OK, with just a week to go it’s time to tell you what we’re doing at MIX this year.
Last year, I looked at a whole bunch of stuff in Virgins, Spaceships and Hobnailed Boots but we focused in on a few things like the power of brand experience, and how you go about it with the philosophy of Total Experience Design where you have to look wider than just the channels in which you traditionally work. Where you consider all touch-points, and the end to end user or customer journey to help drive out innovation that is really useful to customers as well as having those ‘magic touches’ of a beautiful brand experience.
“When you think wider, interesting things begin to happen” is what we said, and we showed this by using Virgin Galactic as an example of how we apply the philosophy, and took a look at some of the tools you can use in that process. In the example, some interesting and unexpected things fell out.
I know many of you left with some good ideas (because you told me) on how to enhance your current design processes, which was fantastic to hear. I also understand that a few ‘glass walls’ sprang up in a variety of places, (including a big software company in Redmond, WA) to help some projects get going. The feedback I had from the room and afterwards was awesome, and I thank you all for that. It makes it all very, very worthwhile indeed!
Here are some of the highlights:
(yes, they need explaining.. but you can take a look at the presentation here, as it will never be presented again! Its repeat performances at MIX events across Europe have well and truly wrung the value from it, so it’s been retired! Big credits to Matt Ratcliffe, Trond, Matt Rooney and everyone else who made that content so good.)
So, to this year…
I have a session on Thursday 19th, 10:30am in San Polo 3501 at MIX09 at the fab Venetian in Las Vegas. It’s called; Total Experience Design: The Digital Building. Yes, that’s right, the digital building… We said, when you think ‘wider’ than your usual media, then interesting things start to happen. Well, we thought we’d blow the doors off that, and see where it went!
We’ve worked in the built environment before, and a lot of our digital strategy and execution work is what retailers would call ‘multi-channel’ i.e. the experience flows into stores and branches. So we’ve always considered things like kiosks, in-store signage and other interaction points as part of our digital domain. When you start working with Microsoft Surface, you also know that you’ve now got a right to consider things like built-in furniture as part of that domain also.
So it was a natural extension to think about how else that domain might extend.
We also have a philosophy that says that the best design is done by integrated teams where technology, operations, and business combines with user experience, creative, copy and planning. In this way you have the people who will own it, the people who have to build it and understand the ‘materials’ best, and the people who have insight into users, brand, ergonomics and aesthetics. Provided you keep those collaborations tight and focused, you should evolve designs that hit all four of the dimensions of good design: form, function, meaning and opportunity.
So, extending that philosophy, when you work in the built-environment, surely you should collaborate with the people who understand that best?
This is something we do when working on kiosks, for example, where the consideration of the context of use is key. An airport environment, for example for self-service check-in kiosks, is a very challenging one and requires collaboration between those who understand operations and passenger flow, as well as those who understand the physical housing and environment of the kiosk device itself.
So in the built environment, those people are surely architects aren’t they? Of course they are.
When you look at how buildings are getting smarter, being flooded with IP addressable devices, adapting to their environments, even moving… then you have to start pondering what would happen if the digital elements of the building weren’t just an after thought and became an integral part of the building’s very fabric.
We posed this question to the Architectural Association, one of the most respected architecture schools in the world, attracting students from across the globe. After some initial head-scratching, one of their tutors rose to the challenge and gave us the opportunity to explore whether this kind of collaboration might have some merit with some of his students. The answer was yes and that it’s our job now to help define what that looks like.. we’ll see another day where that goes.
What we’re going to examine at MIX 09 is what that opportunity looks like, and what it shows is that up til now we’ve considered our interfaces to users largely to be screens, and our input devices to be keyboard, mouse and touch screen, whereas actually our opportunities have widened almost beyond recognition. Today only a few specialists are working in some of these areas, and what they do is limited to the purely experiential, and the aesthetics of buildings.
When times are tough, people shy away from these kinds of things (unless of course they’re in Vegas!), as they’re looking instead for things that genuinely add value in a long-lasting way. So what we’ll look at is how collaboration is key to making things that fit well into their environments and drive real value from digital applications, at how the inputs and output opportunities in the built environment are much, much wider than we thought and how they are leading to a whole new raft of opportunities to interact with users, and create long-lasting value. Out of that we see clearly that the technologies we are working with from Microsoft, like WPF, Mesh, Surface and Windows 7 will hugely enhance our ability to do things in this environment.
Aside from being a light-hearted and hopefully entertaining 75 minutes, what you should walk away from the session with are:
- Some more ideas on how Total Experience Design can help you innovate for your customers, and how to structure this thinking
- What integrated design is and how it unlocks the key to great design that has form, function, meaning and opportunity
- How and where Microsoft Surface, multi-touch and sensor integration in Windows 7 create new opportunities for us to create useful and meaningful applications in places our clients didn’t expect us to be able to operate
- And of course maybe a giveaway or two… bear in mind we’re in a recession though!
So, please come. I hope you’ll learn something, or at the very least be entertained… after all, you’ve come a long way, you deserve it!