Live from XMediaLab: Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer, Schematic

Note: I'd like to apologize for not blogging Adrian Sexton or Parmesh Shahani's talks. They were both great! Check the #xmedialab twitterstream to see what they talked about; I'll also link to the videos once they go live. From the program: With twenty-five years in graphic design for television and film, and over a dozen years experience working with interactive user interface design, Dale brings a unique perspective to his role as Schematic's Creative Director and co-founder. Dale has designed more than 15 network broadcast packages. He directed and designed the on-air graphics for three Winter Olympics for CBS (Albertville 92, Lillehammer 94, and Nagano 98), ultimately winning three Emmy awards for this work. His user interface experience bridges Enhanced and Interactive TV, the Internet, and broadband networks, as well as emerging wireless media. Leading development in interactive television, Dale designed the interface for Time Warner's groundbreaking Full Service Network in Orlando. Semi-apologetically, Dale starts by saying that creatives are unpredictable, so this is a bit freeform. The topic of the talk is designing ideas. We’re in a challenging landscape, but new ideas can emerge from downturns and times of change. He’s been through this before – he had a small company during the dot com bubble, and he learned that this kind of upheaval is a great time for ideas. He’s going to look at

• Context and Ideas
• Spatial context
• Context of time
• Expressing ideas
• Now & next

The audience is everywhere: watching TV, using Facebook on your iPhone, online, whatever screen wherever -- this is where the audience is going. Consider the context, the landscape by distance. The way they look at it is really from the audience standpoint -- the distance from the screen. How far is the audience?

• Personal media is 1-2 foot navigation -- computer, iPhone, etc. Personal devices where the audience is really close and can actually touch the screen.
• The traditional TV experience is 10 foot navigation, and includes friends and family.
• Public media is screens that the audience doesn't own. People can walk up and interact with them. This type of screen can be anywhere from 2-200 foot navigation, and could also include layered navigation (somebody close, somebody far).

He drew a big line between distance gesture (TV & public media) and touch gesture (personal media). He says he's talking really fast -- true! My fingers are about to fall off :-) Screen space. If you have a screen, there's a space in front of the screen. You can use perspective to push the screen back and put information in front of the screen (rather than just cluttering the lower part of the screen). It's a branded space you can play with. Product as experience. His products are experiences – they’re less about a product (computer, phone, etc) and more about what the user is doing. Theoretically, the same experience can move seamlessly across other devices -- that's what they're pushing for. Interface = brand. They work with Comcast -- the interface on the TV screen is the customer's experience of your brand. They did a 6x10ft media wall in an airport for Accenture, split down the middle so two people could use it simultaneously. This is a new model for advertising -- it's a dynamic experience that's an ad for Accenture. Accenture is not a consumer brand, but you have a screen in an airport, and there's a person right up against the screen interacting with it. There's a second audience walking by, and Accenture's audience is perhaps an executive walking by watching someone interact with the screen. Time: now and next. Ideal -- current reality -- past legacy. A lot of projects they're doing are looking at designing concurrently something for now (current reality) and something visionary (your brand in the future when some of these limitations go away). Shows example of screens that utilize z-space -- dive in, pull back out. He's seeing a great advancement where they're looking at Flash being brought to set-top boxes. Expressing ideas. Put things out there. He represents with Schematic the pushing forward of new ideas. Example: hand gesture as input. Assignment: what is it like to interface with the computer in the future? He worked on Minority Report, and he believes some of what came out in that movie made these new concepts more accessible to the audience. Screens as wallpaper. They imagined that video would not be furniture anymore -- it would just be part of the background -- you could use it to paint your house! When screens are this large, you can imagine the scale -- you can watch a movie across the wall. Dynamic Assemblage. You could say that today if you're watching bits and pieces -- like YouTube -- there's a finding process, and then you watch it, then you find more, then you watch more. It's a lot of work. They're proposing that through advanced metadata, that's all assembled automatically. When you watch television, there's a careful process to put branding, promo, credits, show, etc.; there's a crafting of all these parts. He sees that in the future the system would understand these parts and the crafting and would know you reasonably well, and would lay them out for you. Dynamic assemblage means that online experiences could look like television, but assembled automatically. Time chain: archive --> recent --> now --> next --> promo. The unfortunate thing with some of these ideas is all the NDAs he's under! So he can't show us some of the really cool stuff he's working on. Pure gestural navigation for TV. They're working with Prime Sense, based in Israel. Showed a brief video of controlling volume using a hand gesture -- Minority Report made real! Can't wait to try it. He loves the purity of not having a remote device. It's also got implications for doctors in surgery -- you're sterile, can't touch anything -- but maybe you won't have to! What's really going on is you're training a machine to respond to the language of your hands. Sketching -- staying with the big idea. It's the idea that you're able to really quickly rapid prototype and create simple expressions of ideas, not getting bogged in the details. He uses Keynote or After Efx to quickly mock up ideas. Transitions are critical moments (reminds me of Paul Dunn from B1G1 and his idea of 'magic moments'). Use continual beta to address constant change. When we're looking at what we do as actual initial products are in beta versions, it's important that as products are distributed this way they can be changed and modified quite easily. They’re even looking at brainwaves as inputs – they want to get data coming out of your head! Critical ideas for cross media -- what does it mean to design for that? From a television standpoint, it's very common to have a list of things on the left, and then some detail on the right. With touch gesture, you can touch an item on the left and it would open on the right. With hand gesture, you could gesture at an item on the left and flick it over to the right. Those are just some of the things they're working on. Wow.