First Published on Linkedin on February 27, 2020 https://bit.ly/3bjXk91

My take on Interaction Week 2020.

Amongst the 80 speakers at this year’s conference were some of the biggest names in the industry and some fresh new talent. Of the conferences I’ve recently attended, the IxDA’s Interaction Week 2020 is by far one of the better organised, situated and curated ones (let’s keep this last one between us).

Throughout many of the talks emerged a well-known, yet persistent theme: unconscious bias which is responsible for both discriminatory behaviours online as well as algorithmic biases. These included frameworks for influencing gender equality, religious and cultural diversity, and accessibility for the psychologically and/or physically disabled. 

Moreover, talks were split into categories that ranged from governance and organisations to robotics, new mobility modes, and the heightening of our sensorial experiences.

A ‘new dawn’ is a catalytic space for sharing ideas and discussing ways to address concerns about the future of design and the design of our future(s). This is the space to envision a better future by design, for everyone, everywhere. 

The addition of killer keynote speakers to sandwich the daily talks over the three days, such as Giorgia Lupi and Jan Knikker, gave an extra dimension to the conference, as their respective practices in Information Design and Urban Design dangerously flirt with the field of interaction design and more broadly service design.

The following are my 7 highlights:

(1) The Internet is not an equal place.

Anneli Westerberg opens her talk with a provocation: 

“Have you ever been harassed online? Do you own a device with internet access? In what context do you live?”

Designer and activist, Westerberg brings research and service design methodologies to Plan International where she helps tackle the ongoing challenges of children rights and equality for girls around the world.

She argues that women’s safety is governed by context and takes on variable levels of urgency depending on that given context. In developing countries, for example, low-income family units can be seen adopting a culture of sharing, where no one owns a mobile phone, and everyone has access to the same device. This brings about constraints that in the West are not commonplace. Device co-ownership has the unfortunate potential to put women in vulnerable or unsafe situations. What could happen if a family member saw private information not meant for them to see? What kind of risks could this incident put them in? What cultural and/or domestic behaviours could this engender?

A perfect example of their work can be found with Girls out loud— an online platform designed as a safe space for women and girls to share their stories. Amongst its capabilities, the platform offers support for at-risk troubled girls, mentoring events, and programmes.

When it comes to inclusion, gender equality is not alone: physical and mental disabilities are areas that designers are increasingly addressing.

(2) What neurotype are you? 

According to Treyce Meredith, product designer at Carbon Five, designing for neurodiversity would be to cover neurological disabilities that are broader than the typically recognised, and sometimes more noticeable, differences amongst people, such as: Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, ADHD, Autistic Spectrum, and more.

As of today, the landscape of diversity and inclusion in design practice does not represent neurodiversity as much, but rather distinguishes individual differences such as race, socioeconomic background, physical disabilities, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. 

Moreover, Meredith claims that “36% of users are considered to be neurodiverse”.That’s more common than we’d like to believe, and because individuals with diverse neurotypes experience the world differently than others do, their responses to social cues, for example, will be atypical and deserve to be considered when designing online tools and platforms.

For him, interfaces that address challenges faced by dyslexic individuals, like Grammarly, are forgiving of human error rather than embarrass, and encourage individuals to seek help if they need rather than make them feel flawed. (If you’re interested in more examples, visit Cool Apps for Schools for special education solutions.)

How will your next project benefit from building empathy for extreme users like the neurodiverse?

Our experiences of technology can vary from one individual to another. How would embedding multiple sensorial modalities within the design of digital products and services facilitate the reception of information? This is what the next speaker sheds light on.

(3) Designing for sense-ability. 

As humans, we have multisensory bodies. Christine Park, design leader and co-author of Designing Across Senses: A Multimodal Approach to Product Design (2018), describes our sensory modalities as “designed to function on autopilot.” 

In a world where our environment collects data about us thanks to technological sensors that are embedded in our devices and the infrastructure around us, we sleepwalk through our habitual spaces. A multimodal approach opens up opportunities to think about what can be done, through design, to augment our senses. No longer on autopilot, our senses can be disrupted, and we can regain awareness of them through directing our attention to them.

Designing for multimodal sensory experiences, Park argues, could also mean designing for less, for non-engagement with our devices and more real-world experiences, where one would activate all of their senses. What would it be like to live in a world where our physiological, social and spatial experiences are amplified?

Through leveraging emerging technologies, such as Cloud Connectivity, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, we can design digital experiences that stimulate our senses. For Park, our senses are interconnected with bodily motion, rhythm and time — these all play a role in how we experience the world. For example, experiences can be physiological, that is, to the body (like wearing an earpiece); social, that is, to the group (like interacting with Alexa); or spatial, that is, to the environment (like attending a concert).

“Focus is the new engagement. Don’t design behaviour. Design focus.”

After following principles for designing for usability, accessibility and inclusion, the new human factor to consider in design is sense-ability: the ability to focus on one’s sensorial experiences of the world(s) around them.

The idea of being in touch with ones senses, of continuously encountering new experiences through design, of feeling the world around us, of being entertained by our technology is akin to living in a future where everything is amplified, where robots live amongst humans and our techno-scape meshes seamlessly with everyday life. But, how far into that future are we really?

(4) To screen or not to screen? 

The forever humorous, clever and thought-provoking product designer and author of four books —Designing Devices (2011), Designing Gestural Interfaces (2008), Designing for Interaction (2006, 2009) and Microinteractions (2013) —Dan Saffer reflects on what it means to design robots and the kinds of challenges he has encountered.

After pushing for topless meetingsand jokingly saying “tap that interface” whilst referring to app design back in 2008, it wasn’t surprising that he would be sceptical about also having to tap robots. In fact, the anatomy of robots is one of the many aspects he highlights as lacking imagination. Do robots need legs to walk on or a face with eyes? Do we need robots to be emotional and attractive to us like would a human being? Do they need to have a screen? How helpful is it for a robot holding an iPad to mimic human mechanics? Does building walking and talking machines warrant the money invested in them if they end up being no smarter than a toddler?

Time has taught us that our expectations of robots are too high for what is conceivable, achievable or even desirable. Robots today are associated to “The three D’s: Dirty, Dangerous, and Dull“. So, what is it about robots that makes us want to build them?

Saffer pushes us to reflect on the reasons for bringing robots into this world. When designing them, we will need to think about how they might fit in social situations, more so than in labour-intensive endeavours. 

In his view, there will not be a time when robots replace humans and take over their jobs, at least not in the way that one might paint a dystopian future. However, the robots are coming, whether we like it or not, and it’s part of our job, if we are to live amongst robots, to consider the intent behind the design of robots, both hardware and software alike.

This takes us to the next robot on wheels we’ve long been interacting with and have seen evolve since the Benz Motorwagen took over the roads in 1885: the automobile.

(5) How do we enjoy where we are going? 

With the electric car and sharing economy having reached its plateau of productivity, and the prospect for mainstream autonomous vehicles, “New age digital disruption promises a lot,” says Harsha Babu, design lead at Arrival.

There will always be good and bad outcomes with respect to novelty, and it is through trial and error that we can learn, improve and compromise on our vision to fit the reality of everyday life. Theft and vandalism, for example, are on the rise since car-sharing and bicycle-sharing became available commodities, within everyone’s reach, no matter the socioeconomic context in which they are deployed.

Referring to Nick Tyler’s A Vision for Cities (2014), “a courteous, active, safe, healthy, evolving city,” Babu offers his suggestions on how to go about co-creating a better living city, “a future where everyone is together”, both vehicles and the community. To name a few: 1) Work closely with your local councils; 2) Get to know the local dynamics between people, vehicles and road infrastructure; and 3) Remember to apply Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit.

The future of mobility is a hot area to explore as it is directly linked to questions about the environment and our ways of living. It challenges our personal and collective notions of safety, trust, privacy, ownership, and community with the ever-growing culture of sharing economy. 

Making sense of the complexity of transport systems, urban infrastructures, and regulatory codes is an effort that design thinking can address. What would it mean to navigate the organisational complexities of business transformation?

(6) Be like water and adapt!

Paraphrasing Bruce Lee, Sami Niemelä, design leader and co-founder at Nordkapp, encourages designers to adapt to emerging unknowns, that affect utopian visions. For him, it is through sense-making, the faculty of being reflective, that a vision can evolve into a protopia; which is to say that learning from making sense of complexity enables designers to gradually shape the best solution, one he calls ‘antifragile’.

The theory of ‘antifragility’ refers to Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (2013) in which the author describes the advantages of working with chaos. 

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. […] Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” Nassim Taleb

So, how do we design for antifragility? “Visions are easy,” arguesNiemelä. He stresses the importance of outlining a readiness for change strategy in order for design to be truly successful and for organisations to transform. In other words, preparing organisations for the changes they want to implement is an area that is becoming clearer to us and, as such, has become a critical part of designers’ engagement with businesses.

To embrace complexity is to design with an antifragile mindset, which allows us to make sense of the complex systems we help businesses conceptualise, build and maintain.

Engaging in iterative design cycles and stress-testing our solutions is a proven way to de-risk what we put into the world so that they can be viable, feasible and desirable. The next speaker argues that some level of risk is unavoidable, despite having the best intentions.

(7) We help to create challenges, not just face them. 

One of my very favourite design leaders to listen to and learn from, Robert Fabricant, co-founder and partner at Dalberg Design, sheds light on the power of design in addressing challenges and creating them too!

Design revolutions are borne out of visceral human needs to improve our lives and to create change around us. In fact, Fabricant reminds us, design revolution is not a new phenomenon. Technology developed for transferring scripts in the 1300s may be looked at as one of the early design revolutions —a revolution with a higher purpose: to educate people and disseminate religious faith. With that, also, came inevitable social, environmental and economic impacts. 

In hindsight, all design revolutions have and will cause “unusual and unanticipated consequences”. 

Fabricant leaves us with a reflective question to further illustrate this point:

“Have we benefited from gaining back time as a result of technology doing things for us? What happened to promises of leisure time and the pursuit for meaningful experiences?”

The New Dawn is Ours to Design.

As the public sphere gains greater awareness of the positive impact that design thinking can have on businesses, people, and our built environment, the realm of design practice expands. In fact, designers today are invited to sit at the table with the big boys and engage with organisations in totally different ways; in turn, gaining more leverage. Together with key decision makers, designers help businesses leapfrog their competition by crafting a more compelling purpose, devising organisational changes that transform businesses and dramatically improve audience engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.

At Designit, we spend a lot of time thinking about Futures. We believe that today’s designs will shape a more equal, human, and sustainable tomorrow. Through design explorations and experiments it is possible to design a better future, for everyone. So, we question: What role can designers play in mitigating future problems? What does it take to trust? What does it mean to be human?

More recently, we’ve hosted a number of Speculative Futures events at our Designit London office, as part of the London Chapter series of Meetups. Founded in San Francisco in 2016, The Design Futures Initiative promotes the application of Future Design Thinking approaches —such as Critical Design, Speculative Design, Design Fiction, and Futurism —to speculate about alternate futures.

For years, designers have been advocating for a more equal, diverse, and convivial future. By shaping meaningful conversations about the purpose of design, its raison d’être, designers continuously transform and re-invent design practice to not only benefit screen-deep experiences, but also exploit the full potential of design and technology in informing and changing the ways in which people think, live and act, as individuals and as part of a community.

In the new dawn, we can expect designers to be more explorative in terms of speculating the future of our cities, our everyday technology, and digital environments we navigate.

Links to talks will be available on Vimeo in a few weeks. Be sure to check out talks mentioned above as well as the countless other fantastic talks!

Talks mentioned in this article:

1. ‘Why your digital product should be feminist’ (Identities) by Anneli Westerberg
2. ‘Designing for alternative cognitive styles and learning disabilities’ (Health and wellbeing) by Treyce Meredith
3. ‘Designing across senses’ (Multimodal) by Christine Park
4. ‘The robots are coming!’ (Robotics) by Dan Saffer
5. ‘The anatomy of urban experiments’ (Mobility) by Harsha Babu 
6. ‘Embracing complexity’ (Governance) by Sami Niemelä
7. ‘Hindsight is 20/20’ (Organisations) by Robert Fabricant