When asked what personal qualities make a good interaction designer, Larry Tesler highlighted humility:
“Enough confidence to believe you can solve any design problem and enough humility to understand that most of your ideas are probably bad. Enough humility to listen to ideas from other people that may be better than your own and enough confidence to understand that going with other people’s ideas does not diminish your value as a designer.”
Larry Tesler, Vice President of the User Experience and Design group, Yahoo in Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction.
Unlike some of my my esteemed colleagues, I must confess to being a relative novice when it comes to public speaking. Which makes it all the more awe-inspiring when I get to watch a great talk.
Stefan Sagmeister’s ‘Yes, design can make you happy’ fits the bill perfectly. Sagmeister delivers an eloquent, funny and inspiring account in to how and why design should inspire happiness as opposed to just representing it. Highly recommended viewing.
As I said, I’m a novice orator at best but I’d like that to change. So in advance of my ascent on world superstardom I’m starting to collect some hints and tips. Anyway, this is what I learnt from Stefan. No doubt, these contravene all that makes up that blissful state of Presentation Zen, but it’s a start:
- Being provocative is as effective – perhaps even more so – than presenting big solutions.
- Tell your own stories – personal experience is the simplest means of encouraging empathy.
- Trim the fat. A few simple, accessible ideas are memorable.
- There’s no need to explain everything. In fact if you do, you risk patronising your audience. Let people experience some of the the joy that you did when you worked all these things out.
- Make people laugh. They’ll like you and your presentation .
- Fifteen minute presentations encourage you to be smart with your content. Anything longer inevitably results in some people losing focus. If you can’t tell people what they want in this time, you shouldn’t be presenting anyway.
“Starbucks is selling a public gathering place. Coffee is the enabling mechanism.”
Jim Kunstler
“…watching a tool in use is the same as observing a conversation. everything, in a sense, has its inputs and outputs. From that point of view, the boundary between “interactive” and “noninteractive” tools start to dissolve.
Interaction design is largely about the meaning that people assign to things and events, and how people try to express meanings. So to learn from any tool, interactive or not, go watch people using it. You’ll hear them talk to the tool. You’ll see them assign all sorts of surprising interpretations to shapes, colors, positions, dings, dents and behaviors. You’ll see them fall in love with a thing as it becomes elegantly worn. You’ll see them come to hate a thing and choose to ignore it, sell it, or even smash it. And I guarantee you won’t have to do much of this before you encounter someone who makes a mental mapping you would never dream possible. And you’ll learn from that.
I’ve been using tea kettles as an example in some of my teaching, because on the one hand kettles are so familiar to us, and they’re only interactive in a borderline, predictable, mechanical sort of a way. But once you start to examine the meanings involved with kettles in use, you realize they have things to say that people would love to know, but most designs allow them to be said. “I’m getting hot, but I have no water in me.” “My water is a good temperature for a child’s cocoa.” “I’m too hot to touch.” “I need to be cleaned.” And so on.
Marc Rettig, Founding Principal, Fit Associates in Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction
Paul drew my attention to the terms of use on Facebook:
“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”
Facebook
A little excessive perhaps?