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

Over the last 8 years I have seen a slew of questions on the IxDA site and LinkedIn about information regarding schools for interaction design and how do I choose a school and what not. After close to a decade, I don’t expect the questions to end, as people will always think that their take on the question is special or more relevant. So this is not an attempt to end the questions, but hopefully an attempt to aid people to think better about why they are asking and to be more specific about what they are asking for.

This post will be mostly about grad schools as almost everyone in my network asking is really thinking about grad school, so I’ll continue with that assumption.

Why do I need a degree at all?

Well this really depends. There are tons of high-ranking designers out there in the world who barely passed their BA let alone did any grad school whatsoever. But exceptions as they may be, most likely they climbed the glass escalator at a time when these degrees didn’t exist, or hell, they are just awesome. While I love the advice “Be Awesome!” I do think it doesn’t scale very well and some of us need a leg up from time to time to fill in the gaps and create new networks and design additions to our portfolio.

The best reason to go to grad school is not to break the glass ceiling (though it is a good reason depending on your area of interest). It is because you are hungry. You have a topic that you want to figure out to create a thesis out of, or you are hungry for more knowledge or skills (hopefully both).

While I understand that there is a strong voice out there advocating for non-institutional education, I don’t believe that everything is learnable in as timely a manner in a self-directed way, nor does everyone learn best without direction. And unfortunately my experience is that few senior designers out there have time/energy to dive deeply with apprentices in this day and age. Few organizations and work models today allow for it.

When you pay an institution for your education you are getting a few things put in place for you:

• Resources: tools, connections, curriculum
• Accreditation: As much as we argue about this, the truth is that parts of this system do indeed work and throwing out the baby with the bathwater makes no sense. Accreditation forces institutions to formalize and structure curriculum to map against agreed upon thresholds for assessment and outcomes. You can always surpass them, but you can’t go below them, too easily.
• A coalesced and packaged network of peers, alumni and faculty.
• A pig skin (piece of paper, possibly). While arguably important, for many types of organizations that masters degree is used as a gatekeeper to certain positions.

A very important & often glossed over reason for institutional education is the exchange between industry and education. You send us students, we create a space where we can more easily and arguably more cheaply create new knowledge. So many of today’s greatest companies came from the “incubator” of education, and many more ideas that are used by industry today as well.

Finally, many people go to get a formal graduate education because they are interested in a career in academia at least part-time. Looking at the previous issue where academia and industry are in dialog, we must assume that for this dialog to take place there can not only be students in the system but also masters and doctors (teachers & researchers).

Online vs. In person

The reality is that some people will not be able to travel to find the right program or their station in life (spouse & kids) don’t afford them the possibility of relocation and their current city doesn’t have a program that fits. So there are tons of reasons why an online program might suit you better than an in person education.

I would also say that an online education may be appropriate or not depending on the topic of study. Skills-based design programs that are trying to teach you tools, methods, and processes might work in this environment. Knowledge-based theory & research programs have even a greater chance to work in this environment. However, programs that are about teaching thinking, apprenticing applied knowledge within a studio environment have the least chance of success further if your chosen profession moves beyond digital it becomes even that much harder to emulate the studio–e.g. industrial design or even physical computing prototyping.

But let’s say all being equal. You want an HCI degree that is taught close by but also online. Would the education be better offline or online? I have the inclination to think that the portfolio of the student working offline who has access to a real professor face to face, who can work with her peers doing group projects together or otherwise gain shared knowledge and experience will be better. I say this cautiously as my own institution has some reputable (as in award winning) online programs some of which with studio work.

I personally think that in many cases a hybrid approach of both remote and in person education is probably best, though this model is difficult to fit within many institutions’ structural models and may not overcome all the obstacles that students face.

Questions to ask

While no one can tell you what program to go to, they can tell you what questions to ask the programs you are interested in and what questions you need to ask yourself.

Questions for you

• Why do I want to study?
  This question more than any other needs to be clear to you. The most popular reason is that I need a degree because hiring managers are asking for it. Ok, I can buy that, but graduate education is hard. It is a lot of work, a lot of time commitment and usually some sacrifice of financial resources, often considerable. That being said you better look a little deeper inside of yourself and find something else to inspire, engage, and energize yourself for the next 12-24 (sometimes up to 36) months of hard labor. Some better answers could be:
  • I am excited about a topic that if only I had the dedicated time I could really have fun diving down into.
  • I have come far in my career, but I am missing core skills that I could get from a graduate education. Those skills that I need are. The programs that are best at teaching me those skills are.
• What are the limitations I have in terms of resources and logistics?
  This question is pretty easy to answer, but articulating it out loud is still important. This is your technological constraints that are basically without drastic forces cannot be changed. These include:
• Money: do I have it in the bank? Can I take on loans? Do I have any white knights? Will my job help support this? Can I afford not to work?
• Location: Am I tied down to THIS spot? Can I go international (this may impact money)? Does my spouse have geographic constraints (how mobile or geo-versatile is their career)?
• Family life: married? children? older?
• When I’m done with my studies what do I want to be doing?
  Too many people go into a graduate degree not thinking about where they want to land when they are done. It’s OK that the plan you have changes during the experience, but it is really important that you go in with a plan. At minimum though you should be honest with yourself that the degree you are looking for is about you “finding yourself”.
  Something that many people don’t consider and I have hoped more would consider this is that not all masters degrees are equal. When it comes to the academic world there is something called a “terminal degree”. This is the degree in your profession that is considered the minimum for teaching within an academic institution (without justification by an accrediting body). If there is any bone in your body that is hungry to teach at an academic level please be sure you go with the right degree. In the United States this means getting an Masters of Fine Arts or Masters of Design in Interaction Design or a PhD in many of the HCI or Library Sciences.
  The other answer this question will bring up is what type of position are you looking to work in. Is it a design studio position or a research & engineering position? Answering this question will take you one way or another and there are few programs that handle both these paths equally well. I can’t think of either.
• Can I devote myself to a full-time course, or do I need to reserve much of my time for other endeavors?
  Not everyone can quit their job and study full-time (which is much more than 40-hours per week). And some programs to afford people the possibility of doing part-time studies both in person and online. I will say that online programs are much easier to do while working, and hybrid programs that require in-person class time, while offering mostly online remote learning are often the perfect balance for working students. These seem to be rare in the design community though.

Do your homework

Going to graduate school is not like going to undergraduate. Learn about the programs individually as in many cases there are issues that can directly impact your learning.

• Learn about the faculty
  What I mean by this is that your success in graduate school is tied to how well you fit with both the other students and more importantly the faculty you are studying with. In some programs you are not just studying with faculty but you are working directly for them doing their work. I realize that many think of education in our line of work as merely vocational, but even so, the topics that interest your faculty will take your work in specific directions that you may or may not want to go in.
• Learn about the industry relationships the program has.
  This will effect the types of project work you get to work on and what types of employment opportunities you might expect after finishing or even as internships in between.
• Learn about the alumni.
  Where did alumni end up after they graduated? This will most likely be the greatest networking opportunity and thus job placement resource you’ll have. Find out where alumni are ending up. You’ll most likely end up there or at least near by.

Do not look at HCI and Interaction Design and Information Architecture as comparable?

Many times I see online the question about what school should I go to to learn User Esperience and I want to cringe. I want to cringe because they’ll list such disparate programs in terms of focus of study. I know we all want to think that user experience is the same all over and that specifying anything under this umbrella is not helpful. However, this is not true at the graduate level of education. Generalization doesn’t do very well at this level of work. The purpose of graduate education is to dive deeper into a topic. The purpose of doing this is not necessarily because you will be diving in deeper in the roles of your career, but rather with depth comes breadth. This notion of depth leading to breadth is not well understood, but any good graduate program will require that someone diving deep will gain contextual knowledge of the breadth surrounding what it is they are working on. Further with depth comes wisdom and wisdom is something that can be applied broadly. Arguably wisdom is not reachable without depth.

If you do not know the difference between an HCI, Interaction Design and Information Architecture program, you might need to do some preliminary work first. Take the Cooper Practicum, go to a few conferences: CHI, IA Summit and IxDA Interaction to name a few that would help you out. It would also be pretty easy (and cheaper) to just join the different communities and see how they differentiate themselves and their practice disciplines. But in the end talking to people in person is key.

Conclusion

Having a list of programs is always a good start and there are many places to get a list of programs out on the Internet. What you can’t get (and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are lying) is an answer of what school to go to. This I’m afraid can only come from you. So as much as I’d love for everyone to come to my program, I would be remiss to give such advice without a thorough conversation that would include many of the questions that are above and an even deeper conversation.

——–

Image CC-SA2 by San Jose Library

I am in constant pursuit of the “clay” of interaction design (IxD). Even if that clay is intangible, if we are to consider ourselves a true design discipline there must be something that we are manipulating. Once we understand what it is that we are manipulating we will be better able to communicate to all our stakeholders the intentions of what it is the interaction designer designs. One possible property of said “clay” may be motion or movement.For almost all interactions we place our body in motion. Even speaking requires muscles to move in order to work. There has been a ton of work done on motion as an aesthetic quality towards an audience, even if that audience is just perceived. What I’m interested in is motion as an aesthetic regardless of perceived or real audience. The question I ask is if certain movements just feel better than others at an aesthetic level and further that perception is manipulated by other interacting factors.

The Foundations: A Recap

A couple of years ago I started positing that there are foundational elements to IxD. If we are to discuss material and medium in IxD there must be properties that we can use to describe and differentiate and even qualify what it is.

Why I pursue foundations as a concept is strongly influenced by Roweena Reed Kostellow (founder of the Pratt Institute’s Industrial Design Department) and her six foundations for three-dimensional design: line, luminance & color, space, volume, negative space, and texture. It isn’t just that these foundations exist for their own sake. They are a basis for two important requirements for the education and practice of design—educating craft and a basis for criticism.

Another growing influence is the work of Bill Verplank. His three areas of concern for the interaction designer are articulated beautifully in his video taped lecture he gives in Designing Interactions for his former colleague Bill Moggridge. In it he suggests that the Interaction Designer is concerned with three things that all start with “How do you …”. It’s worth the watch.

What is unclear to me from Bill’s explanation is how do I manipulate things to achieve the outcomes that he describes. Further it seems that he is only discussing the end result or point of interface that people interact with. This did not seem to map against my idea of what interaction design is. For me interaction design supports the interface by defining both the desired behavior of a product or service and the desired behavior of the people who will interact with that system.

So, with this in mind I’ve been working out a collection of foundations that I believe make up the “clay” of how to do just that. I have three original elements: Time, Metaphor, and Abstraction.

• Time is in many ways the most multi-facetted of the three. It breaks down into the following attributes: pacing, rest, duration, frequency, attention. These properties all combine to create a relative sense of time amongst people using the system, the same way that one experiences anything.
• Metaphor is related to what Richard Buchanan calls the “Poetics of Design”. It is the way we need to use analogy as the bridge between the intangible complexities that are forged through digital technologies (and other complex intangible and abstracted systems such as services) and the tangible world where our senses and cognitive abilities evolved to embody.
• Abstraction is really a value property. It relates to combined physical and cognitive activities that takes place to initiate an activity and when it is perceived to have been occurred.

The rest of this article though is about a new type of foundation that I alluded to when I presented at Interaction 09 on motion or movement.

Background on Motion

We are using a larger variety of motions with our primary computing devices than ever before. The devices are in motion like when we shake an iPhone to initiate an undo, or we are in motion & our devices can sense the movements we make. The previous tap which mapped almost exclusively to a mouse-click has been extended with new gestures like pinch, flick and swipe. Like the ubiquitous mouse-click there are a variety of contexts where these gestures are used changing their meaning, and emotional contexts. Mouse down, move, mouse up is commonly called “drag & drop”. How we combine movements within specific contexts can effect how we interpret their interpersonal meaning and the feelings we have associated with them.

One aspect of motion and movement comes from dance and martial arts. I love to dance and I used to practice both Tae Kwon Do and capoeira (two fairly different martial arts). Dance and martial arts requires a practitioner to be fairly aware of how they move in the world. Yes, you can say this is about balance and agility, but it is also about understanding what brings about balance and agility. It also forces you to understand your place in the world physically compared to everything around you. To me, this spatial awareness is to motion the equivalent that attention is to time.

spatial awareness is to motion what attention is to time

I spent more focused attention on my practice of capoeira as an adult. In doing so I realized quickly that how I felt emotionally doing a movement directly correlated to whether or not the movement itself was successful. On watching capoeira I noticed similarly as an audience member that beauty occurred within the success of those playing (you play capoeira instead of fighting it because of its history as a covert mechanism to learn how to defend yourself within the context of being a slave in Brazil.)

Compare the act of moving a file from one container to another with the act of panning a map. In this example the motion is almost the same but there is a clear difference that effects the aesthetic quality. The level of precision required for panning a map is substantially less than that of file-folder management depending on the level of graphic resolution and other factors related to Fitt’s Law. The motion of panning can in fact have a comparable flick like quality to it, especially when the user knows they are several lengths of motion away from their desired target. Targets themselves are usually approximations as well. Applying Fitt’s Law to this activity, an approximate target has a cognitive equivalent of just being a fairly larger target than an absolute target.

The Case for both good & bad motion design: Twitter for iOS

What got me to return to thinking about motion almost two years later was my own impressions using the newly released Twitter for iPad app and comparing those to my other iPad and iPhone apps I use. Specifically, there are new gestures introduced by the designer of both Tweetie for iPhone (now Twitter for iPhone) and Twitter for iPad, Loren Brichter formerly of Atebits.

On Tweetie, Loren brought to the iPhone world a whole new gesture. Playing on the existing metaphors of gravity & friction in other iPhone gestural interfaces, he used the existing playful springiness at the end of a list as a spring-loaded trigger to call for a refresh of the results of that same list.

The now-standard spring refresh on iPhone

This first gestural innovation was so successful that a host of other applications have taken it on as their primary means of refreshing a result list. For me the adoption of the new gesture so permeated my standard use of my iPhone that I now expect this gesture to be available in every app that I use. That is a pretty successful independent major UI paradigm to design.

When I opened up the new Twitter for iPad app, I was ready for some goodness because of all the hype I read before I downloaded. It is very well designed and is completely different from its iPhone sister. It takes advantage of the unique properties of the iPad. (For those not familiar with the app, the motions are all shown below).

The new iPad app puts the details of a single tweet in a right column, but instead of putting an “X” icon or other “button” to close or collapse the detail view, Loren invented a new gesture/action combo where the user swipes (a common gesture for deletion) to literally push aside the right column, which disappears for portrait view and squeezes it and clips it in landscape view. In so doing he both creates a new motion gesture and uses that new gesture as a means of reducing abstraction through what appears to be a tangible equivalent of pushing aside a pile of paper on your desk. (Yes, it is also an abstract metaphor and also has attributes of time associated with it.)

Clipping Columns

Understanding Aesthetics of Motion

Using all these apps I began to get new critical thinking that I could apply to the foundations I mentioned above. Whether it is the original flick-scroll that Apple designed with the launch of the iPhone, or the spring-refresh, or the swipe-dismiss there is a commonality for how the gestures are engaged. The movements share a lack of control and/or precision. This has as much to do with the size of the targets as it does with the complete lack of target for ending. These free-ending gestures work because of their ease, but also because of the extended range of motion creates an aesthetic quality to them that more precise and controlled gestures do not. In turn they add to the overall aesthetic quality of the interface around feelings of play & personal satisfaction.

I’ve also noticed some other key areas when using my iPad that have, compared to my iPhone, triggered similar emotional responses due to gestural differences. In general, scale of motion adds a lot aesthetically. As in dancing, extensions are just more beautiful.

The area that I find really different is in typing and general tapping. When I compare the typing experience on my iPhone to my iPad I notice the difference greatly. To really feel it open an iPhone app that requires data entry. Normally though we type on an iPhone with the single finger peck or by thumbing. I’m a big thumber. Even when in the correct form factor (and I’m pretty good at thumbing on my iPhone) the feeling of being more constrained & swaddled is there when compared to the openness & bounce you feel when typing on an iPad.

I’ve equated this feeling to the scene in Star Trek Generations when Data, with his new emotion chip, is singing while tapping away on his glass console screen. I’ve felt this so strongly that I’ve even been searching for a Star Trek console wall paper. I’m also constantly singing Data’s refrain when using my iPad, “Life forms. Tiny little life forms. Where are you? Da da da Da!” (Star Trek: Generations. 1994).

The added scale of space allows one to almost feel like they are dancing with their two hands on a glass dance floor.

When looking at any system of evaluation it isn’t only important to look at what works, but also understand what doesn’t work. My example here also comes from the iPad Twitter app. It has 2 other gestures that are applied to new outcomes. Both are related to revealing something in a new context without any visual cues that it is there. Like the swipe to reveal actions in the iPhone app.

The first of these is is two-finger gesture. With two fingers target a touch holding it down and swipe down. If there is a conversation related to the targeted tweet then it will reveal itself.

iPad Twitter Replies—two finger swipe

The other one also requires two fingers. It uses the the reverse pinch to reveal the detailed view of the tweet.

Pinch Open

Without going into why we need these gestures (I kinda feel they are “easter eggs” more than really usable functionality), they both have properties that lead to their lower performance or evaluation.

First, because they are two-fingered gestures it is less likely that a person will discover these behaviors accidentally. People do not use two fingers regularly accept in specific contexts that are well understood like zooming. For example, I was recently struggling to figure out how to scroll an inset frame without scrolling the surrounding container. It never occurred to me that I should use 2 fingers to scroll. When hearing that, I thought, “that’s messed up” and I tested it on 5 avid iPad users who all failed to figure it out as well and all complained that they were having the same problem.

The second problem is more about the reverse pinch activity then it is about the downward two-fingered swipe. With the reverse pinch the amount of fidelity required to do it is just too high. While the ending point is unimportant there is something about how to start the gesture that might require more precision and higher resolution than the system can handle consistently. For the two-finger swipe down to reveal the conversation, the difficult part is that you need to remember to keep your fingers on the glass or it will disappear. This leads to the constant repetition of the task lowering its utility. It is just easier to tap once on it and have it reveal itself that way.

How to Design for Motion

So what does all this mean for me?

First it means there is a huge opportunity. Loren made a huge name for himself as an accomplished iPhone designer/developer by innovating a new gestural paradigm. It catapulted his app into the limelight and eventually got him “acquired,” in this case by Twitter itself.

I don’t know what methods Loren used to come up with his spring-refresh design, but I can look at the work of Kicker Studio and their case study they published for the gestural TV remote control they designed. What is clear is that sketching & prototyping now requires a new methodology. We all need to learn to become solid actors if we are going to design interfaces that require the user to move in new ways outside of buttons, pointing devices & keyboards. When it comes to mobile devices and touch screens especially, we need to all become actors.

I’m reminded of the case study that Bill Buxton wrote about in his amazing book Sketching User Experiences on how the Palm Pilot was designed. They used a block of wood & a cut off pencil and played with various forms & felt how various gestures would play out. Binging our prototypes into the physical is going to be key as we design for mobile gestural platforms. We are going to have to act out scenarios of use, dance out gestures to complete new choreographies. We need to see gestures both as dancer and as audience.

One of the reasons these gestures work is also related to the visual cues for all the states of availability, direction, activity and completion. Rehearsing the gestures in front of others will cause people to ask questions like how do you know it will do something? And how do you know it when it is complete?

Gestural interface design is still very new. We can deeply appreciate the work of Apple , Microsoft, and Google in their leadership efforts but there are still lots of opportunities in this area to innovate even more. Having an understanding of all four of the foundational elements of interaction design will help you design more solid interfaces & interactions for better overall experiences.

Concluding Thoughts

I am cautious about adding this as a foundation of interaction design because it feels like it might fit within the context of “interactive design” or “interface design”. For now though I believe that there is a behavioral property that moves beyond the point of interaction itself towards embedding behaviors within human beings that become embedded culturally. The motions themselves then become akin to affordances of there own even though they do not connect to any visually perceived markers. They just become expected on one hand and they imbue an emotional aesthetic all their own.

References:
Foundations of Interaction Design article on Boxes & Arrows, and related podcast,
Revised article on Johnny Holland
Interaction09 Motion and Movement video and slides

Day three was a binge of amazing keynote speakers. I definitely expect that everyone’s head was completely filled by the end of the day. Besides the amazing talent that was there, UXLX in its association with the brand new Want Magazine presented clips of the newest videos that were launched that very day with the online magazine itself.

Jakob Nielsen: video

As noted above there were 3 videos during the course of the day. The first was by Jakob Nielsen. The clip selected had Jakob speaking about the state of usability practice today. He discussed how there have been two growth paths for usability professionals, but more importantly stressed that it is non-usability professionals who should be doing more of their own usability testing. This point of multi-disciplinary individuals gets highlighted at the very end of the conference as well.

Peter Merholz: Upgrade Your Mandate: Elevate User Experience Within Your Organization

Peter demonstrated through specific case studies how the following points are the key to success as a user experience professional:

• Engage across functions
• Engender empathy
• Use design tools to define problems
• Align values & vision
• Articulate experience principles
• Build from the outside in

As you can see these points resonate nicely with Luke Wroblewski’s workshop, Panu’s talk and Sarah’s talk from earlier in the conference.

Bill Scott: Designing with Lenses

Bill has been creating structured models for designers for a long time. He created the Yahoo Pattern Library (and word has it he and other former Yahoo cohorts are back at curating it again) and his book Designing Web Interfaces is an amazing resource for applying patterns to web design work. In this instance he showed us how to apply a new structural model to design challenges. This time borrowing from game design instead of architecture he talks to us about lenses as a tool for guiding design decision making.  This in essence was a deeper dive into case studies and specific examples of how to use lenses as design principles. Design principles themselves have been a constant thread throughout the conference.

Dan Saffer: Designing For New Technology

Many of us are beginning to work with new technologies in our day-to-day design practices. Dan wanted to offer his experience with gestural interaction design to express some general learnings that would be practical to any designer regardless of the type of technology the person may be designing for. Before jumping in though he started by defining “new technology” as any technology that is new for those whom you are designing it for and new for you to be designing with.

So help us all out he offered several key considerations when designing with new technologies:

• It takes a lot more time than you think.
  One of the biggest time hits is that you need to learn the limitations of the new technology within the specific contexts of your project.
• Prototype to get a sense for how people will behave with this new technology.
• Help sell it internally & externally. This will actually help you later in figuring out how the new technology can add value to the project.
• Words matter – How you describe your work will affect how people relate to it.
• Testing is hit & miss.
  It is difficult to test how people will react and be able to use a disruptive technology.
• Expectations: People expect things to work the way they have always worked. When this is not true they don’t know what to do.
• MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (Raymond Lowey)
• Pattern Recognition
  People look for patterns to understand in everything they do. New patterns are harder to discover, but once discovered and used often they eventually become old patterns.
• The “Of Course” factor
  Most companies are looking for a “Wow” factor, but the true win is when someone says, “Of course, this is part of my life.” Thus, never being able to imagine a life without it.
• Affordances are key. People need to know what they can do and how it will behave. They also need clear signs as to how to know when it is behaving.
• Metaphors are also key. This is best way to help people understand what it is that is new.
• Personality: What is the figurative voice of the designed artifacts?
• Emotion
  If we have an emotional connection we will be most likely to engage and keep it longer.
• Emotion is almost always found in the small details
• Emotional resonance
  Some gestures had a weird emotional weight of its own.
  [matches my thoughts about motion aesthetics]
• Sound Design (big issue)
  Web almost ruined sound design with overkill and inappropriate use.
  Important tool to give personality
• Meaning
  What is the deepest reason people will use this new product?

Donna Spencer: Design Games slides

Donna took us through a series of game examples that are used to help with the design process. Games are a fun way to get people engaged in the design process without even knowing they are playing games. Playfulness gets us thinking in new ways. She is suggesting we use games because they are fun, engage people, and is a good way to communicate.

After going through a ton of great examples of games to play in a design context, she offered these considerations when playing design games.

• Determine outcome you want
• How do you expect it t0 run?
• What are the rules?
• What are the outputs?
• How will everyone be involved?
• What happens to “winners” & ‘losers’
• Make sure it isn’t a waste of time? (how will it move to a next step)
• It’s ok to use existing games and then modify them to fit your goals.

When creating games Donna suggested the following helpful hints:

• Make existing stuff more fun/game like
• By making it silly
• Creating a sense of urgency through a deadline
• Add an element of light competition
• Have instructions

Luke Wroblewski: First Person User Interfaces slides

Luke starts out summarizing the current state of information technologies with the following quote:

“We can get people closer to things they care about through the new technologies that are out there.”

Luke then offers us a history of the user interface of computers that has progressed by hiding more and more of guts of computers moving from punch cards to command line interfaces to graphical user interfaces, the current excitement around natural user interfaces (gestural interfaces) and finally what his talk is about is, what he calls, First Person User Interfaces (FPUI).

What I find interesting in this talk as an interaction designer is his use of the word “abstraction”. The history he gives interprets human interfacing with computers becoming more abstracted from the workings of the computer. But as that happens, what is more interesting as a designer, is the relationship between the human and the activity they want to achieve is becoming less abstracted and more direct.

He goes on to define at length what an FPUI is. It is basically the use of sensors for understanding the user’s position, movement and orientation to then use input usually from a video to overlay data on top of that video stream in near real time to augment what is seemingly the user’s view (through the device). There are earlier systems like GPS Navigation systems for the car that create abstract models of that world and present them as if from the angle of the user. Today though, tools like Yelp Monocle and Google Goggles are creating tremendously interesting tools that overlay their information over screen views of the world as we see it in real time.

This is very early and the uses of the tool are very emergent, but tremendously effective. For example Yelp’s Monocle was meant to be for fun (an Easter Egg) but it has helped increase sustained traffic on their properties by 40-50%. Currently though our biggest issues are around the small screen sizes we are designing this functionality for (it implies a mobile solution) and further how awkward the interaction models are. Really quickly “Point & Scan” becomes a “Nerd here!” marker.

There are solutions in the making, but even these feel a bit extreme to me like heads-up displays and nano-LED displays inside of contact lenses. The one solution that seems pretty helpful and around the corner is using near field technologies like RFID tags as the gesture to engage with them is more subtle than the point & scan required to engage with barcodes.

Eric Reiss – The Web Dogma

Eric did a smart and entertaining job of explaining his 10 Basic Rules or Creating Web Communications. Don’t judge till you get to number 10.

He starts out trying to differentiate between User-centered design and user-driven design. To be honest, I found this part of the talk to be unclear so I’m not sure what he means by driven and how it is difference from centered.

Then he discusses innovation. There are 3 bad reasons to innovate:

1. to differentiate your product
2. to be different
3. to satisfy your ego

But he clearly states that the only reasons to innovate is to solve a problem. Innovation itself though has a lifecycle where it is best done when it starts on the previous efforts of past innovations which have previously been converted into best practices. Best practices though could become habits and innovations can turn into fashion or style which can lead to old-fashioned. I liked this insight a lot. I think it explains how AOL was innovative, but turned into yesterday news to MySpace which is fighting that same fate to Facebook.

With this background he jumps into his Dogma (or set of rules). They are a good set of design principles to be used on any project. I think limiting to the web is unnecessary.

1. Anything that exists that is not for the end user should be eliminated.
2. Anything exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer should be eliminated.
   [I don’t think this one is black & white.]
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page should be eliminated
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitors ability to navigate freely should be eliminated
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to make things work necessary
   [HTML 5 Advocacy]
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction w/o it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything else.

He then closed with this wisdom:

“We’re not just here to prevent bad things from happening, but to make wonderful things happen.”

Susan Weinschenk – Neuro Web Design

This talk felt like a short version of her workshop. It was so effective proven by the way everyone referenced her talk throughout social events until the very last moment. I’m sure the jokes are all old to Susan, but for us they were fun banter that just helped reinforce her excellently communicated pitch about the need to design for the realities of the human brain. The crux of the short talk is that we all need to design for all 3 brains (Old, Mid and New) in order to be effective. you can’t only design for one aspect and think you’ve gotten it nailed.

• She urged us to maintain a relationship to research old and new by stating clearly, “Technology changes but we actually don’t.”
• Some of the great insights follow:
• We are very open to suggestion through the use of framing and anchoring.
• We make a great deal of decisions based on “social elevation”. This is where a person will be effected by peers who are clearly human over edited content that clearly states quality differences of options.
• Things that are scarce are more attractive. For example, a cookie in a jar by itself tastes better than a cookie that comes from a jar that is full.
• Listening to a story about emotion engages the neurons related to that emotion. For example, telling a story about human pain may make you wince as if you have suffered the same wound.
• Pictures that include elements of our primal needs (food, danger and sexuality) are better at grabbing and retaining our attention. Pictures of people generally are powerful. It helps even more if they are attractive and in some way relate to you.

Larry Constantine – Design for User Performance

Larry started out by stating his background, which is primarily focused on mission critical systems. He admits that it is a bit different than what his peers do.

For Larry User Interface design, user experience design and even experience design were all interaction design. And he defined interaction design (the only speaker who actually took on interaction design in this way) as “How users interact with the designed artifacts in the context of their activities.” Further he is not focused on users, but more specifically on their performance. He is not user-centered by activity-centered in a similar fashion as how Donald Norman declared a few years ago when he said, “Focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves.” The discussion that followed led to the need to “pay attention to the contexts in which activities take place.”

The rest of the talk tried to center on how to do this work by using “model-driven design” where the use of abstract models based on some kind of “sound theory” are used to represent data that is captured. The steps of the method are capture, carry, organize, explore, evaluate and trace. The objects of the system are stated as tool, actor, purpose, rule, community.

These can then be organized in one of three ways:

Roles < > Transformation < > Outcome
Activity < > Action < > Operation

Purpose < > Goal < > Condition.

What ends up mattering most for the interaction designer are the activities, the level of participation in that activity and the level of performance. These all come together to create maps & profiles.

The combined methods run though the following process:

• Model Driven Inquiry
• Structured & Visual brainstorming
• Compile, organize
• Focused, efficient, limited field inquiry
• Rinse, repeat
• Large scale architectural models
• Design

Larry then summarized his entire talk down to the following:

• Don’t put users at the center
• Support human activities
• Use models
• Use the power of abstraction

Jared Spool – The Dawning of the Age of Experience

Jared started out his talk making it clear to everyone that CEOs get it. They know that something is different and looked at 2 amazing examples of success based on total experience design: Apple and Netflix.

He then outlined the following points that through his research of successful experience design as a means for achieving successful business goals. A lot of what he states is mentioned throughout the above presentations but no single presentation put all of these together.

1. You have to equally understand the customer (or user) and the business
2. Really good experience design is learned but not open to introspection.
   He related a story about research he did regarding the Wall Street Journal and then hearing a creative director separately without any methodical research come up with the same conclusions and executed on them effectively. The creative director in question was not able to describe how they achieved their design. They could explain why, but not how they got to why.
3. Good design when it’s done well is invisible.
   He then asked the question, how do you do a portfolio of invisible success?
4. Experience design is multidisciplinary people doing multidisciplinary tasks.
   There are less people in organizations taking on more activities.
5. There is a coherent vision that everyone can agree to and relate equally to others in and out of the organization.
6. Everyone has access to getting direct feedback regarding their products and services.
   Has everyone seen someone use the design in the last six weeks? It is not the number of users that makes a difference as much as the number of hours each team member is exposed to direct user feedback.
7. The culture of the organization rewards failure in a big and positive way.

Jared gave everyone his usual performance complete with humor and wit and closed the conference with the reality that we are all still learning about this stuff every day.

Conclusion

UX-LX was definitely a very successful first time conference. I hope that Bruno Figueiredo, who organized the conference single-handedly, decides to make this an annual event. It was definitely worthy to belong among the must-see user experience conferences of the spring season. The venue was great, the content was well curated and the diversity of the sold out crowd were on target.

–

Header photograph by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Day 2 of UX Lisbon included presentations on seduction, creative uses of Twitter, and the secret sauce of design.

Sarah Morris: Design for Seduction

Having missed the morning workshop because I needed time to work on my own workshop for later in the afternoon so that meant my first session of day-two would be Sarah Morris’s 20-minute talk on “Seduction Design”.

Sarah said that she learned a lot of what she was going to tell us from her reading of “Casanova,” the womanizer who would seduce women just to leave them when he got bored. Here’s here take of what she called his 3 acts:

1. Find an attractive woman w/ a problem he an solve & have her become grateful.
2. She succumbs to his charms.
3. He gets bored and leaves her.

She called him the first UX Designer if only we can change act three.

She then outlined 6 points for designing for seduction:

1. Invest quality time into your relationships.
   This boiled down to a touch strategy. Discover where and when others will touch your content and be sure that they know it is yours.
2. Security & comfort: Be sure to make your relationships feel secure and comfortable.
3. Balance dependence and independence by discovering the sweet spot between undivided attention vs. continuous partial attention and snacking  vs. binging.
4. Be sure to reassure your relationships how lucky THEY are to be with you.”
5. Be sure to actively listen and respond when appropriate
6. Make the extra effort.

Sarah has a very particular angle in her talk which didn’t really become fully apparent until she started talking about her own work as part of an advertising centric user experience agency. So she then talks about how to be more effective as a UX designer in the environment of the advertising agency.

• Huddle often to align ideas.
• Have a creative brief that includes the functional, the user scenarios and the experience planning.
• Continuously learn from other disciplines.
• Merge your understanding of UX principles with the concepts of trending.
• Great design is polygamous and not monogamous. Work with others.

Panu Korhonen: Interaction Design Leadership Lessons Learned

Out of the 3 20-minute presentations I saw this was the most succinct once it got going. Further, it had a feature that I’ve never seen before. Panu for each slide had a tweet sent at that moment that had the explanation for the otherwise curt slide. As a note taker this was really great. It also made for really retweetable content.

His experience where he got these lessons comes from years of design management while he was at Nokia working on projects like the S60 operating system. He broke down his talk into 3 categories: Design, Process and People. This talk ended up being a great talk for designers and managers a like.

Design

• “In the beginning, write down short and clear design drivers”
• “When directing design, you don’t want the design that you ask for. “
• Pick the battles that lead to the designs that are most relevant for the user.
• Stay too near and you’ll bore the audience. Go too far and you’ll alienate the audience.

Process

• Create first concept in a small team. Then start splitting the work. As a design leader your focus will move to the boundaries between teams.
• Milestones are good
• Design something I know will work (then move on)
• Get basic designs approved first. When you have a fallback plan, you can free your mind to explore further
• Difficulty of UX reviews
• 1 picture can’t really show you enough. (ok)
• UX is not skin deep. Review it by experiencing it, not by looking at it
• Time is a heavier commitment when reviewing UX than graphics or industrial design
• Good UX needs good SW (play nice!)
• Demos are not just for demoing the design. They are a design tool for revealing areas of concern.
• Tools of trade
• Your design tools leave marks in the UI.
• Tools need to change to do this well.

People

• Skills is everything: Interaction design is like music. You must master your instrument before you can make art.
• The most interesting design happens between the disciplines, not within.
• You’ll spend most of your time with the inexperienced designers.
• You’ll end up spending most of your time in the least relevant parts of your UI, b/c you give that work t/ the inexperienced designers who need more help
• Tacit Knowledge
• You can’t write down the soul of a design
• The soul of the design cannot be documented. Designers must grow into it.
• Stress leads to bad judgment. Take care of yourself.

David Malouf: Sketching: The Secret Sauce of Design

As this was my workshop, I’ll break this down very quickly. This was a very hands on workshop that asked participants to put down their laptops and take out pen & paper. Here are the core elements of the lecture:

What is design?
Design is the intentional creation of the conditions that allow for serendipity to happen. Serendipity are happy accidents. Designers do this in many ways, but the process and accompanying artifacts and use of space associated with sketching alone or in a group is a fundamental aspect of allowing this to happen.

Abductive Thinking
This is analysis through asking the question, “what might be”. It favors exploration over hypothesis validation and uses the critique as a means of knowing success instead of rational criteria.

What is a sketch?
By heavily referencing Bill Buxton’s “Sketching the User Experience”, we focused less on sketch as a specific type of artifact and more as a relationship between Intentionality, Form (artifact), and Implications.  A proper sketch is a suggestion more than an answer. It asks for more input, instead of validation. To do this a sketch must have several properties:

• It needs to happen quickly.
• It needs to be cheap enough as to be disposable (materials & time).
• There has to be an extreme multiplicity to have broad comparison & juxtaposition.
• The visual vocabulary needs to be well understood by all stakeholders who will be looking at it.
• It can’t have a higher quality than what is truly complete.
• It needs to communicate in a material that gives the sense that it is rough.

There were lots of exercises to practice these ideas within a few different contexts. The last exercise highlighted a group activity where sketching is used as a tool that allows for collaborators to “riff” off of each other’s ideas. By constantly building off of ideas, we saw how the core of an idea can be expanded on again and again to have a design progress.

The environment where you work is key. There needs to be lots of wall space where you can hang up materials so that everyone involved can constantly view every sketch. Nothing should really be taken down. Walls should be removed from a design space to allow for interruption and butting in. It is preferred to use chart paper instead of whiteboards for this type of work so all artifacts get preserved in a material that can be hung up right away.

Lastly, we talked about a specific type of sketching that places people in the situation of using interfaces. By drawing quick comic strips early experience prototypes and stories can be put together.

It closed with a call to all UX Professionals to sketch every day.

-

Header photo by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

UXLX or User Experience Lisbon[i], was the brain child of organizer Bruno Figuierro. Bruno put on an amazing event. It was clear from the moment I stepped off the plane and was greeted by Bruno[ii] (and Donna Spencer) that Bruno was putting out all the stops. His team crafted an experience that was one of the best conferences I have been to.

About UXLX

Getting set for UX-LX

The format of the conference was an interesting one, based on other UX conference experiences, but reconfigured to be all new. The first 2 days were end-capped by 3-hour workshops. These were opportunities to dig deeper into our practices. They were led by some of the best practitioners from around the world. In between the 2 workshops each day were short presentations from presenters who submitted abstracts for review and selection.  The last day was a binge of presentations by thought leaders of user experience. Each one could have been a closing keynote all its own. The nights were always filled with networking opportunities where at any given moment you could hear 4 or 5 languages being spoken around you. With about 25 countries represented from as far away as Australia & Brazil and as near as around the corner, this was truly an international conference.

Lisbon is a beautiful hilly city in the spirit of San Francisco or Rome. It had 7 hills like both with great views here and there. It felt much more like San Francisco with a big pay, long bridges (even 1 modeled after the Golden Gate) steep hills, and trolly cars that take you up and around them. Of course, it had an energy and culture all its own.

The night before the event, there was an ice breaker of wine tasting and fado (the local music of Lisbon). It was a first chance for people to start making people. I can say that the people I met that night, even though there were just a few, stuck with me. It was a nice touch with little fan fare.

Day 1

Luke Wroblewski (@lukewdesign): Influencing Strategy by Design

Luke’s workshop was one of my favorites of the conference. It was less a workshop than a great seminar on what it takes to influence strategy as a designer being a designer. This leads to Luke’s core thesis is that designers do not need to become business people to influence strategy, but our skills and thought models are a great complement and add value to the business strategy side as designers being designers.

• Don’t be a victim. Take responsibility and be ready to respond to needs as they arise. This will put you in a position to influence through co-ownership.
• “Leadership is not a position; it is action.” Donald McGannon
• Designer’s unique thinking processes is a wonderful complement to business analytical processes. This is best underscored by 2 dichotomies:
  • Risk averse vs. Failure open
  • Deductive/Inductive vs. Abduction (or referencing the past vs. looking to [& envisioning] the future)
• Design’s core competencies break down to: insights, synthesis, means and meaning
• Translated to pattern recognition, storytelling, visual communication and Empathy
• There are so many data sources out there for designers to access and then use to tell stories with the goal of visualizing to create empathy.
• Business looks for incremental growth. Design creates geometric and exponential growth.
• It is important to enter the conversation and create artifacts at the right level of the problem being worked on. “Where you start the conversation is where it is going to stay.”
• Framing: Design redefines the challenges facing the organization.
• Problem Solving:  Design finds new opportunities by solving existing problems.
• Function & Form: Design makes things work better.
• Style: Design: Design is the gateway to be hip & cool.
• No conscious design: Design value isn’t recognized. This attitude fosters design by default – however things come out is fine, because there are more important issues to deal with.
• We are in a world of metrics. We need to stop being scared of data and embrace data and understand that we have the power as designers to bring life to data in new ways that business people can’t as they are mostly locked into the visual & limitations of Excel.
• A high percentage of the hard work of having influence is being able to present with confidence.

I would say that one of the flaws of Luke’s presentation is his lack of understanding of the audience he is speaking to. It was even clear during the question and answer that some people were overwhelmed by an expectation of having to be expert visual designers, as Luke’s examples were a brilliant master class in visual communication. Most usability professionals, information architects and even many interaction designers are not formally trained or otherwise have experience in visual communication of this sort. I would further argue that many are even further on the continuum of Deductive/Inductive to Abductive thinkers than business people. They use scientific methods as grounding to the work they do. This dichotomy became dramatically apparent among the different speakers. Scrolling through the #uxlx twitterstream can give you insights to this.

Marcos Silva – How NUIs are changing HCI

I was very excited going into this talk, but must admit I came out less than thrilled. From the title I expected us to be told we have to do a serious re-think about older HCI principles in order to design for NUIs and that NUIs themselves are challenging HCI principles even more generally. I’m still waiting for the big challenge to Fitts Law. But this didn’t happen. Instead we were just given a history of interfaces and what NUIs were and why we should care. While the speaker only had 20 minutes, he did not use his time wisely to make a case for or teach his audience anything they either don’t already know or couldn’t figure out quite simply for themselves.

The one major take away I got out of this talk that I didn’t go in with is how the nature of gestural interfaces means that much of the interaction model is hidden and it is up to us all to share what we know and learn to others in order to make it work. While I never said it that way before, it has been noticed by myself and many others the Apple way of putting in subtle instructions of using their products in the very commercials that cause us to buy them.

Conference issue

Timing was a big struggle.Yes, we were late a lot, but what the problem really was about is that there is no slack so that this struggle with time could be better managed. In this case on Wednesday I was not able to make it into the second 20min. talk and because I left the room I was in I couldn’t go to the talk that was in the room I was supposed to be in.

Susan Weinschank (@thebrainlady): Designing Usable and Persuasive Websites

This was a beautiful master class on the psychology of behavior. Susan never missed a beat in telling us the great story of the mind. She separated the mind into 3 simple units of understanding: New, Mid and Old and explained what each meant and how we could be taking advantage of the strengths of each to create more usable artifacts, but to also create artifacts that are more persuasive. She did caution that not all uses of this information is ethical, so it is up to each designer to figure out how to use this information.

I really appreciated that Susan started out with the dichotomy of issues in design that deal with “can do” vs. those that deal with “will do”. She did underscore that sometimes design decisions can lead to both and further that sometimes they are in opposition with each other.

Then Susan listed different core behaviors of people and how we can optimize our designs for them:

• People don’t want to work or think more than they have to
• Progressive disclosure: only display what you need now, but have easy access to what is need (with easy ways out without loosing context)
• Path of least resistance: users will always choose the path that feels easiest.
• Examples: We always like examples.
• Affordances: We interact with things when we can tell what it is we can do.
• Only the features they need (and nothing more).
• Defaults: We like when others make decisions for us, or fill in the obvious data (so long as we can override).

Visual Systems

• Color can be used for imply associations (but be careful about color blindness)
• Don’t use colors like red & blue that don’t work well together because they are on opposite sides of the light spectrum.
• Grouping through use of white space. Nearness implies association while distance implies disassociation.
• To make icons more recognizable use the canonical perspective (always from the top a little and from the side)

Typography

• Most standard fonts are just as readable whether serifed or not, normal case or all caps are equally readable. Size is more important. Too small is bad, for everyone.
• Things are hard to read on a screen (backlit like LCD and OLED) because of the higher luminescence.
• Break it up into chunks
• Use proper fonts at proper sizes.
• White background with high contrast color/shades
• Oh! And make the content worth it!
• Line length: People read faster with longer line length, but prefer shorter.
• Keep density (aka clutter) to a minimum.
• People CANNOT multitask regardless of age. Everyone takes a productivity hit when attempting to multitask.
• Human memory is fallible, complicated and reconstructed.
• Chunk things
• Give strong landmarks and other contextual markers
• Group things into 3 to 4 items.

We Are Social

• We look for social validation
• Will look to peers before making decisions

Reciprocity

• We will do activities when there is a perceived sense of debt.
• Bonding: We prefer to do things synchronously with others in person.
• It is inconclusive whether or not really being in person matters across all types of online social activity, but synchronicity definitely matters.
• Laughing releases hormones that make us feel good. (Typing LOL doesn’t work.)
• Strong ties/weak ties:
• There are a maximum number (like less than 7) of people in your network (who ARE near you) who can be strong ties.
• Weak ties can have 1000’s
• Mirror Neurons
• You feel similar effects watching someone do something as doing it yourself.

Attention

• Inattention Blindness: People are blind to the things they are not paying attention to.
• Tendency not to notice when things change outside of our visual field
• Need to make it quite obvious that things have changed.
• Ways to get people’s attention:
• Cyan/magenta
• Big words
• Use fun & novelty: pay attention to what is fun & novel
• Things that are different stand out
• People are easily distracted
• People Crave Information
• Dopamine Loop: Dopamine causes us to look for things.
• We wouldn’t look for food if we didn’t have dopamine
• Searching for information creates more dopamine which causes us to want to look for more information (the loop)
• We want more choices to keep searching. However, this leads to paradox of choice:
• We want more choices
• However when we are given too many choices we act less often
• When searching we need feedback to corroborate requests happen.
• Unconscious Processing
• Commitment
• Get people to make small commitments and then loyalty grows and kicks in to allow for bigger commitments and stronger loyalty.
• Emotional events get processed differently than unemotional events.
• The Old Brain reacts to the big 3: food, sex and safety
• Using appropriate imagery and contexts can be very persuasive.
• Advertising has been doing this for years.
• Scarcity: When we perceive something to be scarce we begin to crave it.
• Habits are very powerful. They tend to hold across different contexts.
• Being used to turning on a light switch as up is hard to unlearn.

Framing & Anchoring

• This is a type of suggestion that sets in motion a specific type of meaning. 
This is probably one of the most powerful forms of persuasion because it is unconscious and because it usually works best with enough critical mass of people involved.
• People make mistakes. Be ready for it, in all its contexts.
• Use confirmations if the consequences are severe.
• If you know it’s an error then correct it for them.
• If the task is error prone then have people do things one at a time.
• You make mistakes too:
• Iterate your design.
• Test your designs.
• Susan uses http://usertesting.com to pilot her scenarios for in person tests.

It holds 5 liters of beer with a tap on the bottom.....

The networking party w/ 2m beers

On the 1st night of the conference we had a great party at a local micro-brewery right next to the event. They had the above “draft pitchers”. Beer was flowin’ for sure.

[i]Lisbon was originally called Luxboa and so they still use the abbreviation LX. Seriously, it was everywhere in the city.

[ii] I was an invited workshop leader for the conference.

Set up picture by Pedro Moura Pinheiro , beer picture by Dave Malouf / CC BY-NC 2.0

There are many interaction designers like myself whose growth into the field was a feat of organic if not chaotic chance. Our community of practice was born out of the convergence of people who did not have the option to be formerly trained in interaction design in almost any way what-so-ever. So we educated ourselves – sometimes alone and sometimes with the support of peers and mentors. It is a common presumption that because we did it this way we have to somehow hold out a universe where that path continues to not just be an option, but to be a viable one; and one that we even laud over other more formal ones.

I believe that there has been a huge paradigm shift in the very nature of design practice and a growing shift in its education. If we do not acknowledge this shift at the core of education and career development we are doing a disservice to those who are interested in coming up the ranks as young interaction designers today. At the core of these issues is the belief in the separation between form and interaction. This myth can no longer be maintained – definitely not in education.

We can look at a definition of Interaction Design like this one by Robert Reimann: “a design discipline dedicated to defining the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems (i.e., products)”. Therefore it is concerned with “anticipating how use of products will mediate human relationships and affect human understanding”. It is easy for us to stop there. But what is also true is that all interaction design is embedded in form (even those areas of IxD like gesture). And it is my belief that interaction design lives in these areas of communicating possibilities for action and responses to actions, surrounded by forms.

Core understandings

I have often held the ground that our discipline has a place next to other design disciplines like graphic design and industrial design in the area of practice.  We have done well as an emerging user experience culture and community to do just that along with usability testing, design research and information architecture (to name the most prominent). Due to the ways they built up UX teams this model seems to be working for many organizations. However, I would challenge that to have “design” separate from “user experience” – as many creative agencies have done; or having “user experience” be the name or structure of your “design organization” – does neither scenario any long term use and this is the basis of this article.

one of the core understandings behind IxD and even UX as a whole is to design from the point of view of the human being(s) who’s lives we want to impact through our designs

If we are to understand that one of the core understandings behind IxD and even UX as a whole is to design from the point of view of the human being(s) whose lives we want to impact through our designs, then we must also agree that it is the tone of our voice – the expression of our products & services through the various mediums that make that up – that is our ultimate tool. Thus, any true practice of design with a human focus has to be built on a foundation of traditional design that focuses on the the craft & design of perceptual mediums using methods & practices of design from the root of art over science.

Human-centered education

As a professor of interaction design at the undergraduate level, I truly believe that an education in human-centeredness is a requirement of EVERY designer, regardless of medium of interest. Each medium would have its own distinct way of looking at how to integrate the philosophy and methods of practice to work from a human-centered perspective. As I look at my courses in interaction design that I teach for our undergraduate minor, I am always stuck on either of two sides of a problem: I either need students who already know the rules and tools of interactivity; and/or I need students who are experienced in prototyping 3D forms & functions.

Since a minor is supposed to be open to all students throughout my college (SCAD.edu), it is hard for me to really cross departments effectively and efficiently. Despite this problem – which I’m working on fixing in future iterations of the curriculum coming soon – I think that the addition of an interaction design concentration is the right direction for undergraduate level education. This allows enough lower level support courses to be available to primary form-giving design programs whilst giving the opportunity to those students who wish greater depth of understanding of the particulars of interaction design. But what is ultimately true is that it is impossible to teach IxD without virtual interactivity, which means that there is always an addition to every non-graphical medium. All designers need to learn 2D interactive prototyping.

I truly believe that an education in human-centeredness is a requirement of EVERY designer regardless of medium of interest.

Growth path

This issue isn’t just related to undergraduate education, but also about early professional practice. Here is where the real controversy kicker is going to come in. Anyone with less than five years experience under their belt should not be working in a purely UX capacity. By “purely” I mean doing structural and behavioral design without also directly owning the forms within which they are embedded. What’s worse is that many organizations will not even hire entry-level designers, thus sidestepping this part of the growth path.

If I were starting out today here is what I would do:

1. Find out which design medium I like the most: interactive, industrial, architectural, graphic, interior, fashion, etc.;
2. Find a school that teaches courses in the medium I like and has either separate UX support (electives) minimally, but ideally has concentrations in UX generally & IxD specifically;
3. Intern at trans- or converged design organizations (hard to find but they exist);
4. Find a job at the same type of organization, but different.

But it doesn’t end there, right? What happens then? What happens after my fifth year? Where do I go? What do I become?

Paths to take

To be honest, there are so many variables that the options are infinite in their paths and combination. Along the way create a relationship with good mentors (don’t just ask for one, build one). However, there is a path I could recommend.

The path I’m speaking of is within Interaction Design or the similar path of Service Design (no one has still convinced me these are different and I’m looking forward to two talks at Interaction 10 to see if they can do the job). In other design disciplines there are often specializations that pop up. The clearest examples for me come out of graphic design. Not every graphic designer becomes a typographer or iconographer, but there are a few people who specialize in those areas. I see interaction design the same way. Only a few people will ever need to have this level of specification in their careers, or become educators who need the depth of understanding to teach at any level or to produce new bodies of knowledge.

Most people will continue their careers and learn enough depth in interaction design or any UX discipline through practice and professional education opportunities. Only a select few will make the leap to thought and practice leaders that requires the level of mastery and creation of “new thought” that a good Masters program should provide.

The reality is that an interaction designer without chops in form, is at best a strategist or manager.

There are other options, though, in this continuing “decade of transition” as I see the previous five years and the next five years. Certificate programs like that at Boulder Design Works could be (depending on the results, which we haven’t seen yet) one type of path for those needing some graduate level depth; transition skills education; and who are interested in media and messaging. Other programs could be similarly developed around other markets or practice types.

Reaching out

The reality is that an interaction designer without chops in form, is at best a strategist or manager and really doesn’t design (i.e. build) anything that anyone will ever understand as tangible enough to hold long term value through an ever collapsing economy. The cerebral nature of our tasks with lack of tactical results are not just merely easy targets for redaction, but also hold less value empirically: unless they are bound within forms. Yes, we can collaborate with form givers, but the tasks are not as separable as say writer and illustrator for either comics or children books. Both produce tangible outcomes that fit mental models of business and consumers. Our role does not. So we need to reach out not for collaboration, but for skills and practice with the areas in which we want to work.

As many may know, language is really important to me. I’m one of the first people to jump into any mud wrestling battle drenched in “defining the damn thing”. I love semantics, or more importantly I treasure appropriate semantics. So to support the design challenge, I thought I’d write about metaphors, and more specifically about the metaphor we are so happy to be-friend: the tab.

Lately, metaphors have been growing on my mind like ivy on the side of a Boston rowhouse. First, there is my recent talk on Foundations of Interaction Design that I did in Vancouver in February. But if that wasn’t good enough I did a cut-down version of it in Washington, DC for ReDUX DC. Then I’m in the midst of teaching a Perception & Cognition class as part of my job at the Savannah College of Art & Design where my colleague and co-teacher for the class, Bob Fee, reminded me so poignantly that not only is metaphor in everything digital but a good 90% of our language structure and semantics is rooted in metaphor. Finally, this fine publication along with the organization I helped to establish, IxDA, partnered with Mozilla Labs to create a summer Design Challenge whose topic is tabs in a browser.

Why metaphors at all?

Before we can answer why, we have to answer what. Well, we all took grammar in school and were told that a metaphor is an analogy that unlike a simile does not use the words like or as to declare a relationship.

My life is an adventure whose journey passes through wonders ridiculous and sublime.

Microsoft Bob, the worst metaphor OS ever

Of course, life is not an adventure, but at times has the feel of an adventure. As one of my students stated earlier this week, by creating the analogy without a prefix of like or as it is reinforcing the analogy as a truism which can’t be easily rebutted.

But why? Why do we need metaphors? What value do they add? The answer is quite simple. There is a density of complexity in the world around us. Analogies by themselves often create mental maps between intangible concepts that are difficult for us to understand. And tangible entities that have properties that we can associate between them, thus creating a definitional relationship, which we can use to aid our comprehension of the intangible concept.

A great example is how we talk about expenses: we say they are either rising or falling. Value or Expenses are neither additive or reductive. They just are. We give them a sense of size so that we can relate it to the experience of stacking coins which can go up as there is more, but prices, expenses, value in and of itself has no physical embodiment especially none that relates to altitude. Time is also very tied to metaphor. Does time really “pass”? I don’t think so. Nor does it fly or slow down.

In the digital world the metaphors around us are easier to see. Trashcans, files, folders, paths, etc. And our new favorite metaphor The Tab.

Tabs have existed in user interfaces for quite some time. With files & folders already among even the oldest WIMP (Windows Icons Menus Pointers) operating systems, it only makes sense to continue the office supply metaphor. I don’t know when they first entered the world of the GUI, but I remember them in the world of Windows settings dialogs as a way of presenting collections of options in usually arbitrary categories

I think the next major use of tabs was in the web world. Not in the browser (other than in dialogs) but in web sites themselves. The #1 prognosticator of the use of tabs as a form of web navigation was Amazon.com. They were also the first to realize and deal with the fact that tabs as a navigation/organizing form does not scale.

Older than Amazon but oft forgotten is that Microsoft Excel was using tabs as the means for navigating worksheets for quite some time.It was the main example of using tabs as a means of organizing separate work environments with minimal relationship within a single window instance. Following on its coat tails rather quickly was Visio (before its acquisition by Microsoft and after).  The assumption by both these applications was that there was no need for scaling up to lots & lots of tabs (just like Amazon).

Other applications like Fireworks and Dreamweaver then by Macromedia started using the tab metaphor to manage multiple canvases within the same windowing environment as well. And around this same time tabs were introduced through Netscape’s Navigator and then Mozilla’s Firefox to the browser world (now a de facto standard of all browsers).

The Challenge

The Mozilla Design Challenge for this summer put forward the following.
First the design challenge question:

Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?

Then this explanation:
“Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.”

And they are correct. Tabs for many users are broken. A quick poll of my class demonstrated that they are indeed not fulfilling the user requirements mostly in terms of scalability, but also not in terms of mapping the need of organizing their browsing experience (as it is done today) compared to that of tomorrow. And this is where it gets interesting. The line “… the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; …” complicates things tremendously. It implies something greater that needs to be done which contradicts the seemingly limited question of the challenge itself. I don’t say this to be critical, but to guide (and I will not be a judge in this competition) participants that maybe “redesigning tabs” is not really the right question, just like “designing a bridge” is not always the answer to “Design me a bridge”. Sometimes you just need to design the appropriate means of getting from point A to point B across water or air.

Dissecting the metaphor

All metaphors should have a solid analog in the physical or tangible universe and Tabs is clearly in that category. When a metaphor fails, you should go back to its analog. Does it fail in that space? If it does maybe it means the metaphor itself is inappropriate. If it doesn’t, you need to understand what about its physical incarnation gives it advantages over its virtual.

In the case of Tabs there is one piece of the dynamic that must be understood when doing a proper analysis. This is that Tabs in the real world have depth. This means they can scale a lot more than the 2D virtual version.  This depth allows for stacking which means the only limitation becomes not the tabs but the depth of the draw in relation to the thickness of the content being held within the tabs themselves. And before anyone goes out there and build 3D tabs, please realize that 2D UI controls in 3D interfaces are not usable to the mainstream, at least not w/o major advancements in the UI control methods.

My advice

Continue doing three exercises:

1. dissect the existing problems;
2. explore what it means to transition from data delivery system to window of a cloud-based computing architecture;
3. understand not the usability of tabs, but rather the orientation of human needs towards organizing multi-tasking, and cross-referencing.

I hope other smart people will offer their advice for participants in the comments below.

I’d like to close, though, with the first part of Adaptive Path’s Aurora concept browser for inspiration:

This article is written as part of the Mozilla Design Labs Challenge: Summer 09. For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Last December I posted a small blog post entitled “Designs with Soul”. In it I discussed the importance of the designer in product design.  Some feedback about the piece is leading the formation of my upcoming presentation at the From Business to Buttons conference in Sweden this coming June.

Here’s my summary of the original thesis:

Most successful products create a sense of connectedness between the consumer and the designer and that this connection occurs when designers balance the pull towards the rational, functional, & expedient with the natural & emotional.

But let’s take the thesis deeper. What is really being connected here? What does it mean for the end-user to feel connected? What are the examples in the real world where we get this at the various layers of design.

Great design is connected to art

Great art isn’t just beautiful. It creates a sense of connection between artist and audience. Here is my attempt at what makes great art evoke a sense of connection to the artist:

• nature – Even the “ugly” in nature can and often does inspire a sense of connection to “something”. As a devout atheist (not even close to agnostic anymore) I call this sense of awe created by the magnificance of chaos and how time works out so much beauty.
• emotion - emotion expressed, or otherwise given space, demonstrates a connection to the society around us and the people who embody society.
• analog – This means a few things. 1) it means non-digital. Our senses are set up to understand the analog; whenever we digitize something we are asking our minds to perceive elements that they are not used to and it throws them. 2) Metaphors that map to our expectations.
• technology – demonstrating we have an intellect, a sense of rationality is key to remaining connected, as it holds us towards the hope that all is not chaos. It is balanced, because too much technology negates the previous two ideals.
• referencing the world – even if your audience doesn’t get it, referencing the world (the many cultures we share this blue ball with) will bring an added sense of connectedness.
• aesthetics – this isn’t just about color, layout, form, line, texture, etc. but rather it is about engaging all facets of the mind, as it moves through an experience. How one moves during its use, the conversation it engages, the fit to motivation & goals.
• amazing craft – I think we all know that craft is hard and we have an internal appreciation of the skill it takes to make something wondrous.

I’m sure there are more, but when these properties of art are also applied to products & services, it upgrades the overall experiences surrounding them from “getting the job done” to “How did I ever live without this tool?” to “I will not only use this product, I will pay a premium for it, and be its greatest advocate.” To be great doesn’t require applying all these elements, but balancing a few really well. When it comes to a product even one of these attributes done well can have a great effect.

Let’s focus on art a little more…

Michaelangelo's David

David by Michaelangelo (not just a past relative) is one of the best known statues in the world. What is so special? Is it the perfection of the body? Or is it also the amazement we feel when we sense the magic of the craft that carved that vision out of the marble. It also has to be the choice of subject. Taking a story of the Bible and portraying this “Boy” as someone robust & perfect, but also oddly vulnerable.

The Renaissance offers up a ton of examples that accomplish this goal–Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, Birth of Venus. Just the application of depth added a truer naturalism than previously present. Not until the Impressionists and post-Impressionists do we see again this great sense of human connection & soul in the art of Europe. The emotion against nature that Monet explores is unparalleled. Van Gogh obviously increases the intensity of the emotion, but also adds more abstraction through what can be called the addition of technology to his painting.  Art has always waxed and waned in trying to remain connected while advancing its means of self-expression. Even if we look at seemingly non-natural art like Kandinsky, Pollock, Warhol, Picasso, Miro, etc. some elements of the above are mixed together at the most abstract levels to draw connection between the artist and the audience.

Now let’s look at design …

One can’t ignore architecture’s primary mandate going back to Roman times which states: Firmness, Utility & Delight. I would argue, though, that all 3 of these are attainable in the most basic sense without achieving the soulful sense of connectedness that I believe moves a product out of the territory of contemporary success into the heavens of “How did I ever live without this?”

Great design using the attributes noted above is referential to something global. Most references that work best exist in nature. The Elephant of the Kitchen Aid food processor, or the natural lines on most cars (cats, fish, sharks, whales, etc.) begin the process of creating the scene for a story for the consumer or end-user that, if maintained, can be the track guiding them through their connected life with the product.

Y-water by Fuseproject

Another more recent product (Nope! I’m not going the Apple route…yet) that feels this way for me uses another tactic in product design that is seldom thought about: playfulness. Yves Behar’s design of the water bottles for Y-water is a great example of using the story behind the product and twisting it with appropriate playfulness. It creates a sense of connection to the children who are the chief consumers and the parents who are the chief purchasers all at the same time.

It’s at 2 levels of the design …

Great design is carved out of an amazing story. In some cases the design itself is a story, but more likely the design is referencing and creating a story within its interaction.  Too often the story used doesn’t play to the aesthetic elements noted above and we feel the product’s design value becomes contrived–even the most awarded designs. Motorola’s products fall into this category. I don’t know if I can say there is a story around “The Razor” but I do know that the subsequent design language used to create a dozen post-Razor replicants is totally devoid of meaningful connection between designer & user. The initial design upon which all that followed is based, is devoid of any balance of the 8 properties noted above. It attempts to only speak to our most base levels of aesthetic understanding through great technologies. This strategic design flaw can probably be used to point squarely at the downturn of Motorola.

But as an interaction designer there is another level. This level is a lot more tactile. Some may be familiar with my Foundations of Interaction Design. In it I discuss 3 primary foundations that make up the clay of Interaction Design: time, metaphor & abstraction. Two of these are directly related to the topic at hand. I alluded to one, metaphor, earlier in the examples of referencing the natural. The other is abstraction.

I describe abstraction as the movements of our body in direct or indirect correlation (abstraction) to how the system communicates that it understands those motions in a meaningful way. The least abstract thing one can do is tap on a screen or speak a natural language command. I don’t want to say that “direct manipulation” is always the best aesthetics as I could imagine that directness may be less natural in some circumstances in terms of mapping against expectations in the mind. There are also possible efficiencies within the most indirect and abstracted of all interfaces the command line interface.

Google Maps

When the abstraction layer is in balance with the metaphors being used to communicate the responses to those abastracted commands, then something great can happen. My favorite example of abstraction done well with metaphor is Google Maps. The clipping metaphor maps against what I would do if I had a paper map on my table in front of me. I have a naturally occurring clip due to the focus area of my eyes. When I want to bring something from the south west into centered view I grab the page and slide the whole page towards the north east. The only breakdown here is the notion of “grabbing”, but in the context of mouse-usage this breakdown seems to be easily overcome through the extension of the metaphor of the mouse that is so ubiquitously well understood.

Let’s take a step and examine the evolution of the iPod. The iPod is arguably a soulless (yet attractive) form design, despite huge success. I say that because of its almost complete lack of obvious natural or analog tendencies. (I’m not delusional; there are a ton of reasons why iPhone is a success; I’m trying to make a point here.) It is in the interaction design and the information architecture where its soul shines through. A circle is infinite–its that simple. Compare the wheeled navigation of an iPod to all the previous attempts at non-circular navigation of music players. The circle afforded something that other modes of interfacing could not and that is a sense of “forever”. It also added the element of gears shifting in an easily translatable way. If I went slow I wanted it to proceed slowly and if I hit the gas on my thumb I wanted it to go to warp speed and skip through the alphabet. The kicker is that when I slowed it didn’t mean go to individual songs again, but just slow the alphabet and only after stopping and starting again would I move the individual items again.  The wheel was an advance in UI convention that reduced the level of abstraction within a mapping to a winning metaphor that was also a key instrument to the product’s success.

Apple iPhone (3G)

But it doesn’t stop there. The iPod advanced. It moved from wheel to touch screen. The make up of the screen however removed the physical affordances of a wheel. Moving around a circle without physical guides would have never worked. So it meant returning to up and down again. But it had to be improved upon. The flick in terms of a gesture against the touch screen actually increased the level of abstraction successfully. If it was truly unabstracted movement would cease when the finger left the screen of the device. But not only does it continue, it continues using a fairly complex algorithm used to replicate the physical analog of a wheel. This “gravity” metaphor is a big part of the iPhone story.  Couple this with the jump navigation in the right margin and you gain a combined interaction design model that successfully brings the infinity metaphor of the wheel to the iPhone. Not by re-creating infinity but by mapping against other metaphors with newly appropriate metaphors.

Back to humanness …

As I said, soul comes through a feeling of connectedness. The above mentioned flick of the iPhone is more than just a great metaphor: it is a calling card. It is that random sign that is completely analog in its interpretation. No machine could have ever conceived that. Apple through almost all of their products have become expert at adding these “human” touches in their designs. Washington Mutual Bank did this with the language they used in their ATMs (I’m sure it is gone now). I was always amused with their use of slang in the system.

Sometimes even “bad” design choices can lead to more connectedness. The allowance of mistakes (tolerable ones) increase the sense of humanity’s imperfection in the system. Think about how the best heroes in literature are always ones with flaws. Perfect heroes are untouchable and beyond our ability to relate to them.

Great design in the end will give us something to relate to, to feel connected with, and to reinforce our humanity. Tapping that right balance between emotion and logic, chaos and control, analog and digital, is the key to this success. We can no longer rely on “form follows function”. Form has to be parallel to function, as function is growing in commodity. … more on this in Malmo in June! I hope to see you there!

About From Business to Buttons

Held in lovely Malmö in southern Sweden, From Business to Buttons is the meeting place in Europe for interaction designers, business strategist and usability experts. This year it will be held on June 11-12.

The delay of this article in no way should be construed as a lack of passion on the topic of Foundations for Interaction Design. I’m very proud of the presentation I gave at Interaction 09 just a month ago and the delay in writing this invited follow up to my talk is more to do with life events and well needing time to reflect than anything else. The depth of the conversations I’ve had during Interaction 09 and since definitely required more time than a quick follow up would allow.

Where’s the “clay”?

As a reminder to what this is all about use the following references:

• The original Boxes & Arrows article
• The subsequent podcast follow up
• The slides from my talk at Interaction 09

At Interaction 09, the conversation about my piece often consisted of the question, “What is the clay that interaction designers mold?” I juxtaposed this question next to industrial design and also visual design. Their clay is very well understood and in the case of industrial design codified beautifully in the education practice developed by Rowena Reed Kostellow at the Pratt Institute. For details you can read “Elements of Design” by Grace Hannah. I recommend that any interaction designer who is truly interested in the design side of interaction design (as opposed to the science side) take a look at this book as guidance on understanding design education, design thinking (not the IDEO type), and the goals of design beyond mere utility.

But back to our question … What is the clay that interaction designers mold? I put forth for now three elements of our clay: Time, Abstraction (or physicality) and Metaphor. The three work in tandem building off of each other like color, value, volume and texture do for 3D form.

An assumption that I make that others may not is that interaction design is ostensibly formless. That the conversation and engagement that takes place within an interaction can have a fluid or formless embodiment. Wherever there are embodiments while influenced by the interaction design they exist within the realm of other design disciplines. Thus, the success of any design is in how the partnership of behavior and form come together. The goal of the form-giver is to clarify and communicate the behavior (what is possible & system feedback) along with other non-behavioral needs of the system.

I’m not being rigid for lack of flexibility. Rather, by holding out there a rigid absolute truth I hope to create a crucible that allow us to test the limits and definitions of IxD. In this way I hope to create the conditions where a true foundations and a better education system can develop. My goal is to create a true design discipline with as much foundational grounding as our partners in form design (architecture, graphic design & industrial design).

“There is no [clay]” — Neo

Ok, so there is nothing new there since February. So what’s new?

There was one person whom I felt challenged my foundations in a way that made huge sense to me. Robert Fabricant, an executive creative director at frog design, told me point blank, “Maybe, interaction design doesn’t have clay.” I’m still holding onto my class as I move forward with my own teaching, but also trying to understand what a “clayless” design discipline might be.

Design in my mind is about making. But if there is no clay, it seems to me that you are only left with thinking and that doesn’t feel like design to me. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but I don’t like it, so I’m going to move on from it until someone proves otherwise. Keep trying, Robert.

Robert did say more. He talked about how interaction design is about mapping for example which fits the conversation fundamental that Uday talks about in his recent piece. In this case I am assuming that mapping is about mental models to task flows. But again, for some reason this just doesn’t fit for me the thoughts of what a foundation is and what it means to be a designer. Further in my conversations with Robert (a veteran educator of Interaction Design) he discussed exercises he would give his students about using context and choreography that definitely feel MORE like what I’m thinking of in terms of interaction design and go way beyond mapping towards exploring frames. These frames are constructed in both time and physicality in order to evoke different behaviors.

But I do agree that in terms of process we create maps of mental models (implicitly or explicitly) and use them to create guide the framing (creation of system language) that expresses the components of my foundations.

Why no context?

To move on from Robert, another constant theme I hear when I present these ideas is “context”. “Where is context?” I always address this one quite simply by saying that context is not what you design, but what you design for. You don’t design personas, but doesn’t FOR the personas (if you use that tool). I don’t want to come across as dismissing the importance of context though. It is in the constraint of “context of use” that interaction designers work best. Our tools for research and framing are about defining context, bringing understanding to it, and dissecting it. So while we do a lot of work with context, it is not the final clay of our behavior, but rather, is the kiln. We have to build a custom kiln every time we have a new project to work on and that kiln exists of context and many other parts that come together to define the canvas or collection of constraints we design against and within.

I must say that I’m quite convinced that Time, Abstraction and Metaphor are still core elements of foundation in thinking about deconstructing interaction designs separate from the embodiments they are contained within. Through this, we can begin to create a language system of design criticism. It is also a basis for us to think about how to educate thinking of interaction design outside of the usual HCI oriented semantics that drive data driven designs.

Well, where are you with all this?