archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’m late to making it available here, but O’Reilly media published the video recording of my presentation on The Language of Discovery: A Toolkit For Designing Big Data Interactions from last year’s (2012) Strata conference in NY.

Looking back at this, I’m happy to say that while my thinking on several of the key ideas has advanced quite a bit in the past 12 months (see our more recent materials), the core ideas and concepts remain vital.

Those are, briefly:

• Big Data is useless unless people can engage with it effectively
• Discovery is a critical and inadequately acknowledged aspect of sense making that is core to realizing value from Big Data
• Discovery is literally the most important human/machine interaction in the emerging Age of Insight
• Providing discovery capability requires understanding people’s needs and goals
• The Language of Discovery is an effective tool for understanding discovery needs and activities, and designing solutions
• There are known patterns and structure in discovery activities that you can use to create discovery solutions

I’ve posted it to vimeo for easier viewing – slides are here /user-experience-ux/strata-new-york-slides-new-discovery-patterns for those who wish to follow along – enjoy!

Several weeks ago, I was invited to speak to an audience of IT and business leaders at Walmart about the Language of Discovery.   Every presentation is a feedback opportunity as much as a chance to broadcast our latest thinking (a tenet of what I call lean strategy practice – musicians call it trying out new material), so I make a point to share evolving ideas and synthesize what we’ve learned since the last instance of public dialog.

For the audience at Walmart, as part of the broader framing for the Age of Insight, I took the opportunity to share findings from some of the recent research we’ve done on Data Science (that’s right, we’re studying data science).  We’ve engaged consistently with data science practitioners for several years now (some of the field’s leaders are alumni of Endeca), as part of our ongoing effort to understand the changing nature of analytical and sense making activities, the people undertaking them, and the contexts in which they take place.  We’ve seen the discipline emerge from an esoteric specialty into full mainstream visibility for the business community.  Interpreting what we’ve learned about data science through a structural and historic perspective lead me to draw a broad parallel between data science now and natural philosophy at its early stages of evolution.

We also shared some exciting new models for enterprise information engagement; crafting scenarios using the language of discovery to describe information needs and activity at the level of discovery architecture, IT portfolio planning,  and knowledge management (which correspond to UX, technology, and business perspectives as applied to larger scales and via business dialog) – demonstrating the versatility of the language as a source of linkage across separate disciplines.

But the primary message I wanted to share is that discovery is the most important organizational capability for the era.  More on this in follow up postings that focus on smaller chunks of the thinking encapsulated in the full deck of slides.

Slides from my talk Big Data Is Not the Insight: The Language of Discovery at Enterprise Search Europe in London last week are available for viewing and download from slideshare. The conference was a good gathering of leading perspectives on search in Europe, definitely one I’d look forward to attending again. And of course London is lovely in May, even when it feels more like winter than spring…

Big Data Is Not the Insight: The Language Of Discovery: from Joe Lamantia

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I’ve posted slides from my presentation at Strata to slideshare; they’re available for both viewing and download. I shared quite a bit of new material with the audience at Strata: most notably a new collection of mode chains and example scenarios capturing patterns in discovery activity in the consumer domain, to complement our understanding of and descriptive patterns for enterprise-centered sense making.

O’Reilly recorded the talk, so I’ll post the video as soon as they make it available.

Thanks to all who attended.

Big data types, visualization wonks, analytical savants, and all those interested in the discovery space as the leading category of interaction in the Age Of Insight should join me in NY next week for Strata. I’m super excited to be sharing the Language of Discovery: A Toolkit For Designing Big Data Experiences at this East Coast edition of Strata.  If travel and time allow, I’m going to take in some of the NYC Data Week events scheduled for the same week.

Slides and video will be available after the conference, but there’s no substitute for being there.  And besides, New York is beautiful in October, so what more reason do you need to join?

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Not one but two sets of sketch notes are available from my UX Australia talk Designing Big Data Interactions with the Language of Discovery!

This set is courtesy of flickr user uxmastery – a complete set of sketch notes from UX Australia is available here.

And this set is courtesy of flickr user CannedTuna — you’ll find the complete set of Gary’s sketch notes from UX Australia here.

Thanks to both note takers for crafting and sharing these notes!

The lanyard page gathers all the published resources for this talk: http://lanyrd.com/2012/ux-australia/sxbtz/

Slides from my talk at UX Australia are posted now.

I’m speaking at this year’s UX Australia event in Brisbane, presenting a talk titled “Designing Big Data Interactions For Big Data In the Age of Insight Using the Language of Discovery “(that’s a mouthful…!).  The full description of the talk is here.  The complete program is available here, and includes a good mix of well-known UX thought leaders and new speakers.

I’m looking forward to finally seeing Australia in person; I was booked for the 2010 UX Australia edition, but had to cancel in order to finish my move from Amsterdam back to the U.S., and I’ve been bummed about missing a great excuse to take a very long flight to the other side of the planet

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I’ve posted the slides from my UXLX talk on the Language of Discovery. Thanks to a few days spent featured on the slideshare homepage, they’ve clocked over 60,000 views in the past week!  In combination with the buzz from the audience for the talk, I think this shows there is broader awareness and appetite for answers to the question of how designers will make big data accessible and ‘engageable’.

From the practical perspective, if you’re looking for a way to describe discovery and sense making needs and activities, there’s no better resource than this.  And the LOD is well-grounded from the methodological and research perspectives, having roots in HCIR, cognitive science, and a number of other academic disciplines that contribute to the toolkit for understanding human interaction with information and discovery activity.

I hope the language of discovery is part of that bigger picture of how creators of interactions and definers of experiences shape the new tools people use in the Age of Insight.

Also, the Lanyrd page for the talk aggregates the slides, sketch notes, and pointers to some other resources.

Sketchnotes from my UXLX talk are posted. Thanks to the crew at Livesketching for creating these, and sharing them (this photo is courtesy of flickr user visualpunch).

As I’m sure you can see by the level of density, I was moving quickly to cover a lot of ground…!

The complete set of sketch notes from UXLX is available as a set on flickr here.

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