InfoCamp is an “un-conference” that encourages conversations about anything information related. Its supposed to be democratic, unstructured, and low-cost. Its in its 3^rd year (my 1^st year attending and volunteering), and had a great turnout:  350 people!

There seemed to be a good mix of professionals and graduate students, and topics ranged from UX to content development. I met lots of interesting people (which only added to my week of networking after attending Web Analytics Wednesday). The way it works is that people can prepare presentations ahead of time, or on the fly, and sign up to present and discuss an idea. The organizers want InfoCamps to happen in other cities eventually, and so do I.

On day 1 my former interaction design professor Axel Roesler gave a keynote on IXD, and design in general. There was one quote that resonated with me, but I forgot to note who originally said it:

“Design is the reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable constraints.”

I also saw great presentations on user-centered design and information visualization from Noah Iliinsky, and on user-centered design, optimization, and kittens by Jason Carmel from ZAAZ. I live blogged from day 2 of InfoCamp (sadly I missed Vanessa Fox speaking) below.

Information Architecture and SharePoint

This one was presented by Microsofties, so I was a bit skeptical. I also typically hate dealing with SharePoint, and I’ve done an  IA project with it; maybe I’m just completely biased.

Someone asked about people who want to tag things with more terms than you’ve allowed, or conversely, don’t want to tag things. The answer was “I don’t think that’s a technology problem, that’s a people problem.” Not sure I agree with that. Yes, you need to establish a process that works for your users, but not allowing flexibility and user error recovery in the information system is poor usability practice.

In terms of metadata for SharePoint, their argument is that authors will automatically see the value in assigning metadata to documents and fill in metadata.  I believe unless people are educated in the value of metadata and there is some kind of control applied to what kinds of metadata terms should be used, SharePoint is not as effective.

Hm..and now he’s admitted “[Microsoft SharePoint is] not the best wiki, we’re not the best document and records management system…but we try really hard to make all of these things work together.” Fair enough.

How to start your own InfoCamp

Recommendations from the organizers, Aaron Louie and Rachel Elkington from ZAAZ. There’s tons more info on the wiki.

**NO FEAR**

1. community
2. $ – sponsorship
3. venue
4. publicity
5. logistics
6. personnel
7. social media (see the #infocamp hashtag on Twitter)

Came about from Rachel and Aaron attending IA Summit, and thinking it was good for theory, boring for practitioners.

“The best discussions happened in the hallways and afterparties.” –Rachel Elkington on typical conference experiences

Wanted to bring in the local community and reinvigorate the local ASIST chapter.  They also didn’t like that conference attendance is limited by cost and structure. Both of them wanted to imitate a bar camp format in Seattle and have it be be a movement–a viral form of conference.  The key was finding like-minded people and keeping the conversation going.

So in my continuing quest to figure out new ways to visualize data, I came across this article through The Grok, (which I realize is from 2007) in Smashing Magazine on new and interesting approaches to data visualization.  I tested some of them out and I wanted to share and post pictures of the results (though some are better when in action than still).

1. Amaztype.  These people utilize Amazon Web Services to make a word of your choice based on book/album/dvd covers. You can sort of see the graphic design trends that people follow. I especially like that Goodnight Moon made it onto the Night visualization.
   

   Night

   

   Light

2. Death of the Pie Chart.  Using pixels instead of pie charts to demonstrate relative size. I like it.
   

   Pixel graphs

3. We Feel Fine.  This site does amazing things to get a sense of how the world is doing by “harvesting feelings from weblogs.” You can filter based on feeling, gender, age, weather, location, and date for 6 different ways of viewing the data. I tried out Madness, Montage, Murmurs and Mobs.
   

   Filtered Madness by the feeling "sad", possibly about Michael Jackson.

   

   An image from Montage.

4. Websites as graphs.  Graphs by the HTML code, so tables, links, images, etc. get different colored nodes. I made a graph of this site but I didn’t think it looked too interesting.
5. Book/essay word visualization.  A German Interaction Design Institute wanted to show the connection between words and ideas better and made an awesome sort of Venn diagram. One pretty much includes everything that I learned at the iSchool, and some extra German words tossed in.
   

   Visualization of words in an interaction design text.

6. The Shape of Song.  Graphical representations of music. I did one for Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat.
   

   Visualization of Nocturne in E flat.

7. Visual Complexity.  The mother lode of data visualization, a large gallery of different types. I was really fascinated by the transportation ones.  The ones I’m showing here are of the global internet distribution and the blogosphere from “inspirer” radiating to “inspiree.”
   

   Global internet distribution

   

   Blogosphere from inspirer in the center radiating to inspiree.

…because it is sunny again in Seattle! w00t! I am now done updating the site for the moment. I condensed the nonsense on here thanks to the informal usability advice of “Richard Branson.” Today is my last day off this week so I would plan on tanning, but there are definitely a lot of construction workers that can see me. So maybe not so much.

And borrowed from the amazing D.A. Clements, Information School lecturer and mentor extraordinaire,  5 books to read on web design/interaction design from the iSchool webmaster:

• BIll Buxton. Sketching User Experience
• DK Van Duyne, JA Landry, JI Hong. Design of Sites
• Jenifer Tidwell. Designing Interfaces
• Dan Brown (not the Da Vinci Code guy). Communicating Design
• Andrew Dupont. Practical Prototyping and Scriptaculous

I’ve read parts of the Bill Buxton and I think Tidwell books, but not the others.  Now I have time to read this stuff, but I’m still finishing the Polar Bear book. I’ve skimmed it before, but I’m trying to pay attention this time. I didn’t realize Scriptaculous was supposed to be any better for prototyping than another Javascript library, but the same things can probably be applied to other libraries.