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Resistance ...is a good thing?

I've been spending the week away from the office at UX Week in San Fran, a conference for user experience practitioners that Adaptive Path hosts every year. This year's event has taken good strides towards making sure that attendees aren't sitting in a dim ballroom listening to talking heads for a majority of the day, and the programming has a healthy mix of lectures, working sessions and even field trips.

Day one of UX Week kicked off on Tuesday around the theme of "Fundamentals of User Experience." Interestingly, one thread that continued to surface throughout the day was the idea of resistance or constraints being a necessary part of the creative process. Jensen Harris from Microsoft was the first speaker to more directly speak about how finding resistance was an integral part of his team's progress in redeveloping the interface for Word 2007, and he referenced this quote from Igor Stravinsky:

Quote - Igor Stravinsky

The notion of resistance as a tool for propelling projects forward presented itself again in an afternoon working session on, well, designing effective work sessions. Pulling from Adaptive Path's collective experience with structured ideation sessions (translation = "brainstorming"), it's critical to build a framework of resistance to help shape the direction of a group discussion and give participants something to react against.

I'll continue to post more followups as the conference continues, and day two delves into the theme of media and service design.

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