Media:

Watch Obligatory Video of Microsoft Surface at IxDA ’10

Speakers:

Nathan Sedroff: Innovation
Nathan is the author of Making Meaning

Dave Gray: Innovation Games
Dave is the author of Gamestorming

Jarmin: Emergence service design

“Service design is a way to get closer to the right conversations about what we are doing.”
“Holistic service design is the small leap we need to make better products.”

Richard Banks: The future of looking back

• Richard Banks is into Technology Heirlooms
• Concepts of end-of-life technical artifacts like Twitter and digital photos reminiscent of the 2004 film The Final Cut
• Begged the question that if our experiences are digital, and that data is destroyed (like in a nuclear holocaust) we risk creating a new dark age.
• Not sure if data should be stored on commercial systems.

Jon Kolko: Design Thinking
Jon is the author of Thoughts on Interaction Design

• Talked about the power of words, ownership, and being less prescriptive in order to engage more effectively.
• Really Jon? 5 weeks to assimilate research? If it takes 5 weeks for a person to synthesize design research, they should really reach out to others and/or start making something.

“Your work will change culture. do work that is worth doing.”

Ezio Manzini: NEXT “design in the age of networks and sustainability”
Creator of Sustainable Everyday Project

“In the network society the small is not small: it is a node in the network”
“Do not cosider people as passive consumer, but as actors in the process..”
“We do not need to start from zero. We can make easier what before was difficult.”

Priceless tweet:

#ixd10 aspirational talks, yet wondering, where are the stories from people in the trenches making change? I want war stories. (@thinknow)

Interaction11 starts February 9th

Alan Cooper and Ward Cunningham

As agile adoption has increased throughout the world, thought leaders from the agile and user experience communities have been talking past each other. All along they were both talking about same thing: better software.

The agile mindset seeks to create sustainable software. Agile wants to be iterative and embrace change: design just enough to bring value to the customer. User experience design on the other hand has carried a stigma of representing a big design up-front mentality.

The word customer was traditionally at the center of this misunderstanding. Agile values customer involvement in the software development process: a great approach when the goal is to create minimally marketable software. Close communication with the person paying you to produce software is a great way to ensure you do not over-produce.

The user experience mindset seeks to create humane software that improves people’s lives. In the user experience world the customer is the user. By taking care of your customer’s users, the customer is happy. A happy customer is a customer with happy customers.

Compare these values—sustainable and humane—and see that a culture for better software can be realized.

The goal of the software makers at the agile-ux retreat was to find a common ground and nurture a unified culture: Some people confessed to being less than optimistic. What resulted was larger than agile and user experience. What emerged was a new normal and a higher benchmark for collaboration.

Through over 20 hours of discussions, panels, and exercises the group of approximately 30 software makers made a sinusoidal, divergent-convergent discussion pattern. Words like trust, solidarity, interdisciplinary, and fractal were shouted or uttered. Concepts such as us vs. them thinking, and overcoming the momentum of tradition were argued or pondered.

The values thus far are as follows…

Disciplines over roles
Roles split teams into silos that split goals into task segregation, encouraging specialist behaviors and us vs. them culture.

Effectiveness over efficiency
By teaching and learning effective software practices, efficiency naturally follows.

Product over process
By emphasizing process, the goal to produce and deliver product is overlooked.

Shared responsibility over sole responsibility
When there is something worth doing, it must be done. Ask for help when the task is unfamiliar or unwieldy.

Attendees are still trying to come to terms with what the progress they made means for the whole community.