This post by John Tolva is heralded as “critical reading if you have any interest whatsoever in networked cities and citizenries” by city-ubicomp expert Adam Greenfield.

As Chief Technology Officer for the City of Chicago, he uses examples from city initiatives (Bus Tracker, Train Tracker and potential other civic startups) to propose the future of urban cities:

… [think] of the city itself as an open platform with an API. Physical objects generate data that can be combined, built upon, and openly shared just as it can be from the data portal. The difference in this scenario is location. Where much of the data in the portal is geo-tagged, data coming from the built environment would be geo-actionable. That is, in the city-as-platform scenario certain data is only useful in the context of the moment and the place it is accessed.

Just don’t call it an ‘urban OS’:

… I’m growing skeptical of calling all this an operating system, at least in the sense we traditionally do. Much of the talk of an urban OS focuses solely on centralized control. But if you’re true to the analogy of a computer operating system it would have to be a platform for others to build applications upon. In truth, this is a lot more like a robustly deployed, well-documented set of fault-tolerant API endpoints than it is an OS.

There’s been a lot of interest in urban spaces in the last few years from people such as Adam Greenfield,  Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati (who we also covered in this year’s EuroIA conference notes), and Dan Hill (who we also covered at Interaction 10). However, Tolva’s perspective is particularly heartening given that he represents the public sector, and represents a growing number of authorities realising the future role of open data.

—

City of Chicago image NC-BY-CC by accentstage

10. “Checklist Thinking” for UX Professionals: Retaining Your Sanity in a Complex Project

Author: Greg Laugero
It’s common knowledge (or it should be) that discovering requirements during page design is a recipe for madness. But no matter how much we believe this and strive to avoid this, it still happens. In this article Greg let’s us take control again.

9. Experience Design Models: Minding the Gap Between Ideas & Interfaces

Author: Marc Sasinski
What can we do to better communicate experience design vision during that window of opportunity between raw ideas and design deliverables? How can we use our abilities to visualize for the greater good? Enter experience modeling.

8. Designing a Reason to Come Back

Author: Stephen Anderson
In this article Stephen shares some of his ideas on how to get people back to your website. He explains the significance of rituals and even gives us a design challenge.

7. The Theory Behind Social Interaction Design

Author: Adrian Chan
Via this article I would like to give you the big picture introduction to the theory behind social interaction design. Many of my articles on this topic are anchored in social theory but don’t make explicit reference to it, so I thought an overview might be in order.

6. Aristotle’s Storytelling Framework for Interactive Products

Author: Jeroen van Geel
Throughout the centuries people have told stories to share knowledge between generations. Storytelling is an important skill each interaction designer should have. It helps create engaging products and services. But how should we start doing this? I came up with a framework.

5. Where Innovation Belongs in User Centered Design

Author: Jake Truemper
User Experience designers have a unique opportunity to become the facilitators of holistic design and the advocates of innovation. By combining traditional user-centered activities with a greater emphasis on creating engaging designs we can bring usability into alignment with innovation in the design process.

4. Design Research and Innovation: an Interview with Don Norman

Author: Jeroen van Geel
I got the chance to interview one of my heroes: Don Norman. This May he was one of the keynote speakers at UX Lisbon in Portugal. I spoke to him about innovation, design research, and emotional design.

3. User Experience and the design of news at BBC World Service

Author: Tammy Gur
Designing a setting for the torrent of content that passes daily through a news website is a challenge unlike any other. the BBC World Service has got a user experience and design team which designs and develops news sites for the web and mobile devices in 27 languages, catering for audiences across world. In this article Tammy shares some of their experiences with you.

2. The ‘IxD Bauhaus’: What Happens Next?

Author: Rahul Sen
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, Rahuk believes that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts.

1. How Your Coffee Mug Controls Your Feelings

Author: Seth Snyder
What would you say if Seth told you that objects you use every day are now believed to be practicing a form of mind control on you? Sounds crazy, right? Well, although cognitive scientists probably wouldn’t use the term “mind control”, they wouldn’t disagree that while we interact with physical elements of our environment, our brains are performing what’s known as embodied cognition, a sneaky sort of intuition that drives how we feel and behave and is breaking down century-old mind/body link claims with a vengeance.

The project is split up into five themes:

1. Personal Exposure: ”how technology is impacting our identities and behavior”.
2. Relational Connections: “[the] role of technology as a facilitator, participant, and obstacle.”
3. Transformation: ”[the] role of technology in our everyday lives, both in terms of what is changing (us) and how”
4. Biological ”[the] blurring boundaries between technology and our everyday lives (and bodies)”
5. Wonderland

Some highlights from the series also include an interview with Near Future Lab’s Julian Bleeker:

What I hope for design fiction is that it could do the same thing and its outcomes or products would be accepted as, at worse — things around which conversations can be had that may lead to new near future worlds that are hopefully more habitable. At best, that same suspension of disbelief makes it possible to have a design fiction speculation accepted as imminently possible. That means that the guy in the room who has the check book and the decision making power can say about some curious idea or a disruptive thing that isn’t just another uninspired, middling “innovative” device – yes..that’s what we should do.

Also worth reading is their interview with technologist (and Lift Conference curator) Nicholas Nova:

The population is not equal. People who grew up with these technologies will be less stressed out by the vague micro-decisions we have to consider, simply because they have lived with this new norm. …. Also see Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You. Overall, I see a set of tradeoffs:

• A huge and diverse quantity of material that can be useful or interesting for anyone curious. I grew up in the countryside and it was a pain in the ass to get access to “long-tail” music/books/fanzines/etc. The web is a formidable source of difference for people intrigued by others’ cultures and who want to learn.
• However, this huge quantity of material makes us run like headless chickens, taking a quick bite from lots of sources of information but we may lose our ability to sit still and think deeply about a certain topic.
• At the psychological level, the capacity to cope with large amount of information, integrate multiple factors and make decisions. Yet we also suffer from decision fatigue (e.g., bombarded by requests, information and data).
• Privacy is shifting and we are more and more obliged to share personal information with others.
• An urge to be reachable (and aware of current trends) 24/7 which is tiresome too.

They also speak to ‘A History of the Future in 100 Objects’ author Adrian Hon.

[EDIT: there are more interviews in the pipeline next year, and the project itself is only in its early stages. Thanks Steve for clearing this up.]

Ethics has always been an important subject in our field. But since persuasion design has become popular people seem to talk about it more often. In most cases these thoughts don’t go far beyond a “I don’t want to design bad things.” Stephen Anderson managed to go a few steps further and share his thoughts in Towards an Ethics of Persuasion.

I’m often asked this question on the subject of ethics: “When is it okay (or not okay) to influence someone’s behavior?” Here’s my simple response: Don’t take on projects that you wouldn’t personally use yourself or recommend to your friends and family.” When you agree to work on a project, you make an ethical choice. The question of ethics begins with the clients you choose to take on, not the tactical design choices you make along the way.

There’s a hidden benefit to only taking on projects you believe in: it helps you avoid the more difficult question of, “How far do I go in influencing behavior?” Are seduction techniques like the ones I describe in my book ethical? This is a difficult question to answer.

Persuasion, and even control, are subjective things. What seduces one person might be laughable to someone else. This makes it difficult to argue that a particular tactic is right or wrong when the effectiveness is dependent on the person being influenced. If one person is influenced by the presence of testimonials on a page (an influence tactic known as social proof), and simply changing a word in the copy is enough to influence another person’s behavior, how can we say that one tactic is unethical but the other is not? Both of these intentional decisions influenced someone’s behavior. You might even argue that the person was being manipulated in both cases.

Read Stephen’s complete article Towards an Ethics of Persuasion.

Indeed it is. Every interaction people have with your website is an opportunity for your organization to improve, hurt or confirm your credibility with them. When your content doesn’t support your business/organizational goals and provides zero value to your customers, you will end up with more unpleasant conversations and missed opportunities. You need a content strategy. So where to start? At the beginning, of course. But what is the beginning? You are in the day-to-day grind of maintaining your current site, fixing the most “urgent” issues rather than addressing the underlying problems that led to today’s real and perceived crises. The process of creating a content strategy was very rewarding, both for the Web team and the people we worked with internally. We discovered insights about how the website could support the goals of individual business units and the corporation. Stakeholders realized that there was value in creating content that people wanted to read, view or respond to. But you can’t to results without starting.

1. Realistically Assess Your Situation

Can you finish what you start?

At Cerner, we knew that there were problems with our content in the spring of 2010. We “knew” it in the sense that we got complaints about it, we noticed inconsistencies and inaccuracies in how we talked about our solutions and services, and our analytics told us visitors didn’t care to read, consume or react to what was on the site. But we really didn’t know what it would take to fix everything, or even what “everything” was. Before anything could be done to fix our site, there had to be a commitment to do so. This sounds simple, but it’s not. Is your company/organization willing to let someone (or several someones) spend the time necessary to dig into the underlying problems with the current content? Will your company let that person or persons create a plan for fixing it and then go do it? If not, is the company/organization willing to be influenced on the importance of content? If the answer is still no, then your default content strategy will be to have no strategy at all. For us, fortunately, the answer was yes. In 2010, we started a redesign of our entire site. The redesign was not limited to just the visual design and a new technical platform, although those were important considerations. We wanted to create an entirely new user experience, which would not be possible without completely re-thinking how users found our content, and what we actually chose to say (and not say) with our content. The content portion of the project was not just added on as an afterthought, but was included from the very beginning of the discussion of what we wanted the website to be.

2. Build Internal Support

Who cares about content—and can do something about it?

So great, you have permission to create a content strategy, whatever you decide that means. It’s one thing to have approval from your manager to do so, but what about the other areas of your company or organization? If people outside your team are involved in the content process (most likely creation or review/approval), you need them to support your efforts. To get their support, this group needs to care, or why they should care. We had about 30 people across the company responsible for providing or overseeing the content for their group of solutions and services. These people were not/are not writers or Web content experts, but implementing a content strategy would be impossible without their support. We targeted a small sub-set (three) of these people (we’ll call them content contributors) who we deemed as influential among their peer group. In individual meetings, we discussed the idea of putting a strategy behind our content. We didn’t use the phrase “content strategy” in the meetings; instead, we talked about their business goals, and shared ideas for how content could help them meet those goals. These people were not executives within their given organization, but rather those who would most care about content in that organization and who would be in a position to take action on it. What we discovered:

• Content contributors were desperate for guidance on how content could support their business goals;
• Governance had to be included in our content strategy. Governance by itself is not a strategy, but our content contributors needed a clearer process for governance of our content;
• This group would start to really care about their content when we gave them a reason to.

This sub-set of content owners served as advocates down the road when we shared our plan for content creation, maintenance and updating during the redesign process. By introducing the idea that content was important to an influential sub-set of this group, we faced no opposition to changing “how things had always been done” when meeting with the full group. With the internal support in place, then it’s possible to get the subsequent work done.

3. Define and Prioritize

How will you get the work done?

I listed this after building internal support, but in reality this step can and should occur in conjunction with creating internal support. While we were meeting with the sub-set of content contributors, we identified the key problems areas (both quantitative and qualitative) with our existing content. We took the time to catalog and inventory ALL of our content, which at the time numbered about 7,500 pages, including our nine global sites. Taking inventory of your content is time-consuming and hard work. But you have to do it in order to define the problems with your content and prioritize how to fix them. There are numerous examples on the Web of what your audit should include, from a spreadsheet to more sophisticated software tools. Devote some time looking at them (hint, a spreadsheet will probably work for you). Ask yourself how that approach would work for your website. Ask people who work on content strategy how they handled a content audit. We decided to capture the following information in our audit:

• Page Title;
• URL;
• Metadata keywords;
• Last date page was updated;
• Who updated it?
• Did the page include an image? Video? Downloadable PDF?
• Was it any good?
• Is it written in appropriate tone and voice?
• Does it contradict content in other locations on our site?
• Is it just a regurgitation of a flyer or product spec sheet?
• Is it written to inform a visitor, or to please a product manager?

The last item (was it any good?) took the most time to complete on our audit. But you aren’t doing an audit without answering that question. Otherwise, you are just filling out a spreadsheet. Yes, quantitative data was essential to understanding our overall content issues, but ultimately you need to make judgments about your content. Our content issues immediately surfaced once we completed the audit. And we now knew exactly how bad the problem was (or wasn’t). For us, these issues were are biggest challenges:

• Lack of tone and voice – For example, we might talk about our radiology solutions in an informal, conversational way, with the content focused on how it might benefit the end-user or health care organization. But on our page for our pharmacy solutions, we would list 15 bullets of feature functionality, with no consideration of how this solution benefits the end-user or organization. So are we a company that wants to talk only about how great we are, or are we a company that is focused on helping our clients improve how they care for patients? Can visitors to our site believe what we say about our solutions? Are we credible? It was hard to tell;
• Bad metadata and information architecture – Incorrect metadata of course has the consequence of making your content harder to find by search engines. Beyond that, if you are sloppy with your metadata, page titles and naming of sections on your site, it can give the user (even subconsciously) the idea that you don’t take content seriously. If you won’t take the time to make sure that pages are named consistently, then should visitors to your site take seriously what you have to say? For many of you, this might be stating the obvious, but don’t farm out the metadata and naming conventions to your technical team (unless they are content champions). Take the time to understand how your content management system works and how to fix metadata issues;
• No standards – A user would have no reasonable expectation of what they would encounter on types of pages within our site. It became obvious that we needed a standard for what type of information a user should expect to see on a solution page vs. an event page vs. an executive biography. This includes the words, images and video, as well as the font types, sizes and color used on each of these sections. These things matter. Take the time to consider them and stick to them;
• Governance confusion – Some groups were allowed (more or less) to publish content on the site with little oversight, while others went through a semi-review process before publication. This issue was an underlying reason for all of the previous three issues.

There were other issues, of course, but these – if corrected – would most improve our content, support the website and business goals. Now it was time to find out if our plan would work.

4. Demonstrate Success

What results did you get?

To make content strategy an integral part of your company/organization, you’ll need to show it’s worth the time and effort. Here are a few examples of success we attribute to the content strategy work.

• Users more easily find our content – Prior to the redesign of our website (including a strategy for content), less than 20 percent of our visitors came to the site via search engines. Within a few months of redesigning the site, that number increased to 30 percent of our visitors, and today we are approaching 40 percent of visitors to the site from search engines. This represents new groups of people finding our content and interacting with us;
• We increased Cerner’s credibility online – Our content strategy included the creation of a corporate blog. We wanted to use the blog for our own industry experts, as well as selected clients, to talk about key issues in health care. The blog does not overtly tout our solutions, but focuses on sharing our perspective on key health care issues. Recently, Investors.com (part of Investor’s Business Daily) referenced a Cerner blog post in a story on ICD-10, a change to how diseases are classified by health care organizations. Providing credible, relevant content resulted in a third-party recognizing us as a source for information;

Figure 1: Investor’s Business Daily cites a Cerner blog post

Figure 2: The quality content of this Cerner blog post by Lisa Franz led to its citation by Investor’s Business Daily

• Our content resonates with users – Six months after we redesigned our website and implemented our content strategy, we provided feedback to our content contributors on what types of content resonated with people. Product pages with video (and especially those with client testimonial videos) received more visitors than those that didn’t. And visitors – on average – spent significantly more time on the product pages with videos than those without videos. (See Figure 3) For us, more traffic + more time spent consuming content = win. For those of you who rely on other groups in your organization to supply content, you must give them guidance on what works. At the time I shared the video results with our content contributors, we had just 13 product pages with video. Today, that number is more than 30.

Figure 3: Adding quality video to our product pages led to more visits and to users spending more time on those pages (image credits: John O’Nelio)

Get to Work

I came across a quote from Thomas Edison during this project.

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it.

Applying a content strategy to your website requires work. As you begin the process by building internal support and evaluating your content, the path toward a content strategy that will work for your organization will become clear. It’s likely you’ll realize additional benefits, too. In our case, the relationship between the Web team and content contributors – and the business units they represent – is much stronger due to the successes achieved. Discussions about content occur (more often, not always) during the planning stages of projects rather than the middle or end. This approach is one that worked for us. But none of it would have been possible without getting started.

A Few Resources That Helped…

• Kristina Halvorson, The Discipline of Content Strategy – A List Apart, Dec. 16, 2008;
• Colleen Jones, Content Analysis: A Practical Approach – UX Matters, Aug. 3, 2009;
• Erin Kissane, Content Templates to the Rescue  – A List Apart, July 7, 2009;
• Kevin Nichols, Examples of Content Audit and Inventory Tools;
• Content Strategy Knol (Google)

In the article 5 incredible ways mobile design will change in the next 5 years Nokia Connect gives you a short but interesting view on Nokia’s idea of the mobile future.

DIY design – “Hackers get a pretty bad press, but apparently that’s all set to change. In the near future people will still be taking concepts and adapting them for their own use. However, instead of trying to stop them, Sondre believes companies will embrace them.”

Electronically enhanced senses – “Mobile technology has empowered us in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago, yet according to Sondre things are set to get even better. In fact, he says mobiles will be designed to give us almost super human powers.”

The smartification of everything – “Today, most people who buy a smartphone want it to be everything and to have as many apps as possible. But this could all soon change. According to Sondre the smartphone will be stripped back to its fundamental functions as part of a family of objects that belong together and which use apps specific to them.”

Less digital bling. More content first – “Expect the digital space to be a lot more about direct content. Forget needing an app icon to access what is essentially a folder. We’ll be moving to a new paradigm, which is content driven.”

Getting serious about play – “This isn’t about games themselves becoming more popular, but taking game logic and elements into the design of everyday applications. The aim is to make them more engaging and easier to learn, while encouraging new behavior. For example, weight loss apps or carbon footprint apps, which reward you with upgrades or new functionality. Mobile technology will be designed to increasingly make a game out of everything.”

Great insights in the creation of Facebook’s latest feature. Read the entire article: Designers Behind Facebook Timeline: 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul.

Nick Felton and Joey Flynn say that when creating a page to tell someone’s life story, you have to throw out the UI rulebook and study how people recount memories.

Facebook’s Timeline wanted to do something more: It wanted to convey a feeling. Two feelings actually: The feeling of telling someone your life story, and the feeling of memory–of remembering your own life.

One of the primary decisions that had to be made was what the basic organizing framework would be. If you ask someone to tell you the story of their life, Flynn explains, they don’t tell it chronologically (“In 1999, this happened, in 2000, this happened,” etc…). Instead, they talk about moments. So the team experimented with a framework around the important moments in a person’s life: When they got married, for example, or special birthdays.

Facebook wanted the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about. The team experimented with giving a users a lot of control over various design elements on the page–different kinds of photo borders, so you could use an elegant border for a wedding photograph, for example, and a sporty one for an action shot.

Making in design probably serves many purposes and the honest truth is that every individual designer has their own personal reasons why they make things as a designer. In my mind, however, there are two reasons to make: experiencing and communicating.

There are some who would argue that designer’s main reason to make is to execute or to produce. For this article, what I mean here by execute is to contribute towards the artifacts that will be part of the final consumed version by end users.

The interactive designers

The interactive designer I understand completely. Their tradition is rooted in technology as an art form, like painting or sculpture, where the artist was the producer of their vision. Their penetration into software design in my mind has had many positive attributes. I see the tinkering movement in interaction design directly connected to this group of artists who have always been explorers of the medium.

But there are others from many hybrid sources of skills and education. People have been mostly working in the areas of web design and mobile native app development. It’s those people who I feel have have been seduced by a false rhetoric of technology.

Interaction designers love technology. I would even suggest that we may have lost our way, by becoming too enamored by technology. We have ostensibly drank the Kool-aid of a promise of technology and have given up our precious ability to be critical towards it.

Technology promises us efficiency and speed, not just in our final solutions, but also in how we execute all the pieces of our process. If we couple this with the lack of design foundation in the practice of interaction design it is easy to see why so many designers have given in to this engineering-centric rhetoric. This would have us criticize the worst historical moments of software design, which completely ignores the more real and complex design-centric history of interactive software and media. We have made the engineering call for efficiency and speed a higher calling over what is so special about design: beauty as manifested through holistic systems thinking.

Short-term focus

A recent warning to this kind of thinking has come in the guise of criticizing the capital of the technology startup world, Silicon Valley, and by one of its poster children, no less. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview at Y Combinator’s Startup School, challenges the notion that Silicon Valley is the best place to start and run a technology company:

If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.

Further, he alludes in the same interview to a conversation with Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos who says,

“There’s a culture [in Silicon Valley] where people don’t commit to doing things. I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he explains. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”

How has this manifest itself in the interaction design community?

Simply put, by the corruption of making in design to focus on execution and production as the core attribute of ‘making.’ This has been manifested through the interaction design community’s response to two separate but related movements (for lack of a better term) Agile development process and Start up culture.

Both have had positive outcomes in some respects. In a recent Twitter debate about the value of LeanUX (LUX) I ended my part of the conversation with the following tweet:

The 2 messages I do really appreciate from agile, lean, etc are “balance” & “collaboration”. The 1 I dislike is “design =making”.

— Dave Malouf (@daveixd) October 29, 2011

But both movements have great issues when it comes to their most basic premise, which is that artifacts outside of direct production of code provide little value to the process of making software.

Why do I make things?

With that, I’d like us to talk more about “why do we make as designers?” – experiencing and communicating. Further, I have to ask “Why do we experience?” – to deconstruct.

Design is a deconstructive process. At our core we make things, these we can tear apart, so we can build something completely different out of the previously disparate components. Without the ability to deconstruct in this way, we are no longer doing design and we are losing all that makes designing special.

So I make to deconstruct and this plays out to bring value to me in various ways: It means I make things to compare them. This requires that I make a plentitude (to take from Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience) of artifacts.

It means I make things to associate. Again, this will lead to a plentitude of artifacts because each artifact regardless of how ridiculous the idea that is being communicated serves the purpose of being part of the collection of ideas that inspire all the ideas that follow – not just the next iteration’s worth.

It means I make things to critique. Criticism is not just something one does. It is something that is created through making. We make many artifacts in order to help us develop the language of design that evolves towards our principles of design. Principles are not just conceived, but they are grown through a collection of artifacts.

It means I make things to understand and clarify. The things we initially create often are more than what we know we need. It is not our intention to maintain scale or complexity, but rather we create in order to understand scale and complexity. This helps us to better clarify and to reduce complications of the systems we are designing (for and within as well).

Of course, part of what I need to understand is the material(s) out of which my designs will finally be carved.

It means I make things to generate new things. Great designers are open to the ‘generative.’ That means creating artifacts whose purpose is to generate new things – artifacts, experiences, conversations, etc. – that lead towards designs and designing.

All of this isn’t to say that I can’t make to execute if I am so inclined and skilled, but this is not design. Execution is production work and in the world of software, making is usually done by and using processes geared towards engineers. This isn’t bad. But it not being bad doesn’t mean it is good, nor make it design.

Design is influenced by art

There is another angle to all this that adds even more confusion. Much of design is influenced by art. Art also makes. But art executes. In my sister program here at SCAD, Interactive Design and Game Development, they execute what it is they conceive. They also make for many of the same reasons I mentioned above beyond execution, but they differ in other core aspects of applied knowledge and process that are beyond the scope of this article. Their program’s history is from art where the painter paints, and the sculpture sculpts, etc. Few painters ever had someone else paint for them their idea except as exercises for their apprentices who in essence were the metaphorical equivalent of their master’s brush.

But since many who come from the world of ‘new media’ also have this connection to interactive art, there are many designing interactive systems who also execute their ideas. This multivariate influential space of interaction design leaves a sense of conflict between the industrial design side of interaction design and the ironically formed engineering and art side of interaction design.

To conclude

For me, I do not mind that there are interaction designers who can and want to execute design. What I mind and take offense to are statements that conflate traditional design with the idea of ‘making’ through statements like, “LeanUX makes sense, because design is all about making and this puts designers in the role of making instead of creating artifacts that are not about production.”

It assumes that making is only equal to execution and while I can see and have seen a great work where designers do execute their ideas, I will not abide a world of design that defines making only as execution without acknowledging its more important purposes – communication and experience.
—-
Book image NC-CC by olivepress

If you’re interested in design and emotion, you’ll want to take a look at the upcoming series of posts from Smart Interaction Lab (an offshoot of Smart Design).

They’ve been looking at how objects can express emotion (also carrying on from researchers at Georgia Tech who looked at the Roomba [PDF]).

Until recently, the design of common household products was often limited by the use of off-the-shelf components that were affordable choices for implementation….
When crafting such product behaviors, we often build physical prototypes of the light systems in order to experience them in real time and create a vocabulary of responses for user testing as well as final product design and specifications. In future blog posts, we’ll share some of the experiments we’ve been creating in order to have a flexible, easy to use system available during the design process to allow designers to craft a wide vocabulary of light behaviors for almost any product.

They’re also looking for examples of “products with expressive light and sound” to feature on their blog.

Source: Smart Interaction Lab

In Philosophy of Interaction – and the Interactive User Experience the author Dag Svanaes goes through four perspectives on interactivity: interaction as information processing (Cognitive Science), interaction as tool use (Heidegger), interaction as perception (Merleau-Ponty), and interaction from a media and art perspective (Arnheim/Itten).

Over the last two decades, interaction design has emerged as a design discipline alongside traditional design disciplines such as graphics design and furniture design. While it is almost tautological that furniture designers design furniture, it is less obvious what the end product of interaction design is. Löwgren’s answer is “interactive products and services” (Löwgren 2008). This narrows it down, but leaves open the question of what it means for something to be interactive.

“What makes a product or service interactive? One of the simplest interactive products imaginable is a touch-sensitive light switch like the one in Figure 11.1A. You touch it once to turn the light on, and again to turn the light off. At the other end of the complexity scale you find interactive products like the cockpit of a modern aeroplane..”

“If you solder a light bulb to a battery and leave it on your desk until the battery is drained, this digital product can hardly be called interactive. You can of course turn it off by cutting one of its wires, but that would not be an intended interactivity of the product. The light bulb could be substituted with something far more complex, like a digital photo frame that was programmed to generate random fractals on a screen. With no buttons, handles or other means for interacting, despite its complex behaviour, neither that product would be interactive. It would be like the 1957 Sputnik 1 satellite (Figure 11.2C), which contained a “transmit only” radio beacon that transmitted beeps from space for 20 days until its batteries ran out. From the above examples it becomes clear that what makes a product or service interactive is not its complexity, nor the fact that it is digital, but whether it is designed to respond to actions by a user.”

Read Philosophy of Interaction – and the Interactive User Experience