Are You Talking to Me?

Tell me, a n d I will forget. Show me, a n d I m a y remember. Involve me, a n d I will u n d e r s t a n d .
- - Confucius

I want to close this part of the book with a post-script to the climate control study that
we just discussed. You see, I didn't tell you the whole story. There was another hypoth-
esis to the study--one that I got wrong. Very wrong.
At the start of the study, I strongly believed that the broader experience resulting
from exposure to alternative designs would translate into more creative and construc-
tive suggestions from the users than we would see from those exposed to only one
design. However, after studying the videos of the experimental sessions and reviewing
the end-of-session questionnaires and interviews this turned out not to be the case.
Those who saw multiple designs gave us more critical comments. A few even re-
jected one of the designs (something extremely rare in studies that only evaluate one
design, and therefore very significant). But constructive suggestions? There was no
difference between users who saw one design and those who saw three.
So, as we were writing it up, I started writing something along the lines of, "Well,
why should they have given us more constructive suggestions? After all, they saw us
as professional interface designers, and there was nothing in their background that
would equip t h e m to do so. We had been naive to think that things would have been
otherwise"
I thought that my hypothesis had been wrong, and that through the study, I had
gained a new insight. But what actually had happened is that I had just made another
error, and I had learned nothing. This became all too clear as we did the analysis of
some of the other data that we collected during the study--data that we were using
for another paper (Tohidi, Buxton, Baecker & Sellen 2006b). Luckily, we discovered
the problem before we had submitted our first article, so we were able to fix the error
of our ways.
So what were these new data, and what were their relevance to the hypothesis about
users being more constructive when exposed to multiple designs?

393
PART I1: Stories of M ethods and Madness

What Maryam did at the end of each user's session was ask what seemed to be a
simple favour. It went something like this: "Since we finished a bit early, would you
mind taking a couple minutes and making a simple sketch of your ideal home climate
controller? It can be as rough as you like. It doesn't matter if you can't draw well. Just
do a quick sketch on this piece of paper."
And sketch they did. Sometimes they hesitated. Sometimes they were shy. Some
were gifted draftspeople, and others were pencil-challenged like me. But every one of
them did a drawing, and they were a revelation.
Later, during analysis, Maryam and I spread them all out on a very large boardroom
table. All 48 of them. We then sorted them by condition. Thus, we had four long rows:
one for each of the three groups who saw only one design (Circular, Tabular, and Lin-
ear) and one for those who saw all three.
For the first three groups (the single condition ones), we then sorted the sketches
according to how close they were to the original. We started with the ones that were
most similar, and ended with the ones that were the most different.
The sketches from those who saw all three designs were just clustered by similarity.
You can see the sorted sketches in Figures 153 through 156. Compare them to the three
designs that the users saw, as shown in Figures 145 and 151.
What is clear in these sketches, even to a lay-person, is that the users did have origi-
nal ideas about alternative designs. What we had not done in the first study, however,
was let them communicate them to us in an appropriate language.
I can hear the collective yawn of the participatory design community at this stage as
they tell me, "I could have told you so." Okay, mea culpa. But at least this episode helps
bring closure to this section of the book with yet another example emphasizing that
sketching is a language that supports a particular form of dialogue--a dialogue that
can help all of us bring our ideas one step closer to fruition.

394
Are You Talking to Me?

395
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1927 - 1930: A Period of Transition in D e s i g n ~ N o t Unlike Today
The period that we are in right now in terms of interaction design is not unlike that
in which American industrial design found itself in the latter part of the 1920s. The
discipline was establishing itself as a distinct and legitimate profession. Yet, for the
very reason that it was not yet established and there was no defined curriculum for
training practitioners. Those who established what were to become some of the most
influential practices and consultancies came from a myriad of backgrounds, including
illustration, architecture, engineering, fashion, painting and theatre design.
Like the interaction design practitioner of today, these early industrial designers
transferred skills from established disciplines, and adapted them to the demands of
product design at the time.
Here are a few examples.

It was at this time that the first car that was designed as well as engineered was sold.
It was the 1927 Cadillac La Salle and it was designed by Harley Earl. Earl studied
engineering at Stanford but had been drawn to designing custom automobiles for
famous clients in Los Angeles. There he attracted the attention of General Motors.
This investment in design by General Motors was in stark contrast to their main com-
petitor, Ford, who were still very much functioning in the tradition characterized by
Henry Ford's famous statement, "You can have it in any colour as long as it is black."
While Ford produced their fifteen millionth Model T that year, they also discontinued
it, and shut down their production line for six months. It took them that long to come
up with a competitive product, the Model A. Harley's La Salle had changed the au-
tomotive industry forever. Design, and the techniques that he introduced (such as
building clay models), became the norm in the industry.
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 Walter Dorwin Teague was a successful graphic artist who opened an industrial
design practice in 1 9 2 6 - a firm that is still in business today. His first project was
a Kodak camera, the Vanity Kodak, that would fit in your vest pocket. Not unlike
today's iPod Mini, one of the things that distinguished this camera was that it came
in five colours, blue, brown, green, grey and red, with matching coloured bellows
and satin-lined case.

Henry Dreyfuss is likely the most important person in terms of introducing ergonom-
ics into industrial design. Yet, he began his career as a designer of stage sets for
theatre. He opened his own office in 1929 in New York city and that same year won
a competition from Bell Laboratories to design the phone of the future. If you pick up
the handset of almost any payphone in North America, you are experiencing the re-
sults of his design that resulted from this competition. His firm is still in business.

Raymond Loewy emigrated to New York from France in 1919. He began his career
in New York as a window display designer as well as a fashion illustrator for maga-
zines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Like Dreyfuss, he opened his own firm in
1929. His first commission came that same year. It was the redesign of the Gestet-
ner mimeograph machine. One of the most universally iconic of his designs is the
classic Coca-Cola bottle.

It is in such people, their practice, and their development, that I see the model for the
evolution and maturation of interaction design as a distinct profession.