Ubiquitous pervasive computing, networked products, embedded devices and their connections to interactive electronic communications, websites and networked software applications captured my interest this year. This emerging direction promises to further blur the distinction between product, communication and service. It is becoming difficult to decide whether an electronic networked experience is a website, a software application or a product interface. Today we still sit down at our computer for our interactive connective experiences, although increasingly we use our Palm Pilots. Soon it will be our refrigerator, bathtub, car or nightstand that connect us to the Internet.

In fall 1999 the IDSA Pervasive Computing symposium and ACD Living Surfaces conference raised the problem of branding pervasive computing 'products'. Until then, branding had seemed a bit too commercial to be interesting. But ubiquitous networked products and interactive electronic communications products create whole new product landscape, and demand a new toolkit of design methods. Now branding becomes crucial to identify and differentiate invisible products.

How do you brand a smart networked product that is an invisible response to your changing daily needs with little physical form? Paste logo decals on smart baseboards in the internet-wired house? I don’t think so.

New networked and e-commerce products are more service than hardware. They are intangible, temporal, time-based, fleeting presences, alive on demand, but vanish after use. This is a radical change from the 10,000 years of human object-making and written message-making where the material object and written/printed message have a continuous physical presence.

For instance, a fan sits there in your room even when not in use, expressing its 'fan-ness'. It speaks of air motion and cooling through its physical form, its aerodynamically shaped blades. It is always reinforcing its identity and product value proposition, its potential service and affordances.

A letter, book or poster also has a continuous physical presence. But a website is very different from a shelf of books. When it is closed, it is gone. Out of sight, out of mind. Today’s dynamic electronic media require serious user intentionality and motivation. Electronic time-based media must be activated to get audience mindshare. Casual encounters are difficult. Scanning, skimming, chance encounters, unsolicited reminders and spontaneous reinforcements of the message are either inaccessible or cumbersome.

This new population of dematerialized interactive products and communications are time-based and temporal. They do not have the advantage of continuous physical presence. Dematerialized services, especially from backgrounded products, need branding to be commercially viable and to compete in the marketplace. Without branding, their services will be without identity, differentiation or distinctiveness, and become generic commodities. Through branding, one product can be differentiated from the next and build mindshare in the marketplace.

'Stickiness' is a useful term. How do you make an electronic communication or product memorable and resonant? Not out of sight, out of mind. Behavior and character generate stickiness. Character that is sensory, experiential, and richly resonant can be personally meaningful and memorable for the user. Character is the sum total of the user's experience and interaction with the product, service or message. This is a key element of 'Experience Design Branding', a term we developed for the High Ground Breckenridge 'Designing the Brand Experience' Studio Conference.

Some great examples of experience design branding are the outcome of informed intuition and talent. The first Mac desktop interaction was so distinctive, completely unlike previous computer experiences. The original VW Beetle generated immense affection and loyalty. And Harley Davidson's 'exhaust note' is an unmistakable— and patented— brand identifier. These products all possess a wonderful pleasurable stickiness.

But what are the tools to create character in a consistent deliverable process? Product and communications designers need a new set of roles and methods.

This brings us to the issue of 'information architecture', the term of choice these days for communications designers working in this domain. I find this term very troublesome, a very narrow description that omits a world of design strategies, methods and potential design roles. Richard Saul Wurman may be the father of this term, and probably did not intend it to indicate interactive electronic communications. It was an attempt to find a more 'high minded' term for graphic design, something that eschewed style in favor of the more noble goals of clarity and objective function. These days, its use typically indicates serious intentions and solid professional grounding. Everyone seems to want to be one, from Massimo Vignelli to Clement Mok, and especially designers in the web and software communities.

In its current use, the term 'Architect' , apparently refers to the planning and structuring of a site or software application, the syntactical dimension of the design process. It also looks like a pathetic attempt to gain credibility and respect on the coattails of a more venerable and prestigious profession. And an extended discussion would have to ask if this is a serious misunderstanding of the discipline of architecture.

'Information' keeps getting used as the overarching adjective modifier. Why information and not communication? Information design is a subset of communication design, after all. 'Information' seems to refer to school of Information Design, a distinguished lineage from Otto Neurath to Michael Twyman and Robin Kinross. The values of clarity, objectivity, rationality and ordered organizational hierarchy (most frequently based on a Swiss grid) are connected to the ‘glass goblet’ school of graphic design and the Modernist ideal of culturally neutral value-free design. ‘Order the content, and it will speak for itself.’ This also refers to that traditional divide between information and persuasion. (See my piece from High Ground 1999 for more thoughts on that.)

That old dichotomy in graphic design of information versus persuasion is no longer pertinent, especially with interactive media. Information is one type of content and cannot possibly describe the entire scope of interactive electronic design and pervasive computing products. Interactive media content is one big bowl of soup, including computation, information, data, entertainment, learning, gaming, dating, relating, propaganda, shopping, and advertising. All communications design— and now product design, as well— must be consciously persuasive and seductive to be sticky, resonant and memorable. Cool detached communications design might have been occasionally effective when it had the advantage of a continuous physical presence. But now electronic nonlinear communications and dematerialized products need all the viscous juice we can give them, including subjective emotion and sensuality.

My current preference for a more descriptive term for our design role is Interactive Electronic Communications Design. This is a mouthful— we need a more economical description— but it seems a more accurate choice until we find a more elegant name.

A lot of persuasive character comes under the semantic category of semiotics. Semantic associative meaning is a language process described by semiotics, the science of signs. But character also has to do with nonverbal, non-language expression from preverbal, subverbal or subconscious experience. (Information design is strictly a language process, and omits nonlinguistic aspects of communications.) Non-language theories, like phenomenology, can contribute to design and guide us toward richly haptic, sensory and non-rational modes of experience.

Designers can use other, sensual dimensions beyond vision and hearing. Sight and sound are contemplative senses that deliver somewhat distanced, abstracted and more cerebral stimuli, which tend to be more mediated. The contact senses of touch, taste, smell are more primal and less culturally mediated. They evidence some sort of hardwired link to memory. Smell, in particular, is a powerful mnemonic trigger that releases rich spontaneous associations from past experience. Emerging media technologies promise to deliver kinesthetic body sensations that design can harness.

What might be useful theories to inform our process for these additional sensory dimensions of design? Cognitive and perceptual psychology and an array of language theories are already applied in the more rigorous design schools. In addition, perhaps we should investigate behavioral psychology, the psychology of personality and animal psychology.

How can character and personalities grow, and relationships with users evolve? This will be possible in digital character. Computer technology allows a software application to evolve and learn from its interaction with it user. Random vectors and unexpected interactions may have some appropriate roles in interaction design for a generation of users raised on the challenges of computer gaming. We need to provide users with the experience they expect, and more— both commodity and delight. Character and behavior would seem to be key attributes to animate our users' experience with our communications and products.

How can user experience design create branded character and personification in a communication's or product's behavior, rather than a superficial veneer? This must be an organic inside-out process, an outgrowth and culmination of intrinsic, embedded character to achieve any authentic brand identity. An interaction between the designed product's affordances and character with the user's response, utilization, appreciation and participation creates a branded identity.

Branded character in interactive electronic experience is like driving a car. A car’s character affects the user's driving style and creates a rich user interaction. Think of driving five different vehicles to town— the experience will be different each time, even though the activity, the route and the destination are the same. So when we design an interactive electronic experience, we could ask, 'How does it drive?' Is it brisk and tight, low to the ground with instant response like a BMW roadster? Is it smooth and floaty with delayed response like a Buick? Is it cranky and recalcitrant like an old pick-up truck? We could also ask, 'How does it smell?' Think of the pleasure of that 'new car smell', the smell of leather seats, or the musty damp smell of a garaged old car .

What is the analogy to a website or a software application? It needs to go beyond superficial imitations of personality like AOL's 'You've got mail', or overly-rendered personalities like the computer 'Hal' in 2001.

This is a revised vision of the product designer's role. Networked pervasive products are only partially about product form and more about behavior. Thinking of the car analogy, we realize that much of a car's character comes from engineering choices that affect the contact senses— the drive train, suspension, brakes, and engine compression. Too often, traditional industrial design has been about the contemplative senses triggered by the reflection of light on body surfaces. Perhaps 'character engineering' would be a more descriptive term. But I hope not....

So what's in a name? What we call ourselves shapes how we see our roles and how our colleagues relate to us in cross-disciplinary teams. Too often designers have been categorized as the 'look and feel' specialists that are brought in at the end of the process. Hence the ambition of ‘information architects’ to start at the beginning. Neither 'look and feel' or 'information architect' adequately describe this new discipline. We need a term that includes both of these components, and more.

But even the term 'industrial design' has always been problematic. People think we design factories. 'Graphic design' has been troublesome too; librarians always shelve our books under Printmaking. Computing is also having trouble with terms. 'Ubiquitous computing' and 'pervasive computing' are mystifyingly vague.

So 'ubiquitous design' is no better. But if we and our teammates think of ourselves as information architects— or industrial designers or graphic designers— we will never be positioned to design behavior and character experiences for our users/audiences or acquire the theories and skills necessary to do so.

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© 2000 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com