Brainstorming and Design Principles

Advanced

One of the core skills of interaction designer is the ability to rapidly generate concepts. This hands-on workshop will look at some of the best practices for doing just that, and, just as importantly, what to do once you have those concepts, both in clustering and categorizing them, but also in selecting the best. How do you go about deciding which concepts to prototype? One answer is Design Principles. By generating design principles, you can create criteria for determining your best concepts, but also “guiding stars” for making design decisions throughout the prototyping and production process. In this workshop you’ll learn:

• How to give your brainstorming sessions structure
• Simple tricks to generate more ideas, including laddering
• How to make sense of your ideas when finished
• How to write design principles to guide your work

Designing for (and with) New Technologies

New technologies, whether they are fancy, high-concept gestural interfaces or something as behind-the-scenes as a new algorithm, require some extra care when they're first being utilized in a new product. This care extends not only in the design process, but also to its introduction and explanation to users. This talk will cover, via case studies from Kicker Studio, what pitfalls to look out for, as well as what opportunities exist in introducing a new technology. We'll discuss how to design so that Raymond Loewy's MAYA (Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable) principle is put to its best use.