Interaction14

5-8 February 2014, Amsterdam

Reframing the field

Looking at something from another perspective can expand your professional abilities.  Here are a few ways Interaction14 will open your eyes, open your minds and expand your horizons. 

Killing the wireframe machine

The workshop of Lis Hubert is a call to action. Lis explores why and how UX is de-evolving from design thinking to wireframe machines, what problems this causes our web and mobile teams, the solutions to this de-evolution, and how to get UX to deliver on its promise.

She argues that we have to learn a process for synthesizing and strategizing the solution without the interface by addressing the following challenges:

Some of Lis’ previous presentations on SlideShare:

Jamming for change

Opening our eyes and minds to new ways of looking at our world and practice is the focus of Thursday’s Jamming for Change session.

Steve Baty will propose a conceptual leap: from experience design to behavioral design.  This is driven by the fact that clients and designers care more about target behaviors and how to shape them than in experiences and emotional responses.
In a Fast Company article, Baty provides insights on what we can expect from his talk. In the article, he identifies three ways to develop the required deep insight, which are all focused on looking beyond the obvious and staring directly into the blind spots of our accepted norms.

Anneli Olsen will talk about what she has learned from doing a user experience evaluation of her cat. These hilarious slides will whet your appetite. The session concludes with an explanation on how interaction design and service design can help alleviate urban poverty.

Lea Ward will explain her work on the Door-to-door for change project, which tries to break the poverty cycle. It targets 150 families and tackles the intergenerational problem of “inherited poverty.” Research has shown that getting parents engaged has a positive effect on their children, who become more likely in turn to find work.

Going back to his linguistics roots

His Thursday talk at Interaction14, which he positions as a crash course in sociolinguistics, is a return to his roots.  How has his take on sociolinguistics influenced his work as product designer?

His talk promises to be provocative: how does our language differ depending who we talk to, what are our hidden messages, and how d that influences our interaction design work and the exchange this creates with our customers?

Privacy by design

Privacy has been very much on the mind of cyber-anthropologist Amber Case for some years already. Amber was interviewed by WNYC and CBC Radio (Canada) on Facebook and privacy as far back as 2010.

In 2011 she came to the DISH conference in the Netherlands to discuss the implications to privacy, information and the formation of identity with our memories increasingly stored being in virtual space, and the ability to archive and access that data.

It will be interesting to see how her thoughts have evolved post-Snowden and in the more privacy-conscious Europe where her Interaction14 talk will take place.

The extended biology of computers

The title of Steven Pemberton’s talk at Interaction14, The Computer as Extended Phenotype, is exactly the same as the one he gave at the UX Week in San Francisco in 2011 (and which was summarized by Luke Wroblewski at the time).

The phenotype can be described as the visible, physical manifestation of our genes, he said in the talk. Most of these manifestations are part of the body, but some are outside (e.g. bird nests, beaver dams, spider webs, etc).

In humans, such ‘extended’ phenotypes are our language (memes), clothes, glasses, cars and planes, and even… computers: “The computer is being used in so many ways to extend our abilities. I can see no other possibility than to regard it as part of our extended phenotype.”


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