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Stacy updates the family about our son’s development with an occasionally updated blog. In the most recent post, she realized a striking similarity between toddler playgrounds (new for her) and dog parks (where she’s been going for years).

1. Everyone is there because walks around the block just aren’t enough stimulation and exercise.
2. In general, you get to know the kids’ names long before you get to know the parents’ – if you ever do.
3. There are cliques of parents who are local regulars, and who aren’t enthusiastic about chatting with parents from Other Neighborhoods.
4. On a weekday, more than half of those playing are there with “professional handlers” while their parents are at work.
5. Some of those playing are food-motivated and have good recall if you’re holding a treat. (this is not Jules)
6. Others are ball-obsessed. (this is Jules)
7. It’s time to go when your companion just wants to lay down in the sand.
8. A good run around the park means a big drink of water before heading home for a nap.

I had originally planned to speak in SVA’s Interaction Design lecture series yesterday, but had to cancel because I’m needed in the SF Bay Area. So, I thought I might blog the things I would have said

In school, and, well, in most companies, product design and development is approached as a process. The problem with this is that people stop being able to see the forest for the trees — they get so focused on following the process that they lose site of why they’re engaged in the process to begin with.

What’s more important than process is mindset. And when it comes to interaction design, that mindset is having empathy for and understanding your users, and creating something great for them. If you and your colleagues have the right mindset, you’ll likely do the right thing, because you won’t be satisfied until your users are pleased. At UX Week 2009, Aaron Forth, the VP of Product for Mint.com, spoke. (You can see his talk here.) One thing that Aaron points out is that his team didn’t engage in anything resembling a user experience process, but because everybody at the company, from the CEO on down, cared about the user, they weren’t satisfied until they produced great results.

In Jared Spool’s talk “Journey to the Center of Design”, he claims that companies adopting a “user-centered design process’ actually produce less usable designs than those that don’t. What happens is that companies offload critical thinking onto the process, and assume that if they follow the recipe, good things will come out at the other end. It just doesn’t work that way.

Speaking of what comes out at the other end, that’s all that matters. Results and outcomes are what’s important, not the methods you use to get there. If a rigorous UCD process is what gets you to great design, awesome. If sketching on a napkin, then bringing that into Photoshop works, great. The proof of the pudding is in the eating — if people are happy to use the design, and it satisfies whatever tasks/goals/etc they seek to achieve, that’s what matters.

So, at most, use methods and methodologies as a scaffold to help you think and work through your problems. But don’t adhere to a process. Just use whatever works.

I had originally planned to speak in SVA’s Interaction Design lecture series today, but had to cancel because I’m needed in the SF Bay Area. So, I thought I might blog the things I would have said

This is a subject I’ve talked about at length before, perhaps most notably in the essay, “Experience IS the Product… and the only thing users care about”, the slidecast “Experience is the Product”, and it was a main theme in Adaptive Path’s book Subject to Change. So I won’t go into in detail again, but it’s worth acknowledging that most people still approach product development very much from a features-and-functionality standpoint, and most design work gets so focused on the specific outcome that the designers lose sight of the ecosystem in which their work must fit.

In this increasingly complex world, product design is really systems design. A number of elements must be marshaled and coordinated. But it doesn’t make sense to design a system for the sake of it.

So, a system to what end?

I would argue, a system to support great experiences for people. And from figuring out how to support the delivery of great experiences, then design the interactions, identify the touchpoints, and build the systems that support that.

I have a… complicated relationship with the phrase “design thinking”. Over 4 years ago, I wrote a post, “The Dark Side of Design Thinking” that looked at the shortcomings of the designer’s perspective, and even earlier, lamented how the phrase “design thinking” was being used to mean “thinking that I like,” and not really about design.

But then I also co-wrote a book that addresses the value of design approaches (and I’ve been known, in person, to say that it’s a book about “design thinking” that never uses the phrase “design thinking”).

I most recently blogged on Harvard Business about “Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You”, because I find myself, again, fed up with how people use this phrase in such a way that it’s essentially meaningless, and it seems to serve little more than helping sell design firms trying to be more strategic, or sell business magazines in desperate need of appearing hip.

The problem I faced in that post is that there’s no good alternative term for the kind of thinking I promote, which is a wildly multi-disciplinary approach. Dev tried with “hybrid thinking”, but I found that phrase too limiting. I considered “integrated thinking,” but it’s too vague, and too similar to Roger Martin’s integrative thinking. Perhaps the best term I found was “post-disciplinary,” ironically enough from IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri (ironic because the rise of the phrase “design thinking” is pretty much all due to IDEO).

Something I don’t address in my post, but where I think there’s a real opportunity for exploration, is to identify how this wildly multi-disciplinary thinking actually does contribute to organizational success in the 21st century.

Boing Boing recently pointed to a video that explains the neurology and experience of synesthesia, the condition where some people’s sensory perception crosses wires, where numbers and letters have colors, flavors have shapes, words have tastes.

At UX Week a couple weeks ago, we had a day devoted to perception, keynoted by Dr. Temple Grandin. Before she spoke, I showed a very strange short film I had found online, also called “Synesthesia.” It’s not really worth describing in detail — it’s a four minute art piece that tries to capture the synesthetic reality in a highly impressionistic fashion, photographed beautifully.

I’m surprised that the film hasn’t gotten more traction online — it strikes me as the kind of thing that folks would love. And good for Sunday web viewing!

Over 8 years ago I blogged about LineDrive, a mapping technology that attempted to simulate the types of maps humans draw. I was even emailed by it’s creator, Maneesh Agrawala.

This morning, as I read the SF Gate, I found out that Maneesh just won a MacArthur fellowship! I hadn’t kept up with him, but he’s now teaching at UC Berkeley, and continues to endeavor to understand how people process visual information, including maps. Lots and lots of maps. I’m probably fooling myself if I think I’ll find the time to look over what he’s done the past few years, but it sure seems worthwhile!

Today’s “On Language” column in The New York Times addresses the rise of the prefix “un” in the time of increased computer use and social networking.

A word unmentioned in the article, but which I’m growing to love, is “unsee“. It’s a strange word, because, as the phrase goes, once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it (I think I was introduced to this unfortunate reality when someone showed me tubgirl. Which I will not link to. As I don’t want you to see it, much less vainly try to unsee it.)

A different use of “unsee” comes in China Mieville’s latest novel The City and The City, set in a geography where two cities literally overlap and integrate in space, and residents of one are raised from birth to “unsee” what goes on in the other. It’s a concept that appears bizarre at first, until you realize, as a city-dweller, just how much you unsee of what’s around you (homelessness, squalor, nefarious activity).

This New York Times article discusses how Facebook is doing more and more to come across as Twitter-like.

Which strikes me as absurd. Facebook and Twitter serve some pretty distinct needs. Any move toward “Twitter-like” will detract from Facebook’s core offerings, and is thus likely to piss off the literally hundreds of millions of people who already use it. And I’m sure there’s heaps more to do with that core offering–focusing on really blowing out that “social graph” experience must have tons of opportunity. Why distract itself with a wholly orthogonal communication model?

Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2009, for which I’ve done extensive programming, is only a few weeks away. And the deadline for early bird pricing ends August 30.

Enjoy 4 days of UX goodness, combining thought-provoking presentations with hands-on activities-based workshops. It’s a mix of inspiration and information unlike you’ll find at any other event!

Use discount code FOPM and get 15% off the registration price

I tweeted something similar, but I thought I’d ask here: tomorrow (Thursday) I head to Toronto for a little over a week. What must I do? Eat? Drink? Understand, these are the things I know I like:

• awesome hole-in-the-wall ethnic cuisine
• great breakfasts
• great relaxing afternoon pub
• coffee coffee coffee (drip, not espresso, and comfortable places to drink it)
• museums with an historical bent
• museums with local quirk
• relaxed, fun neighborhoods
• pinball

Suggestions? Add ‘em in the comments. Thanks!