In just under 2 days now I will be presenting the Urban Design project I did together with Joshua Noble at the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference in Amsterdam. It’s a great opportunity to meet some legends in the field of urban & interaction design and I’m really looking forward to it.
For the occasion we have spruced up the app element of the design and made it a bit more visually friendly. Who knows maybe soon we will actually have this thing up and running and start testing it out.
Well it’s been over for a while now but I’ve only now recovered! Plus I’ve been hard at work putting together a new site to show off the shiny hard work that I (along with some amazing people!) did over the course of 2011. A truly special year. Very creative, very inspiring and a testament to the potential of us all.
I hear by say thanks to everyone at CIID in Denmark and all the amazing people on the IDP 2011 course for making it such an amazing year. As someone chanted on the final night though: “It’s only just begun!“.
Urbbi has a voice! Although a slightly generic boring voice for now but I’m working on his pronunciation!
As described in my earlier weeknotes Urbbi is currently reading the light levels and moisture in the workshop at CIID. I think the light being so erratic is due to the crazy building going on from the class of CIID 2011 in the workshop at the moment! Or some kind of calibration issue, I’ll look into that later.
For now heres, the light levels.
And the data for Moisture.
Update on the weeks work in the workshop. I got Urbbi winking a little hello. I guess he need’s another eye before he looks like a pirate!
So once again I combined the weeknotes for the past two weeks. As things get busier in the workshop/production phase I have less and less to reflect on. I wanted to use these weeknotes as a way for me to reflect on the direction and process but I find more and more towards the end of this short project that it is slightly harder to reflect on the decision made during the design/prototyping stage because a lot of the time they just feel instinctive or as if it’s the right choice to make in order to progress.
In any case, I decided to force myself outside the workshop and sit down to reflect for just a moment on the direction I have finally decided on taking and in what way it answers the design challenge I set myself some time ago. The first thing that is obvious is the slight change in context of the design proposal. I have (through co-creation and experience prototyping) taken a step away from the ‘service of convenience’ model and more into actually helping people care for and grow a garden themselves. This is mainly due to strong feedback about the current real issues around maintaining a growing project at home. Also the idea of resonating with current, ‘cool’, technology as a platform to use in inspiring younger adults was another key piece of learning. Simply put, young people are increasing connected through devices they find cool. Why can’t something that needs to fit into their lives be the convenience side of the story? Of course I’m not saying that the delivery service concept couldn’t lend itself to this interaction also, but it seems more of larger step for people to identify with. You need to explain the service, then the interaction, then the value etc. It’s a longer, more obscured story as you are having to actually design the CONTEXT as well. (Herb subscription services don’t exist as far as my research suggests).
Enough of what I’m not doing. What I am doing is providing help in the form of, essentially, a little sensor box that sits on your freshly bought herbs or tomato growing project or chilli plant in the kitchen and provides you with a “How am I doing?” sort of information directly to iPhone through a web service. But instead of just a number, a tweet or a bar graph as feedback, what you are presented with is a data relationship specific to the place in your home that you put it. For example, someone growing a pot of basil may know that basil needs sun. Placing the pot with the sensor box on his window sill seems the obvious choice. However, having a radiator under the window sill means that water in the soil (of which basil also needs a fair amount of) seems to dry up quickly. So although the spot seems perfect based on the information provided wherever the basil was bought, actually it’s not. How would you know that? Another example. Am I giving my basil too much or too little water. To you and me looking at a basil wilting, it’s hard to know. It’s hard to remember. Is it dry? Didn’t I water it yesterday? Oh no did I give it too much? This is the lack of information that I am hoping to address. But this isn’t a new thing. Sensing our environment, specifically our home environment, has always been an interest for many who want to save money and energy. And it’s playing an increasingly important role in defining the energy efficiency market. Having knowledge and thereby developing control over your environment is an expanding field that, in my opinion, needs serious attention in the design world in order to allow people to easily, quickly and WISELY make decisions that can long term effects and consequences. Such as the long term consequences, coming back to my project, of plants and horticulture that aren’t cared for in the right way that is specific to YOUR environment, YOUR plant and YOUR lifestyle.
This is what Urbbi is. Urbbi is your little urban gardener. Your little friend who reminds you in a delightful way about the consequences of your environment on the plants you keep & grow. It does this is many ways:
It provides status (What’s up?).
It provides the historical, environmental ‘rhythm’ of your home. (How’s your day been?)
It provides inspiration in the form of personal, communicable touchpoints? (How do you feel?)
It provides a network of other Urbbi’s and their owners that can provide help and support (What is it?)
And finally it provides the very beginning of control over your environment, albeit for now just your digital environment. (When the water is low can you tweet Anna next door to come and water it? Thanks)
How these will manifest is my on-going work at the moment so I should be able to show you the first prototype (v.1) end of next week when this project should officially finish under development at CIID.
(I am seriously considering developing the idea further after I leave Copenhagen however)
Finally, a bit more of an update on what I’ve been up to technically this week. I managed to finish Urbbi V.0.5 yesterday and hes currently sitting at the studio collecting data about light and soil moisture. He’s reporting the data to ThingSpeak.com and then I’ve written a super simple JQueryMobile page to grab the JSON data and parse it. At the moment it’s spitting out the last entry number but I need to heavily develop the interface this weekend to express what I’ve talked about above. I had a look at integrating a node.js server to collect the information (someone recently wrote a MQTT server library for node.js so could be interesting) but I doubt I have time to implement this. For now querying the data from ThingSpeak works very well. And it’s more beneficial maybe to have the data open to the public to use as they want in the future. I may plug it into the slight more well known Pachube but we’ll see. Urbbi also has data output as LED bar levels on the actual device which I am bit shifting so I need to design and implement the indicators as to reflect the web interface. (The question still remains, should I directly reflect the levels or should it’s interaction be slightly different? We’ll see.)
So that’s the plan for the weekend. On top of shooting a short film! Busy busy. So time to run I think, time waits for no man!
Last project weeknotes (10) next week!
An update from the shop floor. I’m heavily back into making the final prototype in preparation for testing over the weekend so this will just be a quick one. Note the action shot!
Here’s a short video I shot and edited in a day to describe the vision behind my design direction currently.
Apologies for both the overly dramatic music and ‘did-it-while-cooking’ AE motion tracking…
Enjoy!
A belated update indeed. Time to catch up!
I was lucky enough to take back another batch of rapid idea prototypes to some of the people around Copenhagen I’ve been researching & co-creating with over past few weeks.
This time my concepts focused a bit more in the, if it’s fair to say, “digital realm”. The decision to tailor my prototypes more towards this was based on two things. Firstly, and unashamedly, I’ve grown an interest in developing a solution for urban gardening exploring it’s relationship with current advances in technology, sensing and social networking. It’s a like a personal inquiry. Can technology and growing something integrate better than they currently do? Secondly, a lot of the feedback I was getting from people using some of the early prototypes were highlighting inconsistencies in the way the product (or service) was conveyed through the form of an idea prototype and the reality of the solution to their everyday lives. something became clear. ‘Smart’ stuff is everywhere now. Including that particular gem, the smartphone.
I decided to incorporate some of these realities in an attempt to suggest ways that ‘smart’ technology can not only be ‘smart’ itself but also let YOU be smart. In essence that is what my project is trying to do, using growing as a context.
Here’s some examples.
For now I won’t go into the exact details of how they work or what they are, suffice to say that to the right we have a service/product to help and inspire people to care for their herbs or plants by providing feedback in a specific tone of voice (I will release a video soon to explain more). To the left we have a ‘seed starter kit’. Simple and similar to many on the market except this one encourages you to keep in contact with your seedling through email. A strange combination I know. Strange enough for user testing? Yes!
“No that’s really odd I would prefer the other one where it shows me on the actual box. I feel attach then. Like it’s my box. And it’s helping me out”
An important point was bought up at this point. People, you and me and everyday folk, develop interest in something progressively and often because of incentive. It’s why it’s so common for people who eat healthy to often find themselves caring for herbs. Some even find themselves trying to sprout their own herbs at this point. But the important point raised is that it’s progressive. Pushing a seed box onto the market without a real grounding in something that encourages, excites and delights people to care for something like a plant in the first place has an obvious outcome.
A main thing I learned again from doing this testing was a dual stroke. People want help in understanding the potential and problems of THEIR environment when it comes to growing and caring for a plant. If they don’t they can’t care. If they can’t care, they lose interest and give up. I think I describe everyone’s experience of buying a potted herb from a supermarket only to find it dead 2 days later.
“And I give it sun, and water but nothing. It died. I actually kept [the bonsai tree]. Maybe because I still want to know why…”
The weekends’ efforts. I’m definitely focusing in on something more and more as I busy myself in the design phase. It’ s one of my favourite times of a project when working through a problem with your hands and sketching you can really start to tighten up was has been a lot of open ended questions up until now. Most are just experiments and a way for me to think. More coming soon!
What a crazy few weeks!
Partly it’s the reason I’ve had to combine both weeks into one set of notes. Last week I was mainly busy building prototypes for testing and sharing over the weekend so my focus was away from thinking (in the abstract sense anyway) and more on expressing my ideas as something sensory. This is something that I find increasingly important. “Sketch it!” is what my old tutor back at Industrial design degree level used to tell me and I finally see his point. An idea means nothing if you can’t express it either on paper or physically. I jumped the moment I had planned out what I was doing and after two weeks I found myself with ‘articulated’ ideas I felt confident going into user testing with.
I did a couple of activities. Firstly I set up a communal herb garden in my building where I live here in Copenhagen specifically to test my more communal/sharing ideas. After the initial shock of seeing a strange looking English guy sitting in the foyer staring at herbs in a box on the floor I managed to engage many people some of the designs and got some great feedback. In this space the main consensus from people was that they couldn’t understand who was responsible for the herbs and hence, actually didn’t feel enticed. A lack of information at this point may be to blame and it’s true that after explaining my concept many people could see themselves using the ideas but I sensed a real opportunity (and difficulty!) in making the concept about shared living spaces.
My next session was actually in the apartment of a young couple living just outside of the city centre here. I was warmly received and again got some great feedback and observations. The general concept of the delivery service was agreed upon as being a good idea for many reasons that made sense to their lifestyles. (Considering they live above a local supermarket this was amazing to me.) Many factors like the availability of herbs, being able to choose which ones they wanted, not worrying about how to take of them. They really saw the value of the convenience. Some of the ideas however, which explored what kind of added value can be included, were either misunderstood or not seen the value in. One specific prototype, however, really sparked some discussion. The Travelling Recipe book started off as a way to share and get knowledge from the community of people involved in the service and eventually started to draw a lot of parallels with many social networking dynamics. They really dug into the details and even came up with many of their own. This was great. Having a physical mockup there allowed them to add to it, experience it and imagine themselves using it. What I got out of it was focused, creative feedback. A common theme from this session that arose was the potential in all of the ideas to be part of the same service but differentiated as various product offerings for various people and their lifestyles. I had not thought of this at the time of development and in hindsight makes sense since all of the prototypes I presented were based around the delivery box.
Two conflicted things started to be clear to me. First that there was real value in the service side of the concept. Naturally since it was a convenience driven service. People really saw the value in it. But more and more through seeing my prototypes it became a realisation that there needed to be a ‘value added’ in the form of the physical delivery. I explored this in the experience prototyping essentially but not many felt I was there yet. Which, of course, is fine but something else happened…
During my preparations last week I received an email from the family who I had co-created with in France. The email was an update into the box we planted together with an attached image of the first sprouts. In it they asked if we could Skype so I could see it. Talking to them I felt the excitement in the sudden appearance of life in the box which up until then was shrouded in mystery as to whether something would happen or not. I came to a realisation that showing this with me was both a feeling of sharing in success but also in wanting to know what to do now! Questions about watering, dryness of the soil, sunlight came bubbling up, some of which I could answer but others just needed assurance that everything would be ok. Just wait and see. I realised that within my idea of the herb delivery service what I really was speaking about was about channels of communication. Being able to have someone there they knew they could seek help from was just as valuable as providing the box with the seeds and everything in the first place, if not more valuable.
This feeling was subsequently echoed by Timo Arnall from Berg London when we, at CIID, were lucky enough to have both Timo and Jack Schulze come over to spend a few days with us and give us feedback on our project directions. Both the guys were great and really honed in on the essence of our project concepts. Being great storytellers really brought a critical interrogation of exactly how we were going to communicate and present our work. But, I digress. Timo really felt I had strayed in my prototyping efforts by trying to inject ‘value’ into a concept which already had so much value to offer. Helping people care for their plants is such a huge challenge area in itself that trying to ‘add value’ may distract and confuse. Of course he has a point, but it doesn’t detract from the invaluable learnings from the prototyping in which, upon looking back, also reflected this. A clear direction was always there, I just needed someone to get excited about. And Timo did just that.
Currently I’m focusing heavily on three concepts tackling what I speak about. With insight as my driver and technology as a tool I want to explore three facets of caring and nurturing for herbs (or other plants) from seed to healthy adult plant. I am deliberately grounding the concepts in present technology but ‘bending the rules’ slightly to ask some questions about our current interaction with our plant life in our urban households. Why do we need to treat it like we have gardens? Why do we need to put plants in a pot? Why can’t technology encourage and HELP me not only care for the plant but also form a relationship with growing my own? For a long time the idea of technology in the world of gardening has been resisted and where it has grown has been totally independent of the technology we use in our everyday lives ALREADY. Should it be so separate? Should we just be relegating growing something to the greenhouse or the pot or the balcony? Why isn’t growing something as, if not just in a fractional way, similar to that other great period of caring for something. Children. My concepts explore this and I’ll be developing them for testing next week.
As a final word before I head back into the depths of the workshop: I expect many mobile phones to get very dirty in the future. We’ll see!
Next weeknotes incoming end of November. Till then look out for updates from the ‘shop floor!