One of the best presentations of Lift08 was by Robin Hunicke, a games designer at Electronic Arts. A wonderful speech with similarly wonderful hand drawn sketches on the slides. One of her main points was to explain an important point with game design – to set the player in focus and make him or her achieve things and feel important. She then expanded on this and explained why i e Facebook in this sense was a game that made you feel like you lived a fun life with a lot of friends who you recognize you. (See Bernhard Schindlholzer’s blog post on the subject)
This is a terrific perspective and because she used this simple and generic model for design it changed my view on interaction design in particular, but also on design in general.
Why doesn’t more designers have this perspective when designing complex things? I agree that it is maybe a bit harder to have the goal to make users of a glass or a knife to feel like he or she is in focus and have achieved something. Or is it…?
Today we are in the middle of the inflection point of an computer interface and sensor revolution. When computers become small and cheap enough and also get sensors that make them see and hear, more and more things will have computers, sensors and communication built in to them. The emergence of intelligence in everyday things will be an interesting design challenge. In short almost all things around us are going to be designed by what we today call interaction designers.
This made me see a future where many more things in our environment will be designed to make us feel important, achieving and joyful.
As a forecaster I can’t help thinking about the uncertainties in this as well. Are we really going to feel important when all our things are trying to invade our personal sphere? Probably not, but some things may succeed. One potential is artifacts that are alone having a relation to a person, like personal computers or other personal information devices. Or cars or other forms of personal vehicles.
And maybe not a single fork or spoon can make us feel us in focus and reward us for making a wonderful dinner table, but all the dinner tools on concert maybe can?
I think one thing is clear. In the next decades we will see many attempts of intrusive design which will compete with what designers of games and social software are competing with today: making is feeling important, achieving and liked. And sensors and computers are going to play a part in it!
See Robin’s presentation here
