Starts off by showing some games…

Quest for the crown

Desert Bus (1995, Sega TV, unreleased) – Drive the Penn and Teller tour bus in real time. Get to the end (after 8 hours) and you get 1 point. (video)

Marathon video tame – Run a virtual marathon in real time button tapping, guy did it, took him three hours. Showed vid. Guy looks like he’s going to die.

You only live once – Standard platformer. When character dies, it’s for good. When you restart the game you’re still dead.

Upgrade complete – Game about upgrading a game. Game play itself is pretty booring. Can even buy the ending.  (walkthrough here)

Achievement unlocked – Get achievements for everything.

Punchline: All these use games to discuss what games are. Last two focus on the meta game. Even though you know you’re being manipulated, it’s still fun.

Mechanical Turk

Feels weird when he uses it. Feels like exploitation. So he set a Mech Turk task for people to photograph themselves with a sign saying why they do it.

Turns out that the demographics are roughly the same as the English speaking internet. Most say they do it for the money (very small amounts) or for fun (but the tasks are very tedious).  This is kind of weird given the small rewards involved.  Then he realized it’s kind of like a MMOG. You pick your tasks (quests), compete with each other, win cash (points), communicate with each other.

Social web = MMO

More examples of games at work

At Target, the cashier’s terminals provide feedback scores on the last 10 checkouts. Mainly is a motivational thing, incentivises them to improve. Get printout each week, compete with each other, place bets. Fun.

The Squeaky wheel – Bug tracker with achievements.

Obama campaign – Neighbor to neighbor – Level up, get promotions. Patrick was in room!

Ford Fusion, Honda Insight – In dash reflection of fuel efficiency – (growing leaves in the Ford).

Nike/iPod exercise site

Investigate your MP’s expenses – Had 450,000 documents. Posted it online. Let people dig through it. Had a leaderboard, persistant identity, reputation. View of entire team’s progress.

Kick starter – current project – Is all or nothing. You hit the goal or get nothing. 90% of projects that hit 20% mark succeed. Never had a project that hit 80% fail.

What you need for a good game

• Options (decisions the player makes, picking which quests to do)
• Feedback (points, metrics, levels)
• Recognition (awards, achievements, collectibles)
• Goals (with levels of difficulty)
• Community

Ribbon hero – turns Microsoft Office into a game. Using more advanced features of the application increases your score. Includes hints, and suggested “quests”. Gives feedback when do something write. Has advanced mode. Connects with Facebook to challenge friends. Exploratory learning.

Good games are easy to learn, hard to master.

Grinding is no fun. It’s when it stops being fun.

Warnings

Once you have game elements, they are very hard to remove. Community gets pissed.

Do not do a leader board (absolute ranking) – every single time it results in a conflict. Alienate people who can’t get near the top. Negative competitive vibe. Can be ok if scope it to friends, or small location.

Metafilter – number of favorites for comments. Moderators felt it contributed to snarkyness. Wanted to try changing it from number of favorites to just “favorited” for a month. Huge outcry. Ended up changing it back.

Cheating – It’s hard to resist. Foursquare example (fake check ins, fake accounts). Incentives can invite abuse.

Stack overflow – Was lots of cheating. Solution – Bind incentives very tightly to the desired behavior. Who’s gaming who?

Evil gaming

What responsibility do we have? Do we have a responsibility to tell people we are hacking their brains?

Do games make people happy? Or do we just make them unhappy whne not playing.

Farmville – Uses incentives well. Reciprocity. Loss aversion. Whole friends can see how bad you’re doing. Set completion. Mostly is grinding with a lot of social interaction. Not really evil, but has very compulsive.

CruX360A – 3rd ranked woman in the world. Plays games just for the achievements. Collection impulse. Especially when you’re almost there, hard to stop.

MMOs – Blizzard tells people to take breaks, go outside. Are doing more timed events. Don’t want people to burn out, loose jobs, drop out of school. Better to keep them for life.

I personally draw the line when you start using feelings of guilt to motivate behavior. Swoopo.com, sooo evil. Pay to bid, each bid brings the cost up by one penny and extends the auction. One person gets a cheap product, everyone else looses what they put in. You feel like you’ve already put in so need to get something. Even auction bids. Bid buttler – bids for you. Takes advantage of our irrationality, gaps in how we think.

Final thoughts

Making boring fun – Need a skill that is repeatable and measurable, with those two things you can make anything a game.

Reputation – want something supportive, that fosters collaboration. Achievements don’t take away from other people. Are popping up everywhere. Quests are also good.

Making a direct connection to cash changes people’s behavior dramatically. Like paying your mother for Christmas dinner. Lawyers surveyed were asked if they’d do work on discount for good causes, answer was no; asked if they’d do the same work pro-bono (for free), answer was yes.

Further reading

Jesse Schell talk – everything is trackable, everything has points and achievements.

Web reputation systems – O’Reily (check their blog post about karma)

Amy Jo Kim – Putting the fun in functional.

The art of game design

Panic status board – Good example of reflecting back progress to staff, which then serves as a motivator.

Usability for evil

Presenter: Scot, CEO of Meetup

Movement is a feeling.  People identify themselves as part of it… “environmentalist”, “union member”, “evangelical”.

Fan page – It’s the problem.  Erin is not a fan.  She wants to be part of it.

It is easier than ever to get psudo members, harder than ever to get real members.

Example:
ipledge2protect.org (now offline) – “join the movement against genocide”

But wait… What am I pledging to do?  This isn’t a petition.  What does it mean?  “I pledge to click submit” 

Think beyond followers

Followers are over rated – great if you’re starting a cult!  or a dictatorship.  Or a band.   Or a brand.

It’s always, “Get involved” – Watch us, see us, join us, friend us.  What about me?

Fans and followers are wasted for movement making.  Get them to self organize. Connect them.  Give them permission to be amazing.  Distribute tasks.  Distribute responsibility.

Go for accidents, serendipity.  We’re all organizers now.  Leaders will emerge.  Fan the flames and watch what happens after they connect and share stories.  (“Stories of me, turn into stories of we.”)

Let’s do something!

We’ve got 6 million meetups, 60 million rsvps.  Very common word is “Let’s”   284 thousand on public site (not counting private meetups).

Meetup is backbone of the tea party movement.  Lots of tea party meetup groups.  There really is no leader.  Sparticus style “I am the tea party leader” videos.

When running for the US Senate, Obama promised to go to any Meetup that got over a cetain number of rsvps, when running for Senate.

Beppe Grillo Meetups in Itally saying will create an alternative municipality structure.

We had a problem that people were creating meetups that were kind of spamy.  Added a check box to their sign up form that said, “I pledge to create local community” (you had to check the box to sign up).  Thought this would cost us sign ups.   Surprise. More people joined up.  People wanted to pledge, they wanted to create.

Big take away - Be everywhere.  But you can’t.  So crowdsource your everywhereness.

Some tips

Continue the relationship – What happens after the march or the meetup?  Is there a netowrk of local groups, each filled with their own plans and network and internal account ability and energy?

Inspire rather than manage.

Get followers and fans around the mission.

Get them interacting online globally.

Get them to meetup locally everywhere

Use the internet to get off the internet, decentralize.  Networked networks.

Organizing with new kinds of organizations.

People should feel comfortable having small, low key events.  Not everything has to be burning man or the million man march.

McGregor – Did Mars lander account, astroid watch, Mars pheonix, etc

Nick Skytland @Skytland – Future missions, advocate of participatory exploration

Amanda Stiles @alias_amanda Xprize foundation, online community manager and google liason.

Dave Masten @dmasten – Space entrepreneur

C. Higginbotham – @Cariann Co-owner and host of spacevidcast

Nick….

Social media – sharing the human experience, something we’ve had a hard time doing before. Direct access to the astronaut experience.

Astronaut tweeting – @Astro_mike was a pioneer.

3 astronauts currently in space using twitter. First time ever have internet in space…

@Astro_tj

@Astro_Soichi Lots of twit pics, will snap on request if can (obviously it’s not his day job, and it depends what they’re passing over).

@Astro_jeff Ordered his wife flowers from space, 1st ecommerce from space

Go where the conversations are, listen. Tweetups at the launches. Giving “supporters” (my word) access.

Open gov – opengovetracker.gov Paticipatory exploration. $5 mil budgeted for what we (the public) select

Culture is biggest challenge.

opennasa.gov

spacehack.org

spacesweetssociety.org

Amanda…

Google lunar X prize – 30 mil dollars, international, participatory, build a robot, send it to the moon, move at least a 3rd of a mile, send back about a gig worth of HD video. 20 registered teams in 11 countries, including some you wouldn’t expect (like Romania). Team members in 70 countries. Lot of diversity in design. Is an advantage of incentive prizes – only give a goal, teams can take risks on design

2004 – first winner – built a vehical that went to sub orbital space twice in two hours. Showed that private enterprise could do it.

Only in last 6 months discovered that there is a lot of water on the moon. 1972 was last USA moon mission. 1976 was last Russian moon mission.

googlelunarxprize.org

@GLXP

GoogleLunarXPrize facebook

thelaunchpad.xprize.org blog

Also have an open source team if you want to jump in.

Dave M…

Dec 14, 1972 – Last time anyone set foot on the moon.

spacetweepsociety.org kind of a meeting place for everybody involved

masten-space.com/blog

Almost every employee is tweeting. Talk mainly about work, but also about what doing on weekends. On youtube and have a blog. Post every test, including failures.

Team frednet.org open source X prize team. Masten is involved.

It doesn’t take a lot of engineers, it takes a lot of support – lawyers, accounting, web dev, marketing, administration, PR, cat herding, etc.

We do answer back. And you can bring your skills to frednet.

Kariean…

Space vid cast

Was already doing a pod cast, husband said wanted to do one on space. She didn’t think there was enough material. It’s been 3 years now, do it weekly, always plenty to talk about. Are only place to get NASA HD vid on the web

spacevidcast.com

Got started because no one else was doing it. NASA only started last year. It’s important, there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know what’s going on.

Media always covered the shuttle, but in a way that made it common place. Lost the amazing. End up with 2 minutes on CNN. “Space is boring” NASA kind of beats it down. We’re trying to get people educated again. Get school kids to skype in and ask questions while on air. I don’t even care what the question is, as long as there are questions.

You can watch a launch and treat it like a tailgate party. We get people from NASA in our chat room, and other space geeks, and school kids.

QUESTION: Public domain

McGregor (everyone’s going by their last names on the signs)

Twitter questions showed us what information we were leaving out in our public communication.

Q and A

Apathy – how can we overcome it?

Higginbotham – If you see a beautiful picture and it’s only 2 inches by 2 inches, that wont grab them, but if you put it up there in giant size and it’s a beautiful picture – you’ll stare at it. It will light a spark.

Why is it taking so long to go back?

Masten – Public choice theory – things get worse over time, more and more layers of beauracracy. For Appalo, 5% of fed budget, now less than 0.5% of fed budget.

Does the fact that all of your imagery is public domain help or hurt?

McGregor – Every single image from mars rover goes on the web unmanned spaceflight.com Community formed, spread images, wrote software to view them (to make movies, to make 3D Mars views). NASA doesn’t have the budget to create all this cool stuff. They’ll put it together faster than we can.

That’s just one example.

Data.gov – more and more agencies are putting their data out there. Some data is sensitive – like human test subject data, we need to scrub those for the subject’s privacy.

Amanda Stiles @glxp

Veronica McGregor @veronicamcg

Nick @skytland

Challenge prizes – future of innovation?

Staff want to tell their stories, they’re passionate, they love their jobs. “It’s not an elitist space program, it’s your space program.”

McGregor – When worked for CNN could not get anything done on space unless it was really big or a big failure. Ratings were good, but the bosses didn’t believe it. Social networking is now mandatory for my office.

NASA’s budget is completely up to you.

Twitter suggestion for @MarsPhoenix to have something for blind people. There was a microphone on, but weren’t planing to turn it on. (Power drain, wasnt part of the mission, didn’t have software for it.) After that tweet decided to go for it. (Didn’t work in end, but they did try.)

What is a viral video?

Different answers…

Is kind of a sliding scale. Most popular video on youtube has been seen over 100 mil times.

Where a significant amount of the viewership wants to help with the distribution.

Anything with boobs or kittens. (shows video)

Taps into something essentially human, something people can feel compulsive about sharing.

Two big buckets: Viral by accident. Happen to capture something extraordinary or cute or something. Flash in the pan. But can also create them intentionally.

TED guy – Goal of TED – Spread ideas. Started in 1984 (was video taping them, but not very well). Having a taped accademic lecture online… seemed rediculous. First successful one was malcome gladwell (40,000 views). That was their initial bench mark. Factors that helped:

High video production values – shooting from multiple angles, high definition, tight close ups (for youtube size), start talks with a bang (where it actually begins).

OK Go guy – Know your audience – sometimes they don’t expect you to have high production values, then it would do more harm than good. Backyard dance video – is homemade, feels homemade, was actually a rehersal, crappyness was part of it’s charm. (10 mil views) We’re not very good dancers anyway so it would be borring to watch us on stage. But content does need to be good. You can’t make shitty content spread. Ex. We think of crazy ideas and try to do them. Creates a sense of wonder.

Some back and forth among the panelists about content

Some of the most popular content producers have middle/low production values. Immediacy, accessibility – “I’m like you”.

Inspiration, surprise, sense of wonder, cleverness, positivity. Rarely see content that’s negative or depressing. [NYT research about forwarded stories]

Exception – Funny failures, and testicle kicking.

Tips for making it go viral

• Build audience – subscriber base, gives it a boost at launch.
• Encourage embedding
• Good metadata (title, description)
• Distribute on multiple fronts
• Cultivate super seeders
• Limited exclusivity (want to be careful with this, don’t contradict embed principle)

Community has a very permiable wall. Getting people to help with creativity (shoot offs, parodies) is extremely important to virality

Fail blog doesn’t create content, it curates it. Find great stuff, make it easier for people to find it.

There’s no one way to do it. TED tries to get videos out in as many ways as possible. There is no longer one route to the audiences.

OK Go – Dumped their record label because they wouldn’t allow embedding. It’s a no brainier, in first days, almost all the views are off site (1st three days 95% of the Rube Goldberg video’s views were not on you tube)

You tube woman – It’s common with viral videos for 50% of views in 1st 48 hours to be off YouTube (embedded). Then people hear about it and search for it on YouTube. Metadata (good titles, etc) are key for helping people find them.

TED guy – Can use different titles depending where posting (blogs, youtube, etc) to reach different audiences. Distribute with blogs, Virgin America channel, etc. Embedding is huge.

TED guy – People post comments that are very emotional, and personal. You can’t write that kind of stuff as a PR person.

OK Go guy – State Farm paid for the whole video. Record company didn’t have the money so we found outside sponsorship. In return, added a thank you slide at the end. They were very hands off (unlike a record label, which has content expertise, thinks they are the artist). At first State Farm wanted exclusivity. That was a non-starter for us. Exclusivity doesn’t work online. The point of something spreading is that it’s supposed to f*cking spread. People just aren’t that cattle-ish. We partnered with 5 different blogs. Each got exclusive photos and bloopers videos a few days in advance.

Our message to State Farm was:  Our fans aren’t stupid, the world isn’t stupid. We’ll make you part of the story by thanking you at end and in the metadata. We also had state farm on the truck that started off the video.

(Actually a lot of people in audience hadn’t seen the This Too Shall Pass video.)

This video took 6 months to make, 18 engineers to build, 60 engineers for shoot days, working 24 hours per day at end. They were in it for the love. People watch it between four and five times, hard to get it all in one go.

Hundreds of takes. 65 takes got past the tire. Three finished, combined footage from these for the video (didn’t get every thing on film in one shoot). No CGI, it’s all authentic.

People said a lot of positive about Sate Farm in the comments. Is like 17th century sponsorship.

Take away:  Do something incredible, something that seems almost impossible.

Surprise people

Showed this video because it has reveal after reveal after reveal…

Much less successful than Surprised Kitty (but oddly big in Korea)…

Surprised SXSW contest

After watching these videos we got our own surprise. The panel announced that the “Surprised SXSW” contest.

First we made our own video…

The contest – make your own SXSW surprise video, Tweet about it with #surprisesxsw Gift bags for the 20 best vids.

Crowdsourcing is really an umbrella term, it encompasses a number of different things. June 2006 – term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe, it existed before that and has been utilized for decades. “Customer made” was one of the other terms going around at the time. Social media was on the rise, provided opportunities.

Common misconception – Crowdsoucing ONLY equals access to free labor. It can have other advantages as well. “Wisdom of the crowd”.

3 business models

Crowdsourcng wisdom – Wikipedia, Behance. Consensus based.

Crowdsourcing labor – Mechanical Turk, Traditional spec contests – An open call to complete or fill a specific task or need.

Crowdsourcing both (wisdom and labor) – Digg, Threadless – is most exciting. For Digg, labor is finding and adding items; wisdom is deciding what’s most interesting.

How sustainable is your source? (Crowds and Communities)

Crowd:

Common purpose

Based around an event

Interpersonal isolation – Like on an elevator or airplane. Because there is a start and end date, it’s not conducive for relationship building.

With crowds, sourcing exists in sprints. Crowd fatigue is a problem. It’s only the participation that makes you part of that crowd, if you stop acting you stop being part of it. Can get tiring.

Community:

Conditions affect the identity of the participants.

More sustainable – are inherently organic, are inherently adaptive. More than one thing glueing them together.

A community can evolve in a way that separates it from the brand. It can become its own thing – ex. if Harley Davidson went out of business tomorrow the communities that have created around the brand would probably go on.

As a business you are part of the community (not the owner).

[The take away seems to be that communities are often more sustainable, but which model you use depends on what you're doing, plus who you're trying to involve and how you're trying to involve them.]

Risks

Discount sushi - Satisfying a need of a moment, but doesn’t seem like such a good idea later (when you’ve got food poisoning).

Football team vs Strip club – Football team needs to work together; incentive for collaboration. Strip club – colaboration is counter productive; competing for a limited pool of money.  For sustainability you need increased collaboration. Need to do things better than non-crowdsourcing models.

Note: They did say they don’t know much about football or strip clubs. [Hmmm, crowd sourcing stripping... I'm sure it's been done already.]

Careless engagement – Apathy, carpet bombing (designer who makes one logo and submits it to many competitions). Antidote is connect it to reputation. If what you’re doing affects your reputation, you’ll care if it’s a good job. If incentive is money only, people will do the minimum and look for ways to game the system.

Wasted neurons – People spend tons of time working on stuff, and in the end most of it doesn’t get used.

No contextual reputation – Like playing a video game with only one level. Need to grow reputation. (On other hand, if you take away any chance to catch up with the people who have high reputation, that sucks for new comers.)

3 questions we should ask of any sourcing model

(Not a checklist, more to help gain understanding)

Can it foster a community?

• Incentive for conversation and learning
• To engage beyond a specific transaction
• Is there a culture of collaboration?

But Mechanical Turk doesn’t satisfy any of these, and is still successful.

Does it tap collective wisdom?

Does the whole become greater than the sum of the parts?

Does it nurture participants?

• Work benefits reputation
• Participants are building relationships
• Resources aren’t wasted
• Terms and facts are crystal clear

[Yeah, that's four questions. Just how I wrote it down.]

Bottom line: Can have huge amount of trust with your community. Can screw up and appologize and they’ll believe you. Money can’t buy that kind of trust. They expect you to be true to who you are.

Topic: Open data on mobile devices is a lens for daily choices. (description)

What you make goes everywhere – and it sticks around.  So we have a chance to kick out little bits of awsome into the world.

Information overload – we give each other signs, guidance.  Think about the vast array of refreshing beverages.  People are open to ideas about which to pick.   Another example – “drains into the bay” sings on sewage drains.

Book recommendation: Nudge by Richard Thaler

In the near future, we will all be at a party.  Imagine you’re there now.  And that you’re Brian Eno, and its in a bit of a rough neighborhood…

[I kind of got lost imagining myself at a party. So I didn't get the full story down.  The point was (I think) that our sense of place changes depending on our perspective.  If you ask someone if they like where they live, while you're standing in their apartment, their answer might reflect how nice the apartment is - not how nice the city is, or the neighborhood is. Ask a different person, or the same person in a different place, and you'll probably get a different answer.]

The big here, and the long now.  How big is the here you imagine?  In SF, I think about the watershed, and the pacific ocean. Ends at the bay (across the bay is far away.) Here in Austin, my here is very small, it’s about 6 blocks square.  I don’t know this place.

[Fire alarm interruption. Little discussion about whether we should evacuate.  The staff member (with radio) manning the door, said it's a false alarm. So we decide to stay put.]

Technology can expand our “here”.  For example…

Locavore’s iPhone app ($2.99!) that tells you what’s in season and where the farmers markets are.

Seafood watch iPhone app – Helps people make ethical fish buying decisions.  180,000 downloads, used 2.8 times on average.   New version will add a “super green” rating – what’s good for you and the oceans.

[I met Humberto, the creator, afterwords.  Nice guy.  Told him that I was pretty jealous of their app.  Turns out that the original fish guide project had been done for internal reasons - making sure the fish they were buying as aquarium food were ethically sourced.  Then they created a paper guide. Then a volunteer made them a (very cool) iPhone ap.  Getting and managing good data is the hardest part.]

Good Guide website – 70,000+ products, indexed on three categories (health, enviro, social issues).  Can get it by SMS, can use website, can use with iPhone.  If you wan to help out, contact Sumhir Meghani via http://developer.goodguide.com/

[Rachel pauses her talk for an announcement, "I have been asked to clarify to you that nothing is wrong. Everything is going to be OK."  Well, that's good.]

Book recommendation:  Daniel Goleman’s, Ecological Intelligence, stories about what happens when people have product information.

Mobile empathy amplifiers…

Ability for people in a disaster to ask for help, and for people in far away places to give help has become much easier.

Ushahidi (witness), open source.  Used for Kenya violence. Was also used for Haiti. Real time relief reports. The big relief agencies were using it (FEMA, Red Cross, etc). Some great quotes about how effective it is.  Turns out the guy behind it is in the room, and he needs help (patrick [thingy] ushahidi.com) (want’s volunteers).  Ended up training about 300 distributed volunteers in a day or two of getting the word to deploy (and realizing that they were getting more information that could be handled).  Mainly student led volunteer response.  Community that developed around the tool, mapping data found around web, was what he found fantastic.  Now he wants to improve the underlying system.

Project 4636 – Started with Haiti earthquake. Maps were not accurate enough to get help where it needed to go.  Connecting people who know a location with people who need to supply help. Short code sms sent when help needed. Is forwarded to crowdflower.com, gets translation, goes into a fairly complex data flow.  See also mission4636.org/history and this.

The Extraordinaires – iPhone ap, lightweight, for distributed volunteering.  ex. Tagging photos from news stories to help find missing people during Haiti earthquake.  Get the ap at…  beextra.org

Red Cross Haiti mobile campaign – MGive processed $37 mil for Haiti in three weeks.  Massively record breaking for mobile fundraising.  2.3 mil tweets with haiti or red cross jan 12-14, 59% retweets, 150,000 included both, 189,024 included “90999″ (the code you could text to donate).  Felt like you were reacting immediately and personally to people who needed help.

Q and A note…  Even in the US 1/4th of the people are not on the internet (and don’t have smart phones) in any given week.

Synopsis: The humble button is very under appreciated.  We don’t even know who invented it.  Most of the interaction conventions we use today were developed in the 70s, and even before.  These conventions affect how we think.  We’re transitioning to surface interaction (think iPhone touch screen)  – a shift that will also affect how we think.

Technology is shaped by us, but also shapes how we think.  For example, railroads compressed our sense of time – could move around faster.  Telegraph compressed distance – communication from afar (Chimeran war was first to be coordinated from a distance).  The radio (world wide web of its time) brought the outside world into your home.

Generations of  interaction:

1. Lever – till about 1900, was driven by electricity and mechanical devices (ex. guns)

2. Button – Physical buttons became popular around the turn of the 20th century. The personal computer and WWW brought a new level of abstraction.

3. Surface interaction – Shift is happening today

4… What next?

Mechanical age – Levers scale motion.  You can see and understand what they do.  The lever is an extension of simple tools.

Buttons – Abstracted motion.  Creates a result unrelated to the action of pushing.

1898 – the flashlight hits big time (used by NY city police), first time the button becomes part of daily life.

1890s Kodak slogan – You press the button, we do the rest.  Buttons become associated with convenience.

1900s – doorbells

1910s – light switches

1920s – The radio.  30 million sold by 1938.  Preset station buttons – first notion of “save”.

1939 world fair – key moment, included a giant cash register with 5ft high buttons.

1956 – First tv remote control (operated on sound)

1958 – Monsanto house of the future (in partnership with Disney), to promote plastics.  Push button kitchen (moving shelves).  Buttons represent luxury.

In 50′s also came to equate buttons with fear, “push the nuclear button”. Automated war.

Buttons started representing control.  Late fifties, early sixties computers (buttons and switches).

Buttons also started to represent play…

1947 – First pinball machine

1977 – Atari joystick, major moment. Next year, Simon, also stand up arcade games.  Big boom in button innovation.  Buttons started to do all sorts of things.

Button pressing dexterity became a prized skill.

1984 – Buttons become a metafor, virtual (for mainstream) with the Mac. Big conceptual shift. Apple had to buy up advertising and use it for instruction. Early Apple interface design put “pushing a button” in quotes (because they weren’t really pushing a button)

1996 – WWW, buttons lose their shape. Before that they always looked like physical buttons (or at least an abstraction of one, with a button part and a casing).  Now you had links.

Today – Can interact with a huge amount of things on a web page.  Amazon page example – almost everything can be clicked to cause an action.  We all intuitively know this.   Now, it’s normal to have links/navigation that don’t have any visual distinction at all.  Color is not the only way to indicate actionablity.  We can know they are “buttons” from their context.

Touch screens – iPhone has two old school buttons (power and menu).

Multi-touch, pinching.  “Steve Jobs hates buttons”.

Now…

Buttons don’t need borders, contours, shape, ornimintation.  Understand them by context. Associate them with a myriad number of actions.

Are approaching a point where anything can be interactive.  Ex. an interactive tablecloth, a wall that you touch to turn lights on and off, motion capture games.

4…. Dynamic tactile surfaces. Disposable physical interfaces.  Probably coming sooner than we think.  Surfaces move/change depending on interface.

The future?   Kids today can use an iPhone before they can even talk.  Who knows

p.s.  Favorite button ever – the OK button.  OK itself is now an icon.