DesignAday

Thankful

What should a designer be thankful for? This year, and this month in particular, we should all be thankful for Christina Wodtke and the volunteers behind Boxes and Arrows. In case you haven’t heard, this long-time journal of design (graphic, interaction, information, etc.) was on a bit of a hiatus. Founded in 2001, the site contains over 400 articles, but the volunteers who had been keeping it going became busy with life, and there were several months without any new content.

Then, on November 13th, like a phoenix from the ashes, Boxes and Arrows relaunched on a new platform with a slew of new articles. Christina made her appeal to the readership, asking for new volunteers to step forward.

And so, facing retirement or resurrection, we’d like to ask you, reader, what should be the fate of Boxes and Arrows? Is there a new generation of designers out there who wants to take the power of this magazine’s reach and use it to talk about the next generation of user experience design? Will you define it? Will you defend it? Will you debunk it?

And the community is responding. A mailing list and Google Group have been started for those interested. Thanks to everyone that made Boxes and Arrows possible in the past, and thanks to those of you stepping up to see it into the future.

99% Awesome

I don’t understand how it is that I have never heard of 99% Invisible until this morning. I was listening to Debbie Millman’s Design Matters while I was getting ready for work. In the latest episode, she interviewed Roman Mars, producer and host of 99% Invisible, “a tiny radio show about design, architecture and the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.” As soon as I was dressed, I went to my computer, searched for it in iTunes, and proceeded to download all 55 episodes. I listened to about 30 of them today during my commute to teach my class down in Morgantown.

The show airs weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco with support from Lunar Design. The shows range in length from five to twelve minutes, as Roman regularly adds content to the podcast version. The production value is nothing short of fantastic with special care given to the backing soundscapes—eclectic mixes of music, dialog, noise, and sound effects. Each episode is carefully designed and crafted as a aural experience. The content is, without fail, intensely interesting. The shows I’ve listened to have covered everything from the redesign of the toothbrush, to the architectural significance of the Transamerica building, and the hunt for a sidewalk graffiti artist. Regardless of your area of design specialization, this podcast will be relevant and well worth ten minutes of your week.

Company Blogs

A couple weeks ago, I posted a list of IxD blogs and mentioned that company blogs would be posted separately. Then several things occurred, such as the release of the iPhone 4S with Siri and Steve Job’s passing, that I had to write about. Today, I’ll continue my IxDn00b series as promised.

You can often learn as much or more about an Interaction Design firm by reading their blog as the rest of their website. Many design firms are making significant contributions to our body of knowledge, and anyone new to the field should be taking advantage of these outstanding learning opportunities. This is a list of blogs from some of the top firms in our industry, but it is by no means a complete list. Find a firm you are interested in, and they will likely have some interesting things to say.

Adaptive Path
This is a very prolific group. Every member of the firm takes a turn, and it is all quality content. This list is alphabetically ordered, but I’d put them first anyway.

Cooper
It’s not surprising that one of their larger categories is Personas, but with fifty categories and over twenty contributors, you can bet there is plenty of breadth and depth to be found in their archives. 

Experientia
I honestly don’t know much about this experience design consultancy, but their blog, Putting People First, is one of the best sources for user centered design news on the web. 

Frog
More than just a blog, Frog gives us Design Mind, an entire online journal with articles from their printed magazine, videos, a podcast, a monthly newsletter, events, and 32 blogs. They take publishing seriously.

IDEO
With an archive stretching back to 1999, IDEO’s blog contains mostly news about the firm: events, awards, speaking engagements, and the like. The thing is, they author enough content for other publications, it fills their blog too. Be sure to check out the By IDEO page, too. 

Kicker Studio
Are you interested in touch, haptics, gestures, physical interfaces, and robots? This ain’t your grandpa’s Interaction Design blog.

Lunar
Lunar has a very academic approach to their blog, and I mean that in the very best way. They know what they’re talking about, and they express it very clearly. They also have an outstanding podcast. 

Method
With categories ranging from Smart Textiles and Wearable Technology, to Organizational Design and Health Innovation, Method is a diverse firm with a blog to match.

37signals
Get wonderful insights into the process of designing software from the design firm turned product developer. Signal vs. Noise, their blog, regularly lays out the decision making that goes into the tiniest of details.

Smart Design
“Our design leadership is reflected not only in the work we do, but in how we engage the design community, participate in public dialogue, and share expertise and insight with the world at large.” Yep, that covers it. 

UIE
I don’t know of anyone else that has the volume of usability anecdotes that Jared Spool can rattle off the top of his head. Need convincing of the value of good design? Jared’s got the goods, and he shares them on his blog, Brain Sparks.

Ziba
Like IDEO, this is more a news feed than a blog, but it provides links to good work and thoughtful writing. 

IxD Blogs

Books and journals are, without a doubt, excellent resources for learning about Interaction Design. You know that the content is coming with some amount of curation—that the writer’s have established credibility. But there is a wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from blogs that, like this one, are written by experts who publish without an editor or peer review. This is a starter list of blogs belonging to interaction, information, and user experience designers that are known to the community and regarded as valid contributors to our discipline’s body of knowledge. It is not a comprehensive list by any means. As of this writing, the blogs listed here are active and posted to regularly. Company blogs will be listed in a separate post.

LukeW - Ideation + Design - Luke Wroblewski
Luke is the author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability. He was Lead User Interface Designer at eBay, Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo, and a founder of IxDA.

O Danny Boy - Dan Saffer
Dan worked at Adaptive Path before founding Kicker Studio. He is the author of two books: Designing for Interaction and Designing Gestural Interfaces. 

Engage - Dave Malouf
Dave is currently a Professor of Interaction Design at SCAD. He’s also one of the founders of IxDA.

Ghost in the Pixel - Uday Gajendar
Uday is a principal designer at Citrix Systems. Former positions include Adobe, Oracle, and Cisco.

Jamin.org - Jamin Hegeman
After working as a senior designer at Nokia, Jamin moved to his current position at Adaptive Path. 

Good Experience - Mark Hurst
Mark runs the Gel conference and is the founder of Creative Good. He is also the author of the book Bit Literacy and previously ran the popular site This is Broken.

Design with Intent - Dan Lockton
Dan is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Brunel University, specializing in design for behavior change for social and environmental benefit. He is currently involved in the EMPOWER project.

I think, therefore IA - Livia Labate
Livia is Senior Director of User Experience Design at Marriott International. Prior to that, she was a Principal designer at Comcast Interactive Media. She has also chaired the IA Summit and was Director of IAI.

Inkblurt - Andrew Hinton
Andrew is Principal User Experience Architect at Macquarium and was formerly Lead Information Architect at Vanguard. He helped start IAI and was one of its directors. 

Disambiguity - Leisa Reichelt
Leisa is a freelance user experience consultant and founder of UX Bootcamp.

Bloug - Louis Rosenfeld
Lou is the founder of Rosenfeld Media, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and co-founder of both IAI and UXnet.

Peterme - Peter Merholz
Peter is one of the founders of Adaptive Path and previously worked at Epinions.com and Studio Archetype.

Bokardo - Joshua Porter
Author of Designing for the Social Web and founder of Bokardo Design, Josh is currently Director of UX at HubSpot. In the past, he was Director of Web Development at User Interface Engineering.

Ignore the Code - Lukas Mathis
Author of Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web, Lukas works as both interface designer and software engineer.

Feel free to and your own suggestions in the comments.

Interaction 11 Coverage

There has been quite a bit of excellent reporting of Interaction 11. Johnny Holland was on the ground, giving detailed coverage of every session, which has been compiled into four lengthy posts with photos:

Interaction 11 report: day 1 overview
Interaction 11 report: day 1 - inside-out design innovations and design meets branding 
Interaction 11 report: day 2
Interaction 11 report: day 3

Offering up another blow-by-blow report are the students from SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design  program, who were sent to Interaction 11 via departmental scholarships. I enjoyed the opportunity to review the conference from their thoughtful perspective’s. Each student took on one of the three days with a fourth wrapping things up in a final post:

Interaction 11: Day One
Interaction 11: Day Two
Interaction 11: Day Three
Interaction 11: …Let’s Get Back to Work

There are many, many more blog posts online covering the conference, ranging from Webgrrls interviews with female speakers to lighter coverage by Autodesk, one of the conference sponsors. For a list of at least a fair portion of them, check out the home page of the conference site.

Blog of the Week: Ghost in the Pixel

My blog tends to be rather light reading. I enjoy making observations about my environment and experiences more so than knuckling down on theoretical essays. My original intent for DesignAday was to provide a short, tasty design snack every day that wouldn’t take long to read, but would still be informative, inspirational, or entertaining. I think I’ve stayed true to that for the most part. My “In the Details” posts are probably the most enjoyable to write.

If you are interested in sinking your teeth into some juicier content—deep, thought-provoking analysis of Design with a capital D—stop by Ghost in the Pixel. From the About Me page:

Uday Gajendar is a UI Designer in Silicon Valley. His work has included enterprise software, desktop tools, Web applications, and phone devices at a range of companies—Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and Involution, a boutique studio. Holding degrees in both interaction design (Carnegie Mellon) and industrial design (Michigan), Uday continues to evolve his place within industry.

I knew Uday while he was a student at CMU, and it is obvious he was able to digest Dick Buchanan’s lectures much better than I. Uday’s writing is academic, very much rooted in his courses at CMU, yet tempered by his own extensive experience in the field. It spurs critical thinking while at the same time being directly applicable to a career in industry. Take, for instance, his most recent post, On becoming a design leader…

Blog of the Week: Coroflot

Coroflot is a web service for designers that allows publishing of web portfolios and provides a design-centric job board. They also facilitate a community of designers through special-interest groups that share images of their work. Supplementing these core features are a bi-monthly magazine and blog that feature the members of their community. Coroflot takes pride in the fact that it serves all of the design disciplines, with Industrial, Interaction, and Graphic being the most popular.

Toward that end, they have been publishing a design salary survey for the past eight years, the results of which are available to everyone. They’ve been a little light this year on Interaction Design participants, so if you haven’t already, head over and fill out the survey. It only takes a minute, and the more of us that participate, the more accurate and useful the results will be.

Blog of the Week: IDEO Labs

There are a lot of design blogs out there. The majority of them are the blogs of individuals like myself who feel the need to personally contribute to the ongoing global discussion. A few of them are published by firms. This is a perfect vehicle for self-promotion, both within the design community and in the public-facing media. IDEO, one of the premiere design firms in the world, has been strangely absent from the blogosphere… until now.

On July 15th, IDEO Labs posted their “Hello World”. Since then, they’ve shared with us their forays into DIY multi-touch. Their most recent post is awe-inspiring. They created the king of all Rube Goldberg machines, spanning the globe and running nearly twenty minutes. The creativity, ingenuity, and engineering prowess displayed in the video is not only a savvy bit of self-marketing, but truly inspiring. 

I don’t know what to expect next, but you can bet it will be worth a look. There’s one more RSS feed added to my list.

Blog of the Week: Chartjunk

Viveka Weiley, a user experience design consultant based in Sydney, Australia, has started a new blog titled Chartjunk after Tufte’s name for all of the unnecessary and distracting elements people tend to throw into data visualizations.

Viveka doesn’t just call attention to visualizations—he critiques them in detail, pointing out flaws that misrepresent the data. Many would stop right there. That is plenty enough to offer on a blog. Viveka, however, takes it a step further, redesigning the visualization to correct all of the deficiencies. Further, he encourages his readers to do the same.

The upcoming election is giving Viveka a lot of fodder. I hope he continues the blog after the election, as it is of real value to students and practitioners alike.

Blog of the Week: Engage!

David Malouf’s blog, Engage!, was one of the first design-related blogs I started reading on a regular basis. Of course, he was David Heller at the time. I can’t remember now if I found Dave’s blog before IxDA, or if IxDA lead me to it. Regardless, he was one of the organizers of the organization and its first Vice President.

Just this past Friday, Dave announced that he is leaving Motorola to take a faculty position at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). He’ll be picking up where John Kolko left off with the goal of turning their minor in Interaction Design into a complete program. That sounds like a delicious challenge, and I know Dave is going to sink his teeth into it. Much like myself, Dave has been drawn to teaching, leading workshops on rich internet applications (RIAs) and sketching for Interaction Design.

I’m very much looking forward to learning how Dave shapes the curriculum at SCAD, and I expect he’ll be sharing many of the details on Engage!