After several months heads-down on several projects (more news about that soon), I decided to go back and see what I had missed by skipping Ubicomp 2007. So far, the most interesting paper, from my perspective is Sung, Guo, Grinter and Christiansen's My Roomba is Rambo (1MB PDF). It is a small empirical study that validates that people's relationships to their Roombas is often anthropomorphic and positive (in fact, it's almost a love letter to the brand, though I don't think the researchers were biased). I'm not surprised, since Roombas are one of the most prevalent forms of artificial life around and their unpredictable, unexpected behavior triggers is pretty "animal-like" to many people. This unpredictable, animal-like nature is what probably drove at least one Roomba competitor to show how their robot cleaner makes nice overlapping, distinctly mechanical sweeps when cleaning. Despite the fact that people have been naming their technology for thousands of years (ships, for example), there's still a tension between the rational response (of course it's a machine!) and the emotional one (...but it kinda acts like an animal) and it's good to see folks exploring and examining that tension. Their conclusions are in line with other work...

Yesterday I had the pleasure and honor of speaking at the Information Architecture Institute's IDEA Conference in New York. I got to share the stage with David Rose, CEO of Ambient Devices, probably the most pioneering consumer ubicomp company. The title of our session (as chosen by Peter Merholz, who curated the conference) was "Digital IA in a Physical World." David spoke about Ambient Devices' history from the Ambient Orb (well, actually, from his childhood home) to their current products, and how they've changed their vision since they began. I spoke about how ThingM developed our smart wine rack, and the larger context in which we do our work. Speaking to an audience of information architects, I really wanted to emphasize what I feel is the fundamental change that information processing goes through when it becomes ubiquitous. One of the ways I've been discussing this transformation in the last couple of years is by talking about information as a material. I reiterated that argument for the IDEA audience: [...] embedded information processing and networking starts behaving like a material. Let me explain. When a product designer can include information processing in a product for very little cost, the calculation becomes...

Reading a description of the design of the Appliance Studio's RoomWizard (now a Steelcase product sold by Polyvision) for my book, I came across this description of the tension between the capabilities of software-based devices and users needs. I think it's one of the clearest articulations of this dilemma I've read. [O]ne of the measures of users’ enthusiasm for RoomWizard is the ease with which they generate new feature ideas. Everyone has their favourite “must have” feature. On the one hand this is great. As suggested above, it could be taken as an indicator of the enthusiasm with which users embrace RoomWizard. It also means that we (and perhaps third-parties) will never be short of revisions, enhancements, and different versions with which to keep the product “fresh”. On the other hand, every silver lining has a cloud. In this case, the cloud has two parts: the real possibility that we might never satisfy every “need” of every customer; and the danger that we might damage our proposition--perhaps fatally--in the attempt. Of course, all these needs, and the features which purport to support them, are true and present. They’re strongly felt and very real. The question that we have to seek...

Elizabeth Goodman and I got married this weekend in San Francisco (where we live). I'm ecstatic to be married to the smartest, wisest, funniest, sweetest, most wonderful person I know. Thank you Liz for agreeing to be my wife. (photo by Cassidy Curtis) Thanks also to everyone who came, and extra special thanks to everyone who helped. Timothy, your forklift skills (among other things) are amazing. Thank you. Various people took photos, here are some from Flickr: James',Audra's,Cassidy's, Peter's,Brian's. Thank you all, again. [8/28/07 update: Elizabeth posted some photos, and so did I, along with some photos of our honeymoon]...

I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to give two very different presentations recently. Yesterday, I was on a panel at the Headlands Center for the Arts on the economic side of creative work. This is something that's long interested me, but something I rarely get to discuss in private, much less in public with such panelists as Donald Fortescue, Bruce Tomb and Andrea Zittel. My presentation (400K PDF) was only a small piece of the two-hour discussion, but I figured I'd share it anyway. In it, I introduce the idea of boundary objects as a way to talk about products and projects that fall between the primarily commercial work of design and the primarily expressive work of art (though as the discussion showed, the distinction is very fuzzy). In the presentation, I mention the work of Noam Toran and although I have ranted about critical design before, I think his work is great, even though I still don't think it's really design. Also, if you were there: what I meant when I said that the high end art market (which is a market, unlike the music industry) was corrupt was that its workings (as someone on the...