During a conversation with a couple of friends a few months ago, it was suggested that I dust off and resurrect a project I worked on in the year 2000 A.D.: the first website for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
And so, in the interests of posterity and in the hope it raises a smile for a few people:
Here it is.
Notes
Being a nine year old site, not much works. Some of the pages, even at this stage, were still awaiting content (and this first version of the site ran off an Access database, which is no longer accessible.)
Saying that, there’s still some interesting content to be found, at least from a historical perspective. Particularly check out the definition of interaction design (found under “Why Interaction Design?”), along with the lists of the faculty and the “Explorer’s Club.”
This site was designed by Chris Downs (yes, that Chris Downs) and built by myself in two weeks. I’m sure Chris won’t mind me saying that the design is a pretty accurate depiction of where the web was in Y2K, and the code certainly isn’t any better.
Anyway, enjoy.
Interaction is the annual conference put on by the IxDA, and next February it returns to the city that hosted the inaugural event in 2008, Savannah. This year promises a program full of content as interesting as the previous years, and I’m lucky enough to have been chosen to try and contribute to that.
I’ll be talking around the idea of solitude: why it’s important as a mental state, why the products and services we use every day might be making it harder to attain, how some people strive for it, and how we might design to enable it. Plus, I’ll be judging the design challenge, among other things. Hopefully I’ll see you there.
I recently had the privilege of having an article published in the March/April 2009 edition of the ACM’s Interactions Magazine.
The article attempted to look at how co-creation can be a powerful technique in the design process, particularly within the realm of service design. Since services ordinarily involve a person-to-person interaction at some point in the delivery process, involving those people who are actually involved with delivery in the design and ideation process is important to ensuring a service is successful.
I try to illustrate this idea by looking at a case study which I think proves this: former employer live|work’s “Make It Work” project for Sunderland City Council, which looked at how existing community organisations might be better structured to help the long term unemployed back to work.
Interactions has kindly agreed to allow me to make a PDF version of this article available for download, which you can do here.