Interactionary puts Design Teams through RFID Challenge

The Interactionary – a live design challenge, conducted by volunteer teams who are given a previously unknown design problem to work through and solve in public - shared the forty-sixth AIGA Experience Design London meeting with the more usual themed talks. Following presentations from Martin Swerdlow of Integrated Product Intelligence Ltd and Gill Wildman of Plot (see UN story: Radio Frequency Identification Tags need Design Space), four teams competed to design a use for the technology in the context of a doctor's waiting room.

The teams – each of four people - were given 30 minutes thinking and working time to solve the same interaction design problem. Each team then had 5 minutes to present their solution and the thinking behind it, in two sections – process and product. A panel of judges, including Swerdlow and Wildman, went on to critique their approach and choose the most successful, and the audience was also invited to judge which solution they considered the most interesting.

Teams formed for the challenge came from two companies: Flow Interactive and Framfab, and two sets of independents: The Indies, mostly drawn from BBC New Media, and Team One, a genuinely disparate grouping of freelancers. Working with flipcharts and the information given them earlier in the evening, they exposed their thinking to the rest of the night's audience who were free to wander between them.

Interactionaries have a short history – having formally been launched at CHI 2001 to expose how designers solve problems. The first of these lasted half a day. The judges acknowledged that half an hour was a particularly tight schedule and eliminated room for exploring the design space, although this was the stated aim of the evening, in that RFID's potential 'is barely understood'.

Nonetheless, fun was had by all. And three teams left commended for their efforts. Framfab, who failed to report on process, walked away with the 'Product' award, having offered 'a balanced approach to the whole system'. The Indies, who managed their time well – the only group to work to a schedule of understanding, producing a problem statement and then developing solutions – came out with the judges' 'Process' award. And Flow Interactive, whose focus, understandably, was user-centred design, since they specialise in this aspect of usability work, left having come first in the audience vote as 'Popular Choice', with The Indies close behind.

Team One, which had the least coherent offering, was also the group with least common ground and, within the timeframe, had little chance to develop a working style.

Overall though, Swerdlow was impressed: 'If you add up the cumulative turnover of the companies in this area, we have got further than they have in a couple of years in identifying new opportunities for products and services based on RFID. They could take a leaf out of our books in terms of thinking laterally.'

As an exercise, people agreed, it was interesting but flawed. The brief was complex, the success criteria were ill-defined and the time was tight. If we are really to learn from each other about process, which is what such a challenge offers the potential to do, we should be running such events regularly, perhaps with greater attention to detail and the luxury of more time. Anyway, Nico Macdonald, AIGA London convenor, should be commended for such a bold piece of programming – not ideal in a short evening meeting, but nonetheless well outside the comfortable routine of just thinking, not doing.

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