Tedtalk: Jan Chipchase Our Cell Phones, Ourselves

Jan Chipchase, a human behavioral researcher who works for Nokia travels around the world in search of behavioral patterns that will inform the design of products we don't even know we want - yet. He said the three most important things we carry are keys, money and cell phones which relates to Maslow's heirarchy - survival of ourselves and loved ones. Chipchase stated that the mobile phone has the ability to transcend space and time, and it is universally appreciated. It is personal, private, and convenient. He spoke about how illiterate people use cell phones as a bank to send money home to their villages. Despite all the resources and sophistication, people in the streets innovate and use the phones is ways that meet their needs. The cell phone is creating a connected world where everything is intertwined.The designers are looking at these innovations, and incorporating that information into the everchanging mobile phone. Chipchase said that learning to listen is the most important part of studying people and their behavior.

This talk was extremely interesting to me. I am too involved in my own job and every little problem of everyday that I actually opened my head to think about the world and how huge, wonderful, and diverse it is. The fact that technology is evolving so rapidly because of the street (all the people in the world) is far out.

TedTalk: Jeff Han:Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

Jeff Han showed a high resolution multi-touch computer screen that may be the beginning of the end of the point and click mouse. He began with a simple lava lamp then turned it into a virtual photo-editing tabletop, where he moved photos across the screen with his fingers. He was able to enlarge photos with just touching them in certain ways. He said that by using this multi-touch, multi-user screen, there is no need to conform to a physical device, the device comforms to us. These interface-free computer displays are able to zoom in and out on a Google map just by pinching two fingers together. I enjoyed the creative applications where he was able to create shapes, move them around, draw shapes and interact with them by touching them. It will be exciting to see these new computer technologies in the future. Here is a webpage about Jeff Han's multi-touch interaction research which says that the technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users. It also shows a video demo of multi-touch interaction experiments. The music, "Who Am I?" is haunting with a great beat by Peter Kruder, Peace Orchestra 1999 :http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch