His blog post shows him map out various interactions, and their resulting spaces:

House Study

A new type of space from the diagram: Maker Space

I don’t necessarily agree with all of his points (he believes that web apps are primarily linear), and also agree with one commenter pointing out that he didn’t have to use a webapp as the concepts of flows in architecture have been around for decades. Still, it’s an interesting concept that puts the A back into IA.

I also noticed one of his points in his rationale.

the web is not a graphic design medium but a product design one.

The correlation between web and product seems to be becoming noticed as of late (for example Jeff Croft’s ‘In 2012, Let’s Stop Talking Web Design and Start Talking Product Design’ or Smashing Magazine’s ‘What Successful Products Teach Us About Product Design’).

Above all, it’s a reminder at how we can not only draw inspiration from other disciplines, but also feed it back the other way.

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

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

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

Just don’t call it an ‘urban OS’:

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

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

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City of Chicago image NC-BY-CC by accentstage

When I tell people that I have a background in architecture, I usually follow that statement with “as-in-designing-buildings” because people often assume that means that I have a computer science degree and was a software architect. But no, by “architecture” I am referring to the years I spent hunched over a drawing board and building models out of balsa wood and cardboard.

UX and Architecture

I am sure that the connection between User Experience Design and Architecture is not an unfamiliar one; even here on Johnny Holland there is a post “Interaction Design and Architecture: A Video Primer” that highlights eight videos in which people talk about the connections between the two fields. But, as someone who studied architecture and worked as an intern architect, when people ask me what the connection is between them, my response is two-fold. Firstly, an important part of architecture is the design of the navigation, orientation and way-finding through and within spaces. User experience design also encompasses the design of those aspects; the difference is in in the materials used to embody those designs. To quote Christina Wodtke:

Much like our real world namesakes, we design spaces for human beings to live work and play in. The big difference is the materials we work with…

Secondly, as an architect, you represent the voice of the client throughout the design and build process. You are constantly mediating between the various engineers and tradespeople, while representing the needs of the client. Similarly, as a user experience designer you are representing the needs of the end-user throughout the product design and development process while mediating between the various stakeholders such as project management, development and quality assurance.

What Did I Do

I didn’t know what I wanted to do when it came time to apply for university. But, then I went for a visit to Carleton University that happened to coincide with “Kosmic”, an annual party put on by Carleton’s School of Architecture. The school had been completely transformed, through the magic of enormous corrugated cardboard structures and a lot of creative lighting, into a “Through the Looking Glass” themed-world. My mind was made up, that school was where I wanted to go.

After graduating from Carleton, I found a job in a very small Ottawa firm. As a part of the internship to become a licensed architect in Canada there is a requirement to log hours across the full-range of what an architect does, such as: doing design sketches and producing working drawings; running client meetings; conducting on-site inspections with the contractors and sub-trades; as well as producing any change requests or addenda as changes are made throughout the construction phase. Since our office was small, the two architects were able to let me get experience in almost every area that I needed to get experience in; until there was a recession.

How I moved into UX

Late in 1996, things really slowed down in the office, to the point where the architects had to let me go. I was making ends meet doing contract work, when I heard about a new Master of Architecture program that was going to be starting in the fall of 1997 at Carleton University. This new program was going to explore the relationship between “traditional” architecture and the design of “new” virtual spaces and interfaces. Unfortunately, this program no longer exists, but in 1997 I was accepted into the inaugural year of the Master of Architecture, Design and Technology program. After completing my first year, I went back to working full-time at the architecture firm for the summer. But, after receiving a phone call from a classmate about a summer position as a UI Designer at Corel, I went for an interview and was offered a contract for the summer. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I went and spoke to the two architects – they practically packed up my desk for me, right then and there. They told me that I had been working for them for over three years and had a clear understanding of what it was going to be like to “be” an architect, but I had no idea what it would be like to “be” a UI Designer, so they convinced me to take the contract. When the summer ended, I stayed on part-time at Corel through the fall and winter while I finished my thesis and then started full-time after graduation.

I stayed at Corel for eleven years.

What I Bring to UX From It

There is so much about what I learned from architecture that can be applied to User Experience Design, but here are a few of them:

1. Ideas aren’t precious.
   At Carleton, at various points during our projects we would hang-up our work for public display and present our ideas for critique from our peers, professors and visiting critics. Early sketches and quick massing models were presented and discussed, as were our final, laboriously rendered, drawings and meticulously crafted models. From all the presentation and discussion of my own projects, and those of everyone around me, I came to realize that ideas aren’t precious. Ideas are there to be discussed, debated and critiqued; but in order for that to happen, the ideas must be made concrete. It is through this transformation from idea to object where people display their design skills, by showing their ability to articulate their ideas through the material of their craft, be it a sketch or a model or a mock-up or code. It’s that concrete manifestation of the idea that can then be communicated to others and iterated upon, in order for it to improve and not be something that is coveted as a precious design artifact.
2. S**t happens. or Nothing ever gets built as planned.
   In school, as we worked back and forth (from sketch to model, then back to drawing, then back to model again) the models and drawings never matched each other, and we were criticized if they did. The goal of this translation back and forth was to have one manifestation of the idea inform the other, and to continually improve as you went from one medium to another. Once I started working in an architecture firm I quickly realized that the same held true for “real” buildings, nothing ever gets built as planned. These changes need to happen for a myriad of reasons: the requirements change; steel structure of the existing building isn’t exactly where the as-built drawing said it was going to be; and on, and on, and on. But it’s just a regular part of the process of translating a working drawing of a building into its built form. The same holds true for User Experience Design. Nothing will ever get built as planned. Changes need to happen for a myriad of reasons as the implementation is underway, but it’s just a normal part of the process for translating interaction designs and visual designs into products.
3. Listen to others, especially those that know better than you do.
   In my last year of my undergrad I had a professor, who told us, time and time again to listen to the tradespeople, because they all knew more than we did. For example, a drywaller with twenty-five years experience, probably has some pretty good suggestions on how to improve a bulkhead detail, they may have suggestions as to how to better anchor it to the ceiling, or how to support it in a way that would use less material and would therefore reduce its weight and cost. The tradespeople had experience and knowledge to be learned from, if we were willing to listen.  Similarly, as user experience designers we get to work with a wide range of people: clients, project managers, developers, quality assurance specialists, just to name a few. Each of them have their own area of expertise, or trade, and we, as designers, can learn from their experience and knowledge.
4. Seeing the Big Picture and the Little Details.
   In the architecture firm I worked in, by the time we were creating the design details in the working drawings for a building, we each had a clear image of the building in our minds. So, for example, if the siding contractor told us that the siding needs to be out 2” further than what was shown in the wall section detail, we would have been able to quickly consider the implications of this in all dimensions at both a macro (how will this affect the wall detail at the top, at the bottom, and where it joins the adjacent walls) and the micro (how will this affect the details at the window, door and louvre openings in the wall). Not to say that architects have a monopoly on this type of spatial thinking, but similar to industrial designers, architects can quickly understand the implication of one change across a variety of dimensions. As a user experience designer, the mental gymnastics that were previously required to mentally flip from plan to section to elevation at both a macro and a micro level are now used to visualize the relationship between the elements in a product. This helps me to understand the implications of a change to one element and visualize how it cascades through the inter-related pieces in the design.
5. Know thy client.
   At the early stages in the design process, the architects would go through a requirements gathering phase. For example, if it was a residential project, the architects would go and spend time with the client in their house. They would observe how existing spaces in the house were used and what worked and didn’t work for the client. Some of these observations came directly from what the client told them, and others were uncovered by being an objective viewer and seeing first-hand how the spaces were being inhabited. Only later, as a user experience designer, did I understand that what they were doing was a form of contextual inquiry, to help them gain insight into the living patterns of the client so they could design a space for them which would better fit their needs and living patterns.

What’s the Difference?

Aside from all the similarities in processes from requirements gathering to design iteration, to mediation and negotiation during the construction phase, the one obvious difference between architecture and user experience design is the lifespan of the resulting product. Compared to most buildings designed by an architect, the majority of products created by user experience designers are relatively ephemeral. In some ways, this is a good thing as rapid, iterative releases allows us to continually improve and modify our products in response to changing requirements and customer needs. There is no easy way to do A/B testing for the design of a detail in a building. But, as an architect, the implicit permanence of designing a building carries with it a sense of responsibility. Once that design takes its place within the built environment, its life span is typically much longer than the products we create as user experience designers. I can’t help but wonder if we would have better designed products if some of that responsibility and sense of permanence of architecture found its way into what we do as user experience designers.

As an architect, the implicit permanence of designing a building carries with it a sense of responsibility… I can’t help but wonder if we would have better designed products if some of that responsibility and sense of permanence of architecture found its way into what we do as user experience designers.

What I’ve Found About Moving Into UX

To do well in either architecture or user experience design, the ability to communicate well is key, and the most important part of communicating is listening.

As designers, we need to listen to our clients and their customers to understand their needs and requirements. We need to communicate our designs to both our clients and our development teams in a way that they will understand. Our ideas need to be translated into designs and made concrete, through user scenarios, workflow diagrams, mock-ups or wireframes so that they can be discussed, understood, tested and improved upon. Communication becomes even more important once those designs start being built. As I already stated, nothing ever gets built as planned. Therefore, communication is key in working with the development team to evolve and refine the design as it gets built, and to manage the expectations of the client throughout the development process as those changes are occurring. And, a lot of that communicating is listening.

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Picture from lightmediumbold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cantilevered chair by Marcel Breuer

What’s the ‘IxD Bauhaus’ about?

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

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

Concepts for the Windows Media Player by frog

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

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

Skeumorphic UI

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

The Windows Phone 'Metro' Design Language

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

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

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

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

Visual motion in the Barcelona Pavillion

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

Flipboard for iPad, The Puma Phone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Tati's Playtime

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

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

Conclusion: How much of less is more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We always have these thought provoking articles. And other sites always have top 10 UX books… so I thought I’d introduce some lighter material: 10 non-UX books you should read

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be – Paul Arden

Get the book: Amazon

Without a single doubt I can say that this is for me the best book around when it comes to attitude-changing books. In ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’ Paul Arden tells a simple, yet powerful story about the importance of doing what you believe in. It explains his attitude and beliefs when it comes to wanting to be the best in what you do. Like the back cover says, it’s “a pocket ‘bible’ for the talented and timid to make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible.”

For me the best quotes in the book (I have tried them and they worked) are:

• “Do not seek praise. Seek critisism.” – because when you seek critisism you are able to improve;
• “It’s all my fault” – only by not pointing to others, but by making mistakes your own are you able to solve problems;
• “Do not covet your ideas” – share your ideas and more will come back to you.

Yotsuba&! – Kiyohiko Azuma

Get the book: Amazon

Each time an intern of mine leaves the company I give him or her a copy of Yotsuba&! Why? Because the stories in the book are a reminder that we are not the user…

Yotsuba&! is a manga series from Japan about a little girl with green hair called Yotsuba. As a reader you follow her around while she discovers the world. You see her go to a festival for the first time, see what she thinks of a washer and many other things. Her innocence and direct response to these things are for me a great reminder that we as designers are not the user and must always design for both the experienced and first time users. And besides: the stories are fun to read.

By now there are a total of 8 manga books published with the stories. They are available in English and are definitely worth your time.

Blink – Malcolm Gladwell

Get the book: Amazon

People make decisions all the time, but what we don’t know is that many of them are made by our subconscious. In a split second it’s possible for us to make great decisions, while our conscious decisions that follow afterwards can be wrong. In this book Gladwell takes us through a series of interesting stories while making slowly making his point about these subconscious decisions. One of the best examples he gives: a museum buys an extremely expensive mummy after months of deep analysis. But the first second an expert sees it he gets the feeling that it is a fake. After a long period they find out that it is in fact a fake mummy.

The book builds up to a theory that Gladwell calls thin-slicing. According to the author it is all about reducing the amount of information so that an easy decision can be  made. By picking out the slice that is relevant to you (with your specific expertise) it is possible to make decisions in a blink.

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

Get the book: Amazon

Invisible Cities is a book that is experienced, rather than read. Not in an expansive, descriptive way – the novel is a mere 166 pages – rather, as if Mozart had been a writer. Taking place as a series of conversations between the explorer Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Kahn, the book has the feeling of the state of mind between dreams and reality – evocing deeper meanings without ever being too clever about it  (though apparently the structure of the novel is very clever indeed, employing such techniques as the Fibonacci sequence and sine waves). We’re never entirely sure if the cities that are talked about – the titular Invisible Cities, Cities and the Dead, Hidden Cities – are ones that Polo believes he has visited, or fables for the grumpy emperor.

If I had to suggest a book that captured what magic was, it’d be this one.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat – Oliver Sacks

Get the book: Amazon

Just as truth can be stranger than fiction, the workings of the human mind can be more engrossing than any novel. ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat‘  brings together case studies (but think observations rather than papers) from neurologist Oliver Sacks‘ patients into an engaging insight into the effects of maladies of the mind – the title comes from a patient with visual agnosia (unable to recognise faces, he once mistook his wife’s head for a hat), while other interesting cases include synaesthesia and priopreception.

While Sacks has written many other interesting books that give the layman access into psychology, this remains my favourite because of its range of studies (his later books tend to focus on one subject, such as music).

Enchantment – Guy Kawasaki

Get the book: Amazon

How come that companies like Apple are able to create such enchanting products while others fail? How can one person with the same message get agreement from a crowd while another doesn’t even get their attention? In this book Guy Kawasaki explains to us the power of enchantment, which is “the art of changing hearts, minds, and actions.”

Through many different examples Kawasaki shows us what it takes to become an enchanting person. He gives tips about the clothes you must wear depending on the people you interact with. The stuff you say and moments you can swear and get away with it. And he jumps into the use of social media, where presentations, Twitter and e-mail are great push technologies and Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn are pull technologies to pull the crowd in.

A very fun book to read that will not make you enchanting in an instant, but it will definitely put you on the right track.

Fun fact: did you know it took 260 designers to come up with the book cover? Check the story behind Enchantment’s cover.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School – Matthew Frederick

Get the book: Amazon

We know like nobody else that we can learn much from other fields, among which archicture must be one of the most inspirational. So can you imagine what a wealth of knowledge is packed in this tiny book? Matthew Frederick wrote down no less than 101 learnings that he wants to share with us. He presents each thought with a short description and one image, making it very easy to scan and function like a little book filled with zen.

In the book he jumps from one level to the other, describing things about drawing techniques, ways of thinking, presenting, and of course how to create better architecture. And a lot of the ideas in this book are very usable for any designers. It absolutely inspired me the first, second and third time I read this book. Some of his learnings:

• An effective oral presentation of a studio project begins with the general and proceeds toward the specific;
• A static composition appears to be at rest;
• A dynamic composition encourages the eyes to explore;
• An architect knows something about everything. An engineers knows everything about one thing;
• Properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like one is losing control of the design process.

The disciplines of interaction design and architecture share a number of common traits—such as a focus on solving problems for people and encouraging people to interact with products and environments in new and exciting ways—and each discipline can learn much from the other.

These eight videos highlight the work of people who see and celebrate the connections between interaction design and architecture.

The SENSEable City

Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, presented this talk at Lift Conference 2009.
Original video

Stewart Brand on the Long Now

Stewart Brand, who is working with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year timepiece called the Clock of the Long Now, presented this TED talk in 2004.

New Soft City

Dan Hill, a senior consultant at Arup in Sydney, presented this keynote at Interaction ’10. Hill’s presentation was too beautifully described to paraphrase it.

Muti-sensory interaction design now merges with architecture, planning and an urbanism informed by a gentle ambient drizzle of everyday data – and so a new soft city is being created, alive once again to the touch of its citizens.

Changing Things: The Internet of Things is not what you think it is!

Usman Haque, director Haque Design + Research Ltd, founder of Pachube.com and CEO of Connected Environments Ltd., presented this talk at Lift Conference 2009.

The City as an Interaction Platform

In this panel discussion from PICNIC ’09, Ben Cerveny, Greg Skibiski, Adam Greenfield, Beth Coleman and Atau Tanaka discuss how the technology of today and the near future will transform the experience of living in cities.

The Long Here, the Big Now, and Other Tales of the Networked City

Adam Greenfield, head of design direction for Nokia and author of Everyware, presented this talk at PICNIC ’08.

Future urban life will thrive on new modes of perception and experience, based on real-time data and feedback. What will the networked city feel like to its users? How will it transform our sense of the metropolitan?
-Adam Greenfield

Cameron Sinclair on open-source architecture

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. He unveils his TED Prize wish for a network to improve global living standards through collaborative design.

Architecture that repairs itself?

In this 2009 TEDGlobal, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials; instead, she proposes a not-quite-alive material that repairs itself.

For more videos on UX, don’t forget to check out Johnny TV

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Header image taken from Dan Hill talk

Primal Source is an interactive performance/installation which has been created for an art festival in California. They used a large-scale outdoor waterscreen/mist projection system to project a stunning light-show onto the mist. The installation responds to sound emanating from the crowd, thereby letting the crowd create their own performace. That night 200.000 people brought it to life, by walking past the installation.

Different modes where displayed depending on how active the crowd was and some modes even created ‘creatures’ whose shape, color and movement all reacted to the crowd. Here is a video. You might want to turn down your volume a little bit since screaming is the first thing people tried to make it come to life.

Next to the fact that the installation is just so incredibly overwhelming and stunning to watch, it reminded me of something else which al together gave me an interesting perspective on the whole concept of interactive art/architecture.

Just recently I came across a man on television who was passionately explaining why the bow and arrow are such an important part of our history. He even claimed that without it, we would have never gotten to the moon. I can’t remember who he was since I came across it while flicking through the channels and I just watched it for a minute or two, but he made an interesting point. He saw the bow and arrow as the first time man exceeded/amplified their own physical abilities. Before that, spears and where used and we where limited to our own physical strength. Now if you look at it from that perspective, the bow and arrow are suddenly a much more interesting phenomenon (at least that’s what I found it to be).

What I see happening more and more nowadays within interactive art/architecture is that it amplifies things we haven’t been able to amplify before. A lot of them are starting to amplify the presence of people and sometimes they even react upon it. But what we’re also seeing now is that they’re trying to amplify emotions and expressions. To me, this is something very interesting. Especially because that’s an area which is still relatively undefined. What would happen if we would take this out of the museums and bring it into our daily lives? What will happen when we amplify our emotions and thereby making them visible to others? That’s a question which is occupying my head at the moment. I’m curious what you think about that.

Primal Source is an installation from Haque design + research.

Hylozoic Soil is an interactive architectural sculpture created by Philip Beesley, an architect based in Toronto. It can sense the presence of someone or something using proximity sensors and kinetic actuators, and responds with air movement. The result is an incredibly organic sculpture. So organic that the way people tend to interact with it, shows more resemblance with human-human interaction than human-computer interaction.

Here is a video of the sculpture (there is something wrong with the sound though):

Next to the fact that this sculpture is an incredibly impressive piece of work that interacts and moves in some of the most organic ways I’ve ever seen, it’s also interesting to look at how exactly people interact with it. People tend to move around it in a very careful manner and explore the sculpture using their hands and body movement without loosing their patience. It’s a form of human-computer interaction which we rarely see.

Today’s human-computer interaction is often subject to numerous expectations. If it doesn’t meet these expectations people tend to lose their patience and sometimes even get angry. I guess meeting these expectations is part of ‘user-centered design’. However, we have different expectations from human-human interaction than from human-computer interaction. What a project like Hylozoic Soil shows us is that the more organic human-computer interaction feels like, the more our expectations start resembling those from human-human interaction (in which we take the time to get to know each other, respect each other and often have more patience). A very interesting phenonomen.

More about the sculpture (including more video material) can be found here on Philip Beesley’s website.

Last summer London premiered with the world’s first eco-nightclub. It sells ecological drinks, has waterless urinals and tries to be green in many other aspects. But what makes this nightclub really special? Your presence is fueling it with free energy.

All you have to do is dance to save the world

Because next to solar energy and a wind turbine you are a solid source of energy. The designers of the nightclub, Club4Climate, managed to develop a dancefloor which can store energy. All you have to do is dance the night away, your movement will trigger power generating blocks that conserve energy. By having fun, you can feel green. How great is that?

It’s especially interesting since it is a good way to create awareness. A lot of green products cost extra money, but this club isn’t more expensive… it’s even cheaper: When you go by foot or bike, you get in for free. And the club hasn’t changed the way you have fun, you can still drink and dance on great music. All it does is interact with you in a subtle way, giving you the feeling that you are doing something good by having fun. And at the same time it feeds you with knowledge about alternative energy sources and the need for a clean world. Everyone wins.

via Dailymail