The Faculty Blog @ IIT Institute of Design

Godrej's Magazine Change publishes Anijo Mathew's article "Are you ready for the information economy?"

Godrej's internal magazine Change publishes my article - "Are you ready for the information economy?". Read it here: http://issuu.com/godrej/docs/jan_2012/11.

ID student installations for the City of Chicago up and running

This semester my Interactive Media Workshop is working with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to develop interactive placemaking probes for the City's 2012 Cultural Plan initiative. Three student teams in the class were asked to design interactive interventions, which will allow the common citizen to express their point of view about culture and engage with other citizens, both synchronously in place and asynchronously. The teams have conducted research, conceived, prototyped, and implemented  three different interactive prototypes located in cultural hubs around selected neighborhoods - one at the Old Town School of Folk Music, another in Pilsen/National Museum of Mexican Art, and the third at Chicago's City Hall. Over the next two weeks, the teams will monitor interaction to capture user information at these hubs. 

If you are in Chicago, please visit these sites and see the high quality installations that ID students have completed for the city and add to the research by participating. Here are some photos of the projects being set up/launching.

Note: PUSH is a mobile installation that is moving around the city. There will be an exhibit/event at the National Museum of Mexican Art when the devices come back - more information about this will be posted soon.

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The three teams are:

SkyWords (at the City Hall)
Lauren Braun, Kareem Hindi, Lee Lin, Jose Mello, Jaime Rivera

The City Listens (at the Old Town School of Folk Music)
Jorge Angarita, Paul Keck, Leticia Baiao, Jennifer Gzesh

Push (at Pilsen/National Museum of Mexican Art)
Janice Wong, Philipp Bohm, John Shin, Nathaniel Jiang

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Google's Project Glass vs. Nokia's Future Vision; why Google has it right...

By now, you must have seen Google's Project Glass video showing the future of wearable AR technology. As expected the blogosphere is abuzz with excitement, scepticism, and mockery of the concept. Some are even calling Nokia one of the first in augmented reality glasses, take this Giz post for example - "I Liked The Google Glasses Video Better In 2009 When Nokia Made It". Wearable AR has been around for many many years. See this Atlantic article which talks about MIT Media Lab technology that is 13 years old showing wearables. In fact the cyborg Steve Mann [who I have seen in person in 2002] has been wearing AR glasses for years before Nokia or Google envisioned it. ID Professor Tom MacTavish remembers a time when he met Steve Mann at a conference - once he recognised who Tom was, he pulled out a log of the last time they had met, using that as a way to start the conversation. Tom felt unequipped to match this sort of augmentation of human memory!

What makes Project Glass [the right way to say it] compelling is that it uses mature voice recognition technology, real location based prompts, and contextual computing to describe its concept. This is no longer science fiction, nor does it reside purely in engineering labs' future vision videos. This is real technology that will be on the street soon. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was seen wearing one of these at a recent event. Sure Google may mess it up, maybe their actual product may not be that compelling. But by doing it first, Google paves the way for future designers and engineers to come up with technology that will work. Wearables is where AR will shine in the future, and Google is on the right path...

[posted first on www.anijomathew.posterous.com]

 

ID student paper accepted to DIS2012

 

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A team of IIT Institute of Design graduate students (David Kodinsky, Tuduyen Annie Nguyen, Will Skelton, Parminder Kaur, Yu Yin) recently had their research paper accepted to the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2012). DIS is a premier arena for designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers to come together, debate, and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. As part of my Fall 2011 Communication Design Workshop, and supported by Santosh Basapur at Motorola Mobility, this student team designed and prototyped a public interactive installation at the Design Research Conference 2011 to explore the use of gaming in encourage philanthropic giving. The accepted paper was peer reviewed; out of 449 papers submitted, only 89 were accepted in a double blind review (less than 20%).

David Kodinsky (who starts at IA Collaborative this Fall), and Tuduyen Annie Nguyen will be presenting the paper at DIS2012 in June at Newcastle, UK. Please join us if you are planning to attend the conference.

Coke Freestyle, social vending machines should curate drink mashups.

Yesterday, I was at the Pei Wei diner in Chicago. It was an interesting outing, mostly because I finally got to use Coke's new Freestyle vending machines. If you do not know what Coke's new Freestyle vending machines are, head over to Coke Freestyle to learn more. I, for one, was super excited!

While I was at my table (craftily chosen next to the vending machines), I did a little informal user observation study. Of course, people were amazed by the features of the new machine. Most people would spend a few minutes exploring their options. One couple talked about the options with each other before choosing their drink. But here is the kicker - not one person (in about 10-12 people who used it during my short observation period) explored mixing different drinks. The whole point of this new machine is that you can mix and mashup drinks. All the people I saw went through the choices and then picked one drink, and then walked away.

Granted this was not a rigorous study by any means, but it led to me asking why...I think by providing people with so many choices, I think Coke is confusing people more than helping them. So what do they do? They default to known preferences, something they are used to.

Here is a thought - what if Coke curated some drink choices? Maybe even get some of their brand ambassadors to endorse drink mashups. This way one option would be to choose your own mashup, another would be select something a celebrity has endorsed. Then have a story page connected to each mashup, so that people can brag about them:
"Oh what are you having?"
"I am having an Oprah Winfrey mix, the one she drank at the Oscars"

Better yet connect the Freestyle to social media, so that users can like or dislike mashups, tweet their drink mix, or bring up favourite mixes of their friends. Pepsi is trying to do this somewhat with their Social Vending Machines, but does not go all the way.

In a world of free information, curation and the ability to curate for others will be the key to long term engagement. The Coke Freestye is a great idea but it stops one step short.

Coke, are you listening?

[posted first on www.anijomathew.posterous.com]

 

Prototyping for the City of Chicago

This semester my workshop is working with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to help with the planning of the City's 2012 Cultural Plan. The 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan will provide insights on how to elevate the City as a global destination for creativity, innovation and excellence in the arts. The focus of the project will be to further build on Chicago’s vast cultural assets and vibrant community, established through the collaborative partnerships formed with the public and private sectors and civic community. Public engagement will play a key role in shaping Chicago’s cultural future.

Three student teams from the workshop will conduct user research, design, and deploy three placemaking prototypes in cultural hubs in selected neighborhoods, one at the Old Town School of Folk Music, another at the National Museum of Mexican Art/Pilsen neighbourhood, and the third at City Hall. The teams will deploy these prototypes in April-May, 2012 as well as monitor the prototypes to capture user information at these hubs. At the end of the project, these experiential located and portable prototypes will help DCASE augment traditional forms of research by listening to the voice of a larger diversity of Chicagoans as they move through their everyday lives.

Here are some pics from the mid term review of these prototypes. Keep in mind that these are still works in progress, and may or may not resemble the final installs. In these pictures you can see Jewel Malone, the Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs; Julie Burros the Director of Cultural Planning; Ann Hickey, Director of Program Development; and Juana Guzman, the Vice President of the National Museum of Mexican Art.

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Anijo Mathew presents at Gensler's North Central Partner Retreat

On Saturday, Feb 4 I lectured at Gensler's North Central Partner Retreat at the Lodge in McDonald's Oak Brook campus. The topic of the session was Intelligent Cities. I followed Susan Piedmont-Palladino, Professor at VirginiaTech's Alexandria Center in DC and curator at the National Building Museum. Susan leads the Intelligent Cities initiative at the NBM.

The lecture was based on the work at IIT ID around Interactive Placemaking; it was followed by some energetic Q&A and a discussion between Susan and I.

 

 

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Anijo Mathew speaks at the 11th CII NID Design Summit in Delhi

I was invited to deliver a keynote address at the 11th CII NID Design Summit held in Delhi on 8-9 December 2011.

The Summit featured some great keynotes from VIjay Kumar at IIT ID, and James Woudhuysen, Professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

I spoke about the move from an Industrial economy to an Information economy and what business and design can do to affect change in this context. The same presentation was also made to an interesting mix of business folks and designers in Mumbai at the invitation of Aparna Piramal (of the Piramal group and BP Ergo). Aparna writes extensively about therole of Design in Indian business and it was quite interesting have a conversation with a group hosted by her. The session was attended by Radhika Piramal (VIP), Devita Saraf (Vu Technologies), Ratan Batliboi, Preeti Vyas among others.

 

 

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Why Amazon Fire is the new disruptor...

Yesterday, a good friend of mine casually mentioned - "You know, I pre-ordered the Amazon Fire". If reports are to be believed, 95,000+ others made the same decision. Why is this important? Well for one compare it to RIM's performance in the second fiscal quarter - only 200,000 Playbooks were sold in the entirety of that time. The Kindle Fire is not an amazing innovation by any means. It has a dual core processor, 8 GB HDD, 512 Mb RAM, NO CAMERA, and limited access to applications - by any measure this is mediocre hardware. BUT it costs $199! ONLY $199!

This is where Jeff Bezos did something smart - something which other hardware manufacturers cannot do. Hardware manufacturers (Samsung, Motorola) have one problem - they are hardware based. Which means that if Apple holds all hardware aquisition contracts for tablet hardware, they have to work around it by charging more for their device. Because thats all they have...the device. And because they hold this position, the companies (including Apple) have to continuously fight a losing battle - cutting edge hardware technology. 

Bezos took an alternate position - he decided his company could make money off cloud content instead of the device. He should know - he has been working hard to make Amazon one of the best cloud based information service out there.  Now all he needed was a platform to access this content - an Amazon branded platform. A "cheap" Amazon branded platform.

So what does he do? He waits. Rob Wheeler in his HBR post suggests why waiting is a good thing for disruptive innovation. He says that "Disruption occurs given two criteria. The first: that incumbents move upmarket to the most profitable segments, ignoring low-end competitors at the bottom of the market. The second: that the low-end competitor introduces a product with a scalable technology or business model advantage at its core that has the potential to displace the incumbent."

When the time was right, Bezos picked the platform that was most on a trajectory to failure - the RIM Playbook. By using the RIM Playbook as a hardware template (he hired Quanta, the same company that designed the Playbook, to design the Fire), Bezos dramatically reduced his front end design costs; by using technology that is just right (not cutting edge), Bezos reduced his supply chain costs; AND by using the same hardware platform, Amazon gave Quanta breathing room .

Now that Bezos had the price he wanted, he could focus on the experience. The Fire is so compelling, not because it is the fastest, or the lightest, or has the best camera. But because it is the BEST cloud information device out there. Better than the iPad, better than Android, and better than WP7 or 8. And Fire will change the way we interact with the cloud!

My friend invested wisely. Fire is the new iPhone. Fire is the new disruptor. 

Prototyping Workshop at ID led by Carla Diana and Jeff Hoefs

As part of the IIT Institute of Design's prototyping initiative, we invited Carla Diana, Associate Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design and Jeff Hoefs from the Lab at Rockwell Group to lead a 1 day workshop on the intersection of product and interaction design - exploring what is popularly known as the "internet of things". 

These prototyping workshops are part of an ID initiative to bring interesting learning experiences to ID students outside of classes - a way for students to "get their hands dirty", and learn how to prototype from industry experts. The "Internet of Things" workshop was held at ID on Saturday, September 17, 2011 and was offered FREE for all registered students of ID. 24 students participated in the workshop and five teams came up with wacky but fun solutions around how RFIDs can be used to extend interactive experiences from the screen to physical products.

 

You can read more about ID's prototyping initiatives at the website and follow the Twitter/Facebook pages for upcoming workshops and lectures.