Author Archives: justinalvey

A natural human-computer interface

Fascinating article on why The human body will be the next computer interface, by service design consultancy Fjord. To extract the key points:

“Why swipe your arm when you can just rub your fingers together. What could be more natural than staring at something to select it, nodding to approve something? This is the world that will be possible when we have hundreds of tiny sensors mapping every movement, outside and within our bodies. For privacy, you’ll be able to use imperceptible movements, or even hidden ones such as flicking your tongue across your teeth.”

“The possible interactions are almost limitless and move us closer and closer to a natural human-computer interface. At this point, the really intriguing thing is that the interface has virtually disappeared; the screens are gone, and the input devices are dispersed around the body.”

And meanwhile, what if digital interfaces became more tactile…

Why Makerbot selling to Stratasys makes sense

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An annoying effect of printing with a Makerbot, or any other FDM printer, is creating supports that are tricky to remove.

Stratasys own the rights to a water-soluble printing material. If Makerbot get’s to use this for printing support materials, you’ll be able to print beyond geometric constraints, dip the result into water and dissolve away the rest.

3D printing is still in the dot-matrix era. In fact, having a 3D printer next to a laser printer completes the metaphor. But thinking exponentially – in the same way a touchscreen connected to any other screen in the world would appear mind-bending to someone designing a better quill and ink pot, it’s hard to not underestimate what 3D printing can bring.

Mapping new senses for health monitoring

The feelSpace is a belt designed to indicate where North is by vibration. The incredible effect occurs after a while when the wearer would start to develop a strong intuitive sense of direction. Similar projects involve augmenting a sense of balance to people with damaged inner ears, and spatial awareness to the blind through sending electric shocks to the tongue. The incredible flexibility of the human brain means we can plug in new senses through existing ones such as touch or sight.

So what else can we plug in? An existing trend in healthcare is making data easier to visualize and therefore more meaningful. We could go one step further and use this sensory augmentation to effectively sense key health indicators and gain a greater awareness of our body and the effect of our lifestyle. This is profound.

For example, elevated insulin is one of the primary causes of heart disease, as well as diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer and  other health conditions. Stable blood glucose levels also have a significant effect on mental performance, mood, and general well being. It may seem strange that we aren’t doing more to measure and act on this unless we’re diabetic or our life depends on it. But testing blood glucose testing hasn’t been cheap, fun or easy.  And for continuous feedback, the sensor typically needs to be embedded underneath your skin in a way that it is exposed to constant bloodflow which has complications.

The C8 Medisensors turns this on it’s head by using light to accurately and non-invasively measure blood glucose. It won’t be long before one of these devices can be small enough to be integrated into our clothing at which time it will be trivial to gain a realtime awareness of our blood glucose and we can start to gain a better understanding of the effect of our lifestyle habits on our health. If observation is the best behavioral change mechanism, we could learn how to live healthier lives and potentially prevent these diseases before they develop.

“It might seem as if the importance of hardware is fading, but ironically, hardware design is becoming more valuable to us. Industrial design is hot again. It turns out that as things become more software-driven, more ephemeral, our need to connect with the visceral, touchable stuff increases.”

Mark Rolston, frog

Combining Myo, Minuum and Google Glass

A few projects have been surfacing that hint that in the near future we probably won’t be walking around the world, looking down and poking at 4″ touchscreens. Follow the sequence below…

Meet Minuum – a project to linearise the keyboard and in doing so allow it to easily be mapped to new inputs.

Now meet Myo – an armband that lets you use the electrical activity in your muscles for gesture control. Unlike the Leap it doesn’t require your hand to be in front of a camera for it to pick up your gestures and is therefore more appropriate for when you are not behind your desk. Mapping minor gestures to a new type of keyboard, like Minuum above, is a good use case.

And we all know Glass – the wearable, head-mounted display from Google X Lab, that (relevant to this use case) has been criticized for the potential awkwardness of voice commands in urban or noisy environments.

Stick these three together and you have a new immersive, yet discreet, way of interacting technology, where one can use gestures to type messages, control actions, and interact with the world around us. This type of interaction has shown up before, in the form of a MIT Media Lab project called SixthSense, consisting of a projector and camera that hangs around your neck. It projects a display onto everyday objects you encounter, using the camera to recognize hand gestures by tracking color markers on your fingers. But two fundamental things will be different:

  • Instead of requiring a surface to project onto, the display becomes more personal and versatile for everyday applications. Only you can see it and it’s overlayed in the top corner of your eye – there when you need it.
  • Instead of measuring your hand moving in physical space with a camera, one can measure the intent of moving your hand through electromyography. This means gestures can be more subtle and potentially more accurate as you can map commands directly to nerve signals, measuring closer to the source.

The specifics of this new model for how we carry around and interact with technology will probably vary. Having an actual projection may in some cases be useful, as well as less costly than Google Glass. Minuum are even working on hardware themselves, such as rings, bands and other wearable technology, which will most likely also use EMG signals and accelerometers.

However any other combinations will probably result in the same general outcome: mapping basic movements to an interface in a way that the technology is no longer just contained within one device but spread across a few seamlessly integrated systems. This is a pretty good example of the trend of ubiquity (think invisible omnipresence) in computing that we’ll see more of in the future. 

The market winner will be the one that manages to combine this tech into a persuasive and complete product, designing an interaction that manages to avoid the “Segway effect” thats bound to come with a new technology that involves you wearing strange headsets or making weird movements in public, no matter how inconspicious they are.

Some notes

The following are some thoughts I’ve jotted down over the years that I recently found. It felt appropriate to collect them together.

Find your log cabin

It’s too easy in today’s world to drown out your inner voice.  The most creative and productive times I’ve had were from stepping out of normal ways of thinking and focusing on what was important. The Bon Iver album was written from a log cabin. Some of the most inspiring and over-performing people I’ve met still take the time for reading vacations or a week in the desert. Take some time once in a while to disconnect and hear your own voice.

Embrace new experiences

The insights gained from not being afraid to step into new fields has been invaluable, as well as being a way to solve existing problems using new ways of thinking. The more you do this, the greater your chances of serendipitous new discoveries and your ability to see the larger picture, and “connect the dots” across different fields.

Neurologically, new experiences exercises neuroplasticity – the flexibility and “youthfulness” of your brain. To quote Seneca: “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

Learn to eliminate

“In the pursuit of knowledge, something is added every day. In the pursuit of enlightenment, something is dropped every day.”

Lao Tzu

By eliminating what is not important you make room for what is. Minimalism is all about this. Re-prioritise how you spend your time and who you spend it with – what you fill your life with will shape who you become.

Ignore the resistance

The things that are the most important for us to do are for some reason the scariest. It’s easy to be a rhetoric and talk about ideas. Seth Godin calls it the “lizard-brain” , and it’s convenient to give in to it and persuade yourself that something is too hard. Some of the most successful people were delusional enough to try things that a realistic and grounded person would have dismissed as impossible.

Be prepared to be a pirate

Paul Graham, of Y-Combinator praises “naughtiness”, the well-intentioned willingness to hack and challenge, as being a factor he looks for in founders. The Mac team in the 80’s called themselves pirates. If you see a better future be prepared to challenge the status quo to achieve it, as you can’t rely on everyone believing that what you’re doing is right. Having a cause to believe in will guide you though and make what you do more meaningful and ultimately more successful.

Do what you love

The most over-quoted phrase, but doing what you love is the biggest leveraging factor of doing something successfully. Finding what you love may not be easy. For me it seemed to sometimes defy all logic, but I did it anyway. Each step will peel back a layer to get you closer to your core of who you are. The closer you get, the more right it feels. And the answer is always a lot simpler than you expected when you started searching.

“Sketching” the next big thing

An article on Core77 mentions how sketching in hardware allows designers to focus on “exploring variations of experiences” rather than “reassembling the building blocks”. While this way of working has enabled the lean, explorative and customer-focused approach to software development, it is starting to spread into the design and production of hardware as well.

Focusing on the experience

In a design school they’ll teach you to prototype early and often. By “sketching” and initially not focusing on the details of the technology, you can shorten your time to prototype and jump ahead to focus on crafting the end experience as soon as possible.

You can even do this with little or no actual technology. In the human-computer interaction field there’s Wizard-of-Oz prototyping, in which technology effects are simulated with a human “behind the curtain” controlling the experience. Wireframing lets you mockup interfaces or interactions without writing any code, and even from paper sketches. Jeff Hawkins, on inventing the Palm Pilot, carried a wooden block around with him, pretending to check his mail throughout the day, and in doing so was learning if and how someone would use such a device.

The Airbnb founders were crafting their experience by being on the ground acting as their customers would. Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn was learning if and how people would buy shoes online, by taking photos of shoes in a store, posting them on a website, and upon purchase, manually buying and delivering them to his customers.

The premise of customer development and the lean startup approach is that startups rarely fail due to lack of engineering execution – it’s not whether they can build their product, but whether they are building the right thing – something that addresses a need and customers will pay money for. Similar to the design-school approach, the message rings clear: Build a minimum viable product to get you to the point where you can launch and start learning from real situations.

Building on top of platforms

In software, the open source movement has been making it easier and faster to piece together a complete experience. Frameworks, libraries, packages, gem’s, API’s – all make it easier to tap into existing platforms to build new things. The existence of platforms have been a precursor to innovation throughout history -Tim Berners-Lee was able to build the world wide web by building on top of a lot of existing internet protocols. And while HDTV took 20 years and an ensemble of experts to become a reality, three guys were able to build Youtube in 6 months using existing web platforms. 

The hardware revolution

The exciting thing is we’re now seeing a rise in hardware development platforms. The revolution that reduced the cost and difficulty of putting a software product in front of a large audience, is starting to happen in hardware. 3D printing gives you the quick and dirty prototypes. Open source hardware (think Arduino shields) let you plug in the functionality, intelligence and interactivity you require with minimal development time or costs. And the Kickstarter model lets you simultaneously get market validation and upfront payment – offsetting the high production costs that made investment in hardware startups so scary.

There are still some growing pains but I think the building blocks are in place, and it’s an exciting path ahead.