Created by Marina Posniak, Alex Cheek, Fawn Ellis, Mike Altman, and Kimberley Harvey. Filmed at Interaction 12 in Dublin.

Duration: just over two minutes

Hack to the Future:
Fabian Hemmert

The charming Fabian Hemmert  (not only a TEDxter, but a Johnny as well) wanted to be either a magician or an explorer when he was a kid. If he’d known what a designer was back then, he might have chosen that, as he believes that the discipline brings the two together.

“we make the impossible a reality & we explore the future”

After an enviable job history working at Nintento and Marvel, he moved to Deutsche Telecom “it was just as fun, because it’s the real world” and then began the PhD studies on embodiment. He’s investigating the topic with ‘research through design’ which he calls a very designer-friendly research approach.

Topics he’s interested in include:

• How do we embody physical aspects into the digital on phones? Results for this include using vibration, shape changing, weight change. It might even have personality.
• How can we make telecommunications more emotional? Letting callers feel the hand or breath of the callee digitally is on the border of what people can take, sensing moisture (using sponges and material) well and truly invasive.
• How can we take interaction design to the streets? The Streetlab project spent four weeks with teenagers investigating the future of mobile. The results included that status is importance (expected), privacy (unexpected: when you share a room with your brothers, it’s the only thing that’s yours), showing off (conflict, also about creativity.)
• How can we make mobile phone calls more polite? Tactful Calling allows calls to be filtered by importance—though Hammert acknowledged that what a caller considers important might be very different from a callee.

Hammert finished by urging the crowd ”to hack for the future … establish design as knowledge producing discipline.”  As a child who adored Peter Pan, he insists that designers, just like that boy “must never grow up”.

Ethnographic animation: using 3D animation as a UX tool for business and education
Kate Ertmann

Kate Ertmann’s sparky stage presence was explained in her introduction, where she described her parents’ work in American network television that led to her own initial career as a child actor. Immersed in the world of television the young Kate quickly learned about broadcast technology and the important role of the client – lessons she now brings into play in her work as owner of ADi 3D animation studios.

Reviewing the history and growing impact of animation as an artform, Kate highlighted how Steamboat Willie is now legendary while the movie it premiered alongside is forgotten (‘Gang War’ trivia fans) and named ADi’s lead animator ‘The Don’ as the big gamechanger in animation today as he, and all the millennial Generation Y-ers like him, no longer differentiate between forms of media – you don’t go and see an ‘animated movie’ any more, it’s just a movie.

Citing the wealth of research that has evidenced animation’s ability to boost conceptual understanding, comprehension and learning, Kate moved on to describe the potential of its application as an ethnographic and research tool. Pitching video against animation, she countered each of the former’s strengths with the potentially greater benefits of animation: Video connects with real people in real situations, but with animation you can use a representative human form to neutralize any identification (or lack of) that might colour your view of what you’re seeing, leaving you free to make connections you might have missed and develop a clearer understanding of presented experiences. Video can of course let you show off your shiny new product in a glossy commercial, but with animation you can do the same with a product that doesn’t exist yet – and continue to tweak it so that it remains looking fresh years later Questions from the audience suggested that the perceived timescales involved in producing such animation are still deterring agencies from using it as a development or ethnographic tool rather than a presentational one, but with assurances from Kate that quickfire work is possible (and can always be used as a starting point and enhanced further down the line) maybe there’s aspace in the UX toolbox that could be filled by 3D animation in the future?

Biomimicry Data
Peter Denman

While many a designers will get out into nature to get inspired, Peter Denman of Intel talked about his experiment to take it one step further and use nature as a way to structure interfaces.

Copying nature — in other words, biomimicry — has led to a number of innovations in materials technology, be it flow without friction (from the trunks of elephants), cleaning without cleaners (how water rolls off leaves), or antibacterial skins (based on the germ free skin of sharks). But how could it be used in interaction design?

Denman saw that it could be of use in infographics (or information dashboards). While infographics can help communicate information, they also run the inherent risk of only reflecting the designer’s viewpoint, and are one off. He believed that nature might help show complexity without losing clarity.

His case example of using fractals to give an overview of diabetes patients’ health over time initially didn’t have much of a reaction with nurses. However, he found that those higher up the medical care chain—those who need to identify problems rather than treat them—found it useful in comparing patients not only over time but against each other.

Denman sees his project moving in next few years towards moving using “beautiful mathematics” fractal forms: be it the Golden ratio, Vogel’s model, or the Fibonacci spiral.

Denman also made a (now common across the conference) point about designers and coding: he had done “some bad coding” in Actionscript 3 to make the prototypes, and had become a strong supporter of prototyping in code.

Critical Design: Restoring a sense of wonder to Interaction Design: Dr. Michael Smyth & Ingi Helgason

What was the last product that made you go wow? Smyth and Halgason, working on design research at the boundaries—”where the interesting things happen”—of art/design/technology shared a number of projects they’ve worked on through Napier College.

He notes that there’s a tension between the problem-solution culture of design and the meaning focus of ethnography: while the latter is interesting for designers—”is ethnography the new black?”—and uncovers meanings, it doesn’t provide problems or solutions.

Instead, like Anthony Dunne the day before, they see critical design as a way of exploring the problem space.

Some of the projects they talked about include:

• This Pervasive Day Edinburgh 2010: in an installation commenting on privacy and sharing: people walking past a screen had their picture imposed onto fake Facebook data and presented to them as a profile. Responses to it ranged from the serious to the playful, “which is fine”.
• Exploring a city’s issues related to time: in a project with a Croatian school, the students made outdoor projections throughout the city that juxtaposed present day concerns (“should I go to the gym?”) as speech bubbles from classical era statues.
• Prekham Morst: How much can happen crossing a bridge? Everyday people crossing a bridge in Slovenia were presented with a digital camera and asked to take photos over the time it took them to cross. Pictures ranged from capturing others in the project (creating a sense of kinship), or commenting on society through small details (snapping a flower basket holder that was empty thanks to municipal cuts in spending).

Aristotle’s Storytelling Framework for the Web
Jeroen van Geel

Building on his 2011 article of the same name, our very own Jeroen van Geel presented his translation of Aristotle’s classical rules of story and drama into a framework for the creation of compelling online user experiences.

A really special story is one that you don’t even realize you’re reading, and really special writers may be blessed with talent but need to follow a process in order to get the best results. The cautionary example here was George Lucas: clearly talented, but guilty of screwing things up (you can guess where) by getting wrapped up in creating spectacle and comedy and neglecting the real process of crafting a story.Aristotle dissected the art of storytelling into six key elements, all of which can be applied with minimal adaptation to the world of the web: plot, character, thought (or theme), fiction, song (or rhythm) and spectacle, all of which are listed in order of importance (take note Mr Lucas).

The central layer of the framework is Plot, which for a website can be defined as product goal + user need.

The second layer is made up of Characters and Theme. Characters can be divided into primary and secondary, both of whom are necessary to any story. Using the example of James Cameron’s Titanic Jeroen identified Kate and Leo as the primary characters whose action defined the story – but pointed out that without the evil Billy Zane for Kate to escape from, there would have been nothing bringing the lovebirds together in the first place. Theme is what’s possible (or not) in the place where your story is happening. If your story is Brokeback Mountain, it’s Wyoming in the 60s and men are expected to be masculine and defiantly straight – which clearly affects what can happen to the characters. If your website is a transport site like 9292.com in a world branded ‘Just do it’ or ‘Think different’, those brands will influence what can happen in your online experience.

The third layer of the framework, which Jeroen described as the ‘most boring’ and also the most overemphasized in
design education, encompasses diction, rhythm and spectacle. Diction is the language your site uses, rhythm the patterns it adopts and how they spread across all its platforms of communication, and spectacle lies in making things look beautiful.

In summary Jeroen explained that the central layer of the framework (plot) involves strategic decisions, the second layer (characters and theme) tactical decisions and the third (diction, rhythm, spectacle) operational decisions – and that choosing the right layer on which to focus, and the right seniority-level of staff to work on them, was the crucial thing.

While Jeroen may not have got the hugs he was angling for in his talk, he clearly ignited the thinking of a great number of designers in the near-capacity audience and gave this designer/writer a fresh perspective on how the techniques of narrative can be utilized in interaction design. (And his Brokeback Mountain translation-fail was an absolute classic

How to lie with design thinking
Dan Saffer

First up in the main hall lightning talks session was Dan Saffer. Having never witnessed his presentations before I was informed that it would be a must-see, and (the alleged) Dr Saffer didn’t disappoint. Making a superhero entrance sprinting down theaisle and high-fiving, Dan announced his delight at being here amongst his own people: the passive-aggressive alcoholics (that’s IxDers, not the Irish).

Thanking the organization and conference he founded for giving him a whole ten minutes out of their three-day schedule, Dan proceeded to unleash a gleeful slaughtering of the industry’s holy cows in the form of an interaction design cheat’s manual. First of all, give up the hard work of design and start selling design thinking – it’s the fun part where all the easy money is! (Dan gave credit where it’s due for this one: prostitutes worked it out a long time ago). Next give up the wireframing, after all nobody reads them (not even you) and nothing else says ‘we’re working hard’ like a wall full of (illegible) post-it notes or a whiteboard full of (incomprehensible) conceptual models. Now do some ‘research’ to help you invent your invisible friends (Dan’s name for personas) and if you absolutely must present anything make sure it’s nothing more than a cute whimsical little movie. If you want to build stuff it’s time to move to China.

Naming each of Interaction 12’s sponsors as the perfect suckers to try this snake oil out on, Dan exited to thunderous applause as the group seated next to me confidently informed each other that ‘Dan Saffer’ was in fact a fictional persona created purely for the purposes of writing books and whipping up controversy. After all, a real speaker couldn’t possibly have said all that stuff! Right? Or could he? I watched them hitting Google with bated breath…

Ritual in Interaction Design
Matt Nish-Lapidus

IxDA board member Matt gave us a whistle-stop tour of ritual and the part it has to play in the work of interaction designers. Defining ritual as ‘a set of intentional actions with symbolic rather than logical meanings’, he presented its fiery roots in religion before moving on to the rituals that now make up our daily lives: from the breakfast rituals that get us into the right mindset for the day, to cultural rituals like weddings whose trappings communicate so much more than just the act of getting marries, to the community-creating rituals of sport that give value to something essentially meaningless.

Ritual can also be found in our interactions with consumer products. iTunes isn’t ritualistic, but dusting off the vinyl and turntable certainly is and there’s a whole subculture of those who stick stubbornly to traditional rituals like straight-razor shaving and the use of manual-wind watches. By undertaking these rituals we’re making would could be simple tasks much more complicated to achieve, but with added effort comes added significance.

Matt signed off by asking us to consider how we might create more meaningful and significant products and services by engaging the ritualistic instincts and behaviours of our users.

The craft of UX
Leanna Gringas

Leanna compares the practice of UX to guilds for bakers and metalsmiths, and that we can use theapprenticeship model to develop and grow junior UX designers. Guilds are serious about growing talent, and it can take 6-8 years for apprentice bakers to reach the rank of a master, where half of that journey solely focused on learning the foundation and core skills. Apprentices benefit from a high standard of training and good opportunities to tap into valuable networks. Practice is where the bulk of learning happens, where exposure helps uncover unique ways of problem solving. There are clear expectations set by the masters, who act as mentors throughout an apprentice’s tenure. These expectations also extend to the hiring process, where guilds seek candidates with passion, curiousity and humility before bringing them on.

IA heuristics
Abby Covert

In this lightning talk, Abby the IA took a stab at updating a list of heuristics (best practice, rules of thumb, common sense, intuitive judgments) as an attempt to facilitate design critiques more effectively with non-designers. The creative directors she used to work with used to say about UX work, “does it have legs?”, which was a way of saying “is this stable, effective and stand on its own?”. She argues heuristics need to be teachable, business friendly, consider cross-channel, and be easy to implement. Many of the common UX heuristics (Nielsen & Molich, Morville, Rosenfeld, ISO9241, Resmini & Rosati) lack some of these elements and are in need of an update. Abby proposes an updated model of 10 principles, based on 50 existing heuristics from the four aforementioned ones:

1. Findable
2. Accessible
3. Clear
4. Communicative
5. Useful (includes usable, which isn’t enough anymore)
6. Credible
7. Controllable (error tolerant. not the same as personalization)
8. Valuable
9. Learnable (predictable, consistent)
10. Delightful

In addition to that, we need to apply three rules when using these principles, which is to put our user shoes (don’t get hung up on our job) and goggles (the user’s context) on, and not to assume we “are” our users. Finally, while heuristics can be powerful tools to facilitate design critiques, they should never be used as a substitute for good user research.

Bananas,technology and magic: breaking the clichés of user-centred design
Adrian Westaway

Presenting the IxDA Award-winning project ‘Outside of the Box’ to a crowded room eager to find out more, Adrian spoke to the importance of creativity in research as well as in the implementation of final design solutions. Describing a childhood letter to magician Paul Daniels asking for help in making his teacher disappear, which directed him first to the library and from there to a career in engineering design for magic, Adrian comes across as something of a real-life Jonathan Creek – explaining his perfect understanding of the importance of surprise and delight.

Given a commission by Samsung and the Helen Hamlyn Centre to design a new mobile phone for older people, Adrian’s studio
Vitamins took the innovative step of focusing on their users’ capabilities rather than disabilities, and nervously approached their corporate overlords to ask if it would be alright if they didn’t actually design a phone at all? After giving older people money to buy their own phones they’d discovered that the point where frustration with their new product emerged was when they took it home and opened the box. While younger users tend to trust implicitly that a product will work, tossing the manual and starting to play straight away, older people have come from a different tradition of learning. Wanting to make sure they used their phones properly, they would turn straight to the manual – finding them singularly unhelpful, which ultimately lead to a lack of engagement with the product.

Having convinced Samsung that older people didn’t want another ‘special phone’ with scary red SOS buttons reminding them
they could die at any moment, Vitamins set out to discover how their users learn. At workshops in the UK, Norway and Italy they gave older people bananas to customize any way they wanted in order to represent their ideal phone, and then asked them how they would teach another person to use their banana-phone. The most inspirational example came from a professional novelist, who wrote his instructions as an adventure storybook. Realising that a phone manual has nowhere to live, Vitamins final (and award-winning) design solution was phone packaging in book-form, with layered cut-out pages that introduce each feature of your new phone in stages – neatly avoiding information overload and giving you permission to store your manual neatly on the shelf and refer back to it whenever you need.

It was fantastic to hear that Adrian is free to describe this project in detail because the Helen Hamlyn Centre is dedicated to the creation, and more importantly the sharing, of new design methodologies – a rare thing to hear at a conference where the usual statement seems to be ‘I’m sorry but I can’t talk about that’.

Why we share: motivations at the heart of sharing
Angel Anderson

Angel sought to illuminate the human motivations behind the like/post/favourite viral sharing behaviours we exhibit online, in an age where ‘volume of sharing fostered’ has become a key indicator of design success.

She identified three distinct motivations of bragging, complaining and reaching out, and from these distilled a range of
social design characteristics that designers should explore when seeking to provoke sharing behaviour:

• Landscape: in a sea of social media platforms, people tend to create a ‘social layer cake’ by using different platforms to share in different ways, like Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for business. Where are you choosing to share your information? And if you’re making new platforms, where will they fit in?
• Frameworks: people who don’t fit in your social layer cake (not close enough for Facebook, not business enough for LinkedIn) are actually falling outside of your self-imposed frameworks – into what Angel called ‘friend purgatory’
• Social objects: social media platforms are giving us new forms of social capital, turning details like your current location into share/tradeable information
• Social privacy: with the Facebook privacy statement now longer than the US constitution, it’s crucial to give your users value in exchange for the privacy they may be surrendering through sharing
• Friction: without which, sharing loses meaning. If sharing is automated, an involuntary act that sends out our information without requiring our thought or input, it becomes devalued – what are ‘happy birthday’ messages on Facebook really worth? And if sharing becomes autosharing then the real task for the designer becomes curation.

Angel closed by reminding us all that in this ‘age of UX enlightenment’ our industry is still in its infancy and it’s critical that we share because the next generation of users is already out there and interacting with us online.

Designers as Change Agents
Jonathan Kahn

In an ambitious, deeply referenced,  and somewhat controversial talk, Jonathan Khan urged interaction designers to become linchpins and be prepared to design change rather than interactions. For tips to do this, he looked to five different disciplines:

1. Service Design: has the concept of front and back door, we need to understand both elements.
2. Cross Channel UX: we’re moving beyond the mouse and screen to a range of platforms
3. Content Strategy: considering the role of content on a site and its lifecycle. Criminally ignored by interaction designers until 2009, but now has at least three must-read books on the topic.
4. Data Governance: not perhaps known so much in interaction design circles, data governance takes the opposite approach to content strategy, asking “what happened to the organisation to get it to this point”
5. Agile
6. Lean UX: telling us to “ignore the startup part” in Eric Reis’s Lean Startup book, Kahn pointed out Reis’s five principles of lean startup (Entrepreneurs are Everywhere,  Entrepreneurship is Management, Validated Learning, Innovation Accounting, and Build-Measure-Learn ).

One of the stunning factoids was that organisational structures (summed up at its worst in the infamous Microsoft organisational chart) were designed to limit information flow rather than encourage it: they were devised in the age of trains as “a means of minimising embarrassment”, and are effectively one way. ‘This is bad because it means the system can’t take feedback and learn.” (In comparison, the Toyota-founded Lean UX was all about sharing, though I’d argue that could equally come from its basis in Japan). This was a prelude to Genevieve Bell’s comment about technology always being related to morality.

Rage against the machine? Designing our futures with computing
Dr Genevieve Bell

After the announcement of Interaction 13 in Toronto next year, Intel’s director of user interaction and experience Dr Genevieve Bell brought Interaction 12 to a close with a talk that she described as a ‘provocation’, and one so freshly-distilled that it could well have a lingering odour of new-car-smell.

As one of the first social scientists at Intel, Genevieve’s somewhat daunting remit was to help the company understand two things: women and ROW (as in Rest of World, or everywhere but America). With just these few billion people to focus on (!) Genevieve set out to investigate what she described as an emerging thread of anti-technology discourse’, with the aim of understanding our changing engagement with machines. One woman she spoke called her technology a ‘backpack full of baby birds with open mouths screaming feed me’, symbolizing the high-maintenance relationships we have with our devices (relationships we’re probably only in for the internet).

Documenting the historical rise and fall of our love affair with technology from the 18th century fascination with ‘uncanny mechanicals’ (tea-serving Japanese dolls and defecating French roboducks) to the Industrial Revolution of manual labourers destroying the machinery that was attempting to replace them, Genevieve highlighted how the romantic notion of outlaw revolutionaries pricked the imagination of the emerging Romantic poets, who took up the cause of championing the human over the mechanical in their work. This sentiment has continued into contemporary writing and drama, and there still exists today a persistent belief that machines are either ‘subservient to us or will kill us’ (see all variations of Terminator, past and present).

Genevieve posited that, rather than designing technology with the intent to deceive or fake, we do better when we begin with the notion of grace and wonder. When electricity was first introduced to consumers, it was a hard sell to get them to rip up their homes for wiring when they could already get warmth and light from candles and oil lamps. What finally persuaded them to get on board was the Electric Fairies: by running a charge through women clutching lightbulbs and having them skate around a high society party, electricity suddenly became fun, safe and desirable.

Today it’s hard to imagine our lives without our digital devices – indeed, in Japan paper replicas of iPads are burned ceremonially to ensure that the ancestors don’t have to go without in the afterlife (with new upgrades being sent up in smoke every year). We increasingly want our devices to stop making demands upon us and instead to maintain themselves while providing us with nurture and care. Genevieve’s closing call to arms came in the form of a question: what will it take for us to imagine relationships rather than interactions?

Closing Party

Interaction designers took over the Guinness Storehouse, and stunned band of the evening Ham Sandwich by demanding an encore. Whether all the movement on the dancefloor (both to music and the Kinnect) were as terrible or not is up for argument, but  as one audience member told the band “this is what happens when nerds go out”.

Keynote—Jonas Löwgren: Exploring, Sketching, Other Designerly Ways of Working

Jonas’ keynote is reminiscent of Bill Buxton’s sketching user experience, beginning with the quote “IxD is about getting the right design and the design right”. He encourages designers to explore possibilities while we can, sketching cheap and fast, and thinking beyond storyboards. Storyboards are limited because interaction is temporal with many unknowns, a major one being the user.

Instead, sketching (in the broad sense) allows you frame and shape the problem in parallel, and understand through the problem solving process. No more trying to establish requirements before designing. This is especially true for unique experiences where interactions are not idiomatic, in which case he argues you need to prototype with higher fidelity materials. He gave the example of Body Synths – you had to prototype it with sounds and sensors as a full body experience in order to know what it was.

In instances where designers don’t understand the domain, subject matter experts are needed as co-designers, especially since most knowledge is mostly oral. Doing a show and tell in moments of work becomes crucial in the design process, such as an intensive care ward with hundreds of machines and a few experts to needed to operate a machine.

Other projects he talked about include:

• Pinpoint: a directory for a large organisation
• Avatopia: getting students involved in the community

In conclusion, he calls on all designers to treat sketching as a continuum (which runs through the execution phase) and to keep a sketching mindset while prototyping

Building a Better Starship: Scaling Design Systems into Humanity’s Future
Scott Nazarian

I suspect at least a few people thought this talk was going to be about sci-fi and space-travel. They were in for a shock. Nazarian’s talk reminded me of some of a combination of Bruce Sterling and Ezio Manzini’s discussions. Fast paced and challenging, it’s one that I’ll be reviewing once the videos come out.

He had one key aspect we need to consider in our digital future: the relationship between data and energy. (Without power centres, the data is effectively dead).

Moving down the futurist rabbit hole, he transposed the UI designer’s stack to a more fundamental one: (humans, environment, systems etc), and posed such questions as fidelity, subliming information, and capacitant futures where we have stored memories so that we can survive 1000 years of sleep during space travel.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science
Ariel Waldman

She had us at ‘f**king teddies in space!‘
Equal parts entertainment and education, Arial Waldman made space seem as exciting as it did during the space race. Speaking of space races, she pointed out that 1969 is the year not only of the moon landing, but also the first virtual connection through APRANET. “It wasn’t much. It sent the message ‘L O’, or ‘log on’, to another computer—which crashed”. Still, from these inauspicious beginnings, now it’s the net that has far more wider impact than space travel.

Her frustration at the lack of takeup of NASA’s Open Data happened to be heard one day by Jeremy Keith, and as a result he helped form Science Hackdays where designers, developers, and scientists come together to hack fun things—”Hackdays are not about solutions, they’re about getting inspired and having fun, using space as a material”—ranging from a synesthesia experience made with a scary looking gimp mask, to listening to the sounds of particles colliding, a typeface where each letter has the same wind drag, or making an electronic canary for quakes using electronic devices ”I worry that people would game the system by all jumping at the same time”.

She also touched on opening up space exploration to the masses, if not by actually going to space, but by discovering universes and being recognised for it (hello Green Peas Galaxy).

And going back to history, and making data open: just because it’s open doesn’t mean it’s accessible. While NASA has had their transcripts online for a while, it’s only recently that Spacelog has actually made it engaging.

Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement
Dustin Di Tomassio

Mad Pow’s Experience Design Director Dustin spoke on the somewhat maligned topic of gamification, filtering self-determination theory through games in order to get beyond badges and leaderboards to reveal the human traits and values that gaming exploits. Dipping into the motivational psychology beneath games, we discover that they provide safe environments in which to undertake our lifelong pursuit of ‘the sensation of mastery’ – we all want to be better at something at some time, and gaming builds on that need. There’s an addictive sequence of tension and release in exerting effort and achieving a goal, and by scaffolding tasks to keep those goals ever so slightly out of reach we keep users in the pleasurable state of challenge. However that state can’t go on forever without risk of user burnout so it’s important to build in moments of reflection, allowing them to look back and revel in their growing mastery. ‘Juicy feedback’ that gives users huge rewards for small actions was a game technique Dustin felt designers could make better use of, and asked for examples of long-term gamification techniques he encouraged us to tap into people’s over-life goals, such as the desire to improve their education, health and wellbeing. In closing he also pointed out that good game platforms are never really complete – once your user achieves the ‘epic win’, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and build them a whole new game.

Why is no one using your product?
Julie Baher

The second stream of afternoon lightning talks kicked off in a jam-packed Liffey hall 1 with Citrix’s Julie Baher on finding the right users to inform product development. While designers can make their products completely adorable, they are still puppies in a window waiting to be adopted until a user takes them on – like TiVo when it first hit the market. While it’s pretty easy to get feedback from experimental early adopters, they’re unlikely to become your mass market. Recognising this Citrix are sending free products out to ‘real people’ – the slow steady pragmatists who would usually avoid trying something new without a heap of recommendations from existing users. By removing the barriers of price and access Citrix get more useful feedback from appropriate user groups, allowing them to tighten their design cycle and iterate products faster.

Designing the mobile wallet experience
Jonathan Rez

Seren Partners’ Jonathan Rez discussed the consequences of our smartphones transitioning into mobile wallets, containing by necessity all that is currently in our physical wallets: from primary, secondary and emergency cash cards to forms of ID, warranty and cashflow control. He outlined the very different risks of losing a mobile wallet – with all the data and credentials it contains stored in the cloud, and the mobile wallet itself capable of being de- and re-activated remotely, you might think it a much more secure alternative. However this depends on whether you trust your mobile wallet provider, which could be Visa, Google, Tesco or even your local corner store. Jonathan closed by asking us to contemplate a future where our Google cash card posts details of purchases to a Twitter feed, as a means of perpetuating the status symbol denied us when we can no longer have a platinum card to whip out in restaurants.

Input/Output: Interaction design at the intersection of city and its interfaces
Sami Niemala

In his work at Nordkapp Sami Niemala has discovered that cities are lumbering beasts on the brink of waking up. The blinking blue charging points still waiting to be used are at odds with street furniture contracts that run for 20 years – an eternity in the life of the interactive touchscreens Sami’s team were looking to create. The practical challenge of designing devices that would survive the extreme Helsinki weather (as well as general drunken city shenanigans) were matched by the challenge of creating truly urban touchscreen interfaces, which Sami likened to designing for mobile but at much lower resolution. He summarised the key learning from this project by calling on his fellow designers to aim as high as possible aim when designing devices anew, and cited the example of architects who, when invited to propose a new building for Berlin, instead envisaged a mighty mountain to be placed right in the middle of the city – an idea whose ambition has since become a cultural symbol.

Sculpted! Using Sculpture as a Design Lens
Rachel Bolton-Nasir

Inspired by an interest in sculpture, Rachel Bolton-Nasir took a refreshingly physical approach to interaction design by showing how principles from sculpture could be applied to interaction design.

She walked the audience through six principles of sculpture, and their application to interaction design:

1. Form: as sculpture is divorced from function, as it’s not a means to an end, you focus on elements more.
   In interaction design: what happens if you remove the functions from the page? Is the visual language strong enough to work without it?
2. Multiple viewpoints: sculpture unfolds over time & experience.
   In interaction design: think of multiple touchpoints (e.g. Zipcar has the site, the key, the car ….)
3. Physical parts: devoid of function, the different materials and how they are changed give meaning.
   In interaction design: do the materials in your designs feel familiar?
4. Bodily empathy: imagining yourself to be what it is your making
   In interaction design: Do physical interactions ring true, to they mimic natural actions?
5. Multi-sensory: can’t always touch, but you can move around etc.
   In interaction design: Does it require or inspire a physical engagement (e.g. zipcar fob)?
6. Context: interacts with space & vice versa.
   In interaction design: How does this interact with  its environment? is it flexible?

Your Users are Hobbits: How classic quests can inform your next design
Abi Jones

The Quest Cycle is a story that transcends culture (it’s been detailed by story expert Joseph Campbell) and helps people reach fulfillment. Abi Jones illustrated the elements of this story using Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. It’s worth noting that neither example appeared to fully capture all the elements—how can it be that that Frodo never becomes a Master of both worlds?—but it was still a good romp through story craft.

The quest cycle is based around an archetype: the hero is us and who we design for.

• The story starts with a call: (Frodo been given the ring, Luke being called to fight)
• And a refusal: (both turn it down)
• They need mentors and helpers (Gandalf and Sam; Yoda, Millennium Falcon crew). “Mentors don’t need beards or wands or anything, but they need to know the tools you need to be of help”
• Each involves crossing a threshold (getting past ringrwaiths with elves help, or escape w/ Millennium Falcoln). While this is exhilarating, it also means a point of no return for the hero.
• There are a series of trials and ordeals: be they trial of the dragon (an unknown enemy) or trial of the brother (a known enemy,  either in self—e.g. the ring—or outside, such as Boromir)
• There’s always a meeting with a goddess (not necessarily a woman, but beautiful e.g. Galadriel). They show hero good and represent love: not romantic love, but idealised love.
• But there is Temptation: (the ring to Galadriel; or the Dark Side). Giving in would be to become less than whole.
• his comes with atonement (e.g. Aaragon, or Darth Vader’s eventual apology).
• The adventure finishes with apotheosis ”often in movies with change of clothes!”; a change to whole person. (In LOTR, it’s with destruction of the ring). The help from an unexpected place (e.g. Gollum).
• However, there’s a Refusal of Return, (Luke and Frodo both delay going home); needs a Rescue with Without. In the real world this is from parents when a child, mentors when an adult.
• Ideally, the hero becomes a Master of Both Worlds: returning to your old life with the knowledge of the new  (Sam gets this, but Frodo doesn’t).
• It finishes with Freedom to Life (becoming a teacher; as Luke does).

Core Principles of UX Management
Michael Hawley

Michael Hawley gave practical tips on UX management, with three tenets:

1. Educate: build expertise , be pro active, budget for it
2. Mentor: enhance creative thinking.  Juniors struggle at selling ideas, getting over stumbling blocks and a number of other skills. Mentoring helps.
3.  Motivate: inspire best work. Money seems helpful, but it isn’t (Dan Pink reports on research that shows that monetary rewards helps with physical tasks, but not cognitive ones). People are by far motivated by intrinsic value (internal guides). e.g. give autonomy, enable progress, alignment

For me, given the current general discussions about mentoring, the most interesting question for me is what you should be as a mentor: you should not be the solutions person. Instead you should be encouraging your mentee to be able to find their own solutions.

People are Software — The Story of Project Interaction
Katie Koch

“Our kids are ‘of’ design, but they aren’t aware if it” —Takeo Onishio

Concerned with how high school kids can find out about design as a career, Katie Koch and Carmen Duke are part of an initiative (whilst stil having full time jobs!) teaching a group of New York girls about interaction design. They shared their experiences of running Project Interaction over the last few years.

1. High school students ‘get’ interaction design. They were born in 1995, have only known a world with tech. (Koch laughed at the results from one exercise they do with their students, where they have to try doing an everyday action in another timezone. When it came to finding an alternate subway route in the 90s “their mime for using a payphone was very funny as they’d never used one before”)
2. Young people are full of creative ideas, and they’re ready to share them. When given sketchbooks, they love them and fill them with observations from their lives.
3. Students learn design through a clear, repeatable process. 

They’ve also found that they use a cycle for teaching, as well as with students:

1. Entry: students invariably think of fashion and product design when asked about design, but they get it with real life examples like subway ticketing systems.
2. The make/test/reflect cycle:
   Make: using all sorts of materials, be it paper wireframes, post-it notes (really useful with students as it allows them to commit but also move, rip off page) even lego/cardboard
   Test: iterate (the students didn’t like being told to throw stuff away at first!), try different ways to tell a story (ranging from simple presentations to comics, dance)
   Reflect: compare feedback to expectations (have students critique each other right throughout process, which is new and hard for them “they’re used to just handing something in and getting a grade”)
3. The showoff stage: sharing final work in presentations; having a presence on project website; just getting their thoughts out of their head

There were also some interesting questions from the floor:
Why interaction design rather than some other form of interaction design? Is it just because of your background? 

Given the interest amongst many UXers about urban planning, the welcoming talk from the Lord Mayor of Dublin Andrew Montague was heartening. He briefly talked about how the town has taken on design in its work be it in redesigning the spaces of poorer areas or using desire lines and not making helmets compulsory in their free bike sharing scheme.

Keynote – Luke Williams : Disrupt

Disruption has never been so fun. Luke Williams pulled the tricky first speaker act of inspiring while being accessible enough for anyone recovering from early morning shock (or in the case of many attendees, Dublin hangovers). He would also kick off the trend of the day of Hitchcock references.

He’s noticed working with clients that they suffer from only having ideas that fit into their current paradigm. This leaves them open to lose out when the market changes, as Motorola did to Nokia (which it is now losing to Apple).
So, how do we avoid The Innovator’s Dilemma? He urged designers to not predict as much as provoke. While we parely remember it now, Hitchcock’s Pyscho starts in all intents and purposes as a caper film, and only becomes a thriller 30 or so minutes in.(Other examples of challenging expectations include the Grand Central Station Freeze).
The key strategy he gave to combat this is understanding surface cliches (at a product, interaction, and price level) … and then inverting them (while ensuring they can scale).

While some of his examples were interesting in their story (Red Bull challenged the idea of soft drinks being cheap and aspirational by making them expensive and functional; Eurosiko games bombing their own ships in order to win), my favourite was on taking an utterly mad idea and making it work, or “being wrong in order to be right”. When a man had an idea of selling unmatching socks in pairs of three, he searched for a market … and eventually found out that girls age 8-12 love mismatched items. His company Little Miss Matched is so popular he has expanded into also making pajamas.

His call to arms: don’t look at experiences that are broken, look for the ones that aren’t, as those are the opportunities for true disruption.

August de los Reyes
‘Design and the New Modern – Three things you should know’

Freshly relocated to the Samsung UX Centre in San Francisco from Microsoft in Seattle, August de los Reyes declared himself happy to be in Dublin, and quite literally happy to be alive after accidentally chowing down on a raw chicken kiev the previous day thanks to a misleading M&S product label (interaction fail).

Inspired by a ‘life changing’ day trip to the French perfumery town of Grasse in the company of design legend Massimo Vignelli, August outlined his quest to bring the modernist values of his new ‘guru’ into the digital age by presenting them through more accessible means. He began this mission by questioning the audience on their zombie apocalypse plans. After touching on why rational interaction designers might consider such plans even a remote necessity (it’s all about your politics) August drew a highly entertaining parallel between our changing attitudes towards the undead, and towards ambiguity. Where previously the plots of zombie/vampire genre fare concentrated on wiping out those troubling live-dead hybrids and restoring normality, contemporary dramas such as True Blood and Twilight focus instead on learning to live with their ambiguous state of being. This neatly encapsulates the agenda of New Modernism, and begs the question: how do we design for a world in a constant state of change?

August believes that while things may change, the basic relationships between then stay the same and can be analysed on 3 levels: the Semantic, where relationships between objects are arbitrary and driven by consensus; the Syntactic, where relationships themselves have meaning apart from the objects; and the Pragmatic, where there is a shift away from deep, tight focus towards shallow but broad relationships, exemplified by the ‘bricolage’ approach that builds systems out of many disparate parts. His example of this was the way our modern identities are constructed from pieces of ourselves spread across diverse platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flipbook and Spotify.

While avoiding any direct comment on the Samsung Natural User Interface, August made clear that his talk set out his agenda for that work and that (picking up a thread from Luke Williams’ earlier keynote) he looks forward to being a force of positive disruption in the project.

Design Language
Mike Lemmon

Queen Elizabeth 2 vs Che Gueverra? It’s all in the name of design language, as Mike Lemmon showed, drawing both on his background as a product designer and his work in Ziba.
Lemmon argued that as we move from the physical to the digital “these days we buy an app as we would a coffee from Starbucks”, we as designers risk not seeing the wood for the trees, namely through forgetting that the products we work on belong to a larger family (Android and Apple have created it for their platforms, but that doesn’t necessarily cover anyone else). A design language – “part philosophy, part instruction manual.” – creates cohesion.

So how do we do this? Lemmon gave an interaction framework:

• Consumer: ”it all starts with the human interface”
• Brand: it sounds like a bad thing, but car companies for example understand targeting a niche (Porshe: performance, Honda: value; Volvo: safety.) Beyond this, why not have an MBTI for your product? Ziba did this with a travel site, ending up with Queen Elizabeth [guild your travel] vs Che Gueverra [unlost, rebel against plans].
• Structure: design for features, rather than platforms (and stress test it too). This will keep you on the bigger picture. Netflix does this well (even if most people in the EU can’t use it yet ….)
• Interaction and visuals: investing in these shouldn’t be underestimated, be it the smooth system of Flipboard, or the well done Metro Windows Phone system.

Innovations in Accessibility: what we can learn from digital outcasts
Kel Smith

The tantrums often observed in people with autistic spectrum disorders are not, as often assumed, a part of the condition but in fact a symptom of frustration at an inability to communicate. With the example of a mother who created an iPad app that allowed her child to describe the emotions he couldn’t articulate, Kel Smith illustrated how technology can be used to tackle the unmet needs of such ‘outcast’ populations.

Highlighting through sobering statistics the likelihood of us all becoming digital outcasts at some point in our lives, Kel hammered the point home with a (near obligatory) William Gibson quote: that the future has already arrived, but is not yet evenly distributed.

To get new ideas into hospitals Kel stated that they need to be cheap, behaviour-based and compatible with existing workflows – and it’s worth remembering that rough but compelling ‘hanging wire’ prototypes are acceptable when you’re piloting rather than taking to market. However closing questions touched on a troubling disconnect between designers and the medical industry, with Kel admitting disappointment that despite its amazing results an immersive ‘virtual cold world’ that helps burns patients through painful wound treatment is still only available in the single hospital ward where it found funding and practitioner support. It appears that the next big challenge for healthcare design innovators is to give their ‘hanging wire’ prototypes a meaningful life beyond their birthplaces.

Artificial Emotional Intelligence
Giles Colburne

Ever want to hit your computer? Perhaps it —rather than you — needs to be more emotional. With examples as diverse as FBI bargaining strategies and horror movies, Colburn showed how we should be thinking responsive interactions.

While extreme acts of violence against a computer are uncommon, most of us have felt or at least seen more benign examples of anger at a device. We may even be designing them: it turns out that in user testing, people will blame themselves for product failures whereas in the real world will blame the product.
However, removing emotion from computing would be like being Nurse Rakett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It turns out that emotion is key to helping us make choices: get rid of it and we can’t decide.

Instead, try the tiered model that the FBI use for negotiation:

• active listening ”When designing interactions, show ways of listening” (Howard Nass change the then-hated Clippy to ask “was this useful?” and adapt, to huge success)
• empathy (From the FBI: be positive and upbeat, but be credible. In other words, be like Siri. While there are studies on pattern matching emotions, it’s difficult enough for people, let alone a computer.)
• rapport (Nass also conducted studies where people were given blue headbands and computers with blue screen rim. They felt a connection).
• influence, behaviour change

Colburne also pointed out the importance of understanding ‘difficult people’: “everyone is someone’s difficult person”, and potentially matching computing behaviour to them:

1. tank (get it done),
2. yes person (get along),
3. whiner (get it right),
4. think they know it all (get appreciated)

He finished with a couple of pointers:

• We should be designing flexible (rather than static) models that we can tune to people’s personalities
• Rather than designing responsive sites, why aren’t we designing responsive interactions?

Design for the unknown: healthcare and ambiguity
Maggie Breslin

Maggie Breslin comes to Interaction 12 seeking validation: as a designer-researcher in the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation, her time is typically spent designing paper-based tools to enable better conversations between doctors and patients, and she asks how this work weighs up against the polished and weighty cross-platform products more commonly discussed at such conferences.

Maggie described many the insights generated and challenges faced during her work. In one example she talked about the reluctance of the design team (as well as doctors and nurses) to discuss ‘risk of death’ when designing a tool to help cardiac patients make an informed choice about adhering to prescribed treatment after discharge. Ultimately by talking to patients they discovered that, for someone recovering from a heart attack, risk of death is no longer a shocking concept.

The audience questioned whether devices such as diabetes decision cards, which help patients choose a treatment based on possible side effects, are in fact shifting the whole ethical position of doctor-patient relationships away from ‘do this’ instructions towards a more honest (and potentially scary) presentation of the true uncertainty of medical care. Maggie’s view was that it’s really about getting patients involved in the right decisions – for example it would be pointless to wake a patient during surgery to ask what kind of sutures he’d prefer. A key metric of the Mayo Clinic’s work is whether it has enabled patients to ask questions about difficult subjects, and they have discovered that people will often do a lot more than you might expect if you can create the openings for them.
As a designer working in the same area of enabling better conversations in caring contexts, it was reassuring to hear my own uncertainties about the position of this practice within the field of interaction design echoed by another – and to find in Maggie’s work such a strong argument for its further representation at future events.

The future of Design, Healthcare and Mobile Technology
Virgil Wong and Akshay Kapur

From their opposing backgrounds in business technology and art and design, Akshay and Virgil came together out of a shared desire to challenge the conservative and siloed nature of the healthcare industry. Seeking to improve on standardised models of personal medical records, which are typically paper-based and exist in multiple asynchronous versions, they partnered with Microsoft to create an online medication list that could be maintained by multiple physicians.

However, while an improvement on previous provision, this new dataform still lacked the crucial ability to ‘be’ with a patient – to move in the same fluid way as that person’s understanding of their own health and wellbeing. With individuals now able to have their genes sequenced for a mere $1k, healthcare services are becoming personalised rather than generalised.

The result was the Medical Avatar, a visualisation of an individual’s medical records applied to a 3D body model, personalised with a photo taken by them and capable of being peeled apart to reveal the myriad anatomical structures beneath, and ‘aged’ in order to introduce people to their (potentially worrisome) future selves.

By bridging the gulf between art and medicine in this and other projects (such as the creation of a fictitious future hospital exploring sci-fi scenarios of selected children and male pregnancies) Akshay and Virgil stated their belief that design has a major contribution to make in a healthcare industry crying out for creative input, but increasingly stymied by red tape and bureaucracy.

Joan Vermette and Christina Persson
Process: A Love Hate Relationship

Love process? Hate process? While these two speakers each fell on one side of that divide (Joan Vermette loves ‘em, Christina hates ‘em), this talk turned out not to be so much about this as understanding the design muscles that you and your organisation use (and overuse) and how to develop them all.

They recommended a model known as think-draw-make to gauge both your own output and your company’s. They describe the three steps as the following:

• Think: playing around with ideas. If you need to see the whole before to understand the details, you’re strong in Think
• Draw: making abstract visualisations to play with concepts. If you find yourself saying “I’ll know it when I see it”, you’re strong in Draw.
• Make: implementing, getting it out the door. If you have a hard time nailing down dates, you’re strong in Make.

The technique also uses the inspired analogy of design muscles and through it that you or your company may be overdeveloped in one to the detriment of others. They also stressed both knowing your leanings as well as your company’s to understand both where change needs to happen and also how to implement it.

“Enter into the enemy’s strengths in order to defeat them from within” —Walter Benjaminp

Celsius vs Farenheit: EU vs US interactions
Katey Deeney and Søren Muus

Talk about gauging the temperature of a culture. In the second of today’s battleoff-style talks — and an apt one given that this conference was being held in the EU rather than the US for the first time — Katey Deeny and Søren Muus talked about US and EU cultures respectively (and were represented in the audience by a similarly equal split). And it can all be summed up in temperatures systems, it would seem ….
The EU uses the logical and abstract (as well as recent) Celsius system, while the US uses the more confusing but traditional Farenheit scale.
After ripping through a series of differences, summed up the differences between the cultures as such:

• The EU commonalities are: that they are tribal nations, multi-language, with 9,000yrs of co-exisence, homogenous, common history, few words
• The US is a nation of states, one primary language, around 250 yrs of existence, multicultural.

The intriguing differences come here in the unified experiences:

• EU: shared cultural references (history), external contemporary references
• US: internal contemporary references (entertainers etc), language

One obvious manifestation of the differences is in appliances: those in the EU use symbols whereas those in the US are largely text-based (though the latter is starting to change).

What can we learn from this? They suggest that the audiences’ type of knowledge can correlate to the countries (amongst other situations) and have interaction implications:
If audiences have a narrow, deep knowledge (e.g. in the EU): there is most always a first time and a next time, people are willing to learn, lengthy explanations are not necessary
If however they have broad, shallow knowledge (e.g. in US): provide clear labeling, instruction, every time may be the first time (a key consideration in ecommerce or infomation sites); use contemporary references.

The Aesthetics of Motion
Dave Malouf

Who could dislike a talk with live demos of charades, air drums and tap dancing (the former two performed by the speaker)? Dave Malouf carried on from his 2009 Interactions talk (and 2011 Johnny Holland article) on how designers can understand gesture?

What is gesture anyway? It’s a language that needs to be easy, with clear meaning (think signalling on airports), relevant to context (don’t put a touchscreen on a treadmill!), culturally appropriate (one hand gesture that means “wait” in Israel is offensive in Italy), and ergonomic (Minority Report interactions would give you ‘gorilla arm’).

While the iPhone has led to the age of ‘finger meets glass’, the more traditional arenas for gesture — music and dance — share an aesthetic for sound and motion. Fluidity is key in dance, and DJing and guitar playing require a mastery of slides and stops.

So, how do do this? He gave a series of tips:

• Know your reference material: he loves Designing Gestural Interfaces and Tapworthy
• Know your material. Have a touch device to understand it.
• Use animation for mockups. A good pointer he gave was to follow the animations with your finger to check they work
• Use micro-actions to keep the eyes busy
• Let people find secondary actions through play
• Design responsiveness — don’t leave it to the engineers!
• Think states and actors and look at notations

Tony Dunne : Crafting Design Speculations

Day one started and finished with “What If?”. But while for Luke Williams this meant disruption, for Tony Dunne this meant speculations. Namely, design speculations from both his own practice and that of the acclaimed RCA Design Interactions Course.

Design Speculations fit (provocatively?) in the space between problem solving and commentary/critique, where Dunne suggests they “open up the problem space into a methodological playground”. Based on the work of futurist Stuart Candy, they also focus on potential futures rather than probable ones.

Dunne also gave some points on fidelity, particularly for those experiences set in current time: for people to buy into the experience, there needs to be a level of unreality, be it through slightly over the top costumes (the Dunne and Raby Foragers, the work of Hiromi Ozaki), or strange future situations such as objects being treated like exotic animals (the ChambersJudd David Attenborough Project & Gesundheit) or people considering information like a drug (Ludwig Zeller).

“With speculative futures, it’s a mistake to make it too realistic as people believe it real. Better to have a level of unreality to let them into the space.”

While the work was familiar to anyone who has either visited the RCA DI course or the MoMA ‘Talk to Me’ exhibition, it was still an important counterpart to the call for ‘seamlessness’ we hear so often in the industry (and even at this conference).

One audience member did ask the obvious question: where is the role for such out there work in everyday interation design? His answer was that these students come from work and many return to the commercial field being employed by big corporations: it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts.

Dan Lockton (Brunel University) talking at London IA about his Design with Intent toolkit, a set of design patterns for influencing behavior, which can be used as a brainstorming tool for designers and other stakeholders.

Duration: 44 minutes

Dan Lockton
Design with Intent toolkit
London IA

[He's also doing a workshop shortly at Interactions12 in Dublin]

The studio is, above all things, a learning environment. It allows designers of all levels to work together, promoting constant knowledge sharing, critique, and collaboration. This increased teaching has allowed me some time to reflect on my own education, and what I want my students to learn. Art and Design school was an interesting experience, one that strongly shaped my view of life and work. It forces you to think deeply about your work, the way you work, the environment in which you work, and what it means to succeed. I’ve come to realize that there are three main components to design education that are incredibly important to my daily work as a designer.

1. The Journey

Design school is really a journey. You start as an inexperienced novice, and leave with four years of intensive practice in the foundations of design. Over that time you learn to use certain tools naturally, you unconsciously competent with your tools. The first courses in design school help you learn expression and exploration. Through focused study in art and design history, open ended creative exercises, and self-directed projects you learn how to answer questions by making things. During this period students make an absurd number of objects, be they photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, or anything else. Many design schools have adopted the practice based methods of Rowena Reed-Kostellow, who had her students make hundreds of models to explore the different aspects of 3D space. The second, complimentary, part of this early education is the idea of deconstruction. Deconstruction is where students take a formed object, or design solution, and take it apart to learn how it all works together. It also involves learning how to thoughtfully edit you work. Understanding what to leave out, how to remove it, and how that impacts the final product is an integral piece of the design practice. What students are really learning when they practice exploration, expressing, and deconstruction is how to tune their intuition. Intuition is a designers best friend, it’s what allows you to understand when you have a correct solution, when something is aesthetically pleasing, and how to put the pieces together to get there. Jon Kolko has done some great work to popularize the idea of abductive reasoning, and that is where all these early design school exercises should get you. Reed-Kostellow’s repetitive exploration methods help students internalize the forms they are building, thus giving them a strong intuition about when that type of form is “right.” Synthesizing various inputs and coming out with a new idea or object is the core of design practice, and all of design school is setup to help students internalize this process. One of the most important skills students learn from constantly making things is creative stamina. An art or design student is expected to be able to be creative on demand, and consistently. Students must be able to show up for a 3 – 6 hour studio session and create interesting and useful things that help them explore their topic. You quickly learn how to force creativity and inspiration, even when you’re tired, hung over, and have been doing this every day for weeks. As a practicing designer these are the core skills that I use every day. Exploration through making things, learning and synthesis, creating new knowledge form a variety of information, and using my intuition and history to understand when I’m on the right track. All of this comes together in the second big thing I learned from design school: The Studio.

2. The Studio

The environment in which design takes place has a huge effect on the output of the designers within it. Design schools consists of a number of environments – lectures, social activities, and more. However, the most important environment learned in school is the studio. The studio is a place to create, learn, share, critique, and collaborate. In a design school most practical work, either in groups or alone, takes place in the studio. A studio is a lot like a professional kitchen. There are a number of requirements to create a functional studio:

1. Tools and materials for making things must be readily available and setup in an organized way. A studio will quickly fail if people have to search for their tools and waste time that could be used making things. Students (or working designers) should be able to jump right in and get going with the minimum of setup.
2. A studio environment must be open enough to allow of serendipitous critique and collaboration, but also give people space to focus on their own work. This is a hard balance, both in schools and in professional design studios.
3. A successful studio will have designers of different levels working in the same space and encourage a natural form of mentoring. More senior practitioners, in schools this would be either professors or higher level students, can use the openness of the space to give feedback and help to more junior designers, as well as lead by example. The ongoing critique and the ability for junior designers to watch the more senior people work makes this an incredibly strong learning environment.

The studio is where students go to do their exercises, explore ideas, learn from and talk to other students, receive instruction from professors, and make their projects come to life. The creative stamina learned from hours of exercises is what allows them to enter the studio and create things until they get it right. The studio, and the rest of the design school experience, teaches designers to constantly create in order to understand the design problem at hand, and eventually come up with a solution.

3. Foundations

The final element of design school that I’m going to talk about is foundation. A great studio, and learning how to explore, deconstruct, and intuit solutions, is all fairly useless without the foundational elements that let students actually create things and understand why some solutions work and others don’t. Foundation gives us the basis for critique as well as creation. The shared language used to describe elements of a design solution makes it possible to discuss designs based on a common understanding and intent, while still leaving room for different perspectives and styles. These elements include things like time, colour, 2D and 3D space, line, feedback, and more. Design schools teach students how to use these elements and talk about them in a critical way. The other aspect of foundation are the hard skills designers need in order to explore and create designs. The most important of these is visual thinking and communication. Design is created and communicated in primarily visual media – sketches, drawings, models, videos, etc. Students learn how to sketch in a constructive and deconstructive way, refine those sketches into models, drawings, and diagrams, then create prototypes using sculptural or interactive materials. Learning how to think by sketching, for example, is an integral part of design education. It allows students to create outputs that clearly communicate their intent and can be discussed and critiqued using the share language of the foundations. Learning these skills is a combination of practice, instruction (i.e. life drawing class), and reflection. Once learned though, they form the basis of design communication and creativity, setting up the student for success in the studio and beyond.

In Practice

Design school teaches people to be comfortable with the unknown. Tight deadlines that require large amounts of creativity and output teach focus and discipline. The studio environment gives students a safe place for exploration, learning, and critique. Visual thinking and communication lays the foundation for taking ideas and making them real. These are what I’ve taken away form my time in design school, and hope to pass on to those that I teach and work with. A successful design business is a lot like a school. It should help the designers within it learn, grow, and create good work; it should support collaboration and serendipity; and most of all it should encourage designers to explore ideas, solve design problems, and teach others around them.

Interaction 12

If you didn’t attend design school, and are interested in getting a taste of what it’s like in a way that you can immediately bring back to your daily work, Matt will be giving the workshop ‘What You Missed When You Skipped Design School’ with Dave Malouf  at Interaction 12 in Dublin.

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Studio picture NC-CC by sandcastlematt
Moleskine picture NC-BY-CC by dmpop

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

Recently we had a chance to talk to Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and researcher. She is the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research. We talked with her about social research, myths, design research and several other interesting subjects.

Dianna Miller: I heard you speak a year or so after you joined Intel about the home studies your team conducted in China.  Can you talk about how Intel envisioned the contribution of social research in 1998 when you started there? How has it changed over time?

Genevieve Bell: The impulse to hire social scientists generally—and anthropologists in particular—arose in the 1990s at Intel as markets the company had traditionally served changed and grew beyond recognition. If you can remember back that far (it seems forever ago), it was a time when the PC was starting to move from office and work functions into the home. It wasn’t precisely clear what people would do with computers during this shift. Intel hired social scientists to help explore what might happen. In the vernacular of my office at the time, it was all about “finding new users and new usages” for technology.  We looked at emerging middle-class households in urban Asia and their complicated relationships to new information and communication technologies; we studied health-care providers, in homes and hospitals, and mapped their uses of digital devices and analog ones; we studied classrooms and televisions, teenagers and families with small kids. We spent a lot of time educating and engaging the engineers and other decision makers about what life was like beyond the walls of the company – it was exhilarating and exhausting.

These days I have a new research group at Intel – Interaction and Experience Research. Comprised of nearly one hundred researchers, running the gamut from ethnographers and interaction designers to computer scientists and physicists, my group is charged with reinventing how we experience computing. As Justin Rattner, my boss and Intel’s Chief Technology Officer likes to point out, we are “already late,” by which he means our relationships with computing are long due for an overhaul. We have a strongly interdisciplinary approach that shapes everything from framing questions to the projects we tackle and how we choose to share our thinking. Currently, we are exploring changing notions of storytelling and social participation; charting the shift in use of cameras, phones, and televisions; and hacking the latest screens, printers, and sensors to see what we can make with them, just to name some of our work.

DM: In your book, “Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing,” you and Paul Dourish discuss the distinction between the mythology that has shaped values and vision in ubiquitous computing, and the messiness of everyday experience. What are examples of these myths and messes, and why is it important for designers to understand both?

GB: Oh, such a good question. As an anthropologist, I also think about this as the difference between cultural ideal and cultural practice. In either case, there are many examples. Take security. We design systems to keep systems safe and people write their passwords on bits of paper stuck to their systems. So, is it that people don’t care about security or is that the security we are designing is securing the wrong things? Or, are they just securing them in the wrong ways? Clearly we know that people care about the security of their homes, their possessions, their digital selves, but they adopt a range of patterns for doing it that are incredibly messy, complicated, and contradictory. Not to mention that in other cultural traditions beyond the west, sometimes it is not as much about security as it is about courting good fortune, about diminishing the barriers to good fortune finding you. What does a system look like that courts good fortune or allows security to be about writing passwords on post-it notes?

DM: On the subject of messiness, designers are stepping up to challenges that address cultural, technological, and political complexity. We’re not only collaborating with other disciplines, but our work itself is becoming transdisciplinary. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of the designer’s contribution? What do we need to be aware of?

GB: I think our biggest challenges (and opportunities) are about creating the possibilities of collaboration. For me, that means we need to invest in making our work, our methods, and our insights intelligible to the broadest possible base. Being transdisciplinary means committing to work across disciplines and across cannons and methodologies. It means we have to be generous and genuine and always committed to moving the conversation forward. I suspect it also means that what we do will necessarily grow and evolve, which is great. We can learn from all our encounters and improve what we do. And, I think it also means we need to let go of the memories of every time it didn’t work well in the past. I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna, but I think we have to look forward with hope and optimism.

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring.

DM: What new tools and methods is your team exploring to study emergent behavior and relationships between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience?

GB: Most excitingly for me, we have been experimenting with processual and post-processual archaeology and returning to a material culture bent. We have been excavating cars of late, in the classic archaeological sense. It’s been fascinating to think about the flow and traces of objects that are in those cars, move through them, and stubbornly resist materializing there.

DM: Which areas of research do we still need to put more focus on?

GB: I think we have a great deal more work to do, which is good because I like research. We have spent a lot of time focusing on the obvious and the obviously sexy stuff – mobility, gaming, social networks, and of course the individual and youth. We have, as a consequence, neglected the other stuff of daily life – religion, spirituality, love, child-care, anyone over 40, who does the dishes, who puts out the recycling, community, the nation-state, changing ideas of citizenship.

DM: There are still development organizations that are hesitant to invest in design research partly because they perceive it as either too time-consuming or expensive. What advice do you give to experience design teams that are attempting to convince their organization of the value of social research and generative design methods?

GB: I think you need stubbornness and patience in equal parts. It takes time and a lot of repeated conversations. After all, this is about organizational change and that tends to come slowly.

Interaction 12

Genevieve Bell will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

The Surgeon General of the United States says that “youth violence is an ongoing, startlingly pervasive problem.” Despite the fact that “the majority of aggravated assaults, robberies and rapes are never reported to the police,” one out of every 3,000 youths aged 10-17 are arrested for serious violent crimes – homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault – each year. While the predictive risk factors include family aspects we might all expect – low socioeconomic status, poor parent-child relations, broken home – many of the individual risk factors apply only to males and the most predictive risk factor of all in this troubling laundry list is simply “being male”.

By now you are surely wondering, “Um, isn’t this supposed to be an interaction design publication?” Yes, of course, it is. But the domain relevant to digital products that is most important, least understood, and represents the greatest opportunity for remarkable growth and advance is the degree to which we understand our users.

To be sure, a focus on users is nothing new. In computing devices it dates back at least to the long-standing Scandinavian tradition of cooperative design, later applied to IT artifacts around 1970. There is an entire subculture in the digital design community built around the idea of user-centered design. Memes about narrative, storytelling and ethnography punctuated the 2000s, and we generally believe we have refined, evolved framing and methods for considering users as part of the product development equation.

Hardly.

Divining Human Understanding

Going back to my opening about the epidemic of violent crime in young males, how well do we understand that problem? It is certainly recognized as a problem, by the highest governmental authorities. A litany of risk factors and predictive models exist, so people more likely to participate in violent crime can be identified by parents and teachers and kept track of as they wind their way through adolescence and young adulthood. Yet, as a society, we dismiss such perpetrators as criminals, animals, evil and inherently bad. We do this despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that their gender – a coin toss at birth – and socio-familial situation are the drivers behind their destructive behaviour.

Let’s break those two things down: why gender? To better understand that we need to learn a little about endocrinology, the field of medicine focused on our hormones. Androgen is the term for hormones that stimulate and control the development and maintenance male characteristics, including those in the Surgeon General’s laundry list of risk factors. There is a long history of castration in human cultures all around the world, as even before the science behind it was understood, people learned that men without testes were far less aggressive. Enlightenment era heroThomas Jefferson even created legislation in the state of Virginia after the Declaration of Independence was signed making castration the punishment of choice for a handful of crimes. The amount of testosterone production varies widely from one man to another, and indeed those who are – from the standpoint of modern civilization – cursed with very high levels of testosterone are far more likely to prove unable to stay within the behavioural bounds dictated by our society.

Another critical discipline for understanding behavioural differences by gender is neuroscience. Like most of the United States sick care system, the preponderance of investment in and attention to neuroscience has to do with the work of neurologists, curing brain tumors and other diseases. But it is also the field that best understands from a mechanical perspective how and why we function. Male aggression is actually one of the more complex dynamics within the brain, involving all of the amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, septal nuclei and periaqueductal grey of the midbrain. While the complexity of each of these disparate brain factors’ impact on male aggressiveness is beyond the bounds of this article, needless to say there is a startling amount of science and real understanding into mapping observable brain structure, condition and operation to many critical human behaviours, male aggressiveness that leads to violent crime being only one.

Now, let’s consider the other main group of predictive risk factors for violent behaviour, socio-familial background. As just one example, MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan have done wonderful work on the psychology of why people can’t escape poverty. In a nutshell, they illustrated that since buying small, everyday comforts is far more costly to the poor than to the wealthy – representing a substantially larger proportion of their net worth – that poverty limits free will and in the process has a resultant drain on one’s overall willpower. Needing to make tough decisions and sacrifices much more frequently than their more affluent neighbours makes it far more likely that the poor will have willpower issues in other contexts. Such as, say, testosterone-fueled moments that spiral out of control. These are economists, studying issues of psychology and sociology, deconstructing behaviour in remarkably insightful ways.

While socio-economic status is only one vector of the socio-familial milieu, the example highlights the ample research and science which illuminates the conditions that finally culminate in serious violent crime. And it underscores an important point: while some criminals might be “bad” in some objective way, many of these criminals are simply very unfortunate people who are victims similar to those they’ve victimized: they happened to be born male, they happened to have high testosterone levels, they happened to be born into poor or broken families. Armed with this knowledge, surely we as a society can do better?

Truly Understanding Users

I’ve chosen the issue of serious violent crime in young males as my example because it nicely applies to all of the five sciences that should be essential learning to anyone serious about understanding users: endocrinology, neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology. In each of these, crucial pieces of the human behavioural puzzle are provided:

• Endocrinology: the study of the endocrine system which secretes hormones into the bloodstream and regulates the body;
• Neuroscience: the study of the central nervous system which uses neurons to coordinate our actions;
• Economics: the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services – crucial to the understanding of individuals in a fiercely capitalistic, free market society;
• Psychology: the study of people and groups in order to best understand them;
• Sociology, the study of a society in order to best understand that society and its inhabitants.

Needless to say that the role of some of the more social sciences on this list – particularly psychology – are already seen as having a role in successful user studies and understanding. However, the preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep, multi-disciplinary scientific way. The future of design will belong to those who are able to untangle what people do and why, even those who can predict and understand – using a scientific basis – what people are likely to respond to and why and how, as opposed to simply making gut decisions.

As it is a fairly straightforward matter to untangle the objective dynamics behind serious violent crimes in young males using these approaches, imagine the impact you can have on your product, service, company, market or even society if you have the vision, rigor and discipline to start truly unpeeling that most complex and layered of onions, ourselves.

Interaction 12

Dirk Knemeyer will be one of the presenters at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

If IBM and Apple had a baby today, it would be called UX.

Not very likely, perhaps, but you see the point: UX has a mixed heritage, drawing from engineering traditions as well as big-D design traditions. I would like to characterize briefly what I have come across as typical values in professional UX practices. Then talk about what I see as “designerly” ways of working within interaction design. And then finally put the two together in order to highlight some opportunities for designerly ways of working in UX.

A short history

For UX, the engineering tradition largely means the academic field of human-computer interaction (HCI). This field was founded in a time when computers were used only for instrumental purposes in work settings, and thus the focus was squarely placed on usability, efficiency, reducing user errors and fitting the users’ tasks. In the 1990s, the practical application of HCI knowledge to product development was even called Usability Engineering.

And then computers moved out of the offices and into our pockets, cars, headphones, living rooms and all other aspects of everyday (Western) life. Internet became part of the infrastructure, and huge digital consumer-product markets emerged in the entertainment and leisure sectors. Most computers today are used for pleasure rather than for business; the use is discretionary rather than mandatory; the designers’ focus is on experience and sociality rather than on usability and computer-supported collaborative work.

During that move, HCI crossed paths with Design (via consumer products) and Media (via social and communicative uses). Lots of new methods and concepts were introduced, and today there seems to be consensus that the professional discipline of shaping digital things with a focus on users should be called User Experience, or UX.

Blending engineering and big-D design traditions

Apologies for the brevity of this historical sketch; what I want to illustrate is simply that UX is at a point where engineering and big-D design traditions start to blend. Or, rather, they should be starting to blend, given the tasks that UX professionals are facing. I am not sure they are, though.

I have spent quite a few years as a university-based designer working together with UX professionals, mainly in the ICT and telecom industries. What I tend to find is that professional UX practice is quite heavily influenced by the engineering/HCI tradition. This shows in observations like the following.

• There is a strong preference for fieldwork: To study intended users in their settings to learn about them and perhaps find problems and opportunities for improvement in their current practices;
• Work should generally proceed in stages: First observing and analyzing (for instance through fieldwork), then deciding what to design, and then designing and testing;
• The results of observation, analysis, design and testing are documented and communicated in reports;
• In general, UX is seen as a profession that concentrates on users and their needs and capabilities. It works together with engineering, marketing and design/communication as needed.

The designerly ways of working

Given this state of affairs as I see it, I should now move on to addressing designerly ways of working in UX (as promised in the title). But what does that really mean? What are designerly ways of working?

My sense is that there is a design tradition of working (“big-D design”) that is strongly related to design-school training and the creative industries, and that generally involves four characteristics:

• Design is about exploring possible futures, examining what things might be like, how people could work and play in new ways. It may be based on fieldwork (studying users and settings), or just as well on creating a structure of participation, where there are no “users” to study but rather participants contributing their expertise in a particular field of practice through a co-design process. Exploration in design may also be guided by technical possibilities, i.e., exploring the potentials of the design material at hand;
• Design addresses multiple aspects of quality in parallel. From a design point of view, the instrumental and the technical are inseparable from the aesthetic, symbolic and ethical realms. When designing a way-finding mobile app, for instance, its usability cannot be assessed without considering its performative qualities. In plain English: If you look silly when using it, you will not use it in public, no matter how well the interface performs in the usability lab;
• The understanding of the “problem” grows in parallel with attempts to create “solutions”. Design often starts with partial and unfounded solution ideas, and lots of them. Those ideas in turn stimulate a growing understanding of what the “problem” entails, and new solution ideas emerge. The resulting trail is mapping out a space of possibilities, a design space;
• Design entails thinking through sketching and other forms of tangible representation. Design happens in the moment of drawing a sketch, or building a model, or enacting a future use scenario. It is not about thinking first, and then capturing the thought. The body and the mind, the pencil and the eye, think together. This is one reason why it makes sense to talk about design as experimentation.

Mapping engineering and designerly ways

Even though the design tradition grew up in a more artsy neighborhood, my experience is that blending it with engineering/HCI style UX practice is a worthwhile effort. In order to get a sense of what this blending might entail, let’s start by putting the engineering and the designerly characteristics together in a grid.

Mapping engineering and designerly ways

We can see that there are a few areas of potential friction between engineering and designerly ways of working – for instance, the “fieldwork” preference of studying representative users in typical settings seems to be at odds with the designerly practice of “exploring possible futures.”

Introducing designerly thinking in UX practice

To address the frictions in introducing designerly thinking to HCI-tradition UX practice, I have tried quite a few strategies. Five of them in particular seem to yield good results in various professional UX settings. I have placed them in the grid to indicate which specific friction they address, and next I will discuss each of them in turn.

Diverging in upstream phases: This is probably the most important part of instilling designerly thinking in UX practice. What it means is simply to frame the start of a new design process for yourself or your team as a learning adventure, where the aim is to investigate as many possible directions, ideas, questions and problem framings as you can – while you can still do it at a very low cost. Sketching ten product ideas in pencil thumbnails takes ten minutes and provides you with a whole catalog of different ways to envision the project-to-follow and another catalog of different ways to frame the “problem.” If you spend an hour, you will have fifty ideas or ten very different ideas. This, in turn, might guide you in planning fieldwork and help you steer away from the most obvious incremental-fixes-for-observable-problems framings – assuming that your incentives include innovation, which is quite common these days.
Fieldwork can be geared towards divergence by means of seeking unusual settings, extreme personas and future envisionments, which in turn suggests paths towards other parts of the design spaces. All the while seeking to maximize learning through divergence before having to commit to one direction. Examining ten different design directions rapidly to identify the most promising one provides much better validation than locking onto one without examining the alternatives, no matter how much you iterate on the chosen direction further down the road.

A broad inventory of concepts, trends and ideas that was developed quickly as the foundation for designing a tribal-navigation video service. It provided the basis for five distinct design concepts that were elaborated and then synthesized together with the client into one project direction.

Related to fieldwork, there is the notion of turning users from objects of study to participants in the explorative adventure. There is no room here for details on participatory design or its contemporary cousin, the living lab, but there are proven ways to team up with users in exploring parts of the design space far away from the users’ current practices (which is all you learn about if you study users using conventional fieldwork techniques). Again, early phases may provide room for divergent approaches – which adds a comfortable sense of faith in the chosen direction once it is time to start converging.

Staff members at an Intensive Care Unit during a participatory design process aimed at supporting informal on-the-job learning and knowledge sharing. (image credits: Erling Björgvinsson and Per-Anders Hillgren, by permission)

The big picture is also related to divergence. What it means is broadly that even when you dive into the details of a particular design direction, try to keep a third eye on the overall direction of the work and on what your detailed decisions mean for the product and the use situation as a whole. This can be difficult at times, which is why it is generally a good idea to have systematic big-picture reviews when the team is required to step back and rehearse the overall situation. Good questions might be, for example, “What does that really mean for the user? How does it fit with her everyday media streams and practices? What would she make of it in relation to these other ten things that she likes to do? Are there other groups of stakeholders who might come across this design and what would they make of it?” Asking this kind of questions might sound strange; after all, we have decisions on how to proceed overall, surely we don’t need to spend valuable time revisiting them? I would argue that you do need to, simply because detailing the design changes your understanding of the overall situation, and it is much better to spot big-picture problems at the stage of design detailing than to learn about them the hard way after product launch.

Another aspect of the big picture has to do with organizational silos. The big picture spans the different functions of the organization in a way that seems disconcerting to some UX teams specializing in studying users in their current settings and wireframing interaction flows: If we were to look at the overall situation, we would be overstepping our mandate to interfere with business development, engineering, visual design, et cetera. This is true, and that is why I note that multidisciplinary (“crossfunctional”) teams have much better chances of keeping the big picture alive throughout the work. Moreover, my strong sense is that multidisciplinary teams actually save money in terms of reducing interdepartmental confusion, communication breakdowns and redundant duplicate work – as opposed to costing money by having people spending hours in activities that are not 100% devoted to their respective fields of expertise.

The final item – using expressive forms that are close to use – follows mainly from a mode of working that promotes sketching. Basically, if interaction sketches such as storyboards, video scenarios and function mockups are the best ways of exploring ideas of future use and learning about the design space, it seems reasonable to use them also for communicating those insights. After all, what UX does is essentially validated visions of future use. Communicating UX results in use-oriented representations (i.e., interaction sketches) not only increases precision by speaking the native language of the topic addressed, but it also saves money by not having to convert use-oriented representations to standard report forms.

The actual design documents (“specifications”) from the concept development phase of a collaborative platform for product information.

To conclude

I need to make the obvious apology that addressing this big a topic in a short piece of text leaves generalization holes large enough to drive a full-scale pervasive game prototype through. I have neither been able to include concrete examples or specific stories, nor to substantiate my claims with academic evidence or sustained reasoning. Still, I hope you find some food for thought on why you work the way you do, and how you could play around with working in other ways.

Interaction 12

Jonas Löwgren will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.