Preliminary Color Research for the ABC TV Show “Dirty Sexy Money”.

As an Interaction Designer with a background in film, people often ask me how my current job relates to my previous experience on over 20 film, television, and commercial productions.

I usually describe the common skill film (production) designers and interaction designers need: eloquence. Designers working in any medium, need to clearly communicate a creative vision to stakeholders, not just visually, but also verbally, and in writing. The best film designers, don’t just deliver the most detailed and beautiful sets, they’re able to inspire stakeholders and their creative teams to collaborate with them. This requires a fair amount of interpersonal skills and making creative collaboration more accessible. They use research as a method to inspire, justify, and collaborate in decision making. Both industries share the challenge of co-creation, which exists more as an ideal than as a reality. In each field, designers have to engage stakeholders who might not understand the design vision, or their role in the process. Eloquence requires a precise articulation of process and concepts to be understood and accepted. 

Perhaps more informative than the similarities in techniques are the differences in how filmmakers engage others in collaborative creative process. In film, a director assembles a rough cut of the current fidelity of a project to show the creative team where a project is heading and to decipher what still needs to be done. These rough cuts are intentionally unpolished and in animated films, the rough cut might include numbered placeholders for elements and shots to come later. 

“You have to look at it, you have to critique it, but if you don’t have all of the right eyes looking at it all in context, you just miss things,” said Patrick Quattlebaum, Design Director at Adaptive Path, who applies his background in film and technology to design cross-channel experiences. He uses the technique of rough cutting to approximate the organizational progress and visual feel of complex projects. “You can bring people into the room to look at it and ask, is it going to work?” Much like prototyping, rough cutting is a way of testing what’s working holistically and visualizing a complete result before you’ve finished. Different from prototyping which is used to test an interaction with an audience, rough cutting is a way of bringing creative elements to stakeholders earlier. 

On a film production, we would divide our office wall space into the sets of the film that we were designing. As elements of the final design would come in, such as historical research, visual references, furniture, wallpaper samples, location photographs, and color references, we would put them up on the wall. Often if walls or bulletin boards did not exist, we would build them–that’s how important collaborative surfaces were for us. As counterintuitive as it sounds, we knew that our walls would unite us.

The Living Room and Dining Room sets for “Dirty Sexy Money”. 

We used these physical space to externally visualize what we were working on for ourselves, but also to articulate what we were working on to others and to intentionally attract feedback from our extended creative team which included: studio executives, directors, producers, and actors. It’s much cheaper and much more efficient to sketch a sofa and attach several options for upholstery than it is to fabricate the wrong one, but putting those sketches and samples on the walls elicited impromptu critiques. In film, the schedule constantly changes due to the weather, actor availability, and the irregular speeds in which different scenes might take to shoot. We often didn’t need to schedule formal design reviews, because we would cover the walls into the shared hallway.  Stakeholders would stop in on their way to the catering trucks or on the way back from location scouting.

Working on the walls eliminated a need for formal deliverables because we delivered each element directly to the wall as it was sourced, drawn, or created. We were able to see all the elements at once, and visually imagine the missing pieces. We immediately noticed when one wall had more work on it than another, or the texture of a fabric swatch was too similar to the texture of another. Since it was our workspace, we were attentive to receiving live feedback and because the stakeholders had their own offices, they could choose when or when not to say something. We engaged frequently when we had work to review and less so, when we were hard at work. By placing the items on the wall, we reduced the finality and the importance of an individual design asset because we were meant to look at the project as a whole. 

In interaction design, I’m often constrained to work within the confines of computer monitors, file sharing platforms, and the project management software I’m using with our team, and client partners. Frequently we’re looking at files one at a time, or a sea of files and folders rather than direct images or the body of our work. Usually, we’re reviewing at work at regular intervals and sometimes we’re not in front of each other. I think we prefer digital mediums to analog ones, because these are the tools we make. Working on walls is a method of persistently making our work visual, social, and highly collaborative.

A Unique Experience                                                    “Sentient Orbs” by littlewhitehead

I cringe when I hear the demeaning term, “Eyeballs” used to refer to people. In recent years, designers (at least at the highest level), have replaced another suspect term “user-centered design” with “human-centered design”, but I still hear inconsistencies in the way in which we talk about people. Often, we choose the word “human” to define our approach on our marketing sites, and behind the scenes, we revert to the word “user” to describe aspects of our disciplines, our process, our job titles, and our customers.

The word “user” has long had a negative connotation in the design community. Brenda Laurel lectured that the word user should be avoided. It’s how we describe someone who uses illegal drugs; a drug user, or someone who manipulates others for personal gain: he was a gifted user of other people. (Laurel lecture, 2009) Donald Norman writes, it’s a ‘“horrible word”. Someone who uses? Although it is not nearly as degrading a term as “consumer”: someone who consumes. Nor is it as bad as the term experimental psychologists like so much “subject.” Why not call them people?’ 

The vague action of “using” an object no longer reflects the heightened level of activity, creativity, customization, and interconnectedness that’s required. People are not passively “using” technology, they are communicating with it, changing culture with it and shaping our future. Calling a prototype, a “usability test” undermines our expectations. To say that something is usable, assumes meeting business goals and technical requirements is sufficient. Instead, we should think about software like theater or film in its ability to fulfill the emotional needs audiences. Like a theatrical performance, creatives need to think beyond binary usable and unusable outcomes and accept the full spectrum of possible responses.

I’ve found people have different reactions to designs based on their personality and experiences. Those feelings are often unique and as design moves forward, unique experiences have become more important and relevant than mass experiences. There are limitations to designer’s current abilities. To say that we can design a person’s experience is an overstatement. Today, we design interactions which usually create positive experiences. Perhaps we will be able design experiences in the future. In the meantime I’ve started a glossary for better words to refer to people.

Glossary for Interaction Design (beta)

Outdated Term => New Term

User-Centered => Human-centered                                                                                             User Experience => Interaction Design, individual/common experience.           Eyeballs/User => People, Audience, Customers, Patients, Beneficiaries                     Usability =>  Performance, Resonance                                                                                            Experience Design => Interaction Design

Example: We design interactions for people who have diverse experiences. We test them to maintain optimal experiences for a majority of customers.

Questions for Netflix Designers & Content Strategists: How does this code help me solve this problem independently?  Can we eliminate the code or hide it? Can we simplify this message by unnecessarily alarming viewers about your backup plan? Even in this not so terrible example, you can see how we need to give technical instructions without overwhelming people.

“Digital products are rude,” begins a chapter in About Face, The Essentials of Interaction Design. The book’s authors, Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin reminds us that technology frequently requires people to think like computers.

Software arbitrarily asks us to choose our file preference from options like save (most logical), export (less logical), or print (least logical). Social media asks us to find, approve, and sort our friends into circles (Google+) or lists (Twitter). Technology brings affordances to people, but it also creates more work for us to do. 

Recently, I was asked to help re-write the most common error messages for a complex web application. The organization believed that the content of the messages could be made more clear. We were able to write them more clearly, but we found that those errors were often indications of larger, unsolved design and business problems. One of the most popular errors people received, “You’ve entered an incorrect username,” should really be asking for a more memorable identifier, like one’s email address. The most common field error, “You forgot to enter your phone number,” could easily be indicated visually with color. 

Error messages seem to come from a pre-interactive, socially obtuse world. Talking to people with unspecific, inhuman codes is still rude.

Last night at Adaptive Path, Brandon Schauer, gave an inspiring, encore performance of his keynote presentation from the Service Design Network Conference.

In his talk, The Business Case for (or Against) Service Design (PDF), Brandon identified a large opportunity, which he calls The Service Anticipation Gap. He calculated the US spends $40 Billion on advertising services and only $2 Billion on designing and planning services. Domestically, only 8% of US customers say that they are receiving superior experiences. [“Closing the Delivery Gap” by Bain & Company (PDF)].

Brandon made the business case to transfer a portion of wasted ad spends on existing weak services and invest in creating improved and new services that actually resonate with customers. He presented his central thesis that Service Designers are strong at designing services that put people at the center, design across touch points, and with little risk.

Compared to Europe, in the US, relatively few services are designed. Most services are created in-house by siloed disciplines ranging from System Engineering, Operations Management, Branding & Marketing, Customer Service, and Executive Leadership.

The talk took a playfully, provocative turn when he also presented his antithesis: service designers have difficulty demonstrating ROI and creating integrated, scalable systems. We tend to focus on optimization of services, but there’s often a greater opportunity for us to create new capabilities and to reach new customers. As a designer, I see value in acknowledging these short comings and by classifying them as constraints and opportunities for partnerships. It’s true. Successful service design teams need members with deep marketing, business, and operational skills.

Among the tactics he recommends include embracing digital as a means to create less-expensive, consistent experiences, and adopting lean design practices from the start up industry.

I’ve seen soft launches work well for technology applications when feedback can be easily aggregated from analytical data to inform future design directions. One challenge I find when creating non-digital touch points is to design, without that feedback, sometimes call feed lack.

While presenting successful Service Design stories are helpful, identifying the weaknesses and opportunities for our sector, process, and outcomes is even more helpful. Both arguments made a good case for the evolving discipline of Service Design.

Photo from Biometric Devices: Current Attitudes and Trends, a collaboration with Phil Balagtas

    “These don’t work.” Dr. Bradley Monash, a young doctor said as he walked briskly towards three COWs in a hallway at the UCSF Medical Center. He’s not talking about animals grazing in the hospital. COWs are an acronym for Computers On Wheels, rolling desktop computers enclosed in plastic housing. The day I visited, three of these big beige units were parked unused, against a wall, around the corner from the nurses station. They can be wheeled into patients rooms, but if patients are contagious, the doctor takes notes on paper, or leaves the patient room to update the terminal. Perhaps their most lovable quality is their non-medical name, but it’s also their barnyard name that expresses their awkwardness in the hospital setting. As an interaction designer, I am trained to look for broken things, to investigate behavior, and to question improvised workarounds to problems. As I watched Dr. Monash sit down at a working COW, I realize he’s speaking hyperbolically about his diagnoses. The outdated computers are perceived to have little remaining function compared to newer, faster mobile device alternatives, which leads me to question, what are the current information technology needs of clinicians? Looking at a current information vehicle, the Apple iPad, I realize we are just beginning to understand its possibilities. The iPad is changing the way we live our lives and how doctors care for patients.
    I follow Dr. Monash through his account of a typical day at UCSF. He logs into a desktop computer to check lab results, find information on a particular illness, record information from his rounds, communicate with staff, and to stay informed about new developments in medical practice. He uses several different databases. In all, he spends a lot more time using a computer than I thought he would. I infer too, that it’s even more time than he imagined he would spend when he attended medical school and later when he chose to specialize in care for very sick patients. As we pass the nurses station, he points to binders containing paper forms and records, evidence that digitized workflows in modern medicine have not fully been realized.
    One reason is that the hospital’s information systems have changed faster than the hospital’s floor plans. Even if the COW units were able to keep up with the fast pace of Dr. Monash, and they did not rely on humans to remember to plug them back in (another one of his complaints), they still would not be close enough to a telephone, to the nurses station, or to the social comfort of other people. I empathize with his frustrations. Hospital staff are often hurriedly computing, but it must feel lonely to work in the hallway– a makeshift work space.
        Dr. Monash takes his iPhone out of his pocket. He has over 20 medical applications, he says but he hasn’t used them all yet. I take a moment to ponder this. When else in the history of human civilization have we kept tools in out pants, without the full knowledge of what these objects can do, or how they can help us? These devices are not really even tools. They are toolboxes of unlimited size. With mobile technology, he’s hoping to ease his burdensome workload. The efficiency of a digital device could keep needed information literally at his fingertips. As I discuss the iPad with him, I can sense his excitement. It has the promise to make his job easier and to change the way he cares for patients.
    Dr. Monash specializes in Hospital Medicine, the discipline that focuses on the site of intervention–the hospital, rather than the age of the patient, or a particular organ of the body. It’s a field which balances both patient care and systemic problem-solving. In addition to seeing patients, these physicians, called hospitalists often manage quality initiatives. His supervisor, Dr. Watcher helped coin the hospitalist term. Dr. Monash explained all of this to me by typing “hospitalist” into Wikipedia and clicking on a blue link to show me Dr. Watchler’s blog. It’s the first time that I’ve surfed the internet in a doctor’s office and I’m struck by how ubiquitous medical information is influencing hospital care.
    When Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple unveiled the new computer tablet in April 2010 called the iPad, he referred to it as a “magical” device. Several people in the crowd snickered, but by magical perhaps he meant that this object has surpassed a person’s ability to understand how it function. Sure, it is essentially a larger version of a pre-existing Apple product. We know that the iPad was designed in-house by Apple’s rather secretive design team. It relies on many different technologies, such as a nano-technology computer chip design, a multi-touch user interface, a liquid crystal display, individually precision-machined aluminum unibody enclosures. The interactive surface, the part of the object that people can feel and control with their fingertips, appears to be just a piece of glass. Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design describes the way that the object has been reduced to its bare essentials. “There’s no pointing device and there isn’t even a single orientation. There’s no up. There’s no down. There’s no even right or wrong way of holding it. I don’t have to change myself to fit the product. It fits me.” Ive argues that the iPad is one of the first interactive objects created in which a person is not customizing the object, but that the physical object is customizing itself.
    Mobile technology like the iPad is offloading responsibilities from the doctor and it’s likely that its succeeding technology will continue to do so. The ability and memory of the machine to retain data has eclipsed the memory of the human and the need to remember medical information independently. I begin to think, at what point, will the iPad become the doctor? It is already increasingly common to not see a doctor when one visits the doctor’s office because expert medical care is becoming less common. A growing shortage of physicians has increased the need for less-skilled doctors, like nurse practitioners. Medicine is moving from diseased-based treatments to symptom-based treatments, as says Richard Thayler whose small Californian company, the Catalysis Foundation aims to treat tuberculosis more effectively by harnessing mobile technology in third world countries to assist low-skilled doctors in making more accurate diagnoses. Telemedicine, the field of providing healthcare remotely through technology is a growing field. Admittedly, the far away doctor is less ideal than a visit to one’s doctor in person, but the introduction and implication of virtual practices means  that more people in more areas have access to doctors.
    Looking at the iPad through the lens of a medical device, there is extraordinary potential. With Apple’s open-source software initiative, developers have created hundreds of applications for the device. Epic, the major electronic record developer, has released an iPad application. There is a demand for compatible peripherals to be designed that could help automate, record, and communicate procedural tasks such as measured blood pressure, heart rate, and other vital signs. As with the introduction of any of technology, there is also the potential for safety concerns. Like the COWs, the iPad will have to withstand hospital disinfection procedures and theft.
    Design philosopher Vilém Flusser argues that the problem with technology (which he calls non-things) is that it is not able to emote. If we apply Flusser’s critique of technology, to the COWS at UCSF we realize their sense of coldness- these machines are not able to feel, to express those feelings, to live or to die in an environment that cares for the living. Dr. Monash describes the current inabilities of the iPad. He tried to reassure me, “It can not provide empathy or the healing power of the human touch.” The object to person relationship can not yet replace an interpersonal relationship, but I realize we’ve only seen the first two models of the device. With the agglomeration of interconnected technologies contained in a specific device, technology is changing at an unfathomable pace. This pace not only exceeds our ability to understand how the complex object functions, but it also threatens to break our distinction between things and non-things. The futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that this transcendence where the thing and non-thing become one will be called “The Singularity”. He writes, “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains … There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” One could ask, can we stop ourselves from reaching this point? (Kurzweil, 9)
    Throughout my visit at UCSF, I kept needing to interrupt the sharp and speedy Dr. Monash with questions to translate his doctor-speak into my medically-untrained lexicon. He seemed well-adapted to my type of questioning and patiently gave explanations for me, the non-expert. He preemptively answered some of my questions and I wonder, how does he know what I don’t know? For example, does he as a doctor know that most people understand what a hospital is, but not a hospitalist? While the iPad can access Wikipedia and find the definition of what a hospitalist is, it’s not yet as intuitive as the doctor to assume what I don’t know. The computer is not yet able to use the same kind of advanced reasoning to guide patients through medicine that websites like Google and Amazon are just beginning to do with search and e-commerce optimization. So, if the iPad knows more than Dr. Monash why am I interviewing him? Could I not just google my questions? I acknowledge that the iPad knows more about medicine, but perhaps it knows too much. With the amount of medical information it has, I also realize when seeking council of a medical professional, I am not necessarily looking for the aggregate opinion, I am looking for a subjective view. Medicine is somewhat quantitative, but it is also qualitative in its prescriptive advice. However flawed the current human perspective can be, perhaps what I was looking for was that confident, humanistic point of view that he has. I prefer talking to people than to things, but I realize that this preference might be beyond my control.

SOURCES

“Apple’s IPad Will Fall Short of Transforming Hospital Care” IMedicalApps.com - IPhone,  IPad, and Android Medical App Reviews and Commentary. Web. 11 Dec. 2010. <http://www.imedicalapps.com/2010/01/apple-ipad-will-fall-short-of-transforming-hospital-medical-care-potential-with-electronic-medical-records/>.

Dalsgaard, Peter, Eva Eriksson, and Lone K. Hansen. Rethinking Information Handling: Designing for Information Offload. Scholarly Paper. Roceeding CC ‘05 Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: between Sense and Sensibility, 2005. Web. 13 Dec. 2010. <http://www.bloc.se/publications/informationOffload.pdf>.

“Doctors Using Skype to Transform Medical Practice.” Skype: Blog. Web. 12 Dec. 2010. <http://blogs.skype.com/business/2009/05/doctors_using_skype_to_transform_medical_practice.html>.

Fisher, Thomas. “Viral Cities.” Places: Design Observer. Web. 01 Nov. 2010. <http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13948>.

Fluser, Vilém. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion, 1999. Print.

Hager, Emily. “IPad Opens World to a Disabled Boy.” New York Times. 31 Oct. 2010. Web. 1 Nov. 2010. <http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8f487ee52a29493e61aa9277a3b8c151>.

Halamaka, John. “A Doctor’s Review of Rounds with an IPad « MedCity News.” MedCity News. Web. 01 Nov. 2010. <http://www.medcitynews.com/2010/06/a-doctors-review-of-rounds-with-an-ipad/>.

“Hands-On With Apple.” Wired News. Web. 15 Nov. 2010. <http://www.wired.com/video/gadgets/gadget-lab/46211877001/handson-with-apples-ipad/75854562001>.

Heidegger, Martin. What Is a Thing? Chicago: H. Regnery, 1968. Print.

“Interview with Bradley Monash, MD.” In-person and telephone interview. 15 Nov. 2010.

The Ipad. Perf. Jony Ive. Apple. Web. 13 Dec. 2010. <http://www.apple.com/ipad/design/>.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.

Mandi, Kenneth D., and Isaac S. Kohane. “No Small Change for the Health Information Economy.” New England Journal of Medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 26 Mar. 2009. Web. 15 Nov. 2010. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19321867>.

Martin, Michael. “As Health Care Demands Grow, So Does Need For Nurse Practitioners : NPR.” NPR : National Public Radio : News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts : NPR. 28 Apr. 2010. Web. 12 Dec. 2010. <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126363962>.

Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2004. Print.

Thayer, Richard. “Diagnostic Treatment Devices from the Catalysis Foundation.” CCA, San Francisco. 5 Oct. 2010. Lecture.

An interface from Talk to Me: “Hide and See” by Jaakko Tuomivaara from The Royal College of Art. It uses beauty marks on a woman’s face to subtly indicate information such as missed telephone calls.

“What is your definition of design?” I asked Paola Antonelli when she visited our studio at CCA in the Fall of 2009. Ms. Antonelli is the Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA and the organizer of the very interesting and very interactive exhibition, “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects.” As an MFA in Design student, this seemed like a definition that I should have known, but as design is changing mediums and further, changing the mannor in which we practice, it still seems relevant. She gave a detailed and careful response; one that included the ability to reach the five senses and the phrase, “striving for elegance”.

This concept of “striving for elegance,” can be applied to every design field. It has stuck with me as I have observed the competition between design-driven and engineering-driven technology companies here in the Bay Area. “It’s not not up to me, it’s not up to my designers, it’s up to my end-users,” one CEO told me. He was referring to the A/B testing method which his company and others use to select “the best design”, but as I often wonder, what if both designs are bad? It seems noble to allow end-users to have the final say and I support the inclusion of end-users in the process (in human-centered design: this is vital to inspiration, refining and evidencing.) However, the designer still plays a vital role in understanding, communicating, creating, and mediating design process and principles to others. Elegance is not a subjective preference, but it is intimately linked to usability. As Donald Norman argues, “Attractive things work better.”

Marie Laurencin, Group of Artists, 1908

Henri Matisse, Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 1908

The SFMOMA exhibition, “The Steins Collect” connects with me. What’s significant about the subject matter (the relationship between a family and significant modern artists, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso) is the impact that the Stein family had on modern art. Curated chronologically, the show shares this Bay area family’s story as early adopters, social facilitators, and educators of the Avant-garde movement in Paris and the US. The exhibition includes a variety of media including paintings, but also sculptures, photographs, films, audio, furniture, architectural models, written correspondence, and historical accounts.

The presentation of narratives from the artists and the owners of their works was more meaningful to me than a collection of art with formal deconstructive descriptions. This show portrays the family as real people with real emotions and weaknesses. It details positive milestones in their lives (the acquisition of significant works such as Matisse’s Femme au chapeau) along with interpersonal struggles and misfortunes (Sarah and Michael Stein lost 19 to a German Gallery before WWI). The show explains the important role of the collector as supporters, taste makers, and influencers of art.

In the film industry, a show or demo reel is the equivalent of an artist/designer’s portfolio. It’s submitted to employers in addition to a resume to concisely show a range of one’s work and abilities. It’s a quick and engaging medium for enjoying a simultaneously visual and auditory experience. I’m inspired by how effectively one of my early mentors, Production Designer Mark Friedberg visually explains his work in his reel. In this case, the audio from the projects compliments his work.

Today, I launched my first research and design reel. Building off my experience in the film industry, I hope to continue using time-based media to create visual and auditory experiences.