DESIGNING *for humans

Comparative Global Design Law

I had the opportunity to review the recently published Comparative Global Design Law, edited by Elizabeth D. Ferrill. The book provides an overview of international design intellectual property law and then dives into the details for the major IP jurisdictions, including China, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This is a great book from the perspectives of either an educational read straight-through or referencing a particular chapter/geography as needed. I appreciated the clarity, and especially the consistency across regions, which is sometimes lacking when there are multiple contributors.

What was most valuable to me was the specific attention given to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) both in the content and the annotated illustrations. For example, the illustrations above are excerpts of how a representative user interface is specified within a design patent (in this example, within Japan). A similar approach is used to convey how physical product designs are documented across jurisdictions.

The one limitation with a work like this is currency, as design laws will change over time, albeit gradually. But it stands as a comprehensive and accessible reference for the state of the art as of 2020.

Reviewing A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects

I've written a review of a terrific collection of essays that sit at the convergence of product design and intellectual property - A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects. Read my review, entitled "Objectifying IP" on Medium.

What do User Interfaces Want?

I recently published an essay on UX Mag - "What Do User Interfaces Want? The Next 500 Years of Interaction Design".  It's grounded in the principles of Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants, but extends his ideas above and beyond into the fields of user interface design.  I also wrote about some of the more technically scientific implications of Kelly's book back in 2011.

I'll also be presenting on this topic as the opening speaker on February 20th at the upcoming World IA Day event in Philadelphia.

What if Charles Dickens Played the Xbox One?

For reasons that are still unclear to me, I was inspired to write a version of Dicken's A Christmas Carol with the the spirits of the past, present and future replaced by each of the new gaming consoles  - Steam, PS4 and Xbox One, respectively.  Definitely not my usual approach, but it was fun to write.  

Read A Carol of Consoles on Intuitive Company's blog.

 

Bureau of Ergonomics

Update Sept 27 - You can now directly access the article on Design Bureau's web site.

People often ask for my input on everyday design and ergonomics questions - I was once even contacted by an automobile dealer who was concerned about a customer's request to swap the brake and accelerator pedals (I wisely chose to stay out of that).  

Starting  this fall, I will have a recurring Q&A column called Bureau of Ergonomics.  This is premiering in the just released Sept/Oct issue (#13) of Design Bureau magazine   For those unfamiliar with Design Bureau, see my review from earlier this year.

Like the magazine itself, my column will cover questions from a variey of areas including packaging, travel, shopping and interfaces.  If you'd like to submit questions for future issues, please email me.

I encourage you to check out the Design Bureau web site and consider subscribing to the print or iPad version.  As of this writing you can get a free preview of the full Sept/Oct issue that includes my first column.

Universal Methods of Design

It's not secret that I'm a huge fan of William Lidwell's Universal Principles of Design (which I reviewed in 2006) and the subsequent Deconstructing Product Design (which I contributed to and reviewed in 2009).  So I was eager to contribute to Bella Martin's and Bruce Hannington's research focused book, also published by Rockport.

The full title of the just-published book is Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions, but we can just call it UMD for short.

As with Lidwell's books, UMD is a highly-organized and visual.  The book covers a variety of methods including card sorting, eye tracking, design ehtnography and Kano analysis.  Less of a text book than a guide, it would be useful as an introduction for those learning about reaserch methods for the first time, and for professionals as a tool with useful examples and references.

I contributed to the Ergonomic Analysis section, much of which draws on methodologies I have presented on this blog.  The section also shows images from the crimping tool analysis that we conducted at Bresslergroup.

Universal Methods of Design is available from Amazon.com

 

User Interfaces as a Force of Entropy

The Big Picture

Increasing improvements in user interface design are a natural result of the physical laws of the universe. To understand the underlying meaning of that statement, and its potential consequences, it is necessary to enumerate a sequence of logical assumptions (which I will attempt to summarize, but are no replacement for a fuller reading of the sources cited below):

1. The universe is driven by physical forces, including entropy – the dispersal of energy from localized concentrations towards generalized equilibrium. The cliché example of entropy is the spread of heat from a cup of coffee to the surrounding room. The heat spreads from the local area (the coffee cup) to dissipate equally within the room.

2. The origination and evolution of all systems in the universe from stars, to rocks and eventually life, has been driven by entropy. Moreover, over the history of the universe systems have developed that have been progressively more effective at increasing entropy (i.e. distributing energy). Astrophysicist Eric Chaisson has applied the measure of energy rate density – the flow of energy per unit timer per unit mass – as a common metric that can be used to compare the relative energy emissions of everything from stars, to plants, to people, to cities. His chart of energy rate densities from an upcoming publication, illustrates the emergence of higher energy density systems over time. While stars are incredibly powerful, they are also incredibly massive and pound-for-pound do not emit the relative energy of plants and animals (incidentally, “Gya” is shorthand for giga years, as in billions of years ago). 

3. A key contributor to the entropy contributions of living organisms is the complexity of their behaviors – for example, digestion, mobility and cognition. Across species, mammals have higher energy rate densities than reptiles, which are higher than fish, and so on. The more highly evolved the animal, the higher the energy gradient (birds being the interesting anomaly to this pattern due to the high energy demands of executing flight in three dimensional space.)

4. Technology originated and evolved with life, to the point where man-made technologies have even higher energy rate densities than the humans that created them. Kevin Kelly illustrates this (using data drawn from Chaisson), in his recent book, What Technology Wants. As Kelley illustrates below, computer chips, with their extremely high ratio of heat output to mass, have energy gradients that are among the highest of any system in the history of the universe. In other words, the evolution of systems has followed a path of progressively higher entropy output, starting from large scale inanimate systems (stars, planets) to smaller scale living systems (plants, people) and presently to even smaller scale technological systems.

Interfaces as Entropy Enablers
If you’re still with me, you may be thinking that this is all interesting, but how does it relate to user interface design? We can consider the implications at a couple of levels.

Superficially, user interfaces are the mechanisms by which we control computer chips, how we interact with these powerful entropy engines. At the least, this should lead one to appreciate that we’re dealing with powerful stuff even if we have grown accustomed to them because of their ubiquity. Chaisson even suggests that more transistors may have been produced than any other product in cumulative human history. From a historical perspective, the activity of designing interfaces which control interactions with these chips could be considered as fundamental a human activity as laying the bricks to build cities.

At a deeper level, we can consider the computer chip as a product and force of evolution and entropy. Like humans (and from humans), chips evolved as a progressively powerful entropy-generating system. But from an evolutionary context, why do chips appear to be a successful system? In evolution many systems or groups don’t not successfully proliferate – for examples the Neanderthals did not spread out or survive very long, compared to Homo Sapiens. In the case of humans, spoken language led to the rapid advancement and growth of the human population 50,000 years ago. Similarly, I posit that graphical user interfaces have accelerated the propagation of the computer chip. Early on, interacting with computer chips was difficult, requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Over recent decades, the refinement and proliferation of the graphical user interface allowed an explosion in the number of people who could interact with computer chips across a range of contexts, activities and platforms.

In other words, user interfaces have enabled a rapid increase in the number and uses of computer chips, directly impacting the rate of energy dispersal. There is a logical and perhaps inevitable sequence to this as the graphical user interface connected the language of the humans to the language of the computer. Taking this a step further, we can consider graphical user interfaces as an adaptive trait of computer systems that led to their successful proliferation, with humans as the carriers.

The Future of Interfaces
User interfaces increase entropy. To an interface designer, this might be taken as encouraging, discouraging, or both. To be discouraged is pointless as entropy is fundamental and inevitable. I see it as encouraging that those aspects of interface design that we should strive for as a profession - accessibility, ease of use, effectiveness, and efficiency – are characteristics that will continue to lead to the evolution and expansion of technologies.

What does this mean for the future of interface design? I would expect a continued expansion of chips with greater power, smaller scale and concomitant higher energy gradients. Similarly I expect interfaces that allow us to keep up with this growth in technology by effectively controlling more power and complexity. At some point in the future, we will reach a limit in what can be done by a user interface just as we will reach a physical limit in what can be done by a computer chip (i.e. the flattening of the Moore’s Law curve). What is the ultimate end state of the user interface and what can apply from entropy in the short-term to influence the design of interfaces? I will consider these possibilities in future discussions.

Ergonomics of Typography

While I've never had any formal education on typography (or perhaps, because of that absence), I've always had a great amount of respect and admiration for the discipline.  And just as a skilled driver can win a race without understanding the physics of internal combustion engines, the vast majority of us can write effectively without comprehending the physical details of the particular letters we are assembling.

But my interest in typography has recently grown due to my exposure to two leading practitioners.  Michael Beirut and Oded Ezer are very different kinds of designers.  Beirut, who I enjoyed seeing lecture a few weeks ago at a Philadelphia AIGA event, is an expert at applying typography to design projects.  His encyclopedic knowledge of type history can be seen in this video from Atlantic Magazine:

On the other hand, Oded Ezer is a true typographer who creates letter forms.  An Israeli, he works primarily in Hebrew type, both in applied and experimental forms.  I am currently reading Ezer's just-published The Typographer's Guide to the Galaxy, a visual review of Ezer's body of work ranging from relatively simple and direct treatments (like the image at the top of this post), to unconventional 3D treatments of letters and "Typospermatoids" (pictured below) - a hypothetical half sperm/half letter, "whose typographic information has been implanted into their DNA."  For more information, see Ezer's web site.

This emphasis and exposure to typography has caused me to re-evaluate my own perspective on the field.  For the usability or human factors practitioner, typography is generally considered in very functional terms.  Whether it's road signs on a highway, warning labels on medication or data captions in a software application, the focus is on the appropriate visual clarity, legibility and structural hierarchy.

But Ezer's unconventional, even anthropomorphic treatment of typography has me thinking of letters as actors with characteristics, rather than inert symbols.  More specifically, I realized that some of the basic principles of ergonomics could be mapped to typographical elements, and that typography and anthropometry (the study of human body measurements) are curiously related, at least metaphorically.

The fundamental principle of anthropometrics is that although people need to conduct the same types of behaviors and tasks, they vary greatly in their physical characteristics.  The same is true for different type faces - while they vary greatly in their physical characteristics and appearance, each must represent and allow the assembly of the same sets of characters into words.  That is, any font (English font, more specifically), is a variation on representing the 26 letters of the alphabet, etc.

But a more striking similarity between ergonomics and typography arises when one considers the rules that govern fit.  In my series on Ergonomics for Interaction Designers (part 3), I discuss the four key factors - reach, clearance, posture and strength.  These four inputs can be applied to assess the ergonomic fit of any person in any context.  But they are also metaphorically comparable for assessing the characteristics of a type:

• Reach can refer to the size of the typeface.  For example a taller type would have a greater "reach" or expanse than a condensed one.
• Clearance is physical space, or in the case of type, white-space.  A type with more space around the letters has greater clearance.
• Posture is the degree of alignment, such that a very slanted type would have a greater postural deviation than a a more linear type.
• Strength is the visible impact of the type as conveyed by the contrast of line thickness and boldness.

As a basic example, we can visually compare Arial Black with an italicized version of Times New Roman.  While both examples are at the same type size (13 pt), Arial Black clearly has greater reach and strength, while Times New Roman has a slanted posture.

Perhaps an interesting mental exercise, but anything more to it?  I've just begun to examine this interrelationship, but I think there may be inspiration here for typographers.  Gaining an understanding of human physical characteristics, and how they vary, could influence the design and application of typography, not for functional purposes as much as creative and exploratory endeavors.  Conversely, my interest in typography may lead to new ideas for addressing ergonomic issues - but if not, I will have gained a better understanding of an intriguing, ubiquitous design niche.`