Interaction 20: an inflection point for design?
By: Boon Yew Chew
Tags: User Experience, Usability, UX, Interaction Design, Product Design

Local leaders @ Interaction 20

Last week in Milan, I attended my 8th Interaction conference. If I could count Boulder as my first, then Milan would be by 9th, but it was a partial attendance because I was following tweets and updates remotely from my loft in London. The coverage was so amazing that I was able to sketchnote several talks and one workshop, and some people even thought I was there.

But I was smitten from that moment, and over the years, IxDA has become a professional home for me and many others.

I won’t be posting my thoughts on the talks I attended—they were all very high quality and I urge you to watch them when the recordings come out. I also recommend what Jason Mesut and Aleksandra Lazovic have both posted from the week.

Instead, I thought I’d share my impressions from the various conversations, reflections, thoughts and observations from people I’ve spent time with—old friends from the community, new ones I’ve met along the way, newcomers, volunteers, friends from the board, local leaders, students, mid career folks, leaders, and pioneers.

From my gut, I feel that we are in a multi-year transition where we’re in between something that is starting to become the norm, and something that is already happening.

My hunch is that we are in that shift from designing the futures we want, to figuring out how to avoid designing the futures we don’t want. Or at least, avoiding or shaping the work that leads to more problems.

Several themes have echo-ed this across the week, but there’s one that sticks in my head more than others:

“The future is already here.”

The general tone and atmosphere of the conversation has become more sombre, more serious, more careful—we don’t need to stretch our imagination to map out the consequences and outcomes we need to be ready for…it’s already happening now, all over, and will continue to persist.

I’ll avoid discussing things like climate change, the general inability of governments to cope with the 21st century, the widening gap of our societies and our beliefs, and the bulldozing effect of present-day techno utopianism… I’m guessing every one of us have had personal, visceral, and emotional encounters and issues about “things that happening around us and the world”. I suppose that has something to do with it.

At a local level, I’ve heard from friends who have left agencies who are struggling, others who have weathered seemingly endless acquisitions, observations of continued shifts towards inhouse and enterprise work, but also the usual internal struggles designers have within organisations—hiring and attracting talent, disjointed teams, poor culture or skills fit, or just generally not getting along well with everything else within the company.

No surprise there—the world is still trying to figure out what to do with designers. Or designers figuring out what to do with ourselves.

Others seem more positive—joining newly formed initiatives within their org, getting a fresh start in a new leadership role, launching a new agency, launching a new book, exploring a coaching career… our industry is constantly in flux and change is constant.