–Engage

Though the first attempt didn’t take, there has been strong support for a take 2. I really want to teach this special workshop on Sketching for IxD and I hope you can make it — now on Oct 29th.

Victor of SmartExperience.org and I had a hard time canceling the class, but there just wasn’t enough juice in it given our overheads at that time. Since canceling though, 1 or 2 organizations have stepped up and said, we’ll host for free if you make it happen. So one or both are going to try and help (details are being worked out).

The course description is still the same, but in the spirit of the tough financial times we are all facing, I’ve reduced the price to $400 for the day long workshop. That’s a bargain by most standards.

Here is the description of the class:

Are you looking for new ways to bring design thinking and design practice into your daily practice as a user experience professional? Do you want to learn how great designers of all types get to that “new” idea without having to wait for divine inspiration? Do you think that “sketching” is only a tool left to those who have been formally trained to draw?

“Sketching for Interaction Design” is a 1-day seminar and workshop created to teach people what sketching really is all about, why it is powerful and how you can bring it into your daily practice as a User Experience Professional. In this class you’ll learn how the great organizations of design and innovation use sketching in their daily practice. You will also gain practice in sketching and see why it is a distinctive tool from prototyping geared more towards idea generation than for testing and communication. It is both a tool for personal use, and a tool for group collaboration.

The course will contain these units:

• Defining sketching as something similar to but different from prototyping
• Placing sketching in the context of a larger design process
• General practice using drawing as a communication tool
• Class project working in teams
• Communicating concepts in interaction design
• Review period of team work
• Take away lessons, and next steps for people wanting to apply sketching to their practice

The course is geared towards people who are practicing interaction design and other user experience practices, but can be beneficial for anyone who is trying to apply core design thinking methods into their personal and business practices. No previous experience with drawing or sketching is required. You don’t even have to bring a writign instrument or paper, as we’ll be providing them for you.

To register send me an email (dave[dot]ixd[at]gmail[dot]com). All payments will be made over my PayPal account.

Yup, I’m leaving Motorola as of the middle of December and starting off the new year as a Professor of Interaction Design at the Savannah College of Art & Design in historic Savannah, GA, USA.

There are so many reasons for this move. The biggest of which is that it is time to focus on family and I’m hoping that the combined slower life of teaching and Southern US living will help me focus on what is most important right now. My family.

The other reason is related. I’ve always been someone to dream big and at least try to go big. I think my biggest success in this area is IxDA. But having a very engaged career at Motorola Enterprise Mobility, a wife & toddler, and my ambition for building not just a community of practice but advancing the growing discipline of interaction design has left me entangled. So I’m still thinking big and also in the spirit of Randy Pausch going to do one of my childhood dreams — teach. (Before going into computers I was an anthropology grad student with the goal of teaching.) I have been encouraged by one of my favorite people, Jared Spool, to take my teaching further and when this position came to my attention I had to take it very seriously.

I also believe I can do more for interaction design from this position. Part of my mandate leading interaction design on this design campus is to be outward facing, and to further myself as a community thought leader. For the first time my goals are getting closer aligned than they had been in the past.

So for people curious about what I’ll be doing. I’m going to be the Professor of Interaction Design within the Industrial Design department of SCAD. I will be taking over where John Kolko left off with the long term of goal of transitioning a minor in IxD, into a full-fledged program.

There are lots of problems to be designed around in this space and there are no easy paths through the new cultural landscape I am dropping into, but I enter with optimism, support from my Department Chair and Dean and with a sense of realism. I am also entering with the idea that I’m just going to enjoy what I do NOW and while the future is exciting, so is the present and I can’t wait to begin. I can’t believe it is less than 3 months away. Many people reading this have known for a while and well, now consider yourselves free to spread the word.

To this regard, there are a couple of negatives. First, I have not just invested myself in the global creation of IxDA.org, but the local group here in NYC. The team has bounced a lot over the last 4 years and is now I feel hitting its strongest stride ever. Right at a time when IxD is going to get exciting in NYC with the advent of the new Masters program at School of Visual Design, and the leadership of the local IxDA group being led so wonderfully by MJ Broadbent, it is both a good time and a very sad time for me to be leaving NYC.

The other big negative is that after my 2 1-day workshops this month for SmartExperience, I will not be able to teach for SmartExperience (and the great Victor Lombardi) again. Teaching these great students has been an amazing test bed for my thinking and all my students have been wonderful to have as the vast majority engaged in thinking with me and helped me evolve my thinking class to class.

But I have been hating my very long commute, and the politics of my never-ending project, and the hustle and bustle of NYC living (despite loving its diversity, community, and inspirations) for quite some time. And while Savannah is going to be a Twighlight Zone shift at first, I am so looking forward to throwing away my winter clothes, and finding a new home with a porch swing where I can just sip sweet tea all weekend long. Oh! the 22weeks of vacation time and 4-day work week when I do work, won’t be too bad either.

In looking at my upcoming workshop on RIAs and IxD I thought I’d write a bit about defining an RIA in terms of user experience but also technology (sometimes they are inseparable).

The Page

“There is no [page].”
– Neo

What Neo had to figure out in “The Matrix” (I can’t believe you haven’t seen it so I have no sympathy if you haven’t) is that when living in a virtual environment it is all metaphor, or to say it is all a mental construct and that can be easily disassembled or re-arranged. The other side of metaphors is that their existence while intangible are framing. So until the very moment you say “there is no spoon” (the real line) there is definitely a spoon (or trash can, or page, or site map, etc.)

This relates in (its own metaphor) to the traditional page metaphor of the web. This paradigm shift while almost second nature at this point for most of us designing for RIAs is the KEY change in thinking designers need to make to really enter the RIA arena.

Distributing the GUI in real time
Not as neatly and cutely described, but is something that most people talking about RIAs forget about it. The very method of deploying the GUI is something that does NOT change from non-RIAs web sites to RIAs. Why does this define them, but it does separate RIAs from desktop applications and network applications (new term, I’m making up now … join in, its fun!).

So what is a desktop application and does this mean that RIAs have to be in a web browser? First, a desktop application is one that has its GUI (those elements that the user interacts with separate from the data exposed inside those elements) fully installed (and thus pretty static) on an end-users device (PC or mobile device). And network application is a type of desktop application and this is a continuum as much as anything else. But a good poster child of both of these is Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook. Word for the most part is used completely locally. There aren’t any data points of the network that get manipulated and re-sent back to the network, short of networked file systems. (Yes, translate and other Sharepoint functionality is available in the sidebar, but these are exceptions). On the outlook side, you can do a lot disconnected from the network, but the primary point of the application is to receive data over a network stream and sending information over the network. It is a class client-server application. But the GUI itself has to be installed. Yes, it can be customized with new “forms”, but those forms have to be installed.

What does it mean to be distributed. E.g. couldn’t I easily send that custom Outlook form in an email (over the network) to an end-user and have them install it at that time. Sure! and this model is purported by many such as the “update” model in AIR applications and other desktop applications. But once installed it is not reset in real time. Like pure HTML applications the display of the GUI is rendered in real time and with each new return to a site or page the GUI can be changed. Add in JavaScript and you can change the GUI elements themselves offline (of course you can do this in desktop applications too, provided all the logic is installed on the system).

Again, there is a continuum here. For example an AIR application can access SWF files (the equivalent of an HTML file) that is built in real-time using a system like Adobe Flex could be done. However, I’ve noticed that this hardly happens and that most AIR applications do the classic “update” instead of real-time rendering. This is for performance reasons I would imagine.

Now, both of these defining moments define RIAs from both ends of the spectrum, and they both have deep ramifications to how and what you design with RIAs. For more come to my 1-day workshop, “Interaction Design for RIAs” through SmartExperience.org. Use the discount code “Synapse” to get some more off the regular price, and contact SmartExperience.org to find about corporate discounts for sending multiple students.

Also, if you take this class on Oct 16 and add my class, “Sketching for Interaction Design” on Oct 17, you get an even bigger discount.

See ya in a couple of weeks!