The British Computer Society’s Annual conference on Human-Computer Interaction was held in Cambridge last week and I popped round to present a paper on using sketching as a design technique to improve collaborative design activity, enhance creativity, and generally help the design process. This is an approach we foster at Tinker.it! and we try to actively engage with our clients in this kind of collaborative idea generation.

Highlights of the conference were the Keynote addresses and a few interesting papers on tangible interaction (though these were old news by now). In the opening Keynote, Prof Anthony Dunne, Head of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Art presented several interactive student projects and generally perplexed the audience, many of whom are not used to thinking about interaction design from a designer’s perspective - a couple of the audience questions could be summed up as “What’s the point?” The Formal Methods (see wikipedia) guys had a field day.

UI demigod Bill Buxton presented a stimulating closing keynote which showed examples of user interfaces from days gone by, like a touchscreen interactive mobile phone from 1991(!) - no web access though, since that was BEFORE THE INTERNET. Remember that?? He suggested that we can get a lot of great interaction design ideas and bootstrap design by looking at what’s gone before. And he made a good case for studying your interaction design history books - yeah, they don’t exist. In fact, at Tinker.it! we’re currently working on a really cool retro-80’s project with some pretty novel and old user interfaces. The results will be at the BFI this weekend, so stay tuned.