Ocean Observations at SIDeR’14: The Next 10 Years of Interaction Design

The Student Interaction Designer Conference (SIDeR) was held this year at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm in co-operation with MobileLifeCentre and the Interaction Design Foundation. SIDeR is an annual conference that enables interaction design students to participate and contribute to research in the emerging discipline of interaction design.

On the first day of the two-day conference, an industry panel was held with representatives from the industry world discussing the next 10 years of professional Interaction Design.

Ocean Observations were invited to represent one of the companies for the industry panel and our Interaction Designer, Tianlin “Tintin” Gu, was up for the task. The other panelists were James McConnell from Screen Interaction, Anders Mellbrandt (Stand-in for Darja Isaksson) from Ziggy Creative Colony, Björn Johansson from SVTi and Lidia Oshylansky from Google.

The attending students had the opportunity to ask the panelists questions about the future of Interaction Design, Service Design and design processes, new means of interactions and what it is like to work as an Interaction Designer.

The panel discussed bodily gestures and eye interactions and how these approaches will become relevant and important for the future of interaction design. Screens are getting bigger, hardware is getting smaller and everything is connected. It will become more crucial to move away from just using the tip of our fingers to interact and create more experiences that involve bigger gestures for platforms that are way bigger than a single smartphone screen.

The panel also discussed the importance of receiving haptic feedback, citing an article by Bret Victor. The most important function of our fingers is to be able feel things and a lot of our current interactions with touch-on-screen solutions are regarded as “moving pictures under glass”.

Another interesting discussion was about what the next “big thing” after touch-on-screen would be. We as users are currently looking down on our screens and the panel agreed on that there needs to be more focus and ideation regarding how we can present interfaces that allow users to instead look “up” and beyond. 3D projected user interfaces, augmented reality and the emergence of Google Glass will definitely become game-changers in terms of how we will interact with future user interfaces.

Gender equality in the Interaction Design industry was also discussed and it was interesting to see that the IxD industry is regarded as much more equal compared to other fields within the IT-industry. Most companies represented at the panel had high gender equality.

We are currently working in very exciting times with new technology such as wearables, internet of things and augmented reality flourishing, inspiring us to create more innovative and meaningful designs and user experiences. Unfortunately, there was only one hour for the panel discussion but it is safe to say that these discussions could have gone for hours, or even days!

Ocean Observations is proud to have been part of this conference and would gladly return to help the research world of interaction design.