Design by Fire 2010

Thoroughly enjoyed Design by Fire Conference 2010. The highlight was of course Bill Buxton's talk on Natural User Interfaces. This year's conference was a huge improvement over last year's due to a better lineup of speakers. The only downside (however minor) was the building where the conference was held - it got really cramped outside the auditorium in the pauses. Here are my take-aways:

Bill Buxton - NUI: What's in a Name?
Book: Sketching the User Interface Slides: -

- Everything that we think of as new is at least 10 years old such as multitouch, the mouse, touchpads and smartphones.
- There is a long process which Buxton calls "the long nose" before technology reaches mainstream which he demonstrated by showing a Casio Calculator watch from 1984 with gestural recognition and video from 1983 with demoed the "pinch zoom" now popularized by the iPhone.
- Good design is about being a good thief and know your history (and by extension E-bay and Amazon is a great place to find prototypes of new products).
- Natural User Interfaces are about exploiting the skills that we have acquired over a lifetime. Natural is meant in the same sense as it is natural to button a shirt or tie a shoelace.
- The same skills might not be suitable in all situations for example controlling the inflight entertainment system in the same way as Microsoft Kinect is just bad.

Claire Rowland - The psychology of creativity
Twitter: @clurr Slides: Psychology Of Creativity

- De Bono's theory on hats has no scientific basis in studies on adults but seems to work well for children with developmental problems.
- Certain traits within the Big five seems to have a link with how creative a person is such as scoring high on openness and low on conscientiousness.
- Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation in in stimulating creativity. But "recognized geniuses" such as Darwin and Newton probably had both high intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
- Brain storming is actually a less good in generation new ideas than individual work but people seems to get energized from brainstorming sessions. Probable reasons for the lack of creativity are social loafing and group think.
- It's important to switch team members from time to time. Working with the same people every time hampers creativity.
- It's important to try to reconceptualize. Why are we doing this and for whom?
- Janusian thinking (after the many-faced roman god) - try to think of the opposites of a problem at the same time such as thinking of social and anti-social aspects of a service.
- Absurd stimulation - put stuff on the office walls to get people thinking and discussing.
- Look at something unconventional to prime your brain to come up with unconventional solutions.
- Lie down, the decrease in noradrenaline stimulates creativity.

Andrei Herasimchuk - Turning the Corporate Battleship with Design
Twitter: @Trenti Slides: -
- Kickstart your projects with a picture because it helps non creative people grasp what it is that you are trying to do and it makes you accountable.
- Eliminate busywork which means stop doing with any sort of documentation that isn't an integral part of the project such as extensive specs on prototypes.
- Print out your designs and put them on the walls and get as much space as possible for whiteboards and other means of collaborative sketching.
- Get version control and make sure all team members use it.
- Get the designers away from the computer since it is a production tool and a silo.
- Do design reviews but only with peers. Don't invite management.
- Standardize on a toolset. Only when everyone in the team has mastered the product you can start thinking about acquiring more tools.
- Structure is lika good playbook but you must be able to change the play on the fly.

My apologies for the crummy pictures.