I was catching up on news about CivicSpace by reading Zach Rosen's blog and found him sitting next to Jesse James Garrett in a roundtable discussion with a Senator.

Jesse's face seems to be everywhere.

The article by David Twiddy, AP Business Writer, about cell phone simplicity is getting good distribution (Google search on "Some Cell Phone Owners Spurn Gadgetry").

I did not notice the article until I was reading my Sunday morning paper. The bagels taste better when you are reading things like:

If you bring somebody in and they have problems, it's not because they're dumb, but we were dumb with the design.

We believe there's a strong correlation between our standard of success and how usable the products are.

I am sure most of you reading this found the article long before I waited a week for my local paper to publish it. WebWord covered this article already and there are a few more blog entries about the article and usability.

On June 2, 2006, the Workshop on Universal Usability will take place in conjunction with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab's 23rd Annual Symposium (at the University of Maryland).

Jonathan Lazar and Sarah Horton will lead the workshop. Description of the workshop:

Many governmental initiatives focus on providing universal access to technology for diverse user populations, but having access to technology doesn't help if the interfaces are hard to use. Universal usability is the study of making interfaces easy to use for all users, including young users, older users, economically disadvantaged users, and users with perceptual, motor, and cognitive impairments. Our goal for this workshop is to explore current trends in design and technology that help or hinder the development of universally usable interfaces. Specific topics that we hope to address include:

• Collaborative design: Designing user interfaces that can be adapted by the user
• Design methodology: Incorporating universal usability into the development process
• Tools: Software and guidelines for achieving universal usability
• Technologies: How technologies such as web applications and mobile devices affect universal usability
• Policies: Government policy related to universal usability

Each workshop participant will be expected to make a short 5-10 minute presentation.

One-page position papers were due May 15th.

Jared's article Innovation is the new black struck home for me. Not just because he quotes IBMer Eric Tsou from the @issue conference, but because "innovation" has quickly permeated many things within IBM.

For me personally, I have worked on The Innovation Value and won an "Innovation clients can feel" award for a different project. If you have been watching ibm.com, you will notice a lot on innovation. I cannot count all of the messages tied to innovation any more.

I'd say "Innovation is the new blue". (^:

My first glimpse into the business world's obsession with innovation was last year's International Workshop on Accelerated Radical Innovation. There I started to pick up the innovation lingo and, like Jared, saw how important experience design was going to be. None of this user experience work is new, it is just becoming a lot more valuable. If this is because CEO's are obsessed with innovation, then I am quite happy to share my background and experience to help them innovate.

Innovation: "It's the user experience, stupid".

讲故事已经进行了几千年；这是一个与他人愉快相处的极好方法。故事情节并不是很直接或是关于某个人，但是它们会传达一些信息，可以解释其它世界观。各式各样的讲故事的方法，比如电影、小说和戏剧等已经成为了反映文化理念的巨大的娱乐事业的一部分。宗教通常使用故事书来传达道德理念，比如圣经。所以在HCI领域发展了许多叙述形式不足为奇，这些叙述形式将与人们生活有关的故事和信息传达给其它的世界听到。

An IA Institute job posting for "System Designer / Prototyper" at Klein Associates in Dayton reminds me of the "Management by Discovery" workshop that I attended in March. The workshop was part of the Mind your leadership conference at BGSU. (I missed the rest of the conference because I was travelling to the IA Summit.)

The workshop was officially titled "The cognitive dimenions of leadership: A practitioner's toolkit." I had no expectations, was mainly attending because it sounded interesting and it was close to home - worth the risk of a day of my time. What surprised me was that I already knew a lot of this stuff because Gary Klein is well-known for Cognitive task analysis and other HCI work (not sure how I missed Gary up until then). I had "stumbled" into an HCI person presenting to a business audience, so I felt right at home.

Management by Discovery is different than Management by Objectives and other management styles because it focuses on emergent goals (instead of upfront, well-defined goals, which never happens anyway). It means a lot of story-telling, sense-making, iteration and other things we assume with a user-centered design approach. "Taking UCD to the management decision level" might be a good summary.

Jay Rothman added his expertise on conflict engagement to the workshop. This was Gary and Jay's first collaboration on this topic.

All-in-all, a good day for me - sitting with a bunch of organization development people and "peeking over the fence" back at my own profession.

Yes, I got an award from UPA last week at the annual conference. Thanks for all of your kind words and congratulations. A few people missed the ceremony and later said they would have showed up for it - I did not tell very many people, just the way I am. For all of you that missed it, here are some pictures.

Waiting to get the award from UPA President (and fellow IBMer) Thyra Rauch, with conference chair DeeDee DeMulling seated.

Celebrating the award! (a bit blurry, I think Whitney the photographer was laughing too hard to hold the camera still).

And here is the award itself:

"UPA Usability Service Award is awarded to Keith Instone...for your leadership and tireless work in creating the first World Usability Day, and your innovative work on the event web sites. 2006"

There you have it - nice to get the recognition, but it was all worth doing without any award. Even better than the award was seeing long-time friends and making new ones at the conference. Oh yea,I actually attended a few sessions while I was at the conference - I will blog those later.

This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products.

Friday, October 22, 5:30 - 8:30 pm, Japan Society, East 47th Street, 1st and 2nd Avenues

Universal Design is the design of products and environments intended to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need of adaptation or specialized design. The concept of Universal Design was first created by Ronald Mace, internationally recognized architect and designer in the 1980s, and has since spread around the world. In Japan, one of the world's most rapidly aging societies, the universal design approach has been adopted by numerous companies and has become part of everyday life.

Sam Farber, Founder, OXO International Inc., will give the symposium's keynote address, followed by a panel discussion featuring: Dr. Daniel Fechtner, Director of Stroke Services, Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation; Dr. Patricia Moore , President, Moore Design Associates and Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design at Arizona State University; Scott Henderson, Vice President of Industrial Design, Smart Design, Inc.; Bruce Hannah, Professor of Industrial Design, Pratt Institute; Dianne Pilgrim, Director-Emeritus, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Satoshi Nakagawa, Principal, Tripod Design, Inc., among others.

The symposium aims to offer a deeper understanding of universal design by investigating how demographics, design initiatives and businesses intersect as key factors and players in the development of user-friendly, inclusive products for all people. Presented in collaboration with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Followed by a reception.

www.japansociety.org