Easy6: India’s conference on software usability
INDIA’S SIXTH USABILITY CONFERENCE

To be held on January 23, 2006 at The Taj Residency, in Bangalore, India.

I took a bunch of photos of the posters at DUX and put ’em on flickr. Flickr is acting up right now and doesn’t seem to find all the photos with the “poster” or “postersession” tags. Very strange. I’ll blog this anyway, assuming that it’ll get sorted out.

I will be doing a workshop at the EPIC2005 conference next month in Seattle.

The Sociality of Fieldwork (or Personal Experiences with Interpersonal Connections)
Workshop Facilitator: Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting

In the activity of fieldwork, the ethnographer creates and facilitates a series of powerful interpersonal connections including (but not limited to):

* ethnographer and respondent
* ethnographer and fellow ethnographer/researcher/designer
* ethnographer and ‘client’
* ‘client’ and respondent

We leverage these connections to accomplish our most basic purposes: creating empathy and gathering data through establishing rapport. But perhaps there is more going on here. The goal of this workshop is to explore and consider these closely-felt connections and collectively begin to build a deeper understanding of the roots, power, impact and further potential for these interpersonal connections.

Through the workshop we will share our respective experiences, looking both for common themes that emerge, but also unique perspectives that the workshop participants may have, drawing those out and ideally building specific techniques that we can employ in the future, looking towards fieldwork that is more stimulating, impactful, and satisfying for each of the different stakeholders.

Robert Scales was blogging the CanUX conference. His page about my presentation is here

, without a lot of detail, and with some corners seriously cut.

Some of the research items Steve included in his presentation included:

* mprovements to existing products and services
* ideas for new products and features
* new applications for existing technologies
* specific implications for design

I’m not sure what a research item is but that is text (badly copied-and-pasted) from my website, not particularly relevant to the talk. He suggests looking at my site for more info, but his link to my site appears to be broken.

It’s nice to have someone write about your presentation, but this just seems shoddy. And I wouldn’t take notice of it, except that Robert was at the conference to promote his own event at the Banff centre later this year, about blogging! Ironic!

I wonder how I end up on these mailing lists. I just got a flier for an upcoming event in San Jose called RoboNexus – “North America’s Largest Business and Consumer Robotics Expo!”

For the fourth year running, I’ll be speaking at About, With, and For, organized by the ID in Chicago. This year it’s October 28-29, at Navy Pier. The details of my talk aren’t up, but I’ll be doing a workshop about the relationships between improv and ethnography and innovation. It’s similar to the tutorial I’m teaching at DUX in early November. AWF is always a great event, and the first set of speakers they’ve announced looks pretty good; check it out!

My paper Projective Techniques for Projection Technologies has been accepted for the DUX05 Conference. I’ll be sure to link to the final case study when it becomes available (Update: PDF here), but I will say that it’s about the user research that informed the development of the HP Home Cinema Digital Projector. I wrote about the process in a previous issue of FreshMeat.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll also be doing a tutorial at DUX, Whose Line is it Anyway: Innovation, Ethnography and Improv.

Most of the EPIC 2005 Program has been posted.

What do you think?

MSquared is a mini-conference in SF in late September, put on by Influx Strategic Consulting. I’m serious about the mini aspect – between 8am and 12:50pm there are 7 presenters (including Chris Anderson and Howard Rheingold), Q&As and a coffee break. Anderson presents for 20 minutes. Rheingold for 30. Yeesh.

Given that the aim is obviously to promote Influx’s brains (and services), one might wonder what it costs. That information is nowhere to be found. The registration page simply asks for contact information. Submitting that, however, takes to you a page where you are asked to pay $185.00. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, but how hard is it to put that information upfront so people can decide to register or not? It might be nice to be a little clearer that this is happening in San Francisco, specifically.

Update: They’ve fixed the price thing; it’s right up front now. Thanks!

The event might be fun, however, we’ll be on vacation (well-deserved I might add; it’s been a few years).

Just announced: I’ll be leading a seminar on ethnographic research at Creative CanUX, the Canadian User Experience Workshop

, to be held at the Banff Centre, 9/23 to 9/26/05.