My favorite spaces at my school are the workshops. They are not very big but you find people working with materials like wood plastic or fabric and with digital materials. I love that combination between the traditional craftsmanship and the electronic: Fabric with sensors, wood that moves.
Electronic is getting easier and easier, and everything moves soo fast that probably in a couple of generations, people might see an electronic specialist as today we see a carpenter.

I’ll miss building things when I leave the school.

As I wrote on my previous post I’m digging into the peripheral qualities that we are missing in the transition from the physical things to the digital devices…

…And this is the first experiment. I’m focused on the way we study with books. I’ve seen that many people like to underline, write, stick notes etc… We can do this with the kindle or the iPad too but I think pens and paper are still more natural. I’m trying to find if that is true and also to imagine how it might be to use a pen and/or paper to take notes in the future e-books. It seems that companies are only focused on what’s happening inside of the screen and not enough on the rest. They should think more on how to communicate small devices together and create new designs from objects that are already with us. Actually, I thought ubiquitous computing was about that, not about having another LCD screen on my fridge.

Anyway, to envision these different ways of annotating, I made a cool video where you can see them. I’ll be glad if someone, (especially, but not only, people used to read with an iPad or kindle) can answer these two questions (by email, comments, facebook twitter…):
1- (only if you have an iPad or Kindle) How do you feel about writing your notes on an iPad or Kindle? If you have a pen do you still use paper?
2- What do you like and what you don’t like from these three ways of annotating on e-books?

Envisioning new ways of annotating electronic books from Sergio on Vimeo.

These days I’m doing some experiments and previous research about what might become my thesis project in the next semester. I don’t have so much content but I have marketing name for it: Digital Collateral Damages (yes, I’m kind of proud of this name)
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Las week I went to the Microsoft headquarters in Copenhagen (sic) where they host a Mr Bill Buxton open talk. For those who don’t know him, Bill Buxton is one of the big names in Interaction Design. He made some great inventions with touch interfaces around the 80s and he has a great book called “sketching user experiences”. I really enjoyed that book last year and it is the first book I would recommend to a new Interaction design student or to anyone who is getting into Interaction Design. Buxton is also the principal researcher at Microsoft research. Probably his big task there is to change Microsoft from a only-techie company to a design concerned company.

The talk was short but it worth the travel from Malmö to Vedbæk. Firstly because they gave us a nice breakfast with tons of danish cakes, and of course, also because of the ideas he explained during the talk. Some of those ideas are the ones I want to share with you, dear reader.

The long nose

This is one of Buxton’s theories. Every new technology takes 20 years to become a mature market, which in terms of money means 1billion$: Multitouch, Internet, mobile phone. Everything, and he has data to convince us. So if you want to find something to become rich in five years, you don’t need to invent a revolutionary device because the next big thing is already around us. We only need to look the world with different eyes.

Look to the past

Bill showed us his clock collection with cool examples of touch Casio clocks in the 80′s also some of his tangible interfaces, art videos with image recognition and old touch mobile phones: all were technologies that were not a success 15-20 years ago. When apple came up with the iPhone some voices said: “I don’t understand so much excitation: There is not anything new here” And they were true. Nothing was completely new but everything was an improvement over the previous things, and together was something different.

Technology is moving slow

IT people like to talk about how fast the industry is moving. Bill told us that it is not true: Everything we have now was here 20 years ago. so what the fuck we’ve been doing? Computers are used in the same way as 20 year ago!

It seems that M$oft keeps trying hard to receive quite a lot of hate, and they are a serious problem for the industry -thanks to his army of lawers and his CEO-, but if they listen to Buxton, they will also have some great products in the future.

And for those who are still reading, here comes the tip: Read this Nice interview with Buxton where he explain most of the things he talked in that lecture and also something that I totally agree:

I don’t understand how anyone can be a competent and experienced designer and make products that offer a great experience if they have limited experience in their personal life.” [...] Jimi Hendrix asked the right question when he said, “Are you experienced?” It was a different context, but it’s the fundamental question.

So, as I understand it, fellows designers, let’s do something else than talking about design and go to conferences or we won’t design a… anything really good.

There are many talks, many discussions about the importance of design for more than doing cool chairs or fancy computer interfaces. The “Design thinking” buzz, is about using design methods to design important things, and this is good for people like me who is studying design now because it means… Interesting jobs to do!

Anyway I just wanted to write a bit about “envision the future”. One of the most interesting concepts I internalized this last year is the importance of this tool, actually I think that’s in the core of being a designer. Whether you’re designing a complex service like the patient attention system in a hospital or a task workflow for a web application it’s extremely important to know what is the goal. Furthermore is not enough to only have it in your head, but you have to be able to represent and communicate it, to think in scenarios, to mock-up the idea with videos or to richly describe it. This brings a path, It can be bad, or it can change, but at least is a goal, a scenario that we can discuss. We have to be always open to change the goal, but I think that a simple not-very-good-goal is better than nothing.

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