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 : )

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?

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.

A friend of mine pointed me to a great post which collects together a number of interesting user experience concepts at Smashing magazine. I noticed most are large scale and would lend themselves well to public or external spaces, and along with some of the “natural” interaction techniques presented it could make those objects very engaging and intuitive … but for what purpose? I shall ponder.

My friend and former Ivrea colleague Noel Perlas is giving away a moleskin. You can check out the post on his blog. He regularly blogs on Interaction Design related topics.

I just came back from Guy Kawasaki’s talk at BayChi. He presented “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09″ where he talked about how he created the Truemors website (and he insists it’s a website). This is the first time I’ve heard him speak, but it was a really great, and a very entertaining talk. I hope to learn a little and improve my presentation techniques. In his talk, he mostly talked about what he had to do to create the site, and I thought it as a great point that a decent idea, with the passion to implement it and see it through is a great combination.
The service itself is interesting. It makes it easy to upload content to the web (really text snippets) - kinda like twitter, for no user stream But people tend to post news stories and links. Two things in my mind make this site interesting.

Firstly, allowing many ways for anyone to post content, online, sms, email and speech to text technology that lets people upload via calling . Secondly, that it’s sort of a free for-all-all posting site that relies on community moderators (less interesting) and newly introduced community management tools (more interesting). WoW recently introduced such features and it really seems to reduce the amount of spam.

As for the service, we’ll see how it does. Good luck Guy!

Jeff Han at NYU has done more work on the multi-touch UI concept. It seems they’ve explored how to extend the metaphor s they developed to more everyday tasks such as surfing, searching and Google-mapping. A lot of nice examples in the video. The metaphor looks very promising indeed.

It was only a matter of time : ) I wouldn’t have loved this as a kid .. wait, i love it now!
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/11/wiisaber-star-wars-kid-do-your-thing/ via [gizmodo]
I played the Wii this past weekend. I’ve seen a lot of work done in the area of gestures in interaction design, and a lot of very good ideas. The Wii, however, brings these kinds of interactions to the mainstream. and what amazed me is how well it worked, and how accurate it was.

Well done Nintendo! (again)

Now I just need to find one for sale …

UPDATE: I was able to get my hand on a Wii