« Faith, Status, Affiliation, Local Interpretation | Main | The Experience of Moving Bits »
Adapting A Path, Adapted
Those of you looking for any excuse to while away the minutes before you leave the office this balmy Tokyo Friday should consider turning their attention to A Path, Adapted [PowerPoint, 4MB] recently presented to the User Experience Conference in DC.
A summary?
That as human centered design practitioners we talk about, well, putting humans at the center of the design process. Which is all fine and dandy except that in the context of designing our ubiquitiously connected and oh-so-smart future this roughly equates to understanding the sum of all human experiences, which is clearly impossible. The joy of aiming high and failing. Or not?
That the path to a good project can start with the simplest of questions. Who are you? How can you prove it? What do you carry? Why did you do that thing you did? Since you ask - that's my Calabasas design studio colleague Raphael over here for a high altitude team building..
That the deep pockets of a corporate research lab/design studio and buy-in from upper management make for a well resourced project, but that ultimately all it takes to get started is an inquisitive mind and a bit of positive attitude. Point in case? - the years of illiteracy research which I've written about previously and which is ongoing in the research lab started out as a three week scoping project with no travel budget, relied on the voluntary assistance of a friendly India based subcontractor who gave up her weekend to collect data on our behalf. The resulting report showed sufficient promise to warrant further (better resourced) investigation. And the subcontractor? Ah, she earned her place on the team in studies from Cairo to Tehran, most recently in Dharavi, Mumbai. Looking for experience? Willing to work for peanuts? Of course you are.
And that you'd be surprised at the internal credibility that comes from external reporting of the design research. By this I don't mean peer reviewed navel gazing or at the other extreme, lite fluff pieces. But simply that when your research is what they see when they open their favourite press, in their mind's eye you've arrived. For now at least a virtuous circle.
One of the pleasures of writing a new presentation is browsing the photo archives to pull out something that sets the tone of what is to be delivered. Whither the title page? The feet of a Korean friend sitting in that post onsen bliss. The feet on the closing slide are mine and those of a Scottish friend. The cultural preferences and acceptability of seating styles for Europe and East Asia.
Writing from Tokyo | August 24, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Your image of a petrol bottle atop a brick in Vietnam and your comments have stuck with me. You asked the audience about what it was and you stated a gasoline station. You pondered if the brick could have been removed.
My perspective is that the brick was essential to making it commerce. The brick removed it from just being someone's jar on the street to an purposeful display of petrol for sale.
And the more I thought about this the larger the metaphor grew for me. The brick is marketing stripped to its simplest form. The user experiences the marketing and the product as one.
Posted by: Ray Daly at August 24, 2007 10:19 PM