Invention & Inspiration: Building a Better World

Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research and Development and inventor of the Segway, iBot, an insulin pump and a portable dialysis machine, started by thanking the IEEE as the place in the background that makes sure that things keep on working and told us that ADD is one of his greatest assets.

He talked about three of his projects:

Prosthetics

He was approached by DARPA who told him that weapons have developed a lot in the last 150 years, but that prosthetics has bare ly developed at all. They challenged Kamen to make a 9 pounds prosthetic arm in two years that would allow somebody to pick up a grape and a raisin from the table and eat it. He thought the assignment was impossible and didn’t really want to take it on. At night he couldn’t sleep and kept rolling around his bed. He then thought: how do you roll around if you don’t have arms, so he decided to take it on. After about 15 months of development tey had their first generation prototype which could be used by somebody to pick up the grape after about 10 hours of training. The second generation of the arm will come out soon.

Water & Power

These are two of the world’s greatest problems. 1.1 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. If we could give clean water, then 50% of all disease in the world go away. 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity. Without access to electricity it is hard to participate in the global modern economy. We are using a 19th century centralized model to distribute water and electricity. We now have different models for distribution. An example is the way that cell phones have taken off from the bottom up.

Water is tough: you need too much infrastructure to get the right amount of filters, chemicals and other solutions to clean the water. Kamen’s idea was to make a box with two hoses. One hose you put in any type of water and out of the other hose come water that is crystal clear and meets all standards for water quality. The box should be small enough to move around and should be able to support one hundred people. Distillation is a process that could work, but that normally takes too much energy. They found a process (a vapour compression distiller) that could re-use a lot of the energy to boil the water. The box needed a little bit of electricity which could be a problem. So they needed another box that could generate electricity: the stirling engine. They trialled these technologies in Bangladesh and in Honduras. The technology is now there, so he needs help to find a way to distribute this globally and get it in every little village. The one product that has a truly global distribution system is Coca Cola (they have over 300.000 in Africa for example). So he is now partenering with them to develop a next generation fountain. He is now challenging coca cola to become the world’s largest healthcare provider.

FIRST

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is his project to fix a cultural problem in which we don’t celebrate the things that matter. We are obsessed with sports and entertainment. So he has created a sports inspired set of competitions around science and technology:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1QyM9WTF18]

Street-Level Genius: An African Maker Safari

Anita Pyke (Petproject.mobi) moderated a panel with Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi and Afrigadget), Steve Daniels (Makeshift Magazine and writer of Making Do) and John Kidendafor a discussion that was billed as follows:

From bicycle-powered mobile phone chargers to a helicopter built from an old Honda Civic and the remains of a crashed 747, Africa has been producing a unique strain of innovators long before the maker movement started trending in the US. With projects ranging from the practical (DIY biofuel systems), to the whimsical (home-made robots), street-level makers in the most resource-poor communities show time and again that the only essential materials for innovation are ingenuity and ambition.

They started with sharing some examples:

Small-scale incubator made by Geoffrey Kago.
Sonic fish trap from electronic scrap made by Pascal Katana.
Kiira electric car made by Makerere University.
Jua Kali wind turbine made by Access Wind.
The Fablab in Nairobi.
Generating energy from scrap by William Kamkwamba in Lilongwe, Malawi.
Coping with disaster in Thailand with all kind of Thai flood hacks.
Modular tooling in Nairobi Kenya.
Lighting homes and workplaces with water bottles (passive solar) in Manila in the Philippines:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyNAbOJFZIc]

Flood Ready Bike (from Makeshift Magazine)

The types of environments in which these innovations usually don’t have regulations: often a whitespace area where there isn’t a lot of control. Usually there are many resource constraints driving this type of innovation. All the resources are constanty reused and recycled. On the one hand these informal economies (in Kenya 75% of employment is in the informal economy) allow a space for experimentation, but it also comes with a lot of risks. The speed of adoption is very quick too: if something works, then it is copied fast. Sometimes this inhibits innovation in Kenya, because inventors are afraid that their work will just be copied. The copying problem led to an interesting discussion on intellectual property and how that should be approached in these informal economies. An interesting distinction was the difference between efficiency (making a particular product with as little use of resources as possible) versus resourcefulness (making as much as possible from a limited set of resources).

Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

Amber Case (CC-licensed by webvisionsevent.jpg — Amber Case (CC-licensed by webvisionsevent)

Amber Case is a founder of Geoloqi and a cyborg anthropologist. Some of the themes that interest her are “ambient intimacy”, “the automatic production of space” (you can put stuff in your computer, but it doesn’t get heavier), “the digital dark age”, “persistent paleontology”, “information jetlag”, her dislike for skeuomorphs and “cellphones as providing temporarily negotiated private space”. According to her we are all cyborgs now. The minute you look at a screen you are in a symbiotic relationship with technology. Most of the tools from the beginning of time were an extension of our physical selves. Right now we are starting to see tools emerging that are extensions of our mental selves. From a fixed interface, we have now moved to liquid interfaces on our screens which can be infinitely configured. What will be the next step in the interface world?

Steve Mann already wore a computer in 1981. He was the first person to lifestream his life. He wrote a great paper titled WearCam, the wearable camera. He worked on the concept of diminished reality where he would cancel out the ads and brands that he didn’t like. One of his issues was how do you type? So the Twiddler,a one-handed USB keyboard, came out. He could get about 90 words a minute with it. He created contextual notification systems for “remember the milk” type of things. He built in face recognition software. He went from 80 pounds of gear in the early 80s to the current situation where he has the information laser projected onto his eye.

“Calm technology” was research done at Xerox Parc in the 70s. It is exactly what it says that it is: actions become buttons, there are invisible interfaces and there are trigger-based actions. The haptic compass belt is a great example of calm technology. At Geoloqi they realised that with geo-technology you can now make invisible buttons. So for example your lights will turn on when you enter your geo-fenced house. This will allow your phone to become a remote control for reality. She showed a lot of examples of what you can do with geofencing. One example was mapattack.org.

The conclusion of her talk: The best technology is invisible, gets out of your way and helps you connect to people.

Future15 at SxSW

One format at SxSW is called “Future15”. These are five solo presentations of 15 minutes each. I attended one of these sessions.

Demystifying Design: Fewer Secrets, Greater Impact

Jeff Gothelf is a lean UX advocate with a book that will hit the stores soon. He describes what the design process looks like for people outside of the profession: basically it looks like a mystery. He is convinced that designers actually feel this mystery as empowering and giving them control. Jeff thinks the mystery isolates the designers from the non-designers. It creates artificial silos which quickly degenerates into an us and them situation. There is no shared language or common understanding. This means that a project manager is usually the person in the middle. This will get you to the end-state, but it will be lacklustre. He says that transparency is the key component to making the best products, mainly because the efficacy of collaboration is directly related to team cohesion. The onus is on the designers to demystify the way that they work. If they do this, the “fingerprints” of the customer and the other team members will show up in the work. This doesn’t make everybody a designer, it actually make the role of the designer more valuable. One thing that bothers designers with this way of working is that it “shows your gut” and that might be very tough to do.

There a few simple things that designers can do to help this process along:

Draw together (share “trade secrets”)
Show raw works (frequently)
Teach the discipline
Demystify the jargon
Be transparent

The Art of the No-Decision Decision

Peter Sheahan is a founder of Change|Labs and has all the mannerisms of a bullshit artist. He talked about decision makingHe drew a simple framework that showed that people make decisions on the basis of their identity or the consequences. These he calls “decisions”. Habits and structural things also make us make decisions. He calls this “no-decision decisions”. He gives an example of a Japanese toilet that measure people’s blood sugar levels and contacts a doctor when the levels are not what they need to be: a no-decision decision. I guess his main point was that we need to remove the user from the experience and design technology and the environment in a way to get behaviour you want. There are four things we can do to help people make no-decision decisions:

Be intentional with design (physical and flow)
Build in real-time feedback loops
Put “new” behaviour in flow
Put new behaviour “in the way”

Creating Engagement: Brains, Games & Design

Pamela Rutledge is a psychologist. She talked a little bit about the different systems in our brain and the ages of those (the reptile brain, the emotional brain and the new brain, you know the drill). The only way to really engage the “new brain” is through turning the experience into a story. She then went on to talk about “flow” the optimal balance between anxiety and boredom and challenge and skill. The easiest way to get the brain into a flow state is by using story. The story is the real secret weapon to get the brain engaged, this is becayse they are both instinctual and abstract and can speak to all parts of the brain. She finished off with saying the following: “You design for people. So the psychology matters.”

Why Mobile Apps Must Die

Scott Jenson from Frog Design made a humble proposal: mobile apps must die. The usual reaction from people is to ask him what he is smoking. He doesn’t mean to say that native UX isn’t currently better than web UX. What he does mean is that only focusing on native UX we have stopped thinking about things and our design future. To him we are currently on a local optimum. He sees three trends:

App glut. Are we really going to have an app for every story we are going to walk into. The user is becoming the bottleneck now: customers are now gardening their phones and removing cruft. The pain of apps is starting to be bigger than the value of them.
Size and cost reduction. The cost of computing and connectivity is going down. There are going to be an incredible amount of devices.
Leveraging other platforms.

These three trends all work against the native apps paradigm. He sees a lot of “just-in-time” interaction with the web. Installing an app is too much work for these type of interactions. It is hard to change away from the “app” paradigm. Scott showed us an alternative: Active RFID, GPS, Bluetooth and Wifi are four technologies that can help us show us what is around us. They cn show us what is nearby without us having to discover it. Companies that can deliver on this promise might become the next Google. This will be hard to do: we don’t yet have the just-in-time ecosystem where we have phones asking “what’s here” and other objects going “I’m here”. If we don’t start thinking about these things now, then we won’t have them tomorrow.

Geo Interfaces for Actual Humans

Eric Gelinas works at Flickr. They are using geolocated photos to make the photos more discoverable and easier to navigate. Location very often helps to contextualize a photo. To make this easier they created a 3-step zoom. The default is zoomed out, when you hover over the maps you are zoomed into the city and then when you hover over the point on the map you are fully zoomed in. A lot of map interfaces have traditionally be very awkward: not dynamic, information overload. A lot of websites are switching away from Google Maps now and move towards OpenStreetMap data often in combination with MapBox (e.g. Foursquare, it allowed them to put much more design into the maps and escape the licensing costs from Google). There is a campaign to help others switch over to OpenStreetMap: Switch2OSM. Eric wrote a lot of code for Flickr to make their maps. Right he might have used something like Mapstraction. Another great library is Leaflet.

In Flickr you can put in your geo-preferences which allow you to hide your detailed location for particular locations. Merlin Mann wrote the following tweet about that technology:
<phttps://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/108613619989757952

Right to Be Forgotten: Forgiveness or Censorship

Meg Ambrose and Jill van Matre, two lawyers and privacy policy thinkers, hosted a conversation in which from the outset there was the ambition to answer some of the following questions:

Is forgiving and forgetting worth protecting in the digital age?
How does the Right to be Forgotten work in EU member countries?
Does the First Amendment prevent any possibility of a Right to be Forgotten in the US?
How does time change the value of information?
Can anything ever really be deleted from the Internet?

From the online summary of the session:

The digital age has eternalized information that was once fleeting, and the Right to be Forgotten has gained traction in the EU. A controversial aspect of these rights is that truthful, newsworthy information residing online may be removed after a certain amount of time in an attempt to make the information private again. Two compelling camps have arisen: Preservationists and Deletionists. Preservationists believe the web offers the most comprehensive history of humanity ever collected and feel a duty to protect digital legacies without censorship. Deletionists argue that the web must learn to forget in order to preserve vital societal values and that threats to the dignity and privacy of individuals will create an oppressive networked space.

They kicked off the conversation with the example of a girl in college who did somebody stupid which was posted on Facebook and surfaced 6 years later. We were also asked to remember our most embarassing moment and then imagine that being posted on the Internet and showing up as the first result on a search for your name. They then handed out a roadmap for the discussion (which I think some of the other discussion sessions could have used).

Forgetting is incredibly important to our emotional health. How human do we want our technologies to be? This becomes more important now that it is becoming harder to keep yourself out of the online context and are forced to live some of your civic life online. Digital life is also core to our expression rights. Somebody in the audience had a disability with his hands. He is now scared to post pictures of himself online being happy, because they might take his disability insurance away if he doesn’t look “disabled” enough.

In general the tone of the discussion seemed to be very pro right-to-forget (so deletionist). One German lady brought in the perspective of her press job. The press is very nervous about how this right will be used to censor the press.

My personal question on this topic relates to the ability to reinvent yourself. This will become much harder once everybody has something like a “Facebook timeline”. The assumption behind this seems to be that people don’t change and that identity is a constant concept. This semi-objective (it still is a subjective lens) digital history might become the single source of truth about who you are.

There are a lot of behaviours and social norms that are coming through that are helping us cope with this situation. There are also options to enforce law with forced technological solutions.