Come out and get to know the community of New York area visual thinkers for an evening of socializing as we gear up for another great summer in the city.

Join us for a casual evening of food, drink, and fun, including:

• Sketchbook Show & Tell – Bring yours, check out others. It’s always a treat to peek inside someone else’s sketchbook, as well as to share the doodles, notes, and thinking in yours.
• Pen Swap – Got a pen, pencil, or maker you love and want to share? Bring a couple to swap with other pen geeks.
• Napkin Sketching – We’ll be sure to have a few stacks of napkins to jot down your ideas on.
• Graffiti Wall – Contribute your doodles to a wall of paper… and we will share the end results with the community.

When

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

6:00-9:00 p.m.

Where

The day started off with Jimmy Chandler‘s workshop “What UX Designers Can Learn by Going Out to Eat”. We shared and explored problems, solutions, likes and dislikes from both the dining and designing world while Jimmy involved the participants in drawing parallels between what makes for great experiences in both.

After lunch we kicked off the afternoon with Kaleem Khan‘s controversial talk “Design for Evil: Ethical Design” which I was able to realize might not deserve the negative reaction so many happy iPhone owners have had. Granted, it’s tough to talk about ethics without offending someone and Kaleem isn’t necessarily trying not to offend anyone but after a second viewing of the talk and a couple of drinks and some conversations with Kaleem I do think his motivation to get designers thinking  about their own personal ethics comes from a good place.

Our next talk was Dave Cronin‘s ” Healthcare Interfaces: How Interaction Design Can Help Fix Medicine“. Dave joined us via skype from the West Coast. It was an interesting irony to be hearing about how many improvements can be made in the healthcare world by applying todays design thinking and technology after struggling through setting up something as simple as a video conference at a state-of-the-art facility at one of the world’s premier internet companies. Dave highlighted this irony and reminded us that most hospitals and doctors offices are woefully behind the times. It is surely a huge challenge but it’s also one that many designers are very excited about tackling.

Next up was Megan Grocki who explained how “Marketing is not a 4 Letter Word.” With all the talk recently about unicorns (UX designers with visual design or coding chops) I deemed Megan an even rarer Pegasus Unicorn with chops in  UX and marketing at Mad*Pow. While giving us some more insight into how marketers think and what they do, Megan also reminded us that we are all marketers sometimes and that what they do is not always evil or douchey. In fact, the better we do our job as designers, the easier their job is and the more good our work can do.

Callie Neylan presented “Beautiful Interactions: Codifying Aesthetics in Interaction Design” where she explained a system for measuring and comparing the relative beauty of the cities in which she has lived and then applied it to some examples of interaction and service design. Callie presented another lens through which we can view our work in attempt to make more beautiful experiences.

Finally, IxDA NYC’s own Lis Hubert gave an impassioned talk about “Agile’s Secret Step: Discovery“. Lis walked us through her experiences with integrating UX into the agile process and proposed a method by which strategy and planning work in parallel with development and delivery. Lis’ passion for solving difficult problems (and for beer) gave the entire audience some food for thought (or drink for thought, in this case) and spurred quite a bit of discussion to close out the day’s talks.

Following the presentations the group was treated to a cocktail hour by Tandem Seven where we were all able to decompress, share our thoughts and questions with each other and the presenters and get to know our colleagues a bit better. The party continued (as it often does) with an IxDA-sponsored afterparty at B Bar down the block.

After countless hours of planning, preparation, discussion, and anticipation the day went off as well as anyone could have hoped. I’d like to thank everyone involved:

All of the  IxDA Leaders and volunteers who made this happen

• Lis Hubert
• Peter March
• Andi Mignolo
• David Fine
• Chris Palle
• Brian Durkin
• Fritz Desir
• Kellie Leake

Our sponsors Tandem Seven, Microsoft, and Wiley Publishing

Our host, the AOL Consumer Experience Team, especially Gabi Moore

All of our presenters and every member of the interaction and experience design tribe for another memorable day, some new friends, and a bit more knowledge and insight that will make me a better designer.

Kudos all around!

UPDATE: View the slides for Amir’s presentation on SlideShare

You can read more about his planned talk and workshop on Mark’s blog.

Here’s the review of Ann’s talk, from Robert at Boogdesign.

Join the great NYC UX Book Club community along with VizThinkNYC at Liquidnet this July to talk about solving problems with pictures and our latest summer reading, Unfolding the Napkin.

Date: Thursday, July 22, 2010

Time: 6:30PM – 8:30PM

Location: 498 Seventh Ave, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10019

Book: Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems With Simple Pictures

By: Dan Roam

The NYC UX Book Club is back! And along with VizThinkNYC we’ve got a great event in store for our next get-together.

For our summer gathering we decided to follow up on VizThink NYC’s fun and interactive exploration of visual thinking and problem-solving based on the revolutionary work of Dan Roam with a good old book club delving into his latest work, Unfolding the Napkin.

Unfolding the Napkin is Dan Roam’s reworked version of his original book, Back of the Napkin, where he laid out a framework and explored a set of tools to solve any problem using pictures. Unfolding the Napkin walks us through a series of hands-on exercises and case studies that will help us hone our built-in visual problem solving skills and leave us with another tool in our kit to tackle whatever problems we face. Don’t worry if you can’t draw. We’re not talking about art here. The book is broken up into four individual workshops that guide us through the four stages of visual problem solving:

• Look
• See
• Imagine
• Show

As an added twist we are anticipating several informal, off-the-cuff gatherings to go through these activities together between now and the July 22nd gathering. It doesn’t take any more than three or four people, the book, and a pencil to make it happen. Look for announcements here or on twitter (hashtag #unfoldnyc). Feel free to call a gathering publicly or privately. And don’t worry if you don’t go through the exercises with a group, they work just as well alone.

If all that isn’t enough, we will be holding the gathering at Liquidnet’s spectacular midtown educational space. Many thanks to MJ Broadbent and the folks at Liquidnet for their continued commitment to innovation and education through hosting events like this one. If you haven’t been to Liquidnet for an gathering like this, you’re in for a treat.

Space is limited and security requires a full list to enter the building so please RSVP on our facebook group.

Here are the details:

Schedule:

6:30-7:00 Drinks and mingling

7:00-8:30 Group discussions (maybe some drawing)

8:30-9:00 Farewells and, for those interested, food and drink somewhere nearby

About the Book:

Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, a BusinessWeek bestseller, taught readers the power of brainstorming and communicating with pictures. It introduced a completely new way to look at problems and see solutions, from the boardroom to the sales floor to the cubicle.

This companion workbook, Unfolding the Napkin, helps readers put Dan’s principles into practice with step-by-step guidelines. It’s filled with detailed case studies, guided do-it-yourself exercises, and plenty of blank space for drawing. Roam structured the book as a complete four-day visual-thinking seminar, taking readers step-by-step from “I can’t draw” to “Here is the picture I drew that I think will save the world.”

Unfolding the Napkin teaches readers how to:

• Improve our three “built-in” visual problem solving tools.
• Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.
• Instantly improve our visual imaginations.
• Learn how to recognize the type of problem we face and corresponding pictorial solution.

The Back of the Napkin introduced visual thinking; Unfolding the Napkin is the guidebook that will soon be heavily marked up and dogeared.

Hope to see you there!

- The UX Book Club Planning Team

The talk was organised by Intelligence Squared, and you can view the video of highlights from Tufte’s talk on their website (if you pay that is).

My favourite point (as summarised by Intelligence Squared) is: “Data should be used to guide the design, rather than design being based on fashion or what the technology offers. Content-oriented design is necessary, as the point of information display is to assist analytical thinking.”

Some found his talk a little ‘rambling’ and complained that he was just reciting from his notes, however it’s worth noting that he is an academic, not a public speaker, so perhaps we should forgive him for such things! Any guru’s followers can often get weighed down with the minutiae of what they say, rather than focusing on the underlying principles they are attempting to communicate. It’s these key principles (such as the one mentioned above) that made the talk a success for me, as I think much of it reinforces my views on what good UX design should be. He had some very good examples and interesting graphics to illustrate his points (Minard’s the poster of Napoleon’s march on Moscow will end up on our wall!).

We failed, however, to get our copy of Tufte’s “The Visual display of Quantitative Information” signed by the author

Want to brainstorm, solve problems, and communicate ideas more effectively using pictures?  Sure you do…!

Join us on Weds, May 19 at 6:30pm for a fun and interactive exploration of visual thinking and problem-solving based on the revolutionary work of Dan Roam.  The event is free, no experience necessary, and we’ll even supply the napkins!

In his groundbreaking book, “The Back of the Napkin,” Dan brought visual problem-solving (made-simple) to the masses.  If you’re not familiar with his work (or even if you already are), we highly recommend checking out his website which contains a generous assortment of information, tools, and resources:  http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com

(*Note:  While our VizThink NYC event will be touching just the tip of the iceberg of his work, you might be interested to know that Dan Roam will be delivering his 2-day workshop right here in NYC in September.  You can find details of Dan’s training conference here … http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/events/)

Back to our VizThink NYC event…

Facilitated by our VizThink NYC team, we’ll discuss some of the key tools from “The Back of the Napkin,” and together explore how we can apply them in the real world.

Also, our following (follow-up) event in June will be a discussion of Dan’s accompanying hands-on workbook “Unfolding the Napkin” with the UX Book Club NYC, so you may want to pick up a copy of his books and dig in…!

Please RSVP asap for our fun and informative VizThink NYC event, as seating is limited and we expect a full house.  Please RSVP with you full name in order to get into the building.

Also, we ask that you please be considerate of your fellow VizThinkers and sign up ONLY if you’ll be able to make it.  We’d hate to have an empty seat while someone else is sitting at home napkinless.

Date & Time
Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 6:30 PM — 8:30 PM

Location
Liquidnet
498 Seventh Ave, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10019

Pitching UX: Robert Fein, the Director of User Experience at Grand Union, ran a very time pressed workshop on the nuts-and-bolts of pitching for UX work. He had a well developed process breakdown, and ran through a couple exercises on interpreting Request documents and then responding to them in a very short amount of time. When Robert sends me his slide deck, I think it would be useful one evening to go through his process. His workshops where most applicable to smaller UX consultancies and agencies hungry for work. Frankly, his scenarios for responding to clients with no prior notice, just a few minutes to read their RFQ and then pitch an approach to a solution would not be something I would participate in a our business sector, if for no other reason than it doesn’t allow as to do our best for our clients. That said, having to quickly digest information and then doing some quick thinking is a great exercise. Overall, a very good workshop.

Futuristic Business Challenges: Darren Evans (I don’t know who he works for, or if he has his own company ):

will reveal how to solve business challenges using futuristic digital media, in an interactive session that will allow attendees to gain hands-on experience.

I was really looking forward to this. And the session was nothing like the above description from the programme. What we had was a round-table discussion where we were asked what we thought were the important future trends in technology and how that impacted the UX practice space (I’m paraphrasing). Fine! I was excited with the prospect of hearing the insights of other UX professional into the future of technology, and the UX role in its unfolding. Stark disappointment. One by one the attendees ventured some lame example of current, mature technology as if it was new and would somehow be revolutionary. Mobile phones. Watching TV programmes on a computer, or, a mobile device! E-commerce! And more of the same, but I didn’t bother write any of it down because none of it was futuristic. I don’t know about these people, but when I think future, I’m thinking “over the horizon”, not next week, or last week for that matter. Its as if these people have never cracked open a copy of Wired magazine. So, I have to admit, I became a bit contrarian. Which was fun. In a cheeky way. Conclusion: We could run a similar discussion ourselves that would be much better informed and insightful.

• Posted by Charlie Robbins

• Posted by Charlie Robbins

• Posted by Charlie Robbins

Microsoft’s top developers prefer old-school coding methods

Video of the panel discussion at PDC09. The article captured key highlights the panel was quite good.

It has been a year since these tools have been released. There have been great updates even since the May CTP drop this year.

• You can compile “M” files in VS 2010 without mucking with the csrpoj file
• Error reporting is integrated in the IDE
• Enhancements to Intellipad and the M Language for building textual DSLs
• Using M Schema, there is a VS IDE option to target the database.
• And more

via Doug Purdy

PDC talks are available both videos and slides from the links.

If you have been skeptical of our recent renaming of “Oslo”, I encourage you to actually watch the videos, download the bits and then make up your mind.

More importantly, if you are a .NET developer, please take a look at what we are doing around EF and DS – especially the OData protocol.

Data/Modeling “Anchor Session”

Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer

Coming in VS 2010

Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in .NET 4 and Beyond

ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework

Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework

SQL Server Modeling (nee “Oslo”)

Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language

Building Data-Driven Applications Using Microsoft Project Code Name "Quadrant" and Microsoft Project Code Name "M"

SQL Server Modeling Services: Using Metadata to Drive Application Design, Development and Management

Using SQL Server Modeling

The ‘M’-Based System.Identity Model for Accessing Directory Services

"the industry understanding of the cloud has really evolved… the cloud is about more than just infrastructure, it’s also about an application model’

Bob Muglia President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.

PDC09 Keynote

Oslo transforms into the underlying application model of the cloud

I finally go to shake the hand of Jeffrey Snover, the man behind the vision of PowerShell. We got to chat for a few minutes before he was on the panel Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming. Some great thinkers on the panel, Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith. Covered Parallel programming (we’ll still be figuring it out in the next 5-10 years), textual DSLs, modeling, importance of glue languages and more.

I’ll be doing some posts on SQL Modeling Services (aka Oslo). Just finished downloading the latest CTP on my main box. It has a dependency on .NET 4, works in VS 2010, has more features and better integration with SQL and VS. Don’t forget to download Pinky’s DynamicObject Over M values. It is a implementation of .NET 4.0 dynamic object over Node/Edge data model provides a read-only object-based view over M values.

Plus sat in on the PowerShell talks. Layering GUIs over PowerShell. Very cool and just the beginning. Download the demos here. They give insight to how Microsoft Exchange re-worked there GUIs to sit on top of PowerShell. Restricted Runspaces for security, Runspace Pools to execute PowerShell asynchronously, Remoting, and the start of how to ‘record’ the PowerShell commands the user is clicking on in the GUI.

Lot’s to experiment, enjoy and engage with.

Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.

i think silverlight just swallowed wpf from the inside

Bill Wagner

• Download it http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/silverlight-4-beta-is-now-available/
• Silverlight 4 Debuts with Killer Demos at PDC09
• Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features
• Channel 9 training http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/
• Shawn Wildermuth
  • Silverlight 4 Beta Announced!
  • Data Binding Changes in Silverlight 4
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Offline Documentation
• Silverlight 4 Rough Notes: Managed Extensibility Framework

Direct Links

• App Fabric Download   Windows Azure platform AppFabric provides common building blocks required by .NET applications when extending their functionality to the cloud, and specifically, the Windows Azure platform.
• Microsoft Dallas Use the Dallas Service Explorer to visually construct REST API queries and preview the content in XML, ATOM, RAW (for blob and real-time content), or in Table view and you can use Power Pivot with the data.
• Reactive Extensions for .NET
  • Check out Matt’s multi part series. Including a Twitter client
  • Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

• SQL Server Modeling

  Renamed from Oslo. Modeling has a home in a shipping Microsoft product. It was also shown during the first keynote and how it can play in Cloud development.

  • Check out the write up
  • Download the CTP
  • Read Doug Purdy’s blog (owner of Modeling) and On DSLs and a few other things
• PowerShell. “Demoed” quickly during the keynote for deploying to the Azure Cloud. PowerShell is the automation platform for Windows.
• Visual studio 2010 has a huge number of features for developers. Intellitrace, Architecture Explorer, Azure templates, Parallel debugging and more

Check out NASA’s Pathfinder Innovation Challenge with datasets in the cloud.

Jean Paoli, co-creator of Xml, presented the story on Microsoft’s interoperability effort. Covering 4 key tenants: Products, Collaboration, Developer Resources and Standards Bodies.

For Microsoft’s big main products they

• Have documented protocols, more than 80K pages
• Work with more than 150 standards organizations
• Sit down every six months for two days and talk with IBM, Red Hat, Apache etc. Having frank open non-marketing conversations about interoperability

Check out their page Interoperability Bridges & Lab Center.

Microsoft says they see big opportunities in the operability space. Perhaps another chance to embrace and extend.

• Follow my twitter feed as well as the hash tag #pdc09

• Watch the two keynotes  Both begin at 11:30 Eastern time

Day 1, November 17th, Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia

Day 2, November 18th, Scott Guthrie, Kurt DelBene & Special Guest

• Channel 9 will be broadcasting live for three days

So I whipped up this 25 line PowerShell/WPK GUI. Type in the search box to find matching session titles. Click on a title and the browser navigates to PDC session page.

The Code

Grab the Code

You need PowerShell V2 (if you don’t have Windows 7), WPK and this script.

• The ‘M’-Based System.Identity Model for Accessing Directory Services
• Microsoft Project Code Name “Repository”: Using Metadata to Drive Application Design, Development, and Management
• Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language
• Building Data-Driven Applications Using Microsoft Project Code Name "Quadrant" and Microsoft Project Code Name "M"

An old friend said, this looks like one of the best PDC’s in years. Sessions on PowerShell, Azure, Oslo, Dublin, Velocity, MEF, VS 2010, WPF 4, WF 4, PLINQ, DLR and more.

I am looking forward to the panel discussion Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming with these technical leaders Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith.

If there is something you want to know. Contact me, leave a comment, tweet me or email me.

Mark Hamil hosting the Awards Show

Morgan Stanley Matrix (looked great and functioned well... but didn't win)

Chewbacca showing off the new Physics features in Flash

Project called "Rome" which completely blew my mind

The MAX Awards show (hosted by Mark Hamil) didn’t quite go as well as we had hoped.  Morgan Stanley Matrix, hampered by secrecy and relegated to showcasing just a few screens, lost to an inferior enterprise app.  However, the Sneak Peeks afterwards presented a few incredible “might-haves” in the future: Flash objects with physics attributes, cut & paste vector graphics linked to data in Dreamweaver, a spot-healing tool that can intelligently edit HUGE sections of an image (a crowd favorite), and ROME – an intuitive working environment that allows users to add, edit and manipulate any form of media without having to switch applications!

The TESLA Roadster

Here’s a cool project: incorporating a touchscreen center panel into the new TESLA S model.  As can be expected, having visual eye candy on your dashboard detracting from your ability to drive safely is a HUGE concern…