It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.
I totally agree that “Writing = Design” and you should hire him for Design/Writing/Illustration: https://christophrauscher.de/writing/
Something that Ed Zitron has already mentioned, internet users are being trained very rapidly to suspect everything to be a scam. In the case of honey, it’s a Paypal owned online shopping extension that lies and deceives.
I made the mistake of opening the desktop Spotify app which does not really work anymore. The UI is broken and there’s lots of irrelevant stuff going on.
Technology should become more useful, not more exploitative. It’s a simple thing to ask for.
(At some point, your music app is just done.)
Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.
Vivaldi on the other hand has a million settings which mostly show that nobody knows wat this app is supposed to be doing. There are entire note taking apps and e-mail clients in there but none of them fun or nice to use.
Products truly live and die in the pixels.
Nicolas from All About Berlin has done so much to make living in this administrative nightmare bearable for people. It’s a very clear example of what kind of 10-100x improvements are there to be had.
Logitech already has a forever mouse. No need for an MBA CEO to reinvent the wheel.
The G500s I bought in 2013 is still going strong, the only thing that’s missing is updated and functioning software to go with it. Logitech’s own driver offering was always absurdly bloated and after a couple of years dropped support for this particular model.
Most people should not bother with specialized productivity software but just see how far they can get with what’s already on their phones: Reminders, Notes and the likes. Apple has made these unassuming tools absurdly powerful without losing too much on usability.
https://fredbenenson.medium.com/advanced-topics-in-reminders-and-to-do-lists-c5edec286670
Threads works functionally but as a product it’s very bad. As this article mentions being on Threads is a slow-motion exercise in going insane. Threads actively disables many things that make microblogging work and for the rest of the experience there’s very little thought that went into it other than “let’s make a text-based Instagram and see what happens”.
Threads makes Mastodon feel engaging (and that’s saying something).
https://maxread.substack.com/p/threads-is-the-gas-leak-social-network
The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.
I don’t think that really matters that much other than serving to have the person making the comment show their ass for the entire world to see.
I feel that Apple Vision Pro is a deeply interesting and conflicted technology which is also the conclusion that Cortex reaches here. You’ll notice that Grey and Myke actually used the device and they are fairly knowledgeable about apps and ways of working/playing.
I got to take one home for a weekend and I can testify similarly except for missing out on a bunch of features. Because it’s only out in the US, I could not access a paid App Store or get an Apple Arcade subscription. That means I could only get the free vision apps out there which are incredibly lacklustre.
What everybody seems to have done is to take whatever IP they had lying around, wrap it into a VisionOS starter project and throw it onto the App Store. That will probably be the modus operandi for a while going forward. If you look at the absolute dregs on the App Store and now realise that making a good VisionOS app is probably at least 10x as difficult as making a good iOS app, then things are not looking good.
The only really compelling experience was the Encounter Dinosaurs app which is genuinely disconcerting and scary. But because of its very high production values, it’s also only a couple of minutes long.
Most compelling is using the Vision Pro to consume media. Watching movies in Disney+ is a fantastic experience if the device wasn’t so uncomfortable to use. Being able to watch sporting events on a massive screen with sidecar screens and 3D views of the course/track seems like it would also be excellent. It would be even more interesting if we would see a proliferation of 360 cameras to be able to place yourself in a Formula1 car or on a sports pitch. The amount of embodiment it yields, seems like it could go a long way to make remote meetings feel more real.
I agree with this review that this device is a devkit. I’ll wait for the real deal.
After trying apps by Sony and Garmin I think that Apple should be the only hardware manufacturer who’s allowed to write software.
Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.
Also I already know I’m going to use the term “side quest” a lot.
We don’t use Linear but we recently moved all our stuff from Jira to Github Projects which—even though it is mostly abandoned—is Linear-enough.
Most importantly, it is right on top of our codebase which is where I believe all engineering work should happen anyway.
Notion has formulas now (!) and here’s a formula to calculate a Cost of Delay column based on two other columns:
if(Value=="Killer" && Urgency=="ASAP", "1 Very High", if(Value=="Killer" && Urgency=="Soon" || Value=="Bonus" && Urgency == "ASAP", "2 High", if(Value=="Killer"&&Urgency=="Whenever"||Value=="Bonus"&&Urgency=="Soon"||Value=="Meh"&&Urgency=="ASAP", "3 Medium", if(Value=="Bonus"&&Urgency=="Whenever"||Value=="Meh"&&Urgency=="Soon", "4 Low", "5 Very Low"))))
As much as it pains me, I’m teaching myself Helix and trying out the Jetbrains IDEs. Code has been the first editor that really clicked for me but as with all free things, there’s a hidden price to pay for it.
(Also the quality of VS Code seems to be going downhill. At some point if they keep developing software past completion, the software becomes crap.)
After trying so many note taking apps coming in back from nvAlt and friends, it’s fine to have found one that sticks with Obsidian. I have a relatively tricked out Obsidian setup (which I’ll maybe write about at some point) and for personal notes I’ve been using Bear also for years now.
Some good insights in reading about Flipkart’s popularity in India and how they achieved that.
https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/how-did-flipkart-convince-indians
The examples are hugely exaggerated for effect but the explanation of why so many people in software engineering keep themselves busy with solving imaginary problems is worth it.
https://cerebralab.com/Imaginary_Problems_Are_the_Root_of_Bad_Software
After using all kinds of note taking tools (eg. Notational Velocity) at some point some years ago I moved all my personal notes to Bear and it has been my secret productivity boost ever since.
I’m glad to see that they’ve held to the vision and didn’t compromise to get Bear 2 just right. It can be difficult to pull something like that through.
https://www.theverge.com/23786996/bear-2-notes-app-iphone-ipad-mac
Looking back over my notes and reactions from Interaction16 where I gave a talk calling chat interfaces the “UI for AI”. Feels good to be right.
Ink & Switch is doing amazing work leveraging technology like CRDTs to create novel highly-interactive multiplayer interfaces. Here’s their work on Upswelling which is a git-like take on writing and editing.
It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).
What we need with the Bürgeramt though is not 10% more appointments but the automation of at least half of the processes there to no longer need human intervention. We needed that 10 years ago.
Going through these presentations by Matt Jones the main thing I’m left wondering is if anybody still does any real design and thinking work anymore, when it comes to technology or if all of it now is just flinging shit against the wall (which it very much looks like).
“When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
“He believes that a justice lens can help foster collaboration and creativity in a much broader way that goes beyond our current power structures.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/
Important prototyping work to show how German government forms can be much better and much friendlier than what’s out there right now.
Getting anything like this to production will be very very difficult without a lot of systemic changes and groundwork done first.
Planning should be about confidence intervals and de-risking, not about loading capacity full with commitment.
Discord has been executing near perfectly and it looks like they’ve built-in most of the functionality of Discourse now. That’s an absolutely amazing complementary feature to the ephemerality of the chat stream.
https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-conversation
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
The problem is that monoprocess pretty much entirely does not work for any creative/agile endeavour. Things are valuable exactly because they are complicated and messy.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.
A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.‌‌”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.
Since the one digital thing that Germany is really good at is copying, here is the UK’s 2025 roadmap for digital and data. Just copy-paste it and do everything that’s in there.
Anything less than that is not really acceptable anymore.
Despite not being the biggest fan of Shape Up or of 37s, I still really enjoyed watching this video by Ryan Singer about Shaping.
It’s very well done and though I wouldn’t recommend anybody to follow this by the book, you would do well to take inspiration from it.
Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.
The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.
We’ve mapped our metrics and levers in Double Loop as a platform org and are now seeing this approach spread through the company.
Daniel explains here how you can use their tool to operationalize strategy and systems thinking.
https://blog.doubleloop.app/strategy-systems-thinking-and-being-wrong/
Leuke aflevering met Menno en Wimer over de lange en rijke geschiedenis van hun bureau Booreiland en de volgende stap die ze nu zetten.
https://www.studiogeorge.nl/degebakkenperen/booreiland-clarify
Running multiple strategic tracks will set you up to dominate at a large scale, but many organizations can’t run one let alone run multiple at the same time. The visualization and plays as described here by Itamar Gilad look a lot like Wardley mapping.
Product sense (and taste) are so important but so hard to pinpoint and teach to others. Lenny here unpacks what goes into it but even then there are very few shortcuts to getting it.
Nice to read a project we worked on a long time ago (web application concept and initial set of user stories to hand off to development) is still going strong. This project and others like it support my thinking that it’s possible to solve problems definitely in a product agency context.
Pretty much each of these 20 systems thinking tips, I’ve had to learn the hard way so seeing them all in one place is good but also difficult.
Some ways to improve the quarterly prioritization tussle between engineering and business that focus on facilitating the conversation and reducing the number of things under immediate consideration.
We’ve worked remotely like this ten years ago with Hubbub and had to come up with a lot of these tactics and tricks just to be able to get work done. In the meantime, it seems the tools have come a long way (imagine the things we could have done if we had a tool like this back then!) but people’s thinking is still stuck in the past.
An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?
I was amazed at how closely this article about product development at Facebook tracks with how I approach it: “PMs are 100% accountable for the results of your team.”
I’m doubling as EM/PM for a bit and engineers in my team fully own some of our projects. This is a combination of high demand and high trust that I think is working out well.
The Pulp game editor is hugely impressive and at the same time making something like this is well within the potential of any small talented group of people who have a bit of time and vision.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/console/playdate-pulp-zero-to-video-game-in-60-seconds
Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. So that means somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics.
Quick-thinking, quick-acting people do really well here.
One of our operating principles is “really, really care.”
https://newsletter.bringthedonuts.com/p/building-products-at-stripe
A culture of celebrating shipping, versus celebrating measurable progress and learnings
A nice story of how organizations slowly adopt data and all the struggles a data team has to deal with.
https://erikbern.com/2021/07/07/the-data-team-a-short-story.html
I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.
I started a new job and thought I’d try out OmniFocus for a change after using Things very intensively at the last job. Things felt a bit constricting and I thought I’d try out the alternative app for a change.
Turns out this was a huge mistake.
I will be switching back to Things as soon as I can find out how to purchase it in the correct way. And because both of these tools are fairly popular there’s an exporter/importer so I don’t have to type everything over manually.
Agile is setup as a bit of a straw man in this piece about scaling product delivery, but it is true that following the existing methods too rigidly will not get you where you want to be. I’d rephrase it to say that mature teams need to be able to reflect and create their own systems as they go.
The more experience you have, the more implicit authority you will have. It can be tough to understand that when you propose a silly idea over lunch when you have 5 years of experience has a very different impact than when you have 15 years of experience — someone might actually listen to you and go make it!Really, this is a great thing, a sort of influential power you gain. It needs love, care and maintenance though — always work on getting better, learning from your mistakes and improving on your experience. There’s nothing more dangerous for an organization than a person with terrible ideas whom everyone admires professionally.
but I like working with PMs who went into it through channels other than the official ones, and are motivated out of their passion for building things and solving problems. Not because they feel it’s something they’re supposed to do, or because they think it’s prestigious, or because it is the default path from whatever elite school they went to.
That is an excellent and very opinionated list of criteria of how to gauge a product organization. I’m not sure whether I’ve seen any that hit all or even many of these. If you know of one, let me know.
http://dangrover.com/blog/2020/01/20/a-sanity-test-for-large-groups-of-pms.html
What is weird is that organizations that purport to be against risk will often do their projects exactly in this very risky way. Within an institutional logic, it often seems like there is no alternative but that is up to a few people to change.
It’s by no means easy to find let alone hire a good PM but if you want to try, here’s a good guide of how to interview for one.
https://jackiebo.medium.com/how-to-hire-great-product-managers-f07a3c9337ea
“So if, as a product leader/CEO, you think your team isn’t 1 working on things that truly matter, or 2 achieving results that justify the investment, it is first ON YOU to figure out which of the 4 strategy problems you have, and fix them.”
A very solid thread on product as we are used to get from Shreyas.
A crucial part of effective teams is introducing slack like in this case removing the entire concept of a hand-off (which causes misalignment at best).
“Ultimately the truly great product manager ensures that everyone in their organization feels connected to the business, and shares an equal level of urgency and commitment to the customer’s needs.”
A lovely and long history of Nespresso a coffee I’ve hated to drink but it’s still been better than many alternatives.
A good definition of product judgement which is absolutely essential for project success. I’ve seen groups without this head off in the wrong direction too often to count and have usually had to jump in myself.
The recipe of how to acquire this skill is also not the only way to get it but it will reliably get you there.
A lovely set of easter eggs hidden in Switzerland’s official maps.
Reading this reminds me what a pleasure it is to work with good product managers and how rare they are.
https://blog.coinbase.com/a-letter-to-a-new-product-manager-d5d96c228bf4
Not surprising that the entire concept of ‘ethical AI’ is another scam perpetuated by the MIT Media Lab. At this point I would assume any project coming out of that institution to be compromised unless proven otherwise.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/
This is good advice for a Director of UX by Adrian Howard that generalizes well to any other kind of Director.
Lekha is a former collaborator who now has this lovely site of her own. Her sense of systems and many skills have always made it a joy to work with her.
A bunch of very relevant guidelines of how to setup a product team at various stages of a company from the CPO of Credit Karma.
“In the new city of the supertalls, man is born free but everywhere is in salad chains. The people are being made skinny to fit the skinniness of the buildings to come.”
“Whether the art that comes out of The Shed will be any good, or just social media-ready kitsch delivered in unnourishing experiential baggies for the ’gram, we don’t yet know.”
Every city worth a damn will be colonized and sterilized.
I started reading this article on WeChat which turned into a convincing takedown of design thinking’s incrementalism and lack of vision.
https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-kind-of-creative-thinking-that-fueled-wechats-success
A concretized framework for making better product decisions by Laura Klein that comes down to: get together, write things down, review things, course correct when required.
https://www.usersknow.com/blog/2019/10/2/make-better-product-decisions
I usually say that application development (mobile and otherwise) is a solved problem but once you go to any kind of scale, you run into all of these operational issues which keep things interesting.
By a solved problem, I mean that figuring out what to build and building it is by now, for an experienced team, a linear endeavor. Aligning the rest of the organization to be able to do this, however, not so much.
“75 jaar vrijheid, en wat krijg je? De lichtgevende lul van Daan Roosegaarde.”
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/11/02/als-twee-mensen-hetzelfde-doen-a3978941
Not very fair but overdue for somebody who’s bought into his own hype and believes (as do most Dutch creatives) that all of their ideas are original.
I checked the concept and the video and it is indeed very reminiscent of the Stolpersteine without a mention and the presentation is as flat as we’re used to from Roosegaarde.
Figma’s multiplayer support is fantastic and something similar should be a part of every creative application. Now they’ve also written a very understandable high-level overview of their implementation (with CRDTs).
https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/
I remember some very early conversations about the Basslet (now Lofelt) and its creative possibilities. Building their own design tools for this medium is a key move and I look forward to trying it out.
https://lofelt.com/blog/lofelt-composer-designing-audio-haptic-experiences-for-ios
I’m very impressed by this design research blog by Maike Klip about the digitalization of Dutch government services and how to maintain a human connection.
I’ll trust Artefact Cards when they say they have something that’s better than the Sharpie.
Marty Cagan’s piece on product vs. feature teams yielded more than enough stuff to reflect on and discuss. I wouldn’t mind having a ‘true‘ product manager. Where do you get one of those?
Design thinking is finally officially over, even Ideo admits it now.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90257718/ideo-breaks-its-silence-on-design-thinkings-critics
About password managers:
“But I never found a way to get people onto 1password in a single training session. The setup process has a lot of moving parts, involving the desktop app, browser plugin, online service, mobile app, and app store. It requires repeatedly typing a long master passphrase.”
People do not like to hear it but password managers are BAD. Even the best of them is so bad that I struggle to use it. (I do because I have no alternative.)
https://idlewords.com/2019/05/what_i_learned_trying_to_secure_congressional_campaigns.htm
Ages ago we also made a game that:
So yeah, I’m always glad if our ideas are proven years after the fact. Something that happened quite regularly.
“code is just a high precision design medium”
https://twitter.com/PavelASamsonov/status/1127207381673418752
From an interesting discussion of the nuances between product and design strategy a notable tidbit that sheds a lot of light.
Also while we are discussing the ever-shifting definition of design, here’s another interesting tweet.
You see this a lot with design wanting ‘a seat at the table’ but more often than not at those tables (which are inexplicably always at the highest echelons of power either in companies or government), most designers will not have the first clue what to contribute.
“The key to building this aura is to become increasingly detail oriented, to be more prepared than anyone else, and to have a higher bar than those around you.”
I’ve always dabbled heavily in product but reading something like this really gets me hyped up to consider switching into Product Management.
It’s exciting to see the Emirates government put design front and center. Unfortunately though in a closed context such as that, it is more than likely that design will be instrumentalized and deployed only for material gain.
I can confirm most of the best practices from this guide of Stack Overflow’s remote first design culture.
A Mac app that turns any website into a handy application, another wild app exploration by Morten Just.
A worth-while apology for Design Thinking:
“This is why I advise executives study design. If culture is driven by leadership behavior, then culture change is primarily driven by leadership behavior change. Design has a lot of techniques to offer.”
https://medium.com/columbus-egg/design-thinking-as-decision-framing-7d6795542421
A basic lesson in design and the importance of non-functional characteristics from Jony Ive: “What we tend to focus on are those attributes that are easy to talk about, and just because we talk about them doesn’t mean that they’re the important attributes. All that means is they’re the ones that are easy to talk about.”
Facebook did a half-hearted push towards a more messaging focused experience during the conversational boom, but didn’t manage to make any inroads and abandoned the effort. Whatsapp could have been the beachhead but with the original leadership and vision gone, nothing interesting will happen there. Instagram (also without original leadership) is slowly being turned into sludge by whatever PMs Facebook has left.
There is room for something new to kill Facebook, that is if they don’t buy or copy it in time.
The origin story of Notion is pretty wild but all of the recipes in it for deep collaboration and radical iteration make a lot of sense. When I briefly tried out
An article about
This description of the Goldsmith MA Design Expanded Practice is more or less also how I prefer to work whether in my own practice or anywhere else. An exposition of how to redesign design education that is well worth reading.
We wanted to build a new form of post-disciplinary practice that utilised some deep material skills (from their UG degrees and professional practices) and theoretical skills (from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds), but evolving them through team work and collaboration. We didn’t want to reduce design to a set of methods or ‘design thinking’ processes, we wanted to give students the space to develop and evolve a truly expanded practice.
https://medium.com/@matthewward/on-reflection-rethinking-masters-design-education-cd9cd8ad71c8
I got around to visiting the Parklets in the Bergmannstraße. That is a plural because there are two of them during this pilot and that’s it.
As far as quality and usage goes I don’t think there is anything to complain about. The benches look and feel nice and they are being used by the tons of people passing through this street. It is nice to have some extra seating here that is non-commercial.
The only issue is that the rest of the street (especially the traffic situation on the thoroughfare) is still terrible. After having seen the botched project in the Maaßenstraße1 local government is afraid to do much of anything, let alone give this street and neighborhood the overhaul they so desperately need.
Maybe they are right to not do anything. Public works in Berlin have the tendency to not work out. If you already know that you are going to screw it up, you might as well keep your hands off it. But there are lots of new people in Berlin who demand better and in many cases are also willing and able to do it themselves. Let’s see how long the government can resist that pressure.
Ik ben een trouwe luisteraar van GBI en het was leuk dat Vasilis toen hij in Berlijn was de tijd nam om ook eens met mij te praten. Volgens mij is het een leuk gesprek geworden.
Last Tuesday I gave a talk at EMERCE Tech Live on the main stage of the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. It was a lovely event and it was fun being back in Amsterdam however briefly.
It was a business focussed practical riff on my ‘Designing Conversational Interfaces’ talk that may have blown some people’s minds. So it goes!
Next up, @alper talking about conversational interfaces. Join the livestream at https://t.co/mdVhV45tsg
— Peter Bihr 🚀 (@peterbihr) December 2, 2016
Up now #thingsconams Designing Conversational Interfaces with @alper. Here we go: chatbots! “Why isn’t this presentation given by a bot?” pic.twitter.com/62AGWjAxle
— TIStv (@TIStv) December 2, 2016
Conversational interfaces at Thingscon (at @Volkshotel in Amsterdam w/ @iskandr @alper) https://t.co/VRvsntSq78 pic.twitter.com/U6IcGtHZJI
— !ianus keller (@ianus) December 2, 2016
“Are chatbots the end of applications?@patagonia said ‘we can do this better at our website, so please delete our app.” @alper #thingsconams
— TIStv (@TIStv) December 2, 2016
Next: the mastermind of Designing for conversational interfaces @alper on the UX of messaging and chatbots #thingsconams pic.twitter.com/ISFlwttIrl
— Info.nl (@infonl) December 2, 2016
Now @alper on designing for conversational interfaces. From Eliza to Lark. Via Clippy. pic.twitter.com/9pBIvZHAs9
— Iskander Smit (@iskandr) December 2, 2016
Again someone stating the end off #Apps, will messaging be the answer?@alper @ThingsConAMS #thingsconams pic.twitter.com/YvriSdFr0J
— IoT Sensemakers AMS (@SensemakersA) December 2, 2016
The UX of messaging and chatbots is what @alper talks about in his keynote. #ThingsConAMS pic.twitter.com/ULpQsQPDRS
— ThingsCon Amsterdam (@ThingsConAMS) December 2, 2016
On stage @alper: (at @Volkshotel in Amsterdam w/ @iskandr @josk @frankmeeuwsen) https://t.co/BYiYlCm954 pic.twitter.com/d0OghNZLvF
— guidoz (@guidoz) December 2, 2016
Entering the world of #chatbots @duolingo and & @hm leading the way@alper @ThingsConAMS pic.twitter.com/u2Ibsac3ot
— IoT Sensemakers AMS (@SensemakersA) December 2, 2016
Best practices and interesting newcomers in the world of chatbots according to @alper: @qz, Marsbot, @SlackHQ and @duolingo. #thingsconams
— TIStv (@TIStv) December 2, 2016
“Prototyping an interactive chatbot is not very different from writing the script for an interactive story book.” @alper #thingsconams
— TIStv (@TIStv) December 2, 2016
Digitale dementz, too much noice from messages and notifications @alper #conversationalUI #thingsconams
— Anouschka Scholten (@anous) December 2, 2016
There’s no “view source” for chatbots. – @alper #thingsconams How do we figure out how systems work? The UX for AI.
— Ame Elliott (@ameellio) December 2, 2016
“‘UI for AI’. Whatever kind of Artificial Intelligence, chat will be the interface.” @alper #thingsconams
— TIStv (@TIStv) December 2, 2016
Chat is for AI what the lightbulb was for electricity: a first experience of the this new technology, says @alper #thingsconAMS
— Peter Bihr 🚀 (@peterbihr) December 2, 2016
Amazon can take your data in a truck, but I don’t think German companies are allowed to do this, by law. @thingscon @alper
— Axel Roest (@axello) December 2, 2016
“Chat is for AI what the light bulb was for electricity”: great talk by @alper at #ThingsConAMS
— Martina Uhlig (@martina_uhlig) December 2, 2016
Designers! Let’s get to work. @alper on the next technologies we need to design for. #thingsconams pic.twitter.com/imjImkbOTZ
— Ame Elliott (@ameellio) December 2, 2016
#chatbots entering the messaging apps human use among each other can be very envasive and lead to stress… 😨@alper #thingsconams
— IoT Sensemakers AMS (@SensemakersA) December 2, 2016
Designers need to program to make really interesting stuff. With Framer @alper #thingsconams pic.twitter.com/wc0ZQ3G1ii
— Iskander Smit (@iskandr) December 2, 2016
Slide van de dag, met dank aan @alper #thingsconams pic.twitter.com/xQPurwgiRM
— Frank Meeuwsen (@frankmeeuwsen) December 2, 2016
#thingsconAMS impressions: @alper pic.twitter.com/9othPU1Kdn
— Peter Bihr 🚀 (@peterbihr) December 2, 2016
I was at the 2016 Bot Summit in London a couple of weeks ago. I did my best to capture salient points from every talk in a tweet. Here are all of them in order.
Now @v21 who made https://t.co/46XYTViILi about creating tools to enable people to play with technology. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
.@v21 talking about learning, competency and sandboxes, reminds me of this talk by @helvetica: https://t.co/2A62R4yK7c #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
.@v21 hints at what skills may come in handy when creating bots: "Poets are better botmakers than programmers." #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Important points by @ojahnn about how to make bots pick the right words and how that shapes our interaction with them. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
I do think that using vernacular and colourful language is the most advanced part of language acquisition for humans and bots. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
One point from @mtrc's talk is to not make bots pretend they are human. I think that is an approach that limits us both. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
The bot by @M_PF &co that makes Katamari Damacy-like 3D printable objects on Thingiverse is amazing. https://t.co/sXCgapTUeX #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
A really important labour analysis of digital assistants by @HelenHester starting off with the Apple Knowledge Navigator. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
.@HelenHester references @ibogost's hyperemployment as a rebranding of the relational work that used to be done by women. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Lots of references to @TayandYou at #botsummit which was just a bunch of engineers crunching hard to get something out before #BUILD16.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Brecht (so boring…) has a good point via @mewo2: “The audience should never forget they are interacting with a machine.”#botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Lots of examples by @mewo2 of Brechtian digital technology that's more focused on enlightenment than on entertainment. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Or as @mewo2 put it eloquently: "A set of techniques which promote a realistic view of bots and a bot-like view of reality." #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
A live performance by @deer_ful of Graphic Score Bot. #botsummit @ Victoria and Albert Museum https://t.co/pNDeIPLqwE
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Guidelines by @starsandrobots how to put personality into physical robots using this great example: https://t.co/6Utr3Lh1Cp #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
The guidelines by @starsandrobots are that a robot gets personality by being: expressive, generative, fun and surprising. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
.@ArianaNGiorgi talks about the algorithmic journalism bots can (help) perform. See her slides here: https://t.co/QSRMLFeAnJ #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
One of my favorite journalistic bots is autotldr on @reddit: https://t.co/vIo07ACXuT (explanation: https://t.co/3erkE9CTsu ) #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Sometimes my paraphrasing from #botsummit may be a bit too free. Here are the actual guidelines by @starsandrobots. https://t.co/tt3ESQeUgy
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Oddly no mention of ELIZA yet (right?) at #botsummit though many have talked about the qualities people ascribe to even the simplest bots.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
.@davelubin mentions ELIZA and “Computer Power and Human Reason”while explaining the ethical issues behind @TVCommentBot. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
Live demo by davidlublin of the various TV bot comment modes #botsummit @ Victoria and Albert… https://t.co/wTnnfmdiex
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
.@erocdrahs who has made some amazing bots ( https://t.co/4lzn6xOvYZ ) made us think about what it could be like to be a bot. #botsummit
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
A beautiful closing of #botsummit by @katierosepipkin about taking up making bots as a folk art both personally and as a wider thing.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
#botsummit was an excellent mix of disciplines and of people who are in themselves a mix of these disciplines. END OF BOTCAST
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) April 9, 2016
The video of my talk “Conversations are the New Interfaces” at Interaction16 Helsinki has been posted. I am yet to watch it, but here it is for my archive.
Alper Cugun: Conversations are the new Interfaces from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
I shared it elsewhere but to briefly clip it here as well. I took a bunch more pictures with the photographer that were a lot of fun but of course this is the one they chose.
I’m still waiting for the pictures of Friday to air on the IxDA Flickr and for the video of my talk to be posted, but here are some notes I found around the web about my talk (for my personal notebook).
Eigenlijk veel interessanter om 14:00 is ‘Conversations are the new interfaces‘, van Alper Çuğun (nog een Nederlander!). Als de mensen van Hubbub iets doen rondom experimentele interfaces, dan let ik op. —Vormfout.nl
Today Alper Çuğun will lead a session about ‘Conversations are the new interfaces’ and Marcel Schouwenaar will talk about ‘Trade-offs & Sharing’. —Embassy of the Netherlands in Finland
Alper Çuğun (@alper), who used to co-run a gaming company called Hubbub, talked about conversational interfaces. I’ve been really interested in these lately so I found it very helpful. He showed an example of a conversational UI that they developed and gave a rundown of do’s and dont’s when designing for them. One interesting insight was that they found that kids will read a lot of text if they get it in SMS-sized chunks. He smartly called conversational UIs the “UI for AI” and cautioned that they are not perfect for every use case. —Aaron Ganci
Another fantastic talk was from Alper Çuğun. He gave an overview of conversational user interfaces. It was based on his own experience making mobile games that use conversations and messaging as the main mechanic. He also shared an analysis of the tools out there to make conversational UIs and a prediction of where the scene is heading.
In particular, I was struck by how conversations, like the messaging apps we’re all familiar with on our phones, can lower the barrier to people using technology. It now feels very natural to text back and forth with friends. When machines can text with us, that might give us a sense of accessibility and agency in our interaction with them. — Michelle Thorne
I just got back from Interaction in Helsinki having given my talk about how Conversations are the New Interfaces.
I have been blown away by the response to and kind words about my talk. I think this is a conversation (!) worth continuing. Stay tuned for details on that.
Here now is a collection of photos I found of my talk (for my personal archive):
.@alper asks #ixd16 if we are at #peakchat. #sketchnotes @whatsthehubbub pic.twitter.com/QlEIINjVgu
— Chris Noessel (@chrisnoessel) March 4, 2016
@kaeru @alper 🙂 pic.twitter.com/RB148HXINS
— Nico Druif (@NicoDruif) March 4, 2016
Conversational UI: the Rise of the Chatbot! My prediction for the next Star Wars title? @alper #ixd16 pic.twitter.com/IyTeI0GI4a
— duff_el (@duff_el) March 4, 2016
Any startup with “chat” in it is gonna get funded right now. When will we reach “Peak Chat”? @alper #startups #ixd16 pic.twitter.com/rntO9PcioV
— Thomas Fogarasy (@thomasfogarasy) March 4, 2016
Chat UIs have origin in choose own adventure stories. As pattern progresses, need storywriting tools – @alper #ixd16 pic.twitter.com/lM7g3mG7JT
— Chris Lee (@cleerview) March 4, 2016
Shoutout to Clippy, the original conversational interface. @alper at #Ixd16 pic.twitter.com/Qq3uMolQ51
— Peter Bihr (@peterbihr) March 4, 2016
Chat Everything @alper #ixd16 pic.twitter.com/hN7i2J8GRe
— Sonja Heinen (@sonjaheinen) March 4, 2016
Great to see @alper talk about conversational interfaces and games about difficult choices at #Ixd16 pic.twitter.com/0OrO8koOnC
— Peter Bihr (@peterbihr) March 4, 2016
Inspirational talk about conversational interfaces by @alper Great stuff! @ixdconf #futurice #ixd16 pic.twitter.com/NKzT2gB9B6
— Matti Vahtera (@mattivahtera) March 4, 2016
Rob Dubbin at the Awl has written a comprehensive account of what is wrong with Secret Hitler. I agree with his critique but I want to highlight one issue in particular.
I tried ignoring Secret Hitler but their design notes kept making their way into my twitter. I skimmed through them and found them to be well put together. The last one about illustration and graphic design however convinced me that the game goes well beyond just bad taste.
The problem is that the identity cards for fascist players in the game (shown below) display them als lizards where the liberal identities are shown as human. Fascists are inhuman, get it?
This is simplistic and immoral. If it’s not obvious why, here are three reasons:
This way of thinking is part of an ongoing trivialization of fascism and spreading it is harmful.
As Rob Dubbin says in his piece:
There should be a high bar for invoking this person, and there should be such a thing as falling well short of it.
The people making Secret Hitler are obviously intelligent, skilled and have vast resources at their disposal. I can only guess why they would make a game about this topic and then do it so poorly.
Last week there was some debate spurred by some of the larger insurers of the Netherlands who want to use tracking data to personalize insurance coverage. A piece in the Reformatorisch Dagblad of all places and Rob Wijnberg talking about it at DWDD.
The problem is that insurance by definition is not personalized and we should be protected from each other’s best interests. I tweetstormed about it and have recorded it below.
1/ Recent developments in NL have sparked the debate about the changing role of insurance in an age of personal tracking and big data.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
2/ Tempting as it may be for insurers to know more about us, it is in their and our best interests that they do not.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
3/ Insurers' job from a user perspective is to hedge us for the consequences of the unforeseen.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
4/ Data science may claim that it can see the future. Big data actually does not remove the unforeseen for the (n=1) individual case.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
5/ Insurers have proposed two general ways they would like to use data: to penalize wrong behavior and to help people improve.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
6/ The first of these tasks is better left to the government and the second we are better suited to do ourselves.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
7/ We wouldn't want government to track us so they can automatically punish us. Why would we allow a company to do this?
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
8/ Big data can improve lives by informing research and democratic policy. This would help everybody and also bind insurers.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
9/ Conflating government and insurance is not that weird in NL where both are heavily intertwined, but maybe they shouldn't be.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
This is particularly salient from a design perspective if you see the tweets below. What this comes down to is a policy design problem of a vast scale, a level of abstraction up again from service design. People aren’t well equipped to make these decisions for themselves and they probably shouldn’t have to be. They should be aware of which expertise they are lacking and they should know who they can trust. Creating those two competencies are the two hardest problems of our time.
@pieninja People's idea of how they behave is often not consistent with how they actually behave. That's one risk.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 6, 2015
@pieninja The second risk: people have no idea (and have no idea that they have no idea) of how their behaviour is measured and modelled.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 6, 2015
Talk about this is increasing all around us (see this piece by Cennyd) and I think it’s time for me to share some of our recent thinking on the topic as well. We believe that conversational user interfaces will be the way that most people will interact with digital systems from the near future on. That can be chat or voice or something else constrained to offer only specific responses or fully freeform. Natural language processing has improved to a point to make this workable and will continue to improve further.
Chat apps are the sine qua non of mobile devices. They are essential, they are everywhere and many of them are cross-platform. People use chat to connect to people but increasingly chat applications are used to interface with non-humans. Chat apps can offer a flat channel to a digital system or facilitate any and all kinds of persistent bots and application logic to be deployed. A great example is this a16z piece on the wide applications of WeChat in China.
The fact that chat apps are cross-platform creates a new smallest common denominator on which you can build applications that are guaranteed to work on all the devices the app runs on. This is a new OS. That people are used to these interactions and normally use them to connect to other people also creates a convenient habituation.
I argue that the bits of conversational logic deployed through chat can be called applications and do most things that apps do.
Most apps allow you to retrieve information or to perform an action. This is glued together with some chrome filled with awkward ever-changing (hamburger menu in or out?) architectures. They need to conform to stringent visual design guidelines while looking recognizably the same across lots of different devices.
Information retrieval and performing actions can be done via chat as well where an AI/bot counterparty will keep track of your context and give you the right cues at the right time. “Slackbot give me a GIF.”“Domoticz turn off the light.”
I am the purveyor of a small app to find good coffee called Cuppings. There is no reason why that same experience could not be delivered through a chat interface. No reason in fact why it could not be delivered better through a chat interface.
Add to that that making good apps is becoming an increasingly difficult endeavour because of device proliferation (mainly on Android), API bloat (on all platforms) and increasingly high visual and interaction design standards. Increasingly making a pixel perfect app that feels nice and works well is something that only larger companies can afford.
Most of the effort we spend right now into user interfaces could be moot if the experience would be delivered through a chat interface. That every app has a different UI and information architecture and that it has to be learned anew is a huge impediment to its adoption. We have recently built several chat based apps & games inspired partially by Lark. During testing we found that users don’t need to be explained anything because they are so familiar with the paradigm.
Chat is here to stay and I’m incredibly excited to see how far we can push this new medium.
The great Peter and Michelle have written a book called “Understanding the Connected Home” based on current developments around the topic and both of their professional interests.
I talked about the topic with Peter a bit and thought it to be a natural extension of his work in the connected devices spaces and their recent visit to Casa Jasmina in Torino.
I hope to get around to reading it soon since right now I have no desire or opportunity to live in a connected home. The housing stock in Berlin is old and does not lend itself well to connectivity. Our current house has a central water heater but even then most faucets are heated locally using electricity. Internet connectivity (let alone Fiber to the Home) is hard to find in many houses and you can count yourself lucky if you can get a Kabel Deutschland connection.
I think I would like to take the best of what these technologies can bring but they probably only make sense if you innovate in the other layers of a house as well as in what is built and the way it is built.
If you look at the six Ss, connectivity consists of things at the manufactured level of Stuff (cheap consumer grade electronics from China). It latches onto the Space Plan and I would guess it has considerable effects on that and would benefit from changes in that plan. More problematically it pierces these layers and as such deteriorates the structural integrity of the house further. Connected things need to either interface with the Services layer or call for new Services to be deployed throughout the house. These move from the inside out but also from the outside —Skin layer— in when it comes to things like solar power and geothermal connectivity.
It seems an interesting though complicated time to be an architect. The API and expectation surface of a house is exploding while the margins and expertise of your average architecture practice leave a lot to be desired.
What would then seem obvious is that we need systematic and generative ways of creating our dwellings in which the inhabitants of a house are participants as much as the traditional experts are. It seems like connected homes will make more sense and sense made of them when you consider the movements of self-built buildings and open source dwellings.
Yesterday I saw the documentary on the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Rima Yamazaki as part of the DOKU.ARTS festival here in Berlin. I wasn’t aware of this landmark during my last visit to Tokyo though I must have passed close by while cycling through the city. I’ll make a point to see it when next I visit if it still stands because that is exactly the topic of the documentary.
The tower is a prime example of Metabolist architecture by Kisho Kurokawa. Metabolism is a hard to define but influential strand of architecture that is described in the documentary as an architecture without timelag. It turns out that the tower by now, though charming with its tiny rooms, is outdated and unmaintainable. Most of the owners want to tear it down and have something new built there that makes more economic sense. Among architects and historians there are voices for preserving it as a monument to an important movement in Japanese architecture and other who think it could indeed be torn down.
The main reason why I wanted to see this movie is because next week I’m moving into a building in Berlin designed by a metabolist architect Arata Isozaki. He appears in the movie as a member of the metabolist movement and as an proponent of conservation. I found his reasoning to be somewhat incoherent and overly sentimental. I’m not sure what that means for the building I will be living in but we’ll see. I’ve only been there once, but I absolutely love the building pictured above. Time will tell whether that is justified.
Another architect Toyo Ito who expressed a disillusionment with metabolism was in favor of tearing it down. His reasoning is that buildings just like people are finite and that if they have fulfilled their purpose they should be allowed to disappear to be replaced by something new. This is a way of thinking about architecture that is mostly alien if you live in Europe but that I find to be extremely refreshing. I think our local hangups on history and current efforts to construct buildings in a historicized fashion are morbid but this is the way we do things in Europe.
All along during the documentary I had to think about some William Gibson I read about Tokyo but which I cannot find right now. So instead I’ll post this from My Own Private Tokyo that I came across.
The Japanese, you see, have been repeatedly drop-kicked, ever further down the timeline, by serial national traumata of quite unthinkable weirdness, by 150 years of deep, almost constant, change. The 20th century, for Japan, was like a ride on a rocket sled, with successive bundles of fuel igniting spontaneously, one after another.