Another good article from Cliff Kuang, about Assaf Wand’s process in creating ergonomic self-care brand Sabi (essentially OXO for Rx):
You can’t create a brand with just one product. You become too hit dependent, and you can’t really serve the needs of an entire audience. Behar agreed. “If you’re going to start a brand, depth is key,” says Behar. “If you’re going to talk to a user about their everyday lives, you better consider every facet.” So Wand and Fuseproject set about figuring out what categories would allow them to create the most products at the most reasonable cost. And from there, they settled on products that would solve the everyday pain of taking pills.
Interesting tactic. I wonder if one of the things people miss in the rush to Apple-ify their product lines by simplifying, is that the reason computers could be so drastically simplified is that their variety was in the software.
In the physical, the equivalent of software is the different elements of the product range, so simplifying doesn’t necessarily mean reducing the number of products. It just means reducing to only fill the most essential niches.
Fred Trotter talking about the programmable self, which I think does make sense as the logical next step from the quantified self.
Programmable self is the combination of a digital motivation hack, like StickK, with a digital system that tracks behavior, like Fitbit (that’s the Quantified Self part). You have to have both. Recently, for example, Stickk started supporting the use of the Withings Scale to support weight entries. Withings is a Wi-Fi-enabled scale that broadcasts your weight automagically to the Withings servers. From there, Withings will send your weight generally wherever you want: HealthVault, other personal health record (PHR) systems, or over to Stickk.com. With that feature, Stickk became a programmable-self platform.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
That said, this reminds me of that early 80s gamer culture where you had to type your games in before you could play. Then as now, only a very small proportion of the population was able to participate, which limited its reach until the tools were mastered by true artists like Shigeru Miyamoto.
What will be the Super Mario of the programmable self?
Cliff Kuang for Co.Design, speaking with Ricky Engelberg, Nike+’s director of user experience::
“Every Nike+ product will soon earn you fuel,” says Engelberg. In the coming months, all of their various pedometers and heart-rate monitors will start to spit out Fuel scores, which you can tabulate online.
Now that’s a clear vision. I want to see gyms aggregate those scores, apartment buildings, neighborhoods, workplaces, insurance companies. Looking forward to the API.
Joe Flatley for the Verge, quoting OK:
“[b]efore Snookie was punched in the face on camera she was the cheapest Jersey Shore member making $2,000 an appearance. But after, she became the most expensive — $10,000 an appearance!”
Aaaah, the mathematics of fame.
Good article by Peter Bright at Arstechnica, elegantly drawing the parallel between the reward structure of games and that of coding:
Visual Studio 2010 offers a free-form gaming experience. Nothing in the game prescribes a particular layout for the dungeons; they’re left entirely to the taste and discretion of the player. They can be large, baroque, sprawling monstrosities, or small, clean, tasteful affairs. The results are as varied as players are; no two experiences will be the same.
Yes! But my god – if Visual Studio is a text adventure, what does that make VIM?
It was disappointing to see the negative comments beneath the article. As shown by the success of IDEs like Minecraft, coding’s gameful nature is already a huge part of the appeal, and we should embrace that as a way to draw more people in.
There’s much wrong with Color’s pool party ad. It’s creepy, unrealistic and brings back all kinds of memories of the first season of the OC (I was forced to watch it, ok?). Nothing good can come of a steamy make out session with an odd number of people. Maybe Color is targeting jilted third wheels with nothing to do but broadcast their awkward presence at someone else’s party.
But most of all, I spent the whole spot worried about the phone doing the filming. Kid, don’t you know what happens when an iPhone gets even slightly damp?! You’re in a pool, you moron!
Color only makes sense if you think of it as an attempt to do for video what Twitter did for blogging, and Instagram did for photos. Those guys crafted a package around the smallest possible unit of interestingness. That packaging made sharing frictionless, because it created a fluid tool, yes, but even more because you knew it wouldn’t take long, so you actually decided to do it.
For Twitter, that package is of course the 140 character limit, but also plumbing like URL shorteners, hashtags, and other language conventions (thnk u SMS) that make that limit usable. Instagram already had the concise unit of the photo, but the filters and Polaroid square added a sheen that made individual photos shareable . Flickr always felt to me like it was as much about albums, which is also how I grew up thinking about photos. Instagram broke out the individual photo.
Those restrictions don’t just allow sharing. Like any good artistic constraint, they stimulate creation, too.
So how’s Color’s packaging of video? First, sound (Color has none). Having no sound forces a certain passivity, which in theory should help keep you in the moment. I like that spirit, but the disruption’s already happened as soon as you get your phone out. Maybe the 30 second limit by telegraphing that the intrusion is temporary, but how would people know you’re filming through Color and not a regular video app?
Second, live. Compared to photos, the real barrier for video is editing, encoding, uploading and watching your hard drive fill up. Making it live cuts all out, but I think may also reflect something more fundamental. While writing this, I realized that I naturally think in terms of sharing files – so naturally sharing a piece of text or self contained photo is the same as sharing a self contained video (whether five seconds, or five minutes). Each shared item is just another event in my activity stream. But isn’t video itself already a series of events?
I think what Color has recognized is that sharing a video in your stream isn’t the same as sharing a streaming video. The unit isn’t the video, it’s the frame, or, ultimately, the moment. Sometimes, you should share a series of photos or tweets. Other times, maybe it’s a series of moments within a single video. Sometimes it should be asynchronous, a conversation held over days and weeks, sometimes it needs to be synchronous. Perhaps Color will fill a niche – either way it’ll be a (costly) experiment to learn from.
John Gruber quotes Mike Davidson’s image of the perfect news site:
As a closing thought, I’ve had this idea in my head for the last few years of what a perfect news site looks like, and it’s quite simple: a white screen with a list of 5 or 10 links that changes once a day. That’s it. Here’s the tricky part though: the 5 or 10 links need to be THE 5 or 10 links that are most useful to me on any given day. (link to original article)
Mike & John’s posts were triggered by Twitter’s acquisition of Summify, which buckets up the firehose of links from our social media feeds, but I think there’s a lesson closer to home. Their posts are from the perspective of the reader. As readers, we can absolutely (and should, and probably will have to) use services that give us algorithmic recommendations, but that’s not the only way: we already opt-in to the authors whose editorial hand we trust and enjoy.
Daring Fireball is exactly that short list of links for me, at least for a certain portion of my information diet. That and a few others (and yeah, I suppose some of them have do white backgrounds).
When I see tools like Summify, it makes me feel like I need to up my game as a writer, specifically how to be helpful to people interested in the same things as me. It took me a while to get this, but am now responding by trying to make this blog entirely transparent. It should be as clear a window as possible into the intersection of games, design and behavior change.
So that’s the lesson for authors. If you’re deeply involved in any area, perhaps it’s your job to create those 5 to 10 links. Why leave all the fun to the machines?
Hey folks, just wanted to let you know about very worthwhile Kickstarter, an online multiplayer storytelling game called the Written World. They’ve got just 3 days left and need your help! Here’s the link.
It’s a simple concept, delivered through the browser:
it’s a game of Narrator versus Hero. The narrator controls the story; crafting a plot and presenting the Hero with encounters, and challenges. The Hero creates a character that she believes can make it through to the end.
And when the story’s over it lives inside the Written World, for other people to read, re-use or play themselves.
What really excites me about this concept is that it’s in that messy space between straight-up fiction writing (hard, lonely), and role playing (rules!). As an obsessive improviser, I know how much practice it can take to get a freeform story going between two people, which the Written World hopefully adresses by injecting a lightweight set of game mechanics.
I’ve known the team behind it a very long time and they’re incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about games and storytelling, and they’ve been featured in The Atlantic and Huffington Post.
Oh, and give them ten grand and you’ll be able to name their firstborn anything you like (I’m keen on Blancmange, myself).
Anyhow, why not give them your dollars?
Lakshmi Sandhana over at Co.Exist reports on an extraordinary commitment to understanding the people you’re designing for:
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself–for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.
I really think design falls short unless you find techniques to embody your user (or are your user), and you rarely have to go to this Pattie Moore style extreme. Inspiring that Arunachalam was in a situation where he did, and that he had the guts to follow through.
