We were recently visited by a student at University of Washington’s School of Art‘s Design Studies program, Timothy Damon, who is currrently engaged in a design dialogue around user experience design methodologies and how they are put into practice. He’s particularly interested in how we (Artefact) integrate experimentation into the design process when designing complex software solutions with fast-paced and high-demand clients.

With tape recorder in hand, he spent an afternoon with us discussing our process, our platform for cultivating ideas, and our plans for the future. Some of the questions he asked included:

• Where do the initial ideas come from? How do you cultivate them?
• How does your experimental lab work integrate and influence the design process?
• When/Where/How are these experimental projects created?
• Are these experiments used to further client work?
• Do you feel this process helps you improve the design processes when working with clients?

He then wrote an article about his visit that he used to share with his class and to generate dialogue around our approach and processes. Here’s Damon’s article resulting from his visit:

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Article written by Timothy Damon

Examining future possibilities

Walking into the workspace at Artefact, one of Seattle’s newest top-clout design firms, communicates a sense of focused excitement that usually comes in much smaller doses. Perhaps it’s the setting sun over Puget Sound combined with the attractive soft reflections of cinema sized Apple displays at each desk. Or maybe watching people bouncing from desk to desk crouching, pointing out items of interest and talking excitedly over projects on-screen that make the atmosphere incredibly inviting to someone interested in knowing what it’s like to innovate and create things that in turn make the people that use them excited on the exact same level. But the most interesting part of the work that is done here doesn’t even take place directly under a client’s watchful eye.

In helping develop and build new experiences in interaction design from Microsoft’s World Telescope application to websites that let a user navigate as though walking through a forest of product choices, the designers at Artefact simultaneously engage themselves in another world: this one. In other words, rather than place themselves in an inward-focused creative environment where outside exploration ends after researching competitor’s features and techniques and conducting some focus groups on a product, designers at Artefact choose to form active dialogue with the creative community. This is especially evident in the realm of DIY culture, where one can find some of the most incredible innovations waiting to be taken further and developed to (perhaps) useful ends. In choosing to keep a very active blog and working on and openly sharing and discussing experimental projects with the public, Artefact is hoping to put themselves in a favorable position when it comes to developing and applying new ideas and applications for everyone to experience in their work. This incredible gesture seems to be doing nothing but good for the small firm, allowing them to build an arsenal of useful tools and techniques that can in turn be worked directly into later client projects. This takes the time to focus on exploring new ideas away from the current paid project and allows more time for that project to develop fully while simultaneously allotting time for digressive ideas to have their place and be explored, rather than be lost to their rejection under paid design work. Effectively, Artefact has redesigned the Design process for themselves, and under the new system, ideas to be kept are never lost.

The woman spurring on the majority of Artefact’s experiments is Jennifer Darmour, one of the User Experience Designers at Artefact. Jennifer and her colleagues, along with Josh Hinds, who was also present to talk about the firm’s experiments in NUI’s (natural user interfaces) all have impressive and diverse training and goals in what they wish to accomplish. Bringing these distinct ideas together has made for beautiful, well thought out solutions in client projects and a series of incredibly forward-thinking experiments examining what the future of human interaction with computers may be. It is clear by the enthusiasm with which Jennifer and Josh present the methods of research and building prototypes here that Artefact is an exciting environment for creative minds to see their plans to fruition.

Experimentation in the design process

Luckily for the designers, Artefact’s clients demand unique and useful experiences that bring complex information (including the known universe itself in the case of World Telescope) and movement to order, and in a stimulating and meaningful way. Interaction design is a region of the discipline that requires an ongoing knowledge of both the latest software and hardware possibilities, even as they develop. Artefact has all this, and something a little extra, the realization that there are people developing these ideas all over the world, fashioning possible solutions and tools by way of open source software and public postings encouraging others to continue developing work that one person has taken as far as time or creative capacity permits.

DIY multitouch on the cheap

For example, in setting out to create a DIY multitouch table similar to Microsoft’s Surface project, designers poured over thousands of pages of web forums on the subject, enlisting the help of all the previously posted material to guide the build process of both a one dollar table consisting of nothing more than a sheet of glass, a cardboard box, a seven year old netcam, and a sheet of paper, and a one thousand dollar version housed in a wood frame utilizing more materials and allowing users to experiment with many more gestures at a small fraction of the price of a Microsoft Surface table. Sites such a Make Magazine and innovators such as Johnny Chung Lee (made famous for his work hacking Wii remotes to create new types of interactive interfaces) offer and are seen as a real source for ways to rework technology and use it to help navigate a problem.

This embrace of the DIY world represents an incredibly intelligent move on the part of Artefact. It is in this way that Artefact conducts its experimental work, cultivating previous ideas that designers wish to pursue, building dialogue around these ideas, and finally setting up projects to explore these ideas on a full-scale prototype level with surprisingly cheap and readily available technologies and materials.

Another example of exploration in natural user interfaces is Artefact’s “Body as a Mouse” project, featuring an image projected on a screen that be “navigated” by walking either closer or farther away from the screen, or walking left or right to pan the image. This was accomplished once again with the help of open source software and proximity sensors, which were calibrated to react within a range of movement determined by boundaries set within the software. Further experiments in this series feature the ability to draw in space with a light recognized by a computer, allowing users to create images on screen by motioning in thin air with the light. In the next step of this experiment, designers then explored the ability to manipulate drawn objects with another light using gestures similar to those already used in multitouch interfaces on Iphones and Macbooks.

"Light as Mouse" experiment

An arsenal of possibities for future problems

Not only does Artefact look to the future in terms of barely-discovered technologies and tools of discovery, but in order to see these experiments come alive, they conduct all of them independently of client work. Jennifer spoke of how Artefact designers budget time to work on ideas that otherwise wouldn’t get the attention they deserve while working within the time constraints of a paid project: “To carve out this experimental lab, it’s all (conducted) on our off hours which we don’t really get that much of, so it’s weekends and evenings and between client projects (that these experiments take place).” She went on to talk about how energizing and exciting it has been for everyone to actively participate in these projects, creating what they all refer to as a playground and an experimental platform where everyone can dive into innovative solutions around natural user interfaces. The level of commitment and passion oozes into the room as Josh and Jennifer speak over how long each project took, what problems they ran into along the way, and how rewarding it has been for each of those involved to exercise their creativity without feeling the burden of a timeline or the opinions of the person paying you to create a project for them. In implementing these experiments, Artefact is effectively giving themselves an arsenal or reservoir for possible solutions to future problems, and in doing this they’re simultaneously saving themselves time under paid work that can now be even more focused on the project at hand while giving themselves a selection of already-developed solutions that take far less time to adapt to a project than if they were being dreamt up and implemented then and there. This is innovation at it’s best, not only is the firm producing successful work, they are rethinking the entire process, designing it, organizing it in an even more efficient matter, making the economy of ideas in the firm substantially more efficient.

On another level, keeping up the practice of experimenting and prototyping is an excellent way to maintain a designer’s creative and productive stamina, along with helping everyone improve their skills on presenting prototypes to a client, which is another skill the company actively strives for. Bill Buxton, a well-known pioneer in the realm of natural interfaces and interaction design as a whole is also famous for his ability to communicate ideas more quickly, cheaply, and thoroughly than most would imagine possible in this business.

Artefact saw fit to have him come in and teach them all a thing or two about rapid prototyping, which may include miming how an interface would operate, quickly “hacking” items together to represent a completely new instrument and/or usage, or faking a movement or gesture within software by tilting a laptop while simultaneously moving the mouse on the side of the screen to get a desired effect of moving a map or manipulating an object onscreen. These skills are constantly maintained by the experimental process and once again directly effect the paid work by enabling effective ways to show a client how something will function without having to actually build it.

A greenhouse for sprouting design possibilities

Predictions for Artefact’s future are optimistic at the very least, the company has already taken cues from some of it’s experimental work in a web interface for Nau Clothing Company that is in many ways similar to the moving environment depicted in the Body as a Mouse experiment, but the future will undoubtedly produce a host of client work with influences and solutions directly spawned from the experiments. It may be hard to chart exactly how these make their way into final projects, but imagining scenarios in which there would have to be research done that even remotely relates to the work done in the experimental labs would reveal an idea of just how much time the company can possibly save in the future, and how far ahead they are in developing what may turn out to be the perfect solution for an incoming client. From both a design and business standpoint, Artefact is innovating and thinking ahead both in the physical development of projects and the very process by which these are created and cultivated. Coupling this with their direct connection to public via an extensive blog and even an internet TV cast, it is clear that those that work here are putting forth their best effort and actively thinking about what it means and what can be done to be on the cutting edge of the design world in terms of output and development of what will be next in their field, and then sharing the good news with anyone and asking for even more input! It is a truly impressive undertaking, and should see the young, yet already well-established firm on it’s way to becoming iconic in the design world and perhaps even in the mainstream. In a town where sustainability is of huge public interest, it’s no wonder that companies are taking the idea to the level of developing systems of sustainable idea cultivation. Imagine if you will, a world where no good idea is lost in the brainstorm, where instead they are stored and fed and grown for later use and eventually “planted” wherever they may be needed. This is Artefact, greenhouse for sprouting design possibilities.

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Timothy Damon is a student at University of Washington’s School of Art in the Design Studies program. His class, Design Case Studies, is led by Professor Dominic Muren and is currently investigating design firms around the country that are innovators and cultivators of new design processes.