My interests are concentrated in three main disciplines:

Service design:
how to create better service across a product/service's entire life cycle
Strategy:
how to plan and execute a product or service, and in particular how to understand its user audience.
User experience design:
how to create a usable and beautiful products and services

My professional and personal interests tend to overlap, but here's a brief list of what I'm interested in lately.


Professional Interests

I'm interested in learning all there is to know about the work I do. My current interests include - but are not limited to - the following topics (in no particular order):

area topic

business:

  • Best practices: standards in all disciplines, especially managing the product development life cycle
  • Sustainability and Systems Thinking: using holistic systems thinking/systems theory to design solutions and indicate change management
  • User experience: benefits of user experience design and measuring those benefits both qualitatively and quantitatively (KPIs, metrics and ROI), promoting UX as a growing discipline; customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction; online communities and communication
design:
  • Infovis: information visualization and how information design affects perception of messages and branding
  • Innovation: how to encourage and sustain it
  • Interdisciplinarity: linkages between disciplines and encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration
  • Product design and sustainability: how social design helps address and solve global issues
technology:
  • Social media software: how to leverage technologies in the service of others, especially web 2.0 technologies (social media and online communities)
  • Tools: how to create tools, and measure their effectiveness; collaborative technology/groupware
  • Ubicomp: ubiquitous computing and how to design for it
  • Web Standards: Standards based design, and Mac OSX development and applications

I'm also very much interested in cultural aspects of these topics - including topics like memes, online culture, community building, how technology influences people and vice versa. All of these topics influence what I design and how I design it - and, of course, at the intersection of these areas (business, design and technology) is user experience.


I also administer a number of groups online. All links open in a new window.

Site Topic
Business Exchange Sustainable Design Page BusinessWeek's BusinessExchange collaborative page on Sustainable Design (which duplicates much of the content at Squidoo below)
flickr
brc
Black Rock City From Above - for collecting aerial shots of Black Rock City (at Burning Man)
brainjams

Brainjams - for members of the Brainjams organization use to post images of interest. Please note that Brainjams has now be superceded by the folks at the Social Media Club.

web 2.0 Frappe Nation - for collecting pictures of frappe drinks (icon courtesy Daniel Young of Frappe Nation) There are over 254 members as of October 2008
ux box User Experience Design - for collecting UX diagrams. Companion to the Slideshare group.
web 2.0

Web 2.0 diagrams - for collecting web 2.0 diagrams

slideshare Rollyo Rollyo - for a search through design pattern libraries online
slideshare

ux box

User Experience Design - for collecting UX presentations. Companion to the Flickr group.

steal these buttons squidoo Sustainability Associations, Organizations and Resources - for those interested in the topic
steal these buttons ux box 'Steal These Buttons' - for those who like 80 x 15 badges on their Web sites

You can view more of my social networks on my 'connections' page.

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ux box ux box ux box

Personal Interests

When not found creating user experience design products, you can find me interested in the following:


  • general: monitoring the latest trends and issues in pop culture, design, technology (especially social networking software and
    Digital Lifestyle Aggregators) and politics (and how these all intersect)
  • creative: art, craftsnew window, gardening, origami, painting
  • travel: many places, including Burning Mannew window

...and a multitude of other intellectual pursuits. If there's a free newspaper in the doorway of the store, I'll pick it up; if there's a way to satiate my intellectual curiosity, I'll find it. My motto in all that I do can be summarized by this:



Seneca

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