This post is originally on Mozilla UX Blog.

Last week, three of us from the Mozilla design team attended Interaction14 (IxD14), an annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) where industry professionals come together to share new ideas related to the practice of interaction design. This year the conference was hosted in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the theme is “Languages of Interaction Design“.

There were 90 speakers, and more than 800 attendees joined 4 days of workshops, presentations and conversations about design. The topics range from traditional design process like designing design projects to fun topics like important design lessons learned from cat. Here I want to share with you some interesting talks I attended and my sketchnotes, just to give you an idea of what IxD14 is about.

Talks about sharing experiences

Many of the presentations at IxD14 were about sharing experiences. I particularly enjoyed the talk Bad Design Advice by Paolo Malabuyo who turned three bad advices designers often receive into good ones. I also enjoyed Jan van Geel‘s talk about how to sell your Ideas by better communicate with others.

Talks about design theory

In the very first keynote Languaging Reality, Dialog and Interaction, Klaus Krippendorf gave an overview of several theories of language and explained how language manifests reality in our daily lives. In the talk The De-Intellectuallizaiton of Design, Daniel Rosenberg differentiated enterprise UX vs. consumer UX, and identified the gap between design education and industry. In his talk Design for Dasein, Thomas Wendt examined philosophical origins of design principles and new models of practical implementation.

Talks about new design languages

There were many presentations about new design languages, new trends and challenges in the field of interaction design. Stephen Gay and Susan Hura gave a very informative talk on the opportunities and principles of designing Voice User Interface (VUI). Antonio De Pasquale talked about Designing Motion based on the famous 12 Principles of Animation by Disney. And Zak Brazen and Wyatt Starosta talked about what can we learn from the UI of Nature.

Talks about how we can work better together

On the topic of process and how designers can work better together, Chirs Noessel shared how Cooper uses Pair Design in their day to day work. Irene Au shared how Yoga and meditation help designers gain focus, empathy and creativity. There were also discussions of how Introvert and extrovert designers work together and how industrial designers and interaction designers can work better with each other.

There are definitely more interesting talks than I can include here, you can find the full list and a collection of videos of all the IxD14 presentations. Next year, Interaction15 will be hosted in San Francisco, I hope many more of us can make it and enjoy another 4 day of awesomeness.

The Original Post was on Mozilla UX Blog.

Matt Rogers, founder & VP of Engineering at Nest, gave a great talk on Revitalizing Unloved Devices at Designers + Geeks last Thursday. For those of you who don’t know, Designers + Geeks is an open community for people interested in design, and features talks from experts on design, technology, start-ups, and all manner of geekery.

In this talk, Matt talked about the reason why some industries became stagnant and what happened to those forgotten, unloved devices. He also shared his firsthand experiences in reinventing a whole product category and bringing desirability to one forgotten gadget, the thermostats.

Here are the highlights of his talk and my sketchnote. You can also watch the talk on YouTube.

• What causes stagnation? When having a product that has a big enough market, companies sometimes stop challenging themselves and stop innovating. Matt used the example of Rio the digital audio players, blackberry and vacuum cleaner to explain how big companies became stagnant.
• What causes innovation? In Matt’s opinion, frustration of using those devices causes innovation. He shared his experience working at Apple and how Apple invented iPod and iPhone by “designing from scratch, and keep improving”.
• How do you avoid becoming the stagnate product or company? To avoid the “defense mode” and stagnation after a successful product, companies should “not be afraid of replacing yourselves and be the worst critic of your own product.” If you don’t, someone else will eventually replace you.
• How do you make people exited? In the end, Matt shared how they make people exited about the learning thermostat, Nest. Aside from a great design, Nest has a whole service behind it, including matching websites, Apps to view and manage energy use, and customer services. “We give people no excuses to not buy nest.” The nest team even designed there own screwdriver and included it in the package (which is pretty genius).

Sketchnote of the talk

The core idea of Matt’s talk is that a company should never be afraid to replace itself and take the risk to do something new. I’m glad to say that here at Mozilla, we share the same understanding, and never stopped improving on our products and bringing better experiences for our users. Also, we are not afraid of risk ourselves to try something new, like the Firefox OS project, and a lot of other projects at Mozilla.

San Francisco | 01.22.2013