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 * Timo Arnall
 * Films
 * About
   


SATELLITE LAMPS


A Satellite Lamp sits on a snowy fjord. Each lamp samples the uncertainty of GPS
signals at a particular point in the landscape. When we take photographs and
make timelapses out of a lamp, we begin to see the patterns of GPS uncertainty
over time.


Satellite Lamps is a project that reveals one of the most significant
contemporary technology infrastructures, the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the Yourban
research project at AHO, it continues our project of revealing the materials of
technologies that started in 2009 with RFID and WiFi.

GPS is widely used yet it’s invisible and few of us really have any idea of how
it works or how it inhabits our everyday environments. We wanted to explore the
cultural and material realities of GPS technology, and to develop new
understandings about it through design.

> “Satellite Lamps shows that GPS is not a seamless blanket of efficient
> positioning technology; it is a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit
> geometry and the urban environment. GPS is a truly impressive technology, but
> it also has inherent seams and edges.”

We created a series of lamps that change brightness according to the accuracy of
received GPS signals, and when we photograph them as timelapse films, we start
to build a picture of how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.





We’ve made a film that you can watch here.


The project is documented in an extensive article that thoroughly details how it
was made and why. You can read more on how we explored GPS technology, how the
visualisations were made, and about the popular cultural history of GPS.

Posted in Film, Photography, Project, Research, Technology, UrbanismTagged
cities, discursive design, GPS, landscape4 Comments on Satellite Lamps


MAKING VISIBLE


The cover and opening pages from the thesis ‘Making Visible’.


My PhD thesis called ‘Making Visible’ was submitted in December 2013 and
successfully defended on 12 June 2014. The thesis reflects upon the design
material exploration research from the Touch and Yourban projects. It uses these
explorations to situate design research with technology as a cultural, material
and mediational practice:

> In Making Visible I outline how interaction design may engage in the material
> and mediation of new interface technologies. Drawing upon a design project
> called Touch, that investigated an emerging interface technology called Radio
> Frequency Identification or RFID, I show how interaction design research can
> explore technology through material and mediational approaches. I demonstrate
> and analyse how this research addresses the inter-related issues of
> invisibility, seamlessness and materiality that have become central issues in
> the design of contemporary interfaces. These issues are analysed and developed
> through three intertwined approaches of research by design: 1. a socio- and
> techno-cultural approach to understanding emerging technologies, 2. through
> material exploration and 3. through communication and mediation. When taken
> together these approaches form a communicative mode of interaction design
> research that engages directly with the exploration, understanding and
> discussion of emerging interface technologies.

The thesis is made up of four peer-reviewed journal articles accompanied by a
‘meta-reflection’ document that reflects upon and situates these publications
through theory, concepts and models.


OVERVIEW

This document develops the concept of mediational material that focuses
attention on the material and communicative practices in interaction design.
These are used to explore, develop and share knowledge of technologies as design
materials.


The thesis is 178 pages with 53 illustrations.


I’ve made it available in a number of different digital formats:

 * Download as PDF (7MB)
 * Download as ePub (14.4MB)
 * Read it on Kindle (US, UK)

It will also be available through AHO’s open-access archive ADORA.


ARTICLES

The four included articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals.


ARTICLE 1: EXPLORING ‘IMMATERIALS’: MEDIATING DESIGN’S INVISIBLE MATERIALS

This article takes up the issues of so-called ‘immaterial’ and ‘seamless’
technologies and asks how designers might explore them in order to consider them
as design materials. It situates interaction design as a sociocultural practice
that is concerned with culture, critical approaches and with engaging the
technocultural imagination. It concludes by analysing its mediational
strategies, such as the use of documentary formats, online film and weblog
writing, and the ways in which new material perspectives have been shared,
discussed and developed by others.

Arnall, T. (in press). ‘Exploring ‘immaterials’: mediating design’s invisible
materials’. International Journal of Design, 29. Will be available at the
International Journal of Design.


ARTICLE 2: VISUALIZATIONS OF DIGITAL INTERACTION IN DAILY LIFE

This article explores how visual signage may make aspects of ubiquitous
computing technologies visible and how digital tools and platforms impact that
visual design and semiosis. It looks at a range of ‘identification’ technologies
such as barcodes and rfid, that only become ‘visible’ or ‘interactional’ through
a designer’s intervention in physical or visual expression. It finds that
designers should emphasize the bindings and distinctions between design
processes and visual mediations, and symbols and signs, in engaging with
emerging technologies as material for creative and communicative composition.

Morrison, A., & Arnall, T. (2011). Visualizations of Digital Interaction in
Daily Life. Computers and Composition, 28(3), 224-234. Available at Computers
and Composition.


ARTICLE 3: SATELLITE LAMPS

Satellite lamps is a project about using design to investigate and reveal one of
the fundamental constructs of the networked city: GPS – the Global Positioning
System. It extends the concepts of ‘mediational materials’ to an investigation
of the ways in which GPS technology inhabits urban spaces. The article takes up
how a discursive and reflexive interaction design practice can contribute to new
perspectives on networked city life. Importantly, Satellite Lamps is a
multimediational web text, involving different media (film, media, notebooks and
a host of images) allowing for the richness of the work to come to the surface
in a way that would not have been possible in traditional means of academic
publishing.

Martinussen, E, Knutsen, J & Arnall, T. (forthcoming 2014). Satellite Lamps.
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Will be available at
Kairos.


ARTICLE 4: DEPTH OF FIELD: DISCURSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH THROUGH FILM

This article is about the role of film in interaction and product design
research with technology, and the use of film in exploring and explaining
emerging technologies in multiple contexts. It concludes by looking towards the
potentials for a discursive design practice, where the object of design and
analysis is the discourse that is catalysed by new artefacts, and the emphasis
of design research is on communication.

Arnall, T., & Martinussen, E. S. (2010). Depth of field: discursive design
research through film. FORMakademisk, 3(1). Available at FORMakademisk

Posted in Interaction design, ResearchTagged design, design materials,
immateriality, Immaterials, interaction design, materials, phd thesis, product
design3 Comments on Making Visible


INTERNET MACHINE


Internet Machine’s three screen installation at Transmediale 2015.

Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of
the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring
some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.





Film: 6 min 40 sec, digital 4K, 25fps, stereo.
Installation: Digital projection, 3 x 16:10 screens, each 4.85m x 2.8m.
Medium: Digital photography, photogrammetry and 3D animation.

Internet machine (showing now at Big Bang Data or watch the trailer) documents
one of the largest, most secure and ‘fault-tolerant’ data-centres in the world,
run by Telefonica in Alcalá, Spain. The film explores these hidden architectures
with a wide, slowly moving camera. The subtle changes in perspective encourage
contemplative reflection on the spaces where internet data and connectivity are
being managed.

In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to
investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt
important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these
machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them.



What we find, after being led through layers of identification and security far
higher than any airport, are deafeningly noisy rooms cocooning racks of servers
and routers. In these spaces you are buffeted by hot and cold air that blusters
through everything.



Server rooms are kept cool through quiet, airy ‘plenary’ corridors that divide
the overall space. There are fibre optic connections routed through multiple,
redundant, paths across the building. In the labyrinthine corridors of the
basement, these cables connect to the wider internet through holes in rough
concrete walls.



Power is supplied not only through the mains, but backed up with warm caverns of
lead batteries, managed by gently buzzing cabinets of relays and switches.



These are backed up in turn by rows of yellow generators, supplied by diesel
storage tanks and contracts with fuel supply companies so that the data centre
can run indefinitely until power returns.



The outside of the building is a facade of enormous stainless steel water tanks,
containing tens of thousands of litres of cool water, sitting there in case of
fire.



And up on the roof, to the sound of birdsong, is a football-pitch sized array of
shiny aluminium ‘chillers’ that filter and cool the air going into the building.



In experiencing these machines at work, we start to understand that the internet
is not a weightless, immaterial, invisible cloud, and instead to appreciate it
as a very distinct physical, architectural and material system.


PRODUCTION


This was a particularly exciting project, a chance for an ambitious and
experimental location shoot in a complex environment. Telefónica were
particularly accommodating and allowed unprecedented access to shoot across the
entire building, not just in the ‘spectacular’ server rooms. Thirty two
locations were shot inside the data centre over the course of two days, followed
by five weeks of post-production.


The three camera rig in the virtual reconstruction of the data centre server
room.

I had to invent some new production methods to create a three-screen
installation, based on some techniques I developed over ten years ago. The film
was shot using both video and stills, using a panoramic head and a Canon 5D
mkIII. The video was shot using the Magic Lantern RAW module on the 5D, while
the RAW stills were processed in Lightroom and stitched together using Photoshop
and Hugin.


The three camera rig in the virtual reconstruction of the data centre rooftop.

The footage was then converted into 3D scenes using camera mapping techniques,
recreating the perspective by hand (a kind of low-tech, traditional
photogrammetry) so that entirely new camera movements could be created by
animating a virtual three-camera rig within this new virtual space. The final
multi-screen installation is played out in 4K projected across three screens.

There are more photos available at Flickr.

Internet machine is part of BIG BANG DATA, open from 9 May 2014 until 26 October
2014 at CCCB (Barcelona) and from February-May 2015 at Fundación Telefónica
(Madrid).


Internet Machine is produced by Timo Arnall, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona – CCCB, and Fundación Telefónica. Thanks to José Luis de Vicente, Olga
Subiros, Cira Pérez and María Paula Baylac.

Posted in Exhibition, Film, Photography, Project, Research, TechnologyTagged
Data centre, documentary, film, infrastructure, video78 Comments on Internet
machine


THE IMMATERIALS PROJECT


Light painting the field around an RFID reader.

The Immaterials project is concerned with the increasing invisibility of
interfaces and infrastructures. The systems we interact with everyday such as
WiFi and 3G networks have a profound impact on how we experience the world. As
Adam Greenfield says:

> the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects
> remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.
> […] it’s hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a
> world where we don’t understand the objects around us.

And as James Bridle has eloquently and disturbingly observed:

> Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and
> are powerless.

The project set out to expose some of the phenomena and mechanisms of
technological infrastructures through visual, photographic, narrative, animated
and cinematic techniques. Over the last five years I have worked with Einar
Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones towards a body of
work that is now brought together in an exhibition for the first time.





From 2004–2008 I speculated about the ways in which wireless interactions
inhabited physical space, through my work on a Graphic language for touch, and
also through films such as Wireless in the world. Some of my students made
beautiful but fictional speculations about the physical qualities of different
kinds of radio.





Jack Schulze and I also made a short, playful film called Nearness about action
at a distance. In the film, a series of simple reactions are set off by
immaterial phenomena, such as radio waves, mobile networks, light, magnetism and
wind.

In 2006 we ran a Touch workshop with BERG where we became concerned about the
invisibility of RFID technology, and the effect that had on our ability to
design with it. We found it extraordinary that a technology that was defined as
a proximity or ‘touch’-based interface, was so opaque in terms of its physical,
spatial, gestural materiality. How do we as designers make these materials
visible, so we can have reflective conversations with them?

We developed Experiments in Field Drawing as a method of revealing, literally
drawing, the physical presence of RFID interactions. We revealed these fields in
a much richer, multi-dimensional way using photography, animation and light
painting in the film Immaterials: Ghost in the Field.





Matt Jones coined the term immaterials to describe the project and gave a great
talk about some ways of understanding the immaterials of interaction design.
Matt and I also looked at machine vision, another phenomena that increasingly
becomes a material for design in Robot Readable World.

In 2011 at AHO, as part of a research project called Yourban, we extended the
investigations to WiFi, using similar light painting techniques we revealed the
enormous scale and pervasiveness of ad-hoc WiFi networks in urban spaces in
Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi.





Finally, over the last two years we’ve become increasingly interested in the
Global Positioning System (GPS), that has become a central part of both the
vision and the implementation of contemporary interfaces.


Satellite Lamps Exhibited at Dread 2013 at De Hallen Haarlem.

We have built a series of Satellite Lamps that sense the presence of the 24 GPS
satellites in orbit. The lamps change brightness according to the strength of
GPS signals they receive, showing how the technology itself is messy and
unpredictable, and revealing how GPS is a negotiation between radio waves,
earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment.





Satellite Lamps has so far been exhibited at Lighthouse and Dread, you can watch
the film and read the extensive article detailing our process as well as a
cultural history of GPS.

The visual languages that we’ve developed have ended up in advertising, on the
BBC and Discovery Channel, and the techniques have been extended in research at
MIT and CIID, and by many designers, enthusiasts and hackers. It’s exciting that
both the subject and the methods are being taken up and used broadly by other
people, and we’re looking forward to seeing more.

> the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these
> occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the
> people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly
> conditioned by them. — Adam Greenfield (2009)

The Immaterials project emerged from the humble preoccupations of a few
designers dealing with some of the invisible, immaterial, intangible stuff we
had in front of us. These small experiments led to larger and more visually and
narratively communicative work. In the end what I think we’ve developed is an
approach to technology that revolves around material exploration, explanation
and communication. Because images and language, as well as materials, form our
understandings of technology, Immaterials has shown how we can use ‘design and
playful explorations to shape or stir the popular imagination’.


THE EXHIBITIONS

All the Immaterials projects are on display at Lighthouse in Brighton from 5
September until 13 October 2013.

Satellite Lamps and Robot Readable World are on display at Dread in Amsterdam
from 7 September until 24 November 2013.

Posted in Interaction design, ResearchTagged BDF13, exhibition, Gallery,
Immaterials, LighthouseArts11 Comments on The Immaterials project


NO TO NOUI


A selection of recent articles on ‘invisible design’ and the disappearance of
UI.


‘The best design is invisible‘ is the interaction design phrase of the moment.
The images above are from my ever-expanding collection of quotes about how
design and technology will ‘disappear‘, become ‘invisible‘ or how the ‘best
interface is no interface‘.

The Verge has recently given both Oliver Reichenstein and Golden Krishna a
platform to talk about this. This has spawned manifestos, films, talks, books,
#NoUI hashtags and some debates about what it might mean. I’ll call this cluster
of things ‘invisible design’.

I agree with some of the reasons driving this movement; that design’s current
infatuation with touchscreens is really problematic. I’ve spent the last eight
years rallying against glowing rectangles, studying our obsession with screens
and the ways in which this has become a cultural phenomena. In response I have
been researching and inventing interfaces for taking interaction out from under
the glass.

But I also take issue with much of the thinking for a few reasons that I’ll
outline below.


1. INVISIBLE DESIGN PROPAGATES THE MYTH OF IMMATERIALITY

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and
seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like
‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of
undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and
is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to
sense, processors overheat and batteries die.

> Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of
> their materiality. – Jean-François Blanchette

Invisible design propogates the myth that technology will ‘disappear’ or ‘just
get out of the way’ rather than addressing the qualities of interface
technologies that can make them difficult or delightful.

Intentionally hiding the phenomena and materiality of interfaces, smoothing over
the natural edges, seams and transitions that constitute all technical systems,
entails a loss of understanding and agency for both designers and users of
computing. Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty and folk-theories that
hinder our ability to use technical systems, and clouds the critique of
technological developments.

As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is
exactly the wrong model.

> By removing our knowledge of the glue that holds the systems that make up the
> infrastructure together, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to
> begin to understand how we are constructed as subjects, what types of systems
> are brought into place (legal, technical, social, etc.) and where the
> possibilities for transformation exist. – Matt Ratto (2007)

In other words, as both users and designers of interface technology, we are
disenfranchised by the concepts of invisibility and disappearance.


2. INVISIBLE DESIGN FALLS INTO THE NATURAL/INTUITIVE TRAP

The movement tells us to ‘embrace natural processes’ and talks about the
‘incredibly intuitive’ Mercedes car interface. This language is a trap (we
should ban the use of natural and intuitive btw) that doesn’t give us any
insight into how complex products might actually become simple or familiar.

Invisible design leads us towards the horrors of Reality Clippy. Does my
refrigerator light really go off? Why was my car unlocked this morning? How did
my phone go silent all of a sudden? Without highly legible systems for managing
and understanding all of this ‘smartness’ we are going to get very lost and
highly frustrated. The tricky business of push notifications and the Facebook
privacy train wreck is just the tip of the iceberg.

The example of the Nest thermostat invisibly ‘learning’ your habits to control
your home temperature is a good one. But the Nest has a highly visible interface
that reassures you as to its status, tells you when it is learning, and a large
dial for adjusting temperature. Beautiful, legible microinteractions. A Nest
without these visual and direct manipulation interfaces would be useless,
uncanny and frustrating. Nest wants UI.

The discussion around invisible design often talks about using sensors and
tangible interfaces instead of visual interfaces. But these systems are not
inherently simpler or more familiar. They have their own material qualities with
edges and ‘grain’ that need to be understood and learnt. Their literal
invisibility can cause confusion, even fear, and they often increase
unpredictability and failure.



Revealing the invisible seams of RFID interfaces in the Touch Project.

In our work with interface technologies such as RFID and computer vision, we’ve
discovered that it takes a lot of work to make sense of the technologies as
design materials. So it’s not useful to say that UI is ‘disappearing’ into
sensing, algorithms and tangible interfaces, when we don’t fully understand them
as UI yet.


3. INVISIBLE DESIGN IGNORES INTERFACE CULTURE

Interfaces are the dominant cultural form of our time. So much of contemporary
culture takes place through interfaces and inside UI. Interfaces are part of
cultural expression and participation, skeuomorphism is evidence that interfaces
are more than chrome around content, and more than tools to solve problems. To
declare interfaces ‘invisible’ is to deny them a cultural form or medium. Could
we say ‘the best TV is no TV’, the ‘best typography is no typography’ or ‘the
best buildings are no architecture’?

Much of our work at BERG is not just about solving problems, but about cultural
invention:

> We’re not interested in this idea of the invisible technology in a modernist
> sense. Tech won’t be visible but only if it’s embedded into the culture that
> it exists within. By foregrounding the culture, you background the technology.
> It’s the difference between grinding your way through menus on an old Nokia,
> trying to do something very simple, and inhabiting the bright bouncy bubbly
> universe of iOS. The technology is there, of course, but it’s effectively
> invisible as the culture is foregrounded.” – Jack Schulze (in Domus 965 /
> January 2013)

We should be able to simultaneously celebrate the fantastic explosion of
diversity in UI, and develop healthy critique around the use of interfaces like
touch screens. But by calling for UI to disappear altogether so that things can
be more efficient, we remain in the same utilitarian and rational mindset that
produces inert technological visions like this, rather than seeing interfaces as
part of the cultural landscape.


4. INVISIBLE DESIGN IGNORES DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY HISTORY

The movement ignores at least thirty years of thinking in design and technology.
A few examples:

Much of the recent invisible design discussions repeat the thinking in Jared
Spool’s ‘Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen‘ and Donald Norman’s
‘Invisible Computer. But a better reference point would be Don Norman’s earlier
book, The design of everyday things, where he instead talks about the ‘problems
caused by inadequate attention to visibility’ and supporting or managing our
mental models of systems. We need a lot more thinking about our mental models of
algorithms in particular.

Adam Greenfield has investigated the social and ethical issues around the
development of ubiquitous computing systems, and is particularly concerned by
its disappearance:

> “Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent
> querying of their ownership, use, and capabilities. Everyware must, in other
> words, be self-disclosing. Whether such disclosures are made graphically, or
> otherwise, they ensure that you are empowered to make informed decisions as to
> the level of exposure you wish to entertain.” – Adam Greenfield (2006)

Some designers have talked about the actual qualities they want from ubiquitous
computing interfaces, such as polite, pertinent and pretty:

> “The vast quantities of information that personal informatics generate need
> not only to be clear and understandable to create legibility and literacy in
> this new world, but I’d argue in this first wave also seductive, in order to
> encourage play, trial and adoption” Matt Jones & Tom Coates (2008)

Matthew Chalmers has, more than anyone else, revealed the history of
seamlessness. Seamlessness is ‘the deliberate “making invisible” of the variety
of technical systems, artifacts, individuals and organizations that make up an
information infrastructure. This work actively disguises the moments of
transition and boundary crossing between these various parts in order to present
a solid and seemingly coherent interface to users.’ (Ratto 2007). Although Mark
Weiser is often thought of as an advocate of seamless systems, Chalmers found
that:

> Weiser describes seamlessness as a misleading or misguided concept. In his
> invited talks to UIST94 and USENIX95 he suggested that making things seamless
> amounts to making everything the same, reducing components, tools and systems
> to their ‘lowest common denominator’. He advocated seamful systems (with
> “beautiful seams”) as a goal. Around Xerox PARC, where many researchers worked
> on document tools, Weiser used an example of seamful integration of a paint
> tool and a text editor (Weiser, personal communication). He complained that
> seamless integration of such tools often meant that the user was forced to use
> only one of them. One tool would be chosen as primary and the others reduced
> and simplified to conform to it, or they would be crudely patched together
> with ugly seams. Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique
> characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained their
> individual characteristics. This would let the user brush some characters with
> the paint tool in some artful way, then use the text editor to ‘search and
> replace’ some of the brushstroked characters, and then paint over the result
> with colour washes. Interaction would be seamless as the features of each tool
> were “literally visible, effectively invisible”. Seamful integration is hard,
> but the quality of interaction can be improved if we let each tool ‘be
> itself’. – Matthew Chalmers (2003)

Matt Ratto investigates the darker side of this drive towards invisibility,
revealing that seamlessness encourages:

> “a particular kind of passivity and lack of engagement between people and
> their actions and between people and their social and material environment”
> and that we must “critique the clean, orderly, and homogenous future that is
> at the heart of these modernist visions” – Matt Ratto (2007)

And Anne Galloway suggests that it is in the seams where the design work can be
done:

> “Although seamlessness may remain a powerful and effective metaphor to guide
> particular projects, when it comes to actually getting the work done—and the
> challenges of having to do it with people who can be very different from each
> other—then I suggest it is in everyone’s best interests to recognise the
> importance of seams and scars in marking places where interventions can be
> made, or where potential can be found and acted upon.” – Anne Galloway (2007)

In interaction design we need to look at the long history of Durrell Bishop‘s
work, one of the strongest advocates for self-evident design, whether it is
physical or virtual, through his teaching and design practice. Durrell’s
‘Platform 12’ in the RCA Design Products course attempts to see design as:

> “a celebration of a model for how things work, where once again we can treat
> function as beauty, instead of merely treating design as form and image.”

Durrell’s work on the Marble Answering Machine (1992) is a brilliant piece of
self-evident design, and remains a touchstone for all interaction design work.

Designers also need to look at the first four chapters of ‘Where the action is‘
by Paul Dourish which give a coherent account of the relationships between human
abilities and computer interfaces over the last 50-60 years. Dourish shows how
interfaces are not becoming invisible, but how they are increasingly social and
tangible.

And finally, from a design perspective, there is a long tradition of making
complex products legible and understandable. Industrial designer Konstantin
Grcic talks about the relationship between the technologies and the use of an
object:

> “A machine is beautiful when it’s legible, when its form describes how it
> works. It isn’t simply a matter of covering the technical components with an
> outer skin, but finding the correct balance between the architecture of the
> machine… and an expressive approach that is born out of the idea of
> interaction with those using the object.” – Konstantin Grcic (2007)

And perhaps more famously, Dieter Rams has always talked of honesty and
understanding in his product design practice. Making a product understandable is
one of his Ten Principles of “Good Design”.



This drive for understanding needs to go further than physical form (as it has
done at Apple) and start to inform the design of systems and UI.


TOWARDS LEGIBLE, EVIDENT INTERACTION

We must abandon invisibility as a goal for interfaces; it’s misleading,
unhelpful and ultimately dishonest. It unleashes so much potential for unusable,
harmful and frustrating interfaces, and systems that gradually erode users and
designers agency. Invisibility might seem an attractive concept at first glance,
but it ignores the real, thorny, difficult issues of designing and using complex
interfaces and systems.


‘Legible interactions’ by Durrell Bishop, Joe Malia and Timo Arnall at BERG.


We might be better off instead taking our language from typography, and for
instance talk about legibility and readability without denying that typography
can call attention to itself in beautiful and spectacular ways. Our goal should
be to ‘place as much control as possible in the hands of the end-user by making
interfaces evident‘.

Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use, effectively
invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible,
readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build
trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can
comfortably recede into the background.

Posted in Interaction design, UbicompTagged Interaction, Interface, invisible,
invisible design, NoUI, tangible interaction, UI124 Comments on No to NoUI


IMMATERIALS AT THE VIMEO AWARDS 2012



The film Immaterials: Light painting WiFi made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and
Jørn Knutsen as part of the Yourban project is a finalist at the Vimeo Awards
2012.

The awards ceremony is on the 7 June at 8PM in New York City. The Vimeo Festival
also looks great!

Posted in Film


ROBOT READABLE WORLD

This is a short film, an experiment in machine-vision footage. It uses
found-footage from computer vision research to explore how machines are making
sense of the world.



Robot Readable World. Timo Arnall 2011. 5’09”.


As robots begin to inhabit the world alongside us, how do they see and gather
meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? Machines have a tiny,
fractional view of our environment, that sometimes echoes our own human vision
and often doesn’t.

Read more about the film and have a look at Matt Jones’ talk of the same title.

Posted in Research5 Comments on Robot readable world


TALK TO ME

I have five works in MoMA‘s latest exhibition ‘Talk to Me‘ in New York. The
works are Nearness, Immaterials, Media Surfaces, The Journey and Suwappu.

I have written more about the exhibition and the works at the Touch and BERG
weblogs. The exhibition has also been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast
Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others.

Posted in Film, Interaction designTagged exhibition, films, moma, new york city,
talk to me


THE FILMS OF ADAM LISAGOR

I’ve been quite taken with the films of Adam Lisagor for a while.

> I make small, palatable videos, like commercials, for companies involved in
> tech, to figure out how to convey the essence of their products in concise,
> accessible ways.
> 
> I like to think that I’m able to do this because I think slowly enough to
> notice the exact points while using a product at which I respond with the most
> delight. And if I can reproduce those moments on-screen, without explicitly
> saying that they’re delightful, an audience will intuitively understand the
> delight they might feel themselves.
> 
> (From an interview in Business Insider.)

He’s good at surfacing the joy and pleasure in some of the smallest
interactions, particularly evident in this ad for the Jambox by Jawbone.

Posted in Film, videoTagged advertising, film, products


MOTHER. FATHER. ALWAYS YOU WRESTLE INSIDE ME.

> A truth that releases a waterfall of emotion. It is this energy that propels
> us through The Tree of Life. A voluptuous, bulging energy shaped and
> encouraged by sweeping camera movement, ultra wide lenses, lyrical blocking,
> the safe-harbor of Jessica Chastain’s face, and the vacillation in Hunter
> McCracken’s. These combine to create scenes that perfectly capture the
> rapturous feelings of childhood. Sensations evoked when light & dark entwine,
> and our instinctual knowledge that these things are the same.

And on how to approach the film:

> A moment long enough for me to relax, and I was suddenly taken by a feeling of
> great tenderness and calm. I don’t completely understand why I felt this, but
> the inclusion of these CGI dinosaurs struck me as an particularly affectionate
> and loving decision. Terrence Malick believes in his audiences, and has faith
> that we also can believe. It’s the feeling of your mother brushing the hair
> off your forehead as she tells you a bedtime story. You protest because she’s
> changed a part of the usual tale, or it’s not the way you want it to be, but
> smiling, she says “Shhh shhh. Just listen.”

From the brilliant Kartina Richardson.

Posted in Film, PhotographyTagged childhood, cinema, cinematography, film,
review, terrence malick


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