My Curious Life

Interesting opening by Deborah Adler of ClearRx fame, much more soft spoken and hesitant than I would have guessed. Great ideas, nice to see her prototypes and hear about the process she used to arrive at such great results.

Kevin Brooks of Motorola Labs was very engaging and entertaining, as would be expected of someone with his background as a professional oral storyteller. In fact, he’s produced a CD of stories, called Kiss of Summer, that sounds very interesting. It’s definitely on my buy list now.

Kate Rutter, “Sticky Ninja” and member of Adaptive Path, did a great job turning the humble Post-It note into a weapon of mass instruction. Were Kate left on a deserted desert island with nothing but a few packs of stickies, she’d surely be found weeks later having build a vacation resort there out of nothing but determination and stickies. I sincerely hope she has stock in 3M.

Hey, MightyGirl, was that you in the elevator? What a cutie you’ve got in the stroller! Nice to see that UX Week is a family affair.

Ryan Freitas, also of Adaptive Path, did a great presentation on the parallels between working in a professional kitchen and working as an interaction designer. His published article on the same topic in Ambidextrous magazine is a good summary of his presentation.

Jess McMullin of nForm spoke to a topic that I can relate to — The Designer as Facilitator — and had some solid suggestions about how to “grease the wheels” so to speak, and increase influence and work through business roadblocks to make good design (and implementation) happen.

Liz Sanders of MakeTools really wowed me, though, and capped the day with two sessions back-to-back — a presentation and a workshop — that explored the history of the design research landscape and where she sees things going in the future: generative tools. I have a ton of notes from her presentation, with a bunch of brain sparks in the margins. Nothing compares to seeing how she’s using these simple, but incredibly powerful toolkits to empower people (not just designers) to make meaning and create the future. Liz is tops on my list for the day … what a great way to wrap up the day and finish energized and motivated.

I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings …