Well, my two days of high-end conference fun are over; if I don’t get back to the office tomorrow it’ll eat me. Although I did fix the handle server today, go me, and I’ve about 3/4 of my article obligation written.
(I’ve written several times the 2100 words I’m on the hook for. I just keep deleting words once I’ve written them, dang it! But—honestly—this article may manage not to suck by the time I’m done with it. Y’all will be able to decide for yourselves when it comes out; I have self-archiving rights.)
For the record, this conference was pretty close to gender-balanced in attendance, and there was a substantial presence of people of color as well. The presenters were overwhelmingly white (only two non-white that I noted), and substantially male (18 to 8). Not great, but I’ve seen worse.
I noticed what I flatter myself is my own speaking style in most speakers, only polished to a high gloss—articulate, focused, not dependent on notes or slide text, plenty of humor (they’re much better at humor than I am) and volume and physical motion. Maybe if I keep working on it…
The Technorati tag for this conference is “uxweek,” so that’s probably the place to go for blow-by-blow descriptions of the proceedings. Keep an eye out for podcasts and slideshows from the conference, too; several (notably Bierut, Veen, Saffer, Freitas) are worth listening to. I’ll just try to hit a few highlights for librarians.
Clever and potentially useful collaboration tools I hadn’t previously heard of: Thumbstacks, browser-based slideshows and Vyew, free web-based screen-sharing and conferencing. The Freitas presentation that demoed these gizmos is worth listening to as a podcast for its intelligent framework for evaluating collaborative tools and techniques.
The outstanding Maya redesign of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh is still a watershed for the design field, it appears. Peter Merholz (I think it was) noted that the big win there was the extension of the single design effort across all the library’s spaces and services, physical and virtual. (It turns out Maya was originally brought in just to design a single kiosk!) I liked that insight; it’s too easy to consider the design of a given service in isolation.
Library science is not the only field struggling to define itself and inculcate employable skills in its students despite a wide variation in those students’ previous education and work experience. The panel on Tuesday discussing what graduate schools of design teach would have sounded immensely familiar to recent library-school grads and CavLec readers. Some of the problems we talk about are endemic to most professional education, it would appear; it’s not just us.
Yet more evidence that library marketing and outreach is ungodly horrible, and the library stereotype still hurts: Michael Bierut’s keynote yesterday discussed the task he accepted pro-bono of coming up with a theme for a major redesign of certain New York City school libraries. His initial ideas, based on his childhood experiences in libraries, involved distancing the new theme as much as possible from Library Stodge—indeed, from the word “library.”
Cooler heads prevailed; an associate pointed out to him that he was jumping to conclusions, assuming an antipathy to libraries among a population that had mostly never seen one. That insight got him back on track, and the resulting theme and designs are fantastically inspiring.
Consider, though. This is an educated, wealthy, smart man. This educated, wealthy, smart man told the UXWeek conferencegoers “These libraries turned out to be a nexus for the surrounding community” with all possible wide-eyed innocence. He was astonished that the librarians took the ball and ran with the new designs, and that they disliked one design for being too dark and too formal.
Hell’s bells, we librarians know that libraries are often the nerve-center of a community, or even several communities. We know we’re enthusiastic. We know we go to bat for our patrons. We know we like the bright and the nifty-keen and the not-so-formal. But Michael Bierut doesn’t know all that; a man whose life work it is to put old wine in new bottles had trouble escaping the Library Stodge myth. I find that profoundly disturbing and distressing, not least because it means we are liable to get suboptimal design work out of our stereotype-enmeshed contractors.
Outreach. Outreach NOW.
If I were an actual interaction designer or information architect, I don’t know that I would have felt I’d gotten my money’s worth out of this conference. Several sessions were pitched at a very introductory level—so introductory that even my desultory reading in the field let me anticipate many of the points being made—and one or two sessions wasted much too much time on vendor pitches.
If you spend about a quarter of your presentation showing off cool stuff your company did, despite its complete lack of relevance to the topic of your presentation? You’re a vendor pitchman. If you just wrote a book, and you mention it a baker’s dozen times during your presentation? You’re a vendor pitchman; it’s just that your wares are your book. And I don’t care how self-deprecating you are about your pitch, it’s still a pitch and it’s still insulting and inappropriate in a session people pay through the nose to attend.
As I only spent the cost of Metro trips, and I’m not a pro in this field, however, I got quite a bit out of my two days, though I don’t feel any burning urgency to go again.
