Sessions at Interaction12 about Interaction Design on Thursday 2nd February

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.

This presentation aims to identify and explain differences (and similarities) between how interaction design is practiced in the US and Europe. While Europeans have a rich depth of shared cultural references to draw upon amongst narrow groups, Americans tend to share broader, yet more fleeting, contemporary popular references. Shared references shape how mental models are formed, therefore these differences have an effect on how we create and communicate, ultimately influencing the design process as a whole.

Using anecdotes from their own experiences, the presenters, who practice in Europe and America respectively, will explore how shared references between users, practitioners, and clients influence design processes and practice internationally. Understanding how these differences can inform interaction design will be framed through the lens of cognitive theory and ethnography, providing foundational context for the discussion.

Attendees can expect to learn about unique cultural factors in process and practice that they can directly apply to their own work, regardless of the country or region where they practice. In addition to gaining a depth of understanding about the global interaction design community, attendees will expand their knowledge of methods for understanding representation and reference.

This talk will carry from where Dave left off in 2009 when he explored the Foundations of IxD as criteria for coming up with a semantics for critiquing IxD. Dave will review these original theories and dive deeper into an area he only alluded to in the first presentation: Motion.

Motion has always been a part of interaction, but today more than ever, the types of motions we are being asked to do have greater scale and greater diversity and the very motions we employ are now central to how we differentiate the means of interaction and lead to new aesthetic and semantic phenomena as part of the total experience design.

The talk then transitions from the theoretical and outlines how this new understanding of motion as an aesthetic of its own requires us to shape the way we practice interaction design differently regardless of platform, but especially when we are working in areas where we are creating new interaction paradigms or working with immature ones.

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).

'The Great IxDA Debate' - The place where top industry pros will work with the audience to tackle the greatest interaction design questions of our time.

Setting the stage on fire we have: Abby Covert, Andrea Resmini, Dave Malouf, Giles Colborne, Jason Mesut, Jeff Gothelf, Kieron Leppard, Pete Trainor with our host, Dan Willis, and our supporting cast, Boon Yew Chew and Tom Graham.

If you're an Interaction 12 ticket holder, join the debate to have your opinions heard, enjoy live action from these great thought leaders and have plenty to eat & drink too.

If you're unable to be in Dublin for Interaction 12, you can always enjoy the live feeds on the night, just follow us on @IxDAdebate.

For more details and pre-debate banter you can follow us on Twitter - @IxDAdebate. Tickets available through the eventbrite link below.

3 Teams, 3 Debates, 100 Voices, 1 Night - Mark your calendar now!