We’re greatly looking forward to this week and weekend in Boulder, CO, when IxDA and Boulder Digital Works present the Interaction ’11 conference February 9-12. Three of our own team will be presenting during the conference lightning sessions, so mark your schedules! Here are the times and topics not to miss:

Thursday, February 10

User Experience Director Tim Wood presents “Scandalous Interaction” at 11:30 a.m.

Designers have grown complacent — overly dependent on anachronistic design patterns to provide ready-made solutions for the design problem at hand. In many cases this complacency is exacerbated by process, schedule or resource constraints that have always been a factor in preventing designers from truly innovating for users. Additionally, the pressure to design a ‘usable’ system often prevents designers from taking risks and exploring superior solutions than what may be found by using traditional ‘off the self’ GUI widgets.

While it may seem scandalous to reject design orthodoxy, we are finding ourselves working with an increasingly unconstrained medium with limitless possibilities, so let’s bring scandal back to design and reject the limitations of the past. It makes things far more interesting!

Friday, February 11

User Experience Designers Lindsay Moore and Austin Brown present “Human-Centered Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds” at 11:30 a.m.

There has been a historical divide between human-centered design for the physical world — considered the domain of industrial designers and engineers — and the digital world — the domain of user experience designers, information architects and human-computer interaction specialists. We are entering an era of ubiquitous computing where digital experiences will no longer be limited to desktop computers and mobile devices and will seamlessly integrate into everyday objects and activities

Based on their experience and backgrounds in both industrial design and user experience design, Austin and Lindsay will demonstrate how they’ve redesigned everyday objects based on the combined disciplines of industrial and digital interaction design.

We hope you’ll plan to attend both of these lightning sessions at Interaction11 this week. While you’re there, stop by the EffectiveUI recruitment booth (Table 10 in the UMC Glenn Miller Foyer) and DON’T MISS the official EffectiveUI/Adobe opening night party at 6:00 p.m. Thursday.