[-empyre-] Report from DIS 2004

[Jonah Brucker-Cohen <jonah@coin-operated.com>]

Hey All -

I'm here at the ISEA conference in Helsinki and 
was talking to Melinda and thought this recent 
report I wrote on the Designing Interactive 
Systems conference in Boston might shed some 
light on the idea of imperfect design and  the 
re-appropriation of interface in everyday life. I 
found the conference did not address the most 
important aspect of design: the people that mess 
it up! This is extremely fitting in the context 
of our recent dialog on list structures as those 
that challenge the normalcy of and complacency of 
normal list culture and behavior. To me those 
disruptions show how the structure of lists works 
and doesn't work and what might be possible to 
augment or change these social networks..

For more of my reports - http://www.coin-operated.com/reports

Jonah


Report from DIS 2004
 http://www.sigchi.org/DIS2004
 By Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah (at) coin-operated.com)

 The 5th bi-annual conference on Designing 
Interactive Systems (DIS) began on an early 
Monday morning at the Marriot hotel in Boston. 
DIS is an event focused on the marriage of 
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and 
Interaction Design (IA). The conference caters to 
user experience designers seeking to go beyond 
usability by combining disciplines and research 
methodologies. This year's event featured 
artists, designers, commercial practitioners, 
musicians, and researchers from over 20 countries 
and was a lively three days of panels, posters, 
and hands-on exhibits.

 The opening keynote was a lecture by MIT 
professor of Architecture and head of the Media 
Arts and Sciences program at the MIT Media Lab, 
William Mitchell. Mitchell's talk was on 
"rethinking campus design", a topic that MIT was 
currently working on with three major 
architectural projects underway and completed. 
Despite a well-crafted overview of the building 
projects around campus (including the new Frank 
Gehry Lab and Simmons Residence hall), Mitchell 
focused too much on the special design attributes 
of the buildings and glossed over their use. His 
statement that wiring the dorm room made people 
less social and increased roommate conflicts 
seemed a bit uninformed. To Mitchell, having a 
flexible, informal space is a key element in 
creating a positive social space. This view 
seemed too utopian for the designers in the room, 
who really wanted him to answer the questions: Is 
there any proof that working in a nicely designed 
building makes the work better? Is there ever a 
feeling that the space you are working in is 
better than your work? When does the space become 
too much? Unfortunately, Mitchell missed a good 
opportunity to emphasize how mis-use of space 
often yields better results than intended use.

 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" to 
"Designing the Future". Some of the posters that 
stood out 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 was 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, mobile phones. Her 
approach was in-depth user studies that attempted 
to uncover the strengths and weakness of these 
devices in order to uncover their conceptual 
models.  Other interesting papers included 
"Making Tea: Iterative Design Through Analogy" by 
M.C. Schraefel about how using the analog act of 
making tea in a social scene can augment the 
design of a digital prototype. 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, I found myself engaged in a 
new type of conference social messaging system I 
made up called "SSID messaging". This is when you 
create an ad-hoc network with your laptop and 
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 with this is 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.

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, I exclaimed: "This would really 
work better with a mouse!"  to which I got a lot 
of laughter. To me, 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.

 I spoke on a panel called "Design For 
Hackability", moderated by Ottawa-based 
ethnographer and avid blogger, Anne Galloway. Our 
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. This application was 
reaching more people than users of the website 
that Dan was developing. A nice example of how 
open systems such as RSS (Really Simple 
Syndication) and media streams are making their 
way into creative public uses. Overall, I think 
our panel was successful by examining the nature 
of hackable systems and how they exist in 
everyday life and practice.

 Despite having to leave DIS early, I thought the 
overall production of the event and the range of 
topics covered lacked focus. There were too many 
DIS-connected topics and the audience seemed more 
observers than questioners. Some of the projects 
mentioned in panels and talks reminded me of 
ideas I had heard before the dot-bomb crash and 
were overly optimistic. I was hoping to find 
critical analysis of the state of designing 
interactive systems and how these were relevant 
on social, political, and everyday situations. 
Most of the conference seemed to focus on how 
systems and technological innovations were used 
instead of why they were important. I'm hoping 
that the next DIS will honor a stronger theme and 
attempt to emphasize why design is becoming less 
important than content.

¬-Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah (at) coin-operated.com)





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Jonah Brucker-Cohen             |        Human Connectedness Group
PHD Candidate		    |        Media Lab Europe
NTRG, Trinity College  	    |        Sugar House Lane, Bellevue
Dublin 2, Ireland   	    |        Dublin 8, Ireland
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http://www.coin-operated.com - projects and work/blog
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