Musings on design & other stuff jen's place

I know, I write a lot about one particular band, but I really like this lyric (the title of this post), and it got me thinking — what is my "walk on the moon"? What is the most revolutionary, amazing accomplishment of my life? Is it submitting patent applications? Getting my Masters degree at 40? Having papers published at international conferences? Having a child? Or having a great marriage after 10 years?

Those are all tremendous accomplishments, and those are the things that I'm most proud of in my life, but I just read Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture, and that's influencing my thinking. Randy was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon when he was asked to give a "last lecture" — a talk on what he learned in his life as though he were at the end of it; except that he really was at the end of his life, because, unbeknownst to the college at the time of it's asking, he'd been told that he only had a few months to live. He had three children who were all under the age of 6, so he used the last lecture to try to tell his children who he was, and what was unique about him.

So while I am immensely proud of the work I've done, of the child I've brought into the world, and the marriage that I've nurtured, those things don't make me unique. What Randy decided made him unique was that he had achieved his childhood goals. I suppose that is something I share with him.

No, I didn't always want to be a user experience engineer :) But I remember a letter that my kindergarten teacher wrote when I graduated from high school — she talked about how at age 4 and 5 I would help the other children with academic work. Yeah, I know, that was like the alphabet. Then in first grade, I was appointed "student teacher" to mentor my classmates through difficult math problems. In college, I tutored English, Calculus, Statistics, and English-as-a-second-language. After college, I volunteered to teach adult literacy. And the list goes on ... until this past month.

This past month, I asked my former graduate adviser if I could have permission to launch and run a new program — a mentoring workshop series to help students and alumni to get their work published in a professional journal, magazine, or presented at a conference ... and he said "yes". So we start next Thursday, with a panel of 7 speakers, and 20 participants. It's not a class. There's no grade. I won't get paid. But this is my one small step — this is my walk on the moon.

One thing that I've learned from musicians is that they perform a song over and over again. They don't just write it, sing it once, and then move on to the next song. But we do. As user experience practitioners, we tend to give a talk or write a paper, and then never give it again. Not very efficient, is it? It's like saying that just because I sang a song in California, no-one will want to hear it in Massachusetts. That's just not true.

I have given numerous talks on persona development at Sun, which prepared me for the talk I gave at CHI in April. Since returning from Italy, I've given that talk again, twice. Once, two weeks ago, at the Boston CHI monthly chapter meeting, and then again on Wednesday, at the Boston UPA Mini Conference on Usability and User Experience. I re-packaged it just slightly for the Boston CHI, and added 30 minutes of content for the mini UPA conference, but that same 10 - 15 minutes of material has gotten a good workout, as fas as talks go. I've also received two invitations to talk about persona development at local companies, so I may get even more mileage out of those slides.

Reduce, re-use, recycle ... words to live by.

Several weeks back, I published a blog post on my talk at the ACM CHI conference, in Florence, Italy. For Andrea, who asked, and for any other interested parties, here are the slides for the talk I gave.

Let's face it, Florence is beautiful. But it's a noisy city, much like Boston. We were extremely lucky with our hotel room. There were only two balconies in the hotel (at least on the front), and we got one of them. The room had high ceilings covered in dark wood panels, and tall doors onto the balcony that must have been two hundred years old. The people were nice. Everyone was willing to speak English to us, and they were happy to help us try their cuisine. I've returned with an entirely new appreciation of pasta.

The weather was sunny on Sunday and Monday, and while it sprinkled a little bit on other days, we were never in a downpour -- actually, I think there was one hard rain, but we missed it while we were eating dinner. Tom and Rachel traveled with me, which sounded like a good idea when we booked the tickets, but they were both suffering from the flu while we were there, and wished I had left them at home. That said, we saw a lot of Florence when they were hopped up on Advil and Benadryl.

We took a lot of pictures. I think we printed 164 in all, but there were many that didn't make it to the photo printer.

I've penned a number of blog posts expressing my appreciation for the music of Great Big Sea. So, when they announced that they'd be playing in Massachusetts this Summer, I bought tickets right away. Last year, they played in Lowell, which is only 15 minutes away. This year, they were playing in Edgartown, a town I didn't recognize.

I know, I should have Google-d, MapQuest-ed, or researched in some other way where Edgartown was, but I figured it'd just be a drive away in any case. The show was 21+, so my 8-year-old wouldn't be able to join us this time; we'd leave her with my Mom, who'd be visiting.

So imagine my surprise when I found that Edgerton is a town on Martha's Vineyard, which requires a ferry ride to get to. The round-trip ferry is about $200, and you need reservations. But for that price, we may as well see MV, since I've never been there, so we'll stay for 2 nights, and since we'll be gone that long, we may as well take my mom and Rachel with us. Of course August is high season at MV, so the hotel room is going to run us more than $400 a night, including taxes. The term "slippery slope" comes to mind.

$75 for concert tickets, $800 for the hotel, $200 for the ferry. And three days of eating out for four people. Oh well. I've never seen Martha's Vineyard, and it'll still be a lot cheaper than our trip to Florence.