ALL ART BURNS

I’ve posted slides and a poster or two over at my mTID page. There’s a lot more than that needs to be documented and written out, but it should give you a taste of some of what I’ve been working on for the past two semesters.

Technorati Tags: design, ixd, mtid

Some stuff that’s been floating around in the back of my head as I finish out the semester and start reflecting on what I’ve been doing. Ripping the Tao te Ching, “The Design that can be explained is not the everlasting Design.” Now I can say whatever I like about capital-D design and always have an out!

Towards the end of last semester, I sat through a number of 10 minute presentations by designers, engineers, and artists. I wrote this in my sketchbook about half-way through:

Graphic design is the ability to focus on multiple compositional elements at once in a 2d space, taking into account typography, color, grid, graphics, etc. It follows that capital-d Design is the ability to focus on multiple compositional elements at once, independent of the medium. Background, typeface, color and grid (2d) are as important as shape, texture, temperature, and other tactile elements (3d). All of the elements have to be considered simultaneously as foreground and background, content and context, instead of focusing on them as individual elements.

I wrote that in response to slides that all had a similar problem: individually-good-but-conflicting elements. Perhaps a nice background and a good typeface, but they have nothing to do with one another at best, clash horribly at worse. A text-heavy set of slides about office workers that quickly became boring due to lack of illustrations of what office life is like, only page after page of fully justified text. Or an in-depth look at music in two different cultures that had no audio examples, only transcriptions of lyrics. Another was a image-heavy slideshow about youth culture with the images sort of randomly placed against various stock background images. All the presentations had excellent content, were clearly researched well, and the conclusions were all supported with lots of data — but because of the design choices made, the presentations were not very effective.

It seems that there is a gestalt people need to be able to comprehend if they want to be a designer, be it of images or things or processes. Maybe that’s how type, color, grid, and whitespace work on a piece of paper; how form and color work on a tool; or how space and light work as an architect. In design classes, we learn to “see the grid” or “learn what gives a thing the quality of thing-ness” but we also learn to look at things within their greater context. If need be, we keep popping contexts off the stack, until we’ve backed out far enough to get a full view and understanding of what it is we’re doing.   

So what does that have to do with tangible interaction design?

If the elements of communication design are in a plane and those of industrial design are in a volume, where do the elements of interaction design lie? For web sites and most software, within the plane, but what about interaction design applied to form? Are the elements shape, weight and texture? What if the form can change itself as part of the interaction? What if the form can change its characteristics in ways previously impossible, much less conceivable? How do we sketch these tangible interactions and what language do we use to discuss our sketches?

If the elements of tangible interaction design are the ability to manipulate the elements of texture, temperature, shape, stiffness, etc; what is the context that these elements live in? What is the “grid” of tangible interaction? What is a “form study” in tangible interaction? What will become the traditional exercises performed by students of tangible interaction?

Technorati Tags: design, interaction, ixd, tangible

[I’m focused on finishing 16 weeks of work in 12 weeks so I can demo my final project at CHI ’09.  If you want to know what I’m doing, my delicious and twitter feeds hold clues.  Until then…]

A long but good post about “kinetic design” that everyone should read.

Technorati Tags: design, kinetics

Interesting article in the NYT on a classroom fitted with standing/sitting/perching desks. One teacher got the idea after seeing children squirm, and now the students are being studied:

[…]

Researchers should soon know whether they can confirm those calorie-burning and scholastic benefits. Two studies under way at the University of Minnesota are using data collected from Ms. Brown’s classroom and others in Minnesota and Wisconsin that are using the new desks. The pupils being studied are monitored while using traditional desks as well, and the researchers are looking for differences in physical activity and academic achievement.

“We can’t say for sure that this has an impact on those two things, but we’re hypothesizing that they may,” said Beth A. Lewis of the School of Kinesiology, or movement science, at the University of Minnesota. “I think we’re so used to the traditional classroom it’s taken a while for people to start thinking outside the box. I think it’s just a matter of breaking the mold.”

[…]

I think this really great news on a variety of levels. Kids can burn off energy without being labeled disruptive or ADD and they also will have a mindset less accepting of poor ergonomics when they get to college or the workplace.

Technorati Tags: chairs, design, ergonomics, perching, sitting

Wow.

What I’m taking away — besides a ton of knowledge and ideas and business cards from new friends — follows. I attended ixd09 hoping to learn more about interaction design as a field and I leave with more questions than I arrived with. Which is always a good thing.

Let’s get this out of the way: “defining interaction design”. I agree that arguing about it is a waste of time, but I think that not all people arguing carry equal weight and that we need something descriptive, not proscriptive, for use when talking to people outside the field. I challenge the leaders of the warring factions to agree upon a one-sentence definition I can use next time I’m in Customs. I need a simple definition that won’t get me subjected to extended questioning about what it is I really do by some well-meaning 20-something who could care less about UX vs. UE vs. IA vs. CD vs. GD.

The hallway, mealtime, and barroom conversations were truly amazing. I think I learned as much in random conversations with people I’d never met as I did in some of the talks. I’ve never before come home with such a huge stack of cards from people I want to stay in touch with. What a wonderful group of people to meet and talk with, it was a much better experience than I’ve had at something like SIGGRAPH or a con.

I went to a lot of presentations, but here are the ones that changed me and my view of the world:

John Thackara’s opening keynote was a powerful challenge to get off our (collective) ass and do something that matters. I’ve never heard Papanek speak, but I wonder if Thackara ever met Papanek and what sort of conversations they had. I heard a few people complain about the “doom and gloom” and I think that they’ missing a huge point. Collected in that room were a few hundred people who, if they worked together, could make a significant change for better in the world. That’s not hyperbole. Form teams lead by Saffer, Herasmchuk, Rettig, Kolko, et al and staff those teams with everyone who had an ixd09 badge and turn them loose with some laptops, coffee, and booze. Think of the damage that has been caused by a few hundred individuals involved in 4th gen warfare against a superpower — now think of the amount of good the same number of expert designers could create with a 4th gen “war of design” to improve our situation.

Modulo some technical difficulties, Fiona Raby gave an excellent presentation on conceptual design and challenged the idea of what is possible in design. She showed some excellent work by her students, including a video sketch of life with a desk based on reconfigurable nanotechnology, that I hope really got people to thinking about the lack of limits in what we will do in the next ten years. Designers are taught to push themselves, ask questions, and explore possibilities, I hope that Raby’s talk moved the “creative goal line” for many people in the room. Her work (along with Dunne) makes what I do possible and I hope that other designers and designers to be follow up by reading her work and the work of her students.

Mikkel Michelsen had only 25 minutes to talk about mission critical design when he should have been given hours, if not his own track. Kolko (I think) made a comment at a panel to the effect of “if [we] fuck up, nobody dies.” True, if you have a bad user experience at a ticket kiosk or downloading a movie it’s not the end of the world. But (IMHO) design needs to focus on harder problems than social networking sites for tweens and efficient porn searches. There’s a real challenge in designing systems for people involved in life or death situations, whether they be patients, doctors, first responders, or soldiers. Perhaps it’s not popular or comfortable to talk about interaction design for the military, or maybe it’s too application specific, but isn’t it worth more than a 25 minute “lightning talk”?

I won’t lie. I’m going to rip off Andrei Herasimchuk’s “Building a Digital Concept Car” as soon as the podcast is up. I’ve spent what feels like ages trying to convince people of the value of prototyping as part of software design and engineering, but Andrei’s case study really makes it blindingly obvious. I went in not needing to be convinced, but needing help figuring out how to convince others it’s a worthwhile proposition, and I think I’m now on the right track.

Camille Moussette gave another “why didn’t this get a full hour?” presentation. I’m a huge fan of hardware sketching in general, Camille makes an excellent case for interaction designers getting their hands dirty while they’re sketching ideas on paper. I look forward to seeing more of this — perhaps a workshop — at Interaction ’10.

Due to time constraints, Marc Rettig’s keynote was the last presentation for me. Every time I talk to Marc, I end up feeling like I’m not as smart as I thought I was but that I walked away smarter than I arrived. His recent work on not just designing things, but designing ways to change things for the greater good gave me huge hope for my newly adopted field of design. Thackara’s talk was the setup and Rettig’s talk slammed it home — we have to get off our asses and do something. If you didn’t “get it” after hearing Marc speak, go farm goats or something. Seriously.

Finally, in his thoughts on ixd09, Kolko writes, “this field is screaming for a unified theory that relates cognition, aesthetics, and culture.”   Perhaps it’s naive of me, but isn’t that the Greater Discipline of Capital-D Design? How could a unified theory of interaction design exclude the design of tools and shelter? Or is the real answer to his request the research we’ll do trying to answer an unanswerable question?

As I get on the plane for home, I am overwhelmed with gratitude towards those who took the time to share and help the rest of us become better designers. Thank you all for your kindness, advice, and friendship.

Technorati Tags: design, ixd09, #ixd09