Bill Buxton spoke at Novembers BostonCHI meeting. His talk was called Sketching & Interaction Design. I found the talk provocative and inspiring. In fact, it put the wind in my sails. Bills message was that interaction designers need to adopt methods used by other design disciplines such as industrial design and graphic design. In particular, that means we must move towards generating multiple disparate ideas, to feel no ownership of a single idea. Above all, we must adopt the quintessential design activity: sketching.

Sketching is the point at which design thinking takes placeits quick, loose and inexact. Sketching drives ideation. Sketches are social, they need to be shared to open up discussion and critiques.

Sketching a product or graphic layout is a lot easier than sketching interaction. Objects and images are fixed. Interaction happens over time. Bill (a formally trained musician) used music terms to describe the attributes of interaction: time, dynamics and phrasing.

One method Ive used for sketching is storytelling. At The Hiser Group, we developed activity scenarios which describe the user experience, sometimes multiple user experiences such as a customer service rep and a customer. Activity scenarios are narratives that put a specific persona in a context of use. Related tasks happen over time. We then sketch two or more designs to illustrate the scenarios, creating storyboards or paper prototypes. Working through more than one design allows innovation to happen.

The talk was timely because Im reading two other books which are related to Bills idea of sketching. One is Serious Play by Michael Schrage. His position is similar to Bills: that brainstorming, modeling and prototyping are fundamental to good design.

The other book is Thoughtful Interaction Design by Jonas Lowgren and Erik Stolterman, a wonderful book which explores applying traditional design discipline to information technology. After all, digital artifacts are being designed and used more and more.

In short, one message of all three is that if you take the time to ideate, you end up with a better result. If you get stuck on a single design from the start, you may end up refining a shaky concept. Then the whole design loses integrity.

At the same time, industrial designers and graphic designers are beginning to adopt user centered design. And so the design process is evolving.