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. 

My work were kind enough to send me to this year’s dConstruct, held at the Brighton Dome on the 2nd September. As usual, I sketchnoted and you can see the results in this blog post. Generally, I found the quality of the talks to be better than I expected. There was a couple I wasn’t a big fan of and a couple that I really loved - Don Norman, Frank Chimero. 

In terms of sketchnoting, I found the length of the talks a little short for my sketchbook. The 45 minute talks were about right for a full page, the 30 minute talks were a little short. For a change, these were mostly Tombow‘d post talk. I miss the time that is normally used for questions! 

Don Norman - Emotional Design for the World of Objects

Kelly Goto - Beyond Usability: Mapping Emotion to Experience

Bryan & Stephanie Rieger - Letting Go

Craig Mod - What is the Shape of The Future Book
Frank Chimero - Oh God, It’s Full of Stars 

Dan Hon - The Full Stack of Entertainment: Storytelling, Play & Code
Kars Alfrink - The Transformers 

Matthew Sheret - Pocket Scale

Kevin Slavin - Reality is Plenty

If I haven’t said it before, then I’ll say it again, the RI — Royal Institute of Great Britain — in Mayfair is one of my favourite venues for talks - great venue, fantastic speakers and always thought provoking.

This week I went to a talk by Professor Raymond Tallis, who has recently written a book called Aping Mankind - Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, the talk was on the same subject. Although the talk was very fast paced, it was very insightful, although some of the questions were rather interesting. 

If you haven’t been to the RI, definitely check out their programme of talks. As usual, my sketchnote is below - Enjoy!