Last Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the Design of Understanding conference. Organised by Max Gadney and held at St Bride, it was as interesting and diverse as the previous year’s conference, which made a nice change from the usual UX conference scene. 

My favourite speakers were Luis Rey’s talk on illustrating dinosaurs and his work with paleontologists to accurately represent them, Gill Ereaut’s look at how a company uses language in order to reflect back their silent assumptions and Lee Coventry’s take on how stock photography companies like Getty expand their collection and work with companies like Flickr to do so. 

Sketchnotes for Timo Arnall and Alan Patrick

Sketchnotes for Luis Rey, Gill Ereaut and James Bridle

Sketchnotes for James Bridle (cont.), Lee Coventry and Tom Armitage

Sketchnote for John Walters, Alice Taylor and Dan Hill

Thanks to my lovely employers — RMA Consulting — for giving me the day off and paying for my ticket. As always, views expressed on this blog are my own. 

In celebration of Daniel Kahneman’s most recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow he gave a lecture at the RIGB last November. Unfortunately it’s only now I’ve been able to write this post. The book is now firmly on my to-read list and I’d encourage everyone to have a look. My sketchnote is below and you can see Eva-Lotta’s sketch on Flickr. 

In November 2011, I attended a talk at the RIGB titled The Serendipity Engine with Aleks Krotoski and Kat Jungnickel. 

They describe the engine as the following (taken from the website): The Serendipity Engine is a physical manifestation of theoretical and technological interventions that can be used to enhance serendipity on the World Wide Web. It is a working machine that uses bike parts, flower pots, cake, pulleys, lightbulbs and other concrete objects to articulate the processes that could be translated into digital “solutions” that will re-engineer the potential dystopian social trajectories of current (social) software trends*. It is being theorised, devised, designed, developed and welded together by Dr Aleks Krotoski and Dr Katrina Jungnickel.

Brad and I weren’t too sure about this talk, mainly, if you are engineering serendipity, is it really serendipitous anymore? As a metaphor, I didn’t find the engine appropriate. Still, it was an interesting talk and neither of us went looking for answers. I’ve included my sketchnote below.