“The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday” – Bill Buxton

A tad late with this entry, but I have to say how much I enjoyed Bill Buxton’s lecture. It left me with much food for thought. Among other things, I learned:

Products encompass individual, social and cultural experiences. A design falls flat if it doesn’t.

Humans tend to act like lemmings; hence multiple similar products.

Don’t be a one-dimensional designer – collect things and be observant.

All this from a guy who spent ten years looking for a Casio watch with a calculator. Ten years. I really can’t complain that I’m still looking for my holy grail doll for nearly two years.

In addition to the awesome talk, I got to chat with some wonderful ladies who are also on the learning path towards understanding usability better. Because of this I am once again eyeing the bandwagon known as LinkedIn that I’ve been avoiding all this time. But wouldn’t joining make me one of the lemmings Buxton was talking about?

In completely unrelated news, I’ve switched the colors of the background and text. Hopefully this will make the site more readable for the majority.