Hasta La Ideas

In anticipation of Device Design Day 2011, we’ve partnered with Kicker Studio to bring you a series where speakers from this year’s conference reflect on six questions about design and their practice. D3 brings together visual, interaction and industrial designers for a multi-disciplinary conversation about the design of consumer electronics and objects with embedded technology.

Leading up to August 5th’s Device Design Day in San Francisco, we’ll be learning more about this year’s speakers through a short series of six questions from Kicker Studio. This week we sit down with interaction designer and Porsche-racing speed demon Elizabeth Bacon. Read on to learn about quite possibly the coolest pen in the world, the thrill of motocross and why designers should always remember: Only you can make yourself happy.

Elizabeth Bacon is a practicing interaction designer with over 12 years of professional experience. She began her career at Cooper, where she got her “post-grad” education in interaction design while working across a variety of domains. She then was a “Human Factors Design Engineer” for over five years in the Cardiac Rhythm Management Division of St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 100 company. She designed multiple products around the clinical systems that handle implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, and formalized a process that blended interaction design methods with traditional human factors engineering approaches. Liz has been running her own design consultancy, Devise, for the past several years. She’s also a Director Emeritus of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). On the personal side, she loves to draw, write poetry and race cars, although not usually at the same time.

Read on for more from this year’s Device Design Day speakers:
Six Questions for Mike Kruzeniski, Microsoft
Six Questions for Branko Lukic, NONOBJECT
Six Questions for Cori Schauer, NASA

Kicker Studio: What is the most cherished product in your life? Why?

Liz Bacon: My life’s most cherished product is a 3,018 pound one: my 2006 Porsche Cayman S. This beautiful Arctic Silver Metallic piece of design & engineering magnificence brings me more joy than anything else in my life that doesn’t have a beating heart. At times, I sometimes imagine that she really does have a heart, and once she became mine (about a year ago now) I quickly gave her a name, Cherie. I’ve always loved driving for the simultaneous involvement and release of the experience, but only started practicing the competitive performance driving sport of autocross about 7 years ago. I had made a vow to myself when I was 9 years old that I would drive a Porsche some day, so Cherie’s arrival into my life was truly the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I started going to the race track with her in 2010 for non-competitive driving events, where the increased speeds added a new level of development to my already intense focus on improving my car handling skills. When the tach needle is pushing into the red at 120+ miles per hour in the back straight at Portland International Raceway and I’m approaching the zone for hard braking & heel-and-toe downshifting coming in a few seconds, I’m wholly existing in a flow state where few memories are formed but I feel completely in touch with every atom of the car sliding through space…that is a cherished feeling unlike any other in my life.

What’s the one product you wish you’d designed, and why?

I wish I’d designed the Livescribe Pulse smartpen. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a pen with a built-in microphone & speaker that also has a camera in its tip; when used with specially-coded paper it allows for the synchronization of your written marks and recorded audio so that it can play back the sound associated in time with your written marks. All that data is synced to your computer, becoming a text-string searchable record of written notes, plus the sessions can be shared with other people either privately or publicly.

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