In a weeks time I’m starting a two year full-time course to become a UX designer, at iths. I’ve been doing the coordinator and project management stuff at KKV GBG for eight years by now, and it’s time to learn something new. I’m also trying to reinvent myself – It’s been fifteen years since I graduated from art school, and I’ve spread myself thin since then. I’m grateful for the perspective that the art world offers me, but I haven’t been able to apply it as much as I feel I ought to have done, and so I’m pivoting to a more applied path.
With that in mind, I’m trying to read up on some UX literature and listen to a bunch of podcasts, and will try to keep a tally here on the blog – if for no other reason than to have something to look back on and fondly recall my naïveté. I’ll be adding to the list below until I post something new that pushes this post down.
One of the podcasts I stumbled across was the now defunct Product Breakfast Club Jake and Jonathan, which was run by the author of Sprint, and the CEO of AJ&Smart, a design/workshop company in Berlin. The podcasts are chatty and not particularly informative per se, but they do provide a feeling for the ambiance of how design folks might talk, which feels useful somehow. Book recommendations abound, and even though many of them are of the American self-help variety, I’m trying to set my prejudice aside and read them with an open mind.
Jonathan Courtney of AJ&Smart has also been evangelizing Workshopping as a next stepping stone for people doing design/research work, and he’s published a book called “The Workshopper Playbook” – a short read where he gives an example of a hypothetical workshop. It’s fun to imagine that facilitators and workshoppers have their own little secret book of exercise recipes, ready to pull out the perfect workshop for a “3 hour workshop for automotive investors in North Africa” or somesuch.
Whenever I’ve tried to do right by web standards, or understand some nuance of code or semantics, I’ve ended up on A list apart – a blog which looks and reads great – and they’re also publishing a bunch of books. One of them is Just Enough Research by Erika Hall, and I just finished it. It’s a pragmatic breakdown of the reasearch part of design work, and it’s a great primer for someone who’s just starting out. Like I. We’re actually doing research & survey stuff right now at school, so this is very timely. Easy to read, well explained, good stuff. (Hall also works at Mule Design, and their blog is worth a read)