Design and Use: Tools and Trends

q. 1 How do our methods need to be extended or adapted to support design in the wild?

q. 2 How do we position our own practice in relation to this dynamic and changing design space?

These are two questions I posed at the end of a recent presentation I was invited to give at UTS to Masters students from the School of Design, Architecture and Building (edited slidedeck above). While the focus was an introduction to Personas and Scenarios (new to many of the students from outside the field of Interaction Design) the presentation also highlighted new trends or “strong currents” currently influencing design.

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Emerging a User Experience Strategy: Presentation Slides

The slides from @michellegilmore and my presentation at UX Australia are up on slideshare. We’ll add the audio as it becomes available. We’re hoping to take a version of this presentation to IXD10 next year (submissions are currently being reviewed) so any feedback and thoughts are more than welcome!

UX Australia was a fantastic conference, thanks again to the organisers!

Mapping methods, techniques, tools and design values

Methods can be a bit like a black box. Embedded within them are particular assumptions about design and participation that can be unwittingly projected into our design process and outcomes. If we hope to privilege sociability, flexibility and openness in our designs, these values can be better supported through some tools and techniques more than others. In my thesis I have drawn attention to particular qualities and concepts relevant to design in the context of social technologies. I’m in the process of making these available to others in different ways such as maps, vocabularies and considerations.

mapping goals, experiences, enablers and qualities in early design research

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