Perhaps it was the influence of this very sophisticated, elegant city of lights. Many Paris citizens looked like they had just stepped out from a fashion shoot. Even if a cancer-inducing cigarette was dangling vertically from silent, pouting, or even speaking lips, well, it just appeared more elegant, more cosmopolitan. Even the lady in a small side-walk booth sporting a battery-powered electronic cigarette looked sophisticated as she tried to convince me to try one. I didn’t, preferring real, very occasional small cigars.
In the CHI social gatherings, elegant multi-colored, complex sweet treats and other nibbles, the hors d’oeuvres served with beverages of our choice, seemed much more architectural and visually appealing, signaling, perhaps, that more was expected of conversations, and presentations.
In my opinion, this is exactly what I found. I comment on my own, admittedly limited, exposure to a plethora of activities.
My week started with my participation in a two-day workshop on “HCI in Third Places” organized by Roberto Calderon, Sydney Fels, and Junia Anacleto. I presented our own project the “Learning Machine,” a mobile concept design for learning anywhere, anytime. At first I was a little uncertain about the value of the objectives and likely outcome, but as I had more exposure to the issues of concern, I realized that this workshop was focusing our attention on actual physical places where people gather outside of work/school and home, and how technology might help or hurt the truly human-human interaction and communication. The importance of these shrinking opportunities of real interaction, not isolation, limited, or virtual encounters, were important to cherish and nourish. Imagine our delight and surprise when we learned that much of Day 1 was devoted to field/contextual studies of Parisian cafés. I have never, ever spent so much time drinking coffee and observing people, in this case in the Latin Quarter! What a delightful, and insightful, experience.
Other workshops, which I noted from the Program or heard about from other participants seemed to focus attention on topics that have been touched upon in past conferences of CHI, UXPA, DUXU, and others, but the frequency with which these terms seemed to be used at CHI 2013 signaled a nuanced understanding: that concerns more than technical were at stake, more than abstractions, more than software, more than hardware, more than cognitive science, more than computer science, which have been the bases for CHI’s activities and interests for decades, its grounding communities of interest. I mean, for example, the terms mentioned in workshop titles of children, ethics, families, seniors, sustainability, teen-agers, and vulnerable people.
The opening keynote about “The New Frontiers of Design” by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, discussed issues of how to understand, value, and respect HCI objects/devices/systems in their present and future collections. This topic added perhaps just the right spin to papers, panels, exhibits, and other events that emphasized design and the presence of designers at CHI. Perhaps many younger attendees may not appreciate that designers have fought long and hard to be included in the Proceedings and sessions of CHI. As a former Board Member of Interactions, I can recall when a member of the academic community cautioned about accepting design-based articles and sneered that the design rabble was infiltrating the august hallways dominated by computer science and cognitive science. The times, indeed, have changed. As the first member of the CHI Academy with an official design background, I am part of this change (some would say) progress or maturation of CHI.
Even in posters, whether from student competitions or PhD dissertations, the variety of topics seemed much more diverse, much more socially aware, and much more curious about the world. I was surprised and touched to discover three Mexican women students from the Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca standing by their poster about a project to raise awareness of women about how to cope with and live a life free from gender violence. Another display entitled “Using Design Thinking to Empower Immigrant Youth as Information Mediaries” seemed to bring together urban civic organizations, technology providers, and social services groups in a fresh, productive way. It is not that these topics have not appeared in the past, but this conference seemed to carry many more of these themes. That seemed, also, to be a sign that CHI was maturing in its social, political, and cultural roles and responsibilities.
On a more techie note, I was delighted to see at least one display/presentation about the use of fingernails. I have suggested for several years that this part of the body might be at one of the forefronts of display innovation. Raphael Wimmer and Florian Echtler of the University of Regensburg showed a prototype of a device that would enable you to see on your own fingernail the enlarged letters or symbols that your finger was over, thereby making it easier to point, select, type, etc., on touch-sensitive surfaces or interactive buttons/keys.
One of the art/game-oriented exhibits also caught my attention: “Big Huggin’: A Bear for Affection Gaming,” by Linsay Grace. Big Huggin’ is a game played with a 30-inch custom teddy bear controller. Players complete the game by providing several well-timed hugs to propel an avatar on a wall- display to leap over obstacles (see photo of teddy bear).
The reason this project seemed especially poignant was that I had just heard a TED talk on National Public Radio before coming to CHI, of Sherry Turkel from MIT’s Media Lab recanting her earlier enthusiasm for adorable robot technology used to calm Alzheimer’s patients or other patients with dementia, after she realized that technology was enabling all of us to “outsource” care and concern for vulnerable people, whether family members or not. She now feels such technology is leading us down a path that desensitizes us and makes us even more remote and isolated from others, we who seem no longer to wish to make the time to care for others and might not even know what to do given the opportunity to care. This controversial issue seemed to be hovering conceptually nearby, as I watched enthusiastic CHI participants hug the teddy bear and squeal with delight.
After roaming the corridors, social gatherings, and session breaks for a week, I realized that the most valuable part of CHI was the time I spent talking with people, not the presentations or the posters themselves. In fact, it seemed clearer than ever that the CHI conference was a giant version of the Parisian cafe. I felt I had just enjoyed a tremendous jolt of, not only caffeine, but of discourse, challenging discussions, renewals of old friendships, and close encounters of many kinds with new, strange, different people and ideas, not just technology, and an opportunity to make new friends.
Bravo! to the organizers/sponsors of CHI 2013 for providing such a rich, varied, and “mature” environment in which to have these experiences. CHI has come a long way since its founding in 1982 and through its many transformations over the past three decades. I am glad I have been able to witness, and perhaps to have contributed a little, to these changes.
Figure: Photo of Aaron Marcus with a tourist’s beret hugging teddy bear used as an alternative input device.
German Radio Carries Interview with Aaron Marcus at CHI 2013 in Paris
Mariann Unterluggauer, Vienna Journalist, interviewed Aaron Marcus at CHI 2013 in Paris on 2 May 2013. The interview was broadcast on German Radio:
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Posts LoCoS book
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has posted LoCoS: Visual Language for Global Communication, co-authored by Yukio Ota, Cecilia Macaulay, and Aaron Marcus. The long-awaited, 295-page English translation of the guide to the LoCoS universal sign language invented by first-author Yukio Ota in 1964. KDP Select published the book at the Kindle Store. Readers may purchase the book at www.amazon.com/dp/B00AUW0QFC
The End of Civilization as We Knew It
Is it just me? I don’t think so. I do not think that I am being singled out by sinister forces whose objective is to end usability, usefulness, and enjoyment of user experiences as I knew them and hoped would continue. However, I am becoming increasingly worried about the future of civilization. Consider these cautionary tales:
Apple
In August 2011, I purchased a new Apple MacBook Pro from a local Apple Store. I was warned about jumping two levels in the operating systems to OS 10.7. Apple operating system versions are given charming (?) animal names by Apple but I refuse to learn them because they are impossible to remember in terms of sequence. Is a Leopard before a Lion? I suppose alphabetically it is. I decided: if I have to suffer OS migration terror, I might as well do it just once. In retrospect, I feel I made the wrong decision. The experience was disastrous, and I was crippled to about 50% productivity for a period of about four months, from September 2011 through January 2012.
Among other things, the Apple store provided a machine with a track-pad that was dysfunctional. I had to replace the computer. A second computer was delivered, but I discovered it had the incorrect operating system installed. I had to return that computer, but I had made the mistake of tossing away the box in which the computer came. The Apple store would not accept my computer without an Apple box. How many boxes are we customers supposed to store? One for every piece of electronic equipment? I had to purchase a second (actually third) computer, so I could cannibalize the box, return the other computer and get my money back, and hope that my third Apple MacBook Pro would work perfectly. No such luck, but I am stuck with it. I was so dissatisfied with that Apple store’s representatives, I transferred my registration to another Apple store with the hope that the crew might be better. It was, marginally. Among other Apple MacBook Pro annoyances:
Apple’s own clock/calendar widget has a bug in it that states the wrong date! Today, 11 April 2013, my Apple-provided clock/calendar says 5 April. I have tried numerous times without success to correct/clear/reset this function. I took my computer back to the Apple store, and several “geniuses” attempted to reload the operating system and to perform “magic,” but nothing worked. To this date, the error persists.
At the time, Apple’s own Mail program, which I considered inferior to Eudora (Eudora was no longer supported and it would not work on the newest OS), had bugs in it, including the fact that if I selected text and wished to change the color to black to make it more legible against a white background, Mail changed the color to white, and the text disappeared! I have noticed in the last week that this bug somehow disappeared over the past months, perhaps with updates of the OS. Nevertheless, it seems to me startling that such a bug should have been there in the first place with a long-standing application.
Apple’s own Address Book application, burdened by its dysfunctional, skeuomorphic appearance, which locks in place its layout and size, was a disaster for me. I was never able to find an easy route to port my contacts from Eudora to Mail, except by paying about $1000 to a systems professional (admittedly for that as well as other corrective measures) to pull off the text of all contacts, including many detailed notes, and cleverly recode them so that many, but not all wound up in the Address Book. However, I have had to individually adjust the contents and layout of each one over time in order to make them functional for me. Another astonishing “design decision” on Apple’s part was to have the search bar constantly interrogate the entire Address Book as I typed characters of the name or company I was seeking. The typing speed slowed to such a glacial pace, that I have had to resort to Apple’s Spotlight widget for searching through my Address Book. It works, sort of, but is this the way “insanely great” products are supposed to work?
One other annoying “feature” is that Apple seems intent on forcing all users to treat their desktop/portable computers as if they were iPads, in preparation for the Next Big Thing. I found these gestures inconsistent, unfamiliar, erratic in their behavior, and ill-suited to my hand positions on a keyboard (with my two thumbs ready to do movement/navigation with my right thumb and selection with my left). Apple’s previous two-part trackpad was much more usable and useful for this purpose that the single surface of the current computer. I turned all these gestures off, except for two-finger scrolling and enlargement/reduction in size with two fingers. Also, I turned on scroll bars, a control that Apple had hidden away, and discovered they were reduced in size making them awkwardly smaller targets, without any ability to change their size.
What was most unsettling is this: Apple’s software came full of bugs and dysfunctional enhancements, in addition to forcing significant discontinuation of previously useful applications. I wondered about Steve Jobs, his achievements, his legacy, and Apple’s future. His mastery seemed to be in marketing hype, and pretty objects, not in actual software usability. Granted, Apple made changes in user-interface design that were better than Microsoft’s, but my experiences during this period of time has led me to think that anyone who thinks Apple’s products are insanely great seems likely to be greatly insane.
Comcast
Another, similar set of user experiences occurred with Comcast. After about seven years using DirecTV to view/record satellite television, I decided for cost reasons to switch to Comcast and to combine cable television reception with telephone service and faster Internet than AT+T could provide at the time. I must admit, I was used to the DirectTV program guide, which had improved significantly over the years and was quite legible, readable, usable, useful, and appealing.
Again, as with Apple, the migration was painful. Neither of the television companies, DirecTV or Comcast, provides an easy way to retain/transfer saved movies, even with migration of their own products. Most of my saved programs were lost in the change-over process (I found a slow, tedious work-around to save some of them via VHS copies and then DVD copies of those VHS copies).
The installation process was painful. I later learned when things were set up and running, that the initial Comcast installer had removed or used my own on-roof TV antenna set of cables, which rendered that antenna useless for my other off-air digital TVs and FM radios not connected to Comcast. I had to install quaint rabbit-ear antennas on the other television sets.
The electronic program guide (EPG) was horrible. I was amazed at its poor quality in comparison to DirecTV and wondered at the millions of customers who suffered through it. Did they know about the, well, almost beautiful, version that DirecTV provided?
What astonished me recently was the installation of one new set-top box on the main television screen, the Xfinity X1, which replaced an earlier set-top box. The Comcast installer said that both units he had on his truck were dysfunctional and not booting up properly! He left and said someone else would come a day or two later to attempt a second installation. This second installer eventually replaced my equipment. He installer quickly assured me that everything was working and departed. It seemed in proper order, but, really, how was I to know about all the new functions that this box enabled?
To my pleasant surprise, its EPG was much more useful than the old system. Comcast had finally, after many years, improved its EPG, even though it was still not quite as well-designed as DirecTVs. Selecting Favorites and preparing a list of preferred stations was still a hidden, frustrating process, involving many steps. When I called one Comcast representative, that person did not even know how to set up Favorites, yet it seems one of the most likely activities of a new customer: to select the 100 really desired stations from the 800+ that are available. Comcast does not make this process easy.
However, the worst was yet to come. Weeks later, I attempted to retrieve and view a favorite television show. When I tried, the screen froze into a gray default Xfinity screen, and eventually an error message box appeared suggesting I call Comcast Customer Service. I did. That person could not solve the problem and said Comcast would call to either solve the problem or send yet another installer to replace the box for the fourth time. No one called. After two days, I called Comcast. The customer-service technician spoke strangely slowly, could not seem to communicate well, could not solve the problem remotely, and dropped the call when she attempted to transfer me to a supervisor. I had to call again, make my way through the phone-messaging system (I was at last getting quite adept at the numerous steps), and spoke to a third technician. He could not solve the problem and transferred me to a supervisor. After sending some “strong signals” as he called them and my rebooting the device for perhaps the fourth time, the system had restored this functionality. Hooray! Then, as I was trying to thank him and comment on Comcast’s poor technician behavior or phone system, his call dropped, also! Fortunately, he had given me his direct number, and I called back to thank him.
Although this functional problem of Comcast’s was restored, it had cost me significant time (perhaps 1-2 hours), numerous calls to a vendor, and exposure to what seems to be unstable or faulty equipment and poorly trained technicians being provided by a major company in the US market. Is this a trend?
Entries for the Journal of Inevitable Disaster
Well, taken individually, each of these events can be attributed to random fluctuations in Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, eventually will. Mind you, those of us fortunate to have such challenges live in a world surrounded by vast arrays of equipment and networks connecting them. To be fair: most things work most of the time. If that were not true, we would be living truly in Hell on Earth, as some unfortunate people do in some countries.
What gives me pause is the seeming increase in the number of things that don’t work at all, that don’t work well, and that weren’t designed well in the first place. This, despite the progress we seem to have made, judging from the dazzling array of appealing, colorful new products/services.
Were these products mentioned above shipped out too soon? Did people forget to do quality control and quality assurance? Have businesses learned so little from 40 years of user-interface design and user-experience design professionals that products/services are produced that reach major segments of US and world markets and still have strange, unsightly, unjustifiable, intolerable bugs?
Are things getting worse? Are we in a gradual decline because we are just losing our grip on producing complex systems that can be maintained and serviced by technicians who have increasingly poor educations, poor communication skills, and poor manners? I fear for my children’s and grandchildren’s lives.
When corporations say naively that they intend to do only good and no evil, are they just being naive or ingenuous? Or are they in their own sophisticated way, just part of the problem?
Let us consider further….while there is time….
Aaron Marcus to give UX Design Course at Information Institute, University of Texas/Austin
Aaron Marcus to give 2.5 day UX Design Workshop on 22-24 May 2013 at University of Texas/Austin’ s Information Institute. For full details,
see: https://infoinstitute.utexas.edu/courses/user-experience-design-for-work-home-play-and-on-the-way.
Solving Sequestration: FaceBucks to the Rescue
Once again, a fiscal event looms large in the US psyche, or at least in US media, and is the subject of Congressional/White House dithering. This time, its sequestration, due to take effect 1 March 2013. At stake is $85 billion dollars of cuts, potentially furlowing a 100,000 governmental employees, bringing down the air traffic controllers and our nation’s flight system, to say nothing of the harm done to schools, student loans, and many other aspects of our daily lives.
Both Congress and the White House are deadlocked in their attempts to find solutions to cutting government spending and/or increasing revenue through tax changes. What are we to do?
A simple change in our “money policies” could increase significantly US Treasury revenues and significantly reduce the need for sequestration. Here’s how. We could issue FaceBucks!
The US Treasury could decide next week that it is perfectly legal, financially advantageous, and ethically required to achieve fiduciary responsibilities, to enable all people and companies that wish to have their own personal or corporate, institution, even product/service images appear on the face of our onedollar bills, our hundred-dollar bills, or any denomination in between. Their corporate or organization logos could appear on the back. I mention the one dollar denomination in particular, because recently proposals have been made to eliminate this bill, and to issue one-dollar coins instead, thereby saving about four to five billon dollars (over 30 years!). However, this proposal completely overlooks the public relations and brand value of our familiar and much beloved cultural artifact, our most “populist” denomination.
Persons or groups wishing to buy FaceSpace on one-dollar FaceBucks, for example, would have to pay $100 million per image, or $200 million per set of sides. Don’t let the price deter you….
There are about three billion one-dollar bills in circulation, the most of any denomination. These bills last about 21 months, which means that every two years, the US Treasury Department could issue new editions. If there were only 500 sponsors of these two-sided images/logos, the US Treasury could quickly raise $100 billion over a two-year cycle. In ten cycles, this translates to $1 trillion, or the current national deficit. Quick reminder: there are 400 billionaires in the USA alone, and corporations are sitting on the largest-ever piles of cash. This “design-thinking” approach to innovation, acknowledges that one-dollar bills (as are our other denominations) constitute a valuable medium of communication, one that has significant cultural, media, and brand value.
Think about it.
Apple might sponsor iCash, with an image of theit iPhone, iPad, or rumored iWatch (if Samsung doesn’t beat them to it with their own Galaxy products).
Sanrio might sponsor Hello Kitty Kash. Hello Kitty now exceeds Mickey Mouse in the number of image results on a Google search.
Disney might sponsor Mickey, or any other of its more recent Pixar animation or movie branded characters.
Stephen Colbert might ask all the several million members of his “nation” to send in donations to sponsor his face on Colbert Cash. He has already successfully promoted a painting of himself in the Smithsonian, located between the men’s room and the women’s room. Now he can claim that “Stephen Colbert Saves America, and So Can You!”
There many companies and organizations (worldwide) that would line up to see their favorite person, persona, or symbol conveyed worldwide in a way that has become acceptable in other media. If NASCAR vehicles and municipal stadiums can do it, when even hotel plastic door-key cards contain ads for Macy’s, why can’t the US Treasury get with the program?
People, characters, and companies/organizations within and outside the US might contribute to the cost of these FaceBucks, thereby enabling wealthy individuals or groups to contribute to the reduction of the US deficit.
Our US currency has been undergoing significant graphic redesign. Now is the perfect time to make this historic change in “outside funding” of our currency. The cost of printing and detecting such bills would not be prohibitively expensive. These FaceBucks might become highly desirable outside the US as well, much like our movie production, which might bring further sponsor contributions and collectibles desirability. Perhaps the US Post Offices could handle distribution, just as they do with commorative stamps, thereby adding economic value to their established buldings and people, which are now threatened by being decommisioned as economically non-viable.
While people complain about money spent to buy elections, wasted on porkbarrel projects, or debatable entitlements, let’s make a radical shift in thinking. Taxing the wealthiest corporations and individuals is always challenging. This simple suggestion gives sponsors with wealth a tangible benefit in return for their funds: something desirable, valuable, and noteworthy. FaceBucks also recognizes that our currency is one of our valuable remaining iconic worldwide communication “products.”
Remember: If we don’t do it, others might beat us to it: like China. They’ve been very innovative in creating capitalist enterprises. With a middle class larger than that of the USA, and much greater control of currency, publications, and distribution, it would not take much effort to bring about this revolution in money and design.
FaceBucks would allow the US government to use money to make money. Sequestration is almost here. We can’t ignore this opportunity.
ACM Interactions Magazine to publish Aaron Marcus’ article about science fiction and human-computer interaction
The Editors of Interactions Magazine have accepted Aaron Marcus’ article “The History of the Future: Sci-Fi Movies and HCI” for publication in the July/August 2013 issue, 20:3, of Interactions, the member publication of ACM SIGCHI, the largest user-interface design professional organization in the world. The ariicle reviews briefly some of the sci-fi movies of the last hundred years of science-fiction, which have depicted detailed views of future human-computer interaction (HCI) in order to convey a compelling scene and to move the plot forward. This essay explores some of the themes that emerge from examining this body of work and concludes that HCI professionals can learn something from sci-fi media, and sci-fi media producers could learn more from HCI professionals in order to show smarter views of the future.
Index of Online Education Resources.
Recently, AM+A has been working on a project called the Learning Machine, a user-interface concept design for tablet-based online learning that combines information design and persuasion design to change learning behavior. In relation to this project, I’ve learned about an index of online education resources in the USA: http://graduate-school.phds.org/education-index , which uses the National Center for Education Statistics.
This Education Index is a comprehensive and informative resource that systematically sorts out the available undergraduate and graduate programs available today in the US. I think this information is valuable to students today who are not only dealing with the competitive nature of higher education, but also the rising costs of education.
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By filtering through data like average SAT scores, retention rates, tuition, and percentages of students receiving financial aid, one can use the Education Index to eliminate schools from an inventory that don’t make sense. The system also allows for an additional layer by helping one rank and compare specific programs at multiple schools. By selecting one’s priorities on a 1-5 scale, the system can automatically filter and rank schools. Thus, one is looking only at data that really matter, like student diversity, institutions known for excellence in scientific research, etc. The database allows one to tailor a search around these and other factors, like subject or degree level.The Education Index seems to be a powerful resource for anyone pursuing further education. Please take a look and let the Education Index know what you think.
In all fairness, I do have to comment that Education Index does not have categories for the following:
graphic design
information design
information visualization
interaction design
user-interface
visual-communication design
These are the subjects of interest to AM+A, subjects that seem very important to the ongoing humanizing of computer technology and important for complementing/repairing the rapidly decaying verbal literacy of the general public. Our national experiment in democracy relies on an informed, educated population. As you may know, we have much to be concerned about in this area.
However, a representative of the Education Index has acknowledged this oversight and mentioned that the managers of the site will consider adding these topics in a future version, to account for those interested in the user-centered design (UCD) topics of D-schools, I-schools, and UCD-schools across the USA (and around the world).