No Technical Problems…How Unusual!

The final major day of production has come, and gone. Our final interview when with no technical hitches, and Mike’ answers were really interesting.

This second interview had always been a part of the documentary that we were very unsure about. We were not sure what direction our documentary was likely to take after the observation period. It was decided that we would leave the scripting and questions for this final part until we knew how the observations went.

The observation part went amazingly. I, and I am sure my group would agree, learnt a lot about Mike, and what I can hope to learn, about the world of Interaction Design, and how it is applied to real world problems. One collection of objects which we presented to Mike, was a collection of computer mice. We had very old mice, right the way up to the latest multitouch mice. Being able to see how he takes an object, and immediately identifies its key features is inspiring. One of the mice which we had was Michael Schumacher special edition which we had resurrected from the early 90’s. At first we just saw a bright red, poorly design computer input device, but Mike jumped straight into how the product could not have been more poorly designed for someone like him. Like many people, Mike is left handed. The Schumacher mouse was shaped with a thumb rest on the left hand side. This thumb rest had no actual purpose - there were no thumb buttons/wheel. It’s only redeeming feature was how uncomfortable the mouse was for left handed people. He even went as far as to say the mouse ‘offended’ him!

Mice were not the only objects which we presented. He responded very well to everything we had gathered together, and has given a lot of great footage to work with. We are now in the fortunate position were have to choose only the very best of the footage, as almost everything said was very usable! This had been a blessing and a course - having to be so critical about which points are good has been really difficult. Having to bin parts that we all really liked has been difficult, but has forced us to be really thoughtful about what we are doing.

With the success of the observations we really had to make the questions rise to the challenge, and bring out the best in Mike’s opinions.These questions had to reveal his core ideas about where Interaction Design is going, what the importance of it is in this world, and what people should learn about it. We were extremely happy with what we got, and there are some outstanding sound bites in there.

Next stop - Rough Cut!

F.