Adaptive Path Blog

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Peter Coughlan, the head of IDEO’s Transformation by Design Practice and MX San Francisco speaker about the ways in which organizations can fundamentally rethink their approach to things from a design-oriented perspective. Some highlights:

On making change tangible:

 One of my favorite examples comes from a hospital that wanted to help reduce their patients’ worry levels while they were waiting for (chemo) treatment. A very simple idea they had was to just go up to patients and ask them if they had any worries, any questions that they could address. It turned out that doing that — going up to patients and asking them questions — was very awkward and difficult to do. So they created an artifact to help them get over that awkwardness — a set of question cards that they shared with patients to help break the ice and provide something to talk about. It turned out to be a wonderful way to prompt new behavior on the part of patients and providers.

On the designer-client relationship:

I would say that the most important shift in the design profession will be for designers to get comfortable with the notion that it’s more important for a client to have a great idea than for the designer to have the idea. If the client organization has played a role in coming up with the idea, it’s way more likely to see the light of day.

Read the complete interview here.

You can still register for MX San Francisco, April 20-22 here. Enter the code FOHF for a 15% discount.

Share This

This week I had the opportunity to talk with Adaptive Path’s old friend Matt Jones, Co-founder and Designer of Dopplr. He’s one of our featured speakers at next month’s MX conference. Some excerpts from our conversation over instant messenger follow, and the whole interview can be found over at my own blog, the Second Verse. Matt and I share a mutual love for some very particular (peculiar?) subjects, so the interview explores some unpredictable territory: the Situationists, Jack Kirby inventions, Grant Morrison, movement in hyperspace, and what the success of the iPhone means to the rest of the mobile device industry. Matt was kind enough to share a ton of information about his perspective and his influences - I hope you enjoy reading the interview.

Also, be sure to remember to register by March 31st for MX - On April 1st, the price goes up. MX is on April 20-22 in San Francisco, the price right now is $1,495. After March 31st, the price jumps to $1,595. (You also get a free iPod Shuffle when you register for MX by March 31st). So register today!

(more…)

Share This

It is no secret that a lot of us were science fiction geeks growing up, so it was with sadness that we learned of Arthur C. Clarke’s passing yesterday. In our own ways we remembered his influence on our lives:

Jesse James Garrett:

Not the year, but the movie. Arthur C. Clarke died today — yes, but did you know he invented the communications satellite, complete with math, decades before it was technologically possible? — and I’ve seen this link in a few places about the creative process behind the film:

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0073.html

As you probably know, I love hearing about the dead ends and abandoned concepts in any creative project, and this diary is rich with them: he describes their initial schedule as “hilariously optimistic”, recounts working through at least two Christmases, and the blow-by-blow accounts of directions considered and abandoned (and crucial last-minute rewrites) show that even the path to great work requires innumerable wrong turns along the way.

Jeff Veen:

His Three Laws are still inspiration to me, even if contemporary usage
has pushed them to cliche:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to
venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_law

Kate Rutter:

That last one [Law #3] is still my favorite. During one recent project, the similarities between what we were designing and the World Of Harry Potter kept me up at night.

As for me, books like the 2001 series, The Songs of Distant Earth and short stories like “The Nine Billion Names of God” have remained with me in many ways. Last weekend I unpacked my books after my 14th move in 12 years. Arthur C. Clarke’s books have been with me for every one of those moves. They remain some of my favorite stories and they even got me through college astronomy. Not only were they factually correct on the particulars of our solar system, they were way more entertaining than the stuff the professor assigned.

Share This

If you’ve ever used a bot like SmarterChild, pause and pay a moment of respect to the late Joseph Weizenbaum who died March 5, the news of which is only now making the rounds. Weizenbaum was the creator (in 1966) of ELIZA (play with the web simulation), the first software program whose purpose was to make the computer seem like a human being, with human-like responses. ELIZA was (and remains) ridiculously seminal in HCI circles, and its influence can be seen in everything from IM to text-based adventure games to Clippy.

Weizenbaum had some wrong-headed, disparaging things to say about the internet (”a garbage dump”), but his caution about the possible evils of computers sounds like he was warning us about SkyNet long before anyone else was. He had a great concern with the ethics of technology and strongly advocated that computers never replace human decision-making.

Another one of the old guard is gone, and we are all lessened for it.

Share This

We recently had an opportunity to visit the Current TV studios here in San Francisco. They were gracious enough to give us a guided tour of their operations.

Current TV started in 2005 and bills itself as the world’s leading peer-to-peer news and information network. They are the only 24/7 television network and site produced and programmed in collaboration of its audience.

I’ve been watching them off and on over the past couple of years and have always liked how much emphasis is placed on covering stories that young adults care about. It reminds me of what MTV could’ve done had they not gone batshit crazy.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived at their studio was the amount of people they have in the building. From the outside, it seems like a small space, but once inside, it goes on and on. They have about 300 employees in the SF location with more in Los Angeles and abroad. Their offices are as unique as their programming – everywhere you look there was an individual personality to the place.

We were shown rooms where the teams edit, produce, film and write. It was also amazing to see one room dedicated to managing and collecting all the feeds that come to the network.

What really struck me though, was the vibe of the place. It truly felt like people were there to make a difference – that they were dedicated to their jobs beyond just a paycheck. Current talks about “democratizing” TV and internet content. I get the feeling that it’s more than a marketing ploy.

It’s interesting that their site is so intrinsically tied to the content on television. They strive for a 2-screen experience and they tell us that everything featured on the TV network is available on their site. I imagine that most of their audience watches TV with their computer on their lap, so why not build an experience that caters to this displayed need?

I’m really curious to see how far this goes. There are plenty of examples of user-submitted content successes in the business world today. You only need to look to the many video sites and even CNN’s I-Report project to witness how media has already been changed. Current’s dedicated network and content-rich site provides a much more focused implementation of this trend. I hope they succeed and teach us all a thing or two in the process.

Find what channel they’re on in your city here.

Share This

Chris Conley of Gravity Tank and the Institute of Design spends his time educating young designers as well as clients the finer points of design, business and the process of building a creative and sustainable culture. I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about what it takes to grow and sustain creative excellence within organizations. Here are some highlights:

There is a tacit assumption that making is a production activity rather than a critical, informative one. Anyone who has ever been a part of a productive R&D team realizes that trying things and doing experiments is the fastest way to break into new territory. By putting a priority on thinking and talking (through email, meetings, and PowerPoint) our work activities and environments have become sterile and devoid of the tangible aspects of what were in business to create! You can’t tell by going into the offices of most companies what business they are actually in! Consider how challenging that inherently makes it for new people in the organization to understand and contribute creatively….

The “new” way of working is to re-train the organization. I put scare quotes around it because it is exactly how we used to work. You remember photos from the 50s of all of our great companies like General Motors, Lockheed, IBM? The photos were of folks in rooms full of prototypes, drawings on the tables, and walls that were blackboards with sketches and drawings. They were building the businesses. That’s gone. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that tangible things don’t matter.

Check out the entire interview here. Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.

Share This

The theme of UX Week’s Day Four is Interaction Design in the Field. Just to give you a taste of what it will be like, I had a conversation with one of the speakers, Bill DeRouchey, recently. An excerpt:

Bill: Interaction designers, of course, should be trying to deconstruct everything around them to better train themselves as interaction designers. And the fun thing about that is we’re completely surrounded by examples, it’s all the devices in our daily lives. It’s the cell phones, microwaves, ATM machines, computers, printers, and so on. We’re surrounded by buttons and icons and little blinky lights that can give us examples of how people think about devices and interaction design because there’s one thing that’s definitely true, people don’t approach the product from a void. They’re taking the learnings that they’ve experienced with other products and they apply them to a new product: that’s why you tend to see the same icons over and over that mean the same thing; they have a stock meaning within the language of interaction design. An arrow tilted on its side and pointing to the right means play because it always means play, and because people know it means play when they approach a new device and they see that, they think, “That’s play.” It’s such a simple thing, but it comes down to the core of a visual language that we all share, and I think it’s important to try to deconstruct that language so we know how people are approaching a new product, a new device. So we can make it intuitive and they can tap into what they already know.

Read the full interview and I’ll see you at UX Week!

Share This

I missed Stephen Anderson’s talk at this year’s IA Summit. Every time I think about it, I kick myself. Where the heck was I? Wandering lost in the serpentine halls of the Flamingo Hotel, no doubt. Regardless, I hear I missed something special so we booked Stephen for UX Week.

Share This

We are in for a treat tonight—Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management, will be stopping by to share insights and ideas from his new book The Myths of Innovation. Scott gave a great talk at MX this year and we are really looking forward to having him here.

When: Tonight, Wednesday, May 16; 6pm social hour, 7pm talk

Where: 363 Brannan St, upstairs (look for the signs)

Adaptive Path will be providing soft drinks and snacks. Feel free to bring your own beverages.

Full details are available at upcoming.org.

Share This

This posting is not about Star Wars analogies.
This posting is about a project sketch I showed during my portfolio presentation for Adaptive Path two weeks ago. This interactive sketch parses subtitles and maps them as dots linear on a stage. When you roll-over a dot you’ll see the timecode, the number of the subtitle and the text of the subtitle itself.

I experimented with subtitles, because some dialogues in movies are almost like poetry, or as significant as the image itself. Furthermore, I found it interesting that I could associate many of the Star Wars subtitles with the corresponding sequences.

To try the sketch out click here: Star Wars
(pop-up blockers might prevent this from launching)

Who am I again? Let me explain, my name is Sebastian Heycke and I luckily started an internship at Adaptive Path a couple of weeks ago.
I‘m in the final stage of my studies towards my Diploma in Communication Design with emphasis on Interface Design at the University of applied sciences in Potsdam, Germany. So far my internship has been very insightful and interesting and I’m very glad to be on board.

Thank you.

Share This