Design Ripples

This blog has moved!

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:38:03 -0500

I have moved my blog to http://designripples.wordpress.com/. I realized that iWeb is not the best software for managing a serious blog, thus the move to Wordpress.

Semiotic analysis of Time Machine

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:20:34 -0500

Time Machine
Time Machine is a utility that manages complete system backups to an external hard drive. The backups collect over time, making it possible to ‘travel back in time’ and see the system as it was in the past and recover that state if necessary. The backups are done in the background, but they are accessed through a visually striking, immersive interface.

The visual style ‘inside’ Time Machine is quite sci-fi, in keeping with its moniker. Finder windows, representing system files, stretch out straight ahead until they disappear in the horizon in the middle of a depiction of a spiral galaxy. These windows are shown straight on and from a slightly high angle (it is only the tops of the windows in the background that can be seen). Navigating forward or backward in time appears to be the result of a tracking shot: advancing forward (backward in time) takes the viewer closer to the first window and then through it to those following, while advancing backward does the reverse. The arrows on the bottom right of the screen can be used to advance incrementally, while the index bars on the right can be used to navigate to specific dates.

The interface is striking for several reasons. First, it completely takes over the screen: none of the rest of the operating system controls can be seen (dock, menu bar, etc.). Second, the background is a picture of outer space, with what seems to be a spiral galaxy in the middle (although it can’t be seen clearly because of the finder windows in front). There is also a very clear sense of depth. The Finder windows stretch out straight ahead and seemingly to infinity (and beyond? =) ). The control bar at the bottom of the screen is also portrayed as three dimensional and stretching out straight ahead, as are the arrows used to navigate forward and backward in time.

The head-on view of text retreating into the horizon against a backdrop of an image of space is very reminiscent of the intro to the Star Wars movies, in which introductory text scrolls onto the screen and seems to retreat into the horizon of deep space. This, as well as the theme of time travel, provide strong science fiction connotations. The complete immersion in the interface also gives the sense of being cut off from one’s normal environment of the desktop, reinforcing the perception of actually leaving one’s current time and place to travel to a time and place in the past.

In summary, the Time Machine interface contains ingenious signifiers that reference the science fiction idea of time travel and thus help users to understand how the application functions.

Technical/musical synergy

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:09:06 -0500

I just listened to the 2008 year in review episode of the NPR All Songs Considered podcast, and was intrigued by a reference that the commentators made to technology in a discussion of the over-arching themes or moods of 2008 music. One of the main themes that they identified was that of retreat, solitude, reflection, etc., as exemplified by artists such as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes. One commentator (I think it was Bob Boilen) equated this with the ‘death of the boom box’: the public listening experience of the boom box has given way to the more solitary and intimate experience of music through iPod headphones.

I thought it was interesting how there could be this synergy between musical trends/evolution and the evolution of our collective listening habits. Then of course, being the nerd academic I am, I started wondering what kind of sociotechnical theory could be used to account for this. Does technical change cause musical change, or vice versa? Do they mutually shape each other? Are they causally unrelated, and the iPod experience just happens to accentuate one of the current musical moods?

I’m not going to work through all that, and it may be just coincidence. But even if it is, I still think it’s interesting to think about how technology design shapes the way that we relate to and experience music.

Online banking, warm fuzzies, and the impersonal personal

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:23:44 -0400

A few days ago when I logged into my online bank account, I was greeted by a banner wishing me a happy birthday from said bank. It wasn’t exactly my birthday yet, but I still had a split-second reaction of ‘awww, how sweet’ when I saw the message. This is in spite of the fact that I know no one at my bank actually knows who I am, and that banner was probably triggered by some conditional line of code that executed when the date got close to my birthday.

This is yet another example of the ‘impersonal personal’ that technology makes so easy. Another common example is when Facebook reminds you of a friend’s birthday. This frequently triggers a flood of wall posts from well-wishing friends, many of whom would not have had a clue that it was that person’s birthday if Facebook hadn’t told them.

This also reminds me of a device that Jean Paul Jacob mentioned a couple weeks ago at the IBM Almaden Research Center in his delightful yearly multimedia presentation, “The Future is Not What It Used to Be.” The device is a pair of glasses that is integrated with a personal memory organizer (YouTube video here). The idea is that when you meet someone you can store information about them (like their picture and business card info), and then when you meet them again have that information displayed on the inside of your glasses so that it can make it easier for you to pretend that you actually remember who the person is. (This also reminds me of a scene from The Devil Wears Prada, except in that case the personal memory organizers were obsequious humans!)

I wonder if an increase in ‘impersonal personal’ interactions will lead to new ways of showing when something really is personal. It makes me think of how medieval knights raised their helmets as a gesture of friendship, to show that they trusted the other enough to make their noggins vulnerable. This morphed into the gesture of tipping one’s hat, several centuries later. (This may in fact be a totally false urban legend, but since it sounds good and helps me make my point I’m sticking with it.) I wonder if in this age there may be a parallel gesture of (literally or figuratively) raising one’s digitally enhanced memory glasses as a way of showing that none are needed. In other words, is there a way I can show that I remember your birthday, not because I saw it on Facebook or because a line of code executed at the right time, but because it - and you - are important enough for me to remember?

Identity management on the social web

Mon, 4 Aug 2008 23:05:06 -0400

I’ve been following a new web TV series on the open web at thesocialweb.tv. The weekly 15-20 minute episodes consist of a group of panelists covering recent developments and issues in the effort to build the social web, where different social applications all play nicely together and share their data seamlessly.

These tech guys are of course approaching this as a technology problem. The technology is certainly a big part of it, but what seems equally important to me is the issue of identity management. Different social sites frequently serve different purposes, and the data that users put on them is often targeted at different audiences (professional separated from personal, for example). It may make it easier in terms of data entry and maintenance to have profile information flow between them, but this is a nightmare for identity management. It seems that what we need is some type of super application to manage the data flows to the different sites - ‘one site to rule them all’ and provide awareness and control over exactly what is going where (and to whom).

I did hear the first brief mention of identity management in this week’s episode, but I think there really needs to be more critical thought given to the social implications of these technologies. In other words, I think it’s time to call in the social informaticians! =)

On the other hand, I also wonder if the identities of the future will become more seamless. Maybe the children of the digital generation will be so used to playing out their digital lives on the web that maintaining strict boundaries among different facets of life will seem as passé as poodle bangs. Only time will tell.