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.

“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.

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.

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

“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

Do you love your phone or the experience it brings? You can re-upload your data if you lost your phone to an identical handset… the phone itself is replaceable.

Empathy

Think about the spaces between the experiences you’re creating.
Withings – http://www.withings.com/ Automated products that consider the spaces between.

Connection = Meaning.

Addiction/Devolution

We need to bring back connections with people rather than to devices.

Ritual – Something we can understand (how people are actually live there lives).

Devotion… Mood – context is everything. The mood people are in effects the experience people have.

Branding – Provides context… different preconceptions are levels of trust effect the experience.

Research – Getting from ‘what people think’ to ‘how people live’.  If you ask a focus group if they just washed their hands after leaving the toilet you will probably get 100% ‘yes’. Contextual research (putting a camera in there) would show a different result.

iPhone home button – comfort (goes home)/discoverable/satisfaction (tactile). Can also be personalised.

Beyond Usable – We’re at a point where things should be basically functional or useable. We’ve moved to a higher level of emotional design. Evolution of ‘Sensory Engineering’.

Kansei- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansei_engineering

Contextual Research - ‘deep hanging out’

Experience Mapping – Decide what sort of experience you’re creating.

The space in between things – Creating seamless connections that work with our lifestyle.

Google – The advertisers are the users and you are the product. They know about us and that’s valuable information. Really good at technology but don’t understand people.
You can be thrown off Google+ for using your “real” name… ie. the name that you’re known by (not your birth certificate/driving license/*credit card*)

Gestures – On tablets there is no feedback, undo, discoverability… it’s a whole new ball game.
Standards like moving the window and not the text.
Apple got uncomfortable and threw out existing standards in OS Lion.

Forget the old model. New world.

iPod… Apple made it legal to get music/made it easy to find … they integrated it into our lives.
It wasn’t successful because it was a beautiful product.
Amazon has done the same thing with the Kindle. An effortless system.

Think ‘systems’ not product design.

Stop thinking of a single application or website. Look at Twitter. Twitter (the company) just provides the opportunity – the users develop the content.

Systems is where the future is.

Emotion and experience. It’s about total experience – not any one component.

We design experience. What matters is the memory. How long does an experience last? “Design for the memory… memories last for years”.
At Disney, photographs/mementos are all parts of remembering the experience.

Gestures – When you scroll to the bottom of a page Safari bounces bit Firefoc and Chrome doesn’t. What function does this serve? It’s neat and elegant… it matters… it’s just more pleasurable. Mozilla/Google don’t get it.

Stories – The greatest pleasure and success comes after a negative. In films, books and games things unfold in time… over time.
Consider and plan for emotions that go up and down.

Memories are more important than reality… It’s like augmented reality… Memories can be better or worse than the reality.

3D printing – Makes it even less of a gap between physical devices and digital interfaces.

Co-creation – The most powerful tools come about when we empower others ie. Blogging.

Opportunities – Sensors that will recognise people and objects.

We’re never disconnected.

The changes are interesting. Computing started with command line which you had to learn/memorise. We then moved to graphical interfaces which were easy to learn… We’ve now moved to gestures and these have to be learn’t/memorised – we’ve gone full circle.
The browser is also like a command line interface.

The most popular games are timewasters.

There’s an opportunity for cell phones to be more exciting. When cars got too complicated they simplified… it needed to be physical/knobs… The physical emdobiment is really important and that’s coming back. Touch and feel + shake etc.

Moving from screens to stories and experiences to memories

The intention economy. Not your actions or experience now but what you intend to do in the future.

I’ve shared the mobile presentation that we’ve been using at Tincan to talk to various organisations about the mobile web. As the title suggest it’s become too big a subject to ignore any longer.

We’re trying to get people consider “mobile” more strategically…  it’s not something you add onto your website… it is your website. Ultimately this is about your content and the engagement of real users. To get started you need a content strategy.

The presentation covers responsive design and the re-design work we did work recently for the ICA. This is ultimately a collection of other great ideas and I would heartily recommend that you go and read both Ethans Marcotte’s book Responsive Web Design and Erin Kissane‘s book The Elements of Content Strategy to get started.

A consistent theme I heard throughout the conference was user experience, and specifically, how this relates to the changing role of marketing within the arts.

Jerry Yoshitomi‘s keynote set down the foundation for this. He told the audience to not just do things for people but with people, recognising the changing patterns of customer demand – “People are inherently creative and want to share their experience”.

Will McInnes‘s excellent keynote was also a real call to action – “Marketing needs to be more than the last mile… be the curators/the storytellers for the organisation… create intimate experiences”.

Mark Robinson later encouraged the audience to take creative risks and run adventurously based on the principles of becoming reflective, open and adaptable, along with taking responsibility to defy expectations and create generously.

As a designer this was all great to hear. In short – the future of the arts is about starting with the customer, then enabling a culture of innovation/empowering everyone within both audience and team to participate.
The clear message was that marketing identifies and creates value – I would say it’s more universal than this, marketeers are having to become designers in the universal sense.

Russell Willis Taylor closed the conference with “Art matters more now than ever, and marketing tells us why”. The point being that without marketing so much within the arts would go unnoticed.
I think that design goes beyond this. It opens the door to experience. It is driven by the quality of ideas and innovation within each organisation. We need to break away from established, yet mechanical design processes as we strive to create something unique and of real lasting value. Everyone can contribute, everyone can be a designer as long as it starts and ends with the customer.

Thankyou to everyone who attended, came to say hello, and lastly to AMA for organising a great conference.

Additionally – there’s a series of great blog posts on the AMA website with more thoughts about the conference sessions/topics from various attendees.