Category: Methodology

Invited speaker at MEX2010

Last week, on the 19th of may, I attended the Mobile User Experience Conference (MEX2010). MEX is an industry strategy forum exploring the techniques and strategies for creating great mobile user experience in a multi-platform digital environment. It was a great two-day event and as an invited speaker, I was given the opportunity to share some of the insights from the work in our research group as well as from our start-up IDEAviate. My topic was “Multi-platform user experience design – learning from crisis situations”.

It was great to network with industry people to learn more about what frame their thinking. One of the most valuable things was to talk with Heather Martin, Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design, on all the opportunities that exists for designing really innovative solutions that targets voice in broad terms and not just as a simple voice-to-text interaction. It was very clear that Heather had a great balance between practical design experience and theoretical base for her ideas. MEX2010 was a great conference.

Workshop on future incident response support software

On Wednesday last week, Crisis Response Lab together with MSB organized a design workshop on future software systems for incident response. The workshop was held at Karlstad Fire and Rescue Services. The workshop resulted in a range of insights and ideas for future development.
The workshop participants, (and the ones that did all the hard work) consisted of eight people from small and medium sized fire and rescue services. As a workshop leader, I am very happy to have worked with such a good group that in an open-minded way addressed all the different tasks that we assigned to them. The massive material will be of great importance for a wide range of possible software solutions addressing the needs experienced during emergency response work. The workshop was conducted by Jonas, Anna, Fredrik from the Crisis Response Lab together with Stefan and Jenny from MSB.

HCD harmful? – Don Norman discusses HCD and suggest a move to ACD

Human Centred Design (HCD) has gain massive attention in the last few years. Recently, IDEO, published their open-source version of HCD. As always, we should be critical and make a strong effort in understanding the limitations and weaknesses of the methodology we adopt in our studies. Don Norman has presented som really insightful reflections and critique of HCD. Don Norman presents in his text, dating back to 2005) what is wrong with HCD and how HCD could be improved by moving to a methodology of Activity Centred Design. Read Don´s insightful reflections “Human Centered Design Considered Harmful” at jnd.org.