Tidbits from Day Two of RE:DESIGN/UXD

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After a great Day One, our flock of really smart people came back today for Day Two. With twelve sessions, here are my highlights as I flitted about as staff photographer and occasional contributor.

Simona Brusa Pasqué led a discussion about designers founding or co-founding startups, not only making the argument about how it makes sense but also how hard it can be and sharing some of her lessons learned.

Nadya Direkova from Google led a lively discussion about how to gamify almost anything, even gene sequencing. While Yu Shan Chuang from Rosetta continued to explore another aspect about the role of the designer in organizations, touching about apprenticeships, mentoring and industry community.

Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek from Cooper delivered Part 2 of their hypothesis about the future of interfaces (paralingual linguistics?) and visions of a very sci-fi future.

Marc Escobosa from Arena Solutions talked about the buyer’s journey and how to design marketing to drive the buyer from one stage to the next—echoing Marisa Gallagher’s talk yesterday—and drawing parallels between experience design and marketing. My takeaway: Design—big D—must not only be involved in product development, but also the marketing of that product.

Andrew Crow from GE reminded us that there could be some extreme conditions in which our users might be using our products, such as in space where an unshielded tablet could be fried by the immense radiation from the sun.

Dan Albritton from MegaPhone Labs made the argument that the smartphone in our pocket is the ultimate controller for anything and everything.

If I were to some up both days of the conference, I would say that there were two emerging themes. The first was really about the role of the experience designer today and how it’s changing. It’s more than just determining the best interaction for an e-commerce shopping cart or best practices for forms. It’s expanding to business strategy, product development, brand and marketing. The second theme was clearly about the future and how we as designers need to be ready for it. Interfaces will only become more varied (ubiquity of smartphones, voice control, ocular control, agents and robots from Futurama) and surprisingly more human.

On a personal note—just like RE:DESIGN/CD—it was really awesome to see old friends. As an initial speaker list, I reached out to many of my former UX friends from past lives and was really happy to see them: Marisa, Sarah, Nadya, and Tim from the Razorfish days; Chris and Dan from the marchFIRST days; and meeting John Nack in person after corresponding with him about my iPad app DesignScene.

Tidbits from Day One of RE:DESIGN/UXD

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Today was the first day at RE:DESIGN/UXD. We had about nine sessions and below are my highlights.

Tim Richards from BLITZ started off the day by raising the bar and saying that experience designers shouldn’t only focus on interactions on a screen. Instead we should think about the macro-experiences to design ones that are authentic and resonate with the audience so that we can avoid the “Ice Cube Effect” (NWA vs. Are We Done Yet?).

Marisa Gallagher from CNN continued with an interactive session equating the UX process with brand strategy (it really is the same). She asked attendees to break out into groups to use their UX knowledge to solve hypothetical branding challenges for companies like Sears and the USPS.

Cooper designers Chris Noessel and Stefan Kolarek led a thought-provoking lunchtime session that looked back on the evolution of interface design and where it will go in the future. Hint: there is no screen.

Sarah Murgel from Razorfish made the following challenge: if protesters using social media in Tunisia can spark a cultural and political revolution in the Middle East, if a young startup can raise $7MM on Kickstarter for a watch in four weeks, why can’t we as UX designers innovate in corporate America?

Lots of phenomenal discussions and idea-sharing happening. As Marisa put it: it feels like a great salon. Day Two is tomorrow.

Introducing the RE:DESIGN Conference

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I’ve been working behind the scenes on a little thing called the RE:DESIGN Conference. It is a whole series of events around Design and the format really encourages intimate conversations led by session leaders.

The first event is themed around Creative Directors and I’ve had the privilege of trying to get many designers whose work I’ve long admired and many friends, colleagues and mentors to come speak at the conference.

Here is a quick rundown of those I know, and how I know them, arranged in autobiographical order:

  • Lawrence Azerrad was in my class at California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC, now California College of the Arts (CCA)). I am envious that he has the pleasure of working with my favorite contemporary band Wilco.
  • Mark Fox was my one of my teachers at CCAC and I interned for him. A lot of what I know about logos and symbols I learned from him.
  • Neal Zimmermann was one of my bosses in my first full-time design job. Always funny, he would push us junior designers to kern five-letter words for a week, earning him the nickname of “The Kernel.”
  • I worked with both Angie Wang and Eric Heiman at Zimmermann Crowe Design (ZCD) and they have both since become inspirational educators and design practitioners.
  • Colleen Stokes was my boss at USWeb/CKS (which became marchFIRST). Her designs were always impeccable and she eventually moved to New York to work for a number of style and fashion brands.
  • Adam Connelly and I met at marchFIRST (formerly USWeb/CKS, formerly CKS) while working on the Sega account. We would cross paths again at Apple and Razorfish. His wealth of indie music knowledge is amazing.
  • Shawn Hazen and I worked at Apple together. Although we were in different groups within Graphic Design, we were both part of the growing team of highly-skilled designers cranking out layouts with Apple Myriad on white.
  • I met both Cinthia Wen and Christopher Simmons while working on a side AIGA/SF project dubbed “The Pub Project.” Both are CCA alumni and both are brilliant.
  • Dan Buczaczer is the likely outcast of the bunch. He is not a designer, but he and his company are incredibly creative when it comes to innovative ways to get one’s message out. He is also my neighbor in Oakland.
  • Dave McClain and I are counterparts at LEVEL Studios. We also both previously worked for Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish, formerly SBI.Razorfish, formerly SBI and Company, formerly marchFIRST). Don’t remind him that the Oakland Raiders beat the Denver Broncos at Denver, in their 2011 season opener.

I cannot wait to see all these people in Palm Springs in November. I think it will prove to be a very fun, interesting and inspiring time. More info at the RE:DESIGN website.

One Day For Design

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The AIGA is sponsoring a 24-hour online conversation about Design (with an uppercase D). This is all happening on Twitter, moderated by some pretty big names like Alex Bogusky, Erik Spiekermann, Armin Vit and others.

I’m happy to see the AIGA doing this online and using social media. And I’m happy there are moderators that represent a couple of generations of designers.

Link: onedayfordesign.org

Art + Technology at WWDC

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As with most creative people, I have ideas. A lot of them. I’ve got ideas for websites, products and of course iPhone apps. The last bit has gotten me really excited recently, especially with articles about how tiny iPhone app developers have been able to make a lot of money. I’m not necessarily interested solely because of the iPhone gold rush—just partially—but also because of the thrill of exploring the new user interfaces that are possible with iPhone.

I’m not a developer. I’m a designer. Although if I tried really hard I could probably learn Objective-C and hack something together, it probably wouldn’t be the best quality and wouldn’t necessarily be the best app. There’s an old quote from Pixar’s John Lasseter that I love: “Art challenges technology and technology inspires art.” If I am to do anything well in the saturated iPhone appland, I need to find a genius dev.

In my quest to hook up with an iPhone developer—since I only know talented web devs—I found Steve Weller. Fantastic guy. He fits the profile of an Apple developer perfectly, in a good way. He knows his stuff and he lives and breathes Apple. Although we haven’t actually worked on a project together yet, he is of the same mindset: good developers need good designers (and vice versa).

To me there are just too many apps out there that are nice from a functionality standpoint, but really fail in user experience. That’s where we as designers can give an app that extra special sauce to help it reach Apple’s Top 25 lists.

Steve has organized a meetup for iPhone developers and designers during WWDC this week. It will be on Wednesday, June 10 at 12:15 by the waterfall at Yerba Buena Gardens. See his site for more info and to RSVP.