The IA of Things - Twenty Years Of Lessons Learned

It's the dawn of an age where interactive functionality and information is available and intertwined everywhere. The past two decades have been a pre-dawn period where products, software, environments, functionality, and interaction with information have gradually converged. What lessons have been learned within a single consulting design career during this period, pursuing from the beginning, convergence in these areas?

What are some examples of these design disciplines overlapping in past projects? How do the constraints of limited physical affordances computing power, and small displays affect the user experience of devices, and what are some strategies for designing them to be more successful? How can a rewarding balance between efficiency, friendliness, flexibility, and inevitably expandability, be achieved when designing in these areas? What design strategies can help devices, their software, information architectures, and network infrastructures leverage each other for greater rewards?

While by no means exhaustive, or inclusive of all the many projects I've encountered during my career, this presentation cuts across a representative sample of my design work. I will use examples from a wide range of projects as a context in which to discuss issues related to the above questions, all of which are increasingly important in today's design challenges. As a designer that has been among few working in the field of product and system user experience for this length of time, it is my goal to offer up some of the diverse ground I have covered and subsequent lessons this experience has taught me. (Via IA Summit 2005)