Micro-Interactions: Making The Experience Portable

Update: Coverage on our panel in Ad Age (Digital Next)
Last week I went to a local gathering in Chicago where people in the industry were meeting informally over a few drinks. It's the typical scenerio that we keep seeing more of—most people had been meeting for the first time even though they had heard of each other from some type of social network or another such as Twitter.

Mike, an Apple employee was one of the first to greet me—and he extended a simple gesture. As he introduced himself he held up his iPhone which was displaying a digital name tag generated on the Web that he had just personalized moments ago. Within minutes, nearly half of the attendees of this small gathering were doing the same. it had gone "viral" so to speak—each person found our where they could customize their own "badge" and some were even adding "@" symbols so that their "Twitter friends" could recognize who they were.

And this I thought was a simple but relevant example of how we are having "micro-interactions" in ways that we we can take with us.

Today I'm moderating a panel on this very topic with Steve Rubel, Ian Shafer, Matt Dickman, Stephanie Agresta, And David Malouf. It should be a lot of fun as we'll be discussing how indivisuals and brands are making content and functionality "micro" and designing it "to-go". And of course a conference like this had to have both an iPhone and a Widget version (below). If you are going to the event, hope to see you there.

Source: http://darmano.typepad.com/

Brand Interactions Are the Future: But Are Interaction Designers Part of Your Agency?

"Call them information architects, experience designers or Jack or Jane -- they are the design geeks who love to sweat the details. They care about "micro-interactions" and toil away at the building blocks of what actually results in a "lovemark" in the end. We love to use applications that help us do things like plan vacations, find old friends and share our passions with the world. The ad industry has made a big mistake in the past by thinking technology was for geeks. Technology, in fact, is a love affair."

Read The Full Article at Advertising Age (Digital Next)

Design Thinking to Finance Skyscapers

In her comment to my post on the recent HBR article on design thinking, my friend HK writes, “What the article is missing is some concrete examples — what do designers do at strategic phases of projects, when the problems they’re solving aren’t explicit design problems?” She goes on to describe three of her own examples.

I suspect it’s both very hard and very easy to show examples. Very hard because applying creativity to what are normally analytical activities is a design problem in itself. I’ve found that inventing even rudimentary tools is hard. It’s reinventing how we’ve done business for hundreds of years, and it’s going to take years to build a more creative practice as reliable as our current methods.

But finding examples of design thinking applied to business problems is also easy, there are examples all around us. Financial deals can be quite complex and structuring one requires creativity. I was reminded of this last night while reading Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate, stories about living in New York. In one scene he tours midtown Manhattan with a property tycoon…

It was a cold, crisp fall day, and as we looked at all the great glass skyscrapers of Park Avenue — the Seagram Building and Lever House and the Citicorp Center — he unraveled for me the complicated secrets of their financing and construction: how this one depended on a federal bond, and this one on a legendary thirteen-year lease with a balloon payment, and this one on the unreal (and unprofitable) munificence of a single liquor baron and his daughter…

We can imagine the sort of creativity needed to solve a problem like financing a building costing hundreds of millions of dollars involving several parties, credit instruments, commitments over time, tax structure, and so on. I’d like to know if anyone in finance is studying these deals as creative activities to help us understand how to design them better (and if traditional designers will be interested in this sort of design!).

vía Noise Between Stations

Google Health--Who Can You Trust With Your Medical Records?

BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign de bruce_nussbaum el 20/05/08

I've been looking at the new Google Health site. It can organize all your health records and link you up to other people with your own medical problems.

So the question is how much do you trust Google and other folks to protect your medical privacy? Or do you even care about medical privacy?

Privacy is one of those big issues that cleave the GenXers and Boomers right down the middle. Over 50=worried about privacy. Under 30=not worried about privacy. Yes, of course, with caveats and all. But members on our Innovation & Design team who are in their 20s put stuff up on their Facebook page that I would never reveal. It's just culture.

And maybe that's it. Culture. But maybe it's more than culture. Insurance companies still restrict coverage to people who have genetic dispositions to certain diseases. Lots of men and women hesitate to marry and have children with people who have genetic dispositions to certain diseases. And we're talking about a 3%-5% higher risk, nothing major.

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis has joined Google Health and revealed his atrial fib. Jeff is talking to others with this condition and finding good information and support.

So....Google Health? Not for me yet. You?

PARC Develops Low-Energy, Membrane-Free Water Filtration Technology

Leave it to the brainiacs at the renowned Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to devise a water filter that manages to do away with two of the technology's most vexing problems: a high energy requirement and the need to constantly replace used up membranes. Their device, called a spiral concentrator, is a 50 cm long, 1 mm in diameter piece of plastic tubing that separates particles as small as 1 micron in size by centrifugal force, reports Technology Review's Lee Bruno. Those particles are in turn moved out of the ...

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Awards 2008

California Academy of Sciences green roof

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities has just announced the Awards for Excellence 2008 honoring projects that exemplify the aesthetic and environmental benefits of green roofs and living walls. The winning installations are a showcase of innovation and awareness-raising ideas that standout among the growing field of building integrated green space. Honorees were recognized for several important aspects including design, research and policy development in seven award categories. The distinguished designs among this year’s winners are engaging examples that successfully deploy economic, ecological, aesthetic and functional considerations in gorgeous green form.

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