Bill Buxton Returns to Keynote CanUX 2023

The 12th edition of CanUX marks the return of the Canadian design legend.

 The Case Against Human Centred Design
} Nov 4, 2023   2:45PM / 50 MINUTES

Despite having contributed a chapter to what may have been the first book on Human Centred Design (Buxton, W. (1986). There’s More to Interaction than Meets the Eye: Some Issues in Manual Input. In Norman, D. A. and Draper, S. W. (Eds.), (1986), User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale New Jersey, p319-337), I am increasingly convinced that the term has not only past its “due date”, it is also biasing our attention away from achieving what the term was originally intended to achieve.

If this is a rant about anything, it is not Human Centred Design. If there is a culprit, it is our own tendency to jump on the latest bandwagon – the would-be panacea or shiny new thing (Metaverse or Chat-Bots anyone?), While everything is best for something (and worse for something else), over investing in any single or sub-set of components brings a strong bias against framing things within the ecosystem as a whole, including the interactions of all of the constituent species – of which humans are just one. Yes, and important one. Yet over focus there ignores the interdependencies of the collective whole.

These are not the meandering idealistic, impractical hippy from the ’60s; rather, thoughts which can be supported with concrete examples from history (there has to be some potentially beneficial insights stemming from having been in the field this long!)

 Speaker Bio: Bill Buxton

For over 40 years, as designer, musician, lecturer, writer, teacher, critic and researcher, Bill has been obsessed with the evolving human-technology dance. From the creative disciplines of music, his focus has evolved to the broader stage upon which this dance takes place. A practicing skeptimist, he is a devotee of Melvin Kranzbergís first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. It will be some combination of the two.” Thus, he is driven by a pursuit of “informed design,” without which he believes the bias will most likely lean towards the bad rather than the good.

Between 2005 to 2022, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design.

Bill earned his Bachelor of Music degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON. Around that time, he was also introduced to the world of computing while working on a “digital music machine” project at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in our very own Ottawa, where he ended up commuting on a beloved custom BMW R69S motorcycle named “Mabel”. He captured that particular snapshot of his life in an essay titled My Vision Isn’t My Vision included in the book HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community, a collection of short stories charting the emergence of the HCI field.

He then studied and taught for two years at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Designing his own digital musical instruments led him to the University of Toronto, where he completed an MSc in Computer Science, and subsequently jointed the faculty. It is also the path that brought him into the field of human-computer interaction, which is his technical area of specialty.

Between 1987 and 1989, Bill lived in Cambridge England, helping establish a new satellite of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (EuroPARC). From 1989-94 he split his time between Toronto, where he was Scientific Director of the Ontario Telepresence Project, and Palo Alto, California, where he was a consulting researcher at Xerox PARC. From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, the company behind the renowned 3D modelling and animation package Maya, (now part of Autodesk) and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc.

In the fall of 2004, he became a part-time instructor in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 2004/05 he was also Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto.

Outside of work, Bill loves the outdoors. He is especially passionate about mountains, including skiing, climbing, and touring. This interest extends to the written word. He has contributed to the literature on mountain history and exploration, is an avid climbing and mountaineering bibliophile, and was on the jury of the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Festival. He is an accomplished equestrian, an avid cyclist, and active in kayaking, canoeing, and windsurfing.

For more info, you can follow Bill on on Twitter @wasbuxton or you can visit his prolific personal website at billbuxton.com

Prior Presentations:

WILD DESIGN FOR LIVING IN THE WILD (CanUX 2019)
Nov 3, 2019 2:30pm / 60 min

*Image credit: Bill Buxton