Intwo

Yesterday I attended a public lecture by Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO and grandfather of interaction design, at Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver BC. Mr Moggridge designed the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass in 1980, and is the author of the book Designing Interactions, a historical look at the evolution of the field of interaction design. The book comes with a DVD packed with interviews with people who have shaped the field, and it has a companion website.

The title of the talk was Design Thinking, and it was an introduction to the problem space interaction designers move in. He started with the example of phone services.

Back in the old days, a phone call was made by lifting a receiver, which would put you in contact with a phone operator, whom you told that you would like Mrs Smith in Someplace. It was human-human interaction through a simple mediating object. Human-human interactions are the stuff of great stories, human-machine interactions seldom are.

In today’s networked world, we make calls using cell phones. Calling your friend Mrs. Smith entails finding the entries under ‘S’ in the phonebook interface, finding the right entry, selecting the entry, and calling. On my Nokia phone, the sequence is: [down], 7, 7, 7, 7, [down], [down], [down], [call], [call]. To quote Mr Moggridge: Everything is getting so complicated.

He gave the example of the Japanese i-mode mobile phone service, with which it is possible to make purchases from vending machines with your cell phone. When IDEO’s Tokyo office tested the service, it took them 30 minutes to get a drink from the machine, and they had to fill out a huge online form on a standard cell phone. They even had to deposit change into the machine! The designers clearly didn’t test this service in a real-life scenario before it was implemented.

This is how Mr Moggridge explains the increasing level of complexity in different types of design: To design a pair of Nike sunglasses, the designer need to have (at the very least) some knowledge of anthropometrics; measurements of the human body. To design a chair, an object that needs to be ergonomically accommodating in different positions, you need to know something about physiology. To design a remote-controlled underwater camera, which you control through an abstract button interface with no direct relationship to the physical world, you need knowledge of human cognition.

To design a connectivity service, you need to have knowledge of, and constantly evaluate the user experience of that service.Highlights of the talk:

• Good interaction design should help people to “do the work they do today, but with a new [and better] set of tools” (Tim Mott, originator of the now ubiquitous desktop metaphor).
  At IDEO, the design teams practice “Post-Disciplinary design”. The motto is to “Check your discipline at the team room door”. Muliti-disciplinary brainstorming then becomes a natural extension of putting a multi-disciplinary team in one room. The different specializations come back into play when it’s time to think of how to implement the chosen idas.
  When investigating users, don’t be fooled to look at the middle of the bell curve! There’s no such thing as an average person. Instead the designer should look for inspiration in the edge cases.
  Prototyping user experiences doesn’t have to involve physical prototypes. It definitely shouldn’t in the early stages. More effective ways are through storytelling, enactment, theater, video scenarios and simulations.
  Post-discplinary teams will evolve if you put people to work in the same room for long enough (~6 months). It becomes self-apparent what everyone can bring to the table, how the puzzle fits together.

I was a little disappointed with Mr. Moggridge’s answer to a question about what designers can do about designed obsolescence and the growing mountain of e-waste. He made a vague statement that increased use of the virtual, and ubiquitous computing, can stop resources overuse, but in my opinion he evaded the question and having to take a standpoint. It made the slides he had shown of compostable shopping bags and biodegradable Danish milk cartons seem fake, like he was just trying to sell a sustainability image. On the other hand, I know the good Mr Moggridge had a long day of workshops behind him, and answering a question you are not ready for often by necessity becomes a vague statement.

Nonetheless, IDEO has a booklet on lifecycle awareness tools, with advice for how to help you and your client look at design projects through a sustainability lens.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:20 pm and is filed under design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.