Summer School 2006
After Ivrea, Roma, Split and Timisoara the 5th Convivio Summer School came to Edinburgh, August 14th-25th.
The theme this year was: "Technology, Enjoying or Enduring it? Visions, Boundaries and Transformations in Extending or Replacing Human Capacities."
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Archive for July, 2006
31-07-2006 by
Fifth Conference on Design and Emotion.
The fifth Conference on Design and Emotion will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on September 27-29, 2006, at the Chalmers University of Technology.
“Emotions arise towards people, towards places, towards food, and towards things. Emotions influence our well-being as well as our purchase decisions.
From a design perspective, we need to know more about how artefacts elicit emotions.
We also need to know more about the way we can identify the relevant emotional aspects and how we can evaluate the emotional impact of a particular design.
The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum where practitioners, researchers and industry meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion.”
The conference will focus on many sub-themes, such as attachment and behaviour, brand and identity, methodological and theoretical issues, emotion and culture, surprise and delight, space and environment, unpleasant emotions.
Posted in Conferences, User Experience, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
29-07-2006 by
Ruthless focus.
In “Ruthless Focus on the Customer” Business Week’s Jeneanne Rae looks at how “… companies and brands are discovering how superior customer experience keeps ‘em coming back for more.“:
“In this new age, customer experience will decide the winners and losers in almost every industry imaginable.
Here (are the main reasons): Raving Fans, Loyalty, Premium Pricing, Differentiation.
Great customer experiences start with the “moments of truth.”
These moments of truth occur at the key touch points in a customer’s journey with his product or service environment.
Most companies these days use customer-relationship management databases to identify you and manage your transactions.
Beyond this perfunctory capability, we have found that companies whose systems are turbocharged to deliver sophisticated insights regarding customer behavior and lifestyles have an edge in developing great customer experiences.
This enhanced level of customer intimacy allows companies to act on patterns that suggest how to reorganize their human resource practices to drive better, more personalized, experiences for customers, and more profit for the corporation at the same time.
Entrust your customers to co-create their own experience.
The next level of value for product and service companies is not only mass customization, but co-creation of the entire experience.
Use an eco-system approach to orchestrate numerous business models that drive customer value.
The starting place for customer-experience design is not a company’s existing set of manufacturing or operating competencies, nor is it necessarily the traditional distribution channels. The customer doesn’t care about these things; customers care about what they want when they want it, and they turn to the easiest place to get it.“
Posted in User Research, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
28-07-2006 by
(Power) laws of innovation.
In “Power Laws Of Innovation” John Thackara lists his 10 laws of innovation.
Unsurprisingly many have human beings at the center:
“Power Law 1:
Don’t think “new product” - think social value.
Power Law 2:
Think social value before “tech”.
Power Law 3:
Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.
Power Law 4:
Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.
Power Law 5:
Think P2P, not point-to-mass.
Power Law 6:
Don’t think faster, think closer.
Power Law 7:
Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what’s already out there.
Power Law 8:
Connect the big and the small.
Power Law 9:
Think whole systems (and new business models, too).
Power Law 10:
Think open systems, not closed ones.“
Posted in Interaction Design | No Comments »
27-07-2006 by
Tangible Futures.
Philips Design’s “Making the future more tangible” looks at the increasingly active role consumers will be playing in future product-development practices:
“It is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of collectively shaping and designing it.
We are in a period of fundamental societal transition … the conventional industrial model is under increasing pressure and will ultimately no longer be able to sustain itself.
This creates a whole new set of challenges for companies like Philips.
People are becoming more empowered, and want to ‘co-author’ by demanding a greater say in the products and services they choose.
How do you cater for this sea of change?
Philips does so by regarding people not as consumers of technology, but rather as living side-by-side with it.
Central to this approach is an even greater emphasis than before on putting people firmly at the heart of innovation, and therefore involving them extensively in the fuzzy front end.
Through research, home visits, on-line conversations and experience testing, an ongoing dialogue is established that generates deeper insights.
It also means that propositions and concepts are much more in line with what people like, because they themselves have been involved in developing them.
Historically, innovation was driven by technology roadmaps. Slowly but surely, market research and socio-cultural input was increasingly incorporated.
The next step was to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach that involved designers, marketers, technology people and others.
Then came open innovation, which involves collaboration with customers or even other companies and universities.
The current Philips approach is perfectly in tune with the latest phase, ‘inclusive innovation’ in which the user and other stakeholders are involved right from the beginning of the process.“
Posted in Human Centered Design | No Comments »
22-07-2006 by
Changing frameworks in HCD.
In “A New Framework” Adaptive Path’s Todd Wilkens calls for an end to the decades-old framework that has been used for understanding people:
“There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing products, web sites, or monolithic centralized systems.
As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s better to think of our projects in terms of services and systems rather than products.
Of course, focusing on services means having to deal with a much messier set of issues related to human behavior than in traditional interactive design.
This is fundamentally changing the way we all go about doing design.
In particular, I’ve been thinking that we may need to move away from a framework of tasks, goals, and states in favor of a framework focused on behaviors, motivations, and contexts.
Essentially, I am calling for an end to the decades-old framework that HCI, information architecture, and interaction design have been using for understanding users.
This is not just a semantic or linguistic game I’m playing.
I’m not just substituting one set of words (i.e., behaviors, motivations, contexts) for another (i.e., tasks, goals, states) while maintaining the underlying structure.
The models we use to understand and talk about people greatly influence how we can understand a problem or situation.
If your framework doesn’t explicitly account for culture and context, then it is unlikely that you will be attuned to these things when you do your research and design.“
Posted in Interaction Design, User Research, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
21-07-2006 by
Taskonomies.
In “Logic Versus Usage: The Case for Activity-Centered Design” Don Norman expands some of his previous considerations around the need for the evolution of Human-Centered Design processes and methods:
“Human behavior seldom follows mathematical logic and reasoning. By the standards of engineers, human behavior can be illogical and irrational.
From the standpoint of people, however, their behavior is quite sensible, dictated by the activity being performed, the environment and context, and their higher-level goals.
To support real behavior we need activity-centered design.
Years ago, anthropologists Janet Dougherty and Charles Keller studied how blacksmiths organize their tools … (which) are organized so that they are ready for the job, ready for use.
In other words, good behavioral organization reflects human activity structure, not dictionary classification.
Dougherty and Keller called this form of organization ‘taskonomy’.
Many of the design tools used by the Human-Centered Design community lead to well-structured, carefully organized designs … (which) are far too logical.
Call this the ‘hardware store’ organization: hammers are in the hammer section where they are all logically arranged, nails are in the nail section.
The hardware store organization is based upon a taxonomy … this organization is well-suited for well-structured retrieval, but ill-suited for the direct support of an activity.
Is activity-centered design overthrowing all that we have learned about human-centered design?
No, definitely not. I consider activity structure to be a refinement of HCD.
Taxonomic structures are appropriate when there is no context, when suddenly needing some new piece of information or tool.
That’s why this structure works well for libraries, stores, websites, and the program menu of an operating system.
But once an activity has begun, then taskonomy is the way to go, where things used together are placed near one another, where any one item might be located logically within the taxonomic structure but also wherever behaviorally appropriate for the activities being supported.
The best solution is to provide both solutions: taxonomies and taskonomies.“
Posted in Interaction Design, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
20-07-2006 by
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.
Great news from Heather Martin, together with Neil Churcher one of the last academic directors of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and Simona Maschi, one of IDII’s longest-standing associate professors.
With the support of Alie Rose and of a few IDII alumni, Heather and Simona are starting a brand new school in Copenhangen, Denmark, called the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.
“The aim is to create a high profile design institute, which is small but dynamic and which interfaces with academia and industry.
The institute will become an international setting for new thinking in design and technology in Copenhagen.
The institute will encourage multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary learning, teaching and consulting in Interaction Design.
We imagine that people both from the academic and the industrial world will come to Copenhagen to work with us on innovative products, services and technology for the future.
The institute aims to become an international centre of excellence in interaction design and innovation by 2010.
The uniqueness of the institute is that it will incorporate an integrated plan of teaching, research and consulting - all in the same building, at the same time allowing them to influence each other in their vision and philosophy.
The institute will award a Master Degree (MA) in Interaction Design or a certificate for completing a Foundation course in Interaction Design.
The Masters courses will focus on tangible/product interactions, graphical/screen interactions and service design interactions.
The Foundation Course is an intense course aimed at teaching fundamental skill-sets specific to Interaction Design (e.g. Design Methods, Product Design, Service Design, Visual design, Physical and Software prototyping etc).
This course is not only aimed at those would like to update their existing skill-set (employees on sabbatical or interaction designers needing to update existing skills), but also enables students from other disciplines to join the course and learn all the skills required to then study an MA in Interaction Design.
The Research Lab will be financially self-sustaining.
It will support the research and consulting program of the Institute.
Activities conducted by the Research Lab include consulting for clients and innovation workshops, done in collaboration with industrial and research partners.
There will be 4 different sizes of projects: SMALL (2 weeks), MEDIUM (4 weeks), LARGE (12 weeks) and XLARGE (24 weeks).
The goal is to give private and public organizations the possibility to collaborate with a young, dynamic, and skilled group of researchers.“
Posted in Interaction Design | No Comments »