Reflections on PICNIC 08

The most interesting talks to me at PICNIC 08 where the talks dealing with issues of human- computer interaction, Interaction Design practice and data visualization. I will try to give a small overview of the different speakers and their approach towards those topics.

Concerning man-machine or human-computer interaction I want to address three talks given by Genevieve Bell, Adam Greenfield and Rafi Haladjian. While Genevieve Bell was more speaking about the human side and psychological implications of new technologies, Adam Greenfield and Rafi Haladjian were talking about different perspectives on ubiquitous computing.

Genevieve Bell is a researcher at IBM Research. She investigates our relation to secrets and lies and the machines inability to deal with it. In her talk “secrets and lies” she pointed out that lying is a part of most humans every day activity and without ethically judging it she argues that it might be the seam which helps keeping our social garment together. Although it is natural to us humans the machines are not yet able to address this. They do not forget and never lie. A good example she used was the GPS device in your car which tracks everywhere you go. According to her each time a technology enables us to lie another comes along which subverts this ability. For example enabled us the mobile to lie about places while new tracking
services subvert this possibility.

Adam Greenfield is the author of the well recognized book “Everywhere” about ubiquitous computing. In his presentation called “the long here, the big now, and other tales of the networked city” he talked about different implications of ubiquitous computing especially in relation to cities. What he calls the long here and the big now describes how time and space get distorted by a layer of digital media in ubiquitous computing cities. Since Mark Weiser in the early 90s the vision has come a long way which becomes obvious when he describes experiments where a whole city was built with the ubiquitous computing vision in mind. Addressing the human side of this socio-technical construct he asks: how does it feel to live in such a city?

While Adam Greenfields approach is more theoretical, Rafi Haladjian and his company Violet are working on actual products bringing the internet of things to life. In his quite cheerful way of speaking he started out with the vision his company follows. The first step would be to connect a rabbit to the internet and the second to connect everything else. By connecting the rabbit he was talking about the companies product Nabaztag which is a funny looking plastic rabbit. Wifi enabled and equipped with an RFID reader it is thought of as a personal ambient information device. The next step is connecting everything. To do so Violet divides all objects into two kinds; Connected objects called Cobjects and not connected objects called Nobjects. Cobjects are network connected objects containing micro-controllers while Nobjects are dumb objects containing RFID tags. Violet sets out to release a number of different Cobjects and stamps containing RFID chips turning any object into Nobjects. Nobjects can be identified by a device called mirror. The mirror essentially is an USB enabled RFID reader. In combination with the supplied software any Nobject can trigger computer based functions. Holding an umbrella in front of the “mirror” could for example bring the weather forecast up on the screen.

Some insights into current Interaction Design practice and its outcome gave the talks by Bill Moggridge (IDEO) and Michael Tchao (Nike). Bill Moggridge as a founding father of Interaction Design gave an inspiring talk elaborating on the role of design today and describing current design approaches. He did so by first looking at the historical development of the discipline. Starting with measurements of the human body as foundation of early industrial design over the mechanics of the body until today when cognitive psychology has become a foundation of design. Further he described the interdisciplinary approach and the wide design space current practice is operating in. He argued that one person alone is not able to unify all the needed skills for a larger project in one person. That is why IDEO employs quite interdisciplinary design teams.

Michael Tchao is the General Manager of Nike Techlab and one of the leading people behind the Nike+ products. His talk described apart from the product itself and its surrounding services the design research which lead to the design. The product itself is basically a radio transmitting pedometer which can be connected to an iPod. Interesting here was how a once bought product can gain value through later added web based services. Services such as running contests between friends on different continents, personal training plans or just keeping track of every run and visualizing it.

Speaking about data visualization I would like to address two talks by Ben Cerveny and José Louis de Vincente both from the panel “Can you see what I know?”. Ben Cerveny from Stamen Design talked about data visualization in comparison to alchemy. Alchemy as fringe science united all sorts of different approaches under one goal. The aim was never achieved but many discoveries were made on the way. José Louis de Vincente is the curator of Visualizar at the Medialab Prado in Madrid. He argued that data visualization has turned from a tool of science only into one for journalists, activists and artists as well. As examples for the different fields he showed the projects “The Atlas of Electronic Space”, “Casas Tristes” and many others. In relation to the “quantified self” and visualizations of personal data he showed my project “Mail Garden” which was also produced at Medialab Prado.

Summarizing I can say that PICNIC was an inspiring experience. It was one of the rare opportunities to get people from different realms such as science, business, design and art to the same conference exchanging ideas.