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

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.

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

“Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams–daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing–are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.” – L. Frank Baum

The Power of 8 is a set of concept videos, fake products, landscape designs, architectural plans and stories that combine to show what a future where technology brings people together might look like. Really well done and unique.

“So you’d think that, to a first approximation, the Earth is inhabitable by human beings…In fact, to a first approximation, from the perspective of prospective interstellar colonists, the Earth is uninhabitable…Currently, a random meat probe dropped on the Earth’s surface has something like a 15% chance of finding it survivable. But a random sampling over the historical epoch would return a survivability probability of around 1%.” – Charlie Stross