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Opening keynote at the 2017 Museums & Galleries of Australia Conference, Brisbane.

Slides available on SpeakerDeck.

Talk Summary

New landscapes are emerging that blend technology, architecture, and the people that inhabit them in increasingly complex ways. How can such museum experiences be designed to foster meaningful human connections and interactions?

This question is central to the work produced by Local Projects, an experience design firm, based in New York, USA. The studio has won multiple awards for groundbreaking projects that integrate architecture and digital media, including the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Their work has enabled visitors to browse an art museum’s collection with facial expressions, monitored brain activity as visitors explore a science museum, and turned visitors into designers with an interactive pen.

To create captivating innovative environments that remain sensitive to the human scale, Local Projects leverages emotional storytelling, visitor participation, and shared social interactions. Their interdisciplinary team of architects, designers and technologists design experiences that encourage visitors to fully engage with body, heart, and mind.

John Ryan, Creative Director and Director of Interaction Design at Local Projects, will share the studio’s groundbreaking projects and investigate the design principles that have informed them, examining how such experiences can be both innovative and meaningful.

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Space, the Final Frontier: Designing Interactions Beyond the Screen

Presented with Eric Mika at Interaction17, NYC on Feb 6, 2017

Talk Summary

How can ‘real’ space pull its interactive weight in the era of ubiquitous mobile computing?

Local Projects is an interactive design studio whose work has been bleeding off screens (and between disciplines) into objects and architecture during the past few years: houses that come to life with the story of their inhabitants, augmented-reality characters who guide you around museums, and physical DNA building blocks that children can use to create new lifeforms.

Eric and John, who lead technical and design teams at the studio, will share some challenges, triumphs, and insights into embedding interactions in physical systems:

Examining the ‘skeuomorphic-cycle’: How physical affordances inspired digital paradigms which are now feeding back into physical interactions.

Exploring new boundaries: How do we create seamless ‘interfaces’ between the digital and the physical?

Identifying opportunities: What new experiences are possible as devices become increasingly spatially-aware, and sense a user’s presence, state, or emotion?

Logistically, creating these kinds of interactions — even in low quantities — is easier and cheaper than it has ever been, but the freedom this entails amplifies design challenges. This talk equips you with some approaches and paradigms as you step into this exciting new realm for interaction design.

Slides

Slides published on SpeakerDeck and Slideshare

References & Further Reading

№24: Double Robotics Product Video

№63: Myo Gesture Control Armband

№87: Multi-Touch Gestures by Gabriele Meldaikyte

№88: Video by BERG from their insightful blog post Connbox: prototyping a physical product for video presence with Google Creative Lab, 2011

№101: Demo video of Arduino-based indoor positioning system, Pozyx.

№107: Pokemon Go

№107: Timo Arnall’s Robot Readable World (video)

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You/Me/Us: Collaboration, Storytelling, & Technology

Workshop, Chaos at the Musuem, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Contemporary technologies promise a move from a one-way broadcast to collective storytelling, and yet many of our interactions with technology are isolating and non-collaborative. At Local Projects, we design technology for museums and public spaces that enables participation, storytelling, and social interaction.

This workshop examined the methodology behind Local Projects’ award-winning work. Participants undertook a series of exercises that the studio uses early in a project to identify opportunities, define strategies, and develop concepts. The workshop finished with a survey of both lo-fi and high-tech tools that might be used to prototype such ideas.

Slides on Speaker Deck

Video of Pecha Kucha

Post-summit: recap website, publication, and instagram photos

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Looking to the Past to Design the Future

A talk on Local Projects’ work that I gave at The Made in NY Media Center's event Designing Alternative Futures (in partnership with The Conference) on Wednesday August 17 2016.

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Designing Tools – Bringing Data to Life in Interactive Experiences

A talk I gave at the UX + Data Meetup on May 11, 2016 (Event Details).

Talk Summary

As designers, we find ourselves working with increasingly new technologies and data sources — Virtual Reality, quantified-self, RFID, internet of things, interactive architecture, and more. Technological trends change so rapidly: how can we use them in meaningful ways, in enduring ways?

This is the challenge taken on by Local Projects, an experience design firm for museums and public spaces. Their work invites visitors to… browse an entire art museum with just a facial expression… explore the invisible conversations taking place between smart home devices… become a designer with a digitally-augmented pen… and explore biometric data captured during a museum visit.

John will illustrate the core principles that guide the firm's work as he walks us through their most innovative projects.

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Video (slides plus audio) of a talk I gave on Local Projects' work for the New York Chapter of the IxDA, on Sept 17 2015.

Slides on SpeakerDeck

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Designing (with) Tools

Various versions of this talk have been sore dented to NY's IxDA, Harvard’s Art, Technology, Psyche conference on April 23, 2015 and at ITP’s Summer Camp July 28, 2015.

The work by Local Projects that I covered includes:

Our work for the Cleveland Museum of Art

Our work for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

Noticing Tools created with NYSCI

Body Metrics exhibit at The Tech Museum of Innovation

Bibliography & References

“When We Build” — Wilson Miner, and notes

“A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design” — Bret Victor

Tools: Extending our Reach exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt

Man the Prosthetic god

How fast could your travel across the US in the 1800s — MNN.com

1975 comic on education and rote memorization — Explore

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Slides, video clips, and audio from my presentation at SVA's Critical Information Conference on December 8, 2013. The 20-minute long presentation covered the research and making that made up my MFA thesis project Declarations of Interdependence.

I was contributing to a panel entitled "Communication/Isolation/Retaliation: Our Responses to the Age of Information" (Video excerpts here). Panel description: "How are we connected? The virtual, the simulated, the networked: we refer to our technological state of existence by many names. From studying the impact of the Internet, to exploring the function of logic, computation, game theory and surveillance technologies, in this panel, we will explore a number of ways in which we communicate information and why it is important to study the ways in which we are connected."

Slides on SpeakerDeck