Panel blurb: Vitruvius, the first Roman Architect to write about architecture, asserted that any well-designed building must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas or be durable, useful and beautiful. Can these same three tenets be applied today to help us design better interactions in a digital environment? This presentation will first touch on the similarities between designing buildings and designing digital interactions. Then, there will be an introduction to Vitruvius and his book, De Architectura. In his book Vitruvius writes about this notion of a well-designed building being durable, useful and beautiful. Those three qualities will first be looked at in their historical context, but then will be examined to see how they translate into the contemporary context of interaction design.
Panelist: Jennifer Fraser, Lead User Experience Designer, Corel Corporation (Fraser has degrees in building architecture)
Presentation slides are available at SlideShare.
[edited to add] Presentation audio
Notes:
- Interaction design is a profession in its infancy
- Vitruvius was a theorist, not practitioner - we only know of one building he designed plus his treatise De Architectura consisting of ten books
- Trivia: Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man drawing is called that because it is based on Vitruvius's principles of ideal human proportions [I'd always assumed the proportions were original to Leonardo]
- Three design qualities: durability, convenience, beauty
- An example of what we might start with when approaching a project: the Winchester House
- Various foundations for different designers: OS, browsers, Facebook apps, mobile devices, etc. If not carefully built, project/product turns into house of cards
- Importance of failing gracefully. Examples: Twitter's 404 page and error pages, Firefox's "restore session" feature when restarting after crashes
- Not so great: MS asking you to send crash data
- No south-facing libraries in ancient Rome because of damp south winds
- Rooms = webpages
- Matching is important - don't mix Doric and Ionic features
- Adhere to established vocabularies and conventions, or at least be aware of them
- Good: MS Office 2007 minibar that shows up just when you need it and fades away after a moment
- Modern interpretations of Vitruvius's three design qualities: usable, useful, desirable
- Fraser used an equilateral triangle with points B, C, and D (for beauty, convenience, and durability) to illustrate. The aspiration is to be in the middle (in most cases--some products/projects will vary). Try to figure out where your project is in the triangle. There will be tension and pull between internal and external stakeholders.
- It is terrifying what people will do with products!
Fraser's session was mainly theoretical and abstract, but managed to be practical at the same time. She said that she had been curious how traditional building architecture principles could be applied to interaction architecture design, and chose Vitruvius after considering several others.
Fraser's content was fantastic, but I wish she hadn't tied herself so closely to the prepared text. She made nice use of humor, but I'm not sure how much of the audience caught it in her delivery. That said, presenting solo to a SXSW crowd is an act of bravery I'm not sure I'd be up for.
Photo © Luc Viatour GFDL/CC
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