November 2009

Though it seems a bit early to be thinking of SXSWi, it’s really only 4 months away!

What I found very interesting was the fact that while having a conversation about SXSW with a close friend of mine in the industry, he admitted he never knew SXSW had an interactive portion to their conference. The only thing he ever knew about it was that it was a music festival. I find it funny that I’ve been two years in a row now and have yet to see a music act.

I should be in attendance again this year, job/vacation time permitting, and will be able to attend for free again as I participated in a journal writing project last year where I documented my entire experience in a moleskine and then after the conference sent it in for them to analyze and look for ways to make SXSW even better!

I also submitted a panel idea for my research on Fedora which I will be posting a very detailed entry on tomorrow!

Let me know if you’ll be there and perhaps we can put together a little anthro meetup!

This is just an observation tonight while raiding in World of Warcraft.

When I first started almost exactly 5 years ago, the day the game came out, many of my fellow guildmates had to worry about school schedules or their parents allowing them to play. Tonight most of the interruptions were due to guild member’s children.

Odd the things one notices, especially when you’re trained to notice such things.

As far as gaming goes, it is more than just about playing the game for me, I also help moderate WoW_Ladies, the largest women’s WoW community online with over 7500 women (and men!) in it. Additionally, I have focused some of my undergrad studies in the form of an ethnography a guild in WoW for my ethnographic field methods class and grad studies on it in the form of a user group analysis (and a resulting product I created but will not post until someone comes up with this or I get the funding to make it happen!) for my information sciences class.

If you want to know how important gaming is today, I suggest reading: Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever published by Harvard Business School. It’s an interesting read even if, and especially if, you have never played a game in your life!

I use a four year old Mac G5 as my primary computer and a PC I built as my gaming machine / machine that runs all the stuff my Mac can’t (my G5 can’t run Parallels because it’s not an Intel processor – but I do have it on my MacBook!). For Mother’s day a couple of years ago my husband bought me a really nice Logitech G7 mouse. I prefer cordless mice with rechargeable batteries so this was perfect, or so I thought.

Turns out that Logitech never released Mac drivers for the G7. I found an alternative shareware program that allows it and its buttons to function as close to properly as possible, and usually it does a really good job.

However, every now and then though it just completely spazzes out and will not track across the screen properly. There is nothing more infuriating than when this happens, especially when I am in the middle of a large Photoshop project and I cannot do any pixel point changes. I realized as this was happening to me tonight that my keyboard and mouse are the two tools I use more than any thing else in my life. More than my car, more than even my tooth brush!

So, why am I using something for up to 16 hours a day that doesn’t work as it should? I really have no idea other than the fact it was a gift and perhaps I’m just too stubborn to give up on it working on my Mac. Perhaps that’s really the root of it, we as Mac users have had to deal with this sort of thing for so long that we just expect it now.

I use a Death Adder on my PC for gaming and I’ve discovered, especially as of late, I am now spoiled by it. It strikes me as odd that I’ve been suffering through this mouse abuse on my Mac for two years now. Perhaps after I get a new job I’ll start researching a new mouse.

Poor little G7, I love you so.

Lately it feels as though I am running down the information super highway with one of those walking billboard over my shoulders that says ‘Looking for Work’ on one side and ‘Please Hire Me’ on the other as I yell out my credentials to anyone who will listen and staple my resume to every open wall available.

Looking for a job has turned into my full time job and I do believe it is harder than my last job was. Here I am on a Saturday afternoon continuing the hunt. No rest for the weary.

It’s kind of ironic that I worked for a place that developed HR software in that I know all to well how this process of major companies sifting through tons of applicants works now, and it scares me. However, I am apparently not scared enough as I still refuse to pay for job search services. I have been approached so many times with offers to ‘gain more access to who’s looking at your resume’, ‘pay us to get introduced to the top hiring companies’, or ‘let us write your resume/cover letter for you’ since I have started my employment search that I have to truly wonder, especially right now in our current economic climate, how these people make money.

While I realize that those with jobs do indeed perform job searches, I’m willing to take a wild guess and estimate they make up only about 10% – 20% of those currently looking for work these days. This means that the other 80% of us who are looking for work are actually out of work and therefore, at least for me, our funds are finite. This makes me feel that people have found yet another way to capitalize upon the desperate, playing on our fears of not being able to find suitable work quickly enough or at all.

I imagine I could be very far off the mark here, so if you have a story where you paid for a service such as these and it was worth it to you tell me about it!

‘So why did you go from anthropology to design?’

This is one of the most common questions I have been asked during my search for a job these last two weeks. What’s really funny though is that I technically went from design to anthropology, not the other way around.

And, rather than looking at these two as completely separate disciplines, I actually bring them together in the work I do! Anthropology is really just the study of how and why people do what they do. I choose to use my anthropological training to better understand users, which helps increase the usability of the work I do in interface design. I of course am always striving to learn and do more, and this is why I just applied for an interdisciplinary information science PhD program where I will be customizing my coursework toward Human Computer Interaction.

When I talk about my studies and my work I tend to get excited because I am very passionate about what I do. Depending on who I am talking to this can work either for or against me, but I can’t help it – I love my profession!

I have also studied and participated in design anthropology research which is related, but not exactly the same. This is the more anthropological side than design side, whereas what I do as a usability and interface engineer is more design heavy, but I feel it’s important to understand both sides and how they compliment each other.

I think Dori Tunstall says it best:

Design anthropology does not place separate emphasis on values, or design, or experience, which are the domains of philosophy, academic design research, and psychology, respectively. Rather, design anthropology focuses on the interconnecting threads among all three, requiring hybrid practices. The outcomes of design anthropology include statements providing some deeper understanding of human nature as well as designed communications, products, and experiences.

And this is why my undergrad is an interdisciplinary degree in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology!

I love interconnecting disciplines and finding ways very different things fit together that would otherwise go unnoticed if I did not have such diverse knowledge. This combined with my  background in information architecture, interaction design, web/graphic design, and web programming gives me both the breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to correctly assess and alleviate usability issues for a variety of products and services. Combine that with my passion for doing what I do and you have someone that doesn’t do this just for a job, no I do it because I enjoy it and believe users really do need an advocate. That, and I am a user too.