This is absolutely stunning (via Metacool).

Great point from Diego about BMW’s brand audacity in getting Jeff Koons to vitalize the car:

I admire the marketers at BMW because they seem to be able to conceive of their hallowed brand as a dynamic, living thing. Instead of saying “our brand can’t go there”, they think “our brand is designed to go places”, which I’d wager is why the brand is still so strong after so many year in the market. The dynamic totality of their vision, which encompasses everything from manufacturing to sculpture to R&D to messaging, is centered on the principles of movement and getting to new places, with the risks that come with leaving the safe harbor called What We Know That Works Today.

The other point though is that sometimes you have to look to other fields and media to communicate your essence. The front view in particular gives an incredible sensation of speed and color – and life – that BMW could not have achieved just with their skill and passion for shaping the form of the car.

More below and Autoblog (including video of the unveiling).

I just finished playing Braid, Jonathan Blow’s critically acclaimed indie game. Get on Steam and play it! Now. Really. It’s that good.

More than enough has been said about Braid, so I’ll just focus on three things that blew me away.

1) Exploring every aspect of a gameplay space.
Braid is one of those games (much like Portal), that takes a gameplay concept and explores every corner of it. The basic mechanic is simple – you can reverse time – but every level brings with it a new twist.

2) Absolutely no filler.
Blow has crafted a very compact experience which you takes just a few hours to complete, and as his walkthrough pointedly points out, massively rewards you for doing so. Because each puzzle is different, the feeling of satisfaction from getting that puzzle piece at the end is intense. This maintains the beautiful balance between the pleasure of unravelling its delightfully mind-bending mechanics and the manual dexterity to actually execute (reminds me of my first love, rock climbing).

3) The theme, ending and overall storytelling.
The story is told through obscure fragments that don’t inform as much as they set up a mood. You’re introduced to this Princess you are seeking in these strange worlds, but it’s never obvious who you or this character is.

This aspect is arguably where Braid pushes the boundaries of games the furthest. The main theme of this game is regret (if you don’t mind massive spoilers you can see just how much here) and this is supported by the time reversal mechanic, the painterly, ethereal art style, the nostalgic locations, the distorted pop culture references. If you’ve played Sanitarium, you’ll have some idea what I mean.

Most games justify their mechanics through storytelling, aesthetics or simply because they are fun. This isn’t bad in itself, but what a huge achievement to set up gameplay that in itself reinforces the very theme of the game (in the same way that the Munch’s brush style enhances The Scream). Another argument for the idea of game mechanics as art.

The final level (scene?) is a masterpiece in itself, because it wrenches all the game mechanics together in a way that immediately makes you go through the gut-wrenching sense of realization, hopelessness and regret (normal computer game topics, right?) that Braid is ultimately about.

The game industry is undermining itself by focusing on epic adventures that take millions to produce and dozens of hours to play. Games like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect are brilliant big budget experiences, but their core gameplay is often repetitive. Your gun might get nicer over the course of the (admittedly awesome) story, but you’re still shooting things in much the same way. Their length also serves to make them inaccessible. Imagine if you could only see one or two films a year because each took 40 hours.

It is just as valuable to create a highly focused game that fully explores its space, avoids repetition and most importantly delivers a lasting emotional impact.

Jane McGonigal from the Institute of the Future at TED. I’d never considered that there were millions of gamers with a fully fledged education in skills that could hel save the real world… if it was more like a game.

10,000 hours

“The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games, by the age of 21. For children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.”

“So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you have probably read Malcom Gladwell’s new book Outliers. So, you would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of success. It’s based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master 10,000 hours at effortful study, at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we’re looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.”

What are they getting good at?
1) Urgent optimism
They believe that they are capable of changing the world – and ready to take action at a moment’s notice.

2) Weaving a tight social fabric
Gamers are masters at rapidly creating strong social bonds. Also, it’s interesting to note that we like people more after we’ve played with them.

3) Blissful productivity
Gaming exemplifies that we are happier working hard than relaxing if the work is structured right.

4) Epic meaning
Gamers love (and are used to) being attached to world changing stories.

Right now, we are using games to escape into virtual worlds, but it doesn’t have to be that way. These skills could apply to the real world if the real world was redesigned to work more like a game.
Just one example: World Without Oil

“We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real, and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil. So, when you come to the game you sign up, you tell us where you live. And then we give you real-time news videos data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what’s not available, how food supply is being affected,  how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if their is rioting. And you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. ”

“Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we are supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, “We’ve run out of oil.” This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive. Most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.”

She also talks about two others: Superstruct which asks gamers to come up with smart ideas to solve the world’s problems (she’s got 5,000 and counting) and Evoke, a crash course in social innovation.

Great stuff, and if you’re wondering what that might feel like on a more everyday level, watch this genius talk by Jesse Schell from Carnegie Mellon University.

In Canabalt, your pixelated running man runs for his life through a dystopian world reminiscent of the Matrix, jumping from rooftop to collapsing rooftop and getting steadily faster until he either plummets into the ground, runs into the debris that’s been left lying around or is bombed into a fine mist from the sky. It’s all controlled with one button: all you have to do is jump at the right time to keep accelerating. Best of all, the game was developed in only five days.

Play it as a flash game or on the iPhone. (via Offworld)

The game nails the sense of speed and control, making it a perfect example of flow. How?

Sense of control
The one button controls make it easy to feel in control, but only because they enable you to successfuly tackle every challenge thrown at you (within the limits of your skill, that is). It seems that one of the basic principles of flow in games is that it is enhanced when controls become more sensitive, i.e. as you have to do less to meet the challenges thrown at you. Think of the kung fu master blocking punches and kicks with one arm with a look of thinly disguised boredom on his face. As a bonus, the simplicity of the execution means there are no extraneous elements to pull you out of flow

Sense of speed
There is a limit to the brain’s reaction speed, but you can increase the perceived speed of the character through a few tricks, improving the sense of flow because you make the player feel that they’re going even more awesomely fast. Canabalt uses a bunch of tricks:

• Four layers of parallax with giant shadowy machines stomping around the background create an epic scale
• The occasional jet flying in the opposite direction adds an extra layer in front
• The repetition of the windows/bricks in the buildings adds extra speed
• The character animation is spot on

Sense of impact
This is related to the sense of control. Here, the buildings that collapse as you jump on them and the physics of the broken glass bouncing around you and birds taking off as you run through their midst amplify your involvement in the action. The more of an impact your actions have on the world, the greater the resulting sense of flow when you successfuly keep things moving at the edge of your ability.

Synaesthesia
The music is a perfect complement to the action. It could do even more: synchronizing the visuals and the sound effects (as Audiosurf does), would increase the sense of involvement even further.

Overall, Canabalt is a pretty brilliant case study in how to generate flow.

Last week’s post about the Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) showed just one of the many cool exhibits they had running this summer. Here’s a few more.

Paro, the Therapeutic Robot
First up, a robot created entirely to create an emotional bond with its owner. Paro the robotic seal has been around since 2003, there are now about 1,000 of them in use in Japan, and you can get one at Japan Trend Shop for just under $6,000. In the words of its creator, Takanori Shibata, (well, his organisation’s website)

Unlike industrial robots, “Mental Commitment Robots” are developed to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to the robots. Rather than using objective measures, these robots trigger more subjective evaluations, evoking psychological impressions such as “cuteness” and comfort. Mental Commitment Robots are designed to provide 3 types of effects: psychological, such as relaxation and motivation, physiological, such as improvement in vital signs, and social effects such as instigating communication among inpatients and caregivers.

The striking thing about Paro is what its designers have done to make it feel… alive. It weighs the same as a baby, is warm (because of the machinery inside) and fuzzy. It responds to your voice and touch and its power cord looks like a pacifier. It makes plaintive noises, which instantly make you want to comfort it.

And yet, you know that it’s a robot, so it’s kinda creepy. The reactions of the girl in the video are a fine lesson on the effects of the uncanny valley .

Paro, Emotive Robot from Raphael D’Amico on Vimeo.

Even so, it’s fascinating as it addresses the emotive aspect of technology, which will become more and more important as smart machines continue to become ubiquitous. It may also be directly helpful to improve the brain function of elderly dementia patients, for example, and the principle of animal therapy – creating an emotional connection to empower the sick and needy – seems sound. It’s an interesting way of introducing this relationship into animal un-friendly environments like hospitals.

More info here and here.

The Internet

A mechanical model of the internet. Each ball is a ‘bit’, and kids can send messages between five terminals in ‘packets’ of  16 balls. Fun, accurate and impressive in its scale. Video and pics below.

Interfaces

Just for the interaction designers reading this, this was a display where you could drive a virtual vehicle around using a steering wheel (of course), but also with a joystick, by tilting a mug (!), a keyboard or even with reins. Cute, and hopefully inspiring at least one kid a day to a future in the field.

Human body

The components of the human body. Nuff said.

The Story of Dark Matter

Another comic book visualisation of a complex topic: the genesis of the universe and whatever happened to those poor antimatter particles.

Ryota Kuwakubo’s Media Art

Ryota Kuwakubo creates pieces of interactive art that get you to think about how we interact with technology, and also how technology makes us interact with each other. Case in point the pixel videophones that change their expression based on the tone of your voice, the beach ball that makes a sound when you bounce it, the robotic eyes that suddenly give mundane objects a face and a personality, and most awesomely the strap-on tail that tries to help balance you. Mind-expanding.

Some pictures below, though as I didn’t get a chance to fully document his exhibits at the Miraikan it’s worth checking out the many other places which have reported on him.

Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) doesn’t pull its punches. While many museums seek to entertain, this one hits you with beautifully presented information that rewards your attention with real teaching.

The first exhibit I’ll mention is particularly relevant for readers of this blog. It’s dedicated to five types of innovation:

• Alternative: “New ideas unconstrained by traditional values give us the ability to create new things”
• Serendipity: “Unexpected developments give us the ability to make fortunate discoveries”
• Integration: “Combining and integrating things with different properties for a single purpose gives us the ability to generate new things”
• Associative: “Identifying qualities shared between things that seem at first to be unrelated can by association give us the ability to generate new perspectives”
• Mimic(ry): Mimicking existing solutions from the world and reproducing them in new ways

“The Spring of Wishes” Stunningly for a museum populated with both adults and children, each form of innovation is explained in detail. But first you should decide what you want at the spring of wishes, as the museum calls it. What do you want innovation to help you with? Out in the real world, this may well be the hardest step.

“The River of Creativity” Choose a path to follow, and you first get a small example (e.g. Le Corbusier’s domino system of supporting a structure with a framework of columns, an alternative to using the walls).

Then a bigger example (e.g. an electronic tree mimicking photosynthesis):

Then a (sometimes frighteningly) detailed explanation of the bigger example. Check out this cutesy book describing photosynthesis, and look carefully at the text. Quote: “Outside the village the skilled chef Rubisco traps carbon dioxide, mixes it with RuBP fruit and then adds the special ingredient NADPH. Simmering this concotion over the ATP flame, he makes his delicious GAP jam.”

Finally, a parting shot with three more examples of products generated through this process. Take the serendipitously discovered post-it notes, velcro or, of course (ahem), the large-scale synthesis of carbon nanotubes.

“The Sea of Fertility”. But wait! That’s not it. At the end of each curving paths through innovation takes you to a magnetic blackboard wall where visitors are invited to use the technologies they’ve just discovered to solve the world’s tortuous problems. Each blue disc has a technology (solar power, biocompatible materials, fuel cells, etc…). Can you connect them in a useful way?

As with most of the other exhibits in this museum, this one is almost shockingly in-depth, which is both its strength and its weakness. I was blown away by what I learned (I’d never quite got what a lab-on-a-chip was before it was introduced in the segment on integrative creativity), but I wonder if it got through to children. They had plenty of toys to play with, and while I was there I saw a bunch of them scribbling furiously on the wall of innovation, but how much did they get out of it?

Kids are smart, and adults are part of the audience too. What’s the right balance between condescending simplicity and depth you can really learn from?

More on the Miraikan coming up.

Words of Jack Shulze being interviewed by design consultancy Kicker:

“No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.”

And…

“You get the work you do. If you want to do something else start doing it.”

Wonderful advice.

More inspiration for interaction designers: Windosill, the Flash creation of Patrick Smith a.k.a. Vectorpark. The game’s sole goal is to find a simple cube in each level which opens the door to the next screen. The point and click puzzles get increasingly creative, making you discover by trial and error the rules and foibles of each little world so you can hold of the key to the next one. The sense of exploration and discovery is brilliant (and well worth $3)

Only have one minute (and 9 seconds) – this video review will show you the premise.

As for why this is worthy stimulation for interaction design, Offworld puts it best:

…that exploration wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding were it not for Smith’s ability to somehow have teased out (with the aid, I can only conclude, of some dark, black magic) easily the greatest sense of physicality Flash (still, remember, an essentially 2D toolkit) has ever produced. Everything has such a well defined heft and tension, everything responds to your prodding with just the right amount of ‘squishiness’, that even its most surreal concoctions feel fantastically alive.

It’s amusing to think that there are “serious” user interfaces out there that manage to make it both less fun and harder to accomplish your task than Windosill.

As I’ve said before, games can do a lot more than just entertain. They can can make accounting fun, help kids learn, teach valuable lessons in design and suggest new interactions with the world around us.

In that context, here are two more examples of game design techniques in two of the least frivolous areas imaginable – health and wealth. Both from Raph Koster’s great blog (which is essential reading for people creating anything that another person will use/experience).

Games for Health

Coming up June 10-12th is the Fifth Games for Health conference which looks at all the ways that games can act as a positive disruptive force in healthcare. For example:

• games used for rehabilitation and therapy
• “exergaming” (exercise gaming) which exploded onto the scene with Wii Sports and is here to stay
• improving doctor patient communication by using virtual environments
• games to raise awareness of issues like STDs (“Catch the Sperm”)
• game environments to train surgeons and rapid response teams
• where games help kids to develop (and where they might be a problem)

Games have two things to offer healthcare. Firstly, they are engaging and can bring an addictive reward structure to just about anything. This is valuable for us all, as we tend to live our lives less healthily than we should due to the  of the delayed benefits. Using game mechanics to make the rewards more immediate could revolutionise our attitudes to our health.

Secondly, they can be very realistic simulations. Games can educate and train healthcare professionals in more engaging ways, which ultimately makes the learning more effective. They can also simulate things which are hard to otherwise experience (see Burn Center below).

Here are some of the sessions that caught my eye (full list of sessions announced so far is here):

Mindless Eating Challenge
In the game, players are tasked with caring for a virtual pet or plant, similar to the popular Tamgotchi.  Pet care requires the user to follow a variety of health and eating recommendations and verify their actions with photos taken with their phone’s camera.  For example, the recommendation “Eat a hot breakfast” would require the player to submit a photo of him/ herself eating a bowl of oatmeal.  Photos and compliance are then judged either by judges or peers.  Based on compliance to these recommendations, the pet or plant changes its appearance and gains features or accessories–a tree might grow taller or grow more leaves or fruit in response.  Alternatively, leaves might fall off if the player’s performance is poor.  A social portion of the game allows the user to see various depictions of their performance in comparison to the performance of others in their group, as well as of their group in comparison to other groups.

Case Study : Burn Center
This session covers the design, development, and rollout of Burn Center by 360ED an award winning training game covering a mass casualty burn-victim event. Burn Center not only provides the immersive experience of a full-scale, chaotic triage situation, but it also features an extensive resuscitation mode that follows patients over the course of 36 hours of treatment on an intensive care unit following a disaster event.

Case Study : The Skeleton Chase, A Healthy ARG
This session covers the development, rollout, and results of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) titled Skeleton Chase that was developed to serve as an intervention for college students who studies show routinely dial down their exercise activity upon arrival at college which in turn sows the seeds for bad health habits and outcomes later in life. (more at this link)

The Coming Age of Sensor Based Health Games
Increasingly, games are using a new generation of sensors that can detect movement, haptics, proximity, global position, light, audio, visuals, brain waves, emotional states, and physiological states, to name a few. These sensors often transmit their data to games without requiring players to transmit the data themselves, such as through an accelerometer attached to the player’s belt throughout the day, or a GPS system that inputs the player’s physical location into the game state.

Advances in sensor technologies and affordability are giving health game designers new gameplay options. This session will cite research findings and case-study examples to provide an overview of the many types of sensor systems that exist today or are just around the corner, and their potential integration into the research and design of games for health.

A Conversation with Richard S. Levine : Developer of Microsurgeon
One of the first games about health ever debuted for the Intellivision video console. Microsurgeon featured incredible graphics for its day and detailed gameplay where you guided a nanobot through a human patient helping them battle a variety of ailments from cholesterol build-up in arteries, to bacterial infections, kidney stones, tapeworms, and tar deposits from smoking.

The YouTube clip of this 1982 game is a must see.

Games for Money

Personal finance sites like Mint and Rudder have been springing up to help us save money and make sense of the hundreds of options out there. They have incredibly useful tools which aggregate all your accounts in one place (so you don’t get fooled by your own mental accounting) and allow you to set budgets and send reminders when you go over. Mint has been a great success, and now reports over a million users.

Despite the zillions of products out there to do this, we still managed to wheel, deal, and borrow ourselves into a financial crisis (that is still ongoing, though swine flu may be eclipsing it just now). Clearly, something was lacking in the appeal here, for if said product category were truly successful, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

Now, Mint is in closed beta on a feature that turns personal finance into a game, complete with points earned for doing things like socking away some cash into the savings account each month, or switching to a credit card with annual rewards. Get enough points in a sustained way, and you too can be a Financial Guru.

This seems like a fairly straightforward harnessing of game-style incentive systems towards a laudable goal (though I should note that said credit card with rewards is likely from one of Mint’s partners). But honestly — money is points anyway, isn’t it? Why is it that we value the cash less than the flat-screen TV?

Raph goes on to wonder at the kind of game mechanic that would nudge us to try and save as money in the same way that WoW players go nuts over experience points.

It may be that one reason why we used to be thriftier is simply because the money we hoarded was more tangible… gold coins trigger the brain’s systems in a way that a bank balance does not. This is what the Mint point system is designed to supplement: by creating a non-fungible point system, the game is giving you something other than real-world stuff onto which to displace your acquisitiveness, a “virtual stuff.” It would do even better, perhaps, if the points were gems or something else more “stuff-like” in terms of its representation.

Go read it the whole thing. It’s a powerful point. As with health, we save too little because the tangible reward comes in the future, and we massively understimate our future wants. Using game mechanics to bring that value forward can only help.

Should form equal function? If something is to work well it often must, but that tells you less about what it should look like than you’d think.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the amazing photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a German artist couple who spent the last fifty years taking pictures of industrial architecture:

The Bechers first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959, and had their first Gallery exhibition in 1963 at the Galerie Ruth Nohl in Siegen. They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which certain buildings were designed. In addition, they were intrigued by the fact that so many of these industrial buildings seemed to have been built with a great deal of attention toward design. Together, the Bechers went out with a large format camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward “objective” point of view. The images of structures with similar functions were then displayed side by side to invite viewers to compare their forms and designs. These structures included barns, water towers, storage silos, and warehouses. (from Wikipedia)

Looking at these pictures it’s fascinating to watch different shapes emerge in the designs of each type of building. Even though they are utterly functional and mostly have the same constraints, they still vary considerably. More evidence that, as with the Chords Bridge, creativity can be born out of thinking not outside but *inside* the box.

Here are a few pictures of their works. More here (from their book Typologies) and in exhibitions worldwide.

Gravel Plants (2006)

Framework Houses (1970)

Grain Elevators (1985)

Winding towers (1983)

Cooling Towers (1976)

Bonus for photography lovers: the photography of Edward Weston.