The Milan presentation of “Extra Spatial”, a book with an interactive cover and illustrating IDEO’s last five years, is a chance to meet Colin Burns, director of its London offices. He tells Elena Sommariva what an interaction designer has to do today.

The name comes from ancient Greek, and means idea. But IDEO is also the acronym for Innovation, Design, Engineering and Organisation. These four elements have always been the favourite keys of interpretation of the company officially founded in 1991 when Bill Moggridge decided to join forces with another two design agencies: David Kelley and Matrix. In the space of ten years, IDEO, which had in the meantime become a team of 370 people and in 1996 became partner of the Steelcase group, retraced the boundaries of our everyday lives. This heterogeneous group of professionals – in London, Munich, New York, Chicago, Boulder, Grand Rapids, Palo Alto, Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo – invented the new essential luxuries of the day – with a touch of poetry and masses of technology. And without ever forgetting that “The digital world” explains Colin Burns, “will enhance, not replace, the real world”.

What is interaction design today?
I think interaction design, at its heart, is about creating behaviour. The very literal translation of industrial design is giving form. Obviously, industrial designers do more than that. And interaction designers do more than give behaviour. I think that we give behaviour to software and hardware artefacts, but, inevitably, you end up designing the behaviour of users. So you do things that make them or force them to behave in certain ways. And I think it can be a kind of big responsibility sometimes.

“The Swiss Army knife never put makers of elegant expensive cutlery out of business”. A couple of years ago, you used this metaphor by Don Norman to explain that the digital world will enhance, not replace the real world. Are you still convinced of this?
I think this is substantially true. I think that the personal computer is a Swiss Army knife. It does ten different things, some quite well, some not so well maybe. It was a product or a system that was designed to do desktop publishing and now it is a communication tool, a video editing suite; it is all these different things. But it is still always a Swiss army knife. One of the things that interests us at IDEO – and I think it is part of our future – is that although we have Swiss Army knives none of us are throwing away our beautiful fine cutlery; we still like the beautiful fine cutlery. I think we are going to get computers that are still Swiss Army knives, but also we are going to get new tech computers that are very good in one thing and very beautiful and able to do one thing very well.

You have said “What matters is what is happening between disciplines”. Do you think that design is sort of in between technology and life?
I don’t think that design sits between other disciplines. I think that design is a discipline and has its place. I was thinking about our own organisation. The best ideas don’t always come from designers. They sometimes come from the human factor scientist, or they sometimes come from the mechanical engineer. The fact that some people go to design school and have ‘designer’ on their business cards, I think is a bit unfortunate. I think that design is essentially the creative activity. And one of the things we are increasingly being involved in is that mass design going on. Real people design things in their everyday life. And so a lot of our work is about taking some of the ideas that our customers and users already have and finding a way to distribute those ideas very widely. Design does happen between the disciplines but it also happens between those people that are so-called professional designers and the people who are hardly ever called designers, but actually have a big part in the innovation process.

Is there a recent project you are particularly happy with?
Six months ago, we finished this project for the Vodafone headquarters in Lisbon (Portugal). The sense of that was to create a multimedia welcome experience. Vodafone is a very hi-tech, fun, young brand, which is very interested in how multimedia is in every part of our lives. So we created a number of components for the hallway. When you arrive, the experience you get actually says something about the brand. We invented a table that has got a virtual map of Lisbon in it, so everybody can go directly to it and use this horizontal screen and look for points of interest. You have a very dynamic view of the city (built in flash), and you can find streets and places of interest. We tried to make it look as much like a table and not like a computer as possible. A second interesting part was the hallway for this new building – it is a very beautiful building sitting on a shallow lake – we put a huge outdoor display that you can see through the windows of the hallway. And on the display there are lots of different changing multimedia screens. One I particularly like is a football game. You play by using your mobile phone, while you are waiting for someone to come and pick you up for your meeting. You can use your mobile phone to play football either with people in the hall, or with other people playing remotely. Using each multimedia as a way to reinforce Vodafone’s brand and create some useful experiences for people while they are waiting or they are leaving the building, would be an interesting thing to have done. We have pretty good feedback from people that are using this space. And we were very proud of it.

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