At our recent ixda board retreat (caveat – I’m an IxDA Director) there was overwhelming agreement that we (the org, network, & field) were at a tipping point. Technological culture has extended to affect so much of our experience*, and it’s clear that Design is going to play a pivotal role in helping us thrive in the world we’ve (largely unwittingly) designed for ourselves. …read more
Maybe this is my new blog
August 22 09
Very exciting news from posterous around their new features.. As an easy way to post and automate rich additions for the meta content of your post, this could form the basis of publication engine quite easily.
The Social Life of Visualization
August 2 09
We’ve just published an article, The Social Life of Visualization, over at JohnnyHolland.
The article introduces our framework for Social Data Visualization, and gives a good intro to the idea of object centered social systems. Let us know what you think!
Social Visualization Patterns
July 9 09
Today we launched the first major public outcome of a project I’ve been leading for the last year, a site documenting our Social Visualization framework. You can check it out at http://socialvizpatterns.info …read more
Visualizing a fundraiser
June 28 09
Decided to sit down this afternoon and get jiggy with processing. For my first sketch I visualized the recent fundraiser IxDA ran to rise money for our next-gen infrastructure development.. check it out and let me know what you think!
making it up as we go along
May 28 09
I believe that interaction design (and by extension, service design) is an emerging practice.
Designers who do this kind of stuff are making a lot of it up as they go along. They’re inventing new methods, creating hybrids of “best practices”, testing the effectiveness of their existing methods, and (thankfully) sharing their discoveries with the wider design community. This is one reason why I believe we’re seeing more innovation come out of the practice of this kind of design than we see emerging from the study of this kind of design:
Trivial objects and the stuff of life: a story
May 23 09
I’m reminded of reading Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Expereinces again for our first UXBookclub in Melbourne early this year. Particularly the chapter that starts with a story about the orange juicers; Experience Design vs. Interface Design. But this post isn’t about that, its about an experience I had a few months back that really brought home to me the power of physical form and object qualities. …read more
so what’s the real reason?
May 21 09
had a small breakthrough today on the PhD: when asked to write for 10 minutes non stop in a ‘how to get yourself started’ workshop.
I discovered that I’ve never really stated that I want to approach this PhD as a design problem, looking at education and other things (like IxDA) as a service.
so
- if IxDA, education etc are a service, what behavior is that service supporting?
- How can I turn the light of IxD research on itself?
- How can you use the process and methods that interaction design employs to better understand what it needs as a field?
This really interests me because it sits at the intersection of academic and practical understandings of IxD practice..
…so to help us answer the question: what does it mean to be a member of IxDA?
Maybe we need to first answer the question: what does it mean to be an interaction designer?
Phd proposal update
May 19 09
Designing Interaction Design
essential qualities and capacities for interaction design practiceWhat am I doing?
Fifteen years ago, you could find Interaction Designers – if you traveled to Silicon Valley, or maybe a few select Universities across the world. Today, the profession supports a global network numbering in the thousands. Many of the professions leaders have backgrounds in related disciplines, such as Industrial Design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Science, Communication Design, Cognitive Psychology & Anthropology (to name a few). While formal Interaction Design qualifications are rare in industry veterans, the increasing trend in hiring is to require formal Interaction Design qualifications from new graduates.
Interaction Design is at a tipping point: the field has rapidly emerged from collaborations between the aforementioned disciplines, into a profession that now seeks formal structures, definitions and career pathways. This situation provides the impetus for my research. …read more
PhD poster and abstract
May 12 09
Designing Interaction Design
PhD (Communication Design)
This research explores the rapidly forming field of Interaction Design, and seeks to answer the following questions:
- what qualities and capacities do interaction designers deem essential to their practice?
- how can this knowledge inform academic and professional roles in the development of this emerging field?
