IxDA at Frog Design in Seattle
Last night I attended the IxDA meeting at Frog design in downtown Seattle. Tres and I stepped out of the elevator outside the Frog Design offices to a surprising buzz inside the offices and walked in to an equally surprisingly large crowd. I think neither of us were expecting this many people at this event… If I had to guess I would say there was about 120 people there. Anyways, on to my summary of the evening…
The Introduction
As soon as Tres and I came in the door they were herding everyone towards an area where an introduction was given by a Frog employee. I thought that this was a taste of what was to come for the rest of the evening and I was a bit concerned as this was really just a long-winded introduction to Interaction Design and Industrial Design and a brief overview of what the two disciplines were all about. Really, it wasn't exciting. Luckily it was just an introduction to the evening and after it was over we split into 5 groups of around 20 people each, give or take, and moved to one of the five presenting companies there in the studios.
Madison Square Garden Remodel
The first presentation I saw was on the remodeling work of the Madison Square Garden in New York City. This presentation focused mostly on the prototyping and input phase of designing a product (or, in this case, a whole host of products.) They went over the usefulness of using a good ol' pencil and paper to come up with stories and demonstrations for how the thing you are designing are going to work, and most importantly, how human beings will interface with them.
I found this part particularly eye-opening because most things I design never have a human in the drawing anywhere. I always bang out the sketch of whatever it is I'm working on and completely overlook actually placing a human being in the imagery. Pencil and paper prototyping is great because the cost is damn-near free.
Medical Equipment Test Equipment
The next presentation was on the design of very specialized equipment used to actually test Medical hardware. This test equipment would do such things as ensure no voltage is seeping out of connections on the equipment and that sort of thing. I cannot honestly say I understood what exactly this equipment did, or how it was used but I got the general idea as described above.
I have to admit - this presentation did not really strike my fancy. It seemed that their prototyping stage involved cardboard models of the form-factor with stickers of controls/buttons/LCDs/knobs/etc. that the client could place in various positions. To me, this seems wrong. You are inherently limiting the ingenuity and problem-solving by only allowing yourself and the client to work with a very limited set of parameters for how the end product will be interfaced with. This actually feels like design, backwards. You have all the LCDs/buttons/etc. as well as the form-factor before you really even get to go and design anything…
Another thing that kind of bugged me about the way they do things came up during the Q&A phase of their presentation in which someone asked them if they ever suggest alternative/better ways of interfacing with these devices to their clients. Their reaction was that since they have such a small client-base, and know them all intimately, there is no need to change how these companies are currently doing things. Again, this seems backwards to me. I believe it is always, always, always the designers job to find a better way of doing something. Otherwise it just isn't design it is production. If the client disagrees with you and tells you to fuck-off-and-die, then fine but you should still make the effort.
Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000
Next was a presentation on the Industrial Design of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. This was pretty interesting to me as this was the only presentation on a product that was passed around the room to be played with. Of course, in hindsight, that was probably a bad thing…
As far as how this thing was designed the speaker did not go into that very much. It seemed mostly like a marketing slide-show. The mouse features buttons on the underside for playing a presentation, and apparently took 18 months of research to design. They apparently had 12 different prototypes for how to tell if the mouse was in “presentation mode” meaning the scroll-wheel and such wouldn't function anymore so you did not accidentally push them while presenting. After all of this research, time and money they went with a on/off switch to tell the mouse if it was in presentation mode. *face-palm*
This mouse actually is designed pretty well, there were just a few things that were big no-noes for this kind of presentation. First, the guy was on a Macintosh giving his presentation. That in itself is not so bad, except this mouse, which is especially made for people like him (out and about, giving presentations) does not work on OSX. *snicker* Also, when you have the mouse in your hand there is a back-port for the batteries. There is a big, obvious, tempting, holy shit I cannot not hit this button on the mouse to pop the battery panel off. When this mouse when around the room over 75% of the people who got it in their hands popped the battery-panel off first thing and couldn't figure out how to put it back on. It is probably not such a good design consideration to make a battery-panel button so awesome you hit it first-thing.
Lastly, this presentation was also annihilated by a question during Q&A time. After all of this time and money spent on this mouse, and it's success, (it is a successful product.) it appears Microsoft did not actually do any research to tell if they hit their market demographic with this product, who it was being sold to or how it was being used. It kind of blows my mind a company would spend this much development and production resources on a product and not do the menial work to ensure they learn from the success of this product. I suppose this should be no surprise to me coming from Microsoft.
Intel Point of Sale Kiosk
Next up was Frog Design discussing their work on what really amounts to revolutionizing Point of Sale. Currently Point of Sale devices are ugly, beige, black-and-white-screened computers that, along with their mass of wiring, are hidden behind a black counter or glass surface out of embarrassment. Apparently Intel wanted to change this, so they hired Frog design to make this device sexy. What they came up with was an entire surface that was capable of scanning and displaying the item you were purchasing as well as potentially offer you matching items and other items people who bought that item purchased.
This would essentially give you the same experience you get online but with the added bonus of someone there to actually speak with while making your purchase as well as the instant gratification that comes with making in-store purchases. I actually really like what they ended up designing, they have really good, cheap computers and processing power - why not put them to the paces when it comes to Point of Sale devices? Here is what they came up with:
Conclusion
Overall I think the conference was just OK. I felt too much emphasis was put into the difference between Interaction Design and Industrial Design, how the differ as positions and what each job “does.” To me this distinction isn't too hard to understand but maybe it is for others… Also, it was hard to tell if the products and how they were designed actually met given requirements and if they learned anything from the experience and what could have been improved upon in the future.
