The once and future design: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the robot car.

Don Norman's rambling The Design of Future Things is just as thought provoking as his earlier books, but three times as succinct (I am looking at you Design of Everyday Things) . In it he discusses what he sees as the future of intelligent devices, namely autonomy and human ability augmentation.

I found his discussion of "loose reign" vs "tight reign" control to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. It is an excellent metaphor that could be usefully applied with some sort of literal interpretation. My thought, going to his focus on the intelligent car, would be to have the steering wheel be able to be pulled out or pushed into the dashboard a certain amount, where fully extended would be maximum human control and pushed in could mean more car control (perhaps folding out of sight completely if the car is fully automated). It would be interesting to see what other things this could be applied to, where an automated system continues navigating about (perhaps the web?) until a human grabs hold and shows interest.

RANDOM TANGENT!!
One thing that continued to pop up into my mind while reading this was why noone has tried putting neural networks or the like into videogames to test automated learning techniques. Perhaps people have, but I think it would be fascinating to integrate AI learning into an online game, where an AI could watch players techniques, whether in strategy games or FPS or racing games, learn from them and then try them out itself. It seems that if you wanted to test how effective an AI system is you could first test it for basic design flaws within a virtual environment populated by lots of human users and test it there.

Tapping and rubbing, way better than buzzing.

Tapping and Rubbing: Exploring New Dimensions of
Tactile Feedback with Voice Coil Motors

Kevin A. Li, Patrick Baudisch, William G. Griswold, James D. Hollan

This paper describes two tactile feedback systems built to increase expressive range of haptic systems. The idea is to build devices that will be able to express output in terms of taps and rubbing in addition to traditional vibration used in current phones and game controllers. It is suggested that this would create a much more natural kind of touch feedback that could express a greater range of meaning.

The tapping and rubbing prototypes were constructed using hard drive actuation motors to power the motion. Signals from audio output were then used to control the movement of the motors to make it easier to create smooth motion that could be varied in frequency and amplitude.

The researchers then tested a variety of tips to put on the devices which would create the best tactile sensation. Once these were chosen the devices were tested with users in order to see how well people could distinguish amounts and intensities of movements as well as to get a qualitative assessment of the devices.

While not much of interest was found in the quantitative study (people could distinguish differing amplitudes and amounts fairly well) the qualitative study proved interesting. The test subjects were split on preference of frequency of the rubbing and amplitude of the tapping. Some felt that the faster rubbing felt more natural while others preferred slower. Similarly some subjects thought that soft tapping felt more natural while others thought that harder made more sense.

Another interesting result is that after a certain frequency was reached, the test subjects could not distinguish between tapping and more traditional vibrating sensation.

I think that these two inputs could be useful in hand held devices. For example if a phone could tap on your leg when you get a text (when it is in your pocket) it would be much more noticeable and quieter than current vibrating systems. Also rubbing feedback when the device is in your hand could provide much more intuitive than vibrating in some situations. The authors of the study also suggest that it could convey a better way to convey human emotions in messages as these inputs often felt like human interaction.

Elevator Algorithm: Ethnography, going down.

Eric, Drew and I did a most excellent and seemingly pointless exercise in ethnographical study: watching people in elevators (and stairs). 

But I assure you, it was not in fact pointless. No, we wanted to get a better sense of the relative usage of elevators vs stairs at the West Campus Garage, a site of much comings and goings, where it is easy to observe people's movement habits. In watching this we hoped find patterns which would be interesting or could be used to help improve the parking garage's efficiency and utility.

At first we thought we would try to observe several elevator/stairway sets and count how many people used one versus the other, how far they travelled and whether they were female or male (the only personal trait distinguishable from a distance). However after a few minutes we realized that one person could not watch both a set of stairs and an elevator, so we had to limit our observations to a single set: those on the North-East corner of the garage. Even with two people this was difficult, as we had to both take notes and track people as they moved from floor to floor. However once we had 3 people on one set of elevators and stairs, we were successful.

We watched the garage over the course of one day at three different times of day. We tried to catch the busiest hours: 8, 12 and 5, but were a little bit late for the early morning and early evening. Still I think those would be the best hours, particularly if watched over a whole week (results might differ on TR vs MWF).

In the end a lot of our results were fairly straight forward. The only one of real interest was the cutoff point for stair usage vs elevator. When traveling a distance of 2 floors, a large portion of people used the stairs, but at 3 floors, the percentage almost flipped. I wonder if this is similar to most buildings or specific to the garage.

Well with more watching and data i bet we could find out more.

The Mole People: one big underground party

The Mole People is a book about the homeless who inhabit the subway and train tunnels of New York City. In it Toth explores the loose groups and societies built up by the people in the tunnels, what sent them into the tunnels and why they stay.

While this book is well written, intriguing and a good read, it does not seem like a very good example a proper ethnography. 

The author certainly put enough effort into investigating her subject, but when she presents the material it is often difficult to determine where specifically the stories she relates are coming from. Sometimes it is obvious that it comes from first hand experience, such as her interviews with Bernard, where other times it is impossible to tell who the story is coming from, for example the piece on the group of graffiti artists and their attempt to tag an entire train. In such cases she weaves in a huge amount of description, but it is hard to believe that all this detail could possibly have been related to her. 

I would argue that the artful story telling is both the most compelling aspect of the book as well as the most bothering. It gives the entire book a feeling of a loose interpretation of what she learned and felt, with poetic license taken where detail is sparse. Unfortunately this makes it difficult to tell what true, what she actually observed, and what is hearsay and stories she learned about in her dealings with the tunnel dwellers.

If she was indeed trying to create a compelling argument about how these tunnel dwellers see themselves and how they want to be treated, it is undermined by the way she presents itself. However if we see her book instead as an evocative narrative which gives a general feeling about what a tunnel dweller's life is like then perhaps these shortcomings are not a problem at all.

Media = Reality

The Media Equation

The Media Equation is a discussion on the lengths to which humans perceive the mediated as the real. Humans have been found to treat all media, from books and films to computers, like people to a certain extent. Even though it is a mediated view, the experience is subconsciously treated the same as if it were real.

I have already discussed what bothered me about this book so I will skip immediately to what I found interesting and useful, namely the latter half of the book.

Source Orientation

I feel that the discussion of source orientation is key to understanding the results of the research mentioned earlier in the book. It pokes holes in the concept that people think of the programmer when using a program, a concept which I had considered an explanation for why people are polite to computers. After reading the section it makes sense that this would not be the case. In fact I would say there are several different hierarchies of source orientation.

Nass and Reeves suggest that people are thinking of the computer when they are interacting with its software. That may have been true of their test examples where there might have only been on type of software on the computer. However, from my experience I would have to say that there are several conceptual source levels between what I am doing on a computer and the actual physical computer itself. Just as is the case in their examples, I notice this when something goes wrong.

First I blame the piece of software I am using right now. That is the entity I am interacting with, not any other software, not the operating system, not the computer. Each application I use has its own quirks, its own personality, I am interacting with them. For example, if you have ever heard someone say "I hate Microsoft Word!" after something messes up. They don't blame the computer, they don't blame the operating system, they blame the application itself.

Now this may be a function of the level of technical sophistication of the user. It could be that if one were less experienced with computers that the computer would take the blame of any software failing, or perhaps instead of the computer, the operating system. I suppose its all in how you perceive the relationship between application, operating system and hardware. You are not interacting with your computer, the physical device, it is much more layered and nuanced than that.

Other Thoughts

There were a few other sections that piqued my interest. One was the section on gender assumptions from voices out of computers. That was all very well, but I wonder how much more information and assumptions they could get from analyzing different accents of male and female voices. They listed a whole host of assumptions (er conclusions) made about the nature of the speaker based on their gender, but what about their accent? If for example we changed the comparison to being between a female British accent versus a male Californian accent. I think that could be just as enlightening (I am pretty sure the British accent would increase perceived intelligence)

I had a quick thought on screen sizes which I am surprised they did not actually do any formal studies on. Namely, is a computer (perceived to be) faster and more capable if it has a larger screen. I can tell you from experience that it is absolutely faster, no question. Next time your computer is bogged down, get a new screen, it will make you feel so much better about your computer.

Finally I found the section on fidelity interesting, and I feel that they could now expand it from just being about visual and audio fidelity to include tactile fidelity. For example on touch screens, to what extent does a lag between finder motion and computer reaction mess with people.

The media equation: A quick thought

The writers of this book seem to think that every single one of their findings would defy the logic of any normal person, even though many things they have found seem perfectly reasonable. Particularly their insistence that humans reactions to media are surprising. I think we have known for a long time that people become psychologically engaged with media even though they consciously know that it is not real. I mean that is what theater is, is it not? People have been going to plays for millennia, knowing full well that what they are watching is in fact not real, but they become engaged in it nonetheless. I would argue that this is just an early form of media, a way of presenting information like stories. People have known for a long time then that media can deeply affect how people feel. The idea that the media equation is a new idea is somewhat surprising to me considering this.

What is new is understanding how people deal with interactive media. However it seems that in many cases, the author's studies elicited responses from people by anthropomorphising the study devices (using voice or human-like text). What might be more interesting is how people react to non-anthropomorphic interactive media. Do people react in a social way to computers if computers act nothing like a person? How is it surprising that people react to computers like people if computers are acting like people?

I feel it has been well known for a while that a conscious knowledge that something is not real does not in any way lessen the feeling of reality if media is presented correctly.