I’ve never considered myself an IA, and in fact, I never really understood the relationship between what we talk about as IA activities and the practice of Architecture. Architecture is a design practice in that it uses iterative processes to consider both function and form as it applies to the final output, generally a building (simplified). I haven’t often seen that in IA practice.

As a designer I believe that good design is always about a balanced relationship between function and form. I also believe that form and function can’t exist without each other, and influence people’s ability to interact with the object/service/etc.

In short, if a designer (called UX, IA, or other) is not considering the flow and function, as well as the form, as part of the process they are failing at their job.

I also believe that successful design (and architecture) practices integrate all their “phases” into a holistic and iterative studio practice. If we focus on the right aspects of the final design at the right times we should need waterfall style phases, i.e. IA > IxD > Graphics > Implementation. These should all happen in different combinations at different times depending on the piece of the pie that we’re trying to solve.

I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with starting with UI sketches, as long as they become an input to working out the detailed flow and interactivity along the way, which then becomes an input to more UI sketches, wireframes, and other design activities and outputs. We continue through this circular process (create, learn, create) until we feel that we’ve come to a place where the product works both in function and form.

If you work with a UX person or and IA that doesn’t care about aesthetics, or you work with a designer that doesn’t care about flow and functionality, then both are failing the product. Form and function live in service of each other, and if one isn’t making the other more successful then something has gone awry.

The over segmentation of our process and practice is harmful. We shouldn’t be thinking about when to do the IA, we should be thinking about the pieces of the product that are going to make it successful. We should be applying solid understanding of people, theory, and technique to making awesome products and services. That’s how we will provide value and actually make people’s lives better. Isn’t that why we all do this?

I’ve recently returned to Normative after interning here a few years ago, and for the past two months I’ve been part of a research project for one of our clients. We’ve been using mostly qualitative methods to dive deep into a massive organization, and understand their behaviours so we can design for the real problem.

A big component of our method has been transcribing onto post-its the data points from survey, interview, and focus group transcriptions. By coding the information in different ways (unique IDs in the corner, colours for individuals or existing categories, etc), we’re free to move the data spatially, creating visual context between data points while still being able to track those pieces of data back to their original source. The changing visual context allows conclusions and inferences to be made from these groupings, and observations can be added to the data as headers and direction.

Why is this important? It’s allowing us as a team of designers and researchers to work together on a massive problem, and keep the data, conclusions, and insights physical. Each of us is emerging as an expert on one component of the project, but our knowledge, research, and findings are being externalized on these walls.

It’s an old technique and the “20-something Designer with Postits” cliche is definitely getting a bit out of control, but when exercised at scale and with appropriate rigor, it’s a fantastic way to facilitate research across teams and enable your clients to participate in the discovery.

(Cross posted on readywater.ca)

The project was part of the Global Service Jam organized by WorkPlayExperience, and was organized locally by Andrew Lovett-Barron and Michael-Owen Liston. We had mentors Heather McGaw, Blair Johnsrude, Lindsay Ellerby, and Ayla Newhouse working with the jammers throughout the weekend.

You should explore the photos from the event on flickr here, and learn more about future Toronto design jams here!

Both Adam and Steve’s posts are well considered and articulate. I hope my thoughts come across as clearly.

I completely agree with Adam’s main sentiment: there is no user experience design practice. In my opinion UX is a construct of an industry that needed design and didn’t have the context or history to tie into larger design practice (I’ve written about this before). I agree that the idea of a “user” is flawed and that nobody can really design an experience.

Where I part from Adam’s point of view is around the idea that Experience Design is a mode of decision making and that design is problem solving. Steve articulated a similar disagreement in his post with which I completely agree. He says that design isn’t just problem solving, it’s also about creating a shared vision and creating meaning in our solutions. I would add to that that design is about making the future. When we design new things we are being futurists and creating pieces of what we’d like to see tomorrow. “Problem solving” doesn’t express enough of design’s inventiveness and ability to actually change the shape of the world based on the designer’s idea of what the future should be.

Steve closes his post with his view that we design for experience, rather than design the experience itself. It’s close, but still doesn’t completely feel right to me. We design for lots of things (efficiency, joy, …) and I’m not sure that designing for experience is that meaningful for me. Hasn’t design always been about enabling experiences? Buildings, chairs, clocks, etc have always enabled people to have experiences that are shaped by the designer in some way. In the 1950s and 60s people like Irving Goffman, John Dewey, and Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on the nature of experience in relation to art, design, architecture, and sociology. That’s not to say that this concept isn’t more at the forefront then it was in the 20th century, it clearly is, but many good art and design schools have been teaching this for a long time. And that brings me to my next point.

At Interaction|11 Dick Buchanan gave a keynote talk that really resonated with me. He described interaction design as the current order of design. The way I’ve been interpreting this is to mean this: Industrial design was the primary design framework of the 20th century. It was built upon a worldview based on largely inanimate objects and environments, and their primarily physical relationship to people (I understand this is highly simplified). In the later part of the 20th century, and dominating the 21st century so far, objects, environments, and other “products” have become more conversational, we no longer have static relationships with the things around us. This has caused a shift in worldview – people now expect “things” to communicate back, to give feedback, to enable conversations, and to have some degree of “humanity.” With this expectation comes a new understanding of the things around us, and a new focus on how they interact with people and with each other.

The effect of this is that all objects, not only digital devices (which are inherently conversational), can be seen as interaction. Buchanan used the example of a chair he has on stage. In the Industrial Design framework that chair is a physical object with material properties, ergonomics, manufacturing requirements, costs, environmental properties, and aesthetics. In the Interaction Design framework that same chair is still all those things, but is also the interactions that it creates between people and other people through its use, and the interactions people have with the object. We begin to see objects in a different way.

To bring this back around, this means that when people interact with the things around them and get explicit or implicit feedback (or expect to be able to) from those things, or other people through those things, they are having an experience. I believe that what we’re designing are those interactions, not those experiences. Interaction design is akin to layering complex choreography over the foundation of industrial design and architecture. We can try to plan the steps, but people are improvisational by nature and will follow their own steps. Our designs can, at best, encourage specific behaviours. But the behaviour, along with the experience the person has with the object, are theirs alone.

I’ll end with a snippet from Steve’s post where he paraphrases one of my favourite Jon Kolko quotes:

“I see three problems with the phrase ‘user experience designer’. i) User is such a narrow term, and assumes a context for both the person and designed object that isn’t necessarily true. ii) it’s conceited on the part of a designer to think they can ‘design’ something as intrinsically personal as an experience. And it’s arrogant to think we have control over such a complex, personal thing. iii) Most of what people practice as ‘UX Design’ isn’t design at all. It might be creative; it might be successful; but it isn’t Design.”

And for one last word: The People’s Front of Design (old IxDA post).

Same difference. Left to right, @antlersanchors, @readywater, @blairjohnsrude, @emenel

To that end, I’ve found myself revisiting ‘design as an activity versus a process.’ We’ve naturally worked that way for a while, but as new folks join it’s good to articulate what that means in a more focused manner.

So, what is design as an activity?

Design as an activity is a mind set. It’s not vastly different from design as a process, but requires a different way of thinking about doing design. It means conducting a series of exercises (such as open and closed sorting of research data, sketching, prototyping, testing, image and word association, synthetical thinking, etc.) with the aim of creating tools for facilitating the design steps that follow. The tools include stuff like: moodboards, personas, mental models, wires, user flows, prototypes, page compositions, napkin sketches, etc; and these aren’t treated as deliverables, which involves working collaboratively with clients so they are participants in the exercises and users of the tools instead of recipients of deliverables.

Why does design as an activity work?

Movement
One great reason for designers to work this way is because it keeps things moving. Exercises build on each other and the tools that are created as outcomes facilitate moving to the next step.

Tools vs. Deliverables
Treating outcomes as tools allows designers to focus less on updating documentation and more on designing. Designers can be less focused on creating documentation and more focused on building tools that facilitate discussion, creation and synthesis.

Flexibility
Design as an activity allows for great flexibility. Designers can focus on the vision, or desired end-state, and not worry about following a ridgid process. Different exercises can be used at different times as needed. An exercise may be doing synthetical thinking on your train ride home from work (a big reason why it’s so hard for designers to track hours!)

Over the last year we really came together as a team, learning how to compliment each other’s skills and interests to make the best work. We keep raising our standards and expectations, and our team rises to the new level each time. We’re in planning mode now, getting ready to work on some huge projects in 2012 including a massive intranet, multi-screen video, robot arms, and new learning tools. It’s going to be a busy year, and we’ll keep posting the best of our work here.

The end of the year is always a time to reflect on what we’ve done well and what we could have done better. Our practice has been improving, but we’ve also become a little more hermit-like. In 2012 we’re going to blog more, speak more, share more, and get others involved in what we do. We’re starting things off with a bang with Interaction Design North in January, then speaking at Interaction’12 in Dublin, and the IA Summit in New Orleans.

I hope everybody had a great 2011, and that 2012 will be even better.

This is a pretty typical scene in one of the Normative project spaces. We tend to have projects explode all over the walls and boards, then leave it all there for the duration of the work. It makes it easy for designers to jump into the project when needed, and to work with clients and collaborators quickly.

This type of tangible work also helps with knowledge sharing and distribution within the team, sometimes called pattern loading. By working physically with the data our brains absorb the information in a different way, and we can do it with others allowing for serendipitous insights and synthesis.

My answer is that to be a master designer you need to understand all of those things. “But that’s too much, one person can’t understand all those skills.” That’s the most common reply… How you you be a great interaction designer, and learn to code, and learn typography, and understand systems, etc, etc…?

I’m starting to feel that the reason designers get so defensive when it’s suggested that they need to learn other skill sets is that we’re trying to do it all too fast. We’ve been taught by the tech dominant culture in North America that we need to be the best we are going to be by the time we’re 30, otherwise you might be too old and no hot startup will hire you. This is a really unfortunate state of mind.. In reality design is a complex, multi-faceted, cross-disciplinary practice that takes decades to master. Designers also need to become experts in different contexts, environments, and domains. We have to apply the wide range of skills we acquire or wrangle in different businesses, organizations, and other endeavours. If we start thinking about our peak practice at 50 years old instead of 30 we now have a much more realistic timeline for mastering this complex craft.

There are some people who display raw talent at a young age, but few show designerly wisdom. Design is complex and requires continual learning. In order to master all the things that allow you to be a truly great designer it takes time and practice. We tend to think in 2 to 5 year scales, maybe we need to be thinking in longer time lines about our own careers and skills.