In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1-4, Core77 will be bringing you a preview of this year's event. Follow us as we chat with keynote speakers, presenters and workshop leaders to give you a sneak peek at some of the ideas and issues to be addressed at this year's conference. Come by and say hello to us at the Coroflot Connects recruiting event and don't miss out on our live coverage as we report from the ground in Dublin!
Luke Williams has been a champion for design innovation over the past 18 years—in consumer package goods for a company in Australia, at New York University's Stern School of Business through his "Innovation and Design" course, and as resident innovation expert at frog design. At frog, Williams has worked for the past decade to help define the global firm's practice and approach to innovation. The Core77 community might best know Williams through Disrupt, a book he wrote to, "reflect on all the different tools and methodologies I've learned through innovation...and on the meaning and terms I use with clients in the business school." We recently had the opportunity to catch up with Williams here in New York City. Besides insights and some great personal anecdotes packed into our half-hour chat, Williams shared a preview of his keynote for next week's Interaction12 conference in Dublin.
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Core77: Disrupt is about shaking up current notions of an established category of business or within a market. With interaction design being a relatively new design field, what are some of the tenets of disruptive thinking that interaction designers can apply to their own work—not only towards creating an innovative product, but for the community or category as a whole?
Luke Williams: When we say interaction design is a new profession, it's true, but it's also very, very old. Because in interaction design, essentially what you're doing is designing behavior. Robert Fabricant at frog likes to say, "Behavior is our medium." What's fascinating about interaction design is that it's not about technology at the end of the day; it's not really about interfaces. For interaction design you're talking about shaping and influencing behavior. Everything at the moment is being seen as a potential interface object—that's the way ubiquitous computing is taking us.
So, every doorknob, every table and every coffee cup has potential to be seen as this interface object. There has never been a more exciting time to be in interaction design. Because interaction designers essentially get to rethink all of these basic human interactions that have been around for 50, 100, maybe thousands of years in some cases. We're at a point in time where they get to rethink those interactions. So, they challenge the clichés that have always been there about how we interact with things at a day-to-day level. And, basically see if those things can be improved.
That's a pretty exciting way to set up the whole entire conference.
It is such an important role and job because the future is going where these interactions are. Many of these interactions of the moment are simple; they're the fabric of everyday life. Now, what we risk doing when we're layering on information and connecting with information networks is to make simple, everyday interactions complex, cumbersome and frustrating.
My mother is my basis point for interaction design. She retired and decided she was going to take a computer course because she hated computers (like many parents do). And, she came back after the first lesson and she was furious. I said, "What's wrong?" She was looking at me as if I was part of the problem. She said, "The language of computers is just ridiculous." "And, what do you mean by that?" She replied, "Do you know to shut down the computer I have to go to the start button?" and that never had occurred to me before.
Now, I've since found out that that's an old joke with Microsoft and they even joke about it internally. But, this is exactly the problem. If my mother, in the future, has this same problem with her morning cup of coffee because we turn the coffee mug into an interface object, there's going to be hell to pay. So, this is a double edged sword. There's incredibly exciting potential for interaction design once everything gets layered with information and they can rethink these interactions. But, there is a big, big responsibility there for interaction design to get these interactions right.
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