Theme
In welcoming us to Day 2 of the conference, Adaptive Path President Peter Merholz promised us we wouldn’t see any product or UI pictures as the goal was to move from technology tools and methods to reflection on the human experience. Day 2′s theme was ‘Expression.’
Keynote Recap
Sarah Jones
Tony Award® winning playwright and performer Sarah Jones brought life and meaning to the concept of personae. Those who weren’t familiar with her work (myself included) were greeted, in the first moments of her presentation, by a very proper English-accented woman whom we assumed would present to us for the next 40 minutes. What we in fact witnessed was a consuming character study that reminded us in a jolting way of the people for whom we work.
After 3 minutes of the British accent we assumed was hers, Jones – a Queens NY native – suddenly began using her own voice. She then spent about ten minutes each as four of the characters she has developed in a career whose focus has been on complete immersion in, and shaping of, demographic-describing characters. We were introduced to Lorraine, an elderly Jewish Grandmother, and Rashid, an urban hip-ho MC, along with an ‘underprivileged’ Latina undergrad and a middle-aged Indian woman with MBA working on UN-type efforts to better the sub-continent. Each spoke of his or her experience with technology and its role in their lives…
In effect, it was a persona exercise done right. I have always been skeptical of personae as things UX folk were usually making up under constrained budgets and project deadlines, and which therefore weren’t usually based on the user research that should make them valuable tools. Jones however has spent half a lifetime doing this research and her characters’ utter conviction reflects this. I’m still skeptical of the value personae offer to UX/UI development exercises. But if I had Jones on staff I’d be much less so.
Presentation Notes
Alex Zafiroglu, Intel Anthropologist
- Ethnographic moments surround us
- Thinking like an anthropologist: a way of viewing and questioning the world around us
- Technology changes faster than durable cultural practices
- 5 Ethnographic Moments
- Fear
- Love
- Responsibility
"Technology thwarts mothering" in the DVR arms race. - Community
- Trust
- "Yuppie Teddy Bear Aphasia"
- Context, context, context
Presentation Recap
Scott McLoud – Experiencing Comics
Scott McLoud, as he tells it, has spent the last decade trying to figure out the form comics take if they are successfully migrated to the online stage. Sequential narrative art has been part of our storytelling fabric for millennia, but its current incarnation – the comic – actually breaks linear flow with the zig-zagging and page turning demanded of readers. McLoud explored whether, for example, we could return to the linear experience if we treated the computer monitor as a window instead of a page.
Central to McLoud’s exploration is a fundamental tension between what may be possible and what may be relevant. Concepts such as “durable” and “successful” mutation inform his thinking and experimentation and he reminds us that “those who successfully adapt to NOW drive their industries, outperform their competitors, etc. But they must be ready for the ground – the stage – to change beneath them…”
McLoud’s work on the potential possibilities inherent in a continuous time/space infinite canvas paradigm was in many ways ahead of its time. This in part was due to the fact that a seamless implementation required a fatter pipe than was readily available at the time. Products such as the iPhone and Palm Pre, however, have taken important first steps in exploring the spatial metaphor instead of simply presenting information fragments in the node-to-node model that the first ten years of the Web made standard. With our ever-increasing bandwidth, we may be near the tipping point that signals this metaphor as the standard on the web as well.
Presentation Notes
Erin McKean, wordnik.com – How Words Work
- Semantic Prosody
- “Whenever you abandon a certain form factor you kind of have to go back to the beginning to see what people want..” Shades of Duarte and webOS.