Samuelbarnes’s Weblog

Sixth Entry. Documentation of ideas and conversations had during class yesterday. The first being a new group name. It seems our default group name was not recognized. Spurred on by the generic “sharehouseaccom” reference used in its place I began thinking of alternatives and was fortunate to come up with something quite quickly: micasa. As in “mi casa, su casa”; spanish for “my home is your home”. I’m not sure if that is the correct spelling. I’ve spelt it phonetically and I like that it reads the way it should be pronounced, but is also a beautiful, sonorous little name in its own right.

On discussion there were some variations suggested: mikasa, mycasa, mykasa. These suggestions were prompted by the possibility that the micasa domain name may not be available. I think mikasa is a suitable alternative, for the same reasons I like micasa. mycasa or mykasa I am wary of. Its cute, but by mixing two languages I’m afraid that the meaning of the original phrase would be lost. I also don’t like the idea of parodying myspace. Could we call ourselves micasa, even if another corporation has the rights to the name?

Next, inspired by couchsurfing.com, some questions we may wish to propose to users for answering:

• Age?
• Gender?
• micasa Member Since?
• Profile Views?
• Occupation?
• Education?
• Associations/Memberships/Subscriptions?
• Personal Description
• Sharehouse History?
• Interests?
• Philosophy?
• Favourite Music/Films/Books/Art/Other?
• Types Of People You Would Like To Live With?
• What Will Bring To The House (Possessions)?
• What Will You Bring To The House (Skills)?
• Are You A Communal Eater?
• Would You Be Prepared To Contribute To Groceries/Essentials?
• Are You Willing To Contribute To The Cleaning?
• Preferred Budget?
• Broadband Required?
• In A Relationship?
• Will Your Lover Be Spending Much Time In The House?
• Do You Have Pets?
• Do You Watch TV?
• What Is Your Routine/Schedule Like?
• Do You Work?
• Describe A Typical Sunday Morning.

And some ideas for the site format:

- Post-registration we have all of these questions (and more) available on a profile creation page. The user can choose which ones to answer and in doing so, what information will be displayed on their profile. Its entirely up to them, but the onus is there to include as much about yourself as possible. To, like with couchsurfing, market yourself as enticingly as you can. People will be more interested in someone who offers a lot of themself, over someone who appears reluctant, lazy or clandestine. Or maybe those are the qualities that appeal to them. It works both ways.

- Questions in the profile creation page should be both orientated to the individual and anticipate the expectations/possible realities of sharehousing. That is to say, give the user  the opportunity to present themselves how they wish and allow the viewer to get a sense of whether that user would be appropriate for the sharehousehold.

- And what of the house itself? Would advertising it require a different format? Essentially this site should provide people with a place to create a personal profile for themselves, and to search for vacant rooms/apartments. The people creating the profiles for the house are likely to be the existing housemates, perhaps even landlords or real estate agents. In the case of existing housemates it would be in the interests of the person searching for a place to live to be able to see profiles of the people they will be living with. But can we get them to create profiles? Is there incentive for someone NOT looking for a place to live to be bothered? Will the responsibility fall to one housemate? I suppose all you can do is provide people with that option. Its up to them whether or not they use it. Besides, most people currently in a sharehouse will inevitably be looking for another at some time (I wonder if there are any statistics on that? I imagine the average to be something like people under the age of thirty renting/sharing must move at least once a year). So it will be in their interest to have a profile. We want to make it be in everyone’s interest to have a profile; for the site to be as unnecessarily indispensable as myspace or facebook are. To be constantly updated. To encourage long-term interaction.

In our group discussion we broached the subject of the video. Jess suggested that this would be a facet of the project where we could really stress the idea of connectivity. It was also his opinion that a successful video would also be vital to the branding of the website and for setting up a context to put the website in. A discussion over the purpose of the site ensued; as did some brainstorming on the reasons why myspace/facebook are so popular, and what we need to provide/present for micasa to obtain similar popularity. In an attempt to translate the qualities of convenience, enjoyablity, ease-of-use and effectiveness that those sites have into an aesthetic, models like flipbooks, children’s card games where an illustration of a character is split into three panels and the child has to match them up, and the boardgame ‘Guess Who?’ were suggested. ‘Guess Who?’ in particular, was very enthusiastically touted as a visual metaphor for a video to use.

Our consultation with Tania at the conclusion of class produced brief but very positive feedback: “Great! You’re on the right track”.

Fifth entry. A brief reflection on the research I was assigned to do before the next class. Inspect 3 websites — www.2share.com.au; www.housemates.com.au; www.yourestate.com.au — and report my findings.

I undertook a fairly substantial documentation of the sites (yourestate.com not included for technical reasons) and their features in my exercise book, but I wont repeat it here. Reading it would probably be as tedious as writing it was. I’ll just relate my general impressions.

www.2share.com.au

-Unispiring homepage

- Gives users option of searching between Sydney and Melborne

- After choosing your city, the next page provides you with a suburb search. One search engine for “ads from housemates looking for a room” and another for “ads from flatmates offering a room”.

- After selecting a suburb (from the housemates looking for a room section), the next page provides listings of people advertising themselves and their needs.

- Some categories in the profile do not allow you to personalize your response. Age, gender, who you are looking to share with (male/female/either/hetero/gay/couple/age range) have to be chosen from pre-generated drop down menus.

- Contact details for advertisers are not presented to the public. To contact advertisers you need to become a registered member. Standard membership is free and allows you limited use of the site for one month. Premium membership costs $15/2 months; provides you with unlimited access to other advertisers and allows you to include a phone number with your own advertisement.

- The majority of the advertisements on 2share.com.au are perfunctory and uninformative. They list the name, age, gender, rent budget, housemate preferences, email contact and a personal description. The content of the personal description s determined by the author, and with one exception, never extended beyond a three or four sentence form advertorial.

- The single innovation, or idea worth stealing from 2share.com.au was a list of laundrettes in Melbourne listed alphabetically by suburb.

Neither housemates.com.au or 2share.com.au struck me as being very effective services or good examples of interaction design. Both maintained a very generic, poorly-designed aesthetic. Their formats were limited and interchangeable with any other competing site. housemate.com.au in particular was a frustrating site to navigate. Not because there were too many options; rather there were too few, but because they belied this lack of content by desperately giving most of their features multiple identities. The same categories were listed in the sidebar, the toolbar, and given an illustrated position on the home page.2share.com.au’s only innovation was to feature a list of laundrettes in Melbourne

www.housemates.com.au

- Similarly uninspired design. Could substitute for a domain name site or a variety of common spam advertisements.

- Homepage displays a number of features grouped in categories (some apparently repeated) and a search-by-postcode search engine or a search-by-map-of-Australia search engine.

- Results for the chosen suburb/state are listed either by Availability/State/Recent Listing.

-Each listing has the suburb and price in the heading; a title, location, availability, description and the option to view more houses in the same suburb. You can open these listings to view a longer description, a summary of the features of the house, a map and images. For the user there are buttons which allow you to receive email alerts about the property, save it to your favourites, tell a friend, ask a question or print the ad.

Feature worth stealing from housemates.com.au: “Housemates From Hell” – a message board formatted section where users relate horror stories from past sharehouse experiences. I don’t know if I would make this a feature of our site, but as a novelty it might have some value.Both of these sites suffer from the problem we identified with the majority of rental resources currently available: they aren’t sensual. That wasn’t a definition that I think has been made before but it seems so appropriate after my experience navigating these two sites. All text, no texture!

For comparison I suggested that everybody inspect the website www.couchsurfing.com. CouchSurfing is, according to Wikipedia, a free international Internet-based hospitality service, and currently the largest hospitality exchange network. I used it regularly when I was in Europe in 2005. Users create a profile on the couchsurfing site; by doing so they are also inviting other couchsurfers to impose on them. Then when they need accommodation in a foreign city they can search the site for users who can house them for an unspecified period and contact them via a messaging application. The local user then checks the profile of the travelling user and decides whether or not to invite them into their home, for how long, under what conditions, etc. It sounds fraught with danger for both users but I never had anything but positive experiences couchsurfing and managed to save 3/4 of my accommodation budget in the process.

I wasn’t conscious of the couchsurfing model when I suggested this idea for the group project. That grew quite organically out of the frustration that I documented below. But upon reviewing the website it quickly firms as an obvious prototype for our service. If only because it privileges the individuality of the user over the features of the accommodation.

A standard couchsurfing profile provides information on the user’s: percentage of requests replied to; their online presence; last log-in; period of membership; number of profile views; age; gender; membername; occupation; education; languages spoken; groups they belong to; friends; personal description; life philosophy; favourite movies/books/music; couchsurfing experiences; interests; types of people they enjoy; things they have to teach/learn/share; opinions on the couchsurfing project; locations travelled; references.

Imagine what you could learn about the suitabilty of a potential housemate if you could be privy to all of this information before you even meet them. Or not meet them if that is the case. This is the direction I imagine we need to take. CouchSurfing is my model.

After devoting considerable time and thought to this blog in the week after the first class, such focus has had to be distributed among other classes. This will be my first update in perhaps a week. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. I believe the stipulation was that we spend half an hour each week on the blog, and I was certainly doing more than that on individual entries. So, a more intermittent reflection may be more appropriate.

I actually started this entry last Friday morning. The intention was to document some of the results of the previous Wednesday’s class whilst they were still relatively fresh. As the passing of time has further deteriorated my recollection of exactly how the group’s discussion progressed I will submit the points as drafted on Friday morning:

- It was agreed upon by all that the idea needed more definition.

- Was the problem we were trying to resolve with our idea that “its difficult for students to find housing”?

- Or are there an abundance of resources but all of them are too general (ineffectual?)

- Is the current Melbourne rental crisis a factor in our project. Does it affect students? The majority of those living out of home do so in share accommodation. How?

- Can we/should we restrict the subject to students? Share houses?

- What about people in similar financial circumstances? Many share houses are comprised of people in different occupations: full-time work, part-time work, student, volunteer, artist.

- How will the site be financed? Can you charge a membership fee? Will advertising content generate income? If it was a strictly student service, and this is perhaps the only argument for it being so, would we be eligible for a university grant?

- Unanimous agreement that the site has to be different to everything currently available. What will we provide that is unique? Why will people want to use this service?

- Content: quirky. Personalized. Questions like, “What do you like on your toast?” How do we encourage people to interact generously with the site? How can we utilize the sites potential to present distinctive profiles? Does the provision of a greater number of categories result in a better representation of the individual? What is the information that is most valuable for seekers to advertise and leasers to know? What do we not want: “facebook applications”?

- It might be worth researching the most common questions asked in share house interviews? What can make or break an interview? (I used the example of my friend James who almost had his own key cut when he discovered that his frequent absence from home — attending residencies overseas, working interstate — would not be so desirable for his new housemates who wanted someone that was around more).

- Another way of distinguishing the site might be to incorporate Google Earth, whereis.com, or some other map provider or direction-giving service. We could give users a preconception of where there potential new home is located. How far it is from public transport, shopping centres, university campuses, cultural precincts? And for users attending more than one interview in a day we could provide them with an itinerary and demonstrate the most effective routes to take in between appointments.

Our consultation with Blair at the conclusion of the class produced a favourable response. His only concern was with security issues. To borrow his equasion: Photos of rooms + Maps/Directions to people’s homes = Invitiation to steal. It was a very reasonable point and one which none of us had considered. Nor had we the real-world potential of the project, but Blair also encouraged us to think about presenting the finished assignment to RMIT as a proposal for a student grant. Which is one reason, perhaps the only one, that I can think of tailoring the project to students.

Am I wrong?

Third Entry, different from the first! Jackie is a punk, Judy is a runt,….Of course, the third verse sounded very similar to the first. If you weren’t familiar with the lyrics you could easily mistake them as being interchangeable. But, technically it was different. And this entry, whilst being a reflection on my reading, may also be a critique of my previous writings. Here’s hoping I just don’t get trapped in my own Ramones analogy.

So, now, what is Interaction Design? It seems to be about how we as designers can create the means for the owners and users of digital technologies and services to utilize those systems more effectively.This definition does counter my previous objections, but after reading the more detailed descriptions of Crampton-Smith and Moggridge, I don’t fear for the obsolescence of the communication designer that I had anticipated. Invoking the book, the cup and the pencil was a way of defending products and tools traditionally in the domain of the communication designer, or I suppose really the industrial designer; arguing for recognition of their continued value. Moggridge’s example of the wineglass and how a designer would consider a drinker’s interaction with it in his creation of the product, and how this same approach to interactions enabled by digital technology is the concern of interaction designers, put the idea in perspective for me. Made it inclusive. Actually rather excited me. Because in answering people’s questions about what I intend to do with graphic design, I have to concede that I don’t know. My interest and practice has been in print design, but I have to acknowledge the opportunities in areas like web design and multimedia; and the definitions of interaction design contained within the readings give me a better idea about how a communication designer can make significant contributions to those areas.  

As for my criticism of Crampton-Smith, I retract my statements. Although I still find her writing less edifying than I would expect, it was a mistake to interpret her reference to “digital artefacts” as simply being the products of industrial designers working in computer and communications industries. And her, and Moggridge’s, allusions to the responsibility designers have to keep almost spiritual aspirations in mind when designing were particularly inspiring.  

And how do these readings affect my opinion of the idea proposed for the group report? They reinforce it. Although the site is not an example of designers improving an existing digital technology or service, I believe that by utilizing features unique to web-based programs, we could create a digital service that better facilitates the introduction of room-seekers with room-leasers. Isn’t that effective interaction design?      

I know I wrote that I intended to do two posts today but this is not what I had in mind when for the secondary entry (that’s a response to the reading I fully intend to do later this evening). This is just a link to an entry I came across when reading the blog of Momus, aka Nick Currie, a Scottish musician, journalist and artist, and which I thought was related, however tangentially, to what I just wrote below. In this entry from dated March 7 2008 he asks his regular readers to post photographs of themselves, so that he “can see names he knows becoming faces”.

http://imomus.livejournal.com/357593.html?thread=14020313#t14020313

Second Entry. The first of two projected parts. Yesterday I spoke with the other members of my group regarding ideas for the group report. I offered the best of my limited ideas for consideration. It is one that I had conceived earlier, and was reminded of by the Urbanseed (?) dating example that Tania showed in the first class. It is essentially a similar web-based community service provider, but in this case the community is those looking for a room/house to rent/share, or those with a room/house to rent/share.

The inspiration for this came in January when I was looking for a new share house to move into. My two main sources of advertisements for vacancies were the Readings bookstore noticeboard in Carlton, and the website http://melbourne.gumtree.com.au. I had used Readings before with success, and found that this time again it provided me with some very promising accommodation opportunities. The reasons for this are many.

First of all, a description. Readings reserves one large window behind the front counter which looks out onto an alley for the posting of accommodation notices. For a gold coin donation anyone offering or seeking accommodation can post a notice in the window. The only restriction Readings places on these notices is that they not exceed a certain size, perhaps half the size of a postcard. So, the appearance and content of the notices in entirely up to the poster. As a consequence, there is absolute freedom for expression, and many of the notices indicate a great deal about the personality of the poster. A discerning viewer can easily eliminate half of the offerings, or choose to focus on only a handful. It may be the handwriting, an illustration, the aesthetic, the humour, an attitude, a description. Any of these things can aid the viewer by suggesting some affinity between them and the poster. Conversely, it can also screen, or filter out applications that may be unwanted.

You can even extend this process of filtering further and apply it to the location as a whole. Readings is, as Wikipedia puts it, “a hub for literary and musical connoisseurs since the 1970’s”. Being located in Carlton, Readings is also in the centre of Melbourne’s student ghetto, although with increasing gentrification, the opportunity for many students to live in Carlton is rare. Still, it is located at the gate of the city’s inner northern suburbs, home base for a large percentage of students. So you can argue that the majority posters and seekers frequenting the Readings noticeboard are likely to be young, white, middle-class, educated people. This is not to say, that Readings, or the people using its service would discriminate against groups not included in that assessment, in fact most would be at pains to protest the opposite, but generally I believe that to be a fair generalisation. And as such, they can feel safe in the knowledge that advertising through Readings or applying to those advertisements, will likely ensure interactions with those of like-minds or at the least, similar circumstances.

The Melbourne Gumtree website is the local version of a UK website, which is according to their own description, “a local London classified ads and community site, designed to connect people who were either planning to move, or had just arrived in the city, and needed help getting started with accommodation, employment and meeting new people”. Essentially the demographic of people using gumtree.com.au would be similar to those who use Readings (I used both after all), but I also get the impression that gumtree caters for travelers, backpackers and people who are in Australia for other reasons and are familiar with the site from their interactions in other countries.

What differentiates gumtree from Readings is that all notices are generated from a series of text boxes that the poster fills in. The boxes allow the poster to enter a location, price, posting title, posting description, room type/size, posting category, availabilty to couples, date available, contact e-mail address/phone number, and pictures or video. Providing information for any of these sections in up to the discretion of the poster, and most advertisements feature a combination of only a few. So while there is greater freedom for describing the subject of the advertisement, most posters stick to the basics. As a result most gumtree ads appear the same. A few lines, perhaps paragraphs of text, and occasionally a photograph. Looking at advertisements on gumtree quickly becomes a process of simply identifying a couple of relevant factors that correlate with the needs of the viewer: location, price, number of occupants.

This anonymity, or the homogenizing effect the website’s structure creates, also produced one instance where I suspect I became the potential victim of a scam. I answered an advertisement for a room to rent in Carlton, reasonably well priced for its location, fully furnished, all extra requirements like broadband included, with three photographs of a very luxurious room, comfortable living space and tidy kitchen. The reply that I received from the advertiser was positive, but because she was out of the country, attending a wedding in Edinburgh, I would not be allowed to view the property; but I was expected, to pay a bond in advance to secure the room, which should be transfered to the bank account of her stepfather, who resides in South Africa.

The dubious nature of an arrangement like that, and the advertiser’s poor grammar and english expression, would indicate to myself and hopefully most viewers that this was not a deal to be made, but the structure of the website allowed for the situation to occur. The advertisement could have been posted from a computer anywhere in the world, let’s say Africa, and it would still appear to be another accommodation notice posted with that day’s other entries.

So, gumtree suffers from security concerns and an inabilty to convey as much of the personality of the poster as Readings does. Where both fail however is in their approach of presenting a need of the user (a room/a housemate), which is so tactile and intuitive, as text. Most people are familiar with the experience of going to a share house interview and discovering one, or both, of two things. Firstly, that the people that they are meeting for the first time are not people that they would like to live with. And secondly that the room they are being shown, or the house or as a whole, is not a space in which they can imagine themselves happily spending a large proportion of the hours of their days for an indefinite period of their life. Because as great as the feeling of affinity we imagine for the poster of the advertisement at Readings may be, their is no substitute for experience.

Or is there? Or can we create a system that improves the current situation? It occurred to me after my thirteenth interview in two weeks, that there had to be a better solution. Why wasn’t there a website, like gumtree, that allowed users to advertise themselves or their rooms, but personalize, humanize the content so that the interface was much more like socializing websites like mySpace, Facebook or Friendster?

What if someone seeking a room could create a profile for themselves on this hypothetical website. The range of information that could be entered about them is expanded, and because the categories and systemized, the user is encouraged to comply with them. Rather than being unable or unwilling to write that difficult short summary of who they are, they are given the opportunity to enter a series of what the German sociologist Max Weber calls “elective affinities”: their favourite films, books, artists, designers, their political/sexual orientations, their ideas and beliefs, examples of their work, creativity or taste. There are limits to how much you can divine about a person from what they offer to present of themselves to you. But it does provide an improved forum for the user seeking accommodation to present themselves. And it allows the people advertising rooms to learn more about how appropriate someone who applies for the room might be. I attended interviews with some advertisers who were seeing as many as twenty applicants in one afternoon; others that many across weeks but only after preliminary phone interviews.

For the advertiser, it is still difficult to represent the spacial and metaphysical aspects of a living space, but apart from similar individual profiles from which the applicant can use for the same purposes, perhaps a section describing the rules and expectations of the house, and the responsibilities of those people entering it may be helpful.

These ideas are in a very early stage of development, but the idea seemed to be popular with my group, and no doubt, upon further consideration, the possibilities of such a website will be refined and expanded. So we’ll see what comes of it. I still don’t even know how relevant it is to the principles of interaction design because I haven’t done the reading. Yet.

The first entry. Perhaps an attempt at writing one is premature. I can’t say that I have any opinions to share, and have yet to attempt any of the readings. But I thought it might be valuable, for the purposes of research, and even just to initiate myself into the process of blog-writing, to put down a few of the questions I have been reflecting upon since yesterday’s class.

First, what is Interaction Design? That may sound like a churlish question for someone who hasn’t done the reading to ask, but I can’t say that I feel like I have a satisfactory understanding. I like Saffer’s definitions, with their humanistic overtones, but they lack the precision of Crampton-Smith’s. The consequence of her precision however is a reduction of Saffer’s inclusive terms for the items which enable greater interaction, “products” and “services”, into simply “digital artefacts”, which I find problematic. Is her specification a reflection of digital technology’s ubiquity in our lives? Or is she influenced by her own interests or occupation?

I suppose I find it problematic because I would not agree that an object like a book, or a cup, or a pencil is any less able to “shape our everyday life”. I might be being precious with those examples, but without my desk and chair for instance, I wouldn’t be able to sit and type this entry on my laptop with such ease and comfort.

As someone training to be a communication designer,  Crampton-Smith’s allying, whether it is intentional or not, interaction design with industrial design is worrying too. It seems to stress function over form, or at the very least in my imagination, relegate the role of the communication designer in interaction design to being the beautifier of the content for these digital artefacts. If the goal of interaction design is as Saffer describes, then paramount to facilitating interactions between humans through products is the creation of an effective interface; one that in having to appeal to humans with the promise of enriching their lives can neither privilege form nor function, but should capitalize upon the complimentary knowledge on designers of all disciplines.

I think it would be a mistake to continue that impassioned reasoning any further. It is, at this moment, entirely speculative after all. But it does provide a good line of inquiry, and I look forward to commencing the reading with those questions in mind.