Ergonomics for interaction designers
workshop – Half day (4h) | Feb 5 – 14:00
What every Interaction Designer should know about fingers, eyes, and bodies.
Interaction design is often focused on desktop or mobile experiences. Increasingly, we’re putting screens on all types of devices, from refrigerators to coffee machines, and everywhere from museums to shopping malls. Many of the conventions we rely on do not apply in these contexts.
In this workshop, we’ll look at how ergonomics apply to interaction design. We’ll learn what principles we can copy, what we should change, and we will take a fun, hands-on approach to prototyping and designing for these new exciting contexts.
Outline
There will be approximately 3 talk & exercise sets.
On average, each exercise will follow this pattern: Short, 15min, talk explaining a key concept of ergonomics, a 30min hands-on exercise which includes a lot of guidance and ergonomics provocations to consider, and a 15min share-out. The last exercise will be a larger one bringing all things together into one larger activity.
People will be divided in to groups of 4-5 and they will work on one given theme throughout the whole day.
Target audience
This workshop is aimed at professional interaction designers who are designing for new contexts with physical constraints, or would like to move into that type of work. It is suitable for all levels.
The only people it would not be suitable for would be people who have extensive experience designing for non-mobile and non-desktop experiences.
About the speaker
Kevin Cannon
Kevin is a Principal Designer at frog specialising in Interaction Design. He has designed medical devices, smart home products and museum exhibitions and has cried in many usability tests along the way. His favourite twitter feed is the @internetofshit account and his goal when designing products is to avoid being featured on it. To date, he has not been 100% successful in that goal. Ask over a beer and he might even tell you why.
