smallfire: design strategy

I’m honoured to be helping to organise the first ever Industry Day for PDC 2010, along with the fabulous Jeanette Blomberg and Ellen Balka. This will be a great opportunity to gather people from Sydney, Australia and beyond to discuss issues of participation and how technology can assist! See short call below or grab the PDF

Join us for Industry Day at PDC 2010 : supporting collaborations between research and practice in the area of participatory design.

As part of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference
Sydney, Australia
29 November – 3rd December 2010
University of Technology, Sydney
www.pdc2010.org @pdcSydney #pdcsyd

Participation by people in the design of the systems they use is integral to the way we do business, support civic engagement, collaborate and connect with clients, constituents and community. The Participatory Design Conference is an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.

Join us for the first ever Industry Day at Participatory Design 2010 to support collaboration between research and practice in the participatory design of products, services and systems.

Read the rest of this entry »

A topic that floats to the surface on a regular basis in my work is the relationship between brand and UX; an interesting, evolving and somewhat contested territory.

One way to think about brand and experience is as representing  two different perspectives: the perspective of the business and the perspective of the people that use the service or product of that business or organisation. In the past they didn’t overlap as much as they do in the case of online service delivery (or service design generally), but as technologies and practices change some interesting tensions are coming into play [*]. There are two in particular that are recurrent for me at the present time.

The first is at the global organisation or company level, the territory of vision where things are strategic and frankly, largely abstract. The other is at local level, where you have the actual implementation of a specific, concrete project/touchpoint/service (it might be the implementation of one the strategies from the global above).

Read the rest of this entry »