UX Book Club July: The Atomic Chef

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Next tuesday night is book club! We’ll be talking about The Atomic Chef by Steven Casey – Amazon

Remember! It’s not mandatory to have read the book, just come along and see what other thought and maybe meet some new UX friends.

WHEN IS IT?

Tuesday, 19 July 2011. Come down to the bar when you finish work, we’ll start the book discussion around 6:30 PM.

WHERE IS IT?

Horse Bazaar
397 Little Lonsdale St
Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

Nothing, it’s absolutely free. (Just turn up and buy something from the bar to thank them for their support of UX Melbourne.)

Special Event: Rachel Lovinger on Nimble Content

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Courtesy of the lovely folks at Sitegeist and Manner we have a wonderful opportunity to hear from a pioneer in content strategy: Rachel Lovinger, the Associate Content Strategy Director at Razorfish in New York will be presenting Nimble Content: Publishing in the Digital Age.

Nimble Content: Publishing in the Digital Age

Content needs to be free (like a bird, not like beer) – free to be viewed across any platform at any time. To survive in the digital age, publishers must find engaging ways to re-package their content as products and services with a distinct value to customers.

In this talk, Rachel will address the challenges facing the publishing industry today, including if and how to monetize content, and how publishers can successfully make the transition to the digital landscape, deliver valuable content to a growing range of platforms and devices, be prepared to create new content products, and deepen audience engagement.

About Rachel

Rachel Lovinger has over 10 years experience in online publishing, website development and content management. As an Associate Experience Director, Content Strategy at Razorfish, Rachel strives to connect users with the quality content they want and need. She’s especially interested in relevance, findability, signification, and inherently funny words. Rachel was doing content strategy long before she realized it was an actual field.

Rachel founded the Semantic Web Affinity Group at Razorfish, dedicated to exploring a future in which information is more efficiently structured and connections more easily discovered. This led her to author “Nimble: A Razorfish Report on Publishing in the Digital Age” which was published in June 2010. Rachel is also a frequent contributor to Scatter/Gather, Razorfish’s Content Strategy blog.

Rachel onTwitter: @rlovinger

When is it?

Tuesday, 28 June 2011.

Come down from 5:30 / 6:00 PM, Rachel will present from 6:30 PM.

Where is it?

Horse Bazaar
397 Little Lonsdale St
Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

How much does it cost?

Nothing, it’s absolutely free. (Just turn up and buy something from the bar to thank them for their support of UX Melbourne.)

Tell us you’re coming…

Tell us you’re coming by emailing rsvp@uxmelbourne.org – it helps us heaps if you do.

And then tell your Twitter followers that you are coming…
I’m going to see Rachel Lovinger talk about Nimble Content.

The next book club is this Tuesday. (Better late than never, right?)

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Next tuesday night is book club! We’ll be talking about Cooper,
Reimann and Cronin’s book About Face 3 - http://amzn.to/mu3tVH

Remember! It’s not mandatory to have read the book, just come along and see what other thought and maybe meet some new UX friends.

When is it?

Tuesday, 17 May 2011.

Come down to the bar when you finish work, we’ll start the book discussion around 6:30 PM.

Where is it?

Horse Bazaar
397 Little Lonsdale St
Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

How much does it cost?

Nothing, it’s absolutely free. (Just turn up and buy something from the bar to thank them for their support of UX Melbourne.)

At long last… our next UX Movie Night!

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It’s been a very long time between movie nights, so this time we thought we’d roll out something a bit different. On February 12 this year, at Interaction 11 in Boulder Colorado, Bruce Sterling called out the Interaction Design community and challenged us to have a good hard look ourselves. He challenged us on our whining, on our moral stance, on our rejection of the past.

“Design is not very good at morality …
the best you people will come up with is morality in permanent beta.”

He does have a couple of nice things to say as well.

If you don’t know him already, Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, editor, and critic whose nonfiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003), and Shaping Things (2005). He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine, and was the “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2005. In 2008 he was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy, and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.

Whether you end up agreeing with him or not, his presentation is engaging and thought provoking. (We’re expect a few grumble and arguments in the bar afterwards.)

When is it?

Monday, 4 April 2011.

Come down to the bar when you finish work, we’ll roll the film at 6:30 PM.

Where is it?

Horse Bazaar
397 Little Lonsdale St
Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

How much does it cost?

Nothing, it’s absolutely free. (Just turn up and buy something from the bar to thank them for their support of UX Melbourne.)

Tell us you’re coming

Tell us you’re coming by emailing rsvp@uxmelbourne.org – it helps us heaps if you do.

And then tell your Twitter followers that you are coming…
I’m going to the next Melbourne UX Movie Night.

Paul Dourish @ UX Book Club

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The next Melbourne UX Book Club is Tuesday 15th February. This months book is Where the Action Is, The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, by Paul Dourish, and we are super lucky to have Paul in town and coming along to talk to us about the book.

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action.

In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls “embodied interaction”—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers.

The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.

Remember you don’t have to have read the book to come along – feel free to just come and have a chat about what others thought and learned from it.

To RSVP email rsvp@uxmelbourne.org

New venue this month!

Cogent Consulting
Level 3, 10-16 Queen Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
http://www.cogentconsulting.com.au/

Drop in after 6:00 PM for a 6:30 PM chat.
(Not before 6, as people will be working.)

Thank you to Cogent for sharing their space with us!

Paul has been invited to Australia by the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.