The role of User Experience Design and how we think and interact with the space around us has fascinated me for a long time. UXers like to pontificate and extend their role into the environment; what makes an office space meaningful, how can you apply UX to the design of a city; it’s all experience right?

UX in the spatial domain is something that colleagues and I discuss a lot. Many of us have had to solve quasi-spatial problems on UX projects. For example working on a project for TV company we had to consider the placement of interactive panels in shopping malls; it wasn’t a simple task. We had to think all the way from who was entering the booth to their posture while interacting with the panel and watching TV. From there we had all the usual business considerations to make; was the TV being bought for internet use or because it had great color saturation. Those were a simple problems compared to some of the other spatial UX projects I’ve seen, heard about and even in museums enjoyed. Just think about what it means to do UX for NASA, the military or a nuclear reactor.

The truth is this; how we interact with our environment is a hot topic. It’s not conceptual anymore. Companies like Variate Labs run by Miles Kemp are way ahead of the game when it comes to understanding that we’re past concepts and into practice. “The digital home” is closer to reality that fiction.

Touchscreen surfaces and cloud technology already allow me to sit at my desktop, work on a file then as I’m heading into work carry on what I was doing on my iPad, project it onto a screen as I walk into a meeting and edit with a group. As Google TV becomes a viable product in digital space is only one step closer to being a reality we will have to consider as part of our everyday lives. Technologies that power Kinnect are a case in point. As UX designers we have to consider what that means; both in terms of the kinds of interaction paradigms we’ll be designing as well as how the social landscape will be affected and influence our work. Tablets are personal devices, large screens on walls on the other hand are not. So there’s one issue to resolve.

I don’t intend to solve the problem here but, I would like to share some examples of innovators in technology and art that have inspired my thinking quite a bit.

rAndom International

In their own words rAndom are:

Working from the fringes of art, design, science and architecture, rAndom are developing projects and installations that re-interpret the ‘cold’ nature of digital-based work and emphasize the interaction between the animate (audience) and the inanimate (object), bringing the two into a powerful relationship of performance.

Their work inspires me because it crosses boundaries between object and experience and begs questions about how we can interact with the world around us. From reactive objects to displays that mirror our movement; for me the group are on the conceptual fringe of experiential design. They bring the participant into the art. The kind of holism that they experiment with defines the whole notion of contextual experience for me.

Oblong Industries

Oblong have been working on what the call a “Spatial Operating System”. Like rAndom the concept of a spatially interactive technology system is brought into the realm of practicality by Oblong. Based in LA the core behind their work inspires the way in which we can think about our relationship with technology. For me they represent a true shift in how we can think about user experience and what it means.
In their own words:

Our technology transforms the way you work, create, and collaborate. The era of one human, one mouse, one screen, one machine is giving way to what’s next: multiple participants, working in proximity and remotely, using a groundbreaking spatial interface to control applications and data spread across every display. This is what Oblong builds. It’s why we’re here.