“Posters and toasters are swell.” If you ever listen to Richard Buchanan talk about design, you’re bound to hear this phrase at least once. I’ve heard it many times, most recently in the course I’m taking this semester, Design Management and Organizational Change. Buchanan believes this to be the most exciting branch of design today, calling it a “new branch of design thinking.”

As an interaction designer, an instructor for a foundational interaction design course, and a frequenter of the IxDA discussions, I know that the majority of practicing interaction designers work in web and software. But I believe interaction design has much more to contribute to design and humankind than screens.

The design management course represents a different arena for interaction design. The course is about taking what we know as designers and applying it to organizational life: how people interact in groups and work together. We can think of organizations as environments, and design for the environment and the interactions.

As to the significance of and relationship between design and organizations, Buchanan says that you could argue organizations are the most important design products of the 20th century. The complexity of organizational life make the subject matter very difficult to tackle: a perfect candidate for design.

Related to my interests in the unrecognized power of design and the troubling disparity of design as a discipline, I find the subject matter fascinating. Buchanan hypothesizes that management and organizational thinking are unrecognized products of design. With the view that there is no absolute right answer for an organization, and that the complexity makes organizations too difficult to understand in full before making decisions to bring about change, the likely candidate for the force behind organizational change is design, as design is well suited to such wicked problems.

Another point that Buchanan postulates is that from a design point of view organizations are products and that they serve human beings. If the purpose of design is to serve others, as stated in The Design Way, and organizations are products, this indeed is a ripe area for design. As an interaction designer, contemplating the idea that organizations are products that can be designed possibly to serve people better intrigues the hell out of me.

If at its simplest definition interaction design can be said to be designing for behavior, the behavior of organizations appear to be fair game and an exciting move beyond screens for interaction design.

Yesterday I received word that the work-in-progress paper I submitted to CHI was not accepted. As it was not my idea to submit to CHI because I do not view it as a good view for design, I was not disappointed. However, I will gripe about the comments I received because they emphasize CHI’s lack of design understanding.

My paper was based on my thesis project work, which explores the idea of being able to prototype your identity in the physical world. I’m taking a research-through-design approach, which means I’m creating a solution to produce knowledge on how explore solutions. This is very much a design approach, using a design process and methods to develop insights and inform direction.

Overall, the three reviewers were interested in the work, but felt it was not fully developed (quite probably). I received an overall rating of 3 (of 5, I assume) from all the reviewers. The 3 translates to “Borderline: Overall I would not argue for accepting this paper.”

The first reviewer begins by stating that the motivation of my work is “not well motivated and embedded in psychologist’s work.” As my work is totally motivated by designer’s work, I completely agree. For the reviewer, it seems a more scientific approach would have been better received. Having gone to CHI last year and witnessed the emphasis on the quantitative and the lack of design, this does not surprise me.

The second and third reviewers share the first’s skepticism, questioning whether the findings could be applied universally and generalized. The third also states that “the conclusions drawn seem to be too subjective.” While it’s entirely possible that my findings were not well argued, thus appearing “too subjective,” I can’t help but wonder if there would have been any room for any subjectivity at all.

While I applaud CHI for attempting to bring more design into the conference (though I also wonder why), I question how design might find its way in if the reviewers do not seem to understand the approach and methods.

And speaking of CHI and design, today I received an ACM bulletin which states: “Each year the SIGCHI conference draws together engineers, designers, educators, and many others concerned with interaction design.” Interaction design? Really? Of all the things they could have said, why not human computer interaction? If making a claim about a conference that draws people together who are concerned with interaction design, it might be best to point to something like the IxDA conference. As someone concerned with interaction design, that’s where I’ll be.

The first assignment for the Basic Interaction course I’m teaching this semester was due today. With it being only a week into the semester, I did not know what to expect from the students. But their efforts provided fodder for some stimulating discussion and considerations for interaction design. The assignment was as follows, originally developed by Chris Pacione (now at BodyMedia).

A: Physical cube

Starting with a cube, design an interactive object that you think best communicates the following uses. The cube should look as though you can:

• rub it
• turn it
• squeeze it

The cube can be no bigger than six inches in any dimension. You may add or subtract from the cube, but it has to remain cube-like. Other shapes may be used as long as they play a secondary role. You may also use color, texture, material as well as a relative context. For example, the final solution might be a green fuzzy cube with little circular nibs placed on the floor.

With no mention of research of audience, the students were left to their own devices in their interpretation. There were a range of solutions, many made of some sort of foam or sponge to afford squeeze, a lot of fuzzy bits for rubbing, and various measures to suggest turning.

After some discussion, we started talking about the success of the requirements from a distance and then once you got the cube in your hands. I saw this as a macro/micro perspective similar to how you might talk about a poster. From across the room you might be attracted to a cube because it looks like you can interact with it in one way, and then upon close inspection you discover further ways to interact with it. I had not thought about affordances as being macro and micro before, so I thought this was an interesting point to emerge especially when thinking about keeping people engaged with a product by not revealing all its tricks up front, but allowing for some exploration and discovery.

We also talked about the range between explicit and implicit affordances. For example, an explicit means of communicating that the cube should be turned might be by an arrow. In the middle of the spectrum might be a quote or line of text that starts on one side of the cube and continues across multiple sides, provoking the user to turn it to read the whole sentence by not explicitly telling them. On the implicit side might be a cube that is a puzzle that can be pulled apart and put back together. This act requires the user to turn the cube to examine all the sides to figure out the puzzle.

Finally, it was interesting that no one challenged the requirements by creating affordances that did not deliver. For example, no one purposely designed a cube that looked like you could turn it but actually did not turn. This brings up a point about intention (and perhaps manipulation) in design. When would you want to suggest an action that could not actually be performed? Unfortunately, we did not have time to discuss this. Perhaps for the next assignment.

As for this assignment, I think it’s a great introduction to interaction design because it gets people thinking about interaction design outside of the context of digital interfaces, it’s easy to talk about because you have tangible artifact to interact with, it’s quick, and it’s fun.

In case you are acronym challenged, that’s Interaction Design from an Industrial Design Point of View. What I’m talking about is the recently Coroflot post Interaction Designers, and How They Got that Way, which takes a few snarky jabs the profession. For example:

“Anyone who’s been following the creative job market at any point in the last few years is probably aware of the feeding frenzy currently going on, as companies large and small seek interaction designers to do…well…whatever it is that they do.”

I read this as more funny than offensive, because to a certain extent, it is difficult to describe exactly what an interaction designer does. Design for human behavior, improve the human condition, and facilitate connections between people are very difficult things to point to.

“David Malouf, the IxDA’s vice president, identified the one crucial skill all Interaction Designers must have as “prototyping.” When pressed for greater specificity, none was to be found, and this in the end may be what makes IxD so useful. It is a continually self-evaluating field, but one content to let the process of asking be sufficient. Similarly, it is a field unwilling to cling to any particular tool, knowing that the selection of the right tool–even if it must be learned from scratch–is in fact the most important step.”

Definitely a funny comment from the IxD graduate student perspective. Learn tools from scratch is now second nature.

But in addition to tools, I would also add that interaction designers are technology and problem domain agnostic. We are useful all over the place, and not, as the articles suggests, indispensable.

This post is inspired by Jack Moffet’s Mystory, which was inspired by a recent IxDA discussion on when/where/how you decided to become a designer.

To answer this question, I could go through my life story—army » engineering » poetry » journalism » web producer » editor » web developer—but that would be rather long and tedious (for me, fascinating for you!). Instead, I’ll skip to the end.

I recognized myself as a designer some time after my first semester in the interaction design graduate program at Carnegie Mellon, about a year ago. I say “recognized” because in retrospect I had been practicing design, but not fully and without understanding design as a rigorous approach to solving problems. Prior to that recognition, I did not think of myself as a designer.

After being educated about and exposed to the design process and design thinking, I realized that the design way of solving problems was not foreign to me and therefore my experience was not zero. But I began to think of myself as a designer only after recognizing that my thinking and my process were designerly. I suppose it was then that I chose to be a designer. By choosing, I committed myself to the development—or the design—of myself as a designer. Being immersed in a graduate program has enabled me to accelerate this process.

That’s not to say that I think everyone needs to go to school to be a designer (it certainly helps). But transitioning from a non-design role to a professional designer isn’t something you can just pick up by reading a couple BusinessWeek articles about design thinking. In fact, I think the current business focus on design, while good in raising awareness of a design approach, may actually be harmful because it does not emphasize the difficulty of producing good solutions, the irrational, nonlinear nature of the process, the need for experience and design wisdom, and the traits that make people good designers. The need for design has been identified, but not how to shift the linear, number-crunching culture to design culture.

But I digress (into thesis paper territory). My point is that being a designer is a journey, a process. It’s not easy, nor is it for everyone. It feels right for me, despite having somewhat blundered into it. So I feel quite lucky to call myself a designer.

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.