As always a pumped, but a bit more tired from previous nights sponsored festivities, the audience kicked of the last day of the conference. After the opening keynote the winner of the student competition was announced and everybody got a chance to know a little more about the results from that.

Jeffery Blais – Designing for Mobile Experiences

One of the prediction for the coming decade was the importance of mobile technology over the next 10 years. Jeffery Blais from Sapient gave us a glimpse exactly why mobile experience will be so predominant. Mobile is for people that are constantly on the go, personal, naturally social, and used frequently. Presently, there are 4 billion people in the world that have some type of mobile subscription, and it’s projected that in 5 years, all cellphones in the United States will be a smartphone of some kind.

As designers, we have certain challenges we will face with the rise of mobile. For example, there will be a massive amount of devices available, each with their own nuances and methods of interactions – an interface design that works perfectly for one could completely fail for another.

Luckily, there are some strategies that can be adopted to deal with these challenges:

• Understanding the business goals behind the mobile channel of your product.
• Who is the audience that you are targeting?
• What kind of opportunities does this mobile channel provide?
• What does the road-map of your mobile interactions look like?

The keynote closed with tips on how to design for mobile experiences. The first step is to gain an understanding of the UI constraints: are you dealing with a full touch based screen or a tactile keyboard with a trackball? Understanding this allows you to know what the most optimum interactions are needed. In order to flush out these interactions, sketching is the best tool. An important part of this sketching activity is to detail the various states that a mobile application can take. It also lets you get down to the interactions that truly matter, and keeps the mobile experience as simple as possible.

Cindy Chastain – Thinking Like a Storyteller

Cindy Chastain's use of the classic dramaturgic model to map a use flow in the same manner

The importance of storytelling has been a recent topic of debate within the interaction design community. This was highlighted by a series of tweets that Cindy Chastain showcased at the very start of her talk. Some argued that they didn’t feel storytelling should get the level of importance as was being implied, while others argued that storytelling is pivotal to the process of interaction design. With her presentation she hoped to paint a better picture of storytelling’s role in design, and it would be safe to say she knocked it out of the park.

Perhaps the most profound nugget of knowledge that Cindy shared with the crowd was the fact that no matter what, when people use something they describe that use as a self-narrative. Everything from how it was used, to how it made them feel by using it. It’s how they convince their friends and family to either purchase a product, or avoid it. So, even if we don’t see the importance of storytelling from the perspective of our work, it’s very much there when our designs make it out into the wild.

Cindy pointed out that the best form of storytelling which we can learn from is drama. Specifically, there are six qualitative elements of drama which can be incorporated into our design process and thinking.

• Plot (events)
• Character (agents)
• Thought (ideas/themes)
• Diction (language)
• Song (pattern)
• Spectacle (The visual)

In closing, we were left with a practical exercise which ties to a design activity we already do: taking the natural flow of classic dramaturgic model, and mapping that to the flows we generate for how people will interact with our designs. This allows for us to map certain steps, people, or systems to one of the six qualitative elements listed above.

Gretchen Andersson – The Importance of Facial Features

Gretchen Andersson

The intention of Gretchen’s talk might not come through at once to the uninitiated. It connects a lot to what Chris Fahey said in his talk: “If we don’t humanize our products, our products will mechanize us.”.
Gretchen’s talk was more of a suggestion on how to hands-on work with how to convey the inner message of what we are working on.
Gretchen says we need take our heads out of the information architecture, wire framing, boxes and arrows work now and then and pay more attention to what it is we want to communicate to our users on a more emotional level. Her suggestion is to do that by using what she has chosen to name facial features. Gretchen referred to something that Jared Spool has said, that we are risking “if we don’t watch ourselves we risk ending up becoming perceived as a very boring crowd”. Gretchen referred to her recent switch to an employer that has a tradition to work more with product design, an area where these kind of emotional features are much more apparent in the design process.

She gave us long list of examples of static, physical products with obvious facial features among other from a recent commercials and then continued on to compare/discuss this to products with more interactive/experience over time related aspects.

She suggested we start by dissecting existing products with this in mind and then use that knowledge to apply it to our own products.

Kel Smith – The Use of Virtual Worlds Among People with Disabilities

Kel did a talk on what is referred to as inclusive design. In his introduction he talked about the term digital natives vs digital immigrants. In relation to this Kel suggested introducing the term digital outcasts, the people that are not considered in a design.

Several of Kel’s examples come from the online virtual world Second Life. He showed how people with all sorts of disabilities use various adaptations of it. Some of these were a digital guide dog for blind that leads you around and reads out tags to the user; a group of people in the Boston area with cerebral paresis that have experienced great personal development by sharing a Second Life avatar; and the Virtual Ability Island, a place on Second Life specifically adapted to people with disabilities.

He went on to show examples of cognitive computing where people control user interfaces and devices only through the power of the mind. Here is one example of a person controlling a robotic hand with the mind.

Some of the psychological aspects Kel talked about were how a virtual worlds adds a buffer of anonymity that facilitates connecting with other people easier or how fantasies can work as a distraction for pain management.

Kel gave a couple of pointers on what to think about when working with inclusive design, the most important being not to offend by for example using condescending wording and that there is a important difference between acting understanding and empathic rather that patronizing. Another source of information on the subject is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 which is described in the POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Reliable) framework.

Dan Hill – New Soft City, Closing Keynote

Dan Hill

Dan Hill gave us an image of what the future looks like, and the role designers play in it. The work he does today is dealing with the design of cities, from a bus stop to an entire metropolis. By using projects that his firm is working on today, both those that are currently being worked on and those that are purely conceptual at this point. Some concepts that have come out of his work tie directly to how things are designed and how they interact with the people around them:

• Sustainable Urbanism – Taking that which in our world that is invisible, and make it visible. Projecting real time data on the fabric of the city.
• Responsive Urbanism – Public libraries around the world offer the use of WiFi internet connection for free. People are using these spaces in order to do simple browsing to their full time jobs.
• Interactive Installation – Pieces of a building or structure that can be packed and unpacked like a playpen in order to be constructed.
• Strategic Prototyping - Create artifacts from the future to show clients and stakeholders a vision of what things will look like.
• Responsive Architecture - Cover a building with material that is capable of providing feedback in real time: Display the city’s activity as it happens.
• Landscaping Information – What is the ‘cognitive load’ of the street? When does urban data become too much?
• Urban Sensing – Is it possible to monitor mobile usage in real time? How does this affect people’s behavior if that information is displayed to the public?

Strategic Prototyping

The design of a city isn’t something that happens overnight. When his team is commissioned to design a subway system, they have to consider the fact the overall life span of that subway system is 50-100 years. Some things are considered in the design knowing that the technology may not be ready yet, but maybe in 20-30 years it will be. These designs are nothing but concepts, yet they still fit into the overall design of the system being created. Dan mentioned how in one of the previous keynotes we don’t really know what a sustainable future looks like. He has a pretty good idea though, and he sees it every day in the work that he does.

Conference Committee – Closing Remarks

All the people from both IxDA and SCAD thanked all the sponsors and participants for creating yet another successful event. As announced earlier, next year’s conference Interaction11 is going to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

The vibe at the end of this conference was positive, uplifting, and inspirational. As people walked out of the theater many goodbyes were shared, hands were shook, and hugs were shared. It’s been said that our community is one of the best there is, and it’s conferences like this that makes us proud to be a part of it.

The first day of Interaction 10, hosted by SCAD in the wonderful city of Savannah, Georgia, kicked off without a hitch. Though eventually everyone was plagued by spotty, windy rain storms, the general pulse of the conference was positive and uplifting. Attendees were still talking about some of the great workshops from the day before, and they carried that energy over into today’s sessions. If one thing had to describe the overall theme of the first day it would be the importance of providing meaning in the work that we do. Below are recaps of the opening and closing keynotes, as well as some of the sessions from the day.

Nathan Shedroff – Morning Keynote

The opening keynote came with a message of why it’s important for us as designers to innovate. Drawing from his books Making Meaning and Design is the Problem,  Nathan Shedroff approached the topic from the businesses point of view and provided insight on how our skills can help them. The goal of any business is to grow, but the only type of growth that leads to continued success is organic growth. Sure, you can rebrand easy few years, but after a while people catch on to what you’re doing. The key to ensuring lasting, organic growth is providing meaning to the people that use the products or services companies provide. Innovation is the means to providing this meaning.

Meaning comes in the shape and form of the experiences we are exposed to. Luckily for us, there are a finite number of core values that describe meaning, which Nathan describes as the following:

• Accomplishment
• Beauty
• Community
• Creation
• Duty
• Enlightenment
• Freedom
• Harmony
• Justice
• Oneness
• Redemption
• Security
• Truth
• Validation
• Wonder

What makes something meaningful to one person over another is how people prioritize these core values. In order to understand how a particular group of people rank these values, it’s necessary to do a lot of qualitative research. By understanding this ranking, we are able to trigger meaning in the things we design and bring meaning to the work that we do.

The keynote wrapped up with Nathan describing how strategic design is looking for the overlap of meaning between a company, team, and customer base. If there is little to no overlap, than something is off: the wrong customers are being served or the wrong team is trying to do the job. All of these lead to the statement of “Consumerism isn’t dead, but it should be. It hasn’t served us well. But, we don’t know what to replace it with yet.” Interaction designers are poised to be the ones that come up with this new solution, as we have the models and research methods that serve us well.

Consumerism isn’t dead, but it should be. It hasn’t served us well. But, we don’t know what to replace it with yet. – Nathan Shedroff

(The presentation and related material are available on Nathan’s website – also check out the interview we did with Nathan)

Dave Gray – Knowledge Games

Any presentation that starts off with a detailed history of the AK-47 is sure to be challenging. Dave’s overview of Knowledge Games and their role in the design didn’t disappoint. The design philosophy that drove the creation of the AK-47 is the same one he is using to develop his framework around knowledge games: keep it simple, make it rugged, ensure that it is reliable, and that it is lightweight. His goal with creating knowledge games is to provide the tools that anyone can use to design better things, regardless of whether that person is a designer or not.

Don’t over think things. – Dave Gray

Dave Gray and the AK47

How do knowledge games help in the world of design? It gives us a framework for getting from point A to point B. It allows us to open up a problem, explore the problem space, and come to a closing point where we have a defined outcome. Here are some key points that we took away from this session:

• Never open something you can’t close;
• Ask questions that get people fired up, that gets them talking and brainstorming some ideas;
• Create a meaningful space in order to do work in. A space that inspires us to create, think, and collaborate;
• Sketch, everyone can draw. If you can draw basic shapes, you can draw just about anything;
• Choose what you will finally create well. Be critical and kill a lot of babies. (This came up a lot for some reason over the course of the presentation.)

Dave ended with perhaps the best message possible. “Don’t overthink things.” This is something that plagues us all sometimes, and it’s good advice to follow no matter what you happen to be doing.

Nate Bolt – Remote User Research

The popularity of performing remote user research is growing. Nate did a great job giving an overview of the value remote user research brings to the design process and highlighted some of the best tools that are available today. He is passionate about this subject, which is best highlighted by a book he is co-authoring and being published by Rosenfeld Media.

He started off by clarifying that the research user experience really cares about revolves around the behavior of people.  While the majority of all user research being done today is still in-person, remote research is gaining popularity. This is firstly because it’s easier to get someone to show up to a remote web meeting than it is to an unfamiliar office or conference room. Another advantage is that it’s easier to pause a study to iterate a design if the research is being done remotely.

If you can put it on the web, it can be studied and tested. – Nate Bolt

One of the most valued aspects of performing remote user research is mashing it up with traditional methods. Since the cost of some of these tools are so low, it’s easy to do a good mix of qualitative and quantitative research. All of the tools he covered are showcased here at RemoteUsability.com

Matt Cottam – Wooden Logic: In Search of Heirloom Electronics

Matt Cottam’s talk explored how natural materials and craft traditions can be brought to the center of interactive digital design to give modern products greater longevity and meaning. This was a very inspiring talk on how to work with electronics prototyping combined with classic wood carpenter craftsmanship.

The initial reason why Matt founded his company, Tellart, was the current disconnect we as designers have from the technology we design for. Matt compared the crafts industry in the mid to early 20th century when design was often closely related also to the technical side of the craft like the loom industry where textile designers and the loom technicians were educated in the same school. This closeness created a good setting for creating these products with longevity and meaning. Compared to today, there is a gap between interaction designers, programmers and electronics designers. What Matt is trying to do through his work is to close that gap, or at least make it smaller.

Part of his work has also been about experimenting with the patina process of objects and how to actually control it. As an example he showed models of toy boats that were put in a bag with ground coffee and then put in a river for several months, which was a very successful way of faking patina. Several of the student projects revolved around the challenge of doing user interface prototyping without computers, often with a very limited time and space, putting lots of emphasis on the presentation of the results.

Drawing examples from numerous student projects Matt has done over the last year with students at CIID, UID and his team he showed very interesting results on how to combine traditional material with modern electronics such as sensors and switches to create new unexpected combinations.

Tellart has created a client server application for iPhone that makes it extremely quick to do simple iPhone apps that communicate with hardware in literally a couple of days. The application is open source and you can read more about it at the Google code site.

All in all, the presentation showed very promising examples, if maybe not the final answers of what he wanted to achieve. You get the feeling that Matt is on to something that could potentially be big in the coming years, certainly in connection to the conference’s overall theme on creating meaning to the things we design.

Activity: Design Jam

Cupcake Carrier Sketches

The leaders of the Portland IxDA group gave a large group of people a run down on a common activity they perform at their meet ups. Jeanne Turner and Barbara Holmes created the activity of Design Jams in order avoid designers from getting burned out and over worked. The technique is borrowed from jam sessions that musicians do in order to avoid the very same things. During the jam session it isn’t about making something real, but rather about play and having fun. During the design jams, designer discuss, sketch, explore, and listen to each others ideas about how to solve a defined problem. By doing so, they learn new methods for solving the same problem and more importantly learn from each other.

The Design Jam has some simple rules that people must follow.

1. Solve real, concrete design problems
2. No limits to what can be discussed or designed
3. No stakeholders allowed. Everyone is a designer
4. Random groups each time
5. At the end everyone has to present their designs and what the contributed to the solution

With this the actual design jam started with the crowd being given one of two problems to solve: redesign luggage carrier to avoid clothes getting wrinkled while travelling, or a means to transport cupcakes without damaging the cupcakes. My group choose the cupcakes problem. After much discussion and exploration some of the top solutions came out to be using hard sugar in the icing, create scalable containers, use an edible container, generate magnetic cupcakes, and use tooth picks with gummies stuck to the top to provide additional support. The great thing about this activity was that it was simple, very interactive, and something that any group would be able to easily host for one of their meet ups.

Kendra Shimmell – Environments: The Future of Interaction Design

Kendra Shummel in action

I was told this talk was actually a bit of a wild card in the program and I can attest to that it as it was very inspiring and entertaining to see. To quote Kendra herself from the day before: “Sometimes you joke about how during a work meeting you should stand up and do improv dancing, and here I am going up on stage doing just that at an interaction design conference”.

We all need, and try, to do other things than our normal work to get perspective on things. Kendra being a trained dancer since the age of four wanted to give us a glimpse into her world of how she uses dance as an alternate way of approaching her design challenges. Kendra started up with talking about the similarities in choreography and interaction design, and how they are connected in staging activities over time in order to convey meaning. Of course in dance there are a whole lot more choreography.

For the second half of the talk, Kendra had in collaboration with Robert Wechsler from palindrome set up a motion tracking system that was hooked up to an application that that detects movements in three dimensional space. By connecting defined volumes in this space  to virtual triggers and scales, loops of sounds, talk, and noise Kendra created new music completely based on the movements from her improv dance. The whole experience is very hard to reproduce in text. All talks were recorded and will be put on the IxDA website with in the coming weeks and if you  decide to watch any of them this is definitely one of the ones you should not miss.

Nicolas Nova – Observing Failures to Provoking Them

Failure is cool. Not only was this the statement on the opening slide, but it sums up the overall session as well. Using personal experiences, Nicolas showed a packed house how vital failure is in the art of design and how much we can learn from it when we try to make it happen. The main focus of the presentation was on the failure of products, specifically automated products such as doors and light switches. What makes these products so interesting is how easy it is to observe the failures in action, showcased by a sensor used on Swedish trains for automatically opening the doors between cars.

Some of the more interesting behaviors he has witnessed involved talking to motion based sensors, and stomping on the ground when the sensors where located near the floor. These behaviors arise due to the invisible nature around automatic products, and a person’s inability to discern how they work. The failures themselves are unique since in the past they may not have ever existed, and thanks to advancements in technology we are able to view them for the first time. There are some common reasons why automatic devices fail though:

• Distinguishing the automatic from the non-automatic
• Invisible or illegible “locus of control”
• Too quick or too slow to activate
• Weather dependent calibration
• Different ‘door’ conventions (e.g. swing vs retracting doors)

A common problem that arises when these automatic devices fail is “Individual-Blame Bias.” People start to get blamed or end up blaming themselves for the failure of technology. After a while, people get fed up and will lash out in frustration at these devices. A great example he used was a robot that helps in the care of people in a hospital. This poor robot would get kicked by patients when it came around to do its duties, for simply coming in at the wrong time.

The session wrapped up by exploring a technique called the “Anti-Probe”, which is meant to provoke a failure. One of the cases he went over where he had used this technique was with regards to the use of the Wii remote. His team modified the remote calibration to make small movements to generate huge reactions while playing a game. Surprisingly, the participants actually really enjoyed this behavior since it took a little effort in order to cause such a huge reaction. These provoked failure lead to the insight of how important it is to see how people react, what new solutions they create, and how annoyed they might get when something does go wrong. This allows the team to use failure as a design tactic and to use failure as an inspiration rather than a hindrance.

Jon Kolko – Closing Keynote

Jon Kolko

Jon Kolko started by offering four pillars which our profession resides upon: experience, behavior, meaning, and culture.

According to Jon, the word ‘experience’ is special and should be used with reserve. This is because we all have one, and no matter what that experience is unique to each person involved in the experience. Factors that help shape the experience are the complexity of ourselves that we bring to it, design artefacts, natural events, and the other people surrounding the experience. This is why though designers may be given the same input and use the same process, the end solutions will be drastically different. Therefore, the key to getting people involved in experiences is through engagement: this, rather than repeatability, is key to good experiences. It’s up to designers to be less prescriptive, focus on the space between, and strive for real engagement.

An echo from his article Our Misguided Focus on Brand and User Experience, Jon again proposed why designers have the power to change culture, and that we have the ability to affect massive and acute change in society. To showcase this point, he talked about a project one of his students did where she went in search for the answer to the question “What’s the deal with deal with kids, beer, and sex?” After collecting some amazing quotes from college students, her solution to this problem was presented. In order to raise awareness of the dangers of unprotected sex, she attached condoms and important information to bottles of beer. The result was an increase in college students practising safe sex. She was able to accomplish this by empathizing with the people she was studying, and designing something that was aligned to how they actually behave.

The final point of his keynote revolved around the quote “Good design is a privilege rather than a right in today’s world.” He states that in some cases, it’s not money that is preventing people from using new technology but perceived complexity. To illustrate this point, he told the story of teachers who refused to use PC’s in their classroom due to the poor performance. The solution to this poor performance was regular maintenance of re-imaging the machines, something a standard school teach just doesn’t have the time to do. His team at frog design helped with this problem helping HP provide a machine that would re-image itself at the end of each computer session. Teachers were then able to use all the advanced tools available to them without having to deal with all the overhead of maintaining the computers. This lead to his closing message of “Designing for real cultural change starts by understanding how people currently behave”.

Designing for real cultural change starts by understanding how people currently behave. – Jon Kolko

The first day of the conference ended on a high note, poor weather notwithstanding. Day 2 has some big shoes to fill based on the sessions of today, but the promise of the session for tomorrow lead us to believe that tomorrow will be just as informative and inspiring as today was.

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All images by Brad Nunnally and Niklas Wolkert