“The Emerging Genre of Data Comics” is an article that was published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, June 2017 but it is actually a comic. Cool!
Cool paper “written/drawn” as a comic
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A walk on the CHIld side: our CHI paper got a Honourable Mention award!
Our paper “A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and
Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile
Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility” was accepted at CHI 2019 and also got a Honourable Mention. Wow!
You can read the paper and download the pdf at the paper page. Enjoy!
Google UX Designers demystify Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Josh Lovejoy @jdlovejoy, in the first minutes of this video about human-centered machine learning, explains “artificial intelligence is really anything where there is an automated decision being made” and cites, as examples, a toaster and automatic doors. Yes, your toaster is AI! And then “what’s distinct about machine learning as a subset of AI is that decisions are learned”. As simple as that. Refreshening.
You might also want to check the very interesting articles from Google’s People + AI Research team
Gallery of XKCD and other Python matplotlib styles
I’m reading the wonderful “Python Data Science Handbook” by Jake VanderPlas, a book written entirely as Jupyter notebooks! And got excited about matplotlib styles but XKCD “style” was missing so I modified a bit the code for rendering the different styles to include it. Below a small part of the gallery (XKCD style is the first line) which is generated by the jupyter notebook available as a gist on github and embedded below.
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I love XKCD graphs, for example the following one, and you can create them with Python!!!
XKCD graph
3 open positions on design thinking available in Trento!
The new adventure I was mentioning few days ago is the Design Research Lab, a joint initiative of University of Trento, Confindustria, Art Institute Artigianelli and Bruno Kessler Foundation.
We are currently recruiting and now there are 3 open positions as research fellow in the Design Research Lab. The duration of the contract is for 12 months. The gross amount is 19.668 euros.
All the details are in the call.
The broad goals of the Design Research Lab (and the tasks of the research fellows) are to effectively promote in public and private organizations the culture of services and their design as levers of product creation and central factors of local development.
The deadline for applying is 12 April 2017 (hurry up!)
Feel free to ask me any question. We might end up working together ;)
Design thinking and how it transformed Airbnb from failing startup to billion-dollar business
Very interesting conversation with Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. I share some insights I got by watching the 2013 video.
- First insight: they were 3 founders in California with a stagnating company (Airbnb), they could have kept staying in their office trying to improve the site, write more software code and instead what did they do? Realising that apartments in New York all had horrible photos, they took a flight (from California to New York!), rented a camera, knock on doors of Airbnb users in New York, took better photos of their apartments and replace them on the site. As Joe says in the interview, “for the first year, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems”, instead going to meet their users is one of the pillars of design thinking, its very human-centred focus. Just after this intervention, revenues which were stagnating at 200 dollars per week went up to 400 dollars per week. Near the end, Joe says “if you ever want to understand your product, go stay in the home of your customer” (well, this applies only to Airbnb … and maybe also to Couchsurfing ;)
- Actually the previous suggestion was given to Airbnb founder by Paul Graham (of Ycombinator, I loved his “hackers and painters” essay!) which suggested it’s okay to do things that don’t scale. What is the meaning? I think it’s again about being very human-centred, going out of the building, develop empathy with specific persons and really understand him/her. So that you can make improvements that really satisfy real needs (of at least one real person!). Scaling to millions of persons will come later, if needed.
- Another suggestion by Paul Graham was go meet the people which again is the very human-centred side of design thinking. The interviewer asks “what if your company is not for < go out and meet people?> and Joe replies “well, be pirate”, a sort of “do it anyway” but then I asked my self how do you get it accepted? This reminded me of the pragmatic book Undercover User Experience Design.
- And what can the employee bring back from this “go out and meet people” to the company? Joe replies “visible, tactical, tangible insight that came from somebody is consuming your product or your service”
- Joe suggests to become the patient (of your service/product). For example, every new employee at Airbnb, during the first week, makes a trip (using Airbnb of course), document it and share insights with his/her new department. Wow!
- Joe also cites the stars vs heart icons story: when you start as new employee at Airbnb, you ship (a new small feature, something) on day one, so that new employees can experience shipping on day one. A newly hired designer was given the task of looking at the star functionality (an icon you click in order to save a listing you find interesting). After few hours he or she comes back with something like “I think the stars are the kinds of things you see in utility-driven experiences. Instead Airbnb is so aspirational. Why don’t we tap into that? I’m going to change that to a heart.” And Joe “Wow, okay. It’s interesting” and they just shipped the new feature, to the entire userbase (not a/b testing or just shipping it to 10% of the users)! They also added some code in it in order to track it and see how behavior change. And the next day they checked the data and the engagement with the icon increased by over 30%, that simple change from a star to a heart increased engagement by over 30%! In short, let people be pirates, ship stuff and try new things.
Design Thinking: Norman and I (and the stupid question)
I’m starting a new adventure and it is about service design and design thinking, so I thought I could start looking at what Don Norman said about design thinking, right?
In 2010 Norman labelled design thinking as a powerful but false myth with questions such as “Why should we perpetuate such nonsensical, erroneous thinking?” and statements such as “what is being labeled as “design thinking” is what creative people in all disciplines have always done”. Norman argues that designers are not “mystically endowed with greater creativity (…) but they have one virtue that helps them: they are outsiders. People within a group find it difficult to break out of the traditional paradigms, for usually these seem like givens, not to be questioned. Many of these beliefs have been around for so long that they are like air and gravity: taken for granted and never thought about. Outsiders bring a fresh perspective, particularly if they are willing to question everything, especially that which seems obvious to everyone else.”
But in 2013, Norman writes a new post titled “Rethinking Design Thinking” in which he changes a bit his position. The part I like the most is the conclusion where he posits “That is design thinking. Ask the stupid question.” basically arguing that:
What is a stupid question? It is one which questions the obvious. “Duh,” thinks the audience, “this person is clueless.” Well, guess what, the obvious is often not so obvious. Usually it refers to some common belief or practice that has been around for so long that it has not been questioned. Once questioned, people stammer to explain: sometimes they fail. It is by questioning the obvious that we make great progress. This is where breakthroughs come from. We need to question the obvious, to reformulate our beliefs, and to redefine existing solutions, approaches, and beliefs. That is design thinking. Ask the stupid question.
Well, I think I can wonderfully get along with this suggestion, so if you happen to pass by while I’m asking a stupid question (or you are the one I asked the stupid question to), don’t be judgemental, I’m just doing my (new) job ;)
P.S.: I hope you can forgive me for putting so close Don Norman and myself in the title ;)
Which language edition of Wikipedia has more registered women?
A paper of mine published in 2014 started with this simple (but interesting, I think) question ;)
As you might know, Wikipedia is not available only in English but there are almost 300 Wikipedias written in other languages.
So what we did? We computed the percentage of females and males among registered users on 289 language editions of Wikipedia.
The pdf of “Gender Gap In Wikipedia Editing: A Cross-Language Comparison” is available for you to read.
But I suggest you to try to answer to the following questions beforereading the answers (which are in the paper) so that you might play a bit with your stereotypes and prejudices about culture and women around in the world ;)
1) Which language edition of Wikipedia has the largest percentage of registered users setting their gender as female? What is this percentage? It is more or less than 50%?
And 2) what is the language of the Wikipedia with the smallest percentage of women? How close to 0% might this be …?
3) Try to order the following language editions of Wikipedia from the largest percentage of female registered users to the smallest: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Swedish, Thai. Where does the largest Wikipedia (the English one) is placed?
4) Moreover, considering that setting the gender on Wikipedia is optional and actually few users do it (see details in the paper). Which percentage of users set their gender on English Wikipedia? What is the Wikipedia in which most users set their gender? What is this percentage?
Note that, as written in the paper, of course languages do not map directly to countries. For example, Spanish Wikipedia is heavily edited from Spain but also Latin America and a similar point can be made from Arabic Wikipedia. India has many official languages Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi but also English. On the other hand, Italian Wikipedia or Catalan Wikipedia are much more “localized”.
Note also that in the paper we arbitrarily decided to consider only editions with at least 20.000 registered users since we computed percentages on registered users (a Wikipedia with 2 users setting their gender would have had percentages of 0%, 50% or 100% clearly not informative) and this filtering step reduced our sample to 76 Wikipedias with a large number of registered users (at least 20.000).
Note also that data refers to March 16, 2013 but we released the Python script as open source so you can re-run it if you are curious about the current situation. You can get the script on Github.
Ok, now you can go to read the paper “Gender Gap In Wikipedia Editing: A Cross-Language Comparison” to get the answers to the previous questions and hopefully be amazed! Enjoy! ;)
Manypedia presented at Wikisym
I uploaded on slideshare the presentation I gave time ago at Wikisym 2012. It is embedded below. There is a comparison of Points of View across different wikis (such as ecured.cu, the Cuban government official wiki, and Conservapedia, Anarchopedia, veganpedia, …) and a comparisons of the same page across different language Wikipedias thanks to Manypedia (such as “List of controversial issues” in English, Chinese and Catalan Wikipedia, “Human rights in the United States” in English and Chinese, “Osama Bin Laden” in English and Arabic, “Vietnam War” in English and Vietnamese, “Northern Cyprus” in Turkish, Greek and English Wikipedia, “Underwear” in English and Arabic)
Manypedia is online at http://www.manypedia.com.
The paper is at http://www.gnuband.org/papers/manypedia-comparing-language-points-of-view-of-wikipedia-communities/. If you like Manypedia and the paper, please cite it. Thanks!
Which Wikipedia pages are edited mainly by females?
Some time ago we developed Wikitrip, a web tool which shows the world location of editors of a chosen Wikipedia page and also the gender of editors, i.e. how many edits were made by males and females. We released Wikitrip as open source on github and we also deployed 3 live APIs: api.php (various stats about a specific Wikipedia page), api_gender.php (returns timestamp and gender for any edit to a specific Wikipedia page by a registered user that specified his/her gender), api_geojson.php (returns a GeoJSON for anonymous edits on a specific Wikipedia page). If you want to use the APIs in your mashups, we’ll be delighted, more details about the APIs can be found at the end of this blog post.
In fact, today I discovered via Gizmodo that Santiago Ortiz has used our Wikipedia Gender API for creating a fantastic visualization of Wikipedia pages based on how many female and male contributors each of the articles has.
Using the cool visualization you can for example “discover” that currently, out of more than 4 million pages in the English Wikipedia, JUST ONE article is edited more by females than males!!! That article, with 7 male editors and 9 male editors, is Cloth menstrual pad.
Note that the API we released is based on data from Wikipedia and that only users who specified their gender in Wikipedia are counted in (these users are a minority, around 10%). Note also that in our Wikitrip visualization we show a plot with number of edits from gendered users while Santiago show the number of different users. For example in Wikitrip you see that the page Cloth menstrual pad has 62 edits from females and 15 edits from males but the different users who edited the page are 7 male and 9 female.
Now I give you some more info about the APIs released with WikiTrip so that you can use them as well in your mashups if you wish so.
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Get various stats about a page
Options:
- article: page title
- lang: desidered language (default: en)
- family: wiki family (default: wikipedia)
- year_count: show edit count per month (default: false)
- editors: show unique editors for the page (default: false)
- max_editors: maximum number of editors displayed (only if “editors” option is set)
- anons: show anonymous unique editors (default: false)
- top_ten: show top 10% of editors (default: false)
- top_fifty: top 50 editors (default: false)
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api_gender.php
Get timestamp and gender for any edit by a registered user that specified his gender on a specific page (might be quite slow)
Options:
- article: page title
- lang: desidered language (default: en)
- family: wiki family (default: wikipedia)
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api_geojson.php
Get a GeoJSON for anonymous edits on a specific page
Options:
- article: page title
- lang: desidered language (default: en)
- family: wiki family (default: wikipedia)
P.s.: the coder of all Wikitrip awesomeness is the amazing Federico “fox” Scrinzi!