Why Design is Conversation and Why Conversation for Every Design
Say you want to eat somewhere and you ask for my recommendation. I say, “Sure, I’ve got the best place for you: Luigi’s Pizza, on the corner of First & Commerce.”
You say, “Great, thanks—but why do you recommend Luigi’s?” What if I replied… Continue reading “Luigi’s Pizza: A Parable”
The NY Times has published a smart and useful article on the anatomy of the failure of a startup. Any product manager, or anyone working in a startup, can learn from the detailed sequence of steps that it took to kill Vine (that link will not work once they take the site down for good).
Vine is/was a well-executed app that was early in the game with video sharing, had clever ideas that suited the market, had good backing, had been acquired by a powerful player—and yet it died an unfair death, at least in startup terms. There were many moments of #fail that occurred, not in product design but in lots of other ways, except bad timing. Think of them as a checklist for what to watch out for. The article offers a real example of how tenuous a startup can be, and how a cascade of errors can kill even a healthy tech company.
Norbert Wiener is the centerpoint of a new project to raise awareness about the history of cybernetics.
There are quite a few videos, including a 16-minute trailer about the proposed full-length documentary (full disclosure: I’m advisor to the project and appear on-screen). The site also offers a wonderful talk by Andy Pickering, proposing a new synthesis and New Macy Meetings. (Andy started using the term “antidisciplinarity” in reference to cybernetics, which brought cybernetics to the attention of Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, as described in his piece in the Design + Science Journal.)
The relationship between a piece of code and the result of that code is nearly always a distant one. “Code” means a long string of text, written in an arcane logic. It takes months or more likely years to acquire coding skills. But the result of that code — a calculation, a screen display, user controls on an interface — must be approachable, transparent, and require only seconds or minutes to understand.
Continue reading “Programming And Animating On The Same Screen At The Same Time”
To understand conversation is to understand how we learn about the world and how we communicate and collaborate with others. Products and services can benefit from a better understanding of conversation. Designers benefit from understanding conversation better, because they can design for better conversations.
In the Fall 2016 Semester, CCS MFA Interaction Design is introducing a new elective, Frameworks for Interaction and Conversation. It’s an in-depth course that explores cybernetic models of effective action that apply to design of software, services, products, entertainment, or organizations. Continue reading “Frameworks for Interaction and Conversation”
The paper “Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action” [PDF] has recently gone to print in a peer-reviewed journal. It offers a rationale for the position that design is conversation; perhaps a surprising idea, but the logic in the paper is rigorous. Cybernetics offers a foundation for 21st-century design practice, here is the core of it:
Given vast changes in society and technology in the past 50 years, what will designers do differently today?
Quite a mouthful, that title, but it’s an excellent summary: The connections across those domains are so rich and with so many shared influences, it becomes clear that the history of interaction design—and also its future—is bound up in systems and cybernetics, cultural politics and personalities.
Continue reading “How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design”
When we talk about “interaction” and “interaction design”, there is a presumption or a hope that the interactions will be valuable, interesting, engaging—maybe even stronger than all that: that the interaction will be compelling. What can make an interaction compelling? It may be helpful to look back at historically important interaction designs, so we’re not blinded by the amazing technology we have today.