Interaction Design '19: Day 1 report

Discipline in Flux

This year's Interaction Design conference was hosted in the (unexpectedly) snowy Seattle at one of Amazon's many buildings. Day 1 got off to a late start thanks to all the attendees having to funnel their way through the Amazon security system but it was worth the wait.

The opening day explored what it meant to be an interaction designer, and the ethical ramifications around our choices, in 2019. Bill Buxton, Liz Jackson, Tea Uglow and Don Norman were the main luminaries 

This is a short snapshot of some of the notes and illustrations I captured from talks I saw.

Bill Buxton

The Canadian computer scientist and designer at Microsoft Research kicked off the day's events. 

He wanted to introduce a new concept of ubiety as a way to describe the prevalence of technology. For machines to be intelligent they need to reflect their local relationships and 'whereness'.

To support this he took us through Three Waves of Mobility. Given his computer science background this of course meant there were four items on his list. In the 1970s there was no mobility, mobility began to be introduced through the 80s and 90s, before entering the mass market in the 2000s. With the Internet of Things, modern connected protocols etc. he believes we've now entered an eco-system phase.

The difficulty we have as we enter the eco-system phase - where the mobile item is the human - is the compounded complexity of this collective devices.

Ubiety should be considered the key to solving the problem. Information, and conversation, should flow consistently between different directions.

Flow was something Bill returned to again and again. He used the example of a sliding door at a Staples. It opens automatically so a user doesn't have to put down their shopping. It expresses this intelligence with a simple 1-bit switch. Our other devices should be as seamless. An inspiring talk!

Liz Jackson

Liz Jackson, creator of The Disabled List, aimed for the audience to critically engage with Pathological Altruism.

Pathological Altruism is altruism that makes the situation worse. Liz says, "Disabled people have become a topic... and that means the solution being put in place are doing more harm than good" from things that are disempowering, to those that break or are simply unsafe.

Liz described how this could be improved by introducing design questioning in place of design thinking.

This would see disabled people as mutually involved rather than passive beneficiaries.

Gabriel White

Following a break Gabriel White - a human centred design consultant - explored the ethics of everyday things.

He bemoaned design's approach to testing that considers solely whether a feature is useful, usable and appealing.

Having laid out the problem Gabriel proposed some rules of thumb with which to evaluate design.

He ended his talk explaining how this new ethical dimension is an addendum to our existing human centred design knowledge.

Jon Bell

Jon Bell previously worked for Twitter where he was part of the team looking to remove abuse from the platform. 

A discursive, entertaining talk, he went in to detail around the difficulty of highly educated people pulling in entirely the wrong direction from one another.

Running through processes and failures he gave some insights on how they tried to keep working flowing.

He ended with an empathy test asking us to understand how Nickleback had sold 50 million records. The majority of the audience failed.

Holger Kuehnle

Related to ethics are biases. Holger Kuehnle, a design director at Artefact, walked through some of the problems with digital information.

He believes by quantifying data and offering historical context users would be in a better position to make an informed decision on it.

He ended riffing on the fact that certain complexity is irreducible.

Molly Wright Stenson

What we really mean when we say ethics

Starting with the Trolley Problem - and the various very excellent memes that have been produced around it - Molly Wright Stenson posed a number of conundrums that we face as designers when making decisions in the field of ethics.

The conversation around AI and Ethics is something that is generalising across the industry if the number of publications on Lexis Nexis is anything to go by.

Molly ended the talk re-iterating the importance of considering platforms that can support ethical decision making - such as Ethical OS or Microsoft's Judgement Call. She ended on the quandary that none of us would have digital work if it weren't for the US Defence department and their investment in ARPAnet etc. that offered the foundations for the internet.

Marijke Jorritsma

As a UX designer at NASA Marijke's talk was slightly outside the flow of ethics from many other speakers.

The subject was fascinating though looking at how design can facilitate the work between the engineers and scientists at NASA.

She's one of 14 designers surrounded by 5,000 engineers. She ended the presentation running through a 9 step system to advocate for UX.

Tea Ugalow

Tea's talk was 'Normality is stupid', which no sensible person could argue against. Tea's the Creative Director at Google's Creative Lab and a trans woman.

She ran through how we define 'normality' via a bellcurve.

Defining normal this way is dangerous. Humans are amorphous and complex, we shift around different bell curves depending on what we're being measured against. As Tea says normality is stupid because "we are all queer, other, excluded."

A recurrent theme was how machine learning and AI is learning the wrong thing. It doesn't get the edges of the bell curve because it considers them as incorrect information. That was why on Google's Quick Draw the algorithm didn't recognise a high-hell as a shoe. Tea hopes Project Respect will introduce language to describe the complexity of human relationships.

I was too busy listening to be able to make particularly useful notes. I'd strongly recommend watching the video once released by IxDA.

Don Norman

Director of the Design Lab at the University of California and author of Design of Everyday Things Don Norman needs little introduction.

Unscripted, and without the support of a presentation, Don ran through his feelings around working with people to generate design. As Liz Jackson had proposed earlier in the day his message was for designers to act as facilitators rather than generators of design. If design isn't created by local communities, or the end-user, then it has little resilience.

He's aware this isn't without problems. Currently working on a project in Kentucky he's aware of the communication difficulties that exist between 'local' and 'expert'.

A fascinating talk on which to end the day.

Day two report to follow tomorrow.