One of the iPad apps that most people think is inevitable is some kind of remote control for home entertainment systems, but I think the conventional wisdom on this isn’t thinking big enough because we just can’t shake the idea of a “remote controller”.

The basic idea is that you’d throw away all your remote controls and have the most fabulous remote control of all time, with the ability to manipulate multiple hardware devices and systems, of all kinds and from different manufacturers, even some devices that enable viewing internet videos such as from YouTube or Netflix, all using a single awesome iPad graphical UI. You could preview what’s on other channels while watching a show on the big screen, scroll through TV schedules on the little screen without changing what’s on the big one, finger-tap on show titles to add them to your DVR queue, etc.

To do all this, there would need to be some additional device to translate the iPad’s output — which is basically WiFi — to what most set-top devices need for input — infrared light (IR). This “Universal Remote” iPad app would also need to be programmed to know the IR codes for most set-top devices, just like thousands of other so-called “universal remotes” do.

Here’s what this system might look like:

Of course, some more visionary people predict the death of these multiple devices and envision them all being replaced with a single multi-purpose device for streaming video from the internet, recording cable programming, playing discs, browsing a personal media collection, and more. Devices like Apple TV and Boxee. In fact, many Apple observers already suspect that the iPad will become the killer remote control for the next version of Apple TV.

This is obviously a much simpler configuration, and looks something like this:

But what if we take this just one step further, and take the expensive devices out of the loop completely? Imagine a system like this:

The iPad uses WiFi to pull content off the Internet (or from its own library), and then uses WiFi to push video to the big ass display, possibly with the help of a cheap WiFi video “receiver” unit (which, come to think of it would be trivial to build directly into monitors).

In this model, the iPad itself replaces all of the set-top devices. While the iPad cannot play Blu-ray disks, it can certainly do everything else in this list. Why should Apple bother making another version of Apple TV when they could build all of the functionality of Apple TV into the iPad itself? All the storage, all the video, audio, and picture playback, all the online video browsing, all of it built into the iPad.

All the games, too. So long Xbox, Playstation, and Wii.

In this model, your “home entertainment center” is all contained in software. The only hardware you need is that big screen. Or select from multiple screens around the house, using only software to determine which screen you want to “project” on to.

Obviously there are technology constraints here, but they are all the usual constraints that inevitably fall aside faster than we generally imagine: network speed, processing power, and memory. HD digital video is a lot of bits to go over a wireless connection. But if you imagine all of these technologies being even only a little better than they are now, we’re basically there.

• Leave a Note (14)

The search is over. Many have heroically tried. But a decisive winner has emerged.

Behold! the most elegant and usable conference badge design ever:

This badge is from The Web and Beyond 2010, held in Amsterdam two weeks ago, where I spoke and saw many excellent sessions.

Let me explain the mechanics of this great design:

Lanyard: The lanyard is nothing special — a branded ribbon with a simple clasp at the end. As far as I’m concerned, the lanyard is interchangeable. Irrelevant, in fact: you could use a metal chain, a hemp rope, whatever. That’s part of the awesomeness of this design.

Graphics: The first name is big so you can say “Hi Christopher”, and the last name and company/affiliation is a little smaller. The same information is printed on both sides. I imagine the text could be a little bigger all around for readability’s sake.

Booklet: Here’s where it gets really clever: The “name tag” is actually the cover of a little booklet. The booklet’s cover, as you can see in the picture, is printed upside-down from the contents of the booklet itself, so that the badge wearer can flip the book up to read the contents. The lanyard attaches to the booklet using “loop staples“, the same staples that hold the book together, thus requiring no additional hardware and, even better, no plastic sleeve. I’ve seen plenty of attempts to make badges with little pockets for holding a conference booklet, but this unified solution blows those ideas away.
It doesn’t hurt that the 35-page booklet contained great facilities maps, a full schedule, and biographies and photos of all the speakers. The covers were color-coded, too, with different colors for attendees, speakers, and staff.

Of course, not every conference can afford all of the bells and whistles on display with this badge design, but it’s easy to see how the basic principle — a book on a hook — can work for smaller budgets. For example, the custom-printed attendee-name covers could simply be blanks on which stickers are affixed. The booklets could be briefer, focusing on just the schedule, for example.

Conference organizers: Please steal this idea!

• Leave a Note (8)

I just finished reading Lolita; it was my first time reading it, but it was not my first Nabokov novel (having already enjoyed Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor). It was a 1955 American hardback edition, the first year Americans got their hands on the book. I don’t understand why anyone buys new classic books in any format — paperback, hardback, or ebook — when beautiful and historic hardback copies can be easily purchased online for a fraction of the cost of buying a new copy.

Nabokov is a staggeringly good writer, in both style and substance. Every sentence feels like a gift from the author to the reader. In the delivery of a gut-wrenching and thrilling plot, he draws you in, deeper and deeper, with his beautiful and astonishing use of language and dramatic structure. I flew through the final 100 pages of Lolita on a flight back from Amsterdam, and it must have been amusing, or perhaps disconcerting, to my fellow passengers to see my face, enrapt, my expressions shifting repeatedly from intense concentration, to a state of near-tears, to knowing giggles, repeat, repeat, in a determined sprint to the conclusion.

(It may strike you as crass for me to consider running a race a suitable metaphor for reading a great book, but please understand that for me, as an athlete, finishing a race is not the end of an ordeal but a supreme pleasure.)

And what delight as, finishing the third to last, right-side-facing page, I turned to the final spread, one-and-one-half pages of text, and unexpectedly found some of the most heartbreaking words of the whole novel, right at the top of the penultimate page, the finish line within sight: an experience that was both textual and physical in its manifestation. Was it the author, the typesetter, both, or neither, who constructed — designed — this neat, sublime, perfectly-timed emotional jolt?

Throughout the final terrifying third act of the book, Nabokov knew that the reader would be constantly, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seeking (or deliberately avoiding seeking) a single word, a word whose distinctive typographical form would light up like a flare in the reader’s peripheral vision, paragraphs in advance, impossible to miss. Every time you turn a page, even if you avoid it, your eyes will, in an instant, claw through the one-thousand characters in every new two-page spread to find it, the word, the single characteristic letter. He plays with this visual expectation so thoroughly — torments the reader, in fact — that it’s inconceivable that he wasn’t always thinking about printed words, words on pages being turned in a reader’s hands.

Oh, how glad am I that I was unable to find Lolita in any sort of eBook format.

• Leave a Note (6)

After waiting six months on a pre-order waiting list, I finally got my Fitbit two months ago. I was really looking forward to it — as a big fan of the Nike+ running tracking system, I was excited about Fitbit’s promise to not only track my running and walking, but to track my sleep patterns as well. And the design was extremely seductive — small in size, elegantly combining form and function (it doesn’t have a clip, it is a clip), and with a magical blue led screen that is invisible when the device is off. How could I resist?

And I was right: I love the Fitbit!

But I don’t want to use it any more. How is that possible?

First, though, you may be asking “What is Fitbit?” Fitbit is a personal health tracking system consisting of a small electronic device that you clip to your body to track your movements and a web site that uses the data from those movements to give you detailed reports and analysis of your fitness and health. The Fitbit device contains an accelerometer to detect anything from a single running stride to tossing and turning in your sleep, and it wirelessly syncs to your computer via a small radio transmitter. The Fitbit has a small digital display indicating the number of steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve walked or run, and how many calories you’ve burned. MORE…

• Leave a Note (21)

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young undergrad interested in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program (where I teach a class in the fundamentals of interaction design).

The student, a talented web designer, was curious about the relationship between “web design” and “interaction design” and “user experience”, and what the future holds for UX and IxD. I thought it would be nice to share some of my response:

It’s hard for any IxD program to avoid the overwhelming presence of the web as the epicenter of most people’s (technological) interactive experiences. And the faculty of the program at SVA certainly draws deeply from the web design world. But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

There is definitely a lot of demand for people who can bring this higher and broader thinking to projects. What I like about the SVA program is the dialogue students have access to — with each other and with the faculty. It’s something you can’t get in most workplaces, and especially not so rapidly and intensely. You are required to talk not just about what you did, but how and most importantly WHY. It’s one thing to design something, it’s another thing to justify why in the world the world needs what you designed. Hopefully, that’s what the program gets students to think about and know how to express.

Finally: I wouldn’t be in this field, or teaching in the program, if I didn’t think that UX was *the* most important factor in creating beauty and happiness in the coming decades. Making stuff that people like to use, well, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid making stuff out of paper and legos.

I hope that gives a little more insight into the program and perhaps even into my thoughts about IxD and UX overall. Good luck, and let me know if I can help any further.

• Leave a Note (12)

Whenever news of an earthquake hits, we are told that the quake had a magnitude of, say, 3.2 or 5.0. Or 7.0, as was the case yesterday in Haiti. We all understand that 7 is worse than 5, of course, but I fear that few of us really understand or appreciate the degree of that difference.

Popularly (but inacurately) called the Richter scale, today’s seismologists measure an earthquake’s energy according to what is technically called the moment magnitude scale.

The magnitude scale is logarithmic: Each increase in the magnitude number actually represents more than 30 times the magnitude of energy released. A 7.0 magnitude quake is 32 megatons of seismic energy, where a 6.0 is only 1 megaton of seismic energy.

I imagine Mr. Richter and his successors prefer to use such a logarithmic scale because it permits them to communicate a quake’s magnitude extremely efficiently. They’re mathematicians, they intuitively understand that 5.4 is actually 5 times bigger than 5.0.

But for the rest of us, even those of us who are numerically literate, the logarithmic scale isn’t something we use every day. To most of us, 5.4 is only a little more than 5. Indeed, 7 isn’t that much more than 5 for us, either — yet in earthquake terms, 7.0 is one thousand times as destructive as 5.0.

I appreciate that the media thinks enough of us, the public, to report using the same technical jargon that scientists use. But in this case, I suspect they are doing the public — and the victims — a disservice. What if, instead of simply calling Haiti the victim of a “7.0 earthquake”, they called it a “32 megaton earthquake”? Or a “32,000 kiloton earthquake”? This would permit people who understand what a 4.0 earthquake feels like (and lots of people do understand this) understand that Haiti is today the victim of an experience thirty-two thousand times worse.

Some ideas on how to help the victims in Haiti:

• Help Haiti with your mobile phone: text “HAITI” to 90999 and a $10 donation to the American Red Cross will be charged to your phone bill. It takes no time at all.
• Nearly half of Haiti is under the age of 18. Make a donation to UNICEF to help.
• Donate to Doctors Without Borders

• Leave a Note (20)

What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made.

A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, from the addictive TV fan site Lostpedia to the new and astoundingly-awesome online typography reference Typedia, Wikipedia is still the mother of all wikis. Wikipedia has so thoroughly conquered our mental model of what an information reference is supposed to be that its most salient concept (social editing) has become inseparable from its fundamental purpose (complete information).

(In fact, I’ve started to notice people using the wordlet “pedia”, rather than “wiki”, to indicate “socially-powered content”. It seems that, for some people, a “wiki” and a “pedia” are the same thing, which to me is tantamount to thinking the “hi” in “hijack” means “airplane”, justifying “carjack” as a legitimate word.)

The “pedia” in Wikipedia is a nod to the “encyclopedia”. The wikipedia, we are supposed to infer, is an encyclopedia powered by a wiki. It’s beyond encyclo, it’s wiki!

The word encyclopedia means “complete or well-rounded” (i.e., encyclo) + “knowledge or learning” (i.e., pedia). So, interpreted one way, “Wikipedia” can mean “People getting together to record knowledge”, which of course is exactly what Wikipedia is.

But Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales could just as well have called it “Encyclowiki”, meaning “people getting together to describe everything”, which in many ways is what Wikipedia, in its blossoming omniscience, has ultimately and more resonantly become.

For it is no longer impressive, at least to me, that Wikipedia is community-generated. Big deal, I get it, I agree with it. I buy into the Here Comes Everybody premise. I take the wisdom of crowds for granted. Like millions of others, I am thoroughly sold on Wikipedia, especially after seeing topics I thought I knew everything about described in informative, passionate, and sometimes astonishing detail. It’s the content that draws me, not the phenomenon that caused the content to get there (if anything, the phenomenon has, and continues to be, Wikipedia’s biggest perceived weakness).

This is why I am glad that Typedia is Typedia and not Wikitype or Typewiki. Typedia is, above all, a compendium of knowledge about type. The fact that it is socially-powered is something we can and should take for granted (and, of course, participate in). This kind of comprehensive one-stop collection of esoteric knowledge simply isn’t going to happen, ever, without social participation.

Basically, we’re all wiki now. We already work together. It’s the pedia part, the knowledge itself, we’ll always be striving for.

• Leave a Note (6)

I’ve submitted two talks for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. As you might know, SXSW’s selection process includes a period of public review to gauge general interest in the panels submitted (they call them “panels” even though many of the submissions, including my own, are single-speaker sessions).

I would be deeply grateful if you, gentle Graphpaper reader, would put in a vote for my sessions. If you want to comment on my ideas — and I’d love it if you would — please do so at the SXSW site. (You have to register to vote, but it’s an easy and painless sign up.)

Here are my proposals (click the title to see the voting page):

• The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)
  More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level — just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.
  .

• Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process
  It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

I’m particularly excited about the first one, as it ties together so much of what I love and/or things I know a lot about: interaction design, science fiction, culture and literature in design, artificial intelligence, human behavior and emotional design. It’s kind of like “The Graphpaper.com Experience, Live!”

Sharing the love

There are a few other talks I think you ought to consider voting for, as well, from people I like and think people should be listening to: MORE…

• Leave a Note (10)