Archived entries for work
Celebrating the Interaction Awards
Over the past 18 months I’ve been moonlighting on Kicker.
My co-conspirator Raphael Grignani and I, with the help of several volunteers, designed, built and launched the Interaction Awards, as a way to recognize and celebrate the great work in our field.
IxDA’s Interaction Awards celebrated their first award winners in a swanky ceremony at the Lord Mayor’s House in Dublin, Ireland. As part of the Interaction12 conference, over 500 people attended the event to applaud 26 inaugural winners, experience the winning projects, and acknowledge the first portfolio of interaction design excellence recognized by the Interaction Design Association.
The Venue:
Raphael and I take the stage:
To mark the occasion, we produced a series of short films about interaction design, our deliberation process, and the winning work, directed by Christian Svanes Kolding, and filmed during the Interaction Awards’ Jury weekend in NYC last November.
Here are a few of the films!
On defining interaction design:
On our inaugural jury:
On our deliberation process:
On what interaction design aspires to:
See more videos profiling the top award winners, and photos from the Awards Ceremony, and see all of the winning projects on the Interaction Awards Winners site. read juror Helen Walter’s wrap up of the awards on Fast Company.
Find me at Fast Company
Last week I had the pleasure of being the Expert Design blogger at Fast Company.
Over the course of the week, I wrote a series in five installments on the trials and tribulations of starting my company Kicker Studio in the current economic climate. It was a lot of work, but a great experience, and I’m hoping it gets me back into the habit of writing more. Here are the individual articles:
Part I: Taking Risks
Part II: The First Fifteen Weeks
Part III: When There’s No There
Part IV: Developing the Kicker Culture
Part V: Staying Focused
You can read them all — and hopefully more to come — on my new Fast Company blog Design in the New Economy.
Dot Dot Dot
I’m in NYC! And as always, I’ve forgotten to mention the fact that I’m giving a short talk tomorrow night at the White Rabbit in the East Village, for the last of SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design‘s Dot Dot Dot series, “the Service Designers.” I’m going to be talking about how our data-rich web habits have come to affect our experience of real-world services, and what we might (or might not?) want to take away from living among so many services online.
It’s late and I can barely type. I hope to be more coherant tomorrow. If both eyes stay open, it’s a plus.
Update: There’s a video of the event:
oh joy.
Our first concept project
We released our first concept over at Kicker Studio today, and we’re pretty excited about it. It’s a touchscreen conference phone, aimed at humanizing the conference call experience and make it a bit more like actually being in the same room.
Touchscreen Conference Phone
Our phone’s features:
* Synchronizes with calendars and contacts for one-tap dialing
* Quickly see who’s talking on a call and who wants to speak
* “Hand Raising” to indicate a desire to speak
* “Poking” to nudge other callers
* Recording and marking of calls
* Multi-line dialing
* Adjusting individual lines for the best overall conference call quality
* Available in four colors
You can read all about our process and see the phone’s features on our blog, and see more photos of the phone on Flickr. Please take a look and tell me what you think!
Update: Our phone is all over the interweb! Good reviews in Wired, CrunchGear, Gadgetrends, and VoIPinsider, and a photo spread in Core 77.
sxsw recap
Forgot to post this earlier this week…
I’ve been back a few hours now from Austin, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to recap my last week or so of conferenceuary (term coined by Neb). In truth I’m supposed to be doing more official writing at the moment, and I’m hoping this warm up will get my fingers flowing. So here goes… first thing I’ve decided about SXSW is that the Hotel San Jose is worth all the cost and cache it’s got. I spent several nights on the patio at the San Jose this year, which I knew from last year as an oasis from the crowded bars of downtown Austin. But last night I slept on a cot in one of their guest rooms — a cot! — and I slept better than I have all week. Perhaps it was the balmy weather, and the fact that there was actual air from the outside world in the room itself. But even though I was on a cot it was beyond pleasant, far superior to the gigantic and generic Hilton. The other obvious thing the San Jose has going for it is the other guests — not only were Molly and Ben staying there, but also Neb, John, Kevin, and my friends Meg and Jason from NYC. Good friends and good cava. What else can you ask for?
Apart from accommodations a few other things stood out about Austin and SXSW. There were the breakfast tacos, of course, which I finally got a hold of this morning. And the migas….mmm egg and tortilla strips. Oh and the texmex martinis, which I tasted on Saturday at the Dryskill and talked about for the rest of the week. Tequila, cointreau, lime and olive juice and a salted rim. Giant yum. Apparently the San Jose also had a special cocktail, a beer concoction called a michelada, but I never got to try it. I was distracted by the cava.
Okay so that’s lodging, food and drink. On to the conference itself. What did I see? None of the keynotes, unfortunately. They were inconveniently timed. But I did get to many of the morning sessions — Molly’s tangible interactions in urban environments panel, Jason Santa Maria’s panel about Design narratives, Liz’z designer and developer shoot out, and a slew of others that weren’t social calls. The role of time in mobile, sex in science fiction, the journey to the center of design, are the first that come to mind. Even managed to get a glimpse of my movie star boyfriend Paul Rudd with friends Jason Segel, Jamie Pressley and John Favreau on the token “film stars entertain us” panel that’s part of SXSW film.
Yesterday Tom and I hosted our own session: “Collaboration or Collision: Achieving Studio Bliss,” a discussion group on collaboration in design. We had about 30 participants in the room, and everyone seemed entertained and engaged in the conversation. We ended up focusing on the design process and guidelines for dealing with clients who don’t understand it, which wasn’t where I’d imagined the conversation going. But it was meant to be a collaboration, so it went where the room wanted it to go. I found myself reluctant to speak too much, for fear of guiding the discussion too directly or stilting the conversation. In the end the participants said they got a lot out of it, and a few said they’d be going home with new ideas about tactics to try at the office. So I guess it went well!
There’s plenty more to the trip than the food & drink and the conference itself, but I need to get on with the other writing I was meant to be doing — a review of Objectified, which premiered at SXSW on Saturday night. You can find that on the Kicker Studio blog, as soon as I get it up there.
Almost time for SXSW!
Back for a second year, I’m returning to the South By Southwest Interactive festival as a speaker next week. This year I’m hosting a core conversation titled “Collaboration or Collision: Acheiving Design Studio Bliss” with fellow Kicker Tom Maiorana. We’ll be sharing how our past experiences with collaboration inform our work at Kicker Studio, and talking with anyone who joins the discussion about what makes collaboration successful. We’re looking forward to it, and hope you are too. We’ll be in room 7 at 3:30pm on Tuesday March 17th. Please come see us if you’re at the conference! (Oh, and if you’re particularly into drawing/diagramming/mindmapping please let me know… looking for some help with documenting the chat. 
)
Me & Kicker, we go way back
I almost forgot that while I haven’t managed to articulate my transition to SF life on a personal level, I did write about why I decided the move made sense professionally. My first post over on our company blog Kick it went up yesterday. It’s is a post called “How I Came to be a Kicker” and it’s about just that. Hope it makes sense. While I’m at it, please subscribe to our blog on Kicker Studio.com and follow @Kickerstudio on Twitter. Thanks!
Leaving Las Vegas
Earlier this week Kicker embarked on our first trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV. I flew in from NYC and met the rest of the team on the strip, where we strategized our approach to the ginormous event. One of our clients was demoing some of our work for their customers, so we took the opportunity to do some business development and introduce Kicker to other potential clients and partners. We combed the exhibition halls, practiced our sales pitch, played with touch screens and mini projectors, and met talking robots! Touch screens and photo frames were the big themes of the show, along with TVs TVs TVs… walking through the central hall was like being in a giant Best Buy, only with booth babes and free pens. Gestural interfaces made an appearance in a few places apart from our demo, at exhibits from Hitachi, Toshiba, and GestureTek.
It was great fun hanging out with the other Kickers, and getting to see friends like Neb & Tod, Mike K & Liz, and old Scient chum Jonathan Steuer. If you have to eat from a taco truck in a convention center parking lot, it’s much better with friends. Business travel on a start up dime is something to get used to — suddenly coffee and wifi are expensive! — but all and all we managed to eat pretty well without breaking the bank. My favorite meal, apart from the taco truck, was probably at the Wolfgang Pck cafe at the Venetian. Not because the food was any great shakes, but that fake Piazza San Marco is surreal! Between the opera singers and the fake afternoon sky I was totally disoriented. That’s how they get ya in Vegas, though, I know. On the people front, great find were the folks we met from Moto, our neighbors in SF, who hosted a suite party on Thursday that they graciously let us crash. We got to talk shop over coctails and prototypes and hopefully made some new friends.
I missed the much-lauded Palm Pre that was launched at the show, but I’m not so concerned with that. I figure anything big enough to get press coverage I can read about in the press. The smaller folks with cool ideas who need design help from Kicker are the people I wanted to see.
Believe it or not with around 60 hours in Vegas I didn’t managed to gamble a cent. There was literally no time for casino play during business hours, and by the end of each day I was too tired to think. Then by the time I got to the airport – home to many a slot machine at the gates – I couldn’t even figure out how to play. I had a fistful of quarters, and no where to put them, needing tickets, credits, and small dollar bills to get anywhere. So I gave up and went home, in and out of Vegas without playing a dime (er, dollar).
And now I’ve got a whole slew of follow up emails to write that say “Hi, remember me? We met in Vegas…” heh.
Finally Kicking!
I’m very excited to announce that as of January 2009, I’ll be on board full time at Kicker Studio in San Francisco. It’s hard to believe I’ve only got a few short weeks left in NYC, but I’m looking forward to joining my partners Dan, Jody, Tom and Mike in our new office space!
Do you know anyone who needs a kick? If you do, please let us know!