Lunch and learn

I’m hosting a “lunch and learn” this Thursday at the StartUp Zone. This is the first talk I’ve held in Canada, and I think the first time I’ve given a presentation in front of an English as a first language audience.

Design talks are generally poorly attended in Charlottetown, so this is a low key trial run, a “user test”, to see if abstract topics like this are of any interest to the StartUp Zone community.

As such I am only looking for a handful of people to attend, 6 – 8 being ideal, which sadly is usually the number of people who attend the design meetups I have been to. At the end of the talk I’ll ask for some open ended feedback and the participants will be compensated with lunch.

The talk description:

Experience is the new Product.

Goods and services are no longer enough. In a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services, the greatest opportunity for value creation is in the staging of experiences.

This in-house Lunch & Learn is a condensed version of a workshop that I have given over the past 15 years. We will take a deep dive into having a more fundamental understanding of experience, impress the need to be sensitive to time (time is the currency of experience), and introduce a simple method for analyzing experiences in the hope that it can influence future and current product development, and deepen understanding of experience itself.

That first paragraph is a direct grab from one of Joseph Pines books, which along with Nathan Shedroff, Don Norman, and many more, form the basis of the ideas contained within.

The last time I gave this talk it lasted almost 3 hours, so I have thus far deleted about 2 thirds of the slides – mostly bits about emotional design, mental models and such – topics which I assume few really want to talk about.

There is a good chance it will bomb, but I’m enjoying spending the day revisiting an old topic and seeing it through older myopic eyes.


Audio Interfaces for Online Environments

This was a presentation I gave at Chiao Tung University on one of research interests. Here is an excerpt:
“Sound is one of our most sophisticated senses, from the time we are babies our entire world is filled with sounds designed to stimulate our behavior. We grow to expect pleasure or annoyance as were are introduced to surprising new sounds as well as established ones.
Sound has a variety of forms – voice, music, effects, nature, or other communication forms – and these can be incredible rich, complex, and subtle.
It is the primary means in which we by which most of us receive data, information, and knowledge.”
Presentation Link


Escaping Flatland: Towards Better Documentation for Information Architects

One of the hottest topics these days in Information Architecture circles is documentation. This is probably partly because the IA’s role is so ill defined. This presentation is representative of my first attempts on the use of visualization to communicate information architecture concepts to clients.
Presentation Link (Chinese) Original English language presentation is available in .pdf format