–Engage

Today Bill Gates at the new Techonomy conference (which looks like an amazing event/organization) suggested that In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web. It is a great read via @techcrunch who have been covering this conference really well. But reading this and listening to the Gov. of Minnesota on the Daily Show (video available) who are suggesting that higher education can happen best off campus, I’m dismayed and befuddled. I’m more confused when I see this from Bill Gates who has been such a strong advocate for education, but then I realize he has mostly concentrated in k-12 and he himself is a college drop out. I’m sensitive to higher education, less so because I now find my career tied to the higher education wagon as a professor of design, but because I have cherished my own college experience some 20 years after the fact as one of the most defining and life altering experiences of my life.

But my life story is irrelevant here. What is more important is what institutionalized Higher Education really means. And it is not about the simple passing of knowledge. There are two overlapping paths that are crucial within institutional higher education that I’m afraid will be lost if we continue this tack of reducing public support for higher education. I also want to say that I don’t think this is an either or type thing. I believe that the power of the open internet is a powerful supplement to what I teach and rely on its videos and abundance of publicly available written material every day in my classrooms. So what is so important in the Academy that we have to maintain?

Growing up
Seriously. in the US, especially, where vast majority of of college students go long distances away from their primary support systems (families) to live on their own for the first time, college is where we get to figure out growing up. We are “supported” through economic help and social systems. We get to explore the politic, the social, the economic, the sexual, the religious and ultimately the human condition before having to fall out this growingly limited safety net to face the realities of a growingly unforgiving world.

As I write this, I realize that this is a luxury of the middle & upper classes, but one that I have also seen make a huge difference to working class individuals who have been able to make it work for themselves usually in the most heroic ways.

Depth & Focus
Having been a teacher, I have seen with my own eyes the difference it makes to work in groups with peers (not necessarily even on the same project). The support and camaraderie and co-teaching that goes on through the classroom in real time face to face is incredibly powerful. The institution is also a crucible for engaging contradiction. This is why it has tenure protection. So that the teacher’s opinion is not the basis in any way or pretense of other reasons created as an excuse for reprimand, censorship or termination. The university setting is our last monastery of contemporary thought. The protection from the “real world” that is here enables focused and deeper learning than the outside.

Not just passing on knowledge but creating it
In the end the most important thing about the academy is not just the passing of knowledge, but the creation of knowledge. The classroom is used as a testing ground for new ideas, and new idea creators. Those who take on the challenge move up the academic ranks and become our doctors of knowledge as much as becoming our teachers. Their mastery of knowledge areas is required for them to move beyond what they know and create a world beyond. The institution of higher learning is their protecter lair of study. Almost every major nobel laureate has come from higher learning. Yes, the budgets for these studies are often supported greatly by corporate financial support, but many are beyond the interest of corporations, or in contradiction to the corporate agenda. The reality is that we need to make sure that the academy remains in part (preferably) in whole separated from the corporate world. Even the government agenda has had negative impact on the results of the academy. These concerns are especially true of the pure academy that has no direct impact on the corporate balance sheet. Pure science, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts (including design) do not always work towards either direct career development or corporate capital growth, but still have pushed humanity as far as any other non vocational or commercial endeavor.

In the end, technology alone is not enough to change the 100′s of years that the academy as we know it has been in place as an invaluable contributor to the higher calling of humanity. I shiver when those focused on the economy as the soul means of improving humanity talk about either corporatizing or removing the institution of higher learning. Money already has way to tight a hold on higher ed than it should. I pray that Bill Gate’s prediction is dead wrong.

I do agree with some of his points about text books and other issues mentioned in the article linked to above. In the end, this is not a black & white issue. The reality is that technology offers tons of opportunities for improving education, career development and even how the brick & mortar institutions of the academy should operate. Where I disagree is that an education solely developed on the Web is as valuable in the long term for humanity (or the educated).

Yup, this last 1 might get me trouble. And I don’t have tenure, or work for a tenure protected institution, so my contradiction of their policies and institutional beliefs means that mine put me in a tenuous if not frightening position.

I got back from @uxlx this week. My write up of the conference will be @johnnyholland later this week. The conference was quite excellent. The diversity and quality of attendees and speakers felt unprecedented to me which combined with the venue and surrounding city made for a wonderful event.

What I want to focus on comes from the closing keynote by one of my fave UX speakers, Jared Spool (@jmspool). His talk was entitled “The Dawning Age of Experience”. In this talk he outlines the qualities of organizations and designers that have led to the design of great experiences (also successful from a business perspective, as well). In this talk, one of his main points was that great experience design is not open to introspection.

I found the use of this term odd and later asked Jared to clarify. He stated that it is not his term, but is a means of explaining results which cannot be easily explained, deconstructred, or codified. He gave 2 examples outside design that were really interesting. The first was about a group of people who can determine the sex of a baby chicken (chick) well before we can through other means with pretty good odds. Well in excess to the 50% that we are all born with. After outlining the “sexing of chicks” Jared explained a similar phenomenon amongst midwives who are able to determine a fetus’ weight with much higher accuracy rates than any medical device or doctor’s procedure in practice today.

Then Jared spoke about how this plays out within design. He explained that he was once invited to an important conference by AIGA. At one point during the conference a creative director of an interactive agency was reviewing their redesign of the Wall Street Journal. Coincidentally, Jared and his company UIE.com had just completed a review of the Wall Street Journal and other financial information sources for a project he was working on, and so he was not listening without some background to the topic of the design. It turns out that the designer nailed the design. He outlined every major point mentioned in Jared’s report and executed on those points really well.

Jared took it upon himself to question the designer. The designer claimed to have done no research–none. He was able to explain why he did what he did but he couldn’t explain how he did what he did. He could not approach it with introspection. He just did it.

How does this happen? It comes from the type of education that is not seen amongst the columns and pig skin diplomas of formal education. It comes through deep & sustained practice within the confines of relaxed mentorship. This isn’t to say that basics of craft and concepts of design thinking and supporting social sciences and humanities that make great designers can’t come out of today’s formal design education. However, the model of apprenticeship is something that is hard to replace in the school setting compared to out in the field.

In a class today, we discussed this topic because I found myself giving directions and not being able to fully support the direction and didn’t want to make shit up in front of my students. I related this story and said that basically, I just know. I know because I’ve tried so many permutations within my years of practice and have found out through all those failures that this is the right answer.

Then I remembered a very long conversation on the IxDA discussion list. The originating post was made by Jim Leftwich, now a former board member. In his originating post and the subsequent conversation he attempted to clarify what he meant by something he dubbed “Rapid Expert Design”. His explanation of his apprenticeship and working system left many aspects unexplained, but more importantly actually tried to codify how the system works.

During the conference I had opportunity to speak with Luke Wroblewski about apprenticeships. She said that everyone who worked under him  he has thought of as an apprentice to him. I know for my short spells of management I tried to think the same way, as well. But I still have pause for a few reasons. I don’t think that most UX design managers do think about apprenticing their direct reports and almost even more important, I do not think that employees understand that they are being apprenticed. First, this relates to the culture of rewarded failure that Jared speaks about in his talk. So few organizations have this culture. I have worked at many and I haven’t ran into 1 that has it, and that includes working directly for creativity-centric organizations like advertising agencies. Second, in the UX community where way too many of us do not have any formal (or even informal) training in traditional  design or visual communications we’ve never experienced what a real apprenticeship studio looks like. Even many programs today are more focused on imparting chances for practice over having practice being part of an apprenticeship experience. Third, it is rare that upon hiring employees feel that they are entering an apprentice environment. I have never heard a hiring manager put in their job description that they are looking for an apprentice. Basically, we are made to feel as if our employment is the equivalent of being converted from a human being into a cog into a machine.

My entire career has been one where I’ve been hunting to be an apprentice. I know that it is not something that requires direct overt invitation. The closest I feel I came to that for myself is in my previous job at Motorola Enterprise Mobility, when I got to work with the amazing (and humble) Ted Booth. He is currently the Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design. Unfortunately, for me he took that position at Smart months after I joined Motorola, so I was not really able to get the long term impact. I did learn a lot from other peers there in an apprentice like way, but the lack of depth in any one area, and the lack of closeness in discipline made it difficult to sustain an apprentice-like atmosphere.

All this begs the question of what an apprenticeship should look like? How can an organization set up such an experience? I may take this on as part of a more broad discussion about design education, formal and informal in the coming weeks. For this article, I’ll conclude with the thought that definitely within the user experience experience the concept of apprenticeship needs revitalization. Even in more traditional design disciplines economic forces are making it hard for well meaning organizations to sustain the requirements that make apprenticeships work.

More soon, I hope!

[I also want to add that having a "mentor" is not the same as being a part of a thorough and formal apprenticeship.]

A very interesting take on where IxD is from a Greek in Scotland.

[This is the second part in a continuing series about UI Design. Catch the 1st part here!]

Storytelling has been huge of late. Many people have been talking about storytelling and creating narratives as a core competency and practice for good interaction design. Some have gone so far as to say that narrative IS what we experience when we use tools and services of any variety because it is through story or narrative that we derive meaning in our lives.

I have also recently been exposed to the practice and methods of service design. In their practice they do not speak of users, but of actors. This reminded me of the classic UML work I did as an IA/BA (business analyst) at the turn of the millennium. We also spoke about actors instead of users back then as well, but did not really think of them as pieces in a production. We didn’t take the metaphor that far.

Today though we are taking the metaphor of performance and production that far if not all the way to the end. We are using video production to create “experience” prototypes as but the clearest example. So I’d like to take this opportunity and declare that like many who refuse to say “user” any longer and use human or searcher or customer or creator, I am no longer going to talk about pages within any type of application platform. I would like to begin advocating for the term “stage” to be used.

Why “stage”?

First, the term “page” which is so common in use to talk about major changes in context (per my original piece in this series) for web sites and applications does not work for all types of application on all types of platforms/media. By using a new term that has appropriate usages outside of the web environment we can do a better job at training application designers instead of just web designers.

Second, it has two meanings. Both of them can be very useful when trying to describe how a human being moves through an interface. It is very common to talk about steps in a process as “stages”. Further, the term “stage” is a great allusion to performance and story. Yes, there is a 3rd meaning, but it isn’t so useful here since no one is on a coach (buggy) being pulled by multiple horses.

This second definition though is the main reason. The use of stage as an metaphor will lend itself to help so many designers think about the environment they are creating as a setting for where dialog and action collide towards creating a performance that satisfies and elicits emotion. Like the real stage itself, we can create sub-stages where sub-dominant contexts have great significance and focus if only but for a short while, while contextually relevant to the whole. We can understand though that a curtain pull between stages (scenes) can act as specific dramatic play, toying with the user’s anticipation, or better preparing the user to receive a large monologue of data that they will need further assistance in processing.

But it is also important to remember that not all UI Design is done for “the web”. Outside the web the concept of the page has no significance. For visual basica applications they have used the term “form”. For Flash applications they have used the term form or scene. I’d like to propose that by using a new term, we can find a semantic structure to UI design that speaks to all application platforms. It will especially help web designers to start speaking about their applications without being tied to the previous metaphor and its unnecessary limitations. I also think it will help web designers and developers alike move more fluidly between different types of application media.

In our next installment we’ll talk about what makes up a stage as it relates to UI Design and Interaction Design. If you missed the 1st one, you can always give it a read.

[This is going to be a 2 part piece discussing first why designing for contexts of use is so important by analyzing kayak.com as a great example. Then part two is going to ask for a new metaphor to be be used to describe this type of design across a greater number of platforms.]

In 2005 and 2006 (you know, ancient times) we started to see that the metaphor of the page that existed till that point to describe the major context of focus in UI design for the web was starting to crumble. At the 2006 IA Summit Gene Smith quoted me as saying “The Page is Dead” as he stated afterward “Long Live the Page!”. I took his talk to heart. Later that year, I changed my own presentations to talk directly to the page and the importance of understanding that “the page is a metaphor of a moment of uninterrupted context.”

There are 3 core points to make in this slide (besides the fact that Neo kicked ass!):

1. Nothing on the internet really exists. It is only through metaphor that we can understand anything that happens on computers at all. It’s all 1′s and 0′s and we are at the mercy of those who present concepts to us so we can derive meaning to the whole.

2. The web has transitioned from a mode primarily of reading and writing to a mode of activities and tasks.

3. If we are to have a metaphor at all, like “page” then we need to reframe what it means so that the meaning we give it fits the analogy of its reality.

The example I gave back then was kayak.com. 4 years later (4 decades in internet terms) it is still as good as ever. There are 3 distinct contexts within Kayak:

1. creating your search query
2. browsing results with the ability to filter and sort along key criteria
3. confirming your purchase destination

There are other distinct contexts, but you can look at these as the primary examples if the flow of Kayak as a service. What is unclear is why these contexts? What makes these moments of distinction worthy of separation, focus, and control? Let’s review each one.

When creating a search query there is one thing we know. We know what we are searching for. We know nothing else. By “what we are searching for” we know what type of travel item. We also know the criteria of that search. It makes no sense to have a bunch of blank areas taking up space and/or creating distraction for the end user.

But what Kayak knows that the end user may not, is the intensity of the process of running a search for travel. By maintaining a distinct context here it is easier for the designer/developer of Kayak to mitigate the awful feeling of waiting for results to emerge. That is to say that the next context, results, is completely reliant on the criteria of the search. Any change in most of the parameters of a travel search require a deep set of processing rules across many servers to acquire a result set.

What the user learns, only upon first use is the shere enormity of a results set for Kayak. If Kayak was to make room for both setting the search query and its result set, there would have to be a sacrifice of usability of both screens. Further, if the end-user changed specific criteria like dates or places in the search query while viewing results, existing results would have to disappear, or alternatively there would have to be a clear way to save pieces of the existing results or concatenate the results of multiple queries. This level of complication would be difficult for even the best designer to manage with probably only utility for a small subset of user real world scenarios.

The power of Kayak though is revealed on this screen more than any other. It is in the left side filters. I can change any of these parameters and without so much as a flick of the page, the data (which is already resident on my computer) is limited in view or changed in order as I requested. Being able to play with this data in real-time without having to run heavy queries back to Kayak’s server is a win for me (the end user) and for Kayak (as it reduces load on their servers).

Besides the filtering capabilities of the UI, it is also important for the UI to offer controls to progressively display if not give options for the next level of key actions, such as purchase. In the example above, when the user clicks “select” for any option, they are presented with a dialog overlay of the precise purchase options.  There are other overlays like this in the results list area. There is also progressive display of parameter options that are not as used as often in the filter area on the left side panel. Combined these allow the user to change the context permanently (the filter presentations) and then the overlays for progressive temporary information, or an access confirming for the end user goes to the right place when they want to.

A great feature in Kayak is the overlay to see a the details of a single direction on a flight combination. This overlay with accompanying options allows the user to get valuable information that is contextualized with useful options for making decisions without a large investment through the change of the interface.

The details view of all directions and all stops is made available through a contextual progressive display. This has had various view types in the past. At one time for example it was a dialog overlay that was modal (didn’t allow the user to use the rest of the application unless the dialog was acted upon). What is also interesting is that depending on the type of travel object being searched for (flights, hotels, cars) this interaction changes. For example, for hotels the amount of information in a details view is so large with so many different types of views (hotel info, map, reviews) that it actually opens a completely new context, but does so without destroying the results view by opening a completely new window or tab (depending on the user’s settings).

Here on the flight page though, this progressive “opening” of the details of the flight selection could be seen as a “sub context” because as you can see, the amount of information that needs to be made available takes up so much of the screen real estate that almost all the rest of the results page is gone. What this does allow though is to take advantage of the 4th dimension in Interaction Design through scrolling. A user can easily compare 2 open details views by having them both open and scrolling between them. I do not think though this is how it is commonly used. So its other advantage is that it allows the user to dig deeper without feeling like there is a large investment in the system to present this information to them and thus not difficult to return back to where they were.

As you can see through this deconstruction of the contexts of Kayak, a lot of thought went into when to “change the page” and when not to. It is important to have focus, but it is also important to make the user feel comfortable in highly invested search operations, so they feel at ease in digging deeper.

I hope this deconstruction of Kayak.com will help any designer in the future make decisions about when and where to create new contexts and how to manage dominant and as described in the last example, sub-dominant contexts.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to discuss why the page metaphor needs to change to something more robust so that the idea of context management can be applied generally to all types of platforms.

Finally got 2 seconds on my friend’s iPad today. Can’t walk into Best Buy because I don’t trust myself. I played with it for maybe 5min tops and a lot of that time was with my little boy tuggin’ at my sleeve saying, “What’s this?” So this is by no means a review.

Despite being accused of being a “total fanboy” (something I don’t understand since until a month ago I never owned a mac my entire life) I was really skeptical of the iPad. I just knew though that until I touched it, my opinion was going to be quite stupid. I was skeptical for a few reasons:

• The hardware made me feel like it was just a big iPod Touch.
• I was REALLY upset w/ the lack of capture tools (no camera or mic)
• And like Robert Fabricant pointed out on Fast Company recently the OS felt really like a step up from the phone OS. This felt like something MS would do about 5 years ago.

So I finally got to pick it up. I have to admit I wasn’t wowed. I don’t think I”m really the market for it. Maybe if I didn’t already have my netbook that I’m using now beautifully with @jolicloud running I might be.  I don’t watch a lot of movies and I’m not a big reader. I have tried to tell myself that maybe I would read more if I had an e-reader, but my wife won’t let me test that out and to be honest, I think she’s right on this one. Oh! I am also not a big gamer. Lastly, I live on my iPhone. I type blog entries, really long emails, do task lists, etc. So I don’t need something bigger just to type better, faster on it.

But that’s me and that’s not the point of this. Not every tool has to be for everyone. But that’s not the point here either.

What I noticed in all this that for some reason struck me harder than in previous work I’ve done in similar spaces myself is how important trust is to the design process. I look at the iPad and I realize that few organizations could do it. Not b/c of lack of talent or lack of skill, but because of lack of trust. Now I could flip this and say that Steve Jobs is capable of seeing the future, but I really doubt that. He definitely has vision and enables vision with his team, but seeing vision through takes trust. A manager and all the team members have to sit back and say, “It will come” and they have to know that “It’s ok if it doesn’t.”

That’s a HUGE deal. There are few environments that I have worked in in either software or hardware that has that freedom of time and failure. Or truly the impossibility of failure because of the freedom of time.

Along with this, I will add the importance of building it to know. Only in using it can we know the true value of interactivity. To me this has been the largest failure of most UX practices where the UX designer never builds anything. How can they know the success of their design if it cannot be used. If you are working on anything more complex than a standard info-site then as a designer it needs to be played with, touched, manipulated, transacted with to be understood and validated as successful.

Tools have come out lately that help this cause, but the processes of UX designers are still too wrapped up in the wastefulness of tools that are way too static. The only static 2D images we produce should be sketches. Anything else after that has to be interactive. If you can’t make it interactive at any level of richness then find a partner who can or get yourself a relatively cheap subscription to lynda.com and figure it out.

The only way that “It will come” is if you build it.

In my last piece, I discussed an important part of design education which is lessons in humanities especially rhetoric and comparative literature. I discussed the importance of frames as well as narrative. But it doesn’t end there. These concepts–frames and narrative–are just tools for something bigger, which is meaning.

As human beings a huge part of our derivation of meaning comes from language. Language though is largely understood as a collection of graphical symbols and signs. Further, we rely on non-linguistic pictograms to complete or enhance moments of communication where linguist communication is not always enough. But even what I’m referring to as non-linguistic almost always is understood as a linguistic analog.

The study of semiotics is crucial for all sorts of communication, but since design is so focused and relies on visual communication it is even more important, so I’ll add here:

#17 Semiotics: How do we understand and create meanings within signs.
When we talk about providing affordances within systems (where there weren’t before) is is really about creating cues through visual signs. Sometimes these signs existed within culture or map directly to culture and can be predictably understood. Sometimes we have to create wholly new signs and teach these systems. Sometimes especially these new semiotics exist in spaces beyond the initially visible and more involved envisioning our own kinesthetic presence. Regardless, for us to do well as designers, especially of systems without direct analog controls, we have to become experts in using existing and creating new meanings through the many forms of signs.

This is #17 of my series on thinking about design education. Here are the rest of the links:

• 1-13 – The beginning
• 14 – Creating knowledge
• 15 – Art
• 16 – Humanities

As always, I’d love to hear from people their thoughts, contributions, questions and contradictions about any and all of these ideas.

[Continuing my series on design education]

I feel blessed to have come to design in a serpentine path. I came to be a designer after being an anthropologist. Not only did I get the obvious dose of social sciences like anthropology, sociology and psychology, but I got a strong does of linguistics, history, folklore, and political science as well. Other peers of mine also studied economics, philosophy and rhetoric.

When I moved to design, I noticed there were a lot of folks like myself who came to design through a similar social science or humanities path. I noticed these folks had something different. They were able to add value through the act of framing. Framing is what I consider to be the most important skill of a business person and if you are involved in design you are involved in business.

An education in liberal arts I feel (and will probably be scrutinized for it) forces a student through more ways of framing the world (if not the universe). One could say (and I will probably be punished for that too) that science is a singularity of a frame and is the basis for all of the natural sciences, mathematics, and applied sciences (engineering). Design also has a limited view of frames, but is balanced out by the infinite frames that the multi-cultural arts provide.

But what is a frame?

It can be simply the way one begins something. It is usually most obvious in the communication arts, when a person uses an opening reference to a discussion and is hard to refute on its own. The following statements then are based on the logic of that opening statement which in combination create a whole new meaning.

This same idea of frames can be seen in the way we learn to communication visually as well. Engendering visual communication is one of the common ways of doing this.

It is important though for designers to be steeped in as many types of frames and manners of framing as time allows.

But it is not just about frames. The humanities offers other types of lessons, especially in terms of narratives. Comparative literature and history both are imbued with tremendously rich narratives. Storytelling is the designer’s data. It persuades toe-to-toe with data in the best scenarios. It is often why creative directors in advertising come from writing and not always from the visual communications side.

So the next rule

#16 A complete education includes the humanities and social sciences.

Here are all the articles thus far in the series:

• 1-12 +13
• #14
• #15

As always I’d love to get people’s thoughts on design education.

Continuing what is now becoming a series I want to talk about the importance of Art and add a well rounded Art education inclusive of fine arts, art history and art criticism as part of any solid design education.

15. Art: Expression, craft, context & criticism

Design’s history comes from the arts. Anyone who wants to deny that is really in denial themselves. It is an applied art for sure, but still art. Art teaches some core foundational aspects within design:

1. expression: yes, design should always include bounded self-expression
2. unbounded stamina of creativity: You just are forced to keep going.
3. craft: you are forced to use your muscles and senses as an intense partnership
4. criticism: you can learn this w/o art per se, but there is something about honing criticism in art that is freeing and the language of art criticism is what has set up the language of design criticism. Too many give critiques, but don’t use a language of design criticism, as they have never used art criticism before.
5. context: not the kind we get from observational research, but the kind you get by understanding the near and long term historical juxtapositions of movements, styles, fads, etc.

So as a recap you can see the original post or go to the first addition.

Recently I posted a bit about design education. I realized this evening that the 13 points that I made in that post were very one sided. They are sided heavily on the vocational requirements of design education. I even go so far as to say in #13 that design is practice and students and teachers a like need to keep up with industry as part of their education and career development.

This framing though is not precise or complete. While a huge part of design education is to create designers, the academy that education is embedded in has another calling which is to create knowledge. It is not the only place to create knowledge, but educational institutions that are part of the academy have gone to great lengths to create protections for educators so that they can serve the dual purpose of imparting and creating knowledge.

Like I said there are other areas that create knowledge, even in industry. The R&D divisions of many corporations serve this purpose. However, they do this w/o the protection of tenure for academic teacher-researchers or the insulation from the quarterly report.

But my focus on the vocational education has 2 sources. 1. Because a good 99% of my career has been in industry and I am not raised within the academy, though I’ve had a bit of experience with it; and 2) Because I do not work in the academy as an educator, I work in a teaching college, or as SCAD (my employer) likes to call it a “student-based” university. Our tagline is even “The University of Creative Careers.” This really demonstrates our focus on preparation.

However this does not always translate fully and clearly. We require that most of our MFAs need to present “new knowledge” as part of their thesis work. This definitely suggests that the school supports at least the students doing research.

But my greater point I’d like to discuss is that knowledge actually needs to be part of all areas of education and practice. When organizations like RKS, Adaptive Path, Coooper, InContext, ForUse, IDEO, HFI, NN/G, etc. codify their inner workings and share it with the world they are creating knowledge and taking part in all of our educations and added to the total knowledge pool of design.

But what makes this all so interesting is that industry doesn’t want to foot the bill of education taking the time to “create knowledge” unless that knowledge is easily applied to their POV … and this is a great shame.

So I will add #14 to my list of what design education needs to be.

14. Space for exploration, discovery, practice, and unjudged failure.
These are as much learning tools as knowledge creation tools. We need to see what works, how it works, and well why it can’t work. The room to fail, not without repercussions, but without drastic repercussions. And with a little serendipity, maybe these failures will add up to new knowledge.

It seems of late in my life there have been a perfect storm of events driving me to focus my attention on re-designing design education. As many if you know, I’m a professor of interaction & industrial design at the Savannah College if Art & Design (SCAD). So obviously the last year+ of my professional life has led me to reflect a lot about the curriculum I teach & for whom I do that teaching (both the college & the students). I ask myself daily if what I’m doing is preparing my students for professional life as robust, multifaceted designers and if the institution whose structure & culture I am somewhat bound by is appropriate for achieving those goals? There is even the question of whether or not the right students are matched together to allow them to succeed, or should the institution & teacher in tandem be able to teach anyone anything all the time?

Here are 12 qualities of design and design education I think will be driving the next wave of design educators.

1. Knowing, Making, Thinking, Processing
We know that these 4 things are core to any type of design. I need too have knowledge about design to know what is right. I need to know how to make something. I need to know what I should make. And lastly I need to know how to get there. Too often programs especially in classical disciplines like Industrial Design, Graphic Design and Architecture focus on Knowing and Making. But the opposite is true of discipline like Interaction & Service design which focus on Thinking and Processing. The system needs to be more balanced.

2. It takes a multi-facetted individual
Or at least an individual who is steeped enough in general design theory and criticism to understand the specialized roles (disciplines) it takes to make a specific project come alive. Way too often leadership of projects are in the hands of people who don’t know what they don’t know. This is as much a sin of arrogance as it is a sin of ignorance.

3. Communicating visually is always important
I don’t care if you are designing sound systems. You have to be able to present your work visually for so many reasons: to communicate to stakeholders (the obvious one) but also to have visual thinking as a primary tool for creatively engaging idea conception.

4. Design is not a service to business …
… design is a core partner of the business. But this means that designers need to have communication, language, and process skills that speak to businesses. But we need to do this by utilizing our strengths, not by assimilating. Be visual; tell stories.

5. The data must flow (to paraphrase Dune)
We have to consider multiple sources and multiple types as data not just as sources for inspiration, but when modelled as guideposts to help keep us on track.

6. However, data and the designer’s vision need to create a narrative.
We as designers need to be better experts at framing the narratives embedded within our  designs. Emotional Ballands must be song from the designs we make.

7. School is not an end
Industry needs to step back into its role as completer of young designer’s educations. Too many have forsaken the value of the internship and even more now expect a skill level of the new undergraduate that does a disservice to them and their school’s ability to create that agent. I think there is also a missed opportunity here for Industry to do a better job of leading through eduction.

8. All designers should have the same foundation
Simply put, we need to start out all designers with t he following basic skills: drawing/visual thinking, movie making, improvisation, programming (as in computers), visual communication, design criticism/history.

9. And then follow this up with concentrations
Whether that is graphics, industrial design, architecture, interaction design, service, etc. A solid education in design should actually force at least 2 concentrations on every designer.

10. There is no single community of practice that owns any design situation,
but rather the many facets of a design engagement force individuals and teams to inhabit any combination of design communities and discipines in order to be at their best.

11. Multi-lingual and well-travelled
The best deigns are ones that cause a shift in the way people think about the insertion o f any collection of artifacts. To create new frames is as much a practiced art form as it is a requirement of practice for the designer. Experience in language and travel helps foster the skills necessary to create frames beyond your own mind’s eye.

12. Human beings are creatures embedded into a social system.
That system is in reflexive dialog with itself causing seemingly server turbulence. By becoming experts in history and social theory/practice we are better prepared to take on feasible and repeatable design projects with massive impact.

So these are my 12 items. What are your thoughts on design and education?

UPDATE (3/31/2010 Due to Vicky’s comment below)

13. This is a professional practice …
… and it can really only be practiced (under mentorship) in industry. This is as true for students as it is for teachers. Students have to follow through on required internships and cooperatives and even teachers should be afforded opportunities that keep them tied to industry practice throughout their career. I’m not advocating adjunct professorships as I see flaws in having teaching being moonlighting, but I did post this diddy not too long ago.

You will have a distinct advantage reading this if you are very familiar with the highways of the East Bay of California’s San Francisco Bay Area.

I have been trying to figure out how to talk about the experience of Interaction 10 (@ixd10) for the last 2 weeks. I knew I had to blog something about it. I have had some thoughts scattered and disconnected over the Twittersphere. But the theme I feel the most is “Crossroads.”

What do I mean by crossroads? The term is usually a metaphor that implies choice between at least 2 directions, which in itself implies a splitting from one. I know as I write this that it is easy to pick apart the metaphor and I can live with that. We are not splitting from one thing to another, but really we are in the process of coalescing our already existing splits to the point where there are new affinities that now have critical mass around them to identify on their own (or soon will be).

The analog in my head will only work for people who live in the Bay Area and cross the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to the E. Bay. I’ll try to describe as best I can.

When you enter the bridge everyone is the same. There are only 4-5 lanes of traffic and except for that really rare person who gets off at Yerba Buena Island, everyone is committed for what they feel is a single destination, “The East Bay.”

Sometime around the tollbooth on the other side the signs begin the task of segmenting people. They are still on the same road, but they start to create new temporary identities based on the signposts above.

Then the splits begin. People leave for south, north (which is oddly called East & West at the same time; and we think IAs and IxDs have problems!?!), and East. This split though is not the last of it.

To the south we have a clean split (one would think) but to get there you used to have to go east first and then south (oh! the glory of the big-one back in ’89). To the East though there is a split between true east and south east (24 v. 580). How do you want to go east? The tunnel is pretty direct but the foothills are windy and picturesque. (I had to make this decision for 2 years; living at the interchange of 580 & 680.) Then to the north is a long road that eventually will split due west or continue north to hook east.

Wait! did I just end with 3 options that all head due east no matter what?

Damn! this metaphor is working out better than I thought because this is exactly how I see things going right now with the design world and interaction design. we are all committed to heading due east, but some of us temporarily whether blinded by the sunrise or just intrigued by the mountains, tunnel or coast line we pick a distinct path. This is an analog to thinking in 3D (Industrial Design), 2D (Graphic Design), information (IA), Activity (IxD/Service), space (Architecture) etc.

At some point these choices will invariably take people who continue on their journey to relatively the same point. Yes, we are getting there with a different set of experiences, and probably different communities behind us supporting us, but the arrival (again for those who keep pressing forward [not too enamored with their current place]) form something completely new and different.

What’s also true is that we make these journey’s repeatedly and each time we have the option to keep taking the same road or to experience new things. Sometimes it is good to skip the travel experience almost entirely, especially for the longer rides.

So now that I’ve beat that dead horse of a metaphor into the ground and probably only those who live or lived in the E. Bay really get it, I’ll move on. …

Interaction Design is one of the legs on this highway system. It’s destination is defined as East as much as any other design discipline. What is East? emergent, beautiful, bright, human, emotional, technological, contemporary, holistic, (and a host more). Our road way takes us on straightaways of rationality mixed with winding roads of exploring the nature of movement and activity towards accomplishments based on self-motivation. We take the tunnel because we are less concerned about “the view”, but after the tunnel we take the local streets to observe the people instead of staying just on the highway passing by.

But at some point there will be another split (you people realize I’m in Contra Costa at this point, right? along 24). We’ll hit the big mountain that inspired us this far (ha!) and we’ll have to pick north vs. south for a bit. And I think it is this split where A) my metaphor ends and B) is where IxD has stood for a little bit. This year the affinities are beginning to coalesce deeply.

The split here is between those who still want to think of interaction design as stopping at the focus of fitting people’s lives and creating efficiencies and those who want to work deeper; leaving technology to those who fetishize it; focusing not on what people want but what humanity needs.

At Interaction 10, Allan Chochinov (@chochinov) of Core77 among other attributes put up this slide!

This slide alone more than any other at Interaction 10 has stayed with me. It was more than design mumbo jumbo, it was a tacit call to arms for designers to get off their ass and start designing for real problems and not the ones that society has made up for them to design (most of those ARE now the real problems we have to design against).

The call to activism as a designer really hits the heart of the interaction designer who is taught first and foremost to have empathy, but then to convert that empathy into dispassion. We come to that empathy from a dispassionate place for the most part as if we are filling an empty vessel.

And this is going to be a part of the next big split. Not the difference between meaning and experience, or hardware vs. software (definitely not the latter). We are going to be split at our core between those who design passionately from a place of knowing the end results and want to drive people towards that result and those who feel that knowing the result breaks the rules.

I’m not sure that this split will even lead interaction designers to the same end point. Is this split of North vs. South going to lead any of us back west before we head east again? Will any of us head east at all?

I am so inspired by Jon Kolko’s new Interaction Design school in Austin and I know as I think about shaping my own design education practice I will look towards his and other great examples.

Even our winner of the IxDA Student Interaction Design Competition, Ahmed Riaz, demonstrated how altruism and driving people towards social responsibility should always be at the forefront of our designs.

I can’t wait to see how this all ends up.

February always comes in like a rocket and leaves even more quickly even on leap years (yes, I know this is not a leap year). For me coming into this February was one of the most crazy of my life (just ask my wife). Being on the ground planning a conference is so different than doing it remotely. There are certain details you can’t let go because you know the lay of the land and further people expect you to do more as well. It was indeed hectic, but also a labor of love as Interaction## always is for me. I can’t believe I have nothing to do with Interaction 11 | Boulder.  I’m determined to keep that a reality except maybe a talk or workshop.

The reality is that I have never been so burnt out on IxDA in all my life. Even 2 years ago when I “retired” from IxDA leadership I didn’t feel nearly as exhausted as I do right now. This isn’t a complaint, but just background to where the rest of this is going to go.

2 Years ago when I co-chaired Interaction08 I did so out of passion. I saw what Dan Saffer (@odannyboy)  was creating and I was inspired tremendously by the content he was creating and I knew we had a winner if only the conference got the right support. So I took the logistic steering-wheel with the amazing support from SCAD Conferencing. Arguably (not by me, ever) Dan & I re-wrote the book on what a UX organization’s conference can be like: Profitable, speakers well compensated and taken care of, well designed (& the design well executed by @danimalik & @ebacon), sponsorships that don’t buy content but still get good value, NOT in a hotel or other institutional setting, and finally GREAT (not just merely good or acceptable) food (the kind of food people talk about 2 years later).

When Bill DeRouchey (@billder) and Jennifer Bove (@jlb) took the reigns for interaction 10 (@ixd10) I was beyond excited. Bill’s attention to detail and Jennifer’s passion for content I knew would come together to create an amazing story. I also knew that Todd Zaki Warfel (@zakiwarfel) and Will Evans (@semanticwill) would do a great job with the experience design. I came in to do what I do best. Not just represent SCAD, but make sure that SCAD’s attention to memorable events shown through again re-inventing the organizational conference experience.

It was a joy working with Sue, Leslie, Heather and Alice in SCAD Conferencing. I can’t imagine a more experienced, passionate team to work with outside the IxDA organization. They were unstoppable and amazing. Just as an example of their super powers. For those not there, We tented one of the amazing historic squares here in Savannah. to do that and make it a presentation space meant using a generator for power. Well a storm hit. The tent was not the problem, but the generator. Generators and lightning don’t get a long so we had to shut down the tent’s electricity and while that was a big blow to exhibitors showing there, it was even worse for speakers unless we came up with a quick solution. Next to this square is one of the 2 amazing historic theaters that SCAD runs. That night there was going to be a performance, but it was free during the day when we needed it. So!?! Quick changearoo and a few score of phone calls later, we had a venue switch (creating an event not with 10 venues but now with 11–Think Spinal Tap, baby!).

This kind of can-do, don’t-quit, attitude epitomized everything that went into this conference again and again. Whether it was digging out a tent the day before for the Fri-night party and never giving up on our oyster roast (I still can’t believe we were shuckin’ oysters at a UX conference) or turning our industrial design space into a space age disco/rave with glow sticks to boot, we would be no where without these Four Musketeers.

So while it is true, I helped focus food choices here and there. I was not giving up the brisket and I threw myself on the tracks for the lamb sliders on Friday night or came up with the international theme for food for Saturday night, it was the connections to the caterers and the venues that really made this fantastic. These Four Musketeers were the real miracle workers.

All this is to say that great experiences required experienced talent to execute on whatever hopes embedded in the design may attempt to communicate.

If anyone is looking for a space to put on a conference and are related to art & design, I highly encourage you all to look at SCAD as a partner for such an event for no other reason but the amazing work of Sue, Leslie, Heather and Alice.

If we can give the longest ovation in the world, I would give it to these women.

::BEGIN APPLAUSE::

I just had this idea. In education we have lots of opportunities for students to gain access to professional practice to prepare them for professional life: coops & internship abound.

What we don’t have are ways for faculty to stay engaged in practice that is sustainable, feasable & practical.

Sonny idea is to take advantage of the huge off time that many educators have & to pair them with industry opportunities during that time. Faculty cooperatives would be great, no?

Is anyone interested in beginning an experiment with this? I’m particularly interested in work being done in design for social change outside of sustainability efforts.

Thoughts?

There are few projects over the last year that have excited me as much as this one, except maybe the work I did for the Freescale Smartbook project. But “Mate” a game project I did w/ my undergrad interaction design human factors class here at SCAD turned out so amazing. I’m so proud of this group project.

The game design has gone so well. So much detail and the game play aspects are right on target. Unfortunately, volunteer development cycles that started too late meant the game could not be ready for a full official release in time for both Interaction 10 (#ixd10) and CSCW2010 (#cscw2010). But for a few good soles (100 of you for IxD10 and another 100 for CSCW you get to play the game now in its infant form as part of this private beta.

But what is Mate? Well, the idea was based off of an invitation by Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! R&D wanting to create a playful information space that used game mechanics and social networking to see how information transfer can be experienced differently in a mobile platform (the iPhone). So combining geolocation tagging, rich asset creation and sharing, social networking, and game play, Mate invites and engages people to learn about Savannah, the events taking place there, and the people who are participating. Check out this early experience prototype video:

Mate: Savannah Conference Game (video prototype) from David Malouf on Vimeo.

If you really think you are a game player and can put down 4sq and Gowalla for the long weeeknd, then please sign up for the Private Beta and join us — Play Mate!

Mate: Home Screen

Mate: Map Screen

I’ve been resistant to publish stuff here that says, look over here for something I’ve said. But this piece in particular is something I put a lot of attention on and struggled about whether or not it should be published elsewhere or on my blog.

As I’ve been teaching this past year and been in dialog with many design disciplines, this piece represents my best thinking about the best direction for young designers and how they should engage in interaction design as a part of their larger design education and career development.

Check out the piece on JohnnyHolland.org.

This year as part of its completely redesigned annual global conference the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is organizing a Student Competition searching for “Excellence in Interaction Design”. Entries have already been streaming in from students representing programs from around the world. For more information about goals and rules of the competition please go to the competition web site at http://interaction.ixda.org/student-competition .

This week we have some big announcements and a really big reminder:

Announcing Dell, Inc. as the exclusive sponsor
We are super excited to announce that Dell, Inc. global manufacture, designer and distributor of computer systems for the home and business is the exclusive sponsor of IxDA’s Student Competition. Dell’s contributions will allow for IxDA to offer full scholarships to our finalists to Savannah for the conference and to continue to compete for the grand prize which Dell will also be contributing (see below).

Grand Prizes for IxDA Student Competition
Because of the generous support by Dell, Inc. IxDA is proud to announce that not only will there be a grand prize for the winner of the student competition, but also a prize for the second place competitor as well. The grand prize winner will receive a Dell Latitude XT2 Tablet Laptop (http://bit.ly/5GQFwk). There will also be a 2nd place prize to be determined closer to the event, also provided by Dell.

So don’t miss your chance …
The deadline for submitting your entry is just around the corner. December 31, 2009 at 11:59p PST will not just be the end of a decade, but also your last chance to submit to the competition. Individuals and groups can submit process books to win a full scholarship to come to Savannah, GA, USA and a chance to compete further to win the grand prize of a Dell Latitude Tablet Laptop or a Dell Mini Netbook.

To submit please go to http://interaction.ixda.org/student-competition

For more information please feel free to contact IxDA at info@ixda.org

Today the Jury of the IxDA Student Competition announce 2 changes to the competition.

1) That the deadline is extended to 31-Dec (Happy New Year!) @ 11:59pm US/PST.

2) That we will now be accepting submissions for groups.

Get the announcement and learn all about the student competition.

Yes, I know, this contradicts my previous post about why we are only accepting individual contributions. But we must evolve. I still haven’t heard anything personally that makes me want to support “all group work” as many of my peers are teaching either in this discussion or from personal contacts. I’d love to hear more about what this newbie educator is missing.

For those that may have missed it, I’m the chair person for the first IxDA Global Student Competition in Interaction Design. Since launching the competition there have been a slew of people asking if their team of 2-a billion could enter the competition. I have even been told that for some students they really only do work in teams and thus cannot enter the competition despite having excellent projects.

I think that unlike other design disciplines’ competitions this competition is as much about the person doing the design as it is about the outcome of the design itself. We won’t just be judging a person on the final result of the design, but also on the knowledge of interaction design embedded in the design and in the person himself/herself.

In this regard, a team project would be very difficult for us to judge regarding individuals. While we recognize that a lot of work in practice does happen in teams which is why especially in early courses team projects are encouraged, much of the work we do in practice, even as team members is done as the sole interaction designer. We work with visiaul designers and engineers and industrial designers in our teams, but usually there are too few of us to go around to all be working on the same project.

In this regard though it is very difficult to judge where the lines are blurried or crossed. So for us to understand the make up of a team is beyond our scope at this time.

Maybe if the competition occurs next year we can change the competition to have some areas that include team work.

At this time though, the competition is soley for individuals. And we hope you enter!

– dave

Whether you are a practitioner, student, educator or prospective design manager, I’d love to get your feedback on this survey.

It should take a little bit of time, especially for employers, but I will do my best to make the information public once compiled.

Thank you in advance.

http://bit.ly/IxDEDU

- dave