In the Pipes

Time to learn a new Word

“Pecha Kucha”   Ok, so that is two words. 

The first Pecha Kucha was in Tokyo in 2003 and now it has spread “virally” to “cities worldwide”.  Google it and you get 700,000+ hits.  Chances are there is one soon in a city near you.  All the cool people seem to know what it is.  Personally, I hadn’t even heard of it until last month, despite agreeing to do one at a conference in December.  (I wasn’t actually listening to the details when I was asked to present.)

So, what is Pecha Kucha?

It’s actually very simple – Pecha Kucha is a slide presentation that is constrained to 6 minutes 40 seconds.  Each slide is shown for 20 seconds (6 min 40 sec @ 20sec per slide = 20 slides).   The short duration and strict slide timing forces presenters to be concise and focused.  The idea was to stop designers/architects form nattering on endlessly, and it worked.  Plus, they usually have a bar. 

The Pecha Kucha format worked so well it has bled into other disciplines, so the presentations now aren’t solely showcases for designers, but cover all sorts of topics.  Last night I checked one out here in San Francisco – mostly it was designers presenting designs, but there was also a trip report, a career retrospective and a political-love-activist (this is San Francisco after all -  gotta love the Bay Area vibe).

Heads up for all you AU attendees:  there will be a Pecha Kucha on MONDAY NIGHT.   Doors open at 6PM, show starts at 7PM, location to be announced.  Seating is limited to 400.  I strongly recommend you check out this showcase of cool ideas!  Plus, as tradition dictates, there will be a bar.

BTW: Roughly,  Pecha Kucha means chit-chat or the sound of conversation in Japanese.  Pecha Kucha is said “Pa shah ka cha”.  PA shah KA cha.   Easy, but still a challenge to remember how to say it:  we solved that at work by re-lyricing an old Muppet Show tune.  Instead of Mah-na Mah-na, we had the office singing Pa-shah Ka-cha.  Warning, if you watch this, it will likely get stuck in your head.

Happy anniversary to me

Yesterday was my 2 year anniversary at Autodesk.  October 17, 2005 was my start date here – and it has been an interesting two years.  I came out here direct from New Orleans – which had just reopened after the Katrina Hurricane disaster.   I managed to spend 4 days in New Orleans cleaning up the yard, taking stock of the neighborhood, and shipping a few boxes of stuff to California before I myself got on a plane and flew out to San Francisco.    (Thinking about Katrina and discussing the mess that is the “rebuilding” aftermath still sets me off.  Not going there now.)  I have to say moving to San Francisco was a big change for me – new job at a new company, new home in a new city.   

So it’s been two years.  I’m settling into the new job – product design is something I’d never experienced as a formal part of software development before.  It is interesting to work with specialists who are concerned with FORM as well as FUNCTION.  It’s no longer good enough that it works (which was enough when you had nothing else), it has to work well.  It has to be easy to use, easy to learn, aesthetically pleasing – “User-friendly” is more than just a marketing buzzword here.  We formally evaluate designs against usability heuristics; we have staff specialized in it; we regularly schedule user testing to reality check designs. 

When I first got here, it was weird to be THINKING so much about the software design.  It seemed to slow everything down. I can just see this conversation:
“What did you do today?” 
“I thought about my problems”   
“Seriously, didn’t you put out any fires?  Write new revolutionary interface specs?  Defuse any time-bombs?” 
“Nope, but in a few weeks, trust me, all that thinking will pay off.” 
That would never have flown in my consulting days . . . but here’s the thing.  At Autodesk it does go over well.  Sure, we have milestones and deadlines and all.  And we also take time to think. 

Of course, in the end, thinking is a good thing – how often have you heard the “spending X% more in the design phase pays off 10-time-X in the construction phase” ? It’s the same with software as with plant design – nail the design, and the programming development goes smoothly.  In the end, the time spent upfront more than pays for itself.  Thinking trumps reacting anytime; again Rands says it better than I can (no, Rands, I’m not stalking you.  Lovely article on pens, though.  I too prefer the Pilot G-2).

Oh, and I’m settling into my new home in this new city also.  My New Orleans cat is finally flying out to join me in 10 days!  I'm actually looking forward to mornings like this:

Input ideas, part 2

Ok, I’m still on this kick about input devices for some reason.  Yeah, I know, I need to get a life.  I was talking to a friend about this on my deck a week or so ago (wooohooo!  I have my very own deck!), and he pointed me to this article from a year ago. 

One topic in there that we waxed philosophic about is the described input device.  Apparently there is being developed a small implant that directly reads the electrical signals of the brain.   How cool would that be - controlling the computer by thought alone!  We also chatted a bit on how they were working on systems that don’t need to be implanted, just worn on the skin.  Neat.  Not so neat that I want one, but neat none the less.   Although when they start talking about “network-enabled telepathy” – that could tip the scales for me.  Wikapedia has an interesting article on Brain-computer interface, and an even more interesting discussion page.

I continue to return to the thought that things that are toys today can turn into ubiquitous  tool of tomorrow.  Although predicting which are going to hit or miss is far from easy, as this article details.   My favorite line in it is this quote from 1876 of  “Although it is interesting as an interesting novelty, the telephone has no commercial application.”  Hah!

Innovation and Convergence

I blogged a few weeks back about some interesting interaction ideas involving touch screens – in particular, the screen from Perspective Pixel. Turns out, we have video of Tom Wujec using the screen with software out of Autodesk’s Alias portfolio. (In case you didn’t realize, Autodesk acquired Alias a bit more than a year ago - not the ISOGEN Alias, the 3D graphics Alias).

We are getting one of those Perspective Pixel touch walls in the office here. I imagine there will be quite a line when it shows up.  The title of this post includes "convergence" because it turns out that as I'm thinking about these innovations in design, Autodesk is too.  In fact, we have a blog - It's Alive in the Lab - devoted to these fresh ideas.

But here’s my problem with the all the cool designs around touch screens. Hardly anyone has a touch screen.  Of course you can get them, but are they are far from ubiquitous. So I thought I’d mention a couple of other input methods that are also intriguing.

First, web cam as motion detector – in some ways a similar interaction to a touch screen, although you don’t actually get fingerprints on anything. There are a number of variations on this idea.  You, of course, need a webcam to get these working.
http://www.marceldejong.info/experiments/bubble/index.html
http://www.extendedreality.com/webcam_game_motion_bubbles.html

And how many of you have wondered if the nintendo Wii could be ever be integrated with AutoCAD?  Ok, so we got a little punchy at the bug-scrub meetings this week, and our Software development manager, Max, has a Wii (or so he says).  But we all thought it would be a great way to draft - especially in 3D!

Every time I think about it, the idea of getting beyond the mouse/keyboard input seems like such an obvious evolution of technology. But even in keyboards, they don’t need to be so desktop intensive. This laser keyboard has been out for a while – it comes complete with simulated key click sounds. Extremely mobile, small enough to fit in all sorts of spaces, not sure how well it works in practice.  But the idea is wonderful.  People are already requesting extensions of this idea - things like a laser projected synthesizer keyboard.

We just had a divisional meeting, where it was mentioned that things that appeared to be toys in
yesteryear are embraced in business today - the desktop PC; Windows operating system; 3D modeling. . . . makes one give the toys another look.