This document discusses the changing role of designers as digital technologies and ubiquitous computing become more prevalent. It notes that designers now must understand how people will interact with and experience technologies, as passive actions can now have unintended consequences. As sensors and data collection become more common, designers' work involves making invisible data flows understandable to users. The interconnected nature of digital technologies means that adding a network connection can significantly change any medium.

1. Urbicomp &
new new media.
Chris Heathcote / @antimega
London IA, April 2011
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2. The specialist designer.
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How many people here are called an IA at work? What about a designer? I find it hard to
describe what I do any more, if I say I’m a designer, people want to know what I’ve made, and
I haven’t made anything for years. I spend a lot of time ghostwriting for an idiot-savant
tunafish at the moment.

3. makes calls
3
I’ve worked on pretty much every different design aspect of mobile phones in the last 8
years. When I started, this was the model to get. It was amazing. No visible antenna!

4. makes calls
colour screen
takes photos
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Within months, this phone had come out. It had a colour screen! It had a camera! I was living
in the future. This totally changed what a phone was, and what it could be. I remember
spending a lot of time working with a company to put various ways of photo sharing in the
silicon of a couple of models of phones - this was the only way to add functionality.

5. makes calls
colour screen
takes photos
browse web
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And soon, this came out. It could browse the web. (just). This totally changed what a phone
was, and what it could be.

6. makes calls record video
colour screen listen to radio
takes photos Facebook
browse web run apps
play games
write email
play music
video call
knows where it is
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And they just kept on changing. In less than a decade we went from a phone that magically
had no wires to mundane Star Trek.

7. makes calls record video
colour screen listen to radio
takes photos Facebook
browse web run apps
play games be your tickets
write email be your keys
play music pay for things
video call
knows where it is
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(and it’s not stopping, yet)

8. Designer, engineer,
anthropologist,
sociologist.
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I think the role of designer has changed as much as the products. Designers have to
understand what stuff is available, they need to know some of how it works, how people will
use it, and how it will fit into their daily life. Interaction design has time as its medium, and
experience design has emotion.
I counted 26 different ways I can communicate with people with this iPhone. That’s illogical,
but each fulfils a slightly different role, and humans are great at understanding just the right
way to communicate with the right person in the right context. It’s pretty impossible to
design holistically, or design as an individual, these days.

9. A thing.
An action causes a
reaction.
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But at least it’s still a thing. It’s an understandable object. This used to often be what most
designers cared about. And then, it was all about interaction - objects would respond.

10. Things happen...
other things happen...
something happens to you.
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But we’re entering a weirder world now. We’re now able to collect large amounts of
information, piece together lots of different data and then act on it. Actions can be displaced
by time and space, and transmogrified into outcomes no-one would have predicted.

11. 11
Although you’re still acting on the world, it’s all quite seemingly innocuous passive actions.
The fact that doing anything can now have a reaction generates a real sense of unease.
I received this email recently. I’d been to the Tate the day before, they’d scanned my
membership card at the entrance to the exhibition.
It felt weird for two reasons: the first is that you don’t expect everything to be joined up. You
don’t think your membership card is linked to your email address. Secondly, it’s really
personal. It’s not from Tate, it’s from Jessica Morgan. It’s addressed to me.

12. 12
Another example. TfL mine Oyster data to see what routes you frequently use, and email you
if there are long-term engineering works.

13. 13
Lovely, bless ‘em, but even the mode change from web browsing to web mail feels freaky.

14. 14
and more customer relationship management. It’s something I’m fascinated by - for example
many good restaurants keep details of everything you ate and drank, and sometimes even
attach your photo or Google you before you arrive.

15. A world of sensors and
the sensed.
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So we’re in a world of sensors, where all kinds of things can be sensed and reacted upon.

16. 16
This is a Japanese vending machine. It looks the same as many others, but it’s actually a 47
inch touch screen. It’s got a camera built in, recognises age and gender, and tailors drink
suggestions accordingly.
Using the same technology, there’s also a digital screen network that changes the ads
presented based on who’s walking past.
Pretty much all screens will have a camera built in - they’re really cheap. But how does it
change the relationship between people and public space?

17. Adding a network
connection changes any
medium.
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Even media we’ve had centuries to perfect and understand suddenly changes when you plug
the Internet into it.

18. 18
Even something like a receipt can change when you add a network connection. This is from a
project by Dentsu London and BERG exploring incidental media. Print can be fast. Live data,
the news, the weather could be included... the purpose of the receipt can be changed.

19. 19
Similarly, what happens if a TV gets a network connection? Why isn’t the ticker made up of
information important to you?

20. Design is about wrangling
invisible ows of data.
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personal data, private data, friends data, public data, urban data. They’re unseen and
intangible, and it’s our job as designers to both instantiate them - make them real - and
make them understandable.

21. 40p o a latte.
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The cliche of ubiquitous computing is that as you walk past a starbucks, your phone will
vibrate with a coupon for 40p off a latte. It’s an unscalable, unsustainable example, but lets
unpick what could be going on.
First off - what ratted on you? Your Nike+ talking shoes, using a credit card nearby, your car
number plate being recognised, your phone reporting your location, or your Oyster card
informing the system that you’ve just come out of Oxford Circus tube?
Next, why you? Maybe your credit card or Foursquare checkins told them you prefer Cafe
Nero. Your age and gender are mixed with your home address’ purchasing profile, plus your
social standing from Facebook and Twitter.
And why now? The store has lower sales this hour than normal - in fact there’s no queue. You
didn’t take them up on the offer last time - they’d only offered 20p off - but you really want
a coffee, and as you enter the store, the barista greets you by name, as your details and
photo have popped up on her till.
That’s a lot of work to sell a latte.

22. Magic is an awful lot of
hard work behind-the-
scenes.
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To appear effortless in real-time takes a lot of work. Computing is cheap, thankfully.

23. 23
This has been going on for a while. This is an extract from the ACORN database, which
classifies every postcode in the UK. It’s used to make decisions on your credit, the advertising
that appears around you, the offers you’ll be given.
Was spun out of the Great Universal home shopping business - they also had their own home
delivery network, a vertically integrated business before it was cool.

24. ANPR.
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And Governments love these kinds of large databases. The UK Automatic Numberplate
Recognition system stitches together over 10 thousand CCTV cameras operated by various
councils and government authorities, and stores over 15 million number plate reads a day.
It’s designed to 'deny criminals the use of the road'.

25. 25
Supposedly Brazil is working on a system that can identify people and will be portable by
2014. I know it’s not possible now, but what about in 2 cycles of Moore’s Law? Is this a case
of creating design fiction to make it happen?

26. How do we take back
control and make urban
computing work for us?
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I’m interested in how this stuff changes our daily life, and I’m particularly interested in the
very mundane daily uses.

27. A car that knows where
the nearest free parking
space is to your
destination.
27
I think of a car as a big mobile phone you sit in. It has many of the same capabilities and
characteristics (other than moving at 90 miles an hour). This seems like an easy problem -
after all nearly every car has GPS in now.

28. 28
But how do you know if a space is free? Well, modern carparks now have parking guidance
systems.

29. 29
Again, not a new thing - this has been a little bit of future urban computing installed for the
last 30 years (photos from Swarco, a traffic solutions company).

30. 30
But now the resolution is changing. Rather than just a count in and out of the carpark, every
parking spot has a sensor and light above it. It detects if the space is free, and sends that
information to the central computer, that knows where every space is, and can direct cars
accordingly.
This is large scale informatics - Westfield London has 4500 spaces, Heathrow Terminal 5 has
3800. Some also incorporate number plate reading cameras, so if you can’t remember where
you parked you car, they can find it.
This data is only useful to us, however, if it’s networked, and available in real-time - and
you’re car has mobile connectivity and a way of interpreting and presenting the data.

31. Food that texts you when
it’s going out of date.
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OK, another example. Your shopping basket can answer back. Again, we’re nearly there with
this...

32. 32
Supermarkets have to know when food goes out of date for stock control. Ocado provide this
information on paper, on your receipt.
But what if you could choose to receive a text message each day? Or if your shopping had a
Twitter account?

33. It’s about being relevant,
in the right place, at the
right moment.
Personal computing.
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34. We have places we
naturally put our stu .
Keys, wallet, phone.
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Jan Chipchase did a lot of work looking at centres of gravity - how and where people store
their essential stuff, when mobile and at home.

35. What’s the equivalent for
data?
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No-one’s really cracked the ability to display the relevant, contextual data you need. The
closest we are now is a mobile phone with an app for each different need. Dentsu’s incidental
media film showed some ideas of how data can inhabit different contexts. How do we place
the data where it’s used?

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How can data pervade our home? EDF and Tinker created a project called Homesense to look
at how people could wrangle data and electronics themselves to create useful urban
computing interventions in the home.
One of the best examples is Russell Davies’ bikemap. It displays the availability of TfL bikes
near his home. That’s all. It’s hyperpersonalised, and it changes the way you use urban
infrastructure. What’s also interesting is the homeliness of it, and how it has to look like a
finished product.

37. 37
This is DisplayCabinet, a (slightly smoke and mirrors) demo Ben Bashford, Tim Burrell-Saward
and Dan Williams made for the Pachube Hack Day. It identifies your personal objects via RFID
and displays relevant information around them. I’m really interested in what can be done with
pico and nano projectors, especially in the home. Dust off those ergonomics books, there’s
lots to be done.

38. Mundanecomp and the
new DIY.
Arduino, Processing, Python, Pachube,
OpenFrameworks, Cinder...
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You can think of a million ways to improve household products and objects. Why does my
washing machine beep when it’s finished rather than text me?
So these are our new tools and materials. Do designers need to know this stuff? Well, yes, we
have to know our tools and materials intimately. And it’s only people like us that will abstract
away the difficulty to make useful products and services for others.

39. Thank you.
@antimega
anti-mega.com
dentsulondon.com
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