–Engage

So I’ve had a lot of offline discussions about my little call for designs of a Harley Davidson car. One major recurring theme is the importance of the sound of the vehicle. That low slow baritone sound coming out of the exhaust that you can hear a mile away defines the Harley experience as much if not more than anything else that can be designed directly by the product designer.

So me and a couple of designer friends here at SCAD started asking ourselves a few questions when we approached the issue of a car for Harley Davidson. I don’t know if we have many definitive answers but we do have good questions.

1. Does it make sense to transfer the “exact” sound of the motorcycle to a car? What differences in the car context would take issue with that sound, or support it?

What we answered here is that sound itself is not the brand alone, but the emotions associated to what the sound means (more below). But we also feel that in the context of a car – sans helmet, listening to music, or GPS navigation – the level of volume probably wouldn’t work as well (more below).

2. This begged the question of, what types of persona changes would occur by expanding to this market?

Since safety will be increased in any change to a 4-wheel, door enclosed, vehicle, the brand will become instantly more accessible/approachable to so many more people. This will mean new persona types and even a softening of the self-perception of the total brand audience. (This reason more than any other might be why HD never did this.)

As an aside, we tried to look at other brand expansions. The closest one we can think of that resembles this type of brand expansion is Apple. The case study of Apple expanding into iPods and then iPhones while maintaining brand consistency across all product lines and throughout the corporate experience has flaws, but is a great story in whole. New persona groups were introduced to the Apple brand unlike before with just desktops and laptops. Even the advent of the iMac didn’t cause as much growth in Apple’s population of customers the way the iPod did. Many of these people didn’t care about Apple the way the previous group did and some joined in head first into the fanboy mentality but from a very different place. Assuming that HD could never argue over financial growth at the expense of having to work harder to maintain its brand integrity for its core fans/groupies, the reality is that adding a car to their product line would indeed create a very different market type. This being said, that means that a car does not have to hold onto ALL the core pieces of the brand while still maintaining the values of the brand and the value of the brand to others.

3. What is the value of sound to the people who who talk about the importance of the “Harley sound”?

There were so many thoughts that this issue evoked: the sound is a literal brand that tells everyone around that the person riding THAT bike is riding a Harley Davidson. It is a brand as powerful as Ck or DG and as far as sound goes probably is the most powerful audio brand anywhere. In my mind I’m comparing it to NBC, MGM Lion, Intel, Apple’s startup, etc. When it comes to motorcycles it is not a Harley if it doesn’t have that rumble. Unlike other audio brands HD’s isn’t just about when the item is present or being presented. It is the overture & the ovation. It is the warning of the “bad ass’” approach and the encore of his departure.

I’m sure there are many other questions that we can ask but these are the ones that we were able to get to so far. I’d love to hear/read your thoughts about the quality of the Harley sound & what questions we need to be asking when deconstructing the meaning & value statements of an iconoclastic brand like Harley Davidson.

Based on where we’ve gotten so far I’d like to start putting together a more serious design brief than we’ve done thus far. Here goes:

Who is this for?

1. This would be an obvious family vehicle for the die-hard Haley fanboy. I’m using the term “family” loosely
2. The wanna-be’s or latent mid-life crisis guy who convinces their partner that this vehicle is an acceptable & safe alternative to owning a real “Hog”.

What form should it take?
I must admit I’m really torn here. Part of me wants this to be a classical roadster, but that “family” requirement is jumping out at me. So this needs to be sporty & bold but balanced with some of the needs of the family. So here’s where I’m landing:

• 4-door
• Sporty
• A more classic American line: camaro, t-bird, mustang, charger/challenger, vette. Notice that only theCharger is a 4-door of those examples, so that is another challenge, but one that is necessary.
• This is not a utility vehicle, but a car. No vans, trucks or SUVs. If pushed this might be taken into redefining the crossover category into something sportier & uniquely identifiable.
• HD is a premium (not a luxury) brand, so should this vehicle.

What about the sound?
This vehicle is not going to have THE sound. That wouldn’t make sense for this type of  ”family” car. The brand statement is going to have to be redefined. I’m thinking about how the iPod & then the iPhone were used to change the brand as represented in the industrial design for the rest of the Apple product line. A market entry piece like this can use the spirit of the Harley brand & not the precise historic execution of that brand. What’s important here is what Harley represents to people and quite honestly a lot of that message is not in the form execution. Harley Davidson is more an icon than a brand. Even Japanese bikes that model themselves on the Harley, ride on the same emotional coat tails. The ultimate message of Harley is FREEDOM. Can that be put into a “family” vehicle? If not, then I go right back to a Shelby Cobra roadster with a low rumble exhaust. I just don’t think it would be as successful & ultimately valuable. It would just be another small market vehicle.

Well, if anyone up in Wisconsin is listening, I’d love to hear if my thoughts have merit. As for everyone else, I’d love to hear your thoughts & suggestions for other brand market expansions with similarly challenging qualities. It is just interesting from time to time to give yourself a hypothetical challenge and run w/ it as far as your skills, experiences, and extra time can take you.

It is often said that interaction design evolved out of the requirement to stem the tide of the ever increasing amount of complexity in our personal lives due to technology. Design & engineering a like had to encompass a personal/human view of the effects that inserting their creations would have on the people who would encounter them (directly or indirectly).

To do this type of work required the creation and assimilation of tools from all manner of the world of art, design & engineering. Basically, we created THE most complex hard to understand and do discipline and practice, to help others mitigate complications due to complexity (said wordily on purpose).

People today have been grappling with where does IxD end and where does service design begin. Hell if I know (or care). Just like I can’t tell you where [fit old design discipline here: Arch, ID, GD, etc.] ends and IxD begins and you shouldn’t care either. What I do know is that there is a new group of people who are creating a community–a vibrant and productive one–which isn’t even really all that new relative to our fast-paced world, that “knows” what service design is, why its important and how to do it. No self respecting IxD with half a sense of integrity could argue that they exist.

Today I was giving a lecture that I first wrote in 2005 about the “history of IxD”. It is all predicated on the sense that our discipline emerged b/c of the need of human consideration by those who were grappling with placing ever increasing complex technologies in the context of the aforementioned humans. Further, we juxtaposed this to the birth of other disciplines like interactive design/art and realized that we can’t do our jobs well without considering aesthetics and classical design disciplines are much better at that than us, so lets look to them for guidance.

Along the way though, we realized that there was much in the world outside of technology that was either already more complex than it had to be, or whose complexity existed outside the ream of technology itself, even if technology enabled that complexity to happen in the first place. Institutions like travel & hospitality, financial services, health services, even retail have become so complex that like the graphical interfaces of yore human beings are being left with the same feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Service designers had to emerge to tackle these issues using new tools and to come up with new frames (such as collaboration) in order to take that same spirit of human consideration that is so rooted in interaction design and apply it to new areas of complexity. Like metaphor was used to bridge the distance between system and mental models in technological systems, so too will new rhetorical devices and frames will be used towards bridging whatever it is that is lacking between the system and human being within services.

All this is to say that at least for myself (and maybe for you now) I now have an understanding of the context that helps me thinking about services better in comparison to my core skillsets, and allows me to engage services in a new way.

I’d be interested to hear what self-identified service designers are thinking in this regards and if this framing at all might help you speak to interaction and other designers understand what it is you do.

This is a bit slow to take off, but it really is worth the watch.

It is an amazing exercise by the folks at Multitouch-Barcelona to try and understand how humans perceive the computers in their lives. GREAT work!

This is an example of what I’ve been thinking of for the student design competition for IxDA where students will be asked to do IxD to define IxD (this isn’t that answer, but the right framework).

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

I recently was honored to have some time with the Esteemed Bill Moggridge, co-Founder of IDEO, author/editor of Designing Interactions, designer of the first laptop and the person who coined the phrase “interaction design”. Let’s just say I was a tad faklempt at the honor.

Unfortunately, I can’t go into right now all that we talked about with him and esteem design educator Norman McNally, but what was great was to have this luminary affirm much of my thinking about the theory, practice & history of interaction design. One such item was the growing if not new requirement in prototyping–videography.

Video has a prototyping tool has come of age in the age of YouTube & Vimeo. At first it was a means of expressing that which has been built as a sorta of record of the moment, or a demo. We’d see these all the time.

Here is one from an HCI research group with a new paradigm in desktop management called Bumptop:

Then IDEO jumped the shark with its work for Intel on new paradigms in pervasive and mobile computing:

The folks at Nokia turned video into a means of expressing things in the sci-fi realm:

Combining the sci-fi and the completed demo with a step backwards in some ways was Oblong:

But then others joined in with IDEO to express ideas instead of prototypes, where the videography like the IDEO example presented something not completed, but merely illustrated with smoke & mirrors (or green screens and editing).

Low-fi versions like Cooper’s Drawing Board’s Commuter Buddy demonstrate how cheap and effective this can be:

The folks at Adaptive Path did a tremendous job with their video demonstrating new desktop & mobile forms of web browsing technology & behaviors:

Obviously, I can’t keep going like this right? The point is made that videos have a ton of power. But the examples I have given so far are mostly interaction designs embodied in the software. But where video prototyping is really powerful is with hardware interactions, and technologies that don’t really exist yet. Or in explorations of the theoretical.

A long time example of this type of use is the work by Tony Dune and Fiona Raby from the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions program. Here is a still from the video (that I can’t find).

Technological dreams series: No.1, Robots

And this entire post was inspired by the most recent work from my favoriate Norwegian IxD researchers from Touch.org working on the study of NFCs. Their latest prototype uses this same type of experimentation in between the smoke & mirrors of videography using an iPhone and a supposed RFID add on (available in the future.

But why all the video? Would storyboards do?

I don’t think so. Despite the fact that sequential art is well sequential there is a property to the type of sequencing that exists in comic form that lacks a fundamental reality. Sometimes this abstraction works in the favor of clearer communication, but that is rare and usually in the hands of a trained professional comic artist. The videos though of all these types communicate with clarity in that 4th dimension of time. These stories insert themselves and force a type of reflection that other forms of none production prototyping do not.

So break out the camera and after-effects and get to work!

In my Senior Intearction Design Studio today I had a student present his sketches to me and the rest of the class. During his explanation I kept getting bothered by the words he was using to describe what was otherwise a good framework for the user interface he was designing for a kiosk system.

Then it struck me. He kept using the word “click”. He meant nothing by it. Really! he didn’t mean anything by it. But it was clear to me that his framing of his interface around “clicking” was leading him towards a specific direction in the interaction design.

As he said click it was very clear that he was using the word “click” to mean “change context”. In the web world, that would mean a new page or a new screen. He would say “click” and then move his hand to his next view, as if to say the current view is over, or “Next!”

I confirmed my observation during the critique when I offered my interpretation, and offered him the following, “You might want to be clearer about when it is necessary for you to change contexts.” (paraphrasing from memory) His eyes sorta lit up as did the rest of the small class as I explained further that he should start thinking about increasing the information and interaction density of the interaction design by layering through progressive presentation elements within the same context instead of always moving to the next context.

Similarly, this happened in the earlier class with the same students where their use of metaphor was single-dimensional, relying on staid patterns like “tabs” which have no reference to the message of the information they are trying to bring futher understanding to. There were two examples where the metaphor of space (buildings) would have been much more appropo and it could have been easily implemented using a zooming interface instead of one that relied on “point & CLICK.”

My point in explaining this is that for me there was an epiphany (this is why teaching is so wonderful), I was finally able to see the example of what I have been trying to articulate for years about the complexity of interaction design, and its so strong tie to language. Not just narrative (as all interactions tell a story) but to the semantics, syntax and semiotics of what makes up the way we talk about the interactions we design.

In this case, even before a real wireframe was developed of any fidelity, the means of framing the interaction already pre-determined (or limited) the interactions that were to be available in the designer’s mind.

Coincidentally, on this very day, @rhjr (aka Robert Hoekman, Jr.) asked the twitterverse about what is good and bad about patterns. He was speaking about design patterns. I think though this ties directly to what can be dangerous about design patterns is that some patterns get TOO ingrained in our minds. They become the only way we can even conceive doing X,Y,Z, and we freeze our creativity.

But this is what language is. It is the cultural patterns embedded in our sentences. As designers though one might say it is our job to move past these limitations of language and structure and open our minds to new possibilities.

Something I usually look for in designers (it doesn’t always work) is to hire designers who are multi-lingual (btw, this design student is at least bi-lingual; disproving my point) because if you have different language sets to access during problem solving, you have multiple frames of reference.

Anyway, my point after rambling is that you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.

Anyway, people have asked me to write more about my teaching, so here is one for you all. Enjoy!

A theme is brewing in my life as a designer and a design educator. As many of you know I’m teaching mostly undergraduates how to become great interaction designers. My classes tend to have some amount of overlap and so themes sometimes come out that jump out at me that can’t be ignored any longer.

This month’s theme is “story telling” or “narrative”.

It came to a head tonight when I saw the announcement of a new product for storyboard, animatics and audio soundtracks.  The Product is called Story Planner (with a Pro edition). I haven’t used it yet, but just its existence is compelling enough for me.

Yes, there are other comic creation tools out there like Comic Life, but adding in the ability to animate aspects of the board and put in a sound track and now you have a tool that lowers the bar in the creation of really simple video narratives for communicating design directions and scenarios.

But what is the big deal about narratives anyway. They really have existed for quite a long time in design now, going way back. The very notion of using storyboards in a design setting is not that new at all. But what has been happening lately is an “upping” of the ante.

Character development through Goal-Directed Design personas and then GDD scenarios is a common UCD methodology. But expanding on those scenarios and converting them into stories, takes them out of the mere “practical” and into the realm of the creative, sparking a new level of connecting the designer to the user, and allowing the designer to use their less analytical skills towards expressing and synthesizing design goals and needs.

So while yes, there is nothing new under the sun, how we use it and fuse it can lead to new interesting things.