It’s been a busy year and as we head into the home stretch, looking forward to 2010 (supposedly the year we make contact), we wanted to take a look back at the past 12 months and call out some of the highlights.

• Our blog, All This ChittahChattah, turned 8
• We conducted our own study (Reading Ahead) about the future of the book and digital reading, blogged at length about our process, posted an in-depth narrated presentation of findings and opportunities, tracked the cultural progression of the digital books issue, presented at the UC Berkeley Digital Futures speaker series (and subsequently at Blurb), conducted a design contest with Core77, and selected a handful of exciting winners
• We helped to launch REACH, a global network of small “design research” consultancies that can better serve clients across multiple markets
• We found good (or at least interesting) design exemplars in/at/from/by information-rich street signs, David Lee Roth and Runnin’ With the Devil, sour cream, NPR, the Forestry Service, real-life interfaces (and again), a farmer’s market, and a drink menu
• We were disappointed by user experiences that fell short, from AT&T, Yahoo!, car dashboards, and Land’s End
• We noticed workarounds for hotel rooms, parking lots, shopping carts, input devices, and loud guns
• We found some curious branding, storytelling, and other customer-facing strategies by Starbucks, M&Ms, Papa Murphy’s, parking garages, The Griddle Cafe, a range of business names (and again), the Santa Barbara Zoo, Verizon’s Hub, YouTube, municipal garbage, Old Navy, Columbus Foods after a devastating fire, KISS (and again), and Jewish delis
• We revisited themes, findings, or product launches from previous projects about IT professionals, safety gear, digital cameras, mobile telephones and saw our client MediaMaster shut down their service
• We bemoaned bad approaches to product development with personas (and again), surveys, and a shallow view of user-centeredness
• We continued to explore where, when, why, and how to use customer information in product development, including a provocative article by Don Norman, and a thoughtful piece by Robert Fabricant
• We found surprise and amusement in gendered home territories, grocery stores, pillows that preserve the shape of a baby’s head, retailing dead formats, license plates, and grassroots product development
• In the face of tremendous growth for Twitter, we considered some of the barriers to adoption as well as the opportunities still to be addressed
• Steve was invited backstage to designer-vibrator-purveyor JimmyJane and found their brand not fulfilling its cultural change (and world domination) business opportunity, a perspective later taken up by the New York Times
• We posited how the electric car industry can create a better story around their optimal use cases
• Steve led his workshop “Well, We’ve Done All This Research…Now What?” for sold-out groups at Interaction|09 and EPIC, as well as abbreviated versions at IxDA-SF, BayCHI (slides and audio here), Web 2.0, and Nokia
• Steve spoke to students from Pratt, SVA, Istanbul Technical University, and CCA’s Design MBA Innovation Studio
• Steve spoke about user research, design and innovation to the MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative, the Istanbul Industrial Design Summit; about culture to the Chicago IxDA, the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour, and HFI; and about improv and creativity at the IDSA and the IxDA-NYC (see slides here and video here)
• Steve gave a webinar about Creating Authentic Product Experiences to the University of Oregon’s Contemporary Design class; we’re looking for future opportunities to give this webinar and even put together a trailer
• World travels lead to a comparison of election posters as well an an examination of toilet paper sizes
• Steve took pictures in Vancouver, LA, Santa Barbara, Amsterdam (some highlights here, here, here, here, and here), Belgium (some highlights here), Miami, London (highlights here), Istanbul (highlights here), and New York
• All This ChittahChattah is now on Twitter and portigal.com is available in a mobile version
• Steve’s chapter, Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret? was published in here) for Photo Reporter Magazine, Let’s Embrace Open-Mindedness for Johnny Holland, The Cultures of Design for DMI Connect, Organizational Empathy, from Top to Bottom for Appliance Magazine, and on video, offered some quick advice to aspiring designers
• Steve was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article about the adoption of e-book readers (thoughts, from the cutting-room floor, here)
• Steve contributed to William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa’s book Deconstructing Product Design
• Steve published a second year of True Tales columns for interactions: Poets, Priests, and Politicians, Interacting With Advertising, Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?, Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?, We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World, and On Authenticity

Previously: Our 2008 review