Conquering The Brave NUI World

by Kevin Wong, posted June 27th, 2008
categorized under events, trends

We made it!

The Seattle IxDA June event was a huge success! Everything but a dying laptop battery made for a delightful evening filled with great discussions, greater awareness of interaction design and increased curiosity for natural user interfaces.

Before going into further detail on how the night went down, we wanted to give a few shout outs to all those who helped make this possible:First, Robert Reimann, Jacob Burghardt and Andrew Otwell for their support in forming the Seattle IxDA chapter. I’m sure forming this group has been on a lot of our minds for quite some time. So to see it come to fruition and with such support is really inspiring.Special thanks to August de los Reyes, Dennis Wixon, Joe Fletcher and our very own Sabrina Boler for their wonderful contributions towards the proliferation of natural user experiences. Your presentations and commentary were warmly welcome and we hope to keep that dialog open as we continue to explore, create and realize how natural will manifest itself in designed solutions.Big thanks to Microsoft for honoring us with not just one, but two (2) play tables Surface computing tables. The guests really enjoyed trying it out. For almost everyone, it was the first time they had really experienced it for themselves.Several other thanks to everyone within Artefact for their support, to Rob and Gavin for funding both the event and our DIY touch table, Josh Hinds and Jennifer Darmour for aiding in the construction of the table, Tiffany Hall for the beer (and food) and finally, Christopher Konrad for moderating the speaking event (which for those of you who did not get a chance to check out, view it on Artefact TV next week!).Oh and I guess this guy too, Chris Hlavaty (pic), for making it look good along the way.

Now onto the juicy bits.

• In total we had 85 total guests registered (so add 15 more =P). Adding our own studio, we had a grand total of  102 guests!
• Guests included interaction designers, user researchers, developers, analysts and students.
• They represented over 15 companies such as Wexley, HP, Brightcove, Teague, Amazon, Microsoft and the University of Washington!
• Photos uploaded on Flickr
• Videos coming soon on Blip.tv

To help tell the rest of the story, I will now use pictures for your viewing pleasure…The night started out strong with a rush of people marching in around 6:45 and heading straight for the kegs.

… then realizing we had real Surface tables out for demonstration!

But wait, there was also an awesome demo of a Do-it-yourself (DIY) touch table too! Wow!

Don’t forget about the other demos we had around the studio.

Once the house felt packed (around 7:55) we kicked off the presentations.

What’s a good presentation without a warm Happy Birthday sing along to our fearless leader, Gavin Kelly?

Sabrina sets the stage with her stories of pioneering NUI experiences before they even knew what NUI was.

Not only did was she sharing her stories of what NUI was, she also talked about how NUI can transform into something more as long as we continue to explore and test out how new experiences will manifest themselves.

Dennis shares his lessons learned back when he was creating the first GUI!

He then tied in the mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics of game design as an analogy to how we should approach NUI design.

Joe offered his expert opinion on what was presented highlighting additional insights based on his experience with Surface.

The presentations ended with audience members raising questions around the social component to the Surface experience and how natural might replay traditional GUI conventions.

People still stuck around and continued to socialize, network and play in the backroom like kids in a candy store. Cute right?

Nathan still at it, showing off his particle demo.

All said and done, we had a great time and we hope everyone else did too! The Seattle IxDA chapter is only just getting started so we are happy to help make an impact and support the creation of this nascent community.Anyone with ideas or feedback, let’s hear them! Leave comments, email us (kevin [at]) or twitter back! There are 12 months in a year, and we want to fill them with amazing events!

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