Speaking at CHIFOO on Design Lenses

Looking forward to a quick jaunt up to Portland tomorrow and back home again Thursday morning. This is my week between Netflix and Meebo and it has actually shaped up to be quite busy. But I am excited to be giving a new talk on Lenses.

Since the CHIFOO site seems to be down at the moment, here are the details of the talk:

Designing with Lenses: Lessons from Other Design Crafts.

In any field of design, designers can enhance their craft by studying the work of others. Through the careful exercise of breaking down real-world solutions into their underlying principles and patterns, previous lessons can be applied to new sets of problems we encounter. Designing for web interfaces is no different. By necessity we are constantly searching for inspiration and practical guidance in solving the problems we face as designers each day. A powerful approach is to capture these lessons into "design lenses". A design lens allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design.

In this talk, I will introduce the idea of design lenses and discuss several lens inspired from fields of study as diverse as theater, magic, game design, storytelling, Shaker furniture, motion graphics, and comics for inspiration in designing rich, interactive interfaces. By teasing out some of the key takeaways from each of these disciplines, a fresh light can be shed on our own corner of the design universe.

Join us at 7pm at the University of Oregon's White Stag Block.