Just came back from a trip to NYC. Just a sensational buzz in that city. I’ll be posting some real content shortly, just wanted to update you on the feed situation. You can select either feed now, my wizard like skills have them both pointing to the right place.

Let me know if you’re experiencing problems.

Hey guys, anybody who is subscribed to the old feed @ http://feeds.feedburner.com/serendipitydoo needs to switch over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/serendipitydoo2 if they want updated content. The sidebar should be linking to the new feed now.
If anybody knows how I can automatically have the old feed point to the new feed I’m open to suggestions. (I’m sure it’s easy but I have no clue how to do it )

I’ve been following Worldchanging for about 2 years ever since GK had a conversation with Jamais Cascio over at NextD.

I love the work they do over at Worldchanging just because they are very solution orientated. They present their work in a very non biased way and express it well showing working examples of sustainable design all over the world. Alex Steffen spoke briefly about the new book: Worldchanging : A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. It was great to see the turnout and know that we can easily be change agents for a better future. One of Alex’s main points is to try and create a world where the incumbents can’t survive doing business in a backwards and careless way. We need to put the pressure as consumers and as entrepreneurs to shift the market focus to a new green future.

Anyway if you go back to my Inconvienent Truth Post you can see some steps to make a difference right now! Don’t forget to buy the book

As a side note, I’ll be fixing my side links shortly to give you some more useful links like before. (those aren’t my real friends )

And I’ll leave you a few photos from my evening at Workspace:

Until I figure out how to get some of my old posts back in their original form I’m going put up some old content. (Minus the pictures and youtube links but it’s something to read for now )

I want to talk a bit about SFU Surrey well more so TechBC for a second. Looking back at the experience it was definitely an experiment as a whole. The curriculum was untested, we learned through an online course management system. The classes were modular as opposed to semester based. But the underlying philosophies are what allowed the school to be an innovative hub. Teachers and students were peers, we were all learners in the same vein of how R Murray Schafer described it as “there are no more teachers only a community of learners” The space was open, no physical or mental doors. We were all learning, experimenting, growing, cross-pollinating, evolving, collaborating together.

Recently I’ve gotten word that SFU has decided to remove Design for Digital Environments. It’s a course taught by Russell Taylor an amazingly passionate and inspiring teacher. After reading Peter Merholz recent presentation about designing systems/experiences and not the products it brought me back to my foundations. Design for Digital Environments is the basis of the Interaction Design stream at SFU Surrey. I take for granted that this way of thinking is common knowledge amongst practitioners. Peter does a great service in educating those who did not have an opportunity to be exposed to this type of thinking but why would SFU destroy it for a new cohort of practitioners?

I attended the Grand Opening for the new SFU Surrey campus to support it and its initiatives. It’s an amazing facility and I envy that the students won’t be learning in an old Zellers space but I feel it is unfortunate they will never benefit from the life changing education I had. The philosophies have changed. I hope that any alumni from the school will lend its support to those who inspired and taught you. Let the SFU administration understand the value of courses like Design for Digital Environments as well as other courses that will soon follow.

I understand that some of our courses were redundant with SFU courses and adopting a semester system is aligned with the rest of the university. But removing a course for, the only reason I can think of, not having “SFU Standard” quantitative measurements is not a good reason. So what if we learn theory and get evaluated on our practice? We don’t need to appease SFU’s masters with grades and tests. Those grades do not reflect the knowledge that a one learns. Test scores are temporal, knowledge is forever.

Synectics have been on my mind ever since I read the discussion between John Chris Jones and GK Vanpatter at NextD. It’s best known as, ‘making the familiar strange and the strange familiar’ and it is the result of decades of research by William JJ Gordon which culminated into his book Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity in 1961.

The basis of Synectics is trying to draw connections from seemingly unrelated topics to drive creative response. I know I find a lot of times when I’m brainstorming on my own it’s difficult to come up with anything that deviates from the normal conventions. It’s always attractive to follow a linear thought process (and faster) but it can be more rewarding to follow a process that promotes more lateral thinking. For example, if I simply do a competitive analysis I might do some hybrid of a couple of concepts and try to mix some new type of element but it’s not really a substantial leap forward other than keeping on par with competitors.

In many situations this method is all that time will permit but if you are trying to rethink complex problems, on paper, Synectics looks like a good way to stimulate thinking. I think a lot people’s creative process integrate some of the elements from Synetics but actually formalizing the process can be helpful in a group setting.

Some key tools when using Synectics are:

1. Subtract: Remove parts of your current approach, or simplify it.
2. Repeat: Duplicate parts of it, or significantly increase resources so that you can take existing approaches to a new level;
3. Combine: Mix existing approaches with other approaches;
4. Add: Make existing approaches bigger or stronger, or add other elements;
5. Transfer: Move existing approaches into different situations, and look at how they would change to cope with these approaches;
6. Empathize: Put yourself in the minds of your customers, or pretend that you are the problem: From this perspective, how would you do things differently?
7. Animate: Bring the problem to life. Think about it as a living thing;
8. Superimpose: Overlay the situation with new meanings or ideas, possibly randomly generated (see random input);
9. Change Scale: Think about what would happen if you radically expanded the scale of the problem, or if you reduced it substantially;
10. Substitute: Switch out and replace elements of your current approach. Switch in parts of alternative approaches;
11. Fragment: Take the problem or your current approach apart. If you solve some parts of the problem, does this help solve others? Or can other people help you solve parts more effectively?
12. Isolate: And is there value in only looking at part of the problem? Are people really that concerned about other parts?
13. Distort: Change the “shape” of your current product, solution or service: Extend it or stretch it, think about it as a different, distorted shape;
14. Disguise: Think about whether you can eliminate the problem by hiding it or camouflaging it (in some cases this may be a legitimate solution);
15. Contradict: Think about doing the opposite of what you want to do (for example, how you would make the problem worse?), then reverse this;
16. Parody: Think about what you’d ridicule about your problem or solution. See if this changes the context or suggests alterations;
17. Prevaricate: Fantasize about your service. Think about what it would be like in your wildest dreams;
18. Analogize: Think about analogies for your product or service, and what you can compare it to in other disciplines. How do people deal with analogous problems? (We’ll look at this in more detail later…)
19. Hybridize: Think about what would happen if you crossed your current approach with something wildly different. Does this suggest any ideas?
20. Metamorphose: Think about how your product or service will be affected if current trends continue – will the problem get worse, or will it fade away in significance?
21. Symbolize: How can you strip your product or service back to its bare essentials? How can you convert it into something this is immediately easy to grasp?
22. Mythologize: Taking this further, how could you give it symbolic, “iconic” or “mythological” status?

On a completely unrelated note I leave you with a concept called Teddy by Takeo Igarashi that was presented at SIGGRAPH in 1999. (Creates a 3D object from your 2D lines)

I’ve recently been made aware of Google’s Image Labeler. It’s such a simple and brilliant concept. They basically match up two random users and place them in a game environment to label images. When the two random users label the image with the same term it’s considered a match and another image is shown.

Google is basically getting people to tag their images for free. I’m sure they tried an elaborate algorithm to try and understand objects in an image to no avail so the next best thing get the users to do it! My guess is that there is a magical threshold where if N number of people believe this image to be ‘man’ then it is the preferred term. There is also opportunity to take all the other words that weren’t matches and see how they faired against the aggregated terms of every other user that has labeled the image.

Ahhh Google so smart…

May 27: Sasquatch
Freak Hail Storm. Miss all headliners.

June 28: Wilco
I moved from Edmonton to Vancouver and had to sell tickets

July 25: The Stills, Broken Social Scene, Sam Roberts Band
Get caught in unusually busy rush hour traffic trying to pick up friend from SFU. Miss the Stills and part of BSS. Leave because Sam Roberts just isn’t any good :/

July 30: Silversun Pickups, Ladyhawk, Magnolia Electric Co.
Bar floods during Silversun Pickups

Future Dates:

Sept 3: Bumbershoot
Alien abduction

Oct 6: We are Scientist & Art Brut
Thomas Dolby comes on stage and blinds us with his science.

I’ve been hit by blog spam! It’s ok not that many people were commenting so I will be removing comments at some point (unless there is a better solution?). On another note the annual Canadian User Experience Workshop: Canux 2006 - Sept 14 to 16 is going once again in Banff.

If you have the chance to go to the event I’d highly recommend it. It’s an intimate venue set in an amazing facility (Banff Centre) with beautiful cascading mountains as your backdrop. It feels a lot less like a networking event and much more about getting together with your peers and growing your knowledge.

As for myself I’ve made as many attempts as I could to try to get to this workshop but it looks like I won’t be able to make it for this year. (BTW any pictures you see of me on the site most likely represent Adrian in an inebriated state.)

I’ve started posting at iaslash. It’s a news website put on by the IA Institute for all things related to information architecture.

As my most recent post on iaslash suggests, you should check out a great series of articles by Christopher Fahey on User Research as well as a couple of great blog posts by Peter Merholz – Emergent IA and Gene Smith – How do people co-create information environments? around emergent IA.