..:: belblog ::..

…The third day starts to be repetitive,

The morning session started with the keynote from Kun-Pyo Lee from Kiast on Culture-centered Interaction Design.
He introduced the issue of cultural differences through a set of fun and inspiring images like the ones used in 2005 by HSBC in their ad campaigns.

“in cultural issues, there’s no right or wrong, there are only differences”.

Then, he went through all the typical levels of knowledge of any given experience and product, using an iceberg picture (10/90)…

1. the visible / objective
2. the subjective / hard to find
3. the subconscious / taken for granted

He also pointed out the missconception between Culture and Tradition,
saying that culture is something dynamic and designers should avoid tradition/past when designing…

Next > I had hight expectations for a talk titled “Developing and Testing a Methodology for Designing for Intuitive Interaction“… but what I got was a superfluous talk on how a team developed during 2 years a method to design intuitive interacitons like putting ATM-like buttons on a microwave…
And they tested it and the conclusion was that the tool to make intuitive and usable interfaces was, in fact, difficult to use… The ironic point is that they tested the tool using a “old school” questionnaire among “only” 17 people…..

Next > Yankee Lee form RCA talked about “Designer’s Social Responsibility” and exposed 3 new roles for the design professional:

1. design educator (develop tools for non-designers)
2. design facilitator (help people/communities design)
3. design generator (knowledge transfer)

Next > have you heard of BOP?
yes, you gessed it right, it is the Base Of the Pyramid,
A talk from a guy from TuDelft showed us some examples of it. (It reminded me the “design for the other 90%” exhibition)…

…Nothing new, he just spread that message “hey, is not only that those poor people need design, we can do it and make profit!”
I was expecting something more deep, sincerely. bad face for TuDelft

Next > The afternoon keynote speaker, Kees Dorst, with his talk on “Patterns & Methods in Design” came to say that design research academia are missing the point only focusing on methods, because methods are part of “process”, and process is only a part of the whole “design”.
Somehow he got it right, I agree on that.
But then, he continued describing the “profession”, by talking about design expertise and design practice…

Here I felt a bit disappointed.. I could take his talk and substitute the workd “designer” for “plumber” and it would make 100% sense… (you can try it in the above slide)
…so I think it was too generalist and not adding knowledge to the pool.

Next > I closed the day by listening to Jasper van Kuijk talking about “After sales information as feedback” (aka: customer service with a twist)
The main point is to enable/embed feedback and tracking channels for users to communicate their likes and dislikes of a given product to the manufacturer. (yes, like that annoying windows pop up), but with in a wide range of consumer electronics. They even mentioned to put a kind of “Black Box” into the devices so the company can “track” what the user is doing at any time… Hey Big Brother, that’s for you!

Today’s learning:

Korea is doing great in Design Research,
Designers need to reinvent themselves (again)

The talk I deliberately skipped:

“A Comparison on Circle-drawing Tasks between the Non-sighted People”

day 1 / day 2 / day 3 / day 4

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under articles, design, ☼. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.