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. 

I finally got around to uploading the sketchnotes I’ve done recently…

First off, a sketchnote from the UPA event on 21st October 2010 - Designing for Emerging Markets, Internationalisation & Culture. Here’s a little blurb as to what it was about…

Sponsored by Flow, Amberlight and IWIPS2010, the evening will showcase a small cross section of the work that is currently being carried out in the industry and academia in designing for cultures and internationalisation. The variety of presentations should provide some insight into the depth and breadth of work being done in this space and provide some background to IWIPS2011.

The presentations will cover practical case studies for international testing and the design of systems that must accommodate a large geographic range of cultures and business norms. The research will demonstrate the wide variety of valuable research being conducted in and for different cultures.

I also had the pleasure of attending Design of Understanding 2011 last Friday and have three pages of sketchnotes to share. Not quite as beautiful as the lovely ones by Eva-Lotta but still thought I’d share them with you all. Here’s a little blurb about the event too…

A one day conference looking at how ideas are designed to be more understandable. It’s hosted by the St Bride’s Library and curated by Max Gadney.

We will not just be looking at the discipline of Information Design, but broader, to subjects such as visual and statistical literacy - as I believe that good conferences have breadth as well as depth.

Morning Sessions from David McCandless, Michael Blastland and Fiona Romeo.

Pre-Lunch Sessions of the News Panel (Jon Hill, Michael Agar and Scott Bryne-Fraser) and Chris Heathcote.

Post-Lunch Sessions from Paul Rennie, Simon Rogers, Rob Waller and Jack Schulz. 

Thanks to the organisers and speakers of both events! 

Update: Justin Avery has written a blog post about my sketchnotes.