12:
I just finished watching the Bill Buxton presentation from the global Expression around the Clock seminars. It is part of the webcasts from the Microsoft launch of its Expression suite.
If you are going to watch any I would recommend this and also the one by August de los Reyes, as I touched on in an earlier post. It will be interesting to see how these talented individuals impact on future user experience led Microsoft products.
The title is “Design for the Wild: Sketching experiences”. Bill Buxton is a senior researcher in Microsoft Research. Here’s an article talking about his job further.
It’s well worth the watch as he delves into his experiences into the growing importance of Human-centric design over a flawed Techno-centric methodology. He discusses that whilst technically communication and learning tools have changed dramatically since the slate and blackboard, the core social and human interactive aspects have fundamentally stayed the same.
Looking into modern communication techniques and tools he explains how recent products have started to re-engage familiar habits people use to interact, and how technology is becoming more and more invisible.
Bill goes onto provide some recommended reading:
“Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communications system” by Ivan Sutherland
“Pygmalion: a creative programming environment” by David Confield Smith
“Designing for people” & “The measure of man” both by Henry Dreyfuss
He also has in own book available called “Sketching User Experiences“. Which even has a quote on the front-cover by Bill Gates for what it’s worth (which must be even harder “than getting Arrington to link your site” ha!)
11:
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).
27:
I’m heading up to Auckland next week for the BeST Awards on the friday night so while in the neighbourhood thought I’d check out “Expression around the Clock” on the Thurdsay morning too.
It’s a half day event and should be quite interesting with the event keynote presentation by August de los Reyes, Creative Director for the Windows Platform Core Innovation Team.
Nigel Parker (Web Development Advisor, Microsoft NZ) and Nas Khan (UX Consultant, Infinity Solutions) will follow, showcasing how Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Silverlight can create compelling User Experiences for the web and the Windows client. The event will wrap up with a Panel Discussion titled: “Merging Culture, Design, Business, and Technology: What? So What? Now What?”
I’ve been getting into the new Expression Studio tools recently with a few funky projects at Provoke and with the birth of the Zamdes User Group (with support from our very own Isha) in Wellington it’s a rather opportune time for events such as this to occur.
I’ll post my views on the event once I get back…
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