Last week, Arnold ventured to Dublin for IxDA’s Interaction12 Conference. Over the course of four days, we crowded into Dublin’s gorgeous Convention Centre with hundreds of international peers, to inspire and challenge each other.

The idea of prototyping early and often was a constant thread throughout the lectures. We heard it from Dave Malouf as he unpacked the emotion and science behind what makes gestures and motion intuitive. We experimented with it in Rachel Hinman’s hands-on Mobile Prototyping workshop. Before jumping into prototyping software, she challenged us, start sketching in DIY mobile templates – snap a few photos with your smartphone and see how the experience feels in the context of the phone. The net takeaway: early prototyping is essential for gut-checking context, pace and emotion.

For us, the most exciting parts of Interaction12 were those that took us out of the brand/product mindset. Dr. Andrea Resmini’s lecture on restructuring Gothenburg, Sweden’s transportation system and Sami Niemelä’s talk on resolving Helsinki’s municipal communication breakdown both described cases that required triggering city wide physical and behavioral changes via cross-channel digital services. Each speaker addressed the difficulty in creating a system for an open ecology that, by its very nature, didn’t have one specific user to target. For Resmini, the answer was impacting collective transportation behavior by gamifying co-modal traveling. For Niemelä, it was “building an operating system for everyday life” in Helsinki with interactive urban displays that served as a hub for shared corporate and community communication.

Resmini’s and Niemelä’s projects both surfaced another compelling nugget from Interaction12: the role of technology as a silent partner. As rampant consumers of information, we’re almost always engaging with and responding to our devices. Calm technology – as speaker Amber Case described – represents the opposite of this phenomenon. Calm technology is invisible when you don’t need it, and there when you do. Ideally, if we can build systems smart enough to know when to surface, and with what information, we free the user to spend their time more efficiently.

Interaction12 was full of thought-provoking ideas and new perspectives, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for us at next year’s conference!