The list of invited speakers and discussants features Bill Moggridge (IDEO); Geetha Narayanan (Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, India); Lou Yongqi (Tongji University, China); Mugendi M. Rithaa (Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa); Aguinaldo dos Santos (Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil); Fumi Masuda (designer, Japan), Chris Ryan (University of Melbourne, Australia); Luisa Collina (Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy); Josephine Green (Philips Design); Roberto Bartholo (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Anna Meroni (Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy), Luigi Bistagnino (Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy); Nigel Cross (The Open University, UK); Victor Margolin (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA); and Ken Friedman (Danmarks Designskole, Denmark)

No less than 163 abstracts have been accepted, including our own. Take a look at the titles and the presenters to get an idea of the variety on offer, all within the wider theme of design for sustainability, or read a reflection on the selection by conference chair Ezio Manzini.

The topics sound great and I will enjoy attending, but I have to point out that the large majority of the papers come from academic institutions. In fact, there are only a handful of major companies (Intel and Philips) and design consultancies (such as Experientia) involved.

This is something bound to be different at another major international conference scheduled in Turin, Italy, the UPA Europe 2008 conference, taking place in December. Conference co-chair (and my business partner) Michele Visciola told me that many major international companies have submitted papers for this conference with the theme “usability and design: cultivating diversity”. More is to follow soon.

The issue is all about “colliding worlds” with “interactions disciplines” becoming “more appropriately integrated into other creative disciplines (e.g. architecture and music), into business, and into the new business models that will shape the 21st and 22nd centuries,” as described by the editors Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko in their editorial.

It also features contributions by Allison Arieff (Sunset), Eli Blevis (Indiana University at Bloomington), Shunying Blevis (Indiana University at Bloomington), Benjamin H. Bratton, Valerie Casey (IDEO), Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research), Dave Cronin (Cooper), Allison Druin (Human-Computer Interaction Lab), Hugh Dubberly, Shelley Evenson (Carnegie Mellon University), Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Adaptive Systems and Interaction group), Zhiwei Guo (Adobe Systems Inc.), John Hopson (Microsoft’s Games User Research group), Steve Howard (University of Melbourne), Tuck Leong (University of Melbourne), Zhengjie Liu Dalian Marine University), Bob Moore, Donald Norman, Steve Portigal, Scott Palmer (University of Leeds), Sita Popat (University of Leeds), Kai Qian, Laura Seargeant Richardson (M3 Design Inc.), Richard Seymour (Seymourpowell), Frank Vetere (University of Melbourne), Huiling Wei, and Ning Zhang (Dalian Marine University)

Interactions Magazine is the bimonthly publication of the ACM [Association of Computing Machinery] and is distributed to all members of SIGCHI [Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction].

It recently underwent a complete makeover the inspiring and volunteer (!) leadership of Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko who turned it into a publication full of timely articles, stories and content related to the interactions between experiences, people, and technology — the must have magazine for the user experience community!

The paper was published in the first issue of the new International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, published by Taylor and Francis.

Abstract
Traditional eco-design has a strong focus on the supply side. Even when focusing on the use phase of products, still impacts directly under the control of the manufacturer dominate. However, the way users interact with a product may strongly influence the environmental impact of a product. Designers can try to influence this behaviour through the products they design. Several strategies have been proposed in the literature, such as eco-feedback and scripting. Existing literature in this field has its limitations. Publications either focus on a single strategy, or do not take a design perspective, or lack empirical data. This paper will present a typology of the different strategies available to designers. This typology will be illustrated with examples and experiments related to two sustainability problems, namely littering behaviour and energy using products. Furthermore a methodology will be presented for applying these strategies. This will be demonstrated in a case study on an energy meter.

- More background by Jasper van Kuijk
- Download paper (preprint version)

Most designers place simplicity above all else. We value simple things because they do all the things we need easily and none of the things we don’t. Simplicity is harmonious. Even Leonardo Da Vinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This is one of my favorite quotes, and it plays on the idea that being simple isn’t banal, it’s elegant.

Don Norman recently ignited a discussion about simplicity in his piece Simplicity is Highly Overrated. He observes that although designers treat simplicity as the ultimate goal, many consumers, when faced with a purchase decision, choose complexity instead. He uses examples from shopping in South Korea: people there choose complex, feature-laden electronics and SUVs over simpler ones. Norman says that people choose complexity because they assume a complex product is more capable.

Porter rethinks the discussion as not one about simplicity but as one about the psychology of trade-offs:

Users face a trade-off when they must make a choice between a simple product or a complex product with more features. If they choose the product with fewer features and eventually need some functionality that is missing, they’ve made a bad choice. However, when users choose the complex product with more features, they don’t have to make this trade-off. The complex product is more likely to have the feature users may need in the future.

People are reluctant to make trade-offs because they can’t predict what functionality they will need in the future. Choosing a product with fewer features is a trade-off that could hurt them down the line. When users don’t understand the advantages of each feature, such as when a user is buying her first digital camera, they are much more likely to avoid making a trade-off by choosing the feature-laden product.

When users choose a feature-laden product, they may not be exhibiting a desire for complexity. Instead, users are anxious about predicting their future needs. The black/white distinction of “choosing complexity over simplicity” seems too blunt an instrument to describe the behavior we see from users. Schwartz’ theory suggests that people in this type of situation don’t know enough about the features of a product or their own needs. The result is that users avoid making a trade-off by choosing the one that looks like it has more features.

Read full story

(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available)

Re-placing faith: reconsidering the secular-religious use divide in the United States and Kenya [abstract]
Authors: Susan P. Wyche (Georgia Institute of Technology), Paul M. Aoki (Intel Research) and Rebecca E. Grinter (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Abstract: In this paper, we report on design-oriented fieldwork and design research conducted over a six-month period in urban centers in the United States and Kenya. The contributions of this work for the CHI/CSCW community are empirical and methodological. First, we describe how recent design discourse around “designing technology for religion” creates an artificial distinction between instrumental and religious ICT use, particularly in developing regions. As illustrative examples, we relate three themes developed in the course of our fieldwork, which we term mindfulness, watchfulness, and embeddedness, to both “secular” and “religious” aspects of life in the communities studied. Second, we make a methodological contribution by describing how we used design sketches of speculative design concepts to extend and complement our fieldwork. By producing these sketches and soliciting feedback, we elicited additional data about how participants viewed the relationship between religion and ICT and prompted self-reflection on our own ideas.

Asynchronous remote medical consultation for Ghana [abstract]
Authors: Rowena Luk (Intel Research), Melissa Ho (UC Berkeley), Paul M. Aoki (Intel Research)
Abstract: Computer-mediated communication systems can be used to bridge the gap between doctors in underserved regions with local shortages of medical expertise and medical specialists worldwide. To this end, we describe the design of a prototype remote consultation system intended to provide the social, institutional and infrastructural context for sustained, self-organizing growth of a globally-distributed Ghanaian medical community. The design is grounded in an iterative design process that included two rounds of extended design fieldwork throughout Ghana and draws on three key design principles (social networks as a framework on which to build incentives within a self-organizing network; optional and incremental integration with existing referral mechanisms; and a weakly-connected, distributed architecture that allows for a highly interactive, responsive system despite failures in connectivity). We discuss initial experiences from an ongoing trial deployment in southern Ghana.

A resource kit for participatory socio-technical design in rural Kenya [abstract]
Authors: Kevin Walker (London Knowledge Lab), Joshua Underwood (London Knowledge Lab), Tim Mwolo Waema (University of Nairobi), Lynne Dunckley (Institute for Information Technology, Thames Valley University), José Abdelnour-Nocera (Institute for Information Technology, Thames Valley University), Rosemary Luckin (London Knowledge Lab), Cecilia Oyugi (Institute for Information Technology, Thames Valley University) and Souleymane Camara (Institute for Information Technology, Thames Valley University)
Abstract: We describe our approach and initial results in the participatory design of technology relevant to local rural livelihoods. Our approach to design and usability proceeds from research in theory and practice of cross-cultural implementations, but the novelty is in beginning not with particular technologies but from community needs, and structuring technology in terms of activities. We describe our project aims and initial data collected, which show that while villagers have no clear mental models for using computers or the Internet, they show a desire to have and use them. We then describe our approach to interaction design, our expectations and next steps as the technology and activities are first introduced to the villages.

(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.)

Case study: using online communities to drive commercial product development [abstract]
Authors: Sheena Lewis (IBM)
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how human computer interaction (HCI) practitioners utilize an online community to drive commercial product innovation, definition, and development. Upper management’s increased interest in user feedback suggests that this development strategy promotes the case for stronger human-centered design processes to be included in corporate strategic planning.

Future Craft: how digital media is transforming product design [abstract]
Authors: Leonardo Bonanni, Amanda Parkes, Hiroshi Ishii (MIT Media Lab)
Abstract: The open and collective traditions of the interaction community have created new opportunities for product designers to engage in the social issues around industrial production. This paper introduces Future Craft, a design methodology which applies emerging digital tools and processes to product design toward new objects that are socially and environmentally sustainable. We present the results of teaching the Future Craft curriculum at the MIT Media Lab including principal themes of public, local and personal design, resources, assignments and student work. Novel ethnographic methods are discussed with relevance to informing the design of physical products. We aim to create a dialogue around these themes for the product design and HCI communities.

“If you build it, they will come … if they can”: pitfalls of releasing the same product globally [abstract]
Authors: Ann Hsieh, Todd Hausman, Nerija Titus and Jennifer Miller (Yahoo, Inc.)
Abstract: As companies based in the US launch more interactive, “Web 2.0”-style products, the rest of the world may not be moving at the same speed. This presentation will reveal the pitfalls of building the same product for all audiences across many countries, especially when it comes to economic, technological, and cultural disparities. This illustrates the point that even if global users want to access new products, they may not always have the means.

What about a ‘local’ wrapper around an ‘universal’ core? [abstract]
Authors: Apala Lahiri Chavan (Human Factors International)
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of restructuring our premise about cross cultural design and explore a possible new way to look at how we can create products in one culture and yet have the whole ‘flat world’ use it!

Studying paper use to inform the design of personal and portable technology [abstract]
Authors: Daniela Rosner, Lora Oehlberg and Kimiko Ryokai (UC Berkeley)
Abstract: This paper introduces design guidelines for new technology that leverage our understanding of traditional interactions with bound paper in the form of books and notebooks. Existing, physical interactions with books have evolved over hundreds of years, providing a rich history that we can use to inform our design of new computing technologies. In this paper, we initially survey existing paper technology and summarize previous historical and anthropological analyses of people’s interactions with bound paper. We then present our development of three design principles for personal and portable technologies based on these analyses. For each design guideline, we describe a design scenario illustrating these principles in action.

Mark Ury, chief experience architect for Blast Radius, was there and wrote about it on his blog “The Restless Mind”:

“His thesis is that in order to grapple with a particularly stressful stretch of time, society engages in some mind-numbing activity that, by consequence, creates a cognitive surplus. Eventually, this surplus overflows and new forms of value are created. He cites post-industrial revolution Londoners blanking out with gin, only to then build many of the modern institutions we cherish today, and post-WWII Americans sitting slack-jawed watching I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island, but now using the Internet to produce Wikipedia and, to a lesser order, lolcats.” […]

“What struck me as intriguing in all this wasn’t our cognitive surplus, though. It’s our surplus of interaction.” […]

“Interaction surplus, though, is new. From RSS to email, flickr to FunWalls, posts to pingbacks—we’ve never before had to deal with an abundance of two-way interaction. And unlike the subtle effect of compound interest, hooking more people up to the grid creates a personalized form of Metcalfe’s law, a signal to noise ratio that is overwhelming and, over time, numbing. Watching “connected consumers” tweet, IM, tag, upload, download and go viral is not much different than a Saturday night rave: a blur of consciousness, ephemera, and not a little dizziness.”

Watch presentation

It is the fourth issue of this peer-reviewed journal issued by the Taiwan-based Chinese Institute of Design (read more here).

Three-in-One user study for focused collaboration
by Turkka Kalervo Keinonen, Vesa Jääskö and Tuuli Mattelmäki
This article introduces a human-centered design approach, the Three-in-One User Study, which applies a set of methods to speed up and focus on the design process. With a Three-in-One, designers’ face-to-face contacts with users are concentrated into one collaborative designer-user session where preproduced self-documentation material and early design models enable focused collaborative exploration. Three-in-One combines three different complementary points of view to design: users’ subjective interpretations, designers’ focused observations, and design interventions with models. Three-in-One was applied in a kick-bike design case, and it led to improvements to the initial concept, as well as justified decisions for further design development.

The product ecology: understanding social product use and supporting design culture
by Jodi Forlizzi
The field of interaction design has broadened its focus from issues surrounding one person interacting with one system to how systems are socially and culturally situated among groups of people. To understand the situations surrounding product use interaction design researchers have turned to qualitative, ethnographic research methods. However, stripped from underlying theory, these methods can be prescriptive at best. This paper introduces Product Ecology as a theoretical design framework to describe how products evoke social behavior, to provide a roadmap for choosing appropriate qualitative research methods and to extend design culture within HCI by allowing for flexible, design-centered research planning and opportunity-seeking. This product-centered framework is illustrated as a method for selecting a set of design research methods and for working with other research approaches that study people in naturalistic settings.

Design, risk and new product development in five small creative companies
by Robert N. Jerrard, Nick Barnes and Adele Reid
Five small creative companies were studied in detail over extended periods of the New Product Development (NPD) lifecycle. Design was a key aspect of company activity and central to the NPD process. Novel risk-tracking participatory methodologies were developed and employed to identify perceived risks at the outset of NPD and to track risk thereafter. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken on regular basis with company personnel responsible for design to provide rich contextual material. Results showed a wide diversity of perceived risk with little commonality amongst the companies – despite shared core criteria amongst the firms themselves, and the new products that were tracked. Implications for the sampled companies, and wider policy in respect of business support strategy, are considered.

How to rate 100 visual stimuli efficiently
by Yaliang Chuang and Lin-Lin Chen
Perceptual mapping is a method often employed in design and marketing as a means for visualizing consumer perceptions of product alternatives on the market. Perceptual maps can be computed from two types of data, from attribute ratings or from similarity judgments. In this paper, two computer-based methods are proposed for obtaining attribute rating data, based on multiple attribute scales, for a large number of visual stimuli: The hierarchical sorting method was developed from a strategy commonly employed in paper-and-pencil surveys, whereas the divide-and-conquer method was developed from a strategy often utilized in (computer) sorting of algorithms. In tests that used 100 armchairs as stimuli, it was found that both methods received high scores for simplicity and overall satisfaction in subjective evaluations by the participants. The evaluations, however, also showed that each method had its own advantages. While the divide-and-conquer method produced equivalent results in a significantly less amount of time than the hierarchical sorting method, the hierarchical sorting method was considered to have a higher likelihood of expressing actual opinions than the divide-and-conquer method, due to the fact that a participant using the sorting method could focus on the details of the stimuli after they had been grouped by similarity at the initial stage.

Perceptual information for user-product interaction: using vacuum cleaner as example
by Li-Hao Chen and Chang-Franw Lee
The purpose of this study is to identify which product designs for parts and directions are most effective, and then propose how perceptional information could best be designed to facilitate user-product interaction. Three categories of perceptional information for product operational tasks were proposed in this study. Task analysis and usability evaluations were carried out to analyze what information users required while they practiced the operational tasks. Finally, a primary model was proposed that revealed and defined specific types of entities and different perceptual information— Behavioural Information (BI), Assemblage Information (AI), and Conventional Information (CI)— to be significant elements for the model. Information for specific applications that is available for various types of vacuum cleaner parts is described below: 1) for specific operational tasks, these applications for operability, functionality and operational directions are required for the user-part category, and BI and CI provide effective support for the applications; 2) the application for assembly-ability is required for the part-part category, and AI and CI provide effective support for this application; and 3) the applications for operability, functionality, operational directions, and assembly-ability are required for the user-part-part category. BI and CI provide effective support for the applications for operability, functionality, whereas operational directions, and AI and CI provide effective support for the application for assembly-ability.

The nature of design practice and implications for interaction design research
by Erik Stolterman
The focus of this paper is interaction design research aimed at supporting interaction design practice. The main argument is that this kind of interaction design research has not (always) been successful, and that the reason for this is that it has not been guided by a sufficient understanding of the nature of design practice. Based on a comparison between the notion of complexity in science and in design, it is argued that science is not the best place to look for approaches and methods on how to approach design complexity. Instead, the case is made that any attempt by interaction design research to produce outcomes aimed at supporting design practice must be grounded in a fundamental understanding of the nature of design practice. Such an understanding can be developed into a well-grounded and rich set of rigorous and disciplined design methods and techniques, appropriate to the needs and desires of practicing designers.

“Sports Tracker is an example of how Nokia has begun experimenting with user-generated innovation. That’s the premise behind Nokia Beta Labs, a Web site where the Finnish handset maker lets users test the latest smartphone software. Instead of people recording silly Web cam videos for YouTube or inventing frivolous advocacy groups on Facebook, they can help make the mobile Internet more useful.

“Beta Labs is part of a broader push by Nokia to harness customers and partners in the service of innovation. At Nokia.com the company allows users to share and rate applications they have created such as screen-savers or games. And over the past year, Nokia designers have traveled to the developing world to ask users to sketch their own dream cell phones. By yearend, more than half the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas, so to exploit this mega-trend Nokia’s researchers visited shantytowns in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Accra in Ghana.”

Read full story

Nokia’s advanced design team today shared “Homegrown”, a long term research project looking at how Nokia can help people make more sustainable choices. The team is exploring specific environmental and social issues including recycling, energy and how to make the benefits of mobile technology available to more people.

The project is being run by the same team who created Remade – a concept first shown at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year and that explores how recycled materials may be used in the future to make mobile devices. At today’s event in Nokia’s London design studio the team showed for the first time some of the other concept they are working on. These are:

• Zero Waste Charger concept - this explores ways to reduce the energy that is wasted when chargers are unplugged from a mobile device but left plugged into a live mains socket.
   
• People First concept – this concept takes three human universals of the way people think about communication – time, lists, and people – to inspire and examine new user interface ideas.
   
• Wears in, not out concept – as more services become available on our mobile devices this concept explores how people could potentially upgrade their devices digitally rather than physically in the future, giving people an additional choice on how they use and update their mobile phones.

The design team developing these concepts works on a time frame of looking three to five years out into the future. By sharing some of these ideas and stimulating a discussion they hope to develop innovative new ideas that can be used both within Nokia’s own business but also more broadly to drive environmental improvements.

- Photos of the concepts
- A beautiful presentation by Rhys Newman (pdf)
- Further background by team members Julian Bleecker and Raphael Grignani and on Nokia Conversations

Keynote: “Journey To The Center of Design” – Jared Spool
Jared enlightens and entertains with his keynote address. It now seems the foundations of user-centered design are disintegrating. Notable community members are suggesting UCD practice is burdensome and returns little value.

Search patterns – Peter Morville
Peter describes a pattern language for search that explains user psychology and information seek behavior, highlights emerging technologies and interaction models, illustrates repeatable solutions to common problems, and position us all to design better search interfaces and applications.

The information Architect and the Fighter Pilot – Matthew Milan
Matthew argues that fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd can teach us a great deal about how to understand, interpret and design for human decision making.

E-service: What we can learn from the customer-service gurus – Eric Reiss
In this passionate and entertaining presentation, Eric Reiss talks about the design and execution of a system of activities – people, processes, and technology – that ultimately build brand, revenues, and customer satisfaction.

Audiences & artifacts – Nathan Curtis
Nathan Curtis explores both the articles we produce and the audience we produce them for, revealing what works and what doesn’t.

Data driven design research personas – Todd Zaki Warfel
Todd Zaki Warfel engages his audience sharing new visualization techniques he has been using that have personas even more effective and valuable to the design process.

Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation. “Everyone loves design but no one wants to call it design,” BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum informed the readers of Design Observer last year. “Top CEOs and managers want to call design something else—innovation. Innovation: that they are comfortable with. Design, well, it’s a little too wild and crazy for them.” Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, offers this prescription: “Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better—they need to become designers.”[…]

Which is more patronizing: to create something you believe in because you think other people might like it too, and just put it out there? (The old, design, way.) Or to study every facet of consumers’ behavior with the intention of filling them with feelings of “insane loyalty” for your client’s products? (The new, innovation, way.)

Read full story

Experientia’s Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken (the author of this blog) are in charge of the afternoon workshop on ethnography.

The event web page explains the importance of empathy in the creation of a successful user experience and stresses the relevance of a user-centred design for small and medium size companies.

The day will start off with a series of presentations:

• Prof. dr. Peter Vink of TNO and TU Delft (Netherlands),
• Anna Kirah, Kirah Consult & Future Alliance (Denmark),
• Matthew White, an independent designer (UK),
• Joannes Vandermeulen and Kristel Van Ael, Namahn (Belgium),
• Alexander Grots, IDEO (Germany).

The afternoon will feature four parallel workshops:

• Workshop 1: Justin Knecht of the Centre for Design Innovation (Ireland) will provide a practical “DIY” manual to understand users (mainly aimed at SME’s).
   
• Workshop 2: Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken of Experientia (Italy) will demonstrate the ‘ethnographic research’ as a new innovation method.
   
• Workshop 3: Jurgen Oskamp and Tim Ruytjens of Achilles Associates (Belgium) will demonstrate the use of ‘personas’.
   
• Workshop 4: Valerie L’heureux of the Human Interface Group (Belgium) will discuss ‘Design Patterns, a perfect technique for user-centred design’.
   

Patricia Ceysens, Flemish Minister of Economy, Enterprise, Science, Innovation and Foreign Trade, will provide the closing speech.

Programme and registration: www.ucd.be

As stated on the website of the German Ministry of Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, the aim is to enlarge the potential that senior citizens can provide to the economy, by developing new products and services for the elderly, which in turn can secure existing jobs and create new ones, and by making companies (in construction, interior design, technology, information design, tourism, etc.) aware of the enormous opportunities by this future trend and supporting them with new ideas.

A press release dated 23 April 2008, gives more detail about the initiatives planned:

Companies, experts and organisations for senior citizens and consumers will be able to constantly exchange experiences and ideas on a new national platform, with the aim of creating a stronger integration of the expertise of the elderly, and therefore better products, that will be useful and pleasant for all generations.

• Small and medium size companies will be made aware of the opportunities of the senior citizen market through regional cross-sector workshops and forums;
   
• To increase the number of new companies founded by senior citizens, they will offered customised information and training opportunities in collaboration with the Chambers of Commerce and the public institutions;
   
• A collection of “best practice” examples of promising business ideas will provide senior citizens with good ideas and encourage to make the jump towards independence.

Germany will become the leader in “trans-generational” design.

• A competence network on “universal design” gathers information and knowledge with regards to product development;
   
• Design competitions in educational institutions will provide inspiration for the type of products and packaging that are attractive and usable by people of any age group;
   
• A travelling exhibition aimed at the public at large will show particularly successful examples of products and ideas that transcend the generations.

Older consumers will more easily find products and services that are based on their needs and requirements.

• The German Government is investigating whether a quality label for age inclusive products can provide support to the elderly during shopping, and can stimulate the development of theses types of products;
   
• Information materials, such as checklists, will make it easier for senior consumers to find the useful products and services within the market offering.

The initiative will initially run until 2010.

Here are some other German language links:
- Wirtschaftskraft Alter (project site)
- Project backgrounder (pdf, 12 pages)
- Design competition “Von Kopf bis Fuß” [From head to toe]

Here some more information on the project:

The Fluid Project is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.

Fluid combines both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of design quality. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source projects.

A critical component of the Fluid project is the task of effecting systemic changes within the community source software projects and establishing a viable process for embedding user experience design, knowledge and consciousness into the community development cycle.

The Fluid project is led by the University of Toronto, represented by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, with core participation from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia and York University. Many other universities are contributing resources and expertise. Corporations participating in the project include IBM, Sun Microsystems, Mozilla Foundation, and Unicon.

Take a look at some of his latest posts:

• The design of everyday relationships
  MIT Professor Donald Schön [observed] that design is a “conversation with materials.” In many ways users have become “materials” as much as participants. We not only engage them explicitly through interaction design to create discrete features, but also in aggregate as social systems and platforms amplify their implicit actions to create value.
   
• The siren call of the system
  Well-designed systems are not, in fact, designed. They are the product of evolution. […] Systems, like narratives, take time to reveal themselves to their authors. Changes in technology, consumer preferences, and markets take years to play out. It’s not clear from day one where the system will go or how it will adapt. […] Systems are so rarely produced because they take time and time is one resource companies don’t have. Most die long before the system is revealed.
   
• Apple and the enigma of innovation
  What makes Apple special isn’t design. Or process. Or talent. It’s fear. Fear of the man who is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. (And sheathed in titanium.)
  An engineer slaving away on the iPhone SDK isn’t concerned about the industry, his peers, or his boss. His relentless pursuit of “system elegance” is simply an animal’s instinct to avoid pain, manifested largely during the senior management review.
   

Jared Spool, the IA Summit 2008 keynote speaker, posited the idea that UCD was an out-dated methodology that should be retired by the UX community. Why? According to Spool , in the last 30 years, there has not been one website or other digital innovation that can point back to UCD as the defining factor for its success. He floated the idea that design dogma, methodology and formal process were inferior to a well understood shared vision, frequent user feedback and a robust tool box of design tricks & techniques.

Read full story (with Jared Spool presentation)

She appreciated that the main feeling of the conference was more closely allied to design, as clearly expressed by Irene McAra McWilliam and Bill Buxton.

But it was hard to meet people: “My editorial gripe: no way to find out who was there or how to contact them, except by chance – immensely frustrating when so many great minds were within a few minutes’ walk. Surely we can find a way to make available a delegate list without compromising anyone’s privacy? Or just a simple internal messaging system?”.

Read full story

(Later this month, I will post my own reflection on the conference and on some books that I was given).

Aside from Bruce Sterling, exhilarating discussants were Massimo Banzi, Julian Bleecker, Donald Norman and Marcos Novak, to name just a few.

Manufacturing: From Digital to Digifab
- Bruce Sterling, Share Festival guest curator, writer
- Stefano Boeri, architect, publishing director of Abitare magazine
Share Festival conferences start - Sterling and Boeri discuss about digital manufacturing. As Bruce Sterling says “on the map there’s more than on the territory”, but it is certainly true that “in materiality i feel confortable as never before”.

Manufacturing Cultural Projects
- Montse Arbelo and Joseba Franco, artists
- Katina Sostmann, researcher
- Kees de Groot and Viola van Alphen, GogBot Festival direction
The development of digital technologies have led to new themes for art and design. Three different European projects present their production processes concerning digital art and design: ArtTechMedia, project to promote digital art, digifab activity of university department of design at Akademie der Kunste Berlin, GogBot Festival, Ducth event focused on creative applications on Robots.

Manufacturing the Streets
- Gianni Corino, researcher at Plymouth University
- Hugo Derijke, artist
- Chiara Boeri, artist
How can artists contribute to design public space and re-define the social sphere? Being part of the shared social network system, art and digital communication are the driving forces behind urban transformation, especially in public areas as museum, galleries, squares and shopping centres.

Dramatic Manufacturing
- Motor, artist
- Mauro Lupone, sound designer
- Andrea Balzola, media theorist and play writer
- Anne Nigten, managing director V2_Lab
Presentation of theatre and research projects concerning the post dramatic patterns of digital storytelling. The theatre is conceived as stage machinery where the actor is the performer and technologies play as characters.
Patching Zone: Manufacturing Interdisciplinary Collaborations
The researcher from V2, Rotterdam, shows us the way electronic art is integrating electronic art studio as a meeting table to enter into new agreements among different subjects.

Manufacturing Intelligence
- Luigi Pagliarini, artist and neuropsychologist
- Franco Torriani, critic
- Pier Luigi Capucci, university professor Università di Bologna
- Gordana Novakovic, artist
- Video by Stelarc, artist
Which is the physical, intellective and emotional relationship between man and machine? A new definition of “mind” that is finally able to be free from the prejudice that intelligence is exclusively belonging to human being, or more generally biological beings, thus assessing that artefacts can take part in this new procedure.

Manufacturing Robots
- Stefano Carabelli, university professor Politecnico di Torino
- Pietro Terna, university professor Università di Torino
- Owen Holland, university professor University of Essex
- Giampiero Masera, Turin Chamber of Commerce
The synthesis is in the title of panel, with “manufacturing robots”, looking at robots, from industrial intelligent machines to androids and to mobile applications of artificial intelligence techniques, as expression of industry, creativity, innovation and art. A perspective perfectly represented by the creative idea of the “Marinetti’s Orchestra“, as a key visiting card for the future of our area.

Manufacturing FIAT 500
- Roberto Giolito (Advanced Design Fiat)
Roberto Giolito, designer of the FIAT 500, tells how is borned the design of this vehicle symbol of the italian industrial manifacture.

A Manifesto for Networked Objects
- Julian Bleecker, professor at University of Southern California
Now objects are on-line too - blogjects , blogging objects. Once “things” are connected to the Internet, they immediately become part of the relational system, thus improving and boosting the connections in the social network, and they finally define a new relationship between presence and mobility in the physical world. With a pervading Internet network objects are now “citizens” of our space, with the possibility to communicate and interact with them.

Manufacturing Digital Art
- Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder
- Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero, artists
In the 90s digital art was referring to immateriality, now the society has a more natural relationship with technologies, thus letting what is immaterial to become real, and experimenting new interaction processes between man and machine, that has completely become part of everyday life in the meantime. Manufacturing is also referring to digital art, where such equipment as Arduino and the explosive advent of 3D printers and devices for digital manufacturing led to integrate what is digital into what is real.

Manufacturing Future Designs
- Donald Norman, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science
- Bruce Sterling, writer
- Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine
- Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino
Donald Norman presents his latest book, “Design of Future Things”, where objects, agents of an operating macrosystem, are inter-connected within a pervasive network where relation is more important than function. Relation must be focused on sustainability as well, since a harmful element can infect the whole system.

Manufacturing Consent
- Janez Jansa, artist
- Paolo Cirio, artist
- Antonio Caronia, theorist
Recent facts in contemporary society, dazzled by consumer offers and information pollution – people can experience forms of collective hypnosis, created by a communication system whose cultural machines are turning alienation and difference into agreement, thanks to “emotional” strategies that can mould people’s consciousness: where does communication finish and propaganda start?

From Land Art to Bioart
- Ivana Mulatero, critic
- Gianluca Cosmacini, architect
- Franco Torriani, critic
Presentation of the book “From Land Art to Bioart”, edited by Hopefulmonster Press, by Ivana Mulatero.

Is Life Manufacturable?
- Franco Torriani, critic
- Luis Bec, artist
- Nicole C. Karafyllis, biologist and philosopher
Life is now part of the manufacturing process that may produce hybrid examples widely including the two different aspects: natural living entities and technical products. Biofacts, Zootechnosemiotics, Nanotechnology: a new “parallel biology” is rising, where artificial organisms can count on some living beings’ peculiarities?

Two Architectures: Atoms and Bits
- Marcos Novak, architect
- Bruce Sterling, writer
The architecture theorist Marcos Novak and Bruce Sterling discuss about Novak’s concepts such as “trans-vergence”, “trans-architecture”, “trans-modernity”, “liquid architecture”, “navigable music”, “habitable cinema”, “archimusic”. Architectonic explorations into expanded, mixed and alternative virtual reality.

Share Prize Ceremony
The jury:
- Bruce Sterling
- Anne Nigten
- Stefano Mirti
Winner: Delicate Boundaries by Christine Sugrue

Although we cannot disclose the name of the client nor the type of research, Niti and Dave condensed their broader insights in what it means to design for emerging markets in a long article for Core77.

“Recent observations in the field on the BoP consumer’s lifestyle and buyer behavior in Africa led us to conclude that their product choices and decision-making criteria are based on an entirely different set of values than those that influence the design of most consumer products today. A combination of factors such as local culture and history, as well the daily experience of coping with a life of adversity, lead to a different mindset when it comes to purchasing patterns.” […]

“Simply adapting techniques and tools from your existing successful markets won’t do; you must build from scratch and refresh all your assumptions. Starting from a clean slate means designing products and strategies that are relevant, thoughtful and emphasize the values important to your new customer.”

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We are looking forward to collaborate more with them in the future.