Within this new world, Design of Understanding tried to answer two questions:
1. How do we begin to understand our current world?
2. How do we begin building our future?

1. Understanding the world.
Gill Ereaut of Linguistic Landscapes proposed an interesting method of understanding the inner workings of an organisation: through looking at the internal language of a company. How are departments called? What job titles do people have? Which words are used in emails? All these small signs create a rich insight into the hidden ways of corporate thinking. If this internal language and these silent assumptions are not addressed, a change of corporate strategy is guaranteed to fail. Ereaut mentioned that in many cases companies came back to her every five years because they had managed to recreate their own problems. If you want to change a company’s path, if you want to follow a beautiful new strategy, you need to address the unspoken rules and the silent assumptions. In short, you need to look at the language, because it is language that constructs the world.

Tom Armitage offered a different way of creating models of the world. In his talk on game design he explained how games can serve as a model for the world at large. If we want to understand a game, we often just start playing it, thereby testing our assumptions against the unknown rules of the game. It’s only through playing that we slowly uncover the rules within the black box. Well designed games are unstable games where not all rules align; for every two rules that reinforce each other there is a third one that creates friction. It is this friction that makes it fun to play.

To understand our current world therefore it is not enough to come up with new theories. To understand it, we must play and keep on playing. Because only through play we will able to slowly reverse engineer the process in the black box and discover opportunities for new approaches.

2. Building the future.
Timo Arnall of Berg made a case for the use of film as a medium to bring the future closer. Film, if done well, is powerful in unpacking actions over time and allows insight into complex emotions. More than any other medium, film gives you a bodily experience of what you see. This makes it a powerful medium for testing ideas before they are made. The touch screen in Minority Report is a good example of a cinematic interpretation that made touch screens look desirable long before they were commercially possible.

The challenge of making people enthusiastic for new technology is also something that Alan Patrick dealt with. He sees hypes and bubbles as unavoidable, and even as a positive phenomenon for new technology to cross the chasm between early adopters and early majority. It’s thanks to the madness of crowds that so much money was pumped into ICT, the Internet and social media, and although much of this money evaporates, in the end we do manage to have better technology.

For me Dan Hill‘s talk was the best of the day, he took all that was good from the previous talks and pushed it forwards. In his work as strategic design lead at Sitra, the Finish organisation for innovation, he deals daily with the challenge of changing the country for the best, whilst avoiding all pitfalls that come with change. He used Wouter Vanstiphout‘s idea that the only way to change cities is by changing the system that governs them, and used the metaphor of dark matter to explain this. Like the universe, our world consists for 90% out of dark matter, a thick layer of rules, regulations, ideas, habits and codes that, although invisible, make our 10% visible world possible. To start changing this invisible world of dark matter, Hill proposed the usage of Trojan horse strategy. A Trojan horse or a McGuffin is a token that is built not for its own existence, but for the sake of understanding and changing the world in which it has been brought to life. Through cycling this new object round after round through the dark matter, slowly the invisible starts to reveal itself (also a theme Tim Arnall and James Bridle). Once the outlines of the dark matter have revealed themselves, experiments can be created to explore the possibilities of altering these lines.

It’s here that the world of games and the world of dark matter start to come together and make a clear statement: the only way to start understanding complex adaptive systems is by starting to play with(in) them. And the only way to change them is through many rounds of slow iterations.

More reviews:
The Unpacking of Complexity by Lulu Pinney
Sketch notes by Amanda Wright
Sketch notes by Eva Lotta Lamm
Lanyrd page 

Inspired by Will Myddelton’s post on the open UX university I got the idea for a series of workshops that could help people become more active in the UX community. Posting the idea on the London IA message board resulted in many positive replies. Attendees, speakers, co-organisers and hosts all came forward. After the initial post it still took a few months to connect all the dots, but on 7 July the first Uxdo took place.

The theme of the workshop hosted at Fortune Cookie was writing and featured Martin Belam and Cennydd Bowles. Martin shared great tips on getting into the blogging habit and optimising your posts and Cennydd made it clear that editing is as important for a good piece as writing itself. At the end of the evening everyone agreed to write a blogpost and two weeks later the majority lived up to it.

Here’s a list of all the posts that were written after the uxdo workshop:

Martin Belam – Cennydd Bowles on the value of editing
Tim Caynes – Writing to be read: a workshop on being a better writer
Heidi Blanton – Who has rights to your Twitter photos? TwitPic updates TOS.
Sally Smith – Copywriting and interface design: five unifying principles – UX Sleuth
Lucy Hughes – Interactivism
Francis Rowland – Science, stories and better design
Will Myddelton – The Story Of How I Got My Name
Tyler Tate – Learning Styles: The Cognitive Side of Content
Martina Schell – UX in startups: 6 tips from the frontline
Simon Doggett  – The London UX Job Pool – A Guide for Candidates
Jason Mesut – The Portfolio Rant (part 2)
Cennydd Bowles – Simple Harmonic Motion

These posts form a wide and rich collection of stories and ideas, which I think is an amazing result! And I hope that everyone feels inspired to keep on writing.

Rumour has it that the next Uxdo will be on workshop facilitation and might take place in mid-August, be sure to follow @uxdo on twitter to find out when the next one will be.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be able to attended a meet up organised by Jason Mesut around the theme ‘What makes a great UX portfolio’. Judging by the discussion that spun out at London IA the last word on UX portfolios hasn’t been said. In this article I’ll share what I’ve learned so far.

1. Know yourself
Every successful pitch starts with good self-knowledge. What is it that you want to achieve by making your portfolio, what should be the idea that you want to install in the mind of the viewer? Why are you applying for this particular job at this particular company? Do you know the direction in which you would like to develop? What makes you so much better than all the other candidates? Those questions should be answered in your portfolio. A portfolio is not meant to be a perfect reflection of your past career, it’s a sales tool that you use to steer your future. Therefore it’s perfectly fine to put a spotlight on those projects that you are proud off, and to show off your skills in the areas you’d like to develop yourself in.

2. Know your audience
It’s hard to decide what you should do if you don’t know your audience. Every hiring manager is different and this should be reflected in your portfolio. Try to gain as much information as possible about the (kind of) person and the company you are addressing. Are you being hired as the only person or will you be part of a large design department? Will the hiring person view your portfolio on the road on her iPhone or look at it at her 30” iMac? Or is she more likely to print it at the very last minute so she can look at it whilst walking to the interview room? The answers to these questions will define the kind of information, the amount of pages and the size of pages (A4, A3, 1980*1200, etc) that will best fit your audience.

3. Tell a story
Make sure you take the lead. Based on your goal (get the job) and your audience (the hiring manager) you can create a visual narrative supported by text. Roughly your portfolio could be structured like this:

1. Top-level view. Show that you understand UX design: show user research, idea generation, idea implementation and testing.
2. Zoom-in. Build up trust by demonstrating that you are an experienced professional: show the different design phases of several projects, make sure you mention the goal of the project, your role in it and the outcome.
3. Team-player. Gain some browny points by demonstrating your obsession with UX: were you involved in organizing an event? Did you write an interesting blog post? Or did you give a presentation? This is your chance to show it.

Through text and visuals you can make clear that they simply have no other option than to invite you for an interview.

4. Sweat the details
Think once more about your goal and your audience and make sure they align. Crop your images so only the essential is shown. Remove words until only the necessary are left. Tune your case studies. Maybe you can use a quote from a happy client. Perhaps you can illustrate your statement about card-sorting and workshops with some photos. Have a look at some great portfolios out there and try to find their nifty little details; speech-bubbles, consistent heading or using an interesting font. And finally put your contact details on the first and the last page.

5. Test and iterate
Print your portfolio, show it to a friend, show it to a mentor, look at it on your mum’s old laptop. Does it stand all these tests? Read through your text, ask a friend to read through the text, make sure there are no spelling errors, no page errors and no wrong images.

6. Learn from others
Here’s a collection of discussions, blogposts and portfolios from around the web. It’s always good to know what the competition is doing.

Should you make a portfolio:

• To portfolio or not to portfolio, that is the question – You the user
• You don’t need a UX portfolio
• Is a robust portfolio for a UX designer necessary – Quoare

How to make a good portfolio:

• The portfolio rant part I – London-IA
• What do clients/employers/recruiters look for in a UX portfolio – Quora
• Thoughts on creating a portfolio – UX exchange
• Online UX Portfolio – Conflict of Interest? – IxDA
• A good UX portfolio – Diane Cherie
• 7 steps to a Kick-ass UX portfolio- Semantic Foundry
• Better UX portfolios
• Fill your portfolio with stories – Jared Spool
• How to ace the UX job application – Foolproof

Examples:

• Abby Covert
• Simon Doggett
• Umanka Karkada
• K van Laan
• Hilary Coolidge
• Danny Hearn
• Danny Hope
• Anthony J. Davies

Get some visual design inspiration:

• 10 steps to the perfect portfolio websites – Smashing Magazine

And finally, thanks to all the great advice given in the London IA forum and by the attendees of the portfolio meet-up. I’ll leave you with one question: what advice would you give to people who set out to create or update their portfolio?

1. Know yourself.

The first thing I learned was that, although the job title might be the same, User Experience Designer can mean many things depending on the environment you are looking at. A start-up might expect you to be knowledgeable in user testing whilst also capable of doing some front-end coding. An agency might expect that you’ve have created and presented pitches, whilst client-side might expect you to design email campaigns as part of your job.

Because all of these different expectations it is important to know what you want, what you can do and where you might find the most realistic fit for those two. In my case I found that what I want, –growth in my knowledge and skills in designing advanced web-applications– was quite hard to achieve with my mix of skills (best to be described as senior web-designer). This showed itself by the variety of salaries that companies were willing to pay me for roughly the same job title. Best advice would be to contact a more senior practitioner, who knows about your work, and gain a good understanding about your strengths and interests.

More to read:
How to get a job at a webdesign agency.

2. Have a portfolio

You might have a well written CV, hundreds of connections on LinkedIn and Twitter, and a well maintained blog, but without a good portfolio you’re unlikely to land an interview. I would advise to have three versions available: one pdf version that you can send out to recruiters, an online version that you can link to, and a set of printouts that you can take with you to an interview. You’d be surprised to find out how many times it’s quite a challenge to get online during a job interview.

As for what should be in your portfolio, have a look at Jason Mesut’s rant over at London IA.  As you can see from my portfolio there is still room for progress. It’s not completely clear which story I want to tell: am I a visual designer with some IxD experience, or a beginning IA with some visual design experience, also the items seem to be in a random order. The positive feedback that I received was mainly on my sketches and more conceptual work; which probably proves the point that the process is more insightful to look at than the end product.

More to read:
To portfolio or not to portfolio that is the question

3. Recruiters

As soon as you’ve uploaded your CV on Monsterboard you will get plenty of phone calls from hungry recruiters, all of them will promise you that you are exactly the right match for their inspiring position. Therefore make sure you’ve done your ‘know thyself homework’ and are able to quickly judge if the proposed job is matching your criteria. From my experience, there are some recruiters who are really good, who are interested in you and are willing to invest time to follow up on conversations. Here are some agencies that took the decency (or precaution) to ask me to come over for a talk: ZebraPeople, Futureheads, Propel London, Ecom recruitment and Vanburn at ITHR. Don’t forget, however, that many companies don’t (or even refuse) to work with recruiters, so it’s worth doing some active searching yourself.

4. Automate your search

No need to keep on visiting websites to hope for an update; modern technologies come with plenty of options to stay in the loop without working too hard. The following services allow you to sign up for an email update on your search query: the Guardian, Monster, the Ladders. And these services you can follow by RSS: uxwork, UK UPA jobs, London IA jobs, etc. What also might be an idea is to search Twitter for UX jobs and to choose the ‘show tweets nearby’ tab.

5. Linked In

LinkedIn was for me the site where I kept coming back to. It has the ability to do background checks on the companies and the people who are interviewing you. Also more and more companies are actively using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.

6. Quality over quantity

At the moment there is a strong demand for UX designers in London, therefore if you aren’t too sure about a company don’t worry too much about turning down a job offer. In the end it’s better to only go to job interview with companies you are interested in, better one well-researched and prepared interview then ten careless conversations.

more to read:
Improve your changes of a job in UX
Grow your UX skill set
Things you need to know to get an IA/UX job
Getting hired

Please let me know in the comments how you’ve experienced finding work and which knowledge you’ve found essential.

When we judge the quality of a product we judge it by the total experience. That is: the actual properties of the product plus the experience we have with these properties. Because the experience depends not only on the product but also on its surroundings —other products available, emotional attachment— the perceived value of a product varies from place to place and from person to person. This split between the actual product quality and perceived quality leads to a situation where it becomes possible to increase the perceived value, without actually increasing the actual product’s quality. To stay competitive many companies choose to increase their experienced quality through large advertisement campaigns that enable the price of the product to go up. It can create a situation where expensive products become expensive, not because they are good, but because the marketing campaign needs to be paid for. I would argue that there is a better way: increase the perceived quality through actually increasing the quality. This is the age-old path of the craftsman.

Quality is realised through the interaction between the physical and the psychological world. Take a bottle of wine for example. The house wine sold in a local supermarket supplies the alcohol that will get your body in a more relaxed state. Nevertheless it is no match for the experience of drinking a French wine imported by a French friend whom you met years ago during your stay in Paris. They might do their physical job equally well, but the psychological impact is of a different magnitude. You can engage with the story, you feel the care, passion and dedication of both the friend and the château in every sip you take. Besides the insurance that only the best ingredients are used, you also want to be engagement with the story and the care of the craftsman who created the product.

In a competitive market the producers of products need to keep on innovating and increase their quality to remain competitive. In the category of computers it becomes quite clear that what was known as the best of the best five years ago is no longer relevant today. But what if innovation is no longer possible? If you are the producer of a famous quality whisky with roots going back for centuries, coming up with a new improved flavour might not be the successful path to follow. Instead what you can do is focus your attention on perceived quality. You can tell the consumers through advertisement campaigns about your unique values, your incredible ingredients, your centuries of tradition; all these stories increase the experience of the first sip.

The problem here is that the quality of the product remains the same. None of the hard working labourers in the distillery will get an extra penny for the improved experience, since what they are doing remains what they’ve been doing for centuries. Or even more in the case of mineral water, where the labour involved consists mainly of bottling the water that was already there. What goes for both mineral water and whisky is that the price that we pay to purchase these products is mainly used to pay for the advertisement that seduced us to buy these products in the first place.

I think this is wrong. We should not waste the sparse resources of this world on advertisement that informs us that we should really buy products of good quality by craftsmen who care. It does not benefit the hard work of the craftsman and it creates the risk of make-belief. Thanks to the power of branding and advertisement we might consider to buy products —for example clothes— that are of a higher price and lower quality than those we could have bought if we weren’t persuaded by the power of marketing.

The money could better be spent on making people aware of the advantages of purchasing products that are created by people who truly care about creating great products. People who not only perform their job, but master it, not because there is a demand for quality, but because pushing quality beyond the ordinary creates a sense of meaningful being for the craftsman. Passion, dedication, care and hard work create an environment where magic can happen. When the reason for making good products goes beyond the wish of keeping clients and reputation, there is a new space where good can become great. L’art pour l’art, craftsmanship for craftsmanship’s sake.

Jesse James Garett
We also have to look at the experience that is being delivered outside the medium that we delivered it in. Our work is not done when we deliver it, it’s done when it is used by our customers. An experience is (always) the outcome, but our goal should be to engage our users in it. We can speak about engagement in two different dimensions, the perception-action dimension and the cognition-emotion dimension.

Liz Danzico
Not only should we redesign the language and concepts that we are using, we should also alter what we design and how. We should bridge the gap between creator and consumer and meet in the middle, where the consumer can use and reuse what the designer made. We should also understand that to give room for improvisation we should be much more clear about the few rules that we keep in place. To enable improvisation we should design for three things: the present – it has to happen in the now, detectability – it must be understood at at least some level (see rules) and responsiveness – there should be a short feedback loop to keep people engaged.

Michael B. Johnson
We build bows for violins, useless in themselves, but essential to create beautiful things. Quality is the best business practice. We layer our films in three levels: the world in which the story is set, the people who live in that world and finally the individual. Beauty is not merely a side product. Making beautiful products makes people happy and enables them to be more productive.

Joshua Porter
If we want to have a bigger seat at the board table, then we should account for our work. Data-driven design might seem to be the answer but is not. There is a problem with the current divide between data-driven and intuition design. Intuition design might come a long way but leads us into endless discussions. Data-driven design might be clear but could cause us to optimise a sub-optimal peak without ever getting to the much higher mountain a bit further up. We should therefore set up a culture that takes the best out of both worlds. Data doesn’t design, designers do.

We can’t solve the problems with the same tools that created them. – Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Einstein

It was a pretty interesting discussion, and a few ideas came out of it that I want to share with you all:

1. Don’t offer the user total control, offer them the feeling that they’ve just successfully designed a site according to their own preferences.
2. Customising sites should be a quick, fun and enjoyable experience, after which users should go on with the reason they came to use your site in the first place.
3. Just because site editors are built in a certain way (for example colour pickers), doesn’t mean you should just reuse that pattern. Think a step further, how you can steer the user in the direction of good design.
4. Although the request might be for a site editor, a customisable template might do the job as well.
5. If you build an editor with many features, you will attract people who love even more features.
6. Tools do push a certain design, don’t give a user too much rope.

A decent write up of this presentation is still in the pipeline, but meanwhile here is my slideshow.

If you have any examples from your own experience or come across other sites with great customisation tools, please share it in the comments.

Later on I discovered that I was haunted by a mix of two ideas, first that in the future things would be better and second that through taking risks and hard work one would always become successful. And as far as I’m aware, I’m not alone. If we no longer believed that buying new and better products would lead to happier lives, if progress could no longer be linked to faster computers, and if a seventy hour work week no longer represented the road to success, the Western world would go downwards fast. Lucky for us most people do buy into the idea that technological progress is essential for the progress of us as a species, and that progress is good beyond questioning. Thanks to this unquestioned faith we now sit behind our glowing screens, drinking fake Italian roast fresh from the machine, burning through our lives for a better tomorrow.

The problem with those two ideas is that they are quite hard to reject. When asked most of us would admit that our lives did become better since the eighties and that we do enjoy the benefits of modern technology. It looks like it is the ideal system of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those noble enough to work hard and take risk will be rewarded, and those faint of heart and plain lazy get the empty lives they deserve. These are the ideas that have made America great, and created a model for the rest of the world to live by.

I want to take you to a place where these ideas collide: the internet start-up. An intense mix of courage, extreme ideas and long working hours that should make up the best chance to meet the future first. The internet-entrepreneurs, the dreamers and the constructors, they are often celebrated and praised by the captains of state and industry. The scene of high-tech start-ups seems to constantly deliver on their promises, innovation is at a speed never seen at any time in any area, and every year it seems to be delivering more new millionaires than the Russian mafia.

Who in their right mind would ever want to be sacrificed in the name of innovation, who in full knowledge would accept an seventy hour work week for unhealthy low pay, who educated by the best would spend their days in cheap office space with Spartan furniture. One look on Techcrunch gives you the answer: the internet entrepreneur! Prince of the future, horseman of innovation, fighter for the revolution, always awake, glued to their desk, only separating from the computer for fellow knights. They fight their solitaire battle, kept warm by fire-side stories of nerds become billionaires like Gates and Jobs; they expect that anytime now victory will be theirs.

But there is a darker side too, a side all too well known by the Googles and Microsofts of this world. The internet industry needs waste, innovation needs failures, many of them. Before a great idea can be turned into a great product it will demand millions in cash and wasted centuries in labour. Who are the minds behind the curtains, who benefit most from keeping these dreams alive? Who try to hide the burn-outs, the wasted lives and capitals, who celebrate the winners and keep all failure hidden, who speak badly of the office drones and hail all young nerds who give up safety and security for sleepless nights? They are the same Steve and Bill who eagerly wait for the very few survivors of the innovation battle. When the day breaks they will reward them with diamonds and glory and enough champagne to help them quickly forget their brothers who wasted their long hours for the beast of innovation.

So what should one do in a battle that knows no victories? Waste one’s days away in the safe factory of the large institutions? Play the endless games of bureaucracy and office sucking up and back-stabbing? Or should one fight the hopeless battle as described above? Maybe it is a good thing that we are human after all, driven by irrational emotions and wild desires. If one would ask me, I would say saddle the horse, bring me my armour, for god, glory and the country, I’m going to battle.