Brukaropplevingar.com: In English, please!

An Epiphany: Epicenter+Paths

Are — 2006-04-09T22:14:00+02:00

It feels strange to blog about this, but here it goes: Today, April 10 2006, I believe I have seen where my professional life as an IA is heading. "And that feels good". Because today I had an Epiphany (for lack of better words) about "design in the age of findability".

Believe it or not, this is actually the second epiphany of my life, but none of my epiphanys have been religious ones. Both have been primarily about the Internet.

I had my first "epiphany" back in 1992, when I by coincidence picked up a theme issue about technology and the Internet in the norwegian anarchist magazine Gateavisa. That was when I knew to do with my life, something along the way of: "I need to be part of this, and my job should be about shaping it somehow." This was the epiphany that governed my educational and work related choices after that, and I have since earned a master in Media and Communications and have been working as a web journalist and information architect for the last 10 years.

Fast forward to today, 14 years later. I'm sitting at a table at Hoppeloppeland with about 500 screaming youngsters aged 1-10 years around me, including my own two sons (2 and 4 years old). While my wife is chasing the kids, I'm trying to sketch out a concept for a service for city parents that we've been thinking about for the last two years.

Then it hits me. An epiphany about how the notion of Epicenter Design that Jason Fried and the rest of the 37signals have been talking about could be extended with Inward and Outwards Pahts to sum up just about everything I've been thinking and talking about for the last 14 years.

Right now I'll have to hit the sack, but I've been writing a good 2 hours about my concept in between chasing our kids, hosting a dinner with friends and packing for our eastern holiday. And the model seems to hold water, in all the cases I've been testing out!

So I'm planning to spend the better part of this holiday writing out an article for Boxes&Arrows or a similiar publication. After that, I'm quite certain I have the material in me to write a book about the subject, which will include a design philosophy as well as steps and deliverables in a "framework for design in the age of findability".

Epicenter+Paths. Stay tuned, I will definitely be blogging more about this. You can pick up my english RSS-feed if you want to be in the loop.

Update Apr 18: I've realized that Core is a better wording than Epicenter.

Thanks, euroIAs!

Are — 2005-10-18T22:24:00+02:00

In case anyone is visiting this blog from the list of European IA blogs, I'm writing this entrance in English. This is primarily a norwegian language blog, and will mostly continue to be so. If you want to subscribe to my english language posts only, you can pick up this RSS-feed (thanks to this explanation).

Anyway, thanks a lot to all attendees for a great and inspiring conference weekend in Brussel! Lots of great people, interesting presentations, good beer and lots of food for thought.

My presentation was entitled "Marketing IA - Experiences and Examples from Norway". The final slides were a bit modified from the proceedings, so here's a link to the updated presentation (1.7mb PDF).

Technorati tags: Euro+IA+Summit+2005, euroia

IA Summit - inspiration for a whole year

Are — 2005-03-11T20:07:53+01:00

Back again from Montreal, still a bit jetlagged but totally impressed with the level of thinking going in this community. Four days of intense networking and immersion in IA topics has inspired me for at least a year to come. The following are some random notes about the conference from the top of my head:

Posters in place

Are — 2005-03-05T22:15:23+01:00

Of course the space provided was 2m wide, and not 2m tall as we had planned for. And of course all the good spots were taken, But we're still smiling

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.are

Quick notes on folksonomies

Are — 2005-03-05T18:14:44+01:00

Here are my raw notes from the folksonomy session on IA Summit: FOLKSONOMIES To bad Steward Butterfield couldn't make it. *GeneSmith (introduction) - examples: flickr, gmail, vimeo, del.icio.us, etc - words: folksonomies, free-tagging, social classification - "it's a type of...

Navigation Pyramid Poster Handout

Are — 2005-03-05T17:12:04+01:00

Here's the handout for my poster later today:

HallandNavigationHandoutIasummit05.pdf
(The PDF is 1.3mB, so watch out)

Search Experiences

Are — 2004-09-03T15:46:25+02:00

Me and my user experience-team here in WM-data recently published a report entitled "Evaluating the search experience on 25 norwegian websites". The report is freely available, but unfortunately in Norwegian only for the time being...

Anyway, here is a short, english write-up i did for conference submission (not proof-read!):

Download SearchExperience.pdf (PDF, 54 kB)

PS! This is my first (maybe only?) english language post on this blog. I do intend to go bi-lingual with an english language versjon (called UserExperiences or something) at some point in time, but need to sort out some technical issues with wordpress first...