How is interaction design changing and what the drivers behind this? Has it managed to develop the skill sets it needs to deal with the challenges ahead? And how does interaction design overlap with other design disciplines? Andy Altmann from Why Not Associates, Durrell Bishop of Luckybite and Daljit Singh, founder of Digit discuss with chair Nico Macdonald.
Read the transcript below
Nico Macdonald
I - very briefly - have been involved in both writing about and consulting on design strategy around interaction design. I am not a designer but writing in Design and other publications in the UK and the U.S about this subject area for 11 or 12 years now, and I've been very interested in it since working with various established designers in communication and graphic design and editorial design in the mid 90s when the web started to become an interesting platform. The question of what design, what traditional design skills and how they might be applied to this new medium and newish form of interaction, became one that preoccupied me a lot. I more recently wrote about it in the context of a conference, sorry, an exhibition called Communicate at the Barbican, which is about UK independent graphic design since the 60s, which flagged up the question about what influence, if any, has British graphic design had on interaction design, which my conclusion was well indirectly, quite a lot of influence, and directly, very little.
The panel here today, we're looking at quite a number of themes around the way in which the skills and so on which inform and make up interaction design. We're going to talk a bit more about that, noting particularly that practitioners in this field have come from quite diverse backgrounds. I'll introduce them properly in a minute but Daljit's background is originally in typographic design, and Durrell's background is in product and industrial design, and Andy's background is in more traditional communication design, but the people have been leaders in this field, or the companies in this field, having worked in architecture, in software engineering, from the music industry and very many other areas, and it's still an area which is very much in flux.
Clearly the number of areas in which interaction design is now being applied and thought about has expanded from software user interface design and product interaction of twenty or thirty years ago through to mobile devices of all kinds through to environmental design, and architecture through to the living room and interactive television, whatever that is, but certainly there is a lot of interaction going on there, to the design of services and all the interactive elements around that, which is a related theme and one which we're going to be discussing some more tomorrow.
So, what we're going to look at is the best ways of understanding this discipline, the skills and interaction designers of different hues. All essentially the same skills, just being applied in different industries, different platforms and different kinds of products, and if not, what are the key distinctions that we need to look at. Then, I want to look at more generally what the newer challenges are and the newer skills we might need. So, I'm not going to introduce everybody extensively but on my immediate left is Daljit Singh who's founder of Digit London, which was founded in the mid 90s and has been pioneering particularly in its use I think of research methods around interaction design and exploring the novelty end, one might even say quirky forms of interaction with almost a sort of an art end to it as well as doing more commercial projects. One brilliant idea, I particularly noted, was a project for Sony Ericsson, which Daljit may talk about, which was a physical interactive environment where one used a Sony Ericsson type phone interface in a physical space and took photographs of oneself, it became a very interesting interaction between people in that space. I saw the example in, I think, a railway station, but showing how this concept of digital photography on a phone which was then still relatively new, might be better understood by people.
Durrell Bishop has moved from product and industrial design through to working in and around interaction design, working in places like Interval Research and Apple Advance Technology Group, teaching at the Royal College of Art, and teaching is something I think that Durrell is going to come back to. He's worked at Ideo twice in different formats and now has a partnership called Luckybite which is working on projects, which whenever I ask him about them, they're all unfortunately too secret to learn too much about, but the cat will be out of the bag one day.
Andy Altman, on my far left, is co-founder of Why Not Associates, which was founded way back in the 1980s. Some of you probably weren't even born then. Andy graduated from the Royal College of Art along with, I think, both co-founders where he claims that although there were few Apple Macintoshes to be used, he and his co-founders were unafraid of them, and keen to embrace this new platform for productivity and experimentation, and that set them in very good stead for dealing with new challenges around design, from design around time-base media, doing a lot of work for television titling. One I particularly enjoyed was the, people might have seen, the advert run earlier this year for the BBC around football, with lovely typography across the pictures - Christiano Ronaldo lined up to score a fabulous goal - and also very physical work. For instance, a project I saw earlier this year at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park which is names of all the benefactors or donors which have been donating lots of money, I'm pleased to say, to the Sculpture Park, which are all machine cut, laser cut, out of a metal grid so as you approach the visitor centre there, you walk over the names of the people and look for the ones that you know, which obviously takes some time given how many donors there were. And has latterly been working on a project in Blackpool with artists around a physical sculpture which is also a climbing wall. So I think Andy's crossed a very great trajectory in terms of the kind of work that Why Not has done.
So, the structure for this session is going to be to ask each of the panelists to just do a brief five to seven minute reflection on the themes of the panel. Then, we're going to have a panel discussion, taking us up to about the half hour mark. So that will be about five past one or so, and then we'll open up to the audience, and what I'll do is ask for groups of questions, not necessarily themed, but just so the panel can make the most of their time in responding and get the most out of the audience here. So, without further ado, the speaking order is going to be Daljit, then Durrell and then Andy, and I'll ask you to kick off.
Daljit Singh
Okay, can everybody hear me? Right. I'm not going to talk about interaction digital web, whatever you want to call it, design to start with, I'm just going to talk about sausages because one of the things we were asked was what is a new skill that you have learned, and I've recently learned how to make sausages. I have to say it's bloody brilliant. While making these sausages, I realised that there was a gap in the market – Indian sausages. So, I’ve got a range of Indian sausages coming out onto the market at the end of this year, but the real killer idea which didn't come from me, it came from my girlfriend's mother who lives in Surrey, was the name of the sausages, and I just thought “Why didn't I think of that?” because ideas do come from everywhere. The name she came up with was Bangras which is – if at first you don't get it, when you do get it, it's hilarious. So, I'm hoping that will turn into something but that's absolutely a skill which I've picked up. The next skill I hope to learn, isn't programming or anything like that, but again, just keeping in the vein of doing something outside of the comfort zone is bee keeping because apparently my girlfriend thinks I'm going to look really stupid in one of those outfits but let's see what happens.
Anyway, coming onto the subject that we're supposed to be here to talk about. I think the word which is really relevant for me is blur, this idea of blur. I mean there's so much noise out there at the moment, you know, it makes my head hurt every morning, and living inside the digital world, and this goes beyond things like Facebook and Bebo and Facepaint…Facesake… and all these names is that there is something new that comes along every single day. So us as designers, as practioners, as developers, as strategy people, it's an incredible amount of stuff that you’ve got to keep up with. You've got to make a choice on which ones are the most important ones. For me, one of the most important design tools which is out there and something which we have to all collectively be aware of is the internet. It's changing everything fundamentally. It's changing the way that design's happening. It's changing the way that designers are working, and more importantly, it's changing the way that advertising is working. My business, which started off as a design company, we still design, has now kind of moved towards advertising because it seems to be the place where there is an incredible need. So this pressure cooker is really beginning to make people's brains hurt a bit. So we all say well what about kids, twelve, thirteen years old, it's fine. We're making those decisions on a lot of levels, and we need to involve them because that's absolutely, absolutely essential. And the world's confusing.
You know, if we don't think about interactive, or interaction or digital web design, and toothpaste. In America, Crest who make toothpaste, they have 53 different varieties of toothpaste. We are bombarded with choice. It's unbelievable and we need something that makes our life a bit simpler. Ryanair have credit cards. Tescos sell computers. My chip shop sells curry. These things some from all over the place, and for us, interaction design, or interactive design, is about moments and that is the way we take it. We take technology, we take strategy, we take design, and we put them together and create moments. Moments of interactions because that is what people fall in love with. That's the relationship that they have, and if you can find love in those moments, whether it's doing that with a screen over an Apple interface, or it's the original Nokia operating system, or it's walking out and engaging with a piece of technology simply. That's what it is about. It's about creating moments of interaction and involving the right people. Now, three or four years ago we would involve designers, programmers, let's get together. Now, those skills are changing. We now look for other skills. We look for people who understand psychology, people who understand the way that two things come together, lots of different skills, product designers, theatre designers, etc., etc. We look out of our space. That cycle of making sausages, I actually learned an incredible amount from it, from production process to every little visceral thing which happens.
The way that we've got there is – it was touched earlier on by Tim– is that one of the bits of the business that has been there since the very beginning is Research and Development. We dedicate 15% of our time to developing R & D. What we've discovered recently is, which is something everyone should write down, SSAP13. Does that mean anything to anybody? SSAP13 is a law within tax benefits which allows creative companies to conduct research and development for which we get a tax break, but hardly anybody knows about it. The key is in the word. SS, what does that remind you of? And 13? If there are four letters that you could have put together, you would have trusted a tax man to do it. So, go and find out about it because it makes a tremendous difference in terms of any type of design, but particularly interaction design because it's so new it's something we're all learning about whether its a piece of physical communication or whether it is something which is two dimensional.
Nico Macdonald
Okay. Thank you very much Daljit. Durrell.
Durrell Bishop
I'm not a particularly experienced speaker so I'm going to read something out. I'm a product designer who works on digital products, installations, interfaces. The question is, what are my core skills? I was actually really pleased to be asked this question because I think skills are currently really under-appreciated in design. Skills are too often thought of as a way of implementing design. Whereas, I found the learning of skills to be one of the most important way to actually change my way of thinking about things. I'm going to give you a bit of background. I studied design and worked for good companies in the 1980s. I got dissatisfied quickly with the job of styling and repackaging electronics. I wanted to work on what new products could do and how we could use them.
I went back to college at around thirty years old to Gillian's course, CID course at Royal College of Art. I spent two years experimenting with products and learning two core skills. The first skill was programming. I learned this through programming graphics and using it to try out product ideas. I'm not a proper programmer. What I can do is use programming fluently as a way of sketching, or sketching behaviour. I think it's important to see programming as a language for describing and trying out potential in design. I think it's pretty much ignored by a lot of design at the moment. The second skill was electronics. This was a way of sketching and trying out physical behaviour. It's a way of experimenting with what products could do as opposed to the way in which they are marketed. I like to experience design and not to create fictions about the behaviour, and there's a lot of storytelling going on nowadays in design but if you want to experience it, you’ve actually got to have a go at doing it, building things, trying them. I found simple tools that let me sketch with microprocessors and physical interfaces. I know it's a bit detailed in a way but it's really for students, or people learning, people who have to actually learn some of these things if you’re going to work in the weird intersections at the moment. The problem with electronics in design colleges is that it’s very difficult to find the right sort of people to teach it. You probably don't want to be taught by electronic engineers but by designers and artists who actually use it in their work. They don't have to be highly skilled. They just need enough knowledge to get students excited and actually playing with things.
The trick of the designer has been for me to find simple and accessible graphical tools. The saddest thing is that some of these tools for designers are not getting any better, but instead are getting more complicated and even disappearing. An example of this is Flash, which came out of a drawing tool and it should be something that designers can move, describe things with, and then so move into behaviour but actually nowadays, to program in Flash, it's really difficult. The very ways in which you get people involved is disappearing, I think. I don't think designers respond very well to being taught programming. It seems better when they have tools that visually demonstrate an idea and then they slowly move into working on behaviour with those tools. So they're always working from their skills first into the behaviour of things. There is a move at the moment, a fashion at the moment, a set of new tools that have come out which actually help designers primarily learn to program as a separate identity as opposed to just being fluidly part of their design skills.
The last thing I was going to say was a little bit about …I think there's reluctance in both graphics and product design courses, say conditional behaviour and communication. This may be a lack of teachers. It may be the massive desire to do decorative work or work in the high end design. It also might be because of the new courses which are claiming the space so the interaction courses, perhaps are actually allowing graphics and product design courses not to deal with behaviour of things. I believe that good invention and simple communication which should come from graphic design is desperately needed in the products around us. My hope has always been that it would be graphic design that actually took over a lot of what product designers do. I don't see it happen.
Nico Macdonald
Great. Thank you very much Durrell. Andy.
Andy Altmann
Hi. Good morning. I've not written anything down to say because I'm really bad when I do that. It just comes out like a really bad best man's speech. I'm just going to make it up as I go along as I normally do. Our history.. it’s very sad for us… it's twenty years that we've been doing this now. It feels like an unbelievably long time, about time I got a proper job. What we have done over the years is, I think, just had a very open mind, and when we've met somebody, quite often our collaborators become friends before we’ve collaborated with them. The artist we work a lot with now, Gordon Young, became a friend before we actually starting doing any work with him. We should never have become friends because he's a Leeds United fan and I'm a Man United fan, and we should come to blows rather than actually come to work together.
For me, over the years, our interaction is with people we've worked with like Gordon, and for me, he thinks like an artist. He can be very stroppy and stamp his feet, act like a proper artist, and I'm more laid back like a graphic designer. Most graphic designers tend to be fairly laid back and open to ideas and things. So, it's quite a good complimentary working relationship but what's interesting about collaborating with somebody who thinks in a very different way to you is that you go on a journey together and you end up at a different place than neither of you could get there on your own, which is what intrigues me because he makes me think in a different way and that applies to photographers we've worked with and writers we've worked with and clients we've worked with.
I did a talk yesterday here to predominantly students. I showed a project we'd done for Nike, and it was a ten minute film that we’d made, and just on the brief was the word “heroic” . We went to present it in Amsterdam. We had to get up at three in the morning to fly to Amsterdam for a ten o'clock meeting, and we showed it and in typical Dutch style, there was just this no emotion. They just went, it's rubbish. We're like, it's not good and so we went back and it went on and on and on but we kept showing ideas and it was this painful exercise but by the end of it, we achieved something that I think is one of the best things ever done, and it was there, them just pushing us and pushing us, to push ourselves. That was great at the end of it but it was a painful experience at the time. I find that you can collaborate with clients and they can push you in different directions, but in our office, we've never worked for anyone else so I don't know how you're supposed to run a graphic design studio. We've made it up as we've gone along and having survived twenty years, it feels like bumbling, middle-aged fools now who've managed to get through twenty years and still be doing it, feels like quite an achievement but it still excites me.
The weirdest thing I've done recently is I went out and bought a drawing board because I was so pissed off with the computer. I was so bored and sick of looking at a laptop. I went out to the local art shop and bought myself a drawing board. And it was great. I was trying to find a pencil with a lead and a rubber. I was searching the house trying to find a pencil with a lead that did that. It was like a new lease of life, getting on a drawing board again, and that started drawing type and things and it was fantastic. It was just a sense of freedom because when we left the Royal College, we had three drawing boards. That is literally what we walked out the door with, three drawing boards but there were computers there like you said at the introduction, but they were so big, it was like walking onto a James Bond set, big whirling things going on in the corners and stuff, video camera and five fonts that would only print in a pixelated way. We were the only people in our year who actually embraced them but they felt like a toy, it just felt like a fantastic toy to play with. Computers still feel like toys but I think they can get in the way these days. It's nice to walk away from them for a bit, get a bit of fresh air, then go back to them. So, that's it. I don't know what else I'm going to say. I’ll shut up.
Nico Macdonald
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I think the last point actually reflects Durrell's point. May be we don't need to get away from it all, we need better tools to work with. Some of these tools may not be based on traditional computing models. But I just want to start off the panel discussion and just ask you to briefly say how (because I realise there’s little agreement about this) how you understand the concept of interaction design and how your background has brought you to it. I don't want to get too much into the semantics about, you know, people have argued about experience design, user experience design, interaction design over the years and so on. The terminology itself is not that interesting but trying to understand what makes this thing up. And we may go on to argue actually, as Durrell already has, is not really a discreet thing and it should probably be part of or subsumed by some other disciplines. Daljit, do you want to talk a bit about how you understand interaction design and how you came to it?
Daljit Singh
Well, I came to it very accidently through working at my first job at IBM. They asked for an interaction designer and I said “No, I'm not one of those”, I said, “I'm a graphic designer.” So it was a very new thing and the thing is that was thirteen years ago but it still feels very new. I think it's what I said at the very beginning, it's very, very complex. We often get described as web designers. That's the general kind of terminology, you create stuff for the internet so you design web experiences. But more often than not what happens is you move away from those comfort zones into new areas where your clients want you to go. I think the point about collaboration with clients is absolutely essential. We often look at clients as they give us something, we answer it, they pay us, we go away, maybe we'll have a relationship. But actually, it's about building this relationship further. I think this new medium allows us to do it. Essentially, the way that we do it is it comes from the background of graphic designers, that's the way it used to be five or six years ago, coming into this environment, and programmers, programmers get together. Some of the software that you use dictates the way that you do those things and that software has changed. I've had to hire five technical people recently because the designers can’t use the software anymore, and that's really sad. I think some of this change is being influenced by the people that produce the elements and the tools that allow us to get there. Essentially it's about ideas. It's about sitting down together, looking at a client problem, and coming up with a solution for it, whether that's going to be a website or web 2.0 as it's described. I personally thing web 2.0 is some stuff which is just twice as bad but it's just an excuse for being out there. Again, I know people are perhaps looking for answers but I'm a bit confused as well, and that confusion is there all the time, and sometimes it becomes simple and sometimes it's not there all the time. Does that…have I just answered the question or not?
Nico Macdonald
I just wanted to ask your work with IBM started off as I understand around point of sale systems in Nottingham. Although you were a typographer, I believe, you clearly saw that there was something they needed help with which turned out to be something interaction design-y or interface design-y around.
Daljit Singh
Yes, I think it was. I really didn't think it was. It was rubbish; it was sixteen colours and two fonts. I'd just come from the wonderful world of Eric Gill and I thought what the fucking hell am I doing this for but actually it was very important. It was at the beginnings of looking at new ways of doing things. It's also learning about new cycles of design. This world, the web world, the digital world throws up these issues all the time so you're having to learn all the time. So in terms of skills, skills are changing. Education, as described before, there are new courses which are being set up which are teaching people about interactivity and interaction design. Some of them do okay, most of them don't do very well because it's so new and a lot of it comes from ‘we train our own people because there aren't skills or courses out there for them to go and learn things’. When there are, they go and do them, and it’s out of date again because it tends to be software.
Nico Macdonald
There is the argument that companies should be training people; it's not the job of education. We'll come back to that one. Durrell, how do you understand interaction design to the extent that you think it's a useful term or way of thinking about things, and how did you come to it?
Durrell Bishop
I guess the easiest way to explain how I came to it is that in the 80s working on products is when you suddenly hit the problem of electronics and the fact that you couldn't understand, they were no longer self-descriptive objects. So, to me, it was completely clear that through product design I wanted to deal with what the product did. I didn't want it to be given to me by somebody. That is why I left product design to deal with what they do, what products actually do. At the time, the most open place to do that was the CID course and that was the start of actually playing with the behaviour of product, how we perceive what something's doing, how you represent the system behind it. I don't do interaction design, that's what I do. I work on invisible… you work on how you visualise invisible systems. Of course, it's what lots of people do in all sorts of areas but I work with it on the initial side of things. That taken us into doing much screen work and screen interfaces as well but it's still the same question, actually letting you, how you categorise things, how you actually bring things together, so you can actually see what's there and manipulate it. I think there are all other types of interaction design but that's the one I still do, and that's taken into games and all sorts of things.
Nico Macdonald
Okay. Just briefly, what would you say the other types of interaction design are running parallel to your work?
Durrell Bishop
The one I don't want to particularly work in and have had to occasionally is working with the rules of graphical user interfaces. It's a very, very valid job and incredibly important but when you have to turn everything into menuing systems, it's a very, very different sort of mind to the one I work with, when I think about things. It is needed but I wouldn't teach it.
Nico Macdonald
Right but maybe you're more interested in the challenge of what kind of GUIs or what should supersede the GUI...
Durrell Bishop
It gets onto a tougher…we were talking about this earlier on…but it's a real shame, there's an enormous amount of opportunities for designers still to re-work out how we perceive the tools we're using. I don't think they're that good but I very, very seldom come across graphic designers who are actually fascinated by doing that. I'd like to see them take it on. And the question is maybe you can do that in interaction courses, I don't know. I think something still’s missing in terms of graphics courses that really get people excited by these sorts of problems.
Nico Macdonald
Okay, thank you, and I think we'll come back to those themes. Andy, the kind of interaction design projects in which you're involved, can you just talk about how you were introduced to them.
Andy Altmann
I don't think I really understand what interaction is.
Nico Macdonald
Okay. That's an answer.
Andy Altmann
I mean we're not obviously involved with programming or the computer side. The computer to me is merely a tool to me like a drawing board and that's the way I want the bloody thing to work. When it breaks, it’s the most infuriating thing. I've got no concept of how the thing actually works, which is kind of infuriating but it is also the most wonderful thing as well because of the things it allows you to do. We interact with people all the time and I think that cross disciplines is something that really intrigues me. People come from different backgrounds and moving into different areas and I think it is a really important thing which was highlighted to me when I was at the Royal College, there was a guy in our year who was considerably older than us, a mature student, who’d been a taxi driver, a London cabbie for seventeen years before he became a graphic designer. Unfortunately he's dead now. We had this project to make an everyday object extraordinary. So, we all went off with our own views, my St. Martin's way of thinking about things, and I came up with what I thought was quite a good solution. I bought a huge ball of string and I tied the meeting room up, every chair the night before the presentation, tied every chair together, whole room, so you couldn't get into the room. And so I thought, I've made this piece of string the most extraordinary thing. I thought it was this great idea. It was no where as good as his idea. He came from a different background. What he'd done was, he'd taken a Bic biro into the local police station and said he'd found it in the back of his taxi. So then he had to fill in the form, put it in a bag, fill in another form, he then got his best friend to go in and claim it, who then had to fill in another form, take the bag, fill in another form... So in the presentation, he just had this Bic biro in a bag and all these forms. And I thought that’s the work of genius. but a work of genius because he hadn’t gone through graphic design training and he just saw it from, completely upside-down to the way we would have looked at, and that’s what I find fascinating, working with artists or people from other disciplines, because they just think in another way and it’s…you sometimes have those Eureka moments when you can try and shake the shackles of all your training off and think in another way. And it’s a really, really difficult thing to do, and most designers who work for us – you know they’re going to go down this – I would love people from other disciplines to have the risk to take them on to work with us, but obviously we’re a small company and our key word in our office is “survival”. We do interesting jobs that pay very little and we do big blue chip jobs that pay a lot and we’re all constantly spinning plates to keep all the plates going, to keep the whole thing going. But to have other people in from other disciplines would be great, but to take the risk and finance that is an issue again really.
Nico Macdonald
Sort of tying into Frans Johannsen’s talk this morning about the breadth of people one might collaborate with.
Andy Altmann
I thought that was fascinating, I thought he was a great entertainer, I thought that was high entertainment value, but yeah there were some really interesting points he had there about diversity – it’s like asking your grandmother what she thinks about something – you know, the different generations. We designed some stamps for the Queen’s 40th anniversary of the accession to the throne, so my mum very proudly took them along to my great auntie in Warrington, and said, “Ooh look what our Andrew’s done!” She said, “Well, did he print them?”, “No, no, no…”, “Did he take the photographs?” “…No, no, no…” “What did he do then?”…and she couldn’t answer!
Nico Macdonald
I think you would have even more of a challenge if it were an interaction design project!
Daljit Singh
You think you had problems, bloody hell! – I tell you!
Nico Macdonald
Before we open out to the audience, I just want to try and give some broader context and ambition to the panel. It’s just to ask what you think the challenges and opportunities that interaction design could be applied to, I mean, if we broadly take Durrell’s description of a way of describing the behaviours of invisible systems or objects and how we might interact with them, what are the kinds of challenges that you would like to see supplied to you – this may be commercial challenges, it may be at the level of infrastructure or broader social or developmental challenges that Tim talked about towards the end of his talk. I was wondering if I could get a sense about why this is important to the future of commerce, or the future of society without over-egging it too much, just so we’re not just talking about something that’s an abstract conceptual thing.
Daljit Singh
For me, half of my business is owned by a certain Mr Martin Sorrell, and that’s both – you feel if you’ve had your soul ripped out of you, and there’s also an incredible amount of opportunity as well. I think the biggest challenge, and we face this challenge day by day, and it scares me slightly, is the world of advertising and marketing, which you’ve got design of, they want our world at the moment because the way they’ve always communicated to people in the forms that we know about, those 30 second commercials, just aren’t working any more, you just can’t do that any more to people. You Google this thing, that style head, a few years ago and there’s now taking over and looking at this idea of intelligence and supplying information to people as and when it’s relevant. But it still creates noise, it still creates things which get in the way. What excites me, and I think a lot at the moment, and it’s a difficult and it’s a very hard thing to do, is really media and how we change the nature of media that we see. Whether it’s a tv that does something slightly differently to just delivering you programmes to a schedule; whether it’s a poster that suddenly reacts and does something, like those science fiction programmes that we’ve seen; whether it’s something which is in your pocket that tells you that you’ve left your mobile phone at home, so you need to go back in and go and get your keys, you know, simple things, simple moments – and that’s what excites me. And now technology is becoming cheaper, more people feel more comfortable with it, although I fundamentally hate it, and I think we’ve got a lot of work to do there, but that what excites me – it’s about taking technology and making it invisible, so we feel comfortable with it and the messages that we’re given and those 53 different types of toothpaste don’t need to be there, we just get the bits that we want and how we want them.
Nico Macdonald
OK, very good. Durrell, you can pass on this question if you don’t have any particular answer.
Durrell Bishop
I certainly think that the idea of making things invisible is probably the worst approach, because the biggest problem at the moment is too much is invisible and we need to be able to see things. The gap between the details of things working, and the hype and the media about stuff, is extraordinary at the moment. I’d be quite surprised if a lot of the designers working on things like mobile phones in mobile phone companies actually know that much detail about the very tools they’re using, and you see very strange mismatches happening at the moment. I think a return to some usefulness and getting involved in detail would be a really good move forward.
Nico Macdonald
Any ends beyond communication devices that you would see that being valuable in?
Durrell Bishop
I work in an area and that’s to do with digital products, some other sorts of things surrounding that, and I’m going to pass on the conversations about the big ecological questions and things.
Nico Macdonald
Fine, sure. Andy?
Andy Altmann
I’m just going to pass!
Nico Macdonald
OK, well look, I’d like to open the discussion out now, I’m not going to try and structure the discussion. The things that I’m interested in particularly in the context of this way the debate is framed, is how interaction design as we broadly discussed it – how well it managed to develop the skill sets that it needs to deal with the challenges that we have at the moment. How it’s changing and what the drivers are that are changing that. What the discrete skills are, if there are indeed discrete skills – I think that something to be debated here, and even whether it’s something which we can consider or is appropriate to be a standalone design discipline. How best, if there are discrete skills, people might collaborate, and that’s not just between people involved with particular areas of interaction with interface design for instance, but with all the skills that support that, and what the challenges are in the future. Tim Brown talked about the developing world, for instance, the idea of new business models, design moving up the value chain, which will frame the kinds of skills that might be needed, and what those particular skills might be and again, Tim talked about creating better briefs, developing new research and observation methods for new markets or contexts, collaborative design, which we’ll talk about a bit more tomorrow, storytelling, prototyping and so on. Or other skills and where might those skills come from. Andy’s talked about his collaboration with Gordon Young, are there areas that we might be looking to? Durrell argues that communication design has got a lot to contribute to this area as well, and is there something in this sort of diversity argument from Frans Johannsen this morning that will inform, or might inform, not just innovation but actually the skill sets behind that. And then there are maybe broader areas of thinking that we need as well.
I was talking to Daljit earlier on who was talking about going to lectures at the Royal Institution in London, something which inspires him as well as learning to make sausages, obviously in different ways, and more worldliness is rarely a bad thing in any discipline. So can I just take questions in batches and questions or points as well? It’s nice of people to say who they are and if they’ve got any affiliation they want to own up to, or even celebrate. So, we’ve got a couple of questions here – can I have any hands up to start with? OK, we’ve got a very interactive part of the audience down here, so the woman at the front and then the woman in the fourth row there. Then, the woman second from the left there.
Audience member 1
Nina Robert from Alloy. It seems like there’s two quite distinct threads that you’re talking about, you’re talking about broadening everything to collaborate with the way other people and disciplines, getting input from all sorts of different areas, at the same time we’re talking about that we’ve got a dearth of direct skills in the area, because potentially of drawback in software or whatever. We’ve got Durrell talking about the fact that you need these very discrete skills are really helpful in focusing on individual areas. How do we, can we, square that circle in terms of how we train our designers, or how we recruit, or how we work with our designers within our internal design teams.
Nico Macdonald
Yeah, I think one of the problems we want to address on how we do address them and they are, you’re right, distinct things. Has Ben disappeared again? – oh, sorry. And to the woman in the fourth row at the back there. Just going to take a couple of questions and then come back to the panel.
Audience member 2
Esther Dudley, University of Plymouth – I want first of all to thank Andy Altman for all the positive responses he’s given to my students over the years, who have sent no doubt very tedious emails to him, but it’s for them that I ask this question, because they’ve been inspired particularly with his interaction with a broad as possible base, and that is with the public, in your very public designs, and I am wondering if we can look forward to a greater emphasis of interaction on Why Not Associates’ part, because I think that they produce so much in terms of enjoyment to the general public, but also they reward graphic design students with a great sense of the permanence of their work, of graphic design, of your work and then by example to the burgeoning students that we are producing.
Nico Macdonald
So you’re talking about interaction in terms of person to person interaction?
Audience member 2
Yes, I’m talking about interaction of design with the public.
Nico Macdonald
OK, alright thank you. Any other questions at this stage? OK, so we’ve got two here, and I’m not ignoring anyone over there in case there are. So I’ll take these two questions then we’ll come back to the panel. So can you put your hands up again, please? So gentleman on the left and then gentleman on the right.
Audience member 3
Hi, my name’s Neil Glen and I run a product consultancy but I also run an interaction course at Bath Spa University. And the question really is, we have a tradition where subjects are taught through a kind of skills base and we’ve all mentioned about interaction as being something that happens as part of our worldly experience. The conference itself is referring to the intersections and the fact that we’re forced to confront things with which we have no experience and therefore we develop our own sense of interaction with that. And I guess really the question is, can we actually teach it, or should we teach it as a subject? Should we find another way of exploring that?
Nico Macdonald
OK, thanks very much. And there’s a gentleman in the fourth row I think.
Audience member 4
I don’t think this is so much a question, I’m just intrigued by Darryl’s statement that he thought that graphic designers would take over from product designers, and that hasn’t happened and I think it kind of reflects some of the other questions that we’ve heard. It’s just interesting that earlier today we were hearing about collaboration meaning between design has created business biologists and so on, and now we’re always talking about products and graphic designers as being quite different disciplines in their own right. I just would really like to explore that a bit more.
Nico Macdonald
OK, so we’ve got questions about the broader areas of knowledge versus how we think we educate people around those things, we’ve got the question to Andy particularly – I mean that question might be to Durrell and partly to Daljit – the question to Andy about Why Not Associates’ role in communicating with the public. Can we and should we teach interaction design as a subject, and is communication design something that should take over interaction design? So, Durrell, do you want to go first?
Durrell Bishop
Yes, I guess I’ll … about that one. I thought that when products went from being more about the difficulty of the building of them to being the way in which the job of communication, that people who were trained in that, or were actually talented in it, would be very excited about the potential, and I haven’t seen that happen. If anything, I think I’ve seen graphic designers pulling away from that. I ask them quite often, whether they’re interested – your one about the interface – you don’t like the computer particularly, but you sit there and you use two versions of perhaps (actually one, probably the Apple) – versions of an interface. Do you have really strong opinions as to how it should work and how it should behave and how it should communicate, because I’ve asked this question so often and they don’t seem to have that answer, but they in theory are the right people to be talking about the behaviour of products. So that worries me, I don’t know – new courses sometimes seem to have a limited life, so you can get subjects building up and they may need to build up for a while but they often don’t last that long, so I hope that the ones that will last will take over those areas again. Maybe interaction really is a serious subject and it really will stay in colleges in a proper way but I’ve seen too many courses come and go to be sure that it’s the right approach. Also, there’s not many interaction courses and there’s a hell of a lot of product design and graphics courses out there.
Nico Macdonald
OK. Andy?
Andy Altmann
On that same subject?
Nico Macdonald
Yeah, you’ve been involved and are involved in teaching.
Andy Altmann
Well I think there’s way too many graphic design courses out there, it’s like a ridiculous amount of graphic design courses, too many graphic designers coming out and there aren’t enough jobs. It’s pretty obvious to me.
Nico Macdonald
They’re taught design thinking so that they can apply it elsewhere.
Andy Altmann
Yeah, well I think you have to..graphically, you talk about the interface and the graphic designer not thinking about that ..it’s because graphic designers don’t think like that.
Nico Macdonald
Yes, this is the question.
Andy Altmann
I don’t think we’re bright enough to think like that. We think in a different way, and don’t question it, even though we should because it’s such an obvious thing to question, it’s something that all or most graphic designers worry about how cool does it look. The young lads in our office, they will kill to get one of those new iPhones, I mean they would literally kill someone to get hold of one, they are so desperate to have it because they think it’s just so cool.
Nico Macdonald
You’ve got to change the attitude of teaching slightly.
Andy Altmann
Possibly, yeah, but I think that’s a basic – mainly more human instinct to just covet something, because it’s – the Apple is the ultimate example. Whenever I do a presentation, and go to a client, the briefing – “Yeah, we want it to be a bit like Apple” – so, for fuck’s sake, you know! The amount of times that I’ve heard that. But it’s because they homed it in from every angle to make you want to covet that object down to the absolutely nth degree, and make you feel like you.
Nico Macdonald
Do you covet the interface or the object?
Andy Altmann
I’m less of a coveter, if there is such a word!
Nico Macdonald
Do they?
Andy Altmann
No, they covet the object.
Nico Macdonald
If you put a Windows interface on Apple…
Andy Altmann
They’d scream!
Nico Macdonald
They’d scream but they actually …the object is what drives them more whereas the graphic element…
Daljit Singh
No, I don’t think it is, I disagree with that! I mean, I can imagine my kids, or kids born in 20 years from now, would walk up to a picture, which is sat there and try and do that with it, because it will become so implicit because it’s so good in terms of what they have done. We’ve dreamt about it and developed it, but they’ve actually made it happen. I remember giving…I was talking about this last night, giving my parents are retired and my mother’s never used a computer. I remember showing her the internet for the first time and I found her this Sikh temple in India and they were doing a live transmission. She started crying! – how did that happen! – she picked up the mouse and put it to her ear! This is what I was talking about earlier on, we are in such a new environment and I imagine there’s lot more questions that people are thinking about but you’re not going to get the answers at the moment. We’re going to get to a point of confusion, even more so, and then things are going to get more simple. Apple have managed to do that in their own right way, and the reason why Apple can do it is because they went through 20 years of pain to get there. When a client like Sunsilk says to me, “OK, can you do us a website please?” “What about?” “Well, shampoo” …”Why?” – who’s going to go there? It’s a waste of fucking time! Apple went through pain and that’s why they’re there, you know!
Andy Altmann
The three of us certainly aren’t going to go there, are we!
Daljit Singh
No, definitely not!
Nico Macdonald
I did notice I was the only person on the panel who, apart from us all being guys, had a full head of hair.
Andy Altmann
That’s a wig, come on!
Nico Macdonald
It is, it is! Can I take anymore questions, particularly I’m interested in, well there are interesting challenges thrown up here about why people may be reluctant to try and learn these skills, or teach them and so on. But where do people see there being a skills gap, where are the problems, where are the things that you feel in your bones are not being done well because somehow we haven’t got the right skills to do them because we’re not collaborating effectively, or whatever the problem is. We’ve got a question over there, any others? There’s a question at the front as well, so the gentleman here to start with. Can you say who you are as well.
Audience member 5
My name is David Pattern, I’m from a design company in Dublin and I find now…
Nico Macdonald
You can hold the mic as well!
Audience member 5
Oh right.
Nico Macdonald
Sorry, just it’s more comfortable.
Audience member 5
I find at the moment – this question is to Daljit - is that we are more and more being asked to recommend media with clients who more and more new companies come on line and they just simply do not know where to advertise. So where we spoke about using computers and stuff, what would you recommend or what do we advise as clients, to interact. You have something like 300 TV stations now with Sky. You have multiple newspapers, you have so many magazines. You have clients who say ‘well we advertise’. How do you get them to market their company using the internet? What approaches do you use, what approach would you recommend to advertise their company?
Nico Macdonald
Well can I just say, is that a question about skills or business strategy?
Audience member 5
That is more kind of business strategy. But it still comes down to skills.
Nico Macdonald
Do you see there being a lack of knowledge or wherewithal among…
Audience member 5
I think I would tend to agree with Andy Altman there. That so many designers are willing to do something trendy and beautiful, at the end of the day it’s the product that has to be sold and we have to, it really comes down to, you know, developing a relationship with the client and he’s going to move if your not actually, if the designer side is not working or there is no results produced from it. Are we not, in college, are we not educating people to think beyond just designing sites? There should be marketing in it as well.
Nico Macdonald
Ben, I’m going to ask you to take that gentleman right up there first and I’ll come down here again, just to save your legs because young people can’t run as far as they used to. I’m told.
Andy Altmann
They can in Gateshead.
Nico Macdonald
Smoke too many cigarettes apparently.
Audience member 6
Thanks. Alan Mundy from Design Wales. I was really interested to hear what Andy was saying earlier on about the joy of going back to finding the drawing board and a pencil with a rubber on the end of it. In the course of my work, I’m in and out of design studios on a regular basis and probably one of the better product and graphic design companies, a company called Studio SDA in Cardiff, are now not interested at all, really, in a prospective designer’s portfolio as to their CAD capabilities. He just wants to see if he can draw and I think it’s interesting that you are saying that as well in a round about way. That, I think there is a lack of skills in a lot of drawing offices, in a lot of design offices, which are just basic skills that designers should have that we had this rush in the 80s and 90s to design product and rapidly get to the product as soon as possible and making use of CAD and various technologies round and about. Computer-aided engineering and within graphics as well and we are losing, I say we, the design fraternity, is losing those skills in drawing and I just wonder whether anybody thinks that technology is actually, to some degree, been detrimental to the design skills and capabilities that we want from our designers.
Nico Macdonald
Ok, so you are asking if drawing is valuable in this area and if it’s being undermined. OK. And the last question, I’m sorry, it’s all the way down here again. And this will be the last question because I want to ask, have the panellists respond and just have final remarks so people can have their lunch. So, gentleman here on the second row, on the right.
Audience member 7
Just wondering, sorry it’s Gus from Alloy just wondering if all this doesn’t distil down to historical ambiguity with profession between the sense of purpose of the designer and ultimately you are creating an experience or whether you are creating an artefact. And styling versus design and all these dichotomies that exist within the profession. There are lots of ways, we talk about design as if it’s a monolithic thing, but is it not an issue the core of the interaction debate when really there is a certain kind of designer that creates an experience and then it doesn’t really matter what the need is, basically. Or you’re defined by your media. Define yourself as a, I work in…So that is one question that is useful. And then the other one, I’d just like people to come back on the tools thing, on the knowledge thing, in other words, it seems to be one of the big issues here is sketching, really, really critically important rapid prototyping tools actually what it is, but the dearth of tools and Durrell in particular, I’m just interested in your views on the tools that might they have there for rapid simulation in your experience.
Nico Macdonald
Ok, thank you very much. Oh actually can I just, before you give back the mic. For me, interaction design’s one of the first design disciplines that seems to have not been defined by the medium. So we had graphic design, industrial design and so on. So do you think it’s important that it’s talked about more abstractly or not connected to the medium, or do you think that’s a….ok can we have that mic on again please. Try again.
Audience member 7
Yeah, well the belief on our side is that it needs to be clarified because ultimately everything that we do is interaction design. I mean our history is very similar to Durrell’s. There came a point in the 80s when the client couldn’t tell you what the buttons did, now there is a point where the hardware doesn’t have any controls and the controls can be anything you want, so you are going right back to the psychology of what are the artefacts? What are the concepts with which you interact? But at another level, they are just the buttons, they are the levers, they are the things that you actually push, pull and deal with to get a result. So yes, at one level all designers should be interaction designers because you know, Tim’s points this morning – Ideo knows, has a better feel than most of the people on the planet for where business values design. If there is nothing else, there is a consensus that there is very interesting... He takes it absolutely for granted. It’s very simple. Designers create experiences, that is what we do. And so if designers create experiences in a business sense that is what we’re here for, then it’s all interaction, because it’s not just, there are actually some others, some passive experience like advertising and entertaining, but fundamentally it’s, sorry I’m answering your question.
Nico Macdonald
Ok.
Audience member 7
You were asking a question.
Nico Macdonald
No, no, I did and I liked, I was interested in your reply. I think certainly in business to business whether you are designing experience to categorise things is another issue, but I will come back to the panel now because I’d like to wind up. So we’ve got a question about whether we need to expand our skill set, thinking about marketing, which I think aimed particularly at you, Daljit. A question whether drawing is a useful skill or needs to be revived, which maybe one particularly for Andy. And then Gus’s question at the end about being defined by the medium in which we are designing and whether everyone should be interaction designers because we are designing experiences and then I think a general question perhaps and then a question to Darryl about the dearth of tools for rapid prototyping. And could I also just ask you to suggest one area in which you think there are, what you think are the areas that interaction design as we conceived it, needs to be thinking about or applying itself to over the next 5 to 10 years or so and what skills it needs to bring in, in order to better address that.
Daljit Singh
I mean just coming back to this, kind of, the answer to that and the previous question about drawing. I mean we fundamentally look for people who, even though we, technology is what we work with, the essential nature of the way that people, creative people, visualise their ideas prior to getting anywhere near a computer is about putting a pen onto a piece of paper and visualising an idea, so it’s fundamental. And if they can’t do it visually, they need to be able to articulate themselves, because we have certain people who are fabulous at creating imagery, but they can’t speak to save their lives and that is critical in that kind of environment and extremely important. We run a figure drawing class once a month and the people who are the best are account managers and I sort of go, how come you can draw and ‘oh I studied graphic design’ you know. So their skills, they’ve made a conscious decision to not become a designer, but to work with designers so they have an empathy and an understanding. So these skills are transferable and I can imagine all those universities and colleges out there thinking oh god what do we teach? I’ll tell you what you teach. You carry on teaching the fundamentals of what design represents because without those basic skills we’re in big trouble and if we start teaching people about a medium which hasn’t grown up yet, we’re in big big trouble, we really are. So stick with it, because those fundamental skills are absolutely essential. They might shift slightly, but ultimately they are the same thing. So nothing’s like somebody who can sit there and come up with a good idea. Whether it’s somebody who has been a taxi driver or somebody who is studied anthropology, they are vital.
Nico Macdonald
Ok, interesting answer. Thank you…