See me Pecha Kucha on mobile gaming

Mobile Vader

Next Wednesday, see me do a presentation on mobile game design at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Off_Corso, Rotterdam. Pecha Kucha are super short presentations consisting of 20 slides. Speakers have exactly 20 seconds per slide to do their thing. Quite a challenge! I’ve finished my slides and a first draft of the talk, now to practice the hell out of my lines… Here’s an Upcoming.org entry I made for the event, here’s the Dutch and international site and finally, here’s some cool Pecha Kucha tips by Yongfook.

links for 2006-10-13

Moo’s cool

Moo cards package Silly title, I know. Sorry Chris.

I received my free set of 10 Flickr calling cards. They’re great, I’ll order more soon and give the nice people at Moo some of my money.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a ‘send to Moo cue queue‘ button somewhere in Flickr? So anytime I see a photo I want a print of, I can just fire it off and forget about it until I’m ready to order a batch.

Here’s some (mediocre) shots of the out of box experience.

Involving the client (a Euro IA theme)

As an IA community we’ve spent an awful amount of time educating our clients about the worth of our work. In a lot of instances we were aiming at making the client be more like us. At the summit, it was interesting to see a number of speakers stress the importance speaking the language of your client and involving them in your daily work. Some examples: Olly Wright’s talk on strategy included such lessons as understanding your client has a boss and finding out what he or she wants, speaking $$$ €€€, the fundamental language of business and making your assumptions explicit. Jared Folkman pointed out we should stop talking about users and start using the word client (certainly when working on retail websites). Doing so, we’ve already started using some of our client’s language. I mentioned agile design and development earlier and do think that one of its points that stick out for me is the focus on face-to-face meetings with the whole team (including a client). Finally, Warren Hutchinson’s presentation workshop on how to run workshops was insanely useful for learning new techniques to loosen up and get real results in client meetings.

This is the fourth post on themes spotted during the Euro IA Summit 2006. The first post was on strategy, the second on social search and the third on process & deliverables. The final post will be on accessibility. My first post-summit post can be found here.

links for 2006-10-11

European IAs are three years behind on their US counterparts*

Warren Hutchinson thinks this year’s Euro IA Summit was way behind on the US big brother conference in both content and form. I can’t confirm or deny this (as I’ve never been to the US summit) but I’d say any summit is better than none, and it’s clear we’re still building a practice.

He also bemoans the prevalence of conservative, ‘little IA’ thinking and a passive consumerist attitude with the majority of conference goers. True as this may be, putting yourself on a pedestal looking down on those that have been less fortunate than you in their development and exposure to big IA (or EA) thought is hardly the most productive path to take IMHO. Also, Hutchinson implies he has a tighter bond to the US summit and in some ways seems to deny a relationship with the EU design community, which I feel is a bit suspect and in some ways perhaps symptomatic of UK design thought.

I’d rather see Hutchinson take up the challenge of being an example for European IAs, designers and whatnot, as he did with his great presentation on workshops (or is that workshop on workshops?) and not slap his eager students in the face because they haven’t yet gotten the point entirely.

Just to be on the safe side: please take some of this criticism with a grain of salt. Lets have a healthy constructive discussion.

* As you can tell I don’t agree (completely) with this post’s title, which is inspired by one of the comments on Hutchinson’s post by Jonathan Mulvihill.

links for 2006-10-08

Process & deliverables (a Euro IA theme)

So sooner or later, any designer working in the professional arena doing client work will start thinking about process. What are the actual steps you go through to get to a successful outcome? Are those steps always the same? (Most design gurus would like you to think as much.) Is there one true IA process? Some attempts were made during the summit to answer these questions, most notably during the process panel lead by my colleague Peter Boersma. This got a bit stuck in discussions on how the panellists’ companies developed and managed their process and not so much into the practicalities of their respective processes. A shame.

The second day of the summit was kicked off with a wireframes panel. Wireframes are maybe the most produced deliverable by many an IA. Deliverables are a natural fit to process, which usually consists of a description of activities, roles and artefacts.

Both RUP and Agile were frequently-used terms with a memorable observation by one of the people present that during their lifetime companies seam to fluctuate between big scary processes and loose small workflows. It’s clear that any design shop adopting RUP will need to slim it down and add a much-needed user centred design component. Agile sounds cool and exciting but really only is fit for a certain type of client (a fearless one).

On the deliverables side, it struck me again how poorly we as designers are equipped to model our intended architectures in such a way that clients get it and developers can pick it up and build it. Who will fill this void?

This is the third post on themes spotted during the Euro IA Summit 2006. The first post was on strategy, the second on social search. Other posts will be on involving the client and accessibility. My first post-summit post can be found here.