Upcoming Appearances and Presentations

Tuesdays, 7pm - 9:30pm Kevin hosts Forever Blue, weekly storytelling gatherings in Cambridge, MA, Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge, MA

• August, 2010 UX Book Club Toronto


• August 18, 2010 Whitney and Kevin will be at the Book Club at UsabilityNJli>
  
• August 28, 2010 Whitney and Kevin will be back at UPA Boston for a Saturday workshop on crafting stories. Come with your own UX story material and spend the morning shaping it into great stories for presentations, reports and elevator talks.


• September 14, 2010 Whitney will be the presenter at UPA NYC


• September 16-17, 2010 Kevin is teaching a 2-day course in the Bentley College UX Certificate Program on Practical Storytelling: Crafting and Telling Stories for UX and Life in Waltham, Mass.
  
  Storytelling is the art of crafting and presenting life and all of its varied experiences in enjoyable, rational chunks that invite the audience to feel as much as think. As a part of user experience design, stories serve to ground the work in a real context. They are an effective way to collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research, spark design imagination and help us create usable products. But most importantly, they help keep people at the center of the work. However a UX project is started, in the end it will be used by people. Stories connect what we know about those people (the users) to the design process, even if the users can't be part of the team. In this course, students will learn to craft and present oral stories for UX work or from material in their personal lives. They will learn the mechanics of the craft, which includes listening skills, guiding the audience, story structures, and managing the relationships between the teller, the story and the audience.
• September 28, 2010 UX Book Club Edmonton


• October 5-8, 2010 Kevin will be at the Game Developer Conference: "Head Games: The Power Of Traditional Storytelling In New Platforms." Austin


• October 12-14, 2010 Whitney's going to Lisbon for Clarity 2010.


• November 10, 2010 Whitney will join Ginny Redish and Kate Walser teaching simple usability testing web and document authors can do on their own at the Center for Plain Language, Washington DC.

Recent Appearances and Presentation Links

• Whitney's workshop "Using storytelling to explore the rich context of user experience" at Agile 2010 was in Orlando on August 10. Presentation slides are posted on Slideshare).
• Whitney led a UIE Virtual Seminar on August 5 - but you can still listen in to the recording.


• Storytelling Storytelling Camp at Pyramid Life Center with Kevin Brooks, Laura Packer, Marni Gillard, (Paradox, NY)


• UX Bookclub London (London via Skype)


• UPA Boston's mini-conference was awesome. Whitney and Kevin helped lead off the day with a presentation. (Boston, MA)


• Kevin and Whitney were at UPA 2010 with a tutorial and presentation. (Munich)


• Whitney's session on Using Stories for More Effective Usability at STC 2010 in Dallas led to a podcast with Tom Johnson on I'd Rather Be Writing


• Whitney organized the Usability Track at Knowbility's Access U (Austin, TX)


• Whitney had a great evening at UPA Austin talking about Storytelling your way to a better UX experience. (Austin, TX)


• Whitney heard great stories at the Center for Plain Language ClearMark awards ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.


• Kevin was a finalist for MassMouth.


• Whitney taught workshops on usability and plain language with Ginny Redish at the Election Verification Network conference


• Kevin hosted a Boston area StorySlam for MassMouth - competitive fast-paced stories on a common theme. Ryles, 212 Hampshire St. (Inman Sq.), Cambridge, MA


• Kevin was an Olio performer at Sharing the Fire, Northeast Storytelling Conference, Warwick, RI, USA


• Kevin was a featured storyteller at Forever Blue, Out of the Blue Gallery, Cambridge, MA


• Whitney ran a workshop on designing for search at User Friendly 2009 (Shanghai, China)


• Whitney spoke on usability and user experience at Informatics for Consumer Health (Potomac, Maryland, USA)


• Kevin and Whitney ran a workshop on stories at Involution Studios for IxDA Boston


• "Human interfaces: design for accessible ICTs" - Whitney chaired a panel at the G3ICT/ITU Joint Forum on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Geneva, Switzerland).


• "The Power of Storytelling: The Most Usable Tool on the Planet" - Kevin spoke at the New Jersey Chapter of Usability Professionals' Association (Morristown, NJ, USA)


• "Researching Search" - Whitney at the Enterprise Search Summit (New York, New York, USA).


• "User Research, Design, and Evaluation" - Whitney led a workshop at STC 2008 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA).


• "Designing for Cognitive Disabilities" - Whitney (with Kate Walser) at UPA 2008 (Baltimore, Maryland, USA).


• "Search is Normal. Now What?" - Whitney (with Caroline Jarrett;) at UPA 2008 (Baltimore, Maryland, USA).


• Weekend Storytelling Camp at Pyramid Lake, Kevin Brooks with Marni Gillard, Laura Packer, and Nancy Payne. Open to anyone yearning to tell or listen to tales, who likes the idea of the Adirondack woods, a clear mountain lakeside, and making friends through story. (Paradox, NY)


• UX Week Kevin's four hour workshop on storytelling and its applicability to design - a workshop where participants will learned how to tell and practice telling the stories that matter to them. http://www.uxweek.com (San Francisco, CA, USA)