USE DESIGN blog

I like Paris metro line number 14. It’s the only line, which is never on strike. Why? It is fully automatic. The stations are modern, clean, the trains spacious and light, and the ‘user experience’ is, so to say, very pleasant. Not that I don’t like the ‘traditional’ metro lines in Paris – I do. Even when the stations are a little bit old, a little bit smelly, the light a little bit yellowish, the trains small and crowded, the advertising huge and the strikes as regular as public holidays.
One thing that surprises me as not very well considered, in terms of user experience on line 14, is the traffic prediction monitor. You see a blue screen with small white characters, which you can only read from very close. So, if you want to know when your train is coming, you have to go look for this information. And what will you see? The first and the second train, its destination and the expected time in minutes AND seconds. Something like this:
Saint-Lazare 0min 40sec
Saint-Lazare 2min 40sec
The thing is, on line 14 there can be only one destination in each direction, so why repeat ‘Saint-Lazare’? And does the user really need to know how many seconds still remain? Besides, it will take you some time to figure out, what time it is and the whole monitor looks like an old Windows computer with a permanent fatal error.

Consider, on the contrary, the monitor on most ‘old’ stations. Practically from the any spot on the quay you will be able to read the direction of the line, the current time, the expected time before the first and the second train – in minutes. I find it a fine example of an economical and self-explaining information design, taking into account its visibility and immediate understanding.

Somehow I find the second monitor to look much more modern than the first.

Here is an older article on information design in Moscow metro.

Voici une petite critique d’Apple (Mapple pour l’occasion) qui ne manque pas d’humour… J’aime beaucoup le clin d’oeil à leur pub emblématique 1984 réalisée par Ridley Scott…

Greenpeace has published a Guide to Greener Electronics, rating the world’s leading high-tech companies on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being the most polluting. Nokia is on top and Nintendo, closely followed by Microsoft, is on the bottom. Curiously the mobile phone companies seem to be greener than PC manufacturers. Apple is a way greener than Microsoft but cannot beat the phone manufacturers.

While Facebook is still figuring out how to monetize its service, the Facebookers are busy monetizing the service for themselves.
More and more often I get ‘friend’ requests from entities other than persons. As soon as I accept them, their statuses, messages and requests start pouring in, filled with… yes, the advertisement of their activities. Sometimes it comes in handy, if you want to keep updated. But sometimes I get the impression that in the few months I have been using Facebook it has turned into a giant ‘do-it-yourself’ advertising engine.

People displaying themselves as persons also advertise. A ‘friend’ of mine puts the name of his website in his every status. Another friend frequently tells all his contacts to ‘go check out my blog’. A ‘friend’ I have never met but reluctantly admitted, puts the same slogan in his status every couple of hours, advertising his business. Daily I am being bombarded by ‘events’ and ‘groups’ and their advertising messages. Again, sometimes I do like to know what is happening, especially due to the handy ‘event’ feature showing ‘who is attending’ and ‘who is not’. But sometimes I wish I would see more people when I go on Facebook.

A logical conclusion would be for Facebook to monetize on their users’ monetizing Facebook. Did the new American President pay for his Facebook page? I have no idea. Did a Facebook page pay off for him in the election race? You bet it did. I suppose filtering ‘businesses’ from ‘just people’ would probably mean screening the users’ content and stumble on privacy issues. However, somehow I get a feeling that a ‘premium’ user account on Facebook is not such a far away future.

According to the latest neuroscience research the electronic media is changing the way we read and process written information. The article Is Google making us stupid? describes how deep concentration while reading a book gives way to snapping bits and pieces of ‘content’ from different electronic media. Not only the kind of information around us is changing, apparently, but the connections within our brain themselves. It seems that we are no longer able to process a long text without loosing our concentration on the third page to see if a friend has twittered something. According to this we should be on our way to value short texts over long ones.

Thinking of this I have looked at the Barnes & Nobles Top 100 Bestsellers of the moment. Number one is a Harry Potter title of 128 pages. The second place is taken by ‘The brass verdict’ by Michael Connelly, a thriller of no less than 432 pages. The third title, ‘Eclipse’ by Stephen Meyer, counts… 640 pages! Walk into any bookstore and look at the shelves. Do you see any THIN books? They are in the poetry and collectors’ items department. As a Dutch editor once said to me: ‘Thin books don’t sell. Short stories don’t sell. They are too short’. The Harry Potter novels are the favorite read of children and adolescents – our new generation, born when electronic media already existed, their brain circuits altered by the extensive use of internet, sms and video games. Harry Potter is a series of seven thick books. The children read them all. After that they go and watch all the Harry Potter movies, each of more than 2 hours.

I am therefore not so worried about our changing brain circuits. What I do worry about a little is the fact that when I was a child my friends were reading Dickens and Tolstoy, but nowadays my friends, who are in their thirties, read Harry Potter.

A gadget ceases to be one when its absence has a negative effect on your social and/or professional life. I was one of the last people to buy a mobile phone and that was only after I have started taking long distance trains. Long distance trains tend to be late. The person waiting for me at the other end wanted to know.

I know a woman who does not want to own a mobile due to presumed health dangers. She is very difficult to get in touch with and people in her social circle complain about her all the time. She misses appointments or appears to ones that have been canceled. ‘We wrote you an email, just as you asked’, people would tell her, or: ‘We called you at home and told your mother.’ Thinking by themselves: just buy the damn mobile and be like everybody else! Me too, I was displeased with her once. For not having a mobile.

I must be the only person in the Whole Wired World not to be on Facebook. Despite a ton of invitations systematically thrown away. Why? For once, I don’t like its boys-dormitory-kind of communication style with all the poking and the partying. I have a very large and very dispersed circle of friends and yet I am not a smalltalk kind of person. If I need to talk to somebody, I will write him or her an email. I don’t feel like gathering hundreds of friends, who are already my real friends, in their digital form once again. I don’t feel like having a stream of their smallest daily news flooding my Inbox: who has befriended whom, who had dinner where, whose pictures are on show. I have to defend my choice not to join all the time. I am a very social person: I tend to respond to every message I get as soon as I can. Continuing to be a social person on FB would mean another full-time job.

Lately a close friend published some pictures on FB, which I would like to see you and which, of course, I cannot. Because I am not on FB. Is it slowly starting to affect my social life? Will I, as with the mobile, become one of the last to succumb to the new gadget? Are people starting to complain about ME? Am I missing ‘it’?

Whatever ‘it’ may be?

Les modes d’emploi Ikea, il parait que c’est toujours très bien fait… Enfin surement pas pour tout le monde apparemment (me voila rassurer) , voici un détournement plutôt sympathique en 15 étapes.

via MikeSacks

Même sans s’attacher à la pertinence ou à l’intérêt des contenus diffusés sur ces cadres lumineux (une publicité, une chaîne d’information, un message institutionnel, une recette de cuisine), avouez que cet envahissement de l’image change notre environnement proche.



Fin 2007, les fabricants d’écrans plats annonçaient des chiffres record de vente en France, presque 5,8 millions d’unités. Or je ne pense pas que seuls les particuliers aient tous décidés de changer leur vieux téléviseur cathodique : le bars ont ouvert le bal avec les dernières coupes du monde de foot et de rugby, chacun souhaitant attirer le public qui ne pouvait se rendre dans les stades, faisant ainsi de ces espaces étriqués et bondés, pour seulement quelques heures, la nouvelle arène populaire.



Depuis tout le monde s’y est mis. Faites le compte du nombre d’écrans que vous croisez dans la journée, moi aujourd’hui j’en ai approché de près ou de loin plusieurs dizaines…



Quelle influence cela va-t-il avoir sur notre vie ? Voyez déjà les gens attirés par la lumière de ces cadres hypnotiques qui, dans une brasserie, passent plus de temps à lever les yeux qu’à regarder dans leur assiette, ou mieux leur interlocuteur. Observez, lors d’un concert, que les lumière bleues des écrans de portable ou d’appareil photo numérique ont définitivement remplacées les lumières oranges de nos valeureux briquets Bic…



Me concernant, certains jours, j’ai véritablement envie de tout éteindre… Et voila que d’autres m’ont devancé et sont passés à l’acte : munis d’un petit boîtier dédié, ils se filment dans différentes zones commerciales, et éteignent toutes les télévisions qui les entourent (YouTube : rechercher « TV-B-Gone »).







Vandalisme visuel, simple blague, volonté d’économiser de l’énergie ? Un peu de tout ça… Si seulement cela pouvait inciter ceux qui nous imposent ces écrans à se poser la question de leur intérêt. Non seulement les 4 par 3 ne sont pas près de disparaitre, mais en plus demain… ils bougent !

Grand lecteur de science fiction dans ma jeunesse, et constatant à l’époque le peu d’innovations présente dans mon quotidien, je me suis un jour demandé si cette « fiction » ne demeurerait pas à jamais réservé à des étagères de bibliothèques remplies de mots imprimés sur des feuilles blanches. Les ouvrages d’Asimov, K.Dick et autres Gibson semblaient effectivement à des années lumières de la réalité des années 80.



Les images même apparemment familières de rues de grandes métropoles imaginaires que Ridley Scott (metteur en scène) et Sid Mead (designer) avaient tenté d’illustrer dans Blade Runner ne parvenait décidément pas à réduire la part de fiction de cette science. A mes yeux et à ma modeste culture, elle n’avait rien de concret et cela en était fort engageant pour mon imaginaire mais tout aussi frustrant face à mon désir de voir mon monde changer.







Or, en cette année 2008, par bien des signes (numérique, Internet, biotech, nanotech) on peut prendre conscience que ces changements sont à leurs prémices. Loin de moi l’idée de tous les énumérer ici, mais un seul est ,je trouve, particulièrement révélateur : les écrans plats qui envahissent nos maisons, nos bureaux, nos rues…



Rappelez-vous ces villes de science fiction, mégalopoles mixant New-York et Tokyo où chaque mur, intérieur ou extérieur diffuse une information, un message, une publicité. Maintenant regardez aujourd’hui autour de vous, dans un bar, à la gare, dans le hall d’une tour de bureau, dans votre salon, dans une pharmacie, dans le bus ou certains metros… Quel mur n’a pas aujourd’hui son écran plat ?



A Los Angeles, un magnat de l’immobilier est tout décidé à rendre réel les croquis de Sid Mead en intégrant des murs d’écrans LCD sur les façades d’immeubles de la ville. Premier signe d’une science fiction qui nous rattrape ? Simple évolution technologique des peintures murales de réclames des immeubles du siècle dernier ?



A suivre…

You might not be aware of it, but in two months (May 2008) the world’s largest particle accelerator will be operational close to your home. To be precise, at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

This blog article gives a detailed overview of what is called ‘the most complicated thing that humans have ever built’. The purpose of the LHC is to observe the Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God particle’, which has not yet been observed but is expected to move the science towards the Grand Unified Theory, or the Theory of Everything.

The LHC, once operational, will recreate the conditions of the Big Bang (on a smaller, 27 km diameter scale). The temperatures generated in the tunnels will be more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun’s core and the superconducting magnets will be cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space.

I did not know we could do that. SAFELY. I think we don’t really know if we can.

The idea is to put as much energy as possible into the smallest possible space and see what comes out. A black hole, for instance. A tiny one. Somewhere under a Swiss farmer’s garden, just outside of Geneva. Which will safely evaporate, say the scientists, because of Hawking evaporation. Which has never been tested, they admit, and actually might not work, but trust us. Everything is under control.

Or a strangelet. Also known as ‘strange nugget’ but best described as ‘a fragment of strange matter’. Something the Swiss farmer might find in his back yard on a peaceful May morning. ‘What’s that you found there, dear?’ his wife will ask. ‘Not another strangelet, I hope?’ From Wiki: ‘If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This « ice-nine » disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.’

‘We don’t even know what to expect’, says French physicist Yves Schutz. ‘We’re now in a domain of energy that nobody has ever explored.’

When a strangelet comes out, we will not be able to blog about it.