I’m writing stuff for the phD and I’m reflecting on a project I worked on a while back with Reuben, where we were trying to crack the idea of ‘groups’ of elements in a presentation app.
As we worked on the solution, and it became more elaborate with implementation feeding back to experience and ixd etc, we put it aside to work on a seemingly unrelated concept.
Turns out, that the newer concept, views, was our solution to groups. And in reflection it was a great example of an interactional approach trumping an informational one. (see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094570 for more on that lovely theory)

What I also found interesting, both then and now, is that a physically engaging experience helped to surface this conceptual link between our work and the work of Boehner et al.

Enaction privileges an interactional perspective? Maybe. Worth looking at.

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I can remember some great ‘aha!’ moments in my time designing. You know, when things suddenly gel for you, and the lights turn on. When I reflect on them as milestones in my career and growth of understanding, they’re helpful to shape the journey of what I think is important in design, and for designers to know. This post is an attempt to catalogue and reflect a little on some of these moments, to see if I can learn something from them.

There’s a call for your aha moments at the end too!

Hacking

I think the first lesson I learnt about design was when I was about 4. For a while we lived on a farm, and I had a chicken wire enclosed first floor cubby house in the tank stand. I had an old wind up telephone to play with and had somehow realized that you could get a shock from it if you wound it up and touched it in a certain place. Thereafter, most (first) visits of friends involved showing them my telephone. When I think back to what this taught me, I remember being amazed that things like a telephone could be used for different purposes than talking. In reflection, this sounds a lot like my first hacking experience.

Now I come to think of it, kids gain a lot of design knowledge through experimentation and the resulting experience. Our three year old is forever inventing new and whacky ways to ‘use’ things. I’m reminded of Alan Kay’s thoughts on instrumental reasoning when I wonder where all this hacking goes to in adults.

Snakes and Singing

School taught me a lot of lessons in design. One of the biggest involved me being put in hospital by a snake. My sister, brother and I went to Two Mile State School on the other side of town. Two Miles on the other side, to be exact. When I say small, I mean 28 students and one teacher, in one room with a blackboard at either end. Grades 1-4 looked at one end, 5-7 at the other. There wasn’t much that you didn’t hear.

So, back to the snake. The school was in Gympie, Queensland, and it was hot in summer. We didn’t wear shoes much. One afternoon we had stopped at a friends place on the way home, just mucking around. I walked through a doorway and felt an electric shock go right up my leg. Looking down I saw a snake trapped under the door I’d just opened! I ran into tell mum 

“I’ve just been bitten by a snake!” to which she replied,

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not getting out of swimming training that easily.”

I came back from hospital two days later, and our teacher had organised the school (all 27 of them) to write a song about me. We sang it. I can remember the final verse ending in 

“…and he keeps his shoes and socks on all the time!”

I remember being surprised that everyone had joined in, and that I heard about the song from people who weren’t directly associated with the school. The song had a life of its own, and I was fascinated with that. In recent years I’ve started to see this moment as one of my first experiences of the way participation and co-creation can build understanding and awareness in a group, and how artifacts aren’t necessarily things that you can ‘drop on your foot’.

Design Exists

High school. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a great art department. We had one semester where we looked at design, and I can remember one activity vividly. We were split into teams and all given a set number of lengths of doweling (circular section timber rods), plastic golf balls with holes that fit the doweling, and a sheet of heavy fabric. The task was to build a bridge that spanned a set gap, using just the balls and doweling, so that it could support the weight of the fabric. That taught me iteration and, to some extent, collaboration. But the biggest realization I remember having was that there was this thing you could do that wasn’t art – but it was creative, it wasn’t tech drawing or maths – but it was analytical. It helped marry all the aspects I loved in the subjects I excelled at, and it had a name: design.

Kill yr Idols

In first year Architecture I remember realizing that I’d fallen in love with a staircase I had designed and drawn. It was just so damn cool. Unfortunately it was directing the situation, form & concept of the building it was attached to. Badly. I think this was my first conscious comprehension of the implications of design processes, the dynamic relationship between concept and form, and the double edged power of fidelity in design communication. It took me a long time to realize that was what I realized, so up until then I just called it my “staircase moment”.

UX & Performance

There’s a big gap here where I played in bands and seemingly had a hiatus from design. My main learning from this is that music and performance bring a great deal to design, particularly when design is informed by an idea of how people will experience your design. I’ve recently started playing music again, and am realizing the effect it has on how I think. More on that next

Process Matters

A few years back it slowly dawned on me that managing research was not as much fun as doing research, but I seemed to be stuck in a role that didn’t allow for a design approach. I looked at what I was spending my time on and realized that 80% of my work was written, often in hideous templates. I hated this part. The other 20% of my work was talking with people, which I loved. So I started to sketch. Alone and in meetings with colleagues, clients & stakeholders, I would draw ideas. I stopped writing as much and started using whiteboards and big sheets of paper. This was an instinctual response to the situation, but on reflection I can see that it changed the way I thought. It also changed the way my collaborators thought. Sketching and diagramming got me back into being a designer, doing design. Sketching helped me realize that design, like knowledge, is a social action. 

A little after that, I was playing planning poker with my team, and realized that agile was what you get when you apply design principles to product development. Designers can design the way they work with others, and this can have an enormous impact on the outcomes of those collaborations.

What about you?

These are just a few instances of ‘aha!’ moments in my design life. Thanks for hanging in there up till now. I’m interested in other people’s experiences of these kinds of moments.. When did you realize something that changed the way you designed? When did you ‘grok’ experience informed design? 

I’m interested in this because I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be hosting an Interaction Design Fundamentals activity http://www.ixda.org/interaction/activities/index.html#JeremyYuille at Interaction11 in Boulder this February! Its a great honor to be asked to do this, and I’m planning how to introduce interaction design to people new to the field. I want to involve people in activities rather than a lecture. 

To inform my design of this primer, I’m want to hear what ‘aha!’ moments you’ve had related to ixd, ux, or design in general.

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I’ve set the elements described above out on the walls of my office
(being an academic has some awesome benefits, being expected to think
for a living being one of my favorites) – you can see some of the
images attached to this post. This way of working seems second nature
to me, and it took me a while to remember where I’d been taught how to
work this way. First year architecture was the culprit: particularly
the early stages of a design where your ideas were discussed.

While i was presenting the narrative of these artifacts I started to
think on the role of the format, and how it helps me to think. To be
honest, without a large wall space like this I was having a very hard
time working out WTF was going on in this phd. Getting the 30,000 ft
view while being able to dig down into detail is one way to describe a
designers role. It also fits well as a description of what those tv
cops do on shows like the wire or csi. This is where the notion of
forensics emerged. Thinking about my earliest situations where I’d
seen people DO wicked problem solving, I continually end up with
fictions… Spy novels, cop shows, mission control.

This also made me think of an experience i had early on in my phd
fieldwork: interviewing a senior designer at a big international firm.
We’d just entered their enormous office space, very open plan desk
etc, and i commented on a row of small rooms along one side of the
hangar sized space. These were the project rooms, projects took one
over and lots of the performative, collaborative, forensic thinking
was undertaken in these rooms. “I can’t take you any further though,
sorry” my guide said… These rooms were where the magic happened, and
confidentiality meant that I couldn’t even approach within 20 meters
of them… That’s powerful stuff!

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I’d be very interested to hear from people working in this area, or for whom these ideas are interesting… these ideas form part of a PhD I’m currently undertaking. I’m getting ready to turn into the longish second last leg, where you work out wtf you’re really on about, and how you might communicate this coherently to someone who isn’t … well, you.

As I also mentioned before, I was happy to see that I could do it coherently in under 10 minutes

One thread of the presentation will discuss Etienne Wenger’s take on
ambiguity, as described in his book Communities of Practice. Rather
than talk about that now (and send you all away to the other talks
I wanted to muse on another big concept in Wenger’s theory:
reification.

Wenger says that “in reification we project ourselves into the world,
and not having to recognize ourselves in those projections, we
attribute to our meanings an independent existence” (p58)

This sounds like a good description of what happens when designers use
sketching to visualize the relationships between elements of a design.
Ive been looking for ways to frame this lately, and I think
reification would be a good start. Particularly as it compliments the
other half of Wenger’s duality (reification, participation)

Note to self: examine projects in the phd through this frame… What
artifacts emerge as critical?

Designers constantly deal with the ill-defined to help people negotiate uncertain situations or artifacts, but how well do we understand our own ways of dealing with ambiguity? Using examples, I’ll discuss three approaches to ambiguity that can inform design, and how these approaches can affect peoples experience of products.

This ties in with recent moves in my PhD, and builds on my thinking about artifacts and affinity.

I’m thinking of presenting different approaches to ambiguity because it appears to be a largely unexamined foundation of design practice. How we approach ambiguity can have the largest effect on a design, because it frames the epistemological foundation of a design, or how a design understands and uses knowledge.

The three approaches that I’m contemplating using describe an arc along a positivist – constructivist spectrum: from extreme empiricism (I’m thinking Herbert Simon etc) to phenomenological (Heidegger or Dreyfus), with the pragmatists (Dewey) in the middle.

The key challenge will be to cover this ground in the allotted 10 minutes, and keep the predominately professional audience engaged. I think it’s totally possible, but will need to draw things back to real world examples constantly. In fact I’ll need to create some exemplary anchors early on to use throughout the presentation.

I’m currently writing two papers. At this point, bits of these papers seem to resemble two chapters of my thesis.

The first paper discusses what I’m calling the affinity gene (apologies to Peter F Hamilton) or a way of framing design capability in terms of affinity. This idea came out of a lot of reading, practice, and the realization (while presenting on a public panel at ozchi 2009) that just about every aspect of design has a dependence on the designers ability to activate and modulate their perception of affinity between objects.

If I was writing science fiction, I’d say that better control of affinity makes for a better designer. Which leads me to the second paper.

Designers use artifacts to activate their perception of affinity. There, I said it. Seems obvious, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Krippendorf has talked about this, and I particularly like his expansive take on artifacts, ranging from objects to discourses.

In this second paper we’re not looking at this aspect of activation, mainly because it relies on the first paper, and neither are published yet . My colleagues Hugh Macdonald, Yoko Akama and I are using Dewey’s model of the expressive object to frame artifacts in terms of how they help people inhabit an experience. In Dewey’s terms, some artifacts are statements, that lay out the circumstances under which an experience may take place; while other artifacts express an experience, or are an experience. These expressions are what we’re talking about when we say that artifacts can help people to inhabit experience.

I’ve been thinking about where this term inhabit came from, and realised that I’ve picked it up from James Wood. In How Fiction Works, Wood uses the term in two ways. Initially, he suggests that writers should inhabit their stories – or attempt to empathize with their characters. Secondly, he describes the “free indirect style” – a technique writers use to help readers inhabit the experience of a character.

So, lets riff on this for a moment, as we follow Diana, an interaction designer, down the street… The cracks in the sidewalk slip away as a couple round the corner, spines scrunched in an iPhone gait, oblivious to anything outside their user experience bubble…

Hugh Dubberly recently published an article called Models of Models where he introduces the concept of models and then breaks down the constituent parts so the reader can think about how to make and evaluate models for themselves. (hint – read the pdf, it communicates more richly than the post. the article also appears in Interactions Mag )

I was looking at this while thinking a lot about my PhD and some curriculum review that IxDA is currently undertaking with BDW. The following thoughts particularly resonated:

Passing models from one generation to the next is a responsibility of teachers and managers. Models are what students take away from school and what young people take away from early jobs. Models are what you remember after leaving.

I recently spoke with Hugh about a wide arc of ideas and histories related to interaction design, cybernetics and education. The issue of literacy (of systemic or ecological thinking) came up repeatedly, and re-reading this article reminds me to write a little about it.

If models are (as Alan Kay states) where “we do most of our work” (and I think they are) then why not teach modeling as well as models?

Let me explain. It is my belief that education is obsessed with trends; what’s relevant now? who’s hot now? what extends the canon? etc. These invariably manifest in a model of some sort; frameworks, theories, templates and protocols can all be traced back to a model. These are important to pass on. Reinvention is silly, except when it can help us understand.

Simon & Buchanan think it always has, but one thing I keep seeing is a ‘resistance’ to using the word “design”.

I think there are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that many people don’t think they ‘do’ design. It’s about this thought that I’ve been thinkin’…

One workshop participant described two courses they have introduced in an IT program. Both courses gave students a grounding in conceptual foundations of programming and the web, and the program saw an immediate increase in the number of students who passed subsequent courses.

To me, this sounds a lot like teaching students to be better designers by teaching them how to ‘read’ as well as ‘write’.

Design is a literacy, and we experience its literature every day.

• Herbert Simon’s use of the word “cookbooky” in Sciences of the Artificial
• Richard Buchanan’s “placements” and subsequent alignments I started to see with
• Dewey’s “expressions” as opposed to “statements” (via Jodi Forlizzi’s thesis)
• The notion of “free indirect style” James Wood uses to describe the way novelists will slide from third person to a semi-first person perspective, in order to put you into the head of the character (without being so explicit)

I’m pretty excited with this last bit, as it leads on from some of the thinking I’ve been having around design fiction (particularly sci-fi) – namely that the fictitious novel form has a way of leaving enough out so that the reader can inhabit the experiences of the characters. The experiences are re-simulated (ooooh nice, just thought of that )