The other weekend I gave a BarCamp talk about my dream to have a texture garden. I love touching things—especially things with interesting textures: furry, soft, smooth, fuzzy, spiky etc.

Yes, my friends do make fun of me for reaching out to furtively touch old ladies’ fur coats; people’s dreadlocks (just ask Pete); and plants. I love markets with exotic spiky fruit or conservatories with fuzzy-leafed plants and hairy-trunked trees.

I’m just as in love with how things feel in the physical world as I am with the virtual world. When I first got my iPhone, I just sat there watching the window bounce back by scrolling it too far. Later with my 3GS, I got the same enjoyment from watching the app icons dim by slowly sweeping them away to reveal the search UI.

I walked listeners through my thinking (in very broad brushstrokes) behind the design for the texture garden, approaching it as I might an interface design project:

• Brief garden history and analysis of other garden types
• User needs and objectives; my usecase “where can I touch plants with interesting textures”
• Constraints including location, climate, sunlight, soil quality, pests, boundaries and horticultural requirements (plant lifespan, perennial or annual, growth habits, context) and the zoological aspect, a rabbit named Stu and a tortoise named Thing.
• Interaction design with a matrix exploring the “texture wheel” centrepiece, and defining a potential userflow for moving through the garden with main touch points to consider for the interface design
• For the interface design, I drew a garden blueprint and showed a collapsed view of the varied-height plant beds which consider the best touching environment for the different types of plants (as well as the herbivore rabbit and tortoise)
• Lastly, I touched on the visual design with a rendering of the “texture wheel” centrepiece plant beds in SketchUp.

Partially to combat my recent RSI, and partially to try a less “designed” approach to design-talk slides, I revealed the narrative of the talk sketch-by-sketch on a large piece of craft paper.