Quick reflection on Interaction 12 in Dublin

Posted on February 6, 2012 by admin

I’m en route home from IxDA’s Interaction 12 in Dublin, reflecting on what I learned and what I can apply to practice. I enjoyed the atmosphere, the city, the other attendees and the speakers. As always, the conference provided a nice mix of theory/thought experiments and concepts that are practically applicable right now. There were surprisingly few talks on industry trends and buzzwords. No one spoke on “lean UX” or “service design” (although there were a couple of talks on “gamification” which I didn’t attend).

Many of the talks were around design and varied disciplines like sci fi, sports, architecture, healthcare, and transportation – not just what we can offer to these disciplines but concepts and techniques that we can learn from them as well.

I picked up several new methods for synthesizing research outputs into design ideas in John Kolko’s workshop. I’m excited to use some of his like Reframing and Insight Combination in upcoming DEZUDIO projects. In my own work I’m always trying to strike the right balance of practicality and process and what I found so encouraging about the methods that I learned in this workship is that they’re really just facilitators for creative ways of thinking. With enough practice, when we don’t have the time or budget we should be able to bypass the formal thought exercises and instead just approach our entire process with these innovative ways of thinking.

Finally, this year featured the first annual Interaction Design Awards with the aim of recognizing important new work in our discipline. My favorite talk of the week was by one of the team members from the project that won the “best concept” award – Adrian Westaway of Vitamins, an invention lab in London. In his case study he took us through their carefully thought out and fun research process, how they reframed their original project brief from Samsung which was to “Design a mobile phone for old folks,” and their whimsically designed aid for helping people of all ages get their new phone up and running.

http://vitaminsdesign.com/projects/out-of-the-box-for-samsung/

The best part was, both when accepting the award and throughout the talk, the Vitamins folks were incredibly excited about the kinds of insights that design research can uncover and the “magical” concepts and products that design can generate. Perhaps their best contribution to conference goers was that their enthusiasm was contagious!

The quest for the perfect project plan

Posted on December 7, 2011 by admin

I find that it’s hard with Microsoft project and Excel/Google Spreadsheet project plans, to illustrate all of the dimensions that a project plan should represent – the activities, how they unfold over time, how long they’ll take, what deliverables the client should expect, the client’s responsibility for keeping the project on track and how much the project will cost. At DEZUDIO, we’ve been refining our standard “Project Map.” Our goal is to create something that easily gets us and our clients on the same page with regard to all of the moving pieces. Because we have backgrounds in visual design and info vis, we like to think that the information is conveyed more clearly than had we used a standard tool. We continue to refine with each new project. Now If we could only build an application to output our project maps for us…

A sample project map for a quick, 4 week UX Enhancements project. Cost estimates are included in a grey row beneath hours estimate.

IxDA Pittsburgh wants to be more than an event planning organization

Posted on November 23, 2011 by admin

During the Interaction 12 Local Leaders workshop in Dublin we are going to explore how we can design richer interaction design communities in our localities. It’s the aim of many local groups to be more than event planning organizations. This is something that we feel acutely here in Pittsburgh. We are a small group to begin with there are so many other groups vying for our members’ time. There are great design lectures and events to choose from in the universities here. In my discussion with other local leaders, small groups in the US experience the same thing. In many of the big cities in Europe, IxDA seems to be one of the most widespread and established design organizations and the folks that I spoke to have high profile speakers approaching them to speak to their local groups – way different.

Regardless of the size and profile of the local group, a common aim is the hope to foster community and dialogue outside of events and serve as hubs for knowledge around our discipline. As such, at the conference we hope to have urban planners, Design Council members or other designers applying design thinking and methodologies in their communities to speak to the local leaders group about their approach to community building. Hopefully local IxDA chapters can learn from the great work that is being done in the field. It’s my impression that this challenge is a perfect application of design methodologies- that we should research the needs and desires of our members and co-design the community in Pittsburgh.

What’s all the buzz about business and design?

Posted on November 20, 2011 by admin

I attended Ad Idem; Discussions at the Interface of Design and Business at CMU last week. http://www.design.cmu.edu/show_news.php?id=359.

The first comment that my former professor Shelley Evenson (now director of research at Facebook) made was that there was an underrepresented discipline on the panel. To truly take advantage of specialties that are complimentary and at the same time offer tension that drives innovation, technology should be a part of the discussion as well. She proposed design – technology – business as the ideal triumvirate. I agree wholeheartedly. I’ve seen most success in projects where each of these disciplines have a say from the get go. In design consulting, that’s why we establish a core team at our client with both business and technology stakeholders.

The conversation was fuzzy and full of talk of trends in both the business and design industries. I attended because I was hoping to figure out what all of the excitement is about. Is it about how we design, build and manufacture innovative products that sell, or is that something that product companies have already mastered?

Based on the vignettes that the panelists told, seems to me as though the excitement is really about the application of design thinking and methods to approach what were traditionally business-oriented challenges. For example, using design methods to help establish a company’s focus or strategy or to spearhead its aim to be environmentally sustainable and socially responsible. The big take-away is that businesses can address these issues by better understanding and empathizing with their customers. Drawing and sketching enables companies to create models that foster shared understanding around what the organization “should be.” Prototyping rapidly and not being afraid to implement and then iterate, even though along with this comes risk, can drive innovation and exploration into uncharted territories. These are ways of thinking and methods that design can offer to business.

And business, in return, offers to design codified methods of analyzing what is “good,” methods for risk mitigation and I’m sure many other things that I’ve yet to learn.

Apple products make us “techy”

Posted on November 17, 2011 by admin

We know Apple products for their simple and streamlined user experience. Apparent to me lately is how Apple products simultaneously hide the technology that make them work behind a minimal face, and at the same time expose it to users in a blatant way.

A friend asked recently if he had to upgrade to Snow Leopard before upgrading to Lion to be able to use iCloud. Long gone are the days when the only time you get a new operating system is when you get a new computer. Now you have to be acutely aware of compatibility to make sure that you have access to the features that you want.

On Halloween we had a trick-or-treater dressed as an iPhone. I asked him if he was a 3 or a 4. “4s” was his response. Why would a 8 year old be so adamant about which version he was? Because it’s better. It has more features. Before the iPhone the same kid would’ve been handed any generic phone and used it to make phone calls without question or concern for what generation it was.

Apple has made us care about the technology behind the experience. Maybe the simple face allows us to devote more time understanding the technology that drives our devices.