Immediately after encountering the Latte printer, I hit the Exhibit Hall, starting with the New Tech Demos. Here I encountered presentations of all the kinds I had imagined on my way to the conference. From augmented reality to tangible interactions, as well as stereographic (S3D) immersive environments (red-blue glasses only), with haptic feedback as the dominant theme.

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Running into the creator of the Latte printer, of recent Maker fame, at Siggraph was an early highlight of my first day attending the conference. When he offered to print any image of my choice on a Latte right there I just had to commemorate my arrival with the Artefact logo.

More (of course, full Siggraph 2008 coverage) to come soon.

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We’d like to warmly welcome Dave McColgin to Artefact! If Dave could be summed up in any fashion, it’d be the letter “T” - in Helvetica. He joins us as a User Researcher, but he also has a knack for design having created prototypes and interactive systems facilitating learning and education. Dave previously worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as their HCI Specialist developing innovative visual analytic prototypes and products. Hotness.

Driven by his passion to learn and create, we were excited to learn about his motivational spirit, making him a solid fit without our culture. This kind of energy is especially great within client meetings. It reinforces our shared interest in crafting better experiences for the customer.

Some of the responsibilities that will contribute to our core services include:

• designing and implementing research studies informing product design decisions
• creating materials needed for research including visual tool kits, prototypes and survey instruments
• collect, analyze and synthesize data from people
• present insights to clients and internal teams
• story boarding and interaction design development
• and many more…

Dave also has some ambitious goals to accomplish in the near and long term. Aiming to beat Olen and myself in a match with Spartan weaponry and plasma grenades, we feel he has a long journey ahead of him. The good news though, is that he’s also passionate about adding to our research offerings with the support from his studies in Psychology focused on understanding human behavior and cognition. Things around here are becoming even more exciting as we continue to evolve our research prowess.

Gabe  joins us from the Institute of Design as a recent Masters graduate in Design Planning. Prior to ID, Gabe graduated cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Sounds fancy right? Well that’s only speaking to his academic history.

Looking further into his professional experience,  you can see his research muscles flexing across multiple areas including telecommunications, furniture, restaurant and educational domains. Across all these uniquely defined areas is a single thread that remained consistent: a passion for leading groups and organizations into better futures through design thinking and planning. Most recently, Gabe worked at Steelcase conducting internal research, which led to changes on how certain skills and activities may be supported, taught, and/or reinforced to help spur innovative thinking about current challenges and future opportunities.

We’re excited to have Gabe join us. A few of us already love him because he “let’s us win” at Halo! However, we’re sure he’ll get over being so modest soon enough. He’s also chalk full of great ideas and plans to grow out the business. Exemplary to his potential is a recently launched video, with fellow colleague Kristy Scovel, aimed to help young researchers learn a thing or two on ethnography and interviewing:

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

“Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer,” which is a 33 minute film (counting credits) to help introduce newbies to some of the basics of ethnography and interviewing. We had a lot of fun making the movie, getting our classmates and faculty, as well as professionals and other outside people, to participate and help us with putting the movie together, and we feel like we found a good balance of levity, humor, and useful information. We’ve gotten good feedback from members of the design community and have even sparked off some old debate amongst the members of the Anthrodesign Yahoo! group.

Having studied Design Planning, we look forward to the insightful findings to come with future projects. Doing that includes:

• performing analysis of business, market and financial data identifying business opportunities
• working collaboratively with designers and the client to develop innovative ideas and solutions
• conducting competitive analysis (SWOT) and presenting insightful recommendations to business strategy and design
• learning about people’s aspirations, motivation, activities, habits and practices
• story boarding and interaction model development
• and many more…

Most importantly, he shares the same vision we do:

help stop the proliferation of stupid crap no one needs and instead, imagine, define and create a better future world.

A’men, Gabe. Welcome to Artefact!

Sabrina Boler in The Beginnings of NUI

Dennis Wixon in The Shock of NUI

Keep in touch because we will be posting more content up related to our DIY multi touch table!

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!

This past Thursday saw the 2nd annual IDSA design debate held at the Olympic Sculpture Park in downtown Seattle.  A decent-sized crowd showed up for drinks and hors d’oeuvres and subsequent righteous debate on design.

On panel were Anne Traver (graphic design), Bill Buxton (interaction design), Bill Gaylord (architecture), and Jill Solberg (industrial design) to discuss their aligned or opposing views on various pre-selected design topics.  For example: Are designers just styling more stuff to sell to consumers to stuff the pockets of rich corporate America? Do large corporate clients suck the creativity out of projects? Can environmentally-conscious design happen at the individual level, or does it have to be a federal mandate?  And so on.

Bill Buxton, offering to be the “official” contrarian, provided much of the stimulus in the ensuing debate.  He offered lively counter-arguments to the relatively moderate opinions of the panel and could always be counted on to provide a few off-the-wall ideas to keep things interesting. 

The moderator, Jacob Fleischer, also donned his hat of excessive trash and consumerism (created specially by Bill Gaylord, pictured left) to provide a level of comic levity to the subject of designers being primarily responsible for landfills.

The debate provided some unique insights and topics, but with the panel staying mostly neutral at most turns.  Next year, we’d like to see the gloves really come off and get those knuckles bloody!

In the end, what seems to be the solution to all the world’s design related problems?   Better design.  Hmmm…

RSVP with Chrish or Kevin [at] artefactgroup [dot] com

Details:Doors open 7:00PM, June 26th, 2008

Artefact, 2125 Western Ave, Suite 500

Seattle, WA 98121

This will be a catered event with light snacks and beverages (alcoholic and non alcoholic).

Parking is available on the street as well as across the street in a paid lot.

The event is also free.

RSVP: Contact Chrish or Kevin [at] artefactgroup [dot] com including any additional information regarding number of guests or questions about the event.

Finally, follow us on Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv, Facebook and Upcoming for future updates and post event media! See you there!

Northwest Chapter IDSA is holding their 2nd annual Design Debate today at Olympic Sculpture Park.

This year’s theme is “What if we designed with nature as our model?” Sound interesting huh? We thought so too! It almost reminds us of a great TED presentation by Janine Benyus [mp3] who did a wonderful presentation on 12 design ideas based on biomimicry.

There’s going to be some great representation there by big names including Anne Traver, Bill Buxton, Billy Gaylord and Jill Solberg. We’ll see you there!

The Design Debate is this week!
THURSDAY JUNE 5, 6:30PM
OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK (corner of Western & Broad)
Doors open at 6:30 PM. Debate starts at 7PM.
$5 for IDSA & AIA members
$10 for non-members
Paid parking is available in the Olympic Sculpture Park Garage.
Street parking is free.

IDSA Design Debate

Flier [PDF]

Join us!

Today, the WorldWide Telescope was released as a public beta by Microsoft. It is now available for download at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.

The WorldWide Telescope is virtual telescope software for browsing imagery of the universe from a variety of sources. This learning resource provides a smooth and seamless user experience that allows users to explore the sky, while understanding context and scale of what they are looking at. The exploration experience is enhanced by a highly visual interface for finding the good stuff in the sky and guided tours made by other users.

Over the last year Artefact collaborated with Microsoft researchers Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay on the design of this simple user interface that always provides a sense of context, scale, and direction. We consulted on the overall user experience design of the application as well as the WWT branding and website.

Congratulations to Curtis and Jonathan on releasing such a compelling experience that will captivate many people around the world!