Sessions at Interaction12 on Friday 3rd February in Liffey B

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.

Gamification is the process of applying game design elements to non-game contexts in order to drive user engagement, influence behavior and improve the user experience associated with digital products and services. Over the past year, the practice of gamification has exploded, fueled by marketing hype, media curiosity and spirited debate. While much of the discussion has revolved around extrinsic reward mechanisms as a panacea for customer loyalty and engagement, the most important and effective motivational dynamics of games have been left on the table.

In this presentation I’ll cut through the hype and draw from the fundamentals of game psychology, double-tapping into the techniques game designers use to motivate, engage and guide players through a game’s lifecycle. In doing so, I’ll lay out a model for architecting user engagement, directing behavior and satisfying the needs of both users and business alike.

While we have put men on the moon, mapped the human genome and found cures for various diseases that previously decimated humanity, the scientific, organized understanding of human motivation and behaviour largely remains the undiscovered country. It shouldn't and, if we have anything to say, it won't.

Join Dirk as he diagnoses why and how the essential, internal human condition has been left to wither while external, physical aspects of the world have been developed seemingly beyond the limits of human comprehension. Then, he will illustrate the immense opportunity that now lies before us to revolutionize how we understand ourselves and others, and what impact use of that knowledge can have on us as citizens, designers and marketers.

Sculpture is often concerned with mapping the human body and locating it in relation to the world. Sculptors create objects that are meant to be seen, felt, walked around and directly experienced. Interaction designers, too, are concerned with creating and defining experiences for their audience to directly engage in. Why not see what the one can contribute to the other? Are there things to be learned from sculpture that can be applied to interaction design?

Through ethnographic observations, conversations with sculptors and sculpture aficionados, and an extensive literature review on art history, theory and criticism I have endeavored to answer those questions. Over time, I have identified six aspects of sculpture that are applicable to interaction design: context, multiple viewpoints, bodily empathy, physical parts, multi-sensory engagement and form. During the talk, I will introduce these aspects and use them to critically examine existing interactive artifacts and suggest ways to use them as design lenses.

In your head you've probably called your users a lot of names, but is ‘Hobbits’ one of them?

Thinking about your users as Hobbits can help you frame the use of your website or application and help you put yourself in the user's shoes. Uh, except they’re hobbits, so they’re not wearing shoes.

Thinking about your users Hobbits will help you by:

Establishing a path through the application
Creating a call to adventure (even if you work in online banking)
Showing how to overcome Frodo's (ahem, a user's) refusal of the call
Introducing a mentor (like Gandalf or Yoda)
Helping users overcome an ordeal (ordering pizza online counts), and
Returning as a changed person (ideally changed for the better).

Much of user-experience design borrows from methods that assume users have discrete & identifiable goals. However, this assumption can seriously inhibit designing for real human behavior, which (as we will see) often has less to do with rationality than we tend to think.

While the Web has evolved from flat documents to being fluidly ambient, we’re using the same user research and usability testing methods and techniques we were using in 1994. We know that conducting usability tests can tell us where people get frustrated. What will testing reveal about frustrations with interactions people have with other people online? When interaction is protean, how do you derive a task scenario? What are the success criteria?

We are tool using creatures. Prosthetics touch almost every part of our lives. Until recently, humans have used their hands and bodies to interface with objects. Early interfaces were solid and tactile. Now, the interface can be anywhere. The best interfaces compress the time and space it takes to absorb relevant information, and the worst cause us car accidents, lost revenue, and communication failures. We increasingly live on interfaces, and it is their quality and design which increases our happiness and our frustration.

This speech will discuss how the field of anthropology can be applied to interface design, and how future interfaces, such as the ones employed by augmented reality, will change the way we act, feel and communicate with one another.

Topics in the speech will include:

Superhuman interaction design
Augmented and diminished reality
Calm computing
New and Invisible Interfaces
Mental fragmentation
and other physiological effects of computing.
* Interfaces and objects as prosthetics and their effect on our nervous systems &8211; the extension of our nervous system into digital interfaces.