Interaction10 – Timo Arnall – Designing for the Web in the World

Written by Russ on February 9, 2010 – 9:11 pm

A handful of years ago, I worked for a mobile phone manufacturer, and that made Timo Arnall’s presentation on Designing for the Web in the World particularly interesting to me. I was fortunate enough to get to spend some time working on and thinking about Location Based Services (LBS) and RFID projects and getting to learn a bit more about where things are heading really gave my brain a jumpstart.

Here’s hoping my notes may give you a bit of that, too.

Timo Arnall’s Bio:

Timo Arnall is a designer working with interactive products and media. Timo leads an international research project on mobile technology, collaborates on interaction design work and lectures in design, media and technology. Timo’s work spans design, media and technology; interested in the ways in which products are used in everyday life, the emergent uses of new technologies and the design of products and services in local contexts and situations. Timo’s history of design work has included projects on the web, location-based and mobile services, film and interactive television production, art direction, motion graphics, installations and exhibitions.

Designing for the Web in the World Description:

From NFC mobile phones to Nabaztag and Nike+, there is an entirely new class of consumer product that becomes almost useless when disconnected from the network. How can designers deal with the vast complexity of designing not only interactive physical products, but the connections and resulting interactions with the data that they produce? In the Touch project we have been working with designing interactive products and services that involve RFID, NFC and mobile devices. The project has developed useful models for designing across tangible and mobile interactions, networks and the web, that allow us to see where existing products succeed or fail, and to get to a grip on the design of new networked products.

My Notes from the Session:

• Shows copper-lined pockets so people can’t scan his RFID “stuff”
• Shows “RFID-Proof” wallet to protect your personal wares (froms canning)
• References “Shaping Things” by Bruce Sterling (@bruces); calls it out as a short, fascinating read, but if all our products are trackable & traceable, maybe it has an impact on lifecycle, recycle-ability, etc.
• NFC is “Near Field Communications”
• NFC – The integration of RFID into mobile phones
• You can embed tags in everyday objects and then take actions upon them – similar to stuff I worked on for <insert mobile phone manufacturer here>.
• We are keen to “reframe” technology to make it fun, not talking about the utility of it all, but more about the exploration, the game-y-ness of it.
• RFID/NFC with youth testing seems to have gone from passive to active usage in a very short amount of time. Learning curve was quick & easy and it was fun for children to have simple controls that delivered fun, consumable actions.
• Showed RFID stickers; previous discussed those types of re/actions at <insert mobile phone manufacturer here> and it’s great to see that we really were looking at the future about 5 years ago.
• The part of the problem with this genre of products is that they become worthless without a network.  This echoes my feelings/fears about working in the cloud (that is, if the cloud.
• 3 Levels of thinking about designing network objects
• 1. The tangible experience.
• It’s become important to create things that live in our everyday lives & attach to our everyday objects
• 2. Objects need to have a connection to the outside world
• They need to also have a reason for doing this! In many ways, this ends up also being very social–sharing data of your workouts, your sleep patterns, etc.
• 3. Visualizing and perfection
• Once you start to collect and create data about/around a device, you need to start to visualize it, show people what’s going on with it.
• Design decisions for products that are connected need to be taken very seriously and need to considered for the *very* long-term. If the network and/or engagement dies, the usefulness of the product dies.
• This seems like an enormous risk (to me) when creating new products.  Does it kill the entrepreneur?
• Nike+ used as a good example. Absolutely; and the advantage of Nike money coupled with Apple money and long-term, low-risk of either/both of them going away. The product *should* have a pretty long shelf-life & you should be able to use it for a very long time.

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