Bike Racks

In my recent trips I have seen so many types of bike racks that I thought it would be great to collect the pictures of them in a post, just for reference. The most common type of rack that we all have seen is the one below.

Here some alternatives.

The one below is from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. I like this one a lot: it is simple but with a clear advantage. The rack is suspended in the air (not at foot level), it is pretty visible (so to avoid unfortunate accident by stumbling on it) and can be used as a support when mounting/dismounting from the bike. Moreover, if you lock your bike the chain and the lock won't be on the ground, making it easy to reach them (hence enhancing convenience) and avoiding the problem of locks rusting if the ground is wet (i.e. on rainy days).

The next two pictures are from EPFL. I like this type of rack because it is comes with 2 features. First of all it provides the chain (you only need a lock to right the chain to the bike) and because it uses the handle-bar rather than the wheels as a mean to park the bike (wheels can be in fact very delicate and subjected to bendings, when handle-bars are engineered to sustain a higher torque).

The last rack is from Lausanne, Switzerland. I am not sure I see any benefit beside stability in this huge rack. Perhaps another advantage is that it is structure in a way to grant more room for bikes, alternating the direction in which you would insert them in the rack.

RIP Michael

A mural in commemoration of Micahel Jackson's death appeared overnight in the EPFL subway station (Lausanne, Switzerland). Not only this graffito is expression of public affection, but it invites to a possible second interpretation which I find perfectly suitable for this case.

Some of you might remember Moonwalker and the Speed Demon video, at the end of which Michael and a humanized Rabbit costume dance together, challenging each other with choreographic moves. The are interrupt by a police officer who fines Michael for having danced: dance was an illegal public expression, as indicated by a sign.

I hence find particularly appropriate that an outlawed art expression such as a graffito commemorates an outlawed dancer and pop star as Michael. In this sense, the graffito becomes the perfect commemorative public interface.

RIP Micheal.

Visual Feedbacks for Pedestrians

In Lausanne, every traffic light in proximity of a crosswalk is equipped with one of the devices represented in the pictures above. Intuitively, you press the button and after few moments of waiting, pedestrians are granted the possibility to cross the road. The difference between this mechanism and most of the traffic lights I have seen, in Europe, Asia and U.S. is that a red light will pop-up whenever the button is pressed, indicating with a visual feedback that the call has been received and processed (like it happens for elevators). Moreover, the red light reminds the users that they cannot cross the street, until the light disappears.

I like the fact that upon a call, a visual feedback is emitted to signal that the request for crossing the road has been queued: who, in front of traditional traffic light, have never doubted that the button was actually defected, leading to the common practice of multiple clicks (sometimes even by different users)?

On the other side though, these devices can cause also a little bit of confusion, especially if you don't know how they are supposed to work. Here an example.

In the road near to the center of Lausanne, traffic light are programmed to give alternating access to cars and pedestrians: there is no need to push any button since the request for crossing the road is automatically queued. The resulting behaviors of the devices described above is that they automatically and continuously go red and then off. Users that approach them but who don't know that the red lights stands for a queued call, just press them anyways, as they would do with normal traffic lights, unaware that a request has been sent already. In this case, the visual feedback is lost and the users become unsure of what the system is trying to do.

Iconographic Recycling

Having traveled a bit recently, I experienced some frustration every time I was approaching a recycling or trash bin in order dispose of waste. The normal experience consists in staring at identical bins differentiated only by colors and scanning the directives which instruct about what bin is for what (usually not in English, unless you are in an airport). In the best case scenario, you can find yourself exploring the content of the bin in order to get a glimpse of what it contains.

Here at EPFL, in Switzerland, they came up with a nice way to represent the content of the bins, simply by shapimg the containers with the required content: a bottle-shaped bin for bottles, a can-shaped bin for cans and another bin (blue) for anything else. The recycling bins becomes, to the eyes of the user, icons which represents the intended usage.

Off by Default

Most of every-day's electronics gives users the ability to enable or disable certain options.

The choice between convergence and divergence of functionalities has always been a rather debated theme in design and also among users: some prefer objects that are versatile and do multiple things (i.e. phone+camera+music = iPhone), some prefer things that do only one thing, presumably in the best way (a Canon 5D for taking pictures). Obviously divergent products tend to have more options than convergent ones, but it is not always the case.

It is a fact though that most of electronic devices come with the possibility to turn on or off specific functionalities. So far nothing new.

What I find particularly interesting though is a more recent trend to ship objects which by default come with disabled functionalities, namely the option is turned off or is hidden.

Nikon, for example, ships its entry level cameras, like D40 and D60, with basic camera settings and simplified menus which can be extended by checking the right option.


Another example is the Samsung Anycall phone: I remember that when the vibration mode was first introduced in phones, the basic behavior was the "ringtone" (the phone would actually ring aloud) and, since it was the default mode, no icon was really needed to represent it. Icons were used instead to show if the phone was in vibration mode. My Anycall cellphone not only is shipped in vibration mode, but comes with an icon to represent if it is operating in "ringtone mode" (obviously not the default mode anymore).

Another example can be found in the car dashboard of the KIA Soul: there is a O/D off icon to indicate that the overdrive is disabled. This is the default mode. When you enable the overdrive, no icon is displayed. It is interesting that the dashboard designers decided to put in evidence what is *not* enabled, rather than what it is.

I think that we all can find many of this type of examples, interfaces with options which are by default disabled, evidently not to overwhelm the first time users. It is an interesting new social phenomenon, a sort of response to the frustrating experience of having to deal with interfaces that are not discoverable, but rather overwhelm the users with tons of options.

Rock-Papaer-Scissors

The picture above shows the caps of a popular Korean liquor, the Soju (often mistaken by foreigners for some kind of sake). Recently one of the producers (I think the 처음처럼, Choum-Chorum, literally "like the first time") decided to use the Soju caps as an expedient for a game, which would involve customers to drink more and more.

The game is a simple adaption of the popular Rock-Paper-Scissors, with hands drawn on the bottom side of the caps such to represent the three game-items: a fist for rock, a palm for paper, two fingers for the scissors. After drinking a bottle of Soju, if you order another one you can supposedly compete with your friends and see if your cap won over the other one.

I wouldn't really call this a game but rather some sort of ambient entertainment: it catches the attention and it works unexpectedly well in a drinking context. After all, there are already so many popular drinking games, and in Korea many of them involving the cap of the Soju as expedient. I would say that this particular game fits well in the Korean-style drinking culture.
Perhaps also western adaptions for other type of liquors, such as beer, could be possible and successful.

Recycling or Disposing?

Being used to live in Korea, where recycling is very popular and people are sensitive about ecological issues, I found this trashcan in Atlanta International Airport quite amusing. It is a regular trashcan, but with the special characteristic that it timely shred the garbage inside in order to maximize the space: after inserting some garbage for few times, it automatically triggers the blades insides which cut in piece the content.

It is basically the same idea of sink mounted garbage disposals applied in a public space, but with the difference that it solves only the problem of space optimization but doesn't really help in terms of ecological friendliness. In fact, try to picture in your mind what would happen if you trash batteries, plastic, paper and organic material all together in your sink, and you get the idea of what probably this trashcan contains.

Movable Bench

An interesting type of bench at Carnegie Mellon, anchored to a pivot on one side and with a wheel on the other, allowing a rotatory movement. I guess it was made with artistic intentions, nevertheless serves well also in satisfying practical needs: the bench is, in fact, near to trees which cast a nice shadow on summer's days. Users, having the possibility to move the bench, can adjust their level of exposure to the sunlight.

'Transformer' by Prada

The first 'Moving Architecture' is currently open to the pubic at Gyeong-hui Palace in Seoul: pyramid-like pavilion will be rotated three times(rotated once already) depending on the purpose of this building.
This 'Transformer' concept is PRADA's passionate project, merging fashion, cinema, contemporary art and architecture all together over six months of events. Miuccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas have been dreaming to realize it since a long time ago. The outer material is a special fabric developed by Cocoon, which is translusent version of plastic-leathery fabric used to cover parked airplanes or tanks.
Never miss it, if you are in Korea!

A Different Perspective

Many times I passed in front of this map, hanging from one of the walls of my lab, but I have never noticed a subtle point: it is map of the world, but, differently from the maps we are used to in the West, it is a Korea-Centric (or Asia-Centric) map.

People here tell me that they grew up with it, so they don't notice anything strange, but for me (and I guess most of this blog's audience) it is not very natural: I was looking for Italy starting from the center of the map, realizing right away that I was indeed looking at the Pacific Ocean.

I wonder if one day, with the growing importance of China and Asian countries in general, also in the West we will assist to the appearance to these maps. Indeed, they are not just maps: they are a window on a different perspective.

Visual Captcha

While browsing the Internet tonight I found a forum that implements a visual type of captcha in order to allow a new user registration (something I actually never encountered before, although probably is not something new).

At registration time, you are asked to click on the image that correspond to the correct verbal description. In the case above, the registration system asks you to click on the image of Homer Simpson. What is the probability, though, that somebody would not be able to answer correctly to the question? (Open question for the audience: do anybody know Homer Simpson?)

AC Power Plugs

AC Power Plugs in one of the lab at KRISS (Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Standards), supporting both the Korean/European and the American standards: I think that precisely they are the

CEE 7/17 (German/French 16A/250V unearthed)
and
NEMA 5-15 (North American 15A/125V grounded)

types. For more information about the AC power plug types, please refer to this wikipedia page.

I did not ask the reason for having both standards (well, they could answer that they are the Korean Institute for Science and Standards...), but I guess that it is safe to suppose that in a scientific lab many devices might come from abroad and some could be produced exclusively for one market (i.e. the North American market), so it comes very handy to have U.S. AC plugs built-in the power line rather than have to recur to custom adapters or transformers.

Flavored. Indeed.

Here's something that I found entertaining. It is a vanilla flavored candy. On the paper wrapper, you can read the following lines, in a font that gets smaller and smaller:

Tootsie (the name of the candy)

Fruit Rolls (R) (description of the product)

Vanilla Flavored (the flavor)

Artificially Flavored (a clarification about the previous statement)

Through all of these lines is evident the intention of the producer to legally protect his own actions, first of all with the register trademark to safeguard the "Fruit Rolls" name (second line), and later, in the last line, with the warning to the consumers that they are indeed consuming an artificial product, in the case they could not tell from the taste. The final result is an abundance of information, when all could have been simplified in an easier (but less interesting, I admit) "TOOTSIE, VANILLA ROLL".

One Way Trains

This is a train timetable I found in the train station of Ivrea, a town in northwest Italy. At first glance everything was fine, then I realized that there seemed to be no trains arriving in Ivrea, at least for our english speaking visitors: the left display shows infact "Partenze/Departures", meanwhile the right one states "Arrivi/Partenze", instead of "Arrivi/Arrivals".

Knowing that there are hundreds of railway stations in Italy, I’m afraid we might be facing here a massive "wrong sign situation", with departing trains, never arriving. I mean, these signs are probably mass produced, not manufactured one by one.

This is not just a communication mistake, it is more like a typo error in a massive advertising campaign. In few words: the worst publicity ever.
Companies that spend big budgets in promoting their products should make an effort to keep quality of communication high also through service's delivery. This kind of inadvertence can really harm the company's corporate identity, as there are hundreds of commercial we get to see everyday. Really few ones however, are manifestly bad.

Ads and Morality

The sign of a cafe in Hongik, Seoul: when I saw it a at first I found it provoking and embarrassing at the same time. "Wine + Coffee = Driving" pictures the ad, touching one of the most sensitive issues related with driving, which is drunk-driving.

I grew up in a society where TV was the predominant media, with TV commercials considered as the ultimate form of advertising and consequently under strict regulations and under the vigilant eye of the public opinion. I never truly realized, though, that I grew up also with the expectations of a certain level of fairness and moral correctness in public commercials, as if they actually played an important educational role (perhaps they do?).

Looking again at the sign shown above, I hence wonder what are the limits of a public ad, if we should expect them to be fair, politically correct, moral, rightful, or if we can justify them in the name of business (please note that I am not sarcastic or rhetoric here).

Although many cases teaches us that modern consumers are more sensitive to moral issues than in the past (just think about the long history of disputable associations between Nike and children factories), and although ads in the course of their history became more a mean through which corporates transmit their cultures and values rather than trying to sell a product (the shift from advertisement to branding), we cannot deny, though, that the original single motivation behind all advertisements is business.

So, perhaps it makes perfect sense to use immoral signs (whatever immoral is) if they succeeds in attracting customers: I leave it as an open question, wondering if what I just said touches sensitive issues in the same way as the sign shown in the picture above.

Grip For Body Fitness

Here an example of a beautiful sport device: grip used for fitness produced by GoGrip, a Korean company. What I like about it, it is the simplicity through which you can select the weights for the exercise. Moving the spring from one placeholder to another (for a total of 3 placeholders), you get different weights for the amount of force required to do the exercise. This simple idea was apparently worth a patent and it is intersting to note that the patent number is embossed on the grip itself.

Urban Trace

The picture above is an example of a urban trace: the roots and the grid signal the past presence of a tree which has been chopped off, but not completely removed: the space previously occupied by the tree has not been transformed again in the sidewalk, leaving us a little bit perplexed about the real intentions of the constructors: did they mean to remove the plant or are they planning to substitute it? We won't know, but we look at the remains of the tree and interpret them as a trace of the urban life: something appears at a certain moment in the time-line of the city life and then fade out, leaving an echo of his presence behind.

Footsteps, Metaphore

Footsteps on the ground indicating the direction to a club in Seoul. The footsteps here above are just part of a bigger picture, namely the path made of footsteps that leads to the location of an event. I find interesting the usage of footsteps as metaphor of a the traces lefted by someone chased, perhaps the prey of a hunt.

To Whom It May Concern: Selective Interfaces

I have recently watched a great movie titled Frozen River (by director Courtney Hunt) which made me think about something I have never really concerned before. The plot of the movie centers around two women smuggling illegals across the US-Canadian borders, by driving their car back and forth over the frozen St. Lawrence river in winter. In one of the initial scenes of the movie the director offers us the key to understand the movie: the image of the US frontier seen from Canada. Beyond the gate, you can read on a green sign: "WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES".

Signs are definitely one of the most obvious type of interface and most of us deal with them on a daily basis (road signals, direction signals, etc...) However, the majority of the signs we interface with are directed to a public audience: the intended receiver of the message is anyone who can read it.

In the case of the sign at the frontier, the message, although readable from anyone who knows English, is not directed to everyone, but only to those who are allowed to trespass the border. In some way, the sign above is a selective type of interface which, although accessible by anybody, has a defined audience.

Urban Glitch

In the contemporary urban environment digital technologies are suppose to augment and improve our city experience, creating some kind of imagined technotopia. However as we all know from our experience with PCs the sleek facade of digital technology can very quickly break down without constant maintenance. More often then not it seems to me the digital "cityware" consists mostly of repurposed consumer hardware, PCs, LCD TV, etc, which were not designed to withstand the heavy usage of a piece of public infrastructure. As a result whether its from heavy usage, negligence or just poor design, our contemporary cities are full of dead or dying digital infrastructure. I personally find this often results in situations that are often comical, sometimes beautiful, and occasionally dangerous, but always fascinating.

Money Money Money

Several international conferences list their sponsors in their homepages: most of conferences choose subtle presentation techniques, giving more or less relevance to the company logos through size (the bigger, the better) or location in a list (the first ones to appear are more important), depending on the monetary contributions devoted to the conference.

ACM UIST and SigCHI, among others, chose a different approach. There is really no subtle information, but everything is stated clearly. Sponsors, depending to their contribution, are classified as Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze, a concept borrowed from the idea of the podium (alternatively they use names like Champions, Contributors, Friends, Hero...).

Definitely conferences benefit of the competitions among sponsors but I wonder if pushing toward the culture of "you can buy anything" is indeed the answer to support conferences. Truly money helps conference to develop, but perhaps also companies that support conferences in other ways could be rewarded (i.e. people reviewing papers for free, number of papers submitted, and so on...). After all, if you cannot support with money, you can still support with ideas. Isn't it what conferences are for?

Contextual Ads

Contextual ads stitched on the steps of a stair, reminding to customers the floor number for all the business activities in the building.

Kimchi Post Box

Kimchi jars used as a post box in a restaurant of Hongdae, Seoul. The aim of this post box is defintely not functioanlity (i.e. keeping the mail safe) but is rather a mix of showing the restauarant's identity and providing something eye catching for the customers, something unique that could be recalled later.

Partial Information

A sign for a parking lot. It is intersting to note that in Korean it is specified that it is a pay parking lot, not a free one. The English translation though omits this detail, probably just for simplicity. The final result leads to a (perhaps unwanted) double standard, where only partial information are given through the translation.

Lomo Cameras

This year at my birthday i got an unexpectedly pleasurable present: the Super Sampler film camera by Lomography (Lomographische AG, Austria). A lomo camera is usually a cheap type of camera made of plastic (i.e. plastic body and lenses) and intended for an audience which enjoys a type of relaxed and casual style of photography. Lomography encourages over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring and all sort of accidents that makes pictures more artistic.

Let me say that lomo cameras may appeal to one or not depending on her/his personal preference: some people love them, other hate them. Nevertheless, there is something that is undeniable, which the beauty of how these machines are built.

Although made of very cheap plastic components, the mechanics is well thought both taking in consideration what should be the final result and what should be the interaction with the camera. The super sampler, for example, has not viewfinder. The shutter button is located on the side of the camera (rather than the top right corner) as a way to encourage a 1-hand interaction. Before taking a picture, rather to pull any lever, you can easily pull a small string (see picture) to set the film ready.

I think that lomo cameras, at least under the point of view of interfaces, are brilliant. I am not even really concerning of the final result, what I like to see is how they made a simple yet intuitive piece of interface out of cheap plastic, but, even more important, how the type of interface they chose for each camera impacts on the users experience to take a picture.

We grew up with a very defined idea of "how is the proper way to take a picture, the proper way to handle a camera", but lomo has the prerogative to be the only camera which breaks these schemes and re-teach you from scratch different ways to take pictures. This is simply genial!

Here some samples pictures taken (not by me) with the Super Sampler.

Here some pictures from Seoul's Lomography store.
Check out also their website at http://www.lomography.com.

An Amazing Old Idea

This multi-pen from Rotrig is a little masterpiece of design and engineering. Differently from the majority of the multi-pen out there, there is only one selection button on the back. The way you can choose among a black pen, a red pen, a marker and a sharp pencil is simply orienting the pen with the selected instrument's icon facing upward. Then you just click the button and you are ready to write. The inner selection mechanism is simply based on gravity.

In an era where any digital device must have at least one accelerometer to be considered cool, the simplicity of this pen is somehow striking. The funny thing is that, the model I am holding in the pictures, is about 20 years old!

Ladies and Gentlemen... the Cultural Design

Perhaps it is just me that I am turning politically correct after having being over-exposed to New York's life, but I find the symbols above, stitched on the doors of the bathrooms in the KAIST Industrial Design building, a little bit offensive.

At first I thought they were trying to resemble the Chinese characters of woman and man, but it is the case that my imagination just brought me too far. They are simply indicating the way how usually men and women urinate, sitting and standing.

Although there is nothing explicitly impolite in recalling the human's posture on the toilet, I somehow feel uncomfortable with this metaphor and I wonder if this is one of those subtle case where culture plays a dominant role.

I talked yesterday with Don Norman about Cultural Design, the horizontal evolution of the concept of design which should take into account the traversal cultural differences, amplifying rather than flattening them.

I hence wonder if the toilet's signs above are one of those cases that perfectly respects the cultural differences and should actually be encouraged (rather than having me feeling offended) or if design should try to avoid those situations where some categories of users, even if small, could actually feel uncomfortable.

Transhuman Imagination?

Today I introduce a London based fashion designer Gareth Pugh with his fascinating transhuman-looking works. It ironically reminds me that 'clothes' is one of the most ever-changing interface in terms of its function and structure through long long history. And I thought Pugh could go more extreme in this sense at first. Style.com describes Pugh as the "latest addition to a long tradition of fashion-as-performance-art that stretches back through Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Vivienne Westwood." But still, as far as clothes serves for anthromorphized creatures, it seems that there's little reason to progressively modify the language of this interface(clothes).

Phone Messaging On the Bus

I took a bus in a recent trip and one of my friend translated for me an interesting message attached in the front of the cabin, near the driver. The message roughly says that if you have any complain or problem you can contact directly the driver with a message (sms) to his phone number. I was wondering if the reason behind this choice is convenience, privacy, safety or legal issues but I cannot still imagine a scenario where the simple verbal communication would not be more efficient. Perhaps is only a matter of culture.

How You Can Lock MY Bank Account

Here a really funny thing I discovered few days ago. Woori Bank, one of the biggest bank in Korea, offers a web portal where customers can log in with user name and password to use the internet banking service. If you mistakenly type your password 3 times, you will have to visit a branch office to file a report (presumably in the meantime your internet banking will be disabled).

Although it seems a very common procedure to lock an account after 3 attempts (as it happens with pin numbers on the phone), in my opinion it is not a good choice for things to which everybody could have access. It makes sense to have this system on a phone, because it is unlikely I will mistake my pin number three times, and if this situation happens is it is probably because someone else is trying to access my phone.

An internet service, however, is open to everyone which means that I can easily lock someone else account (for any reason) and cause to an another person the trouble to have to visit a branch office of the bank.

Perhaps there could be more effective way to prevent hackers to find out your account information, to name one, locking the account after 3 attempts but also sending an email to the customer so that he will be able to file the report on-line.

Assumptions, Philosophy and Design

The beauty of assumptions is that they work as filters: any human action is based on some sort of assumptions in the sense that assumptions determine the direction and result of those actions. In some way, the hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer best exemplifies the role of assumptions in human relations:

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

So how are assumptions, prejudices and philosophy related with interfaces? Here my thinking.

I went to Stabucks and I tried to connect to the free wireless account. In order to do so, you have to accept an agreement, as usually happens, and you have to insert your name and social security number (!! this issue deserves a post by itself). The funny thing though was that they only accepted the spelling of the names in Hangul, the Korean writing system. Hence, my name could not match with my social security number on their database and I was denied access.

The designer's assumption in this case is that the name should be written in Korean: of course the designer was aware of foreigners trying to access the service, but he preferred to deny them access in order to have a simpler and safer system. Consider if I was allowed to input my name in roman characters: Korean could do that too, but as I learned from my staying here, the transliteration of the name of the person is not standard, so there could be many variation for the same name, making difficult the match in the database. For example, the last name 안 is translated in English either with An or Ahn, and it is totally up to the last name's owner.

Assumptions are necessary and represents the true DNA of objects, things, people. They also disclose us the designer's mind and intentions. In this sense they work as a prejudice, a sort of precognition of the world, as Gadamer suggested: prejudices are the indispensable piece of information pre-embedded in our mind that let us know other things or people, and of course the prejudice should be always kept updated, otherwise it would turn in a negative thing, like a stereotype.

Analogously, assumptions are the pre-embedded vision of the world in the designer's mind: they orient his work toward what he believes is a problem and sometimes they bring a product or project in a totally wrong direction. Nevertheless, they are the single most important thing in the evolution of an idea. Under this light, we can conclude that assumptions are the conceptual interface made of thoughts in our mind that let us know and interact with the world around.

Book Vending Machine

In most of Korean train station you can find, among others, a particular kind of vending machine: a book vending machine. The working principle is exactly the same you are used to with soft drinks vending machines: insert the money or card, select the book you want to purchase, get it from the bottom as it is delivered like a can.

What I find interesting about this machine, is not its purpose or working mechanisms (after all, it is a simple vending machine), but the principles behind the selection of the books. Let me explain myself.

Consider a vending machine that sells soft drinks: from the vendor's perspective, it is very important to select the right beverages that maximize the consumption, namely, among the most common and familiar beverages, select those that cover the wider range of tastes. So, you will almost always find things like Coke, Sprite, Fanta in the U.S., while for example in Korea you will find Pepsi, tea, orange juice and coffee (in most cases, tastes are culturally dependent).

So, here the question? How those books are chosen? The question is not trivial.
If they sell only best-sellers, the probability that somebody already purchased the same book is very high, unless the target users of these machines are casual readers. In that case perhaps, the cover is more important. Other issues are that the books cannot be browsed, you cannot read any excerpt, and the the book market, differenlty from soft drinks, continuously and rapidly changes.

I bet that these are just few of the numerous problems related with the seltion of the books: it will be worthy some further investigation.

Domestic Interface and Transition

Diller+Scofidio touched the dark side of domestic life through 'Bad Press'(picture above), which belongs to Dissident Ironing(1993 - 98) series. Domestic objects are full of intuitive rules based on 'normality': shirt to be folded like a shirt, curtain to be wrinkled and hung, bed to be covered with blanket, etc. In this specific space, how we normally dispose things completes the significance of objects. Moreover, it seems that things are automatically sorted into few categories(such as wearbale belongings, furniture and electronics) within the reign of appearances. In this sense, I think that 'Bad Press' can be interpreted as an attempt towards 'an abnormal normality' that Andrea Branzi(italian architecture and designer) mentioned.

Public Phone Today

Here a question: how has the usage of public phones changed over time? The obvious fact is that cellphones made obsolete and almost useless the public phones, however, there are some situations in which public phones are still necessary (it happened to me in a recent trip to Seoul to have forgotten my mobile phone). How our way to using public phones evolved with time?

Here some considerations:

1) phones that accepts coins are slowly disappearing, substituted by those that works with prepaid cards. Cards solve the problem of carrying change and lead to less waste of money per call. However, if you rarely need to use a public phone, you might end up in the situation of having to buy a card just for a single phone call: in many cases the card expires before you can use it completely, or perhaps you forget it and end up buying a new one the next time for an analogous situation.

2) Having lived in New York thought me some basic hygienic precautions: anytime I had to use a public phone I slightly cleaned the receiver before putting it close to my head or simply I would have avoid the physical contact with my face. However, I noticed how the receivers of even old phone booths in the streets of Korea are relatively clean and don't really require any hygienic precaution. This result is, of course, a function of the place where the booth is located, but also a consequence of having so much less people using the receivers.

These are just few thoughts based on my experience of public phones that caught me a while ago while I was actually trying to use them.

That Scalable Object of Desire

http://blog.naver.com/peripanu/40043003099

http://images.google.co.kr/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Big-shoe-Tricycles-vehicle.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Big-shoe-Tricycles-vehicle.jpg&usg=__VIsVShAvbXqt33IwT4wKtK9tqOY=&h=1728&w=2304&sz=1507

When we resize objects(especially fashionable items) to micro or macro scale, it seems that their new interfaces bring us different types of desires.

1) micro scale: makes us feel tempted to 'collect' more. A korean business woman collected 98 doll shoes on her blog and says that she really loves to take this kind of picture.(2nd picture) The more, the better.

2) macro scale: entice people to physically experience it(touch, go inside, climb,..) If we take a picture with macro-scaled object, we usually want ourselves to be in the picture.
It would be great in some cases if we can feely scale interfaces, to sustainably support our multiple desires.

Transforming Clothes

I received this video from one Also Plants Fly oversea reader, Sung Yeonsu, so I decided to propose it here, not only to show this interesting type of wearable interface technology, but also to encourage other readers's contributions. We are always looking forward for them!

The transforming clothes are by Turkish fashion designer Hussein Chalayan. For a full article read here. Enjoy the video!

Indirect Interaction

Touch screen devices are probably considered the trendiest technologies these days. I personally do not share this passion for this type of interface: in many cases I find them counter-intuitive, in most cases tiresome or annoying, forcing the user with continuous unnecessary touch inputs.

In my (perhaps wrong) opinion, I think that even though the mouse didn't evolve much in the past 20 years, the GUI (Graphical User Interface) did a lot, in a way that helped users to minimize unnatural gestures or continuous movements of the cursor on the screen: what the mouse could not do, the GUI did it. With the touch screen it seems to me we got back to the origins of GUI design, and although the touch interface is more powerful than the mouse, the final user experience is overall worse.

Here an example of a terrible touch-based interface found in my school (KAIST). A big map of the campus with some other pictures are displayed on a 4-screen display and the input is handled by touch mechanism. However, the touch screen display is separate from the main display: it is positioned on the side of the main screen and it mirrors the main graphical interface of the bigger screen. If you touch the small screen, you can get different images displayed on both screens.

Given this result with the touch-screen display, I start wondering what they will do when they will get the multi-touch displays.

Cut = DIY

As far as i am concerned, paper doll remains as one of the most obsessive work in my life. When I was a child, in late 80's and early 90's, almost every girl used to have so many sheets of paper dolls. I used to spend an entire day to cut all of them carefully and place them in separate boxes of various styles. I don't know if this trendy item for kids had succeeded only in Korea, but i guess pretty much everyone has the same experience of cutting paper shapes for fun.

Definitely it would have been less exciting, if paper clothes were already cut. The real joy of this paper interface is in the process: enticing us into a kind of impatience to fit each clothes onto the doll. The thing is, we have to cut them as fast as we wish. The moment of trying new clothes for the first time is really fruitful. We can call paper dolls as fashion-oriented DIY content in a broad sense. My analysis is that cutting seems to be the source of (analogue) DIY actions, which is also applied to the field of fashion sometimes(especially Issey Miyake's Pleats Please collections), as two-dimensional appoach of DIY still. Cutting in 3d could be suggested for the next attraction in DIY fashion items.(I personally would like to try some DIY laser cutting in realtime..zz)

Jam Package

This jam pack is in my opinion a good example of package design. The pictures are self explanatory, so I won't go into the details of how the package actually works. I believe that this package could work well also with honey, creams and jelly. As far as I understood, this type of package is very common in Korea, but I have never seen it before in Europe or in the States.

Unmanned Mascot

To be honest, I cannot really say that I see a great advantage in using mascots for marketing promotions: theoretically they should contribute to build up the image of a company or of a product, or alternatively should work as a way for people to quickly identify such image. In practice, we often see on the streets cute but somehow anonymous mascots in the in vain attempt to catch people's attention.

The picture above represents in some way the extreme case of this Mascot Culture: indeed there is a mascot costume, but there is nobody inside! Surely this picture is hilarious, but also induces us to think about what is the real role of image identifiers in marketing campaigns.

Ads War

From the highway that goes to Seoul you can see the buildings of Hyunday and Kia Motors, the two major competitors in the Korean car industry. The scene is somehow hilarious: in the darkness of the night you can distinguish only the red and blue logos of the two companies.

It comes to wonder if it is indeed a coincidence that the two building are located next to each other or if one was there before the other. If so, it would be even more curious to know why the second comer decided to get the very next building: was the intention to explititly present itself as the main rival of the other company?

LCD Screen in Potential

A LCD screen with the directions in the Coex Mall, Seoul. The image on the screen is static: there is no interactivity with the users or multiple layers of informations presented as a looping sequence of images (at least, it seems so from what I have seen).

In this sense, the screen is for the customers only a subconscious reminder of being in a technologically advanced place: basically it is a show-off of technology. In fact, this interface serves the customers not better of what would do equally well an old fashioned plastic plate.

The risk of high-technological environments, like in the example above, is to become technology-driven, which paradoxically leads to a waste of technological potential.

Windshields

Umbrellas and cellophane anchored to umbrellas are used as windshields. The first picture in particular deserves few words: we were eating on the beach in an improvised restaurant (very common in Korea). The owner of the activity used the umbrellas as windshield to make us, the customers, feel comfortable. Surely the same umbrellas serve as sunblockers during summer or in sunny days.

Train Tickets in Italy and Process Redundancy

Something funny from my recent trip to Italy: taking a train in Italy is not so intuitive or simple as it should be.
You 1) buy a ticket like the on in the picture above: as you can see, there is, among the other things, the date, the city of departure and destination. Nevertheless, you are required 2)to get a stamp from a machine located on the tracks of train before boarding (you can see the stamp on the side of the ticket). Finally, 3) on the train an inspector will pass through the wagons and punch your ticket (the little squared hole).

Basically, getting a train in Italy require you to do 3 redundant steps, unjustifiably augmenting the costs and the complication, without adding any substantial difference from one step to the other (what is the point of a stamp once you bought a ticket with a date on it?)



If you are actually wondering the reason is simple: over the years different types of non-homogeneous tickets have been introduced. Moreover tickets usually have a range period in which you can use them (which should give more flexibility to the passengers) and inspectors not always pass through the wagons of the train during a trip. Hence, these 3 steps become a system of protection against passengers who would cheat re-using un-punched tickets for another trip, taking advantage of the inefficiency of the service.

In conclusion, as almost everything in Italy, train tickets are the attempt of stitching patches over a system of rules and inefficiency that intrinsically has too many holes and which would require a deep re-design. But believe me when I say, being Italian, that this way of thinking is too far from our culture to ever be accepted.

Beer and Korean Braille

While having a beer at dinner tonight I noticed on top of the can the well known dots used in the Braille system, a widely diffuse method among blind people for reading and writing.

The idea of using it is clever (it is widely used for dangerous products like pharmacies) and it is very unfortunate that the Braille on cans is not a standard adopted by all the beer vendors (perhaps other Korean vendors follow this standard, but not all the international producers).

However, the most fascinating thing about this can of beer is that the dots don't obey to the international Braille system: I looked it up online and it was clear that I could not decode it. After more digging I found the Korean-Braille System, a variant to transliterate the Korean Hangul (the Korean "alphabet"). For example, in this specific case, we can decode the dots in 맥주 (maek-ju=beer).

It would be interesting to discuss more about the Korean-Braille, but the only thing I would like to add here is that it is made on the expectation that people would know how to write in Hangul: in fact, the Braille is not a language, but only a method to transliterate words. The same can of beer exported in the U.S. or Europe should have a different sets of dots, complying with the local language, in order to be understandable.

And maybe this explains why not all the vendors have adopted the Braille as a standard for labeling cans.

Like a Dual Core

This vending machine is different from those you usually see around: it has two doors for dispensing the food, rather than one. The reason is because not only it dispenses food, but it also cook it, if of cooking we can talk when a machine pours boiling water over a bowl of noodles. This process, might require several minutes and if the machine had only one output door it would force other people to wait (rather annoying if two people would like to have together noodles for meal).

Two doors allow multitasking speeding up the pipeline and decreasing the waiting time. So here it comes the analogy of the Dual Core processor: in situations like this one where it is not possible or not productive to speed up the process (you can't cook noodle for 2 minutes instead of 5...), it is better to go for a parallel-process solution.

A Misleading LCD Screen

This post has been long overdue!
At Home Plus, one of the shopping center near to KAIST, on the last floor, there is a food court. You pay at the counter, get a receipt with your ordination number and then take a seat waiting for your number to be called. You can tell that your number has been called once you see it appearing on a big flat LCD screen.

Customers numbers are queued in a linear sequence, quickly accumulating over time and don't disappear for a long time, probably until the exhaustion of the slots available, requiring hence to shift all the entries. All numbers have the same color,blue, making the orders not easily distinguishable at a glance. Moreover, the numbers are not sorted, requiring customers to continuously look up and scroll with the eyes over the big matrix of numbers trying to catch if they missed their call.





This type of interface is ridiculous! It is the fancy counterpart of the old style LED panels that are still used somewhere in the same fashion. In this case, monochrome numbers in linear sequences were an unavoidable constraint. In the case of the LCD screen, however, there is no justification for such usage of colors and layout.

The designer should have simply chosen, for example, to order numerically the entries for easy browsing and to use different colors to indicate different priority levels: a flashing green number means "just called", versus a gray static number which means "called a long time ago". Colors in particular are the obvious answer to many of the design problems of this device and are also the natural application of a LCD screen, otherwise why even bothering using one rather than a cheaper LED panel?

This is a good example of how technology in some cases is misused (in the sense that doesn't provide any real advantage to the users) and such bad usage misleads us, making us think that a LCD screen "is intrinsically better or looks better" than a cheaper LED display.

The beauty of technology is not in the technology itself, but in its usage.

Skinning: Personalization with Stickers

Personalization of a cellphone with stickers is very common, at the point that it totally passes unnoticed to most of us. It highlights though the need of a particular group of users: the need of distinction, customization, personalization, intimate interaction with everyday's objects or work tools.

It is pretty much for the same reason why, if you go to party and see somebody wearing exactly your same clothes, you feel you want to go back home and change them before somebody approaches you and ask if you guys are somehow related.

Store Bell

A small bell hanging from the handle of a 7-Eleven local store in Daejeon. This kind of devices (or home-made hacks) are becoming rarer and rarer, replaced in the majority of the case by the electronic counterparts as described by Donald Norman:

"Hacks and workarounds: those are the soul of innovation. Observing is easy: recognizing the innovation and then knowing what to do with the observations are where the difficulties lie."

I wonder though if this upgrading is always beneficial. Take the case of the store bell: the electronic counterparts are less environmental friendly, both considering manufacturing and disposing of them. They make sense in those stores where the presence of the seller is not always needed and perhaps could be in the back room: in this case, a remote buzzer could be beneficial, but not in places like a local shopping mart.

Labels

When you go the bathroom you probably don't need labels to find the soap, the water or the air dryer, because they are very discrete and evident objects.

In this bathroom configuration at SDA Bocconi graduate school in Milan though, labels are written on a mirror indicating the location of these items: putting your hands under the mirror in correspondence of a label, you can get the desired service.

The interface looks indeed fashionable and nice, but has one major drawback. Labels are in only one language, Italian, and being the mirror and the labels analog items, they cannot be changed in real time depending on the demand, as we are instead used to with digital interfaces. SDA Bocconi, in particular, is trying to grow more and more as an international institution and is plenty of international students, making the presence of these physical labels a little bit funny.

Breaking Conventions in Padova

The city of Padova has notoriously one of the worst urban plan of Italy, at the point that some situations are total nonsense. For unknown reasons, the convention to drive on the right, which is the one used in Italy, is totally ignored in this street: you can see arrows on the ground indicating that drivers should keep the left track.

What is even worse is the choice of using arrows painted on the street as a primary way to communicate this abrupt change of direction: it is easy to imagine a scenario where the arrows could not be easily seen (at night, under the rain or if some snow covers the tracks), creating a confusing and dangerous situation for drivers.

Cutlery

Cutlery items are a beautiful type of interface. Because they are so common, they pass unnoticed, unless we consider them in contrast to alternative eating tools/habits (chopsticks or hands, for example).

Forks, knives and spoons are not only interesting as individual objects, considered in all the variety of forms in which they are made (take as example the beautiful "knife for fish"), but also collectively. Their arrangement on the table is not so intuitive and might procure some difficulties to those who are not used to it.

Forks are on the left of the plate, knifes on the right; desert items are on the top (they might contain forks, knifes and spoons). All these sets might not be present since the beginning of the meal and could be disposed little by the waiters.

In the case that all the cutlery items are present since the beginning, you can start using them from the external set (usually the smallest), respectively for appetizer, first dish, second dish and desert. There might be confusion when some dishes require more than one set of items, like some appetizers that require to use the fork, the knife and the spoon.

Down here an example of fish-knife, a knife that it is polite to use also as a spoon (you can put it in your mouth).

Change Machine in a 24 For 7 Store

24x7 stores are not common in Italy, not even in big cities like Milan. The most immediate solution are vending machine, a sort of self contained oasis where you can find drinks and cold or hot food at any time. I have seen before a similar place on 8th Street and 2nd Ave in New York City.

The only difference I can recall is the CHANGE machine, supposedly because there is not the equivalent of a $1 bill in euro (the smallest bill is the 5 euro), making necessary a way to change bills in coins.

Menus

An example of a compact but not very intuitive interface: a menu with a textual list describing sandwiches in a coffee shop of Milan, Italy.
On the left side of the menu, sandwiches (which, in this case, have names that don't help much in understanding their content) are grouped by the type of meet or vegetable contained, which makes easier to browse over the list, but still requires to spend few minutes readings the ingredients.

If customer turnover and readiness to serve to international customers (denoted here by the presence of the English translation in the menu) are very important, like for this coffee shop, I imagine that pictures in the menu could be a much more appropriate choice.

Accelerometers and Phones

Although nowadays phones mounting accelerometers are pretty common, good usages of them are rare. This Samsung Beat M3510 represents a nice exception. The ring-tone of an incoming call can immediately be silenced flipping the phone, so that the screen faces the ground. This is an example of an intuitive gesture that can be easily associated to the idea of turning something off, or, like in this case, muting a melody. The interface is simple, fast and natural.

Style without gravity

I think shoes have the highest potential to be interactive interface among all the fashionable items, when we define interaction as collision. But there's one major factor that constrains shoes to be natural interface: the gravity. We can keep raising hands in the air as long as we want, but not for the feet.

What if we reside in the space? Will our toes evolve like our fingers? Do we still need shoes? One thing i can imagine is these kind of crazy japanese shoes in Harajuku will have no problem and be enthroned as one of the trendy space style from aesthetical point of view.

Christmas Apple

Also food becomes the vehicle of a message, in this case an apple becomes a Christmas card.

This apple, bought in Italy, shows the drawing of a star on the surface. The drawing is not actually painted, but it is the result of applying a sticker on the apple while growing ripe under the sun.

Camel Smoking Zone

People smoking in a dedicated area of Munich airport. Airports are smoke-free places, hence the necessity of creating small area reserved to smokers.

The one in the picture, named after the sponsor Camel Smoking Zone, is particularly ilarious: it looks like a transparent zoo cage packed of animals. It comes to wonder if using transparent walls is an expedient to give sense of space within the box and perhaps to let the poeple inside observe what's going on ourside or if it is a security requirement. Neverhteless, it puts under everybody's eyes those that decide to smoke a cigarette.

Stereotypes on Sign-Boards

A sign-board in the airport of Munich indicating the direction to an Italian coffee shop. The sign-board pictures San Pellegrino sparkling water, coffee and brioches, three among the most common stereotypical items that represent Italian consumptions.

Stereotypes serve not only to guarantee the authenticity over a range of products, but become a clear symbol to identify things or places. In this case, a distract traveler could recognize in a fraction of a second the presence of an Italian coffee shop, without even the need of reading. The pictures act as subliminal messages associated in the subconscious with the advertised products or place.

Water Fountain

A water fountain in Incheon Airport: the water flow is triggered by a simple proximity sensor (probably an infrared sensor) in order to provide a touch-free interface that enhances convenience for passengers, guarantees hygienic interaction and contributes to build the image of Korea as a technologically advanced country.

Merry

The window of a bus is like an invisible message board, where messages becomes visible only after a sufficient concentration of humidity is developed in the interior of the bus. In this case, a traveler share his/her best wishes of Merry Holidays.

Connected Home Scenario Video

Connected Home from MIT Mobile Experience Lab on Vimeo.

I am really impressed by the presentation quality of this video scenario "The Connected Home" from MITs Mobile Experience Group. The video is definitely more understandable and presentable (though not nearly as funny!) then many future scenario videos of the past. However I can't say any of the ideas they present are particularly innovative or unique in the field of ubicomp. I do like their focus on sustainable design and their mock ups of the home computer interface. It is worth watching but don't expected to be overly awed by their ideas.

found via (Digital Urban)

Stairs Reprised

I got an interesting comment on yesterday's post about the stairs with the chutes. The comment said that perhaps those chutes are actually ramps for bikes, which makes perfect sense in this case, considering that the stairs are really near to a bike lane and that they are the only way to cross a major intersection.

Nevertheless, I went today to check more about the mysterious chutes and I found interesting details. First of all I found the carts for carrying packs of clothes downstairs to the under-street market. I also saw people sliding over the chutes big bags full of merchandise and metal pipes that are used as infrastructure for the exposition tables. I report down here the images that I took for documentation.

Thank you again for the precious comment which "forced" me to investigate a little bit more on this interface and to do my job properly.

Stairs

Stairs of the underpass of a street in Daejeon: both sides of the stairs have a chute made of a grid, which presumably can better serve people who need to push carts full of merchandise in the tunnels under the road (remember, in fact, that in Korea many of these tunnels are turned into daytime street markets). The presence of these chutes seems justified by the absence of a public elevator.

However, the choice to position the chutes at the sides of the stairs, is questionable. Perhaps putting them at the sides is safer than putting them in the center, where people, unaware of them, could easily slip, but it defeats the purpose of having stair-handles attached to the wall. In fact, between the handles and the possible user there is the space reserved for the chutes.

Building Numbers

Numbers attached to the facade of buildings are nowadays a common standard in university campuses and all those places where there is the need of uniquely and easily identify buildings. Ditto here in KAIST.

I criticize though the choice to put these numbers on the top part of the facades, obeying to some implicit convention of old pre-urbanized societies, where tall buidings, like stiples of churches, dominated the skyline and served as reference points.




A random visitor of KAIST would hardly find the building he is looking for, not only because all the building are tall and occlude each other, but also because from the inside of a car, it is hard to look up to the top of the building that stands just next to you.

I am glad to see that I am not the only one sharing this concern. The last picture of this post presents a variant to the building identification number. It is a labeled column at the street level, used for the newly rebuilt industrial design building: a rather more reasonable and well though solution at the problem of visibility.

Ambulances

Ambulances from Italy, U.S., Korea and Dubai. Pay attention to how the word "AMBULANCE" is written on the front side of the vehicle.

The ambulances from countries where the roman alphabet is used have the word ambulance flipped horizontally, such that it could be easily read using the car mirrors.

However, ambulances from countries where other type of alphabets are used, have the word ambulance written in the native language but not flipped, presumably because words in non-roman alphabets cannot be easily parsed or properly recognized if flipped.

Invisibility Cloak

http://kr.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPVQal851U
With optical-camouflage technology developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, the invisibility cloak is already a reality. The cloak that enables optical camouflage to work is made from a special material known as retro-reflective material.

(You can read more details here.)

http://science.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak.htm/printable
It is pretty amazing. By the way, it seems that our motivations for technology is already going beyond the practical needs. Do imaginations from virtual worlds(from novels to online games) conquer our future? We often go 'back to what was once the future' and realize things even if they're not perfect. I wonder what we really want from science and technology. Entertainment? Freedom? Evolution? Stimulus? The thing is it's not completely for convinence and functionality for life any more from this era.

Containers for Cigarette Stubs

Special containers for cigarette stubs are not that surprising, unless they are in a country where it is even hard to find trash cans for generic garbage on the streets.

In order to avoid an unwelcome tax raise, the Korean government preferred to install only a small amount of garbage cans, expecting people to bring home their waste. My expectation is that, in the worst case scenario, the expenditures to clean up the mess done by those few that don't respect the law and trash their garbage on the streets is less than the potential expenditure of maintaining a huge number of trash cans all over the cities.

It sounds hence contradictory to have special containers for cigarette. However, if you think about the risks of having people trashing still burning stubs among other garbage or on the streets, these special cans make sense.



What actually happened, though, is that people not only used this cans for burning materials, but also for common waste (because of the scarcity of regular garbage containers), provoking even more dangerous situations. Apparently also the government is aware of this behavior and is planning to remove the stub containers.

This issue brings up a very interesting design issue that somehow mimics Maslow's pyramid: devices for special needs (the stub containers) work only if more basic needs are addressed first (regular garbage containers), otherwise they turn into ineffective devices for both the primary and special needs.

Where The Streets Have No Name

The majority of the Korean maps I have seen don't report street names. It's not that Korean streets do not actually have names, they do have them: in fact, in Korea there is an efficient postal service, not possible if there were not. Nevertheless, names are most of the time not used in maps, unless they refer to main intersections or important streets.

As alternative way to represent locations on a map, Korean maps use building names, subway and bus stations and even store names. This last choice is very peculiar for this country, where stores come and go at the speed of light, leaving you astonished whenever you realized that the store you were looking for closed overnight and left the space to a new one.

The interesting part of all of this, though, is that also people speak of places in the same way of maps: colloquially, places are always defined and uniquely identified in terms of other places.

Above here, a map to get to the immigration office in Daejeon.

Fahion in Motion

This was an interesting performance i saw on the street of 'Las Ramblas' in Barcelona 2 years ago. As you can see, she looks like walking against the wind, but actually she isn't moving at all.

She catched people's eyes right away with this simple trick of folding and transforming her clothes items and hair style. I think she opened a great possibility toward 'fashion performance' where we can express motion effectively by simple shaping of clothes from another angle. And also fashion designers can apply this joke to their site-specific styles.(I will..)

Office or Restroom?

A tag with the room number on the door of the men's restroom. I exclude that the door was affixed before the bathroom was completed, so I wonder why someone would intentionally decide to attach a number to the door, knowing what there is inside. What was the intention?

After all, there is only 1 men's bathroom on the floor, and no risk to mistakenly confuse a bathroom for another, not even for the workers who take care of the building and need to uniquely identify every room: it is the men's room of the first floor.

Also Plants Take Drugs

With a cold winter knocking at the door, volunteers in Daejeon decided to safeguard the plants near the center of the city with special drip-feed bottles attached to the trunk. The content of the bottle, of which I do not know the exact composition (it was written in Korean) but that is supposedly a nutritive solution for plants, is directly injected at the roots of the plant.

CAPTCHA

Have you ever stopped to think about captchas? You know those swirly boxes with random letters or words in them that pop up when you try to join some new web membership? The world of captchas is much more fascinating then you would think.

To get started you should know that the name C.A.P.T.C.H.A is actually an acronym. According to wikipedia it means: " Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."

So its a reverse turning test! A test given by a computer to figure out if you are human or not. Can a computer recognize a computer?

Here are some of the wide variety of CAPTCHAs out there.

The Basic captcha from Yahoo! (They were the originals).

A little more creative from myspace, nice water mark.

After a few reloads they gave me a textured background, I must be suspicious.



Note the speaker icon from hotmails, guess what that is for?

gmail makes it a little more obvious, its an audio captcha for the visually impaired!


Have a listen its pretty amazing, I love the middle part "Once again" Go DJ!



So if you are a visually impaired person you have to recognize and type the 8 (I think) digits that they read out.

Try another one, this one is from recaptcha





Or the captchas from recaptcha actually help to recognize the text scanned from old books that OCR text recognition fails to understand, Crowd sourcing at its finest. Here is an example:


Below is a really creative one, though it seems not so secure.


Speaking of security, since a captcha is essentially a secruity device against bots (scripts) there are many creative and devious ways to get around captchas. One of the most creative schemes I could find actually has users who think they are typing captchas for one site in reality typing captchas for another site. For example I put a captcha here on alsoplantsfly that is really the captcha from hotmail account signup forwarded by a script. You type in the answer thinking you are accessing some secure item such as comments on alsoplantsfly, but you are really allowing me to access hotmail and create a new spam account via a script!

I am just scratching the surface here, but there are many more interesting captchas out there such as photo matching captchas. More to follow soon.

At the Table

I started recently to put more attention on what I do on a daily basis in order to discover in myself possible (unconscious) behavioral patterns. I was at the table eating with friends and I realized that, trying to grab a bottle water, I impolitely extended my arm in front of the person that was eating next to me.

I can only partially excuse my impoliteness by the fact that I did not want to interrupt the conversation of two people by asking for water. Nevertheless, I started to look critically to what I did, realizing that I almost never acted like this when I was in Europe.

What we could confuse for a culturally-driven behavior is indeed a simple problem of disposition of the food on the table. In most of western countries, the food is served per-person base and everyone eats from his/her own dish, leaving space in the middle of the table for the water: in East Asian countries, often the food is shared in bigger dishes located in the middle of the table, making necessary a re-location of the water at the side of the tables (to this we add the fact that, at least in Korea, people tend not to drink water during the meal, making useless its presence in the middle of the table). It becomes then impossible to grab the water without either asking for it or stretching out on the table.

We can hence easily understand the reason behind some "impolite" behaviors like the one I did and try to read it for what they are: not a cultural difference, simply an interface design problem.

Many Small PCs = 1 Mainframe

Something strikes me about the picture below, a bounce of desktop PCs on the shelves in a room of my department. Since I saw them, they reminded me of the old type of mainframe computers that I have seen only in movies like Tron.

They actually don't even look so far away from each other: on one side we have a whole room dedicated to a huge computer, the mainframe. On the other side we have a whole room dedicated to many small computers, the servers.

We might have changed the computer and network architectures but the boxes are all still there: in the room.

Notices

Despite all the technology we have and use, certain type of information, usually the one that absolutely must be read, is distributed in an old fashioned way. In the case of the picture, sheets with registration deadlines for dormitories are slid under the doors.

Sticker-Curtains

Just few thoughts about an extremely common type of interface. This picture was taken in a recreation center for elders that I recently visited for research purposes.

The room in the picture, a dining hall, has windows with large patterned stickers attached to the glass (roughly every sticker is about 1m x 1m). The purpose of those stickers is blocking the sunlight: the pattern partially obstructs the passage of the light, representing a valid alternative to curtains in those places where, like in this case, there is necessity of a clean and safe environment, in spite of aesthetic concerns.

Interaction design conference calendar

Recently I discovered this rather helpful Interaction design conference deadline calendar/blog.

The website has a rolling list of upcoming deadlines for numerous interaction design conferences all over the world.

You can subscribe via RSS, ical, or via google calendar display the list on your webpage. So if you find yourself looking for an interaction conference in the next few months this list is probably a great place to start.

They are also always looking for new conferences, so if you are associated with a conference or know of one not on the list you can submit it.

Interaction Design Calendar

Bathroom Interfaces

Two intersting interfaces in public restrooms.

The first one is a rolling shutter that acts as a space divisor in a gender-shared bathrrom, hiding in this way the part reserved only to men.

The second interface is a small frame to hold advertisements above the urinals: pople who use them are obviously exposed to an ad for approximatively 30 seconds.

Black-Out

A scheduled blackout in campus over the weekend reminded me how much we are dependent on two things in particular, water and energy. The temporary loss of the two created a lot of   inconvinience and blocked pretty much all the activities of the campus. Extend this phenomenon to a city, a region, a country, the world,  and you get the picture.

Coffee Shops Philosophy

On Sunday I went to the local Starbucks to study on my own. I ordered one latte and a muffin for breakfast and when I received my order I noticed two forks on the plate. 

I already knew that in Korea coffee shops are usually the preferred destiantions for couples on a date, but I found nevertheless intersting that they assumed that I was accopanied, or if you prefer, the choice of serving two forks to avoid customers continuously bugging them for the second fork. Whatever is the reason for the choice, the two forks work here as a sort of interface, on which you can read among the lines the philosophy of coffee shops in Korea.

I knew it already that usually in Korean couples go to a coffee shop in a date, but I found intersting that they assumed that I 

Wear Your Way Home

Today, I'll introduce a quick review of fashion combined with 'map'. I unconsciously googled 'fashion+map' in image search this morning and could collect some interesting results.

The picture right above is a map of London on a glove created for the 1851 Great Exhibition (a.k.a. the First World's Fair) by George Shove, which seems quite old to me. I'm really curious to know when and who was the first to come up with this romantic idea in the world history.

http://baltimore.about.com/od/events/ig/Walters-Art-Museum-Map-Exhibit/Map-of-London-on-Glove.htm

Next. These fashions made of papers were created by french artist Elizabeth Lecourt. http://www.elisabethlecourt.com/html/newyork.html Although they are for look, and not to wear, I totally think someone should produce map fabric because I'd so wear a map dress - and just think how practical and pleasant it would be too.

And these Italian-made suede To Boot With a map of Manhattan on their soles, they are the perfect accompaniment to this World War II Bomber Jacket.

Subway Library

A shelf with some books in a subway station of Daejeon.
Anybody can freely pick up a book from the shelf and read it while waiting for the train or during the train ride, as long as he returns it when finished. I am not totally sure, but I think people can also bring the books at home, like if they were actually borrowing the book from a public library.

I have to say though that the selection of books is very poor and the quality of the collection low. Nevertheless, the city offers a free pubic service to anybody, service which will eventually migrate to a digital form in the future: without speculating too much, we can imagine the day in which borrowing books will correspond to freely download-able (but legal) content for e-book readers or hand-held devices. There are already websites that serve to this purpose, like the Project Gutenberg, and there are already plenty of people carrying around pocket-able devices like the iPhone.
The future is already here.

Standards

Luckily there are standards! Here a trivial example of a patch interface to adapt an Apple AC-adapter for laptops, originally sold with the U.S. plug, into an European or Korean adapter. The actual patch is the black cable, a standard cable stolen from some other device.

Hardware manufactures might be tempted to build AC-adapters in only one piece, so that they could hold the monopoly of the cable supplies for their own laptops (charging so for cables 2 or 3 times the actual cost). However, the modularity of production of these pieces guarantees to companies some economies of scale and consequently lower marginal costs that probably greatly surpass the benefits they would have from the exclusive monopoly their own power adapters.

All You Need For a Birthday Party

What do you need for a successful Happy Birthday Party? Well, a cake, candles, matches, a knife and bangers (indispensable!). As a matter of fact, companies decided to pack all these things together and give them along with the birthday cake.

Beside feeling relieved that I am evidently not the only one who always forget to bring the knife and the matches along with the cake, exemplified by the decision of these companies to provide this extra service, I would like to look at the birthday cake under a different perspective.

The cake used to be a product, simply food no more than pasta or kimchi, but we are assisting to a transition (exemplified by the service described before). Cakes are services, not anymore products. We do not buy a birthday cake because we are hungry and we want to eat it, (especially a cake like the one in the picture, litterally covered by cream), we buy a cake for the occasion of the birthday, even for collegues in our office that we barely know. It is a curtesy sign. It is a political gesture. It is like bringing a bottle of wine or a box of chocolate when you are invited to somebody's else home.

The birthday cake is the excuse to remember or highlight a moment ("Today is my boss' birthday") and companies sell this moment, exactly as when we go to the movie theatre and we buy "two hours of fun watching a movie". In this sense, candles, knifes and bangers can be truly seen for what they are: not products, but props of a service.

Hot and Cold

Here an interesting type of vending machine which I found only in Korea, although I am sure it exists also in other countries. The peculiarity of this vending machine is that it distributes both cold and hot drinks. You can choose the type of drink you want as you would do with any conventional vending machine (although here you can see an example of the actual packaging through the glass), insert the amount of money required, and click the button in order to get your drink dispensed. The difference is that you can choose between drinks that are in the "blue" or "red" space, where blue represents cold drinks and red the hot ones.

This type of machine comes very handy in those days where the weather is very cold and you wish to have your beverage hot rather than cold. Needless to say that not all the cold drinks have the hot correspondent (would you drink a hot orange juice or coke?). One more observation: during the summer the "red" labeled drinks are substituted and the machine only serves cold drinks.

Classrooms and the Mystery of Numbered Panels

Classrooms of a middle school in Daejeon from outside. If you look carefully you can see signs with numbers posted on the windows, indicating the grade and section of a class. It comes to wonder what is the reason for having such panels, since they are intended to be used from outside: it comes natural to think that, for either convenience or security reasons, every classroom would be associated with a unique identifier, visible also from outside of the building, in order to clearly indicate one of them, but these are just my suppositions.
Hence, they remain (at least for me) an interesting and mysterious type of interface.

Isn't it Self-Explanatory?

Adding subtitles to something utterly obvious is surprisingly a very common behavior. A true lapalissade:

Un quart d'heure avant sa mort, il était encore en vie.

("A quarter hour before his death / He was still quite alive")

When You Buy a Book

When you buy a book in Korea the cashier will stamp the bottom side of your book to mark the date and place of the purchase (a small icon is uniquely associated with a vendor).
Since this procedure accompanies and not substitutes the paper receipt, I was wondering what is the reason for having both a receipt and a stamp to testify the purchase in case of a in-store controls and to indicate the date in case you want to return the item.
I asked to some people and here it is the explanation.




When you buy a book you receive a receipt, but there is nothing that binds that receipt to your book. For instance, I could buy a defected book from a store but realizing only after the grace period that it has a defect. I might then be tempted to buy the same book from the same store with the intention of returning the defected one the day after and asking for an exchange, but this will not be possible, because, although the receipt will testify my purchase, the stamp under the book will show that I am trying to return a different book.
Clever!

Future Nerd Fashion

What we usually call a nerdy fashion is roughly one of the two: either someone is just neatly dressed up following conventional(or stereotypical) models/ or the style lost aesthetical charm because of the priority on funtionality(like the example of sandals+socks above, found so often especially in engineering schools).
Then good news for future fashion nerds, since most of the current wearable fashion styles put emphasis on the extension of functionalities: keyboard pants, vest with eBook readers attached on both the front and the back, etc.

Those examples are currently fresh and safe so far, since "well, I've never seen that before" reactions still occur. But i'm sure that they'll degrade to another type of a nerd fashion in the near future, if they keep emphasizing on functionality through low level aesthetical expression.

Colors

Lights are often used to highlight the facade of buildings and to add depth to the viewer's experience. However, although I saw many possible usages of lights as media in closed environments, I didn't find yet many good examples of usage of lights as a vehicle of information on the facades of buildings: most of the times lights are the expedient to catch the viewers' eyes but the experience ends right there.

A good counterexample is the Empire State Building, in the picture below tinted violet to celebrate New York University's graduation day (violet is the symbolic color of the school).

Music Performance by Mihye An

This post has been long overdue, since Mihye An's participation at one of the rock festivals recently hosted at KAIST. Her performance, which was completely out of traditional schemes and closer to a media art piece rather than a music show, explored new kind of interfaces for live musical performances, gaining the right of a post in this blog.

Of the three songs she played, one of them caught my attention: Mihye's band was playing live while another member of the band, who at the moment was in another country oversea, was interacting with her online. Beside dancing and mimicking at rhythm of music, he was engaged in a particular kind of chat with Mihye, an on-line transfer of money.

Basically, the two of them opened a web browser and logged into their internet banking accounts and started a conversation transferring an irreverent amount of money back and forth for the whole duration of the song. Every transaction, which by the way was exempt of transaction fees, was of no more that 7 won, corresponding approximately to 0.5 cents of a U.S. dollar, an insignificant sum of money if you consider the long and tedious sequence of operations that it involves (luckily performed quickly by the two).

The show was overall successful, although also left a lot of people puzzled, but what I find particularly good it is the idea of establishing a web-cam chat that goes beyond the needs of a private communication and actually results in a public performance and the idea of using a tool such as internet banking in a way that, I am sure, was totally unpredicted and unexpected by the service designers and engineers of the bank.

Streets

A street of Daejeon. Streets are among the best examples of urban interfaces: this one in particular, so colorful and full of signs, represents well the streets of a middle sized Korean city, where somehow the city blends in a town.

Bikes

Bikes and motorbikes loeaded to their maximum capiency in the proximity of a market. Bikes are cheaper and faster than cars, but these pictures raise some questions about safety measures for the drivers and all the other people on the street.

Bus Stop Kiosk

A small kiosk next to a bus stop where you can see the waiting time for the next bus, you can get routes information, current time, maps and so on.

Also Plants Fly's Official Meeting

This weekend we had our first Also Plants Fly's team official meeting, or so we call good German beer and great talking. With this, I just want to add that we are always looking for collaborations with enthusiastic people who have something to say about interfaces and interaction design, especially from oversea. Please don't hesitate to contact us. Cheers!

Gigantic LCD Display

A Gigantic LCD display on the facade of the LG building in DMC (Digital Media City), Seoul. Good the choice to locate it at one of the edges that faces the main street to increase its visibility.

A Tempting Dangerous Behavior

Although it is very tempting to position vertically a power strip in order to save some space, it might indeed become dangerous, both for people and appliances. Here an example of a power strip fixed to the wall in my lab and the result of the sparks generated over the plugs of my computer. As you can tell the plug is partially burnt, because the sparks are generated with small oscillations or movements (due perhaps to gravity) in the sockets.

Geniuses Are All Around Us

Last weekend I took a taxi in Daejeon. As soon as I sat I noticed a small light reflector in the cavity beneath the door handle. A little more of examination and I also noticed a blue LED to light up the reflector.

I asked to the taxi driver if he made it and, with a rather surprised look, he told me he did. Pleasantly surprised that somebody noticed his invention, he timidly kept going telling me what I had already understood, that customers at night cannot always easily find the door handle on a car that they don't know and that a small reflector was just a ugly but efficient expedient to help them out in the process.

I defined this a beautiful-human-centered-design problem solving approach and I was delighted to meet this invisible inventor who is far ahead of many engineers working on car manufacturing.

Ondol Floor heating

Here in Korea winter is finally coming. Just yesterday I had to heat my house for the first time this season. Korean homes are heated by what I think is a rather unique heating system called 'Ondol' heating. Here is what wikipedia has to say about it::

The main components of the traditional Ondol are a firebox or stove (agungi; 아궁이) accessible from an adjoining (typically kitchen or master bedroom) room, a raised masonry floor underlain by horizontal smoke passages, and a vertical, freestanding chimney on the opposite exterior providing a draft. The heated floor is supported by stone piers or baffles to distribute the smoke, covered by stone slabs, clay and an impervious layer such as oiled paper.

As interesting as this sounds, my heating system is nothing like that. In fact the only thing it has in common is the floor is heated. My 'Ondol' and I believe most modern Ondol heating systems are hot water heated.

The way it works is there is a centralized hot water heater, and since its Korea, it is usually a rather fancy computerized machine. Pictured below is my hot water heaters central control panel. All i know is in the center there is a bigger power button and a smaller 'reset' button, in case it crashes. How does a hot water heater crash? I have no idea, but mine crashes a lot, though I do know its over due for a replacement as its quite old.



Next to the hot water heater are the valves that turn on and off a number of closed circuit water pipes running through the floor of the house.



Each closed circuit pipe circulates the water through the floor in different parts of the house. Basically a simple way to think of it is as a giant hot water radiator under your floor, the shape of the pipes under the floor is very much the same as well.

This brings me to something I have been thinking about recently. In Korea a common practice if you want to save on your heating bill when you are not using part of your house is to close some of the hot water valves, thus cutting of heat to those rooms. On the TV news a few weeks ago they reported that this practice doesn't actually reduce your heating bill, because the water pressure is just increased in your other pipes, the same amount of water is still rushing through the open pipes, just with more pressure. I however I am not entirely sure this is true.

Bare with my thermodynamics ignorance here as I explain the problem and my thinking to you. So if the pressure is increased it means the water will circulate through the open pipes quicker. Which means the water will cool off less as it circulates around the house and back to the heater. Which means the heater needs to do less work to heat it up again before sending it back into the house. However this is where i could be wrong, because isn't the point of the hot water to lose heat? The more heat lost by the water means the warmer your house, but maybe less efficient? Hmmm, I am confused, so lets look at it another way. Imagine the floor heater as a giant heat sink. The bigger the heat sink the faster it cools right? So if you close some of the valves it will cool slower as the heat sink will be smaller, which mainly means your house will heat faster with more valves open and slower with less. Is it more efficient though? Another factor here though, is if some of your rooms are cold, then your warm rooms will lose heat to the cool ones as most people have no insulation between their rooms.

Anyway my conclusion is this is a rather complex problem, that probably only has an answer on an individual house basis, depending on your house layout, size and heating system. Anyone have an answer to this? Since the hot water heater is computer controlled, wouldn't this be a great thing for it to regulate and control. You select which rooms you want to heat, the computer figures out how to do it efficiently. Either way though I am a big fan of the Ondol heating system. Its quiet, clean, and totally hidden. Best of all you always have warm toasty feet, which is especially nice in the early morning.