We see that they are at the forefront of Agile design & development. But we see that they too have only a beginning understanding of how to combine these effectively.
The future of touch user interface design
Twitter stream: #futureoftouch
Amish Patel and Kay Hofmeester , two designers from Microsoft, had the ambition to show us the future of touch. They only succeeded to a limited extent, but ultimately provided a framework for further development.
All the technologies that are flooding the world do so in 3 phases:
Introduction. A still early proof-of-concept phase, in which the technology is sometimes not yet fully developed and is demonstrated by means of impractical, academic applications.
Copying the old language. A good example is 'The horseless carriage syndrome'. The first cars looked like carriages because people were not yet used to the freedom of form that had been gained. As a result, the full potential of the new technology was not yet used.
Developing a new language . At some point, designers and their end users get used to the new technology and new possibilities arise.
Amish and Kay's thesis is that touch is currently in its second phase. They argue that scroll bars and buttons are GUI elements that date back to the era of the mouse. They suggest that there are 3 levels at which touch will develop:
body-aware , where devices will detect the posture and distance of users. This allows the display on a screen to be adjusted to this distance, for example.
multitouch , where the GUI concept of focus urgently needs to be extended to multiple active points of contact. Single-focus thinking will have to stop.
multimodal . Touch will not stand alone but will be combined with pen, speech and gestures, as indicated by the image on the right.
What this will do to the applications of touch remained unclear. All in all, Amish and Kay's presentation was disappointing. For example, they had no good answer to the logical proposition from the audience that gestures have to do without good hints of operation (affordances). And if someone in a presentation uses sliding pictures to get excited about touch one more time, we will really have to intervene.
HTML5? The web's dead, baby!
In all kinds of panels and presentations there is a lot of discussion about HTML5. The new Haarlem Oil that will save us from all evil. In a panel with programmers and designers it became clear that HTML5 is a non-discussion that still concerns us all. We suffer from the impossibilities of Flash (partly thanks to Apple), we want the web to really innovate for once (no more documents and pages, but apps and interactions), there is such a thing as new HTML (version 5?) and yet we are not satisfied.
Rick Barraza gave the simple answer: “The era of rich and reach is over.” If you want a generally accessible interaction, a commodity, then the web is fine (reach). If you want luxury (rich), then you make apps. Then it doesn’t matter much which platform you make them for. That choice depends on which niche you want to reach. Both reach and rich experience will grow apart in the coming years. The audience thought this was a shame, but did not see the opportunity that lies there: building a lot for many platforms. This reminds me of the times of the browser wars. Elsewhere we heard: “History does not repeat, it rhymes.”
June Cohen - Radical openness by giving it away
We couldn't miss the talk by June Cohen , executive producer of TED , as we are involved in TEDxDelft, which will be held next November. TED officially stands for Technology Entertainment & Design and was founded in 1984 with the aim of spreading inspiring ideas.
Until 10 years ago it was a closed and, by its own admission, elitist event. When the TED talks were put online in 2006, the entire way of doing things within the TED organization changed.
June Cohen is small in stature but fills the entire stage with her passion. In true TED tradition, she stands on the edge of the stage, gesticulating and talking, and gives us a generous insight into the TED organization. The core of her argument: we are migrating from an elite event to an open eco-system: “A global audience becomes a global team.”
More than 5 years ago, the decision was made to make TED an open event. The first step was to put the TEDTalks online. The preconditions were carefully considered: “We aim for quality, we don't want the high school musical camera in the back.” That was, says Cohen, challenging and threatening at the same time. With 400 million views so far, it has exceeded everyone's expectations.
The second step in the quest for openness and involvement was to set up a framework so that others could also organize a TED event, the so-called TEDx events. This has now led to 1500 events in 90 countries in 35 languages. It was amusing to see that the American TED organization found it very difficult to monitor what was actually being said in all those foreign languages.
Finally, there was a real 'announcement': today they announced the third step in their 'radical openness' strategy . After 'open content' and 'open collaboration' it is now time for 'open development': TED will open an API for developers, which is the last step in the process where 'a global audience becomes a global team'. The focus will be on the TEDTalks and related data, in the hope that developers will use the API to create new tools for viewing and sharing, of course not for commercial use. This will take shape in the coming months.
Question from the audience: will everyone be able to upload their own TEDTalk? Cohen was clear: if the audience is waiting for it, we will find a form for it, but research showed that this was not the case at all.
Poole is the founder of community site 4chan and the yet to be launched Canvas . 4chan, according to Poole himself 'a place where strangers come together and talk about stuff', is the uncensored online message board that has planted a number of recent iconographic concepts/images in our collective memory. The English have a nice word for this: memes. Concepts such as ' Rickrolled ' (a rarely wanted pop-up in your head of a Rick Astley song) and the LOLcats have become big thanks to 4chan's anonymous members. Poole focuses on niche communities and has inadvertently become an incubator for a number of influential subcultures on the world wide web. This 4chan.com looks like a homepage for 'stuff'. Varying from 'papercraft & origami' to 'animals and nature', in all respects consciously designed, according to Poole.
Christopher Poole looks like a nerd in his checked shirt, speaks with a nasal voice and is fond of the senegal phone number list funny examples he lets pass by. Honesty compels me to say that the level defies all imagination, but considering the 14 million visitors per month it is wise not to pass judgment on that.
Poole attributes his success to a number of factors: for starters, 4chan is accessible. With minimal effort, you can become a member of the community and contribute. Poole also praises the anonymous nature. This is an opportunity for people to experiment and show things they are ashamed of, or that do not match their own identity. In that respect, Poole thumbs his nose at Facebook, where people 'have to live up to expectations'. A third parameter is the real-time aspect of the 'chats'. The yet-to-be-launched Canv.as relies entirely on the real-time posting of images and responses to them with new images.
Poole's 4chan and probably soon Canv.as have a right to exist, given the number of visitors. The question is what the meaning is in the long term. Not to mention the business model.
The music of interaction
One of the early sessions this Sunday is a kindred spirit to Peter Stahl's presentation ' The Rythm of Interaction ', given a few weeks earlier at IxDA's Interaction '11 in Boulder.