Thursday November 10, 2005

DUX 05: user research anyone?

DUX 05: user research anyone?

I arrived at Fort Mason last Thursday for my DUX tutorial - more on than in a minute. Got registered, put up my poster, and found my way to the classroom for my tutorial.

I sat down. I looked up. Hmmm.

Ok, so car engine mounted on the ceiling? This is an cultural institution after all that I am at. Its clearly not a grill - none of the gender biased in that way even noticed it. It has vents. And pipes. Ok, follow the pipelines back along the ceiling to...

A heater switch? It is a dragon belching fire! Or likely to feel like that if you sit under it when it is on. Don't think I will try. But maybe I can convince some young well-meaning user researcher to try it out in the interests of understanding their users better?

[evil laugh]

DUX (Designing User Experiences) was fun. Not as many straight out design projects were shown as the last DUX; a pity. The "CHI" style papers are starting to creep in. Its a case of "you get what you ask for". The CHI paper format and review process is highly constrained. It results in a particular class of work. I keep wondering if the committment to the CHI paper formats and review process is really the right approach for this conference. The introduction of a juried competition to encourage more design folks would be a worthwhile idea to pursue.

However, that said, there were some interesting patterns at DUX. Improv was a thread that started in the tutorial I took (Steve Portigal taught it) to Bill Irwin's amazing keynote of how to be a clown to the various creative presentations.

Folks only have ~7 minutes to present projects. The more creative in the crowd demonstrated coffee pouring protocol in India, why salespeople selling to celebrities shouldn't hold pens and tablets, and got us all up playing a game.

Edward Tenner closed the conference showing us an amusing litany of unintended design consequences. It was clear from his talk that when designers design something and insert that design into society, shit happens. What we need to internalize as designers is to expect and watch for those unintended consequences. Perhaps we will do better next time. Perhaps we will get chuckle out of it. You never know.

( Nov 10 2005, 03:37:53 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]