And once again, I wasn’t disappointed by the results this co-design session yielded. I invited some friends and told them what an ubiquitous world could look like in 20 years. The first thing they mentioned, like everybody does by the way, was the big privacy issue. I then suggested the global central data management, responsible for safeguarding people’s identities. They immediately saw the possibilities for narrowcasting advertisements upon detection, bt they also expressed the need for access control. An owner of a digital identity should be able to allow or restrict certain applications requesting data, and shop owners shouldn’t be able to directly access the acquired data. The data should be requested and used on the fly without permanent local storage. Next to that, I showed them some fragments of the film Minority Report, to illustrate the things awaiting us, like gesture based navigation, interactive advertisement and iris scans.
Another interesting point is the processing of secondary data to specify the content for a receiver. One of my interviewees mentioned Facebook applies intensive processing and analysis of the secondary data that is gathered through social links, likes, statuses, interests, etc. This helps establishing my hypotheses, assuming the Facebook platform is a good base for marketing campaigns in an ubiquitous environment.
So far for the ethnofuturism. The next phase was the paper prototyping. The first thing I did was ask them how a person buys clothes in a store. This would help them see the steps gone through when selecting a shirt in a physical shop. I already described those steps in Gone shopping for shirts. It took a while for them to distinguish the various steps, shopping has become such a natural process in our Western civilization.
I then observed how they used the interface, and thus I could identify usability flaws. I am happy I hosted this co-design session, since it proves to be an incredible help.