A sad day for Information Design...

As a subscriber to the Info-Design mailinglist I received this sad message from moderator Karel van der Waarde:

Dear list,

This morning, I received a message from Piet Westendorp's partner that Piet passed away on November 19th.

His achievements in Information Design and many related areas are substantial. To pick just three out of his long lists of publications and presentations:

• co-author of 'Open Here. The art of instructional design' (1999)
  
• editor of Information Design Journal (2000-2004)
  
• guest editor of a Visible language issue on 'Visual metaphors in user instructions' (2007)

However, just mentioning a few publications does not do justice to his influence on education, research and practice. His involvement in the Technical Universities of Delft and Eindhoven (the Netherlands), his publications in a variety of research areas, and his continuous involvement in commercial practice made him a true all-round professional.

Piet Westendorp has been a remarkable person. I'll miss his clarity of thinking and his direct aproach, but even more, I'll miss his inspirational enthusiasm and curiosity.

Kind regards,
Karel.
waarde@glo.be

The field of information design has just lost a leader. It is a sad day.

Design Documentation presentation at Adobe User Group

Last Wednesday I gave a talk about Design Documentation at Meeting #9 of the Dutch Adobe User Group.

Update (December 8, 2008): The video is available! Here is the link to the video. I had to reload and fast-forward a couple of times, and the organisers say something went wrong with the encoding and a better version will be available soon, but for now it gives a very good impression of my presentation. You can switch between me, the slides and several steps in-between. Please note that the slides are in English, the presentation is in Dutch...

In this presentation I combined material from my IA Summit poster with examples from my 3-day Interaction Design training (Dutch only) and mixed in a good portion of Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience. The mix was tasty, if I may say so myself...

The presentation is available on Slideshare (who selected it as a features presentation for their homepage, thanks Slideshare!) for online viewing, or right here as a PDF (5MB) for off-line viewing, and I believe the video will become available from the Adobe User Group website.

And: thanks to Paul Reinierse from De Monsters for his 115-character review on Twitter!

3 days left to submit posters for IA Summit

This is a reminder for those considering attending the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis next spring: This Sunday, November 30, is the deadline for submitting poster proposals!

Submitting a poster proposal is a light-weight way to have a more active role during the conference. I can imagine that having an accepted proposal makes it easier to get funding for the trip.

Last year, I deeply enjoyed preparing my By The Book poster and sharing the story of Info.nl's SNS Bank project (Dutch only) by showing all of the deliverables that are featured in Dan Brown's Communicating Design. Dan even dropped by for the photo opportunity.

Traditionally, the poster program is the most inclusive part of the program, which means many proposals get accepted. This is your chance to tell the global IA community about your ideas, your project, your models, your work environment.

Interested? Read all about submitting a poster proposal. I hope to see you in Memphis!