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Cities and the quiet interface.

She walked by just as I was taking the shot. This little old lady next to the tall, glass, modern building in SOHO, filled with architects sitting down for a presentation, those builders and definers of the urban space.

While in New York last week, my senses were heightened of course, as they always are when I'm in New York City – whose aren't? I walked a lot and stopped a lot and listened a lot and observed a lot. All in the vein of what interests me most right now: the city as interface. 

We gave a presentation on Wednesday night as part of the fall lecture series for the School of Visual Art's new MFA, Interaction Design program. I spoke mostly about the visual + emotional design aspects of the new NPR.org, noting that one of our goals was to create an interface that allows the content to sing. Because our content is what makes NPR unique. To do this, the interface needed to recede. We needed a quiet interface. A crystal goblet. 

And so, having this typographic metaphor swimming around in my head, I pondered this question: what about the city as a quiet interface? Does this physical interface need to be quiet in the same way a digital one does?

The answer, of course, is no. For a city, this principle is the exact opposite. Cities need to be noisy interfaces. They need hustle and bustle and people and dogs and lights and cars and bikes and babies and colors and type and film and laughing, crying, shouting, whispering, screaming, stealing, eating, chilling, acting, dancing, mourning, celebrating, selling, buying, wheeling, and dealing. At various times of day. And sometimes in your face and all at once. The noisier the better, actually. Noisy urban interfaces make for good urban experiences, generally speaking. This is exactly what Jane Jacobs wrote about.

In an urban interface, the content is the interface. 

Which made me think of Baltimore and of the two mugging notices I received recently via MICA's campus safety. Baltimore is a city designed to hold a million people but which now holds a little over half that. It has a quiet interface. In some areas, dead quiet. And in those areas, like behind the Rite-Aid a few blocks from our house where those muggings took place, the user experience greatly suffers. 

Cinema lust.

Hecq Vs Exillion - Spheres Of Fury from Tim.Chris.Film on Vimeo.

Found this film via a tweet. LOVE IT. So beautiful. I want one of these Canons. For Christmas or something. Will, are you reading this?

Urban interaction.

In my ongoing thinking about the city as an interface – as an operating system, if you will, of this thing we call Earth – I picked up a book I bought while in grad school: Universal Principles of Design. It lists a multitude of various design elements and principles to consider when designing. I'm mentally listing which ones are relevant to analyze when thinking of urban interfaces. 

I also think about new nomenclature to describe this design perspective, this intersection of interaction and urban design. For example, what would the equivalent of the term GUI (Graphical User Interface) be? How about UUI™? Urban User Interface™.

The two principles that first inspired me to think about the city as an interface (i.e., UUI™) were mental models and affordances. Mental models because of my frustration with learning a new urban plan when I moved from Seattle to DC. I couldn't find anything! Just finding a Target when I first got here proved to be maddeningly frustrating. The system provided no user feedback when I made a wrong turn or took the wrong exit. This was before my iPhone, so my metadata of the UUI™ was limited to one of those folded, laminated maps. 

Mental Model – People understand and interact with systems and environments based on mental representations developed from experience. Lidwell, 130

As Seattle was the first major metropolitan area I have ever lived in, it serves as my base mental model of how the city as a product should work. Hence, my mental model for how the city was laid out upon moving to the DC was completely up-ended. Interestingly, learning Baltimore hasn't been as frustrating for me; my guess is that if you compared maps of the three cities, DC would be the outlier. Baltimore's urban layout is probably more similar to Seattle's than DC's. 

Affordance – A property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function. Lidwell, 20

Affordances in the context of the UUI™ are very interesting, I think. There are physical affordances, such as sidewalks, freeway exits, alleys, streets, parks and buildings. But there are also perceived affordances, those imposed by social implications and realities. These are the affordances that might prevent or discourage you from going into high-crime neighborhoods. For example, blue security cameras abound throughout many Baltimore neighborhoods, indicating that crime is such a problem there that 24-hour video surveillance is necessary. 

There are many more, for sure, but this is the beginning of my categorical thinking. I'm also developing an NPR patterns library at work, which will further fuel my thoughts on this topic; what is the pattern language of urban design?

Lidwell, William, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler. Universal Principles of Design. Gloucester, MA:Rockport 2003.

Penn station.

., originally uploaded by Neylano.

On my way to work this morning....

Interaction design + urban planning.

The semester is humming nicely along. I have an incredible group of about nine grad students in my Visualizing Information design class at MICA. In my research for the class, I came across Trulia Hindsight. It couldn't be more timely given my current bedside reading, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

Anyway, talking with an architect friend of ours here in Baltimore, I relayed to him how increasingly fascinated I am with the intersection of urban planning and interaction design. Take this interactive, for example, showing building trends in American cities across the years. And then there are the new augmented reality iPhone apps that enhance urban navigation. 

How will technology and interaction design change the way cities are planned? How will interface innovations change the way we interact with urban centers? What does/will it mean to evaluate cities as interfaces? What are the heuristics applied to these hybrid operating systems, these UIs that meld physical affordances with the ethereal? What new revelations emerge when cities are cloaked in the context of product design?

I need to go back to school. 

Grind me.

So, I've been wanting a burr grinder for a long time. This one was on sale at Macy's, so I bought it. It got really good views on Amazon. I was going to get a really expensive Italian one, but those online reviews of this machine totally sucked me in.

As I used it last night, feeling the smooth, agile movement of the dial as I chose the grind setting, I just wanted to go back to school again SO BAD. For a degree in industrial design this time. Could you imagine doing ethnography studies for Kitchen Aid? And product sketches? How cool, non? Reminds me of the time I spent at Teague, watching as the designers sketched comps for Zune accessories, marveling at their sketching prowess. 

Anyway, I love this machine, but upon further inspection, I think it looks kind of like a breast pump. Maybe it was designed by a lactating woman....