Nice 1-day conference by Kicker Studio last Friday. A few notes:

Kim Goodwin and Michael Voege, IxD + ID

• When ID & IxD can work together from the start, can be a good convergence process. Start wild, gradually narrow down
• ID often requires more emotional cues from people in user research
• Daily, quick checkins are useful between design teams even in the separate design phases

Stuart Karten, Hearing aids

• People of all ages wanted the hearing enhancement one hearing aid company was offering; not just the old
• Modemapping: research technique to chart all the activities a person does throughout the day by time and quality/happiness, to discover common pain points and patterns across people, then list out functional, behavioral, and social needs in those.
• Sample themes for ID of hearing aids: jewelry, algorithms/nature, performance enhancement.
• Capacitive touch on the ear has issues when people brush their hair back
• Using an iPhone/Android app can be a good way to test touch interactions; just simulate the product onscreen and use the iPhone to respond to touch input

Wendy Ju, Implicit Interactions

• Joe Malia’s privacy scarves are awesome
• Many important interactions take place in the “attentional periphery”: a doorman’s offer to open a door; a dog wagging its tail. Each communicates status, an offer, and acknowledgment of you.
• Implicit interaction axes: Foreground/Background, Proactive/Reactive. A single interaction can move around these quadrants. Most UIs today are Foreground + Reactive; lots of potential in the others

Mike Kuniavsky, Information as a material

• FedEx Senseaware, a passive (soon active) device + web info system for packages
• Multiple screens (phone, tablet, desktop, tv) are “holes in space to the same thing”
• Are you building an APPLIANCE (limited functionality, focused UI) or a TERMINAL (infinite functionality, general UI)?
• A terminal: “a transparent window into services”

Ian Myles, Astro Design

• Concept design can be a fancy concept movie or a simple sketch with localized glowing; both convey the idea but the latter is much simpler
• Intel Moorestown device; ultra widescreen (32:9) suggests new interactions/uses

Dan Harden, Frog -> Whipsaw

• Interesting Skymall items: laser scissors; overhead book holder
• “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his workand his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” – LP Jacks
• “Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.” – Marcus Aurelius
• Livescribe pen lets you draw interface elements and then use them by touching: http://waynehodgins.typepad.com/ontarget/2008/08/cool-tools- live.html
• “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. ” – C.A.R. Hoare
• Vudu remote control is beautiful
• InfiniteZ virtual holographic display system

Julian Bleecker, Design Fiction

• “A Survey of Human-Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies“
• “Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision” – Genevieve Bell
• “Scientists on the Set“, “The Future is Now“, & upcoming book “Science on the Silver Screen” by David Kirby

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

via Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything | Magazine.

Yes please.

A great example of what my dad always called “using CAD: Cardboard-aided design. If you can make it out of cardboard, you might be able to make it out of metal. But if you can’t make it out of cardboard, you definitely won’t be able to make it out of metal.”

The Global Lives project is an effort “to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.”

They started with an exhibit of 10 people at the Yerba Buena Center. I missed that unfortunately but they’ve put some of the video online. You can even view the raw 24 hours of footage for each person, linked at the bottom.

It’s interesting to think about this as a resource for virtual ethnography–just dial up 24 hours in the life of someone in your target market and observe them on demand…

I’ve written about this before, but two great articles recently said it even better:

Don’t try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. – Bill Coyne of 3M, via Bob Sutton

If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer…

But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation…

Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one’s creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life. – Diego Rodriguez

I picked up this magazine in an airport and found a couple good tips inside.

• Tape previous cut pieces together to make a cut on another face.
• Save X-acto blades in wine corks
• Make metal rings by winding rod around a cylinder, then cutting once along the centerline and reattaching.

“Creativity is just connecting things…[but] a lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, 1996

“Futurists perform a quirky, but necessary, task in modern society: we function as the long-range scanners for a species evolved to pay close attention to short-range horizons.” – Jamais Cascio.

From Ed Catmull’s talk at the Economist Ideas conference:

I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.

One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.

We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.

I love this contest idea:

Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems.

While my lovely wife works tirelessly to help the rest of the world develop, I’m working in the “first world” to make sure there’s a worthwhile and sustainable lifestyle for them when they arrive. The current example we’re setting in the U.S. (low rankings on health, happiness, and world respect) doesn’t seem like a worthy goal for the rest of the world.

Efforts like Design for the Other 90% are valuable and important, but I love that designers from that 90% are trying to help us too.

This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of Sum, which I greatly enjoyed.

I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

This is similar to my philosophy on concept design–tell yourself (and others) that this is the “future” experience, when really that’s just a technique to help you think about what you wish things were like today.

Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty…I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

As I get older I feel like I “know” less and less. I always expected it to be the opposite, but this feels right.

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”.

I’ve often said that my job title is designer, but that what I’m paid to do is tolerate uncertainty. It’s uncomfortable and hard to do, but most important projects require a significant period of uncertainty and very few people are willing to endure that.

This is basically my New Year’s Resolution every year. But he actually did it.

My favorite thing about working with stock image and music sites is seeing the same photo you used for a project show up in someone else’s work, or hearing the music you’ve repeated endlessly while editing a video project pop up in a commercial on tv.

It’s like being part of a big community of people who recognize each other by little noises and visual hints. Kinda like the Cylon’s music in Battlestar Galactica, I guess.

“The process of making is the point of it. The object looks good if the process felt good.” – Origami artist, Between the Folds

Just saw a fascinating presentation by Bear McCreary (of Battlestar Galactica fame) at work. Among many interesting stories was his description of how he composed the adaptation of All Along the Watchtower used in one of the show’s most climactic scenes, the piano in the bar.

Apparently the inclusion of the song was director Ronald D. Moore’s idea, and over several seasons it became an increasingly important part of the plot (which I won’t spoil here). But that meant that the musical score for the show was now also something the characters were aware of, so Bear worked with the writers to weave his music into the story. And for the piano scene itself, the writers called him up while he was working on a particularly difficult cue and asked him to describe what it’s like to tease out a piece of music that’s stuck in your head. His responses went almost directly into the script.

I think as media continues to evolve, we’ll see even more examples where connecting music to plot, and to the other aspects of a story, leads to a more interesting and holistic experience. Learning ways to do this is an exciting opportunity for designers from all parts of the spectrum.

The entire presentation was captivating, including a bit where Bear taught the piano theme to someone from the audience, just as was done in the show, and his description of how he sees music while watching a scene (first he sees the overall shape, then starts to fill in the pieces). Hopefully it will be published online for more to see; I’ll link to it if so.

A friend, currently in her surgical residency program, describes what “scrubbing in” feels like:

Once you’re scrubbed in, you can’t really do anything else until the procedure is over. If someone calls for you, all you have to say is “I’m scrubbed in”. You can’t touch your pager. You can’t touch anything. And you yourself are literally untouchable.

Is there benefit in “scrubbing in” for the rest of us, in other types of work? What might it look like for designers?

Ambition and naivete always seem to go together; it seems like a good idea to always be a novice at something, but to be aware of it.

A fascinating and sometimes frightening look at the way games are invading every aspect of our lives, and where they may be going next. The last 8 minutes are a wild exploration of one possible future.

A fascinating view into the cameras and technology used in Avatar. The new technology included a virtual camera that lets you physically shoot a virtual scene, augmented reality that overlays live footage with CGI backgrounds, face-scanning cameras, and a combination 2D/3D camera.

Another innovation was adding imperfections (camera movements, lens flares) to make a “perfect” virtual world more believable.

Really interesting to think about what this technology might do when released to the world in a few years…

Update: i09 has a bunch of great interviews with designers who worked on Avatar: part 1, part 2, part 3

Michael Beirut, partner at Pentagram, describes his real design process:

“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!”

As much as we like to tell ourselves (and others) about our robust, repeatable, formal design process, great work usually comes down to a little bit of magic.