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Last week I had the opportunity to talk about Origami and visual thinking to a great crowd of VizThinkers. Liquidnet gave us a great spot, and the VizThink team brought a great crowd. Dean Meyers took some great shots of the event, some of which I’ve used below. You can find the rest here.

I really enjoyed seeing everyone with a rabbit at the end of the class and some lovely diagrams to take home. If anyone tries to fold from their diagrams…I’d love to hear about the results!

I’ve given versions of this workshop before – to a general audience, to designers and it’s been really interesting to hear how the Visual Communication crowd received it. I think there was some hesitation – it would surely be a fun evening…but would they learn anything about their own craft from mine? Does origami have anything to do with visual thinking?!

Dean’s comment about key frames really consolidated my point of view – it brings together Scott McCloud’s concepts of “blood in the gutter”:

with Leonardo DaVinci’s concept of “show and tell”…If you try to show all or tell all, it’s too much work. Show and Tell – pictures and words together – is magic!

I’d like to just take a minute and give praise where praise is due. I was really gratified with the comments from a few participants about my teaching skills. I mentioned this in the class, but I learned from the best. I’m just following in Michael Shall’s footsteps! The fact that any of us knows about origami at all is largely due to his tireless efforts to spread the joy of folding. I learned how to teach watching him wrangle a classroom of New York inner-city kids into origami masters! Read his obituary here…it’s hard to believe it’s been so long since he’s passed – I’ve lived longer without him than I did with him, but what he’s taught me has never left! I’m really lucky to have so many opportunities to give it back.

Today I ran into the Souvenirs From The Internet project and it’s awesome facebook pillows and internet commemorative plates.

There is a certain delight in the macabre nature of these objects…having a plate celebrating viral videos or the shitty buildings that house mega-internet companies is insane and hilarious. But the desire is a real movement, I think…the timeline on facebook is a new way to take this stream of data (relentless and flowing) and make it into an object – my timeline has a beginning (my birth) and a growing end (the present time).

Apps like Social Memories take facebook detritus and turns it into gold – infographics, photos and posts immortalized in a book form…Seeing one in person is amazing. And it takes very little effort to do. A friend of mine did this the hard way – taking a year of conversations and stories and notes and turning it into a 400 page book of amazement.

On the flip side is the Cloud printer from Berg..it can keep up with the daily detritus and attempts to make it more tanigible…if not permanent and memorable.

So…on the Buildable-Desirable-Profitable Venn space…the plates are the most awesome to me, since they are desirable…but not very buildable. In their current form they are hand painted and craft-y…which is what makes them delightful. The books, pillows…they are similar in some ways to the Berg printer…but they are static and timeless…they preserve something. They are nostalgic in the way they freeze electronic memories in atom form. The Printer is a very conventional product in that way – focused on the now, on desire, on moving forward.

What’s next?

I really enjoyed this post from Fantasy Interactive’s UX director Irene Pereyra.

She talks about 10 steps that help create an engaging user experience.

4. Forget about Nancy, think user types

Personas are vital when it comes to structuring the content. Look at all the content holistically and think about what people are trying to accomplish. Doing this helps prioritise the content and allows the site to be structured around the user’s goals. But traditional personas – “Nancy, who is 28-35 years old, drives an economy car, has a four-year-old PC she primarily uses for email, earns between $30K-$50K a year and wants to comparison shop for a cheap airfare to visit her mother in Florida” – won’t offer much insight into the user’s actual behaviour.

Instead, group basic User Types into categories according to what they want to do on the site such as “browsing,” “comparison shopping,” “killing time,” “looking for specific content.” These groupings will provide you with much more useful insights about why users come to sites or applications, the context of use (where and how), what content they’re seeking and how much time they have. In turn, you’ll be better equipped to design the website or application around their behaviour patterns, thus making their fictional names, ages, professions and income levels irrelevant.

Number four is spot on…a persona is just data, not knowledge and certainly not a path to action. We always need to create a scaffold for the data to make sense…but more importantly, I enjoy highlighting the dynamic tension *between* user types. Even a crap-tastic diagram like the one below can help us have a really important conversation – what types of actions are we going to enable? How to we manage the tension between single and multi-functional needs? Maybe I just like diagrams, but I feel like we always have to make the leap from Personas to Persona-archetypes…and then to a diagram that shows how these archetypes relate or oppose each other.

Then, like in any good story, we can find a way to relieve the dynamic tension between these types.

So last night I went to go see Eames: The Architect and the Painter at the IFC center. Tonight is the last night to see it. You should go.

The movie was an amazing portrait of some amazing lives and an amazing time in our history.The Eames managed to take commercial success in mass produced chairs and become storytellers, movie producers and toy makers. Today we think nothing of such things – the multidisciplinary studio concept is now well established – you can make silverware and movies and ads and buildings if you can get away with it…

The power of the collaboration between Ray and Charles is pretty amazing…I think the question of “who did what” is irrelevant once you look at how detail oriented, precise and deep Ray was…and I really have to admit that I didn’t know much about her contribution at all. It’s clear that none of it would have happened if they weren’t together.

One of the most poignant moments for me was the description of how Eames managed his relationships with IBM, Kodak and other such industry giants – directly with the CEOs, with a handshake. No contracts, no alignment meetings, no midphase revisions…none of the trappings of working with corporate America today – subcommittees, senior directors…many layers to get to the people who have the power to say yes, many layers that dilute and diffuse the power of an idea. I was left feeling reminiscent for something I’d never had!

I could say more…but I won’t. Just go get a ticket.

I had a lovely time last night teaching origami to the drunken design crowd that filtered through the Phaidon Bookstore. You can tell from the photo above that we had some design people on hand – look at that color selection on the trees!

With a large, loud space and three tables full of people, regular teaching would not work…I needed to get people collaborating. After teaching a few simple models, I got people to make Sonobe units. Some resources on how to make them are here and here.

Each table became a collaborative factory, churning out units to make cubes, octahedrons and dodecahedrons! And as more people showed up, people taught each other…which is awesome for retention.

Look how organized and color coordinated this crowd is!

So…yeah. That was awesome.

Thanks to everyone who came out to drink and fold!

As my dear friend Kenzan once said, the internet can get you into trouble, but it can’t get you out of it….this is a tale of how that almost became true.

I had thought about rooting my HTC Incredible for a while…for one, the free WiFi tethering is awesome. The other was just to be geeky about things. Eventually, changing my phone interface became easy. Changing the interface made me pay more attention to the variations, subtleties and possibilities for a mobile interface. All too often, I think we design what we know or what we expect. If everyone on a team is an Apple person there is a tacit assumption about the “right” way to do things. On android, playing with CyanogenMod and MIUI opened my eyes.

The real reason I started, though, was that my phone started to act up…it told me it was running out of space, even though it wasn’t…and made it hard to do basic things. It stopped checking mail, it wouldn’t sync things…it sucked. I threw it back to the factory settings, but it seemed to happen over again. So, as a long-time windows person, I thought I would just reinstall a fresh OS…that usually does the trick. But I realized – if I’m going to loose all my apps again, why not root the phone and have some fun? And a new ROM might resolve the issues. Maybe it was the boggy HTC sense running on my Incredible that was the real problem.

As I was saying…the internet can get you into trouble, but not out. Lifehacker has an awesome, always up to date guide for rooting your android device. Phones run on file systems called ROMs. You flash new ROMs and you have a new phone!

It was pretty straightforward indeed…and in a few hours, I was up and running CyanogenMOD, digging the red-tinged screen mode I could turn on and off for night vision, the better facebook app I could now install, the WiFi tethering.

But at some point, I got bored…and installed MIUI. Sleek, iPhone-esque and very, very customizable, I became enamored of the drop-down drawer that allowed me to turn my WiFi, 3G and sync on and off constantly, to help save battery life. I was also able to replace icons easily, and still had access to apps that others who were unrooted couldn’t – my friend Miles couldn’t seem to get the GoTo Meeting app I downloaded…which made it easy to call in AND see a presentation, all on my phone. sick!

But all was not well…things started to crash unexpectedly. Everything. Gmail. SMS. Maps. Fuck. This was not good. I rebooted, factory-freshed the thing…sometimes it made a difference for a while. Sometimes the app that helped me install new ROMS would crash. That made the process impossible.

I finally decided to wipe the UI again and install a fresh ROM…but I goofed. The version of Cyanogen I installed didn’t have google apps installed – no gmail, no android market. I had downloaded the Google Apps package, but the installer failed. I couldn’t update the app that was supposed to backup my ROMS and install fresh ones. I was dead in the water. My phone was worse than a brick…it was a lame duck. The ROM manager that was supposed to help me go back to a safe system kept crashing or hanging when I tried to install my backups. Why was Clockwork MOD failing? The internet failed to give me a fix!

The Internet got me into this mess. I turned to the internet to get me out of my mess. What about unrooting the phone? It turns out, that is possible, but harder than rooting. I tried this method…you install a zip file on your SD card and reboot into safe mode…but the file wouldn’t unpack. I tried this several times. In anticipation of this working, I had to download a set of Android SDK files, set up a protocol call ADB on my laptop and created a file structure on my laptop that I would flash onto the phone. But no dice.

I had a very painful evening out with no phone numbers and no maps! I went back to the old days of making little post-it maps of streets I was heading to if I didn’t know where they were and dashing down phone numbers to be able to connect to people. Without google apps, my contacts wouldn’t sync, obviously. I even went into the Verizon store, considering a new phone over trying ceaselessly and fruitlessly to revive my phone. I hated all of them. Android phones seem to have gone blobby. Also, I didn’t want to spend $300.

Then I discovered that there was a software solution to the problem of laptop-to-phone flashing that should be easier than the method I was trying. RUU flashing involves a software package that connects to your phone and, in about 10 minutes, returns it to a stock ROM. It seemed straightforward. I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. The classic conundrum of the semi-technical, I encountered a series of error codes, the first was about USB connectivity. It wouldn’t see the HTC phone. In a shot of insight, I downloaded the HTC sync software package to allow my laptop to see the phone, not as a USB device, but as an HTC phone. Then I got an error code about battery life – it thought I was at 30% when I was at 90%. How to fix that? Restart and pray.

In the end, it worked….10 minutes later, I was watching the droid splash screen and the HTC sense startup. 5 minutes after that, I was surfing the net.

I may wait a few days or weeks…but I will root again. I will soon miss the MIUI tweaks, the tethering, the freedom. I will get myself into more trouble and get out of it again.

Today I had the pleasure of working with a team of Designers at Moment for a fun lunchtime session of Origami and Origami Diagramming.

This session seems to have built on last night’s lecture at Pivotal Labs, hosted by Anders Ramsay, where designers from Pivotal and Moment showed how they wireframe in Adobe Illustrator. What’s cool about origami diagramming is that it puts into sharp relief the idea of describing a dynamic process using static images. My theoretical basis for describing this process comes directly from Scott McCloud:

It’s all about the blood in the gutter. There is action shown, and action implied. The more explicit we make the story, the less interesting it is…but it becomes more informative. Making exhaustive, explicit wires is exhausting. There were plenty of comments as we went thorough the session about the challenges of describing interstitial states…as well as showing the results of actions and the next actions overlaid together. Smushing too much information into one panel defeats the purpose of making a coherent document. Spreading it all out makes it incomprehensible. Finding the balance is the art…

At the end of the day, my goal in teaching origami and diagramming together is twofold:

1. People should have a record of the model so they can do it again, or teach others.

2. It’s fun and a great way to think about UX documents.

What we learned last night at Pivotal is that there are pain points in the process when we increase the fidelity of the documents or change tools or change people.

Hand sketching, as we did in this session, can make you a bit lazier when more complex diagrams are called for – recreating complex details over and over again gets to be a pain…but it’s warmer and more inviting than a computer sketch. As we increase in fidelity, and have iterations…the documents become chaotic and difficult to wrangle. The tool we start with isn’t always the tool we finish with. Going back and forth between Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign is a hassle…especially when, in the Agile world, the software should really become the document. In the case of origami, it’s just about getting the folder to the finish line. Making the most lovely diagrams is awesome…but just creating a set of mnemonics for oneself is sufficient in many cases.

At the end of the day, everyone had some lovely blow-up bunnies and flying birds…photo set of their work to come!

Tomorrow, in a few hours, I’ll show a few slides to the audience at urfriday.com/, which should be pretty awesome. Thanks to Bolt Peters for putting this all together!

On my way home, slightly buzzed from an excellent party at www.momentnyc.com/, I thought: “I should just post my talk and write out what it’s all about…right now”

So I am.

At the end of the day, creating a new product experience out of thin air is a huge effort. Vasty resources must be marshaled over an expanse of time in order to hew iron and magnesium, silicon and gold and petrochemicals into a working machine that, in the hands of a person, works and breathes and lives. A washing machine is the tip of a huge iceberg of commerce and industry. So it’s no wonder that it can take a while to get a product to market

Interaction design has its own parameters: Computers and handset devices are already distributed widely. A broad network already exists for a programmer/designer to float their ideas out onto the world. Ironically, so much work has already been done by designers and engineers, so much road has been laid, that interaction design can run far and fast! We all stand on the shoulders of giants, really.

A device is a combination of an Interface and it’s Oobject embodiment, the people who use it and the context in which they do so. In Science, when we have a multivariate problem it sometimes helps to fix a variable or two while you fiddle with some others. If you change everything at once, it’s hard to know what’s happening. What causes what? Of course, that is Abductive thinking, which we excel at.

Nevertheless…it’s best to try a simple model with a simple interface, with the right people, to get an idea if you’re headed in the right direction. Mock it up before you Fock it up, as my old professor Bruce Hannah would say.

So that’s what the talk is about, I think…mix up your fidelity…make some toys and share them. I think of the prototype interfaces I make as thought experiments…or probing for failure.

Once it seems like the user experience, the ID and IxD are on the right track, then I think it’s reasonable to increase the fidelity of the parts in parallel, coming back together periodically to mesh them. There’s always a give and take…ID might push for an interaction that messes with IxD’s wires and system maps…even eliminating some of them. The same can happen the other way around – IxD can push for a more unified solution. The question we always have to answer is, “why can’t I just use my phone?”…and you’d better have a good answer. Because there’s an app for that.

Then there’s the flip side. When something is just plain cool. We do it because we can. These days, I’m doing some very, very interesting work.Transparent touch interfaces at place called while Infusion. In such cases, user testing seems irrelevant. It works and it’s awesome.

Well, we did it again. It was kind of a Voltron moment: Katie Koch, Peter Knocke, Miles Begin, Jason Wisdom and I came together and led about 30 NYU Stern students through a business-focused design workshop class!

Brian Ng and Sarah Lee from NYU Net Impact worked with us closely to help make sure we would deliver a workshop that could meet the needs of their audience and stretch their imaginations, too! I’m super pleased that we left people wanting more.

A special thanks goes to our special guests – NYU alums Rosalyn Savarimuthu and Eliot Pierce!

For those who took the Stern Workshop, the slides above will look familiar. If you want to see the slides we show when we have a bit more time (as well as an awesome movie!), check out my post here.

Please send me your pics and videos to my gmail address and I will aggregate them in a future post!

After having heard Negroponte speak, I have really mixed feelings about the project. On the one hand…it’s an amazing accomplishment – I hope to do as much as he has to move the dial forward. He’s put the tools of technology in the hands of millions of kids at the lowest costs possible. He shared some early models and sketches, and the development of the project is an exciting thing to behold. The crank – why did it go? Kids spend as much energy pressing down on the laptop as they do cranking – so it’s a waste of effort. Plus…that thing was going to break! So it’s clearly well designed from an ID and UI standpoint. No one can argue that.

But just this week, the New York Times wrote about how s