THE TORONTO CATASTROPHE SLAM
"a day of dialogue over Toronto disaster
scenarios".

Be part of this unique day of dialogue and challenge for academics, students, professionals, not-for-profit and the public. The purpose of this event is to exchange knowledge and ideas with others on the topic of catastrophe, disaster and emergency. This is a rare multidisciplinary engagement that will include informative keynotes and participatory challenges that will be designed to examine scenarios including a Natural Disaster scenario, a Health Epidemic and a Security Crisis. For more info on the Catastrophe Slam check out http://digifest2008.wik.is/

WHAT IS A DESIGN SLAM
A Design Slam is where we have a fictitious group of stakeholders present a problem to groups "consultants". We will form these groups randomly at the beginning of the event. These ingenious and innovative people will have a set block of time to design and pitch their idea to the stakeholders.

We have 30 slots that we are opening up for free public registration to the Catastrophe Slam but I encourage you to check out the entire 3 day Digifest event for $25.
You can register for digifest here: http://www.dx.org/digifest/register.html

BUT if you want to sign up for the Catastrophe Slam only head over to
http://digifest2008.wik.is/

1. Create an Account on the Wiki.
2. Sign Up for the event on the signup page. No Charge

It should be a really great day we have some great people coming out to this event and it is a unique space to play in.

Watch the keynote from the Visit Mix site. It is a great show.

Now for my concerns… :-)

While I really appreciate the desire to enhance the designer’s toolkit with controls that can be used as building blocks in the foundations of our applications I am concerned about potential to abuse. I truly believe that Microsoft is doing it’s best to embrace designers but I wonder if developers will inadvertently take this work and corrupt or commoditize the value that good design can bring to a project.

I am a little fearful of carousel controls and Deep Zoom (Sea Dragon) everywhere when the effort to do these types of interfaces becomes effectively none. They say God is in the details so while I applaud the desire to have people do less grunt work and focus on adding value to a project. Do not lose sight of the details . Developers you can’t always do it all, consult a designer, Business Owners your developers can’t always do it all, consult a designer.

Good design is not a feature it is a pillar of the success of your product.

Oh and here is a picture by Betsy of Bryce singing on the RockBand Stage, sober to boot.

I have been working on a mindMap that illustrates the kinds of activities, research and technologies that me and my co-workers do in our everyday practice. While I realize that this is somewhat specific to our company and the work that we do I thought it would be interesting to get feedback on it. I hope to refine this as we develop the practice.

So if you have anything that you’d like to share, please comment on Flickr.

Everyone should go check out the capabilities section of the idea couture site. I personally find it very inspiring but I know it would not work for us. Mind you we are a stogy software development house not a hip design shop :-)

Our good buddy Sandy Kemsley was recently interviewed by Maggie K. Fox. of the Social Media Group. It is a great listen and I encourage you to check it out.

[audio:http://media-c02.libsyn.com/podcasts/54f394de1913fe5f1c0790e69ae5f698/4694cfec/socialmediagroup/SMT20_SandyKemsley.mp3]

I’m enjoying Mix this year and the keynote was pretty cool. The conversations are there but there are still some good old fashion whiz Bang demos. Silverlight looks amazing. I really hope it takes off.

At lunch today I talked Ian Muir and he felt the same way. All the marketer are like “videos with skateboards, AW YAH” and all the developers in the room are groaning.

[tags]mix07, microsoftmix, silverlight, MixKeynote[/tags]

Matt Milan and Gene Smith introduce Rich Mapping and Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to information architects. SSM is a holistic problem solving framework that can be used to design and model interactions between organizations, people, environments, products and services.

[audio:http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Systems_Thinking_Rich_Mapping_and_Conceptual_Models.mp3]

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 22 megs )

The expected outcome for session attendees will be an understanding of the key tenets of Soft Systems Methodology, how these concepts can be applied “off the shelf” to information architecture problems, and how soft systems thinking could be used to drive the development of new IA tools and practices.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, GeneSmith, MattMillan, SoftSystems[/tags]

Jess’s talk from this years Information Architecture Summit. LukeW took some good notes.

[audio:http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/ProjectTouchstones-JessMcMullin.mp3]

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 23 megs )

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

This session will explore principles for creating effective project touchstones with a mix of grounding theory based in framing and boundary objects, pragmatic real-world examples, and how-to guidance. By focusing on creating touchstones early in a project, IAs can build buy-in, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence with their teams, and make a more meaningful difference with their work.

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, JessMcMullin[/tags]

I came into this presentation honestly because the other one i wanted to attend was too full for my comfort. What a stroke of luck. I thought I needed to feed my brain but this was one of those sessions that feeds your soul. You take those when you get them. Olly Wright did a great job and this was one of the highlights of the conference for me so far. I don’t know I can accurately convey what the presentation was but you can read an abstract below. Hopefully I’ll add a link to the slides soon when I get one.

[audio:http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Information_Architecture_and_Ethical_Design.mp3]

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 21 megs )

Information Architecture and Ethical Design
Olly Wright

This presentation will look at how as information architects we can approach our work in this cultural context. How we might take an informed, ethical stand. It will cover some of the prominent contemporary theories of ethical design, culture / media studies, and behavioural psychology, and look at their applicability to information architecture. It will explore areas such as brand authenticity, privacy, social networking, push versus pull marketing, and ubiquitous computing. And it will provide concrete examples and methods for how these can be used in practice. The aim is to bring abstract ethical theory down to the level of the concrete and applicable, and perhaps inspire some to add ‘Help make the World a better place’ to every list of requirements.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, EthicalDesign, OllyWright, Banksy[/tags]

Don't get me wrong. Yes it is a really cool device but I doubt it will replace my Blackberry 7290 for these reasons:

• The battery on my blackberry lasts a week
• I don’t need to sync it. EVER
• I drop it all the time and I don’t worry about it

Somehow I don’t think that the iPhone will meet these standards. I have considered buying a Sony Mylo, Joanna has one, but I think that the iPhone could be a much better replacement for that.

Wi-Fi, OSX, Safari & plays videos!! Cooool! However, who knows how much this thing would be without a carrier or even if it is possible to buy one without a carrier.

I think what is more interesting about this whole kafuffle is all of the really neat posts that have happened because of the hype.

Slashdot posted a CNN article on how apple kept the project secret for TWO+ Years!! I think that is more impressive then the device :-o

Kottke.org posted some awesome photos of the cardboard prototype they made and then compared it to other devices. This is so great because it shows how fast you can create a prototype to conduct a study on a hardware device. Man making hardware would be cool, software is too insubstantial (1s & 0s), maybe I need to go back to school.

The IxDA list has blown up over this thing. One comment by Robert Barlow-Busch I found was particular insightful and yet obvious.

Lovin' a lot of things about the iPhone. But something I'm sure we'll miss is the tactile feel of buttons under our fingers. Being able to feel the buttons means we don't need to pay *quite* as much attention visually when, say, dialing a number.

I remembered that is completely true because I bought a Bluetooth Keyboard, that I saw on CSI Miami (Windows Media Link), for my Blackberry. This keyboard was a laser projected out of a little obelisk (how ACC 2001).

Now the problem was that even though it was hella cool you were always looking at the keys as you typed, which was even less efficient then using my Blackberry keyboard because at least I had some muscle memory of where they keys were.

I hope that apple or third party vendors come out with a decent keyboard or maybe an iPhone with out the Phone part :-)

[tags]iPhone, Apple, IxD[/tags]

Remember this old (Internet time) adage:

Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience – Users spend most of their time on other sites.

Once you convince your project stakeholders that when you are building an website or application that competitors are not always direct competitors or even in the same vertical. You can sit down and go over the applications or sites that they enjoy using. I find that this gives me really valuable information into the design patterns that my client have in mind when they are envisioning the application that they want built.

Now it is hard enough to to convince people to indulge this activity normally, but when you are building an enterprise application and you are asking people to tell you why they like the Air Canada booking system it can become downright impossible to keep them engaged.  The one exception to this is when you are designing an enterprise search and everyone just wants it to be “like Google”. (Don’t get me started on that right now :-), I will discuss that later)

When you are defining requirements for your next enterprise application bring in some of the eventual end users of the system and have them talk about the sites that they like with the project stakeholders. You’ll get some insightful information that you can use in your design, your stakeholders will hear the “voice of their customers“, and if you are lucky hopefully this will aide in the adoption of social software on the Enterprise.

This will become even more important as Web 2.0 patterns start to infiltrate the enterprise (à la Enterprise 2.0).

Dion Hinchcliffe talks elegantly about infiltration in his Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007.

5. Consumerization of the enterprise will continue apace and will help drive Enterprise 2.0 adoption at the grassroots level. If any of this Enterprise 2.0 trend is really starting to happen, it’s because it reflects a better way of working that users are already adopting en masse on the Web. For example, blogging reaches more people than an e-mail can, and often in unexpected, serendipitous ways. “Spaces” build out a low-barrier, cost-effective personal channel on the Internet that provides a well-defined way for a user to communicate with the rest of the world or organization. These models are becoming well-understood and effective on the Web and will drive bottom-up adoption in the enterprise, often being pushed by newer, younger workers who are comfortable and conversant with them. Also, I suspect no solution to the empty quarter will be found in 2007.

I just wanted to remind people that EnterpriseCamp Toronto is happening this weekend on January 13th.

We wanted to get the enterprise development community together in Toronto in a BarCamp style unconference.

This is going to be a different focus then regular BarCamp events. This event focuses on enterprise software infrastructure, solutions and development. Topics could include Enterprise 2.0, Business Intelligence Applications, ECM, Collaboration, Employee Self-Service, Enterprise Search, Technology Infrastructure, Workflow Automation.

Here is what people are thinking of talking about:

• Ryan Coleman – I could put something together on Translation/Localization Workflow automation.
• Carsten Knoch – Porting Web 2.0 to the Enterprise: stop “empowering employees”, start looking for ROI :)
• Jevon Macdonald – Where does the software fit? 4 real enterprise 2.0 case studies
• Peter Childs & Ian Graham – Calendaring in the Enterprise
• Jeff Irving – I’d like to do a session on the value and practice of Domain Modeling during Requirements Analysis of Enterprise Applications.
• Bill Dunlop – I can put together an overview of WCF.
  (NOTE: that is “Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named “Indigo”) is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems.” for the acronym impaired… :-)
• James Christopher – HPC applications and Visualization, how organizations use technology for competitive advantage and value creation.

Enterprise Camp (unconference edition) – January 13th, 2007
http://barcamp.org/EnterpriseCampToronto

I would also like to congratulate Albert and the team at Bubbleshare. They have worked really hard and have produced a great product and in my opinion kaboose is getting a great deal.

This album is powered by BubbleShare – Add to my blog

MMM… Cake and Copyright Infringement.

[tags]bubbleshare, kaboose[/tags]

What is Nakama?

Nakama lets you share pictures and videos from your phone with your friends on the web, and on their phones too, and there’s nothing to download or install.

What can Nakama do?

Want to post your pictures straight to your MySpace, Flickr, Blogger, MSN or other gallery or blog? Send a picture or video from your phone to go@nakama.ca and we’ll post it for you. Ever taken a great picture or funny video? Send it to your friends! Nakama lets you send it to ALL their phones in one step. It’s that easy: no more fighting with your phone or spending a lot to send it to each friend.

I’ll have to get a phone that lets me take pictures and video.

So what is wrong with Samsung’s Value Proposition?

It’s fair to say that the success of the iPod is not about the hardware alone. The iTunes player and store together with the iPod give people a compelling and easy to use experience of finding and managing music. So Samsung wants to play off this by saying “Imagine More Choices” and then showing some of the other online music retailers that are available in Canada. Now I’m not sure if this is a transplanted campaign from the U.S., but the truth is that Futureshop’s Bonfire and Sympatico Music’s orders are fulfilled by Puretracks. So if you really are looking for music “Choice” 3 of the 4 options that Samsung is suggesting have identical catalogs.

What is so ridiculous is that these stores are obviously white-labeled versions of Puretracks. In fact it is so obvious I’m starting to wonder why I am even writing this post… Doesn’t seem like much choice to me.

The only thing that I’d like to comment on is ICT Toronto’s completely naive views on offshoring. How can they support a firm like IBM (not that IBM isn’t cool) offering consulting services in Toronto when their blended rate is supported by offshore development. Native Toronto firms will need to outsource to compete with these large American, offshoring firms and ICT Toronto should help Toronto firms establish relationships possibly by starting sister city relationships.

[tags]cluster, creativecluster, Ontario, talent, technology, Toronto[/tags]

If money is going to seriously enter into the scene then I have two suggestions of my own that may be a little out there:

• The first one is that we could start taking donations at DemoCamp every month so we could fund a special event either quarterly or biannually. This event would be something that we could all agree on and one that would be difficult to get sponsored. We could fly in a special speaker ;-), take a group roadtrip (DemoCamp Montréal — Buses & Bagels) or fund a development or community project of our own. Donations would obviously be “give what you can” maybe a $2 suggested amount, something small so it is practically Free, as in Speech or Beer.
• I have always like the idea of the un-workshops, un-facilities and un-tutoring that Dave Eggers and others started at 826 Valencia. If TorCamp could get a stable location then we could offer un-learning :-) to the community of our own. One of the aspects I feel we are missing from our community is helping rookies and other beginners develop skills and learn best practices of the industry. It would be great if experienced practitioners in our group could offer a HOWTO class, whether it is on CSS, Ruby, SourceControl, or Web Accessibility, and had the facilities to be able to house 12-20 people. Now we all know that very few souls enjoy teaching fundamentals out of the goodness of their hearts so instructors should be able to charge a small fee, like $5 a head. They could also extend their courses online through our friends at Nuvvo. I think this could be a valuable offering from our group to the community as it would help with the development of practitioners for our industry.

With all this talk about money I do have a few concerns about how a “un-organization” can handle a treasury but there are a lot of smart people who probably have ideas on that. C.R.E.A.M.

WU-TANG!

This week is shaping up to be busy. First, on Tuesday there is the Admit it. You’re Creative! Workshop at OCAD, and then there is ICT Toronto: An Information and Communication Technology Cluster Development Strategy on Wednesday. On the weekend there is BarCamp Ottawa which I’m really looking forward to. I’ll get to hang with DerekF, meet some new people and see some cool presentations. Now if we could just figure out the car pool… :-)

[tags]DemoCamp, BarCamp, TorCamp, Toronto[/tags]

Check out my filckr photos

Check out everyones flickr photos

[tags]IA Summit 2006, iasummit2006, informationArchitecture, design+business, Web2.0[/tags]

So Microsoft is going to have a busy year with many product releases and betas. The Mix06 conference was cool and I’m looking forward to them continuing. Albert from Bubbleshare got to have lunch with Bill Gates and hopefully he can turn that event into some MSFT love $$$.

Check out the Link below to see pictures from the keynote on Bubbleshare some of them are very funny

[tags]Mix06, Design, Web2.0, Bubbleshare, BillGates[/tags]