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

—–

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

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

Why metaphors at all?

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

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

Microsoft Bob, the worst metaphor OS ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Challenge

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

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

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

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

Dissecting the metaphor

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

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

My advice

Continue doing three exercises:

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

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

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

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

Mozilla Labs Concept Series, together with IxDA and your very own Johnny Holland, have launched the second in their series of Design Challenges. The Summer ’09 challenge – Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – closes on June 21st.

About the Design Challenge

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. The aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Open Web as a whole.

Design Challenge: Summer 09

For this Design Challenge Mozilla Labs decided to team up with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design, and Johnny Holland (of which we’re really proud). Each one of us will provide two panelists and we’ll also be available for help (via @ixda or @johnnyholland). During the challenge Johnny will provide the teams/designers with inspiring articles related to the subject. In this Summer 09 challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.

However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.

So why are you still here? As Dan Saffer urged us: don’t wait for permission and face the challenge.

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.

On this second day at Interaction’09 the hardcore interaction designers (us) attended the last workshops. After this the actual conference started. The opening keynote was done by John Thackara, after which Jared Spool made his six friends discuss several topics. And hardcore as we are, here is the report… (and I’m off to bed).

Workshop: Drawing Ideas (report by Patrick Sanwikarja)
Today Mark Baskinger and Willam Bardel gave a workshop about drawing as part of the design process. It was a very hands-on workshop, which consisted mostly of sketching exercises, with Mark and William telling their story in between.

Their main argument was that sketching is a very powerful way to communicate your ideas, much better than images created on a computer. This is because people (unconsciously) react differently to sketches than they do to computer generated drawings, even rough designs. Computer output is always precisely rough, while hand sketches are roughly rough. People naturally pick up on the imperfections of sketches and will understand that it is far from a finished design.

Mark Baskinger is convinced that every designer, whether you are a graphic, industrial or interaction designer, should learn how to sketch, at least on a basic level. And so the first part of the workshop was a crash course in basic sketching techniques. It started with drawing straight lines, moving up to squares, cubes, circles and ellipses and on to drawing arrows, hands and people figures (according to Mark Baskinger, if you draw stick figures, you are not a real designer). Doing these basic exercises is a good way to ‘warm up’, even for experienced drawers.

Computer output is always precisely rough, while hand sketches are roughly rough.

In the second half of the workshop we did a number of exercises in which we applied the basic techniques to tackle interaction design issues. Laundry was taken as a case, for which we had to draw all the different parts of the process and communicate the user’s problems. One way interaction designers can use hand drawings is by sketching key moments in a process. Designers often tend to focus on just the middle of the story, forgetting about the beginning and the end. Sequences, scenes and scenarios are good ways to communicate the entire user’s story.
A well-drawn scene captures a bunch of elements. Subtle things like the posture of a person or the surrounding objects tell a lot about the context of use. If you have basic skills, drawing good scenes can be done very quickly.

More than anything, this workshop was a lot of fun. I know I love sketching, but I forgot just how much. This workshop has definitely sparked my inner twelve year old to get away from my monitor much more often and pick up a piece of paper and a pencil. Even though I consider myself I fairly good sketcher, I found I have gotten a bit sloppy. Warming up and keep practicing the basics are good ways to keep up. I would have liked to have done more exercises for interaction designers and perhaps less basics, but seeing how few of the participants use sketching in their day to day work, the workshop was very well set up. It was great to see how people who didn’t think they could properly sketch were actually doing a great job. This summer, the workshop presenters will publish a book about Drawing Ideas and I look forward to learn more sketching techniques for interaction designers from that.

Workshop: Building and using a pattern library for web interfaces (report by Pieter Jongerius)
The goal of this workshop was to get an idea of why patterns are useful, how to create them, how to create a library and how to implement it in your organisation. It turned out to be a slow paced workshop with a lot of discussion that at times circled around semantics and a frustrating struggle between pragmatism and philosophy. All in all, for participants who wanted to start their own library, this was a good one.

Using a good pattern library can save you lots of money. Folks at Autodesk discovered that for many interface problems, dozens of different solutions were designed over and over again. That had to stop, and patterns are the answer. The actual term ‘patterns’ was coined as early as 1977 by Christopher Alexander, in his book ‘A pattern language’. In recent years, people such as Martijn van Welie and Jenifer Tidwell continued on this work and brought it into the realm of 21st century interaction design.

Patterns generally consist of four parts:

• Problem. What does the user want?
• Solution. How to meet the users needs
• Context. When to use it
• Examples. Where you can see it happening.

A lot of effort went into discussing detailed pattern properties. A more detailed list of pattern content can be found at a Boxes and Arrows article Yahoo! did.

Creating patterns can be great fun, as we soon found out in this workshop. However, in order to have a successful pattern library implementation in your organization, it was advised to team up with other disciplines such as development and visual design, so that pattern thinking is deeply integrated into your way of working. Each pattern may be accompanied by wireframing stencils (such as the magnificent Konigi (konigi.com/tools/overview) sets) and ready-to-use blocks of code. A couple of great code libraries that have patterns were mentioned: YUI,  jQuery, SproutCore.

So… Am I going to set up my own library? Not for now. The challenges that come from setting it up and doing it right are tremendous. For smaller organizations such as ours, the open libraries such as the ones from Yahoo! and Welie are great places to start right off. Sorry to see that there’s no gestural patterns there yet. Place your ads here.

Keynote: Experiencing Sustainability – John Thackara (report by Louise Roose)
The first keynote on Interaction’09 was by John Thackara (Doors of Perception) with the promising title ‘experiencing sustainability’. He started off with a rather depressing series of peaks that occur this very moment in the world. Peaks in water-usage, oil-usage, transportation of goods, climate changes etc. Never before in the history of the world have we used so much water or natural resources, produced so much waste or moved so many goods around. But, Thackara says, this will all come to a sudden stop. And things will never be the same again.

Business as usual will be business as unusual

At the beginning of his presentation he focused on energy consumption. Thackara stated that green cars and alternative energy won’t save us. He explains that a small mobile phone has an environmental impact of 500 kg. Which also means that if tomorrow all cars were magically replaced by green cars, that still wouldn’t save our asses. So the question is: what can we do?

He then goes on to talk a bit about men in suits, which frankly was a bit boring and I don’t seem to recall the exact message. (Jeroen van Geel agrees) Something about a huge global debt, thanks to our bankers and this is very bad…

Anyway, let’s focus on what we can do. We have to realize that a crisis provides great new design opportunities. This is the optimistic message Thackara wants to bring across. There are all sorts of tools to measure the effect things have on the environment. These tools are mostly pieces of software, and need lots of improvement. And isn’t that exactly the spot where we, the designer, come in?

And then there are other areas that need to be addressed. Like food. We need to change the way we think about it. Thackara shows us examples of urban agriculture, or better yet, a guy he knows in France that has a food garden in a suburb (or several) and makes then look pretty. Another example is ‘landsharing’, an initiative by some English people who wanted to grow stuff but didn’t have land combined with people who had the land but didn’t have use for it. They hooked up through a website.

These people weren’t thinking about saving the planet, they just wanted to do something…. And did it. The same goes for finding local, off grid, energy sources. Combined efforts make it happen. Or how about feral trade, where people who travel import or export stuff for others.

All these initiatives are already out there. Whatever you can think of, somebody is doing it. But they need help! And that’s where, again, we come in. This is the golden opportunity for interaction and other designers to actually make a difference. At the end of the keynote I wanted to scream: “Yes we can.” and “Just do it!” (I know, I’m cheesy)

Jared Spool & friends (report by me)
During a one hour session Jared Spool moderated a panel discussion. It was situated around an imaginary situation, in which there would be a sudden need for over 10.000 interaction designers. Where are they coming from? What do we expect from them?

One of the first discussions was about the methods companies use when trying to find and hire a good interaction designer. Matthew Holloway (SAP) and Andrei Herasimcuck (Involution Studios) didn’t agree on the method. In a job interview Holloway tends to focus on the behavior of a interaction designer, trying to see whether he would fit in a team… how he would think and respond in a certain situation, etc. This behavioral based interview is totally the opposite of Herasimcuck approach, which is knowledge based. He is far more interested in the qualities of the portfolio and design skills. The difference in this approach is quite interesting. How do you check if somebody is good? How do you know that he actually designed this? Personally I would prefer the behavioral based interview, focussing on the responsiveness of the person. You could easily check how abstract and fast somebody can think… But even then you’d want to know what somebody would come up with. Josh Seiden (Liquidnet) commented that he would give people home excercises, in order to check this.

Another part of the discussion focused on the type of characteristics and skills interaction designers need. According to Seiden passion for and the absolute urge to solving problems are an absolute must. But the exact skills needed are still difficult to define. The reason is that we can’t exactly define who we are and what we focus on. Are we user experience or interaction designers? Does it matter which one we are? What are the differences? During the discussion nobody could answer this question. Holloway claimed that it shouldn’t matter, as long as the customers know what we can do for them. While I tend to agree with him it’s still frustrating to see that we can’t define where our field starts and ends. This was the biggest insight I had during this discussion; we must start defining what we do and what skills are needed for this. Maybe it isn’t a clear line and actually something modular, but we must start somewhere.

Today one of the best UX events in the world started; interaction09 in Vancouver. For four days more than 400 interaction designers huddle together in order to get inspired on the field of interaction design. Of course we sacrificed ourselves and traveled to Vancouver just to give you a ‘live’ report. For the next four days you can read our thoughts and observations.

On this first day there were a series of workshops. We attended a total of three, of which these are the reports.

Workshop: Design Studio (report by Pieter Jongerius)
In this workshop, participants were challenged in their design thinking. Speakers were Liya Zheng and Jeanine Harriman from LiquidNed. Their main argument: interaction design is a growing and promising discipline. Broadly applied “Design thinking” can dramatically improve user experience as well as corporate performance. This storyline was obviously well received by the UX-professional audience.

Three levels of design were indicated:

• Interaction design. Main ingredients of this design level include demographic research, persona’s, technological requirements, user experience, scenario writing, sketching.
• Service design. On this level, we took the step of looking at a greater timeline for the experience of this product, in our case a garment retail example. Moments in time included: awareness, trigger to shop, shopping destination decision, browse, shop, reflection on the purchase. These steps were called the ‘service journey’. For each of these steps, some activities and problems were identified, such as ‘customer becomes aware of a trend’ and ‘no one to give you honest feedback’. These served as a basis of designing the service in terms of contact points and communication requirements.
• Strategic design. On this last level, the group explored the challenges of looking ahead several years. The aim was to come up with an innovative business idea, based on social, technological and demographical trends. From these trends, the group was free to select a target audience and identify opportunities.

It is true, this way of design thinking is very powerful and it enhances the view and influence interaction or UX designers have in their teams. However, many of the participants seemed to have already used these types of methodologies. In fact, the speakers seemed to be surprised of the level of experience. The group was even appraised as their “best audience ever”. And we were in it, yay!

Designing for Touch screens and Interactive Gestures (report by myself)
In this workshop Dan Saffer and Bill DeRouchey introduced us to the world of interactive gestures. The first part of the workshop focused on Dan’s presentation ‘Tap is the new click’, which is based upon his new book. It goes into the challenges interaction designers face when designing for gestural and touch interfaces.  One of these challenges is the changing field of expertise/knowledge: when designing gestures we also have to keep in mind the physical (dis-)abilities of people. Kinesiology and physiology will become a growing part of our job.

We shouldn’t design our interfaces based on pixels, but on physical dimensions. Although it sounds logical, it is worth the mention… we are so used to designing in screen resolutions. This approach would also call for sketching out your interface before digitizing it. This is a very easy way for seeing what it looks like. This brings me to the core of the workshop: paper prototyping.

Saffer and DeRouchey told us that low fidelity prototyping has become more and more important. Gesture and touch interfaces have become so diverse and complex that you need to play around with the interface and test it. Since actual prototyping takes a lot of time, paper prototyping is a good alternative. During the workshop people split up in teams and had to design an interactive music booth. With paper and tape they had to make a testable version. The energy in the room was remarkable and within an hour most teams had a fairly good working prototype. This shows that with minimum tools you can mimic a complex interaction, which you can then test and improve on the spot. Without touching any computer.

At the end they defined three zones of engagement for a particular product: attraction (noticing the product from a larger range), observation (seeing how to use the product) and interaction (actual usage of the product). When designing an interactive installation you should be aware of all these aspects. At the end of the workshop it was noted that the observation zone is the most difficult to design for… it lies halfway between attraction and interaction and touches questions like “How can I participate?” and “Wouldn’t I look ridiculous when I participate?”

So we want to be Hardware / Software designers (report by Patrick Sanwikarja)
This workshop consisted of two parts. The first part was a presentation by Ted Booth (Smart Design) and Michele Tepper (Frog Design) that was basically about the differences between interaction design (the software) and industrial design (the hardware). In the second part, five groups worked on a choice of four design assignments that integrated software and hardware, such as a medication dispenser or a robotic vacuum cleaner.

Even though the border between interaction design and industrial design is a grey area, some clear differences can be found. The first, most important one is that when designing for hardware one has to take into account all the physical restraints. That may be a quite obvious difference, but it does mean something for the way industrial designers work. For instance, industrial designers can’t make any last minute changes to their work because their products are not made of code and pixels. They have to make sure that when the injection mold is build, months before the products will be launched, the design is already definite. This makes industrial design a much more iterative and dynamic approach, always figuring out the best balance between materials, cost, durability, usability and so on. What follows from this is that prototyping is of the absolute essence. For hard/software design, prototyping should be an integrated exercise. Ideally, this is done by prototyping the circuitry, but easier and also effective ways are making video mockups and paper prototyping.

Feedback is important, too. Rule: have twice as many critiques as you think you need (and that probably still won’t be enough). But the most important thing when designing hard/software is to bring the experience alive. It all comes down to an integrated concept and being able to share that. When you can get the big picture across, you can deal with the details later.

This workshop didn’t provide me with groundbreaking new insights, but I did take some things out of it:

• First of all, nobody really knows what interaction design really is, what to call it and where the line lies between interaction design and industrial design. But the good thing is, that doesn’t really matter. Especially during the second, active part of the workshop, people from different backgrounds collaboratively came up with really interesting ideas. What matters is that different people have different skill sets and that you should be aware of who does what best in your organization.
• Mock it up before you fuck it up! When it comes to prototyping and iterating, interaction designers can take an example from industrial designers.
• Wireframes are weird. And they are. Industrial design is about creating an experience in space, interaction design is about an experience over time. I don’t think wireframes are wrong, but I do agree with the presenters that interaction designers should pay more attention to designing the temporal aspect, rather than designing just the ‘snapshots’.
• Finally, sketches are still the best way to bring ideas across. Sketches are vivid and they are a shared vocabulary that everyone understands. The second part of the workshop really showed that.