eri on the interweb

The panel at Digital Citizens: Ben Shepherd – Sound Alliance; Sam Buckingham – singer / songwriter; Gareth Stuckey – Director, Gigpiglet; Dan Rosen – ARIA Chief Executive Officer; Neil Ackland – Sound Alliance; moderated by@acatinatree. The event was held at FBI Social.

So the topic of the evening was meant to be Social media and the music industry but that’s not quite what we got.

Everyone talked about the revenue/rights quandary but there was no real talk of how they were strategising for the digital age. Except for Sam Buckingham, a singer songwriter who has leveraged social media to connect to her fan base, build a loyal following and even crowd sourced $11,000 via the Pozible platform to fund her first album.

Toby & Pete founders speaking at Apple Store Sydney for Australian Infront

What do you do with your eponymous moniker when your duo turns into a company? That was the predicament that Toby & Pete founders, Toby Pike and Piotr Stopniak found themselves in only 18 months after they started and the focus of their talk for the Apple/Australian Insight series. Toby & Pete are CGI artists who specialise in print media. They produce phantasmagorical images for the likes of Nike, AMP, SBS and Daily Juice.

Current outdoor campaign for Daily Juice Company features artwork by Toby & Pete. At bus stop on William St East Sydney

Marc Stickdorn is an academic and author of This is Service Design Thinking so we were more than lucky to have him address the group. Stickdorn teaches to both design and business students. A theme of the night was working and communicating across disciplines, with these two important requirements:

1. That the design community, specifically the UX design community generate a shared language to represent and promote itself consistently
2. That service designers learn the terminology of the other disciplines they are working with

Stickdorn quizzed us on product versus service, touchpoint versus channel, introduced us to service dominant logic and the experience economy but he really wanted to abandon the slide deck and just open up the conversation. Which he did. I think he actually found us to be a little shy as a bunch.

The group questions canvassed the following topics:

Fetch - Curated whats on for the business and digital communities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and London

Friends from out of town have often remarked to me that Sydney has a thriving digital scene. All the events I’ve attended, big and small, are organised by passionate people with a spirit of openness and sharing. Considering most meet-ups are free or under 10 bucks it’s pretty cheap compared to a conference ticket.

But what’s on? Where to go? Where to look? There’s twitter, eventbrite, meetup - the information is out there but its all over the place. Kindly solving this problem for all of us is Fetch by Kate Kendall (founder) and her curators including Hannah DeMilta. So far there’s Fetch lists for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and London covering events, news, articles and more for the business, digital and creative communities. Thanks so much guys — this is a great idea and a great service.

Yahoo! email notification of sale and instruction to authorise permission for new company AVOS to manage.

I’m sure it has been announced previously, but as a user I just received my email from Yahoo! notifying me of the sale of Delicious to AVOS. I used to be a huge Delicious fan. Remember when it was one of the darlings of “web 2.0″? My use and fan-dom has wavered as other tools such as Instapaper have proven more useful. Even in its hey day, my inbox remained empty as friends never really leveraged the sharing aspect as it was designed. Yet the feature remained. Only recently has search of own bookmarks been enabled. I wonder what this means for the future of Delicious? Hopefully some product innovations will follow.

Anyone who visits this blog often may have noticed I go to a lot of industry events. I love hearing talks, I always get something out of it, but even meet-ups without guest speakers
are an opportunity to learn from your peers. So if you’re too shy or too busy to fit an event into your calendar – maybe you’ll find a reason to finally go below.

1. Get to know people in your industry
   New to town? Need a job? New to the industry? You will be surprised how happy people are to talk, offer advice, help you out and put you in touch with others. Talking to others also gets you an understanding of where you are at and where you want to be.
2. Understand the industry landscape
   Which companies specialise in what, who claims to specialise in the new thing, whose been doing it for real.

A few years ago I read an article in My Career about whether your job has a personality. It goes on about introverts and extroverts but it struck a chord with me at the time. I remember my good friend Tamara Graham telling me why she left her established career in teaching. It was during an overseas holiday, where she was outdoors all day, taking snaps that she decided that she hated being inside, staring at the same walls and what she really wanted to do was travel around and take photos.

Mathew Hodgson, an IA/UX type, writes and speaks about agile project management. I have never done an agile project, and this is not a piece about agile versus waterfall. What struck me to think about that article and Tamara’s story was a blog post and graphic that Mathew published a few weeks ago about careers and the Agile team.

If you have not been, Service Design Drinks is a casual meet-up, where guest speakers present and take questions from the audience. It’s held regularly at the Trinity Bar in Surry Hills. The fourth event was held on 18 May and was attended by 30 or so user experience designers, including a team from Different.

The last event was a panel discussion moderated by Damian Kernahan, from Proto Partners. The panellists were:

• Opher Yom Tov, formally of Ideo, now working with BT
• Rod Farmer, Co-founder and Director of Research, Mobile Experience
• Susan Wolfe, Managing Director, Optimal Experience
• Faruk Avdi, from the NSW Department of Education and Training

The opening question put to the panel was “What is service design?”

• Opher Yom Tov: Weaving together discreet experiences in an ongoing relationship.
• Rod Farmer: Meaningful value at the point of interaction.