Some thoughts after Interaction19
I’ve just come back from Seattle and the latter Interaction Conference. IxDa is one of my fav global conferences where I can focus on the state of the art in the Design, debate and receive feedbacks.
Moreover, having a period of time far from the studio, on a different time zone from more of the activities, give me an opportunity to focus on fresh ideas and improvements.
Into the wild
The main topic of the conference was “Design in the wild” and it was really appropriate. First of all for the climate: it was really extreme with snow and chilly winds. I feared I could not fly back home :-)
But, even if designers have some prescience super-powers, they could not foresight the polar storm hitting the city during the conference. “Wild” is meant in a broader sense as the new context in which we operate: complex, fluid, and ever-changing under the pressure of the technological evolution.
The Next Big Thing is not a thing, it’s a change in the ecosystem of social relationship — Bill Buxton
This new environment sets new design challenges and calls for deeper designers’ commitment: our challenge is — one more time — on the experience lived by people, not on the device they use. It’s about the uncontrolled flow of micro-moments in an unknown context. People now want to live seamless experiences across a multiplicity of contexts and situations and this is going to be our main battlefield in the years to come.
Therefore designers have to abandon the dream of controlling the flow of the user, but they have to find new forms of systemic design, where experience is defined by a set of asynchronous interactions.
Living with AIs
And this is the second main theme of Interaction 19: what designers should do in a context where AIs are playing an ever-increasing part?
Off course, there were a lot of talks about the ethics of design and the ethics of AI, but I don’t want to go in depth on this, but, if you are interested in what’s going on, I suggest you follow Chris Noessel and its brilliant notes on the topic.
The most interesting thing, in my opinion, was still how the role of designers and their skills are going to change to cope with this emerging question: designers have to start working side by side with data scientist, embracing their methodologies, to conceive tools and ecosystems that anticipate the humans and smooth the frictions between systems and contexts.
Some suggestions from the BigDad and the Outer Space
At the end of the day, there are two set of rules that, in my opinion, synthesize the role of the designers in the 21st century.
The first batch was provided by Donald Norman, while the second comes from the JPL Nasa. As you might see, there are vast overlapping areas in those suggestions and the main takeaway from the conference can be listed as follow: in a hyper-complex world, the role of designers is to stay with the users and provide a critical, alternative and generative perspective to the tyranny of experts in order to generate value.
Donald Norman on design against expert
- Be a system-thinking generalist
- Focus on people
- Identify the core issue
- Treat the system, not just the symptom
- Take incremental, opportunistic steps
- Mentor & facilitate community creativity
- Think of societal platforms
JPL Nasa design team on design for expert (people smarter than you)
- Learn about who you’re working with and what is his goal
- Figure out how to deliver value for them and value for UX with their (visual) language (slide deck and flow diagrams wons)
- Use your design skills to help facilitate their process like a coach for engineering people
- Synthesize (not simplify) complex processes through visualization
- Demonstrate, show them how UX improves their development process (value for them is only working software, accelerate them asking what their need)
- Show them the kinds of deliverables they can ask for (don’t choose the deliverable alone)
- Make your contributions visible on walls, and Jira (print print print)
- Use your awesome research skills to ramp up quickly, they are not waiting for you
- Find supporters of UX who will advocate for the quality of your work (only a few people)
Next year, the conference will be in Milan. Almost at home. See you there! (Hope it won’t be as cold as in Seattle!)
