My humble takeaways from Interaction 19
By: Michael Caporale
Tags: Design Thinking, Design, Ixda, UX Design, Interaction Design

Designers can no longer live in “design-land.” They must strive to create impact by understanding business needs, helping define success metrics, and working with coworkers in other disciplines to help them visualize their problems, and gather perspectives from outside their purview.

While not related to the conference, I recommend designers check out the book Hacking Growth for more actionable context on this.

Change occurs when enough people believe the change will occur

John Maeda gave a poignant keynote about reinventing yourself. And how it’s okay to be a “Maker/Talker” as he calls it; someone who is good at making things, but is transitioning into a someone who leads, sells, or otherwise supports the craftsmen — a talker. We all need people to help us on our journey; to help us grow and get up after we fall.

People aren’t working for you or against you, just for themselves. When you look at it that way, it’s much less personal.

— John Maeda

No is NOT an answer

Thank you Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun 😉

Her explosive presentation was a meta form of her “hammering technique,” which she employs to turn every no into a yes. This means for example, using multiple email addresses when asking for a bid on an outlandish project. If at first you don’t succeed, try asking another way.

To act is to begin something new in the world.

— Nelly Ben Hayoun

Don’t reach for the “Pickle Jar”

Jon Bell talked about his team’s pickle jar analogy. When you’re in the kitchen and someone is struggling to open up this jar that’s sealed so tight, your first instinct is to go in and offer to help. Obviously you’re much stronger than this other person, right? “Give it to me!”

Well this happens in the workplace all the time. We see a team or company struggling to make a product successful, and we think, “they’re so stupid, if they would only do this!” or “they should let me handle that.” In reality, we weren’t there from the beginning, understanding the complexities of the problem. There’s probably a lot of underlying challenges, whether political, usability, ethical, or timeline-based, that you’re simply not aware of. To avoid wasted resources, and stepping on toes, Jon’s team at Twitter instituted an approval process before anything goes into design production.

Convenience is the commodity

This is a tough one. Companies like Amazon are striving to make our lives so easy that before we even think about what we want, it shows up on our doorstep. But as we take more and more, we give more and more of our privacy. The ethical questions linger on.

I think there’s a positive light here in that if we can design products and services that improve the human condition and free up time and mental space, we will all have more time to devote to the things we really care about. The things that make us happy; like our friends, our art, hobbies, etc. I think we’ll be grappling with the ethical considerations of data privacy and AI forever, but the more proactive design and business leaders are in facing these issues head on, the greater chance we have to thrive as a species.

I did learn some things about ethics. Namely that no one can really summarize a toolkit for ethics. Well, except for one dude — Gabriel White. Here’s his solid list of heuristics for an otherwise complicated topic, which I found to be very practical.