emenel

designer, cyclist, musician, and food lover

works at Normative in Toronto

@emenel
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IDSA’s Interaction Design Archetype

IDSA’s Human Interaction creates the Interaction Design “Archetype” | IxDA

Dave Malouf just posted this link to the IxDA list. It’s really interesting for a number of reasons. 

I really like the general outline of skills they include for each stage, especially the inclusion of visual design and basic technology. Interaction designers need to become well rounded designers, and that includes these things. I know these are aspects of my own skill set that I am actively trying to improve.

There are a few things I don’t like, such as the use of the phrase “Rock Star” for the highest level, and that it skews towards the practitioner -> manager career path. We need a way for senior practitioners to keep practicing rather than managing. We also need to make sure our managers are great managers.. not all great practitioners make great managers.

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Gorgeous studio space.. although if I were in there it would have a lot more shit all over the place. It looks like a great work space with little evidence of design work going on :)
Nicosia Creative Expresso Ltd | Where We Design

Gorgeous studio space.. although if I were in there it would have a lot more shit all over the place. It looks like a great work space with little evidence of design work going on :)

Nicosia Creative Expresso Ltd | Where We Design

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Response: Principles of Interaction Design

I just read @paulseys’s post 11 Principles of Interaction Design explained, and there’s some good stuff in there, butI’m disappointed with the focus on usability. This is an ongoing issue with descriptions of IxD… 

One big item missing from his, and a lot of other, descriptions: 

Aesthetics

How does an interaction feel? Is it smooth enough? Fast enough? Too fast? Does it make me feel comfortable or anxious? Is it beautiful? Does it inspire?

We need to move beyond the focus on pure usability and utility and start developing a working practice of interaction design aesthetics. It should include elements form other forms of design like line, colour, texture, hierarchy, and tension, and add to those more elements like time, response, and fluidity (and maybe pleasant surprise?). This is by no means a complete or accurate list, it’s just intended to continue the conversation and get some ideas out there.

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Five things I’m thinking about right now

I saw this meme on Dan Saffer’s blog and liked it, so here’s my entry.

Five things I’m thinking about right now:

  1. Interactive narrative, in games and in life. How can we construct strong narrative arcs and characters in non-linear time? What is the balance between freedom and direction? Reading some great books like Hamlet on the Holodeck, and Vladimir Propp’s deconstruction of Russian folk stories. 
  2. Character building in RPGs, and how this could fit into passive gaming. Can you live simultaneously as yourself and a fictional character in your day-to-day activities?
  3. Brushing up on my music theory, reading about building chord progressions, modes, and inverted triads.
  4. How to integrate active prototyping more into my daily work. I want to make more stuff more regularly.
  5. Design workspace. The studio space is integral to cultivating a good design culture. What does it look like? How do we iterate and experiment with creating a great design studio environment?
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Very cool solution for creating tables form random slabs of wood.  I’ve seen many door-tables before, but none so elegantly converted.
I also love that this legs/binding system could be used to create tables of any size, making moving into a smaller or larger place a lot easier and cheaper. 
NICOLA FROM BERN

Very cool solution for creating tables form random slabs of wood.  I’ve seen many door-tables before, but none so elegantly converted.

I also love that this legs/binding system could be used to create tables of any size, making moving into a smaller or larger place a lot easier and cheaper. 

NICOLA FROM BERN

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Wireframes, stories, and Keynote

I saw this on Konigi this morning and found it interesting for a few reasons. Using Keynote as a drawing tool is kind of cool, but not that new… people have been using PowerPoint for wireframes for a long time, and Keynote just lets you make nicer looking graphics. 

BUT - I love his emphasis on telling a story with the wireframes, and Keynote is a great tool for creating a narrative. Crafting wireframes in the form of a presentation with good flow is fantastic. This gives purpose to the wireframes.. rather than just making them because they’re required. It also gives them a life beyond documentation.

I also really like his aesthetic for indicating clicks in the wireframes.. 


View more presentations from Travis Isaacs.

Travis Isaacs Demonstrates the Keynote Wireframe Toolkit | Konigi

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Celebrated Summer

The great thing about a song like Celebrated Summer, or much of Husker Du’s work from that time, is that it sounds like it’s barely under control.. like it’s about to get away form them.  It sounds like that feeling when you walk backwards and start going faster and faster until you’re about to lose control … it feels like your legs are about to go out from under you … that you can’t slow down … but you just manage to hang on until you can slow down and come to a stop before falling over … 

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(via ilovecharts)
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Follow up discussion about materials

I posted my last post about design and material to the IxDA list and there has been a great discussion around it. If you’re interested and want to follow along here it is:

http://www.ixda.org/node/26058

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The Designer’s Relationship with Materials

(I just lost the first draft of this post to a Tumblr error, so I’m rewriting it. I hope it’s still good.)


I read a great short post on the Frog Design blog this morning about Apple’s design process (article: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/why-apple-is-the-new-master-of-craft.html thanks to Dave Malouf for sharing this in his gReader). It highlights their relationship with the materials that they use, and how integral that is to their design process.


A quote from Jonathan Ive from the article:

The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.


A lot of what we do as interaction designers is still in the “annotated CAD drawing” category. We make our static boxes and text and send that off to somebody else to give it form (sometimes with our direction and/or collaboration, but not always). We never work with the materials of the final product. 


Just like industrial designers, our materials change with each project. They work with glass and steel on one project, then with plastic the next. Each time they need to learn the properties and possibilities of the materials. Sometimes we work on designs that will become html, css, and javascript; other times it will become objective c in the iPhone SDK, and the list could go on. Does this mean that we all have to become masters with all technologies we might use to implement our projects? No, not at all. What it does mean is that we should spend some time at the beginning of each project to play with the materials. Get to know their properties. This includes code, physical interface, responsiveness, symbolism, input, feedback, and more. 


The properties of a material are also aesthetic. Again, from Jony Ive:

… we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material—and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it.


Interaction designers seem to have some aversion to aesthetics, but we really need to starting thinking about how interactions feel along with how well they work. How does different material respond to different types of input, feedback, and animation? How does colour, texture, and spacing change people’s engagement with your product? Does it make them like it more? Less? Easier to use? More fun to use?


It might sound like I’m making the interaction designers job a lot bigger and more complicated… and well, in some ways I am. But, in other ways, I’m trying to bring interaction design in line with the complexities, challenges, and potential rewards of other design disciplines. There have been members of our community asking where the Jonathan Ive of interaction design is? Where is the Eames, the van der Rohe, the Rand? I think we will never get there as long as we avoid the larger challenge of designing in a holistic way. As long as others are alone responsible for the final form of our designed objects - the aesthetics, the feel, the implementation - we will never see the full potential of interaction design to make amazing things. 


We are more than wireframe jockeys. We are designers and are responsible for the output of our designs. We need to stop making piles of blueprints and CAD drawings, and start making the things that we envision. 

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I love the simple construction, yet complex appearance, of this table. The bent wire frame creates many interesting viewpoints and geometric patterns.
The SP-7 Table by Schwab/Panther » CONTEMPORIST

I love the simple construction, yet complex appearance, of this table. The bent wire frame creates many interesting viewpoints and geometric patterns.

The SP-7 Table by Schwab/Panther » CONTEMPORIST

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rcoleman:


“we have a thing called the internet…” #yellowpage via (bmdesign:)

rcoleman:

“we have a thing called the internet…” #yellowpage via (bmdesign:)

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