Hollidazed

I had a great time at this years dConstruct conference combined with a lovely few sun soaked days with the family in Brighton.

Differing expectations

dConstruct is special because it’s not like other web conferences. The future design challenges we face won’t be straight forward so why should our conference talks and the ideas they explore?
I enjoyed just about all the talks, but not everyone agreed. There’s since been some good discussion on conferences and expectations.

Lots to think about

The day started with Don Norman. Don told us to think ‘systems’ not products. Create things that integrate fully. Design for memories and not just design experiences because memories last much longer.

Kelly Goto talked about the need to think about the spaces between the experiences we’re creating. Creating seamless connections that work with our lifestyles. Kelly told us that the way to do this is to understand how people actually live their lives rather than just knowing what they think.

Bryan Rieger & Stephanie Rieger’s tag team talk was based around the challenge of “Letting Go“. They talked about designing for a unique set of challenges combining current events and technology, arguing that users won’t wait for us to create the experiences they want.

Craig Mod closed the morning with a talk titled “the Shape of the Future Book?”. I’ve got to be honest, I struggled with this one. It was close to lunch, if anything I needed more coffee. Credit to Craig for trying something different in the form of the monologue he used for the main section of his talk.

In the afternoon session Frank Chimero followed up Don’s earlier message and talked about the importance of both the experience and the memory in the creation of delightful design. Frank went on to talk about archiving and making our collections of digital artifacts more useful. Creating and preserving the unique identity of digital objects, and the need to curate.

Dan Hon talk “Storytelling, Play, and Code” continued on the curation theme by talking about the lost association of physical artifacts with digital objects and highlighted the problem of digital artifacts all looking the same.

Kars Alfrink’s talk was influenced by about the recent UK riots. I enjoyed his talk but didn’t really take any notes.

Matt Sheeret talked about bringing the digital world into our pockets as physical artifacts. Doctor Who references aside he was essentially talking about the need for more human, digital objects that matter to us as much as their physical predecessors. These need to have the unique, sometimes random qualities and quirks of the physical objects we cherish and keep.

Kevin Slavin closed the day and talked about augmented reality by making the point that, actually, reality is plenty. Full of beauty and wonder if we look close enough. Augmented reality works if devices guide and connect our experiences, but they need to let our eyes do what they’re meant to do – experience the world around us and not just the world in front of us.

Not a bad message to end on.

These are my notes of key points from the session at Friday’s dConstruct conference…

“Intimate, meaningful objects that humanise networks make time travel a bit more fun.”

Our devices make time travel possible/consider the transition from a pocket watch to what’s enabled in your pocket now through your smartphone. Consider the other objects you carry with you eg. keychain.

User Testing – Get people to empty out their pockets

RFID – eg. Osyter card/triggering other services based on data. Chromaroma… takes your Osyter card data and creates a visualisation. Operates within the parameters of the pocket. You can put a chip in anything eg. a child’s toy… a gift for interaction.

The pocket watch becomes an heir loom (something that’s passed on) …our devices/phones aren’t like this and this is possibly a missed opportunity.

Hacking – Implicitly addresses the relationship something has with a network. Taking stuff apart.
Hacking takes products that wouldn’t otherwise age and gives them personality and a timely feel.

Future Digital Products – Should be more like the Doctor and less like the Daleks. Human/physical objects/random/real objects that matter to people… they’ll be sat next to lego and keychains in actual pockets.

These are my notes of key points from the session at Friday’s dConstruct conference… Dan’s slides are also available.

The full stack(s) of entertainment…
…first storytelling.

Second, play – Heello – “Heello is Twitter for Pretending” (and play). This made it different to Twitter. Services like heello have great potential for play, whereas others are inherently too serious (eg.Quora).

Thirdly, code
“To make art with technology, one does not use it as a tool; one must understand it as a material. Technology is not always a tool, an engineering substrate; it can be something to mould, to shape, to sculpt with.” – Tom Armitage

We lack Authoring tools.

Different content looks the same (eg. OS file systems/media players). “It’s all 1′s and 0′s and file systems”.

You see a physical record and you know what’s on it (eg. video cassette tapes). We’ve lost these associations hen it comes to digital products. Books now look like a thumbnail, 255px wide, and a video looks like a 640 x 480px wide box.
The way we present and group things isn’t a metadata problem, it’s a design/content/code problem.
Where are our content clues? McSweenies example using icons. This is a design and content problem (not a meta-data problem).
Argument in defense of Apple’s physical calendar binding in iCal/OS Lion.

Developers and designers need to work together…Steve Jobs created a new working culture at Pixar.

“The computer is the bicycle for the mind” – Steve Jobs – It amplifies and let’s people do what they want to do.

These are my notes of key points from the session at Friday’s dConstruct conference…

Delightful design – The nature of the offering is the experience and the memory (experience and recollection).

Analog vs Digital
Analog is viable/digital products allow us to forget (ie. bills). Analog we find/digital we search. We own analog/it feels like we lease (pay for) digital.
Analog = OR / digital = AND
There’s an infinite with digital. Analog is a palpable stack like flipping through CD racks. The digital space doesn’t have an order (phantom file) …it’s a random collection of stuff.

The random stuff has potential.

To keep a blog or collection of stuff is not a new idea… eg. Commonplace book

Curation as authorship.

Architecture of arrangement – Finds stuff. Collects stuff. Arranges it.
Arrangement require a second pass… you have to step back and think about what you have.

Digital services are optimised for getting stuff in – not necessarily gettin stuff out.

Revisting:
Richard Saul Wurman – concept of LATCH (Location, Alphabetical, Time, Category, Hierarchy) Location
Alphabet
Time
Category
Heirarcy
(+ Location)

Arrangement:
How we move through time… Instapaper… Let’s you defer/re-surfacing content.

Old content should be able to resurface…
Biblion – New York public library
Photojojo

These are my notes of key points from the session at Friday’s dConstruct conference…Bryan & Stephanies’ slides are also available.

“Our ability to capture, store, and constrain knowledge, led us to believe that knowledge itself might be a finite thing…”

All ideas tend to spread (and grow) when put on the internet.
Ideas on the internet don’t just grow, they self-replicate and evolve …often at an incredible pace.
It’s hard to contain ideas as they spread… the portable/always on and connected device amplifies this.

“Propelling unexpected ideas to greatness… enabling new voices… accelerating change”

(we need) unprecedented levels of creativity for new and unique challenges created by a perfect storm of events and technology.

“We can no longer expect customers to interact with our creations in a linear, exclusive or predictable manner”
Users won’t wait for us to create the experiences they want …they’ll climb overt he fence…. use things in ways we didn’t design for… improve on our content delivery (eg. Instapaper/Readability/Flipboard etc).
Example of enhancing a physical product – eg. Moviepeg. New technology like 3D printing will empower people even further – to make their own products/enhancements.

Traditionally market penetration took time. This was good for mental models…
“with time comes stronger mental model, development of social norms and an undrstanding of how a product may fit into our lives”
Time is now a luxery. Radio took 40 years for a market penetration of 50 million/TV 10 years/iPod 5 years and YouTube less than 6 months. Google+  could achieve this in less than 3 months.

“Each of us is engaging, understanding and engaging with products in a slightly different way…”

Apple = multi-layered and tightly inderpendent systems of experience… achieved by controlling and containing most touch points and user interactions. Like a trip to a Disney theme park where every part of the experience had been designed for you… Like Don Norman talked about earlier – they design for the memories eg. you don’t come away thinking about the time spent queing but with other positive/designed “memories”.
Most products won’t have this luxery… the best products might fail/there will need to be trade-offs in complexity with and increasing reliance on other parts in a larger ecosystem… product models that can adapt to future (abrupt) change eg. environmental – fuel or material costs.

“In an increasingly complex world the most succesful producst may in fact be the simplest-or most flexible…
…enabling pathways for users to find meaning and enrich their lives, through experiences they create for themselves”

The best designs will live beyond there intended purpose ie. open API’s. Maybe even designed with no primary context at all.

Letting go doesn’t remove our responsibility as designers… we’re now more responsible than ever… as technology becomes more a part of our lives there are more implications for our work.
“A responbsibility that is directly proportional to the number of people we may affect with every product we create” – Video Games and Human Condition, Jonathan Blow

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them” – Albert Einstein