Windows of Opportunity

There’s lots of design activity around how to bring more digital services to drivers, but the passenger often gets left out of the fun. So, it’s interesting to see this work from GM on how to enhance the passengers’ experience. For their Windows of Opportunity project, they focused on engaging children in the rear seats.

Apparently passengers often feel disconnected from the surrounding environment. So, the project brief asked “to turn car windows into interactive displays capable of stimulating awareness, nurturing curiosity and encouraging a stronger connection with the world outside the vehicle.”

The project was done by students from the FUTURE LAB at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Israel. The students designed a collection of  apps that use the windows as displays to educate about the current environment, to share music and images with other cars, to glance inside other cars, and to just doodle on the window.

What’s interesting, is how an interest in rear-seat passengers is apparently an automotive trend. About six months earlier Toyota, in collaboration with the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, released their Window to the World concept which has some very similar applications.

The projects are a start. But their similarity demonstrates how conservative the auto industry can be. It’d be nice to see something more adventurous and surprising.

Windows of Opportunity

Window to the World

Windows of Opportunity

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FastCompany recently posted a insightful analysis, definitely worth a read, of the challenges the auto industry faces as they work to embrace consumer electronics and other ditigal trends. The title begins “Cars Are Horrible Mobile Tech Devices…” and details the root of the problem:

“Fast as they they may go, automobiles are some of the slowest-moving mobile devices in the industry, plagued by fragmented software ecosystems, unwelcoming development environments, and old-world product cycles.”

Last year, Near Future Laboratory did a great post entitled The Interaction & Interface Design Car Wreck that gave some examples of awful interface design in current and upcoming cars. And a report that “Ford cars dropped from 5th to 23rd in JD Power’s customer satisfaction survey primarily due to a complex and hard to use in-car digital UI” is an urgent call to action.

The industry works at moving forward,  obviously aware of customer needs, but having to work within the confines of their bureaucracies, histories, structures.

My previous job was at DesignworksUSA, a BMW Group company. One project that the studio was involved in was a collaboration with the BMW i design team on the interface experience of the i3 and i8 concept cars, as well as the BMW Vision ConnectedDrive showcar. The projects were big, and involved a lot of very smart and talented people.

I’d love to share more details and insights but, to avoid any potential violation of confidential information, I’ll just post a couple glimpses at these without any additional commentary. But… I will say that I believe that BMW has an incredible design team, and their attention to detail is unsurpassed.

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There are a handful of relatively new initiatives happening to better interconnect the wide variety of systems that make up cities. IBM’s Smarter Cities (as part of their Smarter Planet), and LivingPlanIT and their “Urban Operating System” are just two. They’re working to harness the complexity and range of data that make up a city — and making it all usable in seamless and integrated ways. But to the lay-person, they seem pretty abstract. Probably because of their potentially massive scale.

So it was interesting to see Urbanflow Helsiniki — an “operating system for everyday life.” Urbanflow is more user-centered, and gives usage scenarios of how regular citizens can take advantage of the government and private data which such a system would aggregate. It’s a human face on the deeper technology infrastructure, and, as such, an important voice in the conversation of what such systems should be.

Interestingly, they point out that it’s often visitors who are the first users of such services. So their scenarios start with visitors using maps to find items of interest, get routing information, and resent hyper-local resources. But the system then expands to residents by presenting information about their communities — raising awareness, and giving them a means to contribute their knowledge to the community and its organizations.

Urbanflow focuses on public kiosks, but there’s no reason that it couldn’t also be mobile-based. It’s an interesting alternative to the countless separate apps I have on my phone for local content. It is in contrast to a trend towards micro-apps, and there are dangers to connecting everything together. But thinking of this from the user’s perspective is a good first step.

(Link via @jdevoo.)

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I recently posted a link about research leading to creating a real-world holodeck. So it was interesting to discover these three films, created for Sony, which showed another technique for creating immersive experiences.

Sony’s “trick” is to use projection mapping — which normally looks best from just a single static view point. They made the environment more flexible by attaching a PlayStation Move to the camera, so that as the camera moved, the projection adjusted accordingly. Probably for the person in these films, things looked a bit distorted, but the next step could be to attach the Move to the viewer, rather than the camera. In that case, it really would feel like you’re in the film.

More info on Great films fill rooms.

(Link via Rubbishcorp and Berg.)

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I’ve heard the term digital native a lot, and the idea of them — kids that have grown up with digital technology and for whom it’s a natural part of the world. But there’s a even stronger implication: that they understand it so deeply that they view the world fundamentally different than non-natives.

This video (linked in a post full of great links by Chris O’Shea) really brought that idea to life.

Fascinating and terrifying.

Chris also linked to an interesting article, reimagining interactive TV, where the author writes about his daughter and her confusion that she can’t drag content from her TV to her bed. The expectation that digital and the real world are fluid.

This video (via TechCrunch) from Microsoft Research shows that researchers are actually working on technolgy that could make such a scenario possible — a kind of holodeck merged with the real world.

Super exciting and cool.

Where will all this lead? To me, it’s a reminder that what we feed these digital natives will influence the world they choose to build. We have an opportunity to create the new metaphors of interaction, and ways of thinking about (and interacting with) content, that can change the world. Let’s not pander to kids with dumb digital experiences — let’s teach them right.

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Microsoft recently released a future vision video — looking at how people might get things done 5-10 years in the future. It’s a quite beautifully done piece, full of detail and scenarios. They’ve also put up a website which describes elements of the video in more detail.

But what’s surprising is the intensity of the reaction to this vision. It’s getting a lot of abuse.

From John Gruber (who further defends this comment in an additional post)

This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today.

Opinionated Type has a funny, and pretty smart, summary of the pieces design details and flaws. Including things like “There is no difference between a tap that selects, records, enters a chat, or backtracks. And no one is confused about this.” and “Mommy doesn’t wear her wedding ring on business trips.”

Fast Company describes the film as lacking authenticity — it’s too clean, and the people feel “dead behind the eyes”

“Microsoft’s film is probably going viral as we speak, but imagine how much more reach it would have if it dared to depict a guy stuck in a meeting that sucked, or using his smartphone in an airport that was full of noisy assholes and long lines, or searching his touchscreen-enabled smart refrigerator for a quick meal because his kids are bouncing off the walls and he’s bone-tired from a long day at work?”

But Joey deVilla supports the piece — and vision projects in general. He argues

“Without visions like concept videos to guide them, especially with the lack of someone in the visionary role, they may remain stuck on their current course: doing well but effectively coasting, content to make incremental improvements to already successful products or playing catch-up as with Internet Explorer, phones and tablets in efforts that are in danger of being too little, too late.”

I’m a big fan of vision films — not only can they set a target, but they let people envision ways to integrate developing technologies and concepts in ways which may not be possible today. (And I’ve worked on plenty myself.) But the Microsoft vision should be better — even if this film’s target is a general, not internal, audience. Microsoft doing lots of innovative work on interaction, interface, and content design. Why don’t we see something which really rethinks what’s possible? Something radical — that will change how people perceive Microsoft. Something with some beauty and joy.

On the other hand — at least it’s not as depressing as RIM’s future vision.

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This new ad from IBM, promoting their Smarter Healthcare initiative is more idea communication than interface. But, it’s nicely suggestive of the complexity of information that doctors and patients need to deal with. And it’s a teaser for the potential of IBM’s Watson in the health care space.

As a side note, sorry for the infrequency of postings here lately. I’ve recently switched jobs, and so things have been unusually busy. Hopefully I’ll be posting more frequently soon.

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