–Engage

It isn’t really so much what Dan has or hasn’t designed. I don’t know his portfolio of work. But I do know his mind, and more importantly how he has decided to share it and what he has decided to share.

The path that Dan has taken himself on, has been one filled with a keen focus on interaction design, but an understanding that the place of interaction design is next to, on top of, below, inside of and outside of so many more design, research, technology, business, and craft disciplines. While he himself is no Da Vinci ala Bill Buxton (who seems to do it all), his deep respect for the intricacies of great design comes through his work & teachings.

I’ve had the pleasure to work with Dan. As co-chairs for the 1st international conference on, for, with and about Interaction Design–Interaction 08 | Savannah–I got an up close glimpse of his passion about interaction design. But that connection I made with Dan through that work, has motivated me to focus more closely on what he has done outside of that context. Not only has Dan set up a great Interaction Design group at his former employers, Adaptive Path, helping them emerge from Web Design/Information Architecture irrelevance into becoming a true leader of human-centered product, service and system design, but he has also contributed 2 books to the canon. His first, “Designing for Interaction” is a must read for any budding Interaction Designer. His second, “Designing Gestural Interfaces”, is as important for anyone who wants to think beyond the now towards interactions of tomorrow.

But what has inspired this blog post (a rarity for me, as I tend not to laud my peers) is what he has done since leaving Adaptive Path. He has created Kicker Studio. A new design consultancy in and of itself is not such a big deal (and I know he has 4 other principals all as responsible as he is for the agency’s creation), but it is what he has done with his new found freedom.

Just look … Really look deeply at his entries on the Kicker Studio blog called “Kick It!” His continuing contributions in micro-slices about interaction design and the contexts in which interaction design works is just astounding. I was most impressed by his sketch mockups of gestural interfaces for the PC, but there is more and it is mostly subtle.

A year or two ago, I guess when Designing Gestural Interfaces was a gleam in his eye Dan posted a “call to arms” to interaction designers, asking that we find our generation’s PARC, and in that call he suggested that “gestures” may be the next mouse or Lisa. Dan’s leadership not just with a manifesto to follow, but how he is setting up a very open environment for people to follow his lead, puts Dan on the path of becoming the next Bill (pick one: Verplank, Moggridge, Buxton), Doug, Jef, Tog, etc.

Right now as I write this, I think I have an answer to Dan’s call to arms though. It is not a place, or a company, or a singlularity in any shape at all, (topic, device, mechanism, pattern, etc.) but in fact it is the metaphor and the strongest metaphor of this decade if not the last 3 decades–The network. The open network can be our space where we achieve our innovations, and work together more openly for achieving the same level of innovative breakthroughs of the previous 2 generations.

Ok, I’m sure that Dan is either laughing that I spent so many characters about him, or is hiding in a corner with a Guiness drinking away the embarassment. Either way, you should all know that Dan will be available to sign print-outs of this blog entry with headshots (just kidding) at Interaction 09 | Vancouver where he’ll be a keynote speaker and teaching at his currently sold out workshop on gestural interface design with Bill Derouchey (another great interaction design soul). I know I’ll be there in anticipation of a great show by Dan. Check back for a link to his great “Tap is the Next Click” presentation he gave at IxDA NYC earlier in 2008.

Endnote: I was about to hit publish when I realized that many are going to post their own nominees. Please refrain. That should really be done on your own blog. Feel free to pingback or trackback though if you do.

Here are the list of readings I’ve assembled for my Interactive Product Design (IACT 317) class I’m teaching this coming quarter at SCAD. (Link to the list of classes offered in the Interaction Design Minor.) 

Before I throw the list at you, you should all realize that the class in question is NOT an interaction design class per se, but really a class on interactive product design focusing on issues of interaction design. How is this different? Well, for some it might not be. But for me it is a semantical one. On the one hand one must include classic understandings of interaction as a human-computer interaction discipline with artistic and definitely aesthetic overtones. On the other hand, one has to support the project process and offer a more well-rounded survey of most (if not all) of the user experience disciplines. I don’t need to include Industrial Design in this because well, all of my students are Industrial Design majors and have gone through their equivalent of design foundations (this also includes visual design; but w/o the information/visualization pieces).

Ok, enough disclaimers, here is the list. Each reading has a topic section that the reading is supporting.

Introduction to why we are here: People!

Kapor, M. 1991/1996. A Software Design Manifesto. In Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, et. al., 1-16. New York: ACM Press Books.

Bringing context to our work in terms of the disciplines we work in.
(Besides the reading, the student will be asked to find samples of visualizations of what is User Experience. Ala, Dan Saffer’s most recent attempt.)

Garret, JJ.  2003. Meet the Elements. In The Elements of User Experience. 20-37. New York. Peachpit Press.

Patterns as a tool and an explanation

PatternLanguage.com, “A Just So Story,” http://patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/patternsframe.htm?/leveltwo/../history/ajustsostory6.htm

Tidwell, J. 2005. Preface. In Designing Interfaces. xi-xix. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Tidwell, J. 2005. What Users Do. In Designing Interfaces. 2-19. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing

McCullough, M. 2004. Interactive Futures. In Digital Ground. 2-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 Greenfield, A. 2006. What is everyware? In Everyware. 9-34. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Interaction Design as Theatre, Narrative
(I’m still trying to figure out how to bring in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics into this section.)

Laurel, B. 1993. The Nature of the Beast. In Computers as Theatre. 1-34. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Foundations of Interaction Design

Boxes and Arrows, “Foundations of Interaction Design,” http://boxesandarrows.com/view/foundations-of

CHI-South Africa, “Your Program’s Posture.” http://www.chi-sa.org.za/articles/posture.htm

Information & Interaction Design

Nathan.com, “Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design,” http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/index.html
(Note: This article unfortunately (& ironically) is not designed to be in a printable format.)

Social Network

Porter, J. 2008. Rise of the Social Web. In Designing for the Social Web. 1-20. Berkeley: New Riders.

Gestures

Tag is the new click presentation in NYC Video (URL will be made available in time for less).

Communicating Design

Brown, B. 2007. Introduction. In Communicating Design. 1-12. Berkeley: New Riders.

Follow up disclaimers:

1. The list is meant for beginners
2. They already took an HCI theory course or similar HF course
3. Reading materials are meant to be inspirational.
4. Reading materials are meant to be teasers not just for class discussion, but also to drive students to want to dig deeper themselves.
5. Section I realize I’m missing now but ran out of weeks (and it is only an undergrad course, where they ARE working on a project at the same time) is eco-system design (no! no! no! I refust to incluse anything on “experience design” … Yuck! Ick! Phewey!)

Ok folks, discuss!!!!

A week or so ago, I explained to people why I’m so excited about the 2nd annual IxDA conference, Interaction 09 | Vancouver. In that post, I said that my workshop (not my talk), Introduction to Interaction Design might be cancelled due to lack of registration/interest.

I got one or two private messages and one public one from people who registered hoping that it would happen and it occurred to me that maybe I’m not doing as much as I can to promote the workshop. I mean, I would be getting paid to do the workshop, so you would think I would have some self interest to promote it, right?

So here is my go …

The workshop was actually inspired by Donna Spencer and the amazing workshop she’s been doing annually at the IA Summit. She does an introduction to Information Architecture workshop. I thought that like the IA Summit, Interaction is not just a conference for the senior folks, but also for junior folks and for crossovers. People who realize that interaction design is part of what they do, but they don’t know enough to really know where to begin and how to proceed in their own learning. This workshop is for that reason.

The workshop will start with basic interaction design theories, and run through a survey of practice methods that build on those theories. Unlike other “intro” classes, this class is 1st and foremost a design class which builds into it interaction theories and user experience practices.

Since I’ll be now teaching this as a full semester course for the Savannah College of Art & Design in my new position of Professor of Interaction Design, I’ve been putting a lot of thinking into what is required to not just be a good interaction designer, but more importantly what any practitioner needs to become a future self-learning practitioner in the wild. This course will set a student on the path of their own self-education path based on a solid learning (what we can do in a 1/2 day) foundation of interaction design.

Well, I hope you are inspired and that you register for the workshop before it gets cancelled. Regardless of whether or not you can come to th workshop you should definitely come to the conference. It will be a winner. Register today!

Well, it is time to do the thing.

Interaction08 | Savannah was an amazing event. Over the remainder of the past year I have gone back to much of the content to inspire me or better give me direct support on my current on going work.

While Interaction09 | Vancouver (Ix09) is not going to be a repeat of the content of Ix08, it is proving to be a formidable contenter towards overthrowing the tremendous experience that Ix08 brought to the conference going circle.

We have brought many new voices like John Thackara (a keynote I’m most excited to meet and listen to) while taking people core to our community like Dan Saffer and giving him his rightful place center stage in OUR community conference.

But it all starts with the workshops.
First, there is my workshop, which honestly is slightly under attended so if you want to attend, you better register now, b/c after the new year we might cancel it. We (the program organizers) thought that we should have an “Introduction to Interaction Design” for the community. What are the core fundamentals of interaction design? What are the basic methods for practice of interaction design? The course is geared towards IAs moving into the IxD space and for developers and program/project/product managers who want to learn the basics of interaction design. It is also for junior level interaction designers who want to familiarize themselves with more of the fundametals.

But there are other great workshops. I’m sorry to say but as of right now the Gesture Design workshop by Dan Saffer & Bill Derouchy is sold out. (Keep an eye out though as we might make more room).

Other exciting workshops abound. I’m going to pick my faves from each section.

• Thursday AM – “So you wanna be a hardware/software interaction designer” – Booth/Tepper
• Thursday PM – “Web Form Design” – LukeW
• Friday AM – If not mine, then “Basic Deliverables” – Brown

The speakers are just amazing

But many can’t come to the workshops for money and time reasons, but the main reason to come anyway are the amazing speakers.

Some of the keynotes
From Fiona Raby of the Royal College of Art’s Designing Interactions program, to a classic praticioner/researcher, Marc Rettig and as noted above John Thackara from Doors of Perception.

Invited speakers I’m excited are coming

There are 8 great invited speakers, and these are 3 of the ones I’m excited to see.

• Robert Fabricant – (“Irrational Behavior”) Executive Creative Director in the frog design New York office, Robert has been teaching at ITP NYU and now at SVA’s new Masters of Fine Arts in Interaction Design.
• Christina Wodtke – (“Designing the Viral Ap”) One of the founders of the
• Leisa Rechtl – (Session TBD) Is one of my favorite thinkers, twitters, & bloggers about interactive design.

Lightning round

As you may know we had about 160 submissions for the less than 30 spots for Lightning Round speakers. The content goes from Social Media Interaction Design to Gestural Interfaces and back again. There are cases studies and rich theory. Most importantly there are lots of opportunities to engage your peers, learn a ton and all help advance interaction design.

Overall

This conference is set to be like last year, one of the best UX conferences of the year.  Whitney Hess did an amazing job of blogging last year’s conference in near real time.  Core77 also did a great job covering the entire conference. (You’ll need to use the arrow keys flipping right [foward] to flip through all the postings. There is unfortunately no “index” of postings and they dont seem to tag/categorize their postings.  But I collected them for you here.)

There are some 120 other del.icio.us bookmarks using the tag “interaction08″. Take a look.  I’m very confident that 2009 is looking even better than 2008 (and I was the chair of 2008).

Take action

• Register today
• Connect with others

See ya there!

[Credit: Banner adverts done by Semantic Foundry under design leadership of Will Evans.]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of designing with soul.

First a little background. I’m not audiophile, but I do love music, especially pop music. I’ve never liked industrial music of any kind. Techno or Freestyle. I always expressed my distaste for this music because it feels “souless” to me. It just feels empty.

On one hand, this could just be that it aesthetically doesn’t resonate with me and my spirit, thus feeling cold and lifeless and devoid of passion. But I actually think it is more than that and I believe that this sense of soul in design translates to almost all of the creative arts and design disciplines.

There are many pieces of creative expression that I love. Few are souless unless being cold and souless is the point of the work, in which case it probably doesn’t feel so much souless as it does feel melancholy, cold, or lifeless.

But now let’s take a step back. What is soul and what is the nature of being soulful? Well considering I’m a devout atheist, I have say I’m not the best person to speak on the topic. But I’m probably one of the more spiritual atheists you’ll find, and it is from this point of view that I’ll attempt to move forward. We’ll learn that for some techno is possibly soulful, but why for others it can’t be, and why for me it seems like it can’t be.

So, what does it mean to be soulful? Well, for me it is all about connected. This concept of the universal soul that many speak of in different religions and even psychological theories, seems to speak to me the most as an atheist because “soul” in the context of creation seems to be mostly about connectedness. And of course, the next question would be “connected to what?”

I don’t have all the answers here, but I notice soulful design when I use it or otherwise experience it. It can mean that the design tries to connect itself historically to the body of design language. It can also mean that the design attempts and succeeds (at a level of critical mass) to connect the points of the eco-system the design resides in. But most importantly I think that it is about the designer and how connected they are to the design, the design problem, the design eco-system, and to the design process.

This last thought which I had most recently has taken me to re-think the imortance of sketching and prototyping. I have no empiracle data, but I am definitely sensing that the more grounded people are in their practice of sketching (for design) and prototyping (or otherwise increased fidelity modeling) the more soulful the designs become. Further, I sense that souless designs are done by people who are not connected to doing the work they are hired to do, but do it out of necessity instead of out of passion & joy. It is work that is handed to them as a task or activity to accomplish towards getting paid, instead of something where their own inspiration can be a canvas for their expression.

Anyway, these are my thoughts for now on the topic, and I hope others might join in and take a think on the topic.

Well, as you all probably know, my life is all about transition at the moment. New job, new home, new city, etc. So I thought to myself, this is the perfect time to create a new blog. Yeah!

So a few notes:

1.  I’m hopeful that comments will now be working and be safe from spam. We’ll see how this goes.
2. All of my old content and even my old commenters (from way back) are still here. Hopefully I removed all the spam. Let me know if  you see anything egregious. 
3. Most importantly, please change your RSS Feeds and use this feed.

I need to give a VERY special thank you to my new favorite Estonian, Jaanus Kase. He did a wodnerful job of transitioning my old blog from the antiquated world of pMachine into WordPress.

Last night (12/10/2008) I had the honor of facilitating a panel with the brilliant duo of Ted Booth (Dir. of IxD @ Smart Design) and Jennifer Bove (VP of IxD @ HUGE) for NYC IxDA.

The panel was more of a town hall with the overwhelming crowd of 200 peeps who filled the wonderful Bloomberg facilities (Wow! what a red carpet treatment!). The audience more than filled the requirement of active participation leading to an amazing conversation about issues facing interaction design and interaction designers today.

My only regret is that we were cut short and missed some 25% of the slide deck embedded below. But you get to at least enjoy the slides here. (I’ll post the link to the video when it becomes available.)

Moving from industry to education; from deep/big urban to small town; and I’m sure many more.

My life is now filled with some pretty big transitions. It seems I am a soul in transition. I don’t think i have gone more than 3 years without some major transition going on in my life and even then I’m always keeping busy with something that is gestating or gyrating or otherwise keeping me on my edge. Every so often these events collide and bring about HUGE change in very short time periods.

I’m leaving NYC. That in and of itself is not news. This will be my 3rd time leaving the NY Metro area in my life. But unlike the last 2 times when I went to the “Promised Land” (Think Chuck Berry, not Moses), this time I’m headed South to Savannah, GA. Having been to Savannah a bunch of times I know this is going to be a big mind shift culturally for myself and my family and I’m just praying that this nice Long Island/California raised Jewish boy will be Ok in this very new environment. What I do know is that everyone I’ve met so far has been absolutely warm, welcoming and otherwise truly in the spirit of southern hospitality.

The other big change that is more relevant to the regular readers (are there regular readers?) of this blog is that I’m leaving the world of industry and going into education. I’m staying firmly within the bounds of my religion–design–but leaving the world of practice, for the world of creating tomorrow’s practitioners.

I’ll be teaching within the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) as I’ve told people here previously. My role is one of Professor of Interaction Design and I’m quite excited about all of it. Not only will I be teaching to undergrads interested in having a minor in interaction design (as part of their other major design curriculum) but also I’ll be forging a new Masters of Design in Interaction as a joint program between Industrial Design and Interactive & Game Design. A place that I believe it squarely belongs–It belongs as a junction between mediums as opposed to owned by any one medium. I’m also excited to be working closely with an amazing Game Design department and their new veteran Chairperson, Brenda Brathwaite.

My journey into this new world of education (I’m constantly avoiding the term ‘academia’ as i’m working for a design school and not a standard research university) has already begun. So far I had to do the following:

1) I had to put forward my vision for a Masters program (++) in Interaction Design. Something I do all the time on the IxDA list, but this time I had to make sense and be real to the school that I was suggesting it for. Meaning, the program needs to fit the goals and mission of SCAD and the Industrial Design Department.

2) I had to amend the syllabuses for the courses I’ll be teaching starting in January. This was a fun labor in deed.

First I had to evaluate the work of my predecessors, Bob Fee most recently who was filling in after, < href="http://jonkolko.com/">Jon Kolko, departed the position I’m taking up. It was fun to see where I agree with my peers, but honestly, even more fun to see where my take on education and the needs of making great future practitioners has different needs.

It would be unfair of me to pinpoint all of my disagreements with the syllabuses I’ve looked at thus far, and it is unfair to state that it was all bad. Looking over Jon’s material in particular was very education for me. There was no throwing out the baby with the bath water here at all. It would be more fun to say that I just needed to put my own voice into my classes.

An example is that Jon Kolko in his interactive product design class uses Poetry as a class topic. I actually really liked the way he used poetry as an analogy to the design of interactive experiences, but it is not in the spirit that I find most useful for practice for me and within my general experience. So I replaced this one class with my own leanings which are towards narrative and theater. The similarity is the metaphor of the linguistic, but I move deeper into other areas of narrative story line and audience where Poetry stops. I also feel that I can really use the reference work of Brenda Laurel’s work in this area particularly well and have it lead to quick application to the studio portion of the course.

What’s most important at this stage in my transition is to note the balance during any transition between creating a new voice, that is still able to communicate your existing world view.

I think so long as I maintain this attitude moving forward I will find tremendous success.

In this early stage of my education transition I want to thank the Tom Gattis (ID Dept Chair) for his over flowing confidence in my future success and Bob Fee (Prof. of ID) for his constructive criticism and overwhelming appreciation for what I’ve been able to do thus far. This makes me feel very optimistic about my future at the end of this tunnel of transition.