Interaction Conference

You’ve worked hard on a design and finally got it nailed. You’ve thought deeply about the user experience and designed for usability and great information presentation. The visual design is compelling. Enjoy it while you can because you’ve been asked to hold a design review. Your creative and well thought-out design is about to be transformed into a into a patchwork quilt as stakeholders argue for changes based on their off-the-cuff reactions and personal agendas.

Whether you work inside a large corporation or you’re a consultant, managing design reviews is critical. This session will focus on:

1. How to prepare for a design review
2. How to manage difficult participants like Ivan the Intimidator, Cathy the Clueless and One Note Nate.
3. How to sift through the comments and respond to real concerns constructively and creatively.

Those who attend will gain new perspectives on design reviews and take away useful techniques.

Charlie Kreitzberg, Ph.D has attended many design reviews and has the scars to prove it. He is the CEO of Cognetics Corporation, an interaction design consultancy he founded in 1982. He has consulted with companies world-wide. He is founding editor of User Experience magazine; a former board member of UPA and Society for Information Management. He has written many articles, several books and has received awards for his work. He also serves as the Technology Director for Einstein’s Alley, a New Jersey economic development initiative.

Foundation and critique are two core elements that separate design from other ways of thinking and practicing creation of ideas and solutions. Foundations are the core elements that we manipulate within our craft. Critique is the way we judge the results of that craft. For critique to be effective though it requires foundation. It is only through our understanding of what it is that makes up our craft, that we can bring consistency and consensus to design criticism.

While interaction designers have strong evaluation skills through quantitative research such as usability, IxD lacks the same types of aesthetic-based design criticism that graphic design, architecture and industrial design have. This 25min. presentation is meant to offer the beginnings of a discussion around what could are the foundations of interaction design, how do they impact aesthetics of interaction and how can they be used for design critique within an interaction design practice.

David Malouf is currently a Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Before taking this position, David was a Sr. Interaction Design for Motorola Enterprise Mobility where he designed software, webware, and hardware interactions and interfaces. Motorola was the last in a 15 year journey of practicing interaction design, information architecture, ui design, project management and other roles and positions working almsot exclusively with think client technologies.

David is also one of the primary founders and first Vice President of theInteraction Design Association (IxDA). David's passion for evangelizing and teaching interaction design, came to a climax in 2008 when he co-chaired the first Interactions conference, Interaction 08 | Savannah. The overwhelming success of this sold out event has catapulted interaction design and IxDA.

Besides writing for this blog, David has been published online and in print writing on topics related to interaction design. David also teaches workshops on design and is available for hire for these workshops as his schedule permits.

You can find David immersed in the social networking world on Facebook, Twitter,Flickr, del.icio.us, Dopplr, and YouTube. You can follow my escapades with my wife, Theresa, and boy, Caleb.

John Thackara shows the ways in which business as we know it are about to change for good, and then identifies how interaction designers can take these challenges on as design problems.

About John Thackara:
John Thackara is Director of Doors of Perception, which was founded in 1993 to create a conference of that name in Amsterdam. It now produces festivals and projects that engage a worldwide network of designers, media artists, technology innovators, and grassroots innovators to imagine (and begin to design) sustainable futures. He also works with cities and regions seeking to build next-generation institutions.

A former London bus driver, and later a book and magazine editor, John was the first Director (1993-1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute. He was programme director in 2007 of Designs of the time (Dott 07) a new biennial in North East England. In 2008 he is commissioner of City Eco Lab at Cite du Design in St Etienne, the French design biennial. John is an Associate of The Young Foundation, and is senior advisor on sustainability to the UK Design Council. His most recent book, In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press) will appear this year in Italian, French, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese.

His personal web site is thackara.com.

Robert Fabricant talks about Interaction Design as a practice beyond just computing technology. He gives examples of Interaction Design as far back as ancient history, all the way to a humanitarian project underway today. He shows that Interaction Design's primary medium is behavior, extending far past the high technology world into the realm of human behavior and relationships.

To comment in this video, please go to library.ixda.org/node/3

Brought to you by the Interaction Design Association (ixda.org). Find more videos each week at library.ixda.org/.


About Robert Fabricant
Robert Fabricant is an Executive Creative Director at frog Design where he leads frog’s efforts to expand into new markets. Robert has been with frog since 2001, leading a multidisciplinary creative team in New York in a broad range of initiatives that span product design, interaction design, environments and branded experiences. He has worked with clients such as MTV, GE, Cox Communications, Virgin Mobile, Barnes & Noble, BBC and Nextel and designed user experiences for numerous platforms, including handheld devices, in-car information systems, medical devices, retail environments, networked applications and desktop software.

Prior to frog, Robert led the Research & Development team at Organic where he worked on wireless applications for clients such as Lucent Technologies, Federated and the Museum of the Moving Image. Other work experience includes @radicalmedia, Microsoft Research and Edwin Schlossberg Inc. He is an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program where he teaches a foundation course in Interaction Design. His interactive work has been featured in ID magazine, Wired magazine, the Wall Street Journal and presented at SIGGRAPH and DUX.