Jeroen van Geel was invited to participate in the Redux at Interaction 13 in Toronto. Speakers were invited to reflect upon the conference content on the last day of the conference. This is part of his reflection, combined with some after thoughts.
Interaction design is a young field. At least, that's what we as interaction designers keep telling ourselves. And of course, in comparison to many other fields we are respectfully young. But I get the feeling that we use it more as an excuse to permit ourselves to have an unclear definition of who we are—and who we aren't.
At this year's Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference, Interaction 13, you got a good overview of the topics that are of interest to interaction designers. And I can tell you that, as long as it has something to do with human behaviour, it seems of interest. In four days time there were talks and discussions around data, food design, social, health, gaming, personas, storytelling, lean, business and even changing the world. The topics ranged from the very specific task of creation of attributes to having an impact on a global scale. It shows that interaction designers have a great curiosity and want to understand many aspects of life. When we think we have an understanding of how things work, we have the feeling that we can impact everything. Of course this is great and we all know that curiosity should be stimulated, but at the same time this energy and endless search for knowledge can be a curse. Before we know it we become the jack of all trades, master of none. Interaction designers already have a lot of difficulty explaining their exact value. But where does it end? I don't know the answer, because I myself understand this endless curiosity and see how it helps me to improve my skills. Maybe the question is: are we becoming more a belief than a field?
The theme of Interaction 13 was 'social innovation with impact.' From this topic there were several presentations that focused on the role of interaction designers making the world a better place. Almost all designers in general, but every interaction designer specifically, wants to have this kind of impact. Over the last few years I've seen quite a few presentations at 'User Experience' conferences where a speaker enthusiastically puts his fist in the air and proclaimed that the time has come for the interaction designer to make the world more livable. Everybody cheered, interaction designers rallied up with their sharpies and thought they could solve every possible wicked problem. They enthusiastically went back to their huge corporation or agency in the hope that the next day they would finally get this world-changing assignment from their boss. But of course it didn't work that way.
Gotta love New York City. Designer Ted Southern decided he wanted to make body armor for a living—not the military stuff, I'm talking Knight and Samurai armor—and shortly after getting his Masters from Pratt, actually found a gig doing it in Manhattan.
Southern's work at a costume and prop fabrication business led him in some random directions: He began designing the wings for those Victoria's Secret models and developed an interest in spacesuit gloves. (Then again, these things might not seem unusual to a man whose undergraduate major was the French Horn.) He entered a 2007 NASA-sponsored spacesuit glove design competition, and while he didn't win, he ended up giving a fellow entrant a ride back to Manhattan after the ceremony.
That entrant was Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian former cosmonaut and spacesuit designer.
The two kept in touch, decided to collaborate on an entry in the 2009 iteration of the same competition, and won 2nd place together.
Sneaker innovation (or the Footwear Novelty Gimmick Contest, depending on your point of view) continues. Hot on the heels of Reebok's crazy ATV-style shoe and Adidas' Boost foam comes Puma's Mobium Runner, a sneaker that "expands and contracts with your foot." Two tendon-like attachments running underneath the shoe, and inspired by the plantar fascia connective tissue on the sole of your foot, reportedly allow the shoe to do this.
Whether or not you believe they work, Puma Innovation Team designer Raymond Horacek looks like he has an awesome gig: Based out of their Japan studio, Horacek sketches, wades through Tokyo, quotes Gaudí and studies cats:
As the inaugural year of SVA's new MFA in Products of Design program nears the spring, they have opened up applications for their summer program, this time around the growing field of food design. Headed up by faculty member Emilie Baltz and Core77 Design Awards Favorite Marc Bretillot, the program takes place in France from July 7–13, 2013. Below are more details:
This immersive workshop is a delicious foray into the growing field of food design. Taking place in the French capital of Champagne province, the program will be hosted in the kitchens of L'Ecole Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Reims (L'ESAD), home to one of the first culinary design program in the world. Emphasizing a maker-driven, cooking-centric approach, the program will reveal new perspectives unto the ways that we engage and identify with our food.
Under the direction of Marc Bretillot, founder of the food design program at L'ESAD, and Emilie Baltz, artist and food designer, the program is based on the understanding that food is our most fundamental form of consumption. In recent years, we have seen a growing awareness around the quality of the food we ingest and the industrial means surrounding our most basic foodstuffs. With the rapidly expanding reach of the design industry, designers are now uniquely situated to explore and affect these systems.
Using materials, gestures, forms and interactions, participants will investigate the role that ingredients, taste, shape and service play within food design. Throughout the workshop, critiques and performances will be held to emphasize the authentic development of personal "taste." Students will likewise be challenged to consider the sensory experience of their work and its ethical, aesthetic, historical and political implications. A professional chef will assist participants with technical needs. Scheduled visits and tastings to neighboring distilleries, vineyards, local farms and food producers will be an essential component of revealing the complex, and delightful, space in which food design exists.
Located 80 miles from Paris (45 minutes on the high-speed train), the City of Reims is one of the cultural centers of France. Participants will stay in centrally located apartment-style housing with full service amenities.
I had one particularly severe design professor who hated materials swapping for the sake of materials swapping. For example if you brought in a design for something ordinarily made of leather but spec'd it for steel, and you couldn't back up your reason for the materials choice, he would excoriate you. "That's not profound, that's not clever," he would rant. "The materials are supposed to serve the design, not whimsy."
Still, sometimes it's fun (particularly when there's no danger of an "F" looming over your head) to see videos like this one, where materials experimentation is done just for the hell of it. To create a piece of "ride-able art," the guys at California-based Signal Snowboards visited some of Italy's master glass manufacturers to see if a glass snowboard was do-able.
The first stop was the Vetrerira Aurora glass factory in Brescia, where the board is first cut and formed. (Who knew you could hot-bend and laminate multiple layers of glass together, like a skate deck?) Stop two was glass magicians Viraver Technologies, where the glass was tempered, bonded and cooked. Then came the biq questions: How would it perform on ice, hard pack, powder? Check it out, and dig the crazy amount of machinery required to crank one of these out:
And we're live from Cape Town at Design Indaba this week covering the presentations, films, music and products that are making a difference not only in South Africa, but around the world. An impressive roster of international speakers includes John Maeda, Steven Heller, Louise Fili, Paula Scher, Asif Khan, Martí Guixé, Core77 Design Awards winner Daan Roosegaarde, Oscar Diaz, Jeanne van Heeswijk, David Adjaye and more. We'll be covering the ideas and inspiration from over 30 speakers representing the broad, transdiciplinary nature of this conference.
This year's events include a stellar film festival hosted at The Bank on Canterbury Street. Screenings of documentary and feature films include some personal favorites: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Waste Land, Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, Beauty is Embarassing, and Design & Thinking. The first annual music circuit presents 32 artists in 8 venues around Cape Town. And the perennial favorite Expo presents emerging designers from around the continent in a lively tradeshow setting.
Beginning on Wednesday, follow us on Twitter @Core77 for live tweeting or if you're a student or young designer in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town or Durban, you can participate in one of the local Young Designers Simulcasts.
In the coming week we'll be publishing posts by frog's researchers drawing on their experience of working for commercial and non-commercial clients in some of the less predictable places of the world: Afghanistan; post-revolution Egypt; Rwanda; Burundi; Brazil, Ethiopia; South Sudan; India and China—the list of countries is extensive, the global insights team ratchet up more than 150 projects a year across industries— financial inclusion, healthcare, automotive, fast moving consumer goods.
In this series, the posts are written by Jan Chipchase, Cara Silver and Mark Rolston to coincide with the publication of their new report: In The Hands of God: A Study of Risk and Savings in Afghanistan that explored issues related to the design and adoption of mobile money services. As you might expect from a country at war, Afghanistan is very much an outlier, but as such it can reveal behaviours that are far more difficult to spot elsewhere in much the same way that lead users are different from mainstream users. It's a journey that revealed the best and worst of humanity: from the bonds family; trust; betrayal and even an attempted kidnapping.
It's not every day two organizations come together to create something even greater than the sum of their parts. It is with great excitement that we announce a strategic partnership between Core77 and the Industrial Designers Society of America.
Over the coming year Core77 and IDSA will work together to mutually promote programming offered by both sides to our respective audiences. In keeping with tradition, Core77 will host the portfolio review and a social event at the annual IDSA International Conference (taking place this year in Chicago, from August 20-23). Core77 will implement a new job board at the IDSA web site, welcoming IDSA as a partner into the Coroflot Job Network.
IDSA is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design, so a partnership with Core77 is a natural fit. "An official collaboration between our organizations makes perfect sense," said Stuart Constantine, cofounder of Core77. "Our motives are well aligned and we are both committed to providing the broader design community with unparalleled professional and creative opportunities."
"While IDSA and Core77 have been cooperating informally for several years, we are happy to have a formal agreement in place to share job board postings and promotion of events that will bring value to designers and the design world," said George McCain, IDSA's chairman of the board. "IDSA has the utmost admiration for the online community that Core77 has built and is honored to become an integral part of it."
Also, if you haven't done so already, there's still time to enter your best work in the 2013 IDEA awards. The final deadline is tonight (Monday Feb 25) so stop procrastinating and get your entry in now!
The game of finding love is evolving, so the technology that supports it needs to catch up! Zoosk improves the lives of its users by helping them find love, and they need you to improve their interaction elements for all those seeking love.
In order to build the ideal experience for Zoosk users, you'll need to be an interaction designer who constantly puts themselves in the user's shoes and knows how to play well with others without rolling over completely. Start-up experience, cutting-edge knowledge of usability best practices and the ability to dodge Nerf darts are great to have as well.
If you think this is a match made in heaven (or online) click the link below.
Here's a theoretically interesting pair of design bedfellows: Mercedes has partnered up with BoConcept on the SmartCar you see pictured here, which carries a title longer than the car itself: It's called the "smart fortwo BoConcept signature style," and it will make its first appearance in Berlin next week as a "brand ambassador" vehicle.
Okay, fine, let's get honest. One, I know I lured you into this entry with an alliterative parent-company/sub-brand bait-and-switch in the title. So sue me. But two, looking at these photos, you're probably as underwhelmed as I was by the nature of the collaboration, which seems more like a BoConcept designer text-messaged some Pantone numbers over to Smart HQ rather than the two bodies engaging in a real meeting of the design minds.
So why'm I bringing it up? Because wouldn't it be interesting if a design outfit and an auto manufacturer actually did an earnest design collaboration, going beyond mere color schemes and materials swaps into real ID? Sure, there are some aesthetic risks—I could see a Lincoln kitted out with Ethan Allen couches, or an IKEA/VW collaboration that introduced more particle board than we'd like, but think of the possibilities: Would you not like to drive a Karim Rashid Porsche with an obscenely sensual stickshift? Or a powerful piece of Detroit steel, like a Dodge Charger, tricked out with fellow Michiganite Herman Miller's seating? Or anything with a dashboard designed by Dieter Rams?
All I'm saying is, car companies like Porsche, BMW and now Peugeot have been steadily encroaching into product design territory for years. It'd be nice to see it start going the other way.
CRAFTING ANALOG DREAMS
DESIGN HOUSE
Tokyo Designers Week / DesignTide Tokyo 2012
Beijing Design Week 2012
Eero Saarinen: A Reputation for Innovation
Beam Project: Call for Proposals
Stripes: Design Between the Lines, Edited by Linda O'Keeffe
Hidden Forms by Franco Clivio, Hans Hansen and Pierre Mendell
Design Process Kills Creativity / Design Process Creates Creativity
"If I Knew Then What I Know Now..."
Industrial Design and Crime
If you are a leader, make sure you give props
Core77 Design Awards 
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition 
Image courtesy of smashingbuzz
Biomimicry 3.8: What Would You Ask Nature
Changing the Face of Motocross
20 Years of Kikkerland
Discovering Chinese Design
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2012
BEIJING DESIGN WEEK 2012
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2012
LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2012
After the Mayan Calendar, Fernando Romero's You Are The Context
"Why Shrink-wrap a Cucumber? The Complete Guide to Environmental Packaging"
"Stripes: Design Between The Lines"
Hidden Forms by Franco Clivio, Hans Hansen and Pierre Mendell
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HarvardxDesign 2013: Event Recap
The Crafting of Analog Dreams: An Interview with SWBK
Poetry in Motion: A Four-Part History of the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing
All Chips On the Table: The Bicycle Art & Design of Garrett Chow
The Future of 3D Printing: Mere Misnomer or Something More?
