A summary of Interaction19 via sketchnotes and wholly-inappropriate plugs

IxDA continues to provide my favorite global conference focused on the state of the art of interaction design. This past conference, held in Seattle, Washington, did not fail to deliver. (Props to the team making it happen. That is not an easy task.)

Bill Buxton opened up the conference by, among other things, introducing a new word: Ubiety, which to hear him describe it, means “information in place.” He reminded us of the architectural idea of a room’s program, i.e. “The things that a room affords.” To me it’s a nice reminder of Lave & Wagner’s situated learning, and I’d say that’s pretty much what Bill was making a call to action for: To ensure that our designs take into account the physical context of interactions and to admit easy transitions between them.

Bill Buxton talks about situated knowledge and flow.

Death to Imperialist Design ✊

A theme that came up a few times is what I’m thinking of as Imperialist Design. That would be the idea that we design for communities rather than empowering members of those communities to design for themselves.

Liz Jackson asked not for empathy, but solidarity.

I’m not sure it’s a clear open-and-shut argument, for a couple of reasons.

First it seems very self-centered to me to presume that members of every community want to design. (Imagine if you were exhorted by engineers to code your own apps—or by tailors to make your own clothes—to empower yourself.)

Also a longstanding tenet of our field is that designing for ourselves is fraught. Any individual is idiosyncratic. We should understand our users as a whole, model them in design-actionable ways, and remind ourselves throughout the process that we are not them. Are we done with that now? Do we recuse ourselves if we are not just like our users?

All that said, Liz’ message was very clear. I’m cautious about my views, and want to listen first, and speakers gave a lot of good stuff to listen to.

In a bit of contrast, Tea Uglow of Google’s Creative Lab Sydney hoped to reframe our understanding that everyone is, in some way, off the bell curve.

Tea’s talk was great, and is an interesting contrast to Liz’. If we accept that we’re all queer, all other, then doesn’t that mean we can design for each other? OK. Head spinning.

Designing for the new, horrible normal

Another major theme was acknowledging how our industry responds to its changing context. That of course includes Artificial Intelligence (see that as its own theme, below) but it included some broader thoughts, too.

Father-of-Interaction-Design Don Norman spoke about how to combine local and outside experts in seamless and effective ways.

In full disclosure, I cheated a bit on Don’s sketchnote. He had published his slides in advance to a boxnote, and I cribbed the original list of imperatives from that. Then I tweaked that list per his live talk. I notice his final list, enumerated below, is akin to one I crafted waaay back in 2011.

What’s a 21st Century Designer to do?

• Be a system-thinking generalist
• Focus on people
• Identify the core issue
• Treat the system, not just the symptom
• Take incremental, opportunistic steps
• Mentor & facilitate community creativity
• Think of societal platforms

My 2011 list, for idle comparison

Marty Neumeier gave a preview of his book Scramble, and about strategies for design strategies.

Jon Bell wove a tale about his time at Twitter, and the challenges they had (have) in managing griefers, bad actors, and terrorists.

Holger Kuehnle suggests that presenting rich data neutrally will help people shed themselves of post-truth data consumption habits.

Ubietous Ethics

Given Facebook’s undermining of democracy leading up to 2016—which resulted in the current, fascist administration in the U.S. (Hang on guys, we’re working on it)—design ethics kept its momentum as a focus for interaction designers.

P.S. I’m being snarky with the header there, situational ethics are the reverse of what this is about.

I really liked Gabriel White’s assertion that it is not enough for us to ask (and test) whether a thing is useful, useable, and appealing. Addictive things, he notes, satisfy those requirements. I’d noted the same thing in regards to sci-fi last year while reviewing the triage interface in Idiocracy, so I daresay it’s an idea that’s leaking into the collective design unconscious.

White’s 8 Ethical Heuristics

Does our design…

1. Autonomy: …equip people for self-regulation and control?
2. Growth: …help people become better versions of themselves?
3. Wellbeing: …encourage positive physical and emotional states?
4. Connection:…facilitate meaningful interactions?
5. Equity: …increase social fairness?
6. Values:…support different viewpoints? (Wondering how we avoid the false equivalency trap.)
7. Respect:…encourage honesty, humanity, and trust?
8. Sustainability:…decrease our negative impact on the world?

Molly Steenson clarified what we really mean. And included some favorite versions of the Trolley Problem.

Elizabeth Churchill encouraged us to learn the Dark Arts in order to fight it.

AI is the new AI

Of course A.I. played a large part of the conference.

As you can imagine, the presentation included lots of hand drawings.

My week started by conducting a workshop with Benjamin Remington about designing for AI, specifically around the organizing principle of “who” is doing the work, you or the AI? Props to the attendees, who understood the core framework quickly, and were eager to move on to the advanced implications! I wish we had had more time.

Those slides (that survived translation to PDF) from the workshop deck can be found here. https://www.slideshare.net/ChrisNoessel/who-is-doing-the-work-designing-for-ai-across-modes-of-interaction

Current plans are to bring this workshop to…

• Stockholm (via InUse)
• London (via ClearLeft)
• Sydney (via Meld Studios)

…later this year, so if you’re local and interested, keep an eye out for those.

***

Day 2 of the conference had two full sessions of 10 minute talks all about AI. This was an information-rich time, and I had to take notes fast. For my money, the biggest takeaways follow.

AI lives or dies in the minds of consumers by imitating human behavior or providing unique value. You must prove competence in the former before dazzling with the latter.
—Emily Sappington, Context Scout

Designers are human-centered advocates in the AI team.”
—Joe Meersman, IBM

What the AI does is vastly more important than how it appears.
—Kristian Simsarian, California College of the Arts

Lists play well in recaps, and Arathi Sethumadhavan and Dr. Samuel J. Levulis of Microsoft provided quite a useful one in their 10 minutes.

1. Make the purpose and capabilities of your AI clear
2. Set user expectations: Your ANI can’t do everything
3. Let users provide accurate, timely feedback on your AI’s performance
4. Provide contextual information about reliability
5. When there’s a failure, describe the source, and provide recourse.
6. In the visual hierarchy, group “beta” components separate from reliable ones (to help set user expectations about capability and reliability)
7. Explain decisions [no word on how to do this with neural nets]
8. Be frank about uncertainty/confidence
9. Let users provide feedback on accuracy [same as #3?]
10. Balance transparency and information overload […more of an imperative than a how-to]

Kristian’s list was a set of imperative for designers

1. Get AI literate (check out lobe.ai)
2. Grok societal goals and your organizations mission
3. Grok bias. Embrace optimism.
4. Define your AI’s learning objectives with verbs. (nouns expire.)
5. Practice brave conversations. You’ll be having lots of them.

The afternoon was full of ten-minute AI case studies.

Pontus Wärnestål of InUse (and Halmstad University) introduced the Aggregated Service Platform Canvas, an interesting addition to the suite of canvas tools.

Ammon Haggerdy (of Formation.ai) slides deserve a huge shout out for being exquisitely crafted visual design. Seriously, I want my slides to look like his when they grow up. And his framework that maps empowerment and playfulness is one to keep an eye on.

Chris Butler of Philosophie touched on a topic near and dear to my heart when he discussed the use of randomness as a design element, specifically to overcome bias. It gets you out of your comfort zones. It asks you to consider new combinations. It shakes ya’ up.

Our French provocateurs

Two French speakers took the stage over the course of the two days, and each took the stance of provocateurs. Rather than being proscriptive, they poked at us and challenged our brains to catch up and make sense of abstraction.

Alok Nandi of Architempo meandered across 7 (at least) concepts, reminding us that design always begins with a narrative.

Lots of people talked about Dr. Hayoun’s talk because it was performance art of ideas and projects and beautiful visuals. The sketchnote above is what I captured in the moment, but in truth it felt more like what you see below. (And I accidentally didn’t preserve the original, so this is now the sketchnote of record.) In fairness, she warned us up front that her presentation would be an explosion.

Above are the talks that seemed to be part of larger themes. There were other talks (even entire conference tracks I didn’t get to attend.) that didn’t have easy companion talks.

Maria Giudice shared lessons from the battlefield of executive level design.

Her list of things to keep in mind for success in the c-suite:

1. Silos are innovation killers.
2. Design requires executive support.
3. Align work to user needs and business goals.
4. Get shit done.
5. You can’t win them all.
6. Stay true to yourself.
7. Evaluate, iterate, and evolve.

Brielle Nickoloff asked us to have AI exhibit human manners to avoid leaking anti-social behavior.

Shubham Banjaree shared tales of engineering affordable printers for the blind.

Snowpocalypse

As happened in New York two years ago, the increasingly volatile climate had the weather fairly assaulting us with snow. Many attendees had to duck out early just to make sure we could make it home for family and business obligations. (Sorry final presenters and closing party!) Such are lives in the Anthropocene.

Pictured: A building, seen through the first hour of snow, on my panicked trek to the airport.

Next year the conference will be in Milan! That’s near where my now passing-into-legend grad school was located, so I already eagerly look forward to next year. Though I need the intermediate year to get more work done to share.

Congratulations, IxDA. Another amazing and inspiring event for the history books.

Bibliography of sorts

A bibliography of books referenced and recommended in my sketchnotes:

• Animal Farm
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• The Righteous Mind
• Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything
• Designs for the Pluriverse
• Scramble
• Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
• Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
• Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (yep)