Chicago Interactive Design & Development Group – May 19, 2009

Written by Russ on May 20, 2009 – 8:35 pm

May 19, 2009, Carolyn Chandler (my co-author for A Project Guide to UX Design) presented at the Chicago Interactive Design & Development Group’s monthly meet-up. We presented our joint presentation (which is really Carolyn’s that we worked me in to), “Learning to Love Tension, Disruption & Chaos” that we had presented a couple of weeks ago at the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in San Francisco.

It’s amazing what a difference 2 weeks can make! It’s also pretty amazing that we each only knew 1 person in the room–quite a few people less than we knew in San Francisco, and Chicago’s our home town! Not only that, I think we both were recovering from being a bit rattled from our presentation in San Francisco.

To be honest, the room was a bit flat–and that’s not to blame anyone, but it was a room with people in the web design space, on the last day of a conference and 2 fairly unknown authors.

Right after the always entertaining Jared Spool, too.

Hey, Jared’s one of those wicked-awesome, keynote-giving type of guys.

Hey, I’ve been hitting the stage and giving a handful of presentations this year and Jared’s been doing this for… let’s just say a bit more than I have. But, you know, sometimes the room can make a lot of difference.

That’s not to say we fell flat on our faces–there were some pretty good questions at VTM, but it felt dry. Regardless, I felt much better about my own abilities as a speaker (and a few people have been twittering my talk from the IA Summit on Heuristic Analysis for the Pitch Process in a positive light and that’s been a welcome boost to my own morale). Back to the local Meetup…

The room was pretty packed–it looked like around 50-60 people showed up, counting the late stragglers. We gave our presentations, felt the room was a bit more alive–and it was pretty nice to be in a room where everyone wasn’t staring down at a laptop. We also had some really great questions and genuinely interested people.

My portion of our discussion was on disruption, and Steve Portigal has been kind enough to work through this discussion. He provided some pretty good insights around how to re-frame problems, and that really helped me provide anecdotes that help others understand the value of disruption. Disruption can be something as simple as performing design testing with users, forcing very critical internal design reviews of your own work, or even getting your butt out of your chair and experiencing the environments where your end result will live (I give some examples using AMC’s touch screen kiosk and shower knobs that tend to paint the picture pretty clearly). We shouldn’t be afraid of someone knocking us off course–we should embrace it! We should be heading it off at the pass and encouraging it early on so we can get knocked out of our comfort zone and force us to be a bit more creative in the way we design. Disruption can be your friend.

Carolyn did a great job of talking about Chaos and Tension and how to work with them within the design process–there were some great questions around how to reign in chaos and how to wrestle with the tension to keep it balanced.

This group was outstanding–and it’s important to note that it’s been around for quite awhile. Judi Wunderlich, of Wunderland Group, has been setting up the local meetups. I’ve yet to be able to attend, and I can tell you that it’s been entirely my loss. The large group was attentive, interested and engaged and it was absolutely my pleasure and privilege to be asked to present to such an awesome audience.

Without Judi’s efforts, I’m not certain we’d have this type of meetup, and it’s important to recognize how lucky we are to have her support in our interactive community. Thanks, Judi!

This is been a rare local appearance–I’m really happy that I was able to take part, and look forward to getting more locally engaged. Support your local scene–they’re support is pretty fantastic!

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