I recently took part on the jury of the first IxDA Global Student Design competition, which had over 40 entries, representing university programs in Australia, China, Columbia, Denmark, India, the Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Of those many entries, five have earned a full scholarship to Interaction10 conference Read More…

This year as part of its completely redesigned annual global conference the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is organizing a Student Competition searching for “Excellence in Interaction Design”. Entries have already been streaming in from students representing programs from around the world. Read More…

Submissions are now open for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Global Student Interaction Design Competition. Submissions are due by November 30th, 23:59, US/PST. Read More…

Foundation and critique are two core elements that separate design from other ways of thinking and practicing creation of ideas and solutions. Foundations are the core elements that we manipulate within our craft. Critique is the way we judge the results of that craft. For critique to be effective though it requires foundation. It is only through our understanding of what it is that makes up our craft, that we can bring consistency and consensus to design criticism. Read More…

In this talk, Manuel Lima leverages the existing pool of knowledge from Visual Complexity (VC ) to convey a current portrait of network visualization. It illustrates some of its current trends and representation methods, and explore the reasons behind the recent outburst. It highlights some seminal executions and finalize with the exaltation of interactivity as the key measure of cognition in Information Visualization, by presenting a series of interaction design principles for exploring complex networks. Read More…

Dan Saffer calls out the Interaction Design community for allowing distracting topics to consume our attention, and for paying too little attention to “moonwalking bears,” the opportunities interaction designers can take advantage of in the near future. Read More…

Social Media Networks, because they are built on the collective participation of individuals, can only be effectively guided by means of a researched and learned examination of social psychology. It is the interaction designer’s job to understand how social media ecosystems are likely to evolve, given the interaction of the application constraints with users — each of which with their own goals, prejudices, social ties, needs for sociality and irrational decision-making.

Design choices affecting application design, functions, and features can only steer individual and aggregate participation within the social network. This talk will begin with the basics of social psychology as it pertains to social media and networking sites and give a brief overview of identity creation in the context of social networking theory.

In this presentation, Will Evans discuss design patterns in social media site architecture and their impact on human behavior, and why interaction designers engaged in building social networking ecosystems must leverage sociology, social network analysis, and behavioral economics to ensure their social media site is Built for Conversation.

Built For Conversation: The Interaction Design of Social Media from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Will Evans is founder and Principal User Experience Architect for Semantic Foundry with 14 years industry experience in informationarchitecture user experience design. His experience includes directin ginteraction design and information architecture for AIR Worldwide, UX architect for web 2.0 social networking site Gather.com, and UX architect responsible for information architecture and interaction design for Kayak.com. He has worked at enterprise technology companies Lotus/IBM (where he was the senior information architect), and Curl,a DARPA-funded MIT project at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Most recently, Will has lead redesign projects incorporating social media, crowd-sourcing and social networking for startups and Fortune100 companies.

Will holds masters degrees in business administration, human-computerinteraction and cognitive psychology. His interests and studies have focused on design, information architecture, human factors and information visualization. He earned his undergraduate degree inmathematics and philosophy.

As interaction designers working within agile teams, Jeff White and Josh Unger have used a design studio approach to user interface design on five separate occasions over the past year in order to establish design direction during early development cycles and provide the design vision for multiple sprints. In their talk at IxDA | Interaction ‘08 Conference, they describe their experience with the merger of user centered design into agile (team) development practice as manifest in a one day design studio. The evolution of one design using the design studio process is presented, and benefits and challenges to a design studio approach are discussed. Read More…