Great design is intuitive. Great design eliminates confusion. But not for everyone, not all the time. The words and interactions you use often have a sophistication that will confuse some portion of your audience.

One  of the constant tensions I deal with, as a designer for a corporate behemoth, is my innate desire to push boundaries vs. the common-sense practicality that rules our culture. Of course, we do take chances on occasion, but the bulk of our daily work is spent making incremental changes. Add a link. Refine the masthead. Remove a disclaimer. … Et cetera.

When projects of a grander scale do arise, there is often a broad sense of wonderment. But inevitably, at some point, novel design conepts are watered down. Could be at the governance review, could be after a usability assesment, or maybe the product manager is concerned that users wont ‘get’ the new features.

Sometimes, though, isn’t that a good sign? Think back years ago, to the first time you rode a bike. It was hard. It took lots of failure before you figured it out. But then, the magical moment occurred, and BLAU! you were riding your bike. And how terrific bicycles are: a place for all your extremities, a place to sit, and never in need of refueling. But. It was hard to get going.

Good designs can be a challenge at first. Heck, I have had to learn how to use my new iPhone. But once you get to understand how to use your contact list, or to save photos to the phone, it is a snap.

In other words, it is ok to have a learning curve. It is ok if not everybody can use an interface flawlessly, immediately. Yes, you may loose a few users. But if the design functions intuitively and easily for most of your audience, then you are creating a great experience for those users. When we dumb things down, or design for the ‘LCD‘ as we used to say, you often lose the magic and fun of a great new design.

Some of the features shown, such as browser-integrated text/IM capability, shared desktop functions, and the nifty wheel menu, seem like they could be added to a standard browser in the near term.

Other features, like the chart-remixing, and history clouds with smart grouping, probably would require some signifigant planning for a common coding framework, plus massive processor power. But they are far from science fiction.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Overall, a ton of great ideas brought to bear in this video. Major kudos to Adaptive Path for their work on Aurora. Wow, wouldn’t it be fun to work on wild conceptual projects like this? A man can dream….

After watching the WWDC keynote, however, I have a profound feeling that this time is different. What Apple has wrought with the new iPhone SDK, iPhone 3G, and MobileMe seems clearly to be a momentous, singular shift in the technology continuum. This, my friends, is a game-changer.

The wicked, once-mythological concoction of real mobile Internet access, location-based functionality (especially GPS mapping), multi-device synching, and an open development platform into one easy-to-use handheld device inexorably alters – accelerates – our technological trajectory. Many ideas once written off as pie-in-the-sky sci-fi are now, literally, within our grasp.

Family functions, friendships, work environments, education, exercise routines, hospitals, doctor visits, game-play, shopping, socializing, – everything - is going to change, and not in some theoretical distant future, but right before our very eyes, starting next month.

Video of the eye-popping MIMVista app:

Littell brings his background in Psychology studies to bear in his approaches to facilitating, and proved to be a great presenter, offering a wealth of psychological concepts that can be tapped to understand individuals and get the most out of people who are taking part in group brainstorming.

A couple of key concepts that I was able to retain include the notion that any facilitator must enable participants to express themselves in a way that is in line with their own needs. Using personality type maps, Littell pointed out that people are motivated by- and like to express themselves in different ways. I’ve been part of many brainstorming groups and I will say that the quality of the facilitator is usually essential to extracting the value hidden within the hearts and minds of the brain stormers.

He highlighted the efforts of an outfit call The Grove, a band of consultants who practice a method called ‘graphic facilitation’; roughly, a way to guide conversations using visual cues and mapping to capture ideas and propel the collective thought processes. Also of note is the de Bono Hat concept, also conceived as a means to enhance the thought process, but more specifically a method to describe unique psychographic profiles that then may be adopted by individuals or groups as they engage in disucssions.

My descriptions above are clearly inadequate in their attempts to capture Littell’s presentation, but the larger point remains: the IxDA hosts terrific events that draw a group of talented designers and terrific speakers. People pay thousands of dollars to attend ‘conferences’ that contain lots of the kind of ideas that you can find in talks like this, for free.

Living in a Mediated World

The fundamental premise of his talk was our existence in a mediated world (”a web of preferences that both vies for our attention through shameless flattery and offers us the opportunity to construct identities based on what we buy”) and how that affects how we see ourselves and thus everything else that we do. De Zengotita argues that the written word is the foundation of this mediated world. It was, he says, the act of reading and writing that enabled individuals’ sense of autonomy, of freedom within one’s own mind.

The growth of that seed into our universe of signage, individualism, consumption, and – of course – media of all sorts has given rise to our modern Celebrity Society, a world where one thing we (as spectators) share is our awareness of celebrities.

But now, with the rise of social media, that paradigm is morphing again. Look around you: We are all staging our own lives with ourselves as the star. This is manifested in many ways: In video games, where the player is the star and spectator at the same time; On the social web, with our own web pages that celebrate everybody – and our circles of friends; through blogs, YouTube videos, and a seemingly endless stream of new technology.

The Flattered Self

Our mediated world has birthed the rise of the Flattered Self – an entire culture dedicated to inciting and then placating the desires and ears of the individual ego. Advertisements, entertainment, friendships and even jobs must somehow address our unique needs.

De Zengotita asserts that representations of all kinds, by their nature, address our egos. Signs tell you where you are and how to get where you want to go. Advertisements register with our emotionally. Even your co-worker’s comment on your Facebook photo serves this paradigm. But it can be overwhelming.

Of course, we can’t all be celebrities, can we? In the mediated age, attention is the only scarce resource. So it becomes necessary to filter the tidal wave of information and representations. And our media consumption technology is serving this need – email, iPods, Tivo, and RSS all help us control our media intake. Here de Zengotita acknowledged David Peskovitz’s concept of sipping from the Information Firehose.

The Age of Fusion

Now that we have achieved nearly absolute control over the content, style, and timing of what we consume, where do we go? More personalization. We are now in the Age of Fusion. From remixes to mashups, genre bending rules. But why? Because everyone is making stuff out of what is around them., and all creators are looking for some way to be original.

So even creation is mediated. But haven’t things always been mediated? That is, even language itself is a medium. Perhaps. But the sheer quantity, quality, and ubiquity of media is now so awesome as to be inescapable. It was only in the 60’s, de Zengotita says, that realizing that everything is mediated became common sense. This an extremely subtle, but radical distinction.

Extreme modern examples of both the Age of Fusion and a Mediated world include transgenderism and body modification. The reality that even the most basic building blocks of identity and even physical being can be mediated, altered, and ultimately determined by the individual is a profound shift in which we have taken the first steps toward replacing God with ourselves.

Conclusion

It is overly ambitious, I think, to attempt to summarize this broad-reaching lecture. But I did take away several key ideas:

• A Mediated World: Any attempt to understand modern design, culture, or media must first adopt the Mediated frame. That is being self-aware of our environment as largely, if not completely, filtered.
• Celebrity Society: is both an outgrowth and driver of the modern individual’s need to feel recognized, flattered, and celebrated.
• Age of Fusion: media, cultures, and individuals are no longer bound by predetermined limitations. With modern design culture, the means of production have fallen into the hands of the workers, who now posses the power to mold media, society, and self.

Taking Stock

It’s been a few days since DUX 2007 ended and I have spent some time thinking about the event, reviewing my notes, letting the deep thoughts marinate. Overall it was a terrific conference, easily the best one I have attended. It was not without flaw, but taken on the whole I have no doubt that it was time and (corporate) money well spent.

Frankly, a major appeal of this year’s DUX was the location: Chicago. This is one of those self-fulfilling prophecy sorts of things, I imagine. By holding the event in such a central and desirable location, the organizers attracted more and better speakers. This pays dividends to the attendees, but on the other hand Chicago is an expensive city.

DUX Presentations: A mixed bag.

I was fortunate to attend the Monday tutorial by Kevin Brooks: Storytelling in business presentation and design. (I will share some of what I learned in a later post). For me it was a terrific way to start the event. It was a storytelling workshop, in effect, and though the focus on applicability to business presentations was minor, Brooks’ teaching style, the smallish class size, and the half-day format all contributed to a terrific start to DUX.

With the Tutorials portion occupying most of Monday, the main event started at 4:15pm with a semi-random series of talks that were a good preview of the mix of style and substance that we’d witness during the following two days. Some talks were overly academic, pie-in-the-sky experiments, others were visionary and conceptual. Some straddled the boundary between academia and practice.

Simplicity & The Information Firehose

There were two standout presentations from the first group. First, BJ Fogg’s video-delivered examination of Simplicity. He is working to develop definable measurements of simplicity, and with a few clear statements, helped the audience grasp his work. It was a fun, engaging, effective and enlightening presentation, and the only one delivered solely via video.

David Pescovitz‘ presentation on Sipping from the Information Firehose was an entertaining and exuberant look at how technology can help us sift through the age of zillionics and access relevant and meaningful information. One example: Picture yourself walking through downtown, while a digital readout projected inside the lens of your glasses, shows information such as your current location, instant access to customer reviews of a restaurant you are looking at, or real-time information on physical presence of people in your social network.

On the other hand, some of the talks were all but indecipherable. I foumd it difficult to cull the meaning behind or application of the SpiderCrab, Bi-Polar Laddering (?) and AnyPhone studies. These talks, however, offered a taste of the more eccentric* elements of the conference that we would be fed over the following two days. They were academic and experiemental in nature, like many others at the conference. And I was lost.

Overall

The conference was dense with fascinating peeks into emerging concepts, novel studies of human behavior impacted by technology, and glimpses into technologies that lay just around the proverbial corner.

The high concentration of dissertations and presentations of findings lent the event an overly-academic focus, but on the bright side this kept it from being a collection of predictions and product previews of private-beta social apps.

Regardless of particular subject matter, I was disappointed by the some of the speakers, many of whom appeared to be delivering oral versions of their findings papers. The accompanying PowerPoint prezos, collections of bullet points projected and then read to the audience, were often sleep inducing.

Meanwhile, many in the audience were busy multitasking. I took notes in my new Moleskine, thoughtfully provided in the conference welcome pack. But anyone with a BlackBerry, iPhone or laptop was reading, posting, texting, and emailing, or generally busy doing anything but listening attentively.

A major disappointment was the lack of actual social media interaction for the event. There was no official blog, no DUX twitter, no live online question submission tool, no speaker ratings or feedback mechanism. I have no doubt that any – or preferably all – of these types of tools would have kept the audience more engaged.

Wait, there’s more!

The conference was so full of new ideas and great speakers. Over the next week or so, I will post additional entries on DUX, focusing on particular talks and themes that emerged from the conference.