Last week started with great news. I was confirmed as the representative of my group to present our paper at Interaction’09|South America. It is the 1st regional conference of Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and will take place on 26,27 and 28 November, in São Paulo.
This event is a fantastic opportunity to visit Brazil. It will be nice to see some friends that will attend the event and do some networking. If you are going to Sao Paulo, see you there! 
Last week I received the great news. A paper that I wrote with my friends Ajoslja Jacobs, Dirk Verhagen, Ting-Ray Chang, and Sophia Atzeni got accepted at Interaction 09 | South America. The 1st regional conference of Interaction Design Association (IxDA) will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 26th to 28th November, 2009.
Our paper is titled “Violent Video Games: Changes in non-verbal behavior and short-term effects on valence and arousal” and is the product of our assignment during the Observation Studies and non-verbal user behavior module at USI Program.
The abstract of the paper is the following: “Video gaming researchers have already studied the effects of violent video games on gamers’ behavior. The present study investigated gamers’ non-verbal behavior and short term effects during and shortly after playing violent video games. The research included three main phases: 1) preselecting violent versus non-violent video games; 2) setting-up an experiment with 20 male college students playing a pair of video games (one violent and one nonviolent game) on Nintendo Wii. After playing each game, participants’ degree of violence and arousal were measured by using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and the results were compared; 3) asking another group of 17 students to distinguish each gamer’s film clips of playing violent versus non-violent video games. While IAPS results showed that gamers’ degree of violence and arousal did not change significantly after a short experience of playing violent video game, gamers’ non-verbal behavior (facial expression) was 78% correctly distinguished by observers. Limitations are reported and further work is proposed.”
The work we reported in the paper was performed in 3 weeks, so having a paper accepted out of such a short project was really an award for us. Besides, it was real fun to run an experiment about Wii games. Actually this is how everything works here at my program. We choose the research question and run the study! We have a lot of freedom indeed. Currently we are looking for funding to support our trip to Brazil.
This week I found the The Fun Theory by coincidence. That theory says that “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better”. If you watch the video above, we will see a inspiring example which took place in Stockholm. Apparently The Fun Theory is just a strategic advertisement from Volkswagen. That is fine for me. Advertisement or not, I am a follower of the The Fun Theory. Since a few years ago when my adviser told me that he makes science and fun, I realized that fun should be in everything that I do for work. Often I hear people saying that my job sounds fun. That is true! In Brazil, Australia and now in The Netherlands I had tons of fun while working.
Going back to the The Fun Theory, it makes special sense for me at this moment because of the research I have been working on. As I said in a previous post I am working on a project about the sleeping experience. As the research findings have shown, bringing people to bed is not really easy since people are full of stimuli asking them to stay awake. My group is not sure yet about the strategy we are going to take about that, but surely fun could be a powerful weapon in convincing people to go to bed.
Fast Company published a list with 16 inventions that boost Habitats, Humanity, Health and Happiness. The list is based on a book of Emily Pilloton which is called Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People. The list brings interesting projects such as The Hippo Water Roller, Antivirus and Learning Landscape. The list is very inspiring and shows that successful design is not a synonym of complex and unfeasible ideas.
Last weeks I have been busy with my colleagues at USI program discussing about sleeping. The reason why we started to talk about sleep is not any personal problem related to that. Currently we are working on our design case, that is a 10-week project for our professional doctorate course. The design case is a very precious moment in our program since we normally have 2 or 3 weeks to work in projects. During it we can run the whole design cycle and even evaluate different levels of prototypes with users.
My group is paying a lot of attention to the user research phase. So far we have run a survey with 80 participants, have done 6 interviews and 5 diaries. It is impressive how much of research has been done about sleeping, but people still complain about their sleeping habits. Thus in order to understand properly what kind of needs and requirements people have, we thought that we should make use of different tools. It has shown to be worthy.
Recently we had some brainstorms in order to translate the main findings of the user research into concepts. Soon we will evaluate these concepts with users. Our idea is to use a very low-fi prototype to be evaluated in this first moment. Later on we will increase the fidelity of the prototype as we will also add feedback from users.
In the future I will post more details about this project. For now, I would like to leave you with some interesting products we have found during a competitor analysis we have performed.
Take a look at some of them:
Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night’s rest.
SleepPhones are the first headphones for sleeping. Soft and comfortable delivering excellent sound quality through thin speakers, SleepPhones help you fall asleep in bed while listening to nature sounds mixed with a sound technology that guides your brain to sleep. Use SleepPhones to reduce noise from snoring, relieve anxiety, and deepen your sleep.
BeoTime, Bang & Olufsen makes sure that even your basic morning ritual becomes an extraordinary experience. The humble alarm clock has been transformed with remarkable and unobtrusive design and surprisingly practical features, like built-in motion sensor and subtle automatic backlighting. The sleep timer lets you doze off to music or late night programming without a care.
Last week, New Scientist published a column about a new report made by Gartner. In its report, Gartner explores what the medical field has already started to work with in terms of technology. From Speech recognition to interaction via thoughts, medicine has shown us the huge potential technology has to offer when we consider the ways we can interact with it.
If you can’t afford the original report of Gartner (which costs something around US$ 2,000), a look at New Scientist’s report is definitely worthy. Below is a picture from Gartner showing its adoption forecast for some of the main technologies in development nowadays. Very interesting graph!
That is the title of a slideshow published by Fast Company. There they give a short overview of a new book called A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business and written by Hartmut Esslinger. Esslinger is founder of frog design which is one of those place I would like to live at. For Esslinger, and as frog design is a real example, the design thinking through the use of the design process is a powerful tool to plan business. Great to know that more and more people are supporting this idea.
A few weeks ago I posted about a project I did at USI program with arduino and phidgets. Now you can see the presentation I did with Natasha Voynarovskaya. Thanks to Aljosja Jacobs for recording it.
Expedia used to be my reference of website for booking flights. I always went there first to check the prices. After that I looked for a better deal somewhere else. We had a few great experiences with them. That is going to change from today on though. Today I tried to buy a ticket at Expedia. I tried more than 7 times (figure 2). I called the support twice. I asked friends to book the flight for me. Indeed they had a deal that I couldn’t find anywhere else. After so many trials, the only answer I got was “Your request cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later”. I tried later and the best they could offer me, by website or phone, was “Your request cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.” After a while, I tried again, but at that time I tried at One Travel. Guys at One Travel are not that good. I just found them through Momondo. At One Travel I couldn’t book the flight because I should have an American or Canadian credit card. Finally I asked my brother and he booked the flight with his American credit card. I’m relieved now because I have got the ticket. On the other hand I’m deeply irritated with the waste of time Expedia caused me. The good thing of this experience is that it makes me more and more optimistic about the future of user experience professionals. Guys, we have a lot of work calling us.
For Expedia, I have to say they destroyed the good experiences I had when I booked flights with them. Because of your bad service, now I know many websites for booking tickets. Even better, now I know where I should go to find good deals like the ones I get with you. But there is still a detail, with the other websites I can achieve my goal and book my flight.
Some recommendations:
Side Step
Some weeks ago I had a course with Bill Verplank about Input and Output devices at USI Program. Bill is a very interesting guy with thousands of stories to tell. Apart from his stories, Bill gave us the opportunity to work with Arduino , Phidgets, and Max/MSP. The project for this course was to create a prototype which would be able to make sound. Through the sensors of Phidgets I had the input devices. Arduino was responsible for processing the input information and Max/MSP produced the sound. Working with Natasha Voynarovskaya, we had a lot of fun creating the sound box which you can see in the picture. We had 3 days to code in Max/MSP and build the box. In total we used 6 sensors (2 touch sensors, 2 sliders, 1 knob, and 1 RFID sensor) which triggered 6 different sounds. Our idea was to create a box which could produce unexpected sounds. Thus users would be motivated to keep interacting with the box. The feedback from our colleagues was very positive. They liked a lot the aesthetic of the box and enjoyed playing with it. Soon I will publish a video showing some people interacting with the sound box.
