One of my classmates was just asked in a job interview what his design vision was. It’s a rather odd question, but strangely enough, one I’ve been asked before as well. Apparently, we designers are supposed to have vision. And since I have several interviews coming up myself, I should probably design one for myself in case I’m asked about mine.

Descending as I do from plumbers, factory workers, railroad men, coal miners, and potato farmers, I’m a fairly practical sort, so talking about vision seems a little quaint. I don’t have no visions, guv’nah. I just do the work! I’m much more comfortable talking about the work and the process of design than I am about a design vision. Visions are ephemeral, work is tangible. And while I have my thoughts on what Interaction Design with a big I and a big D is and should be about, I’m not sure that constitutes a vision. A vision implies a picture of the end-state, and I’m too much of fan of chaos theory and design to be certain of those.

To me, a vision also implies bringing a lot of yourself into products, imposing your “vision” onto them. And while I certainly have an ego, I don’t have a fixed set of things that I think every product should be. Each product should arise from its circumstances. In fact, I suppose that could be my design vision: design is about being appropriate. Creating the appropriate thing for the appropriate time and for the appropriate people.

Few of the things I’ve designed work, feel, or look the same. Although like every designer, I have my bag of tricks, I don’t have much of a personal design style that I impose on my projects. I feel like that’s not, erm, appropriate. The result of the design process should be products whose characteristics have sprung up organically from the research, examined and molded by the expertise of the designer.

Now certainly, I think some of my personality is going to influence the products I create (as I’ve written about before). And I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably desirable. To paraphrase what Kevin Lynch said about cities, we don’t want to make things that are alien to us. But we don’t make things that are inappropriate (unless they are deliberately, disruptively so–sometimes the most appropriate thing is the least appropriate) just to fit a designer’s vision. That’s not ego, that’s hubris. And while that can get you far, it can also cause some hellish things and events to be designed. Vision can be a dangerous thing.

So I’m going to stick with this appropriate thing for a while. It’s a modest vision for individual products, but broadly a very powerful one, I think. If every tool, every experience, was appropriate for you, perhaps especially for you, the whole system of the world would be less frustrating, less cold, and less cruel.

The pilot light of my boiler keeps blowing out, often at the most inopportune times. Like in the middle of the night. Since I live in a city where the temperature is currently in the 30s and 40s F, I’ve occasionally found myself in a very cold house.

Lighting the pilot light is a fairly simple procedure of about five steps. However, if, like me, you’ve seldom done this and are confronted with this massive metal box filled with gas, hot water, and electricity in a dark and cold basement, it can be an intimidating thing. Even for the son (and grandson) of a plumber like yours truly. But there, on the side of the boiler, right above where the pilot light and the ignition are: instructions. Clear, single line instructions on how to light the pilot light, with even an arrow pointing to where to stick the match. Thanks to these instructions, it can be done even in the dark.

How many products do we use that you can say such a thing about? Usually the documentation is in its own (easily-lost) booklet or an owner’s manual, or tucked away on its own web page somewhere. That is, far away from where you are when you need it the most. I’d love a car with some diagrams and basic instructions printed on the underside of the hood. Or an application with some really fantastic help attached right to the pieces of functionality.

Yes, I know we’re supposed to build products that don’t need help files, and while that is a great goal, it’s sometimes unrealistic, especially for things that are tricky but happen infrequently. And sometimes what is simple for one user (obviously a heating guy wouldn’t need the instructions to light a pilot light), isn’t for another (me). We should just be mindful of when and where we provide help. We don’t want to be Clippy, but we also don’t want to be that stereo manual that can never be found when we want to add a new component either.

One of the reasons designers do things like personas is to get into the head of the people they’re designing for, to understand their goals. But as Marshall McLuhan told us 40 ago, people are focused on roles, not goals. And yet there’s almost nothing about role-directed design, everything is about goal-directed design.

Which is not to say that GDD is faulty or wrong. Indeed, it’s very useful in that it lets designers not get bogged down in the minutia of tasks, as we are wont to do. But GDD is problematic in that goals, especially long-term, big-picture goals, are difficult to determine and easy to get wrong. Indeed, some have moved away from the term “goal”, instead focusing on the more tangible “intent.” What does the user intend to do, not what is the user’s goal (which might be very broad–too broad for use inside a particular project).

Maybe it would be good to start including some role information into our personas. Asking people not what their job titles are but what their role is, in an organization, community, or even household. And what role they’d eventually like to have. Since roles will likely have a cluster of tasks surrounding them (“I take the product specifications to the engineers”), the gap between the role people currently have and the role they want could be fertile ground for interaction designers.

This might be semantics, but could also be another means of design research.

Ever do a repetitive action involving a keyboard and more than two keys? I just did while programming something. And while it’s nice to say we should just find ways to automate repetitive tasks, sometimes that’s undesirable or unworkable. Think of where gaming would be if you didn’t press buttons over and over, jumping over barrels or shooting at aliens.

In a repetitive situation, it’s easy to make mistakes unless you get into a rhythm, a pattern of doing it. When you find yourself designing something that out of necessity needs to be repetitive, try it yourself and see if you can fall into a rhythm of doing it. Click on the key sequences in a pattern for a few minutes. If you can’t find a comfortable rhythm, your users probably won’t be able to either. Thus, their task will be error prone and you need to redesign.

My wife is a reporter. In her world, you do the work, you put your name on it. In the design world, you do your work, someone else puts their company name on it. Perhaps one reason we don’t get as much respect as we deserve is that we’re for the most part anonymous.

Unless you look at Comm Arts Interactive or something similar, you often have no idea who designed a particular site, application, or device. It would be nice if we could start including as part of our contracts, that someplace visible, either in documentation or under About This Site or About X Application, it says simply Designer: Your Name.

In this simple way, those of us who aren’t Phillipe Stark or Michael Graves would get what we all want: a little respect. And maybe more money too.

Over the weekend, I watched the documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart which is about the band Wilco while they were recording Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which I think is just a great album. I really enjoy seeing how artists and designers work, what their processes are.

Jeff Tweedy, the singer/songwriter of Wilco, was explaining their songwriting process and noted that, at first, the band rehearses and plays a song in the most straightforward manner it can. Then they go back and try to break the song into bits, to deconstruct it and see if they can’t get more musical juice out of it. It’s an interesting way to work, and I wonder how well it would work with design (if it doesn’t for some designers already).

Personally, I tend to focus on the bits as I work. I have a vision for the product as a whole, but I refine and tinker with each bit as I create it. Perhaps I should try the Wilco method: build things in the simplest way possible and only then go back and deconstruct the parts, making them richer. Something to think about.

I’ve often said that the next big technology innovation and interaction design challenge was going to involve transportation and traffic: smart cars on smart highways. I’ve also often said that we’re probably twenty five years away from that vision. Turns out I was right on the first count, but dead wrong on the second. The Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office of the US Office of Transportation has already spent $4 billion (that’s billion with a B) to make this a reality, and they are hoping to start equipping cars by 2010. This article explains the details.

And some of those details are, as you might expect from a government office that no one has ever heard of, creepy.

For 13 years, a powerful group of car manufacturers, technology companies and government interests has fought to bring this system to life. They envision a future in which massive databases will track the comings and goings of everyone who travels by car or mass transit. The only way for people to evade the national transportation tracking system they’re creating will be to travel on foot. Drive your car, and your every movement could be recorded and archived. The federal government will know the exact route you drove to work, how many times you braked along the way, the precise moment you arrived — and that every other Tuesday you opt to ride the bus.

Like I said, creepy. Under the guise of preventing accidents, more privacy will be taken away. And private data will be provided to businesses to sell you more product.

Obviously, there is a huge benefit to tracking traffic patterns and preventing accidents. Getting into a car and having it figure out your route to work, rerouting based on traffic, and speeding along very quickly and safely is going to be fantastic. But not at the expense of having our liberties (once again) removed.

What’s the relationship between interactivity and the intensity of the experience? I found myself asking that question the other day as I watched my daughter ride a carousel around and around. There’s very little interactivity on your average carousel, and very little intensity either. You just go around in circles and possibly up and down. It’s great for kids, but you don’t see many teenagers and childless adults on most of them.

But then there’s this one: the Looff carousel on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, ridden by teens and adults alike. Its difference: interactivity. It’s one of the few remaining carousels where, sitting on the outside horses, you can grab a ring (hence the term “grabbing for the brass ring”), then try to throw it into a hole farther around the circle to make a buzzer go off and lights clang. Granted, it’s not very sophisticated interactivity, but it is more satisfying than just going around and around (although you certainly can just do that too).

For more intense experiences, we seem to be willing to give up some interactivity. There’s very little interactivity on your average rollercoaster: you strap yourself in and it moves on tracks over hills and loops for a few minutes. The experience is so intense, we don’t care that we can’t do much of anything.

Very complex interactivity doesn’t seem to lend itself well to intensity. Imagine if your email client was as fast-paced as a first-person shooter. Or your online banking application. Or if your car worked like Space Mountain. The intensity has to be low so that you can concentrate on your activity and thus accomplish your goals.

One interesting exception to this is, of course, gaming. There are often complex procedures that need to be executed, often while being virtually shot at or being digitally punched in the head. Successful games find that balance between interactivity and intensity, providing oodles of both. One reason this works, of course, is that it’s a game. Losing and replaying is part of the experience. No one wants to lose with an online stock trade, for example. Restart doesn’t quite work when you’ve lost real money.

If we want our interactive products to be more intense and immersive (and I suppose that’s a debate in and of itself), we’re going to have to build more play into them. And that’s going to be a big challenge: How do you play when things of importance, like money and health and well-being, are on the line? How can you create a heightened sense of reality like a game or a rollercoaster if there is no Do Over when real consequences happen?

Check out this chart that plots every single piece of spam and virus email that arrived at this guy’s work email address since April 1997. You can really get a sense of how spam has grown starting in about 2002. Remember when it used to be fairly rare? Neither do I.

Every year for about 40 years, my grandfather set up his American Flyer model railroad set during the Christmas holidays. The set sat on a 10′ x 6′ platform about a foot off the floor and, while not huge, had a pretty interesting variety of trains, cars, houses, and paraphernalia running on two looping tracks. It’s very post-WWII; one of the freight cars even carries a rocket that launches.

The whole set-up has a chunky panel that contains the controls for the set: everything from the main power source to the whistle to the button that fires the rocket and everything in between. Some 25 controls, all told. My grandfather determined when you were ready to drive the trains, which was usually around when you were 6 or 7 years old. Smaller kids could blow the whistle or lower the Semaphore Man, but not actually drive the trains themselves, which involved not only controlling the speed of the trains (usually two trains were running at any given time) but also how the trains switched tracks. Switch a train to the wrong track and you’d get a collision and that would be bad, probably resulting in losing your train driving privileges for the rest of the year.

The set would not have been as fun without the controls. If the trains had just driven themselves when you flipped a switch, the set would have been fun for about five minutes, but because you could drive the trains and control the environment of the set through the lights and whistles and small bits of interactivity like loading the coal into the coal car, it entertained us for hours. There was enough variety so that no matter what your skill level, you could still do something, even if it was just blow the whistle.

I’ve been thinking about the train set because in its simple way, it relates the creation of larger systems. “Interactivity” isn’t just watching something move (a la a Flash animation), it’s being able to affect what is going on in a meaningful way (play is meaningful). It’s providing enough entry points to a system that beginners can immediately affect it and enjoy it, while advanced users can more fully utilize the system. It’s making enough parts, seen or unseen, to provide a variety of interactivity to make the system interesting.

One level my cousins and I never really got to was putting the train system together, designing the shape and functions of the set for the year out of the pieces provided. That, I think now, would have really taken the train set experience to a new level: that of collaborative and experience design. The industrial designers who originally made the train set built in enough flexibility so that you could put the pieces together in many different ways. It was up to the hobbyist (designer) to decide what was the shape he (and it was usually men building these things) wanted the set to be in. He was limited only by the unchangeable parts (what Dewey would call the form) in crafting his aesthetic. He would put these forms together to create a new form, one that would hopefully be pleasing to the user, fulfilling intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic needs.

Few of the things we use or the systems we’re forced to exist in are as pleasurable as that train set was to me when I was young. Perhaps the toys of our youth should be dusted off and reconsidered; they might have much to tell us.