jamin.org

Steven Johnson’s “Emergence” attempts to connect the lives of ants, brain activity, urban interaction, and software to show how decentralized and bottom-up interactions emerge as an intelligent swarm.

I was at first skeptical about the book, as it seemed to take a very scientific view, which I am wary of given my thesis on design thinking and its relation to a scientific approach to solving problems. But I got over myself and began to appreciate the perspective and what it might mean for interaction design. (Notably, the word “interaction” is repeated a lot throughout the book.)

The behavior of ant colonies forms the backbone of the thinking behind the book. Despite popular belief, ant colonies have no pacemaker, meaning there is no top-down authority that tells the colony what to do. The queen does not give directions, she only lays eggs. The rest of the ants base their behavior on interactions with their compatriots using a very simple language using pheromones. Through the numbers of these low-level decisions by individual ants, the colony as a whole exhibits characterizable behavior.

“The colonies take a problem that human societies might solve with a command system (some kind of broadcast from mission control announcing that there are too many foragers) and instead solve it using statistical probabilities. Given enough ants moving randomly through finite space, the colony will be able to make an accurate estimate of the overall need for foragers or nest-builders.”

When I read that the ants made decisions through statistical samples of the overall population, it seemed related to how designers make decisions based on a small, but rich interaction with sample users. Given millions of design decisions resulting from random sampling of the population, will there emerge a better world for all? That’s the hope that a greater design culture brings.

Another intriguing argument is that through local interactions higher-level order emerges. One prime example given is the benefit of sidewalks in increasing local interaction of city dwellers. Neighborhoods often develop, not because someone planned them, but through interaction with others—individual decisions about where an how to live creates an order. Examples include class divides, ethnic areas, and gay neighborhoods.

Good designers recognize that they have only so much control in the way that there solutions are used. Johnson points out that emergent systems are not without rules. In fact they need rules to prevent chaos. This seems a likely place for design to contribute: by understanding the system as a whole and providing the rules for interaction, but not dictating how interaction should take place. Not all interactions can or should be designed. There is room to allow emergent behavior to determine the interaction, rather than interaction being dictated by the designer.

Does this sound a bit like co-creation or allowing users to design their own experience? I think so. To encourage emergent systems, Johnson suggests that in addition to rules, incentives should also be provided. For designers interested in allowing users to design their own experience, incentives for participation are paramount because they encourage investment and support.

Johnson entertains the principles of emergence being applied to all aspects of human activity, from social organization to urban planning to business management to political systems. For businesses looking for innovation, an emergent approach is worth considering. Johnson suggests an organization made up of smaller teams that act without top-down dictation.

“The role of traditional senior management grows less important in these models—less concerned with establishing a direction for the company, and more involved with encouraging the clusters that generate the best ideas.”

Through the lens of design, you could see this as employees designing their own work experience. With groups making the best decisions at the local level, the overall system would be more efficient and innovative. This idea definitely gains my interest, having worked in too many places where decisions made from above hurt the experience of employees and the effectiveness of the organization; and where everyone at the local level knew how to make productive changes but were discouraged and prevented from doing so.

Perhaps what I appreciate most about “Emergence” is Johnson’s ability to make connections between seemingly tangential subjects, as making connections is what good designers do. Overall, it’s an interesting read with insights into emergent behavior that are worth considering and perhaps bringing into current and future design challenges.

Dan Saffer just posted his list of the best interaction design blogs this year. Missing is his own blog and mine (just kidding about mine—but perhaps one day).

Given grad school time constraints, I don’t follow many blogs these days. But here are a few I have found either insightful or troubling over the year:

• IxDA: Difficult to keep up with, but I try to skim every once in a while. Something usually catches my eye for its dichotic view of interaction design to my own.
• Engadget: Design wisdom in part relies on knowledge of what else is going on in the world. This site helps me keep up with new technology and products.
• Core77: Also good for keeping up with what’s new in the world of design. Usually brief, but prolific, which means I can’t keep up.
• Adaptive Path: Often thought provoking and applaudable for their willingness to share methods and insights.
• odannyboy: If you’re an interaction designer, it’s good to know what the guy who wrote Designing for Interaction is up to.
• The Superficial: Has nothing to do with IxD unless you think that everything has something to do with IxD, in which case this site is required reading for gaining empathy for the ludicrous nature of celebrity, media, and the rest of us who are drawn to it. Oh, and it’s funny.

Deserving an honorable mention are two peer blogs. Electric Insomnia, while infrequent, often has good design food for thought. And thinkcarrie.com, also infrequent, provides budding insights into service design.

I’m tracking “interaction” on Twitter, and this just came through…

“Front-end Developer; Design Technologist; Web Developer; User Interface Developer; Interaction Designer…are mostly the same. Which one?”

If those are all the same, perhaps I don’t know what it is I’m doing.

With the majority of my readings behind me—How Designers Think, The Reflective Practitioner, Thoughtful Interaction Design—I took a stab at rewriting my thesis paper abstract. I wrote the original abstract a few weeks ago, but it was still too abstract for…um…an abstract, so I didn’t share it.

The result is a shift, I believe, from my original proposal, but still within the same vein.

Interaction design’s strongest ties are to design. To understand the value of interaction design, the process of the interaction designer, and what is good interaction design, we need to understand the process of design, and the process of a designer. It is not a scientific process, and therefore difficult to describe the rigor of the process. Some ascribe the design process as a black box or a magical process where you put something in and without explanation a solution pops out. While the design process is difficult for designers to explain, there is strong evidence of a rigorous process that designers follow based on skill and knowledge that enhances a designer’s ability to consistently produce quality solutions. How do interaction designers make the leap that enables them to envision and design what could be? This paper will examine the process, what makes a good designer, how it applies to interaction, and what interaction designers can do to advance their design ability.

It’s still not quite right, but it’s getting there.

What I’m interested in most (maybe) is understanding the actual design process, the simultaneous problem framing and problem solving, and the rigor of design that differs from a scientific approach. I’m also curious about the role of design process models, and ways to communicate the process and the value of design to non-designers.

I have a laundry list of other things I find interesting, and a few more books to digest—The Design Way, Designerly Ways of Knowing. But I’m going to lay off the readings for a while, and begin making my thoughts more concrete through writing.

We’ve hit the midway point in the semester for Design Computing. And I must confess that my first teaching experience had a bit of a rough start. There were a bunch of factors that affected this—planning Emergence, not following last year’s model, Flash C3 being very different from the previous version—but to some extent inexperience played a role as well.

I struggled over what was more important to teach, Flash or prototyping with Flash. In trying to get everyone quickly up to speed to complete the semester’s assignments, I took a few too many detours into the coding aspects of Flash, and veered away from more interesting topics, like what are effective digital prototypes.

We started with a simple motion project whereby an emotion needed to be conveyed using a single black dot. That broke students into basic animation techniques while allowing us to also talk about the behavior of the animation.

The second project was a control redesign. Students were asked to find a single analog control and redesign it using Flash as the tool. This project yielded many questions from those unfamiliar with Flash. And while everyone successfully completed the project, the questions led me to pursue more instruction on Flash itself instead of the hybrid Flash/interaction design course I imagined.

Fortunately, I recognized this shift, with the help of insightful feedback from several of the students, worked back to my original intention. The third project combined necessary Flash skills for prototyping with a larger focus on communication and interaction. The submitted projects and the conversations around then were promising.

Those first three projects were warm-ups for the three larger projects, one of which began a few weeks ago and will finish up tomorrow. I thought it was important for students to learn about video sketching and spend focused time on creating them outside of their other design projects, where video sketching would only be a part.

I had the students propose a product or service and create a scenario of use that would be the basis of the video sketch. The lack of constraints may have been an issue for some. So I would maybe rethink that for future projects. But otherwise I’m really pleased with the work in progress and the conversations we’ve had surrounding the work. I’m hoping the focus now will mean better decision making for them later during crunch time in their other classes.

Next week we will start a mobile interface project. The final project will focus on emotion and play (or harm) for engagement or entertainment using a virtual pet as a starting point. This was also going to offer an opportunity to introduce object oriented programming, but I’m having second thoughts. I began the course with the idea that there are few ActionScript details one must know to prototype in Flash as an interaction designer. Object oriented programming isn’t really one of them. To add more fodder to my thoughts, tonight I stumbled upon Robert Reimann’s So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer, in which he says:

Designers seldom code—if you are attached to programming, all power to you: the world needs more design-sensitive programmers. But unless you have complete control over your projects, you will be short-changing your users by trying to design and develop at the same time—it’s a conflict of interest. So, if you can’t stomach the thought of abandoning programming, interaction design may not be for you.

So I will likely abandon the more programmy aspect of the final project, and instead focus on interaction. The students have a good handle on the tools already. What’s more important, at least as designers, is how they use them.

When examining the design process, you cannot leave out the designer herself. As I have been exploring different readings and thoughts about the process, several questions have come to mind:

• What is good design?
• What is a good designer?
• How does one become a good designer?

Thoughtful Interaction Design by Jonas Lowgren and Erik Stolterman devotes a whole chapter to the designer, a subsection that addresses design ability.

“Every designer needs knowledge and skill related to her specific profession. Having knowledge means understanding the vast amount of specific information and techniques existing within any design field. Skill concerns the necessary craftmanship. Both knowledge and skill are needed if a person wants to be a good designer.”

Continuing, abilities required to be a good interaction designer are stated thusly:

• Creative and analytical ability
• Critical judgment
• Rationality and ability to communicate
• Knowledge of technology and material
• Knowledge of technology use
• Knowledge of relevant values and ideals
• Ability to appreciate and compose aesthetic qualities

It is suggested that developing these abilities is a personal journey: “everyone has to develop her own way of becoming a good designer.” Lowgren and Stolterman then suggest that becoming a good designer is a question of “designing oneself as a designer.”

For me, this statement collides with my thesis project, which explores identity and self expression: how products, services, and perhaps people you know act as a means of designing yourself. I have wondered about designing myself as a designer, transforming myself into an interaction designer through school, embracing of the subject matter, and surrounding myself with markers and stickies.

Well, perhaps. Lowgren and Stolterman say, “that to act as a designer, you have to be able to think about yourself as a designer.” They continue, “Becoming a good designer is to some extent a design endeavor, and not an easy one.”

I agree, becoming a good designer isn’t easy, which is why there is a lot of bad design, and will likely continue to be a lot of bad design. The situation reminds me of writing. Nearly everyone can write. Just like everyone can design by picking out clothes to wear and paint for their houses. However, not everyone can write well. Nor can everyone design well.

With Emergence over, my attention has turned to my neglected theses endeavors. Earlier this week I bought a bunch of books, some of which arrived the past few days.

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) by Bill Buxton
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
• Design Methods by John Chris Jones
• How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified by Bryan Lawson
• Design Thinking by Peter G. Rowe
• A Sense of Self: The Work of Affirmation by Thomas J. Cottle

I skipped right to the end of How Designers Think to a chapter called “Towards a model of designing” as I’m interested in model that attempts to explain what’s happening between research and actual design. I found the following tidbits intriguing.

Unfortunately, the really interesting things that happen in the design process may be hidden in designers’ heads rather than being audible or visible.

And…

Designing is far too complex a phenomenon to be describable by a simple diagram.

I’m wondering if these two statements alone make my investigation moot.

Interaction Designer, Adaptive Path, Summer 2007

Charmr was an internal R&D project at Adaptive Path inspired by an Open Letter to Steve Jobs by a prominent diabetes blogger, Amy Tenderich. The goal was to generate enthusiasm for human-centered thinking and inspire broader change throughout the medical device and design industry.

In eight weeks, we went from user research with diabetics to final concept of what the experience could be. My role included conducting interviews, background research, research synthesis, concept generation, and communication of the envisioned experience.

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More information can be found on Adaptive Path’s website.

One of the great things about being at Adaptive Path is that I have access to the cello-playing man who wrote Designing for Interaction, Dan Saffer. Today I sat down with him to talk about the direction my essay is going, as it’s somewhat of a commentary on the perception of interaction design in current practice.

It was the first time he and I really talked much about our ideas of interaction design (we’ve talked about other things, just not interaction design as a practice so directly). And it was great to pick his brain to find out whether I am either way off or making assumptions about some of the thoughts and gut feelings I have that are influencing my essay.

He was mostly supportive. And not that I don’t value my judgment, but it was nice to validate my thoughts with someone of his stature in the interaction design world.

As for the essay, it’s about the need for interaction design to distance itself from the web. This is something that I have been thinking about throughout the summer having encountered in a practicing world that seems to still largely view interaction design as being tied to the domain of web design. Not that all practice thinks of itself this way. But I think it will be good for Adaptive Path’s audience.

I’ve got a good outline of what I want to say, which I ran by Dan. Now I just need to crank it out. That’s what the last day of the internship is for.

CMU has a news story in its Corporate Visitors section regarding the studio 2 projects with Shelley Evenson we did this past spring in collaboration with Motorola. It includes a definition of interaction design by Shelley, and a synopsis of each group’s concept.

Notable is the article’s focus on interaction design, referring to the studio course as the “annual graduate studio in interaction design,” even though their were folks from the communication planning and information design program (CPID).

But also important is Motorola’s desire to share the projects within the company and continue to strengthen its ties to CMU.

“We wanted to bring people back to Motorola to show off the results,” [Rick] Hoobler, [Motorola design manager in experience planning and design,] said, “[everything was] received very well.” He went on to say that the concepts are continuously being shared across the company.

In addition to dipping into the campus think tank for creative ideas, Hoobler said that Motorola also hoped to broaden their relationship with Carnegie Mellon and to recruit more from the university in the future. As a School of Design alumnus, he knows the quality of thinking and dedication to excellence that the school has to offer and his prior relationship with university faculty lent a critical hand to the partnership. And based on the exceptional performance of the class, recruiting from the program will certainly continue. “We feel like there’s a good synergy between our design group and the school,” Hoobler said, “and we’re looking forward to bigger and better things.”