An Interview with Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati

I stalked and captured Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, style guides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are leading a workshop on design patterns at this year’s Interaction’09 in Vancouver; and, Erin and Christian are writing a book on patterns for designing social spaces for O’Reilly.

“An interaction design pattern is not a step-by-step recipe or a specification. It’s a set of things we’ve learned that tend to work in clearly defined situations as well as some known issues that need to be balanced or sorted out or otherwise addressed. A pattern is closer to a checklist than to a mock or a wireframe.”

How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?

Christian Crumlish (Xian): I came from book publishing where I wore many hats over the years (editor, author, agent). I ended up in technical publishing (“computer books”), an aftermarket made possible by shoddy user interfaces. This piqued my interest and the Web democratized information architecture, interaction and interface design.

Erin Malone: I actually started out as a print designer and Art Director. I went to grad school at RIT around the peak of CD ROMs. I did a project in Hypercard (in 1993). I thought I was going to do interactive education CDroms when I graduated but then the web happened. I taught myself HTML and came out to California to build Adobe’s first website, and I’ve been doing web applications and interactive work ever since.

Lucas Pettinati: I studied Architecture in college after realizing that one doesn’t learn how to design GUIs in a Computer Science program. My first job out of college was at an internet startup where I did general design work but it wasn’t until I created a user flow diagram that I fell in love with the principles of IA and Interaction Design.

Read the whole interview on Boxes & Arrows. »

“Designing and Building with Patterns and Pattern Libraries” workshop at Interaction‘09

Erin, Xian, and Lucas are leading a patterns workshop at Interaction‘09 in Vancouver. “Designing and Building with Patterns and Pattern Libraries” is a hands on workshop where participants will come away with some practical experience spotting patterns, describing them, and thinking about how to apply them to design work.

You can find out more about the workshop on the Interaction ‘09 website: http://interaction09.crowdvine.com/talks/show/2574

Interaction Design Pattern Libraries

Christian and Erin’s book, Designing Social Interfaces, has a website where you can contribute to, refine, and discuss social design patterns: http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/

Designing Interfaces
by Jenifer Tidwell

Yahoo Design Pattern Library
by Yahoo

UI patterns
by Anders Toxboe

Interaction Design patterns for games
by Eelke Folmer

Mobile User Interface Design Patterns
by Little Springs Design

Web Patterns
by UC Berkeley

Tags | design, design patterns, interaction design, interaction'09, ixda, pattern libraries, patterns, social interaction design, social media