Wow! another amazing chapter has been released about Contextual Design by the authors of the book with the same name. As someone who used this book for 3 years teaching contextual research methods, this chapter is very welcome in that it has updated the core since that release and consolidates ...

Recently, I was teaching my students about the history and present of interaction design practice. I tend to be a seat of the pants at the whiteboard type of professor. I know the things I tend to want to say, but I let the moment & my students take me ...

Hi, I recently had a talk rejected from IxDA's Interaction 12 | Dublin conference. I'm far from bitter about it. (Mainly because I have a longer talk and a workshop accepted.) But I kinda liked the idea, or at least the premise behind it. I even had the chance to explore it ...

After teaching almost 3 years now and after conversations with co-teachers I have determined that there are 7 key attributes that make a great IxD student/designer: (aren't we students forever?) 1. Tinkerer: A passion for making of course, but more importantly a love for fussin' around to discover new possibilities through ...

I would say, today was day of the developer on so many levels for me. The keynote today was all about developers so much so that Fireworks (my favorite design tool for UI Design) got 30seconds of mention because now you can do something neato for jQuery. I did see a ...

Help me! I want to go to Austin

For the last 2+ weeks I have traded in my teacher's podium for a student's seat in the studio. I was a student at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) Summer School. Computational Design [caption id="attachment_2041" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Click to see my collection of screens"][/caption] My first week was spent in a ...

Tonight I read an interesting interview of Andy Hertzfeld. To be honest I feel a bit ashamed that I know so little about Andy as it seems he's done some amazing & important work in UI Design, including at Apple & now at Google--for Google+. In the interview a key early ...

One of the best advantages of being a professor is getting 16wks off every summer. But that length of time quickly gets boring unless you find ways to fill it. One of the ways I like to do to fill it is to travel around the world to anywhere that ...

Well here is my first crack at my take on the future of design education. Let me know what you think. (Part 1 was posted earlier.) Please leave comments here! You can also go to the Google Doc.

You may have noticed that I've been thinking about education lately. I do like teaching, but often wish both for myself and my students that education and practice were as purposefully integrated for design as education and research is for other academic disciplines. So I posited the following tweet: "Wishing there ...

I am honored to have been invited to participate in a project to come up with a manifesto on the future of design education. ICOGRADA, which is the international organization representing Visual Design in the International Design Alliance, is leading this effort, based on their first attempt 10 years ago. ...

I am honored to have 2 of my talks up for voting for the "Open Call" for the Microsoft MIX11 conference. I have always heard wonderful things about this event from attendees and know that the only way I'd ever get to go is to put p some great talks. ...

I've read a few critiques of the @Twitter for Mac client. I think Dan Saffer's is probably the best and most comprehensive. I will say that while I get the nits that Dan is making, I'm not sure I'm as critical of them. I think my problems are around my ...

Below is the slide deck (on slideshare.net) for my keynote presentation at Interaction South America in Curitiba, BR. It seemed to be well receive. It was video taped and you might have been lucky to see the live web cast, but if not I'm told the video will be replaced ...

After teaching design research the last 2 years, I realized that our language in my teaching of the course (which I inherited upon my arrival) was filled with branded terminology and even used branded literature as the basis for teaching. While I appreciate the work of these brands (I'm not ...

Today Bill Gates at the new Techonomy conference (which looks like an amazing event/organization) suggested that In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web. It is a great read via @techcrunch who have been covering this conference really well. But reading this and listening to the Gov. of ...

I got back from @uxlx this week. My write up of the conference will be @johnnyholland later this week. The conference was quite excellent. The diversity and quality of attendees and speakers felt unprecedented to me which combined with the venue and surrounding city made for a wonderful event. What I ...

A very interesting take on where IxD is from a Greek in Scotland.

[This is the second part in a continuing series about UI Design. Catch the 1st part here!] Storytelling has been huge of late. Many people have been talking about storytelling and creating narratives as a core competency and practice for good interaction design. Some have gone so far as to say ...