Sessions at Interaction12 about Design on Thursday 2nd February

The products and services we design and deploy are embedded within a culture and not just a context. Culture is an important concept that is often overlooked by designers. We need to think beyond user's goals, needs, desires, emotions, context, psychology and principles of design; we need to start designing from a place of culture.

This talk explores how cultural understanding can inform design as well as how our designs impact the cultures that use them. I define culture in terms of design and build a framework designers can use to better understand culture and it’s implications on their design work. Designers will walk away from this talk with basic cultural literacy and the tools to incorporate cultural understanding into their design process. I will also show the impact the products and services we design have on cultures.

Ultimately, design (even if data and pattern driven) is subjective and we bring our own historical trajectory to our designs. Having a deeper understanding of culture will have a direct impact on what we bring to our design decisions.

More broadly, as a design profession we need to be expanding our discourse to include culture and cultural theory into our understanding of interactions, experiences and design.

The world has changed, but design, like so any other institutions, has barely kept pace. This discussion delves into three aspects of contemporary design that depart from 20th century modernity—without ignoring its inherent wisdom. This narrative journey playfully unveils major pillars of contemporary social thought applied to interaction design, touching on a wide array of topics from vampire movies and dance festivals to space aliens and horticulture.

Remember the days when there was just a PC? – A single form factor to consider when designing an application or web site. It was landscape format, mouse-interaction based, and with relatively high resolution.

Well, times have dramatically changed since then… Today, there are numerous desktop and mobile devices out there – in different shapes, sizes, technologies, resolutions, input methods, features, and more.

These also represent a variety of users, interaction models, behaviors, use cases, contexts, needs, goals, environments, etc.

So how do you design for all of these different devices? And even more interestingly – How do you design for multiple devices which are all part of a product ecosystem?

This presentation (with the help of Seinfeld and some Friends), will discuss the unique challenges interaction designers face when designing for an ecosystem of devices. It will present the unique considerations and complexities to take into account, and try to pave the way towards finding the right, delicate balance between consistency across the ecosystem and optimized UX per device.

Mobile technologies are having a transformative impact on both healthcare access and delivery. The interaction design of a given product for healthcare may have actual life or death consequences. This presentation will highlight key examples of innovative designs for new smart phone and tablet software that helps people manage chronic diseases, quantify their health status, and connect to critical medical resources via remote health monitoring. Benefits of good health technology design for both clinicians and patients include better informed decision-making processes and efficiencies gained through well-organized and aggregated data sets.

Learning objectives include:

How to create powerful design processes to solve complex problems in medicine and healthcare.
How designers can best shape technologies to empower patients, physicians, and researchers.
How to effectively present modular, complicated, variable and voluminous data on mobile computing platforms.
Emerging designs that are serving as stepping stones in the convergence of healthcare and health information technology will be discussed. The presentation will include live demonstrations of outstanding mobile healthcare app designs and other new technologies being used by both patients and clinicians. The importance of interaction design will be emphasized in its critical role for bringing the benefits of mobile technologies to doctors, patients and the overall health care community.

In an ever more connected world we believe that not longer a single entity defines a true customer experience. Not a sole product's feature set, interface or service proposition defines it's real value for the people using it, but it's emplacement in a vivd ecosystem of transferable content, information and personal data. The experience is rather defined by the rules and regulations between the consumer's relevant products in a connected system with an designed overarching layer of tangiblized data. We therefore think that in the future the design of these exact touchpoints between products will be even more important for the consumer than a single interface entity.

Especially in the mobile world an application‘s behavior is determined by device capabilities, data connectivity, periphery accessories and software frameworks that live outside the actual product. Looking at Samsung's AllShare, Apple's iDevices and, more recently, at the attempts of the automotive industry, we see that the true power does not lie in the sophisticated design of the single product but in the transferability and seamless connectivity between screens, input devices and data processing services.

In this presentation we will analyze current experience ecosystems with an emphasis on mobile contexts. By looking into the building block of carefully designed ecosystems we line out guidelines and recommendations for designers to build better connected systems. This talk is especially for professionals in the experience industry, designers, managers and engineers as well as for everyone involved in the innovation and production process of digital and mobile products.

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.

In this talk, Rachel will provide:

Insight into how designers and UX professionals can navigate the unfamiliar and fast-changing mobile landscape with grace and solid thinking.
In-depth information on advanced mobile design topics UX professionals will spend the next 10+ years pioneering
Tools and frameworks necessary to begin tackling mobile UX problems in this rapidly changing design space.

What happens when you decouple design from the marketplace, when rather than making technology sexy, easy to use and more consumable, designers use the language of design to pose questions, inspire, and provoke — to transport our imaginations into parallel but possible worlds?

Once you start doing this you are effectively dealing with fiction and very different aesthetics come into play.

In my talk I will use examples from the Design Interactions programme at the RCA and my own studio to discuss aesthetic issues around crafting design speculations, such as engagement, ambiguity, suspension of disbelief, and different kinds of thought experiments (e.g.: counterfactuals, what if…, and reductio ad absurdum).