The Aquaduct is a mobile filtration vehicle, in other words, it’s a bike with built-in water tanks and a water filter. When you ride this bike, some of your pedaling power goes towards pumping the water through a filter.

I think it’s a interesting and cool design. But I heard a talk from a guy today who makes water purification devices for developing nations and he thinks it’s completely impractical. The bike would be quite expensive along with the filters, which would need replacement. In fact, there are much cheaper to purify water such as using UV light or chemicals. These methods are also reasonably fast.

But nevertheless, it’s a elegant design. It won the grand prize for the Innovate or Die design competition. I’m interested in question of why this design is elegant. (Hopefully in your work, you’ll create designs that are both elegant and practical).

Let’s say that the designers of this bike went out into the field and observed people retrieving water. A hypothetical task analysis would run like this:

Leave house with water bucket->go to water source->retrieve water->go back home.

They knew that they wanted to add water filtration to this set of steps. But what’s makes this design interesting is that they didn’t add an extra step. Adding an extra step is a hassle for people. They’ll be less likely to adopt the practice. Instead what the designers did was they piggybacked water filtration on the “go back home” task. And that’s why this design is a winner.

So, what other designs can you think of that introduced a new practice that piggybacks on an exisiting task?

No comments | Post a comment
Categories: Design transformations

Douglas Engelbart, one of those many Oregonians who did their best work in California, invented the mouse in 1963 as a part of NLS (video, demo app).

The first mouse worked by having two turning discs mounted perpendicularly. It works very differently than the ball or the laser mice we’re used to today. But suppose the first mouse did use a ball…

Now onto trackballs. Little known fact, but the first trackball was invented around 1950 by University of Toronto grads for a sonar application. (An aside: researchers at UofT can also say they invented multitouch in the early 80s—long before Microsoft or Apple or Jeff Han. So it really bothers me when articles such as this one in Wired do not mention Toronto’s contribution at all.)

Look at the photo of the first trackball. Really, all Engelbart would have hypothetically had to do to invent the mouse would have been to turn a trackball upside down.

So that’s the first design transformation: turn it upside down. What are other designs that can be created from previous designs by turning them upside down?

1 comment | Post a comment
Categories: Design transformations

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…

No comments | Post a comment
Categories: Uncategorized