I spoke and gave a workshop on sketching at UX Australia a few weeks ago. Here’s my talk, which without the actual talking is perhaps a little obscure - I’m promised that the audio’s coming soon…
Coming up this week is OzIA. After seeing my sketchnotes from UX Australia (below), Eric was nice enough to sponsor me to be the official sketchnoter of the event. Thanks Eric! Can’t wait!
Web Directions
I was too slack and otherwise occupied to get a proposal in for Web Directions (boo!) but it’s on next week and the program looks like it’ll be a blast (yay!). I’m especially looking forward to hearing Mark Boulton talk about type, listening to Christian Crumlish talk about social interfaces, and playing with the augmented reality t-shirt, designed by Miss Failwhale herself, Yiying Lu and made technically possible by my mates at MOB. The whole week is set to be amazing, as it’s the inaugural Australian Web Week! After arriving in Australia two weeks too late to attend last year’s Web Directions, it feels like it’s about time I got to attend!
Edge of the Web
Last but certainly not least is Edge of the Web, out in Perth November 6th & 7th. I”m honoured to say I’ll be flying over to the left coast to talk about the train wrecks and best practices of online shop design, and attend the award ceremony for the Australian Web Awards, which I helped judge. Gary Barber was nice (or crazy) enough to let me ramble on about job titles to avoid, photography for failed painters and our the reality of augmented reality in a recent interview, which you can read here.
One of my favourite aspects of the Information Architecture Summit earlier this year was meeting and getting to know Dan Willis. He’s a consultant for Sapient (yawn) but far more importantly, he’s super smart, super funny, and scribbles like a demon. He also looks pretty suave wearing my hat.
My favourite bit is what Dan has to say about defining the problem that design is there to solve:
I don’t think it’s served design or designers well to run away from that part. I think designers need to step up their game. If they’re not able to step it up to where they’re really good at that, they should at least not be satisfied with being told what it is at the end of the day.
Thanks for the interview Dan!
Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.
Videos don’t seem to be the kind of content that inspires too many comments, but judging by the links to my Reboot interviews, it seems like you’ve enjoyed them. Going on that—and considering how much I enjoyed meeting the folks I interviewed—I’m planning on continuing the series at dConstruct. I’ll only be there one day so it’s unlikely I’ll get that many interviews done, but there will be plenty of interesting folks there so I’ll do what I can. Top-of-the-list targets are Joshua Porter, Elliot Jay Stock and Leisa Reichelt, but I’m looking for more candidates. If you’ll be there and have something to say about design, @ me on twitter.
Like a fool, I missed both of Thomas Vander Wal’s presentations at Reboot 10. I heard they were good. So it was only coincidentally (and after the conference was over) that I managed to get this interview with him a the funky Fox Hotel where he was staying.
So what’s design mean to you, Thomas?
It’s the layer on top of things that are used, that makes them comfortable and gives them more ease of use. It’s adding experience but taking away the hard edges, and allow people to embrace the tool or service in a closer interaction.
Other than that, his explanation of “the four foundation layers” for developing social tools gave me plenty to think about.
After the interview, Thomas and I coincidentally discovered a shared love of typography, and spent an afternoon in Copenhagen, a beautifully designed city, hunting interesting type with our cameras (his booty and mine). It was a blast to spend time with Thomas: he spit out interesting stuff the whole time, and I wish I’d written it all down.
I’ll be seeing Thomas again soon, and would love to do another interview. What would you ask him if you could? If you’re as interested as I am in what he’s got to say, leave a comment with your questions, and I’ll gather them up and me and my camera will ask him next week.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the last video in the series.
Interview number ten is with Kars Alfrink. How’s that for a cool name? On his own site, leapfrog.nl, he describes his work so: “I design the dialogue between people and the products & services they use, with the help of a broad range of sketching and prototyping techniques.”
Kars’ answer went in an interesting direction, quite different from any other answers I got in the interviews:
The unique thing about design, as opposed to other disciplines such as engineering, is the capacity to imagine things that are not actually here yet, and imagine them in such a way that they can be experienced. [snip] The designer has the capacity to make them tangible in some way, for other people, without them needing to be built.
As you’d imagine from this quote, Kars does a lot of prototyping, which he explains in some detail. He also said some pretty interesting, and uncoventional, things about the relationship between design and understanding of, and involvement in, the technologies of implementation.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the next-to-last and tenth video in the series. The last interview with Thomas Vander Wal will be up shortly.
The video series is almost at an end, and it’s approrpriate that we’ve finally gotten to Stowe. The seed of these interviews was a post I wrote a while back, which came from hearing Stowe and Leisa Reichelt both talk about designing sites. Neither of them are designers in the traditional “graphic design” sense, so there was a bit of a definition question there for me.
Stowe’s pretty well known online, but if you haven’t read his blog or seen him speak yet: he’s a consultant, blogger and thinker, so far over “the edge” of social tools that he often sounds a little crazy (and I mean that in the most admiring way). He writes about social tool developments on /message, and earns his money by helping companies think through (or design) their tools.
Funnily enough, a number of people at Reboot asked me, “what exactly does Stowe do?” Admittedly, I didn’t really know exactly either. He explains it pretty good in the interview.
And what’s Stowe’s take on design?
It’s the laying out of processes or models that represent some thing that’s going to be built or manufactured.
Unfortunately we got cut short by the rain. I’ll see if I can’t squeeze some more out of him next time we see each other.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the ninth video in the series. The last two, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal, should be up tomorrow.
On the first day at Reboot 10, rumours started circulating that, although he was nowhere to be seen on the schedule, Howard Rheingold would be delivering a talk. I read his books “Virtual Reality” in uni, and “The Virtual Community” when it came out, and I have to say they both had quite a bit to do with me becoming what I am today. So I screwed up my courage and almost (but hopefully not quite) embarrassed myself with the whole gushing fanboi schtick, and had a chat with him after his lecture. He was of course as friendly and open as you’d expect, and happily agreed to this interview.
At work I jokingly call myself the “Internet Opa” (Opa is “grandpa” in German), simply because I’m older than most of my colleagues and I’ve been online longer than most. Howard’s the real Internet Opa if ever there was one. Summing up Howard Rheingold in a sentence is beyond me, but right now he describes himself as a writer who founded the Social Media Classroom, an online educational tool to help students learn to use social media. He just announced that they’re taking on the first students.
A little bit of Howard’s take on design:
In the broad sense it means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action.
I asked eleven smart people what design means to them at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark. There are currently seven videos in the series, with more coming soon. Next up is Cenydd Bowles.
The sixth video in the series is Marston Alfred, 17 year type 1 diabetic and founder of Sugar Stats, an online tool that helps diabetics track their own bloodsugar levels.
I took a very short and simple quote away from Marsten’s interview. Design is:
The experience put into context.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? There are currently six videos in the series, and more coming soon. Next up is Howard Rheingold.
Interview number five is with Tobias van Veen, a visual designer at info.nl, a web design agency in Amsterdam.
I’ve been busy working on a shinier, happier mattbalara.com, so I’ve been a little slow in getting all of these video interviews online. Today I’ll put up at least two, maybe three, more interviews, so sit back and enjoy some smart thoughts from smart people.
What’s design to Tobias?
Design for me is to create a total user experience in a product that customers should use very easily, and enjoy!
This is the fifth of a series of interviews I did with eleven very different people at Reboot 10 in Copenhagen, Denmark. You can see all interviews here.
I quite liked his view on analysis vs. synthesis and the role it plays in design:
Design is one of the professions that bridges the analytical way of doing things with the synthetical way of doing things. If you consider analysis to be breaking a thing down into finite elements, and looking at relationhips inside it and making sense out of it, you can say that synthesis is about the interrelationships and the combinations of things. I think that designers have this unusual intuition for what could be meaningful in this analytical [information]. It’s less rational, and more emotional in its approach.
I was too slack and otherwise occupied to get a proposal in for Web Directions (boo!) but it’s on next week and the program looks like it’ll be a blast (yay!). I’m especially looking forward to hearing Mark Boulton talk about type, listening to Christian Crumlish talk about social interfaces, and playing with the augmented reality t-shirt, designed by Miss Failwhale herself, Yiying Lu and made technically possible by my mates at MOB. The whole week is set to be amazing, as it’s the inaugural Australian Web Week! After arriving in Australia two weeks too late to attend last year’s Web Directions, it feels like it’s about time I got to attend!
Last but certainly not least is Edge of the Web, out in Perth November 6th & 7th. I”m honoured to say I’ll be flying over to the left coast to talk about the train wrecks and best practices of online shop design, and attend the award ceremony for the Australian Web Awards, which I helped judge. Gary Barber was nice (or crazy) enough to let me ramble on about job titles to avoid, photography for failed painters and our the reality of augmented reality in a recent interview, which you can read here.