I'm a freelance digital expat, experience architect, strategist, and management & technology consultant based in Amsterdam. I use design to improve the experiences you offer to people.
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:
Overview of augmented reality
Social interaction perspective on current AR experiences
Definition of ‘social augmented experiences’
Common interaction design patterns for AR
Social ‘anti-patterns’ limiting design of augmented experiences
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!
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!
Design frameworks offer substantial benefits to all parties involved in creating high quality user experiences for products, services, digital media, and the emerging interaction spaces of augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, and cross-media storytelling. Frameworks allow designers to better adapt to the rapid shifts in the digital environment by leveraging increasing modularity, granularity, and structure, and accommodating the far-reaching changes inherent in the rise of co-creative dynamics. This presentation — part of a full-day workshop delivered at the 2009 & 2010 Information Architecture Summits — identifies the elements common to all design frameworks, and offers best practices on effectively putting frameworks into immediate use. Altogether, it is a short course in the creation and use of customized design frameworks for addressing the complexity of strategic experience design.
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.
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?