Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of Apple’s iPhone debut in Korea. The iPhone’s impact was bigger than most market observers ever expected. In fact, according to this Korean newspaper’s article, it changed how people live, work, socialize and entertain.

The autumn issue of Koreana, the quarterly devoted to Korean art and culture, contains a special feature on Korea’s smartphone era.The first article in particular – Mobile phones in Korea: between dynamism and anxiety – is worth a thorough read, as it explores the zealous passion for mobile phones in Korea.

I recently became one of Canvas8’s newest Thought Leaders, lending my insights and knowledge to the site’s growing archives of articles and interviews on cultural global trends. My first contribution, co-written with Erin O’Loughlin, was a reflection on designing for sustainability-focused behavioral change. The article outlines Experientia’s behavioral change framework, which has been developed over the course of our work in Helsinki’s Jätkäsaari area, as part of a team constructing a low-to-no carbon emissions building block called Low2No.

Experientia president Michele Visciola meanwhile was invited to send a video message to the World Usability Day 2010 event in Tokyo, Japan. Michele, who is also European Regional Coordinator for the Usability Professional’s Association, spoke on the event’s theme of communication, and the relationship between communication and usability in research and design activities.

Thursday November 18th, 2010 marked the beginning of a new event in the Philadelphia design and technology community. Over 500 attendees descended on the Kimmel Center, a performing arts theater located in Center City, for the start of TEDxPhilly, where the X stands for an independently organized TED event. The overall theme of the event was Right Here, Right Now and showcased a variety of local educators, technologists, artists, and culinary experts.
While the overall themes at this TEDx might not be unique to the TED community, with a Philly spin they had a consistent flavor that everyone in the audience was able to respond to. Below is a recap of the TED talks as they were presented throughout the day, split over four sessions.

Session 1, Systems and Society

The first session most directly spoke to the theme of an individual’s passion, finding what inspires you and pursuing those goals. With artists, educators, and more sharing their stories, TEDxPhilly kicked off with a very strong start.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Author

Be bold, love what you love, chase your biggest dreams

Cristin opened the day. Nine in the morning, just after the attendees were asked to leave their coffee outside the theater, Cristin opened with trivia – and presidential trivia no less. She went on to share her passion for writing and her journey from a cubicle job in corporate American that, as a stepping stone, turned into an eight year hurdle. She shared with us her desire to write for herself, and the scary, thrilling, and necessary move that is to leave a stable job and to pursue what you truly want. Cristin reminded us that day jobs are not the enemy and that we should all be bold, love what you love, and to chase our biggest dreams.

Chris Lehman, Technology driven school Principal

Chris followed Cristin and within the first few moments made a clear point known. An opening slide that read high school stinks, he expressed the common purpose of school to ‘make sure you don’t suck so much at the things you are bad at’. This is inherently wrong according to Lehman. Schools should teach how to learn and open minds up to critical thinking, to teach kids to be citizens and not just workers. In the modern world of smartphones any child can look up a piece of information before an instructor can write it on the board. Lehman’s school program focusses not on rote knowledge but on the creation of whole systems. Teach for now, build real things, and share it is a theme Lehman stresses and his students don’t take midterms and finals but instead find ways to express knowledge and to teach the instructors. This active engagement allows students to find what they are good at and to ultimately pursue their passions.

Nic Esposito, Urban farm activist

Stepping away from formal education, Nic Esposito took the stage to share his thoughts on green initiatives. He made it clear. He was not going to spend 15 minutes scaring us with statistics and fear facts and the last five describing ways to save the world. Instead he focussed on what we are doing – locally and globally. Esposito believes humans are the most just, most humane now as we ever have been and that technology has encouraged our being green. Esposito described a variety of green farming initiatives happening locally to Philadelphia and how their impact has grown beyond a local community and has started to effect policy and a broader perspective. At the end of the talk we weren’t asked to change the way we live, but to change the perspective. Awareness, a key theme of TED talks, Esposito embraced the audience to share with us what is going on, and not to harp on what still needs to be changed.

Human beings are the most just, most humane as ever

Jay Coen Gilbert, Founder B Lab

Jay Coen Gilbert – if Nic Esposito wore a suit and tie and were approaching the green initiative from the corporate level – would look like this. Gilbert founded B Lab, an organization that awards certifications to organizations that meet specific social and environmental qualifications. It is not enough to purchase fair trade coffee if the employees in the shop are treated poorly and similarly the best office conditions are useless if items are manufactured in sub par conditions. The words green and eco friendly are tossed around so frequently that they lose meaning. Gilbert is hoping to bring meaning back into those words by creating standards to strive for. He continues to point out that this must be a for-profit initiative. While non profits are great for creating awareness and getting places government can’t, the scale of a for profit company can reach that much further. For actual change to occur, businesses must shift from shareholder goals of increasing profit to shareholder goals – what benefits those involved, those purchasing and using your products.

Session 2, Culture and Meaning

After a brief break, surrounded with local music and artists, we fell back into our seats for the second session. Culture and Meaning, each of the speakers shared not just what inspires them, but how they instill that into others. The importance of sharing a passion and making sure that everyone can follow a dream and can have a challenge to continue to move to the next level – physically, emotionally, mentally, or any combination wherein.

Stanford Thompson, Music Teacher

We came back from the break with a dozen chairs set up on the stage. Not a normal site for a TED talk, where the speaker stands on stage, pacing across sharing their thoughts. Stanford Thompson came on and discussed his goal to use music to inspire youth. Speaking how successful adults set goals, have patience and break up a task into small achievable goals, Thompson discusses how many underprivileged children don’t learn these skills. Tasks that seem to overwhelming or complicated are passed over in favor of quick achievements – video games, drugs and alcohol, and simple jobs. Thompson’s program, Tune Up Philly strives to change this – by engaging students with instruments at a young age and continuing to challenge them with new skills, Thompson looks to open their minds to their own potential. Now the dozen chairs he had on stage? It is not enough to speak to what children can do with music over a six week program. The final moments were spent with a group of students playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Not Beethoven’s Fifth, but they played three variations, with three different key components being shared. These children who prior to Thompson’s program never touched an instrument and, all are able to play better than myself. To set appropriate levels of challenges to encourage a continued engagement with a task – Thompson looks to encourage challenges for individuals to learn how to problem solve and strive for more.

Tanya Hamilton, Filmmaker

Tanya Hamilton followed Stanford. An independent filmmaker, she recently completed Night Catches Us, a study of the Black Panther movement in the Philadelphia community in the 1970s. Hamilton did not focus on her film though. Instead, after a brief excerpt, she shared with us the story of the White House sit-in protest, the first of it’s kind, and the inspiration she has found from those that went through that ordeal. Hamilton spoke more of the human struggle to pursue a goal and how that strengthens one resolve and her film acted as the channel, but not the focus.

Zoe Strauss, Photographer

People don’t walk under interstates expecting art. But that is where you find Zoe Strauss who, for the last ten years, has made an installation under I-95 in Philadelphia. Starting into photography with the support of her family and friends she strove to capture people, nothing more. To make art accessible and to share her, and her subjects’ emotions. There is a certain connection Strauss has to each of her photos. Each image she shared she knew the name and location of the subject, but they were all strangers. We all bring emotional baggage to situations and it is here that the truth lies. Strauss talked not of the meaning these images have to her, but instead of the meaning to others as it becomes accessible, as these stories become human.

Michael Solomonov, Chef and restaurateur

That’s a good way to create peace, with chocolate sauce

Michael Solomonov, owner of Zahav, an Israeli restaurant in Old City of Philadelphia shared with us not his cure for peace (though his quote might lead you to think otherwise) nor was he looking to inspire us all to be chefs. But he shared his story- how he became a cook and how he found cooking connects him to the things that he loves. Michael shared how his younger brother, in the final days of his military duty in Israel, was killed by a sniper. It was this stimulus, along with years of travel and exposure to different foods and cultures that lead Michael to create his business. It is his way to be connected to Israel, his family, and his brother. It is not a political soapbox, it is his personal achievement and comfort. As the final speaker before lunch, he closed the second session well as all four speakers presented their passion, their lessons, and how those might affect others are not created as their specific paths for everyone else.

Session 3, Incredible Machines

Return from lunch, and let’s zoom out from the personal goals and inspiration. The next set of speakers shared their thoughts and interest into full systems and ecosystems. Educational systems, beer brewing, architecture and research; how their development and growth incites change and inspires on a personal level.

Simon Hauger, Hybrid X team founder, Teacher

Simopn Hauger’s turn. He relates high school to torture, how we all need to find our passions. “Intelligence is not one size fits all but school is one size fits all”. Much like Stanford Thompson, Hauger looks to challenge students and to help them uncover their passion. Creating the Hybrid X Team, Hauger leads a group of high school students who have successfully built and competed against large corporations, universities, and startups in creating high efficiency hybrid vehicles. It is not enough to move students from room to room, class to class. Until they are challenged with a situation and variables vital to success, critical thinking and inspiration cannot occur. To paraphrase one of Simon’s students ‘it is a critical situation building the car, what if something goes wrong and the car crashes, or my teacher dies…’ It is not enough to teach lesson plans and facts without context and understanding the value. Simon Hauger looks to bring that to the classroom on a whole new level.

You can’t teach critical thinking without critical conditions

Robert J. Moore, Technology data researcher

Over five exabytes of information were created between the dawn of time and 2003. But more importantly over five exabytes of information is created every two days. Robert took the time to present this information to us. It is not the fact that data exists but more that with the size and scale of storage it may all be captured. “Digital exhaust” as he refers to it. Robert shared his thoughts for where he sees the potential of all data being universally captured for progress across all domains and verticals. How data enables progress and how with every credit card swipe, bus pass purchase, and vending machine transaction we build a larger network of data. Robert left us with impressive figures and questions as to how this might all be applied.

Evan Malone, Engineer, entrepreneur

The sustainment of American culture as an innovative culture. Evan Malone shared his perspective on how America has always been a place for people to come, build a business, a dream, or a process, and to continue to iterate and develop over time. Evan discusses how the commoditization of manufacturing has led to outsourcing for cheaper goods and the effect that has had, not on the manufacturing within America but on the process of innovation. Evan shares his thoughts on how feedback loops of innovation are critical to a country and how it has been on a decline in America in recent decades. He outlines the trend and the need to encourage the feedback loop that is education, technology, and design.

Bill Covaleski, Beer Brewer

“I’m going to talk about beer but I haven’t a drop of beer to give you,” is how Bill Covaleski, co-founder of Victory Brewing Company, opens. Bill shares the history of brewing in America, from over 1400 breweries before 1900 to fewer than 100 in the 1980s. He describes the political and social influences beer brewing has had on America and the return of the craft brewing movement. As far as machines go, Bill does not discuss the process of brewing but the focus that brewing has taken – from mass production with little flavor to select beers with unique tastes. Food and beer are on the same level, and Bill shares with us the ‘return to normalcy’ that is rich full flavored beer as the same return to home grown, organic foods over processed breads and ingredients.

I should note, that while Bill did not have a drop of beer to share at the talk, the reception to close out the day was full of Victory Brew draft.

Billie Faircloth, Researcher for sustainable architecture

Materials are not simple, and neither are buildings. Billie Faircloth discusses the relationship of lumber to a building, and cords of firewood to trees. She shares her childhood misonception that construction timber and firewood are two different things. And she relates them all together for us. If wood is the fundamental building block, and there is immense problem solving in cutting and measuring timber for optimal output, how does that translate to a foundation? how does that translate to an entire building? A two by four is in fact 1.5*3.5 inches. How is that change measured and how does it come to pass? Billie doesn’t discuss how to create sustainable buildings or the need for green initiatives. She discusses how the different pieces fit together and how scale and complexity of problems are not one in the same.

The 2*4 goes into the buidling but problem solving goes into all scales. Design goes into all scales.

Session 4, Between the Ears

From the enormity of incredible machines back to the individual scale of oneself. The final session of the day focussed on the human mind. Individual’s challenges and investigation with technology on the brain level, and artists’ description of themselves to the world. The day closed on a more personal scale, bringing the sessions back to the participants in the theater.

Iyad Obeid, Neural prostheses researcher

Iyad’s goal is simple, through Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) to reanimate the body with brain control of prostheses or paralyzed limbs. Ok, that is not a simple goal, but it might be broken down simply. Iyad explains the technology around measuring brain activity and translating that into quantifyable measurements to control a system or environment. What is more fascinating the the mind is moldable. A BMI does not have to be 100% efficient – it has to be good enough to function and the brain will create workarounds for the rest. Iyad shares his thoughts on the future of brain interface technology – if machines can become more human then can humans become more like machines? The cognitive processing we as humans are experts at (recognizing faces, images, etc) and the mathematical processing machines are built for – are there ways using this technology to merge the two and create more efficient systems. Is there a time, in the not too distant future where computers come not only with a silicon brain but a neural network to help additional processing? Iyad shares his thoughts for the potential of computing on human and system levels.

You don’t have to build the best Brain Machine Interface but one that is good enough

Stephen Powers, Graffiti Artist

Graffiti is a visual crime, nothing more

Stephen Powers, graffiti artist turned studio artist. But that is a matter of perspective. Are you asked to create your art or must it be completed in the dark of night, under a veil of secrecy? Stephen talks to change to context of graffiti, to expose its true form and the framework it is often created in. Sharing stories of painting the Philadelphia “A love letter for you” series and his work in South America creating graffiti to inspire a community, Stephen talks not of creating a tag or a mark for rebellious reasons but to communicate a story and a passion.

Ursula Rucker, Poet

Ursula closed out TEDxPhilly. Not with a speech on why she performs her art, or how to encourage others to be poets. Instead she introduced herself and her work and shared a collection of her poems. It is important to note, during the entire day TEDx speakers were accompanied by Johnny Goldstein, of Envizualize, where he created visual sketchnote representations of their talks. It was during Rucker’s that the audience had a chance to watch his visual interpretation be captured as Ursula opened herself to the audience. Themes of personal struggle and triumph, themes that made her what she is today. The day closed with a selfless display as Ursula exposed herself through her poems in front of the room, inspiring the audience to do the same in their own way.

Poetry is how I speak, and able to be sane

Top image: Kimmel Center

This week Mark was in South Korea, where he made two presentations at the International Design Congress organised by the Busan Design Center and also met a lot of designers, which led him to a series of reflections on Korean design.

Meanwhile Bo Begole from PARC’s (formerly Xerox PARC) Ubiquitous Computing Area, has been developing an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ to a commercial reality, while James Glasnapp of PARC provided a helpful overview of data collection methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population or situation of interest.

Data use and smart human-centric data visualisations are becoming the “next big thing” in UX design. A number of posts this week delve into the matter.

The latest issue of Interactions Magazine is the last issue of editors Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson. Many articles reflect on the results achieved and the changes  that occurred over the last three years.

Finally, Matt Richtel reflects in the New York Times on the impact of growing up digital. The constant stream of stimuli offered by new technology, he says, poses a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

50 people. 9 hours. 1 design challenge.

The first Design Jam, supported by Mozilla Labs, took place in London on Saturday, 20th of November, at City University London.

Design Jams are one or two day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging UX challenges. While conferences and talks are very popular in the UX community, we don’t have many events for actual collaboration, like the ‘hackdays’ enjoyed by the development community. Only a few UX designers participate in hackdays or open-source design initiatives –  how can we change this and get UX designers more involved? How can we introduce them to open collaboration formats? The idea of an event to get designers together to learn from each other while working on actual problems was born. Design Jams champion open-source thinking & sharing and are non-profit, run by local volunteers. The London team are Desigan Chinniah, Johanna Kolllmann, Joe Lanman and Franco Papeschi.

While the primary audience for Design Jams are UX designers, everybody who wants to learn with and from others about UX is welcome. The 50 people at Design Jam London were UX professionals, developers, visual designers and students, all with different levels of experience and skills.

Participants writing their cards and sticking it on the grid

The team grid

After forming groups facilitated by a ‘team grid’, 9 teams started tackling the design challenge. A Design Jam isn’t a competition, so all teams were given the same challenge, and encouraged to help each other, eg by grabbing a person from a different team for interviews or guerilla usability testing. Picking a suitable design problem was the hardest task for the organisers. Here it is:

What is the ideal interface to track and trace relevant online content?

Every day people consume megabytes of web content – on a myriad of internet-enabled devices from varying locations. This content is typically re-located through:

• history
• bookmarks

Some things to consider:

• What are the typical cues for people to remember and retrieve online content (e.g. colour, keywords, prices, pictures, surrounding context etc.)?
• What are the current pitfalls? Where do users have most problems?
• How can people annotate visited content with additional information (e.g. mind-maps, tags, date/time visited, urls, search engine terms used, group around themes like going on holiday etc.)?
• Can activity be clustered automatically (e.g. time, location, people etc.)?
• Do 3rd party services (de.licio.us, Twitter & Flickr favourites, Facebook likes etc.) have a role in your idea? How do these interact with the rest of the service? Can previous saved content be connected or suggested?
• How can this work on single or multiple devices?
• How does location influence the interface?
• How do you want to expose the service (built-in browser UI, add-on/extension, web-based tool, widget or app, etc.)

Teams started tackling the challenge with a Research & Explore phase. It was great to see the various different approaches, including several brainstorming techniques, guerilla interviews or twitter surveys.

Mindmapping ideas

Desk research

Personas

At hackdays, the only time when outcomes are being shared is during the (often very short) presentations at the end of the day. At a Design Jam, the process is just as important as the outcome. How did you get this idea? How did you approach the problem? To allow teams to compare their processes and bounce ideas off each other, the groups shared what they had done so far before lunch. Articulating their ideas and getting questions from the audience helped teams to focus, and seeing how other teams had taken completely different steps got everybody reflecting on the many different ways to explore a problem.

“Seeing what the other teams had been doing made us see our idea differently and helped us focus” – Jeff van Campen

Show & tell

One of the interim presentations

After collecting tons of insights and coming up with some great concepts, the rest of the day was dedicated to the Design phase. The biggest challenge for the teams was to decide which aspect of their idea they wanted to focus on. Personas, guerilla research, sketching and storyboarding helped to prioritise and refine the design concepts. Design Jam mentors Leisa Reichelt and Ivanka Majic helped teams to make decisions and start visualising by looking at the concepts from a different perspective, asking the right challenging questions, and offering Jelly beans.

Leisa chats with a team

Ivanka helps a team

Sketching out a flow

Wireframes

In their final presentations, each team shared what they had done during the design phase, and presented the concepts. Outcomes included personas and scenarios, sketches and paper prototypes, diagrams explaining what the service does, and flow charts explaining what users do. The teams also talked about their design process. It was interesting to hear about the different approaches to sketching, with teams using techniques like the ’6 up’ template to have many ideas, or personas, storyboards and tools such as Stephen Anderson’s mental notes cards to have different ideas. It was also fascinating to see how people ‘winged’ the final presentations, using elevator pitches, iPad sketches and great stories to communicate the value proposition of their idea.

mindSTORM - final presentation

Bucket 9 - final presentation

Stachs - final presentation

You can find more information and see details about each team’s design process and outcome on the Design Jam wiki, check out the photos on Flickr, and videos of the day will be up on Vimeo.

What’s next?

The London Design Jam was a first attempt to try out this new format and understand the key aspects that will allow teams to collaborate, learn from each other, and walk away with a tangible design concept. Participant feedback and general interest confirmed that there’s definitely an appetite for this kind of event – an opportunity to share knowledge through creating and doing rather than talking. The aim is to have regular Design Jams in London, the UK, around the world, really. The London organisers are busy turning their learnings into a Design Jam organisers handbook, to make it easy to put on future sessions. If you’re interested in organising a Design Jam, add your name to the Design Jam wiki.

Thanks to Mozilla Labs, City University London, and Johnny Holland for supporting Design Jam.

Questions, suggestions, doubts? Thoughts on getting UXers to collaborate? Done something similar, and have advice? Share your thoughts.

—–

Header image under Creative Commons by E1

All photos by Design Jam London. The outcomes of Design Jam are shared under a Creative Commons license.

Amy Quinn recently spoke to Kristian Simsarian of IDEO about his Interaction 2011 workshop titled “Design consultantship: The art of hearing and being heard”. Their conversation centered on hearing about some of what he has to share with user experience consultants, how design and design relationships have changed, and learning more about what he plans to cover in his workshop.

How long have you been doing consulting?

Kristian Simsarian

I’ve been at IDEO for ten years and during that time I’ve had an amazing array of experiences. I’ve worked with very large companies (e.g., Nokia, Microsoft, AOL and SAP), startups, non-profits and governmental organizations like the NIH and FBI.

For Nokia we had this great project where we redesigned Ovi Suite, the PC desktop app for Nokia’s mobile phones. It is essentially like iTunes plus the iPhone. Nokia is an international mobile giant, and for this project, we were designing for over 300 million people worldwide and we travelled to just about every continent to do research. We did version 2.0, which has a much simpler and cleaner interface with fewer features than the 1.0 version. This is perhaps one of the first times a later version design got smaller, but here definitely “less is more”. This was an exciting project and our design team won an IDEA award this year for the design.

Before IDEO, I worked at research institutes. We always had sponsoring clients in government, the military or at technical companies such as Sun, HP and IBM. In many ways, these relationships were similar to the client relationships I’ve experienced at IDEO where there is a sponsor investing millions in what they hope to be a wise investment with high return in value.

For the Interaction 11 conference, you are doing a workshop on how to be a better consultant titled “Design Consultantship: The Art of Hearing and Being Heard.” I’m excited about this workshop since I think those of us who do UX consulting can really learn from each other. What are the main points you are going to cover?

We are going to work through designer-client case studies that should feel familiar and real to designers. The format includes reading email trails, recreating a presentation, and walking through a review transcript. We’ll do some role playing and try to explore and understand what is going on, going wrong and what might have been different. As you might expect, each case is problematic in some way. There will also be a framework presented to hold these points together as well as reflection on how it relates to the participant’s own practice.

I am now also a professor, starting a new Interaction Design program at the California College of the Arts, and I now find myself taking learning more seriously. The basic components of learning are theory, activity and reflection. The workshop is built around these as well as being fun.

One of the key skills we’ll focus on will be setting expectations. The other day, I was talking to a project lead and he said, “I don’t know if I like this job because all I do is fight fires.” During our discussion, I said “Actually the secret is to this job is to put out fires before they start or even better, remove the fuel.” A lot of people who encounter these situations realize that the issues that arise can often be traced back to how expectations were set.
A few more skills include: 1) active listening, 2) realizing what is important, 3) seeking idea integration and 4) asking for, receiving and giving feedback (both on content and process). Many of these skills are not part of standard design education and we usually need to learn these through experience. It’s important to pass these skills on.

The secret is to this job is to put out fires before they start or even better, remove the fuel.

How do you best listen to clients while also encouraging them to listen to you?

You first need to find your curiosity about where your client is coming from and developing empathy with that place of origin. It’s the same type of thing we do with our user research. You can bring those research skills that we use to understand our users to understanding clients.

With this information about what’s important to your client, you then need to prioritize what’s important to you and the project and reframe the direction accordingly. There’s something powerful about empathy. It allows you to understand how to frame what you say so you can be heard and this opens up dialogue.

More and more I find myself not only educating clients but facilitating meetings with clients. What advice do you have for being a successful meeting facilitator?

I find it works best to turn meetings into working sessions. When you think you are in a meeting, you know you are in the wrong place. Many of the clients I work with don’t work in design organizations and they often find the designers’ environment refreshing. You can work that by making the gathering itself something to be designed. Instead of calling it a “meeting,” call it something else, like “charette”, “workshop”, or “design review.” If you use design terms, then it becomes an experience to be designed. It’s exciting to see folks lighten up when we introduce play and make an event that is as inviting, lively, engaging and collaborative as possible.
Here are some specific examples:

• Use breakout teams whenever possible. It often feels that if there are more than three people in a room, working on a task in groups of two is better. Break a problem down into something people can work on and then bring back and share with the larger group.
• Create an environment. Sometimes a work-session can be created to feel like you are inside a “setup wizard” by creating a sequence of large posters with instructions and blank spaces that become the agenda of the workshop. This creates a collaborative space with collaborative surfaces. It’s also a powerful visual environment that enables participants to look around and know what’s coming.
• Make it visual. I find it really valuable to give everyone some visual prework. For example, have attendees bring two pictures to the meeting of their product: one that represents the current state and one that represents an aspirational state. You almost always find that people have more design sensibility than you might think. I find people always come in with amazing things and it awakens a different way of sharing.
• Find a place for everyone to be heard. Find creative ways to make sure everyone is heard while being sure to bring out all of the voices in the room, the business, technical and human design voices, and exploring that information together. Find the intersection between these voices and see how you might reframe the problem so that everyone can acknowledge the different aspects of success, not just design.
• Of course there are tips for being an expert facilitator, but the overall thing is whenever you can, turn meetings into fun events. There’s also something to good food. Often we have surprises, like cookies or shakes or fresh local fruit that come in at a special time, especially at that 2 PM lull. Everyone loves to feel like they’re being treated to something special by just being part of the event, and nice food is a simple but good example.

How have you seen design consultant-client relationships change throughout your career?

I’ve seen a change from the world seeing design as a way to execute to design now being acknowledged as a bonafide way to create value. This has been one of the biggest and enlivening recent transformations for design. More and more leaders are looking to design for leadership in the creation of new value for their organizations and you find more companies trying to generally lead by design.

Business and technology are starting to realize they are not the only drivers of value and see the gap in what they deliver without design. Ten to fifteen years ago they really thought they had it all covered with comprehensive feature lists and efficient marketing. Toward the end they would turn it over to the “pixel guys.” Now everyone is seeing that designers have a complementary sensitivity and way to create value.

The US is a little late to come to this. Europe and Japan have certainly been doing this for a long time. Traditionally the US has been focused on business leadership. And now we have a number of companies that have shown that good design is good business. The obvious example is Apple and they have been marvellous at setting an example by doing both. There are other companies out there like Google, Mint and some design-led startups. People are finally getting it.

And we’re also at the point where the general population is becoming discerning as consumers of interaction. So whereas ten years ago, people would say, “I must be dumb, I can’t use this interface.” Now they’re saying, “This just isn’t a good interface.” So we’re seeing the rise of the discerning software consumer. A dramatic example of this is the consumer rejection of Windows Vista. There was a Time Magazine article entitled something like “Why people hate Vista” when Vista came out. First, it was amazing that a software review was in Time and second that there was a mainstream rejection. This was a big moment showing a new public sophistication that says, “Maybe I don’t need this.”

… whereas ten years ago, people would say, “I must be dumb, I can’t use this interface.” Now they’re saying, “This just isn’t a good interface.” We’re seeing the rise of the discerning software consumer.

How do these skills relate to designers having impact in the world?

You can’t do it alone. Having the idea is often the easy part; it’s actually the expression and the realization that is hard. It’s like the Edison quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” You have to have people collaborate on the 99% part. It takes a team of different skills to make things happen. You have to find a way to listen and be heard and make sure the client is part of your team.

Having the idea is often the easy part; it’s actually the expression and the realization that is hard  … you have to have people collaborate on [that] part.

Interaction 11

Kristian Simsarian is giving the workshop “Design Consultantship: The Art of Hearing and Being Heard” at Interaction 11, the fourth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). The conference is sold out, but workshops (including his) are still available. Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Boulder, Colorado (USA).

Humans have a natural affinity for stories. We know this intuitively. When we’re trying to teach a child important lessons about ethics, caution and quick-thinking, we don’t work them through a series of Powerpoint slides on the subject in the hope that it will get our point across.

Rather, we tell them the story of Hansel and Gretel. Over the course of the narrative – as the siblings walk through the forest, dropping breadcrumbs, as they get taken in by the cannabilistic witch and then delay their transformation from youngster into dinner until they can turn the tables on their would-be murderer – the young audience engages, empathises, and learns.

Adults have a similar experience when it comes to stories. Whether it is the ancient oral tradition of encoding information about hunting or farming into folktales, or contemporary storytelling developments like management case studies, stories have a way of reaching us that mere description can’t match.

This cognitive resonance is what makes design stories a powerful prototyping tool. People can understand complex concepts underpinning a design more easily if they’re embedded in the narrative form. And there are even more reasons to use stories to prototype your design:

• They can be created right at the beginning of the design process, based on concepts and ideas. No coding or process engineering required – only brainstorming and a bit of writing time (although supporting user research efforts can be extremely valuable inputs).
• Used well, they paint a vivid, holistic picture of a future user experience in a way that users and stakeholders can engage with and empathetically critique.
• They provide context – in a story, the focus is not on the solution (eg a website), but on the users and how they go about interacting with it, to their benefit or peril.

And, incredibly importantly:

• Design stories create a mental “scaffold” for their audience. Once people have understood and embedded the user experience story, you can use that mental model to start adding in complexity. Discussions about business processes, technology, user interfaces can be tied back to the story, to help people make consistent sense of it all.

Planning an example speculative design story

Let’s look at how we’d go about using a design story to speculate on the future user experience – say, showing how some of the major technology and social trends we’re seeing today will change the world in the next decade. To plan out our story, we might first consider a few key storytelling elements:

1. Story coverage and size – what should the story cover, and how big should it be?

In terms of coverage, because the story is going to be speculative, I’ve decided to be a bit ambitious throw in a bunch of trends that I think will be influential in how we live our lives in a decade’s time. These are:

• Crowdsourced personal decision-making (asking your online social networks to help you decide on what to do, both in your personal and professional life)
• Social benchmarking (rating yourself against your online social networks)
  Augmented reality, bolstered by ubiquitous GPS usage (technology knowing where you are I a geospatial sense, and being able to “overlay” what you are seeing with additional information)
• Connected home appliances that are actually useful,
• Further convergence of many information devices into a single device (so that your smartphone, iPad, MP3 player, television etc all become functions of a single gizmo),
• Standards unification turning into integrated services across vendor siloes (so that your experience across the online services you use don’t fragment through the need to sign-on multiple times, duplicate information across services, not have access to data from service A while you’re using service B etc).
• Gestural and eye-tracking interfaces displacing (although not replacing) touch and mouse interfaces (getting UI’s off a screen and more integrated with natural interfaces like your hands and your eyeballs).

As for story size, I’m pretty confident that I can show how the world has changed by telling the story of a single, universal experience – waking up in the morning, and going to work.

2. The narrator – Who is telling the story?

Because the story introduces many new societal and lifestyle concepts, it’s important to focus on the protagonist’s thoughts, motivations and feelings, to help the reader quickly make a connection that will ground the speculative future being canvassed. To achieve this, I’ve decided to write in first person.

3. The protagonist – who is the story about?

I want to make the story about someone that the readers can at least somewhat identify with. So I’ve decided on a character who has certain types of common characteristics (25-35 age bracket, professional, urban, cares about health, relationships and appearance, tech-savvy) without making any of those characteristics come across so strongly that people who fall outside of the aggregate demographic will switch off to “owning” the experience that they’re reading about.

4. “Plot-driven” or “slice-of-life” – how is the story structured?

If I were writing a story about a specific service and its value to the protagonist, I might use a traditional plot-driven story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and where the protagonist faces a conflict that the service being designed helps him/her overcome to achieve his/her goal.

However, I am trying to show how life in general has changed as a result of an accumulation of trends. This makes me lean towards writing the story in the “slice-of-life” mode, where I can show a brief snapshot of a person’s life. I don’t need a plot, or too much context, or for the protagonist to develop over the story’s course – I just need people to give people a sense of what life is like in the “new world” I’m speculating on.

An example of a speculative design story:

So, taking all of that into account, here’s the speculative design story. Interestingly, I’ve had two distinct types reactions from people about it, which I’ll summarise with two actual quotes: “I want this now!”, and “Gee. It sounds like…a nightmare.”

This story could be told using many types of experiences as a basis – visiting a doctor, shopping for groceries, going to dinner. As long as the experience is one the audience can relate to and benchmark against their current state , it’s possible to scaffold the complexity and paint a vision that people can thoughtfully consider.

Regardless of the specifics of the story, the freedom that the storytelling form gives you means that you are only limited by your ability to imagine the world in a way where your ideas – as wildly ambitious as they might be – have played out.

Top image: Pawlowski

The week of inspirations continued: after the Venice Architecture Biennale, it was my own city – Turin – that was full of artists, clubbers and hipsters of all sorts. Régine Debatty wrote extensively about the art fair Artissima on her blog we make money not art, while Bruce Sterling was a steady presence at the Share Festival (although I missed his talk there – sorry, Bruce). And then there was the discovery of RENA , a new political group led by some very bright, young people who strive for a new climate of excellence in Italy, and collaborate intensively with no other than Bill Emmott (former editor of The Economist).

Within that context of fresh and inspiring thinking, I was delighted to find the free publication entitled The Enabling City: Place-Based Creative Problem-Solving and the Power of the Everyday (pdf). It is really an innovative toolkit – also featured on a website – where Italian researcher Chiara Camponeschi showcases pioneering initiatives in urban sustainability and open governance. Take a look and you will notice that her thinking is very close to the co-creation and service design themes that are currently all the rap in the UX community. It therefore comes as no surprise that she is inspired by creative communities guru Ezio Manzini.

Another discovery was the IDEA 2010 conference, held last month by the Information Architecture Institute. It is a yearly gathering  where UX professionals exchange insights and share perspectives for designing better experiences across physical and virtual information spaces. Videos of the first day are now available (check those by Josh Clark and Peter Morville) and you can also read recaps of Day One and Day Two on this very site.

Recently we got a chance to interview Erik Hersman. He is the co-founder of Ushahidi, a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya.

For those who don’t know you. Could you please introduce yourself?

Certainly. I grew up in Africa, Sudan and Kenya to be exact, and I live here in Nairobi with my family. I’m intrigued by the way technology helps us overcome inefficiencies in the system, of which we have our fair share on the continent. This led me to start blogging at WhiteAfrican and AfriGadget many years ago, and it was the driver for me co-founding Ushahidi and building the iHub this year.

During the Kenya elections in 2008 you decided to set up a crowdsourcing project called Ushahidi. What is this exactly and what made you create it?

Ushahidi was a reaction by an ad hoc group of African bloggers and technologists to gather information from ordinary people during a very tense and crazy time. There were media blackouts and intimidation, inability to get to places where activities were happening, and many things being swept under the rug. We built Ushahidi over a couple days as a simple way for anyone to send in messages of what was going on around them via SMS, email or web form.

We didn’t think much of it at the time. In fact, it was so plain and simple that we were a little embarrassed by the attention it garnered. Finally, we realized that what we had done was not about the technology, but about the way it allowed information to flow up from ordinary people in an emergency – at odds with the top-down information from government, media and international NGOs that we usually see. With the crowd included, we had a more holistic view of the events.

There are still many different views and opinions on what crowdsourcing is all about. Could you give us your thoughts on crowdsourcing?

To me crowdsourcing is simple: it’s gathering information from the crowd or using the crowd to solve a problem. Nothing magical about it, except for the way you do it and what you do with the information. Providing simple visual tools for quick understanding of what is happening is a big part of it, especially when a lot of data is collected and the noise starts to overcome the signal.

When companies or organizations would start to think about doing something with crowdsourcing. What are the do’s and don’ts you’d tell them?

Our perspective on crowdsourcing is that only about 10% of your equation should be the technology. The remaining 90% is split between managing the crowd, messaging to them and providing an incentive for them to participate.  or us, that comes in many different forms, as the Ushahidi platform is used all over the world for a wide variety of crowdsourcing needs.

We’ve had hundreds of deployments of the platform, here are some examples:

• Haiti – disaster relief (effectected population + diaspora + volunteers + relief organizations);
• Washington DC – blizzard coordination (Washington Post + DC community);
• Italy – Open forest fire (public + volunteer fire fighters);
• Tanzania – Election monitoring (public + election monitors);
• England – Mapping the London tube strike (BBC + public).

When working with crowdsourced data you’d probably face some challenging problems. What are those and how should we deal with them?

There are a couple big challenges.

First, getting people involved and finding the right incentives for them to take part in the crowdsourcing.

Second, verifying information, it takes a while and there are not any great solutions for it yet.  We’re building SwiftRiver to help with this second issue, a way for us to use people and algorithms to filter and curate the stream of incoming information.

Third, analyzing real-time information is hard, yet very important.  Our timeline and map are good for snapshots, but we need better analytical tools that are easy for everyone to use.

Could you tell us a bit more about the way you analyze the information?

This is a very subjective question, as the way that we analyze the data varies from the way other groups using the Ushahidi platform might analyze their data.  We tend to look at the incoming stream of data and bucketing it into urgent/non-urgent queues that we separate and escalate depending on the needs.  It differs from deployment to deployment, as the groups who we partner with change.  In Haiti it was very much tied in with local humanitarian responders, and in the Kenyan Referendum and Tanzanian elections this year, it was tied in with the local security and electoral commission.

Inbuilt into the system, on the front-end is the map and timeline.  Since the very beginning we’ve thought that pairing space with time gives some great insights into real-time information.  What we need to come up with is some additional analytical tools, visual most likely, for everyday front-end users to have access to.

If I’d like to start collecting crowdsourced data. Where would I start? What sources and systems should I use?

This largely depends on what data you’re looking for and your goals for crowdsourcing it.

Generally speaking, if it’s around what we term a “hot flash” emergency, then your best bets are to go with the channels that everyone is already used to using in your country/community.  Usually that’s Facebook and Twitter in the US, and both have great APIs with which to support gathering that data quickly.

If you’re setting up to crowdsource something over time, we suggest you set up a specific site and use multiple input channels for it. In our parlance, this is a “slow burn” initiative, gathering crowd information over the long-term. Unlike the “hot flash” data, which people are giving out regardless, here you have to provide clear incentives to them if you want serious engagement.  Again, in the US, Twitter and Facebook are still great input channel options, but I’d also look at SMS, email and webforms to spread it wider.

If you could make any crowdsource dream come true… what would you love to create using crowdsourcing?

Definitely a better Zombie map!  We must get our act together, more Zombie reports and sightings are critical if we’re to survive the coming onslaught.

I think we’re just on the edge of the way technology makes crowdsourcing so compelling.   Watch Carlo Ratti’s talk/Assaf Biderman’s – if there is a way for the ‘internet of things’ to feed into crowdsourcing platforms like ours, then we could have a real-time view of key stats in a city. Take the example of Copenhagen.  There will be more things coming down the pipe that do upload real-time data in a usable and open way, which is a big deal.

What does the future look like when you have crowdsourced possibilities in mind? And what role do interaction designers play in this?

It looks like a lot more data.  A lot more noise if we’re not careful.

Interaction designers are key to making it easier for the crowd to play ball, and more importantly, helping us all make better sense of what’s being collected.  Meaning trumps quantity here, especially in a real-time world where time to understanding and acting are critical.

In February you’ll be giving a talk at Interaction 11. Could you give us a bit of a sneak peek? What will the talk be about?

I won’t be talking to much about Ushahidi.  Instead I want to touch on some of the constraints and cultural difference in Africa that make designing and launching new services here so different than their counterparts in the rest of the world.  It’ll be about how we see the world differently, making it hard for people with Western assumptions of what the internet and phones are to design for Africa.

Interaction 11

If you want to meet Erik Hersman in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 11. It is the fourth 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 Boulder, Colorado (USA).

Last weekend I went to the Architecture Biennale in Venice, which was themed “People Meet in Architecture”. The focus in other words was on people (how they live, feel and behave in built environments) and how they interact with each other. These Monocle videos (part one and part two) provide a good impression. It’s great to see that people-centred thinking is now the vogue in the architecture world. Rethinking Happiness by the Italian architect/designer Aldo Cibic and his team is one of the projects that was exemplary of this exciting approach, and I encourage the readers to explore the website. The biennale closes on 21 November.

Lots of clippings this week.

Usability was a major theme and people reflected extensively on the usability of the iPad and the form factor usability of mobile phones.

Mobile devices are now, it seems, THE topic in the user experience discourse: their impact on emerging markets, the implications for online news, how they affect retail and local sales, and what apps could mean for tv viewing.

Two must read books got featured this week: Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks were interviewed about their new book Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design, and Jon Kolko published a sample chapter of his forthcoming book, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis.

Please, please, please could we stop talking about content strategy as if it only applies to the web design professional. The impact of content and user experience go far wider and should be at the heart of everyday marketing practice.

Reading Jonathan Kahn’s brilliant article on A LIST Apart, I couldn’t help being struck by how the debate around content strategy still seems firmly rooted in the realm of web design and development.   Now don’t get me wrong, you’ll find no bigger fan of content strategy as a discipline than me .  As a user experience practitioner I am fascinated by the way content strategy is driving the agenda for how we create and maintain compelling web experiences.

Perhaps it’s the wider perspective working for integrated agency affords, but I can’t help feeling that we are missing a trick. Surely we need to drag content strategy out of shadows and beyond the domain of the aloof web specialist (come on, we know we are!) and position it firmly into the core  of everyday, contemporary marketing practice.

In another article I once wrote I made the argument that content strategy goes beyond the constraints of the web site, to all digital touch points and all digital content. The rise of the social web and democratisation of content creation, calls for a new breed of content strategist, one that is dedicated to monitoring, aggregating, contributing and shaping content about the brand in all its digital guises. I believe we work toward a model for shaping content strategy as a means for understanding which conversations to invest in. This argument is being taken further to suggest that ‘user experience’ needs to extend not only to all media, but the gaps in between, Samantha Starmer starts this debate most eloquently.

In this context we see that content strategy goes beyond just the preserve of the digital specialist. We need  to call on the insight into consumer behaviour brought by the ‘traditional’ planner; the detailed understanding of connection and effect, through data;  the appreciation of consumer mental models and demands through search; and the subtleties of the social specialist to build a framework for interaction.

Perhaps, ironically, could the semantics be to blame for keeping content strategy niche? The strongest illustration being what we actually mean by the term content.  By most definitions a TV ad is content, words are content, YouTube video is content, comments and blog post are content – it’s hardly useful . Perhaps we should be thinking more at differentiating by what content does. Is it branded content that informs and compels? It is search content that attracts and directs? Is it conversational content that drives participation? In this way we can link content to its intended behavioural outcome, rather than its make-up or taxonomy.

So is there a wider view?

I think so. I think we need to see content strategy as being part of a wider content ecosystem.

Content strategy is concerned with the systems and processes for structuring, organising, managing and creating the content. As such it is closest to the traditional user experience professional.

Editorial strategy is then concerned with what to say and to whom. It covers messaging, themes , topics, points of view and how they are expressed. As such it is closest to the writers and search specialists.

Content marketing covers how to drive conversation around content. How to use it to attract attention, engagement and participation. And as such closer is to the traditional communication and   marketing professional.

In conclusion brands and their agencies should no longer dismiss content strategy as something the web guys do. It’s at the very heart of modern marketing practice and should be embraced.