Don Norman gets all Emotional

Emotional Design: Donald Norman

In this book Don Norman goes out to cover how designers can design with the emotions of users in mind. He talks about a number of ways designers can approach and affect the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels. He also talks about emotions in robots both as a human interface and as an AI goal/reward system.

I like that Norman acknowledges the large role that emotional connection plays in how people use objects, and more obviously how they feel about how well those objects/devices work.

Just as Norman says, it not very often that people use the reflective part of their mind, and as such it is rare that people truly use logic to make decisions in real life. Often people are doing things where there is not enough time or information to make a decision based solely on logic, and that is where emotion plays a large part.

Say you are looking to buy a new laptop. If you went in to the process just looking for a complete comparison based numbers and price you would likely go crazy with all the options presented. But then you decide that one laptop looks better than another. Perhaps it is pleasing to look at, this could signify that someone put a lot of thought into the construction. Maybe they keyboard feels good, something that might be important when using it to write a long paper. Maybe when you pick it up, it feels sturdy, possibly indicating good construction. All of these aspects affect how you feel about the laptop, and while these feelings may not be indicative of reality, they are often good heuristics to live by.

Of course if we make the jump and say that emotions are just subconscious, self-adjusting mental heuristics, then we could say that Don Norman's vision of robots with emotions is already a reality. Modern AI systems already have rudimentary learning systems that update heuristics that in essence act in the same way as emotions.

My final thought is on Norman's suggestion that we use emotion as output from systems as a way to quickly convey messages to people. This is pretty much the best idea in the book. Taking advantage of the emotional connotations that people place on everything from colors, sounds and facial expressions, we could create a subconscious vocabulary that would create an efficient way for machines to communicate their status to people.

Say your computer is running out of hard drive space, then perhaps a small face or something representing your computer in the corner of your screen begins to look worried, with its expression getting more severe as the problem gets worse. Now obviously the expressions would have to fit the situation, otherwise a person would just get irritated at the false positives and turn the system off. But at a quick glance the system could quickly inform you as to the status of your machine with more detailed information available on request.

Shocking

The Man Who Shocked The World

by Thomas Blass

This book is a biography of Stanley Milgram, the famed experimental psychologist. As far as biographies goes it was certainly fairly standard, with a mix of interesting character analysis and typical (if bland) biographical details.

I find Milgrams ideas and experimental methods interesting, but I don't know if I feel very sure as to whether his experiments were the best way to empirically prove research points. While his shock experiments were certainly enlightening, it seems unclear as to what exactly he thought this would prove about obedience. It showed that within the circumstance of a procedure perceived to be some sort of experiment people would be obedient to a distressing degree, but he did not seem to dig deeper to find out why people acted like that and whether the results could be reproduced in different sorts of situations.

Milgram most certainly shocked the world, but what he meant to do with his controversial experiments is still somewhat unclear to me.

Robot control: wiimotes

Exploring the Use of Tangible User Interfaces for Human-Robot Interaction: A Comparative Study

Cheng Guo, Ehud Charlin. University of Calgary

This paper was a comparison of the efficiency in controlling a robot using two different types of input devices: a set of buttons (aka a keyboard) and a 3d Tangible User Interface (aka a pair of Wii-motes).

There were two tasks that users had to perform for the study using either a keyboard system or the wii-mote+nunchuck system to control a sony AIBO. The first was to navigate through a maze, the second was to make the robot pose in a variety of ways.

Overall the researchers found that the Wii-motes worked slightly better than the keyboard for the navigation task and much better for the posing task. This is likely because there was more of a direct conceptual mapping from the wii-mote motions to the actual motions of the AIBO.

Additionally people preferred the Wii-motes because they generally felt it was easier to remember what commands did what.

In summary I would say that it makes sense to use an input device that has similar constraints to what you are trying to do. If you are controlling something in three dimensions you want something that senses 3d control input. If you are performing a task in 2d then all you need is 2d control ability.

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.