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Speakers, Talks | Blog Team, 22 October 2011

Jeff Faulkner: User Experience and The Point of Singularity

Arriving at #typo11, as a non designer and coming from the advertising and social media industry, I was expecting to be challenged by some hardcore type nerd lingo and design-geek dialect. But I found a real sense of the familiar in the language Jeff Faulkner used in his talk ‘Extraordinary Machines’.

Foto: Gerhard Kassner

He contests that there has never been a golden age of user experience (UX) design and that most brands leave the ‘chaos of UX design’ to the consumer to figure out. This seemed to really upset him. He wants designers to think more about how to help regular people have user experiences that transcend the complexity of life. Making the compelling argument that design is so very important because the chaos of modern life is so very difficult.

His philosophy on UX design started with the description of four layers in user experience that next generation designers need to embrace: Platform, Interaction, Devices and Content. He talked about ‘the dynamic interplay of inputs (platform, devices, content, platforms etc.) which has dimension-alised the problem of design’ explaining that designers need to internalise and explore this in their work. Making the case that the role of UX in all of this is to ‘facilitate human curiosity’ and quite simply solve design problems for the user.

Halfway through his talk he dropped the bomb that Artificial Intelligence has well and truly arrived. And that designers and society are on a trajectory to ‘a transcendent point of singularity’ where ‘technology starts thinking on its own and creates its own thoughts.’ The room fell silent at this point, digesting the prospect of a dystopian future. However, Jeff quickly explained that this will bring with it an opportunity where super computers can be harnessed to create super beings.

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Lastly, I found his comments on the social graph as an ingredient to the user experience interesting. That it is nothing new, but that technology has merely accelerated, warehoused and framed an ancient behaviour into a new digital environment. Explaining that conversations now have entourages of parties that follow them around the user experience, making the linear narrative anachronistic because of the ever present feedback loop.
Jeff_Faulkener_Web

Jeff Faulkner

Jeff Faulkner is an award winning brand, web and UX Creative Director/Designer based in Seattle Washintgon, USA. Jeff is currently Creative Director for Xbox, where he guides the brand and UX vision for the Xbox Entertainment Ecosystem. Before Xbox, Jeff's history includes Executive Creative Director for Blast Radius, Artist in Residence at Second Story, Partner and CD at Portland Oregon design firms deepPlay and Parisfrance where he worked exclusively with Wieden + Kennedy and Nike. Jeff has served on several design panels, as competition judge and speaker. He was also Communication Design professor at the Northwest College of Art. Clients inlcude MoMA NYC, Nike, Apple, Starbucks, Virgin, BMW, Gravis and Burton. Jeff's background includes years in the Pacific Northwest music scene, photography, journalism and lots of design. You can get a sense for his personal style and first love, art direction, by visiting his blog http://agiantgirl.tumblr.com.
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Jeff shone a very bright light on the complexity of UX design. Showing the next generation of designers the problems they need to embrace to help better facilitate human curiosity and invent tomorrows golden age of UX design.

Text: David McNamara, Jam @ Engine Twitter @deemac99

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