From a design standpoint, how do you increase the information made available to the driver of a car? More and more cars are coming with built-in dashboard screens, but it's obvious that anything that takes the driver's eyes off the road is a bad idea. Audio cues provided by turn-by-turn GPS are a step in the right direction. Another non-visual method of communication, now being experimented with by a research team at Carnegie Mellon, is to use steering wheels equipped with haptic feedback mechanisms.
In conjunction with AT&T Labs, Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute researchers are using mechanics more sophisticated that current iterations of the technology, which can merely vibrate:
Imagine how embedded sensors, personal digital technologies, and live data can be used to promote the goals of PlaNYC; Bloomberg's bold vision for a sustainable New York.
This is exactly what fourteen SVA Interaction Design students did throughout a 7-week Design in Public Spaces class. The course was led by Jill Nussbaum, Executive Director of Product Design at the Barbarian Group, in collaboration with PlaNYC.
Throughout January and February 2012, student groups worked through design phases including: primary research, concept development, and user journey creation. The results tackled challenging issues including community supported agriculture, landfill park conversion and urban farming.
Seedspeak Project by: Sarah Adams, Tony Chu, Sana Rao
A service making finding and joining a CSA easy.
Investigations into food supply in the city lead to a focus towards Community-Supported Agriculture, an alternative, locally-based socio-economic model of agriculture and food distribution. Through speaking with supermarket shoppers and CSA organizers the group discovered a growing demand for locally grown produce, resulting in long CSA waiting lists.
Seedspeak is a website and interactive subway advertising campaign that makes it easy to find a CSA nearby. By aggregating & publicizing available spots, Seedspeak promotes growth of Community-Supported Agriculture as a viable local alternative when purchasing groceries.
Much has been written already about the launch of IKEA's Uppleva TV furniture units, but few reviewers seem to have interacted with them.
About 10 of them were publicly shown—in a world premiere—at the IKEA PS show in the Lambrate area of the Milan Design Week event, in different colors, sizes, and furniture combinations. The event ended yesterday and the IKEA Uppleva website is expected to go online soon.
This post concentrates on the interface design—an area which has not been covered so far.
On Putting People First (the Experientia blog that I manage), you can also read more on the user research that went into the design.
The demo units in Milan were running a very advanced prototype software, but the interaction and product design provided an integrated and simple user experience, with only minor problems.
The Uppleva home screen has only 8 items—picture, sound, PAP, options, media, smart TV, lock and setup—and direct access to most of the areas is available via the remote control.
Icons are simple and clean: off-white on a blue background.
This theme comes through in all the screens, with the TV (or video) image being turned into a subdued blue-and-white background presence on the internal screens, as can be glimpsed on the screenshots here:
Uppleva options screen
Uppleva setup screen
(Aside from the IKEA-supplied home screen shot, all other photos were taken by me, and this is the reason for the perspective and color distortions.)
The blue background makes it difficult to change the color and contrast settings, as you have to switch between settings and live image to see the effect, but other than that provides a calming and quiet visual experience, very different from the one that sometimes pervades in these types of interfaces.
We had the opportunity to preview the new sketching applicationPaper by FiftyThree for the iPad. The web video showing their application makes it look easy and beautiful, but, as they say, art is hard. Our previous efforts with iPad sketching applications (Alias Sketchbook Pro) looked nothing like Jim Lee's Batman. No surprise there.
The finger has always been a blunt instrument, unless you happen to be gifted with especially pointy ones. Transparent Capacitive styluses allow a slightly better correlation between the visible contact surface and the actual point, but there is no substitute for pen and paper (though the Wacom Cintiq comes close).
Paper favors gestures to click menus and "napkin" sketches race by compared to other applications we've seen. The ability to overlay watercolor on existing drawings makes highlighting and indication a breeze. Much as they may try, design professors attempting to make students "loose" often fail because we can't help but be precious. By limiting the toolset, and especially due to the absence of layers, zoom and brush size, there isn't really any way to be fussy with Paper although I certainly tried. Instead of spending lots of time with one idea, the hope is that you create many.
A certain famous industrial designer once told me I'd be absolutely amazed if I could see some of the things he'd seen inside Microsoft's skunkworks. I pushed him for specifics, but alas, the design DNA was NDA'd. But this project here just might be one of those things.
Right now we all use computers the same way: Moving from the back of your desk to the front, you've got the screen first, then your hands on the keyboard or mouse, and then your head taking it all in. Now imagine swapping the order so that back-to-front we have your hands first, then the screen, then your head.
Researchers Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger of the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group have developed a prototype called the See-Through 3D Desktop where the user reaches behind the screen to interact with objects in virtual 3D space. Check it out:
Here's another vid showing a different demo of the same technology. You can skip ahead to 1:00 for the action:
Little Big Details helps designers catalog the many UI details they encounter.
As designers, we all realize that the most intuitive user interface often requires the most work. But as users, we always appreciate a thoughtful UI touch that makes that smartphone or laptop that much easier to use. And some UI decisions, like the fact that you can tap the clock on the iPhone to scroll up to the top immediately, act like "Easter eggs" until one day you discover them by accident or someone tells you.
Which is why I was happy to stumble across Little Big Details, a blog that lists out those little UI details that, well, turn out to be much bigger when you stop to think about it. And that serves as good design fodder for your work.
It's easy to join and submit a detail, and judging by the number of via notes, Little Big Details has become quite an active community. It's a great Tumblr or Twitter account to follow, and maybe it will help you train your eye as well as you navigate all the varoius interfaces online. It certainly has for me.
The overall cost of healthcare in the U.S. has reached a whopping $2.6 trillion, up from $256 billion in 1980, and $724 billion in 1990. In many ways, it seems that the rate of innovation in healthcare is moving in inverse proportion, with fewer truly significant interventions being created to tackle our collective health issues. While the quantified self movement has people talking (and measuring) all things health, and cool new products like the Jawbone UP are mainstreaming consumer wellness products, health innovation has remained somewhat niche. However, there has been a recent shift in the players in this space that bodes well for all of our health, despite the fact that these entities have sometimes been seen as our least likely allies.
These challenges are focused on tackling some of the most pressing health concerns in the US, but they are simultaneously supporting radical entrepreneurship. Each of the innovation challenges below are slightly different in their process (some have demo days and mentorships in addition to prize monies), but they are all unique in that they reward great ideas with cash while not taking any equity stake from the entrepreneur (quite a contrast to the VC and incubator model). It's free money and support, and may just get really great concepts in the hands of people who need them. Keep an eye on the following challenges, or better yet, submit your ideas:
Pfizer and Janssen Alzheimer's Challenge: Create concepts for early diagnosis and monitoring for people with Alzheimer's Deadline: March 16 Website: alzheimerschallenge2012.com
Sanofi Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge: Improve health and experience for people with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes Deadline: March 23 Website: datadesigndiabetes.com
Allscripts Million Hearts Initiative CDS Challenge: Improve the clinical decision support functionality for people with cardiovascular disease Deadline: July 6 Website: allscripts.com/cdschallenge
It's never been a better time to be a designer because healthcare innovation is going to depend on real human-centered design and non-traditional problem-solving. $100K of unrestricted cash ain't so bad either....
I'm not yet sold on mid-air gestures as a means of interfacing with a computer, and here's why:
A computer mouse is a precision tool, and back in the days of the original Mac's tiny 512×342 pixel screen, when the mouse made its popular debut, that precision tool was a great way to hit those tiny icons with accuracy.
Human gestures, on the other hand, are not precise. Unless you study kung fu or modern dance or are a neurosurgeon, chances are you simply don't have the muscle control to consistently perform very fine hand motions in mid-air.
It's my opinion that in order for gesture-based interface design to work, it needs to be paired with a flat physical surface. Not necessarily on-screen; I've found Apple's Magic Trackpad and the built-in trackpad of the MacBook Pro to be suitably precise. Placing four fingers on a flat surface and swiping sideways is easy to learn, easy to do and difficult to screw up.
That hasn't stopped Bellco Ventures from releasing their Ion Wireless Air Mouse Glove, seen up top. The wearable $80 device calls on the user to hold their hand in midair and point with accuracy at a screen, and watching the demo video, I'm not convinced:
It's been two weeks since the Interaction12 conference in Dublin, Ireland. IxDA Dublin Redux events have already been organized and are occurring globally. Attendees continue to tweet and share the abundance of information they absorbed over the course of the four-day conference. Interaction12 consisted of 15 workshops, 6 keynotes, 80 speakers, and several planned activities around Dublin, Ireland. IxDA organizers put together a diverse group of lectures and events throughout the conference for attendees to experience.
To give you an idea of the amount of diversity, talks were categorized into subheadings such as behavior, theory, ecosystems, process, aesthetics, strategy, dialogue and gamification. Most talks were 45 minutes and on the final two days there were 10-minute talks breaking up the larger sessions. The keynote speakers began and ended each day, usually sharing a big picture idea that complimented the other talks programmed throughout that day.
Luke Williams kicked off Day 2, with his eye-opening and inspiring keynote on disruptive thinking, titled "The Disruptive Age: Thriving in an Era of Constant Change". He gave a similar talk at the Design Research conference at IIT, but at Interaction12 he challenged attendees to consider how to disrupt the cliches of interaction design. This was the kind of energy that was contagious throughout the four days of the conference. Not only did Williams inspire and challenge the crowd, but the first slide of his presentation was a common theme for the rest of the conference. He shared a slide of a tweet that he came across the night before his talk that said, "What is interaction design? Oh shit. Here we go..."
This was a common question and discussion throughout Interaction12. It was as if Interaction Design was having an identity crisis. It was an exploratory process where everyone was working together to challenge and discover the capabilities of the discipline. Some attendees even created a humorous video during the conference, "Shit Interaction Designers Say," styled after the "Shit Girls Say" YouTube meme.
Genevieve Bell, director of the Interactions and Experience lab at Intel, presented the closing keynote, "Rage Against the Machines: Designing our Futures with Computing," for Interaction12. The IXR lab, in Portland, specializes in exploring the ways in which technology can be integrated seamlessly into daily life, through re-imagining user experience. Bell asked the important question: Instead of designing interactions, what would happen if we designed relationships between people and technology?
Bell was animated and humorous throughout her talk on the final day of the conference. This might have been because she was warned that her presentation was the only thing standing between the attendees and the Guinness storehouse, where the closing party was held. In her introduction, Bell shared her background as a second-generation anthropologist focusing on cultural practice. She reflected on her initial recruitment meeting with Intel for the IXR lab. Intel told her that they wanted to learn about two things: women and the "ROW." "What does 'ROW' stand for?" she asked. Intel's easy reply was, "the rest of the world."
While Bell was on the search to learn more about women, "ROW" and their relationship with technology, she began to consider Intel's user group. Bell stresses the importance of knowing your users. She shared an image of Intel's perceived user and then another image of who she discovered was the actual Intel user. The image of the Caucasian middle class family, sitting around the television laughing on the couch was an unrealistic vision of whom Intel was designing for.
Intel perceived user
Intel actual user
Upon identifying the more realistic user group of a single man in a cluttered apartment, Bell began to explore the relationship between the user and their technology. According to Bell, one woman she spoke with during her initial research mentioned that all of her technological devices were like a "backpack full of baby birds." Each device has its own ring tone or notification. The user often has to reassure the device; for example if the user wants to delete something, the device has to be reassured that this is the actual chosen action. These machines seem to demand attention in the same way a baby bird relies on its mother for love and food.
"Since video games are designed with the primary purpose of entertainment, shouldn't they be able to make other non-game products more enjoyable?"
At Interaction12, Dustin DiTommaso, Experience Design Director of Mad*Pow, discussed this concept during his talk "Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement Through Game Design Thinking." DiTommaso shared his unique perspective with attendees and explained how gamification can be utilized as a tool in Interaction Design.
DiTommaso opened by giving attendees some insight into gamification and game design. But before diving in, he shared some common misconceptions of gamification and how it is currently being utilized. He mentioned a comment made by Jared Spool, principal of User Interface Engineering, which seemed to be a common theme throughout the conference. Spool said that gamification is "all that crap people are pushing because we have a generation of people who grew up on games." Now, that's not a surprising remark considering the amount of discourse around gamification. Both gamers and academics have expressed a similar response, as gamification has become a trend. DiTomasso moves forward in his discussion by identifying the "usual suspects" of gamification as badges, points, leaderboards, and awards.
New Yorkers can be finicky about navigating their subway system. In 1972, Massimo Vignelli designed a map for it that was simple, beautiful and readable, and remains iconic to this day. In 1979, after much controversy it was redesigned by Michael Hertz to more realistically represent the trains' paths and the city, in particular Central Park (which Vignelli's map depicted as square rather than rectangle). Hertz's remains the map used today.
Today, with all our devices, data visualizations, and infographics, we are (thankfully) more accepting of designs of abstract representations. And we New Yorkers were desperately in need of some well-designed New York City Subway apps.
The Mass Transit Authority (MTA) knows their audience, and smartly realized they themselves were not the ideal creators for a well-designed, often-used tool such as the NYC subway system app. In July, the MTA posed an "Appquest" challenge, with directives to provide the 8.5 million riders with "access to great apps that improve their transit experience." The MTA released data for use, and encouraged developers to have at it. They now link to 47 apps for smartphones on their site.
Embark NYC won the challenge on February 3 for its simple, focused design. The developers of Embark are four guys—David Hodge, Ian Leighton, Taylor Malloy, and Tom Hauburger—who made their first transit app, iBART for San Francisco, while still in college. Embark now has apps for Boston, London, Chicago, Philadelphia and D.C.
Embark NYC
I use the NY subway daily, and have tried several transit Iphone apps in a search for one well-designed, which works for all needs. The Maps App covers most of my needs most of the time - but not underground. Some apps, like NYC Mate are comprehensive maps of ALL NY transit: subway, bus and outlying train system; while others, like ITrans, are merely useful as a PDF of the map to view underground. Exit Strategy is great solely in showing where on the train car to get on and off to quickly get to where you are going, and HopStop provides far too much information and detail for daily use.
Embark's functionality focus is simple: make getting from point A to point B as easy as possible. David Hodge, CEO of Embark said that this simplicity is key.
"Our feature list might not fully stack up against some other apps, but that's fine," Hodge said. We leave out some of the extraneous features that would take a lot of time to include but only benefit a tiny percentage of users, and instead, we make sure we do a really bang-up job on the features that everyone uses. It's all about being efficient. You can plan a trip in our app faster than any other NYC app."
One year ago Corning, the upstate-New-York-based glass manufacturer, released a concept video called "A Day of Glass." The five-and-a-half-minute spot featured Microsoft-like depictions of a family living in a world where interface designers appear to have solved more problems than we knew we had, and the vision resounded with viewers (to the tune of 17.5 million YouTube hits and counting).
Now Corning's at it again with "A Day of Glass 2," below. Released almost exactly one year after the first vid, it continues to depict Corning's vision of "how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world." Be sure to check out the medical stuff that starts happening around 4:03--how could would it be if you could do that with cross-sections of particularly troublesome parts of your product design?
While the cynics among us can't help but project the infrastructure and behind-the-scenes design required to make all of this stuff work--"Ah, I guess there's a server in the closet," "So that little rectangle is cloud-enabled," et cetera--it seems even tighter than the Microsoft vids.
Corning has also released a sort of "For Dummies" version of the vid where an on-screen narrator cuts in to explain the fanciful technologies that the characters are interacting with. Hit the jump to check it out.
In 2009 Monocle took notice of Reykjavik's growing businesses and optimistic entrepreneurs, a hopeful sign that the city, and Iceland in general, might be on the brink of overcoming their 2008 economic collapse.
The start-ups here are not deterred by conditions and take inspiration from successful forebears, such as CCP Games, [whose]...executive producer Nathan Richardsson notes, 'This wave of innovation happening in Iceland is a result of the dire consequences of 2008, which provides a useful constraint on developing ideas to find the simplest, best solution.'
In stark contrast to the frothy days of high finance, these bright young leaders have helped create an entrepreneurial culture where banker bragging rights have been traded for humble lunches and transparent business. The view...is one of optimism.
No small part of Reykjavik's burgeoning economy is due to tourism, an industry the country continues to push with all its might. The latest evidence is an interactive city map, soon to be expanded into an online shop and a mobile app. Designed by Borgarmynd, the map lets you zoom in and out of a cheerful illustration of Reykjavik's streets, with a special focus on restaurants, bars, shops and cultural sites. The business descriptions are pretty cute. According to the map, Faktory is where, "You fell in love 7 times a live concert, made 30 new friends, danced to a DJ set and crashed a private party. The suns up now. Just another night at the famous Faktory, the hottest partyplace (their spelling, not mine) in 101."
The map is still a bit beta, but for the most part it's pretty user-friendly and, I imagine, actually helpful if I were traveling to Reykjavik, which I really, really wish I was.
Storytelling is a concept that we are all familiar with, regardless of our background. As designers, it is often utilized as a tool during the design process. In Ireland it has been part of their culture for centuries. During Interaction12, IxDA organizers did a great job of incorporating Irish culture into the conference through different activities and performances at the venue. In between talks, I found myself attending an interactive storytelling experience called "Storytelling a la carte" with professional bard Coilín "The" Oh-Aissiex and Claire "Ambiencellist" Fitch. The audience was able to choose from a menu of stories, which consisted of options such as Ancient Irish Tales, Contemporary Irish Tales, and International Folktales. Each category had descriptions as if the audience was ordering off a menu at a restaurant. For example, under the category Ancient Irish Tales, one of the "Flavour" descriptions consisted of pity and magic, while another consisted of outrage and triumph. Audience members were asked to choose a category and a corresponding flavour of their choice from the menu for a unique tale accompanied by improvisational music.
I had the opportunity to experience two stories before moving onto the next 45-minute block of talks. The Storytelling a la carte experience was a perfect segue into Tom O'Rahilly's talk titled "Identity and Imagination."
Tom O'Rahilly gave our readership some insight on storytelling from both a cultural and design perspective in our Interaction12 preview. O'Rahilly, Director of the Leprechaun Museum in Dublin, began his talk by sharing his experience as a product designer, realizing that people primarily wanted to experience their products. He then moved into a discussion on identity. People often think of identity as items that identify us in daily life, such as a social security card or driver's license. However, O'Rahilly addressed cultural identity. According to O'Rahilly, components of identity include location, perspective, play and people. In storytelling, key components are making sense of the unknown, engagement and experience. These components were taken into consideration during the design of the Leprechaun Museum.
Interaction design and designing interactions... are they the same concept? Anthony Dunne, partner at Dunne and Raby and professor at Royal College of Arts in London, gave a keynote at Interaction12 that began this discussion for the attendees. In Dunne's talk titled "What if...Crafting Design Speculation," he asks designers to use imagination to think about what kind of futures we want—opening up the problem space. What if "we shift from how the world is to designing for how the world could be?" What if...we designed for alternate realities or fictional scenarios?
Dunne shared student projects to give the attendees an idea of these possibilities. One of the projects he discussed was "Menstruation Machine" by Hiromi Ozaki. He introduced this project by explaining that Ozaki didn't design for an alternate reality, instead she chose to design for three fictional personas. Two personas that she designed for were Sushiborg Yukari and Crowbot Jenny, and she assigned each with their own stylistic clothing, environment and accessories. In addition to creating and designing for these personas, Ozaki created video content of these personas interacting in their environment with the objects that were designed for them.
"The best interaction design doesn't just make things easier to use, it opens up new spaces for play and collaboration to enhance our relationship with the world and each other," explained jurist Robert Fabricant, VP of Creative at frog. Kicking off the announcements for this year's inaugural IxDA Interaction Awards, San Francisco-based agency Stimulant won Best in Show AND the Best in Category, Expressing for Loop Loop, an innovative music sequencer app that encourages kids and adults to create improvised musical compositions using their Sifteo cubes to stitch and layer a set of samples and beats.
The People's Choice Award went to Interaction Cubes by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/Museum of Life. The project is an interactive module created for the exhibit "Elementar: a quÃmica que faz o mundo" (Elementary: the chemistry that makes up our world) for the Museum of Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
From a pool of over 300 entries representing 33 countries, 26 projects were awarded honors in the categories of Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, People's Choice, and Best in Category for Optimizing, Connecting, Disrupting, Expressing, Engaging and Empowering.
Best Concept went to Out of the Box by London-based Vitamins, and the award for Best Student was given to Ishac Bertran from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design for his project Pas-à-Pas.
Hello, reporting live from Dublin for IxDA's Interaction12 Conference! After an eight hour flight, the plane landed Tuesday morning as the sun was rising. I woke up to a beautiful day of sunshine and weather in the mid 40s, very comparable to the weather in Chicago. My flight had four or five other Interaction12 attendees on it, so there was much conversation around anticipation of the conference as well as spending several days in Dublin. We were all so excited that we decided to check into the hotel and meet up immediately after to hit the town!
We began by going to the Porterhouse to enjoy a locally brewed pint of beer and some pub food. Then, we walked around town taking in the city and burning off the calories from our lunch outing. Some of the sites we experienced were St. Stephen's Green, Temple Bar district, and the Old Jameson Distillery. This gave us a nice overview of the city and prepared us for the welcoming party.
In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1-4, Core77 will be bringing you a preview of this year's event. Follow us as we chat with keynote speakers, presenters and workshop leaders to give you a sneak peek at some of the ideas and issues to be addressed at this year's conference. Come by and say hello to us at the Coroflot Connects recruiting event and don't miss out on our live coverage as we report from the ground in Dublin!
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19th century culture was defined by the novel, 20th century culture by cinema, the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface. -Lev Manovich, Media Theorist
What will the future of interaction look like in 10 years? 20 years? According to Pete Denman, we will see personalized reactions to a singularity of "vibrant data." Pete is a Portland, Oregon-based interaction designer for Intel Labs. Such a job description is still a relatively new one that didn't even exist very long ago. But in a digital lifestyle where our mobile phones, streets, televisions and even our shoes are a nest of analog sensors, these ubiquitous interactions are increasingly governed by digital information transforming the physical into data.
This data will revolutionize how we act and interact: Biomimetic infographics will help us to interpret data, according to Denman. These biomimic techniques tell a story—whether it's the rings on a tree, the petals of a flower or the depth of clutter on your desk—as Denman will discuss at his presentation, "Biomimic Infographic," during IxDA's Interaction12 conference taking place in Dublin this week.
1. What exciting things are Intel Labs currently working on?
Pete Denman: There are some great things being done in Intel Labs. The projects and ideas produced by the group I work in—Interaction and Experience Research—range from 'revolutionary' to 'thrilling.' The Labs is a crazy place where ideas are currency, and we are purchasing the passion/excitement/talent of our co-workers. Everything from automobile technology to sensing, data, mobile and cloud tech. I'm sorry I can't be more specific. The things we are working on are in the delicate process of becoming "real" and are not ready to be shared yet.
How does Intel Labs make use of Rapid Prototyping in your everyday work? Specifically, what tools and processes are you finding most helpful to experience design and why?
Everyone has their favorite tools. I do my prototyping for UI in Flash/Actionscript. It gives me rich visual capabilities and a vast array of interaction tools and content connections. I am able to generate these prototypes quickly, and I do my testing mostly on iOS. Yup, on the iPhone/iPad making and testing prototypes is pretty easy. In the past months I have begun to explore other options since Adobe seems to be abandoning my favorite tool. Recently I have taken Android and iOS training, but programming natively in either of these languages seems to limit me to one platform, and while knowing the structure and capabilities is great, it commits me to that camp. I've decided to give up my heretic ways and make the agnostic choice: html5 and CSS. Now I just need to become as fast using it.
Touchfoil is a proprietary technology that is designed to turn any large area of glass—a retail display window was their inspiration—into a "huge interactive surface that behaves just like the latest tablet devices." The transparent film can be fitted (or retrofitted) to the inside or underside of any nonmetallic surface to transform it into a touchscreen.
Cambridge, UK-based materials specialists Visualplanet have been refining their flagship product for over a decade now: since the initial release in 2003, "thousands of touchfoils™ have been successfully installed worldwide in public spaces; such as premium brand retail shop windows, office reception areas, bus shelters, street kiosks, tourist information booths and even bathroom mirrors."
Last week saw the launch of their latest product...
In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1-4, Core77 will be bringing you a preview of this year's event. Follow us as we chat with keynote speakers, presenters and workshop leaders to give you a sneak peek at some of the ideas and issues to be addressed at this year's conference. Come by and say hello to us at the Coroflot Connects recruiting event and don't miss out on our live coverage as we report from the ground in Dublin!
Luke Williams has been a champion for design innovation over the past 18 years—in consumer package goods for a company in Australia, at New York University's Stern School of Business through his "Innovation and Design" course, and as resident innovation expert at frog design. At frog, Williams has worked for the past decade to help define the global firm's practice and approach to innovation. The Core77 community might best know Williams through Disrupt, a book he wrote to, "reflect on all the different tools and methodologies I've learned through innovation...and on the meaning and terms I use with clients in the business school." We recently had the opportunity to catch up with Williams here in New York City. Besides insights and some great personal anecdotes packed into our half-hour chat, Williams shared a preview of his keynote for next week's Interaction12 conference in Dublin.
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Core77: Disrupt is about shaking up current notions of an established category of business or within a market. With interaction design being a relatively new design field, what are some of the tenets of disruptive thinking that interaction designers can apply to their own work—not only towards creating an innovative product, but for the community or category as a whole?
Luke Williams: When we say interaction design is a new profession, it's true, but it's also very, very old. Because in interaction design, essentially what you're doing is designing behavior. Robert Fabricant at frog likes to say, "Behavior is our medium." What's fascinating about interaction design is that it's not about technology at the end of the day; it's not really about interfaces. For interaction design you're talking about shaping and influencing behavior. Everything at the moment is being seen as a potential interface object—that's the way ubiquitous computing is taking us.
So, every doorknob, every table and every coffee cup has potential to be seen as this interface object. There has never been a more exciting time to be in interaction design. Because interaction designers essentially get to rethink all of these basic human interactions that have been around for 50, 100, maybe thousands of years in some cases. We're at a point in time where they get to rethink those interactions. So, they challenge the clichés that have always been there about how we interact with things at a day-to-day level. And, basically see if those things can be improved.
That's a pretty exciting way to set up the whole entire conference.
It is such an important role and job because the future is going where these interactions are. Many of these interactions of the moment are simple; they're the fabric of everyday life. Now, what we risk doing when we're layering on information and connecting with information networks is to make simple, everyday interactions complex, cumbersome and frustrating.
My mother is my basis point for interaction design. She retired and decided she was going to take a computer course because she hated computers (like many parents do). And, she came back after the first lesson and she was furious. I said, "What's wrong?" She was looking at me as if I was part of the problem. She said, "The language of computers is just ridiculous." "And, what do you mean by that?" She replied, "Do you know to shut down the computer I have to go to the start button?" and that never had occurred to me before.
Now, I've since found out that that's an old joke with Microsoft and they even joke about it internally. But, this is exactly the problem. If my mother, in the future, has this same problem with her morning cup of coffee because we turn the coffee mug into an interface object, there's going to be hell to pay. So, this is a double edged sword. There's incredibly exciting potential for interaction design once everything gets layered with information and they can rethink these interactions. But, there is a big, big responsibility there for interaction design to get these interactions right.
How will our future change with technology? Designers and developers gathered last week to answer this question at WebVisions in New York City. Presentations and workshops during this 3-day conference explored the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy. Workshops centered on embracing new technology, designing for the user and collaboration.
Much of the focus in the area of Interaction Design centered on responsive design and mobile first. None of this is new to the field, but new techniques were taught in workshops. Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner gave an in-depth workshop on designing and developing for devices and how to build in a future friendly manner. They believe that everything will be interconnected in our future, from your internet-connected refrigerator to your app-loaded car dashboard. By designing a flexible system now, our content will adapt itself to future devices. Participants explored device APIs, CSS3 media queries, responsive web design, and PhoneGap. The workshop was heavy in technical jargon but they always brought it back to how a development methodology can directly affect the user experience.
As the field of User Experience (UX) grows many UX designers are still trying to define it. Whitney Hess, an independent UX consultant, guided us through her principles of experience design coupled with current examples to help us visualize each principle in practice. Hess used Wanderfly.com to exemplify her third principle, Limit Distractions. The Wanderfly home page is minimal with large icons to navigate to your destination. The tenth principle was the most compelling, Make a Good First Impression. "A website is analogous to your a first impression of a person. You want people to make you feel comfortable when you first meet them," she explained. She pointed to Vimeo as one of the best first-time user experiences. When a user visits the site for the first time a message asks, "Welcome, you're new aren't you?" This casual language guides you in like a friendly doorman.
Earlier today, video sharing site Vimeo announced that they will be rolling out features of the "new Vimeo," their first site redesign since 2007, with a private testing period in anticipation of a public launch in several weeks. As sometime users of the site, we're fans of Vimeo's clean interface and they've retained their overall aesthetic with a host (a "zillion," per their announcement) of minor tweaks; the biggest update to the actual viewing experience is a double-size full-width video player.
Similarly, they've reaffirmed their commitment to high-quality user-generated content with new privacy features, a batch uploader, and even "a new section that enables users to browse videos that are subject to Creative Commons licenses." Additional search filters—"by relevancy, length, credits, copyright license," etc.—and streamlined social features—"following," in keeping with current trends—also represent user experience improvements.
Nevertheless, the most significant upgrades are largely technical:
Vimeo rebuilt the site from the ground up using current programming languages and open web standards to deliver optimized site performance and easier, faster browsing. The cleaner codebase allows for more rapid development so the team can release site updates and new features in less time.
After seeing Samsung's Smart Window, the car-minded among you probably thought the technology would be cool on a windshield (though it would undoubtedly lead to some cars wrapped around trees). To see what a similar concept would look like in an automotive application, check out the "Windows of Opportunity" conceptual project, done in collaboration between General Motors' Human-Machine Interface Group and grad students at Israel's Bezalel Academy of Art and Design:
In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 will be bringing you a preview of this year's event. Follow us as we chat with keynote speakers, presenters and workshop leaders to give you a sneak peek at some of the ideas and issues to be addressed at this year's conference. Come by and say hello to us at the Coroflot Connects recruiting event and don't miss out on our live coverage as we report from the ground in Dublin!
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Interaction Design (IxD) is reaching a critical point in its history. We have spent the better part of the last half century converging. We have built our entire identity by bringing in other disciplines and practices into our fold. We are often decried as "land grabbers," but I say it is more about shoring up our knowledge base and practice so that we can be ready for the ever-increasing complexity of the tasks set before us through our acknowledged focus on human behavior as it relates broadly to the interaction of systems.
But it seems that in order to do this Borg-like assimilation of so many different sources (see this great video about Information Architects (IA) doing the same thing) we did not account for the long-term effect this might have on our community of practice, mostly due to our lack of solid foundation.
So it is with sadness that I announce that in the last year IxD, as a community of practice, has faced its strongest challenge to date. We have shifted from converging and assimilating to a community that is ever rapidly diverging.
The divergence is happening along the lines of the gravitational interests from where interaction design was born or where the slippery slope of our primary interest takes us. The divergence is also because the level of complexity of our problem sets have grown so vast that no single group can or should keep track of all of it. We have split basically along our primary lines of interest: Engineering, Individuals (psychology), Culture (anthropology) and Art.
While this year sees the greatest fracturing, I have been tracking the creation of these fault lines since I first helped to start the IxDA. Not unlike the early days of information architecture (IA) where talk of East Coast vs. West Coast IA filled the community's discourse, today the rifts we see in IxD are quite similar. People much like myself have forged interests and communities around the lines of engineering, psychology, culture and art, and each communities have forged practices that further set them apart from others. Rhetorical frameworks have been formed as well, further galvanizing differentiation and making it harder for disparate communities to share knowledge or more importantly, share in the creation of new knowledge.
For me, the image below best expresses how I see the current gravitational pulls facing the interaction designer today.
This grid represents the extremes of people's gravitational pulls. Few people practice at the edges (though there are some).
Let's review the axis and how they translate to the quadrants they create.
New York City welcomes Webvisions this week, a 3-day conference to explore the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy. Webvisions kicked off yesterday with a series of workshops covering topics from building HTML5 games to Adaptive Web Design. Conference goers ranged from hard-core developers to visual designers and the workshops seemed to offer something for everyone.
Three morning workshops held simultaneously initiated the conference. Aaron Gustafson led Adaptive Web Design, guiding us through different ways to think about how a site works in a variety of browsers, on a range of devices.
Small teams set out to define the information hierarchy with a single content set on four different devices: an iPhone, a 7" tablet, a 10" tablet, and a desktop computer. Gustafson questioned our placement navigation on a mobile device, asking, "Would it be better for the user if the nav was as the bottom of the page, after they looked at all the content and are ready to move to another area?"
Gustafson introduced us to Progressive Enhancement (PE), a methodology that encourages web developers to tackle issues based on each user-agent. PE follows the principle of starting with a strong default foundation and if a user-agent can handle it, the developer can add enhancements to improve the experience.
Gustafson is passionate about about this, "Progressive Enhancement isn't about browsers. Browsers and technology come and go. You have to think about your users," he says.
MILAN 2012: SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE
MILAN 2012: SATELLITE EXHIBITIONS
MILAN 2012: BRERA DESIGN DISTRICT
VENTURA LAMBRATE 2012
Uppleva home screen
Uppleva options screen
Uppleva setup screen
Image above courtesy of Paper
Little Big Details helps designers catalog the many UI details they encounter.
Images and reporting by Ciara Taylor
Intel perceived user
Intel actual user
Reporting by Ciara Taylor
Massimo Vignelli's original 1972 NYC Subway Map
Embark NYC
Tour Guide at the Leprechaun Museum
Menstruation Machine by Hiromi Ozaki
Crowbot Jenny, by Hiromi Ozaki
Sushiborg Yukari, by Hiromi Ozaki
Reporting and Images by Ciara Taylor
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