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:

So the world is full of opportunities for good designers.

Furthermore he is acting as a teacher/consultant, so we can talk with him about our individual projects. I quite often found that the “swedish feedback” is too soft. They don’t want to say that something is wrong, and always see the good side, so sometimes it becomes useless. Jon gives his opinion directly and it is something that I really appreciate now.
He also coordinates a “Synthesize discussion Series” where we talked about different design related topics. Is quite nice to have him here, sad it is only for a month.

“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

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?

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.

Not so much to talk about Zach Lieberman. He is great. He is one of the most influential, inspiring, interesting -and all nice adjectives you can thing- artist from these years.

Erik Stolterman talked about Desginers and design tools. A tool could be a pen, an arduino prototype, an illustration software… He pointed different thoughts:
How the tool shape the design process and its results? How the designers choose the tool? Is it a rational process? Do we choose what is better for every situation or do we choose what we’re used to use? Do we use/avoid some tools to feel part of the “design comunity”? If you want to design something new, should you choose tools that are completely different from what everyone uses?

The students presentations had a very different quality. I found a lot of good ideas and some nice prototypes but I didn’t find anything that really impress me. Lot of musical stuff, a few physical prototypes, some interesting approach to other topics, but in general I found the kind of things that I expected in an interaction design conference. That is not bad, but I rather have more diversity: It supposed that interaction designer should push the border of technology and we all are sailing in the same calm sea.

The organization was great. The Umeå school of Design is a great place with great installations and the Interaction design students are fantastic, very friendly. I was a bit jealous when I was there. But on the other hand I found that the kind of education that I’m having in Malmö is  good and very “design oriented”. I found that many of the project that were presented were aesthetically  well finished but they didn’t have user research at all behind them. The kind of questions that we learned to ask when we learned user-focus design wasn’t answered in much of the designs that were presented: Context of use, stories, target groups… For me these ideas are in the foundations of interaction design: Nice graphics and nice interfaces are not the goal of the interaction design but only a few pieces of the whole user experience.

About me, I presented the results of the first two projects that I did this year. I feel quite proud that I wrote the papers in not so much time and both of them were accepted. They are not great but I think that we, me and my teamates, did a good job in both of the projects and people reactions confirmed that
If you want to know more, look for Sergio Galán in the proceedings of the conference.

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

The fact is that, more or less, since 2008 we are using more resources than the earth, as a whole, can regenerate. This means that our society is not sustainable. Furthermore, not the whole world contributes in the same way to this global footprint. According to these calculations if all the world would live like the developed countries, three earths would be need. It seems pretty egoist, we consume more than it’s possible and 2/3rd of world’s population are not even well-developed.

But as we are a smart society, we are not going to tolerate that, do we? So, let’s ask how can we build a sustainable society.
That means, to achieve certain amount of wellness consuming as few recurses as possible, so we let space in the earth to the poor countries in order to not stop their development and show them a sustainable example that don’t replicate what we’ve been doing before. I think it sounds quite reasonable. Is not hippie fantasy chat.

But, poor European man, you still want to use your car everyday to go to work, you want to drive to the sopping mall. You want to eat meat twice a day, you think you need a lot of stuff in your house to be happy, and you still say that you are environmentally concerned because you recycle the newspaper.

Let’s try to design a better society. There is no recipes. So we need to try and fail a few times.

next: Sustainable everyday.

One of the things that I’m learning, let’s say, in the background is the significance of the details. The product creation requires lots of small decisions. Every decision is constrained by circumstances that the designer cannot change, you have to live with them. But every single decision will change the final product.

We’re living in a world with millions of high qualified engineers and designers. Not so many are stupid and they capable to do their own job well. A product creation needs one smart sprinkle and a lot of hard work. Everyone can be smart for a second, but is the care in the details what make the difference between a good product an a bad product. Is the the attention that you put in every decision and how to take it, because once you decide you open a new brunch in the “solutions space” and after that is hard to get back.

Here we’re learning several tools or ways to design to help us during the process, involving users, designers, clients… but at the end is the designer who should take the decision.

Telemegaphone Dale 2008 from Unsworn Industries on Vimeo.

“Telemegaphone Dale is a seven-metres tall loudspeaker sculpture on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. Anyone can dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number and have the sound of their voice projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale.”

Check the Telemegaphone web.

The other one is even better. This is the story:

“In a big campaign in 2007 the department asked the public for suggestions on how to reduce car traffic in Malmö. In reply, they received over a thousand wise, clever and provocative proposals from the citizens.”

Instead of keeping these ideas in a book the council wanted to create public debate, so they contacted with Unsworn and working together they created the Parascopes. Parascopes are devices which show alternatives visions of Malmö according to citizen suggestions. This is one of these products that make me exclaim “I wish I had invented them! ” Simple and beautiful concept.

Furthermore in the visit they gave us some interesting tips. I think I’ll talk about them in another post.

If we want a good feedback of our product, what should we show to the user during an interview?

What happens if you show a software prototype to an user? A software prototype is something that gives the impression of a “finished product”. So if during an interview you give them a software inside a computer they will only say “It’s nice, It’s cool, I like it” but no any useful information.

A prototype by definition must look unfinished and several kind of mockups could be useful. This means from paper mock-ups to simple boxes.

““In summary mock-ups become useful when
they make sense to the participants in a specific
design language game, not because they mirror
“real things”, but because of the interaction and
reflection they support.”“

I was sceptical about the amount of information that those primitive sketches could provide us. But they revealed as a good tool both to communicate between  the team and to test several use qualities without the time-costing process of writing a software.  This doesn’t exclude the software prototypes, only postpone them until a later stage.

Another question that I wonder yesterday was: “If I want to get the user attention during participative design, a good way is impress with eye-candy technology”, so “what to do” is never written in a book.

To be user-centred during the design process, is not enough thinking about “What the user wants?” if you really don’t know who the user is or if you just think about the user as a stereotype. Actually most of the people involved in a product development tend to think that the user is just someone like themselves. To fight against this trend there are several of procedures that a designer can use. One of the most famous is “Personas & Scenarios” and we had a related workshop during the first days.

Basically this method consists on creating several fictitious users based on real user research. In this way you can more easily use all the information from the user research during the whole design process.

This needs several steps:

• User research: Is a kind of etnographical approach. You should go into people life to see how they interact and what they think about your interest topic.
• Create Personas: Physical appearance, psyche, background, tastes. During this process we used a whiteboard and images from magazines to “create” the persona.
• Create scenarios. A persona by itself is not useful. He needs a motivation, a context of use. So scenarios are stories about the personas using the product. Furthermore during the different presentations we realize that scenarios are usually the best way to communicate what the product is and how it is used.

To learn about personas the teachers recommend us the following readings and videos:

• Watch Lene Nielsen’s video about “Personas and user-driven
  Innovation” during “From Business to Buttons” Conference 2008 here in Malmö.

And also these papers:

• From user to character: an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios. Lene Nielsen
• Personas: practice and theory. Grudin, J. & Pruitt,
• Interaction relabelling and extreme characters.
  

Manifesto for a Digital Bauhaus.

This manifesto seems to be quite important,  as a foundation for interdisciplinary design studies, not only here.

There is also a conference here with the same ideas:

Pelle Ehn – Making a digital bauhaus take place