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.

This a really wonderful promotion by Colle+McVoy for Erbert and Gerbert, a sandwich chain: the CandleCannon!

Erbert & Gerbert’s has been making Subs Worth Discovering for 20 years. To help them celebrate, we decided to have more than just a party. So we built the world’s largest and most powerful air vortex cannon and had ourselves a Blowout.

It’s a great ad, but that’s not what I wanted to point out. Just look how delighted and excited the people in the video are! Although the video is planned, the reactions are genuine.

The CandleCannon is probably in large part a reflection of the ad agency’s culture, and I don’t know if Erbert and Gerbert is the kind of place where that would happen naturally. Nevertheless, companies should aspire to be places where employees can do things like the CandleCannon, and where there is enough soul and humour to create reactions like overjoyed jumping and hugging once in a while.

The corporate culture that can create a better world feels like this video. Wouldn’t you want to be somewhere with that kind of spirit?

(via The Uniblog)

And making of here:

An recent article from the Economist made me think about how companies could learn from the distributed innovation of open source to find the great ideas within. The article is about InnoCentive, which helps connect problems with solutions:

[Innocentive] is based on a simple idea: if a firm cannot solve a problem on its own, why not use the reach of the internet to see if someone else can come up with the answer? Companies, which InnoCentive calls “seekers”, post their challenges on the firm’s website. “Solvers”, who number almost 180,000, compete to win cash “prizes” offered by the seekers. Around 900 challenges have been posted so far by some 150 firms including big multinationals such as Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemicals. More than 400 have been solved. InnoCentive reckons the approach can work for innovations in all sorts of fields, from chemistry to business processes and even economic development. It has formed a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, a charity, to help solve problems posted by non-profits working in poor countries, with some initial success.

InnoCentive is now looking inwards with a new service called Innocentive @Work which “replicates the solver network inside a firm”:

Challenges are first offered to “seeker” companies’ own employees. Only if they cannot help is the outside network brought into play. “Companies often don’t know how much they already know,” says Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive’s chief. An early challenge at one firm was to find a source of some data, which, it turned out, had already been acquired by another division.

This is particularly interesting given that InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, a place for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to put out the problems it was failing to solve internally.

Right under their noses

The fact that InnoCentive is successfully being used to solve problems shows the power of setting up a structured framework for innovation. Why is this important? Let’s take a look at the open source software community and ask this: how can thousands of individual coders collaborate on something as huge as Linux or Android?

A large part is the framework in which contributors operate. Much of the coding that needs to be done is well defined and there is a solid framework for executing the solutions. Want to fix a bug? Go into the source code repository, download the project, work on your bit, test it and then upload it for community approval. All your contributions are tracked, and you can see who’s working on what and resolve conflicts. Because of this, a lone coder can quickly change just a single line of code (that’s what most do), while at the same time huge companies can put thousands of their people to task (for example, IBM has contributed 6.3% of Linux, and Sun is mostly responsible for Java).

What would happen if the strengths of this model were applied to business problems, which are a whole lot fuzzier? By what framework could a salesperson easily fix a bug in a large marketing campaign? Or an engineer contribute to an ethnographic study for a new vacuum cleaner? To be fair, programming has the particular advantage of being a granular, text based medium, but tools like Innocentive@Work could make problems visible within an organisation and give solutions a place to go (and the solvers to be rewarded).

InnoCentive is not the only service to link problems and solvers. In the same space are Hypios, InnovationXchange, NineSigma and Tekscout in US, PRESANS in France, Innoget in Spain, and Fellowforce. Moreover, this approach is not only for research and development in the traditional sense: just look at the success of Threadless in generating t-shirt designs, Fold.it for science (see NYT article) or the several dozen sites like TopCoder and ODesk which allow you to outsource self contained business problems, from coding to marketing.

As web based applications, these companies are essentially a testing ground for highly automated processes which allow people to contribute innovative solutions (or even just good work). Organisations should therefore keep a close on eye on the fittest of these services to see exactly what they do to make it easy to specify problems, maintain relationships with solvers and to communicate clearly.

Too often, innovation is forced to squeeze through bureaucracy. Implemented correctly, such automated frameworks could make it look a lot more meritocratic.

What do you think? Please comment below.

October’s DISCOVER magazine has a nice article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the colossal particle accelerator which amongst many other things may reveal the Higgs Boson and the secret of gravity. The LHC is 27km long and requires a frankly ridiculous amount of power to fulfill its single goal of making particles crash at high speeds. But how much is “a frankly ridiculous amount”? What exactly is a “high speed crash” in particle physics?

‘Just the facts’ is only enough if your audience can put them in context without your help

Wikipedia’s entry, likely updated by and for professionals with more than a passing knowledge of the field puts it as follows:

The collider tunnel contains two adjacent parallel beam pipes that intersect at four points, each containing a proton beam, which travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1,232 dipole magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 quadrupole magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1,600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at their operating temperature of 1.9 K, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature. Superconducting quadrupole electromagnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points, where interactions between accelerated protons will take place.

Once or twice a day, as the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 7 TeV, the field of the superconducting dipole magnets will be increased from 0.54 to 8.3 teslas (T). The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV (2.2 ?J). At this energy the protons have a Lorentz factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.9999991% of the speed of light. It will take less than 90 microseconds (?s) for a proton to travel once around the main ring – a speed of about 11,000 revolutions per second. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be bunched together, into 2,808 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 nanoseconds (ns) apart. However it will be operated with fewer bunches when it is first commissioned, giving it a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns.

[...] While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ (equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT) and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ (173 kilograms of TNT).

Technical, yes. Informative? Maybe, but only if you know enough about the field to make sense of the units of measurement presented. This is probably enough for a particle physicist. It likely doesn’t generate understanding in a layman.

If you need to, give useful contexts to the facts

DISCOVER’s Lisa Randall goes one step further in an attempt to translate for the reader:

“I learned more about the backstory [of the Large Hadron Collider] during my visit. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal for collisions is a center of mass energy of 14 TeV, or trillion electron volts. I realise these might be unfamiliar units, so to give some perspective, it is seven times the energy of the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois, which is presently the highest-energy machine, and 15,000 times the energy contained in the mass of a single proton at rest” Lisa Randall, ‘The Heart of the Matter’

The effort is laudable, but it falls short of really communicating what 14 trillion electron volts because it uses examples that are only meaningful to the kind of reader who most likely already understands that unit of measurement. The problem is that electron volts, Fermilab and the energy of a stationary proton are all part of the same language.

Know what language your audience is speaking

Description is not communication. You can’t deposit knowledge in a person’s head, just as you can’t stick new leaves directly onto a plant. Successful communication is about feeding your audience the right blend of facts, stories, examples and experiences so that their understanding of a topic can grow within what they already know.

In both cases, the comparisons given (”largest cryogenic facility”, “99.9999991% of the speed of light”, “seven times Fermilab”, “mass of a singe proton”) will not mean much without similar facts in their mind acting as ‘hooks’. But what if you put it in terms that made comparison easier?

• At their top speed, these protons will travel the 27km circuit (about 10 laps of a Nascar oval, or two thirds of a marathon), 3,500 in the time it takes to blink an eye
• Each of the 1,600 superconducting magnets arranged around the track (one every fifty feet on average) weighs about the same as two fully laden container trucks
• It takes 120 MW to run the LCH, approximately the power consumption of all the Canton State of Geneva where the LHC is located. That’s half a million people, about the population of Atlanta.

This kind of translation isn’t always necessary, but always make sure to speak the same language as your audience. It’s not what you say that matters, it’s what they understand.

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.

I saw this today in Walgreens’ pharmacy section – a magnifying lens to help customers read text on drug packaging. It was right by products aimed at elderly people, so fading eyesight would definitely be an issue.

Helpful, right? Yes and no.

On one hand, this tool magnifies the problem of designs which squash instructions together in hard to read text. On the other hand, it helps the minority of people who literally cannot read the packaging but otherwise doesn’t get in the way. It’s not obvious whether this is satisfactory. How clearly does packaging need to be designed? What is the tradeoff between information and marketing?

Is it enough to help the user deal with a design problem, or should you attack the problem directly?

One company to have gone a step further is Target, which adopted the thesis project of a designer called Deborah Adler. According to her research, 60% of Americans don’t take their medication correctly, and she decided to do something about it when the same error put her grandmother in hospital.

Here is her design, which addressed the problems of the standard brown plastic tubes we’ve all come to know and, well, know. The main issues: inconsistent labeling, brand names taking priority over drug names, confusing numbers, poor color combinations, hard to read curved shape and tiny type. The redesign is covered in detail on the New York Magazine website.

It takes much more effort and money to make something like this work, and not just in designing the nicer package. Brandon Schauer at Adaptive Path points out that the bottle must be supported by an entire system to be effective:

“I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.

Reframing

In my last post, I said that designers have the responsibility to make the most of each design opportunity. These two stories highlight the difficulty of doing so due to the variety of choices faced by any company or individual whose actions will impact those using its/his/her products. How far should you go to make things more usable? Whose responsibility is it? How much money should you spend on improving usability?

All this comes down to the fundamental question: what problem are we here to fix? Deborah Adler chose a much broader framing (”Making sure that people take the right drugs at the right time”) than Walgreens (”Helping some people to read the packaging”). Balancing the frame of action against the resources available is one of the most important tasks of a designer. Tricky.

So, did Walgreens go far enough? Did Target go far enough?

What do you think?

In their heyday, the existence of Native American Indians revolved around the buffalo. They used every part:

“The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy. Out of his skin we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a red-hot stone dropped into it, became our soup kettle. His horns were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women’s awls and needles. Out of his sinews we made our bowstrings and thread. His ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was our sacred altar. The name of the greatest of all Sioux was Tatanka Iyotake–Sitting Bull. When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian–the real, natural, “wild” Indian” (John Fire Lame Deer)

Designers today have a great deal more to work with than the buffalo hunters. Our raw materials range from organic substances to toxic metals, and of course we need to use these as efficiently and with as little waste as possible. There is more, however, to consider.

Opportunity cost

Last night, a friend of mine handed over $20 dollars to catch a game of baseball, but that’s not how much the ticket cost him. The true price of those nine innings is everything that he did not do while he was there. Perhaps he could have been selling hot dogs outside, and by choosing not to gave up several hundred dollars. That’s a pretty expensive game!

This concept is absolutely fundamental to economics and goes by the name of opportunity cost: a.k.a. the value of the next best alternative forgone as the result of making a decision.

This is the standard that every new creation should be held to. What else could humanity be doing with the materials you’ve made your new toilet brush from? Or your new solar panel design?

Even more fundamentally, the new object occupies a physical space. Is it making the most of it? What if it did?

More than a road

Take roads for example. If you laid every lane of road in the USA end to end, you would get a highway 13.2 million kilometres long (source). That’s quite a road trip. If you set out on the first day of summer you’d have to drive at nearly 4,000 miles per hour to cover the distance before the leaves turned red. For comparison, the SR-71 Blackbird has been the fastest manned jet since the 6th March 1990, when it flew from Los Angeles to Washington DC in 64 minutes. It was travelling at (only) 2,190 miles per hour.

All this road covers about 22 million acres, close to the area of Portugal. It goes deep too.

Could this space be used for more than driving? Yes.

Why not build roads out of solar panels? On the 25 August, Solar Roadways was awarded $100,000 by the department of transportation to help develop its concept of prefabricated modules to replace the top layer of asphalt on our roads. Each 12 foot square would collect energy, store it, and act as display for road markings or other information. It would sense what was on it (imagine that stray deer at night) and heat the road to prevent snow buildup.

Israeli firm Innowattech is taking a different approach. Piezoelectric crystals beneath the road surface would convert the weight of passing cars into electricity at a cost equivalent to that of wind or coal power. More weight, more vehicles, more energy.

The companies estimate that for every mile of road using their solution, 400 to 500 homes could move off the grid.

There are obviously issues with both – they are untested, experimental and the economics not yet clear, but that’s not the point.

“The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world.”
~Denis Hayes, International Chair of Earth Day

Designers need to consider the effect of their creations on the entire system they are placed in. This doesn’t just apply to large projects like road infrastructure. Mass manufacturing multiplies the impact of every new design, even the smallest.

“This we know – the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” Chief Seattle mid-19th century

Designs should not just be judged by their impact on a past status quo, but also on how close they came to the limits of what was possible.

Everyone knows what happened to the buffalo. At the end of the 19th century they were practically wiped out by an American government keen to make space for cattle cultivation. Traditional Native American culture, caught in the crossfire, shrivelled and collapsed into reservations as its traditional resource dwindled.

Our civilisation still has physical reserves to draw on, and no one intentionally seeking to destroy them, so there is room for useful, classy, whimsical designs that make us happier. While we’re on the subject of reuse, this is an awesome concept. But even objects like these should be created with the same respect for what and where they come from that the Indians had for the buffalo.

Lack of foresight will be no excuse if we allow our civilisation’s resources to be depleted by designs which waste their potential.

After this June hiatus, welcome to the new site!

As always, this blog is for people who believe that you can design a better world. Stay posted, as I will be reporting back from China and Japan over the next six weeks before joining Chicago’s IIT Institute of Design in August.

Please check that you are still subscribed and let me know what you think of the new design!

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.