Archive for April, 2009

Audio Book, kids, & Sketching

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Idea

At lunch with Mario Bourque, Todd Warfel, Chris Geyer, and Jamie Tompson at Cafe Cuba in Old City.

Mario talking a lot about his kids.

The idea came up about when listening to an audio book to have the kids draw “pictures” as the story is being told. I wonder what will happen?  Dave Gray had us do something similar to this at Overlap, and I have done “stretching-exercises” similar for different teams.  Sometimes the kids and I sit and I say, “what do you want me to draw” and they shout things out and I draw them.  Great fun for them, and great fun for me too. Or we will all sit there and draw whatever comes to our mind.  This exercise will change it a bit so that we are all having the same stimulus.  I wonder if afterwards we will start to “critique”  each other’s work.

I will try it out and post some results.

Bill Buxton

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

I was able to listen to Bill Buxton and sit with him at dinner afterwards.  A wonderful evening.  Here are some of the things I wrote down.

  • Drive toward being able to (specify, design, engineer, and measure) the non-code correctness (motor/sensory, cognitive, social, cultural, emotional,ethical).  – If not, you will fail or at least be vulnerable.
  • If we “perfect” sketches to high fidelity then others disinclined to contribute or imagine.
  • Culture (place, tools like foam core, stack of vellum next to desk) is important for designers.
  • Do multiple QUICK iterative sketches.
  • Don’t ignore transitions.
  • Biggest Design Problem: How to integrate with the other disciplines (Business+Technology+Experience).
  • Don’t simultaneously try to learn new technique AND be creative.
  • Value change, like which results in smoking cessation is culture change and social engineering and is a worthy goal.
  • Many technologies we consider NEW are quite old. E-bay to find what will occur next 10 years.