I have to say, going to a conference has a different feel when you’re a presenter and not just a punter. I end up paying more attention to presentation techniques (the transitions, the things that work, the things that can go wrong) as well as how panels frame the content – what they include and leave out. And being on the last day leaves more room for prep and anticipation and less room for partying. Oh wellz.

The first panel I got to was Touch + The Holy Grail of Delight. This seemed the most like Beyond Sci-fi so I was especially curious. Turns out it’s a bit of a different focus, theirs being retail. They talked through their use cases on immersive out-of-home touch screens that augment and personalize product information in stores.

There is some crossover with my talk in getting at the importance of multi-platform strategy. Us UX designers just can’t stand the thought of porting what’s essentially a web site to these emerging platforms. The more we can get that across to clients the better!

Being a touchy-feely day, I also caught A Touchy History of the Future. The talk basically covered some emerging and futuristic technologies like brain interfaces, RFID, jetpacks, etc. with some thoughts on how compelling or viable they were. Um, I think. They were actually couched in terms of how compelling or viable they were in a future zombie apocalypse. Kinda funny, kinda random. But I agree with Stassi on voice (it’s too loud).

The last one I caught was PayTV vs. Internet – The Battle For Your TV. Or rather, I caught the first few minutes until the Austin Convention Center had to be evacuated (!). I think it turned out a false alarm, but in the confusion I didn’t catch the rest – and really wish I did.

I wished the *showdown* between Cuban and Ronen was framed a little better for those unfamiliar with their apparent blogging saga. I didn’t entirely know what they were fighting about being that the issue is large and complicated. But from the little I saw as well as the blogging and scanning some tweets, I’d have to side with Cuban.

From looking his blog, I believe Ronen is naive as to how complex and interconnected the economics and practicalities of content production, marketing/distribution and infrastructure are. He sees the current system as flawed and the inevitable direction more choice and segmentation. But the current system works for the average user. You can try to end broadcast as we know it, but something fairly similar would spring up in it’s place.

We at SXSW are a unique bunch. We crave interactivity and choice and open systems, but for most people all that amounts to is more work (to find media) and much less payoff (in quality). Content bubbles up in You Tube because of one reason: it’s short. People are not going to browse 1/2 or 1 hour shows or 2 hour movies to find what’s good. That would take all day. Someone else will end up doing it. And while they’re at it, they should make the quality better so it doesn’t look like it was shot in someone’s bedroom. And next thing you know, you got an industry of networks and production companies that is looking for exposure through the people who build a wide-reaching technical platform, i.e. cable companies.

I also think the hate of cable companies is curious in that they seem to be the potential partners of the Boxee business model (making the software and hardware of set-top boxes). I totally understand the burning desire to make a single, optimized platform. TV platforms are unique (in a bad way) because unlike any other device, the TV is a single display that switches between a bunch of wildly different computers that are running through it. Integration is a noble goal, but you would need more that a great UI for that experience. You need content and the wires to get it to people.

Granted, I’m not exactly non partisan on this issue. I work on UI for, oddly enough, Ronen’s own maligned provider Cablevision. Because of vastly different technology and histories, the iTV and internet communities have strangely little contact together, but people in iTV certainly know of UI trends and social networking. The development cycles are also huge and hardware roll-out is glacial as opposed to the ADD device replacement of consumer-driven PCs and web. There are definitely ways iTV can change and it indeed is. There’s just a lot of procedural and economic complexity dealing with infrastructure and content licensing. TV can learn from the internet, but I also think the internet is also going to have to deal with this – only in retrospect. You used to have a business model first, then work on the product. Internet sometimes works in the opposite way, but you eventually have to end up in the same place – viable and sustainable.

I’m really trying to understand this issue in that it’s a crucial one for the future of ALL media. It relates to similar challenges in music and (in the wake of Kindle and iPad) books and is one I hope to explore in greater depth. But for now, I really must get some sleep. -.-

Jochen Winker and Stefan Kuzaj, students in Germany, allow users to “experience” water pollution statistics with objects on a digital table display…

I’ll be talkin’ Tue. March 16 at 5pm in Austin, TX with developer Daniel Williams about Beyond Scifi: Design For Surfaces and Big Screens. In true beyond sci-fi fashion, I’ll give you a space food stick if you show up early and ask.

…update…
Here are the slides from our talk (with some very slight revisions for web posting). Podcast is scheduled to post in August.

Any discussion of NUI inevitably leads to controlling computers with your mind. A 60 Minutes segment from a little over a year ago shows the state of the technology via its most important users – those without any other alternative. It’s still slow and cumbersome (even with sensors surgically inserted into your head) so will likely remain a novelty to the average able-bodied user for some time to come. But perhaps growing interest will help those in need.

less intrusive headset from Emotiv for $300

Though I’d usually peg Apple for being a little more elegant, they’ve made the interesting decision in Quicktime Player 10 to put the controls over the video. I often use Quicktime at work for reviewing motion tests – short videos of UI that require detailed scrutiny, replays and scrubbing – so this feature has rendered the application virtually useless by constantly blocking the thing I’m looking at.

This may be a specific usage, but I doubt it’s rare and I’m not sure which user would *want* their video obscured when it clearly doesn’t have to be (c.f. Apple Quicktime 1-7). Maybe it seems more integrated or more like TV, though porting over the limitations of other platforms when not applicable is a strange kind of progress.

Also fascinating, and less frustrating, is their new 80s sci-fi icon (below left).

Luckily you can still get Quicktime 7 while anticipating the fate of this feature. However if you have Snow Leopard you have to install from the installer DVD.

I thought VLC media player would be better and has the added bonus of playing Windows Media files, but instead of controls it adds the file name on top of video. People just can’t leave video well enough alone.

It’s that time of year when Steve Jobs comes down from the mount and shares with us the latest impending Apple gadget. I followed this more closely than usual with an interest in multi-touch and was less surprised by the product and more intrigued by the lackluster response. Though apparently this is the drill with our volatile relationship with Apple products (noted by HuffPo and NYT amongst others).

However, thinking through a tablet and the best possible execution and positioning for the historically awkward platform, I’d be hard pressed to come up with something better. Lack of flash support isn’t great. Apple’s closed system has it’s downsides, but being an elitist control freak is what begets such holistic superior design. No multitasking has its advantages. They’re choices, trade-offs. If you’ve ever made anything you know you have to make hundreds to thousands of them, and few make them as well as Steve.

What’s notable in the iPad is less what’s emerging as what it’s ending – specifically, print and point & click. By introducing it as standing on the shoulders of Kindle, it’s clearly positioned to do what iPods did for music and CDs. The past few hundred years of books, magazines, and newspapers is over and a new, super easy digital ecosystem is being built to take their place. This is the last nail in the coffin for analogue media and something no general-use tablet has been positioned to do.

The other significant feature is that it is the first completely multi-touch computer designed as such, as opposed to a laptop with a keyboard and trackpad and a few awkward touch functions. This challenges the 25-year dominance of the mouse as primary computer input device. With the iPad being largely experiential and not in release, there’s much missing in live blogcasts of a product release keynote and even more lost on its most important potential audience – casual users. ‘Everyone’ is definitely a much larger and viable market than those sought by traditional tablets (realtors and doctors in TV shows?) or even of Apple computers (design/media professionals, rich hipsters?).

If the feel truly is as natural as early reports indicate, this awkward platform may emerge for the vast majority of people who just want computers for a few basic tasks and were never totally comfortable with the traditional computer platform. It’s like an anti-computer that is more out of the way than in your face. Given their prominence, hardware experience, and lowish price point, Apple may use portables success to sneak in the back door to personal computer dominance.

This is not to say there’s aren’t shortcomings, but dissecting its feature set may prove as irrelevant as doing one for mp3 players where “iPod” brand ubiquity borders on that of “Kleenex”. That’s why I think the reaction is interesting. The tech community’s judgment of tech and what comes to pass may or may not be related. Tech addicts can pull out potentially game changing features where others just don’t get the implications (Twitter always comes to mind), but there’s also ecosystem, integration, price point, and product narrative/positioning. When you read about tech all the time it’s easy to get very cerebral about it and forget about actual experiences – what made it to release, what works well, what users will or absolutely will not tolerate, what real-world relationships are involved in getting it right. But all of these things are crucial for market dominance and create the chasm referred to in diffusion theory.

Given the frenzy of disruptive technologies of the last decade I think we’re in for ever higher expectations and diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that what makes a movie or future visions ‘futuristic’ is that it’s weird to us, but common to the subjects. People’s everyday is mundane, effortless and natural. It becomes invisible not because of failure but by surpassing all its clumsy predecessors. What’s big and new never stays that way and is sometimes opposite of what’s just right.

Though it has been over 10 years since its opening, Encounter restaurant at the LAX theme building remains a fascinating example of total experience design. It’s nice when an architectural landmark can be re-contextualized to fit it’s own crazy space age reality thanks to interior design, sound design (is that Lalo Schifrin in the elevator?), and sophisticated-ly kitsch identity design (by Adams-Morioka). Eddie Sotto talks about the project here as head of Walt Disney Imagineering team that worked on it.

Though the building is enduring some exterior work, the food is less inspiring and upkeep is not always keeping up, it is still an inspiring piece of LA. These kind of multi-sensory projects with such a strong look and feel are rare outside of family entertainment and make art of everyday life.

Cute conceptual dress called Skin for maternity, or not. I can’t find them anywhere for purchase, but you can try asking designer Marisol Rodriguez.

You could get to the 5 north from the far left lane of the 110 north in downtown LA, but this wasn’t reflected in signage so artist Richard Ankrom added it in 2001. CalTrans just made it official last month.

photo by Gary Leonard

Oh, you distracting lower thirds!