Core77

And we're only mentioning the fact because many Core readers are aware of Bill's other qualities: smart, creative, experienced, and well-versed in the culture of effective innovation. Buxton impressed a hundred or so designers and marketers at the Portland World Trade Center last night with a 90 minute talk based on his latest book Sketching User Experiences, and managed to be engaging, witty, and really nice the whole time. Even after: post-talk pints at a brew pub around the corner found him enthusiastically discussing finer points with attendees for a good two hours after.

The talk, sponsored by local chapters of Siggraph, CHIFOO and ACM, essentially summarized his arguments from the book: that framing the question of what to design is as important as getting the design right; that "sketching," in its broadest sense, is crucial to this process; and that engendering a corporate culture that encourages these actions, and the acquisition of skills for creating and reading sketches is crucial, especially given the degree to which technology is affecting the lives of average citizens who aren't interested in becoming technologists.

It'd be too much to re-hash the entire presentation -- that's what the book is for, and it's an excellent read -- but here are a few choice quotes:

"Early in computing, technological problems predominated, and were solved by technologists. In the beginning, the users were the designers. The architecture of computing is essentially unchanged since the days they were refrigerator-sized. What's changed is, these technologies are affecting all of our lives."

On the growing attention the business world is giving to "design thinking": "There was even an article on it in this month's Harvard Business Review. I read it...and...didn't recognize much of anything in it."

On the need for sketches and concepts to be plentiful and disposable: "Hardly any of your ideas are going to end up in the product. If it's a good product."

On multi-disciplinary design teams: "The age of the Renaissance individual is long over, but not of the Renaissance team."