As for Ash, he has since left the cushy confines of design school to return to the grime and grit of interaction design practice in the trenches of the world’s leading technology corporates … it is rumored that he has another blog in the works, but like they say: you never know with these things.   

Ash’s Final Project overview at CIID (which was in full throttle at the time of the last post on this blog) can be found here.  
Ash’s profile at CIID can be found here.

Ciao!

“Information foraging” is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use “built-in” foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food.

“Informavores” constantly make decisions on what kind of information to look for, whether to stay at the current site to try to find additional information or whether they should move on to another site, which path or link to follow to the next information site, and when to finally stop the search. Although human cognition is not a result of evolutionary pressure to improve Web use, survival-related traits to respond quickly on partial information and reduce energy expenditures force them to optimise their searching behaviour and, simultaneously, to minimize the thinking required.

Information Scent

The most important concept in the information foraging theory is “information scent“. As animals rely on scents to indicate the chances of finding prey in current area and guide them to other promising patches, so do humans rely on various cues in the information environment to get similar answers. Human users estimate how much useful information they are likely to get on a given path, and after seeking information compare the actual outcome with their predictions. When the information scent stops getting stronger (i.e., when users no longer expect to find useful additional information), the users move to a different information source.

Information Snacking
Some tendencies in the behaviour of web users are easily understood from the information foraging theory standpoint. On the Web, each site is a patch and information is the prey. Leaving a site is easy, but finding good sites has not always been as easy. Advanced search engines have changed this fact by reliably providing relevant links, altering the foraging strategies of the users. When users expect that sites with lots of information are easy to find, they have less incentive to stay in one place. The growing availability of broadband connections may have a similar effect: always-on connections encourage “information snacking,” short online visits to get specific answers.

Sketching to understand complexity of foraging links, and the resultant scalability the system would need to handle.

A mindmap of one foraging session on the web.

The original page.

The service was visualized as being something that would be accessible through any standard Corporate Benefits program. It would use a combination of online communications, personal messaging, social networking, and location-aware technologies to prompt shifts in the lifestyle of the user towards more sustainable practices and choices. If the individual made such choices, he or she would be offered incentives, all of which would feed back into a reward system. The points earned in this manner would be held by the individual as a kind of currency or capital, which could then be exchanged, traded or used for other sustainable activities.

This video makes a demonstration of how one scenario for Ecopup might work.

As an impromptu exercise for provoking new perspectives when exploring this area, here are some word clouds I generated on Wordle. I used the Wikipedia Community Currencies page and the Kashklash project home page to find make three different wordles. Interestingly, they had different characteristics as seen below.

Wordle of five random articles from Wikipedia's 'Community Currencies' page. Made with http://www.wordle.net/.

When five random articles from Wikipedia’s ‘Community Currencies’ pages were wordled together, the word ‘currency’ obviously stood out, with ‘eco-money’ making a surprise leap into the forefront.

Wordle of almost all pages together from Wikipedia's 'Community Currencies' page. Made with www.wordle.net.

But when almost all the articles from Wikipedia’s ‘Community Currencies’ pages were wordled together, ‘local’  was the clear winner, with ‘economic’, ‘services’ and ‘people’ starting to become prominent as well.

Wordle of text from Kashklash.com's home page. Made with www.wordle.net.

Finally, when the text from Kashklash.com’s home page was wordled, the prominent words were even more interesting: ‘sharing’, ‘communities’, ‘people’, ‘future’.

Driven by exercises like these and others, my team began to explore the question about whether communities of practice could be built around sustainability, which could also exchange any ‘wealth’ generated between the individuals in the community.

The panels were then drawn up in a neater, crisper scanario to use as context-setting probes for acquiring later user feedback on the concept. The reactions and feedback gathered from users were used to define next steps, setting the agenda for the overall design direction of the project.

In retrospect, this turned out to be a very useful technique. In the constant challenge of choosing between zooming in or out, (reflecting on created material or designing forward) its nice to take the latter step now and then a little in advance of its time. Simply shifting into a ‘lets just build this out, shall we’ mode, while still in the process of understanding the design context, is a great way to prevent getting too bogged down by highly refined needs, and consequentially a stunted, myopic view of the whole opportunity landscape.

A work in progress - the sudio space while brainstorming

During our user research, we found that young educated professionals were a very appropriate group to work with for this project, mostly because our Indian and Korean subjects seemed to share many similarities in terms of lifestyles and aspirations. We also moved away from the residential context for several reasons. Firstly, there was much more consensus in the view of our research subjects in their office environments than their homes. Then, there really wasn’t too much common among ‘typical’ residential communities across India and South Korea. Also, office spaces seemed to offer much more potential to explore the main theme of the project ‘The Social Collective as an Agent of Behavioral Change”; office goers seemed much more a ‘collective’ of any sort, capable of exploiting existing group dynamics towards common goals. And finally, interventions to spark behavioral change in the office space had the potential to create huge impact on better energy management, as the huge (technology industry) office spaces in India and Korea with thousands of workers were not uncommon.

A work in progress - me, thought crunching.

The key insight from user research we developed the idea from was:”How might we create opportunities for upwardly-mobile office workers to make visible contributions to sustainable issues?”

The idea was simple: how would a real-time information visualization in the office elevator motivate individuals to make better energy management choices. The concept and sketches to be discussed in a further post …

The size of the dot represents the number of other blogs that link to it, a measure of its popularity. The position of each dot is a function of its links with its neighbors.

Snapshot of "Iran's online public" by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Fromhttp://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public

I found his views so interesting that I’ve added a full description of his March 2009 talk from the CIID website here, for the benefit of readers as well as my own future reference.

Ezio Manzini is a designer, engineer, architect, educator and author – he is one of the most important thinkers in design today.

危机: crisis (危: danger; “机: chance). In Chinese, as in several other languages, the term “crisis” has the double meaning of “danger and “chance”. Without doubt, we can say that today we are facing a worldwide, deep crisis. Many people are talking about the risks. But it is necessary and timely to talk about opportunities too. This is particularly true if we want to discuss the present and future role of design: by its nature, design has to consider opportunities and to become their active promoter.

However, facing the present crisis, to play this role, design itself must change. A change that could happen if the design community takes at least the following three steps:

• To adopt an adequate economic model (the emerging idea of social economy)
• To extend the definition of design (the central role of service design)
• To generate a new design knowledge (visions, proposals and collaborative tools).

Manzini will present these three steps and introduce the concepts of next economy and next design.

The next economy is, mainly, a service-oriented, social economy. It “produces” services, knowledge and networks of meaningful interactions. Its main fields of action are the ecological re-orientation of the production system, the social production of a new generation of services, and regional eco-development programs: a cluster of activities that, considered as a whole, will be “the industry of the XXI century”.

The next design is, mainly, a design for social innovations and sustainability. It adopts design skills and capabilities to co-create original solutions for the next economy. That is, for the emerging social economy. It refers to socio-technical systems innovation, adopts a service-oriented approach and conceives and develops visions and solutions endowed with sustainable qualities.

Today design for social innovations is still at its early phase. But, around us, in all the region of the contemporary globalised world, the possibility to develop it moves in parallel with the growing wave of social innovation. To link design with social innovation is the main opportunity that we have to give design the role it could play in the transition towards the next economy. That is, also, towards a viable sustainable society.

• “Long term costs of managing residences …. now seem to equal or out-weight cost of acquisition”
• “I think it (energy efficiency) is a good concept for the future. But, wondering how this issue effects my current life… ”
• “We need to get used to ‘self-sufficiency.”
• “A thinking generation could make this (sustainable energy efficiency) work.”
• “Costs for water, public lighting, lifts (elevators), and washing clothes can be shared among (residential) communities.”

Concepts from brainstroming

At this point, we had spent a few continuous days in near proximity of users, hearing them out. So we thought it was a good point to zoom out a bit and identify dominant patterns in the thinking of our users. The idea behind this was to move away from the exact thoughts as verbalized by users, and carry those concerns forward to ‘open up’ the domain of opportunity for design.

To do this, the team used the quotes and resulting insights collected as inspiration for a series of  brainstorming sessions. The sessions were driven and managed by CIID and Intel faculty Vinay Venkatraman and Jay Melican, and consisted of a series of exercises with different goals. Switching to a ‘studio’ mindset, members from across the project class circulated between teams and helped put up ideas on walls by the dozen (and this is such an effective way of capturing the skills and perspectives of members across the studio). We were looking for associations, hidden meanings, metaphors, anything – however literal, visual, conceptual or semantic – that would help us move from the realm of concrete concerns into the domain of inspired insight. Here are some images from the brainstorming sessions.