DIS2002: Bill Moggridge of IDEO presents User-Centred Design at One Remove

It was a fascinating tour through the history of interactive design that Bill Moggridge of IDEO gave delegates at the opening of the 'Designing Interactive Systems 2002' conference, as he showed video clips of other prestigious designers.

Saying very little, but letting his editing of the footage do most of the work, Moggridge gave a presentation to explore where interactive design had come from and where he hoped it was going.

Starting with Stu Card, who was the 'supporting science' for the development of the mouse in the 70s, the conference heard how it was sold to the rest of the team as the 'optimal' device, allowing users to work as fast as their hand and wrist could co-ordinate. But, Card said, this working speed could have been doubled by an input device that used the fingers instead or another part with a large area of the cortex devoted to it, such as the tongue.

Next he showed Bill Verplank of Stanford and DIS2002 co-chair being interviewed about paradigms in computing. Verplank looked through historical metaphors for viewing the computer:
* as a person - smart and creative;
* as a tool - useful and able to directly manipulate data;
* as media - expressive and compelling;
before regarding it also as vehicle and clothing. By exploring the different paradigms he was able to show how linking them could make for meaningful interactivity, or a less interactive but emotional experience.

Brenda Laurel followed and her theme was 'Playing'. 'Games led interaction design,' she said, discussing how the freedom of players to adopt roles within a game situation could allow them to assume relevant abilities that the set-up of ordinary work, such as with a spreadsheet, never will.

She advocated 'monkeying around in the lives of characters' as a way of sustaining interest. The theme was picked up by Sims developer Will Wright, who regards his creations as the stuff of hobbies. In this way, commented Moggridge, play and enactment become integral to the design process: loops of interaction form the basis of entertainment as players progress by finding and moving on to the next step.

Other interviews included Rob Haitani, who developed the Palm OS. He argued that in an interface so small, consistency has to be sacrificed to 'doing the right thing first time'. This, he said, was putting things you do frequently on the desktop and not hiding them in drawers. 'Some decisions bubble to the top' he told delegates as he explained why adding addresses and removing them were not in the same place - we do the former far more often than the latter.

The pair of designers behind Google were also featured, talking about search and their simple interface: 'I just put the button up there,' said Sergey Brin. 'People don't want to spend a lot of time looking for the search box.' Subsequently they took even more off the home page to keep the clutter to a minimum.

And Takeshi Natsumo explained the challenge he overcame to create the success of i-mode in Japan: 'It's an internet way of thinking, rather than a telecom way of thinking', he said, detailing the interface design and supplier support for the service that one in four Japanese now use.

The last two interviews were on the subject of tangible interfaces and looked to the future. Durrell Bishop of IDEO talked about connecting physical things to virtual files so that digital material could be moved about in a 'small plastic object', while Hiroshi Ishii of MIT showed how tangible interfaces fed into the information/computation function of the system to become intangible representations.

Although each video snippet was brief, the overall impression was of a rich tradition of creativity using people's interests and abilities as a basic stimulus; a tradition that is continuing.

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