IXDA20, or how my coffee maker got a sibling
I have been around IxDA for quite a while now. When living in Geneva, I used to take the train to Lausanne for the local meetups–one of the few occasions during my masters where my not-so-perfect French skills were not a hindrance, and I could hear francophones struggling with English! (Just kidding. Sort of.)
When I moved to Berlin, I kept going to meet with new, occasionally old friends. So to say that I was delighted when I got the email starting with “Congratulations Julia! Your talk, “Attentive Design–A quest for a sustainable model of attention”, has been selected as a 7 minute session for Interaction 20!” is an understatement. Soon enough, I found myself at the opening party, trying to remember an impossible amount of names and faces.
And then the talks!
I won’t write about all of them–I have sketchnotes!
Day 1
As my colleagues can testify, I kept talking about the Dear Data project whether they were listening or not, so speaking at the same conference as Giorgia Lupi has been wild! Her data humanist approach shows perfectly that you don’t just read the truth from data, you make sense of a data set by how you select, collect and organise its components. You are creating the meaning from it, which will reflect your intents for better or worse.
If you haven’t seen her work before, do yourself a favor and get lost in her projects for 20 minutes (or a day). This will be the most rewarding time you’ll spend browsing data. I will wait.
Dan’s talk resonates well with the Near Future Laboratory’s work. Entertaining interfaces that appear in movies just get annoying and too interactive in real life!
Simone gave a charmingly funny talk featuring a Roomba with an existential crisis (voiced by Bruce Sterling) while raising some serious points: why is machine learning so focused competing with humans while ruining games and human fun, when it could be solving sustainability issues?
Jutta&Virpi, I’m really sorry for mixing up your names! If these 5 points seem interesting, here’s more to read.
Simon’s talk described how designing for farming as caring for living things (unpredictable, inconsistent) is the opposite of designing for farming as a business (efficient, planned). Reconciling these opposites is the biggest challenge. However, it’s the same with humans as emotional and (semi-)rational beings mentioned as ‘users’, isn’t it?
A heavy talk about how to deal a stressed user–useful for interfaces outside of life-threatening situations as well.
Open-source design–or why we don’t need to dedicate our free work to another imaginary feature for a Big Tech app to fatten design portfolios.
Adeola talked about how to design out of trust instead of fearing the unknown, which is crucially important to counter the propaganda of building walls.
Day 2
I have vaguely known Audrey Tang’s work for a while, but never really dived into it. She is ‘a civic hacker and Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation’. It’s a fascinating opportunity to rethink and redesign a society’s tech and governance, these behemoth and rigid systems. Since it was a remote talk, some of it was sadly lost in transmission. It definitely gave me a lot to think and read about in the future. Until then, here’s Tang’s poem about the future she’s working for:
When we see “internet of things”, let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality”, let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see “machine learning”, let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience”, let’s make it about human experience.
When we hear “the singularity is near”, let us remember: the Plurality is here.
Marco Steinberg’s talk stated the obvious and the revolutionary: that maybe, perhaps, government should adapt to its constituents and society, and not the other way around? Is it that hard to regulate a food truck just because it’s a restaurant and a vehicle that it should just be closed? What’s gonna happen with the climate change? Maybe it’s not the food truck that should move.
Do you have power over your own data? Guess not. But what if data trusts could take power back over our data?
Seeing a vision of Toyota from 2020 next to the current Prius was very amusing: no flying doors and whatnot. So what can we do about the gap between past-future visions and our present?
The climate session was a surprise: somehow it was not depressing–and Juli’s talk was the perfect closure for that!
I am partial to Juli’s talk, as we prepared together, but that does not take away from the relevance of her talk. Burying ourselves under a blanket of desperation, anxiety and guilt is not an option. Against all odds, climate visions need to inspire to cultivate the sense of agency necessary to actually face it.
Day 3–the day of my talk!
My nerves and the last-minute preparation made me skip the morning keynote, but not the other speakers in the Ethics session!
The video is coming soon! Until then, here’s the summary of the talk:
If we stopped tracking our attention as time spent, and start treating it as a living connection between us and the outside world, could we create a mentally sustainable digital media environment?
Would you measure how much you enjoyed going to the beach by the minutes you were in the water? Would you strive to maximize the time spent in the water? No?
So I did what I usually do when I’m down: I started to draw. Which helped me understand what other aspects of our attentional capacities matter. My talk will introduce a new, visual model to observe, record and show how we focus. Using it hopefully will bring more flow into all of our lives.
As the hardly readable French quote on my slide says: your presence creates the intensity of this moment. Thanks to all of you who were there, and for the feedback: hearing that the talk was too short is really heartwarming! Many people told me the Ethics session was their favorite, and the room was packed, so the intention to do good through design is definitely there.
And that’s it for the talks. I encourage you to watch the videos later–I will for the sessions I couldn’t go to.
Other memorabilia
So many! The opening party, the aperitivos, the speaker dinner with its delicious pizza, or the group photos of local chapters.
The karaoke. 2 gentlemen, who shall remain unnamed, gave an amazing performance of Prince–Kiss. One singing at the original vocal range, while the other aimed a few octaves lower, turning it into an unnerving and hilarious experience. There was also dancing on tables, in an empty karaoke bar in Chinatown with 2 mics, an old Windows computer, a beamer and Youtube. And all of this for 3x the entry price of the always-booked and perfectly set up Berlin club Monster Ronson’s. (Maybe it was a money-laundering scheme. That would explain a lot.)
I would love to go next year as well. I wish there was a way to account for the wildly different tech salaries around the world in the price of attendance. I’d be happy to sing (metaphorically!) for my ticket and give a talk, but I can’t expect to be on stage every year. If I’m not a volunteer, but an attendant, the price tag means an entirely different thing to a lead designer in the Bay Area and a not-even-senior one coming from a post-communist city like me. I don’t know the solution, I just needed to mention this as well.
And how did my old, trusted mokka coffee maker, from my year at the Accademia di Belle Arti de Brera, Milano get a sibling? Well, that was the speaker gift!
Thanks so much for reading, and thank you IxDA and the #interaction20 crew for having me as a first-time speaker! It was an incredible experience to spend the week with all the designers whose work I’ve admired from afar and to meet so many kind people who made me feel included from the start.
Special thans to Sjors Timmer for encouraging me to apply, to Juli Sikorska for our on- and offline prep sessions, to Gilles Demarty and André de Albuquerque for the coaching, to Kate Ellis for taking such good care of all the speakers and to Franco Papeschi for moderating our session!
