“This presentation was prepared for a lecture in Melissa Cicozi’s undergrad Design History class at CMU. Standard disclaimers apply: This was not carefully fact-checked, and it very much represents my personal view of what has been and is now important. Caveat emptor, and bon appetit.”
Design and Emotion
“One can feel happy about the car that functions properly, aesthetically pleased by the gentle curve of a mobile telephone, proud of possessing a particular necklace, feel indignant because the intelligent product used seems to have a (stupid) mind of its own, and angry because the drawer makes a grating sound. Research in this area investigates what critical factors of human-product interaction contribute to an emotional experience.”
Business-centred design: Designing web sites that sell
“When designing a persuasive architecture, we have to understand and account for every step in the buying process and design for effective calls to action, even if this action is simply to move on to the next step in the process.”
Comments Off
Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview
“One can’t work for too terribly long in the broader user-experience community without hearing the words ‘Experience Design.’ It’s a rubric I as an information architect have a tough time swallowing, despite my near-boundless respect for the people who have identified themselves as members of that community. Why is this so, when I think we’re after the same, or a highly similar, thing — the consistent evocation of pleasurable, meaningful human experiences when confronted with complex artifacts? I thought it might have something to do with a certain professional inclination to distrust engineered ‘experiences,’ and a corresponding belief that users might prefer to be offered information with which they could then build their own. Over the summer, I emailed Nathan Shedroff — probably the single human being most identified with the term Experience Design — and asked him if he wouldn’t mind participating in a debate exploring this idea; happily, he agreed.”
Comments Off
The New Rationalism
“Good article in Cre@te Online… It’s an interview with Bill Moggridge of IDEO — genuine design legend, and the man who coined the phrase ‘interaction design’ …Moggridge noted that the aesthetics recede as behaviour becomes more important — that behaviour is the aspect people actually engage with.”
Comments Off
Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go
A Conversation with Will Wright by Celia Pearce: “Well, actually, the way to put it is that I’m trying to build the maximum possibility space in your head, not on the computer. (Laughter.) Okay. Because the possibility space on the computer is just a huge pile of numbers, but as far as you’re concerned that pile of numbers is the same as another pile of numbers…”
Comments Off
An information design timeline
From “1861: Charles Minard draws Napoleon’s march against Moscow. See the information graphic that Edward Tufte calls ‘probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn’ and then order a copy.” …to… “2000: The IDJ is now published by John Benjamins, under the editorial direction of Piet Westendorp and Karel van der Waarde.”
Comments Off
Extreme design versus extreme programming
“[Alan] Cooper’s view is that the kinds of disasters that have always plagued the industry — most recently, the catastrophic outcomes of many CRM (customer relationship management) systems — are a result neither of poor strategy, nor of poor engineering, but of a failure to properly coordinate the two. The missing piece in his view is product planning and design, done according to a methodology that Cooper has devised and that his company practices.”
Comments Off
Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design
“Kent Beck is known as the father of ‘extreme programming,’ a process created to help developers design and build software that effectively meets user expectations. Alan Cooper is the prime proponent of interaction design, a process with similar goals but different methodology. We brought these two visionaries together to compare philosophies, looking for points of consensus — and points of irreconcilable difference.”
Comments Off
Strategies of Influence for interaction designers
“Unless you have the power to make business and development decisions for your project, some of your energy will be spent influencing those that do. Experienced usability engineers or interaction designers may have limited skill in influence, despite how significantly it can effect their ability to contribute to projects. It’s the smartest and most effective designers that work to understand the human to human interaction within their project teams, as part of their work towards better human to computer interaction.”
Comments Off
