Bringing Mutative Design to NYC Apps at IDEO

IDEO welcomes NYC Apps with beer and pizza!  Photos courtesy of NYC Apps.

It’s small world, but did you know that the NYC tech world is even smaller? I recently met up with an old colleague, Leah Taylor, who told me about an upcoming NYC Apps meetup focused on design. As the go-to shop for Android design & development, I thought it’d be great if touchlab got involved somehow. Lo’ and behold, Kevin happened to know the meetup’s organizer, Serko Artinian, from the good ol’ coworking days. A few weeks later, our lead designer, Liam Spradlin, presented his latest project at the meetup, hosted by IDEO.

While everyone was chowing down on Saluggi’s pizza, Serko shared a fun Lyft ad to jumpstart the evening. He also welcomed the group with recent tech news before giving the floor to the speakers.

Liam gave the group an intro to Project Phoebe, his latest project focused on “mutative design” — a design methodology for interfaces that can adapt automatically to users. He gave examples of how a contacts app could enhance touch target sizes and highlight important actions for a child, and how the same app could enhance contrast for a user with low vision. There was a flurry of questions after the talk from fascinated designers. One person wondered how long a mutative interface would take to adapt. If he had an argument with his girlfriend and was angrily sending text messages with errors, would the interface mutate that day but switch back after the fight was over? (The answer: Mutations probably wouldn’t immediately react to sudden temporary temporary behavior changes like these.) If you’d like to learn more about Project Phoebe, you can read about it here and find the open source repo here.

Liam Spradlin introducing Project Phoebe. Photos courtesy of NYC Apps.

Simon Kirk, the director of business development at Invision, walked the group through the latest upcoming features that’ll improve collaboration between designers and developers. IDEO’s team talked about conversational interfaces. They showed how SMS enables conversational UI, and how it can be used for quick testing of conversational interfaces.

The IDEO’s team presentation on conversational interfaces. Photos courtesy of NYC Apps.

A big congrats to Serko for putting on another amazing meetup. Thanks so much for having the touchlab team!
Also, 2 epropz to IDEO for hosting and ordering Saluggi’s!

A group shot of the evening’s hosts and speakers with their teams.  Photos courtesy of NYC Apps.