I just attended a presentation on the design of Surface by its manager of interaction design, Daniel Makoski. As a prototype product, Surface is pretty neat, but the design process and goals are much richer than you can see in the demos they provide.
Surface is a prototype of what is called “Natural Computing” with a “Natural User Experience”:Â using natural human interactions like gestures, voice, etc.Â
Some tidbits:
- Richard Grefe of the AIGA coined this articulation of experience design:
(Form + Content + Context) ÷ Time = Experience Design - Liz Sanders of MakeTools.com says it we can’t design experience, because experience is only to the person experiencing it, but we can design for experience.
- Microsoft has collaborated with the IDSA with a competition to envisioning the next generation of PCs. One that caught my eye was the Zen PC – with a completely haptic screen for use without vision.
- He showed a really cool vision video from the Industry Innovations Group showing how the experience of health care might be changed with natural computing and other innovations.
- Aspects of Natural User Interfaces: physical, direct, contextual, focused, and realistic.
- Surface design principles: natural & intuitive, unique & magical, social & together, aware & responsive, premium & authentic.
- Neat idea with paper prototyping: laminate the paper so it can be marked up with dry-erase markers.
- Acronym for non-WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) interfaces: STaG (speech, touch, and gesture).
- A great video from Sarcastic Gamer that puts a new audio track on the Surface video.
