What struck me most in the incidental media films is that there are a lot of ubiquitous media or surfaces that aren’t designed primarily for human consumption. Several of the examples switched that around – still being useful for their original purpose, but providing utility for users too.
Receipts are a great example – their main purpose these days is to prevent in-store fraud by cashiers. They also provide a randomly ordered list of goods bought, a throwback to when the receipt was generated mechanically or by hand. To an information designer, an unordered list is a wasted opportunity. What happens when you try to redesign the receipt to be useful to people?
Ocado supermarket delivery receipts eschew the traditional scroll of paper for an A4 sheet, and then order your goods by their expiry date. It’s a format for sticking on the fridge. There’s some information duplication (with special offers called out in great detail): it would be nice to offer a recipe or two using some of the ingredients you’ve bought, or offer suggestions of products you might like.
Burgerville print nutritional information of your meal on their receipts – which feels like a bold move, but one that it likely to be legally required soon. They’re also starting to offer hints on how to eat more healthily by choosing other menu options or personalising the order.
Receipts are often emailed rather than printed these days. This is taken to the extreme when shopping in an Apple Store, where they swipe your card, take your email address, and just walk out. Unfortunately, the emailed receipt is barely formatted and not much use – Square (which lets people use iPhones and iPads to take card payments) produces lovely colour email receipts containing added incidental information – a map (to help you remember what the purchase was), a picture, information about how many visits you’ve made and coupons or discounts for the next visit.
Another underused medium is the screensaver. Screens are everywhere, and several kinds of modern screen still suffer from degradation if the same thing is shown all the time. Even my desk phone has a large LCD screen – and a screensaver. Little has been done to make screensavers work harder – be interactive, responsive, timely or informative.
There will also be screensavers where traditionally the screen would be off – the e-ink Kindle shows pictures of authors when not in use.
They could act as temporary second screens – showing real-time information such as Twitter messages and Guardian headlines –
http://www.whatisthelatestguardianheadline.com/
Could they have an attract mode to signal when something important is happening?
Being able to construct your own screensavers to show what’s important to you is key – and visual programming tools such as Quartz Composer and Impure start to make that possible using rich live data, if still not quite easy enough.
Live Twitter search visualisation example from http://www.impure.com