PJBFCP | great ideas | great experiences

June 25, 2010
by Pete Barry
5 Comments

Digital Identity

It’s not easy being a family

Families have it hard in the digital age. The idea of a digital identity exists only for the individual. Even though the idea of a family as an identity has existed long before computing. There have been significant advancements in the methods of identifying and organizing certain digital elements. E-mail messages in Gmail can be organized using labels which allow them to be categorized by more than one classification. Computer users are not given such a luxury. A person can create and use an identity and that identity can be part of a group but, in the real world, a family is more than a group, it’s also an identity.

I’ve been frustrated for some time about the state of family computing. In my house we have a shared computer. We chose to go about using the computer without separate user accounts because creating separate accounts and managing lots of shared data didn’t seem easy. The flaw to this set up showed up most often when my wife and I were using the same browser. We solved that problem by choosing to use different browsers. I use Firefox and my wife uses Flock. The problem didn’t go away. I use Last.fm. I like finding new music but I mostly like listening to my own music. I hate radio. I don’t want to give up control of what I’m listening to. Pandora is a great service but I never fell in love with it because I didn’t feel like I was in control. When I discovered Last.fm a few years ago I liked how their system worked. I downloaded their iTunes plug-in and it simply ran in the background. It noted what music I was listening to and uploaded that information to my account online. If I was ever looking for new music, Last.fm would recommend new stuff based on what it already knew about my listening habits. This was awesome until my daughters got into Hannah Montana. While I was away at work they were listening to their favorite Hannah Montana music at home using the family computer. The fact that the kids were obsessed with Hannah Montana meant that they would ask their mother to play Hannah Montana music at least once every day. All of those songs being played were being sent to my Last.fm account. I found that when I went to Last.fm to look for new music recommendations I was getting some awful crap. It said that Hannah Montana was my favorite artist. Not U2, Tom Waits, Radiohead or Pink Floyd but Hannah F#%@$^g Montana. Needless to say, I was not happy. I removed her from my Last.fm library and turned off the plug-in so not to cause any further damage. This was my introduction to the problems of family computing and, even more so, to the problems of identity and the Internet Family.

I’ve been told that I need to create different accounts on the computer for each user. That way I have my files, folders, settings and preferences and my wife has hers. I thought of this when we first got the computer but the system doesn’t seem set up well for sharing. At least for family sharing. There are all sorts of sharing options on the computer. Sharing certain files, folders, photos, videos or music seems possible but not plausible. The way that the word share is used in family computing seems almost impersonal. It feels like more of a technical definition than the way a family shares anything. Even if I were to create an account for myself and for my wife how would I deal with the children? They don’t actually use the family computer. I’ve set up my old computer with kids games and that machine acts as the kids computer. However, their Hannah Montana music is on the family computer. So, if there are files, folders, photos, videos or music on the family computer which is only used by the kids should I create an account for the kids? Is that a group of individual accounts or should I create one account for the sum of them. Do you see why I’m getting frustrated? I do appreciate all of the files, folders, settings and preferences which make my machine customizable to me. I believe that there are systems in place in computing which have been in place for quite some time now and when those systems were created, today’s needs could not have been imagined.

I know what you’re thinking. Well, not really, it’s just a figure of speech. I’d guess that you’re thinking, “Don’t tell me the problem, tell me the solution.”
My proposed solution is a bit dreamy and less of a solution for today’s technology as it is a solution for the technologies of the future. In order to make sense of it at all, I have to start with something very high level. Something vague.

Identity

What is identity? Wikipedia says that identity is an umbrella term used throughout the social sciences to describe a person’s conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations. I believe that identity is a balance between two things, how you portray yourself to anything or anyone which you interact with and how anything or anyone defines you. In other words, I believe that your identity is your definition in multiple languages. Your own language and the language of any entity which defines you.

Managing our identities in the real world is something that we learn from a very early age. We learn how to portray ourselves to different individuals or groups and we learn how to modify that portrayal based the on experience we have. Managing our digital identities is not as easy. I would think that technology and the grand network would assist us in managing our identities or possibly improve the idea of identity all together. I believe the difference between real world identity and digital identity is the existence or lack of intelligence and reaction. When I am interacting with anything or anyone I can modify my behavior on the fly, or react, based on the experience and the feedback I’m receiving. Thus, change the way I am portraying my identity and hopefully change the way my identity is being received. It takes the intelligence to know when and how to react and how to modify my identity. In the digital world my identity is not modified in real-time. It doesn’t react to whatever entity is receiving it. Hopefully the future of artificial intelligence will improve upon this flaw.

The concept of digital identity is still young. I plan to continue thinking about it and share my thoughts. I’m fascinated by the idea of improving it and how a better digital identity can improve our experiences. I find myself saying this more and more these days, “An experience which knows me provides me with a better experience”.

There are many facets of digital identity, here are a few which interest me and I expect to share more on in the future:

Digital Family
Real World vs Online
Data Portability
Layers of Trust
Relationship Identification
Identity and the Semantic Web

In researching Digital Identity, I’ve come across some interesting content. Please review it if you’re interested. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

May 3, 2010
by Pete Barry
4 Comments

Signals : Exam Room Flags

On a recent visit to the doctor’s office I asked a nurse what the meaning of the flags outside each of the exam rooms was. I knew that they communicated information to the doctors and nurses about the state of the room but I wasn’t sure of the details. There were four flags outside each room and she explained that each color signaled a different message. If no flags were sticking out it meant that the room was available. One flag might signal that the room was occupied by a patient and a nurse. Another might signal that the patient is waiting for the doctor. Another could signal that the patient is not in the room but will be returning to the room.
Even though there are only four flags, a total of fifteen possible signals can be displayed. This means that anyone working in the office who needs to know the signals has to be able to identify up to fifteen messages just by glancing at the flags outside of one exam room. I find this very interesting. I have to assume that the difficulty in remembering the meaning of fifteen different signals changes based on the complexity of the signal. Because, we learn about colors at a very young age, I expect that it is easier to remember a large number of signals using just four colors because there is little processing required to identify the colors being used. I also expect that with practice the people using the signals become accustomed to the colors being used. I would love to experiment with a doctor’s office by replacing the four color flags with fifteen flags. Would one flag per message be easier or harder to remember. I assume that it would be harder because the people using the flags may subconsciously identify negative space as well as positive space as elements of the signal. In other words if the flags are red, blue, yellow and black, and three of the four flags are out, it may prove easier to remember the meaning based on the one color flag not pointing out.
The reason that this interests me at all is because signals are used everywhere and people become accustomed to using them without much thought. I believe that there is a future for signals in the browser. Currently outside of the display window of my browser I see several icons, buttons and even signals. I can imagine a future state of the browser which utilizes the benefits of signals. I expect that, like most wonderful things from the future, the only way that they will work and be widely accepted is if they are standardized. Consider a few signals in the browser today. There is a signal when you are visiting a secure address. Another signal informs you if the content you are viewing can be subscribed to. I think that we can use signals to help manage identity in the browser as well as social elements which will be integrated into the future of the browser.
Imagine if there was a signal which quickly informed you of your relationship with the content you are viewing. This signal could let you know if you are a registered user of a website or if any of the content which is being displayed is personalized to you. Signals could also inform you if any of your social connections had previously viewed the content, if they liked it, or if you might want to share it with any of your social connections. If we could develop a simple language which would relate to, but not interfere with, interactive content, I believe that the future of interactive experiences could greatly benefit from the use of signals.
It’s funny that I got all of this from wondering what the flags outside of the exam rooms at the doctor’s office meant. It seems that even the smallest things can spark big ideas. I’m not sure if this is a blessing or a curse. I do know that the future of using information as well as the future of digital identity seem to always be poking around in my head, even while sitting at the doctor’s office.

April 24, 2010
by Pete Barry
0 comments

A Signature Idea

I’m currently using Google Apps for my e-mail and find myself using both the web interface and the Mac Mail app. I prefer the web app for the way it looks and the way it handles labels. I prefer the Mac Mail app for the way it looks at the e-mail messages for recognized data formats. For example, if an e-mail has a day or date in the message, upon hovering my mouse over that text, the day or date is highlighted and a drop down box appears. Selecting the drop down displays a few options including “Create a calendar event” and “Show this date in the calendar”. The same thing happens when a phone number appears as text in an e-mail. However, the options are a bit different. “Create new contact” and “Add to existing contact” are displayed because phone numbers are recognized as elements of a contact in the address book, not an event in the calendar. Considering that the person who sent the e-mail did not identify these bits of text as dates or phone numbers using any semantic data, I think this functionality is pretty cool.

I’m actually a bit surprised that the Google mail app doesn’t offer this functionality. I’m even more surprised that the Google mail app doesn’t support HTML signatures. To go a step further, I would expect that Google, an innovative leader, would find a way to integrate their different tools. Consider Google Profiles and how it could be utilized for a web based e-mail signature. I’ve been trying to perfect my e-mail signature for a while now and would love for my signature to contain semantic data. There are workarounds for creating HTML signatures but they aren’t set up to use hCard or convert the information to a usable vCard. Even after using an HTML signature creator and modifying the HTML using an hCard creator it seems as though the microformats are removed once the message is sent. I’d love to see an advancement in e-mail capabilities which would allow people to store their vCard/hCard data in the cloud, possibly using their Google Profile or something along the lines of OpenID. This data could be accessed through secure connections and embedded in e-mails as a signature. If a standard was set then a multitude of e-mail applications as well as mobile applications could use the technology. I can imagine a future without the tons of waste created by paper business cards. I believe that if there weren’t a huge variety of online digital business card options or if they all used the same semantic formatting, we could have a much better solution for sharing our information. E-mail signatures are what set me off on this tangent and the digital business card is what a plethora of web companies offer as a solution. I’m not pleased with the solution and I believe that a better solution could easily be provided.

Take a look at a few of these Digital Business Cards.

April 1, 2010
by Pete Barry
1 Comment

SXSW 2010: Part II

Interactions – A Touchy Subject

I attended a few sessions at SXSW which were about newer methods of interaction. Some were simpler, like combining augmented reality with touch, while others were, well, let’s just say, from the mind of Johnny Lee.

There were many samples of touch interactions from a panel put on by a handful of guys from the Emerging Experiences team at Razorfish. They used augmented reality and facial recognition plus a touch interface to create a great experience for their party. It turned party goers into rockstars and sent out a tweet each time it posted a new photo to flickr. It was called Rockstar. The samples they talked about during their session brought me a sigh of relief as I learned that I wasn’t the only one facing the challenges of designing interfaces for retail touch experiences. The Digital Blue Shirt, which I worked on while at Modern Climate, forced me to think outside of the Internet and the standard mouse+keyboard interactions. At one point during the design I started asking myself, “What if this was made out of wood”? This question proved to help me in overcoming the influence of my previous, non-touch experiences.

In one of the sessions I attended, Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms, the relationship between the size of a device and its primary use as an input or output tool was pointed out. Smaller devices are better for input and larger devices are better for output. While this may seem obvious, I found it interesting that as devices become extremely large the input is often pushed off to a smaller device while the output remains on the large device. The common instance of this is a television remote but it gets more interesting when I branch out from the typical and consider experiences such as the iPhone Keynote Remote. While the audience watches a presentation projected onto a large screen the presenter can control as well as see the presentation and any notes on the iPhone. Motorola, Google and Verizon proved, when they launched the Droid phone in Times Square, that the marketing opportunities of these types of interactions are endless.

These sessions got me thinking about the future of interaction and what may lie ahead. Consider the variety of device types that we interact with today. Consider the options for interacting with one type of device. An iPhone has a variety of input and output types. I can touch an iPhone to interact with it. I can use the microphone as part of an instrument, to perform voice driven interactions, play a game or discover what music is playing in a coffee shop. I can use the camera to capture information for an augmented reality experience or to scan a barcode. Using the accelerometer, I can tilt the iPhone up, down, left or right as a method of interacting with the software running inside of it. The compass, GPS and cellular triangulation act as inputs for location based applications. The iPhone can provide output as data over a network or through the sounds coming out of the speaker, visuals on the display as well as haptic feedback by way of vibrations. I can’t help but imagine a campaign for MTV or Zynga where Times Square is turned into an outdoor arcade where anyone can show up with their iPhones to compete in video games which are displayed on the huge monitors. I can envision a near future version of Call of Duty where battles are held in shopping malls and paying participants are running around looking into their phones while A.R. Drones hovering above are controlled by audiences paying to watch from nearby movie theaters.

I can’t wait to design those experiences.