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Notes I collected from IxDA London 28/01/15

IxDA London 28/01/15: Reflections from 2014

About

Split into 3 parts:

  1. Boon Chew giving an overview of reflections, what was learnt and covered in IxDA London in 2014
  2. Kevin McCullagh gave a talk about the pros and perils of predicting trends (and the future!) giving examples and insight from his work with clients over the years
  3. Everybody was split into groups and tasked with discussing what trends had impacted or influenced them in 2014, and what to look at for 2015, with a focus on the subjects IxDA London should cover in the year ahead.

Boon Chew (@boonych): Reflection

  • Problem in the UK knowing what Interaction Design is nobody knows what it means. The best way to explain it through examples; how it's been applied
  • Meaningless being an IA or UX designer unless you have examples
  • Craft around a theme or topic
  • Try to get real world examples because "that's where the real stuff happens"

Reflection

  • Use what we've already done/learned that help us learn and influence our current and future work

  • Donald A Schon - The Reflective Practicioner. Observed all sorts of people (office workers, nurses, etc)

    • Most of work happens in practice in situ

    • Explained reflection in 3 ways:

      1. Reflection in Action
      2. Reflection on Action
      3. Ladders of Reflection
  • What we're doing isn't quite that but good to keep in mind

Design Practice

An approach to the design of products, software and services...where I use objects from the physical world to help think about and design products and software

-- Durrell Bishop (ex. BERG, IDEO, AAPL)

  • How would you design the original Mac?

  • Break it down into its parts

  • Use physical objects to create a visual means to explain how the system works

  • He sees the value in the meeting of the physical and virtual world

  • FutureHeads covered the Design Education -- Student Show and Tell

    • LIFE and DEATH ("conceptual but progressive")

      • Growbot
      • Bossy
      • Wandular
      • Funeral Planning Kit
      • Knit 01

Products/Services

  • Finance Money

  • IxDA in outside spaces

  • Urban IxD

  • TV interfaces

  • Wearables

  • IOT

  • Slides from all the speakers are all available on the line. No point in rehashing in these here notes

-> YAY: Gartner Hype Cycle 2014

Kevin McCullagh (@kevinmccull): Beyond the Shlock of the New

  • Plan use trends to think about the future

Strategy should be created from the future backwards Never make forecasts -- especially about the future.

  • You can't predict the future but there's no harm

The future is part of every designers job

  • Book: Competing for the future (1994)

  • Foresight:

    • Makes sense of a world in flux
    • Brings clarity to planning, situates
    • Stratefy within a future context
    • BUT YOU CAN'T PREDICT THE FUTURE(!)
  • You learn form your hits and misses -- forced into reflection

  • How to think about the future

    • Whats relevant for your project
    • Society, Economy, Technology trends
    • VENN DIAGRAM WOO
  • Micro and macro trends

  • Benefits of structuring trends and overlapping them

  • You can see that you're calling the same trend 3 different things

  • Useful to see which are close to each other

  • Take that, form a selection criteria, then narrow it down to a small amount

  • "Design trend filtering"

  • "Which are mobile relevant", "Which are relevant to mass consumers"

  • Cheeky clickable interface

  • Some trends are really long term -- over decades. Other can last a week or 2

  • You need to make a call on that

  • Airline will be thinking 15/20 years ahead but social media will be in minutes and hours

  • BEWARE THE FADS but fads can be useful

  • Can we get a feel if this has legs or does it have a whiff of a fad

-> YAY HYPE CYCLE ALL ABOARD CHOO CHOO but not everything rides along the curve!

  • Tech is not inevitable (3D TV LOL)

  • Hand writing was thought to be the holy grail -- it wasn't

  • The future is a mix of change and continuity

  • I totally have that guys shirt

  • Think about whats relevant to the market sector/industry

  • Put sociology before technology

  • Watching the moon landing

  • History or future

  • History doesnt move in straight lines

  • People get carried away with tech. Tech isnt the driver of the future, its one of the factors

  • The feminisation of society -- role and impact of woman on society

  • Culture of fear

  • Most risk free society we're obsessed by FEAR

  • Beware technological determinism

Once is an accident Twice is a coincidence Three times is a trend

  • BEWARE PATTERN RECOGNITION

  • Be an informed contrarian

  • SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY

    • Marketisation of everyday life
    • I am not a target market
    • Trust crisis
  • Seattle riots && NO LOGO was published && 9/11 && ENRON

  • Don't accept all of the trends. Dig underneath; be contrarian.

  • Some things are obvious and some things need debating. Worth debating and debating is productive

  • Have a point of view

  • Trends rarely concur

  • Future context: assumptions about developments that could influence the development of the service

  • Useful to have a framework and assess on a regular basis. Discuss; move it around

Hold strong options weakly..if you must forecast then forecase often -- and be the first to prove yourself wrong

-- Paul Saffo

  • Clients say they're drowning in noise but it's much easier to get hold of information
  • Whats real and what's hot air that people are just repeating (/ reposting)
  • Ask difficult question to flush out the bullshit
  • Looking at the future is a way to predict the present
  • Sometimes to inspire, sometimes its setting a context to make a decision
  • Educated set of assumptions but STILL GUESSING

## Discussion session

  • Walking into a village carrying kilos of water

  • Introduce a pipeline as a easy solution

  • But what are the after effects or unforeseen consequences?

  • Designing for complex systems

  • Designing for true human factors

  • Coming back to true human factors

  • Design is very rarely ethical because our job is to provide solutions to a problem but it doesn't sound like ethics are something should be pushing

  • RETURN TO BASICS

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