–Engage

The Interaction Design Group (IxDG) announced that it will become a formal not-for-profit organization and explains its new purpose and strategy for achieving it.

I have been helping IxDG grow for close to 2 solid years now, and am very proud that a group of 14 energized, intelligent, talented, and passionate designers have gotten together to commit to bring IxDG alive. Below is the announcement that the new steering committee, of which I’m proud to be a continuing member of, sent out to the IxDG community.

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I was reading a chapter in a graphic design book, as I was reminded of the important aspect of most presentation design disicplines–white space. What is white space? Simply put it is the empty areas of a formative design. Margins are a form of white space, but you can have the same emptiness or negative space in 3D volume as well.

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Luke W. in his latest article, “Designed by Nature” looks at an example he recently found showing the extrapulation of a natural form into a design for a car. This is sometimes called Biomimicry, or some call it naturalist design. Mimicry is a bit more specific, as it implies a direct mimicking of nature, while naturalist design is just “inspired” by nature.

Luke saus he is interested in “seeing interface design solutions based on how naturally occurring systems work”. Just reading that my mind went afire with ideas, but few that translate easily into 2d interface design. I’m interested in two concepts of this discussion though (before I get completely stumped):

1. What are examples of natural interfaces?
2. Is naturalism or even biomimicry anything more than just an aesthetic approach?

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Today, June 6, 2005, C|Net reports that Macromedia is aligning and investing with Eclipse platform. For people interested in the whole Rich Internet Application front, this is indeed a very interesting story, as it means that Macromedia media is making a move directly to have itself taken more seriously by developers/engineers as it attempts to promote its platform for developing rich applications to be distributed over the IP network.

For me, my entire existence as a UX Professional has been either in NYC or Silicon Valley (The San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA). This experience has warped my view of how best to organize the greater UX community. I am a very privileged citizen within the ranks of my national and global peers.

The reality is, that in a city like NYC you can have local chapters meetings every month for a host of UX related organizations, each representing either their own take on UX, or a specific discipline that makes up the entirety of UX. For example in NYC, there is usually a CHI, UPA, STC, IDSA, IA Meet-up and IxDG. (See footer for acronym lists.) Each meeting can have anywhere from 30-150 people depending on what the topic is. See the NYC UXNet calendar for more information.

The other reality is that there are places in the world in many places of the US itself, where doing such a collection of meetings every month serves no purpose. No one “group”, representing some axis of a specialization can create enough of a critical mass either to keep organizing such events so regularly, or to have consistent worthwhile attendance.

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