Just recently re-discovered this through a facebook posting by a former frogdesign colleague…it is quite eloquent, profoundly succinct, a true personification of Dieter Rams‘ severely austere ethos as a designer–pure functionalism and anti-style, anti-waste, the sacredness of the object and its utility, nothing more or less. Indeed he once articulated his design approach as “Less, […]

I attended the Interaction’09 Conference, held in downtown Vancouver early February 2009, featuring a wide assortment of speakers and topics from “performance art robotics” to “waiting” (yes, just waiting) to “prototyping methods” and “touch-screen interfaces”. On the whole I enjoyed it very much, found it stimulating, intriguing, and valuable–very eager to see what’s ahead for […]

Conversations, engagements and embodiments. Let me explain further… Conversations are central to what we do as interaction designers: staging necessary and significant dialogues with the stakeholders & teammates as well as with the product’s users via the “It” that is being designed (an interface, a piece of software, a mobile device, a branded service, an […]

First it was interaction design. Then service design. What’s the next hot thing for design? Policy Design. (that’s my big gamble :-) The latest firestorm over Facebook’s privacy and content usage policies indicated that this notion of crafting a community policy is more than simply the work of a few lawyers and a PR campaign […]

I wrote about simplicity last year in a posting based upon Paul Rand’s famous dictum: Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations. I certainly believe Rand’s point still holds, but I’ve been drawn to this concept again, to unpack it further, more deeply as a rhetorical […]