Bill Scott - who works with me at Yahoo! on the Pattern Library inititatives - represented Yahoo! at eTech this week and gave the Yahoo! keynote.

From what I hear, he gave a great talk that really drove home why we opened up our libraries.

His slides and thoughts are available on his blog.

My summit summaries can be found embedded in the IA Summit Wrap up over on Boxes and Arrows. Thanks to all the folks who wrote summaries so I didn't have to. This year was tough - sometimes timeslots with 6 sessions going on. Too many choices, not enough time. And as usual not enough time for networking. Taking advantage of a few brief hours of sunshine, I played hooky for a couple of the timeslots and went to check out downtown Portland. (The cherry blossoms are from the Japanese Memorial by the river) My photo albums can be found here:

• Views of Portland: Erin Malone
• Friday evening cocktails: Erin Malone
• Saturday Sessions: Erin Malone
• Sunday Sessions: Erin Malone

It was fun. I wish we had more occasions to get together. I really enjoy the time with some of these folks.

I will be attending the fifth annual AIGA Experience Design summit next week in Las Vegas. Should prove to be entertaining - especially since a bunch of us are going to see the Cirque de Soleil. Will you be there?

I went ahead and added a brief blurb and link to my ASIST IA Summit presentation to the Artifacts page here on my site.

Feel free to send questions about the preso or about how my team uses these giant flowmaps.

Am heading out in the morning for the ASIST IA Summit in Baltimore. I am looking forward to this - loads of good presenters and interesting topics. I am on a panel covering aspects of deliverables. Look for an overview /summary of the summit upon my return. I will also be covering the summit for Boxes and Arrows.

If your are going to be there - I would love to meet you. If you aren't spend the weekend reading B&A.

The next ASIS IA Summit is scheduled to be in Baltimore, Maryland on March 15-17, 2002. They just announced the call for papers and posters - a more formal version of what we have been doing in the IA Cocktail hours here in the bay area.

The summit is sure to be full of interesting people and presentations, especially if the lists on the conversations and the cocktail hours are any indication. Are you going?

First Monday - the peer reviewed journal that publishes a lot about Online Community - is sponsoring an interesting conference this November in the Netherlands. The conference New Definitions: Value, Community, Space seeks to discuss how technology and digitisation has changed our concept of society. Heady stuff. Speakers include Esther Dyson and Howard Rheingold and a lot of academic types.

2001 Living Surfaces Conference
November 7-10, 2001

Mark your calendars for ACD's ninth annual Living Surfaces Conference, Multiples of 1.
This year's event, chaired by Hani Asfour of Viant, will be held in downtown Chicago. Industrial design powerhouse Karim Rashid will deliver the keynote address.

ACD is pleased to announce ArtByte Magazine as our media partner and Apple Computers and Bombay Sapphire as in-kind donors for the conference. The conference website, designed by Viant, is scheduled to launch this week.

Take advantage of early registration rates and sign up by September 28th. Deadline for registration is October 19, 2001.

http://www.ac4d.org/events/ev_living.asp

Also in the AIGA Communique was a blurb about the upcoming National Design Conference "Voice". They are running an essay contest. One of the topics is How Information Design Can Strengthen Citizen Participation

"Lend your "Voice" and register for AIGA National Design Conference

"Voice: AIGA National Design Conference" takes place September 23-26, 2001 in Washington, D.C. Watch for the registration brochure in your mailbox at the end of July! In the meantime, members who have not yet registered may take advantage of a special offer until July 31: submit a 150-word essay on one of four topics and receive a $150 discount. Your voice may be incorporated into the fabric of the conference in a number of ways, including: within the website, in our lobbying campaign, during breakout sessions and even on the main stage!

Choose one of the following topics and submit your essay when you register online:

- How information design can strengthen citizen participation

- How I fulfill my desire to do socially responsible work without going bankrupt

- How I find my voice as a designer

- The most powerfully socially or politically motivated piece of design that I've ever done or seen

For information about more than 70 speakers and 30 breakout sessions, visit the "Voice" site"

Some interesting topics particularly if you followed the whole butterfly ballot thing and all the design and usability solutions that were offered up after the fact. The AIGA is lobbying on Capitol Hill to create a national Design agenda and have design involved in all major reform areas. This is a conference that should prove to be very interesting.

Got home this evening and waiting for me in my mail was the invite and poster for the IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America). The theme - Designing Your Life - is an extremely intriguing one and the conference has set up speakers and activities to address the components of this. Of interest to the cross discipline group is the speaker: Ted Selker. Selker is the Director of Context Aware Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab. The brief blurb says that "Selker anticipates that computers will soon be replaced by systems that know what users want. He'll present a framework for developing things to be responsive to the user-physical situation and will describe a representation of interface choices and tools and their contextual implications." Cool. Yet Creepy.

The idea of the whole conference appeals to me. As designers, we are daily called upon to design "things" and applications for our clients and our companies. How often do we put ourselves in the client seat and think about designing our own life? Should make for some interesting discussions.