When intensity means time

It's widely accepted that domestic appliances are the kings of everyday misunderstadings. From video recorders to washing machines, they all share a so broad range of diferent controllers that makes semantic hard to reuse.

We all have to learn them one by one, but one it's learnt we are supposed to know how to set the devices. But there is one concern that seems still to be resolved:

How can we remove the gap between selected intensity and time to reach the expected outpout?

Most small and major appliances (specially those related with temperature) run in a nominal power, leaving the control of the result to a matter of duration in time. Some of them express clearly the final state of the expected effect in numeric indicators, such as degrees for a central heating system, and others rely on a continuous scale of simulated power variations like electric cooktops.

Although cuantitative controllers are widely present, why is still so insanely frequent that people keeps misunderstanding these stuff that they use every single day?. Some examples:

Will my air conditioning machine works faster setting a lower temperature?. It won't, because its coefficient of performance is fixed. Will the cooktop heat more at higher values? It will heat water quicker but maximun heating power is limited. In most of them the selected value of intensity means an inverse rate of time pauses between heat activations.

The solution could be to make obvious that they work at a linear rate. A good solution for cooktop could be to avoid relative numeric controllers and to ask always for the desired temperature, showing through process the expected time for reaching the goal. An easy way to accept that intensity means time when power is fixed.

servido por tentempie 2 comentarios compártelo

Unexpected uses

Technology is full of beautiful unexpected uses. Even the most simple act of use innovation should be take as an inspirational example.

Is it possible to design for unknow needs? Probably not. But you must always keep an eye on what people are doing with your product.

servido por tentempie 4 comentarios compártelo

Reinforce your message

"Why should we keep that thing there? It's already at the sidebar/body/somewhere else..."

This is my favourite of client's recurring questions. They all fear something is wrong when repeated. Probably driven by some obscure space scarcity fear they tend to identify those repeated items as threats to its siblings.

Placing something more than once in an interface you create diferent relative weights in terms of business relevance. Scarcity of space is a fact, but scarcity of attention is a psychological asset we should use for our convenience.

What is the most important thing for your business?. Answer that and make sure it's visible enough upon the rest.

servido por tentempie 4 comentarios compártelo

Biotechnology and Interaction Design

AGU is a three letters word that stands either for my short-name and for the ARNm triplet that codes Serine, an amino acid presented in all of us.

As you may remember from school, biology is built from tiny parts that just interact between themselves in a mechanical way that leads to bigger, greater and complex things.

The little strands called DNA, replicated almost one hundred trillion times in your body, and which could surround the entire earth (each strand), have written in them each detail of what you see every morning in the mirror.

At some point in the cell's life, those strands start to get transcribed into RNA chains, a middle-man molecule in the process of polypeptides synthesis.

Once a polypeptide strand is completed by hundreds and even thousand amino acids, it starts to fold in unpredictable forms until it shapes the final structure, revealing a protein, the engine of life.

This plethora of magical steps occurs in a deterministic way, several times per minute in every single organism.

Do you recognize this?:

gagtgcttgg gttgtggtga aacattggaa gagagaatgt gaagcagcca ttcttttcct gctccacagg aagccgagct gtctcagaca ctggcatggt gttgggggag ggggttcctt ctctgcaggc ccaggtgacc cagggttgga agtgtctcat gctggatccc cacttttcct cttgcagcag ccagactgcc ...

This is an extract from the DNA which codes the p53 protein, one of the most globally studied molecules involved in cancer development, well known as the star of cancer suppression proteins.

And what about this other piece of code?:

8B542408 83FA0077 06B80000 0000C383 FA027706 B8010000 00C353BB 01000000 B9010000 008D0419 83FA0376 078BD98B C84AEBF1 5BC3

This strange code is all you need to program the fibonacci serial in the low-level machine language. Executable by almost every gadget around you. See what both codes have in common?

Scientists and tech people have worked really hard during last decades building levels of abstraction. Look inside and you will find a large amount of conceptual layers from ones and zeros to the graphical user interface, each one simpler than the previous. All drives in the direction that nobody needs to think on hexadecimal to send a plain email.

Have you ever think about a cell as a machine?. They really behave like it whether they are yeast or pluripotent cells in your bone marrow. In fact, as Drew Endy define them, they act as computational systems. They receive inputs, and behave accordingly as outputs. Cells have measurements tools, priorities to satisfy and self awareness of different kinds.

DNA is a reference of functions for a certain being, as software is for an application.

The only difference between software and life source code is the abstraction layers created that enables us to understand, write and debug what we do in a computer. Fortunately, that complex frontier between life in nature and what can be done in a lab by humans is breaking down throughout international cooperation in biology and health research.

Knowledge repositories about enzyme interactions in pathways, expression rules of genes and protein transcriptions are spreading all over the web in different public databases.

Although work with bulk data in these databases is still a hard task, little pieces of proteins interactions are been described and identified as functions in projects like the "Registry of Standard Biology Parts", initiated by previously cited Drew Endy. Basic biological functions are explained in its website as simple parts that get combined making devices and systems. The result is a hierarchical scheme of complex behaviors.

Craig Venter used to say "Electronic industry is based upon 12 fundamental components. Up to now, 20 million genes had been identified."

The faculty for using these genes as pieces of code in engineered organisms have an unprecedented potential in creating new things.

OK, but what does all this have in common with interaction design?. As defined in wikipedia, "Interaction Design is the discipline of defining the behavior of products and systems that a user can interact with."

As you can find in some related lectures, biology must be understood as a technology. A technology for creating complex things with complex implications.

As designers, we are used to deal with problem solving tasks, requirements, and constraints. Biotechnology industry is developing extremely fast, enabling a myriad of applications for new products and services based on biology.

Many authors describe the necessity of compartmentalize competences in biotechnology. Specialization brings better quality in every decision step. From laboratory operators to the function of a biological engineer as a technical architect, someone has to deal with the human side of the final product.

As interaction designers we can apply all the inherited knowledge in our discipline to new horizons like biotech. It's just a new framework with new variables.

servido por tentempie 6 comentarios compártelo

Ouch!

Graphic designers are lucky. As the people who structure much of the world's communications, we get to vicariously partake of as many fields of interest as we have clients. In a single day, a designer can talk about real estate with one client, cancer cures with another, and forklift trucks with a third.

Imagine how tedious it must be for a dentist who has nothing to do all day but worry about teeth.

Ouch!

Michael Beirut en Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design.

servido por tentempie 7 comentarios compártelo

Planetaki es mi bolsillo

A properly designed problem is partially solved.

John Dewey.

Esta cita de Dewey me hizo pensar en Planetaki hace un par de días. La encontré leyendo el último libro de Berkun sobre innovación. En una parte del mismo, transmite el beneficio de definir correctamente las necesidades de cualquier proyecto para llevarlo a buen puerto y si es posible, restringir con decisión las posibilidades para encontrar soluciones interesantes.

Javier Cañada mostró desde el principio que tenía muy claro a qué puerto quería llegar. Y llevar la nave hasta allí no era nada fácil, porque crear un lector de feeds para gente que no sabe lo que es un feed es casi como crear una rueda sin eje de giro.

Planetaki combate las dificultades de comunicación del concepto, con una interfaz de obviedad aplastante. Es intuitiva, sencilla y bonita. Un duro ejercicio para eliminar todo lo superfluo o lateral.

Por mi parte hago un uso algo especial del servicio. Si Google Reader es mi mochila, Planetaki es mi bolsillo. Es ahí donde tengo todos los high priority feeds. Fuentes cuya actualización comprobaba antes varias veces al día, abriendo y cerrando carpetas, ahora las reviso de una manera mucho más cómoda.

Larga vida a Planetaki.

servido por tentempie 1 comentario compártelo

Bienvenido Open movilforum

La próxima semana tendrá lugar la presentación oficial del Open movilforum . Una gran iniciativa que potenciará el desarrollo de mashups y servicios basados en móvil con el uso de herramientas open source .

Si no puedes esperar para empezar a hacer cositas, sólo tienes que darte una vuelta por el site . Estre otras, existen ya un par de librerías para empezar a jugar con mensajes cortos. La documentación es bastante clara y concisa. Es cuestión de minutos.

No olvides que Open movilforum pretende ser un foro abierto tanto a desarrolladores como usuarios y emprendedores. Si tienes ideas innovadoras pero API te suena a salsa ideal para un plato de pasta rápida, propón tus inquietudes. Hay mucha gente deseando trabajar en equipo.

Si te apetece saber más, ven el próximo día 4 de Octubre a la jornada de presentación en la E.T.S.I. de Telecomunicación, Politécnica de Madrid. Tienes todos los datos aquí.

servido por tentempie 1 comentario compártelo

Interacción háptica, realidad e interfaces gráficas.

Háptico es un adjetivo que viene a identificar todas aquellas cualidades vinculadas con el sentido del tacto (Hapthai en griego). Y sí, es otro de esos vocablos que tanto nos gustan, ausente en el diccionario.

Bien populares son algunas de las primeras aplicaciones comerciales como aquel Nokia 2230 con vibrador o el famoso mando de la primera Playstation que con asombro de todos, conseguían estimular los corpúsculos de Pacini.

Algo menos famosas, pero no menos espectaculares son las soluciones hápticas ofrecidas por la empresa Intuitive Surgical Inc , especialista en robots de cirugía laparoscópica. Máquinas que permiten operar a metros o kilómetros del paciente, experimentando de forma simulada las mismas tensiones, visión y tacto que si se tratase de las manos del cirujano.

Si bien la categoría háptica lo engloba todo, me gusta relegar a un segundo nivel el uso del témino táctil, especialmente cuando se trata de la manipulación de interfaces gráficas de usuario. Descartando así sensaciones propiamente hápticas como el dolor, el estiramiento y la vibración, en pro de la percepción de la presión. Factor clave en la manipulación táctil multipunto y la multitáctil.

La interacción táctil lleva un largo camino recorrido. Y como le gusta recordar a Bill Buxton , desde que se inventó el ratón hasta que se popularizó pasaron 30 años. Desde que se empezó a investigar con diversos tipos de interacción táctil también han pasado aproximadamente el mismo tiempo. Y curiosa coincidencia temporal, parece ser que en estos momentos convergen dos hechos sumamente llamativos:

Por un lado, parece que salimos del ligero letargo intelectual del último lustro (a mi modo de ver) en lo que respecta a la innovación en el desarrollo de productos portables centrados en la interfaz. Los chicos de Apple han hecho un gran trabajo definiendo patrones de interacción táctil para el dedo, liberándonos de la esclavitud del lápiz. Y a la vez han encontrado usos sencillos y evidentes para viejos conocidos de la electrónica como los sensores de luz y los acelerómetros. Es de prever como ha ocurrido otras tantas veces que los patrones innovadores del iPhone trasciendan de dicho fabricante, categoría de aparato y sistema operativo para facilitar el desarrollo de aplicaciones táctiles.

En segundo lugar, empieza a cambiar una tendencia difícil de explicar. Ahora parece verse como cualidad positiva el romper (a veces) la instrumentación propia de la tecnología. Intrumentación o intermediación si se quiere, que ha contribuido a envolver ‘el mundo’ haciéndonos crear modelos mentales acerca de la realidad manipulada, y creando en muchas ocasiones un colchón sensorial.

Sirva de ejemplo el modo de conducción ‘sport’ que incorporan algunos deportivos para mejorar las sensaciones de conducción. Es en realidad una función que aumenta el disconfort, para aumentar el grado de realidad. Y eso, se siente como algo bueno y deseable. Más sensaciones hápticas es igual a más control y mejores sensaciones.

Para acabar, un caramelo (PDF) de Camille Moussette sobre interacción háptica en dispositivos móviles.

servido por tentempie sin comentarios compártelo