Joe Lamantia.com

The good peo­ple at Chi Nether­lands just posted video of my talk “Play­ing Well With Oth­ers: Inter­ac­tion Design and Social Design for Aug­mented Real­ity” at the Web and Beyond 2010 here in Ams­ter­dam in June.  It’s couched as a col­lec­tion of design prin­ci­ples for the oncom­ing cat­e­gory of social aug­mented inter­ac­tions made pos­si­ble by the new medium of aug­mented real­ity.  But this talk is also a call to action for all mak­ers of expe­ri­ences for the emerg­ing engage­ment space of every­ware to focus on the human and the humane per­spec­tives as we explore the new inter­ac­tions made possible.

The out­line of the talk is roughly:

1. Overview of aug­mented reality
2. Social inter­ac­tion per­spec­tive on cur­rent AR experiences
3. Def­i­n­i­tion of ‘social aug­mented experiences’
4. Com­mon inter­ac­tion design pat­terns for AR
5. Social ‘anti-patterns’ lim­it­ing design of aug­mented experiences
6. Design prin­ci­ples for social aug­mented experiences

(The audio qual­ity is quite good, and the cam­era­man cap­tured most of the slides nicely — so this is a record­ing worth watching.)

This year’s TWAB fea­tured sev­eral talks on aug­mented real­ity, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and related top­ics; you’ll find record­ings of these on the Chi Ned­er­land Vimeo chan­nel: http://vimeo.com/chinederland

Many thanks to the orga­niz­ers and vol­un­teers for putting on such a well-run event!

TWAB2010: Joe Laman­tia — Play­ing well with oth­ers: inter­ac­tion design and social design for aug­mented real­ity from Chi Ned­er­land on Vimeo.

Thanks to all who came to the Muziekge­bouw on a lovely early sum­mer day to talk about the emerg­ing engage­ment space of social aug­mented expe­ri­ences for the third edi­tion of The Web And Beyond con­fer­ence in Amsterdam.

For ref­er­ence, here’s the ses­sion descrip­tion from the offi­cial program:

Aug­mented real­ity blends the real world and the Inter­net in real time, mak­ing many new kinds of prox­im­ity, con­text, and loca­tion based expe­ri­ences pos­si­ble for indi­vid­u­als and groups. Despite these many pos­si­bil­i­ties, we know from his­tory that the long term value and impact of aug­mented real­ity for most peo­ple will depend on how well these expe­ri­ences inte­grate with ordi­nary social set­tings, and sup­port every­day inter­ac­tions. Yet the inter­ac­tion pat­terns and behav­ior we see in cur­rent AR expe­ri­ences seem almost ‘anti-social’ by design. This is an impor­tant gap that design must close in order to cre­ate suc­cess­ful AR offer­ings. In other words, much like chil­dren going to school for the first time, AR must to learn to ‘play well with oth­ers’ to be valu­able and suc­cess­ful. This pre­sen­ta­tion reviews the inter­ac­tion design pat­terns com­mon to aug­mented real­ity, sug­gests tools to help under­stand and improve the ’social matu­rity’ of AR prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions, and shares design prin­ci­ples for cre­at­ing gen­uinely social aug­mented expe­ri­ences that inte­grate well with human social set­tings and interactions.

I’m post­ing slides for my ‘Under­stand­ing Frame­works’ por­tion of the Beyond Find­abil­ity work­shop on strate­gic prac­tices just given at the 2010 IA Sum­mit.  This por­tion of the full-day pro­gram empha­sizes under­stand­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing the com­mon things that make up a design frame­work, con­cen­trat­ing on the sim­ple struc­ture that design­ers need to grasp in order to cre­ate their own effec­tive frame­works for solv­ing design chal­lenges. I hope you find it infor­ma­tive and useful!

I’ve posted my slides for the Where 2.0 panel “The Next Wave of AR: Social Aug­mented Expe­ri­ences” orga­nized by Tish Shute. After a review of the cur­rent state of aug­mented real­ity expe­ri­ences in terms of the social inter­ac­tions sup­ported (using the met­ric of ‘social matu­rity’), it shares 9 prin­ci­ples for cre­at­ing social AR expe­ri­ences that peo­ple will enjoy and value.

Spe­cial points to those who spot the embed­ded April Fool’s joke…

Radio Johnny (brought to you by the good peo­ple of Johnny Hol­land mag­a­zine) just pub­lished an inter­view Jeff Parks recorded with me shortly before the New Year, dis­cussing aug­mented real­ity, why it’s of inter­est for Expe­ri­ence Design, and some of the areas of likely devel­op­ment we’ll see in AR in the near future.

You can down­load the pod­cast, check out the show notes, and sub­scribe to the full Radio Johnny feed here: http://johnnyholland.org/2010/03/08/radio-johnny-joe-lamantia-on-augmented-reality/

Hubris alert: I admit to hav­ing grandiose schemes to influ­ence the evo­lu­tion of an emerg­ing medium, by con­sis­tently hec­tor­ing the world on the impor­tance of tools for sim­ple con­tent creation…

UXmat­ters just pub­lished Play­ing Well with Oth­ers: Design Prin­ci­ples for Social Aug­mented Expe­ri­ences, the lat­est install­ment of my col­umn Every­ware, which man­ages to range from Air­plane II to zom­bies, all while con­tin­u­ing the recent focus on aug­mented real­ity and expe­ri­ence design.  ‘Play­ing Well With Oth­ers’ sug­gests AR has two paths to fol­low as it evolves, and pro­poses some design prin­ci­ples for cre­at­ing the social aug­mented expe­ri­ences — expe­ri­ences rely­ing on aug­mented social inter­ac­tions as the cen­ter of grav­ity — that lie along one of those two paths.

Here’s an excerpt:

With the exotic, mixed real­i­ties that futur­ists and science-fiction writ­ers have envi­sioned seem­ingly just around the cor­ner, it is time to move beyond ques­tions of tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity to con­sider the value and impact of turn­ing the real­i­ties of every­day social set­tings and expe­ri­ences inside out. As with all new tech­nolo­gies as they move from the stage of tech­ni­cal probe to social probe, this AR trans­for­ma­tion will hap­pen case by case and con­text by con­text, involv­ing many fac­tors beyond the direct reach of UX design. How­ever, as a result of the inher­ently social nature of aug­mented real­ity, we can be sure the value and impact of many aug­mented expe­ri­ences depends in large part on how effec­tively they inte­grate the social dimen­sions of real-world set­tings, in real time.

The first four design prin­ci­ples are:

• Default to the Human
• Enhance­ment Not Replacement
• Build Real Bridges
• Stay Off the Crit­i­cal Path

Of course, this is just a start­ing list, and they raise almost as many ques­tions as they attempt to answer.

Some of those follow-up ques­tions include: what other prin­ci­ples are there?

Are there ‘anti-principles’ to be aware of?

What’s the best way to make these prin­ci­ples part of design­ing aug­mented experiences?

“Beyond Find­abil­ity: IA Prac­tice & Strat­egy for the New Web” the full-day work­shop that debuted at the 2009 IA Sum­mit, is back for 2010.   Fea­tur­ing an expanded lineup that includes Andrew Hin­ton, Matthew Milan, Chris­t­ian Crum­lish, Erin Mal­one, Cindy Chas­tain, and me, the work­shop explores lead­ing edge the­ory and prac­tice to equip expe­ri­ence archi­tects for the chal­lenges of design­ing social expe­ri­ences, the DIY Inter­net, engag­ing busi­ness strate­gi­cally, and more.

Read the full descrip­tion here, and then reg­is­ter here!

Bonus: All work­shop atten­dees will receive a free copy of Social Mania — the social pat­terns design card game unveiled at IDEA09.

Last year’s ren­di­tion was pos­i­tively invig­o­rat­ing, with par­tic­i­pants from experience-based busi­nesses like Zap­pos, and prac­ti­tion­ers from lead­ing firms like Adap­tive Path.  But this one goes to eleven: we hope you’ll join us!

2009 was a big year for aug­mented real­ity, and there are many pre­dic­tions that 2010 will be even big­ger; with accom­plish­ments com­ing in the form of new tech­nolo­gies, devices, busi­ness mod­els, and ways of hav­ing fun.  But even as we go about build­ing this emerg­ing medium, we’re still rely­ing largely on old-media style cen­tral­ized under­stand­ings of the pro­duc­tion mod­els, form, and con­tent of the aug­mented world.  What hap­pens when we grasp the new social and inter­ac­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties of aug­mented reality?

I’m part of a panel titled The Next Wave of AR: Explor­ing Social Aug­mented Expe­ri­ences that’s address­ing this ques­tion at the Where 2.0 con­fer­ence in San Jose in late March / early April.  We’ve got a good group of speak­ers that includes Tish Shute (Ugo­trade), whur­ley * (whur­leyvi­sion llc),Jeremy Hight (Mis­sion Col­lege, CA), and Thomas Wro­bel (Lost Again).  Our goal is to look ahead at how aug­mented real­ity will soon evolve to include — or be based on! — mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tions and dynam­ics at small and large group scales.

In the spirit of co-created social aug­mented expe­ri­ences, we’re ask­ing for audi­ence con­tri­bu­tions: in the form of sim­ple sce­nar­ios that describe the future of social AR.  What will it feel like? Who will you inter­act with?  How will these expe­ri­ences change every­day life?

Panel Sum­mary (full descrip­tion on the Where 2.0 site)

This panel will dis­cuss shared aug­mented real­i­ties, con­sid­er­ing some of the essen­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties and chal­lenges inher­ent in this new class of social aug­mented expe­ri­ences. The for­mat is pre­sen­ta­tion of a small set of sce­nar­ios (defined in advance, with audi­ence input) describ­ing likely future forms of shared aug­mented real­i­ties at dif­fer­ing scales of social engage­ment for dis­cus­sion by a panel of lead­ing prac­ti­tion­ers in tech­nol­ogy, expe­ri­ence design, net­worked urban­ism, inter­face design, game design, and aug­mented reality.

Cur­rent aug­mented real­ity expe­ri­ences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at cen­ter stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of inter­ac­tions assum­ing a sin­gle user see­ing sim­ple arrows and tags indi­cat­ing POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) aug­mented real­i­ties.
These social aug­mented expe­ri­ences will allow not only mashups, & mul­ti­source data flows, but dynamic over­lays (not lim­ited to 3d), cre­ated by dis­trib­uted groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syn­di­cated to peo­ple who wish to engage with the expe­ri­ence by view­ing and co-creating ele­ments for their own goals and benefit.

Share your sce­nar­ios for the Next Wave of AR in the com­ments or else­where (tag nextwaveAR socialAR), and come to Where 2.0 and see the panel!

I’ve posted the slides from my tuto­r­ial / work­shop Design For Goals at JBoye 09 on slideshare: they’re embed­ded below.

The struc­ture for this tuto­r­ial is part method review (on how to under­stand people’s goals in a struc­tured way), and part shar­ing of re-usable pat­terns found after research­ing goals.   Since the con­text of ori­gin for both the goals and pat­terns was com­plex inter­na­tional finance, some trans­la­tion of the raw mate­ri­als and exam­ples and the syn­the­sized pat­terns into a realm closer to home for ordi­nary peo­ple is likely in order.

As you’re going through the slides, I sug­gest using your own activ­i­ties that involve infor­ma­tion find­ing and mak­ing sub­stan­tial finan­cial deci­sions as a ref­er­ence.  Not all the exam­ples that I selected as the basis of exer­cises dur­ing the tuto­r­ial made across the cul­tural bar­rier between North Amer­ica and North­ern Europe: I was sur­prised at how many peo­ple (in a pro­fes­sional audi­ence) have never bought house or car…  Which proves yet again that this is one of the areas for user expe­ri­ence design to work on as a discipline.

And as we had a small, noisy, and rather warm room right after lunch, I should say big thanks to all the par­tic­i­pants and vol­un­teers — every­one — who made an effort to engage.

Even design edu­ca­tion is a work-in-progress, it seems.

UX Mat­ters just pub­lished Anony­mous Cow­ards, Avatars, and the Zeit­geist: Per­sonal Iden­tity in Flux.  This is the lat­est install­ment of my col­umn on ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and user expe­ri­ence, and it takes on the ques­tion of how per­sonal iden­tity is chang­ing is a result of the rise of dig­i­tal tools, ser­vices, and mea­sure­ments for iden­tity.   Iden­tity is a fun­da­men­tal aspect of expe­ri­ence, so it’s crit­i­cal that we under­stand what is hap­pen­ing to this uni­ver­sal ele­ment.  ‘Anony­mous Cow­ards’ is the first of two parts, focused on under­stand­ing how dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties work, and are dif­fer­ent from what we know.  Here’s an excerpt:

Dri­ven by dra­matic shifts in tech­nol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and media, noth­ing less than a trans­for­ma­tion in the makeup and behav­ior of our per­sonal iden­tity is at hand—what it is, where it comes from, how it works, who con­trols it, how peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions use and value it. As a direct result of this trans­for­ma­tion, the expe­ri­ence peo­ple have of per­sonal identity—both their own and the iden­ti­ties of others—is chang­ing rapidly. As design­ers of the blended dig­i­tal, social, and mate­r­ial expe­ri­ences of every­ware, we must under­stand the chang­ing nature of per­sonal iden­tity. And now that human­ity itself is within the design hori­zon, it is espe­cially impor­tant for design to under­stand the shift­ing expe­ri­ence of dig­i­tal identity.

The sec­ond part will look at the impli­ca­tions of these changes for our expe­ri­ence of iden­tity.  As I put together my pre­dic­tions for what iden­tity will be like in 10 years, I wel­come input — what do you think?