Let's use this blog for good

Lately, I've been feeling a strong urge to return to activities that I love but haven't been doing enough of for whatever lame reason. These things include writing, pondering, traveling, knitting, beading, yoga-ing, hiking, and smelling the roses (literal and metaphorical). 

As part of this exploration of My Favorite Things, I'm going to blog more. A researcher I met at CHI suggested I blog as a way to get back to thinking about topics I care about. I think that's a fine idea, and I'll be experimenting in this blog for the next few weeks.

And now on to today's topics.

Topic #1 Storytelling

This week was the STC Puget Sound meeting with Mary R. Wise presenting on the "Power of a Story." Her biography says she works at Fannie Mae, is a past STC president, and was previously a circus clown. It has been a long time since I last went to an STC meeting, but storytelling by a circus clown-turned-instructional designer was too intriguing to pass up. The talk turned out to be a pitch for stories rather than a how-to. We heard about how stories are everywhere in our lives, and they are already structuring our experiences. These stories could be used to make our writing grab the reader's attention. Mary played an interview clip of her and her mom for StoryCorps that was very touching and made me tear up. [Side note: If your parents or grandparents have stories that you'd like to hear or have your children hear, please take the time to tape record them. They will be wonderful memories.] 

I've lately been exploring storytelling as a way to structure user experiences. For example, many, if not all, products could benefit from a story that tells the user (protagonist) how s/he should be interacting with the product features (characters and scenery). Much of my thinking has been informed by Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre, a great book about crafting dramatic actions for the user in the interface. Since then, I've learned of design techniques that envision the user as a hero in a story or set users on a trajectory (more on that in another post). Don Norman has also been writing on sociable design which considers technology in a group setting, not just from the perspective of a single user. My interpretation of sociable design is to think of it as considering the story or ecology of an interaction. Great design accounts for everybody in and around the computer.

Topic #2 The Seattle HCI community

And also this week, I attended the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting with Jacob Burghardt presenting on "Mapping targeted opportunities to improve user experiences in knowledge work." His slides are available to look at. I ran into some old acquaintances at the meeting, and I was struck once again by how much I like the small HCI community in town. While I was at CHI, someone told me he didn't like how clique-y the community can be. I prefer to think of it as tight-knit but with many opportunities for newcomers to knit themselves in. One of my instructors told me something about the tech writing community that I think applies to HCI/UX in general: it is a small but penetrable community.