–Engage

Today, the IxDA makes a radical change in how we are defining “community”. I’m proud to help announce the IxDA’s new site (in beta release).

For me this is a beginning on many levels:

• A new way of having a multi-faceted community contributed conversation.
• A new way of thinking about an organization

The former idea will be obvious to anyone going to the new site. The new functionality and how it is integrated well with the existing email forum is just great–just the beginning, but also great as is.

My favorite features center around the ability to tag but also to create favorites around threads and postings. But also the ability to create a profile. Further, I love the RSS features. You can get the whole feed, a topic feed, and some others.

Now the idea that I really love about the beta site is that it is the best demonstration of how the board feels IxDA should work. Someone outside the leadership of IxDA, just did this. Jeff Howard on his own b/c he was fed up with the limitations of the email list, but loved its content, decided to build a system just like this. The board in turn said GREAT! Well, let’s take your idea, and your energy, add a bit more fuel to it w/ some more help and voila! we have a new initiative for IxDA.

So if you have an initiative for IxDA that you want to see happen. Just do it!

Anyway, I’m very excited about the beta site and can’t wait to see people using it.

“> For the 1st time in 22 years the International Industrial Design Congress will be meeting in the US and IDSA will be co-sponsoring this major international design event. I feel privileged that I have a paper accepted AND I have been invited to moderate a panel on interaction design.

Connecting ’07 will take place from October 17 – 20, 2007 in San Francisco, CA.

I will be presenting a new paper on the topic of Patterns in Industrial Design & Interaction Design with Barbara Ballard (of Little Springs Design).

I have also been invited to moderate a panel on Interaction Design. No details yet on the panelists.

This will be an exciting one for sure!

Let me know if you will be attending Connecting.

I love Google’s suite of office applications and can’t wait for their presentation software to be released, but I can’t rely on it.

Why? Well, I’m not always connected or it is not easy for me to connect.

For the foreseeable future, airplanes won’t allow internet connectivity and even when they do they are going to charge an arm or two for it. So if you fly like a lot of people do you are stuck in the air w/o being able to compose.

This problem isn’t limited to Google Docs, but also to their mobile email application which to me is even more problematic in that it is all online or nothing. For someone who lives in NYC where a lot of my mobile email composition exists underground and away from cell towers or other networking connections GMail Mobile gets really frustrating.

But what is even MORE frustrating is how contact management in GMail mobile. All the data is remote so when you want to add an address you have to load the content remotely and it streams in. It has a filtering component of just 3 letters, but every time I try to use it before all the data streams in it causes it to crash (Ok, a bug). But waiting for all my 1300 contacts (b/c it doesn’t separate “repled to” emails from contacts I added) takes way too long AND further it doesn’t allow me to ad hoc enter an email address. So if it is new (off the top of my head) I can’t just enter it.

A simple solution to this is to have a contact management system that syncs when needed, but real use takes place locally.

Now admittedly I don’t have 3G, EDGE or EVDO, so I’m a little handicapped, but when I compare the POP service of Snapper mail to the Web Service of GMail Mobile, I don’t like it. But b/c I love Gmail for now all of my accounts (4 of them now), I tolerate the Gmail Mobile application and try to only reply to messages as much as possible.

But the main point here is that “online only” data and behavior has its limits and frustrations.

Comcast’s use of Zimbra for their messaging and collaboration center is a huge vote of confidence in both Open Source Software and RIAs.

I’m not sure what it really means globally. It could just be a fluke of 1 company doing everything right, but if I was looking at RIAs for the consumer space and Open Source Software for the enterprise, I would definitely take note and possible raise a few stock prices.

Congratulations Zimbra for finding the right business sell for your services on your OSS platform. And thank you for always being a great inspiration to myself and my peers for what AJAX-based RIAs can do, in real world high-concurrency environments.

Everyone else, especially enterprise software makers, should take notice to this and try to learn from Zimbra. I sorta wish I was a Comcast customer.

A now almost 60 message thread is going on within the IAI Members list. It seems that trying to be witty led to a long bashing of myself over and over again, b/c G-d forbid I care about the advancement and growth of UX, IA and IxD. Below is an inspired retort

Some posts the following:

First I say:

What is so wrong with saying, “my gravitational center comes from X and that means.”

Then this person says:

Nothing. What rankles is saying to someone else on a list “you are incorrectly describing your gravitational center – use my schema instead.” (or the more passive but similar “why do you identify yourself thusly when you really should do it this other way”).

[... snip ... ]

I think a core value of mine at least is to respect how other people choose to identify themselves. I may personally describe them or what they do differently but I do not try to convince them to adopt my frame.

My reply to this now.

Bravo, but what does that get you? Does that advance a discipline or practice, or just make you feel good at night? Seriously. Sure, I know if I started calling myself a Duck Designer, it really doesn’t impact the lot of you. But when I start saying that Duck Design is Information Architecture & well usability and HCI and IxD, and create a community and organization to start promoting Duck Design as the latest and greatest thing b/c I have a new blog, book, and conference to support my ideas and my friends like them too, and I have a big consultancy that has sold it to X Fortune 1000 and latest darling startups, then yes, it does start to effect what I do and how I start to re-align my own identity and values. What’s worse, when Duck Design actually doesn’t do EVERYTHING that IA does, nor with the same methods and protocols, or theories of understanding, but still subsumes the language making it harder for me to continue to communicate to my existing clients/users/stakeholders, then it impacts me even further. Let’s not even get into the whole hiring and education issues that are involved here.

While as one person puts it that he just doesn’t really good work and continues to just do really good work, so what does all this matter I would then say, “who comes after you?” “How do you sustain and build?” “How do you communicate to your stakeholders who are reading contradictory spins on what you do in BusinessWeek?” Etc. Etc.

I find the lack of concern by the general UX community, not only IA or IxD to be very disheartening, as I do feel connected to this community IA and UX more generally, but I am seeing that more people are learning from what we’ve been offering and making it their own, and doing a better job of it. I see the design community (AIGA & IDSA) especially taking UX terms and practices and employing them as if they were always in their arsenal.

(Editor’s note: AIGA and IDSA while design orgs who’s practitioners do UX design in many ways, are not as organizations particularly philosophically connected to the User Experience community.)

I say more power to THEM. But it speak poorly on us. After 10 years of being around many of us still have not figured out how to grow the discipline. We’ve only figured out how to grow our INDIVIDUAL practices and the different disciplines we employ in those practices. This short sightedness is what I’m concerned about.

Does this ONLY come down to titles and formalized vocabularies? Nope, but it doesn’t hurt to start with the easy stuff, that’s for sure, and this is just plum easy.