Yanko Design showcased a design recently called touched echo developed by Markus Kison. Touched echo makes a place-based story experience available to visitors without the use of devices like cell phones. Although the technology was anticipated in an early experiment by Laurie Anderson called the Handphone Table, applying it to place-based stories is a new and innovative experience design. The design works by using bone conduction for hearing rather than transmitting audio waves through the air.

Taking their cue from a metallic icon attached to the railing. When visitors place their elbows on a railing while pressing their hands over their ears to their skull, they hear the air raid sirens and bombs dropping as they did in Dresden Germany in 1945.

“‘Touched Echo’ is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl’s Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction)..."

“The sound is not transmitted in air and through the middle ear but instead through the skull bone. To send the sound over the arm and hand to the skull bone, the railing of the Brühlsche Terasse is equipped with several custom made sound conductors and set into a vibration.”

You can view people experiencing Touched Echo below:

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1. Her katılımcının, yıl sonuna kadar, kendi tasarımları arasında en iyilerini içeren basılı bir portfolyo oluşturması. Basılı portfolyonun tasarımının, katılımcının tasarım dilini yansıtması. Tasarımın bir fikir doğrultusunda geliştirilmesi. Portfolyo örneklerinin incelenmesi.

2. Grafik tasarımın uygulama alanına dahil olan "mekan yaratma" pratiğinin incelenmesi ve bu pratiğe minik projelerle giriş. Kişisel portfolyo tasarımı bire-bir görüşmelerle ilerleyeceği için, dersin ilk döneminde ağırlıklı olarak mekan şekillendirme pratikleri üzerinde durulacak. Bir dizi 2 boyutlu ve 3 boyutlu iş üretilecek. Mekanların grafik açıdan düzenlemesi yoluyla izleyiciyle kurulan görsel iletişim ve yaratılan "mekan deneyimi", "marka deneyimi" açısından mercek altına alınacak. Mekanların nasıl markalaştırıldığı incelenecek.

Bu derste bizim ilgi alanımıza giren konular, duvar grafikleri, yüzey grafikleri, grafik tasarım ve mimari tasarım ilişkisi, temalı mekanlar (themed environments), çevre grafiği, yönlendirme grafikleri, sergi tasarımı, müze ve galerilerin fiziksel mekanının görsel kimliği, mekanların markalaştırılması, ürünlerin 3B sergileme teknikleri, fuar stand tasarımı, satış noktası ve mağaza kimlik tasarımı, hizmet sektörü mekanları tasarımı (otel, bar, kafe, hastane? vb.)", belli bir etkinliğe özgü mekan düzenlemesi, deneyim tasarımı" (experience design)...

Kısacası, grafik tasarımın sayfa ya da ekranın 2B dzüleminden taşıp 3B mekan deneyimine yayıldığı alanlar.

In this class, our aims will be twofold:
1. A continuous effort to create your own unique printed portfolio by the end of the year. (Portfolio part)
2. To Introduce ourselves to the practice of “Placemaking” through graphic design. Since print portfolio will run mostly on one-to-one meetings with u&me, we will mostly be concentrating on the “placemaking” part in the first semester. (Gallery Production Part)

Our area of interest lies in the interdisciplinary area of graphic design, interior design and more. The some keywords that meet our expectations are: wall graphics, surface graphics, visual identity, branding, communicative graphic environments, environmental graphics, interior graphics, graphic design and the built environment, installation design, exhibition design, themed environments, event design, experience design...

Move 'em on, head 'em up
Head 'em up, move 'em on
Move 'em on, head 'em up
Rawhide
Count 'em out, ride 'em in
Ride 'em in, count 'em out
Count 'em out, ride 'em in
Rawhide

Folks, targeting is not nearly as important to social media as understanding customers, attracting them, engaging them, and learning from them to improve products and services. Important results, like reinforcing your brand, come naturally from that process. Customers are smarter than many social media analysts think, especially the social media optimizer crowd. The engagement gap is not a marketing problem so much as it is an experience design challenge. Haven gets it right when he says,

...finding a successful social media solution isn't a marketing problem, it's a product development problem...In most (but not all) cases, it's difficult to get people passionately engaged during the selling process. This is because most marketing approaches essentially favor the needs of the marketer (sell the product, reach more eyeballs, disrupt the prospect so they think about us), not the prospect (How are other people in my situation preparing for retirement? Do the people who read that book feel it helped them?). ...what companies need to do is understand how social technologies enhance their existing products in a way that benefits the constituent (or what new product could exist). Make life easier, fun, or inspiring for a person and they'll be more engaged. Make the social technology solution a core offering, then the marketers get a better shot at turning that participation into something that will entice new customers.

Haven's point is precisely an experience design point about the importance of the customer/user relationship to social media. Mark Vanderbeeken makes a similar point.

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Background

By 2008 the purchase of music on the Web accounted for about 31% of total US music sales (eMarketer) -- three times more than in 2005. Digital movie downloading follows a similar trend: in 2005 total spending was just $11M. and in 2007 already $114M. This shift towards online distribution primarily changes the way traditional entertainment (music, video, games) retailers have to make their revenue growth numbers. 

Many companies put all their efforts to the Web. E.g. retailers like Tesco, HMV and FNAC have redesigned their websites and changed their organizations to better drive online sales, others such as Best Buy are buying Internet companies to acquire the necessary skills. While many entertainment retailers deal with the Internet threats, many seem to have frozen their offline activities. Today's high-street stores don't look a lot different than a few years ago, right? Case in point, 1997 was the last time the HMV store was redesigned, one of the largest entertainment retailers in the world. 

Today's challenges for entertainment stores

There are a few problems with the in-store experience, in specific I think they:

• Haven't caught up with consumers' technology shift. Years ago we 'only' had a hifi-system, a walkman and a video recorder to play music and movies. Today we play entertainment through a variety of devices including mobile phones, games consoles, mp3 players, set-top boxes/DVRs, and PCs. While stores sell the hardware, retailers have yet to find a good way to sell hardware more compellingly than electronics retailers, and to offer digital formats in an offline retail experience. 
• Don't resemble how we use entertainment products. Vinyl discs were the only choice until the digital format arrived. When it arrived our options to play and share music kept on growing. We can send music to friends and even to our cars, we can reformat it into a ringtone for our smartphone, and use our TV to watch stored movies on our PC. We don't see a lot of these applications in the entertainment stores.
• Don't allow us to find what we really want. Online we can easily preview a movie trailer or listen to a song's 30-second sample. We quickly find the music that is most popular among those with a similar taste, get specific recommendations, and create customized playlists. On the Web we don't have to buy all the songs of an album, yet offline we do. Try stations only feature one game, scan and listen technology is weak, staff isn't always helpful to find what we need.

Some companies are changing course

HMV: Increase spontaneous purchasing with more excitement

Seven out of 10 HMV visitors have strong or moderate purchase intentions, yet 30% are actually buying something. Two-thirds of the non-purchasers were open to purchasing while 28% of non-buyers claim 'nothing caught their eye'. To increase the number of buyers, HMV wants to:

Blockbuster: Increase revenue per store through different concept stores.

Blockbuster revenues have gone down since 2003 and to turn the tide, a program is under way to redesign the instore experience. Several concepts are created:

Summary

Traditional entertainment retailers that want to increase store revenues with an improved instore customer experience must consider to:

• Increase value and relevancy to customers by dividing up store space to specific, clearly-defined customer segments. Family/kids, technology-savvy, and gamers are the top picks.
• Inject technology into the in-store experience to better align with consumer expectations.
• Navigate customers better with improved signage and cleaner layouts.
• Let employees play a key role in the new concepts. Pretty design, latest technology and quality materials can do a lot to improve an experience, but it largely comes down to staff to make the new format a success. How well can they answer difficult questions on technology? Are they helpful and friendly to customers? If you make corners to separate customer segments, have dedicated staff specialized for that segment only.

Skilful Minds first discussed virtual anthropology several years ago noting the following.

 

The term points to the ability of customer researchers to now tap into the stories about personal experience that increasing numbers of people are providing online...But, keep in mind that the people offering their stories and experiences for your edification are not doing it for you.

 Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human is definitely worth spending your time reading to gain valuable insights into the cultural dimensions of Second Life. Boellstorff studied Second Life, using it for what traditional anthropologists employing ethnographic methods refer to as a fieldwork site. The research was done between June 2004 and January 2007. He notes that,

I argue that ethnography holds great promise for illuminating culture online, but not because it is traditional or old-fashioned. Ethnography has a special role to play in studying virtual worlds because it has anticipated them. Virtual before the Internet existed, ethnography has always produced a kind of virtual knowledge (p. 6).

Boellstorff's writing style comes out of academic anthropology, so some experience design practitioners may find it a bit cumbersome. However, his approach is a disciplined attempt to describe the cultural dimensions of virtual worlds such as Second Life, rather than arguing about the implications of Second Life for general social relationships in the actual world. The book provides a useful way to gain insights about Second Life without spending your life there.

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Lancia Strator Zero
Glossy brands? Neanche per sogno!
Oggi purtroppo “ruvido“ è molto molto poco politically correct.
I nostri precedessori (product e graphic designer) si che ne sapevano.
Il Centro Stile Bertone è un'altra di quelle eccellenze italiane della cui eredità
non stiamo affatto percependo la responsabilità.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Shakespeare (Hamlet)

Many organizations have placed an increasing amount of attention on the quality of the experience their customers have.  However, the first mistake most organizations make is focusing on what the company does to deliver a customer experience rather than taking a step back and thinking first about how customers actually have experiences.  The second biggest mistake is the way most organizations listen to and react to customers' suggestions about what to do to improve the experience.

So, let's consider how people (customers or otherwise) "have" experiences.  Every waking minute of our day, we are swimming in an infinite sea of sensory information about the events unfolding around us.   In order to ensure our own survival, we've evolved very effective ways to subconsciously filter and react to virtually all of this information automatically... without even thinking about it.    This allows us to pay attention to the relatively small number of events that seem most important.  In dealing with the vast majority of the events in our lives, we just get the gist of the situation and respond with relatively automatic behavior. 

Our lives are not influenced as much by events, as by the ways we perceive and interpret those events.

Without understanding the idiosyncrasies in the way people perceive and interpret what happens around them, it's very easy to invest a lot of time, energy, and money improving the reality of the events without having much of a positive impact on customers' experience of those events.

When you get right down to it, there are always to strategies:  1) improve the reality of the events and 2) influence the way customers experience those realities.   My first understanding of this came about 25 years ago, while working with Dick Larson at MIT.  Dr. Larson, an expert in the psychology of waiting, told me the story of commercial real estate managers that we're struggling with improving the service levels of elevators in high-rise buildings during peak hours.  People were frustrated by waiting too long for the elevators.  As in most situations, the complexity and cost of actually improving service levels is quite high.  It involves installing faster elevators, improving the optimization of elevator queuing, etc...   The simpler solution and more effective solution was to install mirrors in the elevator lobbies.  This allowed people to entertain themselves by fixing their hair, straightening their tie, and checking each other out in a much more socially acceptable way.  The perceived experience improvement was greater with the relatively low cost mirrors than with the relatively high cost technology required to improve actual service levels.  (Waiting time is an important aspect of many experiences, for more information about the waiting experience see: Helping Customers Lose Wait)

So, if you ask customers what they want, what do they tell you?  In most cases, they ask for the relatively obvious service level improvements that relate to the first strategy.  While it's important to listen to customers' feedback about their experiences and their ideas for improvements, it's a big mistake to just respond to those requests.  Let's take a look at why this is true.

One particularly useful way to understand how customers' "have" experiences is to consider three levels of processing that get applied as people perceive, interpret, evaluate, and act on the events that occur in their lives.   At the reactive level, more than 99% of the sensory information that we are surrounded by is automatically dealt with in a way that is purely subconscious.  Our brain acts like a pattern matching and prediction machine... we are continuously sensing our environment and, as long as it behaves in a way that roughly approximates what we expect, we don't have to spend our preciously short supply of conscious attention focused on it.  Beyond this purely reactive level of processing, we have a deliberative layer which allows us to get the "gist" of the situation and respond with learned or patterned behavior that allows us to operate on automatic pilot.  This is the capability that allows us to drive into work while talking on the cell phone or thinking about our upcoming meeting... or the capability that allows us to make dinner while talking to the kids about what happened at school.   At the highest level we can consciously reflect on our experiences.  However, what we are reflecting on is often just the gist of the situation from the lower levels.  Although we may believe we actually experience events the way they happened, the reconstructive nature of memory means that we tend to fill in facts that are consistent with our story about what happened rather than clearly and accurately recalling actual events.  (For further discussion see:  Designing for Customers’ Reactive, Deliberative, and Reflective Experiences.)

While it's important to listen to what customers tell you about their experiences, it's also important to realize that the "voice of the customer" is generally limited to the language customers can find... to express what they can remember... about how they think they felt... regarding an experience that was largely subconscious.  Customers are usually able to tell you about the obvious dissatisfiers in their experiences.  In most cases, however, it is more productive to look past what customers are telling you to find ways to influence customers' experiences of the events that happen to them.  In general, the best strategy that we've found is to:

1. Design for Gist Processing. At the base level, you need to understand the basic constructs that customers apply to navigate most of the experience relying on gist processing and automatic behavioral scripts.   When a customer enters a bank branch, checks into a hotel, enrolls with a health insurance provider,  etc... they have a set of constructs that they've learned from and apply based on their previous experiences.  Experiences that are designed based on these constructs, become inherently easy to do business with.   As Alfred North Whitehead said, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."   We've been evolving a structured process of Experiential Construct Elicitation that I will cover in an upcoming post.
2. Deliver Signature Experience Elements. This is all about getting the customers' attention using a small number of highly differentiated "signature experience elements" that customers perceive as a difference in kind compared to what they expected or feel they could get from another provider.  If you listen to customers talk about the Starbucks experience, the Whole Foods experience, etc..., you'll see that customers consistently refer to a small set of experience elements that stand out for them as being the defining components of the experience.  While you can spend a lot of time getting lots of details correct in the experience, having a small set of signature elements are the kinds of things that really stand out for and influence customers.

We are living in a globalized world but local or cultural identities strongly influence our patterns of behavior and our interpretation of behavior in others by estblishing norms and values. Nevertheless, current interfaces seldom reflect such cultural heuristics. Thus, users are forced to adapt their way of interaction and interpretation to a given (most of the time western) perspective. Instead it would be much more reasonable to allow e.g. for culturally tailored presentation of information. Although there is no principled approach yet to challenge the importance of cultural patterns in human-computer interaction, there are a number of promising results from a variety of research projects around the world that have started to integrate cultural aspects in the interaction. These range from artistic work over web design to CSCW support tools and training applications with conversational virtual characters. Bringing together the leading reseachers from these emerging research streams in this special issue will further discussions and contribute to establishing a new research area.

Now, I have a lot to say about this, but perhaps the starting point is the assumption that HCI was ever outside of culture to begin with, that its "enculturation" (if you think about the different meanings of culture, including agriculture and lab cultures, this is a really strange word!) is even possible. I would argue that culture was always already there. The fact that three decades into the field that HCI is only now acknowledging it and engaging with it is the bigger headline.

And, as is typical of HCI, the only "principled" way to go about this is, naturally, to use traditional engineering and user research paradigms. Let me excerpt some more of this CFP:

The special issue will be centered around three main research challenges:

1. Models and Theory...

2. Empirical data on cultural/cross-cultural interaction...

3. Systems and applications...

Now I want to be very clear that I emphatically support the goals that this special issue is setting out to achieve. I am very happy this is happening.

But I am equally emphatically going to assert that this appropriation of scientific methodologies to address cultural issues in HCI deserves far more reflection than it seems to be getting. The three research topic areas quoted above will look absolutely alien to anyone who studies culture.

Worse, this 785 word CFP fails even to acknowledge the existence of cultural studies, literary theory, philosophy, new media theory, or design criticism. Of all of the sample approaches and topics offered in this abstract, the 2,500 year tradition of the humanities--i.e., the people who study culture professionally--are not only not mentioned, but it simply isn't clear even where they *might* fit in. Here are the sample paper topics offered:

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Models and theories of enculturated interfaces
- Design guidelines for enculturated interfaces
- Field studies of intercultural interaction
- Standardization issues on resources and tools for enculturated HCI such as
multilingual/multi-cultural comparative corpus, verbal/nonverbal behaviors
annotation scheme
- Language processing for enculturated interfaces/multilingual NLP -
Multimodal processing for enculturated interfaces
- Culture adaptive interaction techniques focuing e.g. on conversational,
mobile, pervasive, or web-based interactions
- Computer supported intercultural collaboration
- Web technologies for enculturated HCI
- Ambient technologies for enculturated HCI
- Prototypes of enculturated systems
- Evaluation case studies/Evaluation guidelines for enculturated systems

Standardization, information processing, evaluation guidelines, "cultural heuristics"--all of these topics are alien to cultural approaches to technology, media, the arts, and society. Cultural heuristics (a phrase from the intro quoted at the beginning of this post, not the previous list) strongly implies a reductive epistemological position that begs for a little critical reflection. But these terms are all the familiar concepts and strategies of computer science and psychological approaches to HCI; they are not the language of the study of culture.

To preempt any possible misunderstandings, let me say very explicitly that I do NOT believe either (a) that cultural studies has it "right" and that HCI should simply appropriate its approaches; nor do I believe (b) that any of the scientific approaches here are intrinsically due to fail. Indeed, the "digital arts and humanities" movements both at federal levels and even at my local university explore ways that science and technology can support cultural research, and I enthusiastically support these initiatives. But there is no claim behind them that they are "enculturating HCI" as if HCI in its natural habitat lacks culture!

Rather, my point is that as a cultural studies person, this CFP comes across as a colonialization of cultural study--"we know better than you"--and the fact that it doesn't even seem to know that there are any other perspectives, or that it holds them in such contempt as not even to acknowledge or engage them, is alarming. I have a serious problem with the parochialism of HCI, which claims to be "interdisciplinary" but which, in cases such as this, is more imperial than interdisciplinary.

If HCI wants to engage with the cultural, then (a) it's about time, since HCI has always been cultural and in failing to engage with that fact has abdicated some of its ethical responsibilities, and (b) at a minimum, there needs to be some reflection about the fitness of appropriating strategies, methods, epistemologies, and ethical positions from engineering into aspects of human life involving categories that engineering has comparatively little history dealing with: identity, ideology, enlightenment, intimacy, social justice, aesthetic pleasure, subcultures, human expression, self-actualization, speculative reasoning, taste, and radical critiques of knowledge production.

We in HCI should at least be asking: Are the goals of a more culturally nuanced HCI best served by prototypes, evaluations, standardization, information processing models, heuristics, and empirical user studies? This CFP has already answered this question implicitly and in the affirmative. On what grounds? I would hazard to guess habit.

I don't have a problem with any of those approaches per se, but I believe we need to cast the nets wider. The disciplines that brought us innovations in modeling and predicting the usability of interfaces may not, on their own, be sufficient to address profoundly complex and controversial issues of cultural identity and interaction. The obvious answer, to me at least, is that the people who understand interaction the best--people in HCI--need to have a dialogue with, not an imperial take-over of, the people who understand culture the best--people in cultural studies (in the broadest and most inclusive sense).

HCI without cultural studies is dangerous; cultural studies of interaction without HCI are irrelevant (at least to interaction design).

1. Critical theory can inform one or more stages of the traditional interaction design process (e.g., user research, prototyping, evaluation)
2. Critical theory can resist, transcend, transform, or subvert the traditional interaction design process (example: the experimental-art-like approaches of Bill Gaver)
3. Design is used to develop theory (in other words, designs are made only to explore and create theory, not to be released to solve a real-world problem)
4. The critic stands outside of interaction design and critiques interaction designs

So (1) and (2) directly lead to actual designs. (3) and (4), if they lead to designs, they only do so indirectly.

And, after a comment by Ann Light to the effect that each of these entails ethical positions, I realized her point could be expanded to include epistemological positions, notions of "rigor," criteria for judgment, skill sets, and therefore training and education. It is worth teasing these out (but not here, at least not today).

We noted that the findings of the Tribalization study point to a Community Gap. Yet, drawing from Rachel Happe, we also pointed out the differences between the conversations characterizing social media and the conversations of a community. The distinction is important to keep in mind when considering an overall strategy for connecting with and engaging people online, whether they are employees, suppliers, or customers. After reading two recent research efforts, one from Fleishman-Hillard and the other from Forrester Research, it is clear that the Community Gap is one manifestation of a larger gap, the Engagement Gap.

Fleishman-Hillard's Digital Research Group and HarrisInteractive recently released their Digital Influence Index Study, focused on the Internet's importance to the lives of consumers in the UK, Germany, and France. The Digital Influence Index Study provides an overall strategic assessment of the role of digital communications to 35 different decisions, from voting for politicians to buying entertainment tickets, electronic devices, and a range of purchases, made by consumers in the three European countries. Though it doesn't use the specific term, the study outlines an overall engagement gap between the influence of the Internet in consumer decision making and the amount of spending, and effort, by corporations and government agencies in trying to interact with and shape the thinking behind those decisions, particularly through advertising. In the UK, Germany, and France, the Internet is the most influential medium, almost twice as influential as television. However, globally, online advertising accounts for only 7% to 8% of the advertising market.

The Digital Influence Index Study examines the influence of the Internet across consumer decisions for the range of web applications, including Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and what the study refers to as Web 3.0. Regarding the latter, the study notes:

Web 3.0 is an enabling technology that will liberate consumers from the limitations of PC’s and laptops and put the power of the Internet in their hands, anytime, anywhere. Although there are competing definitions of Web 3.0, for this study we have adopted the concept that focuses on mobility as the major factor that will transform the way consumers use the Internet.

Our interest is in the findings offered by the Digital Influence Index Study regarding engagement and conversation with the consumer across all web applications, though the predominance of opportunities to engage and converse occur largely in the Web 2.0 space where social networking and communities are supported.

Engagement occurs on at least two levels on the Web. Web 1.0 engagement is largely defined by interactions at the page or website level, where page views, click-throughs, unique visitors, time spent on site, and other SEO metrics are important. Yet, Web 2.0 engagement, though inclusive of the standard Web 1.0 metrics, occurs at the social level, across a network of people interacting with advertisements, media sources for entertainment and information, and other people. For example, networks of interaction with advertising are seen in recent Facebook ads. As Kaye recently noted over at ClickZ:

The value of the Facebook ads lies in their viral quality. The site alerts friends in a network to the actions of their fellow network members, and the ads work in a similar fashion. A small number of friends in someone's network may be notified when he has interacted with an engagement ad. That distribution can be extended by advertisers willing to pay to notify all friends of those who have interacted with an ad. The company refers to that option as "social" ads.

Facebook engagement ads are an explicit effort to leverage social networks to boost viral marketing campaigns. The topic of what gives a social media object, such as an ad or video, a viral quality is an emerging challenge for anyone wanting to get their message out through social networks or online communities. For now, the thoughts of Michael Wesch from the Digital Ethnography project, an ongoing ethnographic study of YouTube videos, at Kansas State University are sufficiently precise.

It’s not about producing for a mass, but building a critical mass. For a video to go viral it has to do more than just passively entertain. It has to co-opt the viewer into *wanting* to spread it. The key then is to look at what motivates people to spread videos. There are many motivations: political, presenting identity, just sharing something amazing or funny, etc. Likewise it is equally important to look at what might stop people from spreading a video. For example, people do not spread videos that might make them look bad for having enjoyed it, or videos they don’t want to be associated with.

Companies concerned about their brand, or individual bloggers interested in their blog's reputation, are now able to use a range of tools to close the Engagement Gap and understand who is saying what about them across social media. To name just a few of these social media analysis tools: SM2, nuconomy, ClickTale, TruCast, backtype, and others.

The Forrester research mentioned above, which many readers may already know about, came out earlier this year and is incorporated into a book, groundswell, written by the lead researchers, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. It offers a social technographics profile of participants in the groundswell. They define the groundswell as, "A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations" (p. 9). Li and Bernoff distinguish six types of participants in this social technographics profile: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. For our purposes, Li and Bernoff's main point is in advising that the choice an organization makes on how to engage the groundswell (through communities, social networks, etc.) needs to take into account the social technographics profile of the people available for engagement there, and their behavioral preferences in use of the Web.

Moreover, just as the Fleishman-Hillard/Harris Interactive research advises that, "any organisation's digital engagement with consumers must be based on an open and honest representation of interests and positions" (p. 4). The Forrester researchers add that, listening strategies alone, though useful in understanding the interaction of an organization's brand with participants in the groundswell, are most effective when the organizations plan how to act on what is learned. In other words, closing the engagement gap also means learning from the customer's experience with your brand.

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We initially discussed place-based stories back in 2006, noting the way [murmur] provided people experiencing a place to add a story about their engagement with it. To listen to the stories, visitors to that place simply called a number on their mobile device.

I was reminded of the [murmur] service this past weekend while walking through the Missouri Botanical Gardens(MoBot) here in St. Louis. MoBot is hosting the Niki exhibit, showing forty mosaic sculptures done by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 - 2002). Each sculpture is assigned a unique number that corresponds to an audio message for that work. For example, La Cabeza information is available at (314) 558-4357 11#.

While listening to the audio messages that correspond to each sculpture I thought of the [murmur] service and how nice it would be to add my own impressions of the artist's work to share with others who visit MoBot. La Cabeza leaves a visceral impression since you can go inside it to a meditation room. Although MoBot allows listeners to leave comments, sharing impressions with others visiting the exhibit would add to the experience.

The Buddha sculpture was also one of my favorites.

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In it, we argue that online representations do not always represent our offline selves, and it is a mistake to think they should always do so. A major case in point is online social spaces, from Twitter to Facebook to Second Life, where online representations are more accurately seen as symbolically dense multimedia performances than "true" representations of one's "true" (offline) self.

These dynamics are particularly visible in intimate activity online (and we mean much more than cybering by that), which we explore and illustrate in the article. Because people are finding and cultivating intimacy online, and because it seems to be genuine, emotionally true, and also symbolically connected to real world culture, we also argue that avatars are not merely inside virtual worlds but rather that they are another part of our "real" selves. Certainly, our online friends are not imaginary, and if one follows the logic of that forward, it suggests that much of what happens online is no more imaginary than participation in any other part of life (school, weddings, parties, the workplace, etc.).

• Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations
• David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous
• Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
• Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin
• Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
• Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge
• Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity

The last four books move beyond the areas of interaction & experience design and into the related realms of visual thinking, physical architecture, decision architecture, and what Kluger dubs "the art of making complex things simple."   William J. Mitchell's essays on the intersection of physical architecture and digital information networks (collected in such books as Me++, e-topia, City of Bits and Placing Words) are also worth exploring for anyone interested in understanding how the "endless flow of information" unleashed by the web and related technologies is challenging architects to find new ways to integrate the physical and virtual realms.

Of the books on and Malouf & Evans' list, Alan Cooper's About Face 3.0, Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences, and Lidwell/Holden/Butler's Universal Principles of Design have been regulars on my bedside reading table of late.  I highly recommend all three.

For those who think discussions of semantic value and meaning are pointless, with no relationship to technology adoption, you may want to skip this post. 

We first discussed visual tags in 2006. Many people today refer to them as 2d barcodes. However, a crucial difference exists between what things are like and what they in fact are. Calling visual tags (v-Tags) 2d barcodes is like calling YouTube a video database, Flickr a photo database, or Del.icio.us a favorites list.  Literally, the description is accurate. Functionally, it is meaningless.

Discussions about v-Tags invariably note that the technology is new and not well-known, except by a few early adopters. Using the term 2d barcode to describe the applications this technology affords is one sure way of stretching out the adoption curve rather than speeding it up. Consider the difference between suggesting "let's 2d barcode" a person, place, or thing versus suggesting "let's v-Tag" them or it. 

Our initial point in discussing this technology innovation was to take note that these v-Tags represent another web 2.0 application stemming from ubiquitous computing. The point was made in relation to Peter Morville's discussion of Findability and the notion, which since became a meme of its own, that entire cities are developing into user interfaces as John Thackara and Malcolm McCullough initially pointed out. Our basic point on visual tagging went as follows:

The metadata necessary for accessing relevant information is largely in the context, the embodied situation of the user.

From the first time I heard the word folksonomy, a key concept to web 2.0, I really liked the concept. The idea of people building metadata about persons, places, and things as they experience them by tagging those experiences in their own terms really seems cool, tight, or whatever terms goes with your demographic, if you appreciate the concept of sociality.

One of the reasons people continue referring to v-Tags as 2d barcodes relates to the fact that no standard exists governing their creation or readability by different scanning software run on various mobile phones. However, the lack of a standard for the hardware and software supporting a specific application of web 2.0 technology doesn't mean we can't be clear about what the application in fact does. Visual tagging is useful in creating social networks around products, augmenting people's experience with places, mobile learning, and transacting eCommerce at websites, among other potential uses.

So far, people creating v-Tags mostly design them to connect the person using a mobile device to a specific url destination for a specific purpose, i.e. transact business, advertise, tell a story, share an experience with a community. However, if we know anything about the way people use technology, one thing that people doing experience design know is that users find their own ways to apply technology, often outside the intentions of the designer. In fact, the interpretive flexibility of web 2.0 is one of its defining features and key to the importance of the folksonomy concept and tagging.

Currently, people create v-Tags with software on personal computers using Google Charts API or some other software, though that way of visually tagging a person, place, or thing isn't the only possible creation technique. Oliver Starr gets directly to the point in "The future of 2-d barcodes" regarding the future potential of v-Tags (which he refers to as 2D barcodes) over at Sprint's PhoneIQ site. Regarding the current restriction that v-Tags are created on computers, he notes:

But the problem is that, again, that’s not a spontaneous act to create your own barcode, and they have software that allows you to even put it on a T-shirt or make stickers or business cards and that’s very cool, but again it requires you to be at a PC, have access to a printer. It's not something where you could take, for example if you had photosensitive paint and your camera could actually take an image with a flash which then created in real time a 2D barcode on a surface because you were just reporting on something related to that area.

However, we don't need to think as far in the future as Starr to envision uses of v-Tags that go beyond a convenient, but controlled, navigation aid to additional information about a person, place, or thing. It is not far-fetched to envision uses of visual tagging that mimic urban graffiti, with people sticking their own v-Tags on objects to add social networking to the point of connection rather than its destination.

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In Australian universities there is a growing emphasis on student engagement.  Experiential Learning and active learning are central. While ‘experience design’ is claimed to be addressed by contemporary game designers; ‘learning design’ to be addressed by contemporary educational designers, and educators claim to assess the educational impacts on students of learning designs, there is a paucity of evaluations of ‘learning experience’ design. One of the challenges is how a 3D environment can be designed for its emotional contribution to students engagement and the learning experience. How can we measure motivation and other emotions evident in  simulations and games?

This is worth my simmering

Nike initiated a collaboration with Apple a couple of years ago to take advantage of ubiquitous computing as a Web 2.0 application, supporting a social networking initiative that offers a good example of how to engage customers. Nike allows customers to track their runs using an RFID sensor placed inside one shoe and, either a SportBand or an iPod + a Sport Kit that includes an RFID sensor and an iPod nano receiver.

As the Nike+ site indicates:

Nike+ is designed for athletes who like to run with music and who want to measure and monitor their progress toward their goals. To get instant workout feedback, you’ll need Nike+ ready shoes and either a Nike+ SportBand or an iPod® nano and Nike + iPod Sport Kit nano (which includes a sensor and iPod nano receiver). When placed under the sockliner of the left Nike+ ready shoe, the sensor measures your pace, distance, time elapsed and calories burned. This information is transmitted wirelessly to the receiver for real-time audio feedback while you listen to your favorite workout music. Learn more at Nikeplus.com.

Using a somewhat different set of Web 2.0 technologies, Adidas integrates social media with its products by taking advantage of visual tags, or 2d barcodes, to support a social networking site for Japanese enthusiasts wanting to celebrate  Adidas shoes. In this instance, the Adidas logo is transformed into a visual tag, or 2d barcode (in this instance using a QR Code).

The celebrate Adidas website takes a while to load and doesn't really provide much opportunity for the enthusiasts to connect. However, it does allow each person to upload an image of themselves and attach a nickname to it.

You can then search by nickname and embed an enthusiast into your blog, perhaps your own, though Wordpress doesn't allow javascript so I can't do it here. Apparently, Adidas also embeds a visual tag into its running shorts.

Thanks to Roger over at 2d code for pointing to the Adidas celebration.

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Continued from Part 6 of the Interaction Criticism series, which starts here.

Acknowledgment: Many of the ideas and readings cited throughout this series and particularly in this post reflect the research and contributions of my colleague and spouse, Shaowen Bardzell.

I certainly have enjoyed composing this series of posts, and I hope to revise it into a paper soon. In the meantime, I have gotten lots of requests for places to start reading, and so this final post in the series I offer some resources for you to explore.

There are two categories of works I will mention here. First, there are works in the field of HCI that take critical perspectives. Second, there are general and introductory works to critical theory and aesthetics.

Critical Approaches to HCI

I will mention a few works in HCI that take critical perspectives. But before I do, I want to take a position. All of the works in this area I am about to cite are inspirations and models to me. While I have various pecky critiques and peeves for each, I love them all and must acknowledge how enormously influential and inspirational they have been to me.

That said, I do not recommend that interaction designers, especially with scientific backgrounds, rely on them to understand how critical theory can interface with HCI in a way sufficient to support critical practice (they're fine, of course, if all one wants is to get a sense for what critical HCI looks like). None of them are introductory works on critical theory, because all of them are original applications of critical theory in the domain of HCI. They may offer some introductory remarks, but these are (appropriately) merely geared to ensure that readers understand the works in question--not to ensure that readers understand critical theory in any nuanced way. But critical theory is all about nuance; none offers an explicit methodology, as it relies instead on the creative intellectual capacity of the critic to make use of the theory to explicate and/or interpret a given phenomenon. Additionally, critical theory has its own history and relationships to the history of art and design, and it loses quite a bit when it is ripped out of that context.

The risk--and one I have seen actualized many times--is that people appropriate critical theories that they have read about in HCI literature in poor ways. They simply don't understand them, and it's obvious to anyone who has had exposure to the theory in question. I don't want to be an elitist at all--I really want our field to make full use of critical theory and (I really mean this) to innovate on it--but at the same time, there have to be some standards with regard to how these are appropriated. Yanking a critical concept willy nilly out of its context because of apparent similarities to the way one already understands something in interaction design is a poor use of critical theory. Critical theory does not exist to confirm what we think, offering a fancy vocabulary to justify us; it is supposed to transform how we think, offering an approach to helping us think the unthought, to have ideas we couldn't have without it.

So, without further ado, here are things I heartily recommend as ways of seeing how critical theory interfaces with HCI, and which I heartily do not recommend as introductions to critical theory. It is not comprehensive. Remember this is just a blog!

• Bardzell, J. & Bardzell, S. Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI. In In CHI’08 Extended Abstracts. ACM Press (2008), 2463-2472.
• Bertelsen, O. & Pold, S. Criticism as an Approach to Interface Aesthetics. Proc. of NordiCHI ’04, ACM Press (2004). 23-32.
• Blythe, M., Wright, J., McCarthy, J., and Bertelsen O. Theory and method for experience-centered design. Proc. of CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 1691-1694.
• Boehner, K., DePaula, R., Dourish, P. & Sengers, P. Affect: From information to interaction. In Bertelsen, O. et al. (eds). Critical Computing—Between sense and sensibility, ACM Press (2005), 59-68.
• Dourish, P. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2001.
• Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, S. Thoughtful Interaction Design. MIT Press, 2004.
• McCarthy, J. & Wright, P.  Technology as Experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. (2004).
• Sengers, P. and Gaver, B. Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation. Proc. of DIS 2006, ACM Press (2006), 99-108.
• Sengers, P., McCarthy, J., & Dourish, P. Reflective HCI: Articulating an agenda for critical practice. In CHI’06 Extended Abstracts. ACM Press (2006), 1683-1686.
• Udsen, L., & Jørgensen, A. The Aesthetic Turn. Digital Creativity, 16 (4), 205-216.

So I hope that's helpful.

Introductions to Critical and Cultural Theory and Aesthetics

If you want to practice, as opposed to read up on, critical approaches to HCI, then in my opinion, you minimally need to read about critical theory in its original context, which is literary, art, design, and cultural criticism. As noted earlier, I believe this because critical theory is not merely difficult (like all theory) but also because (also like all theory) it emerged in historical contexts, where one theorist was responding to the works of an earlier theorist, or a theorist was elaborating new theory at a time of major political or aesthetic change (e.g., the rise of modernism and the totalitarian state). These contexts matter!

I also recommend that people start with introductory readings. That may sound condescending. You might think, why don't I just go out and read Heidegger or Barthes myself and form my own opinions? You can, but I don't think it's the most efficient way to get a practical, working knowledge of how to use the theory. This is so for many reasons. The main one is that Foucault or Derrida or Bakhtin or whoever wasn't writing in Silicon Valley in 2008 about interaction design, but rather was writing in a different country, in a different historical era, about different stuff. And, by implication, for an audience other than us! That audience is assumed to know all sorts of things that, if you are still reading this post, you probably don't already know. Derrida, for example, wrote assuming that the reader had already mastered (i.e., studied extensively, know the secondary literature on, and have mature, philosophical opinions of one's own on), for example, Heidegger. Of course, to understand Heidegger, you need to have a similar mastery of Husserl, Kant, and Aristotle. And so on. Most of us aren't in that audience, and that means we'll miss a lot of nuance and significance of what we read.

Introductory books explain the key ideas to serious, intelligent people who don't yet have that mastery. There is no shame in that, and I cite them all the time. My student's edition of what could have been titled "What Foucault Said" has been more influential on me than anything Foucault wrote, and I actually have read the majority of Foucault's writings available in English, right down to interviews and minor essays. Still, that intro book lays out the big picture and offers the framework in which I organize all those writings.

So there are five introductions to literary and critical theory that I am happy to recommend. I even append a brief comment about each, to help you in your selections. Again, this is not a comprehensive or carefully crafted list.

• Peter Barry. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995 (second ed. 2002). I just discovered this one, and I really like it. It does a good job of balancing theoretical concepts with a focus on method, that is, how such and such a concept might affect the way you read. I really wish I had had it as an undergrad.
• Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1983. This is the classic work that everyone has read, but I actually am not crazy about it as an introduction. (I like it as an original work of theory, though.) My concern is that Eagleton does not really try to fairly represent the core ideas of each theory on their own terms, but rather interprets them on his own terms as he presents. Thus, there is a lot of critique in this book, which itself is great, but it interferes with its introductory capacity, IMHO.
• Raman Selden (Ed.). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VIII: From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (2005). I love this volume, but it may be a little too oriented toward practitioners of literary studies. If you want to take your skills to the next level with key 20th century literary theory, particularly those influenced by linguistics, then this is a good next step. But if you're just starting, I probably wouldn't recommend this one.
• Lois Tyson. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Routledge, 2005. This book delivers on the promise of its title. It introduces all the major schools in very acccessible chapters. My favorite feature: every chapter contains a section called "Some Questions ____ Critics Ask About Literary Texts," (the blank is filled with the chapter topic: psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist, etc.). These questions are a fantastic launching point for people first acquainting themselves with these theories who also want to practice using the theories. Love. It.
• Patricia Waugh (Ed.). Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. This phone book of an anthology covers quite a bit of ground. The chapters I have read have been readable and accessible introductions to the relevant theory--quite impressively so. The only downside is that some of the chapters introduce, develop, and justify the theoretical concepts without really saying anything about how to apply them. You are supposed to figure that out for yourself (and that's exactly what is expected of trained critics, but those of us outside literary studies might prefer at least a little direction).

So much for the big introductions. I also want to mention aesthetics in this post. One might think that literary/cultural studies and aesthetics would more or less be synonymous. In a sense, they are. But there's also a very significant distinction that's worth mentioning. And I'm going to oversimplify it, but that's too bad. This is a blog.

In the 20th century, there was a split in philosophy, whereby the field broke into two large camps. One was called Analytic, and it emphasized logic and cognition and tended to be practiced in the UK, USA, and Scandinavia. It gave us thinkers such as Carnap, Russell, and Quine. The other group was Continental, and it was primarily French and German, and focused on language, reader reception, and ideology; it gave us thinkers such as Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, and concepts such as postmodernism. These two groups had unpleasant things to say about each other.

The significance for our purposes is that, from what I can tell, people who use terms like literary theory, cultural theory, critical theory, and so on, are generally influenced by Continental philosophy. (Full disclosure: this was my training, and my strength, but I'm no longer a partisan for it--or against it.) In my readings, people who use the term "aesthetics" are more likely to have an Analytic background. And I love their work, even though they say bad things about my French intellectual heroes. There are many introductions to aesthetics as well, but there are two I have read cover-to-cover and wholeheartedly recommend:

• George Dickie. Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dickie is deservedly famous for his institutional theory of art, a brilliantly clear thinker, and a surprisingly concise, accessible writer. How can I possibly improve on that as a recommendation? This book is under 200 pages!
• Gordon Graham. Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 1997 (3rd edition 2005). I need to teach more classes so I can make more students read this book! After offering a general theory of art, Graham examines each of the arts (visual arts, literary arts, music, performing arts, architecture, etc.) focusing on two seemingly simple questions: "What is the distinctive value of ____" (where the blank is filled with a given type of art) and "How does ____ direct the mind?" This second question, which at first struck me as a little idiosyncratic, is, in Graham's hands, quite fecund. (It is also bracingly cognitive, but I'll resist further criticism for now.)

Finally, and I really, really need to stop, unless someone is going to give me tenure based on a series of blog posts, I want to direct your attention to a few series that overall I really like, even if individual items in them can be uneven. Basically, and this is true of all four of the series, each volume takes on a single topic, is slender (usually between 100-200 pages), and written for a serious, but introductory audience. Rather than offering brilliant critique and original thinking, each instead offers a meat-and-potatoes introduction to its topic, based on the present consensus view of that topic. All are well referenced and, from what I have seen, actually written by legitimate experts in the field. So, if after reading some theory you decide you want to get a better handle on Lyotard's critique of twentieth-century scientific thinking, you've got a great next step. Combined, these four series have over 100 volumes. They're totally overpriced, so if someone from Routledge is reading this, now is the time for you to blush. Still, you'll get a lot out of them, so bite the bullet.

• Key Sociologists (series editor Peter Hamilton), published by Routledge. Sample authors: Simmel, Foucault, Weber, Bourdieu.
• Routledge Critical Thinkers: Essential Guides for Literary Studies (series editor Robert Eaglestone), published by Routledge. Sample authors: Barthes, Lyotard, Kristeva, Zizek.
• A Guide for the Perplexed (no specified series editor), published by Continuum. Sample authors: Deleuze, Derrida, Adorno, Levinas.
• A Very Short Introduction (no specified series editor), published by Oxford University Press. Sample topics: Poststructuralism, Barthes, Literary Theory, Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell.

Of course, none of the books in the second half of this post are meant to replace reading the real thing. I certainly would not discourage someone from reading Foucault. But I would strongly discourage interaction designers who do not have a background in the humanities from reading Foucault or Barthes or Bakhtin without also reading some of the introductory literature about Foucault or Barthes or Bakhtin. This will hopefully help prevent the problem of people citing critics where their understanding is actually (and all too obviously) derived from reading about them in HCI literature.

"Interaction Criticism: How to Do It" Series Conclusion

I hope this collection of posts is helpful in arousing interest and giving leads to people with new interest in critical approaches to HCI. I also welcome constructive criticism, via email, as comments right here on the blog, or in your own blogs.

Thanks to all of you for the encouragement to see this series through, especially Shaowen Bardzell, Erik Stolterman, Mark Blythe, Gilbert Cockton, Alan Blackwell, Mattias Arvola, Tyler Pace, Will Odom, Hyewon Gim, James Pierce, Jordan Fugate, Heather Wiltse, and the PhD Design distribution list.

There are several reasons why this activity is important. First, the two epistemological positions are sufficiently incompatible that both sides don't "get" each other. To critics, social scientists can come off looking intellectually lazy, provincial, and mechanistic. To social scientists, critics can come off looking arrogant, totally subjective, and fluffy (not in the good way, like stuffed animals, but in the bad way, that is, lacking rigor). Second, my field (HCI), a traditionally social science-dominated field with an increasing interest in cultural categories, such as "experience" and "aesthetics," is the site of a collision between these two epistemologies, and believe me, it's not going well so far. And third, I'm trying to be one of the voices of translation, if not conciliation. That is, it may be too much to ask a social scientist to think and act like a critic and vice-versa, but it seems to me quite reasonable to ask a social scientist or critic considering contemporary, culturally embedded interaction design to have a basic comprehension (and with it respect) of the opposing epistemological position. We need to get away from the name-calling.

To articulate the epistemology of criticism, I have--as recent and future posts on this blog illustrate--read a lot of criticism and reflected on how it differs from what I suppose a social science approach to the same phenomenon might look like (part of the problem is that they don't often consider "the same phenomenon," so much of my enterprise is speculative). The immediate goal of this is to develop a theory of "interaction criticism" that will, not to put too fine a point on it, get me tenure. Now, one of the problems (and thanks again to Shaowen for asking the question that led me to this thought) is that on the one hand, I want to respect critical approaches. I want to practice criticism with the same care, rigor, and sensibility as a "proper" critic. (As opposed to the way many in HCI today seem to grab onto a random concept from critical theory and drop it ungracefully into HCI-as-usual.) At the same time, I want to update criticism for the context of interaction design. An interaction design is not a novel, and I must be mindful not to treat it like one.

So I know, obviously, that literary and cultural theory cannot simply be ported from Jane Austen to Steve Jobs. But it is a much harder question to know, in everyday practice, when a deviation from "true" literary/cultural criticism in order to accommodate the special characteristics of interactive digital media, is in fact a compromise, and how much of one, and whether anything can be done to make up for it. To answer that question, it seems to me, one needs something of a philosophical awareness of one's use of critical theory.

There is a similar question to be answered as well, besides how does criticism differ from social science approaches, and that is, how does criticism in the arts (literature, painting, film) differ from criticism in design (architecture, interior design, industrial design, and fashion). I have some thoughts, but they need refinement. Probably that will happen in this space in the future as well.

In order to cultivate that philosophical awareness, I am attempting to articulate the epistemological underpinnings of these two different strategies for studying human-computer interaction.

come dice Frank “iconografia hells angels“ per Mike Giant

Although the video makes its points through a degree of exaggeration, the history of the stop sign in the United States does reflect some of the uncertainties depicted.

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As Adam observes, ethnography was one of the first new methods incorporated by design research to meet these challenges in the market. However, he thinks ethnography is, on its own, unable to provide the kind of information needed to validate product and service ideas across wide audiences. He notes: 

Ethnography breaks down at the moment we ask not just for depth of knowledge, but breadth. Anyone who’s struggled to conduct a massive ethnographic study across multiple time zones can tell you this firsthand. While ethnography facilitates the generation of ideas in relation to specific users and use scenarios, it leaves us clueless as to which among these will satisfy a wider audience. Ultimately, we need complementary methods that scale more effectively and validate our work in a way clients can understand. What we need is quantitative research...

But how? Just as ethnography borrowed heavily from academia while applying a looser, more liberal lens, quantitative research can be similarly engaged. When individual observations can be contextualized within a data-driven knowledge of the market at hand, designers can have the best of both worlds. And there are many analytical tools that work well in this context. Segmentation analysis can be used to challenge thinking around current and prospective users, sorting consumers into salient, sometimes unexpected groups that hold together based on survey data – groups that defy traditional demographic segments can be linked by more relevant factors, such as behavioral patterns or attitudes towards technology.

Adam makes several very good points in his analysis of what quantitative methods can bring to design research. Though he recognizes the importance of sustaining a focus on users, I suggest that Adam's discussion does not give enough explicit recognition to the role of empathy in maintaining a productive relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods in research for experience design. Making methods serve empathic purpose in the design of products and services is a key underlying principle, regardless of the quantitative or qualitative nature of the techniques.

Consider the project example Adam offers involving a redesign of a corporate Intranet for a Fortune 500 company. 

Without the ability to individually question the organization’s hundreds of thousands of employees, spread across some thirty countries, we did the next best thing: we interviewed 10,000 of them online. We asked them what was wrong with their current Intranet experience. What did they love? What did they hate? How could things be better? We did an online “card sort” in which we asked