I currently work at a very small company, less then 20.  But compared to the other stories I’ve heard lately from interaction designers like myself, our company gets surprisingly consistent results from our developers in regards to design.  Following are 12 lessons I’ve learned that have helped me get better results from our in-house developers.

1. Be a developer

I can’t stress this one enough.  Development isn’t something that can be appreciated, it has to be experienced.  HTML and JavaScript don’t cut it, you have to go out and actually do what your programmers do.  Write SQL statements, create classes, build an application.  When you can follow along and contribute intelligently to all the technology discussions, developers will start to trust you that you understand them and what they have to deal with.  And most importantly you can help them find solutions they may not see yet.

2. Get in bed with the business people

At the end of the day the business people run the company and they control what the developers do.  At my company I spend a great deal of time with our project manager, VP and CEO.  I try to develop personal relationships with them.  I make it obvious that my goal in life is to help them articulate what they want to the development team.  Then when I present something to the development team, it’s not my idea, it’s what the boss wants.  And in the end the developers are actually happy you managed all that back and forth discussions with the business guys so they don’t have to.

3. Ease their pain

Most developers just want to develop.  They don’t want to worry about requirements gathering, deadlines, art, research, politics and all the stuff that goes into running a project and a company.  So the more you take responsibility for all these things they don’t want to do, the more they will work with you and with what you ask them to do.  When they need something from you, do it fast and with a smile.  The more enjoyable you make their lives the more responsive they are going to be when you ask them to do things.

4. Force business to iterate in design, not in development

There’s nothing a developer hates more then spending months on something that once the business guys see it they realize they want to do something else.  I won’t hand anything off to the developers until I have thought it through and iterated through it with the business guys as much as humanly possible.  There are many decisions that can be made off of drawings rather than programming it.  And business will quickly realize that getting the designers to change their designs is a thousand times cheaper than paying expensive developers.

5. No one gives a rip what the artist thinks

Even though you were hired as the design expert you still have to earn everyone’s trust.  Too many business people and developers have had bad experiences with artists who think they know everything or who are overly emotional.  You typically have a steep hill to climb to affect things as much as you need to.  Design in a business is all about being the facilitator and assimilator, not the dictator.  Collaboration is the only way to get design done in business.  If the developer wants to design, let them!  Just be there to guide them rationally and fill in the gaps when they have to go back to developing.  If you need an artistic outlet, do it at home, or you’ll always be bitter.

6. You get to control those lovely details

Once you’ve checked your ego at the door, something amazing starts to happen.  The funny truth is most business guys and most developers don’t want to think about the details, so you get to!  Usually people on the team only end up really caring about particular features, no one wants to take all that time to think through the rest.  So as long as their desires are represented or addressed, you get to fill in the rest with what you know is best.

7. Write it down, write it down, write it down

The beautiful thing about writing is that it’s the universal standard for communication.  Yes a picture is worth a thousand words, but you cannot draw interactions as well as you can write them.  My documentation is a mix of what we call “scripts” with supporting graphics at key points.  My friend is an html guru at a large company and his biggest complaint is that he gets handed a large Photoshop file with no documentation or annotations that are difficult to understand as a whole.  Writing can be difficult for designers, but it is incredibly effective at communicating the interaction to the rest of the team.

8. Get in bed with the QA team

The QA team is the group of people whose job it is to tell the developers they did it wrong, they are your design enforcers.  The better they understand what you wanted from the developers the better they are going to be at helping keep the developers on design.  It’s critical QA has the right kind of documentation to do their job, and you want to be in charge of that documentation.  The cool little secret about QA is that they like checklists.  I write my documents so that they are essentially checklists that the QA team can easily translate into test cases.

9. You have to have a middle man

In my experience developers do not like to do HTML.  There is a rare breed of developers in the web world called web designers who like to do this kind of GUI development.  But on the whole, GUI is too much of a mental stretch for developers who live in the abstract inner workings of business logic.  As much as developers may think HTML is easy or even beneath them, HTML takes just as much concentration as does any other kind of development.  In my experience the very best scenario is to hire a GUI developer to be the middle man between the designer and the developer.  A GUI developer is someone who cares about the visual details, but they can also code.  If you don’t get this guy you’ll always be fighting a losing battle with developers because they don’t want to do HTML.  They’ll end up butchering the designs simply because their interest is in business logic and such.

10. Proximity breeds understanding

There is a direct correlation to your physical distance from the developers and how effective you will be with them.  Currently I sit right next to my developers.  I hear everything they say, I’m accessible, we go to lunch, and I know what they are doing and saying.  If you hide in an office or work off site, you’ll have to spend a lot more time forcing collaboration to occur.

This one should be obvious, but there’s a basic rule that the more time you spend with someone the better you are going to be able to interact with them.  Be friends with the developers, kick their ass in Team Fortress, go to lunch, carpool, whatever it takes.  Get in their face and take as much time to figure them out as you do figuring out your customers.  Have you spent enough time with Derron to understand why he is such a grumpy loveable prick?

11. Learn to articulate well

This is where studying design comes into play.  Design is difficult to communicate verbally, it’s naturally an intuition and a feeling thing.  But the reality is no one is just going to trust your feelings without good logic behind it.  So you have to learn to verbally articulate your feelings.  The good news is there is actually logic and reason to art, but the bad news is it’s one of the most complicated things on the planet.  It’s complicated simply because of the fact that it’s based on the brain, which we understand very little about.  Computers on the other hand we understand very deeply.  Learning to verbally articulate design takes time, you have to take time to study it.  Study how other designers talk, learn patterns and read design literature like a mad man. Over time you’ll start to surprise yourself how well you can explain why you made the design decisions you did.

12. Good design is always hard to program

I finally realized this after being a developer and then a designer.  Your job as a designer is to get the computer to act more human and to be more understanding of human communication.  A developer’s job is to make a computer more like a computer, logical and efficient.  I came to the conclusion that there will always be a conflict between a designer and a developer because designers speak human and developers speak computer.  Your job is to make the computer do things it was not built to do.

Image: Yourdon

Professor of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Ezio Manzini, took time away from airline food, flatbed seats and a view out the window of the Himalayas to talk to us about designing for social innovation and his work with the DESIS network.

Ezio Manzini

SB: Can you tell me a little about the DESIS network and the work you do there?

EM: DESIS is a network of schools (design and others), institutions, companies, and non-profit organizations interested in promoting and supporting design for social innovation and sustainability. It’s a light, non-profit organization, conceived as a network of partners collaborating in a peer-to-peer spirit.

More precisely, DESIS supports social innovation using design skills to:

• give promising cases more visibility;
• make them more effective;
• facilitate their replicability;
• help companies and institutions to understand the promising cases potentialities in terms of enabling services, products and business ideas.

At the same time, DESIS reinforces the design community’s role in the social innovation processes both within our community (developing dedicated design knowledge) and outside it (redefining the perceived design role and capabilities).

SB: What is social innovation? How does it differ from other types of innovation and garage invention that have been the norm for hundreds of years – the two guys in a workshop or the college room-mates with an idea?

EM: Social innovation is a process of change where new ideas emerge from a variety of actors directly involved in the problem to be solved: final users, grass roots technicians and entrepreneurs, local institutions and civil society organizations. The main way in which it differs from traditional “garage” innovation is that here the “inventors” are groups of people (the “creative communities”) and the results are forms of organization (the “collaborative services”).

Some well known examples of social innovation include:

• zero-mile food networks, where not only a new way of eating but also a new relationship between production and consumption and between the city and the countryside are established.
• co-housing initiatives, where groups of families decide to share some services to reduce the economic and environmental costs, but also to re-create a neighborhood
• collaborative services where elderly people organize themselves to exchange mutual help

Looking attentively to the complexity of the contemporary society shows many cases of these worldwide (for more, see the Sustainable Everyday project). While the stories are diverse, they have one clear (and expected) common denominator: they resulted from the initiatives of people who collaboratively invented new ways of living and producing and who have been able to enhance them, solving specific problems and, at the same time, making concrete steps towards sustainability happen.

Car Sharing in Milan - one of the Sustainable Everyday examples

That said, it must be emphasized that social innovation has always existed. But now there are good reasons to say that its role is expanding and will continue to do so in the next future. In fact, previous experiences show that social innovation flourishes when two contemporary conditions are given: when society is facing difficult problems and when some new technologies, having spread in it, open new and (partly) still unexplored possibilities. No need to be said that both these conditions exist and are particularly relevant today.

Previous experiences show that social innovation flourishes when two contemporary conditions are given: when society is facing difficult problems and when some new technologies, having spread in it, open new and (partly) still unexplored possibilities. No need to be said that both these conditions exist and are particularly relevant today.

SB: You talk of ‘diffuse creativity and entrepreneurship’ – can you tell me a little more about these concepts?

EM: Let me start from the phenomenological consideration we did before: in the complexity of the contemporary society it is possible to recognize promising cases of social innovation. These cases can be found in a variety of fields and have usually been conceived and implemented by the actors involved, moving from their direct knowledge of the problems and their own personal capabilities (namely their creativity and entrepreneurship).

These people have been able to recombine existing entities (technologies, organizations, both traditional and new existing ideas) to give them a new use and meaning (that is exactly what, in one of its best definition, creativity is). At the same time, they have shown an incredible skill and sensitivity in term of entrepreneurship, as every one of the new solutions they invented had to be imagined, realized, and managed in the real world and in economic terms.

The economy to be considered here is a complex and sophisticated one: a social economy emerging from the combination of different economies; the market one, of course, when marketed products and services are needed; but also the economy of time and attention of the involved actors, when their active participation is required; and sometimes also the economy of the gift, when some voluntary activity is included too. I think that is more than enough to say that whoever succeeds in imagining, realizing and managing this kind of organizations is a real champion in terms of creativity and entrepreneurship!

SB: What does a favorable environment for social innovation look like? Are there some key characteristics we should look for, or design for?

EM: Given its spontaneous nature, social innovation cannot be planned. Nevertheless, the invention and implementation of new ways of living and producing are more likely when creativity and design thinking are diffused and, most importantly, where local institutions have a collaborative and tolerant attitude (this is what, in my view, can be defined as a favourable environment). In parallel to this, they become more robust and spread when they are empowered by specific sets of products, services, and communications that can support them and make their realisation easier (that is, when appropriate enabling solutions had been developed).

I like to add that, in our experience, the most successful cases (i.e. the one who lasted in time and spread) have been the results of a positive interplay between creative people, proactive local institutions, and sensitive entrepreneurs:

• creative people who imagine (and actively participate to) new proposals;
• proactive local institutions who understand the social value of these new proposals, tolerate them even when, as it frequently happens, operate at the margins (or even beyond) some existing laws – but it has to be said that creativity, by definition, has to break something in the existing order!) and develop innovative governance tools that permit to support the new initiatives;
• sensitive entrepreneurs, who recognize in the emerging social innovations new explicit or latent demands, and therefore, new business opportunities.

SB: As interaction designers, what can we be doing, today, to help foster this type of innovation?

EM: Designers can use their specific knowledge to empower the social innovation processes: bringing new ideas, orienting the resulting initiatives and conceiving a new generation of enabling solutions. In this larger framework we can discuss, in particular, what interaction designer can do. Of course, this discussion is open.

In my view, speaking in very general terms, interaction designers can play a fundamental role in social innovation. The core of interaction design is of course the way in which people interact (with products and/or with other people). At the same time, the core of the new social innovation initiatives are service-oriented solutions where, similarly, the core of the overall systems are the interactions (their qualities and their effectiveness). If this premise is true, it therefore appears that the social innovation could be a “core business” for interaction designers and that a whole set of lines or research on how to improve it will appear.

Interaction designers can play a fundamental role in social innovation. The core of interaction design is the way in which people interact (with products and/or with other people). At the same time, the core of the new social innovation initiatives are service-oriented solutions where, also in this case, the core of the overall systems are the interactions: their qualities and their effectiveness. If this premise is true, it therefore appears that the social innovation could be a “core business” for interaction designers.

Moving to a more concrete discussion of the same topic, I can introduce here some considerations, which have emerged from research we are doing at the DIS-Politecnico di Milano. The topic of our research is what designers can do to conceive and develop digital services to catalyze people (in the digital sphere) and support them in some collaborative initiatives (in the physical sphere). This possibility appears very concrete and, at the same time, highly promising in social and environmental terms.

What we’ve found and focalized so far is a variety of digital service typologies aiming to support the existence and the consolidation of collaborative organization in different ways. They are:

• Creating new producer/consumer network;
• Mapping diffused information;
• Aggregating social action;
• Creating social network for conviviality;
• Building mutual support circles;
• Exchanging competences, time and products;
• Sharing products, places and knowledge.

In each one of these typologies we can already recognize several interesting cases: from new networks of farmers and urban consumers, to maps of localize sustainable initiatives; from initiatives aggregating collective power (in order to achieve some social goals), to organization aiming to promote social conviviality; from mutual support circles of people suffering of the same diseases (as diabetes, allergies, obesity, etc), to platforms to exchange competences or to share products. The list goes on.

I would say in conclusion that if ‘correctly designed’, digital services and platforms really can support social innovation, and thereby improve social fabric and promote more sustainable ways of living and producing. Of course, to design them ‘correctly’ is what interaction designers should do. And what, in my view, they all have the potential to do.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Ezio Manzini in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

I’m probably not the only one who likes the feedback from tangible shapes over digital ones, they give me a lot of valuable feedback. Today, I’d like to introduce two concepts that represent useful values with their own shapes.

Pie Chart Coins

I don’t like to own credit cards. The thickness of a wallet and the number of bills and coins in it can tell me how much I own, while the thickness of a credit card won’t. I’m a compulsive shopper and I know what will happen if I have a credit card with me… So it’s really important for me to be able to know my current financial status.

I happened to take a trip to Singapore the other day. As is often the case with me when going to a country I’ve never visited, it takes some time to get used to the coins used there. But I have a possible solution: the pie chart.

“We all know about the pie chart. The circle represents the whole, and the size of wedge represents a percentage of that whole. Together, those represented values, add up to 100 percent. Use this only if you’re comparing a few value..” – FlowingData

In my concept, the percentage of the value of the coin is represented as a pie-chart shape (e.g. 25% of 1 dollar is 25 cents). There are at least two great benefits I can think of. One is for travelers and other people who are not accustomed to the currency. They can easily get used to the value of them. The second is for kids. They can learn both percentage and currency at the same time.

Hungry USB Memory Stick

I like to think of funny USB memory sticks and have designed many. This is one of them: a USB memory stick that looks hungry when there’s no data in it. When the memory is full, it also looks full with the inflated belly. Thinking of the proximity of the usb ports, the size of the figure must be reconsidered, but I think it’s able to tell the necessary value with its shape in a funny way.

The days are getting shorter, the nights longer. The end of the year is approaching, but first we are going to have the best party ever: Christmas. Every year you had the same problem: what to ask Santa? Well, that’s over. Because we put together a list of 10 things that each UX geek wants to ask for Christmas.

Mental Notes

http://getmentalnotes.com/ – cost: $33.00

One of our Johnny rock stars, Stephen Anderson, came up with reference cards called Mental Notes. As he writes on his site “In the midst of a busy project it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great products. Mental Notes brings together 50 insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool.” Each card is a short, but directly applicable insight.

Notepod

http://notepod.net/ – cost: 3 for $17.95

Did you also attempt to design iPhone apps several times, only to find out that the stuff would never fit on a screen? That frustration is gone forever with Notepads. These are sketchbloks with the exact same dimensions as an iPhone. Isn’t it brilliant?

IdeaPaint

http://www.ideapaint.com/ – cost: $15.00

You can never have enough brainstorm space. And that’s a fact. IdeaPaint can help you get that extra space. It will turn a wall into a huge whiteboard, making it possible for you to scribble your ideas everywhere.

Pulse Smartpen

http://www.livescribe.com/ – cost: $169.95

Every time I go to a conference I write down all those brilliant quotes and ideas the speakers share with me. I even get enough energy to think I will use the text I wrote over and over again… but as soon as I am home reality kicks in and I have to go on with my life, not giving myself the time to digitize my new insights. With the Pulse Smartpen that could be history. This pen writes like any ordinary pen, but at the same time stores everything you wrote digitally. After the conference you can directly read your notes on the screen.

Flip Mino HD

http://www.theflip.com/ – cost: $199.99

As a real UX geek your daily life consists of observing people. How they behave, move, talk, respond… you want to know it all. And if you could record these moments you’d be able to show these user insights to your team. With the Flip Mino HD this is possible, in an extremely small package.

GUI Magnets

http://www.guimagnets.com/ – cost: $19.99

Tired of always drawing those dropdowns and buttons? With GUI Magnets you’ll be able to create prototypes on a whiteboard within seconds, and they’ll even look good. (Also very handy when you are brainstorming in the kitchen.)

Field Notes

http://fieldnotesbrand.com/ – cost: 3-pack $9.95

I always carry a small sketch book with me, ready to be dirtied with my ideas. Over time I tried big books, small, hard cover, soft cover, loads of pages, almost no pages, etc. In the end I came to the conclusion that small books like Field Notes are the best. You can take them everywhere, everytime. And they make me feel like an explorer.

TweetBottle

http://tweetbottle.com/ – cost: $24.95

With TweetBottle‘s you have a very hip waterbottle, and you are saving Earth by doing so.

Quote/Unquote bookends

http://aplusrstore.com/ – cost:

Each UX geek must have a huge collection of UX books, especially considering the great amount of books that came out this year. With the Quote/Unquote bookends you’ll be able to show your collection in style.

Sharpie markers

http://www.sharpie.com/ – cost: $2

What do I need to say about Sharpies? These aren’t pens… they are our magic wand. Without them we would be unable to draw our brilliant interactions. So make sure you get loads of these, mainly because they constantly get stolen by jealous colleagues.

Top image by: stephend9

Nathan Shedroff is a leading author in experience design and the increasing value of design. His book subjects have included experience design (the 2001 experience-in-itself-book Experience Design 1), design thinking  (Making Meaning, 2006) and sustainable design (Design is the Problem, 2009). He is currently the head of the Design MBA Strategy at the California Institute of Arts (CCA).

Shedroff spoke to me about the difference between businesspeople and designers, his upcoming foray into sci-fi, and what designers wanting to get involved in sustainability can do.

VT:You’ve had an interesting history, starting in automotive design. How did you get interested in user experience?

Nathan Shedroff

I think that user experience was always an interest of mine but back in the 80s it wasn’t framed as a common or even legitimate part of the design discussion. I remember proposing a project in my Ergonomics course at ArtCenter to evaluate the organisation and functionality of car engine compartments and my instructor couldn’t see how it related to ergonomics. I certainly didn’t know enough to frame the investigation as “user experience” and that my users were mechanics back then, but the driving and owning experience was a large part of what interested me about cars.

From there, I moved into information design in a publishing context [TheUnderstandingBusiness and the award winning Vivid Studios]. That was clearly all about user understanding and experience, even if the medium was more narrow – in some ways -than what ultimately is available today in electronic media.

Your first book ‘Experience Design’ was published in 2001. What’s changed in the field since then?

Experience Design (2001)

Mostly, what’s changed is that “user experience” and “customer experience” is now, nearly universally, considered an important, legitimate part of an organisation’s offering – even by those that only pay this lip-service. This doesn’t mean that they practice it or do so well, but it’s recognised by nearly every consumer organization and many B2B companies as well. Similarly, even many of those vocal pundits back in 2001 who complained about the term “experience design” and how vague it was are full-fledged proponents of it, using that very term to differentiate their consulting.

What hasn’t changed is what experience design has always been about and its dimensions and elements. While I’ve added text to the updated book, Experience Design 1.1, the same topics are just as relevant today and will be just as relevant in 100 years as these are universals about human experience. For sure, many of the online or digital examples are gone so I’ve kept some and replaced others, but the teachings about why these elements are important, and what designers need to think about when building experiences will probably never change.

Excerpt from Experience Design 1.0 - IDEO Kiss Communicator

Making Meaning took a far more business-minded (or ‘design thinking’) approach. What was different talking to business rather than design?

Making Meaning

Business people have their own language and focus more on certain management issues. In addition, the vast majority of those who go into “business” are more comfortable with certain processes and modes of thinking. Many rely on consistency and structure to manage processes in predictable ways. They want regularity and to eliminate deviations. Many designers specifically go into the design field because they don’t like these conditions. They like serendipity, challenge, and novelty. They hate it when everything is the same, day in and day out.

Both are required processes, of course. Roger Martin speaks eloquently about the need for both in his books. However, practitioners of both approaches believe, in their own little worlds, that theirs is not only the superior way to build and manage businesses but often the only valid way. This is a fallacy and often the seed of eventual destruction – of offering, of market share, and of culture.

Making Meaning was, by all means, a business book. It began as a business case for experience design. Steve Diller and I had outlined the dimensions and elements of experiences and we kept banging into “meaning.” We knew it was important but we didn’t know how to model or describe it. After some investigation, it was Steve who proposed a model for how meaning worked in experience and it was at that point that we realized that this was not only the most important and strategic aspect of experience, but that it had incredible potential for businesses. So, we turned the book inside out, around meaning, and rewrote the book around meaningful experiences and the processes and steps organizations could use to make them.

we realized that [the concept of meaning] was not only the most important and strategic aspect of experience, but that it had incredible potential for businesses.

The language of the book is more geared to businesspeople and managers but the meaning and experience models are just as appropriate for designers and the language shouldn’t preclude anyone from understanding it. Unfortunately, none of the diagrams for this made it into the book so I’ve made them available on my site in my various slide presentations on the subject. I think these are much easier for designers, and some businesspeople, to understand.

Diagrams from 'Creating Meaningful Experiences'

Your most recent book ‘Design is the Problem’ is a guidebook for designers to use their skills in the field of sustainability. How did you get involved in sustainable design?

Design is the Problem

I earned my MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School in 2006 and Design is the Problem is essentially what I learned about sustainability through that journey from a design perspective. It was clear to me in 2004 that not only was “business” the future of “design” (in the sense that designers needed to understand business issues, processes, and language if they were to have the influence they thought they should), but that “sustainable business” was the future of “business.” So, when a friend suggested that I join her at Presidio, I decided to drink my own Kool-Aid(™) and explore this double-jump into the future.

I very much value my degree but I don’t think it’s realistic to think that every designer is going to take two years to learn about sustainability and business. Yet, it’s critical information that every designer needs to understand. My book is an attempt to get designers up-to-speed quickly, in one book, without sacrificing the principles behind a real understanding of sustainability. The resource list, in the back of the book, helps them move further in whatever direction that is interesting to them, after having gotten a good foundation in the intersection of design and sustainability.

One of your main points in Design is the Problem is the importance of a systems approach to design – something that many designers don’t find particularly interesting. How have designers responded to the book and frameworks?

Very positively. In fact, the only negatives I’ve heard are reactions to the title by designers who haven’t yet read the book. Mostly, I’ve heard a lot of relief and gratitude for laying-out an approach for understanding the principles, frameworks, tools, and design strategies for sustainability. I’ve since started calling this set of concepts, the “sustainable innovation model” and I think it can help anyone quickly come up-to-speed on the domain. It’s probably not complete but I think that all of the basics are there, especially in terms of systems thinking, and there’s a lot in the strategies that designers, engineers, and managers can put into practice immediately. It’s not meant to be the only book you’ll ever have to read on the subject but, instead, the first book that can orient you to the complexities without overwhelming you.

[Design is the Problem is] not meant to be the only book you’ll ever have to read on the subject but, instead, the first book that can orient you to the complexities without overwhelming you.

Sustainability Helix from Design is the Problem

Your books have ranged from storytelling to life cycle analysis. Is there an overall theme to the areas you write about, or do you see it as how design is developing?

I think it’s more about how my interests intersect where design is going. I’ve been lucky to have hit on subjects that were important to me that also became important to design. I doubt that this will always be the case. However, it’s clear to me that business, design, and sustainability can no longer be approached or practiced separately and that one of the most powerful points at this intersection is meaning. My last four books have been right at that intersection.

My next book, Make It So, co-written with Chris Noessel, is about a completely different topic: what interaction designers can learn from science fiction interfaces. It’s a book I’ve wanted to write since 1989 and it’s so much fun to work on. I doubt it will be where “design is developing” in the same way that the last four have been but it will probably be more successful because, really, what designers don’t like science fiction (and even a little sex thrown in!)?

business, design, and sustainability can no longer be approached or practiced separately and that one of the most powerful points at this intersection is meaning.

What other projects are you working on now?

Along with books and speaking, my main focus for now is on CCA’s MBA in Design Strategy and Leading by Design Fellows programs – I’m still building an alumni network and career function to have ready by the time our first graduates finish in May of next year. I always have a few projects on the back burners that will get pulled to the front after that.

Having worked across so many fields, what would a dream project for you be?

I’d like to redesign the experience of television news – and television itself. I’d like to work on rethinking publishing as a model and industry. I’d also like to rethink how the government provides services to citizens. I think smartphones need a more useful front-end for communication (and if the iPhone’s APIs were more open, we could build it).
I also like big questions: What does a post-consumer world look like? We don’t yet know. We need to rethink consumerism, meaning and growth. These don’t have the same contexts anymore and they aren’t serving us in the ways they have in the past.

Can you tell us about what you’ll be talking about at Interaction 10?

I’ll focus more on what interaction designers can do with the principles of sustainability. Often, interaction designers look at the design strategies and think “this is all about physical products and material impact and my work doesn’t deal with these.” This is somewhat true but there are several ways that interaction designers can make a positive impact in their work with regards to greater sustainability, whether that’s ecological impacts, social and cultural impacts, or financial impacts. At the very least, I want people to leave my talk with a foundation that gives them some confidence – if not courage – to start exploring more and being able to start a conversation within their organisations and with their clients about these issues.

Finally, if our readers wanted to start incorporating sustainability into their own design companies and client work, what’s something they can do right away?

Design things that are truly useful, usable, and desirable.
Design things that are meaningful
Look at the systems involved before designing anything and think about providing value through services instead of only through objects.
Dematerialise products, services, packaging, transportation–everything that you can.
Learn and have fun doing this.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Nathan Shedroff in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Image Credits
Kiss Communicator picture taken from Experience Design Books
Making Meaning diagrams from ‘Creating Meaningful Experiences’ PDF // CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Sustainability Helix from Rosenfeld Media Flickr set // CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

User Centered Design is the methodology by which you design a holistic product while considering the needs of stakeholders and users. Agile Development is a programming methodology and philosophy intended to overcome the challenges of the waterfall development process and to deliver clean and functional code. How can these two methodologies come together?

Framework

In order to have this discussion, I would like to define a few terms as they will be referred to in this article. These are by no means absolute definitions, but in writing this article and soliciting feedback from practitioners I thought it prudent to define what I do (and don’t) mean by certain terms for the sake of the article.

• Agile Philosophy: the tactical, iterative and transparent perspective on a project engaging all stakeholders and members of a project team. The ultimate goal is a clean and functional product built through transparency and accountability;
• Agile Method: also referred to as scrum, the actual development process including all the hard deliverables including user stories, backlog, burndown charts and all the other tangible by products of an agile team;
• User Centered Design, The iterative strategy where design and research practitioners involve stakeholders and users to gain a cohesive view of a project and to empathize with users. The ultimate goal is a cohesive vision and product definition backed with qualitative and quantitative findings;
• User Experience, or IxD, or any other of dozens of titles: the actual process of qualitative and quantitative research, concept validation, and design. The end deliverables include system visualizations, information architecture, and design spec’s.

Strategy and Tactics

From Strategy to Tactical

As you might have recognized, I defined Agile as tactical and UCD strategic. I don’t mean to say they are mutually exclusive to each other. The nature of the deliverables tend to lend each philosophy more to one than the other.

So, Agile is predominantly tactical. Established with developers in mind Agile has expanded to include product design, QA teams and business managers. The roles of each are defined by Agile and each stakeholder understands their roles and the deliverables expected of them.

UCD, while spanning both more evenly, is strategic at its core. Information architecture, mappings of ecosystems, and other deliverables are more interpretive than the deliverables expected of an agile team. The importance of these deliverables should not be lost though as it is these initial frameworks that help guide the overall purpose of the product.

It should be noted that while UCD spans strategy and tactics more evenly, both UCD and Agile have equal weight in the project overall.

Chicken or the Egg?

“We’re locked in a perpetual jr high dance. Arms stretched out stiffly, knowing we should like each other, but just not sure how”
- Will Sansbury

Figure 2. Project lifespan

So what comes first? The chicken or the egg? Agile or UCD? The short answer is: both should be present at all times. But which philosophy is in the drivers seat should change throughout the project.

In order to build any type of successful project there must be an agreed purpose or goal, a unified vision, and a determining plan to get there. Understanding this path, it fits a flow from high level strategy to tactics and hard deliverables. Figure 2 breaks a project lifespan into three high level phases that capture this transition. Let’s look at each phase individually.

Phase 1: Purpose

A project exists for a purpose, but understanding the goals, motivations and needs of users requires a deeper understanding.

Phase 1 is the chance for UX practitioners to perform literature reviews, competitive analysis, user research and high level concept validation to narrow and define scope. Hard deliverables could include personas, mappings of ecosystems, concept scenarios, and initial sketches of the final interface.

Since the bulk of Phase 1 is determining the ultimate purpose, member of the agile development team might feel on the sidelines. This is a prime opportunity to gather technical requirements and to perform preparation for the actual sprints. Stress is off the development team so it is a great time to determine technical requirements and to discuss potential pitfalls. Deliverables could include setting up QA environments, sketching potential infrastructure needs and challenges and gathering hardware, software and personal required.

Phase 2: Vision

The product is by no means locked in or fully defined but frameworks are being established. The weight on UCD begins to shift to Agile as deliverables become more measurable.

UCD is still involved in research, performing Round 2, 3, n-1 of research and design. The ultimate goal of Phase 2 is not to have a fully designed product but to understand all the moving parts with a few key pieces well defined. At the same time, agile developers are creating user stories and building out the backlog.

Hard deliverables from Phase 2 should include design requirements for Sprint 1 from the designers and an executed or started Sprint 0 from the developers.

Phase 3: Execution

Now Agile takes lead. By the end of Phase 2, the UCD team should have established enough requirements for Sprint 1. The Agile team can now hit the floor running performing each sprint. In turn, the UX designers will stay one sprint ahead on design requirements and additional research. Scope and requirements may change but based on the Phase 2 research there should be a solid understanding of the product from all stakeholders that changes should be minor and drastic changes can be appreciated by all parties involved.

In these phases, it may be seen how the transition from strategic to tactical deliverables corresponds to the UCD and Agile focus on a project. It must be noted that there is no point where either philosophy owns the project exclusive of the other.

friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood

Paradise Lost

Diagrams are pretty, Gantt charts set expectations, but reality is far from perfect. At the end of the day, a project manager must own the project and there must be some sense of reporting. Depending on the project manager’s background and personal goals there will tend to be a focus towards the needs of UCD or Agile. Additional friction exists from formal training. While most UCD practitioners do not hold degrees in the field, there exists a corner of academia that teaches these methods. There is currently no formal training in Agile however… While those practicing Agile typically have a few years experience, there is also a large percentage of project managers using Agile without having a complete understanding of where it fits in the entire process. Add this to any workspace ego and the trained and the not-traineds and there is the opportunity for a volatile work environment, Finally, friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood.

Conclusion

Agile and UCD can be integrated. I have been personally involved on projects that have used both to perfect harmony and those that were less ideal. A personal belief is that design is about communication. The breakdowns that exist in integrating UCD and Agile exist as a result of miscommunication from poorly set or unframed expectations. As Agile and UCD further develop and members of each camp have training to both methods I see the miscommunication fading as a unified vocabulary and set of deliverables form.

I want to thank Will Sansbury and Jeff Gothelf in particular for their direct feedback and conversations while writing this article.

Top image by: kofoed

If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change I believe this must apply two ways. While it’s true that design can influence users and engender cultural change, this is always a product of our more tangible work: changing the behaviour of technology. As a user-centred designer of technology my goal is simple: to make its behaviour humane. But how should I approach this?

Humanity implies emotion and, beneath that, personality. These areas lie beyond the frontiers of classical HCI and usability. Fortunately, as often happens, we view the distant summit and see others have already planted the flag. Toymakers, for instance, have explored the art of bestowing personality on products for years. The results are fairly crude, but I defy anyone to watch the torture of a Pleo and successfully suppress a twinge of guilt. Even in its moments of crisis, Pleo has a distinct personality; that is to say, it conveys emotional information

Channels for personality

Perhaps the most obvious conduit for emotional content is appearance.

From BMW's grill to Pixar's Wall-E

The designs above show acts of visual anthropomorphism, where gesture and expression alone convey personality. They create empathy through closure, a projection of the self as explored in Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics. Pareidolia, the brain’s propensity to recognise faces everywhere, is a powerful trick. Even an oval, two dots and a line create an unmistakable expression; with detail we can add further emotional nuance.

Closure: excerpt from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

We can also convey personality through message. In the words of Russell Davies, the rise of devices with personality will lead to a surge in “bubbly writing and objects talking to you in the first person”. Here, an Innocent smoothie prudishly asks us to avert our gaze from its most vulnerable area.

Innocent drinks carton with text "Stop looking at my bottom."

But anthropomorphism needn’t be visual. Consider how R2D2 conveys personality through sound alone – his shrieks and bleeps mapping to human expressions of emotion (See Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff at dConstruct 2009 [mp3, 43 minutes]). Similarly, IM programs happily announce incoming messages with a rising fanfare and send replies with a descending farewell.

These can be effective ways to communicate personality, but I’ve recently been reflecting about the fuzzier area of expressing personality through behaviour.

According to psychologist Kurt Lewin behaviour is product of the person in question and his environment (check out Lewin’s equation). Our behaviour changes with context. This suggests that we can only form an opinion about someone’s personality through exposure to various scenarios; a single interaction isn’t enough. However once we’ve formed this mental model, we believe it so thoroughly that we become blinded by it, believing that someone’s personality causes their every action – the fundamental attribution error.

Behavioural variance – acting differently according to our environment – is a celebrated part of being human. Anyone who lacks it is boring. Myself, I act quite differently as a Cardiff City fan than as a grandson, since the contexts are very different. At a party you’re expected to drink beer and flirt with girls, not quietly read a library book, if you expect to be invited back.

Dreary technology

This is why I look at modern technology with mixed feelings. As a tool, it’s unsurpassed. But when we engage with it on any human level, it doesn’t respond in kind. Technology has no behavioural variance and very little personality.

Yes, predictability is a key tenet of usability. High-risk systems must respond to input in forseeable ways: an air traffic control system, for instance, needs to be entirely unwavering. But as we’re learning to appreciate the power of play and emotion in our design activities, is there scope for non-critical technology to display behavioural personality?

Mobile devices, for instance, are increasingly a medium of sensory input as well as informational output. We’ll soon carry devices capable of reading our fingerprints, calculating our position and learning our closest social ties by analysing our SMS and email habits. Adding further richness, recent declarative technology encourages users to publish information that designers can use to build emotional responses:

Google map showing current location as Alton Towers theme park

Facebook status showing a user's engagement

So let’s imagine a Twitter client that asks if you really want to send that drunken tweet (maybe you should have read that library book after all). A mobile that loves going on rollercoasters. An MP3 player that longs to play (and listen to?) a new album for once.

Getting personality wrong

Looking, sounding or acting like a human is desirable only if the human is one we like. Some of our early forays have been spectacular failures. For an archetypal example of botched anthropomorphism, look no further than our most hated paperclip.

Designed to save labour and improve UI learnability, Clippy instead came across as smug and invasive. Not only did his brash tone rub many up the wrong way, but he was irritatingly clingy, appearing on simple tasks where users didn’t need or appreciate help.

The despotic HAL illustrates the other extreme of dislikable machine personality. Clarke and Kubrick created a terrifying villain for 2001 simply by highlighting the unflinching rationality of computation. HAL’s cold-bloodedness is the opposite of humanity. Our heroes are irrational, given to senseless acts in the name of compassion. We can all empathise: who hasn’t done something stupid when in the grip of emotion?

Appealing machine personality lies somewhere between the shores of impassivity and fake friendliness. Social psychology research tells us that we like people who share a similar personality to our own, and people who like us (reciprocal liking). Servile flattery isn’t the answer, of course, but through deep user understanding and reliance on our trusty companions trial, error and feedback perhaps designers will uncover a sweet spot.

We may speculate a few guidelines for conveying personality through behaviour (any additions would be welcomed):

• Personality should be easily overwritten. If you need to make an emergency call, your handset must revert to functionality above all else.
• Personality should be secondary to function. Clippy was disproportionate: his personality overruled his potential usefulness. Not only does this reduce usability, but we risk giving users false expectations of a system’s capabilities.
• Personality should be appropriate to the medium. It may be that desktop computers aren’t an ideal platform for behavioural personality; we still regard them largely as tools of business or home organisation. Mobile phones operate in our intimate space and it’s well known that people form emotional connections with their handsets. Could the mobile arena provide sensible starting points for exploration?

This is largely a thought experiment for now, and it’s clear that behavioural anthropomorphism would raise practical questions. How should users tell devices to stop their shenanigans and get on with the task at hand? Do I want my computer, and whatever systems it’s connected to, to know that I spent the night at my girlfriend’s flat? Would a machine object if I do something it doesn’t approve of?

Any attempt to give technology personality will be divisive. Succeed and we make the technological world a slightly more humane place. Fail, and we create an army of Clippies.

Related resources

• Why is that thing beeping? A sound design primer
• Russell Davies “Materialising and dematerialising a web of data” (mp3, 44 minutes)

Special thanks: Rebecca Cottrell
Photo credits: Duncan, estoril

There are many degrees of failure in the world of design. This is a hard truth that every designer has to learn one way or another. A hard knock lesson that has the ability to be the best teacher a designer could ask for, or completely crush their spirit. Dealing with our failures is never easy, especially when a personal connection is involved. These failures can appear throughout the design process, but each failure can be seen as an opportunity. So where do we go to learn how to deal with and learn from our failures? Reach way back and consult the great Sun Tzu and his masterpiece ‘The Art of War’.

It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.

The entire profession of design is one rooted in failure, for without it there would be no need for designers. Designers exist to come in, assess what has been failing, and offer up solutions for the future. Even the process of creating that solution is made up of a variety of failures that lead the designer to a single golden idea. The more we design, the more failures we are exposed to, and the better our work becomes in the future for having learned what not to do. Luckily, making mistakes in a design doesn’t always lead to death and mayhem like it can when conducting a battle, but the principles are the same. In order to truly use the power of failure to our advantage, we must experience it and not back down when an overwhelming challenge presents itself.

Another advantage the world of design has over that of warfare is the fact that we always have the chance to look back at our ‘battles’, even when we failed. It’s important to take the time and look back at a project once complete to gauge what worked well and more importantly what didn’t. If we want to learn and improve we should review past events in a conversation that includes everyone that contributed to the project. Stakeholders, sponsors, developers, designers, and project management all contributed something to the success, or lack there of, of a project. The outcome of this conversation is an understanding of what needs to be replicated in future projects, and suggestions to processes that failed to deliver. While pride might be the only real casualty of this conversation, everyone should leave the meeting with an understanding of how to avoid similar mistakes that plagued the project in the future.

The general who thoroughly understands the advantages that accompany variation of tactics knows how to handle his troops.

There is no such thing as a ‘silver bullet’ method for designers. Many of us have an underlying process which we try to follow as closely as possible, but modifications are made to it over the course of a project. This ability to adapt and compromise is the single greatest skill that can help anyone deal with failures. When the inevitable mistake occurs, it’s a true fight or flight situation and the demeanor one takes towards it speaks not only to their professionalism, but to their natural talent as a designer. Any design project can be plagued with the unexpected, be it last minute feature requests that ‘have’ to be in the final solution or budget changes that move the delivery date up two months. Taking these random events in stride and using them to help propel the project to completeness is the true sign of a master at their craft. Just like a great general, the battlefield is always being assessed and battle plans adjusted to meet current needs.

Being able to adapt to a given situation can be made easier by keeping a catalog of past warning signs that at the time were missed, but later identified as the reason for failing. By having an understanding of these warning signs, it’s possible to already have the means of dealing with problems as they appear. This ability to think on your feet and maintain a sense of calm while chaos reigns around you can be fostered and learned. It isn’t the talent of a few, but rather a skill of the experienced. And the first step to learning this skill is by acknowledging that whatever process you’re following today probably won’t work for you tomorrow.

To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.

Effective communication can be seen as bringing in the reserves when a battle takes a turn for the worse. Taking in the situation and coming up with a revised plan that is easily explained to all parties involved can make or break the success of a project. Failing back on excuses, pointing fingers at others, or simply pointing out the obvious pales in comparison to the benefits of offering a solution that helps get a project back on track. A well written email or a timely placed phone call to put a client at ease, lessens the severity of the situation and fosters a sense of partnership. It’s this partnership that allows a project team to get past all the bad things that can creep up, and continue to work.

The key to maintaining effective communication is ensuring everyone involved with a project is accountable for their own actions. The current rise of the Agile Development Process has helped this sense of accountability grow with the advent of daily standups. Unfortunately, it isn’t as common place as it should be. ‘Fessing up to problems while the issue is still in its infancy allows the team as a whole to develop a solution. The delay caused by these baby issues is minuscule compared to if they are allowed to fester. Meaningful communication over the course of a project is hinged on the accountability of the members of the project team.

Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources.

In order to truly harness the power of failure, it’s important that the leadership behind an organization encourages a culture that is forgiving and encourages the natural exploration and growth that can come from failure. If an organization’s leadership blames others for the mistakes they themselves make, than there is no desire for the worker bees to accept their own shortcomings. It’s a shame when people, or whole teams, are let go because of failures that they may or may not have been the cause of. Even when fault can be placed on them, drastic measures shouldn’t be taken unless the failure can be attributed to simple negligence.

Companies like Dyson and Honda are prime examples of companies who have turned many failures into great successes. They put a considerable amount of effort into fostering an environment where people are encouraged to fail and to use those failures to reach a particular goal. People are encouraged to explore and test ideas with the goal of throwing out as many bad ideas as possible. If the traditional punishment that is associated with failure is removed from the equation, people are more willing to test out something crazy just to see if it might work. The overall leadership sets the stage for this type of corporate culture, and it’s the individual managers that use the flexibility allowed to them to push their teams to create greatness.

Failing at something sucks, or at least that is what we are lead to believe. The truth is: without failure, nothing would ever improve and innovation would be impossible. If there is one constant, it’s that what works well today will eventually become deficient and need to replacing. Since we’ve already identified that the world of design is made up of failures, it’s time to stop hiding from this mythical boogie man. It’s time to open our eyes and see failure as the beautiful muse it is and as just another tool to use in order to create awesomeness.

If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way.

Brand is a phenomenon that has emerged over the last century as a method of differentiation and control, with marketing beating a drum of “brand messaging”, “consistent impressions”, and a single “brand value”. User Experience is a more recent unicorn to chase, with designers claiming to drive business success through a focus on a prescriptive customer experience. There is a long history of extremely fragile collaboration between the offices of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the traditional shepherds of behavior-by-design, as designers become enamored with brand embodiment in products, and marketers striving to “own” the product specifications, features and functions. The fragility of the bond is obvious, as both groups frequently disparage the other in both private and public venues. As blanket generalizations, designers describe marketers as less honest then themselves, and disparage the Product Requirement Document as a laundry-list of jargon and nonsense. Marketers, in turn, often view designers (and by proxy, the product itself) as a means to an end; the goal – revenue, market share, and brand equity – will be achieved through business rules, not through creative endeavors.

Both groups are to fault, and both groups are perilously ignoring the huge potential at their fingertips. As members of both groups cling to brand and UX as differentiators, they have mistakenly focused on control as a means of generating revenue. In fact, neither brand nor UX will serve as the driving force behind financial success in the coming decades. “User experience” is just a new name for old thinking, and “User experience practitioners” exhibit the same hubris that has long plagued “brand thinking”: the large name-as-mindshare mentality that a company can own a space, a segment, or even a consumer.

clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency

The Problems of Brand and User Experience
For most of the twentieth century, brand – and the marketing machine that created it – ruled the culture of developed countries. The earliest parts of the 1900s boasted brands built around industrialism and production, and these acted as literal and figurative crests, positioned as major pillars of production. The mid part of the century led to the family-focused brands positioned as domesticated icons of class and consumption. And the late 90’s exposed global brands, dominated by large, faceless and relatively unknown holding companies making profit simply by waiting for an opportune time to offload a company to another company. Yet the rules of the game are in deep flux, due to sustainability, a credit meltdown, and an awareness of humanitarian efforts in developing countries. The basic, fundamental properties of major brands are increasingly questioned, as evidenced by the disparaged and embattled Ford and Citibank, and the questions of these mega-brands are more commonly rhetorical and pejorative.

In spite of this, brand equity facilitated by market share is still a goal of the Fortune 500, and it is common to hear clients – both marketers and UX professionals – speak of “winning” in relationship to the user experience.

Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization

Simultaneously, however, clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency. They describe how their customers have become familiar with a particular brand-purchasing behavior, and continue to perform that rote behavior based on circumstances. This includes placement on the shelf, color of a label, and the realization that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There is no “relationship” with the customer; this is a fragile connection that is the consumptive equivalent to taking the same route to work each day. This is a scary reality to face, as brand complacency implies a dependency on switching-costs as a means of retaining market-share. Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization.

The Threat of Commoditization
A commodity is something that has no qualitative differentiation. Mass production drives commoditization within a particular product line, while the traditional “bunch and swarm” mentality of the marketplace drives commoditization across product lines. A desire to create a new set of interactions is an urge to escape this push towards sameness. Innovation is a business goal to produce products that have qualitative differentiation, and there are various forms of innovation – such as disruptive innovation – which are intended to produce massive qualitative differentiation.

In western civilization, the artifact is continuing to diminish in relevance and importance. While people continue to consume things, these things are increasingly a means to an end. Our relative wealth has positioned even the lower-middle class in a position where there is time for leisure, entertainment, and emotionally charged experiences.

Interesting, too, is the speed at which the digital artifact has moved from being exclusive and expensive to nearly free and ubiquitous. Software, once priced at hundreds of dollars and appropriately as scarce, is now widely available for no cost; networked services have enabled content feeds across artifacts, rendering even some services as irrelevant in the larger scheme of the competitive landscape. As an example, for many years, Microsoft offered a for-fee product called Outlook, which manages electronic mail. Google then offered a free service called Gmail, which also manages electronic mail. Then, as Google externalized the Google mail feed through a series of APIs, mail can be embedded in unlikely places – including other products, such as an instant messenger client (like Trillian), or even on other websites. The “designed product” has become less interesting and relevant, and no matter the innovations pushed by Google or Microsoft in their products, the data itself has been shifted to a champion position of value.

Behavioral Change: The Goal of Our Work
The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it’s a useful one. Many of the same ways we “read” an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

• Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end;
• Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer;
• Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity;
• Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach – and personal point of view, or message – into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of “designing experiences”, yet leaves open the potential – the need – for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions – even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions – resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale. Yet because these design decisions have an impact that is diffused and quiet, our impact is hard to notice and pin down. Culture is something that’s not immediately describable; the question “where does culture come from?” is almost as large a question as “where does life come from”, and is equally as evasive.

Cultural Change: The Implications of Our Work
This is a fundamental point that serves to elevate the importance of a designer, and also serves to articulate the implicit responsibility a designer has to the world around them. It’s such a fundamental point that it’s worth making again, in a more overt manner:

1. The interaction designer designs various aspects of an artifact;
2. The designer either explicitly or implicitly hopes to change behavior in a user;
3. This behavioral change is “baked” into the artifact, and then disseminated, in mass;
4. The artifact serves as a stimulus to change behavior in society;
5. This combination of artifacts and behavior describes culture.

Every design decision – from the large and strategic decision to design accounting software, to the small and nuanced decision to use a checkbox instead of a radio button – contributes to the behavior of the masses, and helps define the culture of our society. This describes an enormous opportunity for designers, one that is rarely realized. We are, quite literally, building the culture around us; arguably, our effect is larger and more immediate than even policy decisions of our government. We are responsible for both the positive and negative repercussions of our design decisions, and these decisions have monumental repercussions.

Our Deep Responsibility
For most designers, this responsibility is hidden by the celebratory claims of designing experiences. This claim almost abdicates the long-term responsibility, as “an experience” has an end, at which time the designers’ role seemingly ends. The work is meaningful only on an immediate level of craft and creation, and while designers often take pride in a product once it has launched, they do not frequently make the connection between their creations and the culture that surrounds them. “They’ve stopped using my product – their experience is over.” Convenient – but utterly false. Because emphasis is placed on innovation or brand, designers learn to value their work based on newness or recognition; metrics for success are tied to profit and marketshare, rather than positive and long-term culture change. As the causality is extended over a long period of time, it is diffused as a single product mixes with the rest of the milieu. The individual contribution of a single designer feels muted and insignificant, as there is no feedback loop to indicate the role of an individual design in shaping culture and society.

These negative qualities of our last century’s focus on brand and experience have been forced upon the business of design and the design of business, but it is only interaction and the ability to change behavior that will serve as fundamental pillars upon which to drive successful new endeavors. We must refocus and reposition our work within major companies away from a marketing-driven focus on brand and a design-driven focus on experiential ownership. Instead, it is up to us to emphasize the value a company can provide in changing human behavior – the lasting, nuanced, intellectual, and deep responsibility we have to the culture we are building.

This requires a conscious tradeoff and reprioritization. Instead of control, we must focus on frameworks. Instead of seeking to own and prescribe a singular experience, we must strive to adapt to the peculiarities and nuances of human behavior. And instead of complicity absorbing the corporate drive towards power and brand positioning, we must acknowledge the huge responsibility implicit in our work and constantly vocalize how our work supports humanity and the cultural landscape that surrounds us. We’ve built that cultural landscape, and we owe it to ourselves and to our work to tend to our creation as it morphs, changes and adapts. As you cringe from someone talking into a Bluetooth headset on the subway, or smile as a child and mother look at photos on their phone, realize that this technological culture is ours in the making. Both the bad and good are our ongoing fault and responsibility.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Jon Kolko in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Photos by: hipposrunsuperfast, Lord Jim & arquera