what normal people want from tv
I talked with Peter Merholz following his talk at the New TeeVee conference on What Normal People Want From TV:
I asked Peter about the reported rise in behaviors where people will both watch TV and use their computer simultaneously:
“A recent Nielsen study found that consumers now spend on average 3 hours and 41 minutes per month watching TV and browsing the Internet simultaneously and roughly three out of five TV viewers engage in two-screen consumption.”
Is this a new behavior, or are media providers like Bravo just making two-screen easy enough of an experience (to build on Peter’s points in the talk).
Peter responded:
People definitely multitask while watching TV, with internet/web usage as quite high. It makes me wonder what, activities, specifically qualify as “browsing the internet.” We saw everything from active publishing (blogging), statusing (Facebook), and researching (Wikipedia related to the show being watched).
Because TV is “unproductive”, people want to feel productive while watching TV. So, while in the past, it might have been household chores (and hell, Stacy and I still fold laundry while watching TV), or when I was a kid, it was doing my homework, now people are engaged in online behaviors. I would be surprised if the amount of multitasking has actually changed all that much — I suspect it has simply shifted to something easier to measure.
open sourcing prosthetics
We have open source browsers, operating systems, and other digital solutions, but it’s heartening to see open source also make it into physical products. October’sScientific American covers the Open Prosthetics Project, a clearinghouse for free new designs for better prosthetics. (Just think of groups of people swapping and checking in CAD files instead of pieces of code.) All started by Jonathan Kuniholm—himself an amputee from the Iraq War—and his North Carolina firm Tackle Design, the project has generated numerous improvements to the classic prosthetic arm, fixing common failure points partially by working with test patients who take their prosthetic arms to extremes. Also see the article in Wired, the BusinessWeek post, and the podcast with Red Hat Magazine. And note the Project’s interest in Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, the same dude that’s nuts for another open source approach to physical products, Threadless. The problem for the Open Prosthetics Project is now an economic one. Through open source they’ve eliminated the cost of design and development, but they still battle the cost of manufacturing an improved design. There’s the challenge for physical product open source systems: after design and development, they still have to manufacture and distribute, something the digital world takes for granted.
The year in ideas — for UX, strategy, and fun
In the New York Times Magazine’s 7th Annual Year in Ideas I found a few interesting experience and strategy related ideas: Two-Birds-With-One-Stone Resistance Telltale Food Wrapping Zygotic Social Networking Rock-Paper-Scissors Is Universal Left-Hand-Turn Elimination And a few just-plain-fun entries that made the list: Fake Tilt-Shift Photography Mob Jurisprudence The Self-Righting Object
Multipurpose tools are less likely to be selected by people for real-world tasks. It’s explained that, “connecting one tool or method to multiple goals weakens the mental association between that means and any one goal.” So remember that iPod-speaker-slash-toilet-paper-despensor? Not such a good idea.
Contextual clues about the safety of our food can be conveyed on the packaging that surrounds it anyway. Best news is that the biological detectors can be applied to the packaging via ink-jet printer. Would love to design packaging that intermediates between people and their food.
Using DNA to establish your social network — because everyone’s related genetically to someone, so everyone shows up online with an instant friend-base.
The different strategies of rock (smash ‘em!), paper (sneak up and smoother ‘em!), and scissors (divide ‘em!) seems to be baked into competitive lizard mating strategies, bacteria, and perhaps the corporate world. I’m not sure I buy that all strategies can be boiled down into a rock-paper-sissors metaphor, but something seems right about there always being a second and third strategy for any situation.
Large scale change of tiny behaviors: U.P.S. has further limited the number of left-hand turns its drivers make: not for the time savings but for the energy savings. It turns out idling in the left-hand lane is a small wasteful practice that has big impact when the behavior is changed across the entire fleet. I can imaging more UX and service design being applied to these types of mass-greening solutions — we’re already talented about getting people to switch channels, adopt new services, and other behavior modifications.
Flickr’s Tilt-Shift Miniature Fakes group made the list too.
The New Zealand police force posted the 1958 Police Act online for wiki-style revision. One of the superintendent’s favorite suggested revisions was submitted by a user who requested that the name of the police force be changed to “The New Zealand Yum-Yum Teddy Bear Strike Force Z.”
Two scientists mathematically proved and then manufactured a self-righting object. Called the Gömböc, it’s an object that no matter how you set it down will always turn over and rebalance itself to the same position. See the animation. Two cool observations: (1) It’s similar to beetle shells and other naturally-occuring evolutionary adaptations that first reach the design through trial-and-error; (2) It’s a physical proof of a mathematical problem.
