–Engage

I’ve been asked to write up something about the Student Competition for IxDA that I’m the chair person for. Well, I think I did just that when I wrote up the vision of the competition we posted on the student competition web site.

So instead of rewriting it, I’ll just quote the whole thing here in case you missed it or you enjoyed it so much you want to read it again.

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is committed to supporting the global community of practice for those practicing interaction design (IxD) regardless of specific roles in their day-to-day lives. As the discipline of IxD matures, the need for closer ties to design education programs that include the discipline of IxD intensifies. Every year the Interaction conference has been hosted by an educational institution with strong commitments towards creating tomorrow’s designers with a strong base in IxD. This year we want to take the next step and broaden that relationship with future practitioners by offering them both a venue to demonstrate the amazing work that is going on within education programs around the world and to receive invaluable feedback from the practice community about the relevance and quality of the work being presented. This last goal is of the utmost importance to the core constituents of IxDA; to ensure that tomorrow’s designers marry education’s goals of practical development of future practitioners and the need to create new bodies of knowledge that can be used to inform today and tomorrow’s practice.

So with this in mind, we have put together a humble beginning for a student competition in concert with Interaction 10 | Savannah. This is an open invitation to all students and recent graduates from undergraduate and graduate programs regardless of program type or location around the world. Whether you are in a program for HCI, Industrial Design, Information Architecture, Computer Science, Interactive Design, Graphic Design, Communication Design, Instructional Design, Fashion Design, Interior Design, Exhibition Design, Architecture, Jewelry, and of course IxD we would love to see how your work exemplifies excellence in theory and practice of IxD.

One of the driving principles of the Interaction Design Association is that we are an organization focused on the discipline of interaction design and acknowledges that the discipline is just a part of the elements that make up a great executed design. In this spirit, the competition is going to encourage students to focus on quality of their design for behavior(s) but also must demonstrate expertise in the other relevant aspects of their product & service’s design.

We are keeping this first iteration of this competition fairly open. We will accept future concept work, abstract work, and work with direct relevance to today’s practice. Good luck to all the great competitors out there.

If you are a student or a recent grad and got something to share with the IxD community, please do get to work and get ready to submit something glorious!

Get the details!

IxDA has been an honor for me to be a leader of since the very first moment I joined the Yahoo group August 2003. It has always been about learning. Whether it was learning about group building from Challis Hodge, speaking from Robert Reimann, teaching from Jared Spool, leading from Dirk Knemeyer, designing from way too many people to even imagine, IxDA has always been about putting myself in proximity to people I can learn from. Often as in the case I’m about to describe, the decision to lead was not purposefully about learning, but through design’s best tool, serendipity, it most certainly turned out that way.

A few months ago Bill DeRouchey, one of this year’s co-chairs, reminded me that I wanted to lead a Student Competition as part of IxDA’s Interaction 10 | Savannah conference coming up this February. It wasn’t so much that I had forgotten as I was actually hoping someone else would step up and take it over. I’m SOOO glad no one did.

I immediately sent out feelers to people I wanted to be on a jury. I sent some 15 invitations out and assumed that many would say, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy, but thanks for thinking of me.” What I got back were 14, “SURE!”. And more than that, I even got about 5 people at different times and for different pieces who were incredibly energized and worked really hard.

For each piece we’ve worked on, 1 person though has stood out to me as my mentor for the project. This just reminding me that the person with vision and leadership is not the smartest person in the room, but best capable of knowing who is and how to utilize them. Jonas Löwgren from Malmö University in Sweden has worked almost as tirelessly as I have. But more important than his work ethic has been his contribution to the content of the competition, and his availability to me as a reflecting board.

From Jonas, I have learned so much in this process so far, but I have to say the thing I have been trying to internalize with me the most is Jonas’ ability to synthesize and facilitate through criticism. As someone who comes from a more, let us say, direct culture, I have found that I have struggled the most at learning how to give criticism of students and peers in an approachable way.

I have noticed that Jonas’ discourse style even in his second language is one of synthesis and facilitation. What this manifests itself as is to be that person who restates with innate sensitivity what a group of people are trying to say. But it isn’t just restating, it is contextualizing and purposefully giving higher relevance to some points more than others. Then he reacts in a way which produces the “next logical step”. It is a brilliant teaching technique and one that I both appreciate as a teacher, but more importantly appreciate as a peer and student.

Of course, I have other more direct lessons through this process from all of the participants on the student competition jury and I appreciate every opportunity from all. Working closest with Jonas though has been a true pleasure and I wanted to give this public shout out.

To see what all this good leading & learning has led to, please feel free to go to http://interaction.ixda.org/student-competition and encourage all students to put themselves out there. Jonas, myself and the rest of the jury are some of the best educators and practitioners out there today and our feedback and review regardless of your likelihood of winning will be a source of review you will not have too many chances to receive.

The first weekend of November (just 2 short weeks away), I’ll be one of a slew of great speakers her in Savannah, GA on the topics of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Design at the first of what hopes to be a great new annual event called Geekend!

Check check out this amazing program!

I’ll be doing a flash workshop, “Sketching: The Secret Sauce of Design”. A course on how to bring the fundamental design practice of sketching to any creative, solution oriented endeavor. Come and check it out, but be sure to bring a good pencil and an awake mind!

I’m also going to be doing a session on Sunday during the unconference part with @kplawver on Twitter. It doesn’t sound all that original or enticing yet, but we guarantee to show you something new!

See you there! It will be a blast!

Watch This! before continuing: (It’s an amazing video prototype that re-thinks multi-touch for the desktop.)

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

First Clayton, I’m incredibly impressed by this video. It shows an attention to detail in production value, theoretical analysis, and overall solutioneering that I know many can learn and be inspired by.

I have a host of questions about the video:

1. This feels overly complicated. “It feels” that way b/c it looks like (I can’t play w/ it yet, right?) a piano metaphor and at that the gestures that each finger has to be able to articulate to reach the level of expert is even more complex than that of a pianist. That being said, I just realized that most functionality is available in simple strokes and this can be a way of ramping up someone from novice to expert. I just wonder how many people will be able to make it past chopsticks.

2. I have worked in the industrial design community for quite some time now. Their reliance on tablet profile desktop screens through the use of Wacom Cintiques is quite strong. Other 3D software communities like visual effects artists, etc. are also making great use of this model. The flexibility of the the cinque to articulate between positions is the key to its success b/c it takes advantage of the reality that there are different modes of operation throughout the day. I do Alias and then I answer email. But my main point is that due to the this ability to transform the tablet is not permanent and thus the stress you suggest inherit in that design is not real. BUT! I also want to say that before we had computers we wrote. I mean w/ a pen and this meant looking down and such. We survived that, no? All that is to say that I would re-evaluate your critique of the tablet position, or your limited view of the tablet profile and re-examine it.

3. Who? who is this for? I think your video is trying to generalize experiences which may not be true. For example I have changed my entire mode of operation to be comopletely browser driven. Close to 80% of my daily interactions happen in the browser. This means that due to tabs I have 1 application open at a time with maybe 2 other widgets that I access from a sidebar (music & twitter). This model of interaction feels like it is an extreme case, which is why the person above who talks about music is totally perfect for this, b/c music has such a level of complexity of controls.

Further, is “window” operation/manipulation really that hard in the current model? I probably spend 80% of my time on the keyboard and 20% on the mouse, so what problem are you look at that requires such an intense shift in hardware and software models?

This is to ask plainly, “Is the problem that great or even really there at all?”

But another important point to this is that design needs to not just think about human mechanics, but needs to be situational. I love video prototypes, but I stress to anyone who tries it that video prototypes need to be situational. The narrative of human use is an imperative in making the medium be truly useful to a design process. So I would ask that a 2nd take on this video do just that. place a “real” person in the middle using this in their day to day life. Bumptop a similar attempt at desktop re-design has the same problem, while I think that Aurora by Adapative Path is a great example of changing the browser & hell the desktop too, by embedding real human narrative into their demonstrations.

4. the loss of direct manipulation feels to me to be the crux of the issue. What makes an iphone and other multi-touch systems “work” is direct manipulation. If multi-touch is just a remoted system like a mouse, then all you’ve done is change the point of gesturing and added an arguable level of complexity that is not required. to me it is direct manipulation and not gesturing where the greatest added benefit of touch comes to play and this doesn’t address this.

5. the keyboard. 1 area that is interesting is that you don’t address the transitional moments of shifting between keyboard (well we all know the keyboard is a problem in and of itself) and the “pointing device”. The simple and current elbow articulation to a single handed mouse not only is simple and the muscle memory easy to embed, but it has the added value of leaving 1 hand on the keyboard so that experts (ever play doom?) can gesture with both hands to create unique modes of operation. I.e. control and drag causes a copy.

But the real benefit of this mode of operation is that w/ one hand “always on the keyboard” you end up with increased efficiency of target acquisition b/c the moving hand can always use the reference point of the stationary hand when trying to find home keys when leaving the mouse.

6. the existing trackpad issues where not addressed. The main one being my wife’s pet peeve which is that she always looses her cursor with accidental taps by her wrists.

7. Why choose 1. Going back to my ID studio, the current set up has many devices: critique (pen direct touch), 3D mouse, keyboard and regular mouse.

Most importantly though, that putting yourself out there like this to criticism is HUGE. This is inspirational not only for what it offers directly but because it offers a point of discussion. I could have never done this level of articulation with someone to respond to as well produced as your demonstration. It has great thinking and there are real problems to address, or more importantly even if the problems aren’t great, there are still places where we can hope to do better.

My top list:
1. object management
2. ergonomic data entry
3. mental models of pervasive and transitive computing
4. form factors beyond (too wide, open, eh?)
5. self induced behavioral change through technology

Thanx Clayton for putting this out there! It is going straight in front of all my classes and my entire faculty today!

– dave

I’m really proud and excited about the work this class of mine is doing. Check out their 4wk progress.

It is so hard to not become a victim of our surroundings and this post is trying really hard to not do that.

I have a pretty multi-facetted history; however, that history has been linear in its movement away from technology and towards design. Not that these are opposites, but they have centers of overlapping communities. Each community with its own distinctiveness at its center. Language, methods, mental models, etc. And to be very blunt, my techy side was never really at the engineering level, and more at the social scientist level. Both though share a rationalistic and analytical tendency that allows them to speak more easily with each other like a Norwegian speaking with a Swede, as opposed to a Scandinavian speaking with a French person. This latter simile is more like that of a techie to a designer. Did you notice how the level of zoom changed? (important here).

As many have noted, I’m pretty passionate when I speak. This is a double-edged sword to say the least. I think passion helps you get listened to, but if the energy is not directly properly, it is often interpreted as being definitive instead of suggestive. Lately, there have been a lot of discussion (good discussion) about the relevance of “user-centered design”. Unfortunately, since no one really has a lock on what the heck UCD is, it is hard to have a conversation about it. Further, the idea that there are so many contexts for work makes it further difficult to come to any sort of group consensus about it. Further, people are in different parts of their career.

Some might say that this lack of cohesion of a single community of practice is at the core of the problem and it is hard to argue that. But that is plain cynical and I do believe there is more than binds all these differences than separates us.

Since we are trying to generalize, I will break this down to a common denominator. “user centered design” is the philosophy that we must in a measured and methodical way bring the user into various stages of the development process of products & services. The bold elements are there for a reason.  Measured is not necessarily quantitative, but it is declarative and can be related to the data of observation (in the (social) scientific sense of the term). Methodical is important because it relates to the intentionality of the observations and that they observations follow a method with a history, and a collection of case studies that support its use. This to me is the bare minimum in order to maintain that UCD is a useful, viable term for design.

User Experience is the result of any design artifact that uses UCD. It is NOT “experience design”, but an experience design can be a user experience. Further “user experience” implies by the use of the term user that the experience focuses on “use”. But that might push back the discussion a bit, so gloss over it if you felt the hair on your neck go up.

Now that we know what I’m saying when I say these terms we can move on. The reason I feel like these terms are still moot is because of history. It assumes that sometime in 1991 when Mitch Kapor first declared the software design manifesto or even further back when SIGCHI split from HFES or even further back when HFES formed that these were the first moments of UCD at all. We can look back to DaVinci and his work or we can look even further to the work of “de Architecture” by Vitruvius to see how human beings were being methodically considered in measured ways.

Even in modern times (turn of the century) the idea that we must design for humans has taken place well outside the realm of software design. Henry Dreyfus’ “Designing for Humans” is a core book of study for anyone doing Industrial Design, for example. And there are many more examples. So at best UCD is not describing something new, but describing something specific within a new area where it has been missing. Ok, that’s all well and good.

Today, though, we are designing in close collaboration with more and more types of people and the reality is that the language of UCD in practice and theory is couched in terms that while relevant to many looses relevancy for way too many.

So as someone who has declared that UX and UCD are dead, it is not out of insensitivity to the need that we constantly observe, measure, analyze and model, but rather out of a change of audience when I promote my thinking.

But to the contrary, Dave …

I just recently returned from the Industrial Design Society of America’s IDUS annual conference. There were more “design research” sessions than any other single topic by my best analysis. I didn’t attend many but one that really got me was one of the closing keynotes. It was a brilliant example of how we need to be engaged in observational and immersive research in order to get out of ourselves. What the speaker said is that “gut-based design is at best a derivative of conventions” and in order to leave convention we need new data.

At no time during his talk did this person once use UCD or any other language we would consider in our purview as UX practitioners. He was completely grounded in realm where anthropology and industrial design meet (quite often I might add).

But I hear so many people in software design whom UCD can’t be taken for granted and so many in the ID community for whom research is non-existent. This is why UCD/UX is still relevant for them. But for me, in my world, in my experience, UCD/UX ended about 5 years ago. Suggest to me that research is optional or disposable and I won’t take the job. If you insist that research is the core to great design, you’d equally loose my attention.

I teach research methods and I’m drilling into these students the idea 2 things:

1) you can’t start to design unless you know why and for whom

2) you can’t do research without designing it from the ground up

The dialectic between design and research is strong. You should never stop designing and you should never stop observing. Does observation always need to be methodical and measured? I don’t think so. It is more important to just get out of oneself and consider the world around you. There are contexts where observation has to be measured in order to be useful and the best forms of measured observation are methodical. But again, the goals and contexts will determine how and when.

In February at Interaction 09 | Vancouver, Kim Goodwin’s closing keynote entitled “Each One, Teach One” (video) urged us all to take on the role of teaching as part of our practice.

I’d like to agree in triplicate.

My first experience as a teacher began when I was in college. The summer between my 1st & 2nd years I was a camp counselor and then my entire second year I was both a religious school leader and Zionist evangelist. Both roles started me on the path that I’m on today as a teacher. I’m currently a professor of Interaction Design at the Savannah College of Art & Design.

I guess I’ve always been drawn to teaching. After college I taught English as a 2nd Language in Israel and returned to the states with the goal of becoming a professor of Anthropology (never did finish that!).

The Internet also gave me moments of teaching (not just mentoring) very early on. I taught designers how to think about pixels and taught coders how to think about design very early on in my career.

As I said, I’m now a teacher as my primary profession. I love it. It is really the best career move I’ve made in a very long time.

So what makes teaching so special and why should you care. I agree with Kim that teaching is something that everyone should do. It is the best way I have experienced for honing my ideas and finding ways to communicate my ideas. It is also a great way to get instant feedback on your most out there ideas.

What I would add to this is that it is even more powerful to teach to those outside of your usual zones. For me this week I taught interaction design to high school students.

1) you so have to loose the jargon

2) you have to be clear in a whole new way. You can’t presume any pre-knowledge on the topic

3) you need to find new ways to make the material engaging or otherwise alive. This means learning new metaphors or references.

I have taught internationally, to different market segments and now to different age groups. The more you go outside your range the more you really have to push yourself as a teacher and your ideas that you are teaching.

Get out there and TEACH!

we started out caring about the behavior of the things we create.

we moved towards caring about fitting the behavior of the people we create things for.

now …

We need to design the behavior of things, so they fit the behavior of people, in order to change their behavior.