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- Topic: Design
Wednesday 1st February 2012
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Design with Intent: understanding users and influencing behaviour
by Dan Lockton
Whether we choose to do it or not, what we design is going to affect how users behave, so we might as well think about it, and – if we can—actually get good at it. A systems approach can help us understand how people interact with the different products and services they experience, how mental models and cognitive biases and heuristics influence the way people make decisions about what to do, and hence how we might apply that knowledge (for good).
In this practical workshop, we’ll first try a novel investigatory approach to design and behaviour, using ourselves as both designers and ‘guinea pigs’ in exploring the different ways in which designers model users when seeking to influence behaviour, how users respond, and how better to uncover users' understanding, mental models and heuristics. We will explore the possibilities of constructing behavioural personas, and what insights these could offer.
Then, using a structured 'systems' approach, together with the latest iteration of the Design with Intent toolkit, we'll tackle a behaviour change case study, generating and developing concepts for influencing user behaviour which better match – and even help improve – users' understanding in the process of changing how they act.
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Methods of Design Synthesis
by Jon Kolko
User-centered design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, which must be systematically and rigorously analyzed in order to extract meaning and insight. Unfortunately, these methods of analysis are poorly documented and rarely taught, and because of the pragmatic time constraints associated with working with clients, there is often no time dedicated in a statement of work to a practice of formal synthesis. As a result, raw design research data is inappropriately positioned as insight, and the value of user-centered research activities is marginalized – in fact, stakeholders may lose faith in the entire research practice, as they don’t see direct return on the investment of research activities.
Design synthesis methods can be taught, and when selectively applied, visual, diagrammatic synthesis techniques can be completed relatively quickly. During Synthesis, Designers visually explore large quantities of data in an effort to find and understand hidden relationships. These visualizations can then be used to communicate to other members of a design team, or can be used as platforms for the creation of generative sketching or model making. The action of diagramming is a way to actively produce knowledge and meaning.
This workshop will introduce various methods of Synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights. Workshop participants will learn about how to manage the complexity of gathered data, and through hands-on exercises, they will apply various synthesis methods to elicit hidden meaning in gathered data.
This hands-on approach is critical for building both confidence and ability with the various synthesis methods that are discussed.
As a result of completing this workshop, attendees will:
Understand how synthesis fits into the larger design process
Understand the theoretical underpinnings of design synthesis as an intellectual problem solving methodology
Be able to apply specific methods of synthesis in their respective careersThis workshop is best suited for between twenty and sixty participants. Participants should be familiar with either qualitative or quantitative research activities (such as ethnography, questionnaires and surveys, contextual inquiry, etc), and will likely hold jobs relating to research, usability, design, “UX”, or marketing. No Design Synthesis experience is required.
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Tap is the New Click: A hands-on (fingers-on?) workshop for designing for touchscreens and tablets
by Dan Saffer
Hundreds of millions of touchscreen devices will be on the market in the next three years. Are you ready to design for them? What do you need to know? What are the best practices gleaned from the last five years of wide-spread touchscreen use?
At the end of the workshop, you should have an understanding of the issues surrounding designing for touchscreen devices, know where the best places on a device are for positioning actions, be able to work around fingers not cursors, “translate” an application from a web/desktop based one to touch, and paper prototype an app for mobile touch.
What will be covered?
Exploring designing for fingers instead of a cursor or 5-way
Learning how to design touch targets
Discussing activity zones and positioning of menus and controls
Paper prototyping an app for a small touchscreen
How to communicate the presence and instructions for gestures
Exercises in the design language of mobile touch
Paper prototyping an app for a tablet
Who is this workshop for?This workshop is designed for those learning how to design for touchscreens or who want to improve their touchscreen expertise with some technical knowledge and thoughtful, hands-on practice.
Thursday 2nd February 2012
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Cultural Design
by Erik Dahl
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.
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Design and the New Modern: Three Things You Should Know
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.
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Does size matter?
by Michal Levin
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.
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The Future of Design, Healthcare, and Mobile Technology
by Medical Avatar, Akshay Kapur and Virgil Wong
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. -
A Connected Mobile World
by Thomas Kueber and Christian Drehkopf
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.
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The Mobile Frontier
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 if... crafting design speculations
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).
Friday 3rd February 2012
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Exploring, sketching and other designerly ways of working
by Jonas Lowgren
What is a “designerly way of working”? In my view, the core elements of design are to investigate possible futures, to address all aspects of quality in parallel (think aesthetics and utility), to grow an understanding of the “problem” by developing attempts to “solve” it, and to think through sketching and other tangible forms of representation.
In interaction design practice, I find that a designerly stance based on the elements outlined above most often manifests itself in Exploring and Sketching.
Exploring as in assuming that there is a wide space of possible designs ahead of us, and we need to learn about its topology to know where the most promising directions are. Moreover, we can involve users in exploring the possibilities together, rather than merely asking them about the point in the space they currently inhabit.
The main vehicle for exploration is Sketching, where possible designs are materialized in ways that are specific enough to assess their qualities, yet lightweight enough to be disposable. Sketching interaction design comes with a set of particular challenges, since the essence of the sketched idea is nearly always in its temporal properties – how the interaction unfolds over time.
In this keynote, I will examine Exploration, Sketching and other designerly ways of working in interaction design practice, illustrate them by means of examples and assess them in relation to professional standards.
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Building a Better Starship: Scaling Design Systems into Humanity's Future
If you subscribe to the notion that interaction design makes an important contribution to the somewhat broader endeavor of systems design, then you will no doubt appreciate that many of the most challenging problems and perhaps rewarding insights may arise from considering systems – and their attendant interactions – at scale.
This presentation embarks upon a poetic thought experiment (suspending for a moment the more intractable human issues within our immediate sphere) in which we explore the essential tenets of a design challenge the scale and complexity of which the world has not yet seen: the design of a starship capable of interstellar travel. With very little meditation on the technical challenges this may pose, the presentation narrative focuses on the necessary evolution of human enterprise, including economy, governance and infrastructure that might be necessary for the actualization of such a proposal.
How do designers engage in the design of ever more complicated systems? By considering the starship and the extreme complexity it represents, this presentation hopes to stir debate around design priorities at the “policy” level and what strategies might exist for addressing the many extreme design challenges facing humanity, currently. Overall, this presentation is aimed at raising the interaction design community's awareness of the interconnected systems that may impact their day-to-day in a sincere, if somewhat whimsical, format.
Saturday 4th February 2012
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Demystifying Design: Fewer Secrets, Bigger Impacts
by Jeff Gothelf
Even today, Design is too often perceived as a tactic to simply “make things user-friendly.” To combat that oversimplification, designers often shroud their work in a mysterious cloud of specialized tools and jargon. This mystery gives designers (of every sort – visual, UX, interaction, et al) a false perception of value, uniqueness and control over their process and work. In actuality, this self-imposed mystery drives divisions between designers and their teams. Designers need to stop looking at their work in terms of “trade secrets” and start opening up about their process. Through this transparency, the cloud lifts and the true value of Design becomes clear while designers are revealed to be the indispensable product people they truly are.
In this session you will learn:
Why self-imposed Design mystery makes life as a designer harder
How revealing your design secrets leads to more productive, highly collaborative teams
How transparency makes you more valuable to your organization
How to (finally) convince your colleagues that designers are not just pixel people, but product people
5 tactics for you to immediately begin demystifying Design and increasing your value