#ixda14

[ixdlife-blog]

Definitely one of the best and most inspiring talks I have seen from #IxDA

[flegontovna]

[flegontovna]

You don't design interactions, you design the context for interactions

Stephanie Akkaoui

[srhhnry]

Interaction14: Day Two Recap

Day 2: Friday

The theme of the trip seems to be manageability. How and why are some things manageable and others are not? Amsterdam feels like a very manageable city. You can bike to most locations, and the city is dense enough that every neighborhood feels like it is it’s own small city, with a character and access to most of the the things one needs to day to day. 

My favorite presentation today was the Friday Jam Session, in which three speakers had 10 minutes to present. The first of these, Navit Keren, was a graduate of the Parson’s MFA program in design. She discussed her thesis research on how we treat the end of our lives. Her explorations eventually led her to the forms we use to describe how we would like to be treated as we die, known as advanced directives. She found these forms to be complex and lacking a conversational tone, or a more humanizing language. She also found that the challenge with solving for this issue is that people don’t want to talk about it, at all.

The second speaker presented on working as a ux designer with enterprise-level software as a service (SaaS). She narrated while a video depicted her experience in the visual language of dragons, fables, and flat animation. 

The final speaker outlined a design initiative in which he and his colleagues tried to fit a financial services problem into the analogy of a subway map. The poor guy, his computer kept failing, and thus the presentation turned into a lesson on how important visuals really are in the explanation of a complicated map. 

And once again, here is a smattering of tweetable moments, without context, for your associative pleasure:

“Once you use it a few times, you don’t have to use it anymore. It becomes part of the environment.”

“Dragons do not speak “users” they speak pirate”

“...ever younger objects...”

“You have to get the whole thing right”

“We raise our voice in a loud environment.”

“What would you like to ask a pair of shoes?”

[ashleymarieandthesea]

Interaction 14 - Day 3

(A recap, the final day)

The final day of the conference offered probably my favorite talk of the whole event. Arlene Birt spoke on The Visual [Emotional] Vocabulary of Sustainability. I know I keep relating everything back to thesis, but it's on my mind, and this talk specifically really gets at the heart of what I've been thinking about since our Thesis I course in our first year. The concern was about certain words (environmentalism, sustainability, green design, climate change) and how they've essentially become negative words in the minds of most people. They remind people of punishment and shame. Arlene called it emotional baggage, and that shame just equals shutdown, which is the opposite of what people working in this field want to happen. 

So, she's been coming up with visual languages to help discuss these issues. Information overload is one of her focuses, currently she has been working on projects redesigning the product label, putting the whole story of a product on a package in a concise and visually pleasing manner. It reminded me of NPR's Planet Money Makes a T-shirt. A 5-chapter interactive story that starts with the cotton and goes all the way to the store, except their story takes 5 videos, all of varying lengths from 1 to 7 minutes long, plus a written story for each chapter. It's a lot of information which they break down into a beautiful story, but not something you could replicate with every product on the store shelves. Instead, Arlene distills this information down into iconography and color, a whole story on the side of cereal box. Her goal is to connect "the everyday" to the "big picture". 

[ashleymarieandthesea]

Interaction 14 - Day 2

(This is a recap)

Last week I attended the IxDA 14 Conference with classmates from the SVA IxD program. The conference went by in a furious blur of note taking, meeting new people, and coffee breaks. Day 2 started out with a keynote by Irene Au, focusing on the connection between the mind and body and how consciousness affects our creativity and emotions. It reminded me a lot about some of my intentions entering this second year of grad school. In wanting to be more intentional and receptive in my actions. Hers were physical actions that can help that mindset, from stretches to posture, you can manipulate your thoughts. 

After working on my consciousness I attended a presentation by Svenja Jeune, an interactive artist with a unique point of view about how we treat our objects. To me, it felt like the perfect follow up. As opposed to a talk that takes a pragmatic approach to experience design, this was about feelings and empathy towards our surroundings, much like the talk before was about empathy to oneself and others. Her question was: What is the future of our objects? For most, the future is a landfill. But instead of making the statement in an upsetting way, she took a very curious approach to the problem. Giving her objects agency and a voice for communication, giving them personality and emotions. In this way, she is able to design communicative surfaces that better bridge the gap between interface/technology/human. I know for a lot of attendees her talk probably was a little too weird for them, or maybe it didn't talk about wireframes enough (or at all), but that might be why I gravitated to it so strongly. I'll take the weird over the expected any day. 

[rozinakoskela]

IXDA Information for life conference

IXDA 2014's theme is "information for life". This video depicts our notion of what the theme means to us. It is about now the importance needs to focus on creating an open collaborative environment amongst the people living in rural areas. This is likely to be encouraged from the idea of working with peer to peer relationships and moving away from a more hierarchical approach.