Martin Källström - Wearable Technology

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. I hope it's okay if I take photos of this session. Is there anyone not okay with that? You can cover your face perhaps. So I work at Memoto. I was at Media Evolution, the conference, 2 years ago. There was a really, really good talk here by Amber Case, who is a cyber-anthropologist. She

[00:00:26] Speaker A: really clued me into the principle of calm design, of calm products, products that don't bring so much noise to our presence so that we have to spend too much time thinking about them. And that's a principle that I've been inspired by when developing the concept of Memoto. 2

[00:00:52] Speaker A: years ago, it was a crazy dream of mine to create a wearable camera. 2 years later, right now, it's reality. To me, to me, that's amazing. It's amazing that I can do it and that any, any of us can dream up something and then create it out of nothing else than our dreams. And to do that, I had to reinvent how

[00:01:18] Speaker A: we think about cameras from scratch. And fortunately, I had lots and lots of research to rely on. There's been research going on for about 25 or 30 years in what happens when you have a wearable camera. So what we came up with was a device which is really small

[00:01:43] Speaker A: and light. And you can have it in a range of colors depending on how visible you want it to be. And really, what is the problem, the major challenge facing wearable technology? And this is not only in my eyes, but really what was the conclusion from a panel on this

[00:02:08] Speaker A: topic at a wearable conference in Toronto where I was 2 months ago, the major challenge for wearable technology is to find new form factors of how we can wear technology that is not too much in your face, so to speak, and that doesn't create new habits that are too hard to evolve.

[00:02:35] Speaker A: So Perhaps some of you have heard the story about Sony when they were going to launch the Walkman. There was huge resistance inside Sony to the idea that you would actually wear plugs into your ears with wires going out of your head. There was one engineer promoting this idea that people would

[00:03:00] Speaker A: actually do that. and the rest of the organization were totally against it. They said, it's impossible. No one will ever look like a jerk or an idiot with wires sticking out of their heads. But Sony took a chance, launched the Sony Walkman, with it the earplugs that is now seen— I think most of you probably have 5 of them, if not on

[00:03:25] Speaker A: you, then at home. So how do you design a new piece of wearable technology? This is the topic of my speech. I'm going to add into it a bit in the end about where I think this is going for Memoto and for other niches of wearable technology. But the major part is about how we thought about the design, how

[00:03:50] Speaker A: we evolved it through user testing. Yeah. And there will be a discussion at the end, so if you have any questions, please jot them down so we can have a high-quality discussion after me and Mille have talked. So Memoto is not only hardware, it's software as well. So what

[00:04:15] Speaker A: the software does is that it handles your photos for you, it organizes them for you. The Memoto camera automatically takes 2,000 photos per day, 2 photos per minute. You get an overwhelming amount of photos illustrating the timeline that is your day, and you cannot handle that amount of photos. So we'll— we build software that analyzes the stream

[00:04:40] Speaker A: of photos and recognizes what are the key events. For every event, we bring out a keyframe showing that this was probably one of the important events during the day. And if you're not happy with that stream, you can also filter out the best photos so you can share them to Facebook or Twitter or with friends in other ways. So this app is available for— the app, I

[00:05:05] Speaker A: should say, is the idea of how we think you should— you can consume the photos from the Moto camera. So it's really the camera and the app that is the user interface to the product. And the result is that you can take photos from your own viewpoint, but in an effortless way. For example, these are photos from my daughter's birthday captured from her

[00:05:30] Speaker A: viewpoint with a Memoto camera. This is from her birthday party. And since these photos are taken from her own viewpoint instead of replacing with— in time, replacing her own memories of this birthday. The photos will keep her memories alive. And that is really the point. The point is

[00:05:56] Speaker A: not to live in the past. It's not to have like a gadget that takes up your time. The point is to be able to be present in the future, in the now, to be present right here, right now, without having to think about how can I capture this moment. You don't have to walk around with a device between you and reality. You can experience reality directly, but still

[00:06:21] Speaker A: capture the memories from every moment. Of course, there are a lot of issues involved with this. the issue of privacy and integrity at the top of the list when we started designing this camera. We had a brainstorming session, a full day, where we just noted down every conceivable issue

[00:06:48] Speaker A: or challenge that we can think about that we faced before we started the design process. And then we clustered— after having that brainstorming session, we clustered these challenges into groups, and we made each group a topic of our design process. And we used a process called service

[00:07:13] Speaker A: design. Service design is a concept that is becoming bigger and bigger in the academic world. For the last 5 to 10 years, it's been increasingly important important topic of research. And the worldwide conference on service design was actually in my hometown in Linköping 3 years ago. And the

[00:07:38] Speaker A: idea with service design is that you, you don't, don't look at one specific user interface. You look at the entire experience of a product or service. So it's not about graphic design or industrial design or product development. It's a process where you look at the entire service as a whole when designing it from

[00:08:04] Speaker A: the ground up. And really, what happens is that you iterate a lot. You iterate over ideas that you make prototypes of that you test with real customers. So what we did was that we started out with the basic challenges, and we developed

[00:08:29] Speaker A: prototypes that allowed us to test our ideas and refine the— through iterative prototyping, to refine our ideas and in each step test them towards our product. And so this is what we came up with. We made about 50 interviews,

[00:08:56] Speaker A: about 1 hour each, and we reiterated these interviews in every iteration. And what we found was that we could categorize the people we interviewed in, in, on 2 different axes. So the horizontal axis is the division

[00:09:21] Speaker A: of, of people into active and passive in regards to how they use photos. So this, this part of the research was to find out how do people relate to photos, what do they want to do with them. And some people are active and some are passive. And on the vertical axis are, of course, private and public. And by doing this, we

[00:09:46] Speaker A: could segment the users into 3 different categories: the self-promoters, the memory collectors, and the unsentimentalists. The self-promoters are the people that you see a lot posting photos on Facebook and Instagram, for example. They want to show that they have a creative outlook in life

[00:10:12] Speaker A: by posting a lot of photos. They want to show that they have a beautiful life with friends, and it's fulfilling a basic need in their lives to post a lot of photos. And the term self-promoter is not something negative. It's a neutral term, and When we talked about their idea about

[00:10:39] Speaker A: photos, they often cited it as a very good way to express themselves in a very short way. And to use self-promoters as a target group for us means that we— when people from this target group use our product, we will see a lot of viral spread. And the opposite case is

[00:11:05] Speaker A: with the other group, the memory collectors. They want to keep the photos for themselves. When they share photos, it's only for a very small set of people. So it might be friends or relatives. And it's really about organizing the memories for a small

[00:11:31] Speaker A: set of people and not to promote them to the public. And the advantage of this target group is that they are really into organizing and searching their photos, so they will quickly start using new technologies

[00:11:57] Speaker A: that allows them to do so. And here's a typical, typical quote from, from this group: I will share lifelogging photos with my parents, perhaps a couple of friends. My photos are private. I don't want to show them to the world. And we collected lots and lots of quotes like this that directed our design. And if we look at the last kind of

[00:12:22] Speaker A: users that we explored through this user service, the unsentimentalists, it turns out there is a group of people that are passive in their usage of photos, but also is private with the few photos they take. Basically found that this group of people doesn't have any advantage at all for Momoto as a target group. But

[00:12:48] Speaker A: it doesn't mean that they don't see photos as valuable at all. What it means is that they have probably someone in their family that is much more active than themselves in taking photos. So they often saw that they don't have to take photos at all, but not that they don't use photos, is that often someone else is taking

[00:13:14] Speaker A: and organizing photos for them. And here's the typical quote from this user group: I want to look forward. There's no point in dwelling in the past. You remember the unique things anyway. Those memories are preserved. And as you can see in quantitative terms, They are a minority. So,

[00:13:51] Speaker A: we also looked at what kind of value would people find in a lifelogging service. And one such value is to document their life story. And what you can really find when you use the Memoto camera is that you can wear it very effortlessly without having to think about it. But

[00:14:18] Speaker A: when you look back at the photos, it has not only captured the specific moments where you can find funny photos to share on Facebook, but you can look back at Sort of the broader scope. A lifelogging service is very much like a mirror, but you don't only see the present, like this instance,

[00:14:43] Speaker A: but you can see your entire life mirrored in the lifelogging photos. Another example of value that people talk to us about was that they can see with that lifelogging photos would bring them closer to their friends and relatives. So what we will do with, with the Memoto app is

[00:15:09] Speaker A: that we will develop a social layer that allows people to create albums very much like Spotify playlists that can be private or public, and they can be collaborative or only edited by one person. That you can share with friends, family, or with the public. The last value

[00:15:38] Speaker A: that people talked about, or another value that people talked about, was the idea that you can learn something about yourself. I wear Besides my Moto camera, I wear a Basis watch since yesterday that shows how my pulse and my— how many steps I take each day and how many calories

[00:16:03] Speaker A: I burn. And I learn from these data, but they are very much one-dimensional. When you have photos, you can explore the photos. from your life, you can go back and mine that data for knowledge that you didn't previously know that you were going to be looking for. And that can be done manually or with algorithms. And so we will, with

[00:16:29] Speaker A: time, be able to develop algorithms that can show you statistics on how much time you spend indoors and outdoors. And perhaps if when you're outdoors, are you spending that time in cities or in green areas. And so the idea is that with captured photos, you can decide afterwards what you are going to look for in

[00:16:54] Speaker A: the history of your lifelogging data. For me, the idea of keeping memories alive really has to do with valuing the simple moments in life as much as the moments that you can decide beforehand is going to be valuable to preserve. I have 2

[00:17:19] Speaker A: kids growing up. They are now 7 and 9 years old, and it seems like only yesterday they were little toddlers. And I really believe that the time I spend with them now is going to be precious for me throughout my entire life. And I really want to have more photos of my time with them than the

[00:17:46] Speaker A: moments that I— or sort of the birthday parties and the Christmases and the family outings that I now consciously take photos of. I also unfortunately lost both my parents when I was younger. And when I look back to the photos I have with my time with them, it's— we are— we're almost in every photo, we

[00:18:11] Speaker A: are very happy. We're smiling or giving each other presents on a birthday and stuff like that. But the really important moments can also be when you're sitting down having breakfast or taking a walk in the park, moments that you never think about capturing. And the memories of those— of the people that we love, really, you think when you experience

[00:18:39] Speaker A: happy or sad times that those memories are going to stay with you forever. But it only takes a couple of years before they are starting to fade. And 10 or 20 years later, it's almost impossible to— To recall. to find memories again that you forgot or that you have forgotten. So I'm

[00:19:04] Speaker A: all about living in the moment, but I really believe that a big value of using a lifelogging camera can be to keep the memories alive. And— We also looked at, which is also part of a service design process, something called a customer journey mapping. And what that is, is that you go through

[00:19:29] Speaker A: every step of the way of when a user starts using a product and then keeps using it over days and weeks and months and years. And then we looked at how the value perception is spread over that customer journey. So the result of this design

[00:19:56] Speaker A: process was that we came to a number of decisions regarding how the service should be designed, but also how the hardware should be designed. And of course, we needed to test those decisions as well. To give an example, what we understood through the service design process was that the balance— the most important balance that we needed

[00:20:21] Speaker A: to find in the design of the hardware is to have the hardware designed so that it's both honest and subtle. Honest in the way that it should look like a camera, or at least as a recording device. It is not a spy camera. And if you want to buy a spy camera that looks like a pen or a packet of gum, then you can find hundreds of those on the web.

[00:20:47] Speaker A: But our product, we wanted our camera to be honest, but not distracting. So it should also be subtle and friendly. And of course, we looked at various shapes and forms, and we had an industrial designer that came from Nokia, where he had worked on designing wearable stuff that is

[00:21:12] Speaker A: not mobile cameras, so like Bluetooth headsets and clips and microphones and so on. And for every conceivable shape, we did mockups. We used 3D printing a lot and user testing to come up with how the camera should look. We tried to put the camera lens in the middle of the device,

[00:21:38] Speaker A: but that was really perceived as too distracting. This looks very much like an eye, and when people were wearing this camera, they heard that other people had a hard time talking to them because it looked like a third eye that constantly draws your own eyesight to it. So we solved that problem by shifting

[00:22:05] Speaker A: the eye of the camera up into one corner. And this was much more pleasing to people, and it became a much subtle— a much more subtle look to the device. Yeah. And then we wanted to look at how can we make sure that people recognize this as a camera. And

[00:22:30] Speaker A: the answer was actually in the design of the opening of the lens itself. It's very important, we found, that the edge around the camera lens picks up a glare, picks up light from the surroundings, because— Yeah. then people understood that it's a camera. So, and you can see that

[00:22:55] Speaker A: in most mobile cameras as well, that there's a metallic ring around the main camera. And that was really key to having people recognize Memoto as a camera. So in the end, we also decided to allow people to be very expressive with themselves, to also offer the camera in different colors, not only as a fashion statement of sorts,

[00:23:21] Speaker A: but also if you want to shift the balance between subtle and honest yourself, you can choose a different color. Now, when I wear the gray camera, it's very subtle. If I have the white or orange camera, it's much more apparent. So, What next? What challenges

[00:23:47] Speaker A: do we still have? I talked before about the conference in Toronto. What was amazing about the conference was that not only were Amber Case there, the cyber anthropologist that inspired me on how to design the camera, but her biggest inspiration, Steve Mann, was actually the the organizer

[00:24:12] Speaker A: of that conference. Even more amazing, he had actually invited Marvin Minsky, the father of computer science, to appear at the conference and receive an honorable award from the IEEE organization. If you want to have a look at the entire field of what is called the quantified self, which is

[00:24:37] Speaker A: a subset of lifelogging, how quantified self and lifelogging looks right now, the researchers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists, and what they are thinking, you should check out lifeloggersmovie.com, which is a documentary film. It's about 25 minutes long that we made last year. And And

[00:25:03] Speaker A: Steve Mann, the man in the photo here, is in the movie as well, explaining his view about the difference between lifelogging, lifeglogging, and lifeblogging. We're right now designing the electronics for the camera. The camera I have here is right now taking photos. And we're

[00:25:28] Speaker A: ironing out the last few issues with the hardware. And the software is ready in the first version one week into September. So we are very, very close into starting to do real beta testing with the camera. And if any of you happen to be a backer on Kickstarter, talk to me, and I can make sure that you are one of the

[00:25:53] Speaker A: first beta testers that that get our camera in the middle of September now. And of course, we're also developing the app and all the software that goes with the camera. And we're also looking at what kinds of accessories we can develop, like a Wi-Fi docking station, waterproof case so people can wear the camera while traveling and such. If

[00:26:19] Speaker A: you want to, you can Place an order of the Memoto camera on memoto.com. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to contact me. Thank you very much. Thank you.