Adaptive Path Blog

I’m kicking off Day Four of UX Week with a talk on New Sources of Inspiration for Interaction Designers. When it comes time to design a product or feature, designers look to other similar products for inspiration. Or maybe, if they are sophisticated, they might look at patterns like Yahoo’s UI Pattern Library or to Jenifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces book. But the world is a deep, rich pattern library, waiting to be used. We can find inspiration in all sorts of places, and none of them necessarily on the other side of a computer screen.

The buildings around us can inspire through their use of space and light to instigate interactions. Cinema shows us how storytelling and transitions can work. Nature shows us the complex simplicity of ecosystems, and provides a multitude of movements, colors, and patterns. Mechanical objects demonstrate how things work — how transparency can occur and how for hundreds of years controls have been created.

But Thursday only gets better from there. Following me is Bill “The History of the Button” DeRouchey on Learning Interaction Design from Everyday Objects. Then we’ve lined up two field trips: to the National Building Museum and to the International Spy Museum. Gah, I have to pick just one?!? Before we go, Martin Moeller from the National Building Museum and Cybelle Jones of Gallagher Associates, who did the exhibit design of the International Spy Museum, will prep us on what to see and how they designed it.

It’s going to be an excellent, inspirational day and I hope you’ll join us. AP blog readers can use the code BLOG and get 10% off! Rates go up after this week, so register now.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Adaptive Path, Plugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.