Urbicomp & new new media.Chris Heathcote / @antimegaLondon IA, April 2011

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The specialist designer.

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How many people here are called an IA at work? What about a designer? I find it hard to describe what I do any more, if I say I’m a designer, people want to know what I’ve made, and I haven’t made anything for years. I spend a lot of time ghostwriting for an idiot-savant tunafish at the moment.

makes calls

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I’ve worked on pretty much every different design aspect of mobile phones in the last 8 years. When I started, this was the model to get. It was amazing. No visible antenna!

makes callscolour screentakes photos

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Within months, this phone had come out. It had a colour screen! It had a camera! I was living in the future. This totally changed what a phone was, and what it could be. I remember spending a lot of time working with a company to put various ways of photo sharing in the silicon of a couple of models of phones - this was the only way to add functionality.

makes callscolour screentakes photosbrowse web

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And soon, this came out. It could browse the web. (just). This totally changed what a phone was, and what it could be.

makes callscolour screentakes photosbrowse webplay gameswrite emailplay musicvideo callknows where it is

record videolisten to radioFacebookrun apps

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And they just kept on changing. In less than a decade we went from a phone that magically had no wires to mundane Star Trek.

makes callscolour screentakes photosbrowse webplay gameswrite emailplay musicvideo callknows where it is

record videolisten to radioFacebookrun appsbe your ticketsbe your keyspay for things

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(and it’s not stopping, yet)

Designer, engineer, anthropologist, sociologist.

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I think the role of designer has changed as much as the products. Designers have to understand what stuff is available, they need to know some of how it works, how people will use it, and how it will fit into their daily life. Interaction design has time as its medium, and experience design has emotion. I counted 26 different ways I can communicate with people with this iPhone. That’s illogical, but each fulfils a slightly different role, and humans are great at understanding just the right way to communicate with the right person in the right context. It’s pretty impossible to design holistically, or design as an individual, these days.

A thing.An action causes a reaction.

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But at least it’s still a thing. It’s an understandable object. This used to often be what most designers cared about. And then, it was all about interaction - objects would respond.

Things happen...other things happen...something happens to you.

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But we’re entering a weirder world now. We’re now able to collect large amounts of information, piece together lots of different data and then act on it. Actions can be displaced by time and space, and transmogrified into outcomes no-one would have predicted.

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Although you’re still acting on the world, it’s all quite seemingly innocuous passive actions. The fact that doing anything can now have a reaction generates a real sense of unease.I received this email recently. I’d been to the Tate the day before, they’d scanned my membership card at the entrance to the exhibition. It felt weird for two reasons: the first is that you don’t expect everything to be joined up. You don’t think your membership card is linked to your email address. Secondly, it’s really personal. It’s not from Tate, it’s from Jessica Morgan. It’s addressed to me.

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Another example. TfL mine Oyster data to see what routes you frequently use, and email you if there are long-term engineering works.

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Lovely, bless ‘em, but even the mode change from web browsing to web mail feels freaky.

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and more customer relationship management. It’s something I’m fascinated by - for example many good restaurants keep details of everything you ate and drank, and sometimes even attach your photo or Google you before you arrive.

A world of sensors and the sensed.

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So we’re in a world of sensors, where all kinds of things can be sensed and reacted upon.

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This is a Japanese vending machine. It looks the same as many others, but it’s actually a 47 inch touch screen. It’s got a camera built in, recognises age and gender, and tailors drink suggestions accordingly.Using the same technology, there’s also a digital screen network that changes the ads presented based on who’s walking past.Pretty much all screens will have a camera built in - they’re really cheap. But how does it change the relationship between people and public space?

Adding a network connection changes any medium.

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Even media we’ve had centuries to perfect and understand suddenly changes when you plug the Internet into it.

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Even something like a receipt can change when you add a network connection. This is from a project by Dentsu London and BERG exploring incidental media. Print can be fast. Live data, the news, the weather could be included... the purpose of the receipt can be changed.

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Similarly, what happens if a TV gets a network connection? Why isn’t the ticker made up of information important to you?

Design is about wrangling invisible !ows of data.

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personal data, private data, friends data, public data, urban data. They’re unseen and intangible, and it’s our job as designers to both instantiate them - make them real - and make them understandable.

40p o" a latte.

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The cliche of ubiquitous computing is that as you walk past a starbucks, your phone will vibrate with a coupon for 40p off a latte. It’s an unscalable, unsustainable example, but lets unpick what could be going on.First off - what ratted on you? Your Nike+ talking shoes, using a credit card nearby, your car number plate being recognised, your phone reporting your location, or your Oyster card informing the system that you’ve just come out of Oxford Circus tube?Next, why you? Maybe your credit card or Foursquare checkins told them you prefer Cafe Nero. Your age and gender are mixed with your home address’ purchasing profile, plus your social standing from Facebook and Twitter.And why now? The store has lower sales this hour than normal - in fact there’s no queue. You didn’t take them up on the offer last time - they’d only offered 20p off - but you really want a coffee, and as you enter the store, the barista greets you by name, as your details and photo have popped up on her till.That’s a lot of work to sell a latte.

Magic is an awful lot of hard work behind-the-scenes.

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To appear effortless in real-time takes a lot of work. Computing is cheap, thankfully.

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This has been going on for a while. This is an extract from the ACORN database, which classifies every postcode in the UK. It’s used to make decisions on your credit, the advertising that appears around you, the offers you’ll be given.Was spun out of the Great Universal home shopping business - they also had their own home delivery network, a vertically integrated business before it was cool.

ANPR.

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And Governments love these kinds of large databases. The UK Automatic Numberplate Recognition system stitches together over 10 thousand CCTV cameras operated by various councils and government authorities, and stores over 15 million number plate reads a day. It’s designed to 'deny criminals the use of the road'.

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Supposedly Brazil is working on a system that can identify people and will be portable by 2014. I know it’s not possible now, but what about in 2 cycles of Moore’s Law? Is this a case of creating design fiction to make it happen?

How do we take back control and make urban computing work for us?

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I’m interested in how this stuff changes our daily life, and I’m particularly interested in the very mundane daily uses.

A car that knows where the nearest free parking space is to your destination.

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I think of a car as a big mobile phone you sit in. It has many of the same capabilities and characteristics (other than moving at 90 miles an hour). This seems like an easy problem - after all nearly every car has GPS in now.

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But how do you know if a space is free? Well, modern carparks now have parking guidance systems.

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Again, not a new thing - this has been a little bit of future urban computing installed for the last 30 years (photos from Swarco, a traffic solutions company).

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But now the resolution is changing. Rather than just a count in and out of the carpark, every parking spot has a sensor and light above it. It detects if the space is free, and sends that information to the central computer, that knows where every space is, and can direct cars accordingly.This is large scale informatics - Westfield London has 4500 spaces, Heathrow Terminal 5 has 3800. Some also incorporate number plate reading cameras, so if you can’t remember where you parked you car, they can find it.This data is only useful to us, however, if it’s networked, and available in real-time - and you’re car has mobile connectivity and a way of interpreting and presenting the data.

Food that texts you when it’s going out of date.

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OK, another example. Your shopping basket can answer back. Again, we’re nearly there with this...

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Supermarkets have to know when food goes out of date for stock control. Ocado provide this information on paper, on your receipt.But what if you could choose to receive a text message each day? Or if your shopping had a Twitter account?

It’s about being relevant, in the right place, at the right moment.Personal computing.

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We have places we naturally put our stu".Keys, wallet, phone.

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Jan Chipchase did a lot of work looking at centres of gravity - how and where people store their essential stuff, when mobile and at home.

What’s the equivalent for data?

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No-one’s really cracked the ability to display the relevant, contextual data you need. The closest we are now is a mobile phone with an app for each different need. Dentsu’s incidental media film showed some ideas of how data can inhabit different contexts. How do we place the data where it’s used?

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How can data pervade our home? EDF and Tinker created a project called Homesense to look at how people could wrangle data and electronics themselves to create useful urban computing interventions in the home.One of the best examples is Russell Davies’ bikemap. It displays the availability of TfL bikes near his home. That’s all. It’s hyperpersonalised, and it changes the way you use urban infrastructure. What’s also interesting is the homeliness of it, and how it has to look like a finished product.

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This is DisplayCabinet, a (slightly smoke and mirrors) demo Ben Bashford, Tim Burrell-Saward and Dan Williams made for the Pachube Hack Day. It identifies your personal objects via RFID and displays relevant information around them. I’m really interested in what can be done with pico and nano projectors, especially in the home. Dust off those ergonomics books, there’s lots to be done.

Mundanecomp and the new DIY.Arduino, Processing, Python, Pachube, OpenFrameworks, Cinder...

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You can think of a million ways to improve household products and objects. Why does my washing machine beep when it’s finished rather than text me? So these are our new tools and materials. Do designers need to know this stuff? Well, yes, we have to know our tools and materials intimately. And it’s only people like us that will abstract away the difficulty to make useful products and services for others.

Thank you.

@antimegaanti-mega.comdentsulondon.com

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