Medea is a collaborative media initiative where most of our interaction design teachers are involved. The have a huge, bright studio (much better than our basement-like studio -i’m jealous, yes) and seem to have a lot of money to do things. This month they brought Jon Kolko as an “entrepreneur in residence”. He works for Frog design as associate creative director. He also founded the Austin Center for Design, where he wants to use design to solve big social problems.

He gave a general talk one of the first days he was here. Not so much new but it is nice to listen again the same thoughts about design that are quite related with the stuff we’ve been learning. It means that this is the right direction. On his talk, he argued that design used to be about square things or rounded things, about aesthetics and doing cool shapes. 15 years ago companies like HP or Honda would have go to a design company to ask things like: Transform my ugly computer box into a nice one or make the car more rounded and sexy. Now they go and ask for “magic feelings” in the use of the products or ways to improve the information about the oil consuming.
Here it is the whole talk:

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“The role of design is to find the best design.
The role of usability engineering is to help make that design the best”

Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton

Our last project of the year was related with Critical Design.

Wikipedia-like-simple explanation: Is a concept created at the end of the 90’s by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. They criticize the current design because is too engaged with the economical/social  system and is only another piece to reinforce it. In opposition to this,  they want to create a more experimental way of design that can make people think and question the world. So critical design take some of the function traditionally associated with art and link them with design because, according to them, current art is too far away from people’s life to be meaningful for them.

Tagged like “Critical Design” I’m going to post some thoughts and citations that I found interesting.

The frist one is about user friendly and object. Citation found in Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dune. (P35 2005 edition)

Un user-friendliness does not have to mean user-hostility. Constructive user-undfriendliness already exists in poetry:

“Everyday language is usually informative and instrumental. There is no call for either the speaker/writer or the hearer/reader to dwell on the form of what is said/written since if a piece of information has been successfully passed or some action successfully instigated. The words by which this has been managed can count as “transparent” With the poetic function comes a certain opacity, for the writer is no longer passing information nor seeking to instigate action. There may also come an intentional ambiguity” Sturrock, J. 1986 Structuralism. P(109-110)”

So, we can enjoy poetry, where the information to transmit could be less important than the way it is transmitted.  Can we enjoy in the same way an electronic object where the function is hidden, or is ambiguous? How do we enjoy things that are not completely efficient? Do we feel more about objects with “usability fails” like a book or a turntable?

Three weeks ago I went to Umeå to present two papers to the Sider Congres. Sider is a student Interaction Design conference that happens once a year in the nordic countries and around.
The experience was quite nice. We flew to Umeå and even if it was already the end of March, there wasn’t any trace of spring around. Sweden is a large country and even if I complain about Malmö¡s weather, it is nothing compared with that. I had never seen so much snow before.

The conference was quite interesting… (or should I say “inspiring”?. When I was in the “engineering” world things were interesting or not. Now everyone talked about inspiring stuff) The keynotes were great. Heather Martin is the Interaction Design Director of Smart Design in Barcelona. She talked about service design as the design of a full experience for the user. She pointed a quite a lot interesting inspiring thoughts about the transition from products to services and about qualities that the good design should have. We had a presentation after her keynote so I was a bit nervous and not 100 % focus on her talk but among the examples that she showed this one really got me. Continue Reading »

Before coming here I didn’t know anything about sustainable design, and I never thought that this was related with interaction design. But, to be honest, is great to have studied this. I feel better thinking in solutions for a better world than thinking only in cool interfaces.

At the beginning we learned that we live like we had three planets Earth. I mean, “we” the occidentals. There are some calculations about what the earth can produce and what everyone consumes. If we divide the amount of space in the earth between the inhabitants. And we relate this two measures, is possible to know approximately how much “space” do we have for everyone: what is called the ecological footprint
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