Ciara Taylor was also at Interaction 12 in Dublin and reports on the keynote talk by Anthony Dunne for Core77.

“Interaction design and designing interactions… are they the same concept? Anthony Dunne, partner at Dunne and Raby and professor at Royal College of Arts in London, gave a keynote at Interaction12 that began this discussion for the attendees. In Dunne’s talk titled “What if…Crafting Design Speculation,” he asks designers to use imagination to think about what kind of futures we want—opening up the problem space. What if “we shift from how the world is to designing for how the world could be?” What if…we designed for alternate realities or fictional scenarios?”

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In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 is bringing us a preview of this year’s event, including this guest post by David Malouf, professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“In the last year IxD, as a community of practice, has faced its strongest challenge to date. We have shifted from converging and assimilating to a community that is ever rapidly diverging.

The divergence is happening along the lines of the gravitational interests from where interaction design was born or where the slippery slope of our primary interest takes us. The divergence is also because the level of complexity of our problem sets have grown so vast that no single group can or should keep track of all of it. We have split basically along our primary lines of interest: Engineering, Individuals (psychology), Culture (anthropology) and Art.”

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Note that Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be attending Interaction12 as well.

Chapter twelve of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It deals with what HCI specialists call ‘affective computing’ and was written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University.

As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had to consider e.g. what constitutes an experience, how to deal with users’ emotions, and understanding aesthetic practices and experiences.

The author describes three strands of affective computing: 1. Affective computing (based on cognition, and the most widely known); 2. Affective interaction (coming from a more culture-based angle); and 3. Technology as experience (arguably more art-based).

The different angles show projects that range from helping people with autism to creating text messages with emotion-related colours.

She finishes with a caution that with affective computing “we may easily cross the thin line from persuasion to coercion, creating for technological control of our behavior and bodies.” Her example is a parody fitness app ”I’m sorry, Dave, you shouldn’t eat that. Dave, you know I don’t like it when you eat donuts” just as you are about to grab a donut.”, but she could be talking about the XKCD take on Facebook suggestions as well.

(via Johnny Holland)

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Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, was the speaker at the October 2011 Creative Mornings event in San Francisco.

In her talk she discussed how we hide, reveal and misinterpret emotion online and off.

Watch video (30 min)

Brian Thomas Collins has made a career out of creating brand experiences, “a few of them great”. He writes:

“A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone else about. In short, a great brand experience is a story, in which the brand user – not the brand – is the hero. A great brand experience is direct and transformative. It’s not a stunt or a fantasy. It’s not a campaign. It’s not the idea of something. It is something, something worth writing home about – or at least texting a friend. Brand awareness and engaged consumers are happy by-products, but not the point. The test for a great brand experience is result. Something new created. Something changed. A bell that can’t be un-rung.”

In an effort to make more of them great, he used eight principles.

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In September 2011, researcher Anna Snel defended her Ph.D thesis, entitled “For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourse“, at the University of Amsterdam. It is now available for download.

The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience and the bias towards the organization’s perspective in the discourse cause much confusion. In this study experience is taken back to its basis: the encounter between an individual and his or her environment. Different concepts, effects and values of experience are defined to construct a more integrative discourse for the experience economy from the individual’s perspective. To reap the benefits that the experience economy offers, the role of organizations has to change from a directing and controlling one to a more supporting and facilitating one. A true recognition of the co-creation that takes place in experiences shows how much latent potential for creating value there is yet to discover.

Download thesis

(via InfoDesign)

Experience designers investigate the motivations behind users’ behaviors to develop skill in predicting and guiding those behaviors. A short article by designer Sorin Pintilie.

“So, yes, experience can be designed— not all experiences, but certainly some experiences. And with time, experience designers will continue to investigate the inherent motivations behind users’ behaviors. They will continue to develop and refine their tools and skills to predict those behaviors with the help of cognitive sciences, which are already mapping out predictable and reliable links between stimuli and the reactions they produce.

A structuralist approach may be key in this process. As methodologies become more and more refined, other alternatives may arise. But for now, incorporating the knowledge provided by other specialties into an integrative design practice and learning to work together can be viable solutions for real improvement.”

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Chapter eleven of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It was written by Dag Svanaes, Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (and former professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and deals with the philosophy of interaction and the interactive user experience.

“I will approach the question of interactivity from a number of angles, in the belief that a multi-paradigmatic analysis is necessary to give justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. I will start by defining the scope through some examples of interactive products and services. Next, I will analyse interactivity and the interactive user experience from a number of perspectives, including formal logic, cognitive science, phenomenology, and media and art studies. A number of other perspectives, e.g. ethnomethodology, semiotics, and activity theory, are highly relevant, but are not included here.”

Lengthy comments to Svanaes’ chapter were provided by Donald A. Norman and Eva Hornecker.

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“The experience map highlighted [on the left - click to enlarge] was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US distributor that offers North American travelers a single place to book rail tickets and passes throughout Europe, instead of going to numerous websites. They already had a good website and an award-winning contact center, but they wanted to get a better handle on their customers’ journeys across all touchpoints, which would allow them to more fully understand where they should focus their budget, design and technology resources. Derived from this overall “diagnostic” evaluation, of which the map was just one part, were a number of recommendations for focused initiatives. The experience map helped create a shared empathic understanding of the customers’ interactions with the Rail Europe touchpoints over time and space.”

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The speakers: pioneers Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, and Matt Jones, formerly at the BBC, Dopplr and Nokia, and now a principal at design agency BERG.

Videos:
- Part 1: Usman Haque (17:20)
- Part 2: Matt Jones (18:58)
- Part 3: Q&A (26:49)

“The wristband itself is superbly designed: The slight oval shape and rubberized case mean that it hews to your wrist without bouncing around, which would have made it into an annoying bangle. But the wristband is a minor part of the offering. The real product is the software, and the interaction experience. And that’s where things go wrong: The software is too buggy and confusing, the user experience too unresolved. But rather than carp on what’s wrong, I wanted to lay out a few lessons that the product’s shortcomings teach you about app design and user experience design in general. A product like this teaches us all how to make things better.”

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“Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there.

However, elegantly minimal designs don’t happen by chance. They’re the result of difficult decisions. Whether in the ideation, designing, or the testing phases of projects, UX practitioners have a critical role in restraining the feature sets within our designs to reduce the complexity on projects.

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They are on a mission to make free and open educational materials: There are so many great minds in the human-computer interaction and interaction design community and they want to empower these authors to reach all their interested readers around the world.

Their currently featured chapter (one out of nine) is an authoritative overview of Social Computing by Tom Erickson – veteran researcher at IBM Research Lab. It includes 9 HD videos filmed in Copenhagen and commentaries by renowned designers/researchers like Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo! and Andrea Forte.

Read chapter (and watch videos)

The ~2-hour exchange with and between Don and Jon and the audience (comprised mostly of AAU students) was particularly engaging, thoughtful, rich, and delightful.

Topics addressed included the nature of and the difference between art and design, whether design should be taught in art schools (such as AAU), Abraham Maslow, usability, what design (or all) education should be like, the problem with “design thinking” courses, the destiny of printed magazines and printed books, aging and ageism, the relationship between HCI and interaction design, Arduino, simplicity, social media, Google, privacy, design research, the context in which design occurs, the Austin Center for Design, solving wicked problems, whether designers make good entreprenuers, politics, Herb Simon & cybernetics, the strengths & weaknesses of interconnected systems, and how designers should position themselves.

Read highlights (and watch full video)

Abstract

The Government is taking behavioural science very seriously, but existing nudge-based approaches to behaviour change tend to represent what Aditya Chakraborty called “Cute technocratic solutions to most minor problems”. The major adaptive challenges of our time, including debt, climate change, public health and mental health, require a deeper and more ambitious approach.

Transforming Behaviour Change argues for a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between our social challenges, our behaviours and our brains, based on a considered response to two major cultural developments. The first is the growing ascendancy of neuroscientific interpretations of human behaviour, leading to fears of reductionism and pharmaceutical control. The second is behaviour change becoming an explicit goal of government policy, leading to fears of Government manipulation and coercion.

The report critically engages with these two developments, and proposes an alternative approach to behaviour change that builds on existing public and professional interest in brains and behaviour. We set out to shift attention away from the threatening idea of ‘science as authority’, justifying moral judgements, medical interventions and policy positions, and focus instead on the more productive notion of ‘science as provocation’, helping people foster the kinds of self-awareness and behaviour change they are seeking to develop.

“The UP wristband is meant to be worn 24 hours a day. When you’re awake, its accelerometer monitors your movement–whether you’re running, walking, or climbing stairs–and then sends that data to the app, which shows how many calories you’ve burned. When you’re asleep, the UP monitors your sleep stage, by tracking subtle fluttering wrist movements (a natural occurrence during REM sleep, which is similar to eyelid flutter). When its time to wake up, the wristband vibrates slightly, and times its alarm to the best phase of your sleep cycle. And finally, the UP smartphone app allows you to take pictures of your food and log your meals.

The cleverest features, however, are a bit more subtle. The UP isn’t meant to be a passive health-monitoring device–if so, it would be hard to see how people would keep using it, given how often, for example, diets fail. Instead, it’s meant to constantly nudge you into better behavior. For example, you can set the wristband to vibrate when you’ve been sedentary for too long–a reminder to keep moving around. There are also challenges you can take on, such as running or walking a certain distance each day, or biking to work three times a week. Users can track their progress as they go along, and they can choose challenges created by others (including professional trainers and public-health experts).”

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(see also this Wired article)

“Futuristic interfaces are supposed to solve problems and make life easier. What good are they–besides being eye candy–if the future around them is picture-perfect already? The Microsoft video takes that conceit of perfection and carries it so far that the concepts begin to look ridiculous: You can pick out all kinds of clever touches, such as the way the images on a computer screen can be dragged off screen to become holograms–and then can be controlled with gestures. But by that point, we’re way off in future land, where none of these clever touches feel rooted in life. They don’t address problems we understand.”

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Keynotes

Opening keynote: On models
Hugh Dubberly, founder of Dubberly Design Office

Closing keynote: On radical evolution
Bruce Sterling, writer, provocateur, futurist, design thinker, critic, and author of Shaping Things (2005), among many other productions

Paper Session #1: Defining the value proposition
Some ways that ethnographic praxis can move closer to the heart of business

Evolving ethnographic practitioners and their impact on ethnographic praxis
Alexandra Mack, principal workplace anthropologist, Pitney Bowes
Susan Squires, assistant professor, University of N. Texas

The calculus of change: an ethnography of unlearning
Marijke Rijsberman – Design Anthropologist, Cisco Systems

‘For a ruthless criticism of everything existing’: rebellion against the quantitative/qualitative divide
Neal H. Patel, people analytics manager, People & Innovation Lab, Google Inc.; University of Chicago, Department of Sociology

Paper Session #2: An angel at my table
How ethnographers can help organizations to deal with the challenges of evolution and revolution

Ethnography as a catalyst for organizational change: creating a multichannel customer experience
Robin Beers, PhD, Wells Fargo
Tommy Stinson, Cheskin Added Value
Jan Yeager, Cheskin Added Value

Reinvention and revisioning in an Appalachian industry cluster
Christine Z. Miller, professor, Graduate Program in Design Management Savannah College of Art and Design
Stokes Jones, principal, Lodestar

The not-so-blind watchmaker: evolution by design in corporate culture
Kate Barrett, PhD, Olson

Paper Session #3: Looking beyond the individual
New sightings on service and social system

No more circling around the block: evolving a rapid ethnography and podcasting method to guide innovation in parking systems
James Glasnapp, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Ellen Isaacs, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
> pdf paper download

Changing models of ownership
Rich Radka, Claro Partners
Abby Margolis, Claro Partners

Limitations of online medical care: interpersonal resistance and cultural solutions in the face of technological advances
Pensri Ho, assistant professor, Ethnic Studies Department, University of Hawai’i

What happens when you mix bankers, insurers, consultants, anthropologists and designers: the saga of Project FiDJi in France
Alice Peinado, design management chair / anthropologist, Parsons Paris School of Art and Design
Magdalena Jarvin, design management & critical studies sociologist/anthropologist, Parsons Paris School of Art and Design
Juliette Damoisel, design strategist, BETC Design,

Paper Session #4: The new “local”
Evolving use of theory in ethnographic research

The luminosity of the local
Michael Donovan

Shining a light on agency: Examining responses to resource constraints to uncover opportunities for design
Emma J. Rose, Anthro-Tech
Robert Racadio, University of Washington
> pdf paper download

Unclear social etiquette online: how users experiment (and struggle) with interacting across many channels and devices in an ever-evolving and fast-changing landscape of communication tools
Martin Ortlieb, senior user experience researcher, Google

Cracking representations of the emerging markets: it’s not just about affordability
Renee Kuriyan, corporate responsibility, Intel Corporation
Kathi Kitner, cultural anthropologist, Intel Corporation
Scott Mainwaring, senior research scientist, Intel Corporation
Dawn Nafus, anthropologist, Intel Corporation

Evolutionary Matryoshka: Mapping the dimensions of the evolutionary forces impacting survival of ethnographic insights within a large financial enterprise
Ari Nave, SVP
 Group
 planning
 director
, Deutsch

“User-friendliness is a result, not a tactic. Intuitiveness is a quality, not an approach. Neither term is tangible enough as a design objective to inspire a great product. No matter how strong your jaw, you can’t sink your teeth into vapor and expect it to taste like Apple. You’ll only hurt yourself trying.

To achieve the result of user-friendliness, the design criteria you spill out onto the proverbial page need to meet a three criteria of their own.”

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It’s a conference for service and interaction designers, for social activists, for artists, for developers and geeks, and of course for gamers.

“Gamification has garnered a lot of attention in recent years – both from academia and industry. At the event Games, Life and Utopia we will explore the potential and the boundaries of this emerging field. We will discuss the latest research results and discuss applications, not only in games, but also as tools for behavioral change. Our speakers offer a range of different perspectives on the topic – from hands-on experience with their own gamification products to a critical position based on psychological research. We will examine the operational mechanisms of games and their wondrous capabilities to produce experiences of hope, interest, enlightenment, and fascination.”

The key event organiser is Reto Wettach, a professor in physical interaction design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam/Germany (and a former professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea).