News:
- My change of status. After six enjoyable years, I'm retiring from Northwestern University effective the end of the 2009-10 academic year. Retiring? Well, I'll be busier than ever, but this will let me travel more, stay longer, and be more spontaneous with my choice of activities, unconstrained by administrative responsibilities and teaching schedules.
- Business Week rated both the Northwestern University MMM program in Design and Operations and the Industrial Design department at KAIST as two of the best Design Schools in the world. I co-direct the former and teach in the latter. Neat.
- MIT Press will publish "Sociable Design." Expected publication date: Fall of 2010.
Welcome to jnd.org:
Welcome to jnd.org, home for writings, musing, reviews, and contact information. I post my publications (as permitted), chapters from my books, book reviews, and essays. What does "jnd" stand for? As a graduate student I did research in psychophysics: jnd is a technical term. I suspect that doesn't help, so see What is jnd?
I spend half my time with the Nielsen Norman group consulting for industry to produce enjoyable and effective products and services, half my time teaching in two programs at Northwestern University, a one-year graduate program leading to an MS degree in Engineering Design and Innovation (MS-EDI) and in MMM, the two-year joint MBA / Engineering degree program between Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern Engineering that focuses upon Design and Operations, half my time serving on advisory boards, and half my time writing and publishing. And two months each year as a Visiting Professor of Industrial Design at KAIST, in Daejeon, South Korea. (And that story should explain why I wish to reduce my formal activities, the better to be able to do informal, more spontaneous ones.)
Sociable Design: Dealing with Complexity
The world gets ever more complex world, yet we cope. How? We manage because we are not alone. We work in groups and the interaction is interesting and important. Moreover, understanding defeats complexity. To most of us, the cockpit of a commercial airline is a confusing jumble of dials and controls. To the expert, the cockpit is comforting, familiar, and understandable. Knowledge makes the difference.
The world and our activities are inherently complex, so our tools must match that complexity. Complexity is necessary: it is confusion and unnecessary complication that should be eliminated. This book is an argument in favor of properly designed complexity, against the simple-minded notion that things should be simple. Simplicity is boring. We need richness and depth in our lives.
See my essays Sociable Design, Psychology of Waiting Lines, Simplicity is not the answer
To be published by MIT Press, probably in Fall 2010. I've had a long relationship with MIT Press. They published my book Invisible Computer as well as the UK edition of Design of Everyday Things.
Books
Translations of my published books keep appearing. A Portugese (Editora Rocco, Brazil) translation of "Emotional Design" is out as are Japanese and Taiwanese translations of "Design of Future Things." I've seen a Korean edition of "Design of Future Things," so I guess that is out. A Mainland Chinese translation (uiGarden: Mainland China) ), as well as translations in Brazil, Italy, Korea, and Spain are underway. Greece is working on a translation of "Design of Everyday Things," which will make it the twelfth country to publish it.
ReQall
I am officially empowered as "Chief Mentor" of reQall. Call reQall from any phone and speak whatever you want to remember. It then shows up in your email as text, as a voice message, and on a website. Even automatically on your calendar. We worked hard to make it really simple, to eliminate all the features that came to mind. No features, therefore no fuss. Simple and powerful. Developed by a team, some of whom worked with me at Apple. Neat. (The iPhone implementation is cool. I myself use the special Blackberry application.) It is also a teamwork tool. Free. It works smoothly with Evernote, to increase the power of both (read the CNet discussion).
reQall is also an active memory assistant, using time or your location to remind you. Read all about it in a review by David Pogue in the New York Times.
Schedule
To schedule me for talks, interviews, or consulting, see Press Kit.
My Physical Location (except for talks listed below):
- Until mid-December 2009: Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (Chicago)
- Mid-December 2009 - End of March, 2010: Palo Alto, CA (Silicon Valley).
- April, 2010 l - Mid June, 2010: Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (Chicago)
- Min-June 2010 - September, 2010: Palo Alto, CA (Silicon Valley).
- September 2010 - November 2010 (dates still tentative): KAIST, Daejeon, S. Korea.
- October 2010: East Asia. (Japan, Taiwan, China, ... )
Conferences of general interest:
- February 24 - 27, 2010. Human-Computer Interaction Symposium. Snow Mountain, Colorado (open only to members of member organizations).
- April 10-15, 2010: Annual SIGCHI Conference: Human Factors in Computing Systems. Atlanta, GA. (I may not be able to attend because of my teaching commitments at Northwestern.)
- October 4 - 7, 2010. Design and Emotion Society Conference, Chicago, Illinois.
- July 11 - 15, 2011. INTERACT conference on HCI. Lisbon, Portugal.
In Praise of Good Design
the complete set is in "In praise of good design." Send products to praise to
No bashing -- just praise. Physical products preferred.
Recent Book Reviews
(the complete set is in "Recommended readings.")
Design: History, theory, and practice of product design
The best book on the history of modern design I have read. Thorough, detailed, complete. Covers everything: architecture, products, services, software from the Romans (briefly) to today. I learned tremendously. I first read the book on my electronic book reader (a Kindle) but the many excellent illustrations are critical to understanding the text, and they are pretty horrid on the Kindle, so I also got the printed book. Big, heavy, expensive - and worth every cent
Standards and their stories
This engaging book serves several purposes. It explains much of the history, rationale, and politics of standards. It shows why they have huge social impact, far beyond what most of us realize, often far beyond what was intended. And best of all, it is fun to read.
Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die
I taught a reading course on design to Northwestern's Kellogg MBA students. The most popular book of all was this one: The book by the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, "Made to stick." People were applying the ideas in their class presentations even before they had finished reading it, it was that effective. If you want to do away with boring, dull, meaningless talks that do nothing except kill everyone's time - especially that of the nervous, overwrought presenter, buy this book by the gross: hand it out to your friends, employees, bosses, and professors. Hey, we do interesting stuff: our talks should be just as interesting!
Recent Essays
(The complete set is in "Essays.") (Updated October 2, 2009)
THE TRANSMEDIA DESIGN CHALLENGE: Co-Creation
We live in exciting times. Finally, we are beginning to understand that pleasure and fun are important components of life, that emotion is not a bad thing, and that learning, education and work can all benefit through encouraging pleasure and fun. Up to now, a primary goal of product and service design has been to provide useful functions and results. We should not lose track of these goals, but now that we are well on our way to doing that for an amazing variety of goods and services, it is time to make sure that they are pleasurable as well. Not only does this require emotions to be a major component of design thinking, but we must incorporate action as well, actions that use the whole body in movement, rhythm, and purpose. New technologies allow creativity to blossom, whether for reasons silly or sublime. Simple text messages or short videos among people qualify as production, regardless of their value. This new movement is about participating and creating, invoking the creative spirit. This is what the transmedia experience should be about. All of these experiences are allowing people to feel more like producers and creators rather than passive consumers or spectators. The new design challenge is to create true participatory designs coupled with true multi-media immersion that reveal new insights and create true novel experiences. We all participate, we all experience. We all design, we all partake. But much of this is meaningless: how do we provide richness and depth, enhanced through the active engagement of all, whether they be the originators or the recipients of the experience? How will this come to pass? What is the role in everyday life? Will this be a small portion or will it dominate? Will it even be permitted within the confines of contemporary commercialism? Those are the significant design challenges.
When Security Gets in the Way
If we ever are to have systems with adequate security and privacy that people are willing to use, then the three fields of Security, Privacy, and Usability must work together as a team. Without usable systems, the security and privacy simply disappears as people defeat the processes in order to get their work done. We have a wonderful design challenge before us. It is time to make systems that are more secure, that enhance privacy, and that are still eminently usable. We need systems that are effective at performing their tasks, while providing high quality of user experience at reasonable cost. The solution is going to require sensible analyses, the development of appropriate technologies probably including automation, enhanced interaction protocols and interfaces with better feedback, and the development and continual communication to support the development of an appropriate conceptual models. The only way this will happen is if all parties work together as a team from the start. With notable exceptions, the security and privacy concerns have been addressed by the security and privacy experts, coupled with the arbitrary rules and policies of system administrators, where these concerns have been tacked on to existing systems as afterthoughts.
Designing the Infrastructure
It is time to work on infrastructure. It threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on the designs for infrastructure. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to provide the foundation for everyday life. If we do not respond, it will dominate our lives, preventing us attending to our priory concerns and interests and instead, just keeping ahead of the maintenance demands.
Compliance and Tolerance
Our computer systems are still far too intolerant of everyday human behavior. The systems demand strict adherence to their requirements. This essay recommends changing the battleground. Bring it back to human terms: ask for compliance and tolerance. Compliance and tolerance means to allow inconsequential deviation from a rigid format. Allow dates and telephone numbers in any form that a person would understand. Allow flexibility, allow tolerance for small deviations. No dramatic scientific breakthroughs are required, simply a different philosophy. Those are new concepts for designers, but concepts that are easy to understand. Ask our engineers, programmers, and fellow designers to aim at compliant systems, tolerant systems.
Memory is more important than actuality
An experience exists only for that brief moment of time we call "the present." The memory of the experience can last an entire lifetime. It is the memory that matters, and as much experimental evidence demonstrates, memory is a highly distorted view of actuality. So what does this mean to the designer? Design for memory. Exploit it. What is the most important part of an experience? Psychologists emphasize what they call the primacy and recency effects, with recency being the most important. In other words, what is most important? The ending. What is next most important? The start. So make sure the beginning and the end are wonderful. Make sure there are reminders of the good parts of the experience: Photographs, mementos, trinkets. Make sure the experience delights, whether it be the simple unfolding of a car's cup holder or the band serenading departing cruise ship customers. Accent the positive and it will overwhelm the memory for the negative.
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