Dramatic Acts of Design: Imagination techniques for highly effective product design

Who: Christyne Sisk of Foundry360
When: Thursday, September 20, 2001
Time: Social hour from 6:00-7:00 PM; Program from 7:00-9:00 PM
Location: McInnis Atrium at Autodesk HQ (Directions)
Cost: Free to members; $15 for non-members; $10 for students with valid ID

RSVP/Info Contact: Ann Smulka at (You can pay at the door, but in the meantime, we'd like to get an estimated head count for the evening. If you leave a voice mail message, be sure to include your e-mail address or phone number.)

When Christyne Sisk was lead interface designer for Macromedia's Final Cut Pro 1.0 (now an Apple product), she took apart and studied the innards of a VCR, looking for clues that could spark an apt design solution. This was the start of far-flung explorations into the physical world of film/video that culminated 15 months later with an interface that helped Final Cut Pro launch a revolution in film editing. And it remains a keeper, intact in the latest release, its staying power a testament to the process that produced it.

Christyne has gone on to refine that design process, not only in projects for other industry leaders (most recently through her company Foundry360), but also as a teacher and, now, soon-to-be author. She will share this process in a unique presentation for the NBMA's September 20 main meeting at Autodesk.

Christyne will use her upcoming book, presently titled Where Have All the Humans Gone? (described as "an interdisciplinary approach to the art of humanizing technology design") as a basis for demonstrating the design process. The evening will be hands-on interactivity at its most elemental. Using found objects and other such tools, Christyne will take the audience through a series of exercises in interdisciplinary design.

Designer and Teacher
Over the past 12 years, Christyne has produced designs for a variety of digital products, from children's games and creativity tools to sophisticated business software. Her first years were at Next, Apple, and Claris, where she received, in her words, "very, very deep design training." She became the senior visual interface designer for Claris Corporation and was an infomercial assistant producer for Apple Creative Services. She has been lead design architect for startups such as Flycast Communications (now engage media) and Saatchi & Saatchi, for their global extranet.

Chrystyne has lectured at Universal Studios, co-chaired an interface panel at KQED, and taught interaction design (a class called "Empowering the Audience") at San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program. At SF State, recognizing the copycat quality in her students' early attempts, Christyne realized that they needed to be grounded in the fundamentals of basic design before taking on digital creation. She asked herself, "How am I going to get them to think in a different way?"

Her answer: a series of exercises that forced the students to focus on process and examine the elements of design. ("The first element is time.") Read Einstein's Dreams. Note that what appears to be sequential is often simultaneous. Play chess. Track the strategies involved. Apply those strategies to a design. Clean out the sock drawer. Why was it done in that particular way, i.e., what were the human factors that shaped the process?

Christyne's upcoming book divides into chapters in much the same way: interface design as mathematics, as poetry, as anthropology, as cuisine, etc. She calls them "filters." She says applying the principles or characteristics of a specific discipline or human activity to design is much like applying a Photoshop filter to an image. Each filter can create a different effect. She'll use a chapter, or perhaps several, as plug-ins to demonstrate the principle for the evening's creative quest.

Philosopher's Stone
But at the heart of Christyne's method is a kind of philosopher's stone of design, a basic approach that, if touched upon, can produce golden results. Experienced artists will intuitively recognize it as the creative process they themselves go through, though they may never have stopped to isolate and identify it per se. Christyne not only has isolated and identified it, she has articulated the process and is able to teach it. Would-be designers can learn it early and use it often, a portable tool to carry through life.

It's a process, on the one hand, that links object to objective, and, on the other hand, asks the designer to know that object well enough to visually convey its essence to an audience. This means knowing the audience, too.

Witness Christyne and Final Cut Pro. She dismantled the VCR, became fascinated with the tape heads (object), started drawing them, doing overlays, and playing with them as animation elements in the edit palette (objective). She studied and manipulated film transparencies (object), doing collages that became a Film Noir style for the software environment's background colors (objective).

She interviewed professional videographers (audience) and stayed up deep into the night to see how they felt, and what their eyes could handle (knowing the audience).

"When you work in physical space, you get more functional cues and throughputs — where you think the interaction all the way through," she says.

And what of the human aspect that Christyne asks about in her book title? It's implicit in the process. Exercises such as immersion into the user's world or studying familiar patterns of human behavior ultimately take their place in the design.

A Perfect Mix
No surprise that Christyne's major was psychology with a minor in art. How the mind works, particularly as it relates to design, merges these two fields nicely, thank you. No surprise, either, that she graduated from UC Santa Cruz which has a habit of producing original thinkers. Read more about her and her company at www.Foundry360.com.

Come join the fun for a one-of-a-kind event. Be fortified beforehand with the usual good food and fruit of the vine and/or aquifers, gratis and gratifying, an abundance designed to "enterface" easily.

—by Joe Zizzi (jziz@nbma.com)

Feeling lucky? We'll raffle off a $2795 Platinum Passport to the Seybold San Francisco 2001 Conference at the end of this program. Don't miss it!

Directions to McInnis Atrium, Autodesk HQ
111 McInnis Parkway
San Rafael, CA

- Take Highway 101
- Exit at Terra Linda/Freitas Pkwy
- Head EAST and turn RIGHT onto Civic Center Driver (the frontage road)
- Turn LEFT onto McInnis Pkwy (at the 2nd signal light, just past the RR tracks)
- Follow McInnis past the Embassy Suites Hotel
- Turn RIGHT into the Autodesk parking lot