Adaptive Path Blog

I’m in Innsbruck, Austria this week attending Ubicomp. Ubiquitous Computing refers to the trend that we as humans interact no longer with one computer at a time, but rather with a dynamic set of small networked computers, often invisible and embodied in everyday objects in the environment.

As more and more of our projects at Adaptive Path touch multiple systems, it’s clear that ubiquitous computing is relevant to user experience work. Admittedly, the lion’s share of the work is very technical in nature — but user experience and design are clearly topics of interest.

The keynote was given by Antonio Calvosa from Ferrari and his presentation stressed the importance of understanding users. He encouraged the audience to “…get your mind out of the lab — put your mind into figuring out how to communicate your technology to everyday people like your mom, or to your friend.”

He also talked about how in the end, you should always be thinking about the end user and putting people at the center of what you do. He gave an example of the Moen Revolution shower head created by Design Continuum Inc.

“Moen Revolution was an example of engineering the product based on the design. We worked in reverse to design the inner working that would improve the shower experience.” He stressed that user need drove the design and development of this product — not technology and engineering.

Wednesday’s session line up on the The Design Process seems especially interesting. I’ll be blogging about highlights this week….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:56 am and is filed under Conference Commentary, Experience Design, Mobile, User Research. 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.

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