Aarron Walter

In his short video series Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson (@remixeverything), guides us through history and shows us how ideas are created, copied, and transformed.

Click the scissors three times in the footer at Kickstarter.com, and watch as the bottom of the page falls off.

Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s research on emotion and its evolutionary origins provides fascinating insights and foundational theory for those of us exploring emotional design.

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I’ve been talking a lot this year about ways we can foster our own creative, independent thinking. Creativity and inspiration aren’t natural resources. You have to cultivate them with lots of practice.

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I travel a lot, so I end up spending more time on travel booking sites than I’d like. When you’re planning for a trip there’s just so much on your mind. You’ve got to figure out your schedule, who’s going to pick you up at the airport, what the weather’s going to be like, and you have to make plans with people at your destination. All of these things have some bearing on the flight you need to book. If you’re like me, you wait until the last minute to book your flight because it’s just such a hassle to figure it all out. It’s a lot of stress. When I go to book a flight, I just want to find one that is going to inflict the least amount of pain.

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I ran a day long workshop at Future of Web Design called “Interface Design Bootcamp“. In the workshop we learned how to conceptualize an app to connect people at an event like the Future of Web Design Conference using design personas and sketchboards. Ryan Carson sat in on my workshop and wrote a nice post on Think Vitamin about the sketchboarding process.

The workshop was so perfectly timed as the UX Sketchbook I’ve been working on had just rolled off the presses, and it was time to take it for a serious test drive. As I mentioned earlier here, the UX Sketchbook was really designed to support quick ideation, and specifically, sketchboarding.

I snapped a few pics from the conference to document the fun we were having with the new sketchbooks. You can view all of the workshop photos on Flickr.

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I’ve noticed a trend happening not only in my day to day work as a user experience designer, but throughout our industry. UX work requires a great deal of diplomacy, and a mastery of the languages spoken in many sub-disciplines of web design and business teams. UX designers are becoming translators, and diplomats as well as designers.

I’ve written a short article on UXMag.com about this issue. An excerpt follows:

As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We’re not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well.

read on at UXMag.com »