A review on my Interaction20 experience
My top 5 inspiring talks and perspective on Interaction20 conference in Milan.
Beginning of February, I attended Interaction20 in Milan — one of the top UX Design conferences. Those 4 days have been a rollercoaster of thoughts and a note taking marathon.🤯 It was a journey of meeting inspiring people and learning about an extremely wide range of stunning topics, all connected to the future of our role as designers and responsibilities in our work. I especially got to learn a lot about the role of design regarding social and environmental challenges that we are currently facing. Now that I took some time to process all of my impressions, I want to share a critical perspective on my experience about Interaction20 with you.
Starting the journey to Milan, I was full of curiosity about the next days and if they would meet my expectations:
- 🎯 Having clear takeaways and learnings that can be applied to my daily work as a UX Designer
- 🎯 Give me inspirational food for thought about my profession
Writing this recap now I am still overwhelmed and thrilled by the amount of inspiring insights I took back with me to Cologne, Germany. Held under the motto ‘A new Dawn’ the conference offered up to 31 talks a day with subtopics such as Mixed Reality, Robotics, AI, Life Cycles, Culture, Climate, Governance, Identities, Trust, Mobility, Ethics, Organisations, Multi-Modal and Tools of change. Offering this huge variation of talks obviously goes hand in hand with talks happening at the same time. That’s why the first challenge for me began long before going to Milan — making the hard choice of which talks to attend and which ones to miss. In the end I attended one workshop, 8 keynotes and 24 short talks in those 4 days. It took me some time to recap the flood of information and select my favourite talks, but here they are:
- 🎨 Giorgia Lupi — The human side of data
- 🌏 Marco Steinberg — Plan Z: A case for redesign
- 🌱 Audrey Tang — How Taiwan achieve SDG’s together
- ☠️ Katerina Markova — Digital directives: Managing our life after death
- 💭 Giulia Bazoli & Chiara Lino — Evolving users: The framing of fluid Mindsets
🎨 Giorgia Lupi — The human side of data
Giorgia Lupi kicked off the conference with her aspiring talk about ‘The human side of Data’. As an information designer, she takes a humanistic approach to data. In her talk she took us on a journey about the intersection between data and design and how she uses data as a design material to shape conversations and experiences with. In her amazing work, she translates data into images through data visualisation and interactive experiences. Whereas we tend to associate the term ‘data’ with numbers, technology or algorithms — something abstract that doesn’t feel connected to reality — she points out that data is indeed an abstract representation of our reality.
In her project ‘Bruises — the data we don’t see’, Giorgia created an impressive artwork visualising the journey of Cooper, the daughter of her friend and singer Kaki King, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease where she gets spontaneous bruises all over her body. For four months, Giorgia collected and combined quantitative data from medical tests and qualitative data from the observation of Cooper’s mother. The result: A stunning artistic visualisation of Cooper’s course of disease. As her work is particularly visual driven, every color, size, shape and position of elements in her visualisations is a direct representation of a data point. And so do the visual elements in her project ‘Bruises’ — every element represents a data point collected in the 4 month research of Cooper’s journey. Especially with the animated video of the visualisation building up, taking you step by step through Cooper’s journey with musical accompaniment by her mother Kaki, Giorgia gave the answer to the question: Can data evoke empathy? Yes, it can, presented in this way. Watching the video, I really felt emphasised with Cooper and her journey — so I’m happy that Cooper is totally fine today! Here’s the link to the video with explanation — if you want to experience it yourself, take a look here!
Another project by Giorgia that I loved is ‘What counts’. For the Target space at TED 2017, Giorgia designed unique data portraits of the attendees, using peoples answers to a survey and translating it into a hand drawn data driven image. The images were then printed on buttons to wear at the conference and served as an icebreaker to start conversations. This example really shows how not only the visualisation was designed, but also the experience around the invisible layer of data. Giorgia replicated this data portrait idea for her project ‘What counts’, where she designed and developed an interactive installation for the ‘Museum of city of New York’. Visitors are encouraged to answer a questionnaire on an iPad and based on this data, a unique data portrait is generated. The portrait can then be swiped to the gallery wall, contributing to the an animated portrait projection. As for all her projects, a legend explaining the visual elements of the data portrait is handed to visitors, so they can read the portraits.
With ‘the human side of Data’ Giorgia inspired me to see a new approach to design with and for data. Examples like her projects ‘Bruises’, ‘What counts’, and her fashion collection for the fashion brand ‘&other stories’ made clear to me what she means by ‘the data we don’t see’: The most interesting data is not the one in form of a spreadsheet — it’s the data that isn’t obvious yet unveiling the patterns around us. Instead of focusing on showing numbers, we should focus on what those numbers represent. Giorgia calls this approach ‘Data humanism’ — designing ways to connect numbers to their real meaning about our ideas, ourselves, our society and about making this knowledge available for everyone through visualisations. I was extremely inspired by Giorgia’s work yet find it hard to extract a clear takeaway that can be applied to my daily work as a UX Designer. For me this talk was more about admiring and learning about her almost artistic approach to design with data. Check out her amazing work here.
🌏 Marco Steinberg — Plan Z: A case for redesign
First of all: I absolutely loved Marco Steinberg’s talk and it was probably my favourite. His talk was about how our current social and environmental crises created an increasing demand for innovation in the public sector, which has been put under increasing pressure to transform itself and deliver solutions. Marco makes a call for innovation by reimagining the form of government itself — he shared his perspective on what is needed to create what he calls a ‘smarter government’.
We are at a point of transformation now, seeing the limitations of our current concept of government. We see limitations of our planet but also in our society, where the gap between the ‘Have’ and ‘Have nots’ is increasing. We are observing the rise of populism, a rise of anti-establishment. To Marco that is no surprise, because the ‘Have nots’ feel neglected by the system. But where we as a community could leverage this growing anti-establishment as a force of good to improve institutions and governance, we have failed. Instead, we allowed extreme and populist ideologies to hijack this discontent. Living in a time when our government is not aligned with its purpose, we need to fundamentally rethink and redesign how we govern instead of ‘just improving’ the current system which cannot meet the requirements in time.
With an example of a food truck in Finland which has been found illegal, just because the government was unable to figure out if the truck is a restaurant or a car and which department licenses it, Marco demonstrated the mismatch between the logic of government and our reality. His provocative statement of our ‘18th century institutions’ trying to grab up with 21st century problems really gave me a reality check.
What we need to do is transformation in government without disrupting our current institutions. Innovation starts by asking the right questions — and that is where the role of design and research comes in, operating in a different way. Ending his talk with a scale of how long it takes in our current system to rename a subway stop in Finland (3 years), or to clean a river in Germany (30 years), he’s really been pressuring us with the urgency of change. How are we supposed to address much more complex challenges like climate change with those systems in time? We need to think about and trust human ingenuity and innovation — which in the end is about human interaction, about the ability to connect ideas and people and to align towards a greater purpose. And when we do so, we need to be prepared for the institutional reflex of government to overestimate the risk of doing new things and underestimate the risk of the status quo. Marco’s provocative message made me question my role and responsibilities as a designer in our society with the challenges we’re currently facing. But then I ask myself, what can I contribute to the big picture? How can I really create an impact, working in a digital agency where obviously daily business isn’t about saving the world? I think what matters in the end is to aim for the changes that lie within our power. Even if it’s just a piece of the puzzle, we as designers can influence and thrive organisational change with our clients and thus, contribute to the big picture. We have round about 10 years left to do some extraordinary work and as Marco asked us, I’d like to ask you — are you ready?
🌱Audrey Tang — How Taiwan achieve SDG’s together
Audrey Tang kicked off the second conference day with a remote presentation from Taiwan. Let’s take a moment to appreciate that this setup of ‘Zoom’ for her talk and ‘sli.do’ for collecting questions during the talk (despite of some sound issues) actually worked quite well. 🙏🏼
As Taiwan’s digital minster (yes, they have a digital minister — how cool is that?) Audrey told us about Taiwan’s approach to co-create Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with the public and private sector which helps to reach relevant solutions faster. To do so, they use e-petitions. Everyone can start a petition for their idea. After, they need to collect 5000 signatures to get their idea to the next level. I especially liked the idea of ‘quadratic voting’, which is a method they use to select the most important SDG’s. Everyone (even people below the age of 18) in the voting platform gets 99 points which they can spend on more than 100 proposals on the SDG targets — but they can’t just distribute those points equally. Instead, they need to rank their preferences and prioritise. By using this collective intelligence, they are able to solve real social problems. They call it a ‘norm first approach’. Instead of the law catching up with technologies, Taiwan’s social sector collaborates with the private sector to co-develop norms. It was intriguing to see how Taiwan developed a whole new kind of government. What I found particularly fascinating is that the most active group to vote on the SDG targets are 15 year-olds and the next most active group are 65 year-olds. I think this really shows the need for countries like Germany to reconsider the age limit for elections.
☠️ Katerina Markova — Digital directives: Managing our life after death
Katerina Markova talked about what most of us tend to ignore, because just the thought causes discomfort — Death and the importance of handling our digital directives. When we think about death, usually there is an affiliated person who takes on the responsibility of taking care of the dead’s personal belongings. With the amount of digital services we use these days, there are no longer just physical belongings to be taken care of. This affiliated person will need to take care of our ‘digital belongings’ too. Do you actually know how many accounts you own? Well, Katerina uncovered the facts: 2020 each of us will have on average 207 online accounts. So, what happens to all those accounts and all the data we put out there in the world after our death? Who would want to take care of those in times of grief?
Katerina addresses this challenge by envisioning the future of dying digitally with her concept of a ‘hub’ right between the dying person and their affiliated person. In her theory, people will continue to use services and define preferences for each of them, but at the same time use a hub to overarch the used services with prior preferences in case of emergency or even death. In case of unusual user activities (or no activities at all) the hub system will check the user’s well-being by requesting confirmation from the services, which then will confirm the activity/inactivity of a user. After confirmation by the services, the affiliated person will be contacted to give a final confirmation about the user’s condition. Assuming something serious such as death happened to the user, the hub will then revert to its initial preferences which could be to delete all accounts and send personal or important data to selected people of trust.
Katerina got me thinking outside of my comfort zone and questioning the handling of my data and digital directives — which is something I never really thought about before, just like most of us. Please check out her fascinating perspective on digital dying here.
💭 Giulia Bazoli & Chiara Lino — Evolving users: The framing of fluid Mindsets
Giulia Bazoli and Chiara Lino from Designit gave an interesting talk about the use of Mindsets as a tool instead of Personas. The big deal about Personas is that they are static and unrealistic descriptions of non-existing individuals and that they easily become vectors for bias. So, they rethought the method by asking what information we really need and came up with ‘Mindsets’. Mindsets show the attitudes and emotional responses of different people in the same context. They show how people feel and what they need from a service that relates to a specific area of their life.
The anatomy of a Mindset consists of the following components:
- An evocative name (for example ‘Lost in the woods’) and a picture, to transport the Mindset’s attitude right away
- A description
- Life situations and set-ups which the Mindset might fit
- The type of relationship to the service they are interacting with, including the user’s needs and the role of the service to them
- User-quotes, to keep the connection to real people
- Future evolutions to describe short term as well as long term development of the Mindset
Just like any other method, Mindsets can’t live on their own to frame users. But what I really liked about this talk is that Giulia and Chiara questioned such common established and ‘basic’ method and developed a different way of thinking for researching and iterating users of products and services. They added a new tool to the toolbox that meets the problems of personas and should be used along with any other method that compliments it best. If you want to know more about Mindsets feel free to check out their way more detailed articles that describe the concept of Mindsets: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
And this was it! 🥳 Interaction20 really was a great conference that I would totally recommend. Yet I want to mention that the amount of totally different talks and thus their partly short length was problematic for me. I felt that the broad spectrum of topics and the tight schedule didn’t allow to really deep dive into those actually super interesting topics. This is why retrospectively, it’s also difficult for me to focus on one clear takeaway that can be directly applied to my work. As you might have noticed, my favourite talks mentioned above all address totally different topics — which is great, don’t get me wrong, it really has broaden my horizon. I was just missing some time to process thoughts or open up discussions with other attendees. Even though the amount of talks offered a great variety of insights, it would’ve been beneficial to me to reduce the quantity of talks / topics and thus allow diving deeper into topics as well as processing the input 🤔 Nevertheless — besides the fact that most of the content was very interesting — the casual atmosphere and open-minded folks that were always open for a chat contributed to this in the end great experience. Interaction20 exceeded my expectations — I left Milan with food for thought and it even got me questioning my role and responsibilities as a designer in todays society. So I am looking forward to next year’s Interaction in Montreal!
Thanks for reading! I plan to update this article with links to the talks as soon as they are online. There are more interesting talks than the ones mentioned — If you’re interested in them, just let me know. Feel free to comment your thoughts in the responses or just say ‘Hi’ here on linkedin. 👋
