archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Prov­ing that it’s good to get out of the house — even if you’ve just moved in — my sched­ule for Octo­ber includes three con­fer­ences, cov­er­ing both coasts.

In order, you can find me at BarCampNYC2, UI11 in Cam­bridge, and IDEA in Seat­tle.

I’m not pre­sent­ing, so I’m hop­ing to relax and enjoy the ses­sions, speak­ers, and inevitable hall­way con­ver­sa­tions with other mem­bers of the IA / UX / design com­mu­ni­ties. If you’re there and you have a minute, say hello!

ps. Did I men­tion that Bruce Ster­ling is speak­ing at IDEA? How cool is that! Seri­ously, I think this is a good exam­ple of con­ver­gence bring­ing fun­da­men­tally related ideas and ways of think­ing into prox­im­ity. It’s also evi­dence that the IA com­mu­nity is in active search of ground­ing to help us build a point of view on what the future holds — for every­one who inhab­its the infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments we help cre­ate, not just ourselves.

Over at uiGarden.net Don Norman clarified some of his ideas regarding Activity Centered Design originally published in the summer of 2005.

I’d like to be comfortable saying that I’m with Don in spirit while disagreeing on some of the particulars, but I’ve read both the original essay and the clarifications twice, and the ideas and the messages are still too raw to support proper reactions or to fully digest. Maybe Don’s working on a new book, and this is interim thinking?

That might explain why the contrast between Norman’s two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things – which also is a sort of design philosophy / manifesto – is so dramatic. Halfway through Shaping Things, I’m left – as I usually am when reading Sterling’s work – feeling envious that I wasn’t gifted the same way.

Sterling is speaking at ETech, which this year focuses on The Attention Economy. No surprises with this matchup, given that Sterling’s devoted a whole book – Distraction – to some of the same ideas proponents of the Attention Economy advocate we use as references when designing the future.