Green Design

FASTCOMPANY:COM

If the equation T (technology) + E (ease of use) = $ can be proven, the time may be right for the voice of the technologically challenged who can't operate their remotes to be heard.

-Will it be able to put in the green aspekt in to this?? Like:
T +E+G=$. That hightech and the eas of use will go together with the eas of nature impact?

John Maeda
"I came back to MIT to figure out how you could combine simplicity, which is basic human life, with this thing--technology--that's out of control."

Blame the closed feedback loop among engineers and industrial designers, who simply can't conceive of someone so lame that she can't figure out how to download a ringtone; blame a competitive landscape in which piling on new features is the easiest way to differentiate products, even if it makes them harder to use; blame marketers who haven't figured out a way to make "ease of use" sound hip. "It's easier," says Charles Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research, "to market technology than ease of use."


In the past, he says, adding features usually meant adding costs. Put a sound system or power windows into a car, and you've upped the price, so you better make sure consumers really want what you're peddling. But in the digital world, that cost-benefit calculus has gone awry. "The incremental cost to add 10 features instead of one feature is just nothing," says Oppenheimer. "Technology is this huge blessing because we can do anything with it, and this huge curse because we can do anything with it."

street car in UK

Service envy


We can think of products as serving two basic needs; to perform the function they are engineered to do, and to confirm and communicate the owner's set of values. The second function is crucial. Products help us identify ourselves through a complex product and brand language. If we want to make people desire services more than products, then services will also have to communicate these values.

If we want to make people desire services more then products, we have to create services that help people tell each other who they are. Our major challenge is to enable people to express who they are through the use of services instead of through ownership of things. We must create "service envy".


THIS is from the site to livework.co.uk
It is very interesting to think of this, how to make the service more interesting than the product. They are in this project faced with the "problem" that all the cars in the "lent a car" service is the same. So a rich uptown girl is driving the same car as a poor worker, witch could be a bed thing for the image to both of them. But if it is possible not to look at the product, here the car, we could get the user to have interest in the service, which could give them the image of been Green. So both of the users are now focusing on the image of the service, which is green transport, or being free. One example that have done the same, is the yellow silicon band from Lance Armstrong (and Nike??), where they are selling the same product to a big group of different people, but the important issue here is not the product, but the image, and the value that is in the code.

So if livework could get the people to focus on the value of the “rent-a-car” service, and not in issue that it is a VW, and not a Honda, it would be interesting.

The story telling lamp project 2005 winter

We have been starting with the new project, the communication between human and computer. My Idea is to go into the situation that occurs when a child is going to sleep. How will a voice be, that is suited to tell a bed time story? I am not yet sure about how to make the dialog, should it start when you lie down, are you to start it?

The other issue I will put into this, is the meaning of old things. I would like to se the re-use of old stuff, in a new way. We have all this re-use trends that come and go, but what about the quality itself in the old stuff. What happens when an old story is going to be told to a child in his bed? You may want to have it link to something good, and safe, something not friend. Like an old person telling stories, like grandma. Is it possible to mix the feeling of an old storyteller, and an old lamp? Will the nostalgic (not for the child, but maybe for he parents that are the buyer) old lamp combined with old fairytales give the feeling of a good/worm person?


NEW
(from Nintendogs game at laweekly.com)
This despite that the ostensibly hipper and much more powerful PSP has been heavily marketed with the likes of Franz Ferdinand singing “Take Me Out” as vaguely hip, tastemaker-looking GAP ad extras run the lanes of the grocery story sitting in shopping carts while having oh-so-much-fun with their PSPs. But as any good post-humanist would say: Hardware’s irrelevant; get with the program. Nintendogs trumps anything on the PSP because it’s so much better conceived. (Famitsu magazine, the gold standard in Japan, had given only four perfect reviews prior to Nintendogs.)

-The same things as with the lamp, the hardweare is not importent, but it will build under the feeling the softweare is giving.


NEW
Consciousness has no stakes if it’s never-ending. For machines to become man’s best friends, there must also be the prospect of losing those friends. Then it won’t be Ding Dong worrying if he’ll dream without power, but us.

-How to make the lamp voice/person more alive? What if she could forget stories, or that is somenights is out doing something else, so that the child have to call for her in the lamp. And then she apears, and can talk about what she was doing (going around in one of the fairytales...)



NEW14.12.2005
The play robot”The dragon” and how it works compared to the LAMP.




This robot is interactive by giving the user a chance to touch the arms or the legs of the robot.

It start by giving instructions about what is possible to touch, so if the user is new to the robot, it will not have to exam the whole robot to know where to touch. I think this is a good start procedure, in the way that new users very easily become familiar to the interaction method.


Start Mode
When it is in stand by mode, you can squeeze one of the toes, arms, or just cover the eyes. This will start a reaction, like for ex.
-Hi it is good to se you.-lets have some fun, squeeze my hand and we can sing a song.

This is very direct information bout what the user should do. When the input method is so easy to detect like squeezing a sensor, the computer now that the user is in front of the robot, paying attention and the communication is strong. In the lamp situation, we don’t know if the user is direct in front of the lamp, or far away, with hear head turned away. As long as the sensor detects a pre programmed sound like yes, it will work. So the communication is here weaker then with the robot. The other issue that makes the communication with the robot more personal is the movements and that the user has to become “intimate” to make response.


Young-Old dialog person
One thing a like with the robot is that you could, if you want, interrupts him when you want to do something else. So if the user is well known with the action for instance the foot will give, the user could just pres here, and then gets the wanted action even if the robot is talking about something else. In the lamp, I don’t think this is something that a want to have. This basically because here we are talking to a grown up voice, and it would be better to have a richer dialog, so the user don’t hear the same phrase over and over. And since the lamp is going to be more of a storyteller, it could be more in charge of what is going to happen. This shows a clear difference between the two objects. The robot is nearly an equal playing partner, which has to have response all the time to be able to give the user something. But with the lamp, the situation is different. In the dialog process, lamp takes charge and the user is just giving her info in which direction she wants to go. The rest of the action is basically a story divided into two, the first one about what the person in the lamp have been doing all day (intro), and the rest is the fairytale that have been the choice of the night. So we could put it up like this,

Intro- What the “lamp” have been doing, which is different every night
Dialog- Here the user gives info about what she wants to hear.
Fairytale- The chosen tale is told.


Figurative form versus non-figurative form.
The robot is a dragon, and that makes the link to magic worlds and a magical friend. This is also a way of justification for the lack of rich langue skills in the robot. Hi is from another place, and he is a little baby robot, so no wonder he can’t talk like you and me. And maybe is it just enough for the user that this dragon can make some noise, compared to the old play dragon that didn’t have any digital interaction, and still made the user go into a fairytale world.

The lamp on the contrary is just a lamp, even an old lamp. It has a more grown up appearance that makes the dialog much more challenging in many ways. Here we are talking from a grownup, and toward the user, a little child. Here the language has to be fairly rich in the sense that it has to mach in some way a real grownup. But to ease this task, the person has become old, and she/he is living in his own fairytale world. Then it is possible for the character to be a little strange, maybe forget something. And since all communication will start with the person telling what she/he have been doing, I think this make the user be in the state of mind where she is open for the story. So instead of using the look of a personalised product, like the dragon, we are doing the same by taking the user into our world. Just like a cartoon takes the watcher into the story and into the mood that it wants. The lamps uses a long intro and gets the user excided about the context in the other world, and then everything builds up around the storyline form the users world, and into the unknown.Think this is also important in the way that if the user is ready to go to the world of stories, it is easier to ask the user all the questions the user has to answer. She knows that this will be fun, and that she has to answer to get to the fun part. But if we make the questions funny too, I hope that the sate of mind the user gets into in the intro will be present in the question part, and when the story begins.


NEW

Old Lamp, why?

alt="" />

The main idea behind the willing to use an old lamp is more experimentally than straight logic. The easiest would be to make a new product, which has the same aesthetics that everything else in a child room of 2005 has. But I wanted to put another dimension to the project. What happens when a child start to tie feelings to an old object? Will this be possible in the toy world that exists around them, a world kicking in with a new hype every year (pokomon, transformers and so on)? I was reading about the Sony robot Aibio (or something), which is extremely popular in Japan. Here you don’t have a new product every year (think the one that is for sale now is 3 years old (?)). But you get now uploads. So the connection between the user and the product is always the same in the physical way, it is the same “thing”. But the dialog is getting richer with new downloads that makes the user wondering what the “dog” could do today.

With the lamp we are taking it longer. As with the Aibio, we have the same product all the time, but where the Aibio is made from scratch as a robot dog, we are taking a product already existing. Instead of saying that we are now making an interactive product, and therefore we have to use new, high-tech materials and design, we go old school. Do really interaction have to come in a new, shiny package? By using an already existing product as our base for the interactive dialog, we combine interaction with environmentally thoughts. Giving old products now experience by “digital personalising” them!

But then again, I do se that making a lamp or a product from scratch that will fit more easily in to the child world, would be a possible better “market-way” of doing it. So what will it be, I am really not sure right now….Hmmmm.