Interaction Design, Design Education, Design Thoughts
{ Monthly Archives }
In BusinessWeek Bill Buxton gets a short piece where he answers the usual engineering type question regarding UX design.
It is a beautfiul piece that for the 1st time for me articulates the absurdity of the initial engineering question and outlines the various levels of design “education” from easy to figure out to requiring a degree.
Nicely done, Bill!
John Maeda the president of the Rhode Island School of Design is doing an experiment on Twitter. He is looking for design hybrids. It’s a great idea and is totally in the spirit of many of the conversations I’ve been trying to lead around the realities of design and the changing nature of design practice.
Well of course I have to add a link pointer to my latest piece on JohnnyHolland.org.
The piece is a teaser for the presentation I’ll be giving in Malmö, Sweden this coming June at the From Business to Buttons conference.
This is an amazingly well done detailed video/animated history of the technology that makes up today’s Internet. Very COOL!!!
Thanx (@flytip)
I have had this idea in one shape or another for a few weeks now. It all started during the days of the heavy debates on the IAI and IxDA lists about the nature of our communities and the relevance if any to the term UX for me in particular and our total practice more generally. Where I landed is a very unstable place, but a place that has been getting constant shoring up by peers and circumstance.
I’ll just put on the plate the BIG DEAL.
Technology as a focus of attention of “design” is over.
What I mean by this is a lot broader interpretation of technology than meer computers and networks, but any medium: print, audio, structures, etc. One might even interpret “technology” to be “medium”. A strong statement, eh?
I believe that the Digital Age of the last period which is really the “Information Age” if not over, is waning. Wow! that’s a statement. As social networks are exploding and the application of technology to new situation seems endless, how can one make such a statement?
I am coming from 3 places:
Some might think that I’m restating Robert Fabricant’s thesis from the Interaction 09 | Vancouver keynote he made where he made 2 bold statements:
Interaction Design is not about technology
The medium of Interaction Design is Behavior
But, in this half-baked blog post, I’m positing something more. I’m saying that “medium focused” design is flawed. That any design practice that defines itself first and foremost from its medium will always start in some way from the position of “what?” while in this day in age, the most important first question for designers should always be “why?”.
Are you asking “why?”
This notion also flies in the face of those who call themselves user centered designers who probably would say the first question would be “who?” I counter this charge on 2 levels. In this day and age where transformation against the “will” of the user is one of the primary missions of design’s largest challenges, “who” and “for whom” and even “why whom?” (motivations & goals) is secondary to the more dire goals of the planet, and society.
But putting that aside for a moment It is important to realize that there is something big going on. Industrial Design is changing. A design discipline who’s focus was on 3D form is now becoming THE design discipline focused on “why?”. It is the one next to IxD that is moving the Service Design, Sustainability, and Design Thinking elements in the design community more than anyone (just my opinion, but I’m stickin’ w/ it). It understands that “why?” is the only way to move these concerns forward. It’s not that there aren’t elements in other design disciplines taking on “why?” but I would argue with less vigor and total commitment. From IDSA, to Core77, to IDEO, frog design, etc. the very heart of ID practice and organization is focussing itself on issues of “why?”
Before this realization of mine, I was convinced that only IxD really dealt with designing for “why?” but even then too many of my co-practitioners are still way too interested in designing “what?” for “who?” But at the core of IxD is still the greatest message of “why?” I have seen in a single design discipline (if not practice).
At this point, this may be a bit disjointed, but I’m convinced more than ever that only through cross-disciplinary teams can “why?” ever truly be answered appropriately or well. Our pre-dispositions spoil us. We need to have reflection from other positions. Self-reflection is a trap, that is just a feedback loop. In the world of design this cuts in 2 different directions:
Verticals: Those who’s origins if not current practice focused on a specific medium. Graphic Design, Architecture, Industrial Design, Interactive Design, Fashion Design, etc.
Horizontals: Those disciplines that transcend all mediums and have been sussed out through the advent of networked computational technologies (that isn’t to say they are limited by it, but they were born from it). Information Architecture & Interaction Design
It is important that there are people strong in verticals. These people are necessary to be the craftspeople who can carve out the prototypes to model the solutions of tomorrow. It is equally important to have people strong in the horizontals who can guide the questions that are beyond mediums and answer the real questions of developing problem statements outside of technology and embedded in people.
So there are 2 parts of this half-baked thesis (Damn! I wish I had some 1/2 baked Ben & Jerry’s).
It is this 2nd point that I’d like to tackle next:
I’d like to propose that all design schools change their organization (including my own). Due to the pervasiveness of technology, the tools and the solutions have led to a universal truism. No discipline of art or design is devoid of computational, networked technology. Ergo, having programs that focus on technology is meaningless for a design school. Technology should be considered foundational as much as color theory or art history to these programs. But also equally foundational is how to teach students to design from the “why?” Then, they can work on gaining practice in medium’s craft at higher levels.
I’d like to suggest 2 years of foundation where students learn traditional foundation, but then learn a new foundation:
Then the next 3 years (yes, 3 years) of undergraduate education are a collection of studios that help a student either focus deeply on 1 vertical, or combine 2 to a level of relevant competency all the while applying horizontal design disciplines in either case.
Ok, this is as far as I can take this for now. I’m sorry for the hob-gobblin of ideas, but if I didn’t get this out of my head, I’d explode. Your help, insights, criticisms, etc. in helping me suss this out, would be appreciated. Be gentle though.
This summer I need to go to camp. Yup. Like the young school teachers who turned camp counselors over the summer, I too need a job.
So let me talk a little bit about what I can do for y’all.
Remotely:
On site for short stints (less than a week at a time):
I’m also obviously open to YOUR suggestions as well.
So I know in these troubled times added expenses are hard to endure, but having temporary help to get you through times where permenant design leadership is lacking, can really save the day.
Shoot me an email! dave(dot)ixd(at)gmail(dot)com
Do you live/work in Europe (North America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa or Latin America)?
Are you involved in the world of products or services that involve electronics, software or web sites?
Do you manage these products, design these products, or otherwise help define what it is they’d do?
Then you have to go to From Business to Buttons!!!
The conference is June 11 & 12 in beautiful Malmö, Sweden right next to Copenhagen, Denmark.
The amazing speakers (besides me) include:
These are just the people I know PERSONALLY, and can attest to.
I know the work of InUse, Ergonomidesign, & Malmö University’s IxD Department, and know that they al have currated a total amazing event that brings the best of Europe and N. American Design & Business talent together.
VOIP Conf Phone - by Kicker
When I think back on the early days of the creation of DUX, back in Minneapolis, when we talked about case studies for design. THIS is what I had in mind. THIS type of case study from start to finish of a project. THIS is what we call at least at SCAD a process book (though ours usually have more details, but who cares?).
So Kicker Studios, thank you! for putting out these case studies of your work. It is inspiring and educational.
I recently was honored to have some time with the Esteemed Bill Moggridge, co-Founder of IDEO, author/editor of Designing Interactions, designer of the first laptop and the person who coined the phrase “interaction design”. Let’s just say I was a tad faklempt at the honor.
Unfortunately, I can’t go into right now all that we talked about with him and esteem design educator Norman McNally, but what was great was to have this luminary affirm much of my thinking about the theory, practice & history of interaction design. One such item was the growing if not new requirement in prototyping–videography.
Video has a prototyping tool has come of age in the age of YouTube & Vimeo. At first it was a means of expressing that which has been built as a sorta of record of the moment, or a demo. We’d see these all the time.
Here is one from an HCI research group with a new paradigm in desktop management called Bumptop:
Then IDEO jumped the shark with its work for Intel on new paradigms in pervasive and mobile computing:
The folks at Nokia turned video into a means of expressing things in the sci-fi realm:
Combining the sci-fi and the completed demo with a step backwards in some ways was Oblong:
But then others joined in with IDEO to express ideas instead of prototypes, where the videography like the IDEO example presented something not completed, but merely illustrated with smoke & mirrors (or green screens and editing).
Low-fi versions like Cooper’s Drawing Board’s Commuter Buddy demonstrate how cheap and effective this can be:
The folks at Adaptive Path did a tremendous job with their video demonstrating new desktop & mobile forms of web browsing technology & behaviors:
Obviously, I can’t keep going like this right? The point is made that videos have a ton of power. But the examples I have given so far are mostly interaction designs embodied in the software. But where video prototyping is really powerful is with hardware interactions, and technologies that don’t really exist yet. Or in explorations of the theoretical.
A long time example of this type of use is the work by Tony Dune and Fiona Raby from the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions program. Here is a still from the video (that I can’t find).
Technological dreams series: No.1, Robots
And this entire post was inspired by the most recent work from my favoriate Norwegian IxD researchers from Touch.org working on the study of NFCs. Their latest prototype uses this same type of experimentation in between the smoke & mirrors of videography using an iPhone and a supposed RFID add on (available in the future.
But why all the video? Would storyboards do?
I don’t think so. Despite the fact that sequential art is well sequential there is a property to the type of sequencing that exists in comic form that lacks a fundamental reality. Sometimes this abstraction works in the favor of clearer communication, but that is rare and usually in the hands of a trained professional comic artist. The videos though of all these types communicate with clarity in that 4th dimension of time. These stories insert themselves and force a type of reflection that other forms of none production prototyping do not.
So break out the camera and after-effects and get to work!
I’ll let the video stand on its own! I’m so excited that this talk came to the web finally.
NYC IxDA – Dave Malouf – The State of Interaction Design from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
Not only did I say I quit IxDA, but I also give up the identity of Interaction Designer and the belief that “interaction design” is a discipline of design. Note the new twitter ID.
I’d like to thank the following people for helping me come to this conclusion:
If your name got left out, I’m sorry.
See the following threads for the path to my upheaval.