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.

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?

——-

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

Had you been paying attention? Bruce Sterling had, and wove together several strands of topics from the conference into his closing plenary, whilst also giving the audience a scathing wake up call. Also up included a galvanising Brenda Laurel, Jason Bruge’s inspiring ambient architecture … and the revelation that the Windows 7 Phone interface is actually pretty darn cool….

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja.

The Neuroscience of Usability — Charles Hannon

Our brain likes patterns. Especially patterns which we have seen before and which behave the same as they did the previous times we used it. The brain cant help looking for patterns because it is rewarded by the chemical dopamine when it finds patterns that lead to success. The pleasure is repeated each time we recognize the pattern, and the pattern recognition proves true. According to Charles Hannon, the validation of these patterns is not the only thing that gives us the delightful feeling. The dopamine is also released when we only see a pattern of which we think it will lead to success.

What happens if we don’t recognize a pattern? The App Store, for example, presents the price in a button, which has to be clicked to go further with the purchase. This isn’t a pattern many people are familiar with, since most web shops use a buy button next to or below the pricing information. We are not sure about what to do and get the feeling of frustration.
And what if something looks like a pattern we know but it doesn’t behave like we expect it to do? It gives us the feeling of panic: “oh s%&t!”. Of course we want to prevent the users from that feeling. The good thing is that this also leads to better learning about what patterns lead to success and what patterns don’t.

So, to give people a delightful feeling while using our products, we should use patterns people are familiar with. This leads to a dilemma; how can designers introduce new patterns which at the same time people are familiar with?

Charles concludes with saying that computing can be very invigorating, frustrating and emotional. Let’s hope it will stay like that in the future since it means that we as designers apparently keep on trying to introduce new innovative patterns which in the end will make life more easy!

Up with Complexity! Challenging Users for Fun and Profit — Josh Clark

Complexity is not a dirty word, it gives our lives texture. We shouldn’t just aim for ‘Dont make me think’, but also embrace ‘Make me think’. Our job is not to eliminate complexity, but to make it uncomplicated. According to Josh, there are a couple of ways to do that:

• Just enough is more: Instead of ‘less is more’, we should design ‘just enough is more’. We should hide complexity, but we shouldn’t patronize users by hiding too much. As an example he talks about ‘Umbrella’, an iPhone app that anwers just one question: will I need an umbrella today? But most people don’t want dumbed down apps. They want uncomplicated apps, so there should be weather apps that offer more detailed weather forecasts, too.
• Manage complexity through focus: The app Momento is a microjournal, that allows the user to capture ‘moments’. Most part of the screen is taken up by controls, so there is not enough room for the actual moment. The Twitter iPhone app, however, use a “hidden door” for access to more feature, to make room for writing the actual tweet. The trouble with secret panels is that they’re secret. Josh proposes to uses animations to reveal the hidden controls the first time, or better: to keep showing them until the user demonstrates that they got it. So it’s not about secrets. It’s about giving the user information and tools when asked for.
• Manage complexity through conversation: One of the biggest challenges in managing complexity is that people think: more features is better. It’s up to us to guide them. Tap quality is more important than tap quantity. People don’t mind having to tap more, it’s about the effect of the tap. To Josh, buttons are a hack. They’re an abstraction, an extra layer between the user and the content. Touch will help sweep away decades of menus, folders and controls, and lets the user work with the content directly. So to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: ‘the message is now the medium’.
• Manage complexity through exploration: Until now, software has mostly been a tool to get things done. Now, software is an accessory. It’s content, not just utility. People are looking for distraction. Because of that, people are more open to complexity than we think. Apps like Runkeeper and calorietrackers are videogames for narcissists: they encourage people to slow down and find the story in data. Exploration is the killer app.
• Create friction: Finally, it’s alright to create a little friction now and then. Josh tells the story of the six year old daughter of his friends, who drew a detailed plan to trap her grandma, involving a cake to lure her into the trap. The bottom line: complex schemes take a lot of thought, so spend time to find ways to uncomplicate complexity.

Applying Film Making Tools to Interaction Design — Adam Connor

The way film makers try to grasp the essence of the story they want to tell is inspirational and useful for our field. Adam Connor recognised this and jumped into the fold of film making, trying to discover interesting connections between it and interaction design. He found several

• Beat Sheets are a way for film makers to capture all the important aspects that should be in a movie. It is a scene-by-scene outline describing plot points, actions and the effect on the audience. The way this is captured might be very interesting in our field as well, since we don’t just want to draw screens, but want to think (and capture)the emotions of the audience and the effect we want to achieve.
• Mise en Scene is all the aspects a film maker has that aren’t dialogue, such as lighting, staging, acting, set design and costumes.
• Motion is (obviously) important in film making: the way the camera, people and other things move largely define how things are perceived. In Western culture we see movement from left to right as progress and vice versa as going back of against the stream. Film makers use this by letting bad guys enter on the right. Movement from top to bottom enhances the feeling of inevitability and anticipation, while bottom to top is struggle.
• Another aspect of motion is rack focus. By changing the focus on screen film makers can force viewers to look at different parts on the screen. What if we could use this technique in interaction design? Could we change the focus on a screen?

I really enjoy the approach Adam takes. He has the feeling that there is an interesting connection to be made and dares to present it as a starting point. I look forward to the next steps.

Marketing is not a 4 letter word — Megan Grocki

People moved to get out of the room at the start of Megan Grocki’s talk. Grocki, (head of Mad*Pow’s marketing team) indeed warned us that we had some highly controversial generalizations ahead. So, we put on our flight goggles and sat tight. It turned out to be an interesting ride. We guess it’s fair to say that Megan made some strong points in the interest of marketing and design.

Marketing, of course, isn’t just about cold hard sales driven by the classic 4P’s. It’s about ads, packaging, social media, word-of-mouth, PR, and much more. In a sentence: it’s about companies establishing & growing relationships with customers. Duly noted: companies may be non-profit, governmental or otherwise. Also customers may be other end-users, such as patients or citizens.

Marketing has come a long way since Philip Kotler and is helped forward these days by people like Seth Godin. Megan acknowledges however that marketing has its bad apples. And some of those have been very bad indeed, like the selling of cigarettes even when health consequences became apparent, the use of incorrect health claims for products, or the selling of expensive or addictive items to people who really can’t afford them. Those practices have given marketing a very bad reputation indeed.

“You ARE a marketer. Deal with it” – Kathy Sierra

It is high time though that we realize that marketing and design have a lot in common. Designers and marketeers share the dream of creating delightful cross touchpoint experiences. In this quest, one discipline can not do without the other. Megan gave some great examples of this: the experience in and around Disneyland, the integrated approach to various Netflix services and Zipcar. In all of these cases, a strong notion of brand, fair business propositions, great design and compelling copy come together in a powerful way.

“I’m a matchmaker”, Megan closes, throwing at us one of her charming smiles. She suggests that both designers and marketeers could use some good conversations around the campfire. Get together. Talk. Understand each other. We feel she is right. Designers need market reach for their products. Marketeers need great designs to sell and do their work effectively. Marketing deserves our attention and, most of the time anyway, our respect.

Designing Immersive Online Environments for Kids — Debra Levin Gelman

What better way to start off the day than with Alice in Wonderland? Debra Levin Gelman used this analogy to great effect in her fun and useful talk on some of the unique issues with designing experiences for 6-8 year olds, which come down to three areas:

• Identity:
• Self-expression: Offer the right tools, allow permanent object creation, make it a game .
• Community: broad ground rules, privacy, collaboration and safety.

Gelman finishes with results from a study that suggest US kids are less creative now than they were 10 years ago, based on an experiment on things a person can do with a spoon (kids came up with far less examples than they did a decade ago) But while it’s easy to blame technology, she believes these can be catalysts for activity if we learn how children think and  process.

Computer Engineer Barbie: How Interaction Design can entice a new generation of women — Cheryl Platz

Many a girl geek (and a lot of guys) were in the room for Cheryl Platz’s impassioned talk on getting girls into interaction design.

Beginning with the recently released Computer Engineer Barbie, Platz highlighted that girls have been driven out of the computer science (CS) workplace since 1982 because of stereotypes. And in a Mean Girls world, perception is everything.

Girls picture CS as the guy in the room at 2am, creepily looking at his mouse!

What’s interesting is that while not many girls are in computer science (10%), many are  studying related fields: visual design is 48% female, cognitive psychology 71%. Many of these women could be interested in interaction design. Giving the example of her own CS class (proudly starting with a record number of girls that quickly dropped out), Platz also pointed out on of the turn-offs: the material is taught in the abstract rather than in context, removed from society. What’s more, a recent study shows that many female — and male —students capable of studying computer science don’t take it up because they “would rather be more people-centred or work with computers in another field”.

In other words, many girls who don’t study computer science could be interested in interaction design — if only they knew about it, which often they don’t. Platz advocates for us to make interaction design more visible by talking at career fairs, hosting job shadows, set up workshops, helping educators show the societal benefit of CS, and proposing interaction design additions to existing programmes:

spread the good word about IxD to students and education in your community — you might just save a life!

Photoshop.com 2.0—the making of an experience ecosystem — Ethan Eismann and Geoff Dowd

Dowd and Eismann ran us through the (naturally very good looking) Photoshop.com experience, They summed up their ecosystem redesign with 6 principles:

1. Know where your user is going, not where they’ve been. (i.e. look at disruptors, and how to prevent shift). They looked at competitors such as Aviary, and tried to anticipate why users might want to move to them in the future, and how to design around this.
2. Paint an Ecosystem Picture. Also including the choice quote “No Lorel Ipsum. Ever.” The team looked to understand all the touchpoints of the website — a previous failing with the earlier version, which had locked customers out of upgrades such as Lightroom — and looked where it would be used (e.g. in-the-browser for Facebook pictures).
3. Tell a great story with great detail. From the beginning. The redesign always used high-fidelity mockups to understand the experience — they did risk premature sign-off with this strategy, but felt it worth it.
4. UI is brand. Despite this being a free product, the team took pains to make the language the same as the paid-for Lightroom, to allow for a seamless experience if users moved up.
5. Apps are better than billboards. Free is good (if you can afford it).
6. Beauty runs deep. Above all, draw the product you want.

Adobe’s talk was unusual in that it was from a mature brand with a history of design (they do sell high end design products after all, so in a sense, like Apple, have the advantage of designing for themselves), but still with interesting elements to take to any project.

Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web — Mike Kruzeniski

AKA the “OMG the Windows 7 phone UI is actually pretty cool!” talk, Mike Kruzeniski talked through Microsoft’s new UI strategy — and, much to people’s surprise, won over the audience. Microsoft is looking at “how you remove the chrominess of the experience”, which is already evident if you look at the Kinect (removing the interface) or their Futures 2019 concept video.

In today’s “apps are everything!” era, it’s a hard task to encourage ongoing use — most are downloaded only once, and only 1% are used on an ongoing basis in the long run. What’s more, they’re almost a rebuilding of the web (even 2/3 times for each platform), For apps to be meaningful and longlasting, Kruzeniski suggests they must be (as the talk is titled) personal, relevant, and connected:

1. Personal: “mine, cares, knows about my stuff”. Examples, contact aren’t just contacts, also info about what they’re doing, gallery stripped back w/ typography.
2. Relevant: “I’m always somewhere, sometime, doing something, with someone.” Allowing people to get back to life — how can we bring information to the surface? Trying to use smart info e.g. searching for Bouldher hotel in Boulder – maps. The Windows 7 Phone brings up location based information by default, assuming that since you’re here you don’t want to read about it.
3. Connected: “give me everything where I am”. Making sure everything (e.g. avatars) connects easily between devices to create stories. Gruzeniski pointed out that the XBox poses an interesting challenge — how goes a game go from a console to the PC to the TV? — answering that it won’t be the same, but about a thread, with a hub and spoke model (e.g. jumping from music to last.fm). Above all, it’s important to be appropriate for different contexts — he pointed to Evernote as an exemplar for doing it right.

Gruzenski put forward the wonderful concept of weaving — being able to pull things up to the top that are important to you — in order to create a greater story, an integrated seamless experience. For example, weather has untapped potential to be woven with other information e.g. weather (nice day) + social (see that a friend has free time) + running (you both like to run). People left the talk both excited about the talk, and the Windows 7 Phone examples used to show the exemplars. Eat your own dog food indeed.

Healthcare interfaces: How interaction design can help fix medicine — David Cronin

According to David Cronin of Smart Design, we are at an inflection point in the history of healthcare. We know enough for most people to live long healthy lives, but we have become concerned with people’s health far too late. The most common and expensive diseases are preventable and controllable by lifestyle choices. We need to decrease costs and increase quality and access of healthcare. Interaction designers can help in three ways:

• Encourage healthy behavior It all starts with information. People need to understand the correlation between their actions and the consequences on their health. We can redesign lab reports or design products that help people track their behavior. FitBit is nice example, but the feedback experience is too far removed from the activity. Knowledge is the enabler. Emotion is the motivator: Nike+ – trash their screen
• Bring home care delivery We should help people to do part of their healthcare at home. A great example is a new syringe by Smart Design that magnifies the force so thatpeople with rheumatoid arthritis self can confidently self-administer. Are androids the future of home care, such as the Japanese Actroid-F? An important part of healthcare is not medicine, but face time, the personal touch. If we can reduce time of routine visits, doctors can have more personal time with their patients.
• Improve care in clinical situations Medical informatics is like enterprise software 10 years ago: the UX is really bad. Even the most advanced systems don’t offer good tools for documentation, communication and collaboration. So there’s a big opportunity for interaction designers to help clinicians there. It’s big challenge, because clinical data is incredibly complex, but in the end it will save costs. Another field where we can make a difference is remote care: surgeons operating at one locating, while the patient is in another. We can help by designing better decision support and better data display. Again, if tele-health can be as good as the real thing, this will have a huge saving in costs.

To me, David’s talk was hugely inspiring. It’s upsetting that there has been so little attention to good user experience where it is needed most: in healthcare. Especially now that more and more people need it. I really do hope that interaction designers can play a much bigger role here. As David said: “we’re not just talking about abstract interaction design principles. We’re talking about the health of your friends, family and children”.

Afternoon Keynote —Brenda Laurel

We should have expected something extraordinary to happen. However, Brenda Laurel’s keynote caught us a little off guard. While we were expecting to get nostalgic about the classic designs that came to form our industry, we got more than we bargained for.

In a very personal and candid review of her professional life, Laurel shared some of the major innovations that she was involved in. She started out by showing us a convincing chromatography of technical innovations, with in it’s spectrum ‘dimensions’ such as impact on technology, actors, culture, nature and emergence. She coupled each innovation to what she calls a Hinge. Each hinge she then defined along the dimensions of her model.

So starting in the mid 70s, she told us the story about Cybervision, a computer and television based concept that would allow for gaming, but was way ahead of its time. She continued with the now classic 1976 Atari game computer and presented the early 80s Atari 400-800 which could do games and also ran some educational applications and music programs. She believed this to be a great innovation. Much to Brenda’s frustration, this concept was criticized as being “a fad, just like jogging”. Luckily, she got a lot of help from Alan Kay, who defended her within Atari by explaining to some that Brenda was “okay, but just a little misguided”.
Brenda went on to show decades of inspiring cases, such as Dynabook, Hole in space, Habitat, early nineties VR, along the line not suppressing her gripe with Mattel Inc (it acquired her computer-games-for-girls company Purple Moon and then killed it). Referring to her experimental work without any sign of regret, she elegantly stated that she had been “a crash dummy more times than I can count”.

And while she continued showing these key innovations, slowly but surely, a more profound social and ethical theme emerged, consisting of two intertwined parts:

1. A great call for great authoring, driven by the strong notion that we as humans don’t have the luxury to see technology as something other than us. We created it. We use it. We are it. This comes with responsibility.
2. Technology has evolved from serving single users, to dual users, to small groups, mobs, and now masses. Brenda shared her vision that this can only lead to the next great hinge, which is sure to be a true Gaian hinge.

In a dramatic closing, Brenda called upon us to start authoring for the whole of earth. Create a symbiosis at the level of our dear planet, our home, as seen from space. Great applause. Standing ovation. Some tears. And a mission.

Making mistakes fun: Game mechanics are not a panacea, but they are kinda useful! — Paris Buttfield-Addison

Loads of people see gamification as an easy way to create great experiences, but during this talk Paris Buttfield-Addison tries to give us a reality check. It isn’t just about adding badges and playful aspects. As a designer you need to move beyond adding fun and start thinking about engagement. The thing you want to do is create a relationship. One of the examples that stood out here is Bottle Bank

Pass it Back! Kid Apps on Grown Up Devices — Nina Walia

Long After the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users — Stephen Anderson

Stephen started his presentation by asking the audience who is in a longterm relationship. Many hands went up. And then he asked: would you like to stay in it? Obviously, no hands went down. Unlike his previous presentations and his Mental Notes, this talk was not about getting people to fall in love with your applications, but about getting people to stay in love with them. Or as Stephen calls it: sustaining passionate users through delightful challenges.

He made an analogy to teaching. Having been a teacher himself, he sees three attitudes to teaching:

• Apply it yourself. This stuff is boring, but you have to learn it anyway.
• Sugar coating. This stuff isn’t all that interesting, but layers of fun are added. This is what ‘gamification’ is.
• Mastery. Something is inherently interesting or fun, so that you really want to learn it.

To Stephen, a game is fun when there is play & challenges + goals & rewards. This means we should find the game that is inherent in most things rather than sprinkling it on. Designers should consider whether the user is after a performance goal (i.e. getting an A in French) or a learning goal (i.e. wanting to learn French). As an exercise, Stephen asked the audience to think of characteristics of an existing game and then use them to make a time tracking application more fun. His own example was: what if you would add status? Then time tracking would not only be something you need to do, but also something you can get good at, either compared to others or to yourself.

But in Raph Koster’s words: delight, unfortunately, doesn’t last. Sustaining passionate users takes more than delightful experiences. When asked about why people use applications they have been using for more than three years (Gmail, Facebook etc), they answered such things as ‘because it works and continually improves’, ‘reliability’ and ‘friends use it’. But where is the love? The apps that are most used aren’t the fun and sexy apps, but the ones we need to use.

So in the end, Stephen presented the Kano model, which he thinks can help us to design applications that satisfies both on a basic level and on a delightful level. The model consist of two axes: high satisfaction vs low satisfaction on the vertical axis, and not (or poorly) implemented vs fully implemented on the horizontal axis. The more we can get an application into the upper right quadrant, the more sustaining its usage will be. We need to combine delighters with satisfying the basic needs. So: buy flowers on Valentine’s day, but don’t forget to close the lid of the trash can every day.

Stephen’s presentations are always fun and engaging – he does a good job of involving his audience. It would have been nice though if he had elaborated more about the Kano model and how to get people to stay in love. That part still felt a bit rushed. Guess we’ll have to look out for another opportunity to see him talk. I personally look forward to it.

Afternoon Keynote — Jason Bruges

Jason Bruges brought both a change of perspective and country with inspiring case studies (this year’s Dan Hill?) from his London-based eponymous studio. Showing rather than telling, there were none the less themes of ambient environments and tangible interaction in his myriad examples, which included:

• The wonderful and award-winning WWF Panda Eyes exhibit
• Exploring the ‘off-grid’ and ‘on-grid’ design, such as Phosphor Fields, Ropemaker (“scavenging energy”), Wind to Light, and Aeolian Tower
• Engaging the public, such as the Memory Project (as it turned out, people gamed the installation to get pictures of themselves, someone Bruges loves), or the Narcissus inspired V&A Mirror Mirror , or wonderfully tangible Dotty Duveen
• Tower Bridge for Switched on London — a visualisation of people’s Bluetooth consumption going over the bridge (this decade’s Live Wire?)
• Physical pixels with the Sunderland Train Station’s Platform 5 (glass tile ‘pixels’ feature looping videos of volunteers — “Lots of people think there are people behind the wall.”)
• Current and future sporting work: Oregon’s Game Show and Fast, Faster, Fastest for the London 2012 Olympics

Above all, Bruges believes in learning through failure (i.e. from pushing the limits) and proving through prototyping: both important as they’re often challenging technological constraints with their ambitious pieces.

Accessibility is Not a Checklist — Jimmy Chandler

Chandler gave a insightful and practical guide to designing for computer accessibility (aka A11Y ). He is wary of accessibility ‘checklists’, comparing it to site validation — many well-designed sites do not validate, and vice versa — and so instead gave a checklist of accessibility practices:

• An iterative process is the best way to implement accessibility. Developers probably haven’t been trained in accessibility, early feedback is key, as this means accessibility does not become a painful and expensive add-on at the end. “When people say accessibility is expensive, they’ve done it wrong.”
• Design for mobile first (ala Luke W’s post on this topic). The constraints that are imposed in designing for mobile first are also helpful for accessibility.
• Include people with disabilities in your usability research. Chandler couldn’t emphasise this enough, as it’s key to understand how disabled people use your product. Shawn Lawton Henry’s ‘Just Ask‘ has a wealth of advice on methods.
• Don’t assume people with disabilities don’t want to use your site. A blind person may use a driving site to help their children get their licence.
• Don’t punish your customers to solve your business problems. Captcha may stop spam, but is more likely to make users abandon the form (this can particularly affect dyslexia users)
• Get people to drive themselves. If you design with awareness of iOS’s built-in Voiceover & Speak Auto-Text, you can do blind and many other disabled users a huge service. Glenda Watson, a woman with cerebral palsy, has blogged about how the iPad has changed her life [and the site in general is an eye-opening and inspiring read].
• Have people define their own time. Don’t use auto-advance or time limits — this disadvantages older users or those with reading difficulties.
• Protect your audience. The more people can access your product, the better!
• Accessibility is not just about blind people. It can be about temporary disabilities, other disabilities (again, dyslexia is far more common than we realise), and even cellphones!
• Provide help in an accessible manner. Increasing contrast and esp adding texture helps with vision difficulties (and printing in b/w!) Accessibility is not just about blind people.

If there was one major takeaway from the talk, it was to test your products with at least one disabled user (Chandler said that “if you do that, I’ll have done my job”). For more information, check out his comprehensive list of accessiblity resources.

Closing Keynote — Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling was a cracker pick to finish. For those not in the know, he’s renowned for provocative talks, and having been around for the entire conference, he took no prisoners when giving his own spin on themes that had popped up over the last three days (diginity, our discipline, empathy).

Sterling chastised designers for being overly empathetic to their users (“you’ve got user Stockholm Syndrome”), challenged them to consider what it means to be an a moral designer

You don’t do morality. We talk about it, but don’t go there. You’re no better than engineers or computer scientists … Raymond Loewry pleased his clients (Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike) with great design that killed people later on. If you designed cigarettes now they’d be individually wrapped, with a thumb space … Our successors will reframe what we did and subject us to the same judgements we do to Ford.

Amidst discussions of critique and craft, he pointed out that the former is useful but not necessary, and that Steve Jobs succeeds because he isn’t afraid of anything, even death: “Critique won’t make you a better designer. What will make you a better designer is a fanatic dedication to craft and no fear of failure”

He challenged the place of the IXDA (or “icks-da”) both as an institution (“IxDA is a social network formerly known as the design profession”) and alongside institutions such as CHI (which was flamed by a couple of speakers:

Look at your white haired relations in ACM SIGCHI, and learn — they have history, regulations, decades of effort, and research. Don’t just viscerally react to those that came before you, otherwise you’ll disappear sooner than they did as people move towards another social network.

He finished with a thanks to Boulder (“because examples trump abstractions”): “It’s like Austin but paler and more zen walking around. I’m sure the thinkers of the world wouldn’t be impressed with Boulder. But it has a forgiving lapserian sleeziness about it that took lots of iterations to form. And a quirky charm.”

Perhaps his most inspiring quote was about being an interaction designer:

I can’t give you everything you need, and you can’t give me everything I need. Because I’m an adult. So stop trying. You could take an oath not to ruin my life. (But if you did, I wouldn’t believe it). The best you’ll come up with is a morality in permanent beta, which might be a good thing.

Many on twitter complained afterwards that he’s a science fiction writer rather than a designer, but as he said himself: “I’m your victory condition — an outsider who drank your kool-aid and joined you.” And I’d argue that, in a discipline sometimes overly obsessed with DTDT, sometimes it takes an outsider to tell it like it is — Emperor’s New Clothes anyone?

——

And so rounded up IXD11 (well, apart from the Microsoft party later that night with both a Kinect and absinthe — a deadly combination). Next year the conference goes across the pond to Dublin. For more, check out the IXD12 site.

It is that time of the year again: hundreds of interaction designers from all over the world rush towards the Interaction conference. This year it takes place in Boulder, Colorado (USA). Yesterday there were pre-conference workshops and today the conference itself was officially kicked off. And as always Johnny is there to deliver a daily write-up for those who weren’t able to attend (awwww).

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja

Keynote Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank (who Johnny interviewed last year) kicked off the conference with the words from calligrapher Hella Basu: “in all object making, that aspect which relates to its conceptual interpretation is art, that which relates the object to an intended purpose is design, and the quality of its execution is craft”.

From then on (bar a couple of video clips), Verplank sketched (or as he calls it, “thinking with a pencil)” his way through his knowledge of design and systems, mainly covering his well known  diagrams but also peppering it with informed asides (even if his comments about CHI did cause some consternation). One interesting new story was on path-like vs map-like systems, using the example of a vending machine (a closed machine versus one with a glass window): the former might be easier to maintain, but the latter is easier for users should something go wrong (e.g. a can gets stuck), and arguably even better for business.

Verplank’s presentation shone with experience as both a designer and researcher. He explained different ways of thinking — enactive (do) , iconic (see) , symbolic (know), based on Piaget and Bruner, — and other relevant theories on multiple intelligence.

Verplank believes that we’re coming into the third —  enactive — age of computing, made commercially real with the release of the Wii, and that people should be using haptics in their products to make them smart by taking cues from people such as Hiroshi Ishii. That said, there are interesting exceptions, for example how computer scientists have moved to the Mac because the Terminal allows them to retain the language they learned in teletype machines but it now irrelevant with GUI.

We’re coming into the third, enactive, age of computing.

Verplank also emphasised the importance of understanding systems through control and feedback, and finished by elaborating on his well known but misunderstood diagram ontypes of design

• Most design is currently in the form of media (e.g.  Negroponte)
• However, fashion is becoming important (look at Steve Job’s vision)
• People/AI (e.g. Winograd) are not about designing people as much as life forms (an interesting example being Karl Sims’ ecological computational forms)
• Tools are like vehicles, and underpined by infrastructure — having common platforms as was done with unicode and fonts is key.

Proximus Maximus: Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to the NASA Space Program and Beyond – Michael Meyer

If you don’t create anything, are you actually a designer? That’s the main question behind Michael Meyer’s talk. It’s his belief that we must completely understand the product or service we work with. As long as we don’t understand every little detail we’ll never be able to create superb solutions or understand the consequences of our design decisions. By showing beautiful examples ranging from craftsmanship to a video of the NASA Space Program he gradually shows us the power of trully understanding what it means to be a great designer: it’s all about empathy.

There are three things a designer focus on:

• Empathy. An emotional closeness. A deep, intuitive understanding of the materials you work with is important to get the most out of your work;
• Core. Each person (but also object and service) has a certain core. This is essential material that you have available to craft the product, service, experience. Discovering and understanding this core is really important when working together with other disciplines. There are (for example) often frustrations when engineers and user experience designers work together, this is because they have a different core. When you start not just understanding your own, but also the other cores, you’ll be able to work together in a situation where everybody can be a hero of his core.
• Proxy. This is the thing that represents the sum of your knowledge, to communicate your understanding and ability.

Note: this summary is partly based upon our report from The Web and Beyond in 2010.

What do you do, anyway? Describing IxD to the Outside World – Carl Alviani

This is DTDT with a difference. Carl started off with a video where he’d asked several people to give their definition on interaction design. One of the comments? “Well, it’s magic.”. While that got more than a few laughs, for Carl this sums up most of the problem he wants to address — the impenetrability to the outside world of what exactly is is we do.

When we talk about who we (interaction designers) are, we talk about the value that we have and the products and services that we try to improve. We define ourselves in characteristics that are actually so general that they also apply to other fields such as industrial design, game design, fashion, etc. It’s important to find a clear definition of what we do in order to quell backlash. When you look at other fields and the way people define them you notice that they talk a lot in terms of artifacts. Carl showed an example where web programmers are being defined people by HTML and CSS. And it’s on that level that we should start. We should be where the listeners are and have a tangible starting point for a discussion. If this means that we start saying that we draw boxes and arrows or that we stand in front of walls and put post-its on it than that’s what we need to say.

Consume Consume Consume – Peter Knocke

It’s always a delight when a speaker manages to keep a crowd at the tip of their seats while showing only one slide. Peter pulled it off. In a convincing buildup he made a strong appeal to designers to consider the consequences of their work.
How many of you regularly take Facebook mobile to the bathroom? (27%, apparently). Peter explained to us that when he was once creating a persona, Tim — a heavy consumer of social media, mail, and other interactive media — he realized on reading it back that this persona might be realistic, but not necessarily one to be proud of as a designer.
Peter started logging his own activities and soon found out his life was not much different. He discovered three types of activities:

• Consumption
• Curation (the selection and assessment of items around you)
• Creation

He was startled to find that most of the time he just consumed, and that the act of creation was a rare event. This is because our environment, the media and products all around us, stimulates this behavior above others. This notion was the main driver for this talk. We have to find a better balance in these three types of activities. We have to help our users to create more. This was the real call for change: use your personal perspective, get a bit more greedy. Design for youself if you have to. Design for creation.

Scandalous Interaction – Tim Wood

What is a scandalous interaction? For Wood, it’s daring to challenge the idea of using design patterns (he damningly called pattern libraries as “the clip art of interaction design”). That wasn’t his only ‘scandalous’ comment, as he proclaimed “Usability is overrated. Jakob Nielsen just rolled over in his grave. Wait, he’s not dead.”
But beyond that, his reasons for legitimately reinventing the wheel (with some actual examples) were for such reasons as challenging the constraints of traditional thinking. He used the example of the iPhone keypad as having a legacy back to old fashioned typewriters (though this is in itself an unusual case as they are challenging patterns.)
However, his real reason to challenge patterns is about allowing new interactions to be understood (much in line with Indy Young’s work on mental models). He finished off with an example of an interface and how working down and back up on chain of display logic—core logic—concept could allow for new visual interactions.

The Rhythm of Interaction – Peter Stahl

Peter Stahl is not only an interaction designer but also with musical interests, combining the two in his inspiring talk that it can be useful to design rhythm and flow into our interfaces. There is rhythm in changing TV channels, in driving a car, in gaming and in viewing a Powerpoint presentation: new slide-title-bullet-bullet-bullet-new slide-title-bullet-bullet-bullet. When speaking about surfing the web, there is rhythm in filling out forms, in Twitter feeds coming by, and in watching Youtube video’s. To have rhythm, Peter says, interaction should be simple, repetitive, steady, and it should always be clear how to continue. If you want a user to think, you should interrupt the rhythm to get the user’s attention.

To have rhythm … interaction should be simple, repetitive, steady, and it should always be clear how to continue. If you want a user to think, you should interrupt the rhythm to get the user’s attention.

However: rhythm only is not enough. If we want a user to be totally involved in the activity, that time flies while performing tasks and that the experience itself is rewarding, we have to add flow to the rhythm. Like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Peter helped us pronouncing this exotic name: “chick-sent-me-high-e”) already told us about flow in 1996: “…Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost…”

In our artefacts and deliverables, it is important not only to show the “feature interface design” but also a more concrete form of “user interface design”. A wireframe is not enough any more. To give better insight in the rhythm of interaction, we should add people to our storyboards. We should show how and when they are involved and what reaction or emotion we intend to get from a user at a certain point.

Peter was running out of time, the rhythmic flow we were all getting into unfortunately was brutally interrupted. Looking forward to hearing the rest of his talk some time soon.

It’s not just about talks…

Interaction is the annual conference organized by the IxDA and has grown into the biggest gathering of interaction designers in our field. Right now there are over 600 people attending the event. But despite that huge amount the organization is still managing to give it a special and personal feeling. This is mainly due to all the (un)official events going on in between and after the talks. Below you’ll see an overview of some of the social events going on:

The Officially Unofficial Johnny Hollands & Friends Dinner at the Dushanbe Tea House (image courtesy: Giles DeMarty)

Doing the Johnny during a hike

Lunch at St Julien

Doing workshops at Interaction 11

Party at the Boulder Theatre

—–

Back in the late 1980s, Bill Verplank, when working at what would become IDEO, stopped calling what he did ‘user-interface design’, and instead coined a new term: ‘interaction design’. His work over the years has included  Xerox Parc, IDTwo/IDEO, and collaborations with design schools such as the RCA, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Steve Baty talked with him about interaction design.

You’ve been working as an interaction designer for three decades: how has your approach to your work changed over that time?

Bill Verplank

After my PhD from MIT in “Man-Machine Systems”, I went to Xerox and spent three years testing systems that had taken ten years to invent; then after the Xerox Star was introduced, we spent five years refining and extending it. So in my first decade, I did “human factors” testing and “user interface design”. This is also the decade that ACM started SIGCHI and I started teaching “graphical user-interface design”. (‘70s ‘80s)

In the next decade, I was hired by Bill Moggridge at IDTwo to move the insights from computers to products of all sorts. We called what we did “Interaction Design” and saw what we were doing as the key to modernizing “Industrial Design”. As consultants, we were dependent on clients, so for me it was a scramble to keep up with the variety of problems. When IDTwo merged with David Kelly Design and Matrix to become IDEO, we had established a new kind of multi-disciplinary design consultancy. (‘80s ‘90s)

In the third decade I have returned to invention and teaching. At Interval Research, we enjoyed the freedom to develop technologies (e.g. haptics) and methods (e.g. “body storming”). Also, we encouraged educational programs at RCA, MIT, NYU, Stanford and finally at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). My favorite post-graduate program now is a spin-off of IDII: the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). Also, at Stanford, I have been teaching Computer Science and Computer Music with a focus on the tangible aspects of interaction. (‘90s ‘00s)

Over that same period, how has the practice of interaction design changed generally?

What do we think a “computer” is? I like to contrast three dominant metaphors or paradigms: PERSON, TOOL, MEDIA.

In the ‘50s, we called computers “electronic brains” and many were motivated to make them intelligent, language processors. There are still people pursuing these “anthropomorphisms”; they call it “artificial intelligence” or “robotics”. Interaction is a verbal dialog. A computer is an “agent” or “assistant” – autonomous and intelligent. Think of the computer as a “PERSON”.

In the ‘70s, rather than replicating or replacing people, Englebart proposed “augmenting intelligence” – thinking of the computer as a “TOOL” which extends and empowers us. We became “users” not just programmers or operators. Anyone who asks “Who is the user?” and “What is the task?” is very much in the business of “interaction design”. Good interaction is useful and efficient.

In the ‘90s, with ubiquitous networks, mobile, graphical and dynamic interfaces, computers are “MEDIA”. Televisions, phones, games are all computers that we watch, connect, play and mostly enjoy. A good interaction is engaging, immersive and persuasive.

PERSON, TOOL and MEDIA are sufficiently established as metaphors, we can call them paradigms; they define our business, schools and conferences. What will the next paradigms be? What will we call what we do?

Here’s a sketch I did in 2000 on Metaphors for Computers: PERSON, TOOL, MEDIA – each one a robust “paradigm”. Beyond those three, I predict LIFE, VEHICLE, FASHION.

Bill Moggridge's Metaphors for Computers diagram

In your “Interaction Design Sketchbook” you write: Interaction design is a profession that will mature in the 21st century. Where do you think interaction design is currently immature, or is this more a reference to the emergence of embedded and ubiquitous computers? Implicit in that section of the IxD Sketchbook is the idea that interaction design concerns itself with computers and computer-driven interactions. Do you see a place for the practice of interaction design in non-computing environments such as services?

Interaction Design in the 21st century will be a challenge because almost everything (and everybody) we interact with will have computers in it or on it. Services and systems will be autonomous and only ask for guidance (think of automated cars and guideways); tools will be augmented and powerful; even the most mundane artifact might have far-flung connections and consequences; media will be interactive and engaging and we will all become fashion designers.

We’ve recently seen the principles of interaction design applied to situations where the aim is to shift individual or group behavior in social, economic or environmental activities. Do you see this a logical extension of the work you were doing in the 80s and 90s or a shift away from interaction design’s foundations?

Interaction Design as I practiced it, is very much in the “TOOL” paradigm; the principles were “consistent conceptual models, direct manipulation and WYSIWYG”. If the “aim is to shift individual or group behavior” then use the “MEDIA” paradigm. Advertising, education, persuasion, are at the core of ancient practices. Making media more interactive may or may not get your message across. Media can mystify and intrigue. All I know about media is that “the medium is the message” – a technocrat’s rant.

You’ll be speaking to nearly 600 interaction designers in February at the Interaction conference in Boulder. What is the one thing you’d like them to take away from your lecture?

I would like them to take away my enthusiasm for metaphors and engage in the search for metaphors that help us organize the various paradigms of professional practice.

What will the next metaphor be in your practice? Is your design motivated and organized as a form of LIFE? Or as infrastructure or VEHICLE? Or as the latest FASHION?

Verplank's professional practice metaphor simplified for Designing Interactions

Interaction 11

Bill Verplank is one of the keynotes at Interaction 11 . It has sold out, but workshop places are still available. It is the fourth 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 Boulder, Colorado (USA).

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Picture of Verplank: Mayonissen with CC

The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we’re missing a solid definition of what social objects are. Or, whether they really even exist.

The most common use of the term “social object” refers to shared online resources around which interactions develop and coalesce. Examples could include gifts on Facebook, videos, or what have you. The object sort of serves as a shared object, a focus of attention, an actual digital object, and so on. And the object plays a role in governing or informing interactions; we know what objects mean and what to do with them (give them, comment on them, play them, etc.)

But the definition of social object is a bit too fuzzy for me, and for a couple reasons.

Thinking in objects

Firstly, as designers, the object plays into our interest in having an object language — things to design and design for. We are biased to think in terms of objects; objects belong to the world of interface design. So there is a possibility that where there is actually other stuff going on, we focus on the object out of our own interest. (By analogy, consider the anthropologist who focuses her attention on these social objects: a ceremonial mask, money, a wedding ring, a football. How much of the rituals, pastimes, social and cultural practices belong to the object and are explained by object properties? Not much….)

Secondly, objects are easily confused with their properties, attributes, qualities, uses, and so on. This is just how language works. We name a thing and give it attributes, and having done so we have a stable concept. Plato’s ideal chair, vs all real chairs. Concepts then substitute for the real thing. It’s possible that we’re actually talking about the concept of social objects, and not social objects as used.

Which is a more accurate description of gifting on Facebook: the relationship between two friends and the practice of giving gifts on birthdays, or the graphic of the beer mug? The more accurate description of user interaction would be that which explains the practice of gift giving, the symbolic act of presenting a gift, the Facebook tradition of recognizing birthdays, and the social space in which gifts are seen by others such that birthdays create a cause for a stretch of social interaction.

Shared cultural resources

We know that social objects are a shared cultural resource — their meanings are culturally context-specific. We know that many social practices involve social objects. We know that in the digital domain, social objects are unique in that there is no original object but many copies; that an object can appear in many places at once.

For example, I give you a beer mug and it is on your wall but in my stream also — same object, but not really, since one is the one I gave you and yours is the one you received. We’re really talking about a representation, not an object. In other words, the object represents the act.

Representating acts

If the social object is sometimes the representation of an act, then perhaps the focus should be on the act, and on interaction practices, less on the object. The act of recognizing a friend’s birthday by gifting a graphic beer mug is a better explanation of the user activity. The object is merely a representational vehicle by which the activity is sedimented into a mediated, visible, socially recognizable form.

Social objects, then, might be better understood as common forms. Forms in which many kinds of graphics, rich media, even textual forms (for a tweet is a social object as soon as it is retweeted) permit diverse kinds of social interaction. The object, in other words, is not an object, but a form.

If social objects are a form of representation, we can expand our understanding of what they mean. If a form has visual content, it is an image. If it has linguistic content, it is a text or an utterance. If it is a video, it is televisual.

If it is a gift using a graphic, such as the beer mug, then it is both a symbolic token (as described by traditions of gift giving — the gift is an object with meaning inherited from the tradition of gift exchange, and specified by meanings belonging to the object: price, ownership, status, utility, etc) and an image. The beer mug graphic indicates “a drink” (this is basic theory of representation stuff: the image is a beer mug); the act of giving it refers to “get you a drink for your birthday”. The interaction, in other words, is a symbolically-mediated one, referencing a content (get you a beer) and a cultural practice (on your birthday).

It’s all about interactions

We can now see that the interaction situates and contextualizes the object. Not the other way around. The object doesn’t tell us what’s going on, nor does it define uses and interactions. Those belong to practices — namely, practices in which objects are used.

There’s another reason that the object should take a subordinate role to the interaction. Tweets are social objects. Tweets are utterances that take a form, and which, given that twitter is a distribution platform, can be circulated, referenced, recontextualized (posted to streams, blogs, surfaced in search, etc), and so on. We miss out on the significance of the “commodity” form of mediated talk if we think in terms of objects. Because we think of objects as things.

But clearly, anything that can be mediated and used as a shared resource can be a social object. And this includes tweets, things, and much more. So if the world of social objecst includes linguistic statements, gestural tokens (emoticons), signs, numbers (is a follower number a social object? it certainly is the object of a lot of social activity!), images, graphics, avatars, and on and on. We would have to admit that not only is the idea of social objects so broad as to be almost meaningless; but that it’s lost any critical or explanatory power. A concept too big to give us any guidance.

So that’s where I am on social objects. We need a better description. Personally, I think we can borrow from linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology. I would argue that the interaction domain has primary importance, and that the subdomain is symbolically-mediated interaction.

Within this, then, types include:

• linguistic statements;
• symbolic tokens;
• currencies;
• representational objects;
• images;
• gestural signs;
• signs;
• numbers;
• rich media (video, etc — stuff playable online);
• bookmarks;
• avatars;
• etc

Using the disciplines I just mentioned, we would be able to use:

• linguistics for linguistic statements;
• semiotics for signs;
• representational theory for representations (looks like something) and images (is of something);
• cultural anthro for exchange practices and their token objects;
• media theory for numbers (stats, counts, etc);
• and so on.

The types are then unpacked in the contexts of their use, in their contribution to interactions, in their meanings, and as expressions of intent and guidelines for interpretation. And, most importantly, we would be able to account for the enormously innovative and unique ways in which symbolically-mediated interactions can refer to all manner of meaningful activities online, from social games to Second Life (which is, kind of, a total social object world!), from gifting to retweeting, and so on. It’s a bigger project, but the online world is incredibly rich. And I’m convinced that we might misinterpret what’s going on around it if we allow ourselves to think of objects as objects.

If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change I believe this must apply two ways. While it’s true that design can influence users and engender cultural change, this is always a product of our more tangible work: changing the behaviour of technology. As a user-centred designer of technology my goal is simple: to make its behaviour humane. But how should I approach this?

Humanity implies emotion and, beneath that, personality. These areas lie beyond the frontiers of classical HCI and usability. Fortunately, as often happens, we view the distant summit and see others have already planted the flag. Toymakers, for instance, have explored the art of bestowing personality on products for years. The results are fairly crude, but I defy anyone to watch the torture of a Pleo and successfully suppress a twinge of guilt. Even in its moments of crisis, Pleo has a distinct personality; that is to say, it conveys emotional information

Channels for personality

Perhaps the most obvious conduit for emotional content is appearance.

From BMW's grill to Pixar's Wall-E

The designs above show acts of visual anthropomorphism, where gesture and expression alone convey personality. They create empathy through closure, a projection of the self as explored in Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics. Pareidolia, the brain’s propensity to recognise faces everywhere, is a powerful trick. Even an oval, two dots and a line create an unmistakable expression; with detail we can add further emotional nuance.

Closure: excerpt from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

We can also convey personality through message. In the words of Russell Davies, the rise of devices with personality will lead to a surge in “bubbly writing and objects talking to you in the first person”. Here, an Innocent smoothie prudishly asks us to avert our gaze from its most vulnerable area.

Innocent drinks carton with text "Stop looking at my bottom."

But anthropomorphism needn’t be visual. Consider how R2D2 conveys personality through sound alone – his shrieks and bleeps mapping to human expressions of emotion (See Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff at dConstruct 2009 [mp3, 43 minutes]). Similarly, IM programs happily announce incoming messages with a rising fanfare and send replies with a descending farewell.

These can be effective ways to communicate personality, but I’ve recently been reflecting about the fuzzier area of expressing personality through behaviour.

According to psychologist Kurt Lewin behaviour is product of the person in question and his environment (check out Lewin’s equation). Our behaviour changes with context. This suggests that we can only form an opinion about someone’s personality through exposure to various scenarios; a single interaction isn’t enough. However once we’ve formed this mental model, we believe it so thoroughly that we become blinded by it, believing that someone’s personality causes their every action – the fundamental attribution error.

Behavioural variance – acting differently according to our environment – is a celebrated part of being human. Anyone who lacks it is boring. Myself, I act quite differently as a Cardiff City fan than as a grandson, since the contexts are very different. At a party you’re expected to drink beer and flirt with girls, not quietly read a library book, if you expect to be invited back.

Dreary technology

This is why I look at modern technology with mixed feelings. As a tool, it’s unsurpassed. But when we engage with it on any human level, it doesn’t respond in kind. Technology has no behavioural variance and very little personality.

Yes, predictability is a key tenet of usability. High-risk systems must respond to input in forseeable ways: an air traffic control system, for instance, needs to be entirely unwavering. But as we’re learning to appreciate the power of play and emotion in our design activities, is there scope for non-critical technology to display behavioural personality?

Mobile devices, for instance, are increasingly a medium of sensory input as well as informational output. We’ll soon carry devices capable of reading our fingerprints, calculating our position and learning our closest social ties by analysing our SMS and email habits. Adding further richness, recent declarative technology encourages users to publish information that designers can use to build emotional responses:

Google map showing current location as Alton Towers theme park

Facebook status showing a user's engagement

So let’s imagine a Twitter client that asks if you really want to send that drunken tweet (maybe you should have read that library book after all). A mobile that loves going on rollercoasters. An MP3 player that longs to play (and listen to?) a new album for once.

Getting personality wrong

Looking, sounding or acting like a human is desirable only if the human is one we like. Some of our early forays have been spectacular failures. For an archetypal example of botched anthropomorphism, look no further than our most hated paperclip.

Designed to save labour and improve UI learnability, Clippy instead came across as smug and invasive. Not only did his brash tone rub many up the wrong way, but he was irritatingly clingy, appearing on simple tasks where users didn’t need or appreciate help.

The despotic HAL illustrates the other extreme of dislikable machine personality. Clarke and Kubrick created a terrifying villain for 2001 simply by highlighting the unflinching rationality of computation. HAL’s cold-bloodedness is the opposite of humanity. Our heroes are irrational, given to senseless acts in the name of compassion. We can all empathise: who hasn’t done something stupid when in the grip of emotion?

Appealing machine personality lies somewhere between the shores of impassivity and fake friendliness. Social psychology research tells us that we like people who share a similar personality to our own, and people who like us (reciprocal liking). Servile flattery isn’t the answer, of course, but through deep user understanding and reliance on our trusty companions trial, error and feedback perhaps designers will uncover a sweet spot.

We may speculate a few guidelines for conveying personality through behaviour (any additions would be welcomed):

• Personality should be easily overwritten. If you need to make an emergency call, your handset must revert to functionality above all else.
• Personality should be secondary to function. Clippy was disproportionate: his personality overruled his potential usefulness. Not only does this reduce usability, but we risk giving users false expectations of a system’s capabilities.
• Personality should be appropriate to the medium. It may be that desktop computers aren’t an ideal platform for behavioural personality; we still regard them largely as tools of business or home organisation. Mobile phones operate in our intimate space and it’s well known that people form emotional connections with their handsets. Could the mobile arena provide sensible starting points for exploration?

This is largely a thought experiment for now, and it’s clear that behavioural anthropomorphism would raise practical questions. How should users tell devices to stop their shenanigans and get on with the task at hand? Do I want my computer, and whatever systems it’s connected to, to know that I spent the night at my girlfriend’s flat? Would a machine object if I do something it doesn’t approve of?

Any attempt to give technology personality will be divisive. Succeed and we make the technological world a slightly more humane place. Fail, and we create an army of Clippies.

Related resources

• Why is that thing beeping? A sound design primer
• Russell Davies “Materialising and dematerialising a web of data” (mp3, 44 minutes)

Special thanks: Rebecca Cottrell
Photo credits: Duncan, estoril

During the E3 2009 expo, which was held from the 2nd to the 5th of June, Microsoft presented Project Natal. The project brings human-computer interaction without an electronic input device to the masses. By capturing your full body movement and your voice (and being able of doing this for several people at the same time) it brings gameplay to an entirely new level.

Here is the video:

Interesting to see is that again activities within games which up till now didn’t seem fun enough for the player to be involved in, are suddenly becoming much more interesting simply because the type of interaction has changed (the video shows an example of changing the tires during a race). The same thing happened when the Nintendo Wii was introduced. By adding more physical engagement, the fun-factor of certain activities is increased.

Could this be a general rule within gaming and other activities which involve play? More physical engagement equals more fun? Off course it’s not applicable to every type of game, and the amount of fun or ‘satisfaction’ one gets from playing a game isn’t only determined by the degree of physical engagement (think of puzzle or strategy games where this is achieved on a more reflective level), but it certainly proves to be quite a big factor.

This technology will soon find it’s way out of the gaming industry and into other industries, as Steven Spielberg already indicated at the E3. The question now is how big it’s impact will be.

This is a pivotal moment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games - Steven Spielberg

And so it ends… after four days the Interaction’09 conference is over. At the moment we’re enjoying a drink at a bar and just finished up this last report. We’re pretty tired, but also extremely satisfied and inspired. It has been a great experience, which was openly shared with 456 other interaction designers. We’re off to bed, and you are going to read our pretty report.

Again special thanks to my fellow Johnnies, who helped out writing this report: Louise Roose, Patrick Sanwikarja and Pieter Jongerius.

Keynote: How to change the world complicated stuff – Marc Rettig

Today’s opening keynote was given by Marc Rettig, co-founder of Fit Associates. A company that has the intention to lead, nurture, connect and equip conscious organizations for the greatest impact for the common good.

Rettig starts off with stating that times will inevitably change. It is up to interaction designers to make the transition as smooth as possible. He is optimistic about the fact that interaction designers will play a relevant part at this.

The times of change he talks about he calls ‘the great turning’.  In this time we need to change the way we produce and consume our food, the way we use our energy, think about transport and the way we live. Basically we need to shift just about everything that is defined. Rettig also sees a shift in attitude.  A shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’, and from ‘more stuff’ to ‘quality of life’. And as these shifts are mostly of a social nature, we need to connect with the people we design for (yes, the user!).

Design is intimate, even when the product isn’t.

As we have already seen in the last couple of days, sustainability is a behavioral problem. Sustainability is also a distant and cold word, while design is not. Design is personal, intimate and sensitive. It effects the lives of people in ways that we can’t always foresee. Example: a simple remote control can completely shift the hierarchy in a household. Design is intimate, even when the product isn’t. So it seems that we’re already changing behavior. Maybe we should be focusing on how to do a better job…

Rettig made the effort himself by starting a firm.  His company is not about design or about engineering, but about ‘making a difference’. This difference must lead to a different way of looking at problems and solutions. Rettig states that the world of change is a social one and we should aim for the ripple effect (small change, big effect). He also states this ripple effect will last longer if we think in ‘programs of change’ instead of just one project.

Finally, can we initiate change ourselves? Once change has become your goal, just launching a product will no longer satisfy you. Change requires that you create a set of conditions that are also sustainable. (Stay on, even when you have left the building.

Foundations of Interaction Design: bringing design critique to interaction design – Dave Malouf

During the entire conference there was a lot of talk related to whether or not we should try to (over)define who we are or what we do. Dave Malouf is one of the people who believe that a good foundation and knowledge level is needed for us to be able to improve ourselves. During his talk he tried to show us the importance of creating a foundation for interaction design; a base on which you can build further.

To press his point he introduced us to the world of industrial design, where so-called elements of design are introduced as a foundation. These are line, plane, volume, value, texture and color. He then showed how these were used in order to create iconical products.

Then he went on and showed us his current view on the foundation for interaction design and admitted this was still subject for discussion. His list of elements consisted of:

• time
• abstraction: this is related to the level of directness in an interaction. Google Maps has a low abstraction level, since it gives direct feedback when you zoom in/out. A command line has a high level of abstraction.
• metaphor
• negativity: what are we not about, what does this not touch
• motion (recently added)

Malouf believes that we need a foundation in order to have a common language we can share.  Especially in the education of new interaction designers this will be a valuable asset. At the moment courses are still searching what’s the correct path. They miss a solid base, which causes students to miss a consistent view.

Designing for Teams, Designing for Touch – Joe Fletcher

This short presentation was split up in two parts. In the first one Fletcher talked about designing in a team. He said that as a team manager it is okay to be dumb, as long as you manage to create a team around you which is smart. The importance is to motivate the team to come up with creative ideas. In order to do this Fletcher shortly gave us two brainstorming methods:

• Improv brainstorming: Introduce a single idea. Shoot down any other ideas and build upon that single idea until it’s great.
• Round Robin: Introduce a direction and let all the team members design solutions on their own for 5 minutes. After this they present them and the entire teams votes on the core ideas.

It’s all about facilitating. The team does the rest.

After this he went on about designing for touch. He stated that ‘tap is not the new click’, which was a direct attack on Dan Saffer’s statement ‘tap is the new click’. Fletcher says that by implying that it is the same you are not thinking about the implications. A touch interface is totally different in it’s use and handiness then a mouse.

Fletcher tries to make us realize that touch isn’t the solution to everything. We are enjoying this new technology, but also hype it… especially walls. Besides that we have to realize that it is difficult to design for touch, since there still isn’t any consent. The maximum number of touch point differs per touch screen technology, ranging from one (Wacom) to 52 (Microsoft Surface). Another example he gave were about gesture consent, or the lack of it. On Firefox dragging to the left means going back, while in Coverflow it means going forward.

Understanding contexts of use – Milford Rochford (Nokia Design)

Miles Rochford from Nokia Design gave a very clear presentation about looking beyond the user and designing for contexts of use. He started with a nice example of how, after studying how people live in rural China and India, Nokia came up with a low-end phone that has a built-in torch. Because the power grid there is not reliable and you always have a mobile phone with you, this is a very welcome addition in emerging markets. One could argue that you don’t need extensive ethnographic research to come up with that idea, but Miles’ point was clear.

the one tool you need as a designer is not sketching, but empathy

The presentation consisted of three parts: What is context of use, why is it relevant and how can we apply it? First of all, Miles’ definition of context is a simple one: the right thing, at the right time, in the right place for the right person. That may sound obvious, but if you break issues up into these four aspects, it is very useful to look at things this way. Secondly, contexts are relevant because designers should not only solve problems, they should create interactions that go beyond people’s needs. At Nokia, inspiration comes from people. Their strategy is to observe, then design.
Finally, Miles provided the audience with three steps to apply contexts of use:

• Define: Establish the laws of physics for your project. Know what the constraints are that follow from the context.
• Document: How do these laws impact the interactions? It’s impossible to tackle every issue, so the designer has to prioritize and perhaps compromise.
• Deliver: Finally, the designer has to create great interactions for different contexts. Designers should not try to design one interaction to rule them all.

Miles encouraged the audience to try out his method, repeat it and learn from it. His closing remark was that designers should be really good at listening. Because the one tool you need as a designer is not sketching, but empathy.

Because of the simplicity of Miles’ story, his points were very clear. Unfortunately, there was no time for Miles to go into the subject in more detail. It would have been nice to see more cases of how Nokia’s designs follow from studying contexts, but I guess we have to go out and apply it on our own, as Miles suggested.

Mobile UX design patterns: a work in progress – Jenifer Tidwell (Google)

Jenifer Tidwell’s presentation was basically a very straightforward overview of the most important design patterns for mobile devices.

In her introduction, she gave a number of interesting statistics, such as the fact that tens of millions of weekly searches on Google comes from mobile devices, of which 80 % comes from outside the USA. In some countries, the number of mobile searches already surpass that from PCs. A nice eyeopener is that 98 % of the world’s mobile phones are keypad phones. That is a good thing to keep in mind, with us interaction designer often being more focused on high end touchscreen smartphones. A pattern needs to improve the user’s life and not be a technical solution. Otherwise it’s not really a pattern at all. In order to design for mobile devices effectively, the field should first be narrowed, as there are simply too many kinds these days. Jenifer’s focus was on mobile phones. She briefly discussed 15 design patterns, most of which most designer are probably already familiar with. I won’t write about all of them. Instead, the most interesting patterns are listed here:

Persistent toolbar. Always keep in mind the scarce screen real estate. This sounds like an obvious thing, but it is often overlooked. Beware of the layer cake effect (the stacking of lots of different headers). Instead, take one persistent toolbar of minimal height.

Infinite list. Because loading times should always be kept to a minimum, it’s a good idea to put a button at the bottom of lists that loads more items, instead of showing the long list right away.

Aggressive auto completion. Typing gets in the way of fast task completion, so auto completion should be used as much as possible. However, designers ought to be careful with free text input. In that case, bad auto completion can be very frustrating. The key here is: test, test, test.

Rich interconnections. These are direct links from one application to another, with data from the user’s context prefilled. This is a good idea because switching between apps is often difficult on mobile devices. Mobile users like things fast, so any work you can take out of their hands is welcome.

I had hoped Jenifer’s story would have been more compelling and inspiring. Her constantly apologizing about the fact that her presentation was missing fonts and pictures didn’t help her deliver a powerful presentation, either. It put too much emphasis on the ‘work in progress’ part, and drew attention away from the actual subject. I would have liked to have seen her address issues such as differences between devices and what challenges that brings, or a vision on how mobile devices and with it, patterns will evolve. Most of Jenifer’s examples were screenshots from the iPhone, which was a pity, considering 98 percent of phones have keypads, as she pointed out herself. Despite of the superficiality of the session, it was relevant to designers, because as Jenifer said: we are all going to be mobile designers soon enough.

Play and embodiment – Kars Alfrink (Leapfrog)

In this very compelling session, Kars talked about tangible and social interactions, or as he calls them, embodied interactions. Kars is a game designer and argued that game design and interaction design are not overlapping disciplines as they have long been considered, but rather game design is a specialized part of interaction design. Looking at play can be very inspiring when designing interactions.

Kars’ story was quite theoretical, such as his explanation of pragmatic action versus epistemic action. Pragmatic actions are about directly performing a task, whereas epistemic actions are about getting a better understanding of the task. An example of this is the fact that Tetris players who do superfluous action (move the brick around a lot before placing it) are better at tetris because they do that. They move part of the thinking in their head to the real world. In other words, there is no thinking without doing. So, as lots of the other sessions have also stressed, sketching and prototyping must be part of the design process.

The core of Lars’ story was this: play is free movement within a more rigid structure. Ultimately, it’s the player that defines the real rules, not the designer – he just sets the structure. Kars gave a beautiful example of users defining their own ‘rules’ within an existing system. At a neonatalogy ward Kars once visited nurses used a whiteboard for planning. They came up with their own system of assigning different tasks to nurses caring for babies, using the whiteboard, magnets, written text and colors. The whiteboard became an improvised information display. Obviously, the designer of the whiteboard and the magnets and the markers never thought about nurses using it that way. The nurses made their own rules. Once people start using products, the products are never the same again, or ‘function reforms form perpetually’. Therefore designers should build a ‘loose fit’ into their designs. We should embrace uncertainty and don’t try to control the complete user experience.

Keynote: Each One, Teach One – Kim Goodwin

This conference has seen some serious muscle keynoting. Kim did a great job of turning this last speech of the conference into a worthy closing piece. It actually gave us some goose bumps.

We are improving in our practice, it’s a fact. We’re not running in a treadmill going nowhere. Ten years back, the industry suffered from many usability and design issues. Today, people demand good design because of the growing number of good design they experience. This is a major accomplishment. The classic example is of course the much discussed iPhone. To many, it really is revelation of the power of design. Designers, developers, CEO’s and MBA’s alike, the iPhone allows them to grasp the value of good design, at a gut level. This is a major step forward from interaction designers being important primarily to fix usability problems.

We deserve to celebrate, but we shouldn’t claim victory too early. We are not there yet, and as other keynote speakers have pointed out, some major challenges lie ahead. For one, we have to design for sustainability. Kim took an alternative approach to this important issue. She argues that sustainability inevitably means that we as a discipline have to be around for a long time to come!

There’s a challenge in that. Our recent successes give us a window of opportunity, but it might close all too soon. We have to deliver. Until now we made a lot of promises, which we didn’t always fulfill. We are being looked at in a critical way, we have to deliver soon. But at the same time there are significant hurdles, like our yet to be defined identity.

At this point, Kim started building at the main point of her talk. There are three major challenges facing us:

• First, there’s no magic pill to creating good design. Design is much more work than many managers believe. At the same time, there are not enough interaction designers to go around. So recruiting managers will get the next best thing, get disappointed, and our window of opportunity might close.
• Second, we need a much greater diversity of experience and color in our profession. It is appalling to see that most interaction designers come from a small segment of society. Our group clearly doesn’t reflect the demographics of the communities we aim to serve.
• Thirdly, you simply cannot design effectively by yourself. Designing by yourself is like singing in the shower. We need to team up.

In order to overcome these, Kim did a dramatic and sincere appeal.

We need start teaching each other, one on one. Every one of you. Start now.

We have to require seniors to start mentoring juniors.
We have to learn to be better mentors. Listen. Observe. Imagine.
Mentoring is a two way thing. You learn your craft by teaching.

Each one, teach one. Only in this way we may grow a sustainable profession.

Time is going fast… we’re already past 75% of Interaction’09. Today was a day full of totally different presentations. It varied from very energizing keynotes to short boring presentations (we didn’t write about them . In between the sessions we’ve been rushing in order to do some interviews with Mark Baskinger and Jared Spool, but you’ll see those results later. For now: check out todays report. Special thanks to Louise Roose, Patrick Sanwikarja and Pieter Jongerius, who helped write this report.

Keynote: Irrational behavior – Robert Fabricant
The first keynote of today was by Robert Fabricant, an executive creative director at frog design. He starts by addressing a red hot issue this year: what is interaction design? But since nobody has the answer to that question, he points out what it’s not. He says: Interaction design is not computing technology. Technology is not our medium, behavior is. So how can we express behavior and why is it important? He talks about visualization of data. By visualizing behavior, people become aware of it and can see the impact it has.

Another perk of visualization is that designers love it and it’s much easier to actually remember stuff that you can see. But although visualization is a powerful tool to make things feel more real, will it really change behavior?

By visualizing behavior, people become aware of it and can see the impact it has.

Changing behavior comes down to motivation. If people are not motivated to buy or use your product, they just won’t. What we really need is salience. So we need to learn about what it is that motivates people, what they see, what their perception of our products is. If we know all this…. we have the power to change people’s behavior.

Let’s explore a bit what people respond to. Fabricant gives us a couple of good examples, like faces. All people are trained from birth to recognize faces. Give your product a face and it will speak to them.
Another powerful thing is personalized visualizations. If I can actually see how great my debt is, or how much money i spend (or waste) on products, this will definitely have an effect on me. A third component of human behavior is rewards. If there is the prospect of a great reward, this can be as addictive as a drug and people will do stuff to get the reward.

So wrapping up, we can say that interaction design is about social behavior. About visualizing it, making it real, thus influencing it and… showing the impact the behavior has on this world. After all, we have the beautiful task to help people understand the change needed and help them begin making it.

Katherine Coombs
During her session Coombs tried to inform us of the current state and possible future innovations in banking, but especially mobile banking. She stated that we should not try to innovate for all people. For mobile banking we should focus on the younger people, who will quickly adapt and use it. The elderly like internet banking and will keep using that. This focus is interesting and good, because too often we try to design for everybody… and fail at that.

The most interesting aspect for interaction designers is ‘design for security’. How can you design a user experience where money is involved, that people trust to work safely? Coombs showed us several innovations trying to do this, both failing and succeeding. Some interesting examples were the ability to pay the electricity bill via ATM and the possibility to pre-order money via your mobile phone. In the last case you don’t need a bank card anymore, since you will receive a unique temporary pin-number.

The bottomline of Coombs’ presentation is that there are lots of possibilities for interaction designers to join the innovation and improve the user experience. So let’s do that.

Metaphor Brainstorming: Using Metaphors to Generate Design Ideas, Requirements and Product Personality – Chauncey Wilson
Wilson tried to give us some insights in how we can come up with metaphors. These metaphors should help us explain complexity: they basically describe one thing to explain another.

While not everything during the presentation stuck in my mind, I did like his approach. When you are working on a new project you should go outside and look at the world. While looking around you should see things how they are and describe them. These things could be useful metaphors. As examples he mentioned a car dealer, bookstores and supermarkets. One of the metaphors he derived from the car dealer was the showroom and the possibility for a test drive.

These metaphors can be used to explain complexity, but also to generate new possibilities and features. Wilson also said that it is a good idea to assign homework to people in the design team. During this assignment they must come observe and come up with possible metaphors. Although a lot of designers already think 24/7 about their job, this is still a good approach. It forces you to really observe.

Building a Digital Concept Car - Andrei Herasimchuck
In this session, Andrei made a strong plea to get over it all and start prototyping today. Prototyping is essential to creating complex applications of any kind. Andrei used a powerful quote to support this:

It is far more effective to sit in a chair than to judge it’s comfort by looking at a picture of it

Some quotes from this session:
-    Being able to reuse the prototype in the final product is often a major selling point.
-    Let’s just do it and see how it works. This saves you a lot of meetings.
-    In a project, not being able to throw stuff away is disastrous.

In preparation for this session, Andrei put up a valuable little tool to determine which method of prototyping is the best for a given situation. At the bottom of this page there are also some useful links to tools. You can use it at Involutions.

Design by Community – Leisa Reichelt
Leisa Reishelt talked about the process of redesigning Drupal.org, the website of Drupal, an open source content management system. The special thing about the process was that the community of drupal users were very much involved throughout the research and design. Four … for designing by community were given:

1. Bake the community into the process
2. Be open-source like
3. Transfer skills and knowledge
4. When in doubt, share

Leisa explained how the community was used for research and design feedback and how she communicated with them through media like twitter and flickr. This delivered a lot of valuable data, suggestions and opinions (some louder than others) for the redesign, which actually gave the designers more freedom than usual. The most important point in this talk was that design is no place for democracy. In the end, it will always be the designer’s responsibility to make and defend the design decisions.

Designing Natural User Interfaces – Nathan Moody
Nathan Moody talked about NUIs, how they differ from GUIs and how he designs these at Stimulant. Natural User Interfaces increase the user’s immersion with the content by eliminating proxy controls such as mice and keyboards. Direct manipulation, ‘the content is the interface’ and guessable interaction are main aspects of NUIs. Graphical User Interfaces are graphical and visible, whereas NUIs are physical and invisible. The two don’t exclude each other but rather they are fit for different purposes and environments. GUIs are better for productive and efficient task completion, NUIs are much better for social and collaborative tasks. Nathan showed a number of NUIs he worked on at Stimulant, such as applications for the Microsoft Surface. He also shared a number of practical guidelines for designing NUIs, such as working with the right hardware, and at scale. The four biggest challenges are managing user expectations, facilitating natural and gestural input, designing for large format interaction and for 360 degrees interaction.

the content is the interface

Gorilla Methods for designing in the wild – Paula Wellings
Paula Wellings gave a presentation about designing in the wild. The old fashioned way, researchers study their subjects ‘in the wild’, take their observations back to the office and study them there. But the problem with this is that there is a lot in the wild that cannot be captured. For instance, subtle things in the environment can make all the difference for the user, but may not be noted by the researchers. When they are, this is called environment fidelity. Other types of fidelity of research methods are social fidelity and intervention fidelity. Before design research is done, the researcher should kind what kind of fidelity is important for the project and choose their method accordingly. For instance, social fidelity may be very important, when more than just one user is involved. Paula had a nice way of illustrating this, by showing a picture of one duck in an office, versus a video of a flock of ducks elegantly flying in a V formation. Her point was that you could invite a duck to an office and study the duck and ask it questions (low social fidelity), but that way you would never find out about the amazing things that ducks can perform together. Good places to steal methods from are Embedded R&D, participatory design and design research/action research. Design and development are already touching, and now the fields of research and design are also starting to touch. According to Paula, it’s not a bad idea when everything is touching everything. It was an interesting talk, but it would have been nice if Paula had gone into more depth about the methods she uses for different kinds of fidelity by showing some examples.

Sketching haptic & multimodal interaction – Camille Moussette
First of all, the term ‘sketching’ in the title was somewhat misleading, because the presenter didn’t mean drawing on paper, but rather ‘sketching’ with hardware: prototyping. Camille explained what haptic interfaces are and showed a number of methods to prototype these kind of interfaces. Haptic interfaces work via our sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations and motions. They should not be confused with touch interfaces. The iPhone is in fact a very poor example of a haptic device, because only the vibration function is delivers haptic interaction, the touchscreen doesn’t. An interesting fact is that haptic perception is twenty times faster than vision. Humans are able to notice two stimuli no more than five milliseconds apart. Haptic interaction is often multimodal, because our touch sense is almost never isolated. Sound and vision usually accompany haptic interfaces in some way. Camille showed a number of prototyping methods that can be used, from lo-fi things you can do in minutes or hours, to tools made in a day, to what can be done in multiple days or weeks. He didn’t go into much detail about the tools, but it was nice to see that there is a large range of things you can do. One of the difficulties with designing haptic interfaces is that they are very hardware dependent. Even the smallest technical issues completely kill the interaction. Clearly, it is still a very new type of interface and it will be interesting to see what researchers and designers will come up with and when haptic interfaces will truly find their way into commercial products.

Surviving Design Review – Charles Kreitzberg
During the entire day, this was the talk that generated the most smiles on peoples faces. Kreitzberg started off with a picture of hell, stating that this is what a design review is. According to him the biggest problem is that clients: a) don’t understand design, b) focus on individual needs and c) they state concerns in terms of solutions. And the solutions they come up with are a danger to the design, since it will kill the integrity.

So to deal with this you have to know how to deal with the client. And you must know who they are, what their concerns and fears are to respond to this. Kreitzberg defined a total of six types of clients:

1. The Decider
2. Mr Nice
3. The Enforcer
4. Mr Know it All
5. Ms Clueless
6. Silent Killer

Each type has it’s own fears, goals, concerns and ways to deal with. For example The Decider is typically the boss or project leader. He (it can be a she) fears that he’ll look bad if something goes wrong. You have to try and keep him out of the review and only report the decisions. Another example is the Silent Killer. This is typically the IT guy who doesn’t respect designers and thinks that ‘They won’t let me do it the way it needs to be done” He needs acknowledgement for his geekwork and wants to feel respected and competent.

In the end Kreitzberg stated that you have to know who you are dealing with and have to respond accordingly. Choose your battles and be prepared to give up the non-essential. When you get comments from a client try to get past the solution he gives and hear the true message. State those underlying concerns and resolve them. Make it clear that you understand the concern. And last: avoid making decisions during the review, always do it afterwards.

Keynote: Carpe Diem – Dan Saffer
Dan closed the day in a packed keynote room. He had a real invigorating talk that got the crowd all excited. Rounds of applause interrupting him every few minutes, and rightly so. Dan had a couple of very powerful messages to bring.

Dan argued, by name of William James (1842-1910), that beliefs and attention are the same fact. So, in order to truly innovate, what we have to is learn to spot the moonwalking bears of our industry.

The message Dan brought was as positive as it was activating. In the past decades, there was tremendous progress in computing and it’s applications. We can expect this to continue, with new exciting possibilities coming into view every day. There are many new chances for design: in health care, education, energy, and services. There are also new paradigms to build on: gestures, voice, touch. And even though we seem to have some rough times ahead both economically and ecologically, there are ways to overcome these. Design is part of the answer.

Dan gave the audience some powerful quotes that should help us widen our beliefs:

• Stop discussing differences or responsibilities of IXD, UXD, UCD, ACD, genius design, and the like. You must develop your own way of framing your role. And very important: this frame you use may vary from job to job.
• Instead of ‘design thinking’, think and make. Design details. This requires skill and care and gives a competitive edge. Those cannot be copied.
• Defetishize Simplicity. Complexity can be beautiful too.
• Sometimes you have to be more of an artist than a scientist. Nobody gets excited by a wireframe.
• The future is not Google-able. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So, stop waiting for permission. Stop using your clients as an excuse not to create something new

I am not afraid of storm, for I am learning how to sail my ship

The keynote was as short as it was powerful. The closing motto must have been the bravest of them all: may tomorrow be more uncertain than today. Applause.