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The Mail Project
A series of speculative experiments addressing the benefits and shortcomings of physical and electronic mail, and the possibilty of combining the affordances of both.
The objective of this project is not to fix email.
Email and physical mail both exist for a reason. In many ways, email has solved a lot of the problems that are faced by physical mail. Physical mail is slow, it takes a long time to reach the recipient, is expensive, and can sometimes get lost. At the same time, though, there is a certain sense of anticipation that comes with receiving physical mail--waiting for the mailman to arrive with a package for you can sometimes be the highlight of the day. There is something about the physicality and tactility of physical mail that makes it very exciting for the person receiving it.
Email, on the other hand, is instant--it arrives within milliseconds of being sent, and can connect people in ways that physical mail simply cannot. It provides an easy channel for communication. However, in many ways, email has become a problematic space for virtual clutter, a single address where the whole world can spam you with all kinds of messages: advertisemsents, promotions, work-related messages, personal messages. The important messages can often times get lost in the mess.
Our project is interested in the affordances of both physical and electronic mail. It doesn't try to solve the problems faced by the two different systems, rather, attempts to create a new space for communication drawing together the positive aspects of both. Physical Mail: Anticipation, excitement, physicality, builds up, piles up, asks for your attention, envy (see when other people get mail) Electronic Mail: Instant, accessibility, customizability, portability
PostGeheimnis: Messages to Physical Objects
PostGeheimnis is a alternative form of communication that works as a complement to existing physical mail and email systems. The system exists as a digital interface for sending electronic "Posts" (messages) to physical objects in the recipient's home. The physical objects, in essence, are little mail couriers that alert you that you have a new Post. The sender creates a new Post from the digital interface, and selects not only which recipient will receive the Post, but which object will receive and "deliver" it, as well. The recipient, upon entering the home, will be greeted by objects all vying for his or her attention, wanting to deliver their messages.
The New Ecology of Things
Starting with a deep dive into the design implications of pervasive networks, embedded and embodied technologies, and a world where every object and space has a life of its own, this class will explore The New Ecology of Things. Students will build working prototypes in the physical world, using sensors, effectors and computation to create objects and spaces that take advantage of this new ecology. In particular, students will work beyond the efficiencies of taskoriented applications, and explore meaning-making through productive, mythological and embodied interactions.
This term, students will build projects that are an antidote to the meaning-sapping uniformity of everyday technological life. Projects will create a more heterogeneous, embodied relationship with digitally enhanced things and activities. Considering the entire context of use - object form and function, physical environment and layout, affordance, interface, gesture, system behavior, haptics - students will craft new ecologies that are suited to specific activities rather than generalized to many.
Project: Anti-Homogeneous
Typical computer interactions tend to be very similar - a person sitting at a desk, using a mouse and looking at a screen. In contrast, someone building a car in an auto factory has a completely different apparatus and environment than someone making pottery in a studio. Likewise each interaction with ubiquitous computing should aspire to fit into the context of the activitiy rather forcing the users into a default technology interface. Imagine that instead of millions of people sitting in similar chairs, at similar desks, using similar computers, each individual uses a system (physical objects & space, interfaces, activities, system behaviors, gestures, affordances, etc.) that makes sense for the activity they are doing right now. This NET project should rethink how people communicate, work, or play using the ideas of NET, including productive, embodied, and mythological interaction. The project must incorporate some kind of distributed computation, where more than one object or space composes the whole project. This should involve remote sensors, effectors or other parts of system accessed through the network. As part of this project, students will research and report on how digital technologies have homogenized activities that were previously more idiosyncratic.
PostGeheimnis
The PostGeheimnis System consists of a platform of "super-objects" that have been imbued with special communication behaviors. The objects exist in conjunction with an input management interface, from which a sender can create video/audio/text/image messages to recipients. From this interface, a sender composes a message to a recipient, and then selects which object to send the message to. Once an object receives a message in its queue, it will attempt to attract your attention, letting you know that you have a message. In essence, the PostGeheinmis objects become little postmen within your home that deliver special messages from your close friends and family.
In our demo, we showed a series of three such objects:
The PostGeheimnis Video Lamp
The PostGeheimnis Video Lamp acts as a portal to incoming video Post messages from your friends and family. The Video Lamp will alert you when it has a new Post to deliver. Let the lamp know when you want to view the message by touching the activator, and it will play the message by shining it on the floor around you.
The PostGeheimnis Talking Chair
The PostGeheimnis Talking Chair delivers new audio Post messages from your friends and family. The Talking Chair start talking outloud in a series of strange musings when it has a new Post to deliver. Simply sit down in the chair and your message will be softly played back to you.
The PostGeheimnis Text Toaster
The PostGeheimnis Text Toaster is a delivery space for special AM morning Post messages. The Text Toaster will toast your incoming Posts into your untoasted bread in the morning! Simply place some bread into the toaster, and wait and see who sent you an early morning message!
Design Decisions
In designing the PostGeheimnis system, we were careful to take into consideration the point we had identified in our initial physical mail/email research. We understood that we weren't trying to "fix" email, rather, we were creating the PostGeheimnis system as an alternative method of communication for special messages akin to a physical letter or package from a close friend or family member that would otherwise lose its "specialness" if sent through email.
Additional design decisions were made with the design of the system itself. We questioned whether to give the sender or receiver the ability to choose which object a message was delivered to. If the recipient were to make the decision (i.e., all messages from your mother go to your armchair), then the system would be more like a bin notification system. We decided to go with the sender having the decision-making role in the system. In this way, PostGeheimnis is much more akin to the act of coming home and getting your mail from your physical mailbox--when you reach in, you have no idea what you're going to get. Similarly, the recipient, upon entering his house, has no idea how many messages he's received, who the messages are from, or what the messages are about until he enters the home and engages with any objects that have messages to deliver. We found it important to engage with this sense of excitement and anticipation.
Understanding the Topic
The issue of pervasive computing is a hard one to wrap the mind around. We're so used to the convenience of the computer, of being able to do so much from the digital space of the computer, that it's hard to imagine a scenario where a more traditional physical interface is preferred.
Of course, much is both lost and gained during the translation analog to digital interface systems. To gain a better understanding of this transition, and the affordances of both the physical and virtual interactions, we created a step-by-step chart mapping out the behavioral and experiential flow of sending and receiving both physical and electronic mail.
Brainstorm: Mapping out the Mail Experience
Click to view chart
Identifying Opportunity Areas
Click to view chart
Experiment Concepts Emerged out of Map Brainstorm
Click to view chart
We then proceeded to compare and contrast the experiential differences between sending and receiving physical vs. electronic mail, and began to identify potential opportunity areas for us to design interventions to combine the affordances of both.
Imagination as Research
Charting the differences between physical and electronic mail allowed us to clearly identify opportunity areas for design interventions. We took the understanding that emerged from this more critical analysis and took a step back from the information and let ourselves brainstorm freely, giving ourselves the freedom to come up with wild ideas without worry about practicality or feasibility. We allowed ourselves to let our imagination to drive the design, and to allow a sense of exploration and play to guide the project forward.
The Mail Bubble
The Mail Bubble concept emerged out of discussions of the clutter of physical mail. When you have a lot of mail, it piles up in the home, creating seemingly endless stacks that must be sifted through and sorted out. Email, however, lacks that physicality, and merely manifests itself in the virtual space of the screen as multiple entries in a list. Often times, the user has no real way to gauge the number of emails in his inbox until sitting at the computer screen, immersed in the interaction with the mail interface.
The Mail Bubble concept emerged out of this discussion, and attempts to create a physical indicator that you have too much electronic mail. A small bubble plugs into the USB port of the computer. The bubble grows and contracts depending on the number of unread mail messages you have in your inbox. In this way, the user can see immediately, without even engaging with the computer, how much email is collecting in the system. This instant, very glanceable information allows the user to begin engagement with the email system before ever even touching the computer.
The World Map
One of the main conveniences of the Internet is in that it connects people from all over the world in one common virtual “space.” People are brought together instantly, no matter how far apart they may be physically. Email, similarly, is instant; it makes no difference how far away sender and recipient are from each other. All emails are received in the same way, in the same form, into the same inbox. These is no implication of physical space or distance, no way of knowing where the email came from, or of how far it traveled to arrive in the recipient’s inbox.
The World Map interface emerged out of an exploration of this particular aspect of email: instant and convenient, yet somewhat lacking context. The map is a system that works with an existing email client to allow the user to view and engage with his email in new and interesting ways. The map interface is hung on the wall beside the computer, the main access point for the email, and functions as an alternative visualization of incoming email messages, showing email messages by location. When the user engages the world map system, he can see at a quick glance where his email messages are from in the world, what continent, what country, and choose to access specific messages from the map interface. In this way, email gains a certain physicality, it re-situates the email experience into physical space, allowing the user to gain a perspective on the messages that he is receiving and reading at his computer in the moment.
The Message Read Notifier
The Message Read Notifier provides the sender with an indication that his message has been opened by the recipient. The sender receives a notification every time a message that he has sent out has been opened and read by the recipient. Current electronic mail systems allow for little gratification on the side of the sender when sending out mail messages. Messages are often text-only, and offer little encouragement or incentive for the recipient to immediate respond or escalate communication with the sender. With the Message Read Notification system, the sender immediately knows when his message has been received and read, thus enabling the possibility of opening up a new line of communication with the recipient now that the message has been received.
The Customized Cubes
The Customized Cubes concept furthers the explorations of the World Map concept, and addresses the possibility of a customizable physical interface for mail access and retrieval. Using a customized set of “cubes” or similar, the user can set how mail messages notifications are handled, and when and where they are received. In this way, the user can customize his entire email experience, creating user-specified groupings and sets to correspond to the various cubes. These cubes can be positioned throughout the home, as the user dictates.
The Customized Cubes project is a parallel exploration to the World Map concept in that it explores personalization of the mail experience, allowing the user to take control of his email experience, making it completely aligned with his specific email usage style and needs. In this way, the email experience allows for a new level of interaction, and allows the user to gain a perspective on and a new control over his interaction with email.
The Color Circles
The Color Circles concept touches upon a basic need that we have for communication--we need to notified when someone is trying to reach us. Notifications from portable devices today often get lost in hectic lifestyles--sound notifications are too quiet, phones are buried in purses or deep in jacket and pant pockets, while we as users are in loud restaurants or rowdy bus stations, unable to hear the low notification of the device indicating that we have a new message.
Color Circles addresses this problem taking the notification out of the device itself and making it apart of the environment itself, readily visible to both the user and everyone else around. The floor around the user begins glowing with a bright light, notifying the user that she has a new message on her device. In this way, the user can feel confident in the fact that she will always know when she has a new message on her device.
The Color Circles 2.0
The Color Circles 2.0 concept looks at the social nature of device-usage, and addresses the benefits and pitfalls of knowing when and how often others are receiving activity on their devices.
Color Circles 2.0 furthers the explorations of the Color Circles concept, and addresses the social implications of using a phone or messaging device in public. Phones can be quite distracting in social situations, and also can be quite telling of the user’s social behaviors. Some individuals thrive on contact through their phones, and are always on their devices communicating with vast networks of friends and colleagues. Others may not be quite as sociable, and may use their devices for other purposes. Color Circles 2.0 brings these different device applications and usages to the surface by making phone activity and incoming and outgoing interactions public information. Device notifications are displayed on the phone around the user, readily visible to both the user and everyone else around. In addition to notifications, each individual’s color circle expands or contracts in relation to the current activity on the device itself, i.e., an individual with 50 unread email messages will have a much larger and brighter color circle than someone with 2. In this way, certain unspoken social behaviors are brought to the surface.
The Robotic Mail Pigeon
Email today is largely considered by many to be much more impersonal and unexciting than its regular postal mail counterpart. We receive tens, hundreds, even thousands of emails a day, some junk, some important; some playful, some for business, some, intimate, even. Yet, email, for all its benefits and conveniences, definitely does not convey personality or emotion, and is considered an all too mundane form of communication.
The Robot Mail Pigeon concept proposes a way to inject a bit of excitement into the email experience. Special messages can be sent via a network of robotic mail pigeons that fly out and pinpoint the location of the recipient. The pigeons alert the recipient that they have a new message, and the recipient physically scans the pigeon to download the message to her device. The concept is, in a way, akin to sending flowers or composing a skywriting message to a loved one. The Robotic Mail Pigeon experience creates a sense of fun for the both the sender and the receiver—the mail message itself is still electronic, yet, the act of receiving the electronic message by way of robotic pigeon is not something is impersonal or unexciting in the least.
The Public Mail Center
The Public Mail Box concept emerged from the fact that email has for the most part lost its "special-ness." People receive tens, hundreds, even thousands of email a day. Most of those emails are unimportant, some are very important for work, and some are very important for play. Yet all messages, however, despite vastly differing content and context, are delivered in the exact same way, through the exact same channel of email.
What if there was a way to make the act of accessing certain messages, the ones that are really important, that really matter, in a more engaging way that facilitates a sense of anticipation and excitement? The idea of receiving an important package creates such a thrill for most people. The Public Mail Box concept emerged as an attempt to replicate that sense of excitement for people receiving fun and meaningful email messages. The experience of physically going up to a public mail box and downloading your important messages escalates those messages and their level of important to the user, and encourages the user to anticipate and look forward to the time of day when these special messages can be retrieved and enjoyed. By placing a simple constraint on mail access for the user, the experience of getting exciting personal messages is enhanced, and fun and important messages are far less likely to get lost in the daily mess of emails.
Initial video sketch attempting to help us begin to begin to imagine a world of pervasive computing and networked objects.
An experiment of an interface for accessing and reading mail. This video sketch was one that refocused our project, making us evaluate our goals as designers. We quickly realized that we weren't trying to fix physical mail, nor were we trying to fix email, rather, we were interested in focusing on the nuanced experiences that made each so special and important.
Physical protoptype of a talking pot as a proof of concept for the PostGeheimnis series of products. A sender can send a message to the pot, and the pot will talk and let you know that it has a message to deliver.
