On Tuesday I got to do another trial run of some new work that I’m making ready for the upcoming MidwestUX conference. And it was wonderful to have the opportunity to catch up with Josh Morse, who serendipitously agreed to host the meetup at his company’s facility well in advance of knowing that a lecturer from his graduate school would be the “talent.” People in SB are super nice, and ask excellent questions. You should totally go to their next thing. Here are the slides I used:
Tonight we did a thing we’d never done before: a crash course on wireframes paired with 40 minutes of hands-on workshopping. Our audience was amazing, and there are photos of them presenting their work on the SCWDDM site. Here are the slides:
Just now I ran across a great quote from Mr. Wurman in chapter 33 of the book Digerati by John Brockman (1996):
“In the past, it was possible to get along by doing a much better version of what you were doing previously. In the future, you’re going to die on the vine if you do only a better version of what you’re already doing. It will be increasingly important to explore alternatives, parallel ways of buying and selling ideas, services, products, et cetera, in brief transactions.”
At the end of the chapter on Wurman, Brockman includes quotes about RSW from the other folks featured in the book. Here’s a chestnut:
(Sherry Turkle): Richard Wurman shows you how to look at things a little differently, and then, after trying it his way, you usually can’t imagine how you did things any other way. Richard’s design sensibility has changed the way I hold meetings, plan my travel, and light my office.
Reason 1: Consolidate Identity. For years, the IA Institute’s identity and name have been misunderstood to be synonymous with those of the IA Summit. And in the past, the Institute would explain that no, the IA Summit is an ASIS&T thing, and that the Institute’s conference is a different event called IDEA. And that unlike the IA Summit, the Institute’s conference event did not have a specific emphasis on information architecture.
Click on the image to view video from a recent presentation of Understanding Information Architecture. You can also view a PDF of the slides from this talk
Our friend Matt Burton sent this to us back in October. We finally took a minute to consider it.
Wow.
As an architect, I am interested in my profession and its future, and
I think one can safely say this: cyberspaces will require constant
planning and management. The structures proliferating within it will
require design, and the people who design these structures will be
called cyberspace architects. Schooled along with their brethren
“real-space” architects and urban designers, cyberspace architects
will design electronic edifices that are fully as complex, functional,
unique, involving, and beautiful as their physical counterparts–if
not more so–and the ways that these are disposed in the electronic
landscape.
Theirs will be the task of visualizing the intrinsically
non-physical and giving inhabitable form to society’s most intricate
abstractions, processes, and organs of information. And all the while
they will be re-realizing in a virtual world, in cyberspace, many
vital aspects of the physical world, in particular those orderings and
pleasures which have always belonged to architecture and the
artifactual landscape.
No architect has ever yet designed a bank, or a university, for that
matter. They have designed only the physical shell that houses them.
Banks and universities have an informational structure and content
more marvellous by far than any architect can depict or has yet needed
to.
A trans-coded gem from the VHS library at the University of Michigan school of Art & Architecture. Mr. Alexander gives a three-part talk to object-oriented programming enthusiasts in Southern California back in 1996, and the perspectives he lends on generating living structures and making things be good are an inspiration to our work at TUG. We hope it inspires you too:
We are growing rapidly and want to focus our efforts on establishing the right team to grow in a sustainable way. If you are a detailed oriented person who loves to help other people get their job done we may have the perfect role for you—Operations Coordinator.
We operate with a geographically-distributed team of consultants working together virtually from Seattle to New York. We serve a diverse client base ranging from small design firms and their clients to large, multi-national corporations. Our projects also range in size from short, compact efforts involving a couple of people to multi-phase projects with large teams comprised of both internal TUG resources and client personnel. At any given point in time we will have more than a dozen projects running simultaneously.
Tracking the status and resource requirements of these projects is essential to our ability to meet our client’s needs and expectations. To support these efforts the company uses a variety of software tools including Basecamp for project collaboration, Google Docs for planning and AtTask for project tracking and resource allocation.
Job Description:
We are seeking a highly organized, balanced individual to fill the role of Operations Coordinator. The ideal candidate will be a highly collaborative person who enjoys dealing with people and balancing multiple demands simultaneously. The Operations Manager will be responsible for answering key questions about TUG’s business:
What is each member of our team responsible for? How do their skills and availability align to the needs of upcoming projects? Who needs to be where, when and why?
How accurate are our estimation practices? Are we as efficient as we promise to be in our proposals?
How can we easily predict resourcing needs? To what extent can we swap out resources?
Primary tasks will include, but are not limited to:Read More
