A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young undergrad interested in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program (where I teach a class in the fundamentals of interaction design).

The student, a talented web designer, was curious about the relationship between “web design” and “interaction design” and “user experience”, and what the future holds for UX and IxD. I thought it would be nice to share some of my response:

It’s hard for any IxD program to avoid the overwhelming presence of the web as the epicenter of most people’s (technological) interactive experiences. And the faculty of the program at SVA certainly draws deeply from the web design world. But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

There is definitely a lot of demand for people who can bring this higher and broader thinking to projects. What I like about the SVA program is the dialogue students have access to — with each other and with the faculty. It’s something you can’t get in most workplaces, and especially not so rapidly and intensely. You are required to talk not just about what you did, but how and most importantly WHY. It’s one thing to design something, it’s another thing to justify why in the world the world needs what you designed. Hopefully, that’s what the program gets students to think about and know how to express.

Finally: I wouldn’t be in this field, or teaching in the program, if I didn’t think that UX was *the* most important factor in creating beauty and happiness in the coming decades. Making stuff that people like to use, well, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid making stuff out of paper and legos.

I hope that gives a little more insight into the program and perhaps even into my thoughts about IxD and UX overall. Good luck, and let me know if I can help any further.

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A few months ago I heard a fascinating woman interviewed on the radio, Noreen Grice. Ms. Grice is a blind astronomer — something that, while initially surprising to me, actually makes perfect sense when you consider that most of today’s astronomy research is based on radio signals, mathematics, physics, and chemistry — and not at all on optics.

What’s more, she has published a series of books about astronomy specifically targeted at blind and visually-impaired children. When I heard this fact, I knew I had to see that book. Sure enough, Grice’s Touch the Universe is for sale on Amazon. Within days I was holding a copy.

Notice that I said “I had to see that book”. Because ultimately that is how I expected to experience it — with my eyes. Indeed, from the moment I opened the box and laid eyes on it I was drawn to the book’s beauty. But not just because the pictures are visually staggering, which of course almost all astronomic photography is. And not just because the internal design, typography, and layout have a simple grace to them, which they do.

What attracted me the most was the braille. The way the embossed patterns directly translated the images below them, the way there were two languages in play at the same time. This book goes beyond at least my traditional understanding of braille as a language or an alphabet — this is the syntax of touch used for illustration. I closed my eyes and explored the universe.

Here’s a typical spread from the book. Notice how the red spot of Jupiter is expressed as a spiral, and that the spiral is identified in the key below the image area.

Here is a spiral galaxy, NGC-4603, where the density of the raised dots expresses the density of the stars clustered around the galaxy’s core.

The book also features some of the technology used by astronomers, although ironically this is the Hubble Space Telescope, a purely optical instrument.

The funny thing is that this book could in theory have been produced with no ink at all. How unfair it seems that a book for blind people is so pleasant to the sighted, and yet products for the sighted generally proffer so little for the blind.

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As you might already know, The School of Visual Arts, one of New York’s leading art and design institutions, is gearing up for a brand new MFA in Interaction Design program beginning this September. SVA has for many years been highly regarded, especially for its vibrant and cutting edge MFA programs (for example in Design and Computer Art) so it’s not surprising that they’d be leading the way in the creation of this highly-relevant and much-needed program.

I’m honored to be part of the inaugural faculty for the program, charged with teaching the first-year “Fundamentals of Interaction Design” course. For humility’s sake please excuse me from the following statement, but the faculty roster is an amazing group of professionals and thinkers across a wide variety of disciplines in the interaction design universe. We on the teaching staff are constantly commenting to one another about how much we’d love to take this curriculum ourselves!

Thursday, January 15 (tomorrow!) is the suggested deadline for applications. (although applicants will be reviewed and admitted on a rolling basis after that). So if you’re interested in the program and in the process of applying, it’s time to pull one more all-nighter to put together the best portfolio you can. There are merit-based scholarships available for some 2009 students, based on your portfolio, so going the extra mile could be even more valuable.

The first year of this program promises to be especially exciting, both for the faculty and students, as we try to produce graduates who will make their mark on the interaction design scene both during and after the two-year program. We’re looking forward to a dynamic, cross-disciplinary group on both sides of the lectern, sharing ideas and helping create a new epicenter of cultural, academic, and professional invention.

Also, please note that tonight, January 14, is the latest in the MFA program’s series of public lectures, the Dot Dot Dot lectures, held each month at White Rabbit on New York’s Lower East Side. This month’s episode includes, as usual, a few of my very favorite people:

“The Urbanists,” January 14
Wed, January 14 | 6:30-8:30PM
Through an exploration of new definitions of urban environments, four lecturers will examine the time when public space is more personal, ubiquitous computing is allowing cities to have an impact on users’ experiences, and the design of services to truly be vibrant and meaningful. Speakers: Adam Greenfield, Soo-in Yang, Rachel Abrams, and Phil Kline.

I’ll be at the lecture tonight, so if you’re also there please say hi to me!

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Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek’s editor and blogger on the design and innovation beat, has declared that “‘Innovation’ is Dead” and that “Transformation” is the new “key concept” of 2009.

He correctly observes that the word “innovation” is overused in the business world. This, of course, has been obvious for a long time to a great many people — in particular, I think, among practicing designers. But it’s fascinating to think about what his declaration reveals about the nature of the whole innovation craze Nussbaum helped start.

The conversations around innovation over the past few years have in large part focused on producing innovation where it does not exist. It hasn’t been about innovation itself, but rather about cultivating innovation. It’s been about transforming groups of people who, without clever and forward-thinking leadership, would utterly fail to innovate. The literature, then, is aimed at people who fancy themselves as that same clever and forward-thinking leader.

To those of us whose everyday job is to innovate — e.g., designers — the hype around “innovation” has always seemed a little weird. As if not innovating has ever been an option for a designer. We do this all the time!

So what Nussbaum and the innovation cheerleaders have been talking about all along has not been about how innovative people can be more innovative. It’s been about how to take teams that cannot or will not innovate and getting them to actually come up with new ideas. Which is why, I think, he has chosen to zoom in on “transformation” as the key word. It’s always been about change.

In fact, I would go one step further and posit that what he’s really talking about is therapy. How to take a damaged or under-performing body and build it into something that works. To repair broken methodologies that produce the same-old solutions. To build up capabilities that have atrophied, or that may never have even existed.

The innovation conversation, then, usually begins with this (usually unstated) presumption of dysfunction and failure. You can probably insert a subtitle under most headlines: “How to fix your backward company”. Even Nussbaum’s new “transformation” implies that organizations need to implement radical change just to keep up. But what about organizations who are already keeping up really well? What about organizations that are already leading the way? What relevance does “innovation” and “transformation” have to someone cruising along on the cutting edge?

Transformation is for when you’re doing it wrong. Therapy is for when you’re injured.

But what do you do when you want to really perform?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice.

Practice is what athletes and musicians and actors do constantly to stay on the top of their games. And practice is what great designers do. All day every day.

For those of us who are designers, then, the whole innovation conversation often leads us to think about the difference between practicing and managing: A great design leader may or may not practice their craft every day, any more than a great coach or choreographer needs to break a sweat every day. Whether a design leader does hands-on design work, however, isn’t as important as that design leader pushing their team to do that work. Not to talk about innovation, but to actually do design work. If your team isn’t innovating, then chances are they simply aren’t designing enough. Make them design new stuff. Make them practice.

And, of course, there’s talent. Many assume that innovation comes almost exclusively from talented people. I tend to think this way, too. But a great team is a team of great people working together. Innovative people will doubtlessly fail to innovate in the wrong environment. Managing innovation may simply boil down to leading innovative people to practice their craft more, or maybe even simply creating a space for innovative people to thrive on their own. But it most certainly is not about transforming a mediocre team into an effective hive mind.

This goes the same for organizations. You want an innovative organization? Make ‘em design. All the time. Make them practice.

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I have two pieces of advice for user experience design professionals visiting their families over the traditional end-of-year holiday season.

First, take this opportunity to do some intimate, informal usability testing with your family and loved ones. I’ve written about this before, but I am encouraging it again: There’s a good chance that many of those you will spend time with over the next few weeks will be, when it comes to using interfaces, “regular people”. Perfect test subjects.

What’s more, when you observe user testing in a lab, chances are you know next to nothing about the people behind the glass. But when you’re home with your family, you know your subjects deeply. You know their idiosyncrasies and interests, their weaknesses and strengths.

So that big web site you’ve been working on all year? Don’t just show it to Mom and Dad. Make them sign up for it and use it. And watch them.

I also suggest something new: Interview them. Video them.* Especially the older ones.

For the last decade of her father’s life, my wife would interview him for an hour or more almost every time we visited her parents, videotaping each interview. For his funeral, she edited all the tapes into a single 45-minute movie where he tells stories from his incredible life. It’s hard to understate how happy this video made a lot of people.

More and more people are collecting stories from their families and sharing them with their families and even the public. So this holiday season, why not kill two birds with one stone: video your family but in particular talk to them about what is important to you, trying to find out the historical roots of your own life and interests. You might, for example, ask about user experiences and interaction design in their younger lives. You could ask what using computers, phones, or other machines was like when your parents or grandparents were young.

Lots of people shoot video of their families. But not many really step back and approach it as a formal interview by having some questions and topics in mind when the conversation begins, letting the subject know that what they say serves a purpose.

You’ll learn a lot about history and design — but most importantly about yourself and your family. And you’ll have a recording you’ll treasure forever.

[* Yes, I am using the word “video” as a verb. The word “videotape” is already in common usage as a verb, but it’s ludicrous to use it to describe tape-less video. Hell, “tape” is a verb, too. The phrase “shoot a video” is unwieldy when a single word will do just fine and when “shoot” is, er, a loaded word… as the title of this post demonstrates. Besides, it’s kinda cute to say “video” as a verb. Trust me. Just say “video”.]

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I am a 37-year-old user experience designer, and I don’t have a driver’s license. I don’t even know how to drive a car. I moved to New York City when I was 18 and I just never really needed to learn.

Moreover, I don’t even find automobiles all that interesting or seductive, at least not the ones I see on the streets today. They’re certainly not, as they were a half-century ago, a glimpse into some hopeful and mind-boggling future. Rather, to me, the automobile is a symbol of a bygone era of American industry, culture, and lifestyle.

Because of my obvious dispassion for car culture, I think I can offer an unconventional and hopefully useful perspective on the struggling American auto industry.

I mean, everybody else seems to have a theory about how to save Detroit. And I’ll admit that I find myself reluctantly sympathetic with those who are calling for a radical, technology- based transformation of the business. Whether admonishing the industry to “Stop Building Cars“, encouraging a conversion to a design-based auto industry (some flat out asking “What if Steve Jobs ran GM?“), scolding the automakers while debating bailing them out (it’s amusing to hear Senator Richard Shelby chiding the automakers for their lack of “inn-o-vation” in his Alabama drawl), or Andy Grove pushing Intel to invest in critical battery research for electric cars, it’s clear that many people think the American auto industry’s ultimate salvation will be in cutting-edge technology and design.

I find myself frequently nodding my head at these suggestions. The tech geek in me agrees that there is something the tech business is doing right that the auto business is doing wrong.

What is it? Well, it’s two things.

The ‘58 Bulgemobile Catalog, from Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons.

Design

The first problem, what everyone focuses on, is the product itself. The design. The whole “car experience”, which really hasn’t changed much in decades. AFAIK, the only truly important developments in the last 25 years have been hybrids and GPS.

And from the industry’s perspective the most significant and successful design innovation has, ironically, also been the instrument of its recent decline: the outrageous and gluttonous giganticness of SUVs (which really isn’t all that innovative when you consider the gigantism rampant in automotive design of the 1950s).

It all seems so dead to me. My desire to learn to drive — to the extent that it exists at all — feels on an emotional level similar to my desire to smoke a cigarette, own a beeper, rent a videotape at Blockbuster, or sign up for 600 free minutes of AOL. Which is to say that the whole idea (of driving!) seems silly and old fashioned and lame.

It’s easy for me to imagine a hundred ways that cars could be better — from energy efficiency to user experience to aesthetics, or even fundamentally rethinking the infrastructure of highways and roads and parking. Plenty of other people are also describing Detroit’s many design and technology shortcomings elsewhere. If it were not for the fact that the auto industry is still an integral part of my country’s economy and the livelihood of millions of Americans, and if the auto business hadn’t in previous generations worked at technology’s bleeding edge, I’d be completely apathetic about the whole question of automotive user experience design.

Unlike many of my peers (most of whom drive, of course), I can barely muster up enough interest in the fate of the auto industry to bother to speculate about the details of how cars might be improved from a design perspective. It’s like trying to get excited about designing a new kind of whaling harpoon or devising a new kind of portable CD player. I mean, who cares? What good will it do?

But that is precisely the problem: How can we expect innovation from Detroit when creative and technology workers like myself have no desire to lift a finger to help the automotive business? And forget about me, middle-aged and settled in my web career: Why should a 22-year-old technology or design whiz kid want to build cars when they could be working with far cooler, more exciting, and less environmentally-damaging technologies?

Designers

Don’t get me wrong: Plenty of extraordinarily talented and inventive people work in the auto industry. But it’s just not at the same level as the excitement and innovation we see in design on the web, on our mobile phones, and on our desktops. It doesn’t resonate with the public imagination.

I ask myself this question: “Would I want to work there?” Or one of my friends and colleagues? A talented young software engineer? A recent design-school graduate? As a future-thinking knowledge worker, someone like me should be strongly tempted to work for an auto company.

The biggest problem is not that the auto companies are making products consumers don’t want — people will continue to buy cars and muddle through the lackluster design and user experiences, the outrageous fuel costs, the physical danger, and the unconscionable pollution. No, the real, long-term problem with Detroit is that the automakers are just not the kind of companies the next generation of innovators will want to work for.

I don’t know the answer to this, particularly from a public policy perspective, but it’s important that we all frame the real question correctly. It’s not about the design, it’s about the designers. It’s about the workers.

(NOTE: I hate to seem sympathetic with the techno-futurist camp. There’s something terribly elitist about scolding Detroit for not being like Silicon Valley. It’s unforgivably crass to suggest that we just let the automakers precipitously fail and let their workers drift into unemployment and poverty. There is knowledge and talent in the industry today, know-how that needs to be used to make the new auto industry even better. A sudden lurch into industrial calamity, with an eventual triumphant rebirth in California garages, sounds like an idealistic and romantic story. But it’s not so romantic to the hundreds of thousands of people without a paycheck. The solution needs to be driven by practical needs, not dramatic storylines.)

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If you’re in NYC this Thursday, you should come to see From Sketching to Experience, the first of Liz Danzico’s Dot Dot Dot series of small, informal (and free) lectures. These lectures are the ramp-up to SVA’s new MFA in Interaction Design program. I’ll be one of the speakers this Thursday, and am also going to be on the SVA faculty as well when the program starts in 2009.

This lecture should be fun — four speakers from different backgrounds in a short-and-sweet presentation format. Please join us!

From the official site:

Crossword constructors sketch in pencil before ever laying a grid down, filmmakers rely on storyboards before ever picking up a camera, and cartoonists go pane by pane before designing a strip. Before interaction designers go high fidelity, sketches provide the method by which they communicate process, flow, layout — and importantly, story. Learn from four practitioners of divergent backgrounds how they practice sketching to get to their final product.

Speakers
Join us for the first lecture to hear from:

• Tom Bodkin, design director, New York Times
• Jake Barton, founder and principal, Local Projects
• Andrew Sloat, graphic designer and videomaker
• Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior; forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design

Details
Thursday, November 13
6-8PM (RSVP)
White Rabbit
145 E Houston Street (View Map)
New York

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When I was just 20 years old, I went on a student exchange program to Amsterdam to study sculpture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Those six months I spent in Europe, impoverished and starry-eyed, shaped a lot of who I am, both personally and creatively.

I’m delighted to say that I will be back in Amsterdam this week, from Thursday to Monday, for the 2008 Euro IA Summit, presenting version 2.0 of The Seduction of the Interface on Friday morning. I look forward to meeting some of my European peers as well as walking (or biking) around my old stomping grounds again.

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Last week I delivered a brand new presentation at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, right here in New York City, entitled The Seduction of the Innocent: Merchandising in Interactive Product Design.

(I’m presenting it again this Friday at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, hopefully with a few enhancements.)

The topic itself went through an interesting evolution. I started out thinking that my talk would simply be about the idea of merchandising as a user experience design challenge.

But over time, the word “seduction” in the title started to seduce me. I began to see opportunities to tie the two concepts together, to link persuasive user experiences to the timeless arts of seduction. Once this idea took hold of me, so much of the talk kind of magically fell right into place.

Anyway, if you saw me speak last week I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the talk went and how you think I might improve it. In general, the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been pretty good, but I’ve also gotten some really helpful advice on what to change. If you liked it, I’d love for you to toss some stars my way over at my Web 2.0 Expo crowdvine session page (where so far I have 14 votes, averaging 3.64 out of 5 stars).

Welcome to New York City

I was also on the Advisory Board for the New York Expo. An explicit part of our mission was to bring a distinctive New York flavor to the topics, speakers, sessions, and attendees. I hadn’t realized before how rare it is to actually have a web or design conference in New York City. So many conferences in my field are held elsewhere, presumably due to the high cost of holding events in New York.

Attending a conference in your home city has its advantages (no airfare or hotel), but the unfortunate part is that everyone you work with knows you’re still in town and easily accessible. Because of this, I ended up working during much of the conference. I didn’t get to attend very many of the other sessions, including quite a few that I really wanted to see. Also, I wasn’t able to connect with dozens of out-of-town friends and colleagues visiting for the Expo.

One session, however, that I knew I could not miss was Jeff Jarvis’s interview with John Byrne and Stephen Adler from BusinessWeek, discussing BW’s various forays into social media. The biggest of these is BusinessWeek’s recently launched Business Exchange, a new social media product developed by BW — which, I am proud to say, had a little user experience design help from our team at Behavior.

The BX, as it’s called, is a whole new way to look at business news and information. Structured as a collection of topics (covering just about everything important to business professionals), it gives users access to information not just from BusinessWeek’s deep editorial expertise, but also from their peers’ suggestions and contributions from across the web.

Anyway, it was a thrill to see our pixels unveiled in such a grand and public way.

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At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of “landmark” or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand’s IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters in the 1990s, he writes:

Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable — in gravitas, praise, or memorability — as any of the few projects I just mentioned.

Joshua Porter, however, thinks that Armin is barking up the wrong tree, arguing at his own blog that Armin’s singular focus on graphic design is misguided:

But, frankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective.

If Armin were to ask web designers and web development teams what the canonical web designs are, he would get very clear answers.

Joshua then goes on to cite Google and Amazon as canonical web designs because they do what they do exceptionally well — and that doing things is what web design is all about. He continues:

So while Armin doesn’t want this to be about graphic vs. web design, it has to be at some level because web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

That’s where he loses me. This is, at least to Joshua, just another turf war between interaction design and graphic design, an unfortunate debate that I had hoped had been put to rest in the last decade.

Joshua is buying into the idea that “graphic design” on the web is at best a lesser practice than some other, bigger thing called “web design” (which he says is really “interaction design”, but whose purview also apparently encompasses programming, strategy, content, information architecture, interaction design, and presumably even graphic design itself).

It’s certainly a good thing to talk about web design holistically and to see all of these things as interconnected, but must such discussion be at the expense of graphic design? Is discussing graphic design off limits? It’s clear that Armin was talking specifically about graphic design, but Joshua sees this not as a professional focus but, rather, as a fundamental shortcoming.

Perhaps Armin brought it on himself by using the phrase “web design” when it seems he really means “graphic design on the web”. Given that Speak Up is a *graphic design* site, I would have thought this focus would have been presumed by most readers. But when Joshua compares Google to Armin’s historical graphic design examples, and then claims Google’s iconic stroke of genius lies in its functionality, he is doing the equivalent of claiming that:

• Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster’s “design” includes Bob Dylan’s lyrics
• Vignelli’s subway map “design” includes the engineering of the trains and tunnels of the NYC transit system
• William Golden’s CBS logo’s “design” includes the groundbreaking journalism of Edward R. Murrow.

Joshua is casting too broad a net by claiming that web design is everything when clearly Armin is focusing deliberately and precisely on the profession of graphic design.

Armin is not talking about functionality, and that’s okay! He is talking about the color, typography, shape, layout and all the other formal elements that make up a site’s graphic design. Hell, Armin would probably be quite happy to see just one truly great logo for a web-based product, a logo whose design has the same timeless gravity as the logos from the history of graphic design. Instead we get endless swooshes and reflections.

Is it wrong of Armin to ask for this?

Well, only if it is wrong to want excellence in graphic design. On the web.

Back to the 90s

Why is it that when we talk about web design, “graphic design” is often treated as the red headed stepchild? In other media, and in older times, we can talk about the genius of a particular product’s graphic design independently of the larger system that that design represents or serves. We can talk about the graphic design of the Westinghouse logo without talking about the engineering of a Westinghouse refrigerator. Why should we not be able to do this about graphic design on the web?

My theory is that many web professionals, even graphic designers who work exclusively on the web, look down their noses on the crafts and traditions of “graphic design”. They have been doing this since the early days of the web, back in the 1990s, when it was common for smug young designers to feel superior to print-based graphic designers who didn’t yet know what they were doing on the web. How many of you slick web design professionals remember a time back in the 1990’s when we laughed at the poor old graphic design geezers trying to make HTML pages using Quark Xpress?

Well, those days are over. The joke is old. And you know what? All these years of people believing that graphic design was a lesser discipline, of contending that graphic design is barely an important factor in the bigger picture of web design, have led to precisely the predicament that Armin is complaining about: Web sites, in general, still don’t look as compelling as the historical graphic and visual icons we’ve come to know and love in other media. His point is entirely valid, and Joshua’s attitude only manages to prove Armin’s point. Graphic design on the web kinda sucks.

And as long as we continue to insist that graphic design is a non-entity, we will never have good graphic design on the web.

(I’ve written about this before when I argued last year that the AIGA fell into the same trap when they decided the G no longer means “graphic”. It’s sad that it’s still happening.)

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