November 10, 2009
Educause 2009 Review
Thanks to everyone that stopped by our presentations at Educause! The response was very positive, and more people visited the booth than we anticipated.
Please subscribe to this page to keep posted as we move forward, and don't hesitate to contact dchase@umich.edu with any questions.
All the best,
Doug Chase, University of Michigan
Patrick Gossman, Wayne State University
Thomas Kunka, Illinois University
Jim Gregory, University of Minnesota
Posted by dchase at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2009
Educause 2009 Update
Hi everybody.
I'll be presenting twice at Educause - on November 4, a more general session around the administrative, community, and bureaucratic aspects of deploying a large distributed system like this one at a University, and second on November 5 with others from Wayne State, University of Illinois, and the University of Minnesota to talk more specifically about applications for digital signage in higher education.
Below the fold, find the abstract for this second session, and here's a link to the Prezi I'll be adapting for use at the first session.
http://prezi.com/fnz__ksdqti5/
Continue reading "Educause 2009 Update"
Posted by dchase at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2009
It's Alive!
A couple big 46" signs went live at Rackham today. I think they look great! These are going to be interactive once the app is complete, but for now they're lovely events calendar static displays. Great work, Marc, Dan et al.! Social Work, Palmer Commons, and Nursing all have displays up too - photos coming soon!
Posted by dchase at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2009
Educause!
We just found out that our proposed presentation has been accepted for Educause 2009 - so if you're planning to attend, come say hi in Denver.
This will be a "poster session," where we'll concentrate both on the logistics of getting a project like this off the ground and the specifics of deploying digital signage in higher ed.
If you're at a large, decentralized institution and are working on a signage project, please share your experiences here! Did you have trouble getting central buy-in? Are there multiple signage solutions on your campus? If so, do they interoperate? What about emergency messaging?
Posted by dchase at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2009
Auld Lang Syne
Let me zoom out for a minute: I believe strongly in the future of universities as global education brands rather than physical campuses, towns, communities or facilities. Although we like to think we're the vanguard of technology and innovation, in a lot of ways we lag behind even the retail industry. Relying on the "one-to-many" pattern in the lecture hall is going to get us in trouble. Web culture has taught us that openness is more effective, practical, and even monetizable in many cases than old-fashioned models.
There are a couple conclusions here. First, it's our responsibility to be one hundred percent transparent with our research projects, our technological developments, and our culture in order to effectively sell the brand globally. The benefit of this is saturating underserved markets, instilling love - not respect or envy - of the institutional brand into the genius kid with an OLPC in Ghana, who will remember that relationship and then want to become part of the brand in the future.
Second, to bring this back around to something vaguely related to the project at hand - we should take every opportunity to make projects like this revolve around teaching and learning. Today's student isn't served as well in a lecture hall as she is by being part of a team whose product (even if it iterates in a year's time and looks nothing like the interface she worked on) is public and creating actual value; we could accomplish this by approaching our educational mission more like entrepreneurship than like content distribution.
Posted by dchase at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)
June 01, 2009
Communication and Community
Besides the obvious goal of, like, hanging up a bunch of digital signs, our goals in undertaking this project included avoiding duplicated work (imagine how much would be duplicated if even a hundred groups installed separate systems!) and providing an opportunity for the campus IT community to work together. I think we've been reasonably successful, with only a couple major departments denying to participate, that we're aware of; one said that they "didn't want digital signage," and another purchased a competing product.
If we have been successful, it's because we evangelized this project successfully. A lot of this started with an already-established collaborative IT projects group whose e-mail list we cannibalized.
We tried our best to get the word out to every IT leader on campus, including the medical campus, by holding a catered vendor fair, meeting with IT leadership groups, creating e-mail lists, and pounding the pavement. I've probably given the Digital Signage dog-and-pony show at least twenty times.
Posted by dchase at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2009
Is this thing on?
Hi. I've been away having a baby.
Here's a brief update that I already scribbled to the campus interest group, so rather than recapping, I'll just CTRL-V.
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All,
I'm pleased to share a couple of exciting pieces of news about the signage project today.
First, we have officially secured funding to site-license the Four Winds software for the Ann Arbor campus. This means that any unit wishing to do so may install as many instances of the Content Manager software and the Content Player software as they wish, deploying as many signs and interactive devices as they wish, with no software cost. The pilot has produced an interactive wayfinding application that (after it's fully tested) will be available to everyone, and we will also be providing six U-M branded "static signage" templates that are ready for you to leverage to display events calendars pulled from EMS or Exchange 2007, PowerPoint presentations, video content, images, and any XML-formatted content.
Second, for those of you testing and evaluating the software, a new version of both the Player and Content Manager applications are available today. There are many enhancements, and another upgrade is coming shortly. Contact me for the download URLs if you wish to upgrade your installations.
Now, with all of this in mind, the pilot is not yet complete, and we're just starting to work out how to migrate the administration of this system out of the School of Dentistry and into hands that are better equipped to run the project sustainably. For now, I'll remain the point of contact, and I'll gladly answer your questions, but I am unable to support your deployments. For now, please just send a note indicating your desire to get started and we'll be in contact with you when the appropriate ducks have been placed in the appropriate rows.
We'll be providing the following to units and facilities that want to implement digital signs and directory/wayfinding devices:
- An interactive application with directory lookup and wayfinding capability (you'll have to integrate your own building maps)
- Six static signage templates with different content layouts, ready for you to place your content
- A design and style guide
- A flowchart and documentation on how to navigate U protocols around code compliance, including BFS, ADA, and other regulations
- A document outlining our lessons learned and practices for effective signage and wayfinding deployments
- Recommendations for specifications and sources for your signage hardware, including displays, mounts, PCs, touchpanels, and kiosks
Again, please send us a note indicating your intent to participate and I'll keep you informed as we move forward.
I'm attaching a couple screenshots and documents for your review. Reply with any questions!
All the best,
Doug Chase
Dentistry
Project Lead, Digital Signage and Wayfinding Pilot
Posted by dchase at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2009
Security
When starting any IT project, one of the first topics of discussion - and the one that gets the most traction with management - is security. Any old boring server is a target, but shiny networked public displays, intentionally placed in the highest-traffic areas on campus, are up there among the most attractive possible targets.
From the very beginning we've tried to ensure that the "attack surface" of this system remained as small as possible. I even feel a little conflicted writing about it, in fact, as though I'm suspicious of you who might be reading this. There were some guys I knew in college that would have stayed up late poking at a system like this. Not that any Michigan CS students are that way - not that it'd only be accessible to Michigan CS students. Hence my ambivalence about writing this.
To stay secure you have to assume the worst, that some "entrepreneur" in some remote country is going to try to display his Viagra spam on your digital signs, and that someone in the residence halls thinks the signage network would be a great way to get the word out about their ex.
The University employs a great group of professionals whose job it is to think about this problem all day long, so we consulted with them first. They gave us a 42-page spreadsheet of things to check to make sure our player computers were secure, and conducted a battery of tests that poked and prodded our server. But the closer we get to a big deployment of these devices, the more nervous we got - every device you put in the field is another potential battlefield.
It's tempting to cut corners and do dumb things to save time, but keeping in mind the potential nuclear disaster you're avoiding helps ease the pain of doing repetitive work that you hope won't ever become necessary. No shared accounts, permissions that are as granular as possible, turn off every service and device you're not using.
Posted by dchase at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2009
"Shovel-Ready"
We were pretty shocked when we started getting estimates for installing these devices. I'm not blaming Plant Operations (the group that does such work on campus) - if it's anyone's fault for not being prepared for these numbers, it's our own. It's expensive to hang up 95-pound steel enclosures with commercial touch panel monitors in them, it's expensive to run cable, and it's expensive to make sure everything complies with fire code and the Americans with Disabilities Act. One thing that we had to consider was that these devices need to have "cabinets" built under them if they stick out from the wall more than 4" - so that visually-impaired guests can detect them with their canes as they navigate our hallways.
Running cable is more expensive than you think, too. Now, a lot of people already have experience with this kind of thing, but if you'd asked me before we started, "how much would it cost to install these per sign," I probably would not have answered "over $5,000."
This number isn't entirely realistic, but it is a real example of the upper boundary of proposed costs we encountered. We've managed to whittle these costs down, but my point in posting this is to warn you to get your estimates for construction early and often!
Posted by dchase at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2009
De-Sign: Non-designery Project Manager Perspectives
This is the first in a series of posts about how we designed the user experience and aesthetic elements of the signs. We're not entirely finished with the UX part - we have the look and feel nailed down, and we have an interaction map, and we know what functionality is supposed to be there. As we progress, I'll share more about this.
This post is mine, about the process from the project manager's perspective.
I'm trying to talk Laura Rodrian into writing one too - she's the very talented designer who we've been working with on the UX and static signage designs.
Before I go further on this topic, let me share the designs with you as they stand today. There is a wealth of literature about user experience design. It's an industry and a subculture. I have been shocked to find out how deep the theory behind this stuff goes, and I find myself getting very interested in it - it's a big part of our lives and will only become bigger. As touch-enabled devices become more ubiquitous (watch these (second one especially)!), we are going to feel acutely the impact that BAD user interaction design has on us.
You've been there. "Where the hell is the save button," "why do I have to click so many times to print this," or "why does this icon look like a hot dog when it means 'File?'"
It was imperative that we get this right. Luckily, we have an amazing Human-Computer Interaction program at U-M, where the most talented User Experience designers in the world are trained. Some of them happened to already work for a department that was participating in our pilot, and we took advantage of them. That is, we, uh, leveraged their skills.
Posted by dchase at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
Now what?
We drafted an agreement with Four Winds that allowed us to install unlimited players (signs) and unlimited "content manager" installations within the pilot units.
This is when the actual hard work started - we had to make decisions about details.
First, we had to talk about the actual stuff that would be displayed on the devices. Who wants an interactive application, and what should it look like? What functionality should be in there? Do we try to prescribe a "look and feel" for the entire network, or let each group develop their own? Some of this was laid out in broad strokes within the project definition, but actually settling on these details is a complicated thing.
We had to begin preparing our individual communities for this deployment, too. For the most part, people are happy to let you do a bunch of work on their behalf, as long as you keep the progress transparent and appear to be on track to provide a high-quality product. Besides all of the tangible functionality, these systems will serve as a public "user interface" to the University as a whole - so it becomes a marketing tool, too. The devices need to say "leaders and best" before you read a word or touch a button. Who's going to create all this content? Who's going to vet the content? How and when do we train these people?
Third, our facilities needed to be prepared. Running conduit and cable is expensive. Hanging 42" touchpanels that weigh 125 pounds isn't trivial. Security, both physical and electronic, needed to be addressed.
I'll explore each of these topics in detail in the next few posts. These are the issues that have occupied us for the past six months or so, as we prepared ourselves to actually deploy this system.
Today, I got word that we actually ordered the first batch of touchpanels and the displays, as well as the mounting hardware, for the departments that don't have to do additional construction in order to deploy the product. Until this point the project's mostly been theoretical. I can't wait to get this stuff in!
Posted by dchase at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2009
The Art of Thinking Independently Together
After the vendor fair, many departments contacted me, and a few who were especially interested or "shovel-ready" quickly formed a solid group of units that were prepared to seriously participate. In addition to Dentistry, the Graduate School, the School of Education, University Housing, Nursing, and the Health Center became a core group that started planning to conduct a pilot. Many other schools chose to wait in the wings and expressed that they were interested in participating later.
We collaborated on a Request for Proposal for a signage software solution and started to build a cohesive project definition as well as a project plan (see the "extended entry" below for the full text of these documents).
Also around this time, we decided to solicit the formal support of the University. After meeting with the Vice Provost, we felt as though we'd been given institutional blessing to proceed. (See the Project Definition, below the fold and below the RFP requirements, for more about what that means.)
By the end of May, we had narrowed the field to only a very few suppliers. It turned out, as a digital signage consultant told me, that "there are hundreds of solutions out there. About 50 of them are any good. About 3 of them would be good choices for you." The three finalist suppliers were invited to present on campus in June.
During this period, our collaboration with the Department of Public Safety and the Emergency Management working group became solidified. It became more and more clear that their participation would be instrumental in making this project happen.
After the on-site presentations, the choice became reasonably clear - by no means was there unanimity, but we were able to make a decision with minimal irritation. By the end of July, we had awarded the contract to Four Winds Interactive.
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Thanks for visiting and check back often. (There's a "Syndicate this site" link around here somewhere, too.)
Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.
Continue reading "The Art of Thinking Independently Together"
Posted by dchase at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2009
Coalition-building
8/13/2007:
"Lynn, I want to feel around campus to see if any parallel departments are interested in collaborating on the digital signage stuff. It could bring costs way down and make management easier in the future if we expanded this across campus, even just to a couple departments."
Our first step was to get the impressions of the "IT Commons Shared Capabilities Group," a regularly-convened group of campus IT leaders who seed this kind of collaborative action. Between this meeting and a few others, as well as some informal chats with our peers, we found that a lot of groups were at least thinking about these products; many were doing research and a few already had something deployed.
It wouldn't be practical to do this across the entire campus at once, clearly. We decided we'd try to create an agile team of facilities that would work together on a pilot, selecting and deploying a signage solution that could later scale to the rest of the University. If nobody else had to go through requests for information, contract negotiations, server installation, etc., we'd be saving tons of work and lots of money.
Lynn Johnson suggested a way to get the word out, to coalesce the pilot group, and to get an idea of what the best product might look like in the meantime: we'd hold a "trade show"-style event and invite everyone on campus that might even be peripherally interested in working on this.
In early 2008, we asked ten suppliers to visit our campus, and brought together over a hundred IT pros and facilities managers.
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Comments and conversation are encouraged!
Thanks for visiting and check back often. (There's a "Syndicate this site" link around here somewhere, too.)
Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.
Posted by dchase at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2009
Getting Started: Summer 2007
It didn't take much Googling to realize that there was a large and growing group of companies building signage solutions - some with proprietary hardware, some that promised interactivity, some that looked great, some that looked terrible, some that didn't bother spell-checking, and some that didn't even have any images on their websites. In July, we decided to submit a Request for Information to as many suppliers as we could quickly collect addresses for. We wound up sending the following to about 40 companies.
The University of Michigan School of Dentistry seeks a comprehensive, robust, scalable, and state-of-the-art Digital Signage solution for rapid deployment to seven locations within the School, and for possible future deployment to additional locations. This communication is an informal request for information regarding your concern’s solution for such. You were selected via Internet search to participate in this request. The replies will be assessed and a Request for Proposal will be prepared. By replying to this request, you express interest in being considered as a bidder for this contract. Replying or failing to reply to this communication will not affect the final bid process.The timeline for your reply to this request is short. We require that the information requested below be provided by 12:00 noon EST on Thursday, July 12, 2007.
I. Required functionality.
Please provide a detailed description of how your solution will fulfill these requirements:It must be possible to utilize Internet- and Intranet-based RSS content.
The capability to provide different content to different displays is required.
Multimedia content of various formats (please provide a list of available formats) must be available.
The ability to divide the display into “panes” in order to simultaneously display diverse content is required. II. Additionally, please provide the following in your reply:
A detailed end-to-end description of the content delivery system.
Any available diagrams, white papers, case studies, and multimedia demonstrations.
Because of the nature of this deployment, it is impractical to run additional cable to each display. We do, however, have LAN-connected wireless access points at each location. Please provide a detailed description of a method in which to stream your solution’s signage content over the LAN and transmit it to the display locations wirelessly. III. Provide any additional information that may assist the School in selecting a Digital Signage solution, including functionality and advantages not explicitly mentioned in this Request, and suggestions regarding ways in which your solution could be used in research, graduate and postgraduate educational environments.
IV. If possible, provide a proposal for an on-site and/or Web-based demonstration of your solution.
It's pretty naïve, in retrospect. Doesn't even mention interactivity and wayfinding, which would later become centerpieces of the project. And at this point, we were just beginning to consider working with other campus facilities. In August, we started talking within Dental Informatics about presenting our thoughts about the benefits of interoperable, campus-wide digital signage to the campus IT community. We envisioned the two possible paths that signage solutions might take at the University:
1. Every department separately researches and buys a signage solution.
If we assume for the sake of argument that half of the facilities in Ann Arbor want digital signs, and that half of those wind up purchasing different products, that's over 100 installed signage systems on the Ann Arbor campus alone.
100 groups separately installing and configuring servers, separately researching what the best solution might be, separately learning separate software packages, separately deploying player PCs with different configurations. 100 siloed installations, with 100 separate sets of content that can't be shared, and 100 separate interfaces for Public Safety to implement for emergency messaging.
This prospect is pretty terrifying, especially from an IT pro's point of view.
But surely everyone doesn't need the same functionality!
This is probably the most compelling argument against collaborating on this project, so it was our job to find a solution flexible enough to fit as many sets of desires as possible. We had to keep in mind that everyone's needs are different.
2. Get a single (or very small number of) solution(s) for deployment across the entire campus.
This sounds kind of crazy too, at first, especially in a strongly decentralized environment, where every school and college has its own IT staff, and its own editorial board, and its own administration, who all have opinions about what "digital signs" are and should be. But in the interest of providing the greatest benefit to the community in the long run, it was well worth it to at least shoot for this type of outcome.
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Comments and conversation are encouraged!
Thanks for visiting and check back often. (There's a "syndicate this site" link around here somewhere, too.)
Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.
Posted by dchase at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2009
"80% of Success Is Showing Up"
On June 6, 2007, we started out saying, "let's replace these beastly 30-year-old TVs." Now we're busy trying to implement interactive digital signage and wayfinding uniformly across the entire University, including all three campuses.
I think they call it "scope creep."
It was irresistible, though, once we'd developed a sense of what the potential outcomes might be if we resisted working together. In the next few posts, I'll summarize what's been done since that first e-mail was sent. We'll also talk more generally about interdisciplinary collaboration and its benefits. Eventually, I'll catch up to the present day and keep you updated with the project as we roll it out.
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Comments and conversation are encouraged!
Thanks for visiting and check back often. (There's a "syndicate this site" link around here somewhere, too.)
Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.
Posted by dchase at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2009
What's "Digital Signage" and Why Are You Writing About It?
When we started this project, we thought "digital signage" was equivalent to "PowerPoint presentations on TVs in lobbies." It turns out that there are hundreds of commercial solutions out there, from warmed-over PowerPoint to ultra-shiny and sophisticated interactive signage applications.
If you're interested, start by reading the Wikipedia article on Digital Signage. It's pretty good, although it concentrates mostly on retail and commercial applications for the technology, and doesn't answer a lot of the questions that come up when talking about signage for higher education. For example, it doesn't include anything about wayfinding, or about emergency messaging. I guess I should fix it. For now, though, I'm just going to expand on it here.
"Static Signage"
This is what you've seen around, like at the grocery store or at the mall - a monitor, divided into "regions," with different kinds of stuff in each region (announcements, advertisements, the weather, a stock ticker, or event calendars).
Interactive Wayfinding
Some signage solutions allow you or the supplier to design and build interactive applications - much like a simple Web application. These could be built to do just about anything a Web app can do, but most of these are designed to let you look things up in a directory and show you maps.
One of the main problems we encounter in our public spaces is that we have guests, new students, patients, visitors, and conference attendees, and these people have never been here before, and they get lost. "Analog" signs work sometimes. What if we had a network of touch-enabled screens on campus where people could look up what they wanted and be guided there?
Emergency Messaging
Recent tragedies on university campuses make the need for emergency messaging clear, and there's always the potential for natural disasters about which the community needs to be notified. Having multiple vectors to distribute emergency messages is a necessity. We can use e-mail or SMS messages, but the SMS protocol is less than reliable, and people in public spaces aren't all checking their e-mail. Digital signs prove to be a very effective way of disseminating this kind of information in the event of an emergency.
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It's important to us to be able to share the lessons we've learned in the last year and a half, because there are a lot of them, and we want to help other campus communities make the right decisions. We've been really happy to receive communication from a bunch of other institutions already. Get in touch!
Administrivia: this blog will be displayed in forward-chronological order until I'm done with the history part, and then I'll flip it when it becomes more of a traditional blog kind of a thing.
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Comments and conversation are encouraged!
Thanks for visiting and check back often. (There's a "syndicate this site" link around here somewhere, too.)
Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.
Posted by dchase at 08:09 PM | Comments (1)
