Lots of emotions as the year winds down, with another one waiting just around the corner. Here’s some of what went down this past year.

• We welcomed Beth Toland to the team. Yeah!!!!!
• Steve is closing in on the last of the writing for Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights to be published by Rosenfeld Media in 2013.
• Our columns for interactions magazine included Content, the Once and Future King (with an associated quickies) and Never Eat Anything Raw.
• We looked at the naturalness (or not) in talking to strangers in this post and this one.
• We found perspectives on interviewing people, including a funny take on journalistic norms in in Birbigs’ short film, dark patterns in this article about conversation, Deborah Tannen on interrupting, Henry Thomas and the power of silence, rapport building at Safeway, and the hilarious BBC Radio series People Like Us
• We addressed user research best practices in Tips to Improve Your Interviewing Skills (with a ton of great stuff in the comments), Seventeen types of interviewing questions and Interviewing past the platitudes.
• We really got going with a series of posts called Curating Consumption (co-published on Johnny Holland until they shuttered), with this year’s posts here, here, here, here, here, here and (whew) here.
• We hit the road and took pictures this year, going to NYC (and again), Dublin (and more), LA, (SXSW, Lisbon (and more), Phoenix, Atlanta, Barcelona (and more), Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney (and more), and Ottawa.
• Observations like Stupid computers and our tolerance for them were inspiration for a strong editorial, Stick to the Knitting, in the Journal of Usability Studies
• We began collecting fieldwork War Stories and built up over 35 fantastic, real, dismaying, insightful, hilarious and frustrating stories from the experiences of fieldworkers. More stories still to come; meanwhile go to that link and just keep reading as they are great!
• We drew inspiration from Gotye, Richard Saul Wurman, and Kevin Kelly.
• Steve presented Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization (slides) as a UIE Virtual Seminar and at WebVisions Barcelona and WebVisions Chicago. This exploration informed (and was informed by) our own breakfast roundtable on the same topic.
• We did at a heap-load of other workshops and talks including the Phoenix Design Summit, UX Lisbon (including slides and sketchnotes for two talks), and CPSI. Steve spoke about Early-Stage User Research at General Assembly, Skill Building for Design Innovators at Service Design Melbourne (and at Carleton University in Ottawa), Qualitative Data Analysis for the University of Dundee, best practices for user research to the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s “Design Thinking for Business” class (and Academy of Art University in San Francisco) and led an Immersive Field Techniques workshop at UX Australia (Sketchnotes 1, 2, 3 and also here). Steve also presented We’ve done all this research, now what? at Mozilla and The Power of Bad Ideas as the closing keynote for UX Camp Ottawa
• Video are available for We’ve done all this research, now what? (from Mozilla), Skill Building for Design Innovators (from Service Design Melbourne), and Discover and act on insights about people from UX Lisbon.
• Core77 published Steve’s Power of Bad Ideas and we found even more bad ideas here and here. The exploration of Bad Ideas led to the aforementioned closing keynote at UX Camp Ottawa.
• Steve presented Yes My Iguana Loves to Cha-Cha about design, improv, and creativity at IDSA SV, Carleton University, Schwab’s “Brain Circus, and Silicon Valley ACM. Read a great writeup of the talk here.
• Earlier this year Steve helped organize the Interaction 12 Student Design Challenge. Check out the winners. Planning ahead to early 2013, Steve is involved in the challenge again and our participants are here.
• We considered packaging design as experience design, pondered the moral calculus of offsets and noticed financial pings.
• Some cool patterns in media projects included reframing the image-heavy web by removing text and going beyond the frames of existing content.
• Where was the umbrage this year? We held it in check, focusing only on Hertz.
• We reviewed disturbing but enlightening video projects that explore social norms, including handholding breaching experiment and Surveillance Camera Man.
• While the Omni project ended up going dormant, we published two thought-provoking interviews with brilliant women: Molly Wright Steenson: Shifting time and Lucy Kimbell: Expanding the visible and sayable.
• ChittahChattah turned 11, we shared a bit about the life at Portigal every week, and kept it up with lots and lots of ChittahChattah Quickies.

Journey through the past: 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.