Balancing robot from Japan aims to cheer people up

The cute side of the robocalypse: Balancing robots from Japan

muRata manufacturing wants to cheer people up with its latest balancing machine. It’s part of a group of swarm robots, called the murata cheerleaders. But it’s not exactly clear what they’re cheering for.

Police Used a Drone to Chase Down and Arrest Four DUI Suspects

Shit is getting real. Last Friday, near a cornfield in North Dakota, four underage men were pulled over under suspicion of drunk driving. The four men hopped out of their car and bolted into the cornfield. Grand Forks police didn't follow them: Instead, they put a drone in the sky.

"One of them was walking through the cornfield. It took about three minutes to find him," Alan Frazier, Deputy Sheriff in charge of the Grand Forks Police Department's unmanned aerial vehicle system unit told me. "The other was found on a second flight, after maybe 25 minutes."

The two other suspects were apprehended at another time—they had the unlucky distinction of becoming the first Americans ever tracked down and arrested with the help of a police quadcopter.

Welcome to the future of police work.

The Qube drone that was used to chase down four DUI suspects last weekend. Image: Author

That it happened around Grand Forks is not a surprise. 

Two years ago, a cattle rancher near there was arrested with the help of a Department of Homeland Security Predator drone, becoming the first man arrested in the US with the help of a drone. These four men become the first to be arrested in the US with the help of a local police drone (as of 2013, there were roughly 24 police agencies using drones).

Two weeks ago, in something of a coincidence, I sat in a conference room in Grand Forks as Frazier pitched me and several other journalists on the force's use of drones.

To start off the presentation, he pulled up this video, made by AeroVironment, the company that makes the Qube, the drone that Frazier and his team and several other police departments around the country use:

Frazier called the video, in which a fugitive is tracked down with a drone, "a little Hollywood," but that's essentially what happened there, last week. The Grand Forks Police Department is the first in the United States to get Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly at night, and last weekend's mission was the very first time the department had ever used the Qube at night on a mission.

"There's a misnomer that these are covert spy tools," Frazier told me when I was in Grand Forks. "We utilize them for events that are already occurring. We look for felony suspects, we do further analysis, we use them for totally overt missions. There's no plans to use them covertly."

DOES HE HAVE A REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY? IF SO, THEN WE'D SEEK A SEARCH WARRANT.

"That's not to say they can't be used for covert missions, but they haven't been," he added. A video he showed us pitched the Qube as a "powerful surveillance tool."

The back of the "UAS Unit" SUV. Image: Author

Tim Schuh, the police officer most often tasked with actually flying the thing, says it's been used about a dozen times in the last year—only once while actually looking for a suspect (before this last case). "We're not flying over downtown looking for trouble," he said.

Still, the department seems a bit gung-ho about drones in a way that many others are not. Frazier balked at the idea that the department should or would get a warrant before flying one. (California Gov. Jerry Brown just vetoed a bill that would have required police in the state to get a warrant before using a drone).

A fourth suspect has remained unnamed because he is believed to be under 18. Image:  Valley News Live

When I asked Frazier if he thinks a warrant should be necessary, he said, "absolutely not. We do a quick litmus test—'does he have a reasonable expectation of privacy?' If so, then we'd seek a search warrant."

So far, the drone had been flown on 11 different occasions, only once to search for a fugitive (it wasn't successful that time). It's been used to monitor flooding, look for missing persons, take videos of a sexual assault scene, take photos of a murder scene, and once to get photos of a traffic accident scene.

After telling us about the drone program, Frazier took me outside, where Schuh was on hand to show off the Qube's capabilities. The Qube lives in the back of a police SUV that's marked "UAS Unit." Schuh set it up, and the Qube, a quadcopter not much bigger than the white Phantom drones that have become so popular with hobbyists, took off and immediately began sending footage back down to the ground station.

At this point, the process has become routine. Maybe that's why, when those four men ran off into the cornfield, police didn't chase them, Frazier said. Instead, the drone was called in and found them.

"From there, it was just like any other foot pursuit," he told me. "You chase them down and take them to jail."

First Glowing Lines Smart Highway

Smart Highways are interactive and sustainable roads of tomorrow by designer Daan Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure. The first Smart Highway is Glowing Lines which are lines that charge at day-time, and glow at night for eight hours. Here the landscape becomes energy-neutral and a poetic experience. The first pilot of Glowing Lines has been realised at N329 in Oss (NL) and will be further launched international. New designs include ‘Dynamic Paint’, ‘Interactive Light’, ‘Induction Priority Lane’ and ‘Road Printer’. The goal is to make roads which are more sustainable and interactive by using light, energy and road signs that automatically adapt to the traffic situation. The collaboration between Roosegaarde and Heijmans is a true example of innovative industries. The design and interactivity from Studio Roosegaarde and the craftsmanship of Heijmans are fused into one common goal: innovation of the Dutch landscape.

Volvo Trucks - Technology prevents accidents by making trucks “more human”

Volvo Trucks has developed new technology that can do a 360 degree scan of its surroundings and suggest actions to avoid incidents. The technology is developed specifically to protect vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists.

Transparent Displays Tech

Tech from Korean company Mediafront has produced video displays that are completely transparent. Demonstrated with commercial possibilities such as vending machines and refridgerators, it is easy to see how this tech can be used for new media art. Here are some short videos of the tech in action - the first two were taken by my new favorite Japanese tech blogger, Kyoko Omi: http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/post/99756057691/transparent-displays-tech-from-korean-company

The Future of Work with Jacob Morgan

Unfortunately, the video is a mix of Cornings glass fetish & a thin view of the future. Looks like SAP joins the list of flat-pack corporate visions. "Anything that can be connected to the internet, will be connected to the internet!" Really? Yay… Let’s wristbump. 

Influencing Strategy by Design

Over the past three years, Tom Chi & I have presented ourInfluencing Strategy by Design workshop to over a hundred professional designers across the World. This full-day course teaches mid to senior level designers how to influence and improve strategic decision-making within their organization.

In particular we outline how organizational dynamics, metrics, design skills, and executive presentations can open up unique opportunities for designers and get them a "seat at the table". Over the years, I've been compiling the materials we have presented. Here's a set of our workshop materials and presentations.

Factors Limiting the Organizational Influence of Design

Each time, we start the course by asking attendees to share what factors they felt were limiting their organizational influence. Each time a common set of themes emerged: organizational imbalance, lack of shared understanding, resource constraints, and market dynamics.

When Design Influences Strategy…

At the start of each course we asked attendees to share what they wanted to see as a result of greater strategic influence. Here’s a compilation of what we’ve heard.

Organizational Dynamics

One of the first areas of focus in the Influencing Strategy by Design course is organizational dynamics. Many designers hoping to increase their role in product and corporate strategy start with their design organization and its position in the company.

Do these phrases sound familiar? “Our design organization needs to be more strategic.” “The design team is not included in up-front strategic decisions, we need to convince the organization we should be.” These circumstances are frequently blamed on either reporting structure (where the design team reports in), or a lack of organizational understanding about the role of design. While both of these factors may be in play, focusing only on them to increase influence is unlikely to yield results.

We also walk through some global trends that provide designers with an opportunity for leadership roles. Specifically Tom illustrates the transition from the 1800s craft economy to the 2000s creative economy.

Design Skills

Perhaps the biggest area of focus in the course is how a designer’s existing skills can be applied to business and product strategy. Many design organizations seek to impact strategic decision-making by learning how to speak the language of business. But until they master these new skills, they are likely to be the least qualified people to discuss business strategy at the corporate decision-making table. Yet no one else at the table besides the design team has a complete set of design skills. These skills define a unique perspective that designers can bring to strategic work. Additional information:

• Design Skills for Strategy: the short version
• Strategic Skills of Designers
• How Designers Build Strategy

Metrics

We spend a fair amount of time discussing the impact of metrics on product design and strategic influence. Metrics are used by the organizations that track them to decide what initiatives to pursue, to understand the impact of behavioral trends on decisions, and to interpret the impact of past decisions.

Executive Presentations

One of the last topics discussed in the course is executive presentations. When working on strategic initiatives that impact business direction, more likely than not, designers will need input and buy-in from key stakeholders.

Presenting to executives doesn’t have to be a high stress affair. In fact, many senior level leaders relish the opportunity to hear customer stories and get an influx of data from “the front lines”. Because of their far-reaching responsibilities, executives can’t know all the information they need and are often short on time. As a result, they are data hungry and want the information they need presented with high data density and clarity. Understanding this mindset illuminates several ways to structure and get the most out of executive presentations.

We also outline several tips for presenting to executives or senior leadership within an organization.

3 Take Aways

At a high-level we advocate these three steps for any designer or design team interested in expanding their strategic involvement or influence.

More on Strategic Influence

• Articles by Luke Wroblewski on strategy and design
• PDf of presentation from Influencing Strategy by Design session at VizThink 2008

Apple on Hamburger Menus

Mike Stern, Apple User Experience Evangelist in Designing Intuitive User Experiences - 211 WWDC 2014 session (at 31’ 57"):

But I feel like I would be remiss If I didn’t use this opportunity to talk with you about hamburger menus. AKA Slide out menus, AKA sidebars, AKA basements, AKA drawers.
Now, these controls are very common on iOS, and on other platforms. And I’m sure many of you here work on apps that have these. You guys made the decision to put it in your app. And I’m sure that you did so with the very best of intentions. And I will say that these controls do a couple of things very well. 

View the article with images here http://blog.manbolo.com/2014/06/30/apple-on-hamburger-menus

For one thing, they save space. So rather than taking up a bunch of room at the bottom of the screen for a tab, you’re just taking up a little bit of area in the top left corner for the hamburger menu. 

And you practically have the entire height of the screen to show options to people, and if that’s not enough, you’re going to cram more awesomeness into your app, people can scroll, right. 

But, this is - I actually haven’t played around with the latest version of Xcode, so I really hope that they haven’t changed this - I don’t believe you’ll find a hamburger menu controller inside of Xcode.

Now, typically we don’t provide design advice about the things that we don’t offer to you guys, but I can’t help myself, right? I’ve so many conversations with people about this control, spending hours and hours talking about it, and you know, I think it’s important that we talk about it here today.

And again, I’m not going to say that there’s no place for these controls categorically. I think there are some apps that could maybe use one. But I will say that their value is greatly over-stated, and they have huge usabiliy downsides too. 

Remember, the three key things about an intuitive navigation system is that they tell you where you are, and they show you where else you can go. Hamburger menus are terrible at both of those things, because the menu is not on the screen. It’s not visible. Only the button to display the menu is.

And in practice, talking to developers, they found this out themselves. That people who use their app don’t switch to different sections very frequently when they use this menu. And the reason for that is because the people who use their app don’t know where else they can go. Right? They don’t know because they can’t see the options, or maybe they saw it at one point in time, but they have since forgotten.

And if you use this control, you have to recognize that the people who use your app may not realize the full potential of your app.

Hamburger menus are also just tedious, right? If you want to switch sections from the Accounts tab to the Transfers tab, all you need to do is tap the button and you’re there instantly, and if you want to go back, you tap the account button, and you’re back where you started from. 

Doing the same thing with the hamburger menu involves opening the menu, waiting for the animation to finish, re-orienting yourself, finding the option you’re interested in, tapping that, and then waiting for the animation to complete, getting back to where you were before, and if you want to go back, you have to open the menu again, go through that whole process, and there you are, again.

It takes at least twice as many taps to change sections. Something that should be very easy and fluid is made more difficult. 

And the other thing the hamburger menus quite frankly do badly is that they don’t play nicely with back buttons. Right? I’ve seen this a lot. Back buttons are supposed to go in that top left corner position, but instead there’s this hamburger menu there, so people put the back button right next to it, but no longer does this look like a back button anymore, it just looks like this arrow which is pointing to the hamburger menu, looks ridiculous, and sometimes people recognize that it looks ridiculous so when you drill down into the hirerarchy of an app, the hamburger menu goes away. Now it takes even more steps to switch to a different section. You have to go back up enough times to get to a level in the hierarchy of an app to get to a view that contains the hamburger menu.

Now, sometimes people will try to solve this by putting the menu on the right-hand side, but that’s not advisable either. That location is a really important location. Usually, you can put some kind of action there, you know, like a plus sign to add something, or an edit button. 

And finally, the downside of being able to show a lot of options is that you can show a lot of options. Is that you will show a lot of options. The potential for bloat and misuse is tremendous. They allow you to add all sort of stuff that your users don’t really care about. Like information about the app. Or version history, or credits. I hate to break it to you, but no one cares. 

And the other thing is that people wind up taking ads and special offers and making them look just like regular sections and putting it in there too. That sucks. No one wants that either. Look, drawers of any kind have a nasty tendency to fill with junk.
Okay, let’s move on. [ Applause ]

Apple could not be clearer: don’t use hamburgers menus on iOS.