DesignAday

Interaction 10 Program

The program for Interaction 10 has been posted, and it looks like it will be another outstanding conference. The keynote speakers will be Paola Antonelli, Dan Hill, Jon Kolko, Ezio Manzini, Nathan Shedroff, and a true legend in the field, Bill Moggridge. Additional invited speakers are Timo Arnall, Cindy Chastain, Liz Danzico, Shelley Evenson, Dave Gray, Tom Igoe, Peter Morville, and Denise Wilton. Looking at this list and the 28 speakers selected from 250 session submissions, it appears that Service Design and sustainability with both be significant themes running through the conference.

Registration is now open, and early bird pricing is in effect through November. The past two conferences have sold out, and I see no reason for this one to not follow suit. I’m hoping to attend again, but that’s likely dependent on at least partial support from my company. Here’s hoping.

Interaction 10 Proposal

The deadline for session proposals for the Interaction 10 conference is rapidly approaching. I submitted a demonstration today. All proposals are publicly available on the conference website. Not only can you read them, but make comments that will be taken into account when the committee decides which proposals to except. Not only that, but you can leave comments as to how the potential presenter can improve his or her submission. We have until October 1st to revise our proposals.

Wicked Problems Inspire Creative Solutions: A case study of software design for industry
We are well aware of many great examples of Interaction Design found on the web. Consumer-oriented services and mobile devices like the iPhone capture the public conscious and are the stars of our discipline. Software developed for industry, however, is much less likely to have an interaction designer involved to begin with. The irony is that there are typically much more difficult challenges to tackle in industrial contexts—designers are sorely needed.

I’ll be demonstrating a unique application that was designed to meet an interesting combination of requirements. The tool is used to record information about complex electrical systems in large facilities, such as factories and hospitals. The demonstration will show how a user interface was designed for needs and constraints such as:

• mobile use
• harsh environments
• touch/stylus input
• relatively small display
• visualization, navigation, and editing of very large, complex electrical systems
• quick, non-linear access to individual parts of said systems
• repetitious data entry
• validation of entered data

The resulting solution required creative, custom enhancements to existing design patterns. Of course, it also required close work with the technicians that were to benefit from it. The presentation will include examples from the collaborative process, from initial research and a failed first attempt to “a day in the life” shadowing and high-fidelity prototypes.

In summary, the session will present a complete case study of an industry-oriented software design project through demonstration of prototypes and, ultimately, the final, working application.

This isn’t up yet on the conference site, but eventually you will be able to comment on it here.

Cornucopia of Conferences

The folks over at Interaction-Design.org have just released a new resource that will be quite useful for any designer looking for opportunities to share their work or to learn from others that do. Their World Map of Conferences provides a Google map with pins for IxD-related conferences. Interested in visiting Hawaii? There is UMAP 10 next June. On the other extreme, there is NordiCHI 10 next October in Iceland.

They provide a number of other useful views. They provide a calendar that can be viewed online or downloaded as an iCal or .ics file. They have a list of approaching deadlines, a printer version, and an RSS feed.

I must criticize them on coverage, however. They are missing Interaction 10, coming up this February in Savannah, GA, and I don’t see SXSW. With these obvious ones missing, I can’t trust it as a comprehensive, authoritative source.

Interaction ’10

The announcement went out this week that IxDA is now accepting submissions for Interaction ’10 to be held in Savannah, GA, February 4-7, 2010. There are four different types of sessions that you can propose. From the conference website:

Discussions. Got a burning question that you think the interaction design community should be asking itself? Let’s sit down and discuss it. You are the discussion facilitator.

Activities. Let’s try out something together. Field trip? Interview play acting? A new prototyping technique? Propose something that we DO.

Demonstrations. Want to show off something cool? Success or failure from a project? New technology? Prototyping technique? Launching something? Share it with your community.

Presentations. Want to do more of a traditional talk? We love those too.

In addition, there will be two community documentaries you can submit video for, an interactive art exhibition, a student competition, and a local design challenge that will benefit the Savannah community. This is all in concert with the invited speakers, half-day workshops, and receptions that were hallmarks of past conferences.

The deadline for session submissions is September 15th. Registration opens on October 15th, and November 1st is the final day for art and video submissions.

Designing for Touch Screens and Interactive Gestures

I attended Dan Saffer and Bill DeRouchey’s workshop at Interaction ’09 titled Designing for Touch Screens and Interactive Gestures. While a lot of good information was communicated (Did you know that the largest portion of the brain is devoted to your mouth, while the second largest controls your hands?), much of it was old hat for me. I’ve been designing UIs for tablet PCs with touch and/or stylus input for about as long as I’ve been working in the field, and most of the considerations are the same. For example, it is better to place controls at the bottom of the screen, rather than the top, because in reaching for the controls at the top, you obscure the screen with your hand and arm.

What I found most valuable was the exercise. I’ve never thought highly of paper prototypes. I know, a lot of designers swear by them, but I find them much too tedious to be of use. I can spend the same amount of time or less creating an interactive prototype in Director that is the same or greater fidelity. In my opinion, paper prototypes work well for very simple interactions. Once you start rigging scroll bars with string, you are taking things to a ridiculous extreme.

The workshop, however, made me realize that the new frontier of large scale, touch sensitive displays is the perfect application for paper prototypes. I stated that paper prototypes work well for simple interactions. I now believe it can be measured as a bell curve. In the middle, there is a large area of medium complexity that is too tedious to model with paper and only moderately time consuming to represent in software. Then, as you push beyond the fat point of the curve, you get to a level of complexity that is quite difficult to model with our current, computer-based tools, and paper comes to the rescue.

Our class had been broken into several groups, and we were tasked with designing a music purchasing experience for a retail space. We were given a size constraint, which was, conveniently enough, approximately the size of the circular dining tables at which we were seated. We used paper, markers, and tape to hastily create a very rough prototype of our solution, which borrowed heavily from Microsoft’s Surface. I was particularly fond of our solution, but I was very impressed with how well paper worked in this instance.

It lends itself perfectly to the problem space. You can’t prototype at that scale on a computer screen. You would have to do some pretty fancy stuff to get a projector hung straight down from the ceiling, and then mimic the users motions in near-real-time to make it at all feasible in software. With paper, you can make every element to size, and the test subject can slide pieces of paper around as much as they want.

I don’t know how long it will be before I have the opportunity to design such an interface for real, but I do know that when that time comes, I’ll likely be adding paper prototyping to my toolbelt.

First Touch

I mentioned in a previous post that a feature of Interaction ’09 was the Tangible Interaction Café. Manifest Digital provided a Microsoft Surface for us to fiddle around with. This was my first hands-on experience with the table, and while it was interesting, I was a little underwhelmed. It wasn’t as big as I imagined it would be; it’s the size of a smallish coffee table. The resolution is also quite low. The interactions were very natural, however, and it was fun to spend a few minutes flicking photos around and playing with the water table “screensaver”.

One thing that made it a bit more engaging was that Manifest had developed some software expressly for our conference. They had it pulling in photos and tweets from the conference feeds, which was a nice tie in, but the icing on the cake was the interface with Crowdvine, the social networking site tied into the conference. Everyone who had registered with Crowdvine had a 3-D barcode on the back of their nametag. When I placed my nametag on the Surface, it recognized me and pulled in my photo from Crowdvine.

The red “connect” swash could be dragged onto another person’s photo, which would send them a message through Crowdvine saying that I connected with them on the Surface at Interaction ’09. While this is a rather trivial example, it turned what could have been a short, distraction with a novelty item into a more relevant and engaging experience.

Missing Multitouch

The exhibitor space at Interaction ’09 featured a Tangible Interaction Café. There were a number of interesting things on display, one of which was a sticky note wall. The software application provided a simple UI for creating and arranging sticky notes. Visitors were encouraged to post questions or post answers to the existing questions. The display was projected at a large scale. While it wasn’t possible to interact directly with the projection, there was a fair sized touch screen, as well as a mouse and keyboard. You could add notes and drag them around on the touch screen, but you had to use the keyboard to type in the text.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with the application. There was a rather harsh limit to the number of characters that could be typed into a note, so answers were not particularly helpful. Notes could be dragged around anywhere by anybody, so attaching a note with an answer to a note with the corresponding question didn’t guarantee that it would remain so.

What I found of most interest was observing other people using the touch screen. I noticed someone tentatively drag his finger across it, not sure if it was touch sensitive. The very next thing he did was try to scale a note by grabbing opposite corners with each index finger. This had no effect, as the screen was not multitouch enabled.

People are going to be expecting multi-touch. We have iPhones. We have seen Microsoft’s Surface (and one was sitting only a few feet away). We have watched Jeff Han’s video on YouTube, and we have seen Minority Report. The afforded interactions are so natural, it is only natural to want to use them. Single-touch won’t be good enough. Before too long, if multi-touch is missing from a product with a touch interface, it will be considered sub-par and undesirable.

Interaction ’09 Schwag

So what goodies were parceled out in Vancouver?

1. A black bag (with a tag insinuating it was made from recycled materials) bearing the conference identity.
2. A black t-shirt, also bearing the conference identity.
3. The conference program.
4. Visitor’s Choice guides for Vancouver and Whistler. I didn’t extend my trip for skiing, but I know others did.
5. A card with the IxDA statement of value and purpose: We believe that the human condition is increasingly challenged by poor experiences. IxDA intends to improve the human condition by advancing the discipline of Interaction Design. To do this, we foster a community of people that choose to come together to support this intention. IxDA relies on individual initiative, contribution, sharing and self-organization as the primary means for us to achieve our goals.
6. Advertisements for Mad*Pow, Autodesk, Tangible UX, Axure, and Cooper.
7. Poster for the new MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA.
8. Bookmark from Apogee.
9. Card and pin from Silverback.
10. Sheet of Adobe application logo stickers.
11. Spiral-bound notepad made of recycled, post-consumer waste with a cardboard pen from R/GA.
12. Spiral-bound notepad made of recycled, post-consumer waste with a cardboard pen, each bearing the conference logo.
13. Pen/highlighter combo from the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
14. A Baby Baggu from Huge.

Interaction ’09 is over – interaction in ’09 has just begun

I’m back from Vancouver, and what a weekend it was! I’ll have plenty to write about in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to tell you what I’m feeling in the afterglow.

There were a lot of big ideas bandied about and gauntlets were thrown. As is typically the case, we leave the conference feeling optimistic that we will be able to apply what we’ve learned and do something to improve the world. As is also typical, many will return to the daily grind, and over the course of weeks, forget the challenges posed, the excitement in the potential for positive change, and the can-do attitude that was buoyed by a tight-nit community of very intelligent, talented, and well-intentioned designers—our tribe.

I am relatively certain I’ll be one to carry the torch through the length of 2009. For one thing, I’m on the committee for next year’s conference. We’ve already begun plans, including ideas for acting upon issues that were raised in Vancouver. I’m honored to be working with some extremely motivated people, and as good as the past two conferences have been, I’m already expecting to outdo ourselves.

I’m also quite excited about the IxDA local initiative. There are already over seventy local groups around the world with more starting up every month. My local Pittsburgh chapter is growing, and we have some fantastic events in the works. Local groups are the perfect way to keep the momentum from the conference, offering a venue that doesn’t have the same old constraints as your day job.

It’s 2009, hope is the word of the year, and change is in the air. Look out world; here comes the IxDA!

Who do I want to see speak?

I was recently participating in a discussion about whom I would want to see speak at an Interaction Design conference. One might think that I could immediately start spouting off the names of luminaries that I look up to. I had to stop and think—hard.

It’s not that I don’t have role models and design heroes. I have a lot of respect for a good many designers and business leaders. But it is such a rare opportunity that I get to see anyone speak in person, I felt the need to be very choosy. I was fortunate enough to see Alan Cooper, Bill Buxton, Malcolm McCullough, and a number of others speak at Interaction ’08 last year, and I’ll be attending sessions by the likes of Dan Saffer, Marc Rettig, Luke Wroblewski, and Jared Spool this weekend. Who else is there?

So, I thought of Bill Moggridge, another legend and founder of IDEO, as well as Tom Kelley and Tim Brown (General Manger and CEO of IDEO, respectively). I have Bill’s book on a shelf, waiting in the cue of books to read, and I’ve read Kelley’s The Art of Innovation. I have a lot of respect for their company. I thought about Don Norman, but I’ve been exposed to enough of his writing and interviews of him that I’m not sure how much more I could learn seeing him in person. I thought of others as well, but nobody was really exciting me.

So I changed the question. I started thinking about the topics I would like to see experts speak about. Before I could fully formulate this line of thinking, Bill DeRouchey suggested that a conference should have speakers covering History (the old guard), Contemporary (the vanguard), Extension (application in related fields), Lateral Inspiration (learning from nearby fields), and Future. I really like this model, and upon seeing it, I immediately started thinking of topics and people that would fit, and that I would like to see.

In this day of web-celebs, bloggers, and crowd-sourcing, it really isn’t so much about big names as it is relativity and applicability. Content is king.