My top 10 of Interaction 16's submitted talks
Great all-round conference
The Interaction conference was exceptional this year. I think most of the attendees would agree:
Intricate organisation within a beautiful single building. Rich socialising through formal events and self-organized comms channels. Killer keynotes that weren’t too preachy and were still inspiring on many levels.
Above all, I was most impressed with the standard of submitted talks.
Out of the 23 odd talks I went to, there were only a couple that I endured or walked out of.
Here I wanted to highlight some of my favourite sessions and explain why as breiefly as I could. I’ll be adding links to slides and videos as they become released and may add further refelctions when I get more time.
My assessment criteria
I have judged these talks on three key criteria:
- Relevance (to me and my interests)
- Meaningful value (progressive, effective)
- Communication (verbal, visual)
My top 10 and why — at a high level
- Passengerhood: On the road to autonomy: John Rousseau
On point, rich, exceptional quality - Designing experiences for the connected car: Ricardo Aguilar
Intriguing, slick slides, unveiling - Smart Frictions: Simone Rebaudango + Nicolas Nova
Hilariously engaging, deep meaning, clearly rationalised - The Design Scientist: Amber Cartwright
Unveiling, slick, progressive - Crowds, Algorithms, and Computation — The new Materials of Design: Matthew Milan
Provocative, honest, intriguing - A design practice for the 21st Century: Matt Nish-Lapidus
Provocative, progressive, reframing - Conversations are the new interfaces: Alper Cugun
Funny, rich examples, interesting critique - The invisible cities: Pablo Honey
Stark minimal slides, provocative, city scale - Nature’s notifications: What technology can learn from a buzzing bee and a thunderclap: Emmi Laakso, Phillip Tiongson
Interesting area and emerging frameworks - Getting (dis)connected: Shallow interaction Patterns for Deeper human experiences: Kieran Evans, Jes Koepfler
Nice newer concept to explore
Passengerhood: On the road to autonomy:
John Rousseau
John talked about a project Artefact worked on with Hyundai around autonomous cars. It’s a project full of high quality thinking and execution. I’m amazed that an automotive company would share such thinking, and impressed that Artefact shared it for us to benefit from.
I was looking forward to seeing this presentation more than any other at the conference. I was impressed when I saw some of the work that Artefact published last year.
In the talk, John was able to further elaborate. He nailed the context. He clarified the challenges. He then outlined a clear structured set of considerations that we could apply to many complex semi autonomous systems.
He illustrated some key principles with super clear animations and visualisations.
He then took things to another level and showed some illustrations of new interiors, which I hadn’t seen before.
A solid concept case study with some applicability way beyond the domain of cars. We definitely need more of these in the future.
You can find the original case study here
Designing experiences for the connected car:
Ricardo Aguilar
Relating to Aretefacts’ talk, I was even more surprised to see Ricardo talk from Mercedes. One, because he used to work with me at RMA Consulting. Two, because Mercedes would share this sort of thinking direct to the community. It just goes to show how the auto companies are looking to change how they operate.
Unfortunately, Ricardo’s talk was much shorter than John’s. So he had to have a narrower focus. He decided to explore the connected car side of the auto interaction design side of things.
Ricardo opened with a video that subtly portrayed the joy of driving. A joy that many ignore when discussing autonomous cars. I’m so glad he emphasised this point.
But then, Ricardo stressed that the car is a symbol of freedom and privacy. And that this is experiencing a lot of change with connectivity. It is becoming the extension of the home. People want to transfer their digital worlds with them.
He emphasised the challenge of people interacting with phones as they drive.
He then showed how technology could live across the driving experience:
Before driving. During driving. After driving.
Ricardo then shared some of the experiential thinking around the recent F015 concept car. How people would experience non-attentive driving.
I was gagging for more, so luckily I was able to follow up with him in the breaks and at the IxDA awards.
Once again, great to see concept case studies with some theory and real world context applied.
Smart Frictions
Simone Rebaudango + Nicolas Nova
Design fiction gets its fair share of criticism but I was glad that it had its place at Interaction 16. With Nicolas Nova from the Near Future Laboratory, and Simone Rebaudango from Frog, we were in safe hands.
Simone took us through great examples of his and others’ work. He was funny. He was insightful. He had depth of meaning behind his work. The examples articulated key design challenges, and connected in an emotional way. His explanations took the work to another level. If only, the concept pieces could do more of this themselves.
Nicolas followed with rationale to the infamous material that the Near Future Laboratory has developed. He covered examples including the TBD Catalog, Quick Start Guide for autonomous cars (co-created at Interaction 15) and the fabulous Curious Rituals film. These should all be studied in some depth, but again, having Nicola providing richer rationale around them was extremely valuable.
You can see more from the Near Future Laboratory here, and more from Simone’s collective (design farm), Automato, here.
The Design Scientist
Amber Cartwright
Once more, case studies helped me to connect to some interesting concepts. It’s great to see real concept work that the speakers were actually involved in. Rather than people just curating others’ examples. But where this talk stood out, was its referencing of real live work from AirBnB.
Amber leads a large team of mixed disciplines at AirBnB. One of her focus areas is the host experience. It was intriguing to see the work they did. We heard about what they learned around developing a smart pricing tool for hosts. This would help people set the right price for their place dependent on lots of different factors.
The slides were slick. The delivery was crisp and engaging. It was a really tight talk. More importantly, it unveiled some interesting challenges that we’ll have to work with in the future.
Crowds, Algorithms, and Computation — The new Materials of Design:
Matthew Milan
I really liked Matthew’s talk. Though there was a lot of intriguing theory, it was mostly grounded in some real project work that he had been involved in. What I liked about Matthew’s work was his honesty, especially when quizzed about being user-centred. He doesn’t just follow the pack and has done a lot of thinking and wrestling with some of the complex systems that we are encountering.
Through examples, such as Waze, Matthew stressed the power of combining algorithms with the power of the crowd. Doing this through networks of systems was the key to scale effectively.
Having chatted to Matthew over dinner and drinks afterwards, it was great to connect with someone of progressive mind, who can deliver a crisp talk and be honest throughout.
A design practice for the 21st Century
Matt Nish-Lapidus
I’ve been a big fan of Matt ever since I met him 5 years ago at Interaction 11 in Boulder. He’s always been a progressive thinker, and he’s provocative, but in a really supportive way.
He was one of a great few that used language as a tool to help reframe what our design practice should become over the next few years. He also referenced arts projects. They still have constraints despite popular belief. But they often better question and explore critical concepts that we should be looking at more.
I really liked the concept of the interface being the seam between people and systems.
What was best, was when he was questioned on seamlessness. ‘Seamlessness is a scourge in our industry that needs to be suppressed’. Loved that, and couldn’t agree more. He went on to say that seams help lower the opacity of the system, which was often useful.
Unfortunately, I was incredibly hungover, so struggled to fully connect with all of his points. I will definitely be reviewing in more detail soon.
Conversations are the new interfaces
Alper Cugun
There’s a lot of chat about chat interfaces and chat bots at the moment with the likes of slack helping us to reach what Alper called peak chat.
He shared some of his work on creating a chat interface using Twine and other basic technology. He explained some of his rationale about appealing to people who engaged in chat conversations better than typical UIs.
He then explored the world of chat interfaces. He reinforced the benefits of not having to learn a new UI. But he explained how hard it could be to deliver at scale, and where algorithms might have to help more. But also, he raised the challenges of pace when interacting with these things again and again. It gets a bit laborious, it seems.
I’m afraid, due to tiredness I zoned out quite a bit on this talk, but he raised a lot of laughs and this is certainly one I wanted to explore some more.
The invisible cities
Pablo Honey
I really liked the subject matter that Pablo covered in his talk around cities. He connected to some interesting themes that affect people who work in this area. His slides were absolutely gorgeous — I think all Black and White.
Nature’s notifications: What technology can learn from a buzzing bee and a thunderclap:
Emmi Laakso, Phillip Tiongson
One of the most popular talks at the conference for those that saw it was around notifications. This is an obvious area of challenge, and it was nice to go deep on the area.
There was some nice thinking, with associated models and principles. However, the dynamic between presenters distracted a little bit. It probably could have been better with just Emmi, who came up with the idea after walking through forests.
I think it’s great that this area was explored. However, the talk could have benefited from some more rounded research into sound and other senses.
Getting (dis)connected: Shallow interaction Patterns for Deeper human experiences
Kieran Evans, Jes Koepfler
The duo did a good job of talking about a concept and showing examples of their own work to illustrate their points. Their subject of shallower interactions was a nice antidote to the idea of fully immersed and deep interactions.
I’ll have to go back and dig deeper on some of their work. However, there was something about the concept of shallower interactions to promote deeper ‘real life’ interactions. It beats the NO UI rhetoric in my book anyway.
Check out the slides below
What did you think?
I’ll try to explore some of the emerging themes in a separate, more tightly written post, but i’d be interested in others’ experiences of the above talks or your own top talks.
