Interaction12: Augusto de los Reyes Challenged the Audience to Design the New Modern
- February 2, 2012
This morning at Interaction 12 I had the opportunity to sit in on Augusto de los Reyes great talk about modernity in design where he took on the question “What is The New Modern?” As my friends and colleagues will attest, there’s little I enjoy more than a good debate, and I love modern design, so this was right down my alley.
As it turns out, I have very little to argue with what Augusto presented because of two reasons.
The first was the overall level of discourse set by Augusto. Instead of taking what is a challenging intellectual topic and dumbing it down to a short list of punchy pointers, Augusto’s presentation was at times as challenging to the audience, presenting questions and statements that challenged the arbitrariness of semantic meanings and relationships when talking about design. As a result, his presentation was much more thought provoking and valuable for the audience. This is an approach that I’d love to see more speakers at conferences take – don’t be afraid to ask your audience to keep up with you. This audience has an appetite for concepts and questions they can explore and use their opportunity being away from the day-to-day to really think about design.
Augusto’s presentation style only provided a richer context for the content he was presenting. I thought that Augusto hit on a very valuable thread when he explained the analogy between designing for interaction and the experience of music and architecture. It’s been said and has been said often, Architects don’t design buildings, they design spaces. These spaces are what we experience as the “users” of buildings. To me the value in where Augusto was going with this is in helping frame what the end experience is for people in the real world. “Designing Experience” is what we do as digital product designers, but sometimes the basic idea of designing an experience is difficult to get into practice. The basic idea helps designers step back and avoid being to close to the artifact they are crafting, but it also can be vague and confusing. Augusto took it to a new place for me saying “we create states of mind”. This is not only true, but also it’s a great concept to use in the design process. When developing a concept and thinking about how it will be used we can present the challenge “what state of mind are we trying to put the person in?” As Jeremy Yuille commented after the session, artists approach their problem solving from this perspective all the time. I think what Augusto was saying is that as designers, we should be doing the same.
Comments
[...] us, how we think and offered new tools for designing digital products. John was challenged to think of designing the ‘New Modern; while Yixiu and Mia walked away with digital and analog possibilities for patient healthcare [...]
[...] already written about how much I enjoyed August’s talk and the concept that designers create states of mind, and I found complementary messages in the [...]
I love the idea of “create states of mind”. I think it’s vital to interaction design, where we operate somewhere between the known and the unknown. I think there’s a philosophical word for it called ‘lifeworld’ or ‘worldview’ (something like that), that dictates what users sees as normal and accept.
So when we are exploring the different possibilities, we create different ‘states of mind’ that when done right can possibly become a good interaction for the user.