Hasta La Ideas

A pair of keynotes framed Saturday’s sessions here in Vancouver, both calls to action to the IxD community, but in very distinct ways.

Robert Fabricant of Frog Design led off, with a surprisingly object-focused discussion of human behavior and the capabilities interaction design has for changing it. Such influence has of course been wielded for thousands of years — the talk began with a brief history of the discipline (broadly defined), from hieroglyphics to family trees and onto the modern internet, noting how each of these has changed not only our relationship with information, but some of our ideas about what constitutes proper behavior. Hence his fundamental thesis, “Interaction Design is not about computing technology, it’s about behavior,” and later on “Behavior = our medium.”

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