A very nice example of this is the “unpronounceable rabbit“. It connects to the Internet, is able to sniff RFID tags and communicate by talking, changing colours, communicates with his ears and all kinds of other things. And the rabbits can talk to eachother so you can send messages to a friend by just twisting his ears.

Amsterdam Living Lab is the initiative that we are starting in, surprise, Amsterdam. Here we are changing Amsterdam in a large scale laboratory, together with Waag Society, University  of Amsterdam and Telematica Instituut. Together we try to create new design, develop and test processes based on real life user experience. For this measurement tools and sensor to measure reality will be developed and new design processes that take this real life data into account.

More locations in the Netherlands are developing such an approach. Living Lab Leiden is involved in development of wireless services, Rotterdam Climate Initiative is developing new approaches to saving energy. Approaches that take the real life behaviour of people into account. For the Innovatieplatform I am working a plan to strengthen this ecosystem of initiatives and promote the capabilities national and international.

Next week the Innovatieplatform is organising a big day on innovation in the Netherlands. I am organising a track on Living Labs there too. Several Living Labs are  present and  some demo’s are given. So if you are interested, drop me a line. Meet you on third of December in Rotterdam.

While searching a little further I found this blog post from Jeff Jarvis where he is asking for examples of bank services that Google would be very good at. Examples are peer to peer lending, more transparency around transactions in stocks, open source platforms to increase functionality (E-invoices anyone?).

In a way Google checkout and it’s competitor PayPal are already on the move. In my view banks really have to start thinking on how to really innovate their processes through which they create value for their customers.

They now have a new function where Google scans the text of you e-mail and when it thinks you intended to include an attachment it gives you a reminder. I think this is a nice example of paying attention to your users and deliver services that are based on looking what people are really doing and what really goes wrong while doing it.

I understand from the google groups that discusses this that it does not really work very well at the moment (it misses a lot of cues when there should be an attachment) but let’s hope they will get it right. At least they are trying …

However, I recently downloaded an iPhone app from the NOS that shows you teletekst directly on you iPhone. very convenient.

However, I was wondering myself that it is quite a remarkable that this application for the iPhone is that popular. It is a user interface designed for TV’s with minimal interaction and minimum use of graphics. Of course the original idea was that through this simple view and interface it was easy to use and easy on the hardware. All reasons that are completely not valid on the iPhone platform.

I wonder where the popularity comes from. Is it because people are used for so long to this interface or are minimal interfaces more powerful than we think anyhow? Amazing..

I recently came across this website that is dedicated to fact checking on political statements in the USA. If you listen to the candidates for US president it is often very hard to know if they are talking the truth, bending the truth in their direction or lying outright. Interesting to see that this website (and there are several other ones like this one) are increasing the transparancy a lot. It is shocking to see how much “distorted truths” are being told by these politicians.

The power of sites like these is that it will be getting harder and harder to stretch the truth once very white lie is monitored..

The first is the fact that two research projects dealing with the design of user interfaces showed that people preferred to use the slower interface. In one example they had developed an interface with special icons to use in the address book of the phone, targeted at illiterate people. Research showed that although people were faster through the visual interface they still preferred the alphanumerical one. Maybe they just did not want to be branded illiterate?

The second project dealt with research on the amount of air pollution children are exposed to by their route to school. This Lancaster project gave GPS equipped phones to 12 year old children and had them make pictures and blog their route to school, through all seasons. These routes were compared to the known air pollution throughout the city. Also the children got asked questions on how they felt and on their health. Through this research they could show the children that they would have less air pollution by taking another route. But reality is much more complex than we think. Many of those routes were banned by their parents because they are thought not be safe (e.g. a route through the park).

Both projects show that reality is much more complex than we think when designing products and services. This complexity is I think growing with the digitization of our society.

This conference was also the formal start of the Amsterdam Living Lab, a large research program I am involved in where the focus is in helping designers design products that people really want, not the ones designers think they want. I will publish more on this soon.

A last example how reality can be unexpected also came from the Lancaster project. The children all came from a very poor neighborhood. It turned out that some of them could not recharge their phone during the evening because their parents had pre-paid electricity …

And a final fact during the conference in another presentation: more than 60% of the mobile searches are for adult content: why does it not surprise me anymore …

Recently I held a key note presentation at the conference “Greening the enterprise 2.0“, focused on how to save energy in office environments. Especially in offices it is hard to stimulate people to save energy because they do not have to pay the energy bill themselves. Automatic systems are usually circumvented (people open windows in completely controlled buildings because the intelligent control mechanism for temperature is less intelligent than the maker thought) and therefore seldom delivers the result that we think of beforehand.

And people are lazy. The picture on this post is from my own re-chargers in my office. I once placed a switch there to switch of the electricity. But after two cases of dead batteries that I needed at that moment I always have it switched on.

Focus of my presentation was how to use social networking aspects to stimulate people to save energy. By sharing best practices but also by more direct feedback on individual actions and results (and some peer pressure maybe …).

Here are the sheets.

I do think this is a risk we are facing at the moment. In workplace research there is something that is called Attention Deficit Disorder. What it means is that people are so accustomed to browsing and wandering of a subject, checking mail all the time, reacting to chat and other disruptions that in the end they are not capable anymore of creating things that need concentration for a longer time. They are reacting instead of acting. I myself can sometimes feel this way: you have to force yourself to stay away from email and chat for several hours do finish something that you really have to think about.

A lot of our philosophical heritage is coming from people that were accustomed to do a lot of thinking without interruption. Of course, Plato and Socrates had little choice without broadband Internet available to them… What does this fragmented way of collecting information and maybe the resulting fragmented way of thinking lead us to in the future?

There definitely are positive aspects too. Now it is much easier to connect different information parts because they are all easy to find, or somebody else already connected them for you.

At the least this new way of reading and its consequences for our way of thinking is something we need to take into careful consideration when designing our new tools for the workplace.

Interesting read and food for thought. Do not forget to read the whole lengthy(?) article …