rss feedAuckland: late departure
My secretary has been away on leave so this post is a bit late but here goes anyway…
“Expression around the clock” was an excellent event! August de los Reyes was the keynote speaker and I was very impressed with his presentation!
In the presentation he touched on bridging the gap between the “academic designer” and the “practical designer”. From there he went on further with a discussion showing the different mindsets between “designers” and “developers”.
“Prickles and Goo” by Alan Watts is an animated clip which showed this very well in an easy to digest format.
“SuperEmotion: Making emotions work for you” was the title of August’s keynote and the summary is as follows with further content which can be found at the Microsoft NZ site.
“The competitive environment for consumer technology is changing. Capabilities, features, functions are no longer sufficient. Emotional engagement and compelling experiences will distinguish the successful consumer products of the future. Companies can adapt or die. Designing successful products for this new world requires we change the way we think about people and products. We also need to rethink techniques and processes we use for design and product research. This presentation provides a brief overview of a counter-intuitive (and therefore, controversial) design approach with the goal of eliciting positive irrational response. The primary focus will be a classic but innovative theory of human emotion that has simple and practical implications for both design and research. The audience will be presented with new ways of thinking about not only human emotion but product design and development—a way in which Expression can play a major part.”
Along with the presentation August referenced about 20+ books! Plenty of reading for the next year, here’s a few key ones to check out…
“A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future” By Daniel H. Pink
The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t. Drawing on research from around the world, Pink outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment-and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that’s already here.
“Stumbling on happiness” By Daniel Gilbert
Shows how – and why – the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy. This hilarious work on interrelated fields of psychology, philosophy and the psychological equivalent of music-hall illusionism looks at what it means to be a human being on a perennial quest for happiness.
All in all it was a very successful seminar which included a good presentation by Nas from Zamdes on “Designing with Expression Blend”. (Zamdes is a Wellington based user group for designers focussing on WPF and Silverlight. It usually has meetings on the second Thursday of each month for those curious).
