2008 Program Series
From Ideation to Innovation:
The Role of Design Research in Crafting Great User Experiences
Whether we think of ourselves as researchers, designers, architects, or engineers, we all contribute to the discipline of human-computer interaction. By working to understand people's needs and habits, we seek to inspire new product experiences. But although we may practice our craft daily, we are frequently challenged to articulate the process we use to transform design research into meaningful experiences our customers will embrace.
The 2008 CHIFOO Program Series provides a year-long investigation into this topic, examining how we deliver innovative products and services based on design research and ideation. What is design research and how is it conducted? How do the results of design research feed creativity and innovation? Join us as we invite celebrated researchers and practitioners to share their perspectives on this topic through a series of 10 evening programs and four hands-on workshops.
Meeting Details
CHIFOO is usually held the first Wednesday of the month, but in 2008, we meet on the on the second Wednesday in months beginning with the letter J.
SCHEDULE:
5:00 PM: CHIFOOd (dinner at New Seasons Market, Cedar Hills Crossing)
6:30 PM: Registration, networking, and announcements
7:00 PM: Program and Q&A
LOCATION:
Events are held in Calgary/Alberta room in Building 38 of the Tektronix Beaverton campus unless otherwise noted (view map).
COST:
Programs are FREE for CHIFOO members; non-member admission is $5 (unless otherwise noted.)
JOIN:
Annual CHIFOO membership costs just $20 and offers benefits galore. Join CHIFOO now and attend all meetings in 2008 for free!
Next Meeting •July 9
Understanding the Multi-User Experience
Jen Young & Matt Arnold, Second Story
Museums and cultural institutions are increasingly required to balance visitors' expectations of interactive presentations in the museum with the institutional goal of promoting forms of social interaction that enrich the visitor experience. To meet these needs, institutions are turning to multi-user, or group, interactive scenarios. Members of Second Story Interactive Studios will show how understanding people’s needs and tendencies—and the learning curve for people that must be managed in multi-user experiences—can be squared with innovations offered by ever-changing technology and hardware, design obstacles and opportunities, and the desire to wow visitors while offering designs that are appropriate to the content.
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August 6
CHIFOO and IxDA Social.... Bowling ¡¡¡¡
Come join us for the second annual CHI-Bowl event, held in concert with the IxDA crowd. Take a whirl at bowling some games, or just come out to socialize with your friends and colleagues. Special prizes will be awarded!
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September 3
Design Thinking in the Field
Matt Cottam, Tellart
Many design methods strive to help designers better understand their users’ needs, such as ethnographic research and participatory design. Matt Cottam has put these approaches to the ultimate test: while working on a project for the healthcare industry, Matt trained to be a certified paramedic, giving him a whole new perspective into the needs of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. Matt will share his experiences and how they allowed him to identify truly innovative design opportunities.
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September 4 — Full-Day Workshop
Sketching Physical Devices
Matt will introduce participants to Sketch Tools, a robust toolset that allows relative technical novices to experiment, ideate, and prototype with Phidgets RFID, sensors, Flash, networks, and more. Participants will have an opportunity to work together to sketch, design, and build prototypes using a variety of hardware and software kits. In addition, Matt will demo some cutting-edge mobile sketching platforms, as well as some past projects.
Fees and location soon to be determined.
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October 1
Researching Meaning to Identify More Meaningful Customer Experiences
Nathan Shedroff, California College of the Arts
The business world has begun to talk about the need to address meaning in customers' lives, but few have bothered to define what this means and none have developed any models or methods for how this intersects with product or service development—until now. Nathan Shedroff, one of the the authors of Making Meaning, will present a model for meaning and methods for researching customer emotion, values, and meaning, as well as describing how it affects both business strategy and new product design.
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November 5
Fun and Games at Work
Nancy Frishberg, Certified Innovation Games® Facilitator
This talk will introduce the topic of design games, which are structured to involve your customers, your users, and your team in activities that are structured, time-limited, and enjoyable. They focus your audience on specific questions related to products and services such as prioritization of features, what's not working well, how a product fits into daily life, and what kind of physical-digital environment your customers live in. In the end, your team has data to drive decisions, and even had some fun along the way!
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November 6 — Full-Day Workshop
Creative solutions through Innovation Games®
Innovation Games® comprise a dozen activities which have as their goals strategic planning as well as more tactical decision-making. Using a variety of expressive techniques, Innovation Games get firsthand reactions from customers and users about an actual or proposed product, a product category, or service offering. While similar to focus groups in a few ways, Innovation Games (and other design games) stimulate the customers to tell you things that are important for them that you would have never thought to ask.
Fees and location soon to be determined.
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Prior CHIFOO Meetings in 2008
January 9
Sketching Smart Things: User Experience Design of Ubiquitous Computing Devices
Mike Kuniavsky, ThingM
The user experience design of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) products is a new branch of design. Like Web design was different from traditional graphic design, ubicomp user experience design is different from traditional industrial design. Mike will discuss how he has tackled (and occasionally has gotten tackled by) the unique challenges of ubicomp UX. He will reposition the notion of information as a design material, and propose merging interaction design with the principles of agile software development to create new tools for prototyping new interactions.
See presentation notes >>
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February 6
Design Research: Process and Provocations
Brenda Laurel, California College of the Arts
Those of us who use ethnographic research as part of our design practice are often plagued by criticism from our colleagues in the social sciences as well as those in the design field itself. Anthropologists lift an eyebrow at our seemingly cavalier use of their qualitative methods. Hard-boiled business types snort at our lack of quantitative data. Design students ask, "if we do research with people, does that mean they get to tell us what to do?" And the Great Designers of our time claim that the whole notion of human-centered research is utterly beside the point. This talk looks at a design process that utilizes ethnographic methods as tools for informing and inspiring innovation, and answers all those mean people besides.
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February 7
Half-Day Design Research Workshop with Brenda Laurel
Participants will be asked to bring design briefs or general areas of interest. Together, we will look at several qualitative and representative methods and appropriate processes for each, discussing the value of selecting and deploying a variety of methods. We'll also be using some improvisational techniques to explore various methods. At the end of the four-hour workshop, each participant or project group should be able to leave with a well-articulated research plan.
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March 5
A Framework for Innovation
Jon Marshall, Innovation Frameworks
Originally designed to organize the fuzzy front end of new projects, the DC Cycle™ (an intuitive framework for moving toward well-researched designs and plans) has been elaborated over the past five years to greatly facilitate the innovation process, merging ideas and inspiration with context, opportunity, and customer needs. Jon will describe the basics of the DC Cycle with its component parts and some of the philosophy behind its use. The cycle incorporates many ideas from different disciplines–from the creative process to the Toyota Development System–and can be applied to a wide variety of innovation aspects.
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April 9
Something New Right Away:
Ideation from the World of Improvisation
Gary Hirsch, On Your Feet
Businesses crave new stuff. And they want it now. Product cycles shorten, competitors and information spreads faster and the consumer gets more demanding. Techniques from the world of improvisation can help respond to these forces. Improv actors are real-time, market-driven innovators. A team of people works together to create something (a story) to satisfy a customer (the audience) under extreme time pressure (instantly, on the spot). They use a set of tools that absolutely anyone can learn and practice. The methods improvisers use on stage help create the conditions for new ideas to emerge.
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May 7
Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!
Liz Bacon, Devise & Steve Calde, Cooper
Steve and Elizabeth, former colleagues at Cooper, will discuss using personas as a tool to develop product features and behaviors. They will explore pitfalls, misconceptions, and misuse, as well as helpful persona creation and application techniques to inform interaction design solutions.
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May 8 — Full-Day Workshop
Using Scenarios to Drive Design
This full-day tutorial will teach students about the ways in which scenarios are both a crucial conceptual design and vital communication tool for successful ideation in the practice of interaction design. The instructors are versed in the scenario-based approach to interaction design as practiced in the Cooper Goal-Directed Design methodology.
Fees and location soon to be determined.
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June 11
Design Thinking: Action and Ecosystem
Bill Buxton, Microsoft
The number of books, articles, and conferences on innovation, creativity, and design is staggering. Yet, there is still precious little on what designers actually do, how they do it, and how they interact with the other disciplines involved in bringing concepts to fruition.
This talk is based in the premise that design is a distinct discipline with specific skills and practices. Furthermore, the physical and cultural ecosystem in which designers work has a huge impact on their ability to exercise these skills.
This presentation aims to shine some light on design skills and their relationship to various aspects of this ecosystem. The purpose is not to make everyone a designer; rather, it is to help both designers and non-designers better understand how and where they fit into the larger mosaic that makes up the partnership required to go effectively from concept to practice.
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