Bill Moggridge left our world in September, but his human-centered design spirit lives on!

Bill Moggridge, co-founder of the design company IDEO and director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, passed away on September 8th 2012 of cancer at the age of 69.    If you are familiar with human-centered design, user experience, or design thinking, it is likely that you've have been influenced by Moggridge's work, ideas, and heart!  

I encourage you to take the time to view the following video:


To learn more about Bill Moggridge and his contributions to the people of our world, take a look at the "Remembering Bill" web pages on the Cooper-Hewitt website, and also the Celebrating Bill Moggridge website.

RELATED
Bill Boggridge's presentation to K-12 educators about design:



Bill Moggridge is the author of the following books:

Designing Media (book/DVD/website), featuring interviews with a range of people from various disciplines related to media.

Designing Interactions (book/DVD/website). In this book, Moggridge introduces a number of of people who have influenced interaction design.  It also covers the evolution of the interactive design approaches at IDEO.

CHI 2012 SlideShow (quick)

Here are some pictures from CHI 2012:


 I'll be sharing about innovative, interesting interactive technologies in some of my future posts.

Update from #CHI 2011 - much more to come.

I've been attending CHI 2011 for the past few days and have been impressed by the depth and breadth of the conference.  In addition to attending a number of interesting, high-quality presentations, I had the chance to interview several key contributors to the HCI field, explore a variety of awesome interactive applications,  and participate in an interactive musical multimedia performance.  Below is a video taken of part of the performance, taken by someone at the conference:


I also had a chance to explore Bill Buxton's exhibit of his historical archive of input and interactive devices.  To see the interactive online version of the exhibit, take a look at  Buxton Collection.  You won't be disappointed.

I will be sharing my "take aways" from the conference in a series of posts on this blog over the next couple of weeks. I meantime,  take a look at some of the CHI "Madness" videos below. The video clips are about 20-seconds long and are created by CHI presenters as previews to help conference attendees plan their schedules, since there are many sessions that are held concurrently. 

Gamification: Using Game Design Elements in Non-Gaming Contexts


CHI 2011 Accessible Games SIG




Games for your cat:


Don't forget Grandma!

Usability, Accessibility, and User Experience in a Win7 Environment

Microsoft's newest operating system, Win7 (beta), allows for multi-touch interaction and application development. From what I can tell from the news from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2009), touch and gesture interaction holds quite a bit of interest among consumers and application developers alike.

Hopefully people will think carefully about user experience and usability factors when developing the applications we'll be using in the not too distant future!

Because of my background as a school psychologist, I’m interested how touch/gesture applications can address accessibility and universal usability issues.

I wasn't able to locate user experience or usability information for Win7. Here are a few links from the Microsoft website that I think are worth reading:

Touch Interaction Guidelines

How to Design a Great User Experience

Designing with Windows Presentation Foundation

Accessibility

According to the research from Microsoft, ”more than half of all computer users experience difficulties or impairments related to accessibility, and are likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology. Moreover, approaching software design with the flexibility and inclusiveness that are the hallmarks of accessibility often results in overall improved usability and customer satisfaction.”

Regarding touch/gesture interaction, know that “19% (24.4 million) of computer users have a mild dexterity difficulty or impairment, and 5% (6.8 million) of computer users have a severe dexterity difficulty or impairment.”

Christian Moore, from the NUI-Group, shared this nice graphic that depicts the various fields that intersect or converge with interface design, which I think is useful when thinking about how we will design, develop, and use emerging technologies:



Concepts such as accessibility and universal usability can fit into this design!

For more information regarding multi-touch, see my previous post, "For Techies and the Tech-Curious: Multi-touch/Gesture from the NUI Group"