I was one of the international keynote presenters at this year's Dansk IT Usability and Design conference. I would first like to thank them for the invitation: it was a pleasure to spend a couple of days in Copenhagen and an honor to present to such a distinguished organization (they're an IT organization that just turned FIFTY!).
In my presentation I rolled up a bunch of my ideas from the last six months and added some examples of some new projects (such as Disney/TechnoSource's Clickables-PixieHollow product line) and I talked about the iPhone's applianceness.
You can download the presentation (792K PDF) with extensive notes.
The gist of this keynote, as with many of the presentations I've been giving over the last six months, is that a combination of ubiquitous computing, wireless networking and item-level identification is changing the nature of people's relationship to everyday objects. This change, in turn, creates a number of deep user experience design challenges as objects become intertwined with services and as computation becomes a more ingrained part of how the object is designed. In other words, objects that we find familiar now dematerialize into services, while abstract ideas that had been services before materialize as new, and unfamiliar, appliances. This crossover is pretty alien and implies a rethinking of relationships and design processes.
I'm still working on the practical implications that these big ideas boil down to, but I'm beginning to see the outline of what it implies for the world in which design is going to happen for the next 5-10 years.
