My silly shoes: design, spectacle, and embarrassment

Here are my new shoes. A friend (Kevin) got a pair and they seemed like an excellent idea. They have no support, they give your toes exceptional freedom, you can move surprisingly like you were in bare feet, and you are protected by, albeit thin, soles from pointy things that annoy your feet. I have worn these playing tennis (limited to an hour at a time out of caution) and they are great. I think that I would wear them every day were it not for the spectacle that they cause and the derision that they inspire in people. The laughs and surprise is, well, surprising to me. It is true that I have big feet (size 13) and so these shoes do look like the gorilla feet that you might purchase at a costume shop. I have had to spend quite a lot of time explaining these shoes to people and deflecting silly remarks.

At the end of the day, this is really a design issue. I can imagine one of two possible chains of thought by the designers: ambivalence or intentionality. I can totally imagine, if the designers are out-of-doors types trying to improve on Tevo's or something that they might completely miss the utter strangeness of these shoes. This ambivalence to the consequences of design (me being forced to explain my shoe-ware) will likely narrow the audience of these shoes to those who are willing to put up with the spectacle (I pick my battles). An alternate interpretation of intent is that the designers are fully aware of the weirdness of their design and are going with the "let your freak flag fly" approch to design. I think that is a mistake. My reason is simple: the shoes are very comfortable and it seems reasonable to offer a style that does not require one to become a walking advertisement.

To me, the solution is trivial: put a flexible shroud over the toes so that the most peculiar aspect of the shoes - the individuated toes - is not readily apparent. I'm not sure that this would entirely eliminate the spectacle but it would at least require a more observant bystander.

I am reminded of a sitter I had when I was a little boy. He had Birkenstock's when they were a totally new thing (probably the late 1960's). I remember thinking - wow, those are weird and his reply was very much what I find myself doing: explaining why they made sense. Perhaps, this is the path that excellent design ideas must travel - eventually, they will prevail and become the norm; perhaps they need to hold their ground to make their point. Perhaps I am too old to "let my freak flag fly" without complaining!

Looking for a Good Tennis Book

I'm looking for a book on tennis. I go to Amazon, the subject index gets me down to 1000+ books sorted by something called "relevance." The books don't look interesting and I'm not going to scan 1000+ books for one that is. What should I do? I switch the sorting method to "Avg. Customer Review" but this gives me a ton of five star ratings by a single person. So, if I am the same as this other person then maybe this is a good book for me. I don't want to try to find my tennis doppelganger. I'm wishing that Amazon had New Egg's "most customer reviews" - definitely dangerous because someone could game the system but it eliminates most of the one review wonders. I go to Google Books but it is hopeless. I use Google and search for the "best tennis books" but the results are not helpful. I try the new Microsoft search ... after I try www.ding.com, which is not really the correct name. What was it? Oh yea, Bing (actually, I used Google search and asked for "Microsoft Search"). I got pretty much the same junk that Google gave me.

Perhaps the web has no suggestions about good tennis books - I kind of doubt that. The real problem is that search really does not understand what I am asking - there is no semantic anything that might suggest that I am looking for a good tennis player's opinion of tennis books. It does not need to be the best tennis player, it does not need to be someone famous, etc.

I came up with an aphorism for this problem:

With context, Artificial Intelligence is easy

How to infer context, then, would seem to be the "fundamental problem of artificial intelligence." I have no particular insight as to how to crack this problem but until it is done I will be looking for good tennis books by linearly scanning all of the books Amazon has to offer.

Aesthetics, LED Technology, and Change

I'm sure you have seen a chandelier or sconce that attempts to look like a candle with a "flame shaped" bulb and a long stem that has faux wax drippings and maybe a little bowl shaped bottom to catch the faux wax. Similarly, there are lights that look like gas-lights. These are a kind of transitional objects that gets invented at the transition of technology generations. For some reason they remain as an aesthetic for much longer.

I am of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of materials: all materials are good but you should not try to turn one material into another (for example, plastic with wood grain). These transitional objects violate a similar principle: don't try to turn one technology into another. This is generally not possible when an older technology is deeply entrenched and you have to live with the form factor that it has created for itself. Still, it seems that true good design emerges when the old is abandoned completely and the new embraced for what it is - it's essence.

This transition is happening with LED lighting. The early uses of LED lighting will probably be in replacing incandescent and fluorescent lights while living within the constraints that these lights demand. In the case of incandescent, the form factor addresses the need to deal with the significant radiant heat generated by the bulbs; in the case of fluorescent lights, it is their space-filling nature. LED replacements provide few aesthetic benefits: an LED-based can occupies essentially the same footprint as a normal can - the selling point is the lifetime of the LED itself and the lower energy cost.

There are interesting and novel uses of high-intensity LED. One interesting use is when red, green, and blue LEDs are used to make the light and, as a result, it is possible to cover a wide spectrum of colors. I first saw this as a back light to a bar in Seattle - it was cool as the color would change periodically. This is a dramatic use so it is not particularly refined.

A more interesting, future use, will be when interior designers realize that they can tune the color of lights to match or contrast the colors of fabrics, carpets, etc. Interior designers have quite a sophisticated notion of color and the ability to control the color content of lighting should be an interesting and sublime development. This notion can be extended to changing the light with the change in illumination from sunlight. In our living room, the walls are green but the more sunlight there is, the more yellow the walls become. One can imagine adjusting the ambient lighting to either enhance or counteract this change. Achieving such effects will require photo-sensors that can monitor the light levels in parts of the room.

The dramatic power of lighting is particularly well demonstrated in movies. "The Red Shoes" is an excellent example or the lighting designer's art as are most of Vincente Minnelli's movies (he was a set designer before becoming a director). It is not clear that we would want to live in a "dramatic" environment, but who knows.

The most direct change that we should expect from LED lighting will be the change in lamps, ambient, and task lighting sources. High-intensity LEDs are very intense point sources of light and this produces a significant challenge if you want ambient light. Maintaining their efficiency will require clever diffusion technologies. Because of the low heat generated by the LED itself, one can imagine plastic lenses and reflectors. This is not something that is practical with incandescent bulbs because of the radiant heat. The form factor of an LED - even with it's heat sink - is very small: a common module is a single high-intensity LED mounted on a 3/4" radius PCB with an aluminum back that is screwed against a heat sink. CNC machining will allow heat sinks to be organic forms as opposed to the ordinary notion we have (rectangles with fins).

One comment for technical completeness is that high-intensity LEDs generally require heat sinks. This is not so much because they generate much heat but rather because an LED is a power semiconductor that has a very high heat density over a very small area. The semiconductor junction will not operate properly at temperatures above around 85 degrees centigrade. The heatsink is to keep the junction sufficiently cool.

It is an interesting thought experiment as to how LED lighting will alter our idea of the aesthetics of lamps, ambient, and task lighting. The possibility of "reactive lighting" that can alter color schemes and react to sunlight intensity levels will provide for a broad range of innovations.

A Speech Recognition Conundrum for Old Folks

I while back I purchased Dragon Dictate with the fantasy that I might be able to convey my thoughts in the same manner that I talk. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to talk so this seemed like a rational idea. Unfortunately for me, the experiment did not work: I would sit in front of my computer and my mind would be blank; if I forced it then what would come out would be trite drivel. Then I thought "this is happening because there is no spontaneity" and I got a hand dictation device that Dragon would apparently then translate into words for me. Again, blankness and now the dictation device and the software languish.

I conveyed this amusing failure to a friend (wrs for those of you who know him) and I vaguely recall him saying something to the effect that "I think with the keyboard and not with my voice."

This is an interesting aha if we consider that having trained our hands to do the work of transcription that we have perhaps diminished our ability to use our voices instead. For old folks like me this then would be a natural barrier to the use of speech recognition: for it to be useful I will need to reverse my bias toward using my fingers. This is presumably an old folks problem in the sense that our children (if you don't stick them in front of a keyboard too soon) may find speech recognition more natural.

I came to this thought from another chain of ideas that I track - diet related issues. A friend (Brent) sent me an interesting post whereby the observation was made that we look for genetic causes when there is no variation in behavior. For example, most of the developed world shares a similar diet and instead of looking at the flaws in the diet we all share, we look for genetic causes for some of its consequences (heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes, etc.)

Speech recognition may be suffering a similar fate - we live in a world of keyboards and the failings of speech recognition is that we type.

The Idea of Invisibility

Invisibility in user interface is a compelling notion. When one learns to type, the keyboard becomes a little more invisible then the daunting thing that it was when you started. More compelling to me is the UI of a car, which involves arms, feet, and eyes in a complex, yet seemingly natural dance involving thousands of pounds of vehicle. We can apply the notion of invisibility to more mundane objects, such as forks or chopsticks. To westerners, a fork is really almost transparent while chopsticks are more likely to be a skill learned in later life. In China, the opposite is likely the case. Learning to play tennis, as I am doing these days, is, in some real sense, about making certain motions and actions automatic - opening up the possibility of shifting our mental attention to more strategic things. For example, telling myself to keep my chin up and watch the ball all of the way through a serve will hopefully be unnecessary in some not too distant future and then I can focus on where I want to place the serve and what kind of spin I might want to impart, etc. This is not unlike learning the keys on the keyboard so that we need no longer look at our fingers and instead focus on the words and associated thoughts. These learned things, once automatic, are invisible to our conscious and they, in some real sense, become part of our being. The quality of a UI might be judged by how easily we internalize and make invisible its interface. The mouse, for example, seems much more natural then the keyboard (albeit, they serve totally different functions). A more recent UI device - 3DConnexion's Space Navigator is a surprisingly intuitive device for coarse motions in 3D with six degrees of freedom (three translational and three rotational). I now regularly use a small mouse with a track-wheel in my right hand for scrolling and fine motion and Space Navigator in my left hand for coarse motion; they work very well together.

An interesting historical note about the keyboard is that for a long time it was not really considered a device for ordinary consumption. My father, for example, did not learn to type till much later in life. In his era, secretaries served as an intermediary between the spoken (as in shorthand) or handwritten word and the typed word. The explosive growth of the computer made this interface untenable and the idea of secretaries as transcribers has become more of a specialty - for example, in legal settings. To me this is a good indication as to how poor a UI the keyboard really is - its invention almost immediately produced another interface to simplify its use.

The notion of good UI vs bad UI can then, in some sense, be associated with how much work we have to do to make it invisible. This is not quite enough, however, because we need also to consider the utility of what we get in return. A car takes quite a while to learn but the return on investment, in our current culture, is very high so people are willing to do a lot of work to master the UI. In the future, when we have auto-navigated, cooperative transport - for example, with GPS, traffic monitoring with traffic light awareness, and flocking control (automatic spacing of cars) - then we will look back at the car's UI and say "how did anyone ever learn how to use that thing?" The keyboard gets a little reprieve in this regard - speech recognition has been around for a while now and it does not seem to serve the function of a keyboard in spite of its apparent naturalness.

The focus of my interest is in making new UI so this discussion might productively end with a question:

What elements of UI are naturally invisible?

An Idea from Childhood

I liked Star Trek when I was a little boy and wanted to have one of those chairs that Captain Kirk sat in - maybe you remember it: wide arm-rests that you could put dials and buttons on. Anyway, when I was a little older, in high-school, I worked for the second computer store in the US and assembled a bunch of what would be the first generation of personal computers. I dreamed a lot about seamlessly interacting with a computer - sitting at my captain's chair thinking and having my thoughts conveyed effortlessly to a computer that would understand them. Two ideas attracted me in those days - capacitive sensors and the apparent ability to fire individual neurons. The coolest keyboard I had in those days was a "capacitive sensor-based" keyboard from a SOL-20 from Processor Technology. This was the first keyboard that had a nice feel because the keys were not traditional contact-switches. I dreamed of a keyboard on my captain's chair that was the shape of my palm, one on each arm, with capacitive sensors that would be activated by the gentle pressure of my fingers - that is, the fingers would be the keys and the keyboard would be flat. You see, in those days, I was not a good typist so the idea that typing would be the way I would have to communicate with my computer seemed silly and annoying - I wanted something more sublime. I guess I am still searching for that - as I type on this annoying keyboard.

As a postscript, I never could imagine how to use "neuron firing" without some unpleasant notion involving needles so I kept thinking about it but could never get to a point where there was anything sublime other then the possibility that one could think and directly convey ones thoughts - even if in the crude form of characters - to a computer.