#ixda14

Day 2: Friday

The theme of the trip seems to be manageability. How and why are some things manageable and others are not? Amsterdam feels like a very manageable city. You can bike to most locations, and the city is dense enough that every neighborhood feels like it is it’s own small city, with a character and access to most of the the things one needs to day to day. 

My favorite presentation today was the Friday Jam Session, in which three speakers had 10 minutes to present. The first of these, Navit Keren, was a graduate of the Parson’s MFA program in design. She discussed her thesis research on how we treat the end of our lives. Her explorations eventually led her to the forms we use to describe how we would like to be treated as we die, known as advanced directives. She found these forms to be complex and lacking a conversational tone, or a more humanizing language. She also found that the challenge with solving for this issue is that people don’t want to talk about it, at all.

The second speaker presented on working as a ux designer with enterprise-level software as a service (SaaS). She narrated while a video depicted her experience in the visual language of dragons, fables, and flat animation. 

The final speaker outlined a design initiative in which he and his colleagues tried to fit a financial services problem into the analogy of a subway map. The poor guy, his computer kept failing, and thus the presentation turned into a lesson on how important visuals really are in the explanation of a complicated map. 

And once again, here is a smattering of tweetable moments, without context, for your associative pleasure:

“Once you use it a few times, you don’t have to use it anymore. It becomes part of the environment.”

“Dragons do not speak “users” they speak pirate”

“...ever younger objects...”

“You have to get the whole thing right”

“We raise our voice in a loud environment.”

(A recap, the final day)

The final day of the conference offered probably my favorite talk of the whole event. Arlene Birt spoke on The Visual [Emotional] Vocabulary of Sustainability. I know I keep relating everything back to thesis, but it's on my mind, and this talk specifically really gets at the heart of what I've been thinking about since our Thesis I course in our first year. The concern was about certain words (environmentalism, sustainability, green design, climate change) and how they've essentially become negative words in the minds of most people. They remind people of punishment and shame. Arlene called it emotional baggage, and that shame just equals shutdown, which is the opposite of what people working in this field want to happen. 

(This is a recap)

Last week I attended the IxDA 14 Conference with classmates from the SVA IxD program. The conference went by in a furious blur of note taking, meeting new people, and coffee breaks. Day 2 started out with a keynote by Irene Au, focusing on the connection between the mind and body and how consciousness affects our creativity and emotions. It reminded me a lot about some of my intentions entering this second year of grad school. In wanting to be more intentional and receptive in my actions. Hers were physical actions that can help that mindset, from stretches to posture, you can manipulate your thoughts.