I should just call this the Mozilla Labs + JJG + Drupal 7 post. As has been mentioned in many, many, many, threads over the past week and a half, JJG said some very interesting and inspiring things in his keynote at the end of the IA Summit. One that stuck in my head was how we as designers (whether IAs, IxDs, UxDs, or something else is immaterial) are going to start building a language of critique, and how we're going to move away from being famous talkers-about-work to being famous makers-of-things.
It seems like one of the first steps in this evolution of critique is understanding what exactly it means to share our work. There's certainly precedent for sharing design work: * You can share sketches: http://idek.net/6Jp * You can share wireframes: http://idek.net/6Jm * You can share screenflows: http://idek.net/6Jn * You can share screenshots: http://patterntap.com * You can share design patterns: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ These are great ways to share the the documentation of the work, but they don't really get at sharing THE WORK. Regardless of medium, this is a forum for design in interactive environments (yes, even that brochure site is interactive, just not very), yet we don't really have a way to share that interactivity. Additionally, I'm not sure how I go about sharing the work that *I* do. I am not a lone wolf, the successful completion of the work I do relies on project management, visual design, a development team, the client, and in many cases the people with whom we do research and evaluation. I have approximately zero experience in marketing or advertising, but it seems like the work in those fields frequently acknowledges the contributions of many roles. As a film geek, I know that a movie is the sum of many parts, with astoundingly long credit reels to acknowledge those parts. So maybe the simplest thing is to start acknowledging those teams when we share our work. I was inspired to write this post not only by JJG, but by Mozilla Labs, and by the Drupal 7 UX project. Janna sent a post to the list tonight about a nascent project at Mozilla Labs to develop a site where the community could provide ideas and designs for future Mozilla projects. Mozilla seems to be betting there dump trucks full of cash on the future (see Aurora videos - http://adaptivepath.com/aurora/), and they're interested in open sourcing the design of that future. The Drupal 7 project (http://www.d7ux.org), led by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt, is looking for community input on the re-design of the Drupal CMS UI. They've solicited input in text, images (http://idek.net/6Jr), videos (http://idek.net/6Js), and more. These projects seem to be looking towards sharing design in a way that begins to embrace sharing interaction as well as description. So where do we go? Finally, I'm inspired by GitHub (http://github.com). If you're not familiar with GitHub, it's very much worth exploring. Simply put, GitHub is a place where developers can host their code. Where GitHub transcends its many competitors is that it embraces the modern tools of software development, and weaves itself into the workflow of the modern developer. Adding code, sharing code, copying code, are all done as easily from the command line as they are from the website. It makes me wonder how we would build such a tool for our design work, one that embraces both medium and tools. Alright, thanks for reading this far. It's late and my internal editor seems to have gone to bed, so I'm going to post this as is. So where do we go? How do I share both my own work, and acknowledge the contributions of the many others with whom I work? How do we begin to share not just static snapshots, but actual interactive design? -- jackson UX Design @ Viget Labs PhD Student @ UNC Chapel Hill Web Monkey @ Triangle UPA ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
