February 2012 – Boon Yew Chew

A lot of people are harping around this story of expert violinist Joshua Bell who went barely unnoticed as a busker at a Washington DC metro station and how we’ve lost sight of the beauty of music, how we don’t stop to recognize talent, etc. The real lesson of this story isn’t so much about stopping for a moment or missing out of life’s pleasures or even recognizing talent. It’s really about how we fundamentally are as human beings, how we naturally perceive things one way and not the other.

In short, this story is about the nature of human beings, not about the future of who we can become. If you really want to learn from this, begin to turn the points around as normal behaviour:

We ascribe greater value to things when they’re priced higher (i.e. Metro Station vs. Concert Hall, see http://bit.ly/PaPPx)
We are naturally self-centred, and we perceive things based on our social context (see Tom Vanderbilt’s modal bias article on cyclists vs. cars http://bit.ly/dWW7ZI)
We are also a social species, and there’s been a lot of studies done around crowd or group behaviour, and a crowded space like like a Metro station influence certain behavioural tendencies (http://bit.ly/r0svv)
How we perceive each other as individuals also have a ‘framing’ effect (busker vs. talented musician), so the whole moral aspect to this this interplay of roles is really quite pointless (http://bit.ly/190z3w)

If you want to learn from this story, don’t focus on the morals themselves as they can come from *anywhere*. Focus on understanding our who we are as human beings, imperfections and all – our behaviours tend not to change, but changing environments and contexts (which is easier to do) can help shape and align those behaviours toward good.

Either that or I should stop clicking on lame stuff people post on Facebook.

Last year around this time, I was ‘attending’ Interaction 2011 from afar, cosily in my loft. But when IxDA announced this year’s conference in Dublin, I jumped the chance. I’m glad I did – conferences like Interaction have deep community roots, and help interaction designers come together to reflect, energize, and chart history for the near future.

Here’s an article I wrote for a corporate blog, which didn’t get published but highlights my reflections from the conference…

Last week I joined about 750 attendees in Dublin, Ireland for IxDA’s Interaction 2012 conference on Interaction Design. While last year’s conference had (loosely) answered the question “what have we achieved and how do we move forward?”, this year’s IxD12 has progressed towards answering “the future of human experience and relationships through interaction”. The main themes that emerged throughout the event were the emotional/social aspects of digital experiences and breaking through UX cliches and norms. It was also the first “global” Interaction conference, based in a non-US venue, which thankfully made it easier on us London-based folks.

One of the major takeaways of the conference was about modernising our tools, methods and approaches to address the explosive growth around mobile, social computing, and affective interaction. Several keynotes and talks emphasized the use of innovative thinking (Luke Williams’ “Disrupt”), progressive methods (Abby Covert’s “IA Heuristics”), and expanding beyond conventional interfaces (Jonas Löwgren’s sketching keynote). This critical reflection of the practice was very well received by attendees, myself included.

Even classic UX hallmarks such as usability testing, goals, and tasks were brought into question. In his talk, “Users don’t have goals”, Andrew Hinton argues that we’ve become too procedural, and that there are better ways to design against for organic, fuzzy, human behaviours. The MAO model, presented by Sebastian Deterding, is one such method – proposed as an alternative to BJ Fogg’s “Persuasive Architecture”. Even usability expert Dana Chisnell argued that testing against tasks is ill-suited to research the increasingly ubiquitous social web. Despite the challenging nature of these talks, it didn’t feel superficial or impractical, and certainly left me inspired about the future of our practice.

The evening events, such as the opening & closing parties and the IxDA Awards (an Interaction first), were packed and fed the whiskey-induced celebrations well through the nights. One of them, The Great IxDA Debate hosted by SapientNitro, pitched three controversial IxD topics against panelists Dave Malouf, Pete Trainor, Abby Covert, Jeff Gothelf, Kieron Leppard, and Giles Colborne. With Dan WIllis (@uxcrank) moderating, the debate turned out to be one of the best IxD12 events.

It’s hard to shake off the community spirit at an Interaction conference, and it certainly delivered that in spades this year. Next year’s theme (again, an Interaction first) has been aptly named “Social Impact”, and will be held in Toronto, Canada. Closing keynote speaker, Dr. Genevieve Bell, summed it up best – we’re moving away from thinking solely about interactions and more towards relationships.

I tried to cover as many talks I could with my sketchnotes, but I’ll briefly sum up the event with the following “themes” I observed: