I view social interaction design as a field that seeks user-centric descriptions of experiences and behaviors on social media, with an eye on emergent social practices. I see user interactions as occurring between users, mediated by social tools — not as interactions with the tools only. Social practices, in the view of social theory, involve users who know what they’re doing, what’s going on, and how to participate. Not on the basis of what’s on the screen, at the level of the interface and its design, but in terms of the social activity in which they are involved.

Social theorists usually refer to cultural norms, traditions, routines, and so on to explain the reproduction of structures and systems of daily life. Macro structures are reproduced by means of these daily repetitions. (See: Anthony Giddens, Constitution of Society). I borrow this idea and apply it to social media: individual user actions add up to social activities and practices. Users produce and reproduce the social reality of social media. Social tools in which users are engaged can be construed as social systems.

The Paradigm Shift

I view social interaction design as a paradigm shift in design thinking for two reasons. First, because descriptions and explanations of user activities focus on user experiences, not on design. Second, because the model involves two or more users interacting with each other, not one user interacting with a software application. (It will be said that UX focuses on user experience, and it does, but often as a reflection of design, or as behaviors “influenced” by design. When I anchor social action in the user, I really mean that; and both psychology and social theory are as helpful to the designer in this respect as design skills.)

When social interactions are mediated by software, design is structuring and organizing. Experiences are organized in terms of content and information, navigation, interaction and communication, symbolic actions (think gestures, use of tokens, games, etc). Time and temporality are organized, too, as in the feed revolution and realtime media. (Realtime streams: now and then) I liken social interaction design to urban planning: the use of architecture for social purposes, aware of the tendencies architectures have to produce social outcomes. In short, architecture as social system constraints. At the micro level the user experience may still involve individual user interests, needs, goals and so on. But taken together, social practices correspond to macro effects of individual “uses,” or activities. (I just killed a social game mechanic)

Social theory has been addressing the “instrumentalist” perspective on use over the past decades, expanding concepts of action from rational and goal-oriented action to social action. Social action is action in which the “other” is addressed in the user’s acts. This seems to me the right way to approach social media. I don’t think user actions are explained as interactions with an application, its design or interface, but are rather social acts that explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, intend social consequences.

Communication & Social Theory

Communication theory then comes into play when we realize that most social interaction on social media is communication. But there are mediated acts, using tokens, design forms, social objects, and rich media as elements of communication. (What’s Up With Social Objects?) Things can be said and done online that do not require use of words, or “utterances.” I view this as a rich field for interaction designers for two reasons: first, these elements need to be designed, along with the activity contexts that help to stabilize their meanings. And secondly, because these elements create new ambiguities, new possibilities for both expression and for interpretation.

Interpretation has a special place in social media. Social theory has a long history in the practice of interpretation, dating back to textual interpretation and then through to the interpretation of not only texts, but acts. Interpretation involves meaning, not information. I like this also because I think the best approach to social interaction focuses on the production of meaning in meaningful acts and “exchanges,” not information, data, or “content.” (Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard)

All social action, social theory tells us, is doubly-interpreted. “You know that I know that you know…” and so on. Two subjects in interaction are involved in what’s called “intersubjective” communication. In social media, this communication is mediated not only by language, but by media themselves. As users, we take the medium, or rather the “application,” into account when interacting with others. The medium fundamentally dislocates action and communication from face-to-face co-presence, so it loses both its “situatedness” and its context in place and time.

Social theory uses the concept of “double contingency,” and I find this very helpful in breaking down the two-sidedness of user-to-user interactions. Double contingency is used in meaning-based systems, where the actions of one take into account the likely interpretations of the other. In fact, I believe interaction design for social needs a two-sided model, based loosely on double-sided accounting (debts and credits), or to use linguistics, speaker-hearer. (Re-framing the problem: SxD) For every user action there is an equally valid user reaction (interpretation of action). (I develop this as an argument for coupled activity streams in my proposal for action streams: Action streams: a blue sky proposal)

Context is an issue for all designers, and in particular context of use. The concept of context implies a constructed-ness of experience and of activity. In face-to-face interactions, this is provided by the “situation.” But in mediated interactions, there is no situation; so we have to deal with loss of context. True, contexts are constructed and reconstructed to a certain degree by the application, how it works, what it’s used for, and so on. And these social contexts inform and shape what we do and how we behave, or act. As well as how we interpret the acts of others. The dislocation of action from place, or situation, is accompanied by a discontinuity in time. Because we experience time in terms of past and future, repetition, habit, and routine emerge as organizing forces in our individual experience of how something works and what to expect of our mediated interactions of others. So where context is lost, the meaningfulness of online activity is explained by the user’s own intentions and interpretations. This meaningfulness translates, in psychological terms, as “expectations.” Expectations of the meaning and consequences of online actions.

These expectations are helped out when we have relationships with others, be these friendships or peer connections. Relationships offer a further constraint on social action, and are again a factor in the social interaction model not directly manifest in design. Some relationships are long and lasting, but many, if they can be called “relationships,” are passing and transient. We might just refer to this as communication &mash; as in the “relationships” we can maintain on twitter. Psychologically, the potential for relationships subsists in all communication, and operates sometimes to motivate, other times to discourage, communication. The point I’m making here is that relationships are a structuring and organizing constraint on individual and social interaction conceptually equivalent to design constraints.

Communication theory plays a profound role in my thinking on social interaction design because so much social action becomes or wants to become communication. Acts of communication that are not picked up are not yet action, even if they have that intent. In fact, “social observation” is under-appreciated. A lot of social interaction occurs only after periods of observation. However, observation alone is not captured by media systems and leaves no result (who’s reading those tweets? No pageviews!). This is one of the reasons that so much of the activity in social media involves getting attention. (Social media: the attention economy explained) Attention that is paid but not shown makes no direct contribution to content on social media. The system is biased to an over-production and redundancy of expression; users are required by lack of social and system feedback to put in more, as compensation for the absence of a return look (of recognition and acknowledgment).

Communication that is taken up by another is action. Action has its own structure and organization, and social situations have been observed and described in great detail by many social theorists and psychologists. Social action clearly sits outside the domain of conventional user experience design. But it operates through the applications which facilitate it, and so design matters. But the design approach should consider social practices and outcomes, not only individual user experiences.

Every action captured in social media involves a selection of some kind. This selection is an act involving an item or element. The act may have user intent, but this intent is lost when captured by the social media system, and so the meaning of these selections, or acts, can only be interpreted by others. Social acts online depend in part on the system’s capture, storage, organization, and re-presentation for their likely meanings. Social activities can supply thematic structure, convention, and much more, but ambiguity and noise will always be amplified by the medium. (Is Clay Shirky on complexity too simplistic? )

Meaning and context of use

Much of the richness in designing for social media involves the wide range of meaning possibilities of the elements and selections offered up for social interaction. (Eleven tips on how to apply social interaction design thinking ) We can borrow from social theory in identifying some different core types: signs, symbols, icons and graphical representations, statistics, objects, words, images, and more (i.e. rich media). Skipping over the distinctions between these design elements and their systems of meaning, we should note that these all have two dimensions of meaning: their “objective” meaning and their meaning in context of use (inter-subjective). Or, what they mean, and why they are used. A four star rating may “mean” something, but it’s meaning differs from why a user chooses to rate something. Again, the use in terms of social action is distinct from the meaning as designed into the element. Ambiguity is again amplified by the two possible ways of interpreting the element. Object worlds and action systems offer up divergent explanations of meaningful action; designers work in both. (SXD: The construction of objective relations and operations)

Time is an interesting dimension of social interaction design because it is hard to represent. Action has a serial order in time: not only chronologically, for one act follows the next, but in meaning also, for each act suggests responses and is a response to previous acts. Social media are discontinuous and the user experience of time is individual and separate. This disables some of the seriality of social action but opens up possibilities for re-sequencing and rearranging the content of communication. This reordering is what we do with search results, lists, filters, and many of the other data sorting techniques and can be applied to conversational content, too.

Conversational media create a huge number of opportunities for social media designers, and we are only scratching the surface as of now. Many twitter-related apps are feed readers and facilitate content consumption but not conversational participation. The open space here is in relationships, use of the social graph, user interests and group affinities, and of course the navigation and representation of conversational activities. The temporal dimension of social interaction design can be explored much further, along two axes: the flow of user experience and experience of time (sequence, order, seriality, chronology, but also navigating time periods, snapshots of time, etc); and the linking up of stream items to connect and merge streams for new results. The former involves user experience solutions, the latter, interactive representations of time-based content and interaction.

Linguistics here is an interesting theoretical source, for linguistics, and pragmatics in particular (speech and performance of communication), have long examined the order of linguistically-mediated meanings. One such use of linguistics available to social interaction design is the distinction among different kinds of linguistic expression. We have, for example, differences among requests, invitations, questions, answers, greetings, statements of fact, opinion, recommendation, and many more. All of these come into play, and some efforts have even been made to codify them with microsyntax (in the tweet), activity stream tagging (tagging the feed item), even twitter’s codification of replies and retweets. Important to note here is that language is structure and speech is structuring (of activity and communication). Quora is an excellent example of a simple modification of feed-based communication taking advantage of the structure offered by language (to wit, the Question and the Answer, or more broadly, statements and responses). Quora is an answering machine. (Answer services: satisfying two user experiences)

Social media not only produce interesting possibilities for novel uses of language (its production and consumption) but also for how language and communication reflect the mediated social space. Social media create a kind of “second public,” or audience, one that the user may have in mind even if communication is directed at friends, or at nobody in particular at all. This aspect of the mediated social and public space can create a sense of being seen and of being visible. It is in part responsible for the attention economy and perceptions of influence, status, and “social capital.” And it is certainly a deep motive at work in how and why social media engage users, for it is based on absence, dissociated from situation, and dislodged out of time.

Psychology

Psychology enters the picture here, for social media not only capture action and communication but create representations of the self, also. We can think of the social interface as having three modes: mirroring (the self), surface (on which is content), and window (through which we interact with others). And related to these three modes we might identify three core user types: Self-oriented, Other-oriented, and Relationally-oriented. In short, people who talk, people who comment, and people who like a feeling of something going on. Psychological factors come into play in how we relate to the medium, to others, to content, and to mediated activities. Relations, not relationships, come into play here in psychological modes of identity and identification, as well as reflection, projection, introspection, internalization, and triangulation. (“You’re OK. How am I?” Reading through twitter.) Some, no many, of these can be applied to social dynamics.

The social dynamics which emerge around social media may be attributed to different kinds of user personality types and behaviors, as these are facilitated by the medium. Experts and their fans, stars and status seekers who want to be around them, critics and their peers, inviters and socialites… There are many social couplings and social formations that bring a social site to life, and whose participation can be served by smart social design. An agile approach to social architecture may come in use here, as a model for design planning as well as product execution and iteration. Social practices can be anticipated and iteration need not be a matter of tweaking, for all interactions are contingent on design, and design can do better than launch and see what happens. (Connections: A reflection the development of social tools)

Just a few suggested readings

• Anthony Giddens Constitution of Society and Modernity and Self-Identity
• Erving Goffman Forms of Talk and Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior.
• Jurgen Habermas On the Logic of the Social Sciences and On the Pragmatics of Communication
• Niklas Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media
• Alfred Schutz The Phenomenology of the Social World
• Jean Baudrillard The Ecstasy of Communication
• Don Ihde Technology and the Lifeworld
• Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
• Vincent Descombes Modern French Philosophy

Instead of making one product a million times over you can make one product for one person.

3-d printers have been around for some time now and have increased in popularity through the Industrial Design community as means to create fast and cheap, high quality and functioning prototypes. With products like Makerbot making the technology more accesible, entrepreneurs are looking with increased fervor for viable consumer applications of the technology.

Scott Summit, of Bespoke Innovations offers one solution “Instead of making one product a million times over you can make one product for one person”. Bespoke is the collaboration of an industrial designer and an orthopedic surgeon that offers one of a kind custom prosthetic limbs. Rather than build these tools from off the shelf prefabricated parts, Bespoke combines 3-D scanning and printing technology to understand the individual user’s needs and to build custom apparatus. Cheaper than traditional manufacturing, more local and generally a better fit, these tools don’t stop at a custom sizing. Metal plating, leather wrapping, and other post production modifications help create a personalized and genuine product.

While prosthetics is certainly one application of 3-D printing technology, the software still has a steep learning curve and, with the exception of the Makerbot, entry level printers are still pricey. We are not at the point of having individual makers in our kitchens circa Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age but the accesibility of custom products is here. How might this affect computer tower design or automobile design? The revived Volkswagon Beatle is an impressive step in custom design touting hundreds of options and thousands of combinations. That number increases exponentially when custom 3-D printed parts are introduced into the mix. What else is possible? How can this one-off mentality translate to interface design?

_{Source Article: New York Times}

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The most difficult thing about UX design is not creating the experience, but making sure it gets delivered as conceived. Whilst it might be terribly easy to blame the developers, or worst still the client, the reason why delivery may not match the concept is a little closer to home.

A shared vision?

The truth is: there is rarely a shared vision or understanding of the end experience amongst all parties. This is not down to the abilities of the UX designer, but the way in which the experience gets communicated. We have come to rely on a set of tools and documentation that instead of giving a unified view, allows different people to project different outcomes from it.

So I found myself nodding furiously at Jeff Gothelf’s article Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business, calling for a more agile UX process less defined by the deliverables. We have trained clients to believe that the value lies in the documentation itself, demoting the UX to a sign-off phase. It means we disengage decision makers at the very point their input is most crucial.

we disengage decision makers at the very point their input is most crucial

Whilst we have been advocating this ‘rapid-prototyping’ approach for some time it does not remove the need for documentation altogether, but we do need to create a better understanding of its purpose and application.

Communicating the vision

Our stock-in-trade site map, wireframe and visuals are very poor at communicating the vision to a user or stakeholder, but are essential for documenting it. I link this to the electrical wiring diagram for your house. The electrician needs it, but you just need to know that all the sockets are in the right place.

Some document types and techniques are great for concepting, but not great for sharing. We need others to describe the user context we are designing for (semantic arguments aside see Helge Fredheim’s articles on Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed). Neither promotes the shared vision we need – although they are vital to making sure we understand the users’ mental models. This is where the interactive prototype, the video and the storyboard come in. They are real and give the reviewer a true picture of the end experience. It’s an approach more akin to the way advertising agencies and TV producers work and more in tune with the kinds of digital assets we are making now. It is only with this more accessible view that a proper assessment can be made as to whether the experience meets both the needs of the user and the demands of the business.

This is where the interactive prototype, the video and the storyboard come in. They are real and give the reviewer a true picture of the end experience.

Where has this come from?

As UX professionals we are used to working with closed, task based infrastructure systems, led by technology constraints or a CMS – basically desktop applications and websites. This is where the documents have evolved from, as they define and codify the closed system and how a user interacts with it. If this is the context we are designing within, then the more ‘traditional’ approach fits. It gives the blueprint needed to make sure that the end result is usable and fit for its purpose.

The thing is these infrastructure builds form a very small proportion of today’s UX output. The adaptive design of content-led sites and mobile or social apps needs a different approach. As does the creation of rich content. We also need to build a proper appreciation of how the UX reaches beyond the interaction with the technology or content itself, to interact with other systems and the physical world.

No one size fits all

The key, as usual, is in avoiding the one size fits all approach. It’s not about throwing out the tools and techniques we have honed, but knowing when and where to apply them. An ‘agile UX’ approach has a place in this but is not a solution in itself. We need a flexible, fluid framework that focuses on the specific experience, within the specific context, to bring the vision to life.

A new order

So perhaps we need to turn it all on its head. Perhaps it’s time for a new order where the site map and wireframes are the end, not the start point. Where content creation, prototyping and storytelling take point in a collaborative process that unifies the user, the designer, the developer and the brand in a shared vision.

Occasionally, amidst the rapid rise and fall of trends, fashion and fancy, we are faced with true revolution: paradigm shifts that throw out excess baggage of some kind and usher in new ways of thinking and seeing altogether. The catch is that you need to have the benefit of hindsight to truly measure their effectiveness. With this in mind, I believe that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts.

I’d like to start with architecture and its recent history, and then compare it with current changes in the way interaction design is being conceived and made. Lastly I’d like to discuss the effects of such a revolution in architecture, and provoke thought on what the implications might be for the design of user experience.

Remembering the Bauhaus:  a call to end ornamentation in the built environment

The Bauhaus Movement (1918-1933) was based on a German revival of a purer, honest design representation in architecture, art, typography and product design. Its philosophy celebrated an austere functionalism with little or no ornamentation. It advocated a use of industrial materials and inter-disciplinary methods and techniques. The  Bauhaus aesthetic and beliefs were influenced by and derived from techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture. Artists included Paul Klee, Wassilli Kandinsky, and Feininger. Architects and designers included Mies Van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Lazlso Moholy-Nagy and several others.

Walter Gropius who at Columbia University (March, 1961) clarified the intention of the Bauhaus saying -

“The Bauhaus was not concerned with the formulation of timebound, stylistic concepts, and its technical methods were not ends in themselves. It was created to show how a multitude of individuals, willing to work concertedly but without losing their identity, could evolve a kinship of expression in their response to the challenges of the day. Its aim was to give a basic demonstration of how to maintain unity in diversity, and it did this with the materials, techniques, and form concepts germane to its time. It was this method of approach that was revolutionary…”

This movement was a true revolution because prior to its time, the built environment had bloated in stimuli, caused by an excess of decor and ‘pastry-work’. As early as 1908, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos had said that architectural ornament was criminal, and his essay on that topic would become foundational to Modernism and eventually trigger the careers of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto,Mies van der Rohe and Gerrit Rietveld and other Bauhaus masters. The Modernists embraced these equations—form follows function, ornament is crime—as moral principles, and they celebrated industrial artifacts like steel water towers and other ‘Machine Age’ construction as brilliant and beautiful examples of plain, simple design integrity.

The Bauhaus liberated construction from the excessive need for ornamentation as a means of expression, be it in art, typography, graphic design or architecture. One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. It freed itself from the shackles of historical ‘styling’ and attempted to create a fresh order of primary principles. Such radical thinking enabled a celebration of the purity and honesty of structure and looking for truth in things be it on a 2-dimensional canvas or a building. Anyone who’s marvelled at the Barcelona Pavillion or the Barcelona Chair (both designed by Van der Rohe) has experienced the essence of what the movement stood for.

The Bauhaus’s philosophy was that form should follow function and all other distractions and decoration should be avoided. It wanted space to be experience for its purity, stripped off all the ‘dirt’ and clutter of decor. This is something that’s been happening recently in the field of visual interaction design.

Cantilevered chair by Marcel Breuer

What’s the ‘IxD Bauhaus’ about?

If you’re the kind of interaction designer who starts getting a gradient-itch or delights in making buttons look like glass – think again. The times they are a-changin’.

There was a time when our sense of ‘modern’ in the user-interface was driven by concepts like these -

Concepts for the Windows Media Player by frog

Examine the words used to describe such a concept – “… a rich palette of visual surfaces for the media player and taskbars, giving XP a unique, consistent design language that challenges the traditional digital media experience. Analog-style, “rubberized” buttons on the skin of Windows Media Player offer classic, intuitive navigation and avoid the hyper-technical feel of other online players. Brushed aluminum textures, rich colors, and dimensional lighting add a satisfying tactile quality to the user’s online interactions, lending the experience a sense of the real.” The term often used to describe this kind of UI is skeumorphic. If pre-industrial revolution construction suffered from ‘nature-envy’, skeumorphic visual user experiences suffer from ‘object-envy’.

To quote an explanation from FastCompany’s article on it – Skeuomorphic apps take pains to reference or mimic physical, real-world features in their user interfaces. Apple is the current king of this design style, enshrining skeuomorphics in its Human Interface Guidelines: “Whenever possible, add a realistic, physical dimension to your application. The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.”

Skeumorphic UI

It’s tough to compete with a force as dominant as Apple, in the realm of beautiful user-experiences, but the release of the Windows Phone 7 design guideline (codenamed: Metro), an impending revolution has been made official. The new IxD Bauhaus’ basic principle is that ‘Form follows Data’.

The Windows Phone 'Metro' Design Language

Windows Phone’s new design language is inspired by print in the digital age. Let’s examine the words used by their team (extracted from Mike Kruzeniski’s blog) to describe their UI design principles -

• Clean, Light, Open and Fast
• Alive in Motion
• Celebrate Typography
• Content, Not Chrome
• Authentically Digital

One could almost use these words to describe Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavillion, for example -

• Clean, Light, Open and Fast (Open space, pure exposed beautiful material)
• Alive in Motion (through albeit static sweeping horizontal lines in the design language)
• Celebrate Typography (celebrating structure – making it boldly present)
• Content, Not Chrome (no decor, just beautiful clean spaces)
• Authentically Digital (authentically physical)

Visual motion in the Barcelona Pavillion

There are so many examples that are beginning to exemplify this philosophy, some better than others. Examples of this ‘IxD Bauhaus’ (to name a few) are -

Flipboard for iPad, The Puma Phone,

The Fluid App for iPad and iPhone, Wired app for iPad

Some design their visual interaction with fiercely reductionist vigor. Others still show hints of a gradient itch. The revolution however, is definitely underway. Increasingly, our apps and OS’s hint on letting us focus on our lives and tasks and ‘getting the job done’ by focussing on ‘content rather than chrome’.

Increasingly, our apps and OS’s hint on letting us focus on our lives and tasks and ‘getting the job done’ by focussing on ‘content rather than chrome’.

This is an exciting and most welcome change in visual interaction design. It is also a huge challenge for designers, content-providers and business groups.  Inorder to see the revolution thrive and prosper – all these interest groups need to work even more closely. We need to learn lessons from history and not make the same mistakes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Boxy: What can visual interaction designers learn from the Bauhaus?

The point of this article is not to acknowledge revolution. That’s been done already and perhaps more eloquently. This stream of thought would like to probe the consequences of such a ‘reductivist’ philosophy and draw parallel lessons from history.

The Bauhaus movement had immeasurable value in shaping modern architecture and design to what it is today, but it also faced severe criticism. After living in them, or owning Bauhaus furniture – several found them to be too impersonal, sterile and devoid of any emotional value. All houses started to look vaguely similar, offices became cubicle graveyards while Bauhaus masterpiece-inspired furniture design knock-offs looked tacky and boring. Since the moved was fuelled by World War II and an industrial wave of mass production it killed ‘craft’ and ensured a sameness in the objects we started seeing around us. This was both good and bad.

Jacques Tati’s ‘Playtime’ (1967) was a brilliant cinematic critique of the ‘glass and steel’ forest that modern life had become as a result of the Bauhaus.

Jacques Tati's Playtime

Lets quickly summarize why the Bauhaus was important for design history, but was frequently criticized in people’s lives -

• Not all material is worthy of celebration, not all content is beautiful too.
  The Bauhaus movement was a huge challenge not only to designers but also to the people providing engineering, construction and material services. Everyone needed to up their game in order to make a beautiful chair, poster or building. Any compromise in quality ensured that material/content was revealed as poor in quality and tacky in appearance.In today’s times business owners, content-providers and other interest groups need to do some serious soul searching to ensure that their content alone will carry their online experience through? Just like in the Bauhaus movement, bad quality wood looked tolerable when it was decorated or concealed. The moment one stripped them off decor – it exposed nothing but ugliness.
• Beauty is in the details, construction, and structure.A bad visual experience will now be judged, not by the beautiful ‘glassiness’ of its buttons, but by its inherent structure and little details that are made to manifest from inside out. Interaction designers and developers alike need to collaborate more closely to ensure that experiences are built inside-out, rather than designers applying ‘skins’ to a detached user-experience development platform. Wireframing experiences in close collaboration with developers and content-providers, detailing points of interaction without applying visual clutter will suddenly become a bottom-line in interaction design.
• Ensuring familiarity without losing brand value and character.
  Visual interaction designers will now be faced with the stiff challenge of creating identity, character and uniqueness without the easier palette of ‘decor’. A failure to create differences could lead to familiar ‘Bauhaus problems’ of sameness and monotony.
• Industrial processes drove the Bauhaus, software development processes are driving the ‘IxD Bauhaus’.
  Mass production, industrial fabrication, pre-cast components and material technology spurred the Bauhaus movement to fruition in its time. Today, we need to acknowledge that the reductionist IxD revolution is being caused by a larger understanding that ‘apps’ might be the way forward in a ‘Cloud’ computing world. Designers, engineers and developers would need to ensure that pre-cast components were designed well, almost as ‘toolboxes’ in the design of user experiences so that parts were repetitive without being too rigid. Visual interaction designers would need to think big and small simultaneously – keeping overall architecture in mind while resolving smaller details.
• When all facades are glass, its hard to know where the door is
  Knowing when and how to provide cues for interaction becomes even more crucial for the design of a good user experience. Windows Phone does this through minimal, yet intuitive animations that delight and inform users. Other app-experiences and platforms need to think of their own ways of solving this problem. Since buttons need no longer look like buttons, designers need to ensure clarity in design language using color, typography, or other material to differentiate interactive elements from static ones.

Conclusion: How much of less is more?

The main question here is not when or where the ‘IxD Bauhaus’ movement began. Or if it exists at all.

It is more important to recognize this reductionist behavior as a refreshingly welcome change in how we plan and design our visual interactive experiences. While we can no longer conceal mediocre interaction design behind the facade of decoration and fluff, several questions remain unanswered. How much can we reduce, without compromising on usability , cognition and emotion? How much can we strip experiences of cues (formerly done through decor) without making them sterile?

Even though the movement is in its early days in mobile, table and desktop visual interaction design, its implications will be broad and deep, regardless of commercial performance. A lot of the movement’s success depends on how users accept such a reductionist approach to visual interactive experiences where there are many hidden cues and authentic digital behavior. It remains to be seen how users respond to the lack of familiarity in the new UX metaphors that were formerly mimicking the physical world.

We all like personalization, customization and a feeling of ownership of the objects and services that we interact with and consume. The Windows Phone Design Team has done a great job of showing the user their relevant content on an interactive start-screen experience. How will others respond, without setting off another clone assembly line that mimics rather than acts authentic? While personally praying for the success of such a school of  thought and action, there are hurdles that we need to be clear about and prepare ourselves for that would rush to quash the revolution at the first signs of duress.

If the Bauhaus movement in the early part of last century failed to resonate with users for reasons that we’ve discussed – can we as designers prepare ourselves to meet the challenges ahead?

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Marcel Breuer chair from Wikipedia
Skeumorphic UI from Fastcodesign
Concept sketches from frogdesign
Barcelona Pavillion from Travel with Frank Gehry
Barcelon Pavillion details from Sketchucation

Day Two started bright and early with a full day of talks, panels, and workshops. With Dan Willis as the morning keynote the room was crowded with coffee–and–ipad–in–hand designers.

Keynote, Dan Willis

Technology is the application of scientific thought to practical application

Dan (aka @uxcrank) opened day two with All You Really Need to Know About Users You Learned in High School and his presentation was anything but traditional (and there is video proof). He introduces this as the Hangover Keynote, being day two and the show didn’t stop there. Before starting beach balls fly through the room and a dance party starts getting the entire room moving and shaking. And after a few minutes of displacement, Dan starts his talk or as he puts it, his Sermon on Demystification.

Dan demystifies UX and our profession and shares that a lot of what we do we learned in grade school. This includes:

• Hall passes are bullshit, control is an illusion.
• The cool kids liked you for your car.
• You can’t trust new friends, online friends are not ‘move your couch’ friends.
• You’re wearing what? People group and act like sheep.
• People go to parties to get drunk and have sex with strangers, sometimes superficial is good.

Dan closes his talk debunking myths of runaway technology, the cutting edge, Web 2.0 and human to human connection, and mobile web. He drives up to be a designer and to have meaningful goals with our products as well as to drop the adjective adjacent to design and to focus on the work as a holistic problem solving process.

Agile’s Secret Step: Discovery, Lis Hubert

Lis opens by defining what she means by Agile as a project execution method that is, simply, different than waterfall. Then, after a quick survey of the room level sets that we have all had some form of exposure to the methodology. She moves to discuss that Agile’s secret steps are discovery and planning. Sharing her stories with a large financial services company nicknamed The Titanic and others she discusses the challenges of UX fitting into Agile.

Lis Hubert

Lis reminds us Agile is not the enemy and communicates how we can have UX coincide as a defined element within the Agile process. Lis equates a product backlog to the bottles of beer coming down an assembly line and the need to be informed what is next to run an efficient system. This comes not from an iteration zero but rather a strategy team in charge of the overall plan. Agile must continue to move forward and balance of discovery and appropriate planning can keep UX involved and balanced throughout the project life cycle.

Influencing Business Using a Wall of Knowledge, Heidi Mucn and Derren Hermann

Heidi and Derren, working at Nationwide Insurance, share their methods and experiences influencing business. They step away from corporate samples though and share personal stories that use their methods.

What is the Wall of Knowledge? In Nationwide, its the large spaces to hang up and present information relevant to the current discussion. Much like an affinity diagram, it collates and organizes in a fluid manner information for the team to be aware of only unlike an affinity diagram it can include facts, inspiration, and any other form of content. When in practice, the Wall is used to obtain unified by in and collaboration earlier on so that the large stakeholder meetings are more around head nodding and less around discourse of a direction and decision. Make the information public and social and everyone is more engaged.

Taming a Nine-Headed Stakeholder Monster, Geoff Alday

Geoff defines the nine headed stakeholder monster, its a shared challenge that we all face, and it is our responsibility to synthesize and understand stakeholder needs and opinions. He immediately arms us with his tips on how to manage the beast and defines nine archetypes:

1. User. The myth is they don’t know what they want but they do.
2. Customer. The myth is the customer is always right, but they really want goals to be accomplished.
3. Sales. The myth is all they want is more sales, but address their pain points.
4. Marketing. The myth is all they care about impressions, but they truly do know how to market a product and ask marketing for content support.
5. Support. The myth is they only hear complaints and they can offer a unique understanding of users.
6. Executive. Geoff admits all these myths are true.
7. The Others. While not stakeholders the myth is their opinion doesn’t matter and is dismissed.
8. Developer. Debunk the myth that developers can’t design. They might not have the visual skills but they can contribute conceptual and functional designs beyond a designer’s skills.
9. Designer. The myth is the designer is they can only make it pretty, but there is more thought behind it.

Geoff close with tips to speak to the monsters language and to not use jargon for jargon’s sake, to listen to the stakeholders, and to consider all angles before disagreeing with something. His final thought is to admit mistakes and to get over it, don’t take everything personally.

Winning Big in UX: Changing the Problem–Solving Culture in Organizations, Jay Morgan

Jay defines his cognitive science background as his kung fu grip. He discusses how we can succeed more in UX by interpreting motivations and behaviours, not only of users but of stakeholders. Jay shares a few heuristics, is A like B (representativeness, Start here, get to there (anchoring and adjustment), and How likely is that to happen (availability). Ultimately Jay charges that we as designers must do more than design and must leverage cognitive and social sciences to be ambassadors and to build relationships more than build things that simply look good or behave well.

Working Lunch: Every UX Person Needs a Portfolio, Abby Covert

The UX community discusses a lot around how to present work, what level of a portfolio is needed, and how to best present work, especially given constraints around NDAs. Over lunch Abby had the audience go through a series of exercises intended for self reflection to understand how we can communicate what we do. Abby communicated three key criteria a portfolio should have:

• Pride not Proof — have pride in your work.
• Quality not Quantity
• Passion and Process — what you do, how you do it, and why.

Abby stresses the need for an ‘About Me’ that is real and tangible. Ignore buzz words and companies, focus on what you do in layman terms. She continues to discuss format (readable, presentable, printable) maintenance and growth, and distribution. In the end the audience left with new contacts to continue the exercises and a completed workbook with the building blocks of their own portfolio.

Abby Covert

“This Product Sucks!” A Sampler of Product Design Issues, Darren Kall

Darren tells a story of a product he created that, after conversations with a client realized that parts of it sucked. Darren communicates how to tell if products suck and then, if they do, how to mitigate the issue. What makes a product suck is not if it is unattractive, broken, or tasteless but rather if there is a conscious design or business decision that reduces the ideal experience. We conclude with a series of different non web-based samples of sucky products and what, from our UX toolkit needs to be done to avoid the issue. Comical and lightweight, Darren reminds us all of what not to do and how to approach design.

The Nature of Information Architecture, Dan Klyn

IA/UX is a dated term and IA should stand alone. As a professor with the University of Michigan Dan communicates how IA needs to and deserves to stand alone and that it is not an IA slash UX (IA/UX) connection.

They learn about this thing Information Architecture and they enter a world that does not have IA by itself.

Dan breaks down the ontology, taxonomy, and choreography of things and reframes what information architecture is at a root level. Using the iPad and Apple’s taxonomy as a basis for the conversation, we analyze language and how different product are organized well or poorly, and the resulting effect on the overall experience. Taking a step back away from the deliverables (site map, product map, etc) we are left to evaluate where IA fits as a larger part of design and an equal level, not a slash to UX.

Thinking with Your Hands, Karl Fast

“An experience designer walks into a bar…” And with that Karl opens up with the simple observation that we all talk with our hands. But why? Our gestures help convey additional information about our story. Sharing research around how and when people talk with their hands Karl discusses the learned habits around gestures, and the rate and reasons for gestures.

Karl describes the three types of gestures: adapters emblems and gestures, and the different use cases for each of them. He realigns the meaning of gestures and by introducing the term emblems aligns the audience to what we actually mean by gestural interfaces. Tying the conversation to affordances Karl stresses that we need to understand and design for the implications and details around gestures. They are just as important as the details of a door handle, and it is our role to understand the connection between what we do with our hands and how we interact.

Destroying the Box: Experience Design Inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright, Joe Sokohl

Joe uses Frank Lloyd Wright as a basis to discuss design. It is not the material and tools we make but what is the experience and purpose. Joe references memes that came out of Interactions 11 in Boulder and by discussing architecture addresses the framework of design.

The reality of the building odes not consist in roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in. — Laotse

Some main theme Joe covered:

Content. Frank Lloyd Wright destroys the box and brings ‘the outside in and the inside out’. How can interaction designers break the bounds of the technology we use and still work within the constraints of our technology.

Clients. Frank Lloyd Wright knew what his clients needed and built homes specific for the people who would live in that space. As designers we must know our audience and design for them.

Ultimately Joe’s talk takes us beyond the screen and reminds us what is important when we design, and that other disciplines have much to give to IxD.

Keynote, Jesse James Garrett

Jesse’s closing can best be seen as a reflection with a call to change perceptions. Sharing popularized samples of web design Jesse paints his vision of where design and interaction across all media is moving. He communicates that UX can be applied to anything, not just the web and we need to continue to push those limits.

The user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure

As we move forward with design we are challenged to answer how UX can capture so many different media. But what Jesse defines as design as is simply a mastery of a media, or mediumism. We are too focused on the tools and should not define UX as specific to a tool. Instead we should design beyond medium at which time we can focus on experience and engagement.

Jesse moves across emotion, interaction, and brings the conference to a close as he discusses perceptions of design and our need to get out of the interaction design echo chamber and to seek for more inspiration across all artistic tracks.

——–

_{Top Image: Stephen A. Wolfe’s photostream.
Youtube Clip compliments of brevadude.
Additional images compliments of @ixdiego}

It’s conference season. And we welcome MidwestUX to the mix, brought to you by IxDA Columbus and COUPA. A two day event, hosted in Columbus, Ohio, MidwestUX follows a two track program full of four keynotes, lightning round talks, workshops, and panel discussions. As always, Johnny is there to deliver a daily write-up for those who weren’t able to attend.

I should start by noting, while we had a jam packed first day and an equally full Day Two planned, the conference didn’t start Saturday morning. The conference organizers organized quite the welcome reception with a self guided pub crawl for Friday night for any of the attendees who planned to be there early enough for the pre conference festivities.

Keynote Jared Spool

Jared kicked off the morning with The Secret Lives of Links and shares with us the story of his daughter’s ‘secret’ live journal and evolved the conversation to the findability and secret nature of information on the web. Jared points out that we don’t talk about links, and that they are one of the most important parts of a page and how we communicate information. We discuss the nature of links and search, which as Jared puts it is BYOL, or Bring Your Own Link, as people type in the words they expect to see as links elsewhere in the page.

We never talk about links, yet they are the most important aspect of our sites.

Jared continues through various news sites, university sites, and turns his attention to marketing, ecommerce and other popular samples. He shares the history of links and breaks down why blue underline links don’t work and stresses that links want to look good. He leaves us with the thoughts of how we balance the presentation of links and their actual purpose; on how the power of a link is much more than what we present and how we often mix metaphors to confuse the purpose of links and navigation.

Follow Jared at @jmspool

UX Research in the Real World: Stories from Rwanda, Veronica Erb

Veronica shares her story of travelling to Rwanda to perform UX research around teachers. Three specific lessons were shared.

1. No schedule. When you can’t or don’t schedule your research in advance you think in chunks, not in specific time slots. Work with what is available to you.

2. No Recruiting. Working without a schedule at a new site each day, it was important to know your criteria for who you would like to research and who would be most beneficial gven the constraints provided.

At some point the director is going to come in and start using his filing cabinet and you can’t care.

3. No Lab. When conducting mobile research you are working in any space that is available. Working in a principal’s desk or classroom it requires additional fluidity and the ability to ‘roll with the punches’

Veronica closes with her perceptions on the success of the project: the passion of UXsters, the alignment with the stakeholders, and the willingness to always push for more. She also reminds us not to worry with the Rwandian phrase nta kibazo.

Follow Veronica at @verbistheword

Cooking UX with Cultural Leftovers, Erik Dahl

Erik takes the stage to discuss culture in design and the mutual impact culture has on our designs and design has on culture. We define culture as being more than context. It includes people, activities, context, emotions, motivations, goals, and more. It also includes an abstraction of patterns and stories.

Erik discusses how to suss out culture through observation, empathy and openess to stories and abstraction of differences across people and the world. He moves through definition to examples of where culture and stories are misaligned and it takes time and attention to recognize the effects a decision might actually take. With samples from America and Brazil, expectations and differences in culture help us realize the decisions we make have broader effects and require more focussed attention and thought.

Follow Erik at @eadahll

From Cancer to Bankruptcy, Brad Nunnally

Brad picks up where Erik left off – discussing the need for empathy during research as it helps build relationships as designers. With experience working with cancer survivors and working with retirement savings during the 2008 market turmoil, Brad shares how empathy and relationships are vital in emotionally tense environments. Sharing some advice with the audience, Brad communicates to:

• Never go alone, use the buddy system.
• Always show up on time. Be five minutes early but never late.
• Send a welcome packet, let people know who you are in advance including photos, bios and references.
• Humanize yourself and don’t be a stoic researcher.
• Take the glass of water offered to you and truly be a guest.
• Remember the user is just as scared as you are.
• Be honest.
• When the interview is over, leave. Do not debrief in people’s driveway.

Brad concludes by tying these relationships to different movies — suspense, horror, comedy, and anything else. Research isn’t a scripted science and like a film you have to follow the rabbit holes and follow the user’s stories while maintaining a focus. Brad also shares that it is OK to cry, laugh, and befriend your participant, and to be sensitive that some stories might haunt you beyond the duration of the interview.

Follow Brad at @bnunnally

Empowering Teens through Design Education, Larissa Itomlenskis

Larissa talks about her experience teaching architecture and design to teens in Columbus. Showing samples of work, Larissa communicates the constraints and implications of teaching children in a limited time and what we as designers can take from this experience. Larissa shares the inspiration she found by educating young students on design and by sharing the samples of their sketches and concerns left the room refecting on our practice and the influence we can have on youth. Children want to throw something away if it is not perfect and it is our job to communicate how to iterate and critique effectively, how to encourage discovery in an environment without failure.

In a proffessional environment you can’t just point to something and say that’s dumb.

From Mega Website to Mobile Experience, Edward Stull and Marty Vian

Edward and Marty share their perspectives on mobile experience design with their unique roles: Edward as a mobile app designer and Marty as a current client. Putting the addage to ‘Design for Mobile First’ on end, the duo shares ther story of developing the mobile application Manta based on the rich and extensive online presence. Slides illustrated the translation of functionality from web to mobile and the implications around reolution, environment, and controls. More a showing of their work, the talk acted as a catalyst for the later presentations on design for mobile and showed additional perspectives to a lot of the conversations on how and when to approach mobile.

Follow Edward at @esdc and Marty at @mvianl

Adaptive Mobile UX Design, Jen Matson

Jen shares her story of shopping for a space heater. Navigating the Sears website with Google’s support and through the mobile version and sharing her frustration when the information and experience is sub par. The sub par experience has led, in part, to the notion of Adaptive Mobile UX Design which may be defined as:

Creating web sites and applications that try to give each user the best possible content and experience tailored to their device and browsing context.

This need and definition isn’t new as tailored advertising often employs this as large billboards and targeting marketing spreads adapt to their audience and the context. Jen stresses the canvas or varying size, capabilities of what is available, and the context of the experience as the key items to consider around adaptive mobile ux design. Jen closes by highlighting technologies and methods currently available to employ and support adaptive design including HTML5, CSS3, geolocation, dynamic device orientation and more tools and kits.

Follow Jen at @nstop

Mobile Design Thinking Beyond Apple, Brad Colbow

Brad immediately changes pace from the mobile application design and shares a story of community and social interaction at a modern camp site. After sharing his story he moves back to mobile devices and communicates how the nuanced differences across platforms can be most critical in the overall success and failure of interactions. Sharing samples from Android, Apple, Blackberry and Windows Mobile Brad compares interactions across different platforms. With different hard and soft key placement and different menu paradigms mobile app design is not a one and done process and is not a standardized process. Brad concludes with a review of the different UI Style Guides and best practices of different interactions and motivates us to understand the differences across platforms and the opportunity to build interactions with care.

Don’t let your UI hinder the user experience.

Follow Brad at @bradcolbow

Don’t Watch TV – Experience It, Brian Stone

On avereage there are more televisions in a home than number of people living there

Brian introduces us to some stats: there are more televisions in many homes than people, televisions are more ubiquitous than computers in the home, television is used as a channel to more noise and a venue for social interaction. Yet despite 97% of homes in the US having a television it is wholly ignored from a user experience stance.

Brian calls out the lack of development for televisions wether it is the interaction, the applications, or supporting the experience while exposing the growing number of web-connected systems over the next few years. By sharing samples including Boxee, Hulu and other players he leaves us with three questions around user experience and television: What can it do, How does it do it, and How will it be different?

Users want more meaningful content on demand with a great experience when it comes to tv viewing

Keynote: Marc Rettig

Marc closed out day one discussing Design for Life and brought the theoretical and practical discussions of the day into his presentation. Marc immediately confronts the breakdowns around professional definitions and just as quickly assures us he will not be sharing those thoughts and ‘defining the damn thing’. Instead he uses that as an opportunity to spring board to the need not to define our work but to understand where it fits in the greater landscape. Marc discussed some of the history of user experience and placed us in the context of where we stand in today’s business; both geographically and socially with the amorphous seat at the table.

Marc defines our current status as the ‘UX Era’ and discusses how we communicate within our community and to the broader audience at large. He charges us to determine how to bridge the gap between human society and technology with business. Sharing his journey, there is much that resonated with the audience as he left no tangible action items but rather opportunity for further conversation. If anything Marc’s talk about connections and networks inspired attendees to reach out of their comfort zone and to meet new people during Saturday evenings events.

Follow Marc at @mrettig

_{Top Image: Stephen A. Wolfe’s photostream.}

Designers and researchers love data. Whether quantitative or qualitative data drives design. While it is one challenge to gather data, a far greater challenge is presenting it. Enter Daytum launch August 2008. Created by Nicholas Felton Daytum is a publicly available method for capturing and visualizing data. Felton, a true advocate of data has released annual reports of his life since 2005, capturing everything from food, relationships, and travel in a visual format.

_{Image: 2005 Annual Report}
For me, Daytum offers a way to easily track small sections of my life. Tracking water, beer, and liquor and even simple interactions I am able to visualize a slice of life formerly unavailable to me. With a simple mobile interface, I am able to track life on the go as it occurs in real time. Providing the raw data in CSV format, I am further empowered to create novel visualizations outside the domain of the website.

While this is a novel and fun interaction for my personal life, the value of Daytum spans to UX as well. Imagine providing a user with an account for a journal entry exercise and have access to real time, visualized data. If appropriate, the user could see this data and affect their actions and lifestyle appropriately. How might it be used for accountability across a team, as different items get logged to different categories based on role? Why Daytum has been available for some time, its potential is barely tapped. I encourage you to make an account (it’s free) and start exploring the addictive realm of capturing data.
_{Top Image: Feltron Print Magazine}

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How could we be so wrong about the future all of the time?
Over and over again, throughout history, we have predicted futures that missed the mark. With the exception of a few celebrated cases, futurists have had a dismal track record when it comes to the history of predicting the future. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about premonition, fortune telling, or extra sensory perception. Predicting the future, in this context refers mostly to technological development as it relates to topics such as transportation (flying cars, personal jet packs, teleportation, intergalactic space travel, hover boards), medicine (medicinal near-immortality, designer babies), entertainment (invisibility cloaks, virtual reality) education (instant learning), architecture (underwater cities, self-cleaning houses), food (food in a pill), and communication (automatic dog translation, telepathy). Basically everything you remember loving about The Jetsons, and then some. “Predictions, failed or successful, tell us as much about the time they were made as they do about the future,” says Finlo Rohrer in his essay for BBC magazine. What will our predictions in 2011 tell the citizens of 3011 about our culture, our fears, our expectations, our passions? Wouldn’t you like to know. As a jumping off point for this article, consider these two terms invented by Bruce McCall, prolific illustrator for The New Yorker:

• Techno-archeology = digging back and finding past miracles that never happened.
• Faux-nostalgia = achingly sentimental yearning for times that never happened.

McCall’s illustration titled Fully Loaded for The New York Times.

Why is predicting the future so hard?

We of the 21st century developed world are inundated with wondrous technologies and futuristic advantages, the likes of which would have been impossible to predict a century ago. Understandably so. You see, predicting the future is hard work! To succeed at it, one’s radical idea for a product or lifestyle must become routine, even mundane in the future. Those who have succeeded at it have often been treated as heretics or, at best, insane geniuses, mad scientists. Far ahead of their time, their predictions sometimes become their obsession and take over their life’s work, rarely bringing about any of the change they hoped to see in their generation. But boy would they be proud today. Or would they? Perhaps our manifestation of their vision or our dangerous and immoral misuse of their brain-child would cause dismay and disappointment. Maybe they would just be sad to learn how long it took for the world to accept their radical dream, a notion that they so clearly envisioned for the near future. Which leads me to my big question: why is predicting the future so hard, anyway? Well, I’d like to lay out a few reasons, although I cannot claim that these are by any means conclusive.

Risk

Big industries move slowly. This has started changing a bit lately with the emergence of tech giants who are somehow able to maintain the agility of a small shop despite their enormity (I’m looking at you Google). But for the most part, the bigger the industry or company, the slower the change. Marty Neumeier uses the scissors, rock, paper metaphor to show that small companies are like scissors, sharp in focus, but quickly transition into the expanded focus and momentum of rock companies, who in turn become smothering paper companies whose huge size, vast resources, and wide focus give it a competitive advantage, despite losing its scissor-like precision and agility.

The way I see it, it’s fairly simple – change is risky. Why do things differently when what’s working now is good enough? The danger of failure outweighs the potential for success. Hence, the future never materializes. The present is allowed to continue its course. Despite the availability of often magical and potentially profitable visions of futurists within big industry, the risk of trying something so different is too great. Nobody wants to accept this sad truth so the future keeps on being predicted by those who see how big industries could change if they took the risk, and futurists continuously become wrong year after year, as their future is tossed aside by the present.

Adam Greenfield speaks towards this in his recent essay about his experience working at Nokia. He describes how, “rather than acting as the incubator/force multiplier/accelerator it ought to have, Nokia’s corporate culture served as a brake on all kinds of innovative thought.” Frustrating as this can be to observe from the outside, it may be offset by a minority of companies so wealthy they can afford a few million here and there to support the fledgling R&D dreams of some of its employees, without affecting the bottom line. Not surprisingly this kind of development has led to some fantastic innovations that often take over or at least become a large part of their parent company’s original businesses.

Funding

The future is expensive. Small start-ups, ripe with predictions of how their new products and services will shape the future, often wither before they’re able to acquire adequate funding to grow. It’s challenging to convince investors that they should fund something they don’t understand or cant visualize. The deep future can be murky and most investors prefer to put their money in ventures they can grasp. But, if the seed of the idea is good, it doesn’t get buried with the lack of funding or even the failed startup. The dream is passed on to other, more financially savvy hands who keep it alive, even if by a thread.

With the future, the business model for new products and services that nobody’s heard of or knows why they need, can be a sticking point. How do you convince people that they should buy an electric car when there’s no infrastructure to keep it charged? How do you maximize the return on investment with space tourism as your offering? Fortunately for the predictors of an electrically powered automotive future in which we fly into space for summer holiday, both of these blossoming industries, and others like them, have figured out ways to survive so far. And their future is hopeful. But with your predictions in the hands of shaky business models struggling to find future-forward investment dollars, its understandable why they so rarely become true.

Communication

Where the 1960’s futurecasters made beautiful hand-crafted models and illustrations of their visions, today’s future experts struggle to communicate their dreams outside the realm of scientific papers and frankenstein prototypes. And communication is a supremely important bottleneck, frustratingly keeping our future dreams at bay. Of course, we can get our future fix at the movies, where we are awed by the meticulously rendered futures on the big (and often 3D) screen. But these technologies that visualize glossy futures for entertainment are rarely utilized in the board rooms where discussions about where to focus R&D dollars are held.

Let’s say a future-thinking motorcycle company is interested in developing the Light Cycle motorcycle featured in the recent movie Tron — a vehicle that starts off as an inconspicuous hand-held rod but quickly transforms into a glorious cycle that leaves trails of light lasers in its midst. In this case, the company is fortunate to have the movie and its accompanying sketches and storyboards as visual references for the design. So there’s your “what?”, but the real communication trouble starts when someone raises the big question, “How?”. And when “how” is unanswerable because the materials and processes required to create the Light Cycle have not yet been invented, you can see how communication becomes the breaking point. Its infinitely easier to communicate to the marketing team that the design plan for next year’s smartphone is to make the same thing but increase the screen size and slim it down than it is to suggest that it be embedded in a flexible wristband or that in the near future humans will have developed telepathic skills and will no longer need smartphones at all. We can’t make the future if we can’t communicate how it works and how it can be fabricated.

Sketches of the LightCycle for the Tron:Legacy film. Designers pretended they were making a real vehicle. More here

But communication as a barrier to the future goes beyond expressing how to make it. There are certain “metaphysical ideas that cannot be expressed in words,” explains a post from ad agency Weiden+Kennedy’s new Platform site. The business and technology incubator whose current participants are focusing on “articulating research, testing the future, visualizing data and facilitating events and experiences that enable people to ‘explore their own tomorrow’” references a crucial player in the predicting the future game – design fiction. I wrote about design fiction here in April 2010, but for a refresher, here is Platform’s description of the concept:

Design fiction has emerged as a pre-eminent tool for designing, challenging and understanding speculative future realities. However, design fiction aims to make the extraordinary ordinary. It merges the elastic creativity of science fiction with everyday matter of fact reality. Furthermore, in using current media conventions as a way to express ideas about the future, design fiction is able to twist reality and trick us into accepting the fantastic as possibility.

Platform goes on to say that “design fiction is effectively expressed in a medium of experience. It is expressed as a combined series of moments designed to create a new actuality or at least new assumptions.” It seems that as the world becomes more complex, networked, intangible, and immaterial, the future, in turn, becomes infinitely harder to communicate.

Practicality

Several of the most endearing Space Age predictions such as jet packs and flying cars have suffered, not from a lack of technological ingenuity, but from a void in consumer practicality. As Syd Mead, the legendary visual futurist, puts it in BMW’s Activate The Future miniseries, in reference to flying car prototypes, “…the wings came off and you store them in your garage. Trust that to your local guy down the street to put his wings on right…it’s a nightmare.” So in this case, our technological capabilities have out-sprinted our infrastructure and cultural readiness to adopt future products that we so badly want. “We have fun imagining the future but we have trouble predicting it, because the future we usually get is the one we least expect” says the narrator in the BMW film. And that may have something to do with the unpredictability of consumers and cultural adoption, but I think it has more to do with the notion that imagining impractical, ludicrous, silly inventions is way more fun.

I created this visual formula for the future in order to analyze various aspects of predicting it.

Ok, so predicting the future is really hard.

Despite the challenges, predicting the future remains as crucial and exciting as ever. And it’s not just plain fun, it’s big business too. Google is investing in a web-app that uses a data-based, scientific approach to prediction, and creative consultancies all over the world are being hired to trend forecast and to design the future. Not to mention the defense department’s ultra top secret futurology lab, DARPA whose slogan is “creating and preventing strategic surprise.” Popular Science and other publications look into cutting edge sciences to reveal where the future may be heading. Organizations like The World Future Society and the Institute for the Future have made “future consulting” a service offering. Ray Kurtzweil has made a career out of it.

Ray Kurtzweil, inventor, educator, author of The Singularity Is Near, and subject of the documentary The Transcendent Man, is perhaps the figurehead for modern day future casting.

You have to wonder though, how could something with such a low success rate be so everlasting, so fun, a successful business model? Why do we enjoy predicting the future even though we are fully aware of the dismal odds our envisioned futures have of materializing? Why has so much money been spent on technologies that someone promised would be the way of the future, even though we most likely knew in our hearts it wouldn’t? After centuries of making (mostly) wrong predictions, how is it that a collective discouragement doesn’t inhibit new dreams? Imagining the future is spellbinding. The very nature of mapping out the future has a courageous, wild west feel to it. And of course, it allows for the possibility of a better life, mediated by glossy technologies and laziness inducing conveniences. I propose that it also has something to do with our penchant for optimistic escapism, our fanatical love for mental diversions by way of entertainment or recreation. When we are allowed to mentally replace the unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life in the year 2011 with visions of 3011, or even 2020, we feel a sense of hope. The future must be better (faster, easier, more autonomous, sexier, smarter) than this! Not all possible futures are so optimistic of course – that would leave out all of our dismal apocalyptic visions of death and destruction. But even futures where AI robot servants hijack our flying cars and zap everybody with their ray guns provide us with a temporary escape from the present, where something that “cool” would never happen.

Covers and images from Popular Science & Popular Mechanics magazines from over 50 years ago. More here

Historical Predicting

During the Great Depression Era of the 1930’s, Americans became obsessed with the future. Suddenly thrown into a lifetime low, it became easy to spend unemployed hours imagining a future where technology made everybody’s lives better. This was the dawn of the personal robot servant, the flying car, the ray gun, instant food. The World’s Fair set a stage to talk about and share these dreams and talk we did. But the Depression was only the beginning. It occurred to me that some people may have found it depressing or belittling to think of themselves as inferior when compared to future societies. Arthur C. Clarke, celebrated science fiction writer and illustrious futurologist attempted to curb any such feelings in a presentation he made for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, saying, we should “consider it a privilege to be stepping stones to higher things.”

Arthur C Clarke, one of the most legendary futurists of all time, can be seen here doling out his predictions for a future that, as of now, is still deep in the future.

Decades of ferocious futurecasting were to follow as wartime technological advances gave way to Space Age futurism. Hope, possibility, and optimism reigned supreme in this era of exploration and can-do spirit. “I wasn’t around during that time,” says Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory, “but in my nostalgic view and from the lens of the man who grew up from the boy who wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut or a jet fighter pilot — [there was a] sense of possibility of transcending the surely bonds of earth. And that can translate to going beyond one’s sense of the limits of possibility. The power of the “northstar” way of working toward a goal that seems far beyond what one should be able to do.”

But then a strange thing seems to have happened. For reasons unknown, we stopped predicting with the same tenacity. Its as if Americans said, “wow we really came up with some great ideas for the future, let’s stop here and work on those.” And what’s worse, most of these classic predictions remain predictions today, oftentimes feeling as far off as they may have felt 50 years ago. In fact, we’re still working on actualizing most of what they predicted would be commonplace by the year 2000, and we’re a long way off with many of the ideas. Wired Magazine’s recent article featuring Will Ferrel outlines in-depth “Why the marvels we were promised haven’t materialized.”

We know there are plenty of good reasons these things never made it to the mainstream. But what caused the slowing down of the collective future creation machine that was the imaginations and dreams of the American Space Age? Bleecker says,

It could be that our expectations about the future are intensely compressed by the pace of new gizmos, which I think largely define what we consider the future — what’s coming out in the next 6 month product cycle. You have networks of rumor management about all sorts of things. From MacRumors.com to things that are of interest to photographphiles, like NikonRumors.com. It’s always about what is just around the corner. I don’t get a sense that there are big dreams about — even getting a car that runs on something renewable seems to be the biggest we’re able to dream. But that’s just gizmos. Things like a future where people are mindful of difference and accepting of opinions and points of view that differ from their own and still able to live peacefully — those are more the Space Age future dreams we’ve lost hold of. It’s still such a contentious view and no iGizmo is going to mitigate that.

Let’s Just Make It Up

From what I can see, it’s not that people today aren’t dreaming about the future anymore. It’s just that figuring out what the future can and should be is really, really hard, and has gotten progressively harder over the past few decades. In a technological climate where things change as rapidly as the weather in New England, future forecasting has reigned in its sights from what used to be 50 years or so, to more like 3-5 years or less. “We live in the age of much more complex, more turbulent futures, that approach us with ever increasing speed,” says SUMM( )N, a Dutch agency that helps its clients imagine, visualize, and work towards their possible futures.

Thinking about the future has never been an easy task, but the new, exponentially complex human conditions require us to re-think the way we deal with the future possibilities. Instead of colonizing the future with our old ideas and practices we need to learn to quickly explore and probe possible futures. Therefore instead of ‘predicting the future’, instead of prophesying yet another set of ‘future trends’ we help our clients to imagine and co-create new possible futures…

Another trend in contemporary futurecasting replaces the old practice of tossing out half-baked answers with a more refined questioning process. Rather than declaring that people will live in glass domes in the future just because it looks futuristic, designers, thinkers, and futurists today are asking provocative questions about modern living and how it will shift in the future. You may be thinking, asking questions can’t be nearly as fun as Clarke’s Worlds’ Fair mock-up of the future, but believe me, there’s still plenty of fun to be had. Just look at the RCA’s Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, whose projects and courses explore zany and provocative possible futures. Dunne and Raby are pioneers of the notion that critical and speculative design have the “ability to make abstract issues tangible” and are a valuable addition to “public debates about the social, cultural and ethical impact on everyday life of emerging and future technologies.” Another prime example is Art Center’s recent graduate Media Design Program exhibit Made Up: Design Fictions. The show

presents the work of major and emerging international practices that forecast, hypothesize, muse, skylark, role-play, put-on-airs, freak-out or otherwise fake-it to produce work that is relevant to our increasingly confusing and accelerated world. MADE UP is a new type of exhibition — a self-recording, 1:1 map of questions and propositions: dreams as program; science fiction as precedent; cults of commerce; objects as ideas; strange-ified banality; truth-revealing jokes; false histories; and elaborated scenarios.

What’s great about shows like this one is that the work has an utter disregard for incremental steps toward the future. They couldn’t care less about making batteries that last longer, cars that are slightly more fuel efficient, data storage with more storage. Clarke said that if your predictions of the future sound reasonable, they won’t come true, whereas if they sound completely unrealistic and insane, they will most likely become true. So why not just make it all up? That sounds way more fun anyway. If you’re worried about being wrong about the future, don’t be. It turns out that “there’s no great, complex explanation for why people who get one big thing right get most everything else wrong,” argues Oxford economist Jerker Denrell . “It’s simple: Those who correctly predict extreme events tend to have a greater tendency to make extreme predictions; and those who make extreme predictions tend to spend most of the time being wrong — on account of most of their predictions being, well, pretty extreme.”

But I would suggest that being wrong can be even more successful than being right. Historically, we have attempted to wrap up the future in tight, neatly explained packages. I propose we let go of those controlling urges. Drop the hubris act. Forget about having any authority over the future. If we are able to embrace the ambiguity of the future, break through current structures, think beyond contemporary logic, and work outside of predictable contexts, the future has a real chance – not just of providing us with faster, smaller, sexier gizmos, but of actually being a better place than today.