Girls and Women: Objects, Lessons in the Primacy of Interaction

March 6 2010
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This is Alan Chochinov’s presentation at IxD10 (Savannah).

If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it’s missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe. This error may appear if the URL path to the embedded object is broken or you have connectivity issue to the embedded object. Powered BY XVE Various Embed.

I posted the video to the blog for 2 reasons

a) It is hugely inspiring. To quote  4 key learnings by Chochinov (during his course at the SVA, New York) in the closing parts of his presentation –

  • Raise the Stakes: Make it Personal, Make it Urgent
  • Intervene: Design your products as if they were props in an intervention.
  • Dont Play Fair: Act like a design thinker, but think like a design activist.
  • Facilitate: Its not what you design, its not what you make – its what you facilitate.

b) The work shown in the presentation is yet another indicator toward ‘Design Fiction’ explorations which we currently need more of perhaps at Umea. (sorry, US keyboard!)

—

Less problem solving by design alone, and more of design-intentions explicit through fiction. For want of a better word – storytelling. (…puke)

from: Interaction Design

11 Comments leave a new comment!
March 9 2010
Mikko permalink

[RANT] Don’t do design fiction. It doesn’t get you hired. Learn AJAX and PHP and CSS and MySQL and all the other stuff you never wanted to learn. Learn to create sentences that don’t make a lot of sense to you or the reader. Learn to emphasize sustainability, but never, under any circumstances do anything about it. Learn to invent crazy names for stuff that happens on the screen, patent it and sue everybody that pinch their fingers together. Learn to read some sci-fi, take some invention from it and then tell everyone you invented it. Learn to make a pitch of a scenario that includes a 22-year old guy, who owns a BWM and wants to get a tattoo that says succesful and call him a “go-getter”. Learn to lie. No one likes the truth, even if they say so. Learn to talk like you give a shit. Like, “This booking application for the dentists’ assistant makes excellent use of iPhone’s user experience metaphors”. Just don’t do design fiction, unless you are willing to fight for your methods against an industry full of boring people who just do boring stuff the old way. [/RANT]

March 9 2010
Mikko permalink

Am I drunk? -No. Am I bitter about being unemployed? -Yes. Do I care? -Yes, I am out of money. I think there are several ways, you can do interaction design. One is the boring way that will get you job in a snap. You know, the one with the PHP and SQL and Visio and… … …and then you start talking about methodologies and coping with clients and… Then there is other one, where you have elements of this, but it actually is a bit more creative and there’s a lot of good things in it. I think most of you are working in these kind of companies or hope to work there. And then there is the one where you do stuff, but it doesn’t match either of the previous, it really isn’t art, but it really isn’t design, because somebody, along the way, told you that art and design are two completely different things and you follow this doctrine even if it kills you. You have absolutely no idea what to do with this stuff, so you put a sticker on it that says: “Design fiction” and hope that someone buys it. In the end you just find out that people are only interested in your Flash-skills. This story didn’t end in a noose, though.

March 10 2010
Mikko permalink

Oh and the video. It must an extreme mindfuck for those people who made the Dove video, as they are the ones who are also responsible for this atrocity. The student projects are all really good and inspiring and I completely agree with the guy and what he says about intervening and it’s exactly what I hope all the designers would do, instead of thinking how could the product sell more. It’s just not the way it works.

March 10 2010
Camille Moussette permalink

Mikko, check this out: http://www.syntheticaesthetics.org and it has a call for participants for quick residencies

http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/call-for-participants.pdf

March 10 2010
Camille Moussette permalink

Here is a good example of design fiction!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3JCESdFNyw&feature=related

and a longer one by the same dude: http://www.youtube.com/user/cyriak#p/a/u/0/-0Xa4bHcJu8

You got to love those After Effects skills :-)

March 10 2010
Mikko permalink

Thanks Camille for the links, I will apply to that synbio thing. Just in case that someone misunderstood this. My comments were meant to be humorous, but truthful. I wrote in a personal way, because that is how I experience it first hand. It’s just the way the (design) world functions. People create a lot of hype about new ideas and methods. In the end they don’t really matter. Years of experience are no match to ideas or out-of-the-box thinking to HR people. They look for 1) experience in years. Most of the places I’ve applied to are looking for someone with at least 7 years of experience. One place I know is looking for 4 interaction designers with a minimum 10 years of experience. Good luck in finding those guys. 2) basic skills. Can you do Flash prototypes or icons or wireframes or any other basic skill? Unfortunately as good as they are, Arduino and Processing don’t get you very far. Unless you are mindblowingly good at them. A lot of the places that are available are just glorified web-designer posts. 3) ideas. To human resources these don’t matter a lot. Everybody has ideas, if you can do the core work, then they will look at your ideas. All these can be cast aside, if you are able to find the right company that has the same mindset as you do. So, do those internships, kids. They will get you experience. By the way, all this doesn’t apply, if you just rock. Then you will get to places.

March 10 2010
rc permalink

Mikko, I’m happy to read your rants, because your posts – unlike the vast majority of the posts on the blog – offer a unique and honest opinion or perspective. You’re not paraphrasing what others have already said. You add something. You’re not afraid to express unpopular opinions. You are not trying to be cool or earn favours. For that you deserve praise.

Just to offer my take on the dilemma you’ve presented, and the perhaps obvious suggestion. Creating design fiction fits in the storytelling/communication part of your skill-set as a designer, and I agree that it’s a tough sell if that is your star ability and you want to enter the world of commercial design practice. If you want to continue doing that as your main focus, there may be better avenues for you to explore: academia, the arts, some combination of the two. Or, if you are ready to sell your soul, advertising.

I agree about the insane lists of requirements studios ask for. It goes beyond typical HR robots. There’s a lot of politics in design that have nothing to do with your ability as a designer at all. There’s a lot in the way of someone listening to you. Once you’re past that, there’s a lot in the way of you doing good work, or just doing the right thing. A lot of it is people. Humans. Collections of humans with different values, priorities, and methods than yours. Human robots that (when alike) band together to reaffirm their awesomeness and push forward their own agendas and egos – and become resistant to change. Most importantly, vulnerable humans that are doing work for other human robots who are paying them money to do that work, with pressures that make them predominantly risk-averse. Sad robot humans doing work for anti-human designer robots. Know what I mean?

Even in environments where the freedom to be more explorative and provocative exists, it is balanced by the real demands of industry. You and the rest of us must continue to challenge methods and assumptions to get our voices heard.

“Don’t change yourself. Change reality (if you can).”
-JP, 1991

March 10 2010
Camille Moussette permalink

Hi Mikko, I like you rants too.

I’m not in a position to give you advices on job hunting. I kind of chickened-out of that task by deciding to pursue a PhD education. I’m not sure yet it was the best decision ever, but oh well, that I can not travel back in time and change this now. I’m having fun and mostly enjoying the PhD adventure at the moment. I can fell the large timescale of the whole thing starting to rub in. I kind of prefer quick, guerilla style and impromptu projects. Oh we can’t have it all.

Don’t despair Mikko, I’m sure you’ll find something that floats your boat soon. You sure have IxD skills, personality and style. I believe that if you are passionate about something, and that you do that something really good (well above the general noise level), people will notice, appreciate it and eventually be ready to pay for it. So two things for my non-scientific canadian-beaver-inspired recipe to instant success and fame:

1) have something you excel at or are very knowledgeable about

2) communicate that to the world properly, and the fact you are open to do more/better for a living

Then, wait, dance, sleep, sleep, eat breakfast, sleep again, wait wait wait, rub your belly, then TADA some magic will have people contacting you somehow.

If you are good at something but don’t want to make a living out of it, don’t tell anyone about it. Otherwise people will come to you, asking for that exact skill/thing you are good at. It’s a tough call sometimes to attract clients/jobs while aspiring to do something else. I’m not sure I’m explaining it that well but I remembered some years ago, I became reasonably good at 3D modeling, then everyone started asking me gigs doing that. I didn’t particularly enjoyed it, but it was good money. It’s fun and challenging for a while, but it became boring and then it’s difficult to get out of that vicious circle. Abort mission gracefully as much as possible.

Oh well, I’m going nowhere with this. I hope some USB FLASH DRIVE dude writes some comment to help me out a bit here…

March 10 2010
Camille Moussette permalink

Hey, start logging your rants in a book or online. Maybe someone will notice and appreciate your work. Could you imagine, Mikko Professional Ranter, paid to rant like no others :-) Or write quirky editorial pieces on a/this blog, as a monthly/weekly column. If you feel like it naturally. Then you can brag to HR people that your actually wrote a book + have been an editorial writer for 2-3 years now. Time flies you know.

March 11 2010
Tor Hauksson permalink

Í like your rants too Mikko. Keep up the spirit.

March 11 2010
Artur permalink

I have never really been drawn to companies with HR departments.
(2 exceptions are Philips and Pininfarina) and in those I applied directly to Design/studio managers. In my opinion it’s one of the best ‘push’ tactics to avoid the nonsense that is HR in a design profession.
The other approach is the ‘pull’ one that Camille described so well.

But in all honesty (and perhaps I’m seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses here), I say if you can’t join them, beat them. When the founder of the (once) biggest Montreal design office said that he didn’t like working for other companies because of their views, processes, he opened his own. And none of his employees that I know actually liked him, because they would probably be better fits in those other companies, but he did his thing, and became the best at it (statistically).

And this ties into the video as well. I like how the student responsible for the older-gen project contacted meals-on wheels to implement the idea, make it a reality.

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