What if you had a ton of cheap, commodity screens lying around? The MIT Media lab is exploring just that with Siftables. They have a demo application where they sort and manipulate photos, with each photo on a Siftable.

Or what if you had a ton of mice? Microsoft Research India realized that tons of kids huddle around one computer in Indian schools. Only one kid has control of the mouse, while the rest are relegated to be mere onlookers. Solution: give every kid a mouse, and make educational games that are multi-mouse aware.

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I was going to write about how awesome my Sony alarm clock was. But somebody has beat me to it. Around 2001, after being late for school several days in a row because I had mis-set am/pm on my alarm clock, I decided I had to get a better one. I searched for days and finally found it. It’s almost the same model as the one talked about in the link, but mine has buttons instead of knobs to set the alarm time. Also, mine has an “alarm off” button. It’s no bigger than any of the other buttons, but unlike the rest has an indentation, so it’s super easy to find eyes-free.

By the way, I’ve used that alarm clock referenced in the link before, and the knobs aren’t real. You can’t turn these knobs, they’re really centering, three-state switches. To increase the time, you flip the “knob” up, pushing the internal “up” switch, and likewise for down.

At about the same time I bought that alarm clock, I sketched my own:

Best feature still not in commercially available alarm clocks? Jog dials.

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I’m starting this interaction design blog as a way to document, for lack of a better term, design transformations.

Design transformations are ways of changing knowns, such as existing products and user data into new designs. Here’s what I mean: suppose I’m designing a product and am currently in the brainstorming phase. In this early stage of design, I’ll survey the predecessors and competitors to the product I’m designing to see how my product can be differentiated. Then I can apply a set of design transformations to these existing products and see if the resulting designs are interesting. Hopefully these will inspire me to create something innovative.

One of the most difficult parts of interaction design I think is making the jump from user research to a design. I hope show you examples where design transformations can bridge this gap.

In order to come up with a list of design transformations, I’ll pick some product and think of ways the product’s designers could have come up with that design given some bit of user research and/or knowledge of previous designs. For my purposes, this does not necessarily have to be how the designers actually came up with the design; I’m less interested in the history of a design and more interested in coming up with a list that designers today can use for brainstorming purposes.

Along the way I might point out a particularly good or bad design for fun. I hope to do more pointing out of good designs, as it seems like one of an interaction designer’s hobbies is complaining. But who knows, I might not be able to escape my fated tendencies…

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