Hannah Donovan - Designing without the browser

Web Directions Podcast

Innovation is intensifying off the browser - the things we use everyday are increasingly controlled by touch, gesture and voice. And we, as interaction designers, are faced with a challenge that’s the opposite of our browser-??based one-??man-??shop: there’s suddenly a gulf of production between our concept and the final product; the means of production is as tricky to navigate as a roster of Tolstoy characters; mistakes are expensive; and everyone speaks a different language. Sound dangerous? Sound exciting? Donovan argues the processes for the future lie in our more material-??based graphic designer pasts, and our cousin disciplines of industrial design and architecture. After a decade of honing our newfangled browser-??based skills, learn how to dust off and sharpen the tools of our roots. Hannah Donovan is a Canadian interaction designer living in London. She led design at Last?.fm for five years, and before that worked agency-??side designing digital campaigns. Since leaving Last?.fm this spring, Hannah’s become an independent product designer focused on ways to make music better on the web. When she’s not busy with new work, Hannah contributes to spacelog.org and plays cello with a real orchestra as well as a comedy orchestra. Read an interview with Hannah in Desktop Magazine. Follow Hannah on Twitter: @Han Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).