In a decommissioned industrial zone in Turin, a single bright yellow apartment stands out in the shell of an old factory. This is “CasaZera”, a sustainable living housing prototype, which was officially opened on the 18th April 2013 by local officials, and the project partners. Experientia consulted for project partner DE-GA, designing a tablet-based solution to enable the residents to access information and systems about energy use in the apartment, as well access to local services. Experientia senior design Renzo Giusti was on-hand to showcase Experientia’s contribution.

Click on image to view slideshow

CasaZera is part of the ECOstruendo program, funded by the Region of Piedmont, and promoted by Polight, the innovation centre for sustainable construction at the Turin Environment Park. The apartment is an inhabitable prototype, demonstrating ways to utilise decommissioned industrial areas for residential use, and adhering to five main precepts: zero consumption of soil, zero waste of resources, zero time, zero energy and zero project errors. The apartment itself is a fully-designed and equipped residential unit, which has been integrated into the framework of an old factory, instead of creating new zones for residential construction.

The apartment is around 30 square meters, with a bedroom, living-room/kitchen and bathroom. It contains state-of-the-art technology for home automation and resource management, with 75% of the energy used in the apartment produced by renewable solar, photovoltaic and biomass sources. Experientia’s role, as consultants to DE-GA S.p.A, was to employ human-centred design methodologies to make this cutting-edge technology easily usable for the everyday people who will live in the unit. The tablet-based solution Experientia created allows people to interact with key functions for controlling the home appliances and heating and cooling systems, and shows simple visualisations of how the energy in the home is being used – a “living room” view of the household consumption.

As part of Experientia’s holistic approach to enabling more sustainable lifestyles, the final solution also helps connect the residents of the apartment to local services. This includes information on frequency and time of local public transport, bike sharing availability, and locations of local markets, stores and pharmacies.

The apartment systems will now be tested for 10 days with the unit empty, to gather feedback on how systems are working. After this time, two students from the Turin Polytechnic will move in, and will test the apartment systems over the course of the next year. The students will provide an in-depth look at how well the system performs in the long run, and how easy it is to use for people who are not specialists or involved in the system development, but are representative of the people who will eventually live, work and study in similar constructions.

Turin council member for the environment, Enzo Lavolta, was present at the opening, praising the initiative as a “concrete example of a smart city”. Giorgio Gallesio, DE-GA S.p.A’s managing director, and head of the project, and Matteo Robiglio from the architectural partner Tra, also spoke. Much of the debate of the day centred on how affordable the solution is, and the vibrant possibilities for urban renewal it offers, reclaiming existing urban areas for residential use, without waste. The project aims to be an Italian example of a new mindset, and demonstrate an innovative method to create zones for rental property.

Experientia senior designer, Renzo Giusti, who helped implement Experientia’s contribution to the project, also spoke about Experientia’s vision for sustainable, high quality urban development, and how this was channelled into the final solution.

Experientia’s work on this project was as consultants to DE-GA S.p.A. The other partners in the initiative were: Tra architects, experts in social and co-housing; Confortaree, experts in housing fixtures and fittings; Habicher Holzbau, specialised in wooden residences; Teclmp for heating and cooling fixtures; Golder Associates, environmental and energy consultants; Onleco consultancy service; and Tebe, research group on energy technology for construction.

Tilman Ehrbeck, CEO of CGAP (the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, affiliated with the Worldbank), writes about how his organization has used human-centered design recently to generate demand-side insights and design innovative products that work better for low-income households.

“Half of all working-age adults globally lack access to formal financial services. And contrary to popular belief, these people are often entrepreneurs in the informal economy — by necessity, not by choice. Unbanked people don’t live financially simple lives; they have a strong need for income-generating opportunities, the ability to build assets, and tools to mitigate risks and smooth consumption in the face of emergency. By listening to what these people really need, we can dramatically fast-track innovation in financial services to reach more people with a greater range of products at affordable prices to help them improve their lives.”

On March 25, the Healthcare Experience Design (HxD) conference took place in Boston. Speakers discussed how human centered design and design thinking can improve the quality of health service delivery and digital interactions, helping all of us achieve better health.

Videos of all sessions are now online.
 

PLENARY SESSIONS

Opening Address [14:32]
Amy Cueva, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer, Mad*Pow

Evolving Health IT User Experience: The View from DC [No video yet]
Ryan Panchadsaram, Senior Advisor to the US CTO, The White House
Jacob Reider, ONC HIT, US Dept of Health and Human Services
While federal government’s meaningful use incentive program accelerated the adoption of technology in hospitals and medical offices across the United States, users of these systems express concern about their usability and safety. This session will provide a glimpse of the Federal efforts to help health IT designers & developers bridge the gap between where they are and where their users wish them to be.

Opening Keynote: Sneaking Up Sideways on Behavior Change [36:08]
Jane McGonigal, author, inventor, co-founder, Reality is Broken, SuperBetter
Jane McGonigal is a world-renowned creator of alternate reality games, or games designed to solve real problems and improve players’ real lives.

Health Behavior Change and Beyond: The Health Benefits of Success Experiences [35:38]
Dr. David Sobel, Medical Director of Patient Education and Health Promotion, Kaiser Permanente
While sustained behavior and lifestyle changes can lead to improved health outcomes, there may be another pathway to health. Namely, the increased sense of confidence and control that comes from being successful at changing ANY behavior, even if the change is not sustained, can also improve health outcomes. Learn how to avoid the tyranny of prescribed failure experiences. Learn how to prescribe success by aligning with passions, discovering patient-generated solutions, and celebrating success.

The Happiness Project: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun [27:46]
Gretchen Rubin, Author, The Happiness Project
Gretchen has a wide, enthusiastic following, and her idea for a “happiness project” no longer describes just a book or a blog; it’s a movement. Happiness Project groups have sprung up from Los Angeles to Enid, Oklahoma to Boston, where people meet to discuss their own happiness projects. More than a dozen blogs have been launched by people who are following Gretchen’s example. On her companion website, the Happiness Project Toolbox, enthusiastic readers track and share their own happiness projects.

Closing Keynote [36:22]
Jamie Heywood, Co-founder, Chairman, Patients Like Me
Jamie’s scientific and business innovations have been transforming the intersection of biotechnology and pharmaceutical development, personalized medicine, and patient care.
As chairman of PatientsLikeMe, Jamie provides the scientific vision and architecture for its patient- centered medical platform.
 

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

Theme: Behavioral change

Systems for Self-Regulation [29:56]
Dustin DiTommaso, VP User Experience, Mad*Pow
By better understanding the factors that govern self-regulation of human behavior, we can begin to design products and services that more reliably facilitate healthy changes in behavior.

How to Design User Habits [27:06]
Nir Eyal, Consultant
In an age of ever-increasing distractions, quickly creating customer habits is an important characteristic of successful products. How do companies create products people use every day? What are the secrets of building services customers love? How can designers create products compelling enough to “hook” users?

Theme: Team Dynamics

Playing Nice: Facilitating Multi-disciplinary Teams to Create Better Holistic Experiences [34:21]
Toi Valentine, Experience Designer, Adaptive Path
In this talk, Toi explores the challenges that come with collaboration within a traditional organizational culture and some creative methods and strategies to overcome those obstacles.

Influence Mapping in Healthcare: How information design and organizational dynamics can improve the quality of health communication [31:27]
Dante Murphy, Global Experience Director, Digitas Health
This discussion will demonstrate how applying the techniques of influence mapping in organizational Dynamics and information design can help discover the points of failure in healthcare interactions and address them with appropriate content, tools, and techniques.

The Embedded Designer: How to Make Designers an Integral Part of Your Team [28:12]
Cassie McDaniel, Design Lead, Healthcare Human Factors, University Health Network
This session will outline how to lay down the infrastructure for designer and clinician collaboration by sharing case studies, challenges, opportunities, and tips and tricks, particularly from the lens of the largest human factors design team in the world devoted to health.

Theme: Health Literacy and Public Health

Reader-Centered Design for Health Communication [29:12]
Sandy Hilfiker, Principal and Director of User-Centered Design, Communicate Health Inc.
Molly McLeod, Creative Director, Communicate Health Inc.
The presenters have designed and tested health Web sites and interactive tools using the strategies outlined in Health Literacy Online (edited by CommunicateHealth co-founders). The presentation will include examples and case studies, with a focus on content developed for audiences with limited health literacy skills.

Where We Are: Designing the Environment for Health Impact [No video yet]
Andre Blackman, Founder, Pulse + Signal
Seamlessly integrating health into what citizens are already doing (e.g. not more health posters) is what will help shape the future of health.

Inclusion by Design [27:02]
Dr. Ivor Horn, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Children’s National Medical Center and George Washington University School of Medicine
Social media and mobile technology are disrupting the way patients and health systems interact and our expectations of how individuals and systems manage health and wellness in addition to illness. As early adopters, minority populations, who suffer from some of the greatest health disparities, are positioned to take a lead in leveraging innovations to improve their health outcomes. However, it is important that we discuss ways for companies and developers to partner with underserved populations and the providers who care for them to create solutions that are applicable and relevant to the realities of the environment (economic, social and physical) in which they live.

Theme: Methods for Research, Strategy & Design

Research and Design Methods in Healthcare [1:04:03]
Megan Grocki, Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow
Adam Connor, Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow
Michael Hawley, Chief Design Officer, Mad*Pow
Designing experiences that are elegant, simple, intuitive and valuable is hard. Organizations often have a difficult time coming to consensus around design decisions or leveraging outside perspective and research into their design process. In healthcare, the complex web of patient behavior, regulatory systems, and multiple players make the design process that much more challenging. In this fast-paced session, we share our experiences designing for the multiple facets of healthcare experiences. We discuss core research and design methods that help overcome organizational barriers to good design, and review research and design methods that work for patient, provider, insurer and other players in healthcare specifically.

The C-Factor: Boosting Your Content’s Clout [29:40]
Colleen Jones, Principal, Content Science
Getting strategic about content for your website or mobile application starts with analysis. Would a doctor prescribe a solution without first conducting a thorough exam? Of course not! In the same way, your organization can’t fix its content problems or make the most of its content opportunities without taking a close look at your content situation.

Theme: Well-being: Foundation for Health

Stress is the New Fat [29:12]
Jan Bruce, Founder, CEO, meQuilibrium
Stress is the #1 inhibitor to people adopting healthy behavior changes like diet and fitness. Stress costs employers $300 billion each year in healthcare expenses and absenteeism. One in 4 adults now characterize their stress as high or severe, and 80% understand that, left unattended, stress is making them ill, overweight, unproductive and with a diminished quality of life. This session will cover the common misperceptions about stress and its significance in behavior change; and then explain how stress can be managed in new ways, which give important clues to helping people with other behavior change issues.

Vulnerability is an issue like never before… is it treatable? [27:24]
Alexandra Drane, Founder, Chief Visionary Officer and Chair of the Board, Eliza Corporation
Join our session to better understand how we can help measure Vulnerability in actionable ways, develop solutions based on successful models outside the traditional healthcare space, and then analyze the results of these interventions to determine whether or not this pervasive condition is in fact, treatable.

Calming Technology [27:34]
Neema Moraveji, Director, Calming Technology Lab, Stanford University
As interactive experiences pervade everyday life, the potential for stress and anxiety increases. How can we utilize the power of interactive tools without sacrificing our sanity? The answer lies in a dual-pronged approach: (1) cultivating contemplative and calming practices in our personal lives and (2) increasing awareness of designers to mitigate stressors in interactive products. In this talk I will discuss our research from the Calming Technology Lab at Stanford University towards this aim.

Theme: Patient Stories

Preventing Nightmare Patient Experiences Like Mine [21:28]
Richard Anderson, Principal Consultant, Riander
Richard will detail some of his nightmare patient story, some of what was responsible for it, and some of the implications for how healthcare experience designers and researchers need to work.

Live a Full Life with Chronic Illness [24:00]
Nina Gilmore, Principle UX Designer, Oracle Corporation
Nina will share her experience as a patient and adventurer in the world of healthcare. She’s been poked and prodded, helped and harmed, treated sometimes with compassion and sometimes with indifference. As a designer, she is passionate about opportunities to create experiences more conducive to healing and hope. She’ll talk about what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, and she’ll share her curious experiences on this journey.

When the Designer is a Patient: A View from the Inside [30:59]
Samantha LeVan, Senior User Experience Designer, Mayo Clinic
Patient experience researchers are trained to minimize the influence of personal opinions on the design of a product or service, but when the researcher is also a patient, those personal experiences may be difficult to set aside. In this talk, Samantha will share how being a cancer patient has shaped the direction of her user experience design career and highlight a few tricks to using personal experience as an advantage, rather than a hindrance to patient-centered design.

Patient Innovators and Instigators [31:43]
Katie McCurdy, Experience Design Consultant, Mad*Pow
Meet these bold patients who are creatively using the tools at their disposal to take control of their healthcare. This panel brings together patients who have ‘hacked’ their own healthcare to improve communication, connect the dots between their providers, and generally create a more satisfying patient experience. These problem-solving trailblazers give us a glimpse into a future of highly informed, connected and empowered patients – so we’d be smart to listen to them now.

“…but a sword:” Art, Icons and Medical Advocacy< [24:43]
Regina Holliday, Founder, Patient Artist Activist, The Walking Gallery of Healthcare
Description TBD.

Theme: Consumer Expectations

The Digital Revolution: Leveraging the Consumer Journey to Deliver Transformative Health Experiences [30:27]
Brian Tilzer, Chief Digital Officer, CVS Caremark
Digital trends are changing consumers- expectations of the interactions they have with the healthcare system, and pharmacies sit at the forefront of this transformation. Empowered customers are increasingly managing their own care using an array of digital tools and now have access to technology everywhere they go. To stay relevant, health care companies must adapt their customer experiences to these new ways of doing business.

The #NEXT Generation of Healthcare [25:16]
Sean Brennan, Senior Envisioner, Continuum
As patient satisfaction starts to matter more and more, healthcare services will need to figure out how to deliver for this audience – what attributes does Gen Y seek in its experiences and services? What can we learn from sectors outside of healthcare about what this next generation of healthcare consumers are going to demand from their healthcare experiences? And ultimately, what does that mean for design?

HxD: from the Big Picture to Painting by Numbers [30:09]
Rodrigo Martinez, Life Sciences Chief Strategist, IDEO
Designing better experiences in healthcare is complex, difficult and often overwhelming. What if we were to build these experiences bottom-up, from isolated touch points and principles towards a cohesive system? How might we apply simple lessons from great experiences in other industries?

Theme: Care Experiences

Case studies [32:28]
- Jeff Stevens, Web Content Optimizer, University of Florida Academic Health Center on building an integrated patient-focused website for the University of Florida Academic Health Center
- Chris Herot, CEO and Co-Founder, SBR Health on how SBR health has created a video communication web services model to support healthcare designers who are incorporating today’s low cost and cloud-based televideo technologies into their own applications
- Valerie Mais, Project Lead, Center for Innovation in Complex Care, University Health Network on implementing new ways to capture and display patient experience, care quality, efficiency and interprofessional team “health” in meaningful ways for frontline healthcare providers.

Case Studies [30:27]
- Jeanine Kierkels, Design Research Consultant, Philips Healthcare Design on experience design for labor and delivery
- Brian Loew, CEO, Inspire on Inspire’s rare disease communities
- Zen Chu, Medical Tech Entrepreneur & Investor, MIT on MIT’s H@ckingMedicine program.

Health Navigation [32:11]
Dan Brousseau, Partner, Emperia LLC
Dan’s talk describes how service at hospitals can help transform the overall experience. He describes of how a large unit within a major teaching hospital that he worked with is innovating the concept of service and support through ‘health navigation’ to engage patients and families at a deeper level and bring new value to their healthcare experiences. He provides strategic context for customer experience at hospitals and show how a technique called Experience Value Mapping can be used to examine and redefine the customer experience from the outside-in.

Breaking the Mold [29:56]
Jess Kadar, Principal Product Manager, Iora Health
Details coming soon.

Rethinking the Fertility Patient Journey [28:36]
Peter Eckert, Chief Experience Officer, Projekt 202
Kijana Knight, Senior User Experience Researcher, Projekt 202
Aliza Gold, Senior Experience Designer/Researcher, Projekt 202
The Reproductive Medicine Associates of Texas (RMA) is not the first client to engage projekt202 in the hopes of becoming better, faster, more efficient, and more creative in their approach to problem-solving and ways upon they offer their services; but they are the first to ask us to apply our processes and skills to finding solutions in physical and emotional space. We believe that our findings and the documentation we have begun to create in response to our observations and hypotheses offers an opportunity to begin a very fruitful dialogue between interaction designers and healthcare providers on how the principles of user-centered design can be applied to improve the experience of medical service for both patients and providers.

Theme: Design Innovation

From Malawi to Minnesota: Hyper-Local System Design and Global Scale [No video yet]
Christopher Fabian, Co-leader and Co-founder, Innovation Unit, Unicef
Bringing best practices from design and start-up culture to the world of development challenges is daunting – but allowing for failure, co-creating solutions, and recognizing that almost everything we build in New York does not, in the end, work in the field have forced us to be humble and look for ways to facilitate solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Design and Innovation: The Human Perspective [29:56]
Ryan Armbruster, VP, Innovation Competency. UnitedHealth Group
In this session, Ryan will share frameworks for explaining and understanding this interrelationship which have been effective at helping healthcare leaders grasp and pursue design and innovation effectively within their organizations. In addition, he will share recent examples of how UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest and most diversified companies in the healthcare industry, is applying design to enable more successful innovation.

Theme: Chronic Condition Management

Understanding Networks of Diabetes Care: A Research Framework for the Healthcare Innovation of Tomorrow [26:11]
Eilidh Dickson, Project Leader and Senior Interaction Designer, CIID Consulting
Helle Rohde Andersen, Interaction and Service Designer, CIID Consulting
Working with Novo Nordisk, CIID Consulting assembled a 360º view into the networks of care, that support diabetes patients. By approaching the research from a systemic level and studying a patient’s network of support rather than individuals in isolation, the result was a rich and emotional view into the complex interactions and relationships encompassing a patient’s journey with the condition.
This talk shows how a new research framework and information visualization methods can inspire you to tackle challenging healthcare issues in ways that will provoke new understanding and build user empathy.

Am I Normal? Findings from Research on Text Messaging for Women with Diabetes [28:35]
Janna Kimel, Senior User Experience Researcher, Regence
The session goes into detail about how to insert qualitative research into a quantitative environment, with best practices for getting answers from study participants. This discussion also reviews key findings about how to interact and message disparate populations, as well as the pros and cons of using text messaging to influence health outcomes.

Theme: Health Trends

Designing Work for Health and Profit [31:19]
Martin Adler, Co-Founder & Director of Product Management, Healthrageous
This session will address how cutting edge science and technology can be used to change behaviors and optimize workplace health. In doing so, we will define steps that individuals can take to improve their health and wellbeing immediately, how change makers and organizations can cut costs by improving the health of their workforce and how technology is revolutionizing the way we’ll work tomorrow.

People Powered Health: Health For People, By People and With People
by Matthew Horne, Halima Khan and Paul Corrigan
April 2013 – 58 pages
NESTA, UK

This report, and the People Powered Health programme it’s part of, makes the case for changing the ways in which healthcare is organised. It shows how healthcare can better combine the very best scientific and clinical knowledge with the expertise and commitment of patients themselves.

The People Powered Health approach advocates changing three vital components of the current system:

• Changing consultations to create purposeful, structured conversations that combine clinical expertise with patient-driven goals of well-being and which connect to interventions that change behaviour and build networks of support.
• Commissioning new services that provide ‘more than medicine’ to complement clinical care by supporting long term behaviour change, improving well-being and building social networks of support. Services are co-designed to configure and commission services around patients’ needs.
• Co-designing pathways between patients and professionals to focus on long-term outcomes, recovery and prevention. These pathways include services commissioned from a range of providers including the voluntary and community sector.

Other links

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger says the ability to forget our past, both on and offline, is an essential part of what makes us human.

“The more I’ve worked on data protection over the past 20 years, the more I’ve realised that at the heart of this, what matters as much as the privacy aspect is the issue of human decision-making,” said Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Humans need to make decisions about the present and the future. The beauty of the human brain is that we forget, which enables us to think in the present. That is necessary to help us make decisions.” [...]

“Knowledge is based on forgetting. If we want to abstract things we need to forget the details to be able to see the forest and not the trees. If you have digital memories, you can only see the trees.”

Does design thinking address quick fixes at the expense of root causes, asks John Thackara, referring to “Why the d.school has its limits,” a provocative article in The Stanford Daily by Danny Buerkli, a Swiss Fulbright student at Stanford University:

“Like any method, design thinking structures how you approach and conceptualize a problem. The way the method is currently taught, however, preordains the result.

The answer to any problem unfailingly is a product or a service. Some problems are indeed best solved with a product or a service. Yet other problems need systemic solutions (e.g. political action).”

Liana Dragoman writes on UX magazine about the role of experience design in employee empowerment.

“It has become increasingly important for customer-focused organizations to turn their lens on employee engagement or how employees connect with, think about, and process their work in meaningful ways.

Design researchers and practitioners — in addition to CEOs — have learned that in order to enable positive service experiences that yield increased customer satisfaction, organizations have to empower employees in authentic ways. In addition, employees who have a strong sense of shared purpose, the time and space to perform work appropriately, a synergistic work culture that aligns with their motivations and goals, and access to employee-centered resources (digital and otherwise) tend to collaborate seamlessly, develop innovative products, and deliver satisfying customer experiences.

Mutually beneficial work environments built around nurtured, reciprocal human relationships have the potential to increase an organization’s creative output and eventual profit margins but can also enhance people’s lives in the process. This is what success can look like.

The methods of experience design uniquely situate experience designers to address employee disengagement in textured ways. By uncovering the root behavioral causes and co-producing solutions with employees, experience designers can create the right kind of resources, which empower organizations to own their desired change over time.

As employee experience design is not a tidy activity, this article will focus less on concrete deliverables or step-by-step how-to-recommendations. Instead, a working framework is presented to assist experience designers in thinking through their own process-centric approaches and solutions.”

The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the breakout talks that took place (grouped thematically).
 

AGILE / LEAN

Josh Seiden: A designer’s introduction to lean startup [15:04]
Josh Seiden introduces you to the key ideas of Lean Startup, talks about the amazing opportunities for designers this movement presents, and shares case studies of how he and his partners have used the techniques of Lean Startup as the foundation of their design studio.
 

BUSINESS

Johanna Kollmann & Martina Schell: Lean startup in design consulting: lessons learned [35:01]
As fast, user-centered development gains acceptance, many startups have successfully adopted a Lean Startup philosophy. But, why is it that many agencies and their clients still struggle to apply this methodology to larger-scale projects?

Matthew Connors: Print, snap, tap, track: using interactive print analytics to empower your design [25:32]
This session discusses the convergence of ink on paper and mobile through interactive apps that transfers the rapidly improving camera functionality and capabilities of iOS and Android devices to allow print readers to engage in various types of interactivity.

Nir Eyal: Stop designing apps and start designing habits [33:01]
Companies need to know how to harness the power of the desire engine to improve peoples’ lives, while consumers need to understand the mechanics of behavior engineering to protect themselves from manipulation. More and more developers realize that their success hinges on understanding user behavior.
 

CONCEPT DESIGN

Adam Little: Realism in design – communicating authentic experiences for the real world [10:02]
Drawing on examples from outside of the design world, we will see how artists and film makers have used the spirit of realism to create lasting works that are authentic and truthful.
 

CONTEXT

Jason Brush: The dream of the 90s is alive [43:35]
This personal talk excavates key ideas and media from the 1990s, which we may have forgotten, that, twenty years ago, inspired a generation to embrace digital technology and invent the world we live in today, and investigates how the many of the dreams that drove the 1990s — whether we realize it or not — may be alive today still.

Julia Barrett: Social networks suck – social computing frees you [33:12]
Most browser and mobile applications are designed to suck you in and away from the people that are right near you. We’re often busy updating our statuses instead of talking to the people we’re ‘statusing’ about.

Trip O’Dell: If UX can kill it probably will: designing for the 70 mph interface [36:36]
How do you create a great experience when you have to balance a user’s desire for a “killer app” with one that will not get them killed?
 

EDUCATION / COMMUNITY

Gretchen Anderson: Driving impact not serving shareholders – lessons from the non-profit world [11:24]
This session shares the tools we use to orient our organization, GreatSchools, toward the impact we seek to achieve and how those in the for-profit space can benefit from their use too.

Michael Wolf: Interaction design for learning [35:38]
The talk introduces the audience to the background and theory of interactive learning environments, whilst presenting exciting examples of interaction design projects in the field.

Sami Nerenberg: Design for America – students creating local and social impact – No video available as yet
Design for America (DFA) is an award-winning nationwide network of interdisciplinary student teams and community members using design to create local and social impact.

Rob McMahon, Ken Reddick & Dave Holland: Intuitive Interfacing – No video available as yet
The use of interactive media in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana exhibit.
 

GAMING

Kunal Patel: Badges are the backup quarterbacks of game design [33:21]
While badges, points, and leaderboards can be used to create compelling digital products outside of games, how can we be sure they were the cause of success? Plenty of terrible games employ points and encourage competition, but what separates the good from the bad?

Ryan Coulter & Greg Martin: Navigating the media minefield [36:07]
So you’re designing a media UI — the one, multi-platform content solution that finally solves the living room, forever. It’ll be thoughtful, coherent, social and beautful to behold.

Timothy Garrand: Tell Me a Story But Make It Interactive! [28:02]
What interactive game narrative can teach us about UX process design.
 

HEALTHCARE / WELLNESS

Andy Goodman & Marco Righetto: Hack you – the human body is the next interface [33:15]
Today’s breakthroughs in “Bodytech” include a host of incredible innovations that will to transform our bodies, communication, society – even the human psyche. This provocative presentation will address emerging “smart medicines,” medical technologies, synthetic biology, robotics and organic body part replacements.

Audrey Richard-Laurent: Compliance – design to facilitate a healthcare service [11:49]
How to connect patients to their illness and the medical staff, while complying to the constraints of patient management in the care system?

James Senior: Designing a compassionate healthcare experience [33:26]
This session aims to inspire designers working in healthcare & wellness to keep compassion at the heart of our UX practice.

Juhan Sonin: Hacking Health – Designing for and understanding my health – No video available as yet
This presentation traces the evolution of the author’s health design experience covering open source solutions to interoperability and policy to the design of health stations and corporate clinic experiences.

Sweta Mohapatra: Health on the go – designing electronic health records for mobile [11:20]
This talk covers some of the lessons learnt from building mobile EHR applications, the types of design problems that need solving when designing an application based on desktop software, and the complexities of designing applications where patients’ lives are at stake.
 

METHOD

Derek Vaz: Bury the wireframe – a primer in interaction prototypes [14:16]
This talk discusses why interaction designers should abandon printouts for interaction prototypes, how to introduce them into your process and showcase real world examples and success stories.
 

MOBILE

Behzad Aghaei: Towards buttonless touch interaction [25:31]
Presentation of an interaction concept that attempts to replace traditional buttons or tap interactions with gestures for list navigation and contextual actions.

Calvin Tennant: Moving past the navbar – No video available as yet
This presentation addresses the shortcomings of the navbar and introduce alternate navigation methods.

Michael Costantino: Toucha toucha toucha touch me [16:42]
Comparing standard touch-based input in iOS with musical gesture and how MIDI might provide a framework for us to think about touch.

Nate Archer: Beyond responsive [10:33]
If we have learned anything from the recent push to mobile, we need to anticipate the future sooner rather than later; not only the next wave of formats, but everything after that.
 

PROCESS

Carla Diana: Making meaning in an Internet of Things [38:22]
The Internet of Things presents a juicy opportunity for designers to pioneer new territory in rich interaction, but it also can backfire, filling people’s lives with more frustrations over technology than ever before.

Chris Pennell & Jessica Bailey: Designing for Complexity – What Did I Get Myself Into? [08:44]
In an ideal world, UX designers get to learn all about the people who use these types of systems – what they do, and why they do it – in order to design and redesign experiences that meet users’ needs. But what do we do when the information available is less than ideal?

Dan Saffer: Microinteractions – Designing with details – No video available as yet
The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features.

Dane Petersen: On aircraft and craft [11:00]
This talk discusses self-imposed principles, and how they can inform the way we think about our own design experience.

Davide Casali: Social experience design – shifting the focus where really matters [36:55]
Too much focus on external metrics will harm in the long term the effectiveness of your social strategy as well as your company as a whole.

Jason Alderman: Learning visual design to become a better unicorn [18:25]
Designer and author Cennydd Bowles refers to hybrid designers as “unicorns”–those mythical creatures who not only can do user research, information architecture, and interaction design, but ALSO can make gorgeous interfaces.

Jason Ulaszek & Brian Winters: Setting course – design research to experience roadmap [38:19]
In this session you’ll learn how to turn design research activities into a mental model, identify potential new business opportunities and derive business and experience direction from your newly found consumer insight.

Josh Cothran: Personas made personal [14:38]
This talk provides an overview of the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), highlights research and thought leadership relating personality types to technology usage, examines controversies and limitations of the MBTI and shares ways to use personality types to support and communicate design, including a brief case study.

Judith Siegel: CNN and the UX challenge of presenting long-form stories [10:01]
How is design and user experience considered when constructing pages and templates for these stories? How does the editorial process differ and adapt to web-based journalism?

Ron Goldin: Design and the mobile startup – Toronto edition [33:54]
Design and the Mobile Startup: Toronto Edition is the third in a series of discussions about how great mobile products emerge from the chaos and uncertainty that is startup culture.

Sander Viegers: Designer as connector [11:55]
The story of adding 722 emoticons to Windows 8 and designing the invisible parts of the UX by connecting people.

Silvia Calvet: Switch on and design for good everyday [22:22]
This presentation is about how to adopt a new awareness to add human and ethical strand into our everyday work.

Susan Dybbs: Beautiful failures [11:45]
In this talk Susan Dybbs shares failures from three categories: relationships, results and process. Each story has its own foreboding indicator that provides opportunity for reflection but also an opportunity to reframe the failure as something to be celebrated.
 

ROBOTICS

Matthew Powers: Smart and beautiful – designing robots and intelligent machines [33:50]
Think about the design implications of robots and intelligent machines working in our world, does not only include considering the physical and interaction design, but also the robot’s impact on our social ecosystem.
 

SERVICE DESIGN

Franco Papeschi: Innovation, investment, influence and impact: design that fosters change [38:04]
In this session, Papeschi presents an approach that goes beyond user-centred design and activity-centred design: impact-driven design.

Sara Cantor Aye: Designing everything but the food [34:59]
This year, in partnership with the SAIC, Greater Good Studio designed and built a new public school cafeteria. While that sounds like an architecture project, it really means designing interactions between kids and food, staff, space and other kids!
 

STRATEGY

Azmina Karimi: Grandma likes my Facebook status – how older adults are influencing the digital enterprise
This talk helps us understand the digital practices of older adults, and new opportunities it can create for the social and business models of our clients and brands.

Carina Ngai: Failed futures [15:01]
To design meaningful futures, designers will need to embrace a different perspective: It’s no longer about out of the box thinking, but finding the right box to frame the opportunity space.

Cindy Chastain: New frontiers – the UX professional as business consultant [47:17]
This talk is meant to be both a thought starter as well as a lively group discussion around how UX can begin to play a substantive role in a company’s digital strategy.

Iram Mirza & Jannie Lai: You’ve been asked to re-design the wheel [15:08]
…and while you are at it “make it like Apple”!

Jan Moorman: Measuring user delight using the Kano methodology [39:44]
Learn why and how this methodology can be harnessed in design strategy decisions.

Jonathan Rez: Tomorrow’s news [15:54]
In this session Rez highlights some of the issues with current news websites and apps and presents a number of proposals for the delivery of tomorrow’s digital news.

Juan Cartagena: Getting what you want
This talk covers the mistakes we made, what we have learnt from them, and how we now lead users to do what we expect with our “dietary” approach to UX.

Matt Walsh: Tense up – creating positive tensions in experiences [47:32]
A few months ago we asked designers to finish this sentence: “One of the best ways I’ve seen positive tension created in an experience is…”

Peter Stahl: Rhythm, flow and style [32:37]
Your choice of rhythmic style, and how it’s expressed, can set up predictable behavior patterns and foster intuitions and extrapolations that will result in an engaging, rewarding experience.

Stephen Gay & Rich Redka: Ignite potential – value exchange networks [34:23]
Services are shifting from an era in which companies created and delivered monolithic offerings to passive consumers, to an era in which services exist as networks of value co-creation.

The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the keynotes and panel discussions that took place.

KEYNOTES

Albert Shum: Connecting – emerging themes for interactions [36:59]
This session will share some of the design thinking behind emerging interactions themes and provide ways for design making that will help us create holistic human experiences to enrich people’s lives.

Jer Thorpe: Data & human experience [41:57]
By framing data in a human context, we can use it more effectively, and ultimately foster better practices for data-focused design.

John Bielenberg: Rubber ducks and hockey gloves (or, how to jump the ingenuity gap) [38:22]
How do you unlock the ingenuity that exists within people and organizations? Welcome to Future Blitz, the process of using rapid ingenuity to address your greatest challenges.

Kate Hartman: Social prosthetics – technology and the human form [43:54]
What gizmo can we use to read our minds, expose our hearts, or settle disputes? What gadget can improve our communication with house plants or buildings or glaciers?

Paul Adams: How to design social experiences [46:52]
Paul talks about the social design process, how it differs from classic user-centred design methods, and will explain why he thinks UX professionals will need to change how they work to be successful in the future.

Ravi Sawhney: Our power to empower – the satisfaction of designing for social impact [27:04]
Creating social impact is one piece of a very large world that flows through our fingertips as we conceive and create not only new user experiences but in fact new, highly empowered users… everywhere.

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Data depth and ingenuity [46:19]
Panel with Jer Thorp, Todd Silverstein, Andrew Crow & Ben Fullerton
Big Data…so what? Have you heard it isn’t the size of the data, but what you do with it that matters? Cutting across industry and domain, we’ve invited some of the top creative minds to discuss and debate the value of information, in an information age. What to look for, how to determine what is important in the loads of data captured, and why making meaning out these mountains of digits can be so valuable.

Design led startups [40:21]
Panel with Ben Fullerton, Todd Silverstein, Raphael Grignani, Josh Seiden & Suzanne El-Moursi
This panel brings together a group of designers and entrepreneurs to discuss the real value of design in the startup world, how designers can think about entering the entrepreneurship world and what it takes to “jump ship” and start your own company.

Interaction design education workshop report back [1:13:10]
Panel with Dave Malouf, Haig Armen, Kendra Shimmell, Kristian Simsarian & Dianna Miller
The workshop co-organizers and the topic session facilitators present their session topics as well as communicate the next steps this group of people have planned in relation to interaction design education.

IxDA 10th anniversary panel [59:02]
Join members of the IxDA leadership – past and present – for a look at how our community has evolved between 2003 and 2013. Learn how IxDA started. Discover some of IxDA’s secrets: key moments, inflection points, lessons learned, and how it’s impacted peoples’ lives and work. Hear about where IxDA is today and where it’s going – what are our ideas & goals for the future and how we might get there through working together.

Open Brands: The future of brands is OPEN [52:14]
Panel with Matt Walsh, Donald Chestnut, Steve Baty & Suzanne El-Moursi
The role of interaction design in building an open brand.

ReDux Live: IxD13 [40:29]
Panel with Cliff Kuang, Jeroen van Geel & Lin Yee Yuan
With their fresh eyes and ears they shared from their perspectives the big ideas, trends and predictions from IxD13 and reflected on them while we were still together as a community in Toronto.

The great UX debate [1:02:32]
Panel with Robb Stevenson, Lou Lenzi, Angel Anderson, Donald Chestnut & Mikkel Michelsen
Following the outstanding success of the ‘Great IxDA Debate’ at Interaction12, Dublin, SapientNitro & IxDA have joined forces once again to organize another ‘Great UX Debate’ at Interaction13, Toronto.

Killed at Launch: A complete disregard for user experience leads to drastic action
by Pete MacKie
A failure to account for UX results in an e-commerce being pulled offline shortly after launch.

POP UX! Clued Into Curiosity
by Andrew Zusman
Clue, the classic murder-mystery board game, shows designers how to create an information gap and a narrative that leads users to the other side.

This is an exciting time to be a digital designer, as the future of digital interaction is all around us, writes Nev Fordyce, reflecting on his SxSW experience.

“What many have touted as the rise of the ‘Digital Native’, may be better described as the arrival of the ‘Digital Born’.

This new species will benefit extensively by the promise of the three new pillars of interaction design. Through the implementation of gestural, wearable and neural technologies the Digital Born will simplify their everyday life, amplify their learned knowledge, and even extend their natural life.”

Jan-Christoph Zoels, one of Experientia’s founding partners and our creative director, is going to be a lot in Milan next week.

Aside from his participation on Monday 8 April at the IxDA organized “The Long View of Interaction Design,” he will also speak on Thursday and Saturday.

On Thursday 11 April he will be one of the invited speakers at “The Future of Design,” an evening conference (7 to 10 pm) organized by frog design at their Milan studios.

The theme of the event is “Designing the Future, The future of Design”: “With technology embedded where we work, live, and play, the pace of innovation is increasing. Connected products and services create a new complexity for companies and consumers alike. Making sense of it by designing the human experience has never been more important and strategically relevant than today, but how can we design the future in a meaningful way?

The other speakers are Mark Rolston (Chief Creative Officer, frog), Paolo Ciuccarelli (Associate Professor, Communication Design, Politecnico di Milano), and Tjeerd Hoek (Vice President Creative, frog Europe).

On Saturday 13 April (3 to 4 pm) he is one of the panelists at the UNStudio Platform Dialogues at at Emporio Building, Opificio Courtyard, Via Tortona 31, Milan. Experientia and UNStudio, the famous Dutch architectural design studio led by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, have previously collaborated on the design of sustainable buildings, environments and behavioral change.

The theme of the Saturday talk is the “Interface“: Whether it is as a portal to the World Wide Web or active nano-technologies, the communication between users and materials is no longer only one-way. The surfaces and objects through which we communicate and design provide new tactile and virtual feedbacks. This Dialogue – which will also involve Markus Benz (CEO Walter Knoll) and Birgit Lohmann (Associate Editor-in-chief Designboom) will explore the current and future possibilities of Interfaces with each other and through materiality.

The other UNStudio Platform Dialogues are also worth checking out:

DESIGNING (FOR) CO-CREATING
TUESDAY, 9 APRIL – 11.00 – 12.00
Panelists:
Ben van Berkel – Co-Founder/ Principal Architect UNStudio
Jurgen Bey – Director/ designer Studio Makkink & Bey and director PROOFFLab
Leo Schouten – Founder / director PROOFF

MATERIAL ATTAINABILITY
FRIDAY, 12 APRIL – 15.00 – 16.00
Panelists:
Gabi Böhm – Senior Architect/Project Manager, Premier Composite Technologies
Micol Costi – Director of Materials Research Material Connexion Italia
Giammichele Melis – Associate Director Buro Happold
James O’Callaghan – Director Eckersley O’Callaghan Structural + Facade Engineers
Federica Sem – Managing Director Permasteelisa Interiors

The April 2013 EthnographyMatters edition is edited by Nicolas Nova, consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory, and is about combining qualitative and quantitative data.

In his introduction, Nova writes:

“While ethnography generally draws on qualitative data, it does not not mean that quantitative approaches shouldn’t be employed in the research process. Combining the two leads to a “mixed-method approach” that can take various forms: data collection and analysis can be either separated or addressed together, and each of them can be used in service of the other. Of course, this isn’t new in academic circles and corporate ethnography but there seems to be a renewed interest lately in this topic.

One of the driving forces of this renewed interest is the huge amount of information produced by people, things, space and their interactions — what some have called “Big Data“. The large data sets created by people’s activity on digital devices has indeed led to a surge of “traces” from smartphone apps, computer programs and environmental sensors. Such information is currently expected to transform how we study human behavior and culture, with, as usual, utopian hopes, dystopian fears and *critical sighs* from pundits.

Although most of the work of Big Data has focused on quantitative analysis, it is interesting to observe how ethnographers relate to it. Some offer a critical perspective, but others see it as an opportunity to create innovative methodologies to benefit from this situation.

Aside from Rebekah Rousi’s post (featured here yesterday), EthnographyMatters will feature various case studies and perspectives on the implications of mixed-methods approaches, including Fabien Girardin (on how he used sensor data to yield field observations in a study for Le Louvre in Paris), Alex Leavitt (discussing his research on Tumbler using a computational ethnography perspective), Tricia Wang (sharing her thoughts about the opposite of Big Data, in what she calls “thick data”) and David Ayman Shamma from Yahoo! Research (describing his personal perspective on the topic).

SAP has become the first major sponsor of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), writes Gerd Waloszek on the SAP Design Guild blog.

The HCI encyclopedia, which recently appeared in its second edition, is one of IDF‘s major assets. But IDF offers designers a plethora of free educational materials:

• Free Textbooks: 100+ expert authors on how to design interactive systems. Used by universities and tech companies around the world.
• Free Educational Videos: HD video interviews with leading technology designers and professors. Filmed around the world.
• Free Educational Images: Royalty-free images suitable for learning, teaching, publications or just plain fun.
• Free Wiki Bibliography: The world’s largest wiki bibliography. A goldmine of research on designing interactive products.
• Free Toolbox: A curated toolbox of essential products/tools for interaction designers. Our paying members get significant discounts.
• Free Conference Calendar: A curated calendar of great conferences – ideal opportunities for learning and professional networking.

In addition, IDF supports a professionals association that “is meant for those who want to invest in their career” (membership cost is $98). Thanks to SAP’s sponsorship, membership in this association and access to the resources is free for SAP employees (they will find the respective information on SAP-internal Websites).

In the future, IDF will, among others, cooperate closely with SAP’s new User Experience Community.

IDF is overseen and guided by a distinguished executive board of industry experts and leaders in the field of high tech, software design, and user experience. Members include Michael Arent from SAP and SAP’s former Vice President of User Experience Dan Rosenberg.

As we move towards a quantified society, one shaped by data, we start to dismiss things that are unquantified, writes Om Malik of GigaOm. Empathy, emotion and storytelling — these are as much a part of business as they are of life.

“The problem with data is that the way it is used today, it lacks empathy and emotion. Data is used like a blunt instrument, a scythe trying to cut and tailor a cashmere sweater.” [...]

“What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.”

Dr Anne Galloway (@annegalloway) is Senior Lecturer, School of Design and Principal Investigator, Design Culture Lab, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Trained in sociology and anthropology, Anne teaches courses in design and culture, and researches relations amongst people, places, animals and technologies.

Here are the five things that make her nervous about Ubiquitous Computing:

1. Technological determinism & defeatism
Or, the cultural belief that technological development and progress is inevitable, and we have to adapt.

2. Technological solutionism
Or, the cultural belief that technology is the best solution to life’s problems.

3. Quantification imperatives
Or, the cultural belief that everything can and should be measured, and that everyday life would be better if all our decisions were based on these data.

4. Connection & sharing imperatives
Or, the cultural belief that everyday life would be better if more information was transmissible and accessible to people.

5. Convenience & efficiency imperatives
Or, the cultural belief that people would be better off if there were more technologies to make daily life more convenient, and common tasks more efficient.

As gadgets get more complicated, UI’s must be able to teach their users over time. Philip Battin shows how flow can be used to improve the user experience in interactive electronic consumer products in an article for FastCo.Design.

“More and more interactive products are being returned. In 2002, 48% of all returned products were technically fully functional but were rejected for failing to satisfy user needs (28%) or purely due to users’ remorse (20%). Even though a product may have all the features one can hope for, complexity and bad user experience can prevent users from integrating it into their lives.

User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account. But they could. Here, I present a model for how designers can use the fundamentals of video games and the psychological principles of flow to design enhanced user experiences.

It’s time to start thinking strategically about designing user experiences for interconnected ecosystems like health care, argues frog’s Fabio Sergio.

“Within [massive inter-connected service ecosystems such as education, finance, or health care] the aim to shape an “experience” out of a jumble of disconnected products and platforms provided by different and sometimes competing brands and organizations can feel like an insurmountable, complex challenge.

This level of opportunity is great for consumers, who get to choose their own preferred route to satisfy a need or desire, but it poses novel challenges for experience design. Designers must now think about how to conceive and design such complex sequences of loosely choreographed interactions so that the overall experience can still generate a coherent set of impressions, ultimately cementing in people’s recollections and reflections the desired perception of a brand’s values.”

Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer at PARC, spoke on January 28 at TEDx Broadway about the power of ethnography and how it might be useful in inspiring the future of Broadway.

As per usual with TEDx events, a video is now available.

The UK Government Service Design Manual provides a (draft) digital by default service standard, as well as guidance and tools for building world-class digital services.

The Government Digital Strategy set an ambitious target for teams building services: services so good that people prefer to use them.

(via InfoDesign)