Thoughts, ramblings and experiments in making sense of a complex Future

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Some golden nuggets from ‘I’m Here’, a short story about love in an Absolut World by Spike Jonze.

Man: “What do you mean? We (robots) cant dream!”

Woman: “Of course you can, you just make it up!”

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Man: “…This dream was easily the best dream in the history of all dreams”.

A library assistant plods through an ordinary life in LA until a chance meeting opens his eyes to a the power of creativity and ultimately, love. When this new life and love begin to fall apart, he discovers he has a lot to give. This short film proves that ordinary is no place to be. (via IMDB)

View the trailer here…

I was reading some essays on Design Fiction by Julian Bleecker recently and was especially struck by this film after reading it. ‘I’m Here’ is such a perfectly imagined and made work of design-fiction in the sense that it makes you completely believe in the World which is created here. Not only are the ‘props’ and costumes entirely authentic, the fact that its set in the Almost Present makes the impact breathtakingly moving and simple. It focuses on human/robotic emotion while keeping the work of design very secondary.

This scene in the movie was such a brilliant piece of architectural fiction. It almost made me believe that such hospitals exist.

My moral from this story – A truly moving piece of design fiction is infinitesimally more valuable than a billion half-resolved design truths.

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In the footsteps of Gary Hustwitt… this one should be interesting.

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Credit: Prologue VFX

via Infothestics

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Lets hope we get to use these guidelines and rules soon to build some kickass apps!

via Engadget.

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(via AllAboutSymbian)

Forum Nokia has released a tool, Flowella, which allows designers and developers to easily create design prototypes (mock-ups of how an application will look), without using a single line of code. Prototypes are built by using images of screen mock-ups and defining links between them (i.e. what happens when you click of a given area). The information is then used to create a Flash Lite application or WRT widget, which can be run on a Nokia phone or in the included simulator.

The tool is important because it allows designers to create design prototypes more easily, making it more likely that an application design can be evolved several times during the course of a development cycle. In a video introducing Flowella Tim Brooke, Senior Design Specialist (nokia Desgn), notes that Forum Nokia found that, “a lot of designers were creating visual assets that never made it made out of Illustrator or PowerPoint” and that “a lack of developer resources means prototypes are not created or are created too late in the process”. The result is that “designers are unable to test until late in the design process and this is often too late to suggest significant change”.

The aim of Flowella is to allow a greater amount of design prototyping to be included within a project. It should also help free up developer resources that may have previously been used for prototyping. The end result will be an application with better UX, which will be easier to use and more popular with consumers.

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Even though Flowella might be coming out a little late in the day, I think it’s still interesting enough to try.

I think its great for simple screen based interaction, especially when there’s lots of wireframing involved.

Personally I’ve been trying to use Adobe Flash Catalyst a bit in recent time, but the dream of the perfect software for IxD designers remains elusive.

Download Flowella here.
Watch compelling demo video here.

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For the past few months, I’ve been intensely involved in concept-development, scenarios, Microsoft surface prototypes, writing and video production for our project titled – ‘Helping Hands – The Future of Integrated Healthcare’. The video below along with the article attached caps intense collaboration between several of my most talented team members working with limited resources and time.

After over 40 years of pioneering work in the Life Science industry, we have been working for the past months to put together our take on the future of Life Science. Our story comprises not only scenarios and a clear picture of the eco-system in which Life Science might exist (in 2015) – but we have gone as far as prototyping glimpses of how interaction might occur with doctors and other medical professionals and services. The future concept and prototype was developed by the Life Science team at Ergonomidesign including user experience and interaction designers, design strategists, graphic designers, developers and health care professionals. Our challenge was to envision the future of Life Science and develop possible solutions for the world to test, use and reflect on.

The future of Health Care is a subject that has aroused intense speculation recently across different forums. Several interesting scenarios and points of view have been discussed. Professionals and designers alike have tried to make sense of a fuzzy future. Predicting possible futures for the Health Care industry is an ambitious task, fraught with great risk. There are far too many disparities in various global Healthcare Systems today that make it impossible to present one comprehensive solution that fits all. The industry is constantly affected by Government legislation, making their rate of development impossible to predict in isolation from external factors. Most importantly, Health Care is about us – ordinary people – for whom tailoring one universal solution is out of question.

Often the best way to predict the future is by attempting to design and build critical glimpses of it. Storytelling has usually been the most favored approach – usually giving rise to compelling and believable scenarios. The approach taken by us at Ergonomidesign was to bring in elements of prototyping at crucial moments in the scenario, in order to demonstrate key interactions actually taking place. Right or wrong is always subject to debate – a process of endless iteration.

More to come, once our press-kit is released.

Medical Ecosystem in 2015

Personally, I’m very excited, exhausted and delighted that this project came as far as it did. We started with no real plan except to talk about the Future of Health Care at the World’s biggest medical fair in Dusseldorf – Medica. What followed was some intense periods of creative thinking and making, learning new tools along the way and alot of positive energy from everyone involved.

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I am always rendered speechless by the sheer beauty of BERG (London) work combined with the visual brilliance of Timo Arnall. I dont really know the intricacies of who were involved in the project, but it seems like they had several different teams collaborating on this project. What struck me most about their video was the high quality of the production and the simplicity with which an idea had been communicated. It’s really inspiring to see!

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Excerpts from the BERG blog:

We’ve been working with our friends at Bonnier R&D exploring the future of digital magazines. Bonnier publish Popular Science and many other titles.

Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010?

and then later

The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous, be super easy to understand, and have a great reading experience. We hope so. That gets tested in the next stage, and rolled into everything learned from this, and feedback from the world at large! Join the discussion at the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab.

Recently there have been digital magazine prototypes by Sports Illustrated, and by Wired. It’s fascinating to see the best features of all of these.

I especially love the idea about rubbing and ‘heating’ up content to make things active. As mentioned in their blog, they let the Web be the Web and focus their exploration more on the subtle joys of reading a magazine in the digital realm.

(Image courtesy: BERG London blog)

I’ve been following alot of the projects about digital reading recently and found this concept to be among the better ones by miles.

I aspire to reach near such levels of clarity, honesty and beauty with my work someday.

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I’ve recently been working a lot using the Agile method – a method used alot in the software development World, but something that has immense value for us to use as Interaction Designers.

I’m sure alot of my colleagues/alumni are now experiencing this method wherever you are in the World. Please feel free to add to this post.

Johnny Holland recently posted an amazing article titled ‘ How UCD and Agile can live together’ where a lot of the definitions are given. I think it would be very interesting for us to read and try to implement this method more into how we approach projects – especially those in teams. Several projects of our’s are done in teams, with different backgrounds – experience levels, skills and roles.

Excerpts from the amazing Johnny Holland blog:

User Centered Design is the methodology by which you design a holistic product while considering the needs of stakeholders and users. Agile Development is a programming methodology and philosophy intended to overcome the challenges of the waterfall development process and to deliver clean and functional code. How can these two methodologies come together?

Framework

In order to have this discussion, I would like to define a few terms as they will be referred to in this article. These are by no means absolute definitions, but in writing this article and soliciting feedback from practitioners I thought it prudent to define what I do (and don’t) mean by certain terms for the sake of the article.

• Agile Philosophy: the tactical, iterative and transparent perspective on a project engaging all stakeholders and members of a project team. The ultimate goal is a clean and functional product built through transparency and accountability;
• Agile Method: also referred to as scrum, the actual development process including all the hard deliverables including user stories, backlog, burndown charts and all the other tangible by products of an agile team;
• User Centered Design, The iterative strategy where design and research practitioners involve stakeholders and users to gain a cohesive view of a project and to empathize with users. The ultimate goal is a cohesive vision and product definition backed with qualitative and quantitative findings;
• User Experience, or IxD, or any other of dozens of titles: the actual process of qualitative and quantitative research, concept validation, and design. The end deliverables include system visualizations, information architecture, and design spec’s.

The picture above is from my flickr-stream and was taken during one of the projects to show the all important ‘Scrum-board’ where time and responsibilities were mapped.

You can read more about the Scrum method and order your own FREE copy here. (highly recommended!)

I hope to blog in greater detail about my experiences with this method in the near Future.

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