interaction design

Interaction Awards 2012 Winners

by Andy Polaine on February 4, 2012

Sadly I couldn’t be at Interaction ’12 in Dublin this week, so I’ve been vicariously soaking up the vibe (but not the alcohol) on Twitter and the IxDA conference blog. This year was the first ever Interaction Awards and the winners were just announced.

My absolute favorite was CIID student Ishac Bertran’s Pas a Pas project, which won the Best Student category. The video above explains it best, but Betran describes the project as

an interactive educational tool for schools that enables children to learn and experiment with different sets of elements using animation. It aims to use the physicality and the animated outcome of stop motion animation to bridge the gap between abstract concepts from maths, physics or arts (usually represented by graphs, equations or words) and reality.

As the father of a nearly three year-old daughter who goes to a kindergarten that has a lot of Montessori input and who also loves to grab my iPad and play with it, I really loved the crossover analogue-digital nature of Pas a Pas. The retro hi-fi look of the product design of it really works so well with the concept too. An invitation to play if there ever was one.

Best In Show went to LoopLoop, a tiny sequencer made using Sifteo cubes. It is very cute, but for me was more a re-hash of many a sound toy I’ve seen (and designed) than anything really re-thought. Most of all, more effort seemed to go into the interaction design than the irritating plinky-plonk sound design, which I think is a shame, although this often happens with such toys.

Best Concept went to Out of the Box, a clever way of telling people learn about their new smartphone in an analogue way. It’s basically a book with sections cut out of various pages in which the phone and its parts sit. As the user turns the page, the book tells them how to interact with the physical object. I can’t help feeling it’s a little unwieldy, but very cleverly worked out nonetheless.

The People’s Choice were the Interaction Cubes, which are a nice, low-tech way of creating an interactive periodic table. The analogue aspect of this seemed to connect with people.

(p.s. Don’t forget to go and check out the Interaction 12 Student Design Challenge. It’s a different competition in which finalists compete on-site during the conference. I co-chaired it last year.)

Tagged as: competition, interaction design, ixda

End User Development and more from Interaction-Design.org

by Andy Polaine on December 1, 2011

in General

Mads Soegaard and his wife Rikke Friis Dam have been hard at work over at their Interaction-Design.org site, a free and well put together resource of educational materials about interaction design. The whole site is set up as an encyclopedia with tightly focused articles that have expert commentary underneath and often plenty of video interview material. It’s also been formatted for print/PDF export as well as iPad/iPhone reading. A lot of effort has gone into the site (read the history of it) and it is well worth regularly visiting – the main encyclopedia page already has plenty of useful chapters.

Mads has pre-released some new material on End User Development, “a set of methods, techniques and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify, or extend a software artifact” (Lieberman et al 2006). The intro video is below, which gives some definitions:

While the focus of this tends to be on software, I think there are also some lessons to be learned in terms of service designers delivering tools and skills to organizations they are working for, who in turn can further develop according to their needs themselves. On the one hand, it feels like we’re almost putting ourselves out of business – the old teach a man to fish idea. But I think there are plenty of smaller situations in which organizations do well working internally and pull in outside expertise when they feel they need the external input or a deeper knowledge of a process. It’s much like the difference between basic car maintenance and hiring a mechanic. The added benefit is that organizations are much more receptive to your processes and interventions when they have already taken on the mindset themselves.

Tagged as: Education, interaction design, resource

Kinetic Design

March 16, 2009

Alongside the surge of interest in gestural interaction, there appears to be a rising fascination with kinetic works too. Some of this comes out of the crossover of interaction designers now being able to relatively easily work with physical computing interfaces like Arduino boards and camera tracking. But there seems to me to be a [...]

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Interview and profile of Dan Saffer

February 2, 2009

Core77 have just posted an interview and profile I wrote on Dan Saffer and hhis new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces. Dan talks about his vision for future devices and the way design agencies need to shift to a much more multi-disciplinary way of working if they are to survive. I’ll just point you to “Talk [...]

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