Design by Fire Conference 2010

Natural User Interface (NUI), is one of the favorite flavors du jour in certain interaction design and user experience circles. The term signals a change from the Graphical User Interface (GUI), that has been prevalent since the early 1980s. In many ways, that is good - not that the GUI is going to go away (any more than the QWERTY keyboard) - but progress does, as they say, progress. And just because there was a great idea that took hold, does not mean that that is all that there is.

But beyond the name, what is this new thing? The answer depends on who you ask. Ask enough people, and you will see that it can mean anything — which means that it might mean nothing. According to Bill Buxton, the many views means that there is a lot of diverse conversations accompanying them, and he sees that as healthy. Complacency is rarely a worthy aspiration for design. But out of the collective conversations one would hope that there is some convergence, insight or growth.

The purpose of Bill's talk is to throw his own thoughts into the fray. Taking his cue from the term itself, he'll start like a good naturalist, and strip the term bare, and build from there. Starting with diving into the essence of the term natural.

UAR (Urban Augmented Reality) is the world's first mobile architecture application featuring augmented reality with 3D models. You can see and experience the built environment of the past, the present and the future, via an iPhone and Android application. The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) has set itself an incredible challenge: to make The Netherlands the first country in the world to have its entire architecture viewable on smartphones thanks to augmented reality.

In this session Jacco Ouwerkerk will share his experiences and knowledge of the UAR realization till now with a focus on concept development and interaction design. He will also give a broader perspective on the role of augmented reality for museums. Jacco will show and discuss how to 'augment museum experiences' outside the museum walls.

A lot of hot air and expensive business consultancy time is sold in pursuit of facilitating creativity but the creative process is still thought of as a mysterious black box, often the preserve of certain people and not others. But what's the actual science behind it? Are some of us more creative than others, and if so, why? What can all of us do to help ourselves have more and better ideas? This talk offers a brief introduction to the psychology of creativity.

Designing interfaces for digital products like the Apple iPhone or an interactive web application like Yahoo! Mail promises to be one of the hottest job design prospects for the next century. Nearly every product type we know about has gone or is going digital, from content rich websites like CNN.com to mobile task-based applications like Gowalla to products for the digital home like Netflix. But even when one has great ideas, or creates innovative design for their products, how does one get their company or clients to institute positive change through their work?

In this session, Andrei Herasimchuk will divulge lessons learned from the trenches on how to get large, global corporations to make big changes through Design. What works, what doesn't and how to keep yourself inspired when tackling such large projects. In doing so, he aims to pass on key factors to success while inspiring designers everywhere to tackle the challenges that face them in the workplace, helping them to overcome the inevitable obstacles that will arise in their path.

In 1986 Bill Buxton gave a unique perspective on the WIMP interface by anthropologically reconstructing the human from the computer with its hard- and software interface. This Homo WIMPi had "a well-developed eye, a long right arm, uniform-length fingers and a "low-fi" ear."

Given the progression in interfaces in the last 25 years, the reconstructed human may need to change as well. In this hands-on, plenary workshop, we will try to reconstruct our users based on our new touch, gestural, speech and other natural user interfaces. Based on this reconstruction we will discuss what paying more attention to the body language implies for designing user interfaces that are easier to learn and use.

We all know that attractive Visual Design and exemplary Software Architecture are not solely the keys to successful applications. It is the complete User Experience that counts! But how can you create early interactive prototypes of your idea without bothering about the final technology and programming in general? Especially when there is only half knowledge of code and/or visual design? Sascha Wolter gives you an answer and demonstrates prototyping common applications based on raffish and inspiring ideas. The spectrum ranges from Voice- to Gesture-control, from Wii Remote input to Lego Mindstorms output.

The use of infographics, data visualisations and information design is a rising trend across many disciplines: science, design, journalism and web. In an age of high-speed living and info overload, visualized information has incredible potential to help us quickly understand, navigate and find meaning in a complex world. David will share his passion for this merging of design, information, text and story to unveil some of the interesting, unexpected and sometimes magical things that happen when you visualise data, knowledge and ideas.