Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
(city street sound)
(car honking)
(music playing)
You know, when we talk about interaction design,
often a lot of people like go into their pocket and pull out a phone or some sort of device,
or any device they have on them.
But I think without humans there’s nothing interesting to talk about.
I think we specialize with devices that have a screen because they’re nearly ubiquitous now.
The most common one actually is the mobile phone.
We went from zero in the late 80s to over 5 billion earlier this year.
So like, that’s the biggest shift that ever happened.
Interaction design really implies that what we design as a man-made object
is only complete when there are people who are using it.
(music continues to play)
(drums playing)
We are toolmakers, if you use a stick to reach a high fruit, you're using a tool to augment your reach.
And likewise, every piece of consumer electronics that we’ve made,
every piece of software that we’ve made, every service that we use
right, these are all augmentations of our abilities as humans.
And when the augmentation really works
then that extension of yourself feels natural and beautiful
and does what you want, and doesn’t get in the way.
Unfortunately, a number of technological products that we sort of use
they require our constant attention and they have these sort of annoying beeps
(phone beeping)
and they sort of ask for our attention all the time.
So something that can do its own thing,
disappearing in the background is great.
I do feel that as of now, we are in the phase where we are a little bit confused on what’s really important in life.
I’m right here with you and I start to look at the screen,
my phone is silent but there are a million things that I can do while I’m with you.
But am I then really with you?
It’s really important to look at what the consequences are of putting these products into the world.
When we think about things like the phone, it’s just a piece of plastic and metal.
In a way it’s changed our behavior, it can be enabling and also disrupting.
For these things to change our lives for the better
or enable us to do things we couldn’t do before
they have to be done in a way that feels natural and feels like a conversation.
The use of voice and the use of natural gestures,
so I mean I think Kinect was really quite wonderful in this respect.
You get rid of the wand in the same way that the iPhone got rid of the physical buttons.
You’re removing the extraneous, you’re removing the artificial.
Everything that you touch on a screen feels glossy.
It's all the same, it's touching glass.
then we often try to imbue texture into that and make it feel like something else.
When we start to use haptics, that give physical vibrotactile feedback
we can start to feel the difference in different kinds of touches
and give different kinds of feedback.
And then we can complete that visual metaphor with tactile feedback as well.
I think everybody’s a little too fascinated with making interfaces that look like they can be touched.
I find it kind of ironic that we’re trying to make digital things look a little too real,
see how long that lasts.
Analog can be wonderful, what’s not wonderful is fake analog.
It’s a little tragic how everyone’s trying to translate print onto a digital format.
What we will see at some point is for someone to take the medium
and do something that’s appropriate and magical, and enhances the experience.
And what interaction design really does is make those experiences natural
and make them much more about the content or the experience,
or what we’re trying to do, and less about using a device,
using a screen, using an application.
Let’s make it about the content not about the chrome as they call it.
Chrome is devoid of meaning aside from just a signal of what metaphor is being used.
And every time you see it after that, it’s just noise
whereas the content is always real.
Pictures, movies, stories, these things will never go out of style.
So bridging that somehow.
Making use of the knowledge, the latent knowledge, and the metaphor
without imitating it, I think, is the sweet spot.
We're brought sort of discreet projects that are sold and closed in a box and we deliver them.
And then they get built and put out to the world,
and the reality is most things are really living systems, living documents,
they go on and they almost immediately change.
How you actually design and enact a living system within UX is something that’s quite challenging.
For example, you actually need to think more about
patterns of desired outcomes and behaviors you want to achieve,
rather than just you know simply moving a user through one flow in an experience.
You give up a lot of the control, the luxury you had back in the day.
Where it was one user, one task, one computer. It’s all gone now.
It’s much more like you are setting a stage really for other people to perform.
But you can never tell them what to do
and you can perhaps make your interventions
by changing the playing field a bit or throwing in some new props
but you have to perform surgery on the live patient so to speak
while you have millions and millions of users registered.
We can’t have this attitude anymore that like a map is going to come out once a year
or that like we have to wait for South Sudan to be recognized formally by the UN
before it shows up on the map.
It’s like there’s this idea that the map is this living thing
that’s being made of everything that we’ve got.
The idea that it’s different in the morning than it was in the evening
is a really good way to stay connected to the idea that the world is changing.
I think that’s the beauty and the biggest challenge of interaction design,
that you cannot necessarily foresee the consequences when people adapt what you have designed,
to see something completely different than what you have created,
it’s like throwing a stone in the water and you don’t know what it will cause.
Interaction design five to six years ago meant solving and thinking through
kind of the choreography of information and feedback
and interfaces around a product.
But the big step was going from thinking about it as being contained in each of those things
to now thinking about it as something that exists across them.
It’s understanding that eco-system where the human is at the center
and understanding that network of things and how they all work together,
rather than your device or your thing being at the center.
The technology that I work on, the stuff that I do is about to permeate a whole different field that is not tech per se.
That will be cool and if it could have a really good impact there,
if it can change the way your house is being done.
I think the next big thing I mean we’re talking 5 or 7 years out here,
would be what is now called the internet of things
which is essentially about connecting all kinds of things and stuff that currently is not connected digitally.
And working a lot more with sensors and things to basically get more of the physical world
connected with the digital world.
That’s what the future lies in store for us is there will be software in everything,
in books, not just an iPad but in books,
your packaging for your food that talks to your refrigerator, that lets your refrigerator know what you’re eating.
Clothing, when we started embedding these things into our products
and we’re not talking about pressing buttons on screens,
what we’re talking about are our everyday objects and fabrics responding to the way we behave.
A lot of the things that we interact with like a simple and stupid light switch
becomes a piece of intelligent technology that communicates with other objects
and in a way when I press this button, I may not get the same result,
depending on the situation or the day of the week, or the time.
So in a way the environment becomes a little bit more intelligent
but not with like a centralized intelligence but like smaller units talking to each other.
The transitions between being in your car to outside of your car to back in your car, being a lot more seamless.
Things being done in the background that allows you to just focus your attention on driving
and not just only on like changing the radio or like answering your call.
The more we equip all the products and objects in our lives with these sensors,
and the more that they’re able to sort of talk back to us and have conversations,
we want to make sure that those feel natural.
What I’m looking to do with the kind of information I need when I’m at home is different from when I’m on the go,
it's different from when I’m at work or say in a public space.
So we’re going to see as our products and services starting to learn where we go
and anticipate our needs and how we want to digest information
and what we’re looking to do in each of those places.
Using embedded devices, embedded technologies more broadly in our environment,
not just in the home but moving into cities, streets, buildings, etc.,
as a way to broadcast and communicate data to the network it then creates this sort of a mesh-like network
that lays over the city or one’s experience,
not just between their mobile device and their tablet in their home
but really in real time across everything.
So this whole idea of collecting a lot more data
and then presenting it not as a listing or a spreadsheet but much more subtly,
something that is meaningful to you from the corner of your eye.
So imagine that you could see on the street,
you could see literally the footsteps of your friends, like where they went an hour ago
or perhaps slightly more obstructed so you get this blue kind of buzz over this block and you get the sense that
that’s probably a good place to go because some of my friends seem to be there.
Natural processing of visual information, it’s getting better and better every year.
And of course expressions on faces and emotional content,
I mean there’s that big category recognition one, the one that is able to look at a photo
and annotate and say this is a paper cup, this is a chair, this is a light, this is a camera, that will be very, very enabling.
You know I think it’s very interesting that’s about to happen
is that people are entering status messages,
or they’re talking to each other or they’re noting things
or they're pointing to articles or occurrences on the web.
Or in the case of the earthquake in Japan, they’re asking for help and they’re being found.
So when you type in a message or when you type in a status, when you post a photo, in essence, it’s becoming digital.
You could take all those pieces and you could design all kinds of amazing things around it
because it’s not just about photos being digital or music being digital,
people are now actually entering their lives, what’s going on around them into a digital format
and so we’ll be able to start do things with that in the future that I think are going to be very exciting.
Interaction design is at a pretty interesting inflection point right now.
A lot of the models, a lot of the ideas, a lot of principles are in place,
and a lot of the hard work today, is not just commercializing them so that we can rent a movie,
or that we could hold up our phone and find out what music is playing in a bar.
But figuring out how to drive them into more and more mundane and meaningful parts of our lives.
Things like energy, it’s a fascinating field that interaction design, I think, is starting to really penetrate.
You can’t really rearrange the grid that easily, you can’t really move buildings and apartments and subway stations around
but you can build a shared layer on top of it through behavior
and through the right contextual information that can really shift the way we use those resources.
It’s also going to the medical industry, wearable devices to track your heart rates
and activity you do. All that kind of stuff is really, really exciting and amazing.
Moving healthcare from a place of being this one-time visit with the doctor
where you simply go in only when you feel sick or you sort of have an ailment
to this perpetual ongoing thing and this ongoing conversation in a very lightweight way.
You might be able to help frontline health workers, people who don’t have a great deal of training.
Why couldn’t you take a picture of it, take a sample of it?
And have the rest of the complexity of that all hidden
but that immediate piece of information when you need it.
But the network is sampling the world
and knowing what’s cropping up where and able to match and find patterns
and anticipate outbreaks of diseases.
We’re not just trying to sort of take those disruptive technologies I was talking about and push them out to the periphery.
We’re trying to now collect out of the periphery a much richer set of what’s going on the world
so that we can learn as a society and optimize and evolve the right systems and services.
All over the world, things are changing at a speed that is both terrifying and exhilarating.
I think one of the exciting things about the design industry and the creative process is that they can help.
And I think what we need is for designers who can be embedded
in the topics that are really, really important right now
and for there to be a better synergy between design and business,
design and social change, design and entrepreneurship.
They can’t solve them on their own but they can certainly help us to come up with more creative solutions.
That’s the next big exciting, fun thing I think and it'll have a huge positive impact on people’s lives.
One of the things that I think emerges as a by-product of all of this intensive connectivity
is there’s a super organism building up
in which humans are no longer the top of the food chain in some way.
This whole idea that we would all actually be connected like it’s actually happening.
And I think maybe it’s more fair to say that it already has happened
and we're kind of like still acting in some ways like everybody’s not connected.
We live in a world where access to Facebook can determine the fate of a government.
We’re in a world where that human layer is so critical
and so I think you’re starting to see this kind of new layer
where there’s this powerful kind of secondary effect and emergent power
that is purely delivered by good interactions, good interfaces, good ways of connecting people.
There’s something bigger which is the colony of humans connected in this way.
It is a thing and it has behaviors and it has responses and reactions
and what’s different is that now those responses, those reactions, those actions,
and those collective thoughts, they happen fast
and they happen in very visible ways.
You can see it, like now, you can find out things about earthquakes
on Twitter faster than you can the earthquake itself.
I see occupied Wall Street and I see people kind of waking up to this idea that they’re powerful
and that they can sort of connect with one another.
It’s not very different from what happened,
you know, during the Cambrian explosion when cells began to aggregate together
using chemical signals and things and then became organisms.
Their behavior can become more and more collective as those signals become more and more explicit.
Out of very individual actions,
people are starting to form local connections and then out of these local connections,
you’re starting to see a much bigger system appear.
You know, we’ll look back one day on things like flash mobs
and for that matter the revolutions in Egypt and in Tunisia and so on
as early displays of collective behavior mediated by these new lighter weight,
more ubiquitous, much, much faster and richer mechanisms for connectivity,
we’re part of something bigger.
And I think many of us are not aware of the extent to which we’re a part of something bigger
and not entirely, not just our own selves anymore.
(music continues to play)