Sessions at Interaction12 on Saturday 4th February in The Convention Centre Dublin

In his keynote address, Fabian Hemmert will present a series of research prototypes from his doctoral thesis, including weight-shifting, shape changing, life-like, whispering, grasping, and even kissing mobile phones.

The rings on a tree, the strata on earths crust, the pedals of a flower, the depth of clutter on your desk, even the lines on your face all tell a story. These details when viewed in the organisms whole give the viewer a history as well as an indication of well being. As members of society and mother nature, we all inherently understand how the fresh new green buds on a plant indicate growth and the older weathered look of a tree trunk gives indication of a harsh winter. These are things built into understanding of the world. We as designers can take advantage of this natural “visual affordance” and develop a user experience that is can convey large amounts of information that is easily understandable.

I have developed a user interface that takes advantage of biomimic techniques and delivers complex data sets in an easily understood way. In user testing of this prototype users were able to see data trending they didn’t notice previously and were able to quickly understand over all conditions.

I would like to talk about biomimic techniques in general and how I have applied them. I’ll give overview of user needs (why I created it) the tools techniques I used to create it, show it running on different platforms and the way it will quickly digest and display any data set formatted in XML. I’ll end with user feedback and next steps. i have a video clip of me speaking large group too

No one would think it delightful to see a beautifully rendered building fall under its own weight. To avoid such occurrences, Architects don’t just provide a holistic design for a space, they also assure that the space is structurally sound and can support the expected usage and growth of its “users”. Interaction design is a similar: build a weak structure and even the most delightful content and function will fail to deliver satisfaction. And we have all experienced beautiful designs that fail. Everyday actually.

By taking strategic steps towards providing structural strength within our digital spaces we can make the world a better place for everyone.

The focus of this talk will be on what an interaction designer really needs to know to evaluate the strength of their design solutions. The goal being to create a better understanding of the value that great information architecture can bring to the creative process.

Have great research insights and are looking for a visual way to share them? Ethnographic animation is a business tool for your product, design or technology. Learn how animation can be leveraged as a key strategy in communicating human-centered research to decision makers, venture capitalists and customers.

Storytelling is a very powerful way of bringing a message across. When done right it’s a way of engaging the audience and guiding them into the world you create. And it’s this powerful thing that’s been used in the creation of books, movies, music and theatre. But now it’s time to turn this knowledge into something we as designers can use to create engaging websites.

In this talk I want to step-by-step take people through a framework I created (http://johnnyholland.org/2011/01...) that will help designers to create a website that tells the best story and engages in the correct way with it’s users. The core message is that you need to build up a story in the right way in order to create more solid websites and to enable a real understanding of what’s the core of the product your design. (e.g. when you have a good understanding of the plot & character you are able to apply many different themes)Going through each step of the framework I will relate this to a movie and bring in examples from the web. When giving examples I will emphasize the importance of building up by showing the dangers of doing it the other way around (a lot of designers like starting with cool features or the graphic design, but the danger is that there is a big disconnect with the core message of the product and/or the audience). I will conclude by showing the entire framework.

Web software is a gamble. Especially for start-ups who raise millions of dollars, all in the hope that they'll somehow motivate people to find them, interact, contribute and most importantly stick around for a few years. It's a high stakes game. On one hand there are apps like Color, Wave, Buzz, which couldn't motivate even the most die hard of users to regularly update. On the other hand there is Facebook/Twitter/Instagram with millions of users adding content every minute.

Much is written about acquiring customers online, but in truth that's only part of the challenge. Motivating them to complete on-boarding, contribute content, and most importantly stick around is the most important piece. As many a site owner knows leaky buckets don't fill very fast.

This session will present research, advice and findings from the study of several web applications, and how content and communication contributes to their success. Attendees will leave better equipped to design applications, and maintain good customer communications during the crucial early days of an application's life.

Will the promise of Critical Design deliver after the disappointment of ethnography? Interaction Designers expected ethnography to reveal rich insights that would inform the creation of better products, services and experiences. However the pressure of solution-focused design practice turned out to be a poor fit with ethnography’s concern with meaning and cultures. In response, Critical Design is emerging as a new strategy for exploring the space that lies tantalisingly beyond the current and the now.

At the core of ethnography is observation and therein lies the appeal to Interaction Designers. The disappointment has been in the failure to translate from the rich descriptive picture of ethnography into the generation of requirements. This expectation reveals a misunderstanding as to the purpose of ethnography. Ethnography uncovers meaning, it does not identify problems or solutions. Interaction Designers have responded by taking a more ‘designerly’ approach to requirements generation by considering both the problem and the solution in a more fluid and intertwined manner. In this vein, Critical Design presents design as a catalyst or provocation for thought. Through ‘design fictions’ the approach attempts to challenge assumptions and preconceptions about the role that products and services play in everyday life. A series recent of workshops will be discussed that have blended aspects of ethnography and Critical Design to identify the future paradigms of interaction in the urban environment.

Both pigs and humans have a reputation for being intelligent. Despite this, it seems neither pigs nor humans are able to exercise their cognitive abilities to the fullest in their modern environments.

Farmed pigs in the European Union are required to have access to ‘enrichment materials’. These encourage pigs to perform their (natural) behavior, reduce boredom and tail biting, and, hence, reduce the need for tail docking. This legal requirement has led farmers to provide materials such as a plastic ball or a metal chain with some plastic piping. However, these ‘toys’ for the most part neither resolve societal concerns nor do they appeal to the cognitive abilities of the pigs.

To allow for a more interesting development of (human and animal) behavior, and to learn more about some of the processes involved, a team of play designers and animal researchers joined together at the Design for Playful Impact research group of the Utrecht School of the Arts, to design a game challenging the cognitive abilities of both pigs and humans. In the game, play between species happens in real-time, using custom hardware in pigs’ farm pens and bespoke software for commercial mobile devices on the human side.

In this session, Kars Alfrink, one of the team’s designers, will demo the game and show how it evolved over time, using numerous examples taken from the project’s ongoing process including field research at farms, participatory design sessions and playtests with pigs and humans and the production of a concept video.

Continuing his award-winning and highly-acclaimed “How to Lie With…” series, Dr. Saffer* will illuminate the world of Design Thinking: namely what you need to know to fake your way through conversations about design thinking. Topics to be covered include: IDEO, Bruce Nussbaum, Fast Company, service design, post-it notes, “proof-of-concept” videos, 37signals, James Joyce, and whatever happens to be in the news that week. Each and every audience member will be certified as a Design Thinker by Dr. Saffer* (diploma not included).

• Saffer is not a real doctor. If you’re experiencing burning or itching, please see a physician.

The human spirit is the part of us that feels a sense of deep connection with something larger than ourselves — whether it be nature, a deity or other being, a group of people, a cause, or the Universe. Our use of technology may foster such a sense of connection — or work to its detriment. I will tell three stories from my own experience, two as a user of technology and one as a professional doing UX work. I will invite the audience to share their own stories with me afterwards.

UX is work of the human spirit.

When you think about the design of your product or service, what comes to mind? Is it the color scheme, the layout of the navigation, or the smoothness of the animation? What about… how it sounds?

As humans, our ability to perceive and identify sound is powerful, but typically underutilized by the products we use. Mediums like film and video games have long harnessed the emotional and psychological powers of the aural channel, while many products and services today seem to miss the mark.

Since so much of what we design communicates visually, it can be easy to ignore our ears. But when used effectively, sound can close the feedback loop just as good as anything else, whether it's exposing the state of an application, identifying the boundaries of behavior, or rewarding an action.

In this talk, we'll examine the role of sound in interaction design, the kinds of sounds that make sense, and the times when you should use this exceptional feedback channel to create a positive user experience.

What do bakers, metalsmiths and user experience professionals have in common? They’re all crafts, but unlike other crafts, UX doesn't have a mentality of apprenticeship and practice. I argue that because UX requires broad knowledge across a number of disciplines, practical experience, and people skills, simply getting a degree and attending conferences isn't enough.

Nature has survived the past 3.5 billion years on Earth. It’s been mastering and fine-tuning itself to create conditions conducive to life. It has a strategy and a system that constantly adapts and evolves. It’s obviously doing something right.

What if we can solve problems like nature? Our processes and systems could self-organize, optimize rather than maximize, and be locally attuned and responsive.

Natural ecosystems are self-sustainable, highly attuned and responsive, and work in a cyclic process. It has a constant cyclic process that learns and imitates while being able to self-organize.

Natural ecosystems interact with other systems surrounding it.

Can our systems in our design and business process be as dynamic and smart as nature?

Ritual has always played an important part in our lives. How do designers tap into the desire for ritual to enhance engagement with products and services? This presentation will ask more questions than it answers in an attempt to start a dialog around the topic within our community. What is it about ritual that is so attractive? How does it manifest in consumer products? When can things become too easy, so easy that they loose their appeal? Is ritual at odds with usability?

Using examples from our every day life we will begin to explore the nature of ritual interactions and how we can design for them or around them in our products.

Just like every picture, every graph tells a story, or it should. Frequently the story we want to tell is a comparison to the past or to our plans, a “what happened” story. Do we have the best tools to tell this story visually, in graphs? In this presentation, we'll look at the common strategies like pies, bars, thermometers and heat maps, and how well they tell us “what happened.

Interaction Design is a young field dedicated to how people interact with technology, but people used to interact without technology way long before it. Kid’s street games are one example of what we call Vernacular Interaction Design. Those games have interaction structures that were designed by players themselves across many generations, accumulating a history of successive adaptations for local cultures. By playing those games, children learn how to behave across different social dynamics and, at the same time, update game’s representation of those dynamics by according new rules. But this tradition is under threat. Children are spending more time playing videogames than playing street games. That wouldn’t be a threat if they could adapt videogame rules by themselves, but currently most videogames don’t offer this possibility. Game companies do their best to update their titles, but because they need to operate under mass market rules, they can’t innovate much. This cultural stagnation is happening in many other areas of life, tough. Think about social networking, dating, working.

But Interaction Design can do something about it. Systems can be designed to allow emergent vernacular forms of interactions. Also, old vernacular forms can be revitalized by using them as inspiration for new forms, like Graphic Design did successfully with vernacular typography. This talk will present student works from Faber-Ludens Interaction Design Institute that used children’s games as inspiration for designing enjoyable work interactions.

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

When clients approach us to help them design a digital product (a website or an application) considering user experience, we make recommendations which match the best both user and business requirements.

Unlike in the digital world, designing a physical product is no longer just about coming out with an interface which is easy to use, or finding the right balance between users and business needs. It gets more complicated than that. It involves other areas such as ergonomics, safety and packaging. You will also ought to work around various constraints and production considerations to achieve a good user experience as well as to optimise its gross margin return of investment. You no longer work solely with designers, developers and business analysts. The decision will have be made involving electronic and software engineers as well as the production team.

A product could have the most distinctive aesthetic, with the most ergonomic design and provides the best user experience. However, if it is hard to be manufactured, expensive to run or difficult to be serviced, it cannot be considered as a good product.

Furthermore it is much harder to do an update patch on a physical object than a digital product if you find something is wrong after they are in the production line or out in the market. This presentation discusses the elements that should be taken into consideration when designing for a physical product and how to get the right people involve at the right stage in the design process.

As experience designers, we are increasingly asked to design for social engagement with features like following, commenting, and the critical piece of the viral web; sharing. Tweets, status updates, and content forwards are woven into many of the products and services we use every day, but do we really understand what makes people ~want to share in the first place? You can’t just add a button and expect a digital tsunami of shares. Designers, this is where our unique blend of behavioral understanding and design context can translate into magic. Getting people to share can help you spread a particular message, create a community around a topic, or simply gain buzz about something you want to “go viral” but first you have to design a situation that truly encourages sharing. To get sharing right, you must understand the basic motivations of sharing ~and create a framework appropriate to the context. In this session well examine:

The evolution of sharing behavior
The 3 main psychological motivations that drive people to share
Companies that get sharing right
Guidelines for creating inspired sharing frameworks Ultimately, sharing is good for us as a species. Find out why and discover how to tap the human desire to share to create happier customers, happier users, and a happier you.

This session plans to inspire and awaken the practice of user centered design throughout the design process. It will focus on our award winning project, Out of the Box, which was an open collaboration between Vitamins, Samsung and the Helen Hamlyn Centre in London. The work is currently on show at the MoMA.

The project goal was to design new methods of engaging older users to use existing smartphone technologies. Rather than redesign a dumbed down “special” phone we actually redesigned the experience around receiving a phone – focusing on the out of box learning experience. We developed novel research methods which we will explain in great detail – showing how to understand and create relevant solutions to real life problems. We will explain how we used custom research tools, like bananas, to find insights and explain how we translated those insights into real concepts, fast prototypes and final products.

This talk is of interest to anyone who wants to create more relevant design solutions, and get closer to their users – focusing on older people engaging with technology. We have been touring this talk privately, and at the IxDA in New York over the last year and are now making all of the research public. Adrian Westaway will present the talk, it will be a fun, engaging and valuable insight into the workings of a multidisciplinary design and invention company in collaboration with a major international client.

As interaction designers, organizations are the context for our work.

And when it comes to the web and other digital channels, organizations are broken. We have a problem.

However great our interaction design chops are, we can't sustainably deliver great user experiences that achieve business goals without becoming agents of change. That's right: to do our work well, we need to help our organizations deal with the huge changes that the internet revolution has created. Management sticking their heads in the sand didn't work so well over that last 15 years.

That means we need to leave our comfort zones and step away from our digital tools, to talk to colleagues and clients about the problems they face. Call it service design, multi-channel user experience, or web governance: it comes to the same thing. Does the organization have the key areas of web strategy, governance, execution, and measurement covered?

In practice, design is the easy part—creating an organizational context for design is what separates the linchpins from everyone else. You’re probably an agent of change already. In this session we'll discuss the context for our work, and how organizational denial about change, silo-centric thinking, and poor governance and strategy lead to disappointing interaction design outcomes. We'll explore methods to deal with this problem, and share practical ideas for becoming agents of change within our organizations.

Designing a hand-held device presents a number of challenges. Designing that device for use by folks with impaired physical abilities introduces another layer of complexity. Ensuring that the experience is appropriate for an audience from five year-old kids to ninety five year-old retirees controlling one of their senses is just downright difficult.

Matt & Shane recently worked with Australian innovator and international success story Cochlear to design device to help bionic ear implant recipients monitor and control their hearing. The design represented an evolution to a simpler more usable device.

Particular attention is given to:

Design artefacts: wireframes and screen mock-ups showing evolution from early design concepts through refined user interface.
The full UX lifecycle including; ethnographic research, iterative design cycles and usability testing with Cochlear implant recipients.
The approach taken to coordinate design exercises across multiple teams including; industrial design, ergonomics, electronics, software design, graphic design and small-screen user interface design.
The delicate balance required when attempting to improve user experience without completely confounding the expectations of a large and vocal existing user-base.
The objective of this case study is to provide conference delegates with genuine insight into the design process by exposing the methods and also by showing the actual designs at various points of their development.

Along the way, we detail the pitfalls encountered and outline the practical solutions that were applied. Processes and lessons learned are applicable across UX projects of all types, not just mobile and hand-held product design projects.

We have relationships with technology – we always have had. And these relationships have regularly strayed beyond the merely functional, or rational. Whether anthropomorphising all manner of objects from steamships to guitars, or systematically attacking and breaking machines out of fear and loathing, we have had strong emotional connections with technology. Furthermore, this emotionality is not only borne out of daily activity, it also has its origins in the realm of fiction, myth and even legend. As such we can tell a story where Excalibur, the Luddites, The Turing Test and Cyberdyne share a common genealogy – they are all about our relationships with technology.

Today we inhabit a world in which there are many pieces of technology in our lives, our homes and our places of work, worship and leisure. Early mechanized objects like looms, pianolas and wireless radios have given way to digitally connected computational devices, but have we developed a new emotional register with which to engage with these objects? In this talk, Genevieve offers a meditation on the nature of our relationships with computing, locating them within this larger conversation, and offering a much wider space for human-computer relationships to flourish.