Designing for SpaceTime

The following are notes from the Interaction08 session - Designing for SpaceTime, Building in No Time, presented by Matt Jones of Dopplr. Dopplr is a site where you upload your travel itinerary, share it with friends, and it will show when connections of yours will be traveling to the same or nearby locations.

Slides
Video

Notes:

• Practices cybernetic serendipity, patterns to create unexpected and delightful results
• "Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter"
• Central object = the trip; where are you going = space and when = time
• Models: we make things to help us understand
• Dopplr: model of the future in spacetime
• Trying to find the perfect line through the world
• Inspiration: Recreating Movement
• How does a view of the past & future affect our interactions?
• Our social realities can be described as: Contextual, Interwoven, Fuzzy, Intertwingled
• Need to get more down & dirty with context; Tufte's recent redesign of the iPhone completely ignores context
• What we believe we cannot prove
• We're not even close to understanding how mobile devices devour our attention
• How to deliver bits of info in the right context at the right time?
• Interwoven + distributed: understanding how the very small has big implications
• Check out: Native to a Web of Data
• Web as coral reef: both architecture and organism
• Dopplr: web of data and movement
• Can we make a web site that no one has to go to?
• Deliver value wherever you need it
• Designing a distributed, interwoven identity
• Trying to focus on delight 1st; ex. hotels putting a rubber duck in your bathtub
• "Rational Delight"
• Fuzziness - no fuzziness on city search. Make a good guess on things based on past patterns; ex. searching for a city gets difficult when you hit N. America where there are 95 different Springfield's
• Ask for help when don't get it right; have users help correct
• Inject fuzziness in other places: you're in Oakland and a friend will be in SF around the same time
• Also show who's leaving or arriving just outside of your dates
• Play to find the perfect line; provide fuzzy ways to help people find the perfect line
• What you can do w/small teams (doesn't scale); main design tool: IM and speaking, continuous discussion; do you need to scale?
• Loves concept models: boundary objects create discussion
• To have 1 good idea you need lots of ideas
• Idea scaffolding: lots of sketching and talking
• You're never done!
• Prototype and test new features quickly
• Use tags to mark new features, versions
• Co-Design
• Constantly shifting, like the Hogwarts staircases
• Choreographer of SpaceTime
• "Creating the controversial conditions for an idea to survive"
• Trying to be more public with their ideas, opening the conversation up to users