Design lessons from pinball

I went to a very cool underground pinball hall in Zurich tonight for a friend’s going away party. While there I noticed a number of interesting design choices that make for a good pinball experience.

* Give people lots of points: nearly every action in pinball gets you thousands of points. Simply shoot the ball onto the table and you win 400,000 points. They’re all relative, of course, and to the game that isn’t very much. But it makes you feel great as a player.
* Free play is different: my friend paid for the tables to be free all night, which took the pressure off and let people play freely. It also reduced the tension in the game, which is part of the fun for some people. It’s important to decide what’s free and what’s expensive in your experience.
* Keep people in the flow: flow is important in all experiences, but in pinball gradually increasing complexity keeps you engaged with a mechanically static table.
* Frustration is an opportunity for grace: the best example of this is when a ball goes directly in the trap after the launch; most machines will pop it back on the table right away. What would have been a frustrating and disappointing mistake is turned into a pleasant surprise. Look for ways to turn the worst aspects of your experience into surprise gifts.

Kramer the movie expert

I use this as an example all the time for how people really want to search.

YouTube – Kramer the movie expert [Seinfeld S7E08] Moviephone.

The Desk

Several creative people talk about their desks. Lots of different approaches, from Einstein’s clutter to Massimo Vignelli’s minimalism.

“I like to start the day fresh. If I start the day with things left over, it’s like starting dinner with leftovers — it kills your appetite.” – [Massimo Vignelli](http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=15088)

London Futures

Some fantastic [images of a future London where climate change has wreaked havoc](http://www.london-futures.com/category/images/).

Really compelling design work.

Content and context

> What is context? It’s the operating framework in which the content occurs — the goal, one might say. For example, the design of the Apollo lunar module was content. The goal of landing a man on the moon in nine years was the context. You will get a completely different result from engineers working on a lunar module if the context is "some day we might go to the moon" than if its "were going in nine years.” – Dan Pallotta.

I’ve been trying hard to focus my work energy on deciding context first, rather than immediately jumping to content.

Notes from Device Design Day

[Nice 1-day conference](http://devicedesignday.com/) by [Kicker Studio](http://www.kickerstudio.com/) last Friday. A few notes:

*Kim Goodwin and Michael Voege, IxD + ID*

– When ID & IxD can work together from the start, can be a good convergence process. Start wild, gradually narrow down
– ID often requires more *emotional* cues from people in user research
– Daily, quick checkins are useful between design teams even in the separate design phases

*Stuart Karten, Hearing aids*

– People of *all* ages wanted the hearing enhancement one hearing aid company was offering; not just the old
– [Modemapping](http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2007/09/more_on_modemapping_a_cool_visualization_tool.html): research technique to chart all the activities a person does throughout the day by time and quality/happiness, to discover common pain points and patterns across people, then list out functional, behavioral, and social needs in those.
– Sample themes for ID of hearing aids: jewelry, algorithms/nature,
performance enhancement.
– Capacitive touch on the ear has issues when people brush their hair back
– Using an iPhone/Android app can be a good way to test touch interactions; just simulate the product onscreen and use the iPhone to respond to touch input

*Wendy Ju, Implicit Interactions*

– [Joe Malia’s privacy scarves are awesome](http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/06/what-happens-wh.php)
– Many important interactions take place in the “attentional periphery”: a doorman’s offer to open a door; a dog wagging its tail. Each communicates status, an offer, and acknowledgment of you.
– Implicit interaction axes: Foreground/Background, Proactive/Reactive. A single interaction can move around these quadrants. Most UIs today are Foreground + Reactive; lots of potential in the others

*Mike Kuniavsky, Information as a material*

– [FedEx Senseaware](http://www.senseaware.com/), a passive (soon active) device + web info system for packages
– Multiple screens (phone, tablet, desktop, tv) are “holes in space to the same thing”
– Are you building an APPLIANCE (limited functionality, focused UI) or a TERMINAL (infinite functionality, general UI)?
– A terminal: “a transparent window into services”

*Ian Myles, Astro Design*

– Concept design can be a fancy concept movie or a simple sketch with localized glowing; both convey the idea but the latter is much simpler
– [Intel Moorestown](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyQ_NWt_sjA&feature=related) device; ultra widescreen (32:9) suggests new
interactions/uses

*Dan Harden, Frog -> Whipsaw*

– Interesting Skymall items: [laser scissors](http://www.amazon.com/Northern-Industrial-Laser-Scissors/dp/B001OFOFJM); [overhead book holder](http://www.activeforever.com/p-236-levo-book-holder.aspx?CMPID=Froogle_levo-book-holder)
– “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his workand his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” – [LP Jacks](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Jacks)
– “Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.” – [Marcus Aurelius](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius)
– Livescribe pen lets you draw interface elements and then use them by touching: [http://waynehodgins.typepad.com/ontarget/2008/08/cool-tools- live.html](http://waynehodgins.typepad.com/ontarget/2008/08/cool-tools-live.html)
– “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are _obviously_ no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no _obvious_ deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. ” – [C.A.R. Hoare](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare)
– [Vudu remote control is beautiful](http://www.google.com/images?q=vudu%20remote%20control&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1328&bih=806)
– [InfiniteZ virtual holographic display system](http://www.infinitez.com/zspace/product)

*Julian Bleecker, Design Fiction*

– “[A Survey of Human-Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies](http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1363200.1363210)”
– “[Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision](http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1229069)” – Genevieve Bell
– “[Scientists on the Set](http://sppus.highwire.org/content/12/3/261.abstract)”, “[The Future is Now](http://sss.sagepub.com/content/40/1/41.abstract)”, & upcoming book “Science on the Silver Screen” by [David Kirby](http://www.davidakirby.com/)

Fred Brooks on design

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

via Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything | Magazine.

Giant cardboard robot suit

Yes please.

A great example of what my dad always called “using CAD: Cardboard-aided design. If you can make it out of cardboard, you might be able to make it out of metal. But if you can’t make it out of cardboard, you definitely won’t be able to make it out of metal.”

The Global Lives Project and virtual ethnography

[The Global Lives project](http://globallives.org/) is an effort “to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.”

They started with an exhibit of 10 people at the Yerba Buena Center. I missed that unfortunately but they’ve [put some of the video online](http://globallives.org/videos/). You can even view the raw 24 hours of footage for each person, linked at the bottom.

It’s interesting to think about this as a resource for virtual ethnography–just dial up 24 hours in the life of someone in your target market and observe them on demand…

Good design is messy

[I’ve written about this before](http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=261), but two great articles recently said it even better:

> Don’t try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. – [Bill Coyne of 3M, via Bob Sutton](http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/innovation-will-always-have-messy-parts-wisdom-from-ideos-david-kelley-and-3ms-bill-coyne.html)

> If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer…

> But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation…

> Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one’s creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life. – [Diego Rodriguez](http://metacool.typepad.com/metacool/2010/06/metacool-innovation-principle-18.html)