When people ask me for interaction design (IxD) book recommendations (one of the few things I believe I do exceedingly well is recommend books), I always steer them towards Steven Johnson’s Emergence, away from Jakob Nielsen, and sometimes toward Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. I also show them a great photo/coffee table book about ants.
Yesterday, David Armano twittered a post of his from last year, where he described two architects creating a children’s playground. One architect has very firm ideas about the role of every element in the playground, and how it should function. The other designer is pretty open to creating an environment where things simply happen. (Amusing sidenote: the first is a man, the other a woman.) The first architect is bothered when kids use the playground their way rather than enjoying it in the way he had anticipated . . . Read the post, but the take-away is that designers shouldn’t necessarily be focused on control, and have clear outcomes in mind for the experience their designs create.
This calls to mind a classic story from Jane Jacobs about the fountain in Washington Square Park. City planners wanted the fountain to function as a fountain, with water jets, gently overflowing and tiered bowls, inward spraying outer rings — a lovely bit of the old world here in the Village. Before the fountain was operational, though, residents had turned it into a lunch spot, an additional set of benches, and even a performance space/amphitheater. When the water was turned on, residents had lost a gathering space and lobbied to have it turned off. City planners and parks people kept turning the fountain on, putting their sense of what the space should be used for over what had been working quite well for the residents. Eventually, people turned to sabotage to keep the water off, going so far as to put laundry detergent in the water system so that the fountain would bubble and foam rather than spray.
The residents won out, and the fountain has for years been dry. It is a place for skating, eating, stand-up comedy, the occasional performance troupe, some theater, and whatever other clever things people come up with for their reclaimed space.
That was an important design moment for me, and the book is an important design book for interactive designers. It highlighted to me a key principle: sometimes the best experiences are the ones where users can surprise you with what they add to it or do with it.
This isn’t terribly new today. There is a notion of emergent gameplay that has been around for years. Real-time strategy games like Age of Empires are loaded with emergent gameplay — even players doing the same matchup of civilizations on the same map over and over again try different styles and strategies and sometimes just do humorous stunts. In World of Warcraft, I have seen same sex weddings (Stormwind Cathedral), naked dancing guild meetings, impromptu fireworks shows (at the fountain in the Mage Quarter of Ironforge — Jacobs would have loved it!) and Intel sponsors screenshot contests.
When I was a game designer, I used to think of this as hard-coded experiences versus open ones. A hard-coded experience is a series of gates, funnels, obstacles: Pitfall Harry sidescrolling from point a to point b, solving all of the puzzles in Myst. Open games would include WoW, AoE, Sims, Electroplankton . . .
As we move from web sites to web services, this kind of emergent design thinking — the ability to create systems that users interact with in creative, dynamic, surprising, and useful or entertaining ways — is a new skill we have to come into.
Good points. Marketers, advertisers, brands, corporations and universities are all struggling with letting go of control.
Any education models, programs, or examples that you know of that are doing a particularly good job with design / innovation & interactivity and letting go of control?
Keep Digging For Worms!
Bill a.k.a. DR4WARD
[...] But, I think it’s really important to point out the level of focus Blizzard has. It has a very narrow range of game types and titles and works to make them incredibly good. Anyone who has played RPGs before WoW is regularly impressed at how they’ve improved nearly every mechanic of the genre — the quests are fun, funny, and interesting; resource collecting and skill acquisition are generally fun; major things like the introduction of a mount or a class item/skill come at just the right time; and exploration and paying close attention to things (like the plane crash in the fly-over to IronForge) always pays off. WoW is also does an amazing job of combining directed activity with emergent gameplay. They’ve picked a genre — RPG — and chosen to do it really, really, absurdly well. [...]
[...] This is nice story about how urban planning has paid off and resulted in the kind of urban life Jane Jacobs wrote about. At first blush, the city planners seem to be almost every bit as arrogant and social engineery as those of the Robert Moses era, referring to people of ’superior caliber’ and assuming that everyone is drawn to a city. But maybe they succeeded where others have failed because there was a real human insight there: that people living in cities, recently transplanted in particular but maybe all of them, have a need for open spaces and places to walk and mingle. [...]