MORE There are also photos and a pamphlet.

Left to right: end cover, social and main units

Social networks in physical products

Six lights on Olinda show when a close friend is listening to the radio, using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC’s website for sharing ‘now playing’ information. Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network.

A friend will always appear at the same light, so you can write or draw on the radio to label it, and the lights are bright so you’ll know a friend has started listening from across the room.

Consumer electronics learning from the Web

Olinda includes a connector on the side to allow for all kinds of extra modules adding functionality to the base radio, and – because the interface is simple – home adaptation too.

On the Web, users are in charge of customising and adapting their experience. Key to this are the programmer interfaces offered by services such as Flickr that allow third party developers to create and sell new applications to add functionality.

Similar interfaces exist in physical products, like the iPod dock connector enabling a market of peripherals adding value to the iPod itself. But this is rare. On the Web, the simplicity and openness of interfaces has led to widespread use, including widgets and content syndication.

Olinda attempts to learn from this. Its hardware interface already joins the base unit with the friends module. By buying extra modules – or by making their own using the open interface – listeners can adapt their product over time, perhaps adding a remote control or recording. The Olinda pamphlet gives a few ideas of where this might be taken.

The hardware interface is made a feature with sprung copper connectors, and magnets mounted in rounded guides pull the modules together to a solid whole. It’s kept visible behind a clear, orange cap, and begs to be used.

Interactions and experiences

Olinda has two dials to tune: the outer scroll stations alphabetically; the inner one scrolls only your most listened.

(That’s another lesson from the Web: we like that Web browsers autocomplete those addresses you’ve visited before so you don’t have to type the whole thing again. Likewise, why should a listener configure station presets when the radio already knows their listening habits?)

Where now?

Consumers increasingly expect their products to contribute to their social network, connect to the internet, and involve them in creative ways, whether that’s by offering ways to extend the product with extra modules at home, or simply with playful customisation. This has been identified as Generation C. The Web is at the forefront of meeting these expectations.

Consumer electronics, and all kinds of physical products, can and should learn from the Web. Let’s marry social networks and lessons from the Web with the powerful experiences and shelf appeal exemplified by toys and gadgets, and make a new kind of product.

Olinda is the first step of this exploration with home digital radio. A small number of fully functioning prototypes show that it’s possible to design social, Web-like experiences using industry standard DAB chip-sets, and conventional manufacturing techniques.

We hope this project provokes as many thoughts for you as it has done for us.

Credits

Olinda was commissioned by BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D. Thank you John Ousby, Tristan Ferne and Amy Taylor.

Schulze & Webb would like to thank: Alex Chadwick; Jeff Easter; Frontier Silicon; Andy Huntingdon; James King; NXT Technology; Prototyping Solutions; and Paul South.

Olinda uses Venice 5 by Frontier Silicon, and the speaker is by NXT Technology, using Balanced Radiator Technology.

Olinda is designed and built by Schulze & Webb Ltd in London, UK.

MORE

• Get the Olinda pamphlet (PDF)
• See photos in the Flickr pool (get in touch for press photos)
• Read posts about Olinda on the Pulse Laser blog

Schulze & Webb offers design strategy, and has worked with the BBC and Nokia on R&D and product development. Olinda comes from the meeting of deep knowledge of the Web and social software, and experience in the design and development of physical products. Could S&W help with your product? Get in touch: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

Two metaphors have been used successfully in designing for and thinking about the Web: the Web as a physical space, and websites as extensions of the body. The synthesis of these is what we could call Web 2.0. But now we have to contend with the importance of experience, in addition to utility, and the increasing demands on the attention of our users. A third metaphor may be reached by regarding users as trajectories, flowing through our websites. By considering the Web in motion, an approach which uses a ‘motivations flowchart’ is demonstrated, where the states of a user are used to derive features regardless of the interaction medium. And an interaction pattern is demonstrated: Snap is syndicated interactions, bringing choices users have to make away from websites and together on their desktop. Finally some challenges for the Web in 2008 are posed: other devices; groups; the future—how does Web design itself become open to amateur creativity, and what new tools should be built?

PRESENTATION Movement, slide 1

Movement was delivered at Web Directions North in 2008.

Other articles

On the company blog, I’ve pulled out the Snap concept as its own post: read about Snap.

It’s likely I’ll also write up the motivations flowchart further, at which point it’ll be linked here.

Many of the ideas in the talk come from previous presentations (at which point they’re linked), and from a longer series of notes on my weblog: read ‘wrapping up 2007’ at Interconnected.

Original abstract

We’ve always had metaphors to understand and design for the Web.

The original conception of the Web was as a library of documents. Our building blocks were derived from spatial ideas: “breadcrumbs,” “visits” and “homepages” were used to understand the medium.

Website-as-application was a new and novel metaphor in the late 1990s. The spatial concept of navigation was replaced by concepts derived from tools: buttons performed actions on data.

These metaphors inspire separate but complementary models of the Web. But the Web in 2008 has some entirely new qualities: more than ever it’s an ecology of separate but highly interconnected services. Its fiercely competitive, rapid development means differentiating innovations are quickly copied and spread. Attention from users is scarce. The fittest websites survive. In this world, what metaphors can be most successfully wielded?

Matt takes as a starting point interaction and product design, with ideas from cybernetics and Getting Things Done. He offers as a metaphor the concept of the Web as experience. That is, treating a website as a dynamic entity – a flowchart of motivations that both provides a continuously satisfying experience for the user… and helps the website grow.

From seeing what kind of websites this model provokes, we’ll see whether it also helps illuminate some of the Web’s coming design challenges: the blending of the Web with desktop software and physical devices; the particular concerns of small groups; and what the next movement might bring.

Slideshow

The slides and notes are online: Movement, slide 1

—Matt.

Schulze & Webb works with media and technology companies to help them find the stories in their products – whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices – from product ideation through to design strategy. If you want engaging experiences for your customers, whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices, Schulze & Webb can help: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

Availabot is our own product and part of a broader investigation into presence, mass customisation, and web technologies embodied as physical objects.

In Personalisation (including Metal Phone), with Nokia, we developed experimental prototypes to explore personalisation in mobile phones. Metal Phone points to new applications of customisation through a provocative machine.

Recent work

Other projects online are:

• Our involvement in BBC 2.0 helped the BBC with strategy development and communication in their web offering overhaul.
• 2D Slideshow and Inductive Truck are both small research projects with which we explore different aspects of interaction design.
• Continuous Partial Attention informed Nokia's design strategy with research and a product prototype discussing the demands of communication.
• Lab-Grown Meat briefly explored the future cultural consequences of artificial meat.

We also provide web, social software, and architecture consultancy and contracting. Our clients include the BBC (above), Ning, Mobbu and TimeBank (developing their Social Software Primer).

Speaking and other output

We ran a teaching day at Goldsmiths College, London, as part of an MA group's Fictional Futures brief. The presentation from the beginning of that day is online:

• Sci-fi I like, Goldsmiths, February 2006.

Matt has spoken at a number of conferences, often discussing S&W projects. Some recent presentations:

• Movement, Web Directions North (closing keynote), February 2008.
• The Experience Stack, d.construct, September 2007.
• Products Are People Too, reboot 9.0 (closing keynote), June 2007.
• Thoughts on 3C Products, XTech (closing keynote), May 2007.
• From Pixels to Plastic, O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 2007.
• The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, Yahoo!, other Bay Area companies, and an Adaptive Path-hosted public event, January 2007.
• App After App, or, A zoology of next year's web applications, Barcamp London and Eurofoo 06, September 2006.
• Iterative architecture (built on an internet of things), Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit, July 2006.
• Engaging Technology, We Love Technology, July 2006.
• Making Senses, reboot8, June 2006.
• Assumptions, Attention and Affordances (based on Mind Hacks), BBC Digital Futures, February 2006.
• The 3 Steps: The History of Physics and the Future of Computing, reboot7, June 2005.
• Glancing: I'm OK, You're OK, O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, February 2004.

Matt runs the short fiction site, Masochuticon and the online connections game Dirk.

Together, Jack and Matt post on the company blog Pulse Laser.

Previous experience

Jack is an experienced graphic and interaction designer, teaching typography on the Graphic Design degree at Central Saint Martins for two years, working on original illustrated maps, and designing the book Type & Typography 2nd Edition. Web projects include Public Lettering in collaboration with Phil Baines and Animate for Finetake on behalf of Channel 4 (case study). In 2000, Jack worked on information and interaction design for MamJam (case study), one of the earliest location-based SMS products. More recent projects involve him working with electronics, fabrication and manufacturing, 3D and the web.

Matt has previously written for O'Reilly, spoken at conferences, and created online web toys at home while architecting web systems and managing developers at work. He codes for the web, and on the desktop when necessary. While at the BBC his group developed projects such as Phonetags, and instigated the BBC's involvement in podcasting.

The experience stack is a way of thinking about the different levels at which experience design operates. Experience design can be thought of as comprising branding, service design, product design, interaction design and human factors. This presentation highlights products demonstrating different layers of the experience stack, and the rationale for designing for good experience.

PRESENTATION The Experience Stack, slide 1

(On the company blog, there’s also a presentation structure redux, and a summary of the experience stack concept.)

Longer abstract

Here are two ways of looking at a television: a TV is a display surface in my home which can show video which is broadcast or kept on storage media. And then: television is a friend who starts conversations between me and other people.

Products aren’t only their aesthetic form and feature lists in catalogues. We live alongside them, and they open us to experiences. We first spy them across a crowded shop floor (then take them home and unwrap them); we get to know them, are frustrated by them, are pleased by them; we socialise with them and our other friends.

The experience of a product is what we feel and what guides us through our lives together. Every time we cross paths, there’s a hook for experience. The sequence of these communicates the brand, and can be variously playful, engaging, educational or however we choose to colour it.

Being aware of how this happens helps us design that experience. Through his favourite on-screen apps and physical, plastic gadgets, Matt looks at the whole experience stack – from the moment-by-moment feedback in user interface to large, complex ideas in critical design – and discusses how we can apply these ideas to our own projects.

Slideshow

The slides and notes are online: The Experience Stack, slide 1

—Matt.

Schulze & Webb works with media and technology companies to help them find the stories in their products – whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices – from product ideation through to design strategy. If you want engaging experiences for your customers, whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices, Schulze & Webb can help: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

Jack Schulze discusses the relationships between stories in comics and how that manifests on the page, and how we as viewers look at them. This presentation was given on the 16th of June in Conway Hall, Holborn, as part of the Interesting 2007 event.

PRESENTATION Comics and Pictures, slide 1

(The comics mentioned are also listed on the weblog.)

—Jack.

If you want engaging experiences for your customers, whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices, Schulze & Webb can help: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

Design can be easier when we acknowledge that products share our homes and malls, and have wants and lives of their own. In short: Products are people too. Matt traces a path through social software, adaptive design and engaging technology, and puts forward an experiential approach to product design.

PRESENTATION Products Are People Too, slide 1

Longer abstract

(Abstraction in speech & thought; Actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control; Aesthetics…)

Objects in the shops, websites, media: These aren’t passive tools but have experiential, social, and other complex qualities. Design can be easier when we acknowledge that products share our homes and malls, and have wants and lives of their own. In short: Products are people too.

But what makes people, well, people?

(Risk-taking; Rites of passage; Rituals…)

Like us, products live in a peopled world. They understand this: Human factors, ergonomics and psychology. What makes people tick: Play, politeness, and other engaging techniques. And social software is aware of the behaviour of groups, and the behaviour of people in groups.

Aren’t there other, more humane descriptions of what makes us human? Perhaps these ideas could shape our products too… so what are they?

(Weaning; Weapons; Weather control (attempts to); White (colour term); World view.)

One additional way of understanding what people are: Donald Brown’s list of human universals, a few of which are interspersed in this abstract.

Another way: Humans and more-than-humans as depicted in myths and science fiction.

Through these, other conceptions of what makes people people, and examples, Matt Webb looks at how we live alongside products, how products act and could act in the world, and whether we might use these ideas to inform the design of all kinds of products—ones that maybe we get along with just a little better.

Slideshow

The slides and notes are online: Products Are People Too presentation, slide 1

It sits alongside two other presentations: The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design (Generation C and experiences), and From Pixels to Plastic presentation (Generation C and physical products).

—Matt.

Schulze & Webb works with media and technology companies to help them find the stories in their products – whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices – from product ideation through to design strategy. If you want engaging experiences for your customers, whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices, Schulze & Webb can help: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

Schulze & Webb formed in June 2005, as a creative design consultancy working hands-on with companies to research and develop their technologies and strategy. Specialities include mobile, web, physical computing, interaction and sociality.

biogs

Jack Schulze obtained his MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in 2006, previously running an independent design studio for four years and graduating in Graphic Design from Central Saint Martins in 2000. He is interested in optical perception, especially in display, and focuses his graphics work on looking and perspective. His projects in this area explore maps and representations of urban space. Most recently Jack's interests are in the aesthetics of mechanisms, and his work is drawn from comics, cinema, manufacture and television.

Matt Webb is an engineer and designer, tinkering with web toys and short fiction outside his work at S&W. If you were to sum up his design interests in one word, it would be "politeness." He is co-author of Mind Hacks, a successful book bringing cognitive psychology to a general audience. Previously he has worked in R&D at BBC Radio & Music Interactive, on the changing nature of listening. Matt can be found at Interconnected, where he comments on society and technology, and in London.

work

Read about our current and previous work.

company

Schulze & Webb Ltd., 115 Bartholomew Road, London NW5 2BJ, UK.

Registered in England and Wales, no. 5467952. VAT: 863761204.

As the internet sensibility hits the stuff in our homes, our product world is undergoing a massive transformation. But what will we build? Matt Webb takes the lessons of the Web, social software, and interaction design, and spins up new products—new social stuff—for our connected and creative lives.

PRESENTATION From Pixels to Plastic presentation, slide 1

Longer abstract

Things of solid material and electronics are getting easier and cheaper to sculpt and manufacture. The maker culture shares its expertise in ever-broadening communities. Rapid prototyping machines and software are allowing small, agile companies to apply their iterative methodologies to physical objects. Stuff itself is getting smart and social, with emerging standard components for networking, and new paradigms for interaction. Even the business model is there: folks have been paying for plastic longer than pixels.

As the internet sensibility hits the stuff in our homes, our product world is undergoing a massive transformation. But once there, what will we build?

Matt Webb is a technology consultant and designer at Schulze & Webb. Through the lens of the magic inside all things, he takes the lessons of the Web, social software, and interaction design, and spins up new products—new social stuff—for our connected and creative lives.

Slideshow

The slides and notes are online: From Pixels to Plastic presentation, slide 1

It is part two to a previous presentation, The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design.

If there’s demand, I’ll put together a single document PDF.

—Matt.

Schulze & Webb works with media and technology companies to help them design products for Generation C. If you want engaging experiences for your customers, whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices, Schulze & Webb can help: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

This presentation is on how a new generation wants social, creative, networked products, and how design can help not by identifying tasks to be productively performed, but experiences to be deepened and made fun. All told through some of our favourite things, and a series of increasingly tenuous references to The Sound of Music.

PRESENTATION The Sound of Interaction Design presentation, slide 1

Background

The ideas behind The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design were put together for our January 2007 San Francisco trip, made possible by Yahoo! (we were visiting to speak as part of the TechDev Speaker Series). While in the area, we discussed the ideas in a few other venues, notably at Adaptive Path for a public evening performance (and that’s why there are a lot of jokes about nuns).

Slideshow

The slides and notes are online: The Sound of Interaction Design presentation, slide 1

If there’s demand, I’ll put together a single document PDF.

—Matt.

Schulze & Webb works with media and technology companies to help them design products for Generation C. If you want engaging experiences for your customers, whether on the Web, mobile, or as cheap, physical devices, Schulze & Webb can help: contact@schulzeandwebb.com

Specialities include mobile, web, physical computing, interaction and sociality (more work).

Jack Schulze and Matt Webb are based in London (more about).