SiDeR: Interaction design conference in (almost) the end of the world
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.
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.