masimuddy

Mark Vanderbeeken recently wrote an article on the where-abouts of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea alumni (This is the school where I did my Masters). Mark names a number of companies and schools were the alum now work and identifies a number of new companies that have been started by the alumni. It’s an impressive list, and I think it speaks to the caliber of people that were associated with the school. I am proud to be part of that community.

One of the alum was featured in a Wired magazine article recently as well. A former professors of the school, Massimo Banzi, continued to work in the area of physical prototyping and with his team has garnered a lot of interest for the open-source prototyping platform they call Arduino (named after a bar we all used to frequent). The article talks not only about the project, but the idea that this is open-source hardware, and there can be a business made out of such a thing.

Congratulation to Massimo and the Arduino team, and all the Ivrea alumni : )

Chris Heathcote has an excellent post about user experience “design“.

“There’s certainly no such thing as managing the user experience. Or designing the user experience.

Something doesn’t work? Bad user experience.
Doesn’t do what I want? Bad user experience.
Can’t understand it? Bad user experience.
Bad service? Bad user experience.
It broke? Bad user experience.
Warranty or insurance issues? Bad user experience.
They were rude? Bad user experience.
The store was out of stock? Bad user experience.

User experience is just a strategy. A way of thinking – one that illuminates the possibilities to improve. One that shows new potentials, by looking at things in a new way. One that I believe in. But it’s certainly not the only strategy, and it’s a really hard strategy to implement well.”

So, a friend of mine pointed me to this today:

And you would say “Yes Tom, i know you like cartooon monsters. Very cute.” and I would reply “But wait! It’s a Nokia minisite” and you would say “What do cute monsters have to do with Nokia?.”

Exactly.

From what I can gather, the Mapsters is a marketing mini-site to explain the Nokia Maps application. It’s a little different then what I would expect from Nokia (yes, I used to work there) but I certainly applaud their endeavor to make something fun and engaging. Most marketing site more often then not miss that aspect. And it does seems kinda fun, though I have now idea how old it is.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for cute monsters in the end.

Last week I attended one day of the weeklong UX Week 2008 conference put on by Adaptive Path in San Francisco. The topic for the day was “the future of Interaction Design”.  Here is a summary of my highlight for the day.

Michael B Johnson of Pixar talked mostly about the process they use at the animation studio. It was a nice parallel of what happens (or could happen) when designing products. At the end, he also talked about the development of in-house tools.

This was probably my favorite talk of the day. Not because he showed lots of cartoons, although that was nice, but because he talked a lot about creative processes that Pixar uses. I’ve been thinking about processes a lot lately, like how other creative process are similar and different from design processes. Expect some blog-posts soon.

Rachel Hinman, a researcher at Adaptive Path, talked about how to create a vision and showed recent examples of a mobile vision project.

Jeffery Veen discussed telling a story through info graphics and what that might mean in an interactive world. He presented a few well known infographics and then compared those with data visualization tools that are more interactive (infointeractives anyone?)

Mike Migurski of Stamen talked about adding evidence of realism to web applications. He called this “greebles” after the term used to describe the bits model makers placed on sci fi models to make them more real.

Dennis Wixon a Research Manager at Microsoft talked about his work in the Surface group. He talked about the principles of the Natural User Interface (the NUI) that apply to the touch screen UIs his team is working on. ( I personally prefer the term Touch UI to describe this category of interfaces, since it better describes the interaction method of the approach.)

An Adaptive Path panel told the story of how they created the Aurora concept project video. You can see the video and a description of the project at their project site.

Dan Saffer from Adaptive Path talked about our move to touch UIs and some of the aspects we need to consider when designing a Touch UI. He presented a few good guiding principles if you’re new to the area of designing TUIs. (download slides)
2 gentlemen from Stimulant talked about their process of creating Touch UI installations for customers.

Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM talked about UbiComp and the aspects digital devices afford, and why he thinks UbiComp is more possible today. I particularly like Mike’s ideas around objects having digital shadows that leave a trace in the digital world. Being a wine-lover, I also like his presentation of WineM, and RFID enabled wine sorting system, by my wine collection of 4 bottles doesn’t really warrant such a device (but one must have goals!)

Aaron Powers of iRobot talked about human Robot interaction and some of the things his company considers when design the interface. Are they fully autonomous or tele-operated? What is the distance of operation? What is the input method?

Johnny Lee of Microsoft talked about the hacks he’s done with the Nintendo Wiimote and discussed some of the future projects he’s interested in. You can see a lot of his work on YouTube and download his code to try some of these hacks out yourself.

He had some interesting things to say about the accessibility of the Wiimote. The $40 device and some free code has made digital whiteboards accessible to many schools. It’ll be interesting to see what else can be done on the cheap.

Closing the day, and the conference, was Bruce Sterling. Who spends a lot of time in the Balkans, and described on aspects of what it’s like there.

Overall, I found the conference to be quite interesting and I plan to attend again if the opportunity presents itself.

UPDATE: There are slide decks for some of the sessions available for download.

I like this little snippet from the article Can interfaces be evil? on Bokardo:

Evil design would be when the designers intentionally deceived users by design. In other words, evil design is when designers(in this case the people making design decisions, not necessarily the coders or visual designers) know they aren’t being straight-up with users, and created the interface in order to keep it that way. There are many examples of this…one of which being the Facebook Beacon platform.

(as an aside, I’m sure I’ve made evil designs before, too…this isn’t evil as in Satan evil…it’s more like deception that creeps into an interface over time…and the designers know better but do it anyway)

Bad design would be when something unintentionally happens as a result of the design. This is very different. The designers simply didn’t know what would happen in all cases. I would suggest that most user frustration is caused by bad design…there are so many unintended consequences in the interfaces we make.

Things to keep in mind as we work. Good design vs. bad design. Evil design vs. honest(?) design … what is the right word for that? Or is it always just ‘Good’ design?

Down with Innovation - Rick Poynor for I.D. Magazine

I found an article in I.D. Magazine regarding the design profession(s). The topic of what (interaction) design is has been on my mind recently, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to describe the profession, it’s role in an organization and it’s processes. The article describes the changes and evolution of the design industry, as well as the changes in the way the profession has been perceived. It talks about the differences in designers as stylists and designers as innovators.

The article is a bit controversial as it seems to suggests the role of designers should remain in the aesthetic realm, and the innovation/design-thinking processes being used should be “moved into someone else’s hands”. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I do agree many others professions can benefits from using design-thinking.

via [Putting people first]

Bar codes are becoming more and more common place as ticketing moves to the web and we print our own tickets. Usually a bunch messy squares, the image in this ticket makes use of the aesthetic to provide a nice images. A nice what to present data in a pleasing way. I’m sure there will slowly be more experimentation with this.
(images by david_avi_delta )

From wired article : How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

“Apple’s successes in the years since Jobs’ return — iMac, iPod, iPhone — suggest an alternate vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. In Cupertino, innovation doesn’t come from coddling employees and collecting whatever froth rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people’s feelings are irrelevant. Some management theorists are coming around to Apple’s way of thinking. “A certain type of forcefulness and perseverance is sometimes helpful when tackling large, intractable problems,” says Roderick Kramer, a social psychologist at Stanford who wrote an appreciation of “great intimidators” — including Jobs — for the February 2006Harvard Business Review.”

Innovation through intense, focused processes? Yup, that’s what school was like.

An article over at Wired about “The Brash Boys at 37signals” (makers of Backpack and Ruby on Rails) has prompted a bit of a debate in the blogosphere.

Donald Norman wrote an article asking “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” and 37Signals wrote a follow-up describing “Why we disagree with Don Norman“. Have a read, it’s an interesting debate on software design philosophy.

All articles bring up interesting discussion - is there a single and correct product design process? Probably not. I think the important take-away here is that there are multiple processes and philosophies of product development to consider. But I believe there are some processes better suited for certain situations. The choice of process is only one of the many choices any company has to make on their road to success or failure.

This past weekend, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) hosted it’s first annual conference entitled Interaction 08. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go, but I plan to chat to my friends that did go about the highlights.

I did come across the presentation Matt Jones gave entitled ‘Designing for Spacetime‘. It’s up on Slideshare, along with other presentations from the conference, so if, like me, you missed the talk head over and take a peak. He talks about designing for Dopplr, and littered throughout the presentation are some really nice visualizations.

EDIT: Putting People First has posted an entry with links to about half of the presentations.