Tim Wood reviews practical drawing and sketchbook techniques that can serve as a cornerstone to the interaction design process. The concept of ‘drawing as problem solving’ will be introduced through case studies and real-world interaction design that demonstrate the efficiencies to be gained through the use of these techniques [...]

Last year at IxDA’s Interaction 09, Johnny Holland interviewed Mark Baskinger, associate professor at the School of Design of the Carnegie Mellon University.Mark talks about drawing ideas and shares his thoughts about the differences between industrial designers and interaction designers and how interaction designers can use sketching to communicate their designs better [...]

We can no longer ask users to think like machines just to be able to use software. This talk explores diverse areas of non-digital human experience – including language and theater, neurology and sociology – in order to frame and showcase some of the most exciting current and emerging user experience design practices, both on the web and in other media such as video games and the arts. The objective is quite simply to inspire designers to humanize their interfaces [...]

In 1900, Andrew Carnegie quietly declared that his “heart is in the work” – that he had found an endeavor worth pursuing, and that he would passionately follow-through on that endeavor until it was complete. This talk examines our ability to affect change at the intersection of experience, behavior, meaning, and culture, and will emphasize our responsibility to approach our work with philanthropic enthusiasm that would make Carnegie proud [...]

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 [...]

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. This week we have some big announcements and a really big reminder:

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. This competition is the first of its kind: IxDA will bring 5 finalists to Interaction 10 | Savannah, the 3rd Annual International Conference co-hosted by the Savannah College of Art & Design where they will compete head to head to find a winner. All finalists will be given a full scholarship for attending the conference.

While interaction designers have strong evaluation skills through quantitative research such as usability, IxD lacks the same types of aesthetic-based design criticism that graphic design, architecture and industrial design have. This 25-minutes presentation is meant to offer the beginnings of a discussion around what could are the foundations of interaction design, how do they impact aesthetics of interaction and how can they be used for design critique within an interaction design practice [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]