Slides from my presentation at the Share Festival (Warm-Up talk on October 20, 2010)

2. 2 ingredients in this
talk: failed robots and
french tarts

3. Accidents and Failures
as Fertile Creative
Ground for the Near
Future
nicolas nova
Torino, Oct. 20, 2010

4. Outline
1. Accidents and malfunctions are hot
topics
2. A typology of failures
3. Design and accidents
4. How to benefit from failures (in my
practice)

7. EPIC FAIL GUY

10. A typology of failures

11. Technical accidents

12. Technical accidents

13. Technical accidents: flawed
sensors

14. Technical accidents: flawed
sensors

15. Technical accidents: wrong results

16. Technical accidents: messages

17. Technical accidents: weird
messages

18. Technical accidents: weird
messages

19. Technical accidents: frustration

20. Technologies and frustration
“The applications in which the frustrating
experiences happened most frequently were
web browsing, e-mail, and word processing. (...)
The time lost due to frustrating experiences
ranged from 47-53% of time spent on a
computer depending on the location and study
method.”
“Determining Causes and Severity of End-User
Frustration” by Ceaparu, Lazar, Bessiere,
Robinson & Shneiderman (2002)

21. Intentional accident

22. Intentional accident: punch/hit/
kick

23. Intentional accident: but...

24. Non-intentional accident

25. Non-intentional accident

26. User’s involvementNon-intentional Intentional
Role of
technology
iPhone dropped
in toilet
Kick vending
machineAutomatic
door
Annoying robot
Punching your
computer because it’s
not responsive
Typology of failures -> design

27. User’s involvementNon-intentional Intentional
Role of
technology
Design: minimize failures + avoid accidents

28. Anatomy of a failure: automatic
doors

29. Failure in action: automatic devices
weather-dependent calibration!?
distinguish automatic from non-automatic
too quickly/too slowly
open when you don’t want it too
invisible or illegible “locus of control”:
floor? door side?
different “door” conventions

30. automatic doors: wrong
mental model

31. solution to build a
mental model

32. users unaware of sensors
position and wrong calibration

33. “15 minutes”: who decides
this anyway?

34. individual-blame bias (e. rogers)

35. Accidents and failure as design
material

36. future of robots = look at how people treat
switches and vending machines!
1. Foresight: from here to there

37. Love, hate and a hospital
robot: http://cli.gs/T7VH6e
‘The fact that the robot couldn't tell
if it was a good time to interrupt and
announce its presence was a big
problem for some people, as one
member of the nursing staff
described: "I called it nasty names
and told it, 'Would you shut the hell
up? Can't you see I'm on the phone?
If you say "TUG has arrived" one more
time I'm going to kick you in your
camera.' "
Some staff members actually did
lash out and kick TUG in frustration,
more admitted to considering it.’

38. 2. The user experience of broken
artifacts

39. 2. What minimal features should be
implemented?

40. 3. Seamful design: friction can be
part of the solution
Project with Simpliquity (Fabien Girardin and Pierre Dillenbourg)

41. 3. Seamful design: use the limits
Project with Céline Le Marc

42. Provoke failures and observe
people’s behavior
4. Anti-probe

43. Case 1: errors in a location-
based games

44. "I did not move physically, but I
saw me moving on the map!"
“I saw that Ben moved on the
screen but I know he did not".

45. Case 1: provoke failure as a way to
understand users’ mental models

46. "Determining the limits of pain during robot-
human impacts this way will allow the design of
robot motions that cannot exceed these limits"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827826.700-
robot-arm-punches-human-to-obey-asimovs-rules.html

47. Case 2: wrong calibration on
the Wii

48. Case 2: provoke failure as a tactic
to change the user experience

49. ➡ We need to go beyond “failure is cool and funny”
➡ Different kinds of failures/accidents/malfunctions
➡ They often result from the incompatibilities between
the way things are designed and the way people
actually perceive, think, and act
➡ Failures and accident as a design tactic
➡ We collect design patterns, use cases, we should
also collect “failure cases” as inspirational data
Conclusion

50. “the Tarte Tatin was first created by accident at the Hotel Tatin in Lamotte-
Beuvron, France in 1898.The hotel was run by two sisters, Stéphanie and
Caroline Tatin. Conflicting stories concerning the tart's origin:
- One of the sister was overworked one day. She started to make a
traditional apple pie but left the apples cooking in butter and sugar for too
long. Smelling the burning, she tried to rescue the dish by putting the pastry
base on top of the pan of apples, quickly finishing the cooking by putting th
whole pan in the oven.After turning out the upside down tart, she was
surprised to find how much the hotel guests appreciated the dessert.
- An alternative version: one of the sister baked a caramelised apple tart
upside-down by mistake”
The Wikipedia

51. grazie!
nicolas@liftlab.com
@nicolasnova