Bill Buxton has very kindly offered to make a presentation on, "Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development" whilst he is still around in April. Thanks Bill!
Bill recently made an excellent presentation to a packed audience at a meeting of The Cambridge Network, so expect this to be a cracker!
Date: Wednesday 20th April 2005
Time: 6.30 for 6.45pm
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]
Cost:It is essential that anyone wishing to attend reserves a place. To do this, please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UKUPA member to attend but it would be great if you could join up! Future events may not be free for non-members.
Here's the introduction...
Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development
This talk could just as well be titled "What I have learned about software product design in 8 1/2 years of working with some of the best industrial designers and film makers in the world." The underlying premise is that filmmakers and industrial designers approach the design of new products in a fundamentally different way than the software industry. More often than not, software products are green-lighted, and then work begins. With films and product design, green-lighting comes at the end of a front-end process, not the beginning. Stated another way, software projects tend to go directly to development/engineering, leapfrogging over anything that an industrial designer, for example, would recognize as a design process.
Our argument is that our industry’s bypassing such an explicit and formal front-end design (or in film terms, pre-production) process lies at the root of many of our problems of quality, cost over-runs, and late delivery. Furthermore, I would argue that the absence of this front-end process lies at the root of the software industry’s abysmal track record in bringing out successful new (as opposed to n+1) products. To put my argument into perspective, I will briefly summarize the process followed in film and product design, and discuss how it can apply to software product design.
Bill Buxton is an interaction designer and researcher, and Principal of the Toronto-based design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. During the spring of 2005, he is a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, England.
Bill is one of the pioneers in computer music, and has played an important role in the development of computer-based tools for film, industrial design, graphics and animation. As a researcher, he has had a long history with Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Toronto (where he is still an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute). As well, during the fall of 2004, he was a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In 2001, the Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood. In 2002 Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada, and he was elected to the ACM’s CHI Academy.
More information on Buxton and his work can be found at: http://www.billbuxton.com
Posted by carl.myhill at March 18, 2005 08:28 PM