Duncan Gotobed

We're not rational

 

POST’s (the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology - who provide parliament with policy analysis on science and technology issues) have published a note on “Delaying Gratification”.

The main thrust of its message is that people have a bias towards short-term rewards over longer-term benefits, even though economic theories assume that people behave rationally and that their preferences will be consistent in time.

Picture: the rational pursuit of self-interest by TheeErin

(via Design & Behaviour)

Brain Magic

 

Keith Barry shows how our brains can fool our bodies.

 

He also involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.

 

Watch the video here.

The Future of Mobile Projectors

 

 

The Microvision Mobile Projector is stunning and I want one…

 

Watch the video.

Building Personas

 

A persona is the answer to the question "who are we doing all this work for?". What you know about him or her will inform your choices about what the learning programme will look like and what its content should be. Taking the time to create a persona is time well spent.

 A persona has three key characteristics:

• A name. Don't confuse personas with job roles
• A photo. Your persona is a human - put a face to the name and you'll be better able to empathise with him or her
• A persona has an ecology. Take the time to desribe the world this person inhabits. Creating a basic story that includes education, family life, work, interests/hobbies, and physical characteristics (including disabilities) adds more dimension to the character and gives more options when making creative choices. It's those other qualities that may influence his behavior when engaging with the learning programme

Read the article here.

Picture: zowie and me smiling by paul+photos=moody

Visual design

 

Recently, PSFK sat down with Francesco Cavalli of Leftloft, a noted Italian design firm known for having a foot solidly planted in both digital and print camps.

 

He explained why information design is important.

 

Information design is a very challenging way to conceive of design. Information is a story that needs to be discovered, understood and told. Making it visual is not a way to be more stylish but often is the only way to make the story clear for everybody, regardless of culture, education or social context.

Speak the language of your audience

Mickey Sampson of Resource Development International Cambodia saw that there was a small village near his home where a number of kids were dying from diarrhea caused by bacteria from their wells. The people of the village could not read and were accepting water born disease as a way of life.

 

One day he heard a villager singing the Barney song, “I love you, you love me.” He realized that they were learning new songs through karaoke videos. Sampson, thought outside the box and created a karaoke video that tells the story of love with information about the dangers of arsenic and bacteria in some hand-dug wells. They drive karaoke vans around to villages and are spreading the message subliminally to the villagers to solve the problem.

 

(via SAMBA blog)

Picture: Reality. by from a second story

Thinking differently

 

Virgin makes the dull and routine interesting.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyygn8HFTCo

Simple is best

MIT researchers argue that computers need to become as easy to use as post-its.

Office workers are like electricity: When they want to get something done, they follow the path of least resistance. Which is why, say researchers at MIT, the Post-it note continues to flourish on every surface of the contemporary office, despite all those expensive computers ready and willing to help.

David Karger helps lead a group at MIT exploring the way people work with computers. A recent paper from his team chronicled the attraction of “information scraps” like Post-Its, which, says Karger, are actually near-perfect data base tools. They’re accessible and easy to use, and they take advantage of the brain’s facility to remember an object’s location in the three-dimensional world.

 

(via Experientia)

Picture: post-its! by sun dazed

What books to read

 

If you are ever asked to recommend a business book this website is for you.

 

My Favourite Business Book just carries the reviews of people who have read the books and been able to apply their ideas.

Driven to distraction

Maggie Jackson, Author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, says we’re predisposed to distraction.

We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli. Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. So in this very fast-paced world, it’s easy and tempting to always react to the new thing. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals.

 

This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. That makes sense. When you’re scattered and diffuse, you’re less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it’s hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.

 

According to Jackson we need to re-shape and streamline our environment to encourage focus and quiet. Which is great advice - but for those of us who are designing for people who inhabit a constantly changing info stream, it's about creating materials that can be processed in really short bursts of time.

 

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/attentionlost.html

Picture: Distracted by Ella's Dad

'iTunes university' better than the real thing

Some new research shows how always available, multi-media lectures may be more effective than the old fashioned live kind. New Scientist reports on a study conducted by the State University of New York in Freedonia which shows that being able to review a lecture multiple times leads to improved grades.

The results are fairly obvious as having access to a lecture, and studying and taking notes on it will help a student retain information better (the other group only experienced the live lecture once, in real time). What this experiment does do, is give strength to the argument for recording and sharing lectures in online in forums such as iTunes University.

Picture: Custom Moleskine Planner & iPod touch by Mike Rohde

Focus on the short form

Social media expert Chris Brogan shares an interesting observation - he noticed that USA Today looks like an offline version of a micro-blog. He marveled at the paper’s ability to scale down to essential, quick data points, and says he’s been motivated to possibly re-design his site based on USA Today’s example.

 

Brogan explains, "The paper has little bite-sized media bits, easily consumable, with nuggets of data that are useful and fast to absorb. CNN Headline News does the same thing. They work the short form news format, with fast info, quick data dumps, and as they are trying out lots of personable interactions, it’s even turning a bit two-way."

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/usatoday-and-microblogging-offline/ 

Mobile Learning

 

Just as Sesame Street helped transform television into a revolutionary tool for learning among young children four decades ago, advances in mobile technologies are showing enormous untapped educational potential fo today’s generation.

 

Read Pockets of Potential (PDF), a 52-page report which talks about opportunities for supporting learning with the mobile devices already in childrens' lives.

Picture: My iPhone by mezzoblue

Quantity versus Quality

 

Kevin Kelly calls Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking"astoundingly brilliant" and pulled this excellent excerpt from it.

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

 

Picture: Sagada pottery by bingbing

Moving from looking to reading

Think of your first encounter with a book. You look at the cover to get a sense of it, then perhaps flip to the back or the flaps to skim the publisher’s copy. Opening the book, you might glance at the title page, or quickly run your eyes over the table of contents. Maybe you peek into the back to check the page count, or casually assess the weight of the book in your hand. If it’s a hardcover, you might take the dust jacket off, lest it get in the way.

Most readers engage in at least one and usually several of these behaviors—they’re a kind of pre-reading ritual, part of the culture of books. And yet they serve an important purpose as well, in that they ease the transition between looking and reading. They help the reader establish interest, and they serve as an invitation to reading, setting the stage for the act that follows.

There are many dogged readers who will make this commitment whether or not the design of the page makes it easy on them, but as designers, there are a number of ways we can assist readers in the transition....

 

Read the article here.

Picture: Book pile by Paul Watson

Motivating to action

  

Campaignstrategy.org provides a number of useful guidelines on motivating people to take action, within the context of social marketing.

 The interesting points are:

• Educating the audience about an issue doesn't motivate people to act as it makes an issue less clear cut, although it creates greater understanding
• Identify the forces for and against the change you are looking to initiate, what the key processes are and who your allies and opponents are
• Communicate simply and clearly. Don't be clever just straighforward and direct
• Understand the worldview of your audience. Start from where your audience is. Focus attention on what is unacceptable to the majority of the audience

It suggests that if a learnng programme is to prompt action it needs to be tuned into the worldview of the participants, the politics of the situation and communicate focused messages that guide people's actions.

Picture: Social campaign by phauly

Most information doesn't motivate

Robert Fabricant makes a convincing case for visualising data in a way that motivates people to change their behaviour. He refers to Dan Gilbert who argues that information needs to have one or more of the following characteristics for it to promote action, it: 

• Is people focused
• Violates our moral code  
• Threatens the present  
• Conveys an abrupt change    

 Rather than try to change learned behaviour Robert argues that interaction design should focus on influencing people's perception. He provides a number of examples:

• Energy bills that compare a householder's bill with their neighbours
• A car dashboard that shows a bent dial (that looks really odd) when the driver doesn't drive at the optimal speed
• Smiley plugs that show how well you are doing on your energy consumption   

His talk brought to mind Professor Murmann's meeting meter which keeps a real-time tally of how much a meeting costs.

It also raises an interesting point that while learning design can communicate and reinforce new behaviours it is not very good at prompting them.

Watch the video here.

Kinaesthetic Modelling

 

Nick Payne of armourplatedcamel.com gave a fascinating glimpse into visual thinking in 3D at yesterdays Viz Think London event.

 

He introduced the idea of Kinaesthetic Modeling (KM), which allows novices and practised visualizers alike to move quickly as a group into real time visual thinking.

 

Everyone was given the opportunity to try it out in the form of an icebreaker. We split into groups of 4-5. Each of us were given a sheet of plain A4 paper which was to be our plinth. We then had to choose three things from an assortment of objects in the middle of the room and arrange them in a way that said something about ourselves. People then took turns to interpret the object and draw conclusions from it. The creator would then feedback on the observations and give their own view of the object.

 

Some of the observations made of my object (see above) were:

• bringing order out of chaos
• scratching the head and coming up with a great idea
• project management
• a duck ready to fly off

The technique was fun and engaging. There’s no learning curve, no performance anxiety, it circumvents business-as-usual jargon and cuts straight to a stimulating tangible expression of a situation.

 

I can see how it could be used to open up a set of new possibilities around a difficult problem.

It sometimes takes a stranger

 

There's nothing quite like listening to bird song while you are working.

Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, came across a continuous 24 hour a day soundtrack of birds and woodland that is broadcast on UK digital radio.

 

The audio was originally recorded for the test transmission of Classic FM prior to its launch in 1992. It was later used for the imaginatively named station “D1_temp” and won plaudits from listeners who complained when it was taken off air in June 2005.

 

Birdsong returned to the airwaves in early 2008 and was upgraded in April of the same year to become available in stereo and for 24 hours a day. Listeners and Birdsong enthusiasts should be aware that the transmission could cease at any time and that the recording is not commercially available.

 

Listen to the bird song here.

Picture: Birds-On-A-Wire by lafleurerouge

Not quite the Illuminati

The BBC reports concern over the increasing number of people being trained by by an emerging, secretive organization called Common Purpose, a company that claims to provide advice and guidance for the country’s next leaders and high fliers.

Whilst the company is non-profit, it has support from businesses and people like BBC business editor Robert Peston and Cressida Dick - the Assistant Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

 

People who attend the courses are asked to explore the dark corners of their own psyches, confessing to their own strengths and weaknesses, and are also taken on workshops to mental hospitals, prisons and local tenants associations.

 

Umm...

 

Maybe it was a slow news day.

Picture: Business People. by basegreen