Hand drawn more human?
I spent last night at a lecture organized by San Francisco BayCHI, hosted by PARC down in Palo Alto. It was my first BayCHI event, and the group seemed lively enough - both speakers elicited quite a few laughs, and audience members weren’t afraid to shout out comments and retorts during the lectures.
First up was Ted Selker from MIT Media Lab and IBM fame. Ted seemed like a nice enough guy, and his talk tackled the various trials and tribulations he encountered as a technology product designer over the last 15 years or so. It was definitely interesting to see how he used ‘experimental design’ extensively to explore the intersection of humans and technology - and what its future might look like. This open approach to concept development - and their subsequent failures, many of them in fact, to reach market - resulted is dozens of inventions with varying applicability and real-world usability. However, to be fair, Ted has come up with some interesting inventions over the years, which is certainly a testament to his perseverance, even if very few seem to have made production. I would hazard a guess that this is because A) Ted was trapped in big organizations that resisted his avant-garde ideas, and B) he ignored one of his own “3 Principles of product design”, the use of art and aesthetics. In short, everything I saw except for the One Laptop Per Child (for which as I understand it, he designed the keyboard and ears), was a little on the plain, boxy side. If Steve Jobs had a less successful, less aesthetically-obsessed twin, Ted is the guy. All in all, though, his body of work is definitely impressive.
Next up was Dan Roam, author of bestselling book The Back of the Napkin (and here). Read more…