Recently, we spent the week in Austin at SXSW. Here’s some of the observations and other highlights from the time there.

Anne encountered the Uncanny Valley with this video-projection-on-a-human-shaped-cutout.

In one session, I sat behind a cyborg.

Ridiculous marketing language abounds.

A cafe made use of physical “Like” buttons next to posted artwork. The LCD counter increments each time someone clicks the button. Curious to see interactions specific to the virtual world being replicated in the physical world. See here, previously.

The Frito pie is made from a bag of corn chips, where the bag is ripped open and topped with chopped onions, meat, sauce and cheese.

One really has to wonder about how complex everyday technology use can become. Even though Austin is fairly tech forward, this sign in the convention center is beyond ridiculous.

Gourdough’s used to be just an Airstream that served the biggest donuts you’d ever seen, but now they’ve opened a proper restaurant. Most if not all of the main courses (e.g., friend chicken) feature a donut.

Live music, including the Waco Brothers and Ian McLagan.

And of course, there were mascots.

I was in my old hometown of Toronto last week for Interaction13. Of course, I did spend some time wandering and (shivering and) taking pictures. The Flickr set is taking shape here but meanwhile some faves for you are below.

Sharon Cartwright, a consultant with Optimal Experience, shares her story about uncovering context.

We were surprised that Anna wasn’t at home when we arrived at her house. We could see through the lounge windows that the house was empty of furniture and personal belongings, adding further to the intrigue. We had followed our usual protocol of sending an email confirmation clearly stating the time of the research session and Anna had been called the day before to confirm.

We decided to try calling Anna. She picked up our call as she was coming up her driveway. She was running late and seemed a bit agitated, telling us that she had locked herself out an hour earlier. She was just moving into this house and didn’t have a spare key yet. She’d decided, in the interest of proceeding, that she was going to smash a window to get in and had just called around to her brother’s house to pick up the appropriate tools.

Anna seemed like a practical woman, and smashing her front door window didn’t seem to daunt her. I indicated that there was no need to take such drastic action for our sakes. But she was adamant and was soon taking a hammer to the glass panel in the kitchen door.

Once inside, Anna, myself and the client (who’d come along for the ride) began the clean-up. I manned the vacuum cleaner and mused over the start to the session. There is something bonding about a shared clean-up!

We were there to observe Anna set up wireless broadband. On a good day the process wasn’t straightforward; we had already seen several participants struggle through it. Over the next two hours we observed Anna encountering several technical issues with hardware and software. She managed to resolve some issues on her own. Many times she resorted to calling the contact centre, although their advice was mixed – sometimes helping Anna, sometimes complicating matters.

We had scheduled the session for 1.5 hours expecting this to be sufficient, but many sessions – including Anna’s – extended over this. After two hours Anna had not succeeded in setting up her wireless broadband connection. Unable to stay any longer, we were disappointed to leave without seeing Anna ultimately succeed. We wished her luck, as she was clearly going to need it.

During the two hours Anna revealed a few things to us. Her long-term relationship had recently ended, explaining her move to Auckland. She was also looking for work. Her ex-partner’s teenage son had generally taken the lead on the technology front in their home, and it was dawning on her that this was now her role.

With the significant life stresses she was facing it was hard to watch her struggle through a technology set-up that should have been easier, dare I say simple. While we learned that setting up wireless internet often happens during a time of stress, as it’s one task of many when you move house, I felt for Anna and the difficult time she was going through.

Last week I was in Ottawa speaking at Carleton University as well as delivering the closing keynote for UXcamp Ottawa. Here are some photographic highlights of my time there. Look for the rest of my pictures on Flickr.

Joseph Henri Maurice “The Rocket” Richard

Suzy Q Donuts.

The Canada Hall in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Depicting 1000 years of history, this was an outstanding exhibit. In addition to the familiar elements of contemporary museum design, it had just enough realism, sort of the heightened-fakery from a movie studio backlot. The open-ended design enabled an immersive stroll through recreations of the past. As you wandered you could go in and poke around stores, schools, mills, airports, and so on. It was almost like being in a holodeck, strolling through time (and from east to west).

Building environmental control module or splash screen for circa 1974 television news magazine?

Recreation of the Robert Frank image used on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street cover.

Stickers stuck to poles outside of the National Gallery. I took the picture without knowing what the heck I was looking at, though. It was only when I got my ticket for the National Gallery and was asked to put the same sticker on my clothing did I realize how those poles ended up like that.

That about covers it.

Mice as Stand-Ins in the Fight Against Disease [New York Times] – Looks like this has been happening in some measure for a while, but some new methods are increasing the usage. The most science-fiction thing you’ll read all week.

In what could be the ultimate in personalized medicine, animals bearing your disease, or part of your anatomy, can serve as your personal guinea pig, so to speak. Some researchers call them avatars, like the virtual characters in movies and online games. “The mice allow you the opportunity to test drugs to find out which ones will be efficacious without exposing the patient to toxicity,” said Colin Collins, a professor at the University of British Columbia.

Australia 2012 [Flickr] – My complete set of pictures from Australia earlier this month.

Chinese families’ worldly goods in Huang Qingjun’s pictures [BBC] – We’ve seen other projects like this, but the focus on China captures a material culture in transition.

Amid China’s tumultuous dash to become rich, one man’s photographs of families posing with their worldly goods will soon seem like records from a distant era. Huang Qingjun has spent nearly a decade travelling to remote parts of China to persuade people who have sometimes never been photographed to carry outside all their household possessions and pose for him. The results offer glimpses of the utilitarian lives of millions of ordinary Chinese who, at first glance, appear not to have been swept up by the same modernisation that has seen hundreds of millions of others leave for the cities. But seen more closely, they also show the enormous social change that has come in a generation. So the photo of an elderly couple of farmers outside their mud house reveals a satellite dish, DVD player and phone.

Four Big Things, a phrase dating from 1950s for most sought-after goods for newly married couples: sewing machine, bicycle, watch, radio. It’s since come to refer to whatever is most fashionable at the time. By 1980s the four big things were: TV, washing machine, rice cooker, fridge. Now, consumer goods flood China’s cities, it tends to be used to describe people’s aspirations for the latest thing.

Must-See Video: How a Woman With No Arms Dresses Herself. What Assistance Can Design Provide? [Core 77] – I love the reaction; that excitement of discovering how current solutions could be improved. Designers are so great at bringing that creativity and know-how to bear to make change for the good. But let’s remember, we don’t need videos to be posted by users to uncover what things aren’t working for them. Are designers waiting for broken products to appear in front of them so they can spontaneously improve them, or are they out there looking at current behaviors and solutions in order to proactively find opportunities. Designers: you don’t need the disabled (or anyone) to post their own videos, go and shoot your own!

I hope that more folks with disabilities make videos like this, not just to share with others what their particular trials are, but to enable us designers to improve upon the objects they use.

FILMography – a Tumblr with an incredible series of images where a printout of a still from a film is held up in the actual location where that scene was shot. It’s a “trick” I’ve seen before but mostly as a one-off; the breadth here is fascinating.

FILM + photography = FILMography.

Here is the last post with highlights of my trip to Australia (see parts 1, 2 and 3, previously). Meanwhile, all my pictures are making their way to Flickr.

At the tram stop for the Children’s Hospital, the platform is filled with various cute “Dr. Jake” signs. I especially like transforming the transformer box into a height chart. Someone is thinking broadly about reframing the hospital from scary into welcoming and using the first point of entry – the tram stop – as the place to begin doing that.

Patience is a virtue. A post-design attempt to mollify confused users.

I could not figure out what the heck “Teady” referred to on this first truck. It wouldn’t be my first time encountering a word I didn’t understand (see “showbag” in an earlier post, say). But no, the adjacent truck says “Steady.” I went back and checked – did the initial S wear off? No, it was never there to begin with. The design – sans S – fits perfectly in the designated area on the first truck.

Bold language boldly presented.

Once again, weird people sculptures.

Free WiFi at the train station. Nice visual reference to many memes (e.g., Star Wars kid, the dancing baby, keyboard cat) as well as Facebook and Twitter.

ACDC lane. Yes, the official City of Melbourne lane commemorating ACDC.

Reminded me of a similar sign in San Francisco.

The menu at this restaurant offered beer in a pot or a beaker. I was further charmed by the use of familiar words with shifted meanings, as part of my foreigner’s journey. But no, the beaker is exactly what you’d think: a beaker.

More 8-bit-videogame streetart, although Mario instead of Space Invaders; stickers instead of tiles.

Many many flavors of hot chocolate at Chokolait. I must go back!

Indoor nighttime climbing wall.

I got back last week from two weeks in Australia, traveling around as well as speaking at UX Australia in Brisbane and Service Design Melbourne. Here is the third of four posts with some of the highlights (see 1 and 2 previously). All my pictures are making their way to Flickr, as well.

Hmm. Update: Golden Casket is a lottery company, not the store itself. And “casket” more typically refers to something like a treasure chest than a coffin. The language discontinuities wonderfully surprising!

Brilliant idea to highlight a positive so specifically.

Burger King, in some parts of Australia, is Hungry Jack’s.

While the text and icon evoke the fleeing-immigrants signs seen in Southern California and Arizona, this supposedly refers to a traffic island in the middle of the street where pedestrians can wait if they are caught in the road when the light changes. However, this location had no such island.

Dolphin attendance. What can we infer about the dolphins with the dashes in place of checks? Or the dolphins with a line through the week?

Jelly.

Peanut butter.

From the Gallery of Modern Art (or, if you prefer, GOMA), biomorphic scooters.

“I never stopped loving you” reminded me of the iconic “I love you so much” graffiti-cum-icon in Austin. One is in an art museum, and the other is on the side of a building.

The piece is called Distillery: Waveforming. It uses biofeedback, as you clip a pulse oximeter to your earlobe and the iPad display starts to play mellow music and visually echo your heartbeat. It was like a digitally-induced high. I hope we all get one soon.

I got back last week from two weeks in Australia, traveling around as well as speaking at UX Australia and Service Design Melbourne. Here is the second of four posts with some of the highlights. Part 1 is here.

All my pictures are making their way to Flickr, as well.

Nice combination of cultural iconography.

I liked seeing the range of medical services laid out like this. Not very confidence inspiring, however.

Manners poster.

Asian preferred.

A really awful brand name and sign. What does crocodile have to do with thai? And what is added by making him or it senior? It’s a puzzle.

Father’s Day is September 2.

Milk for the workplace. At last.

360Àö Self-Portrait at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Although there are no visual cues, the artist is in some contraption that moves her around, through a complete circle. As she moves, gravity deforms her face slightly while she essentially remains expressionless. The net effect is compelling and disorienting.

The 18th Biennale of Sydney was chock full of astonishing spectacle. Really wonderful. And I only heard about it because I checked in (via Foursquare) at the museum and a kindly person on Twitter suggested I head over to the island and see it.

A crushed car was on display and yet needed to be marked before and after with warning signs so that traffic going by would not be alarmed. Are the signs part of the work or something that is imposed on the artist in order to allow their work to proceed? And what does it mean to have a sign announcing “End Artwork” anyway? Is that an observation or an imperative?

I got back last week from two weeks in Australia, traveling around as well as speaking at UX Australia and Service Design Melbourne. Here is the first of four posts with some of the highlights. All my pictures are making their way to Flickr, as well.

The diminutive is a common Australian form. Toasted sandwich becomes toastie. Football is footy. Breakfast is breaky/brekkie. Motorcycle gang member is bikie. Slot machine = pokie. Self-portrait is selfie. I saw this in advertising, building signage and the newspaper.

I’m certainly impressed to know that Sol Levy is such an esteemed tobacconist. What related line of business does he offer that requires one to be over 18 in order to take a trip down memory lane and reveal treasures? Some sort of vintage tobacco porn? The mind boggles.

The savory pie is an Australian dish, sold in all sorts of stores including the ubiquitous Pie Face, where their pies are decorated with, well you guessed it, faces.

Yet another example of personas (or the aesthetics of personas) turned into customer-facing messaging: “Hi, I’m James. I’m a freelance TV producer. But before you write me off as some sort of knob who owns a fancy European car, think again. I don’t even own a car! Instead, I just use GoGet Cars whenever I need one. So when I’m on a shoot and I’ve got expensive equipment to transport, I’ll use this van.”

I was astonished at how foreign I felt in Australia. Despite a common language, there are so many disconnects around vocabulary. This ad on the back of a bus reads “Grab an iinet Combo. It’s like a showbag for grown-ups.” Sure, I can read that, but what the heck are they talking about? Some Aussies clued me in that showbags are gift bags from the equivalent of state fairs. Whatever – that feeling of cluelessness was a particularly wonderful aspect of the whole trip.

Whether you say please or not, the option of opting out at the mailbox is something I’ve seen in Europe as well.

Prohibited clothing.

And more prohibitions.

Anthropologist Francoise Brun-Cottan, an ethnographer on the WorkPlace Project team, recounts a story about embedding deeply in an active work environment in comparatively primitive time, both in terms of the recording equipment and the field’s sophistication in describing to participants what was happening and why.

It was the winter of 1989. Members of Lucy Suchman’s group at PARC embarked on a multi-year joint Steelcase/Xerox project to look at ground control operations of two airlines at San Jose airport. Airport management and each of the airlines’ managements were “on board.” The project would study ground control operations of each airline in the existing airport facilities and then follow them over to newly built facilities in a new structure.

We were going to look at the interplay of paper (manuals, computer printouts), voice (over the air, walkie-talkies, radio, and telephone), chalkboard and whiteboards, and direct visual observation (versus camera/video feeds) of planes pulling into and out of the gates and being cleaned, fueled, and having baggage loaded and unloaded.

The plan was to use basic ethnographic methods and techniques: interviewing, shadowing (inside and on the tarmac), audio and video taping, still photography, and transcribing recordings to-we weren’t quite sure exactly what we’d come up with. But we wanted to find out what could be extracted using these methods in such a tech-heavy environment. We were betting it would be informative, insightful, and valuable to everyone concerned. We hoped.

In 1989, technology had come a long way from the cameras and recorders that had to be moved about on dollies and trailers but, as portable as they were, the wonderful Panasonic video cameras were heavy, and so were the VHS tapes and batteries. The little Sony audio tape recorders (about a the thickness of a stack of 10 iPhones) were great for interviews but micing a control room took hours. Synching the mikes with the video was a cabalistic art colorfully augmented by below-the-breath expletives.

The members of the airline ground crews had basically been informed by management that they were going to cooperate. In reality that mean they were going to “tolerate”: non-lingo literate researchers climbing over their equipment whenever they weren’t actually underfoot, being recorded for hours at a time (rather gleefully when crises were underway) and being followed around and asked question after question (further confirming the depth of the researchers’ lack of common sense and basic knowledge) whenever there was a moment of down time.

We did try and tell crew what we thought we were doing. But saying that we wanted to understand their work practices, how they would change in new environments using new technologies and how they made sense of their work and communications was not exactly revelatory. As a field, we’re much better at doing that now, partly because we’ve also got lots more examples we can show to prospective participants about results of our work.

Viewing the videos made clear what some of the crew members stated directly, which is that they were deeply suspicious of what we would report about their actions to management. Anytime they deviated from protocol, or made mistakes, or seemed to be resting rather doing some piece of work might be opportunities for management reprisals of one sort or another. Some people were openly, if politely, hostile. No one welcomed us. It was tough on participants and researchers alike. They always cooperated at some level; there was no point in antagonizing us (though some were pretty gruff).

It is known that after a time people seem to forget that cameras are rolling, even if those cameras are right in front of them and so are the researchers. Viewing the weeks of tapes gave us plenty of opportunities to see them cast black glances our way, or whisper something together and laugh at us. In their banter we also learned about their home lives and romances and trials and aspirations. Sometimes that could let us congratulate them, sometimes our knowing was resented.

I don’t remember exactly when it became clear to our team – maybe somewhere toward the end of our fieldwork – that the final report would be a 2-hour video tape, which came to be known as The Workplace Project. We said our good-byes and appreciations on the last days of fieldwork. “Thanks,” they said and (figuratively) “good riddance.”

We made sure that copies of the tapes were made available to the crews at both airlines. We learned that the report was being used by the crews to convey to mid -management complexities about the work that the crew members had not been able to convey. They repeatedly mentioned the benefit of demonstrating how manuals misrepresented events and complicated the work rather than facilitating it. Although previously unacknowledged in the organization, our work highlighted their level of expertise in differentiating personal task-relevant details from the sonic soup of incoming streams of information.

Sometimes you just have to stick with it, whatever “it” will turn out to be. And then, sometimes, you get to get thanked for revealing aspects of the work that the workers can’t make visible. A few years ago I was told that Steelcase still showed the video to visitors to their user centered division. So, that’s not too bad!