Intelleto

Tomorrow (Wed 12/17/08) I’ll be presenting an Adaptive Path virtual seminar on Sailing the C’s of Change.

I’ve been thinking, wondering and tracking four themes over the past 18 months. In this seminar, I’ll share the patterns I’ve identified and propose ways that we can start to make the most of these opportunities.

Seminar description:
This seventy-five minute virtual seminar explores four key themes that are emerging in the creation, adoption and adaptation of digital products and services, and what companies and practitioners can do to capitalize on these trends.

Who is this seminar for?
What does it mean to “Sail the C’s” of change? The leading edge of Web 2.0 is long behind us; we’re now entering a time where past innovations are an expected way of doing business. What is the legacy left by the early adopters and what are the themes we should be aware of as we move into 2009? As product leaders, marketers and designers, what can we do to align our strategies, teams and products to take advantage of the new opportunities that are maturing?

Kate Rutter offers her unique point of view on four key themes that are emerging as a next wave of change in the marketplace.

Curation:
Harnessing the storytelling potential of your content to answer unmet needs.

Cobbling:
Listening to and learning from the use (and mis-use) of your products and services in the wild.

Collaging:
Layering social media to create new conversations with customers.

Chording:
Harmonizing across multiple channels to deliver a sum that is greater than the parts

This seminar will explore the underlying principles that are driving these themes, and offer insights on possible futures as these trends evolve.

What will you learn?

• Understand how trends in the Web are prisming through other channels.
• Learn how to use tools such as storytelling, market listening and integrated service design enable you to connect more deeply with your customers.
• Inspire new possibilities for taking your products and services forward in 2009.

I’m excited about the seminar and invite you to participate. Since it’s virtual, you can join in from the comfort of your own desktop. It’s easy to register here.

See you on deck!

I just got back from the beautiful city of Copenhagen, where my colleague Leah Buley and I presented a workshop at EPIC 2008. We worked with 25 people on the topic of See>Sort>Sketch : pen & paper techniques for getting from research to design. The EPIC conference was wonderful…many interesting people doing cool projects in ethographic research.

You can see some of my photos from the workshop on Flickr.

You can also download the presentation deck and workbook here.
I’m looking forward to seeing the EPIC community again in 2009 in Chicago. Fun!

Session Description:

The rich world of human behavior is fascinating to observe, yet often difficult to interpret. Underlying goals and motivations lay masked beneath behaviors, essentially hidden from sight until our analysis illuminates them. Similarly, the meaning and opportunities inherent in the findings can be elusive for those who are responsible for taking them forward into organizational action. How can we bring clarity and insight to these areas through tools that are inherently visible? By using the analog favorites of pen & paper.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll experience a number of engaging activities that leverage the power of pen and paper as open, participatory tools. Using inexpensive tools that have a low-intimidation factor such as sticky-notes and Sharpies, you’ll learn sticky-based note-taking, clustering, sketching, and collaging as you explore the benefits of pen and paper to transform an abstract and invisible process into a more visual form. This makes it possible to leverage the natural human affinity for seeing pictures and watching stories unfold, and use that to collaborate more efficiently and effectively.

We begin with a framework that is deceptively simple. Three questions guide the process through collecting research concepts, synthesizing learnings, and paving the way for action: What did we hear? What does it mean? And why does it matter?

What We Heard: Capture and Documentation of Data

Successful research hinges on effective analysis. Youíll learn techniques for making field observations visible to the research team, and turning them into something that forms the basis of theories and strategies for design. Methods include: capture boards, jotting and rapid concept sketching.

What It Means : Clustering, Synthesis and Interpretation

How do you take all the loose observations and ideas that you gather through field work and shape them into something that can form the basis of a viable design direction? You’ll experience methods for making the full landscape of findings as visible as possible, and effective ways to capture and document the emergent patterns and themes. Methods include: clustering, bottom-up trees, theme boards and development of concept models.

Why It Matters : Articulating and Exploring for Action

Once the big themes become clear, the next step is to start to explore what they mean for design. Again, you’ll use simple pen and paper techniques that help get ideas out of the invisible space inside our heads and into a visible, tangible form that we can refine, evolve, and share with one another. You’ll learn methods for structuring ideation sessions that ensure participation and engagement, and that result in concepts and design directions that pave the way to taking action. These methods include: Rapid Concept Sketching, Ideation via spectrums, 2×2s and grids.

At key points in the workshop, we’ll talk through the processes covered, and hold a share-out to discuss your experiences and insights. You’ll leave at the end of the day with a full toolkit of skills and approaches that you can immediately put to use to make research findings visible and actionable to your team, stakeholders, and business partners.

There’s something interesting about disconnecting natural and intuitive. They really aren’t the same thing, yet I have often assumed they are. If you look up intuitive, you’ll find synonyms: natural, innate. And if you look up natural, you’ll find synonyms of spontaneous, unaffected, genuine, unmannered. So far so good.

But if you delve a little deeper and explore “intuition” it gets murkier.

Intuition is:

1. direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension. 
2. a fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way. 
3. a keen and quick insight. 
4. the quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight.

Natural is a whole bunch of things, including (selections of definitions not in order):

1. Existing in or formed by nature
2. Growing spontaneously
3. free from affectation or constraint
4. arising easily or spontaneously
5. based on what is learned from nature rather than on revelation
6. any person or thing that is or is likely or certain to be very suitable to and successful in an endeavor without much training or difficulty.
7. and (my favorite…) In craps, a winning combination of seven or eleven made on the first cast.

Nathan Moody of Stimulant was speaking to a bunch of us at Adaptive Path, and he was clear in his thinking: “Natural does not equal intuitive.” He was talking about large-scale interactive displays, and how the physical movements of gesture and body motion were natural…yet when faced with a taller-than-God interactive display, people had no clue how to interact with it.

Good to remember.

Working in a user experience company, I use a bunch of words to describe user-centered design: user experience, user engagement, interaction design, experience design, there’s a lot of words out there that triangulate the ideas around experience strategy and design, and they almost always are about the Web.

That’s why it was wonderful to hear Jesse advocate for designing for human engagement. Funny how a slightly different words can open up a world of possiblities. Thinking about the best experiences I’ve had…with a product, a place, a site, an activity…I can’t think of one that wasn’t smack dab in the center of human engagement.