Notes on: Designing interactions

Bill Moggridge of IDEO and Gillian Crampton-Smith were in (sort of) conversation on Friday at the Design Museum in London. Some highlights were:

- "Design the right thing, and the thing right": the motto follwed at IVREA

- The task of interaction design is to tame complexity

- People don't want to remember how to use things. Or use the manual. Or be made to look stupid by the machines they own

- Academic ideas and research on interaction design are not making it out into the real (commercial) world

- Writing, according to Socrates, was the death of memory

- Read Guy Kawasaki's post about being able to start a web 2.0 business for about $12,000

- Companies aren't very good at knowing how to make stuff that meets needs as well as desires

- There is much to be learnt from play, and playing with toys

- Build in rewards for understanding control loops. Make the loops simple at first, and then gradually increase their difficulty

- Design for people on the edges of the bell curve

- To understand latent needs, you don't need to use market research methods

- Use narrative prototyping to tell a story about complex services

- Designing is like playing with a pinball machine

- You need to learn to work across many disciplines, but you must have one really strong craft skill

- We underestimate the body's role in helping us know the world

- Someone designed a table with GPS in it. But it can't communicate with the satellite when it is indoors. It says, 'Table is lost'

- Software that is aimed at the professional (and resultingly complex) should be moved towards the consumer, and have most features turned off to start with

- You can design paths for change

- The visual iconography for Mac's OS X was in part inspired by circular reflections in the ice cubes in whisky adverts in glossy US magazines

Much else can be found on the book, DVD and website Designing Interactions.