A few weeks ago, I posted my sketchnotes captured live during the last LDS General Conference. As I noted in that post, I am also a Romanian interpreter, so there are always a number of talks that I am not able to listen to during the actual conference. Over the course of the weeks that followed, I listened to all of the talks that I “missed” and thought I would share the resulting sketchnotes.
One of my co-workers shared an opportunity to participate in a webinar sponsored by AIPMM about UX design and Product Management. This defines the hybrid that is my life right now, so I was immediately intrigued. Brian Lawley from 280 Group and Mary Piontkowski from Macadamian presented on integrating user experience design into the product lifecycle. It was a fantastic look at how good UX practices can transform products and companies. Naturally, I sketchnoted the event!
Last week, I posted about how being a Mormon meant that I was able to participate in a semi-annual General Conference. This week, I am posting about how being a Mormon means that I had the chance to participate in a very different conference. Every year for the past three years, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the official name of the Mormon church) has held an LDS Tech Conference. This is a gathering of volunteers who come together to meet with employees to learn about the technology efforts of the LDS Church as well as to contribute to ongoing projects.
I attended this year for the first time and was richly rewarded. The conference spanned Wednesday evening through Friday afternoon, with a keynote address Wednesday, various presentations and speakers in the mornings, and then the chance to work on volunteer projects each afternoon. It was exciting to me to see all the different efforts that are underway to give more church members access to meaningful experiences through the use of technology. I also enjoyed the chance to truly contribute during the course of the conference. It will be great to see how things move forward, and I look forward to participating again next year.
Included here are my sketchnotes from the event.
One of my co-workers pointed me to these fantastic tutorials by Dave Crenshaw on lynda.com. I enjoyed them so much I wanted to immediately post my sketchnotes and share these with others.
I’m a Mormon. That means so many things, but this last weekend, it meant that I was able to participate in a semi-annual world-wide General Conference. Every April and October, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the official name of the Mormon church) has five two-hour sessions, spread over Saturday and Sunday. It is a fantastic opportunity for us to come and be instructed further about the doctrine that we believe in, and to take a moment to pause from our hectic lives to concentrate on things that really matter most.
For over ten years, I have taken extensive notes at each conference. A couple years ago, those notes transformed into some of my earliest sketchnotes. I have kept that tradition up this year as well, even when it meant using my phone as a small red flashlight because the lights were all turned off in the meetinghouse. Yes, I am a nerd. But I love doing sketchnotes!
In addition to sketchnoting most sessions, I also have the opportunity to participate directly in the conference as a Romanian interpreter. Each language team is a little bit different, but for our team, that means that I get the English text for the talks a week or so in advance of the conference, and the Romanian text anywhere from a few hours to a few days beforehand. I prepare delivering the text, so that when the talk is given, I perform a simultaneous reading, striving to match the speed, tone, and style of the speaker. The most important aspect is to convey the feeling of the message and provide an experience for those who listen in Romanian that is as close as possible to those who listen in English. My favorite part is when speakers like President Thomas S. Monson give a talk, because you never know how much they will stick to the text, and how much they will speak extemporaneously and require live interpretation.
General Conference is significant as a logistical feat—providing access in 93 languages to reach most of the 14,441,346 members around the world. But the most important part is the chance to hear from living prophets, the same as if Moses or Abraham was alive to give us insight into how to live our lives better. What a unique opportunity! I am grateful to have been part of it. Now comes the real challenge: putting all these great messages into practice!
Here is a fantastic infographic from the official lds.org site about the conference (click to see more).
And here are my sketchnotes.
March 2012 marked the second annual Early Education and Technology for Children (EETC) Conference put on by the Waterford Institute. Since I work for Waterford, I had the opportunity to attend the conference. It was a fantastic gathering of people who were focused on how to improve the education and lives of children through the use of technology. I captured each of the keynote and featured speakers in sketchnotes and wanted to make them available. I look forward to a great conference again next year!
I love to write. Not the novel-creating, prize-winning kind of writing, just the act of scratching a pen across paper. Growing up as a child, I wrote all kinds of things and found that I enjoyed playing with letters. My dad is something of an artist, and I always dreamed that I would be too, but that seemed to elude me. Writing though—that was something I could do. My penmanship improved in direct proportion to the number of girls that I “fell in like” with as I wrote each one fresh new reams of notes expressing my undying, albeit fleeting, affection.
Formal education was the perfect forum to develop my love for writing. I had a different notebook for each subject, and took notes in every class. I would like to think that I also reviewed those notes at some point, but I wouldn’t swear to that. The more I had to write, the smaller my writing got, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment at using a fraction of the paper that other people used. This wasn’t due to an over-zealous eco-friendly bent, but sadly just to my pride. I got a sense of sick pleasure at the look of shock on people’s faces as they saw my notes, though their shock was probably more that someone would invest so much time and energy into something that then required even more time and energy to try and read later!
As I got to college, I started taking notes outside of classes as well. It got to be something of a guilty obsession. I carried around a pocket notebook, and recorded particularly meaningful conversations or my thoughts and impressions of lectures, talks, even Sunday School classes. This was all separate from my journal, which I also kept regularly. I created a cover for my pocket notebook to help it last longer, and used a small laminated sheet behind the paper to make sure that I had a hard surface so I could write smaller.
After I was married, my wife encouraged me to focus on developing my own style of stick figures or something equally simple. I began illustrating my planner with small, simple pictures and found that I loved doodling as much as writing. I graduated my pocket notebook to a small Moleskine that didn’t require my creating an additional cover, and started incorporating small doodles into my notes there as well. These became my first sketchnotes, long before I had heard that term, or knew that it was now socially acceptable.
My journey was nearing its natural arrival to the blissful land of official sketchnoting. Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin, freed me to start doodling and sketching at work. If anyone laughed or asked what on earth I thought I was doing, I had a published work to cite as evidence. I began seeking out opportunities to incorporate pictures into my work, and it became the running joke on my team to guess how long it would be into a meeting before I got up to the whiteboard and starting drawing something.
I started following Dan on Twitter and through him, I found mention of a clandestine movement called… sketchnoting. He unknowingly led me to a video of Eva-Lotta Lamm describing how she does sketchnoting, and the planets aligned. I had found my calling. Since then, I have transformed my work notebook into a sketchbook and began enjoying meetings much more. I also have a Moleskine dedicated to events that merit sketchnotes, whereas I use my other notebooks to practice with different meetings or events that I don’t actually want to capture and remember. One of my new favorite pastimes is browsing other peoples’ work on Sketchnote Army.
The remarkable thing to me has been the way that people resonate with sketchnotes. People at work ask if they can sit next to me during company meetings so that they can watch me take notes. My kids even like to look at what I have done at work because there are fun pictures. Hopefully you connect with them as well. If so, come back often and I will keep posting my latest sketchnotes. Even better, give it a try yourself!
Check out my growing gallery to see my sketchnotes.
During the day, I masquerade as a Product Owner and UX Designer for a non-profit educational software company. This week I had the opportunity to attend a webinar put on by Hatch called “Teaching in the Digital Age: Smart Tools for Early Learners.” Brian Puerling from the Catherine Cook School in Chicago presented about how his school has been able to integrate technology effectively.
One point he made repeatedly resonated with me, and that is that technology should not be used for its own sake. This is true in all industries, but especially in education. There should be a purpose and a goal to every activity, and then technology can become a tool to help facilitate that purpose.
Some of the examples that Puerling gave struck me as fascinating. Even in working with preschool students, they are able to use technology as a way to open up possibilities and allow them to express themselves creatively. Students collaborate to create eBooks which are then published and presented at a publishing party to parents. Students works with a “tech buddy,” older students who serve as mentors on how to use technology, and in turn have tech buddies of their own. After studying a book or particular author, they have a Skype interview with that author and allow the students to connect in an extremely personal way.
Driving all of these examples was a concerted effort with dedicated planning to ensure that the outcomes would match the intended goal. This webinar was a great reminder of all the possibilities that technology offers educations, but also that only its deliberate use in proper situations will produce meaningful results.
Included here are my sketchnotes.
This second installment of my Stanford Human-Computer Interaction course went in a totally different direction. Where the first lecture focused around the efforts and experience of a single individual, this second lecture took a much broader look at changing landscape of technical production. The lecture was titled “Burning Man at Google, A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production?” and was given by Fred Turner.
The main point that I took away from this lecture is that the phenomenon of commons-based peer production is starting to change our industry completely. Products like Wikipedia, Linux, and many others are built on the efforts of volunteers, many of whom are highly skilled and are contributing in a different kind of economy than ever before. Contributors are not paid, and so this is driving a new kind of community where people build on each other’s strengths and skills without thought of compensation. As more companies recognize and start to harness the potential of this kind of production, projects of a different nature and scale will become our new reality.
Here are my sketchnotes.
Every once in a while, you make a discovery that makes you feel as if you have been living under a rock. For me, this happened last week as I discovered iTunes University. I had no idea that colleges and universities all over the country have been making premium learning available for free. Economics classes have always taught, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” but this proves them wrong! I found a seminar series from Stanford University on Human-Computer Interaction, so this will be the first in a ten-part series.
In this first installment, Dr. Shumin Zhai spoke on progessive user interfaces. He has been involved in the research and development of the gesture keyboard, an on-screen keyboard that allows for words to be drawn as a gesture instead of tapped out. The fundamental design principle that he discussed was the tension between ease and efficiency.
Ease refers to a design that allows a user to walk up to a new interface and use it without problem. It is a recognition task, so as a designer, you are building on what a user already already uses or intuitively knows. This is the principle behind the modern graphical user interface (GUI) that is largely responsible for the explosion of the personal computer.
Efficiency refers to a design that requires minimal effort. This is a recall task, so it relies on users learning the action to the point where they can perform it without instructions or scaffolding. This is embodied in the world of command-line computing where users can quickly perform tasks, but are required to independently remember the syntax required. A more everyday example of this design is keyboard shortcuts. Some people use these obsessively while most others never bother.
In the battle between ease and efficiency, ease almost always wins. This is mostly due to the fact that we typically value today’s time over that of tomorrow. So for a designer, the secret is to find a way to naturally move users from ease to efficiency. This is the task that Dr. Zhai set out to accomplish with the gesture keyboard, and he shared the principles behind this transition.
In order to move users from ease to efficiency, two things are required: information redundancy and chunking. Information redundancy basically means building in practice. Users have to perform the same actions over and over, and as they do, they can move from recognition to recall. Recall is much more efficient but also more cognitiviely demanding. With chunking, Dr. Zhai found that people learn things in chunks, not discrete items. So to have the greatest effect, the practice should be with chunks of information.
The great challenge for designers now is to explore ways to help users move from ease to efficiency in all different contexts. Sometimes it won’t be possible however, and in those cases, we need to design for users at both ends of the spectrum. As previously mentioned, ease almost always wins over efficiency, but it doesn’t have to completely replace efficiency.
Take a minute to look through my sketchnotes for more detail.
