Design News
September 2004

Overview
DIS2004 is a small conference on design of interaction technologies and applications, held bi-annually between the US and Europe. DIS is an event focused on the marriage of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and Interaction Design (ID). The conference caters to user experience designers seeking to go beyond usability by combining disciplines and research methodologies. This year's event, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, featured approximately 200 artists, designers, commercial practitioners, musicians, and researchers from over 20 countries, and was a lively three days of 30 papers, 4 panels, 10 posters, and 11 hands-on exhibits.

Opening Keynote: Bill Mitchell
The head of the Media Arts and Sciences program at the MIT Media Lab, Professor William Mitchell, gave the opening keynote on "rethinking campus design." Despite a overview of the artistic campus building projects (including the new Frank Gehry Stata Center), Mitchell focused mainly on the special design attributes of the buildings and glossed over their use. To Mitchell, designing flexible, informal spaces is a key element to creating a positive social space. This view seemed too utopian for the designers in the room. Is there any proof that a flexible generic space is better than a well-suited purposeful space? Unfortunately, Mitchell missed a good opportunity to emphasize how mis-use of space often yields better results than intended use.

Frank Gehry's 2.8-acre Stata Center is designed so labs will mingle informally, and support collaborations by allowing people to adapt the internal spaces as they see fit.

Panels and Talks
The conference also featured a wide array of papers, panels and posters, ranging in topic from "Interactive Systems in Public Spaces" to "Science Friction: Fashion and Interaction" and "Designing the Future." Some outstanding posters included MIT Media Lab student Tad Hirsch's "SpeakEasy," a community development project that gives immigrants access to shared social services over mobiles phones through a local volunteer network. Users volunteer skills and are connected to people who need information within the local urban context. Also integrated into city space were Liz Goodman and Michelle Chang's "FIASCO," a street game that pits online and offline players together to create street performance and upload evidence to a shared website.

In the papers section, the hot topic this year was social networking. One of the biggest problems with social networking is syncing these networks across different technologies and platforms. Hillary Smith's paper, "Eliciting Reactive and Reflective Feedback for a Social Communication Tool," examined the ways people stay in contact and use social networking software and devices like IM, email and mobile phones.

Using this idea of shared control in public space was "Jukola: Democratic Music Choice in a Public Space," by Kenton O'Hara from mobile Bristol's Appliance Studio. Jukola is a networked MP3 player (like Mark Argo and Ahmi Wolf's Bass-Station project—which was not credited!) meant to be deployed in a public space where people can access, upload, and rate songs for public play.

During the papers sessions, (which were very sparsely populated), Jonah was engaged in a new type of conference social messaging system he made up called "SSID messaging." Creating an ad-hoc network with your laptop, you can broadcast a message to the entire room in the form of a made-up network name. People can see it and respond by creating their own ad-hoc networks. The only problem, however, was that the presenter's computer—also Wi-Fi enabled—kept getting messages popping up during her talk asking her to connect to a network called "How's the talks in the other room?"! This type of re-purposed messaging system was the perfect example of how systems can be changed with new contexts and needs from participants in a wired social situation.

Most of the panels were standing-room-only, as the audience tried to discern the hottest trends in wireless networking. Jonah spoke on a panel called "Design For Hackability," moderated by Ottawa-based ethnographer and avid blogger, Anne Galloway. The panel was focused on shifting context of everyday experience and displacing the use of systems from their original use to forms that challenged this use. Panel member Dan Hill, of the BBC, spoke about "Steam," an application created by a BCC fan that rips radio streams from the BBC website into a custom program—a nice example of how open systems such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and media streams are making their way into creative public uses.


(left) Paul Moody (IBM) and Daniel Gruen (IBM) with Conor O'Sullivan (Motorola) and Elizabeth Wyndham (Motorola, CMU) (right) DialogTable's pick and drop shadow interface. DialogTable won Best-in-Show.


(left) Blendie awaiting a serenade. (right) Ben Dalton amidst his Rabbit Field. Rabbit Field won honorable mention for Best-in-Show.

Exhibition Highlights
The exhibition was full of interactive projects that attempted to display the diversity of DIS's emphasis on usability and human-centered design. "Context Photography," a project from Sweden's Viktoria Institute, looked at how external factors like pollution and sound could change the visual output of a camera. Also working with augmented displays was "Dialog Table," a projected screen where users placed their hands over it and video tracking changed their hands into a shadow that could grasp some digital artifacts and examine them. While interacting with this work, Jonah exclaimed: "This would really work better with a mouse!" It seems that replacing a mouse with your hand movements—on an interface that a mouse can easily be used with—defeats the purpose of the experiment. (They should have created an interactive experience that cannot use a mouse—that would have been more interesting, and would have gotten their point across much better.) Motorola showed off some haptic phones with MotoVibes, or enhanced haptic feedback. Users were asked to compare the enhanced phones with current phones, and could feel subtle user interface vibrations as they navigated the phone menus.

There were a few interactive audio demos, such as Carlos Rocha's "I Am Driving Through Sound Space" where a user can get behind a steering wheel and drive through a sound landscape. The sound landscape consists of uploaded audio recordings, and as users zoom by, they get a Doppler effect of sounds to the left and right. Speaking of sounds in the environment, every once in a while you'd hear people screaming at Kelly Dobson's "Blendie" project, a blender that activates when people sing to it. The blender only responds to "blender-like" sounds, and is related to other work Dobson has done on machine therapy. Close to this Blender, a pair of bowls would grab users attention with a "pssstt" noise. These bowls were part of the "Recycled Soundscapes" exhibit by Zero-th space-time studio, and collected the ambient noise. When a user spins the bowl clockwise, the collected sounds are played and overlapped onto each other. Many conference goers nearly tripped over a field of inflated nylon rabbits displayed by Ben Dalton. "Rabbit Field" consisted of approximately 10 rabbits organized in a network. When one rabbit is squeezed, it would deflate, and its neighbor rabbits deflate and inflate in a ripple across the rabbit community. People had a good time trying to get the bunnies to do the wave.

Interactive Design Awards
This was a new category for this conference, where over 50 submissions from artists, designers, and researchers vied for bragging rights in Academic, Professional and Best-in-Show Categories. There were also special awards for the best aesthetics, interactivity, utility, technical implementation and concept. International submissions ranged from 3-D visualizations to robotic musical instruments and online websites.
In the Professional category, Small Design gained top honors for their Poetry Harp exhibition for L'oreal, centered around a massive harp that projected parts of a poem onto the wall when plucked. Lemur's robotic self-playing guitar robot, GuitarBot, and FXPal's Yeti, interactive poster screen display, received honorable mentions.

In the Academic category, AudioPad, by James Patten and Ben Recht of the Media Lab's Tangible Media Group. Honorable mentions were tied between Tangible Media Group's Topobo, a cute robotic construction toolkit, and the Royal College of Art's Electronic Furniture for the Curious Home, a provocative proposal of simple furniture that had just a teeny bit of smarts also won the Best Concepts.

The Best-in-Show category, voted on by conference goers, was awarded to Dialog Table by Marek Walczak, Michael McAllister, Jakub Segen, Peter Kennard, while Ben Dalton's "Rabbit Field" took home the runner up. The five special awards saw some repeat winners: Small Design's Poetry Harp won for Best Aesthetics. AudioPad also won honorable mention in the Academic category, and Interactivity. Yeti received the Best Utility award. Lemur's GuitarBot tied with Microsoft Smart Watches for best technical implementation. The end of awards ceremony signaled the beginning of the reception party as a crowd gathered around Patten as he was DJed on AudioPad while we sipped our free drinks, courtesy of google.

Closing Remarks: Gillian Crampton on Immateriality in Design
Gillian Crampton-Smith, who had founded the Computer Related Design Department at Royal College of Art, and has recently set up the Institute of Interaction Design IVREA, gave the closing keynote. She addressed the challenges facing interaction designers today as the value in a product is moved from the manufacture of products to the provision of services. She reflected on the expanding job of the designer to "not just to design the device, the software, and the way you interact with it, but to design the whole experience of the service to make it coherent and satisfying." She noted that the value shift from product to service brings an increasing dematerialisation, along more potential for an increasingly rich physicality in the ways we interact with the experience. "We need now to go beyond inventing useful, neat, cool functions to designing the qualities of interaction with them so they are as rich and satisfying as the other artifacts in our lives."

During the speech, she showed many provocative video clips of mobile experiences. For example, Telekatessen demonstrates how a person sends a chocolate message using the cellphone, and how to buy your sweetie a nice restaurant experience. You send an SMS that instructs the person to go to a certain nice restaurant and show the message. When the recipient arrives, they are presented with a decadently giftwrapped box. When the box opened, it reveals a customized SMS written on a chocolate truffle. Several corporate works—including the Shared Knowledge clip from Motorola's Advanced Concepts Group—where people share videos and interact using gestural interfaces on a zero-edge touchscreen display, demonstrated the experience of digital convergence. A redesign of the mobile purchasing experience, rather than design of new technology, can be successful, as shown by NTT DoCoMo's i-mode system for mobile purchases. She also showed a hilarious clip spoof on designing experiences called "CCRM, delivering dreams," about a fictitious company that makes consumers feel good about the products they've purchased through agents on the streets. For example, as a man stops at a stoplight on a streetcorner in his expensive sports car, a woman (from this company) walks across and glances approvingly at the car and man. Makes you think about all those people ogling your iPod.

(left) Telekatessen, a delicious mobile shopping experience (right) Chocolate with a customized SMS.

Design Open Houses
Conference goers also got to walk around and visit professional studios. IBM research, Harvard's Center for Design Infromatics and InVivia Designs were on the list of participating places. We opted to visit David Small at Small Design. Small charmingly referred to the buzz he's getting, "It's nice to have people over." Indeed, visitors were given a tour of their ongoing projects, including video footage of their award-winning Poetry Harp. They also let users try out their DNA zooming interface and another interface they were building on Churchill's life. At Ambient Devices, they showed the ambient orb, which we all know, and the ambient beacon (which is the ambient orb in a block shape). They also showed an appearance prototype of their meter dashboard. (The ambient beacon they put on the table was not working, and just cycled through the different colors over and over again.) Finally, Orange R&D showed their speech recognition work, and also their proposal for scribbling on a phone. They then treated us to free sodas and a good look at their beautiful loft-style workspace.

This particular design conference seems to be having an issue of identity. Near the end, organizers held an open discussion on whether to combine DIS with DUX (Designing User Experience), and whether to plan the next conference in the US or Europe. In general, the conference highlighted technological innovations and how they were used. However, with the exception of Crampton-Smith's closing keynote, there was little focus on the state of designing interactive systems and how this field is evolving. This may explain why the papers sessions were sparsely attended compared to the panels, as the panels dealt with issues that are more focused on the motivational challenges in designing interactive systems rather than highlighting technological implementations. All would agree that the combination of papers, panels, design awards and exhibits were unique to this conference, and we hope that DIS 2006 will continue to highlight design research and further challenge the motivations of researchers and designers.

For more on the DIS2004 Conference, you can see conference pictures posted by conference goers online at http://www.flickr.com/groups/dis2004/

Angela Chang is a design engineer and researcher in sensory communication at Motorola's the Advanced Concepts Group. She finds inspiration in the MIT community and Central Square lifestyle, and runs the MIT Alumni Design newsletter and supports the Media Lab Womens Group. She is a Miami native who flocked to Cambridge to work on touch communication at the MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group. You can give her a shout by emailing anjchang@anjchang.com

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, and PhD candidate in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group, Trinity College Dublin. He is also a researcher in the Human Connectedness group at Media Lab Europe and co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association. He is reachable at jonah@coin-operated.com and www.coin-operated.com.