My keynote talk at the 2007 IA Konferenz in Stuttgart, Germany, I argued we need to create fewer final designed artifacts and more tools to help everyone design. The audio can be downloaded from here: http://www.iavoice.com/2007/11/27/ia-konferenz-2007-keynote-english/

1. Werkzeuge (Tools) Victor Lombardi November 2007

4. Deutsches Museum On a recent visit to the Deutsches Museum in Munich…

5. Electric 3-Speed Hand Drill, Model GMAS C. & E. Fein, Stuttgart, 1903 I found as many as half of the artifacts on display were tools…

8. User Interface? Software?

9. Maybe the museum was telling me that our tools are not museum-quality yet

10. Is there a pattern in how other fields made progress?

11. Photography as Science http://historyforkids.utah.gov/fun_and_games/photos/history.html

12. Photography as Profession

13. Photography as Everyday Tool

14. Publishing as Craft http://ulibnet.mtsu.edu/SpecialCollections/CMSPrinting/

15. Publishing as Profession http://www.prioritylabel.ca/Aboutus.htm

16. Publishing as Everyday Tool

17. Information Architecture as Craft

18. Information Architecture as Profession

19. Information Architecture as Everyday Tool Edit Navigation… Optimize Navigation… In the future, website owners will have administrative functions with intelligent information architecture options

20. Why Tools?

25. Because we already know what artifacts we want to design Still from the film Minority Report

26. Smart Board http://youtube.com/watch?v=OP3ehdgLcMw And because it’s fast becoming reality

27. Because better tools enable progress Excerpt from the film Sketches of Frank Gehry highlighting the software used to create his architectural work

34. Such as Thermo Demo of Adobe Thermo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdr3dCmxe4

35. Medicine Because when we can grow replacement organs, ambiguous information problems might become a bigger challenge than medicine

36. What Does All This Mean for Designers?

40. We’ll Give Up Control of the Interface 1987 1994 1997 Desktop Publishing WWW Google 2007 WiMAX “ Free” Hardware Digilarity Messy, but Productive Too many interfaces to design for

42. Tools We Can Create Now

43. Adaptive Interfaces, Stephen P. Anderson http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/the-conversation-gets-interesting-creating-the-adaptive-interface

45. Multivariate Testing for Designers (Riff on Google AdWords)

47. We already model perception pretty well… .mp3