Innovation, breakthroughs, leapfrogging, whatever you want to call it, is earned by carefully balancing the extremes. Ken Fry, design director, recently wrote an article for Fast Company about finding the best scenario to produce better innovation.
Do you think you know which scenario works best for your organization?
1. You plan to generate a lot of “blue sky” ideas so you keep constraints at bay. There is no technology constraint or clearly defined market opportunity. The sky is the limit.
2. You see the opportunity to design the next great tablet device that does everything an Apple iPhone can do, but with a bigger screen. It is a wonderfully clear and focused goal.
Will either scenario get you great ideas, lead to a successful design, and all of the fame and fortune that goes along with it? Not likely.
Well, it’s World Usability Day again. Last year we went bowling and pondered the meaning of the word “usability.”
This year the theme is “Designing for a Sustainable World.” Here at Artefact we celebrated by being one of two winners of a short essay contest sponsored by HFI. You can read the essay up on their site and a deeper exploration of the ideas here in a previous blog post. I promise to use my new Kindle prize to read about sustainable design. (Among other things).
Spotted this on TIME.com today. The web version of WorldWide Telescope made it as one of the 50 Best Websites in 2009. The website, which is driven by Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, is the browser version of the client application we helped design in collaboration with Curtis Wong and his team. We’re really excited to see this news and hope that more people get to experience astronomy in an immersive way.
WorldWide Telescope allows people to dig deeper into space with high resolution imagery of galaxies and stars without requiring powerful telescopes. It also includes guided tours that walks through different systems and images across the sky for people who are just getting started with astronomy.
So congrats Curtis and team! We can’t wait to see more from this project.
Great news! One of our designs with the Live Mesh team at Microsoft made it as a Finalist under the Interactive Product Experiences category. The concept tells the story of three friends planning and taking a trip, illustrating how the emerging Live Mesh application platform can make travel a more enjoyable, easier-to-manage experience. Every part of their trip is automatically updated and unified between the multiple businesses involved, personal devices, and co-travelers. For the first time travelers have access to their most current travel information as well as social and planning functions at any time or place in their journey; even offline.
The IDEA® (International Design Excellence Awards) program is the premier international competition honoring design excellence in products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts. Entries are invited from designers, students and companies worldwide.
Other finalists include IDEO, Adobe and (RED)WIRE. Congrats to everyone and their hard work! You can read more about the project in our portfolio.
As part of this project, the students broke into groups and went out in the field to observe, interview, and study students and teachers in the classroom environment. The ID Juniors eagerly took on the task, going beyond the project requirements and performing additional intercept studies, interviews with professors of pedagogy, and more. We provided guidance on some of our processes for extracting key insights from all that observation and information.
Envision
Back in Bellingham we hosted an Artefact-style collaborative brainstorm session (except that we were stuck in a boring beige room…) to take those key insights and turn them into design opportunities & concepts. This was a great opportunity to work side-by-side with the students and help them generate many fun concepts for future educational tools and products.
It was an interesting mix of existing and new skills. It was great to work with students who aren’t afraid to sketch - something that comes in handy during a brainstorm - and be able to focus on getting them to think critically about user needs and problems and then creatively imagine valuable solutions. One fun concept included a multi-user, multi-touch surface computing desk where students work together collaborative on a project and compete with other student groups in a game-like setting.
Anders Mavis describes capturing kids’ vitals at school for improving health and education…
Evan McCormack ponders about how a device like the restaurant buzzer could be used to keep parents involved with their kids…
Tucker Spofford imagines a wall of photo frames for interactively sharing student work…
Let ‘em loose…
After the session, the students were armed and ready to rinse-and-repeat the process and continue to refine their concepts. The groups then met up again with the students and teachers and conducted basic concept value testing to understand and rank the value of their ideas. Some examples are shown below.
The 2009 IDSA Northwest Junior Industrial Design Show is tonight in Everett at BUiLT design. Junior ID students from WWU, UW, and Emily Carr will be presenting their projects from this year. This includes the Artefact+Carbon sponsored project with the WWU industrial design students.
We will be posting details of their work on the education project on the blog following their final presentation in June, here at Artefact.
Partnering with Carbon Design Group, Artefact is sponsoring a project with the Western Washington University Industrial Design Department in Bellingham, WA. Working together, we have been mentoring the students through the user-centered design process and helping them envision concepts for the classroom in 2015.
This project gives the WWU students the opportunity to research and understand the challenges of students and teachers in educational environments. Taking on the role of design consultant, WWU students have been researching and developing educational products to enhance the learning process in the classroom.
A Consultancy Experience
Olen Ronning of Artefact and Joe Sullivan of Carbon, both WWU ID graduates, collaborated with their former professor and industrial design program head, Arunas Oslapas, to put together the project. Having worked on company-sponsored projects while at Western, they understood the value of professional engagements and saw a unique opportunity to provide them with design consultancy perspective and experience.
For the students, we are exposing them to the user-centered design process we employ on real-world projects. This includes project planning, user-centered research, research analysis, collaborative brainstorming, concept value testing, and more. Students assume the role of design Consultants with Carbon+Artefact acting as Client while also providing mentorship through this process.
ID+UI
While the Suits in D.C. figure out how to reform the educational system and administration, we wanted to see what we could do within the realm of product design. We conceived this project as a vision for technology in the classroom - not a beige box running Windows (although nothing wrong with that) - but rather using technology as a means of providing creative, inspirational, and innovative new learning experiences.
Joe and I were very interested in the current trend of physical objects becoming more interactive, and digital interactions becoming more physical. This is enabled by the continued miniaturization and conversely increasing power of processors. This was our catalyst for promoting design students to think about the near future of imaginative and compelling interactions used to help with and inspire learning.
Physical technology-based products in a highly interactive environment (the classroom) was also a great opportunity to explore a hybridized industrial and interaction design process, exposing the students (who study traditional industrial design) to interaction design principles and skills. In addition to bring a great opportunity for the students, it is also a great opportunity for us (Carbon and Artefact) to work side-by-side in developing a ID+UI process and curriculum.
Kick-Off
We kicked-off the project on April 1st here at Artefact’s office in Seattle. Rob Girling did the Artefact dog-and-pony-show and Joe, stepping in for Markus who was on business travels, presented Carbon’s work.
We also had members of the Artefact crew join in to present a little more in detail about our research and design process. Christopher Konrad, always ready to spice things up, took the opportunity to do a little role-playing with the students to show them tips and tricks on how to interview users in the field.
by Kevin Wong, posted February 4th, 2010
by 
by 
Partnering with 
For the students, we are exposing them to the user-centered design process we employ on real-world projects. This includes project planning, user-centered research, research analysis, collaborative brainstorming, concept value testing, and more. Students assume the role of design Consultants with Carbon+Artefact acting as Client while also providing mentorship through this process.
