March 17, 2010
I was so late on getting this out that I wasn’t going to send this out. Then I read @patrickrhone ’s status update last week and decided just because it’s late doesn’t mean I shouldn’t post.
World Usability Day is an annual event created by the Usability Professional’s Association. This year, the event, or rather, events, were held on November 12th. Across the globe, hundreds of chapters hosted various events (for a listing of these events visit http://www.worldusabilityday.org ). The theme this year was “Designing for a Sustainable World.”
I had the privilege of chairing the event this year for our local chapter in Minneapolis, UPA MN. As a board, we discussed several options on how to approach the event. We also had two sessions with people interested in helping out with the event. Our amazing UPA MN chapter president Suzanne Currie, started connecting with people in the sustainability arenas. What we quickly realized was that Minnesota has quite an array of heavy hitters in this broad field. And we wanted to tap into that.
We decided to go big and hope for the best. We didn’t want one speaker, hell we didn’t want one track. So we lined up the speakers (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Suzanne’, she brought in some terrific speakers) and hoped to have enough attendees to make two tracks worthwhile.
Along the way, we decided to make this a low-waste event as well and walk the talk as it were. We had Chowgirls do the catering, they provided compostable garbage bags, cutlery, and glasses. The only water we offered was tap, not bottled. The wine was from a sustainable, zero carbon winery, and for beer, we chose a local brewery, Grain Belt.
After a few brainstorming sessions on how to tie it all together, we focused on sustainability as a series of choices we make every day, a day-in-the-life. From taking a shower, eating your meals, getting to work, buying goods, going to the hospital, all these seemingly mundane events are really a series of choices that can be made to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
If you’ve stayed with me this far, you may be wondering “this sounds great but what does it have to do with design?” The answer it turns out is “a lot”. Several of the speakers discussed the importance of (a) making people aware of the choices to be made and (b) making the sustainable option a preferred option. How? Through improving the user experience of these choices. Energy companies have seen customers improving their conservation through small changes such as smiley faces on their bill when consumption went down compared to other households. Best Buy has seen recycling of appliances and TV’s go up dramatically; they made it easier for the customers to do.
I was incredibly nervous two weeks before the event, we only had 8 confirmed attendees. But over the final week the RSVP’s steadily came in, and we had over 70 attendees (this seems to be a Minnesota thing, as it happens at other events besides UPA). We had several posters showing sustainable options for architecture as well as product design. And two of our volunteers put together a terrific series of pictures showing a day-in-the-life in America compared to Africa. We put this up along a wall with sticky notes for people to write down problem statements and ideas for solving the problem. This spurred some great conversations.
Ultimately, an event like this rises and falls with the speakers, and our speakers took the event to great heights. A special thanks goes out to Suzanne Currie who is so good at connecting people and sought out most of our speakers.
One of the speakers, I forget which one, said, you can only go down a certain path so far before you cannot go back. You cannot un-learn the consequences of our actions once you learn them. My hope is that in some small way for a group of people, we helped go a little further down that path. And my ambition is that the user experience field finds ways large and small, not just on World Usability Day, to engage in promoting sustainable choices in how we live our lives.
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December 31, 2009
I generally don’t read all the Apple rumor prognostications, so you may file this under the “incredibly obvious/already stated” file if you like.
Last night I was in a Frank Sinatra mood. So I played Sinatra on my AppleTV whilst enjoying family game night. After the kids went to bed, Frank sang “One for My Baby” and I wanted to share my favorite version (Sinatra at the Sands) on Facebook. I searched on Google on found the version on LALA.com. I had heard about lala a while back but hadn’t explored it at all.
I decided to try it out. Lala.com scans your hard drive (or the specific folders you choose) for music you own. It then matches those songs to songs it has licenses to online. This process can take a while depending on your library. I have a mid-sized library, about 4,000 songs, and it took about 10 hours. When it was done, I logged back into lala.com and lo and behold it had essentially recreated my itunes online, playlists included. Now it doesn’t have all the songs I had, it ended up about 65% of the songs. I’m sure that aspect will take care of itself over time.
Now if Apple actually launches a Tablet device, it may not have enough hard drive space to house all of my media. Further, with all of ipods/iphones/computers my family of five has, I don’t want every device to have to house all the songs we own. But if my songs are housed on lala, or whatever Apple rebrands this as, and if the Tablet has either wifi or better yet, a Kindle-like built in EVDO, I can access my playlists wherever I want, on my tablet.
With the amount of music, TV, movies combined with the number of devices people own, the idea of having a storage online versus a ‘home server’ makes a lot of sense. This would make my AppleTV more compelling as well because the size limitations of the device will matter less.
Tags: technology
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December 30, 2009
I finally finished reading The Annotated Turing. Two enthusiastic thumbs up. The Annotated Turing’s focus is on explaining Turing’s famous 36 page work which many consider to be the beginning of computing. I would have been hopelessly lost here without the annotations, and even then, I didn’t let myself get hung up on the math or I’d still be reading. It’s the theory that Turing was positing that I found compelling and the author, Charles Petzold explains the theory nicely.
But what I really loved about the book was the first section of the book that essentially introduces number theory to the reader. Mr. Petzold should be a teacher. The story of math is an intriguing one, and in the author’s hands, not only are the actors compelling, but the math itself is as well.
Every generation tends to over-emphasize the change going on as the ‘greatest ever’, but in reading this book, I had a greater appreciation for the amazing changes in math in the first half of hte 20th century.
If you are interested in Turing, computing, or looking for a great primer on math history and number theory, I strongly recommend this book.
UPDATE: thanks to a @lwcavallucci on twitter who asked a very common sense question (that I failed to supply an answer for in my post). The question is on age appropriateness. My first answer is that is has more to do with interest than age, but think I can go deeper than that.
1. For the actual math done in Turing’s paper, there is a high degree of difficulty and it was way over my head. That said, this did not stop me from enjoying the book or understand the theory behind the math, and the whole point of the book is to annotate the paper.
2. For the other elements of the book, i.e. number theory, history of math especially around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, I would say a middle schooler who enjoys math will like the book. (Editorial: I find number theory fascinating and I it is puzzling to me why the American style of teaching math puts that off for so long, when for many students, math would be far more interesting if they could take this earlier in life, and not associate Math purely with “arithmetic.”)
Tags: Review
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December 23, 2009
I am a huge fan of the cartoons of gapingvoid.com; I even bought one of his larger posters. But today I saw one of his latest cartoons, and it has vaulted to the top of my list. Enjoy your holidays, enjoy your now.
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