Lead User Experience Designer, Jennifer Brook spent this past week in New Zealand for Webstock 2012 and hosted a couple of speaking engagements. Read Part 1 here.
Webstock 2012 flew by. Three days of workshops followed by two days of talks in Wellington, New Zealand, a windy and picturesque city.
My presentation was mostly new material. The video will be released in a few weeks, but here are a few highlights: I talked about how living without computers and the Internet in my early 20′s, coupled with being an introvert, affects how I view and think about interface and interaction design. I spoke a bit about working with publishers since the release of the iPad, and how existing products and interactions form mental models about how new products should work. I spoke about how the iPad, coupled with some native applications, present the first widely distributed examples of calm computing. And finally, how touch interactions and interface are rewiring our brains, changing the way we expect everything around us to work.
The conference touted a cast of characters who performed on a stage once graced by the Beatles. But the most remarkable thing about Webstock, was the design of the conference itself.
Every touch point, thoughtful. Every artifact, elegant.
Our lanyards were tiny books held together with a single grommet. Inside: Need to Know Information, a map of Wellington and the venue, and a conference schedule. Every table had power strips, pitchers of water, notepads and pens. On one side of the theater, a free coffee bar stocked with a full-time team of people making everyone espresso drinks. On the other side, a freezer stocked with ice cream and Popsicles. The on-stage sign language interpreters were a personal highlight, a reminder for the importance of accessibility in all of the work we make.
The feeling you’re left with is: Wellington is a city that has taste and loves design. And that Tashand Mike, the good-looking and smart founders of Webstock, want to make you more awesome at whatever it is that you do.
If you’d like to learn more about Jennifer Brook you can follow her on Twitter @jenniferbrook.
Many universities are beginning to incorporate interaction design into their curriculum, formalizing the field into a specific area of study. HOW recently covered The California College of Arts and their newly launched, cutting-edge interaction design program – which touts a healthy mix of math, art, design and engineering.
Method Director of Interaction Design, Ben Fullerton, serves on the faculty contributing his experience and knowledge of the industry to the curriculum, alongside other experienced designers and thought leaders.
Read the original article here.
We got a lot of love here at Method. Enjoying this Valentine’s heart shaped chorizo biscuits this morning courtesy of Meredith. Show us your Valentine’s Day pics @method_inc!
Lead User Experience Designer, Jennifer Brook is in New Zealand this week for Webstock 2012. She’ll be speaking and leading a workshop at the conference along with a catalogue of designers, developers and UX experts scheduled to host workshops and various talks during the conference. Follow her, as she’ll be documenting her trip in a two-part post here on our blog. Look out for tweets from @method_inc about the experience as well!
Follow The Line: Wayfinding in the Auckland Airport
I arrived at the Auckland, NZ airport yesterday after a 20-hour marathon of flights, not yet to my final destination. With a small headache and crick in my neck, I made it through customs and wandered out into the main lobby. My goal: check into my next flight.
I soon learned I’d first have to find my way to a nearby domestic airport.
I wandered outside to discover the finest coffee stand inside an Airstream, ordered a flat white, and turned to see the beginning of a green line with an accompanying sign indicating the direction of the second airport. The green line meandered past a green space with benches, trees, and grass, and then continued winding forward. Along the way signs indicated my progress with, not only the distance left to travel, but the estimated time it would take to get there. Nine minutes. Seven minutes. Two minutes.
For a bleary-eyed traveler, without access to her Google maps, this was a brilliant and simple breadcrumb. No thinking, mobile phone checking, or app downloading was required. I’m always in awe when I see a dead-simple, low-budget solution to what I’d imagine is a complex problem. A few signs and some cans of green paint had me wheeling in the right direction.
This put me in an excellent and inspired mood for my Iterative Prototyping workshop today where we explored some cheap and simple ways to prototype on mobile devices.
If you’re in Wellington this week for Webstock, I’ll be here through Friday and speaking on Thursday about publishing for iPad. Come by and say hi.
With the new London studio comes new office goodies. A few in the office took a quick break to test out some markers for the whiteboards around the studio. After the session, we found some great picks. Here are the winners…
We selected Sharpies for red, purple and orange. Ecolabel won for black and blue.
Check out photos and some of our marker reviews below!
Kaihaan: “I think the Ecolabel is surprisingly good, but the Sharpies are a mixed bag. Some of them come out really juicy and others really wimpy.”
Mark: “Sharpie wins – clear and solid lines (red and purple) but I’m colour blind
so don’t take that literally. Ecolabel second…”
Zelda: “My favourite is Sharpie because it’s thick and clear – much better than the rest. I like orange best. The others are not worth a mention.”
Chris Nieri: “Can we judge it by smell as well? Eco-warrior is my favourite because the black is very strong. It feels nice, has a good grip and it smells good. I hate the others.”
Reshma: “Sharpie colours really stand out, especially red, purple and orange. The red is nice on post-its and on glass, but the black is grey! Ecolabel black and blue are brilliant. Green is ugly for everyone – but Eco is the best!”
Santiago: “Ecolabel’s black is really good, specially on glass. It’s the only black worth buying. The red is pink and it bleeds on post-its.”
The juries for the IxDA Awards, met in New York City at the Method Studios to deliberate over this year’s extensive and impressive catalogue of entries. They have shortlisted a set of finalists, with the winners to be declared at the Interaction 12 Conference, this week in Dublin, Ireland
Our work with Teaching Channel has been selected as finalists and is currently in competition at Interaction 12. You can still help us win ‘People’s Choice’ by voting here! Voting closes tomorrow at 12pm GMT, so please help spread the word!
Whatever you’re looking for on the Internet—entertainment, a product to purchase, a connection to a community—in most cases, you’re likely to receive an overwhelming amount of results to choose from. These relevant search results are valuable to you.
Or are they? More and more commentators are wondering if the tools we create to give us more choices—such as search engines—are delivering less variety, ultimately limiting chance discoveries and exposure to new ideas.
On the BBC’s The Culture Show, Aleks Krotoski recently examined the role of serendipity as an online commodity, questioning whether the Internet is as innovative as we think. She points out that computers have the unique ability to make valuable, unseen connections for us. Instead of maximizing that potential, our search filters keep us focused on only the most relevant information.
Alex explains, “We will never have the opportunity to bump into something truly new, because the machines are predicting our futures based on our past preferences, creating an infinite loop of cultural homogenization.”
The concern over the consequences of homogenized choice is not entirely new. David Byrne noted in his book Bicycle Diaries, that in many urban developments gentrification leads to separation, rather than integration, of different social and cultural groups. This separation leads to less collisions between ideas and the stifling of creativity.
David describes, “I think online communities tend to group like with like, which is fine for some tasks, but sometimes inspiration comes from accidental meetings and encounters with people outside one’s own demographic, and is less likely if you only communicate with your ‘friends’…”
Other commentators also question if recommendations based on a combination of one’s preferences, social profile, and history of consumption really offers new opportunities. In an article for Design Week, Steve Price discussed how the role of media retailers is changing in the age of the “Filter Bubble.”
“Google, as amazing as it is, can only answer the questions you ask it,” he states. “It cannot tell you which questions you should be asking. Search results and news feeds are all now influenced by engines that take as a point of entry all that they know about you and spit back the information they think you’ll want. What is on the screen when you open Spotify? Recommendations on new music based on its knowledge of you. What happens if you visit Rough Trade Records? You often leave with albums and music from artists you’ve never heard of, having heard it played in the store, or from talking to one of the employees who clearly live and breathe music.”
Concerns aside, the tech community seems to be moving in the direction of “smarter” recommendation engines. For example, The Filter founded by Peter Gabriel. These developments suggest we might soon see recommendations for vacuum cleaners based on one’s music tastes. For example, a robotic system called HyperActive Bob has been developed to anticipate customer behaviors in fast food restaurants. This includes correlating a customer’s type of car with what he or she might order, but this particular filter has failed to prove successful so far.
When the self-referential nature of media increases the speed of recycling ideas in film, design, music, fashion and global culture as a whole, what will it take to receive truly original recommendations? What can we design into user experiences that will allow for the unexpected?
Imagine the possibilities of using “dumber” algorithms that will allow us to be pleasantly surprised by serendipity wherever we are…and whenever we “don’t” expect it.
If you liked this article we recommend: http://youtu.be/9ZlBUglE6Hc
The San Francisco team had a special friend in the office on Monday. Pony ran around our ankles, bringing us cheer during our morning meeting. For more photos of our four-legged comrades, visit the Dogs of Method! 
If you can’t tell by now, we at Method love Arduino. So much, in fact, that this week some of the Method SF team journeyed to the California College of the Arts (CCA) to lead an Arduino workshop for industrial design students.
After giving an overview of Arduino, we shared a project we’ve been working on during our PLAY sessions, it uses a slider and Processing to make physical controllers for the arcade game Pong. Then we broke into groups to test the Arduino boards.
The students wrote their first program and soon had LED lights blinking and switches controlling the lights. A few adventurous students even worked on controlling tri-color RGB LEDs. The whole event was a fun and successful way to continue spreading the Arduino love!
