Hasta La Ideas

For the second year running, Kicker Studio’s wonderfully alliterative Device Design Day managed to be a great advert for small, compact and focussed conferences. Taking place over a day in the beautiful surroundings of the San Francisco Art Institute campus, the conference aimed to unite interaction and industrial designers in a conversation around the crafting of physical products. The overall theme emerging from the various presentations was an exploration of how meaning is truly created in product experiences, whether through mediums such as aesthetics, touch and gesture, intelligence and emotional cognition, audio design or by fundamentally rethinking the relationship between people and objects themselves.

Ammunition’s Robert Brunner opened proceedings with a presentation that explored this world of meaning surrounding a product and how that ultimately adds to the importance that people imbue in it. He looked at how stories are woven both in the world of branding and marketing of a product as well as in the physical and software interaction design itself, using a couple of Ammunition’s more well-known projects to illustrate this point, the most relevant being Beats by Dre. This turns out to be a really good example of how much more impactful a product can become once we understand the story behind its development—how a piece of the artist we might aspire to be (in this case, Dre’s preferred sound profile) can become embedded in the devices we buy.

After Liz Bacon of Devise braved no less than two fire drills to deliver an overview of considerations and opportunities within the burgeoning field of medical device design, it was NASA’s Cori Schauer who provided the first real geek tickle of the day with a look at how the environment and technology at Mission Control at Johnson Space Center has evolved over the years—think lots of screens, blinking lights and big tactile clicky buttons, all surrounded by charts and graphs that are decipherable to a select few.

Aside from the sheer general awesomeness of gaining even a tiny insight into a cloistered environment such as this and the requirements and considerations for designing to support situations where there is zero margin for error (and where such error leads to, in a best case, a very expensive loss of equipment), there were just a whole slew of interesting anecdotes and photographs of tools that remain in use even when supposedly better, more modern tools have been introduced. Hearing Schauer’s observations and her thoughts around how to introduce change into an environment with high emotions at play—”it’s our friends up there”—was truly fascinating.

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