Add to iTunesDan Saffer - Experience Design Director, Adaptive Path
Introduction
This week I sat down with Dan Saffer the Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. Dan issued a ‘manifesto’ about a month ago for interaction designers around coming up with a set of gestural patterns for touch interactions. The concept and his manifesto were very compelling personally, so I wanted to share it with you. Let me know what you think in the comments on this post.
Links
- FeedHub (Shameless Plug in Intro)
- Adaptive Path Website
- Dan’s Post - A Call to Arms for Interaction Designers
- Dan’s Personal Blog
- Interactive Gesture’s Wiki
Transcript
| 1:30 | Sean Ammirati: Alright. Dan, thank you very much for joining me. Could you start by just giving us a little bit of your background?Dan Saffer: Sure. I’m an experience design director at Adaptive Path. What that means is that I lead projects and oversee and mentor a small group of designers here. My focus really is on interaction design because I’m an interaction designer. I did my Masters degree at Carnegie Melon in Interaction Design. I really spent the last five to seven years working on interaction design and interaction design products. So, that’s my background. I live and work in San Francisco, and I’ve been doing digital media now for the last 12 or 13 years or so. That’s pretty much the rundown.Sean Ammirati: Great. So, Adaptive…
Dan Saffer: I should plug my book as well. I wrote a book called “Designing for Interaction” about creating smart devices and clever applications. |
| 02:41 | Sean Ammirati: Sure. OK, great. I think a lot of people probably know Adaptive Path and the people associated with that are. But could you just give us a little bit of the overview on Adaptive Path as well?Dan Saffer: Sure, Adaptive Path is a San Francisco consultancy that was founded about seven years ago by seven partners: Lane Becker, Janice Fraser, Mike Kuniavsky, Jeff Veen, Peter Merholz. So, lots of the web luminaries - Jesse James Garrett who coined the term “Ajax” and Peter Merholz who coined the term “blog.” |
| 01:42 | We do a lot of work with a lot of startup companies like we’ve done work with Blogger and Flickr and Ning and other companies that are kind of a startup nature. We also do work with very large companies like Time Warner and kind of bigger and more established companies. So, we run kind of the whole gamut of things.We do mostly Web works but we’ve expanded over the last couple of years into doing more handheld devices, more mobile, more consumer electronic style devices. So, we’re really running the gamut of everything that’s kind of connected to a network at this point. |
| 04:09 | Sean Ammirati: Great. OK. So the reason I wanted to have you on today is you did a blog post on the Adaptive Path blog recently where you talked about a new project that you’re spearheading which is a wiki. You talked a little bit about the collection of the interactive paradigms or gestures for devices, I guess it’s maybe one way to frame it. You kind of framed it, and then maybe give an overview of that project. I think it’s the kind of thing that many of our readers would find interesting. |
| 04:41 | Dan Saffer: Sure. So basically, for the last year, almost every project that I’ve done - in fact, I think every project that I’ve done has involved some sort of touch interface. Certainly with the advent of the Wii and Apple’s iPhone and the new touch iPod, the idea of these kinds of different interaction paradigms were coming into the mainstream.Every time that I went to do one of these projects, I would look for information about it and say, “Wow. Has anyone done anything with it? How do you prototype this? How do you document this gesture where I’m sweeping my hand across the screen?” Every time that I would look for that, I was unable to find really anything much of any value at all.So I began to think to myself, “Well, this was really our generation’s cut and paste. This is our generation’s drag and drop.” These are the types of paradigms that were setup by the guys at Xerox PARC and other interaction designers back in the ‘70s that have continued up through now on to our desktops. This is our time to really step up and do the exact same thing except doing it for gestures. |
| 06:08 | So what does it mean when you walk into a room and slide your finger along the walls? Is it turning on the light? Is it turning up the sound? What does it do? Just start to bring these patterns that were starting to emerge and kind of display them and talk about them and figure out a way to really get consensus around them.I felt it was a really important thing for interaction designers to be doing because, otherwise, we’re going to start to end up with a thousand different ways of turning on my TV where it’s like, “Is this the Microsoft TV where I have to snap my fingers three times or is it the Apple one where I twirl around in a circle?” |
| 06:57 | So I was really figuring out just in general like what’s a good gesture for basic interactions? The same way that cut and paste or just general toolset that was created in the ‘70s are still around. |
| 07:22 | Sean Ammirati: Sure. I think the analogy back to the double-click is actually what really stuck with me because clicking and dragging and double-clicking really are things that you just sort of know to do when you sit down in front of the computer.So I’m curious, what’s the reaction then from the different communities? Because I could imagine lots of different people who could benefit from this information. Who are the people who have chosen to engage with this project, the interactive gestures project? Who are you still trying to reach out, recruit to participate? |
| 07:51 | Dan Saffer: Well certainly, there are issues around intellectual property when it comes to this. So, there are people who are saying to me privately, “Well, I can’t really participate in this because of my employer. We’re coming up with these new things for my employer.” So that has been kind of a hurdle where people are saying, “Well, this is all kind of proprietary information for my company.” It will be great to be able to kind of break through those barriers, but certainly that is definitely a challenge.I think the people who have been responding to it have been a number of different consultants who face the same challenges that I have where I’m working with different companies doing these different things but trying to carry my knowledge between projects and kind of share that out with the world. I think eventually it’s going to happen in the same way that general interaction design, current interactions and patterns have been passed around. They’ll just become standards. I just think that’s going to take a couple of years for us to figure that out. |
| 09:08 | Sean Ammirati: Sure. So, the intellectual property seems kind of a lame excuse to me, but maybe to put a point on that, how does Adaptive Path feel about you sharing this information or Adaptive Path’s clients for that matter?Dan Saffer: Adaptive Path, our whole philosophy has been built around trying to share as much information as possible as we can get out. So, Adaptive Path is certainly all for the sharing of this information. Frankly, I’m certainly not giving away any client secrets. If I can come up with something that’s a brilliant new interaction for them, it may or may not make its way to the wiki. It’s going to depend on the client and how sensitive they are towards that.Frankly, for the most part, most of these things are - I don’t want to say, elements, but they are small enough that they are more building blocks for larger interactions. So things like tap to click and stuff like that, well, no client is going to complain, “Hey wait a minute. I think we own tap to click.” Perhaps the most litigious clients may be interested in claiming that, but certainly most of the ones that I’ve encountered have not been that way. |
| 10:46 | Sean Ammirati: That was sort of my guess. So how long has the interactivegestures.com wiki site been up?Dan Saffer: It has been up for about a month or so now. I was kind of rating my little manifesto about how interaction designers should really take up this challenge. I said to myself, “Well, I should really put my money where my mouth is.” I went that day then registered it and put it up and then when I launched this manifesto and saying, “Hey. We should really be focused on this.” I also said, “Hey. Well, here’s the wiki as well.” Please, everyone, contribute. |
| 11:35 | Sean Ammirati: So what do you plan to come down the road from this and do you think this ends up resulting in a book, a presentation? How do you think people will start to get this information back out from the wiki? Do you think it just lives in the wiki, is that the endpoint?Dan Saffer: Eventually, it certainly could be a book. But obviously one of the nice things about having it be in a completely digital medium is that one of the problems with gestures is certainly documenting them. How do you describe something that’s not very ambiguous? It’s awfully difficult with words to describe gestures or even in diagrams to describe gestures.So having the ability to eventually put up movie clips showing this as a pattern with people moving their forefinger and thumb apart, for instance, having that kind of rich experience would be really nice on the website. Certainly, there is nothing that says you couldn’t package a book up with a CD-ROM or something like that, but that seems kind of old school at this point. |
| 12:54 | Sean Ammirati: Sure. I just thought you’re an author. You have been an author. I thought maybe that’s where this was going. So this has been out there and, obviously, I’m sure you put your stuff up there and other people have contributed. Have you started any project since you launched it where you’ve been able to leverage this yourself?Dan Saffer: I have actually, and it has actually been funny because I’m working on a project now for a touch screen kiosk. People in my team, as we’ve been working on the project and thinking about the project, I’ve really been pushing them to be like, “Hey. You should be using the wiki for this as we talk about things like prototyping. How are we going to prototype this? How are we going to document this?” As we come up with new ideas, we’re going to try to put them up on the wiki ourselves during the course of this project.Sean Ammirati: Interesting. OK.
Dan Saffer: So it’s becoming a resource for us as well. |
| 13:53 | Sean Ammirati: That’s good. So like you said, you’ve written this book on interaction design. You’ve got this project going right now. I’m curious. As you look at different devices, what do you think are the devices, or these physical interaction elements, what do you think are the ones that really stand out as very effective or very well done?Dan Saffer: Certainly. The Wii was really the first one that I just saw it and immediately could see the power of it. I was watching it on Christmas night last year. Me along with 2 billion other people were sitting in a living room watching people learn how to use these physical gestures.People like my mother who has not played a video game probably since 1980 was playing along and just watching how people were able to learn the system and try to move their hand and see what that did on the screen. Just watching the interplay between digital and physical was just fascinating.I said to myself, “Oh my god. This is really going to change everything now that this is in the hands of people.” People can start to see that using their physical body can start to affect the digital environment. I think it’s just a radical shift for people. I think Nintendo just did an amazing job on that. |
| 15:46 | Then, I think, certainly the second thing has been recently the launch of the iPhone. It has certainly been kind of the second thing were people were saying, “Wow. I could start to do these very interesting gestures and stuff happens and stuff moves.”Maybe you don’t need the keyboard as much as you think. Maybe there are these more natural ways of using digital machines. So those two things, I think, have just been, in the last year, surreal catalysts for change. |
| 15:26 | Sean Ammirati: Cool. So those are two great examples. I’m trying to think there’s not a lot of overlap between those two physical gestures. Right?Dan Saffer: Not really. The Wii certainly is very much about sort of movement in space. You’re not really touching anything except the controller. You’re kind of indirectly using a gesture. With the touch screen on the iPhone and other things, your fingertip is actually touching the device that you’re manipulating. So there is this gradation there. |
| 17:18 | Certainly, these things have existed long before now. You have everything from things that are hooked up to sensors like the anti-burglar alarms, and your light setter in your backyard that when someone passes through it, the lights go on, or the touch screens that have been on kiosks for the last 10 or 15 years. So there have been all these examples prior to those two that are antecedents to them but nothing with such complex interactions really. |
| 18:02 | Sean Ammirati: Right. So if you could wave the magic wand, I’m curious, how do you imagine this playing out? Do you think there’s going to be three or four general types of devices and then standards below those different types? How do we get from where we are today to a place where there are these repository of gestures that can be used as standard off the shelf, like point and click is for the computer? |
| 18:38 | Dan Saffer: Well, I think that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of these devices in different kinds. The idea really behind the pattern library was that it would create things that could be used independently of what the device is because certainly as microprocessors, the price keeps dropping on those and they just keep getting embedded in more and more things.The price of sensors, it’s really cheap as well. So very soon you’re going to start to see lots more of these fully interactive environments and a lot more interactive objects. |
| 19:27 | So I don’t think it’s going to be a small set of things. I think it’s going to be a large set of things. I think there’s going to be a general set of gestures that are going to work across a number of different devices. Then I think there are going to be certainly specific gestures that work with specific types of products.You could easily see, for further manipulation if there’s a large photo wall, I may want to be doing specific things with that. You could see if I brush my hand over it in a light way, maybe I want to blur the photo or something like that. |
| 20:17 | So it’s going to be very specific commands for specific applications, but I think that there is also going to be - in the same way that there’s double-click and cut and paste and all that - there’s going to be this set of commands that travel across all these different applications and all these different devices. That’s kind of where I see things going. |
| 20:44 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. Beyond yourself sort of doing this, who are the other people that you’re looking for? In your post, you talk about the different people that you’ve admired like Larry Tesler and Doug Engelbart and Tim Mott. Obviously, I think you stepping up and trying to lead this, you’re trying to help with that.Who are the other people that as you look across, you think - whether they’re within Adaptive Path or at other firms - there’s a person who I think is really going to help shape this? |
| 20:23 | Dan Saffer: That’s interesting. Actually, it’s funny because a lot of the people that have thus far worked on these kinds of devices are very anonymous. For example, we know who the industrial designers at Apple are but we don’t know who the interaction designers at Apple are. Clearly some of them spent many hours working on the iPhone. Who are the interaction designers at Nintendo working on the Wii or at Nokia working on their touch screens? Who are these people?That’s one of the hopes of this. It’s that by doing this, some of these folks will come out of the shadows; those that were, and start to share some of what they’ve learned in developing and designing and prototyping these things that would help everybody. |
| 22:23 | There certainly have been a lot of people working in this phase especially on the academic side that I would like to move into, to draw on their knowledge. There’s a whole conference on touch, and there are classes on touch interfaces and gesture interfaces. It will be great to start bringing some of those people into the field of practice as well.So that’s kind of my hope. There are lots of great interaction designers out there, and I would love to engage all of them in thinking about and working on this stuff because as I said in my little manifesto rant that I think this is kind of the next big thing for us and we really have a chance here to do something really interesting that’s going to last for a long time. |
| 23:27 | Sean Ammirati: Yes. I love your quote at the end. “It’s our time, interaction designers. Let’s rise to the challenge and git r done.” For all kinds of reasons, I thought that was well said.One more question for you and then you can share anything else you want to obviously, but one more question for you that I have is: There’s a lot of people obviously who are listening to this today who may not have the kind of training you do or the ability to contribute at least from a formal training perspective. I think this clearly is an important problem as technology evolves. So what are the things that maybe people in our audience can do to help the process of pulling together this library of interactive gestures? |
| 24:12 | Dan Saffer: When I actually started it, I had forgotten that there were all these really great real life examples that really had very little to do with high technology. One of the first things that went up on the wiki was the clapper; the old clap on, clap off. I was like, “Wow. That completely makes sense.” It’s an interactive gesture. You’re manipulating something in the room by clapping, and it was so old school and yet it fit perfectly.So, contributing certainly doesn’t mean that you had to be very sophisticated and going out and prototyping all these different new gestures and stuff like that. Some of it is simply just being aware of what already exists and bringing that on to the site because there certainly are just a lot out there. Just seeing something like the airport kiosk and really admiring it and say, “Wow. How did they do that?” Just remembering it and bringing it on to the site. |
| 25:32 | Other things would be simply just that it would be great to start getting recordings of simple common gestures with the hand because that’s another thing that would be really useful. To start having that kind of catalog of just simple basic gestures so that we could link to it and be like, “Here you go. Here’s the clip of this movement.”Just making the site richer, I think, is really my next goal now that we’re starting to get the foundation of like, “Here are some basic patterns.” How can we further explicate them and further show, “This could be applied for this kind of thing.” So I think there are a lot of places to contribute. It doesn’t require a Masters degree in design to help this initiative at all. |
| 26:32 | Sean Ammirati: Outstanding. Is there anything else you wanted to share today, Dan?Dan Saffer: I think we’ve covered a lot. I hope that people do take a look at it and start to look around and look at their devices and say, “Hey. What’s really going on here? Could what’s happening here on this device really be translated to other things?” Really look at what’s happening in the world of interaction design and say, “Wow. Things are starting to change.” Not everything is tied to a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor stuck on your desk. Our world is slowly shifting and we need to start shaping it or else, it’s going to be shaped for us. |
| 27:27 | Sean Ammirati: Cool. Well, Dan, I really appreciate you spending some time today with us. We’ll link to the wiki right off of the post on Read/Write Talk. So for anybody who wants to go check it out, you can do that or if you’re in front of a browser right now, it’s www.interactivegestures.com. So thanks for joining us today, Dan.Dan Saffer: Great. Thank you very much. It has been fun. |
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