the Design Experience Weblog

I am reading iWoz and he discusses what he thinks it means to be an engineer.

What I am talking about is what it means to be an engineer's engineer. A serious engineer. I so clearly remember him telling me hat engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world, that someone could make electrical evices that do someting good for people takes society to a new level. He told me that as an engineer, you can change your world and change the was of life for lots and lots of people.

Scientific American: MIND had an issue on creativity. One of the sidebars detailed 4 steps to a creative mind-set. They include Wonderment, Motivation, Intellectual Courage, and Relaxation.

These steps are pretty obvious, but they are still good it keep in mind to help nuture your creativity. Of course, its easier to go get a 5-year-old and follow them around. In a pinch a 6, or 7-year-old can do. Even better if know an older child, or even an adult who still has curiosity.

Motivation is tied directly to curiosity, it basically means, if you are curious, you will go an learn as much as you can about what you are curious about, at least until you are full.

Intellectual Courage, or "thinking outside the box" or innovation is a great concept to keep in mind. This reminds me of my 7-year-old who came home from Camp Invention and told me about brainstorming, and how there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. I have to figure out a way to explain that you should think that way all the time, not get during "offcial brainstorming" sessions!

Relaxation, taking the time to daydream, and let your mind wander. Most people can tell you of a great idea they had in the shower, or just before falling asleep. You need to take a break and let you subconscious work on a problem and twist it around and compare it to the other bits lying around in your head. I think relaxation and clearing your head also ties into ideas like Getting Things Done, where you put all your tasks, and todos, and ideas someplace safe where you know they'll be when you need to refer to them. This keeps them out of your immediate thoughts and leaves room for good ideas.

I realized the main difference in the approch of Interaction Design and Agile Development. ID assumes the cost to change software once it is written in very high. Agile processes are defined precisely to reduce the cost of change, and that is how it can work closely with direct customers, and do more, and smaller designs. Basically it takes the 1 year design, 3 months coding schedule of the ideal interaction design project, and shortens it to an extreme. The other big difference is that Agile allows coding during design. Agile also says that each interation must be able to stand along as functional software. With such short design and programming phases, it is possible to do a good job, just on a much smaller pice of software.

I still haven't figured out how Agile can support integration of a huge application from all the pieces. It seems risky to design one feature in the first iteration, and expect somehow that the interaction for the users will integrate with the whole application, and not change dramatically. I think changing interfaces is a huge training and probably morale problem, even if the changes are improvements. So this is a place where I think ID really has the advantage. I know there is still more to learn.

I am thinking more about interaction design and agile development, and how the ideas connect between them. One theme in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is that the goal of design and development is to build a product that many people will be delighted to use. This product will not do everything, and will not be for everyone, but it will do what it does very well.

Constrast this to Agile development, often used in custom software development, works directly with the people who will end up using the software. I think the idea is to give these people exactly the software they need.

I'll just link to this google search and go through the links later. As usual, so other folks have some thoughts on how Interaction Design and Agile might fit together.