Interaction Design North happened last weekend with a great group of attendees. We had lots of local Toronto people, as well as a few guests from abroad. I hope everybody who attended enjoyed the weekend as much as we did and was able to learn something useful.

We began the workshop on Friday morning with a couple presentations to set the stage. Matthew (@mmilan) talked about the design process at a high level, setting the foundation for our work. Then Taylan Pince talked about designing with technology – a great introduction to some of the relationships between designers, developers, and how to work with technological contraints. All of this set the stage for the real work, which began in the afternoon.

The design problem for the weekend was framed in a very loose way: research some of the issues around urban cycling and design a technologically based solution for some aspect of those problems. We left the problem definition ambiguous to allow the groups a lot of freedom in discovering the aspect they were most interested in. We gave everybody some instruction on field research methods, and then took them out into the city in small groups. Each group chose their own research methods with the guidance of their Normative facilitator. Pretty much every group performed a mix of casual observation, person-on-the-street interviews, and active research (actually riding a bike downtown).

With research data in hand we regrouped at the studio to start organizing and analyzing our data. Day two began with my (@emenel) presentation on design practice and synthesis. This introduced people to the methods we’d be using to start to create design ideas from their research data. Groups created affinity diagrams, mental models, flows, and concept maps in an effort to draw insights from the research. There were some amazing breakthroughs, and lots of struggle as people tried to move past the surface layer of their data and really get into the meat of things. There were some fantastic ideas that started to take shape out of the synthesis exercises, everything from products for drivers to make them more aware of cyclists to new data collection services and interactive road way signage.

From there we had a great presentation on sketching by John (@jpmcardle), then each group took the rest of the afternoon to sketch and critique ideas.  This is where a lot of the designs started to come together and groups began to converge on their final solutions. We put strict time boxes on all the charettes, 10 minutes or less. That way we generate many ideas and force participants to think with their hands. Sketching with this level of intensity is pretty tiring, and most of the participants were pretty worn out by the end of the day.

The final day was dedicated to refining our design concepts and creating a final presentation. Cameron Westland (@camwest) from Big Bang Technology presented some thoughts on current practices in software development and prototyping to help guide our production efforts. Groups spent some time refining their concept in sketches, digital mockups, skits/body-storming, and more.

In the final part of Sunday afternoon each group presented their design concept using the artifacts they created over the first couple days, we then had a formal group critique and wrap up discussion.

It was truly an amazing weekend. Everybody learned a lot, including us. Teaching people the methods and processes that we use every day forced us to examine our own practice in a different way. We really had to dig to get at the details of what we do so that all the participants could really understand how these methods work. We wanted to make sure that people could use what they learned, and to do that they really had to understand it. I hope we succeeded, but we’ll have to wait for one of the attendees to let us know.

I promised a reading list to the attendees, so here it is. Feel free to add to it in the comments if you have another recommendation.

• Exposing the Magic of Design, Jon Kolko
• Elements of Design, Gail Greet Hannah
• Discovering Design, Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander
• Mental Models, Indi Young
• Designing for the Digital Age, Kim Goodwin

I’m sure there were more books mentioned during the workshop, if I missed something let me know and I’ll update the post. I didn’t link these to a book store, you should be able to find them at your favourite online or physical retailer.

We’ll be running this workshop again in the future. If you’re interested in attending let us know and we’ll make sure you are on the notification list.