What allow us to form concepts and re-use knowledge are the mental models we create for things we operate or interact with everyday (The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman). In the process details get lost, they are not important: what’s left is partial information, a mental sketch of the concept as a whole.

Is this mental sketch that most people use when asked to draw something. I would go further and say that most people could draw quite well if they weren’t so tied to their preconceived mental models. Actually Barrington Barber, in The Complete Book of Drawing, includes exercises that help you ignore a preconceived mental model by observation when drawing.

WISIWUG (What I See Is What You Get) can be seen as a way to better understand what’s in the mind of your users. Let them sketch what they got using your system and learn what you should improve the user experience. Better still, let them sketch improvements if the opportunity arises!

I can’t resist to quote Yael Naïm on this

How can you stay outside? There’s a beautiful mess inside.

Ubiquity, a proof of concept based on the assumption that the browser is becoming everyday a more important application, implements a Quicksilver for your browser. Behind the scenes is the creator of Enso, Aza Raskin (take a look at the previous A change in Human Computer Interaction). This project was successful enough to make Mozilla go one step further with Taskfox.

Try out the demo for yourself an be amazed!

A release candidate of Taskfox is planned for the end of July and available with Firefox 3.6.

Now Silverback, a Mac application, gives you the opportunity to make these tests in a very simple & cheap way. It takes advantage of built-in features of your mac – such as the iSight camera or remote – and allows you to perform a testing session recording both user actions and the user itself.

Watch the video from the creators:

Among the many possibilities are (multi)touch screens, voice recognition, etc. But are these fancy solutions good or useful for the next few years? It would be a great challenge to replace our everyday keyboard with more exotic solutions: the lack of sensitivity in touch screens, for instance, would make it much harder to use it although it might look like a huge breakthrough at a first glance.

The immediate future relies on the way we use our everyday devices in a more efficient way. Watch Aza Raskin’s Google Tech Talk:

Many years ago the Canon Cat tried to do all this unsuccessfully. This project introduced a variety of concepts that we still don’t use nowadays. The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin is the book you should read to deeper you knowledge about this. You can as well try Archy: the prototype project that brings all these concepts to your computer.

Finally, a huge step is being given by these guys, Humanized, and their Enso. These project actually brings some of these interaction concepts to your (windows) system today! Watch the demo and try it out.

BBC Cold War Series - front cover

1. Comrades

2. Iron Curtains

3. Marshal Plan

4. Berlin

5. Korea

6. Reds

7. After Stalin

8. Sputnik

9. The Wall

10. Cuba

11. Vietnam

12. MAD

13. Make Love, Not War, The Sixties

14. Red Spring, The Sixties

15. China

16. Détente

17. Good Guys, Bad Guys

18. Backyard

19. Freeze

20. Soldiers of God

21. Spies

22. Star Wars

23. The Wall Comes Down

24. Conclusions

The country is generally warm, even during the winter. You can catch some nice warm sun rays during the winter if you like. What we are not used to is to cold weather and a couple of days ago some arctic winds come down on Europe – at least that’s the explanation I heard for the unusual cold weather.

I saw, for the first time, to snow in Porto: it’s great. However we, Portuguese, are not used to that kind of experience. This is what happens when it snows in Portugal:

When it snows in Portugal

Passive HI

Passive HI is any involuntary manifestation of giggle or laughter, being the most common form of HI. Although it may vary, passive HI is in most cases uncontrollable. This concept was firstly introduced as The Giggle Loop in BBC’s Coupling:

Active HI

Active HI is any involuntary manifestation of joke or prank, being the less common form of HI yet more controllable. Active HI manifests itself as funny ideas popping up in the mind, being the decision to verbalize them ultimately taken by the subject.

Case Study

There are no statistics to show the magnitude of the problem. It’s estimated that most of the population worldwide suffers from at least one form of HI.

Erik Hartman, the Belgium Boemerang TV show host was one of the victims of severe passive HI. Allegedly the conditions to provoke its state were artificially set up.

Watch Humoristic Incontinence Playlist on YouTube for more cases. Are you a victim as well?

Some of the content itself is familiar to you, some not. You can find worldwide information organized by categories like Transport, Health, Pollution among others. Take your time and if you have some social conscience I’m sure this will make you think a lot: Worldmapper. The innovation here is that they really now how to deliver the message.

Infant Mortality - terribly bigger in Africa and Asia than anywhere else

On the other hand the simple design solution found to show information effectively is remarkable. By re-modelling a safe mental image – the world map – they visually induce the impact needed to make you realize facts that wouldn’t be so strong by other means (e.g. a chart or a table). Specially those we should all be concerned about…

From the usability point of view this technique is great to present associative information quickly based on previous known schemes, spacial context and even colour differentiation. One example is WordPress‘ Right Now in Tags for instance, but I could imagine much more uses for this one.

More usability on future posts, for now I let you alone with the maps.

Merry Christmas!

But more than a list of possible gifts I want to show you how you can be creative and do something new and unusual. Here you have my suggestions:

Books

The most obvious and common choice: a book/music CD/… (if well chosen). Forget the top10 at your favourite store and choose wisely: spend some of your time picking up that special book not only by subject or style, but also because you use it to send your message through it. When you find the perfect one write a personal note in the first few pages relating it to the person.

Experiences

Don’t offer anything… instead take someone to do something unusual, like ride a balloon or a massage. Take a look on Virgin Experience Days (or any other) and you’ll find endless experiences for all kinds of people.

Personalized Handicraft

"Pedro is the greatest" mug

Have you ever considered creating something unique by yourself? You don’t need to be a skilled genius artist to paint a mug or a t-shirt. Take advantage of every day’s little events and make them unforgettable. However if you are thinking on something more fancy (like jewellery) you need someone to do that for you. In that case don’t let someone else decide what’s the best, and imagine it by yourself.

Photography

Mosaic Picture

It’s amazing the numerous different things you can do with pictures. You can transform banal things into great gifts with pictures. Choose a set of pictures and create an album with funny comments or a calendar. Among other things you can also pick your favourite picture and create a big mosaic out of it. You can find software on line to help you with the task like MacOSaiX. The possibilities are infinite…

Help people in difficulties

This is one of my favourites: donate in honour of someone else. GlobalGiving for example let’s you send a personalized postcard or offer a gift card. This way you are actually helping someone in need, thus making this kind of gift the most honourable and generous one.

Chocolate Messages

Chocolate message

Why does chocolate gets a full dedicated section? Maybe because I was seduced since the beginning with the idea of sending a message in chocolate. It’s worth to pay ChocoTelegram a visit.

Now that I gave you my suggestions, be creative and discover new ways to make your next gift spark a big smile on others faces. Remeber, if someone is so special and unique for you, so should be your gift.

The albums

We were always too ahead of our time… in a bad way. We needed the easy of content sharing years ago. At some point we got a crappy mic that we could connect to the computer and ultimately record our voices. The results: we recorded 2 CD’s with our scripts and some songs but mainly nonsense talking. That was almost a part-time job, my friends. Check the website, you can find some of these there.

FP CD covers

We also had a fictitious music CD entitled Great As Tits – parody to Greatest Hits CD’s. We recorded a couple of songs from there but they were included in the previous ones.

The radio

Our work – I guess I can call it work now – was on radio several times for two reasons. First was a song that we record that had as instrumental a mobile ring tone: we called it the first worldwide polyphonic music. When the guy form the radio himself did a song by himself using our idea we got some advice from a lawyer friend that we should protect our intellectual property. We never did but the truth is that from time to time we meet someone that heard the song before.

More recently, a radio show was actually asking for stuff like we had recorded 5 years ago (I told you we were too ahead of our time), and so more of our clips were on the radio again, although this time less enthusiastic.

The television

Although our short-movie experience failed, we recorded some short video clips that we published under fp2648 on YouTube. A humor TV show was asking for videos in the same style as ours. We took the chance and submitted them. Guess what? Of course we were on the TV for some weeks. Check out this example video Mission Practicably Almost Impossible (in portuguese):

That was the short story of my humor producer experience. Taking in consideration we never thought of doing this for fame, fortune or both, I guess we were quite successful in the sense of having our ideas and talent recognized. Now we have different occupations in our lives the project was unofficially abandoned, but every once in a while a new idea pops up and get us to do same crazy stuff together again, just like in the old times. Don’t forget to visit Fernando’s blog!

See you next week!