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Since I wrote about the user experience of augmented reality less than two weeks ago, the most important development is the arrival of augmented iPhone apps (unofficially for the moment, officially in September).

Why is this so important, when Wikitude and other AR Android apps have been available for almost a year?  Bringing augmented reality to the iPhone changes the cultural assumptions made about AR experiences as a class of offering. Endorsing AR experiences for iPhone users moves augmented reality from the geek realm of Android and Google, to the chic world of Apple.  Culturally, the assumptions we make about the new products and services from Apple and Google are driven largely by the differences in way we perceive the two brands.  Apple is chic, while Google is geek.

Looking Ahead

Connecting the Apple brand to augmented experiences will persuade many people to try out AR.  Yet as I’ve said, and many others as well, getting the user experience of augmented reality ‘right’ is absolutely the critical element to the long term viability of this new class of experiences.  This entails two efforts.

First, designers must refine the experiences offered by all those AR applications based on the four classic interaction patterns known so far – Head-Up Display, Tricorder, Holochess, and X-ray Vision.  Two factors make refinement essential: competition from other AR offerings that reduces the novelty value of your experience, and increased ‘load’ on the UX in the form of actual use for everyday purposes in the complex setting of real life.  Think about trying to choose where to get lunch for the afternoon by sorting through 1500 listings for coffee shops and restaurants while standing on a street corner in the rain in London holding your phone aloft.  The functional aspects of AR experiences just aren’t refined enough to handle the interaction design, visualization, and contextual sensitivity challenges implied. [Prediction: AR usage cases will naturally settle on a set of common scenarios that balance the strengths and weaknesses of each of the four classic patterns.  More speculation on that in a later post.]

Second, designers must address the gaps in the set of concepts now used as the basis for imagining new augmented experiences.  I flagged six ‘missing’ patterns in the range of experiences offered so far; Loner, Second Hand Smoke, Pay No Attention To the Man Behind the Curtain, The Invisible Man!, Tunnel Vision, and AR for AR’s Sake (see the article for details).  I’m sure the very savvy readers of this blog can identify even more.

I hope all the AR innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs working hard on the crest of this breaking wave of technology find ways to take on both of these tasks.  If they can’t refine the existing models and fill in those experience gaps, then neither Apple chic nor Google geek cred will suffice to make augmented reality viable in the long term.  And what could literally be a new way of seeing the world – one with legitimate potential for changing our behavior with regard to urban spaces, the environment, social structures, play, and economics, among just a few spheres of human activity – will remain little more than a camera obscura style curiosity.

2007 looks to be the year that the user experience, information architecture, and design communities embrace systems thinking and concepts.

It’s a meeting that’s been in the making for a while –
At the 2006 IA Summit, Karl Fast and D. Grant Campbell presented From Pace Layering to Resilience Theory: the Complex Implications of Tagging for Information Architecture.
Gene Smith has been writing about systems for a while. At the 2007 summit Gene and Matthew Milan will discuss some practical techniques in their presentation Rich mapping and soft systems: new tools for creating conceptual models.
Peter Merhholz has been posting and talking about the implications of some of these ideas often.
– and seems to have reached critical mass recently:

• Adam Richardson Why Designing Systems Is Difficult
• Adam Greenfield on Two things product designers and manufacturers need to know
• Jeff Lash with Make your product part of a system

Here’s a set of reading recommendations related to systems and system thinking. These books, feeds, and articles either talk about systems and the ideas and concepts behind this way of thinking, or contain work that is heavily informed by systems thinking.

Either way, they’re good resources for learning more.

Tags:
http://del.icio.us/tag/systems_theory
http://del.icio.us/tag/systemstheory
http://del.icio.us/tag/SSM

Feeds:
Resilience Science recently featured three excellent essays on the work of C.S. Holling

Books:

• Ervin Laszlo – The Systems View of the World
• Ludwig Van Bertalanffy – General System Theory
• Gerald Weinberg – An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine – The End of Certainty
• Manuel De Landa – 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
• and also War In The Age of Intelligent Machines
• Steven Johnson – Emergence
• Manuel Castells – The Rise of the Network Society (vol. 2 of The Information Age trilogy)
• C. S. Holling – PANARCHY: Understanding Transformations In Human And Natural Systems

And for a lighter read, try anything by author Bruce Sterling that features his recurring character Leggy Starlitz – a self-described systems analyst (likely the first example of one in a work of fiction that’s even moderately well known…). His stories Hollywood Kremlin, Are You for 86?, and The Littlest Jackal (two in short story collection Globalhead), are good places to start. The novel Zeitgest focuses on Starlitz.

Articles:
Sustainability, Stability, and Resilience

We’ve needed to bridge the gulf between views of design rooted in static notions of form and function, and the fluid reality of life for a long time. I hope this new friendship lasts a while.