Hasta La Ideas

While it doesn’t appear to be an outright Apple-Chevrolet partnership, Chevy has announced that their new Sonic and Spark models will offer integration with Apple’s Siri. Called “Eyes Free Integration,” Chevy’s system will enable iPhone-toting drivers to initiate and answer phone calls, interact with their calendars, play music, hear transcriptions of incoming text messages, and compose outgoing text messages all by voice.

As per the context in which it’s meant to be used, one of the system’s touches purposely violates a cardinal rule of user interface design: Visual feedback. With Eyes Free, the phone avoids lighting up when interacted with, instead remaining dark to prevent your tendency to look at things that suddenly illuminate, so that you’ll keep your peepers on the road.

Two Eyes-Free-compatible apps/hacks we’d like to see:

1. The KITT voice mod, which continually refers to you as “Michael” no matter what your name is.

2. An app that enables you to call out the license plate of the car in front of you that just cut you off. It automatically dials that driver’s phone, and you can tell them exactly what you think of them without needing to roll the window down to yell it.

“Where did you learn to DRIVE, you #@#$%*?

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We’ve all seen it: the teenagers with one earbud in, feigning interest in conversation; iPad users brandishing the device like a radiation barrier to snap a photo; the veritable hypnosis of the “cell trance.” In fact, maybe you’re reading these very words on your smartphone, killing time in line while you wait for the next express train or your double-shot skinny latte. No shame in that—we all do it.

These behaviors and over 20 other digital gestures are duly catalogued in a research project conducted at the Art Center College of Design by Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu, in July and August of last year. The four published their findings on our gadget-enabled society in an ongoing blog and a book [PDF] as of last September. “Curious Rituals” is nothing short of brilliant, a comprehensive index of the gestures, tics and related epiphenomena organized into seven categories of vaguely anthropological rigor. (The authors also extrapolated their findings in a short film of several hypothetical not-so-distant future scenarios, which I found rather less compelling than the book.)

While the blog illustrates their process—along with related videos and imagery—the final report, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, offers an incisive examination of “gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies.”

Regarding digital technologies, [this endeavor shows] how the use of such devices is a joint construction between designers and users. Some of the gestures we describe here indeed emerged from people’s everyday practices, either from a naïve perspective (lifting up one’s finger in a cell phone conversation to have better signal) or because they’re simply more practical (watching a movie in bed with the laptop shifted). Even the ones that have been “created” by designers (pinching, taps, swipes, clicks) did not come out from the blue; they have been transferred from existing habits using other objects. The description of these postures, gestures and rituals can then be seen as a way to reveal the way users domesticate new technologies.

Dan Hill of City of Sound sets the stage with a number of own observations in his fluent introductory essay. The designer/urbanist/technologist sets the stage by taking a casual inventory of gestures from the “wake-up wiggle” (impatiently jostling a mouse to awaken a sleeping computer) to iPad photography (which “feels awkward and transitional”) and instant-classic iPhone compass calibrator (later referred to as the “angry monkey”). I’d add that this last gesture looks something like twirling an invisible baton or fire dancing—or, incidentally, ‘skippable rope’ from Art Hack Day.

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The forthcoming Touchscreen Cafe Table we posted on has had some good follow-up, and unsurprisingly, Moneual aren’t the only ones to have visualized such a thing. Fans of the seminal ’90s Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop may remember Spike and Jet ordering dishes off of a touchscreen restaurant table that presented holographic images of the dishes, and Core77 readers have chimed in with more examples. SCAD grad and interaction designer Clint Rule (update your Coroflot page please!) worked up a touchscreen cafe table concept video a couple of years ago, and at least one restaurant in London has something similar currently in existence. Whereas I was thinking of the table’s potential purely as a transactional device, both Rule and London’s Inamo eatery have taken it further.

To start with, Rule’s concept integrates social features:

Inamo, an Asian-fusion restaurant in London’s Soho district, opts for projection rather than touchscreen. Their system was created by a London-based company called E-Table Interactive, and though it’s projection, it still contains some type of hand-tracking mechanism that provides similar functionality to a touchscreen.

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Whether or not you’re interested in videogames, this device is kind of fascinating from an industrial design/interface design point of view. The PhoneJoy Play is essentially a portable input device with a slick mechanical design: The two holdable halves can spread sideways, connected by a telescoping mechanism. Your smartphone or mini-tablet can then be “docked” in the middle, and the variety of buttons and motion pads interact with your device wirelessly.

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While yesterday’s date of 12/12/12 was good luck for the numerically superstitious, it’s today’s date of 12/13 that’s looking auspicious for me: Google Maps for the iPhone was finally made available today, at its good ol’ price of zero dollars.

The Apple Maps debacle was a clear reminder that there are some areas where Apple can’t out-design the competition, namely in raw data. Apple has my loyalty with most of the stuff they make, due to their unrelenting focus on the user experience: As I’ve steadily populated my parents’ house, several states away, with Apple products over the years, I’ve experienced a steady decrease in those painful parental tech-support calls. But the Maps mess made clear that blind, across-the-board brand loyalty isn’t the way to go.

So yes, no more trying to get crosstown directions and winding up with a destination in Kentucky. No more having to type every last letter of an address because Siri’s silent partner is incapable of basic logic. The downside is that yes, there’s no way to access Google Maps with Siri, meaning more typing; but I’d rather let my fingers do the walking, rather than my feet leading me in the wrong direction.

Get it while it’s hot here.

Ed. Note: This is also a good opportunity to revisit our Case Study, “Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas.

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