IxDA Library

This short presentation provides an introduction to the exciting world of mission critical interaction design, where safety, security and protecting human life enters the realm of digital technology.

In mission critical solutions, user requirements are extreme – the physical conditions are often difficult and stress levels are high. However, users are required to complete vital tasks with no room for error.

This talk illustrates how game design thinking provides new tools for the design of non-game products and campaigns. We discuss four ways in which game-design techniques enrich interactive design:
1. Understanding that in our ultimate goal as designers is to make the user happy. Games accept this by default.
2. Understanding a product or message better by imagining it as a game. If you have a message you want people to find and interact with, invite them to play with it!
3. Conveying a message by building it into an advergame.

Our sensorial system is our interface to the world. It is trough and with our senses that we can perceive, reason and exchange with external systems, living or not. Our professional and personal activities are made of rich and complex sensorial experiences, spanning on different stimulus and modalities.

Up to now, the repertoire of input and output forms generally found in human-device interfaces have been usually centered on vision and to some extend audition. Despite decades of research and development, very few systems or devices today go beyond these two senses and truly offer rich multimodal interaction. Why is that so?

This presentation will explore the opportunities and challenges related to developing new multimodal interfaces specifically based on the touch sense. It will present various methods, techniques, tools and processes that interaction designers can use to assess, sketch, create and evaluate dynamic haptic and multimodal interfaces.

Many of the interactions seen in tangible and social computing are essentially playful. Play can take on many forms, but they all involve people exploring a conceptual space of possibilities. When designing these “embodied” interactions, it is therefore helpful to have a good understanding of play - this session aims to do just that.

We’ll compare the role of interaction designers to that of game designers, who concern themselves primarily with the creation of rule-sets. By using rules, designers have unique opportunities for conveying messages.

We’ll discuss the emergent behaviour of many social and tangible systems and propose that gardening might be a helpful metaphor. This requires designers to sketch in code and hardware, build prototypes, and observe their use “in the wild”.

Ultimately, we hope to encourage designers to put themselves on equal footing with the people using their systems, so that they can playfully grow meaningful interactions together.

Over the last three years, I've been working on understanding social collaborative behavior, and in particular at LinkedIn, Viral Loops. Interaction design is key to an applications ability to promote itself. In this short session, I'll focus on the critical comments of defaults, sharing mechanisms, updates, notifications and even SEO as holistic elements of a viral system that is currently driving the popularity of social networks and social media successes everywhere. I'll talk about the underpinnings needed to devise a successful social system as well, touching on identity, reputation and relationships in digital communities.

Just how do you re-design a website when you effectively have 200,000+ clients? Is design by community as bad as design by comittee?

That's the challenge we faced when we were tasked with redesigning the drupal.org website - home of the large, international and very active Drupal community.

In this case study presentation we'll discuss the community centric approach we have taken to this project and the various tools and activities we used to recruit, engage with and communicate with the community (including Google Apps, Twitter, Flickr, Online Card Sorting, Slideshare, Discussion Forums, Blogs and Wikis), including some innovative approaches to participatory design en masse and crowdsourcing design. And you'll find out if indeed we are truly nuts, and/or if we'd do it all again!

Natural user interfaces, or NUIs, are perfect for multi-touch and gestural interaction. How are they actually created? What hardware is available to support such interactions? How are they different from graphical user interfaces, or GUIs? Stimulant is one of the world's few interaction design and development agencies whose mission is focused on creating such experiences. From custom hardware to Microsoft Surface, Stimulant will talk about their process, deliverables, experiences, successes, and failures from working towards a more natural way to interact with computers and other devices.