After being stranded in the Detroit Airport, we finally arrived in Paris a day late and arrived at the venue already fifteen minutes into our 24 hour competition. While we were selected to the finals based on our long-term design project, the IU Energy Challenge, the final round was a bit different. Each of the six teams were given a design challenge and had only 24 hours to work through the problem and prepare a presentation. The problem was complex; we were given a description of an information system for monitoring air quality that involved multiple stakeholders and multiple technology components. Our task was to ensure the projects success by redesigning the end-to-end user experience.

We got off to a slow start, having already been up for two days straight. But after a short power-nap we started to gain some momentum and proceeded to break down the problem by articulating goals of the interconnecting stakeholders. Our work space provided some surreal inspiration: it was right on the boardwalk of the Seine with a superb view of the Eiffel tower at night. We also had some tough competition as all of the finalists teams were extremely focused. All of the teams worked through the night, right up until the 2pm deadline. Here’s a photo of Will and I having just finished the marathon design session:

A few days later, we presented our design to a distinguished panel of judges including Surya Vanka of Microsoft, Tom Chi of Yahoo and Ok/Cancel fame, and Neil Churcher of Orange. Interacting with these experienced design professionals was probably the most valuable part of the event. They provided excellent comments and criticism on our design rationale and even took the time to give us personal feedback after. Overall the final round was an amazing learning experience. I think our first place success is really a testament to the quality of design education that we have received at Indiana.

Below is a pic snapped from the stage of the super-over-the-top award ceremony at the Louvre.

And here we are really enjoying our over-sized cardboard check:)

In addition to the project work, all the interns will be meeting in a weekly seminar, where we have open-ended discussions, guest speakers, and occasional trips to green networking events in the state. Its basically a high-energy think tank for campus sustainability. We will be blogging about our discussion here. All in all, it promises to be a very engaging and productive summer.

Chief among them is the notion of design as service. In their book, the Design Way, Nelson and Stolterman write that design is about creating intentional change in the real world. As such, a designer must always work within limited time, resources and knowledge. And furthermore, design is never solitary, but is rather defined by dynamic relationships, working in service of others. (more…)

http://www.infinityart.ro/

I think this site is a great artifact to apply the critical approaches I have been learning in class. Using a phenomenological lens, my first thought is that this is an extreme case of intentionally designing breakdown into an interaction, something that Dave Royer posted about a while back. When navigating most websites, a user is typically engaged in an information seeking activity, clicking on links to reveal text that they are interested in. This activity is part of the horizons most users bring to bear on a website. The expected response when clicking on a link is taken for granted or ready-to-hand. The Infinity Art site affords this activity with typical-looking links, but then suddenly disrupts it, obliterating the screen with unexpected video images. The ‘flow’ of the interaction is interrupted and the website itself, even the user’s computer screen becomes present-to-hand.

Why would the site’s designers do this? They are an interactive design agency and presumably the purpose of this site is to express their professional identity. By introducing breakdown and making the site become so radically present-to-hand, the user is caused to reflect on who the creators of the site are and what their intentions are (as I am presently doing). Furthermore, because the disruptive images are so unexpected, the user is likely to interpret that these designers have an inclination for creating novel, unconventional interactive designs. Finally, because the experience is so novel, users are likely to share the link and post and discuss with others, thus generating a lot of publicity.

I am curious to see what other interpretations and critiques others have.