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August de los Reyes
Experience Architecture
Microsoft |
Thanks for chatting with us today. Tell us a little about your background, and what you are doing.
Microsoft Surface sounds like an exciting project.
Well, first and foremost, I am a designer. I grew up loving books and magazines. I started out my design education with the intent of going into magazine publishing, but I graduated from college as the Web was taking off, and I learned I had a knack for leveraging the design principles into this new medium. Much like there was a sense of pioneering with the Web ten years ago Microsoft Surface captures the same spirit. Multi-user multi-touch generates unique design problems, and the technology itself is just plain fun.
You are the Experience Architect for the Surface team. What does that role entail?
IDEO’s Tom Kelley wrote a book called The Ten Faces of Innovation. In it, he describes the Experience Architect as the person whose role it is to map out how to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary. My role on the Surface team is to look at the design problem from a holistic perspective; so I work across the team to bridge our business leaders’ and designers’ respective efforts, not only to ensure that their goals are met, but also not to forget to delight our customers and users.
An old misconception about Microsoft is that there are no designers at Microsoft. What does the reality look like?
A colleague of mine has been studying Microsoft’s design culture. His latest report shows we have about 340 full-time designers - compared to developers, our numbers are still a smudge on a skyscraper; yet, the impact that each designer makes on their respective products is in an entirely different league than that of designers at other companies. While design is a burgeoning presence, more organizations are quickly realizing that good design can provide tremendous strategic value, well beyond the myth that designers simply “make stuff pretty.”
In design briefings we often read the term “look and feel”. How can the “feel” be designed and tested?
Let’s be really crisp here: in software design, the feel usually refers to the behaviour of any dynamic elements in the experience. While we can think of designing feel as performance, there’s a sweet spot on the spectrum in which system output exceeds user input so that the overall effect to the user seems magical. As far as how to test feel, that’s a simple question with a complicated answer. There are many successful efforts that test the feel - or the impact of the product behaviour on the user - across Microsoft, particularly in the games research team where game design is, arguably, all about feel. Dr. Dennis Wixon who leads a talented user research team in games has done some breakthrough work that in measuring feel - you can read about in the press. Or you can experience it yourself and play a round of Halo.
Before joining Surface, you worked in Windows hardware on a team committed to improving the perception of the Windows PC. What hurdles were some of the hurdles?
I got a lot of flak from other designers for trying to improve the perception of the Windows PC. It’s a big challenge, but that’s part of what drives my passion. A larger part is that I believe in the democratization of technology as a tremendous force for positive change; while there’s a place in society where technology assumes a position of luxury through exquisite formal execution, I think designing for the other 95% of the world is important, too. As the computer disappears into everyday objects, designers face an interesting challenge: not to think about the personal computer as a configuration of technologies to do anything and everything any longer, but to think about applying computing technology in very focused and relevant ways - this shift is a realization of one of design’s great values: the humanisation of technology. The potential for the humanisation of technology is apparent in such things as Surface.
You anticipate a new era of design-led engineering. Is this contrary to Louis Sullivan’s phrase “form follows function”?
To contradict this phrase, you’d have to equate design with form and engineering with function - that would do a disservice to both disciplines. What I mean by design-led engineering is probably more controversial to designers than to engineers. I’m not suggesting that designers lead engineering efforts; rather, design-thinking will become prevalent in every business function, especially engineering. Of course, this change has a lot of implications for the role of design. (By the way, I think it was a sculptor, not Sullivan, who coined, “form follows function.”)
Human-computer interaction becomes even more important with increasing numbers of ubiquitous computing devices. What are the challenges this development imposes on designers?
As the fabric of devices increases in our everyday lives, the amounts of information that pass among them will be tremendous. The biggest challenge for designers will be organizing this data flow and revealing it to users in ways that are meaningful, relevant, and easy to understand. Approaching this problem space from the user’s standpoint, I think more natural ways of interacting with machines will become commonplace. To describe this vision, for the past couple of years, I’ve been throwing around the term STAG which is an acronym for Speech, Touch, and Gesture.
You love books, not only for their content but also for their design. Can the haptic and visual experience of a well-bound book ever be replaced by digital devices?
C’mon. Have people stopped painting because we have cameras?
ABOUT AUGUST
August de los Reyes is the Experience Architect for Microsoft Surface. He is a member of the Advanced Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he researches emotion in product design. He is a PhD candidate in Industrial Design Engineering at the Technical University of Delft as well as visiting associate at Oxford.
