The UX Workshop.TV

SenseMaker Dialogs speaker series focuses on exploring the rapidly changing hybrid activity of SenseMaking in the 21st century.

No longer just focused on data and information visualization, the boundaries of what sensemaking is and what sensemakers do in the context of organizations and society is in a state of rapid transformation like never before.

Leading sensemakers today have become integral to many forms of changemaking occurring in organizations and in societies around the world.

In SenseMaker Dialogs, speakers from diverse backgrounds will explore these shifts.

Richard Saul Wurman

SenseMaking pioneer, author of 80+ books, Chairman of the Entertainment Gathering, and TEDMED, Richard Saul Wurman is a force of nature. For those who might not know, it was 1976, when Richard coined the term Information Architect to describe professional sensemakers involved in what he referred to as the understanding business. Never resting on his laurels Wurman keeps creating amazing new projects year after year, including his most recent: Understanding Change & the Change in Understanding and Super Cities 19.20.21. The mission of the multi-year, multi media 19.20.21 initiative is to collect, organize and better understand population’s effect regarding urban and business planning and its impact on consumers around the world. An inspiration to many and always unpredictable Richard will likely be talking about his life long love of understanding.

Garry K. VanPatter

GK VanPatter is CoFounder of Humantific a SenseMaking-based Transformation Consultancy in New York. Humantific helps organizational leaders navigate complexity, drive change and build sustainable cross-disciplinary innovation capabilities. Working in the trenches of practice for 20+ years VanPatter was an early advocate of applying design thinking to the realms of cross-disciplinary strategy co-creation and organizational transformation. Today Humantific advocates recognition that many challenges facing organizations, societies and ultimately planet earth cannot be solved by creating more products and services. VanPatter also co-founded NextDesign Leadership Institute with Elizabeth Pastor in 2002. NextD creates lenses to understand design in the 21st century. Pointing to recent Social SenseMaking projects like Measure of America, VanPatter believes that SenseMaking and ChangeMaking have become equally important partners in the quest to create a more human-centered world.

Interaction ‘10, the New York City Redux

Every year, the interaction design community gathers to stretch our minds,
sharpen our skills and inspire each other. Every year numerous people are
unable to attend and partake in this incredible opportunity – so we’re
bringing the conference to you, in New York City!

Join us on March 6th for “Interaction ‘10, the New York City Redux” and
listen to a group of the conference speakers. We’ll have breakfast, lunch
and an after-party, you do NOT want to miss this.

Speakers

Chris Avore
MJ Broadbent
Cindy Chastain
Allan Chochinov
Will Evans
Chris Fahey
Alexis Lloyd
Greg Vasallo
Todd Zaki Warfel

About IxDA

With over 10,000 members and more than 80 local groups around the world, the IxDA network actively focuses on interaction design issues for the practitioner no matter his or her level of experience. IxDA is a novel kind of “un-organization” and relies on its passionate members to help serve the needs of the international Interaction Design community.

The IxDA New York City local group is a vibrant community of people interested in interaction design who meet monthly at face-to-face events. Programming is created by a volunteer group of local leaders and realized through the generosity of speakers, sponsors, and host partners.

To learn more, please visit  www.ixda.org

About the Host

The new MFA in Interaction Design at the SVA is an inventive two-year program that trains students to intimately understand how design can affect human behavior, and to think more holistically about the products and services they’re creating. The program explores the strategic role of interaction design in shaping everyday life, and intends to increase the relevancy of design to business and society so designers can make a difference.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dane at Interactions ’10 in Savannah, GA. where we just talked a little about distance learning technologies and where the future might be headed… and how we’ll be there. Here, Dane is imagining the possibilities for what “learning” using the Smart.fm iPhone app could look and feel like.

Designing a Unified Experience: Bringing Interaction, Visual, and Industrial Design Together

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

What is editorial strategy? Why is it so integral to content strategy? And what is the relationship between content strategy and publishing? Jeff MacIntyre, principal of Predicate, LLC will present and moderate a small panel discussion.

About The Content Strategists of New York City

The Content Strategists of New York City (CSNYC) is a group of content specialists who organize a monthly meetup series and other special events. Regularly scheduled meetings run the fourth Thursday of each month and are open to all. See our Facebook Group for further information. Learn more about Content Strategy as a discipline.

Original Post on Multitouch-Barcelona

The way we have been living and doing business is over. Start getting used to that. Climate change makes the shift essential. Peak oil makes it inevitable. There are reasons to be optimistic. Our job is to make the transition feasible and viable. Create and establish the attractive new way on the other side of the transition.

Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

Fiction writers weave stories around themes. Musicians create thematic concept albums. Even graphic designers envision around themes. So, why not interaction designers?

As designers we too often neglect to define a common vision, or coordinating force, behind the scope of what we’re designing, making or building. Without some means of unifying our efforts we can easily end up with a product or service that falls short of its potential for delivering an optimal user experience. One path to holistic coordination is to employ the concept of themes as used by fiction writers and filmmakers. For storytellers, themes are used as a compass, a means of examining every element in the story for its possible implication with regard to theme. For readers, themes offer a cognitive and emotional response to the story that is often much deeper and more memorable than details of plot. In experience design, themes can be used to pattern and unify product solutions as well as a means of unifying teams, assisting in the work of defining strategy and helping to design for the intangible pleasure, emotion and meaning in experience. By aiming to capture the value and focus of the experience we intend to deliver to users, themes guide us in the design process and, by extension, strengthen the impact and meaning of that experience.

Cindy’s Bio:

Cindy Chastain, user experience designer and screenwriter, has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. She is currently the Director of User Experience for Interactive Partners, a New York-based agency specializing in entertainment and media websites. Most recently, she has lead projects for clients such as BBC Worldwide, Showtime, Fuse, Madison Square Garden, Coca-Cola and Unilever. She holds an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University in New York and earned a BS in Radio, TV, Film from Northwestern University. In addition to moonlighting as a filmmaker and screenwriter, she is in the process of researching a book that explores how storytelling techniques can be used as a framework for design.

Todd Zaki Warfel: Sketching & Prototyping: Rapid Design Techniques
Bio: Todd Zaki Warfel, founder and principal design researcher at Messagefirst, has been designing interactive products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included fortune 500 companies like AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, as well as smaller companies like Numara and rPath. An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and member of the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe.

His upcoming book, Practical Prototyping (Rosenfeld Media) will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool and show you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team. Anticipated publication is in 2009.

Making the Case for Social Networks in Organizational Settings

Olga Howard: Why should your company/organization use social networking tools within the organizaiton? I’ll answer this and other tricky questions.

Bio: Olga Howard is an independent user experience architect. She has helped large and small companies including, MTV, PBS, Martha Stewart Online, and more. As a community strategist, Olga helps clients create organic, healthy, and successful environments. As an information architect and usability consultant, Olga has been developing processes and tools that allow for faster and less expensive information architecture with high quality results.

Livia Labate: The User Experience Health Check: A Measure a Day Keeps The Redesign Away

Bio: Livia Labate is a use experience designer, currently Principal of Information Architecture and User Experience Design for Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia. She volunteers on the board of the Information Architecture Institute and can be found wondering about where the UX practice is headed at I Think Therefore IA.

Joe Sokohl: A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely