Buxton on MAKEing Things Happen

by Kevin Wong, posted October 8th, 2008
categorized under artefact, design, events, natural ui, prototyping

This post has been long overdue, but we have good reason for it, which I’ll cover in a second. First and foremost, I’d like to share a couple thoughts with you on the things that Bill demonstrated to us that day that really resonated with the group: you can sell the design by mimicking the experience on the spot, and that the best way to know how something works is by making it yourself (even if someone else has done it). Together, these examples make a great case on the power of prototyping and experimentation as a way to understand things.

For the uninitiated, Bill Buxton has been in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) arena for some time exploring the various ways people may interact with software experiences through input methods like touch, pen, etc. In other words, he has helped advance the understanding of all things cooler than the mouse, and more.

Selling Design by Example
Here’s a scenario: You’re in a review meeting, and your client isn’t quite bought off on the idea yet. They didn’t quite understand what a “synchronous multi directional touch based media reconfigurator” was, but the idea sounds cool enough! So how do you get them to really get it the same way you do? Mimic the experience, or really, live prototype. A live prototype enables you as a communicator of ideas and insight to demonstrate the vision by having someone participate in an activity that resembles the concept. The example Buxton makes is by pretending you’re Charles Xavier and you can move the mouse by waving your hand . While they waved their arms in the air, you would move your mouse according to their gestures. Yes, it sounds a bit crude, but the aha! moment is completely worth it.

Another example would be demonstrating different ways of doing collaborative white boarding. Bill asked yours truly to stand on the other side of our opaque doors. We would both write with dry erase markers at the same time. Surprisingly, we did not conflict with each other while writing and ended up with a nice image of a man and his dog smoking a cigar. The idea here is that as other people join the session to collaborate, their shadows provide enough feedback to indicate their position. This reduces the uncertainty in where and how people will work together in a shared spac;e especially thinking about this in terms of remote collaboration.

Now, this isn’t something that you do as a planned activity, but a skill that you become familiar with incase you need that extra bit of push to get things in the right direction. The beauty of this is how low tech it can be and how easy it becomes to learn about an experience without having to do so much work up front. This concept leads into the next idea of learning by doing.

MAKE Experiences
This isn’t exactly a new lesson learned, but a great one to remember. In the business of designing new experiences, our role is to be experts in that space. Sometimes the best way to really understand how that might actually work out is by simulating it right in front of you. Think of this as a live prototype, except you are afforded a little more time to play things out and use resources that have qualities that make for a better analogy. Those tools are coming out in a grassroots fashion where the Wiimote and all inclusive touch enabling projectors are becoming affordable components to hack and build on. We no longer need to wait for some company to commercialize the technology. We can go to the store and pick up the pieces and learn about emerging technology by being a part of the invention.

Closing Thoughts
For the most part, he discussed touch input and technologies, which is quite relevant to our times today. As the greater population familiarize themselves with touch enabled software beyond just the ATM, it is important that we continue to experiment and learn best practices regarding the various applications they will be engaged in. Luckily, we are becoming more fluent in methods that enable us to get to answers much quicker, without the need to break the bank.

The visit really helped reinvigorate the inventor in all of us. Everyone needs to continue to play and make things that don’t really result in anything but an understanding about the intricacies of different experiences. There are inexplicable things that we gain by practicing with our other senses. So we want to thank you, Bill, again for talking to us and sharing your spirit of getting down and dirty. We’ve taken that drive to continue our work with Frontier projects and the nifty little things that are coming out of it (link to DIY table). Now you see why we’ve been so busy getting this post out!

Additional Resources [Bill Buxton]

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