Yesterday I went from enthusiasm to disappointment in a few minutes when I hacked together an iPad stylus to use for scribbling sketchnotes. The damned thing just reacted too slow to be useful.
Not long after publishing that post, I went back through the DIY video, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. Towards the beginning (around 0:45), he says “it’s a good idea to make sure the foam you’re using is indeed conductive.” So I snipped off a chunk of foam, and tried drawing with it.
And it worked just as good as my finger.
Holding that little strip of foam, I realised I’d made myself an iPad Charcoal Stylus. I’d automatically gripped it as I’d learned to hold a piece of charcoal way back in art school (ahhhh, those were the days), as seen below.
So if you want the simplest iPad stylus the world’s ever seen, you’ll need:
Some conductive foam (found at an electronics store if you’re not a nerd and don’t have any lying around)
Then follow these complicated instructions:
Cut a strip of conductive foam that’s as long as you want and as wide as the thickness of your foam (a square in cross-section).
Snip the corners off of one end so it’s more or less rounded.
Download Sketchbook Pro, sync your iPad and start drawing!
The foam’s quite rigid stuff, so it doesn’t flop around and is easy to hold. The charcoal grip is best suited to pretty rough drawing, but I’ll be experimenting with longer styluses better suited to a typical pen grip. My first results with the iPad Charcoal Stylus are still pretty rough, but I’m now confident that has more to do with learning & getting the most out of the software, and not a half-functional stylus.
So thanks to the wonders of conductive foam I’ll be snipping myself a few more charcoals and sketchnoting TEDx Sydney tomorrow on the iPad! I just hope the conference coffee’s worth drinking.
Since posting a round-up of current AR projects the other day, I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback and engaged in a fair bit of discussion about the subject — apparently it’s a pretty hot topic.
Specifically two interesting projects have come to my attention, and they couldn’t be more different.
Practical Post
So far most AR I’ve been able to find has either been in the alpha stage, or pure gimmickry. So it was refreshing to find something that is practical and useful to average folks, right now, today. It’s not a game changer and it doesn’t redefine any paradigms, but if you need to know if your stuff will fit in a postal box without going down to the post office, this could be extremely handy. [Found on core77]
Finnish Fluff
If Nokia Research had set out to make a video demonstrating how augmented reality could one day become barely more useful than my iPhone, they couldn’t have done better than this concept video. Unfortunately, I think they really mean it. [Thanks to @MichelleGilmore for the heads-up]
If I’ve understood correctly, in the future I’ll need a hideous pair of glasses, a bracelet, cordless earphones and a phone in order to send and receive text messages, surf the web and check the weather. Okay, okay, I’m being a bit harsh, but let’s break it down:
The lady only ever sends smileys, which is convenient considering how difficult it would be to actually send text using the proposed interface.
Imagine yourself walking down the street in New York with a few hundred people & cars passing you every minute. Now imagine trying to keep your eyes focussed on your music player’s menu and not bump into anyone or get run over.
If we accept that she’s able to navigate through her music with her eyes, why does she need a wrist/bracelet twitch to accept an incoming text message?
I vaguely remember seeing a study of disorientation caused by goggles back in the bad old days of VR, and as I remember it one of the primary causes of nausea was projecting static, non-moving images over a moving background.
It’s a nicely produced video, and it does have a soft glow of cool, but does it really show an innovative way to improve how we communicate, connect, and navigate the world and our data? Meh, not really. If that’s what the future looks like, I’ll just keep my iPhone, thanks. My tip for the Nokia Research AR team: spend half as much on the next video, and put in twice as much time thinking it all through.
And it’s off-topic, but I’m curious: does anyone understand why the guy in the boat is wearing a kevlar vest?
Fluff with Style
A “one-day” vision video doesn’t have to fall so short of the mark. This video from the architecture faculty of Valle Giulia gives us a feeling for how AR might one day be used to make the study of architecture more engaging, fun and informative.
That’s what an exciting vision looks like! And apparently you don’t have to look like a complete dork just because you’re wearing AR glasses.
Yes, it’s a Game Changer
I loathe the phrase as much as anyone, but AR is a game changer. For us designers, the “game” for the last 20 to 30 years has been two-dimensional planes inside the monitor’s magic box. AR not only gives us a whole new dimension to work & play with, but also breaks the magic box and spills our interfaces out into the world we spend all our time in.
The only question Nokia Research answered above is “how can we get the functions of today’s phone out of the phone?” which to me doesn’t go nearly far enough and is, well, boring. The question I want AR to answer is “where are my superpowers?” Is that too much to ask for?
Who could possibly know more than Disney about guiding, exciting and entertaining people? Interface designers can learn a lot from “Mickey’s 10 Commandments”, developed by Walt Disney Imagineering President, Marty Sklar. (commandments in bold, my comments beneath)
Know your audience The first link in the chain. Be aware of who your users are, what they like & dislike.
Wear your guest’s shoes Put yourself in your user’s shoes, visit what you make regularly and try and see what it’s like for your visitors. Watch them and what they do.
Organize the flow of people and ideas Know where you want to lead people and offer clear pathways to help them find the goals.
Create a “Weenie” Like a hotdog on a stick, draw people on by offering clear visual attractions.
Communicate with visual literacy Use the basics of form, colour, typography, etc. to get your message across clearly.
Avoid overload Don’t confuse users by pulling them in too many directions at once.
Tell one story at a time Think in stories, and make sure you’re only telling one at a time. A well-told story has far more impact than an info-dump.
Avoid contradiction Be consistent in each experience you design, create a little world which is believable.
An ounce of treatment, a tonne of treat Sometimes users will have to work their way through the experience. Offer them a treat at the end, a reward which makes the work worth it and leaves them feeling good about it.
Maintain it Peeling paint gives a feeling of dysfunction. Spend time on upkeep: fix broken links, update content, remove or update outdated info.
Listening to Marty Sklar explain these made me think that there’s one commandment missing. When you hear his voice, it’s clear that he likes the people who visit Disney parks—“guests” in Disney-speak—and really wants to give them an enjoyable visit. Sometimes we interface designers develop an arrogant attitude, and look down on users who are too stupid to understand our genius. “The button’s right there you fool!” We need to remember that we’re trying to help people navigate through complicated functions and information. I’d add “Learn to like your users” between commandment 1 and 2.
From the time Sumerians first scratched pictographs into clay tablets, we’ve created content by making our thoughts physical, be it on stone, sheepskin or paper. That’s around 5000 years of sealing our ideas in atoms, which are pretty resistant to change. No surprise that so many people still think that way about their sites after only 15 years of web history.
Books Are Beautiful, But…
Although I’m more often than not online, I still have a few meters of books, full of stories I love. There’s no replacement for a beautifully printed object you can hold in your hands, or the feeling of a story unfolding through the turning of pages. No matter how much I love books as objects, I pick up a book, read it, put it back down, and unless it was extraordinary, I don’t remember it after a month. Making a book is the work of one person over months or years, and when it’s done, that’s it. You can correct and change by publishing a second edition, but does that change the first edition? In other words, a book is the exact opposite of the web. I know, this ain’t rocket science. Stick with me.
A web site is not a book—it’s not finished and perfect once it’s online. Most of us working online every day know this. Some web colleagues—or maybe just their clients—don’t seem to have made this leap quite yet though. There are stillplenty of books in the web. They’re beautiful, funny and entertaining, but after I’ve spent a few minutes looking at them, they’re back on the bottomless shelf, and the chances of me thinking about them again in two days (web time’s faster y’know) are close to zero. (aside:thankfully for my colleagues earning their daily bread with sites like these—if not their clients—it’s also close to impossible to actually measure their success in anything concrete like sales or even ROI).
If you’re working on a site so that you can put it online and forget about it until the next relaunch, you’re publishing. You’re making a book in bits instead of atoms. And if you ask me (I know, you didn’t) that’s not what the web’s there for.
The Web is a Garden
Truly good sites—sites that are in any way relevant to the world of the web—are gardens. They grow, in many cases faster and wilder than anyone can hope to follow. So what can you do to help your site along? Duh. Stop “publishing” and become a gardener, of course.
What does being a gardner mean? First of all, before you start with your new relaunch project, as client, agency, designer or developer, trash your publishing attitude. This means your site will never be “finished”. And yes, this is a good thing for everyone involved. Launching a site is only sketching out your garden and planting seeds. If that’s all you’re prepared to do, you’re planting fail and your garden’s already dead. If, however, you’re planning on tending what you’ve planted, the fun’s just begun.
To start with, build your site from the outset to be searchable, linkable and shareable. The less your site is like a book—the more open, distributable, changeable and participatory it is—the more sun and water your garden’s going to get.
Next, make sure your site encourages discussion. Give your audience tools to talk about you, your content and your products, and to talk with you. And although it may seem counter-intuitive to you, strangely enough the more the discussion takes place elsewhere the more you’ll benefit. And it’s about the discussion, which means you’ll have to talk back to them, and expend energy tracking and participating in the discussion, wherever it occurs. You’re hosting a garden party, and your guests will wander. Deal.
If you’ve planted and tended your garden successfully, the next and most harrowing step lies before you. Give up as much control as you can, without letting your fan-hoarde destroy your beautiful garden. If you’ve managed to get your web audience interested in you, you now, in a sense, belong to them. They live in your garden, and you can’t evict them without losing quite a few brownie points. Instead, pay attention to them, what they want, and how the use your site. Plant what they need, and trim it all so they continue to enjoy it.
Gods & Peasants
Publishing as we know it started with monks copying manuscripts of the Lord’s Word for the few who could afford a copy. Therefore, forgive me the religious metaphors, won’t you?
If you’re still “publishing”, you’re a god, handing The Word down to the peasants. Unfortunately for the publishing gods, there are more and more gods online producing their own content and participating in discussions, and fewer and fewer peasants passively accepting what the publishing gods are feeding them. That is (slightly over-dramatised) the power of the web. Some of the old gods are trying to protect themselves from the new behind ever thicker walls, but the web’s true gods are those with the wildest, fastest growing gardens, which are completely open to the public. The walls of the publishing gods are ensuring their own irrelevance. Once these walls crumble, the publishing gods will look over the rubble and no longer recognise the landscape revealed, and the new gods, the “edglings”, will not recognise them either. On which side of the walls are you standing?
Stowe Boyd responded to a typical re-hash of the “connectedness = overload = falling productivity” argument against social media, but to be honest, the argument (yawn) wasn’t nearly as interesting as Stowe’s response. It’s a lovely visionary rant about a future most people can’t even imagine, from a guy who sounds like he’s been there. This is what he calls Boyd’s Law:
Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity.
At the the risk of sounding like some sort of Boyd fanboi, this is the stuff that flashed my ass off last year at Reboot.
The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important — not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way — than making headway on this piece of work, right now.
As someone who’s got more friends who’ve never heard of Twitter than have, it all sounds pretty damned far out to part of me. But there’s also a part that has begun feeling incomplete without an hourly dip into the stream of contact that today’s net makes possible, and that part can see Stowe’s future from here, and is eager for everyone else to get on with it and get connected.
I have said for years that the centroids — media, religion, government, and corporations — would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.
I’d agree, but so far in my experience the biggest hindrance to a more connected world are the people themselves, and not the media, church or whatever. For example, I’ve been evangelising Twitter quite a bit lately, and the first reaction of most people is a pitying look—“Matt, my soft-brained friend… I hope he’s not dangerous…” Of the very few who actually give it a try (possibly only to pacify me), almost all come back to me after a day and say, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” When I try and show them, and see that they’re only following one person—me—I try and explain it’s about connectedness or as Leisa Reichelt calls it ambient intimacy, and that you can’t be very connected with only one contact, and, and… and then I often run out of steam and mumble something like, “you’ll get it if you do it long enough…”
The reason I know Stowe’s onto something, no matter how far-fetched and techno-hippie it sounds, is I’ve seen this kind of transformation happen. Firstly to myself (I didn’t get it to begin with either), and occasionally to someone I’ve browbeaten into trying Twitter for more than a day. The transformative power of social media is made clear by the aversion most feel to it at first—it’s foreign, unimaginable, and therefore threatening—and the “I get it!” moment most experience at some point after giving it a try. If it was just another fad, just something to play with and forget, everybody would try it without resistance and nobody would care longer than a couple of weeks. But for most, it’s becoming an essential part of everyday communication, and it’s changed who they are. And who we’re becoming is more connected, more aware and faster thinking people, through the influence and support of our networks. And that’s such an optimistic vision—such a rare optimistic vision of the future—that I can’t help but grin to be a part of it, and can’t help but thank Stowe for pointing it out to me.
