Hasta La Ideas

From opening parties to closing remarks, Core is all over IxDA’s latest gathering in Vancouver. Links to our posts here, links to other coverage below:

Interaction 09: Vancouver is the right town.

Interaction 09: Some nice touches.

Interaction 09: Day One Recap

Interaction 09: Behavior as the medium, and the search for IxD rockstars

Interaction 09: LiveScribe Paper Computing System is cooler than it sounds

Interaction 09: Lightning Rounds

Interaction 09: Coroflot job board, snapshots from day 3

Elsewhere on the web:

Johnny Holland, an English language site based in the Netherlands, has been described as “the Core77 of Interaction Design” (!) — exhaustive coverage of nearly every session is here.

Doug Lemoine of Cooper gives a succinct run-down of the keynotes here.

Jon Kolko of Frog Design gives a more critical analysis, and a link to the slides from his own talk, on Design Mind.

(more…)

One of the more exciting manifestations of Interaction09‘s variable-length schedule this year was the inclusion of “Lightning Rounds” – 20 minute sessions led by working IxD professionals on some of the finer points of their trade. By running these sessions concurrently in four different rooms, conference planners give attendees the ability to customize the professional development aspect to their own personal needs — a nice counterpoint to the more general, call-to-action tone of the several longer keynote talks, and for many participants, a chance to hear a minor rock star of the discipline speak in person for the first time.

For the visiting blogger, the sessions are both a joy and a pain in the ass, offering some fascinating diversity, and a certainty that another even better session is going on, and you’re missing it. They also present a more finely detailed glimpse into the ongoing attempt being made by the IxD community to define its core competencies; here’s a sampling from the 28 rounds (9 of which we actually got to see in some part):

-Jennifer Tidwell (above), an Interaction Designer at Google, presented a rapid, focused list of directives for good interface design for mobile device touchscreens. Standout suggestions: infinite lists, minimal headers (to avoid the “layer cake effect” of all header and no content), aggressive autocompletion (“because typing on a touchscreen pretty much always sucks”), and Share buttons everywhere (“mobile device use is inherently social”). Also, a commonly voiced concern: “What I worry about is the ghettoization of mobile design practices. We’re all going to be mobile designers soon enough. If you’re a web designer, chances aren’t bad you’re already doing it.”

–Visual Complexity, led by Manuel Lima, the Parsons professor who founded and still runs the website of the same name. As visualization of massively interconnected networks become more commonplace, a standardized set of charts is getting established — a sort of Complexity equivalent to the Bar, Pie and Scatter charts of old — but utilizing time and zoom capabilities to show more information in less space. Check the site for more.

(more…)

There’s a high concentration of cutting-edge gadgetry here at Interaction09, but more unusually, a high concentration of people who think long and hard about what effects cutting-edge gadgetry will have on the consumers that use it.

Here’s a quick demonstration by IIT Institute of Design professor Tom MacTavish, of the Livescribe digital writing system, a pen-and-paper duo that records audio, remembers what was being said while you were taking notes, and affords some basic computing function in a wholly analog format. If that sounds confusing, just check out the video; MacTavish does a great job of showing it off.

(more…)

Chris Brown and Rihanna may have been suspiciously missing in action, and M.I.A. herself might have been ready to pop right on the red carpet (and then again on stage!), but as they say in show-biz, “the show must go on” – and last night’s Grammy Awards certainly did! With toe-tapping performances by unexpected collaborations like the Jonas Brothers with Stevie Wonder and Justin Timberlake with Al Green, the night was loaded with off-your-seat energy… and the red carpet was no less stunning as the arrivals kicked off the night in jaw-dropping gowns and glamour galore! Teary-eyed winner and performer Jennifer Hudson was elegantly posh in a black-and-white cocktail dress contrasted with blue suede heels and Katy Perry ditched her usual mega-short mini-dress (apparently she was saving it for her performance) and opted for a classy pink floor-length gown by Basil Soda. Teen queens (also old Jo-Bro flames and apparently new “BFFs”) Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift both looked polished in long black dresses on the carpet, then went casual-chic in jeans and boots for their somber onstage duet… and Carrie Underwood was predictably prepossessing in a long sparkly sheath as usual. Check out the slideshow for more glam Grammy red carpet arrivals! Photo Credit: PR Photos

With Friday’s morning workshops wrapped up (see above), day one of Interaction 09 moved into full swing with several solid afternoon sessions, starting with John Thackara‘s tweet-provoking keynote.

Opening with a fairly dismal end-of-the-world sort of call to action, the talk painted a picture of multiple coinciding peaks, and not in a good way: peak credit, peak oil, peak movement, peak embergy (embodied energy in manufactured goods), peak water, peak protein, peak climate change. The recurring upshot of all of these was an imbalance in resource usage versus carrying capacity, and an admission that some common behaviors, like regularly consuming food shipped from across the planet, are going to have to go away before too long, regardless of how much efficiencies are improved.

The doom and gloom, though lengthy and impassioned, was eventually used as an introduction to potential solutions and attendant design opportunities. The most immediate examples named were assessment tools: protocols with tortuous acronyms for names — IBAT, MIMES, BBOP, TEEB, ESR — that offer rigorous ways of accounting for the ecological and social impact of products and services. Such processes, Thackara argued, are crucial to long-term behavioral change, and moreover constitute some fascinating and worthwhile challenges for the concerned interaction designer.

(more…)