FOREWORD BY MIKE KUNIAVSKY 9
FOREWORD BY MIKE KUNIAVSKY
PHOTO © JAMES HOME
Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, an influential San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micromanufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centred design of digital products.
Designers must regularly walk the space between broad theories and tiny details, without losing sight of either one. This is especially true of design for the new environment of technological experiences, experiences that exist simultaneously in physical lives and in the Cloud world of internet services — the space that this book calls Meta Products. A car borrowed through a car sharing service can take you from place to place and is simultaneously a data object manipulated by multiple digital services. Creating experiences in this ecology of people, products and services challenges the still young discipline of interaction design. Until recently, only a few guides even acknowledged that what’s important in digital networked object design is not so much the object, but the social relationships around it. This book is one of the first to address this challenge directly. It provides the context, history and key ideas of Meta Product design using great quotations and witty illustrations. The authors take a practical approach to designing in this new environment, recommending specific tools and techniques. Never rigid or prescriptive, their advice applies to designers in start-ups and large companies alike. They argue strongly for mindful design and reflective designers, but never for a single specific process or sole technique. Most importantly, they never promise any magic or single path — there can’t be at this early stage of a change that may be on the scale of the Industrial Revolution — but begin a conversation. It’s a conversation that is going to last for decades to come, and there are few better places to start.