--Engage!

My new blog (and blog address)

So check out my new blog (now on Wordpress).
But more importantly be sure to change your feed as this blog is going the way of the do-do. Don’t worry though b/c all the content here is on the old site.

I can’t believe after 3 years of waiting I got http://davemalouf.com/ .

Where is IxD in 2008? Where is it going

Last night I had the honor of facilitating a panel with the brilliant duo of Ted Booth (Dir. of IxD @ Smart Design) and Jennifer Bove (VP of IxD @ HUGE).

The panel was more of a town hall with the overwhelming crowd of 200 peeps who filled the wonderful Bloomberg facilities (Wow! what a red carpet treatment!). The audience more than filled the requirement of active participation leading to an amazing conversation about issues facing interaction design and interaction designers today.

My only regret is that we were cut short and missed some 25% of the slide deck embedded below. But you get to at least enjoy the slides here. (I’ll post the link to the video when it becomes available.)

Transition

Moving from industry to education; from deep/big urban to small town; and I’m sure many more.

My life is now filled with some pretty big transitions. It seems I am a soul in transition. I don’t think i have gone more than 3 years without some major transition going on in my life and even then I’m always keeping busy with something that is gestating or gyrating or otherwise keeping me on my edge. Every so often these events collide and bring about HUGE change in very short time periods.

I’m leaving NYC. That in and of itself is not news. This will be my 3rd time leaving the NY Metro area in my life. But unlike the last 2 times when I went to the “Promised Land” (Think Chuck Berry, not Moses), this time I’m headed South to Savannah, GA. Having been to Savannah a bunch of times I know this is going to be a big mind shift culturally for myself and my family and I’m just praying that this nice Long Island/California raised Jewish boy will be Ok in this very new environment. What I do know is that everyone I’ve met so far has been absolutely warm, welcoming and otherwise truly in the spirit of southern hospitality.

The other big change that is more relevant to the regular readers (are there regular readers?) of this blog is that I’m leaving the world of industry and going into education. I’m staying firmly within the bounds of my religion--design--but leaving the world of practice, for the world of creating tomorrow’s practitioners.

I’ll be teaching within the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) as I’ve told people here previously. My role is one of Professor of Interaction Design and I’m quite excited about all of it. Not only will I be teaching to undergrads interested in having a minor in interaction design (as part of their other major design curriculum) but also I’ll be forging a new Masters of Design in Interaction as a joint program between Industrial Design and Interactive & Game Design. A place that I believe it squarely belongs--It belongs as a junction between mediums as opposed to owned by any one medium. I’m also excited to be working closely with an amazing Game Design department and their new veteran Chairperson, Brenda Brathwaite.

My journey into this new world of education (I’m constantly avoiding the term ‘academia’ as i’m working for a design school and not a standard research university) has already begun. So far I had to do the following:

1) I had to put forward my vision for a Masters program (++) in Interaction Design. Something I do all the time on the IxDA list, but this time I had to make sense and be real to the school that I was suggesting it for. Meaning, the program needs to fit the goals and mission of SCAD and the Industrial Design Department.

2) I had to amend the syllabuses for the courses I’ll be teaching starting in January. This was a fun labor in deed.

First I had to evaluate the work of my predecessors, Bob Fee most recently who was filling in after, < href="http://jonkolko.com/">Jon Kolko, departed the position I’m taking up. It was fun to see where I agree with my peers, but honestly, even more fun to see where my take on education and the needs of making great future practitioners has different needs.

It would be unfair of me to pinpoint all of my disagreements with the syllabuses I’ve looked at thus far, and it is unfair to state that it was all bad. Looking over Jon’s material in particular was very education for me. There was no throwing out the baby with the bath water here at all. It would be more fun to say that I just needed to put my own voice into my classes.

An example is that Jon Kolko in his interactive product design class uses Poetry as a class topic. I actually really liked the way he used poetry as an analogy to the design of interactive experiences, but it is not in the spirit that I find most useful for practice for me and within my general experience. So I replaced this one class with my own leanings which are towards narrative and theater. The similarity is the metaphor of the linguistic, but I move deeper into other areas of narrative story line and audience where Poetry stops. I also feel that I can really use the reference work of Brenda Laurel’s work in this area particularly well and have it lead to quick application to the studio portion of the course.

What’s most important at this stage in my transition is to note the balance during any transition between creating a new voice, that is still able to communicate your existing world view.

I think so long as I maintain this attitude moving forward I will find tremendous success.

In this early stage of my education transition I want to thank the Tom Gattis (ID Dept Chair) for his over flowing confidence in my future success and Bob Fee (Prof. of ID) for his constructive criticism and overwhelming appreciation for what I’ve been able to do thus far. This makes me feel very optimistic about my future at the end of this tunnel of transition.

Sketching for Interaction Design - Still happening - 10/29

Though the first attempt didn’t take, there has been strong support for a take 2. I really want to teach this special workshop on Sketching for IxD and I hope you can make it—now on Oct 29th.

Victor of SmartExperience.org and I had a hard time canceling the class, but there just wasn’t enough juice in it given our overheads at that time.  Since canceling though, 1 or 2 organizations have stepped up and said, we’ll host for free if you make it happen. So one or both are going to try and help (details are being worked out).

The course description is still the same, but in the spirit of the tough financial times we are all facing, I’ve reduced the price to $400 for the day long workshop. That’s a bargain by most standards.

Here is the description of the class:

Are you looking for new ways to bring design thinking and design practice into your daily practice as a user experience professional? Do you want to learn how great designers of all types get to that “new” idea without having to wait for divine inspiration? Do you think that “sketching” is only a tool left to those who have been formally trained to draw?

“Sketching for Interaction Design” is a 1-day seminar and workshop created to teach people what sketching really is all about, why it is powerful and how you can bring it into your daily practice as a User Experience Professional. In this class you’ll learn how the great organizations of design and innovation use sketching in their daily practice. You will also gain practice in sketching and see why it is a distinctive tool from prototyping geared more towards idea generation than for testing and communication. It is both a tool for personal use, and a tool for group collaboration.

The course will contain these units:

• Defining sketching as something similar to but different from prototyping


• Placing sketching in the context of a larger design process


• General practice using drawing as a communication tool


• Class project working in teams


• Communicating concepts in interaction design


• Review period of team work


• Take away lessons, and next steps for people wanting to apply sketching to their practice

The course is geared towards people who are practicing interaction design and other user experience practices, but can be beneficial for anyone who is trying to apply core design thinking methods into their personal and business practices. No previous experience with drawing or sketching is required. You don’t even have to bring a writign instrument or paper, as we’ll be providing them for you.

To register send me an email (dave[dot]ixd[at]gmail[dot]com). All payments will be made over my PayPal account.

The Biggest Announcement EVER on tihs blog — From industry to academia

Yup, I’m leaving Motorola as of the middle of December and starting off the new year as a Professor of Interaction Design at the Savannah College of Art & Design in historic Savannah, GA, USA.

There are so many reasons for this move. The biggest of which is that it is time to focus on family and I’m hoping that the combined slower life of teaching and Southern US living will help me focus on what is most important right now. My family.

The other reason is related. I’ve always been someone to dream big and at least try to go big. I think my biggest success in this area is IxDA. But having a very engaged career at Motorola Enterprise Mobility, a wife & toddler, and my ambition for building not just a community of practice but advancing the growing discipline of interaction design has left me entangled. So I’m still thinking big and also in the spirit of Randy Pausch going to do one of my childhood dreams—teach. (Before going into computers I was an anthropology grad student with the goal of teaching.) I have been encouraged by one of my favorite people, Jared Spool, to take my teaching further and when this position came to my attention I had to take it very seriously.

I also believe I can do more for interaction design from this position. Part of my mandate leading interaction design on this design campus is to be outward facing, and to further myself as a community thought leader. For the first time my goals are getting closer aligned than they had been in the past.

So for people curious about what I’ll be doing. I’m going to be the Professor of Interaction Design within the Industrial Design department of SCAD. I will be taking over where John Kolko left off with the long term of goal of transitioning a minor in IxD, into a full-fledged program.

There are lots of problems to be designed around in this space and there are no easy paths through the new cultural landscape I am dropping into, but I enter with optimism, support from my Department Chair and Dean and with a sense of realism. I am also entering with the idea that I’m just going to enjoy what I do NOW and while the future is exciting, so is the present and I can’t wait to begin. I can’t believe it is less than 3 months away.  Many people reading this have known for a while and well, now consider yourselves free to spread the word.

To this regard, there are a couple of negatives. First, I have not just invested myself in the global creation of IxDA.org, but the local group here in NYC. The team has bounced a lot over the last 4 years and is now I feel hitting its strongest stride ever. Right at a time when IxD is going to get exciting in NYC with the advent of the new Masters program at School of Visual Design, and the leadership of the local IxDA group being led so wonderfully by MJ Broadbent, it is both a good time and a very sad time for me to be leaving NYC.

The other big negative is that after my 2 1-day workshops this month for SmartExperience, I will not be able to teach for SmartExperience (and the great Victor Lombardi) again. Teaching these great students has been an amazing test bed for my thinking and all my students have been wonderful to have as the vast majority engaged in thinking with me and helped me evolve my thinking class to class.

But I have been hating my very long commute, and the politics of my never-ending project, and the hustle and bustle of NYC living (despite loving its diversity, community, and inspirations) for quite some time. And while Savannah is going to be a Twighlight Zone shift at first, I am so looking forward to throwing away my winter clothes, and finding a new home with a porch swing where I can just sip sweet tea all weekend long. Oh! the 22weeks of vacation time and 4-day work week when I do work, won’t be too bad either.

2 core attributes of RIAs

In looking at my upcoming workshop on RIAs and IxD I thought I’d write a bit about defining an RIA in terms of user experience but also technology (sometimes they are inseparable).

The Page

"There is no [page].”
—Neo

What Neo had to figure out in “The Matrix” (I can’t believe you haven’t seen it so I have no sympathy if you haven’t) is that when living in a virtual environment it is all metaphor, or to say it is all a mental construct and that can be easily disassembled or re-arranged.  The other side of metaphors is that their existence while intangible are framing. So until the very moment you say “there is no spoon” (the real line) there is definitely a spoon (or trash can, or page, or site map, etc.)

This relates in (its own metaphor) to the traditional page metaphor of the web. This paradigm shift while almost second nature at this point for most of us designing for RIAs is the KEY change in thinking designers need to make to really enter the RIA arena.

Distributing the GUI in real time
Not as neatly and cutely described, but is something that most people talking about RIAs forget about it. The very method of deploying the GUI is something that does NOT change from non-RIAs web sites to RIAs. Why does this define them, but it does separate RIAs from desktop applications and network applications (new term, I’m making up now … join in, its fun!).

So what is a desktop application and does this mean that RIAs have to be in a web browser? First, a desktop application is one that has its GUI (those elements that the user interacts with separate from the data exposed inside those elements) fully installed (and thus pretty static) on an end-users device (PC or mobile device). And network application is a type of desktop application and this is a continuum as much as anything else. But a good poster child of both of these is Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook. Word for the most part is used completely locally. There aren’t any data points of the network that get manipulated and re-sent back to the network, short of networked file systems. (Yes, translate and other Sharepoint functionality is available in the sidebar, but these are exceptions). On the outlook side, you can do a lot disconnected from the network, but the primary point of the application is to receive data over a network stream and sending information over the network. It is a class client-server application. But the GUI itself has to be installed. Yes, it can be customized with new “forms”, but those forms have to be installed.

What does it mean to be distributed. E.g. couldn’t I easily send that custom Outlook form in an email (over the network) to an end-user and have them install it at that time. Sure! and this model is purported by many such as the “update” model in AIR applications and other desktop applications. But once installed it is not reset in real time. Like pure HTML applications the display of the GUI is rendered in real time and with each new return to a site or page the GUI can be changed. Add in JavaScript and you can change the GUI elements themselves offline (of course you can do this in desktop applications too, provided all the logic is installed on the system).

Again, there is a continuum here. For example an AIR application can access SWF files (the equivalent of an HTML file) that is built in real-time using a system like Adobe Flex could be done. However, I’ve noticed that this hardly happens and that most AIR applications do the classic “update” instead of real-time rendering. This is for performance reasons I would imagine.

Now, both of these defining moments define RIAs from both ends of the spectrum, and they both have deep ramifications to how and what you design with RIAs. For more come to my 1-day workshop, "Interaction Design for RIAs" through SmartExperience.org. Use the discount code “Synapse” to get some more off the regular price, and contact SmartExperience.org to find about corporate discounts for sending multiple students.

Also, if you take this class on Oct 16 and add my class, "Sketching for Interaction Design" on Oct 17, you get an even bigger discount.

See ya in a couple of weeks!

Sarah Silverman & www.thegreatschlep.com

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

The importance of "roughness" in sketching

When thinking about sketching, there are several pieces that make a sketch a sketch, but to really make it a useful tool the quality of appropriate fidelity is one of the most important. In Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experience” (2007) he talks about the various qualities of an artifact that allow it to be a sketch. He talks about it being quick and he also talks about the importance of it being in multiples. Another quality he addresses is fidelity. He said in his Interaction08 | Savannah keynote that there is no such thing as high-fidelity or low-fidelity prototyping, but rather appropriate fidelity prototyping.

Another part of the puzzle when speaking about sketching that we all need to consider is what is a sketch vs. what is a prototype. Buxton goes to great lengths to work through this. He expresses it as a continuum moving from idea generation to idea validation. The closer to idea generation as its purpose the more it needs to be a sketch. The more it is for validation (i.e. usability testing) the more it needs to be a prototype and its “appropriate” level of fidelity needs to follow suit in order to get the desired results from the created artifacts. So when presenting a collection of sketches, or even going through the action of sketching itself, it is primarily if not entirely for the purpose of idea generation.

So why is roughness important. I mean with today’s tools like Flash, Fireworks, OmniGraffle, etc. I can create some really compelling high fidelity prototypical solutions really quickly, right? but here is the issue--completeness. For a sketch to be a tool of creation as opposed to validation, it must be able to illicit ideas with criticism and correction (and approval). Artefacts that give the appearance of completion tell a story. For sketching to be used as a design tool, it must have artifacts that ask questions.

So why not make stencils or create tools that make things look rough? Well one company thought of just that. Balsamiq created a tool in Flash called Mockups. It is basically Omnigraffle or Visio, but with a stencil of rough objects. But to me tools like this ignore some important issues of sketching because “Roughness” is only a piece of the equation.

But let’s get back to what roughness gives a sketch. It suggests incompleteness. It begs for moving forward, for completion, for change, for association. And the act of creativity requires tools that allow for moments of free association. So the tools and processes it uses need to work within that framework.

If you are intrigued by this and want more, well there is still 24 hours to get the early bird registration for my "Sketching for Interaction Design" workshop organized by SmartExperience.org.

Use discount code, “Synapse”, to get even more discount.

You can also take my other workshop separately or with “Sketching...,” called "Interaction Design for RIAs". Ya get a discount if you take both.

For group rate information contact me or SmartExperience.org.

Classes for Smart Experience in October

I’ll be teaching two 1-day workshops for SmartExperience.org in October. One about the interaction design of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and the other about Sketching in Interaction Design.

First the logistics:
Dates: RIAs is on Oct 16 & SKetching is on Oct 17—from 9-5 each.
To sign up for either class you can go to http://smartexperience.org/
Use my discount code to get an additional amount off your registration fee--Synapse.

RIAs
To be honest, this 1-day workshop is really just about designing software applications with a focus on web-based applications. The reason is, that RIAs is not a distinction of note any longer in web-application development. But the issues for designing RIAs are the same now as they were back in 2003 when Macromedia first coined the term.

The workshop is going to help designers think better about technology choices and hopefully clear away the cloudiness of techno-babble. Then it is going explain what direct value richness (well after we define rich) brings to user experience. We will also go through exercises where we design a project together, and we will deconstruct existing comparative web-applications to learn what succeeds and what doesn’t and why. Lastly, we will discuss both the building blocks and patterns of web-applications and what are the techniques you can use to better document and communicate richness over time to your project teams and clients.

Go here to learn more about Designing Rich Internet Applications

Sketching
This course is actually an evolution of my own personal thinking. It is largely inspired by Bill Buxton’s book, “Sketching User Experience” and inspired by my teaching that I’ve done for SmartExperience.org the last 2 years.

I have taught some 200 or so students in the last 2 years and during that time it has become apparently clear that many UX practitioners (maybe you) have not been exposed to one of the most fundamental of design tools--Sketching. There is a single foundational design discipline from interior > industrial or architecture > fashion that does not use sketching as a primary method for generating and communicating ideas.

It is primarily this concept of using sketching as a tool for generating ideas that we will explore in this workshop, but we will also look at ways to communicate the special needs of interaction design in a sketching space. Finally we will look at sketching techniques outside of drawing.

I’m very excited about this first workshop on Sketching. I think it will be one of many that I do over the next few years and it will evolve from this starting point. I hope you can join me and contribute to what I think will be one of the more important educational programs for the user experience community.

Go here for more information and to register for Sketching for Interaction Design

Register for both workshops and get even a bigger discount and add on to that discount with my discount code—Synapse.

Oh!! and if you register before Sept 25th you even get more of a discount.

Check out SmartExperience.org for all the details.

It just feels like it should have always existed

I listen to music all the time. (It stops the voices.) But I have had this recurring them in my head. The songs I truly love just feel like air. Like they are part of the landscape, like a natural emergence.

And while technologically based interaction design is relatively new compared to say music or sculpture, the idea that Michaelangelo described of him liberating the statue from the marble really rings true for almost any practice of applied creativity. It is why in the end that applied quantitative research within interaction design is also the death of it as an applied creative practice. But that’s a separate story.

I would like to posit that really great design is like great music or dance or painting or sculpture or architecture--The very best examples just feel like they’ve always been there, like they should have always existed, like they just fit.

What makes this particularly difficult for interaction design, unlike sculpture or music is that our craft is not so well defined. Our ability to pre-articulate, or even imagine what is “missing” has not been fully realized yet. But what also makes it difficult is that we as a practitioner community are ultra cynical, which moves us past constructive critique into the realm of dismissive way too quickly. This means that we have hindered our ability to discover micro-interactions of great value intermixed with macro-interactions which are poor.

Further, the conceiver and the executioner are not the same person quite often, or the conceiver does not have the appropriate level of skill to execute their ideas “perfectly” due to the level of technical complexity involved. Our reliance on others, and our lack of expert attention to making the forms necessary for our design hinders our ability to find that flow within the interaction design.

I’m not offering any answers here, but just hypothesizing ideas.