Today I want to talk about the future of interaction design in darwinian terms: less in terms of predictions and forecast, and more in terms of evolving patterns, of challenges and opportunities that they bring.
I will start from the past, looking at what happened in the last 10 years, to understand what has changed, what emerged, what succeeded and what failed. How can we determine success and failure? As interaction designers, we should consider behavioural changes, as human behaviours are our ultimate medium: we design means to enforce, prevent or facilitate behaviours. We deal with interfaces, software and devices, but what we design, ultimately, are behaviours. Someone said that you can determine a meaningful behavioural change when a new name morphs from a noun to a verb, when enough people use something in a way that no existing verb can pinpoint, so that they need a new verb for that innovative behaviour: from Google to googling.
So which technologies emerged in the last 10 years that truly changed our behaviours, and how did they change us?
Three: mobile devices, the social Web and video games.
Mobiles were just phones about ten years ago, half of us had one and we used them primarily to call other people. Today calling has become a marginal feature and we spend most of our time doing something else with our phones. They have become ubiquitous and we are reluctant to even call them phones, we refer to them as smart phones, or tablets, or e-readers. And how do we spend our time with our new smart multi-purpose companions? According to the Ofcom Communications Market 2012's report, we spend on average over two hours a day:
* browsing the internet (25 minutes)
* grazing on Facebook statuses (17 minutes)
* playing games (16 minutes)
* listening to music (14 minutes)
* making calls (12 minutes)
We spend far more time writing than talking (25 minutes versus 12), and we do it mainly through channels that didn't even exist 10 years ago.
These channels have changed the way we access and exchange information, the way we shop, work, socialise and play. We are facebooking and tweeting to our friends or followers.
How did these new behaviours change the way we communicate? We write more, but what we write is shorter (Twitter is an obvious example). Not only shorter, what we write tends to be more uniformed. Consider the rise of online services and apps that give us quick (easy, free) access to creative tools: these apps and services promise to help you making one thing, and make it elegant. By design, they are more prescriptive, because they scaffold our interactions. When we re-tweet or re-blog, copy-pasting what someone else already wrote, when we use hashtags to take part in a shared discussion, we are uniforming in the sense that we are fitting blocks of meaning into given boxes, handing over some freedom of expression to increase the shareability of what we produce.
Uniformity is not only growing in the formats that we use, it also swarms across the information that we consume. Information has become more accessible, abundant and cheaper than ever before. Cheaper to produce, cheaper to consume.
Just as food companies learned that to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar, media and IT companies learned that affirmation sells better than information. In other words, what we want to hear, what affirms our beliefs and views, is more desirable than information that challenges them. It would be too high of a cognitive burden to surround ourselves with information and people we disagree with. Technology, and social media in particular, allow for tailored, personalised content consumption, which creates what Eli Pariser calls filter bubbles: we get more of what we like, and less of what we don't click on. I am not saying that personalization algorithms are evil and imposed on us by corporate agendas, they simply reflect our own behaviours.
As our behaviours change, we interaction designers and (possibly part-time) educators have the chance and responsibility to influence their paths. The interfaces we design, the apps we build and the classes we teach are not just usable tools fueled by a varying degree of technology, they can change human behaviours in small but significant ways.
In this landscape of abundant and uniforming information, I think digital literacy (or literacies, because of the constant evolution of what we need to learn) is key to what we do. We have the opportunity to enable students to understand, to shape and actively participate in the Web, instead of elegantly (and rather mindlessly) consuming it.
I want students to develop a computational thinking, hands-on approach to devise critical ways of using the existing networks.
So how can we harness existing technologies and behavioural patterns familiar to students, to engage them with computational thinking, so that they will deconstruct real-life problems, abstract their components and design algorithms to tackle them?
My answer is: games.
During the last decade video games have moved beyond the console, into the realm of mobiles (where most of us play them today) and social networks.
Young (or not-so-young-anymore) people have grown up with video games, they are familiar with their languages and formats.
Video games are succeeding in the struggle for survival because they engage people in a way that other media cannot. They are immersive, pervasive, and they are prescriptive by design: they give us a playable environment and a set of rules to survive in it.
What captures my attention is the largely untapped potential of games to deliver structured learning.
The way that young people relate to video games is a fertile ground I want to harness. I am not talking about playing video games in the classroom, but rather to design the class as a game, played out in real time in the real world of the classroom, with students as players and the teacher as game master.
I want to design structured learning experiences as games, using game formats and behaviours to deliver digital literacies. I think that students can be more engaged and receptive in a multi-player course, more than they seem to be in a traditional course. There are many ways in which a multi-player course differs from a normal learning practice. Mistakes are most often punished, whereas in games the primary way for players to learn is by making mistakes. Games foster competition and collaboration at the same time. They offer a gradual progression, where everyone starts at level Zero and make their way up through collaborative attempts.
My teaching experience started as a game, and through mistakes I have learned a few things. I had the chance to test game-like activities during my workshops around the country and at Ravensbourne last May. Students responded enthusiastically to those games and their playful explorations led to better results, or at least to increased engagement with the subject.
I think my time is over but I’m happy to continue talking about the games students played in my workshops to design interfaces and learn HTML.
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