Last Monday, I attended an IxDA event at the Adaptive Path studios. The talk, “Herding Cats and Taming Lions,” was given by Jon Littell, a user experience director from Hot Studios. I had no clear expectation of what I was to hear, and so with an open mind. The event was great, with a pleasant pre-presentation meet & greet period, and great turn out. Also, the cheese and crackers were dee-lish.

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.

Of all the speakers featured at DUX, there was one who stood out among them all: Thomas de Zengotita. This is not a slight to the other speakers, as there were a number of outstanding addresses. But de Zegotita’s talk was fascinating in content, delivery, and style. Neither doctoral candidate nor corporate researcher, rather a crotchety professor who delivered his talk without aid of a slide show or other visuals. This alone made him stand out. But more meaningfully, he was able to take many of the disparate ideas we’d been exposed to over the prior three days and synthesize them into a coherent and compelling narrative. Here is my take on his lecture:

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.

Apple vs LG phone catalog, from Superlocal.

My iPod rough patch

I recently hit a rough patch with my iPods: first I lost my Gen2 nano. Then while using my iPod video on the treadmill, the earbud wire got caught on me and flung my iPod to the ground. Luckily the iSkin saved it from a fatal blow, but it does appear to be a little less stable than it once was. At the same time, my earbuds got munched in the treadmill. So I have been running and working out without my music for a couple of weeks now (an awful thing, right?), and clearly am in need of a replacement iPod to accompany me on my workouts and commutes.

The Replacements

Thus, recently I made a trip to my local Apple store to behold, caress, and otherwise inspect the new iPods (nano, classic, and touch versions) to determine their appeal and possibly buy one. I have to say that I was, if not disappointed, underwhelmed.

The classic holds essentially no appeal due to the fact I already have a 30gb iPod that looks almost identical. Yes, a 160gb drive sounds nice but aside from use as data storage, not really something I need at the moment. The touch is a different story: so similar to the iPhone, but without the AT&T contract. This feature is, at once, attractive and repellent, since the lack of cell service frees you of your monthly $70 bill, but then again without cellular internet access the novelty and utility of the device is radically diminished.

Which, appropriately, leaves me with the nano as my contender. I have been a huge fan of its preceding generations, all the way back to the iPod mini, and have owned both mini and nano gen 1 and gen 2 models. But the new one leaves me cold. The form factor lacks the slick appeal of its ancestors, the screen is bigger but not for any practical purpose, and the interface has added silly superfluous background images – for no apparent reason.

I think Apple faced a dilemma with the new nano: the screen had to be bigger, but (for some reason) could not mimic the touchscreen of its more expensive brethren. So a clickwheel (and thus the space to house it) was required on the face of the machine, effectively defining the new form.

A better idea

After spending some time dealing with my disappointment and alternative solutions (I am going to buy a last-gen nano!) I think I’ve come upon a novel design solution that would at once a) push the iPod design envelope further ahead; b) allow the wow/sexy factor of a larger screen and slick proportions and c) avoid the cost and hassle of a touchscreen device.

A superior design would be to place the clickwheel on the back of the iPod, leaving the front surface to house only a large, 3″ diagonal widescreen. The clickwheel, housed on the rear surface, would appear and function like it always has, but when being used an overlay image would appear on the screen, to facilitate ease of ‘blind’ usage. That is, you hold the device in your hand but caress the back of it to manipulate the menus and functional navigation.

Bang! There you have it: a radical evolution of the clickwheel, a sexy new form factor that bears a family resemblance to the the big daddy iPhone, and a compact, must-have device that retains the ease of use iPods have always been known for.

What do you think?