Come and celebrate Adaptive Path’s 7th Anniversary! Beer, wine and — of course — the Taco Truck. All are welcome but you’ll need to RSVP if you want to drink and eat those delicious tacos for free. See upcoming.org for more information.

The First International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video, uxTV 2008, will bring together researchers and designers of interactive user experiences for TV and Video from academia and industry. Outstanding papers, demos and speakers will make uxTV 2008 the best conference for designers and researchers in this field.

At An Event Apart, gain a deeper understanding of web standards and emerging best practices, be inspired by fresh ideas and new directions, and join the greatest minds and hottest talents in web design today. Web standards godfather Jeffrey Zeldman and world-renowned CSS expert Eric Meyer got together to create a conference for people who make websites.

An Event Apart San Francisco will be August 18-19 and will feature design guidelines and implementation techniques to enable better user experiences.

An Event Apart will also take place in New Orleans, Boston and Chicago.

Instructor Lou Rosenfeld teaches “Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience” in this Involution Master Academy course limited to nine students. Site search analytics help you understand and benefit from search engine data, enabling you to better diagnose a multitude of user experience problems.

This day-long seminar will combine lecture, group discussion, and hands-on exercises to cover the basics of site search analytics. Lou will show you how spending even an hour a week analyzing your search queries can help tune and improve your site and expose new opportunities for improving your business strategy.

See Involution Studios for more information.

Instructor Luke Wroblewski teaches “Web Form Design Best Practices” in this Involution Master Academy course limited to nine students.

Students will take a deep, in-depth look at online forms as a specific aspect of web design, focusing on the impact of information, interaction and visual design in a variety of different online forms. As a student, you will participate in discussions and hands-on activities that illustrate the concepts, while giving you the chance to exercise the skills so your company’s web form design will successfully facilitate users taking the action you want.

See Involution Studios for more information.

Get Satisfaction, Inc is sponsoring Customer Service is the New Marketing. Some of the talks will be:

• Building a service-focused culture
• Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable
• Scaling customer service
• Virgin’s Crown Jewel: Customer Service, across 200 Companies and 29 Countries
• Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee
• Customer service as community, community as customer service

Instructor Dirk Knemeyer teaches “Applied Empathy: An Experience Design Framework” in this Involution Master Academy course limited to nine students.

Students will be introduced to Dirk’s unique framework for mapping product planning to designing for real human needs and desires. Then, with an emphasis on group activity and hands-on trial-and-error, students will learn and practice methods for infusing this framework and humanistic design approach into their company and projects. After completing the course, students will be immediately ready to have a significant, practical impact on product or service development in their organization.

See Involution Studios for more information.

Instructor Steve Portigal teaches “Design Research Methods” in this Involution Master Academy course limited to nine students.

Students will develop their own design research philosophy, learn how to think about people, behavior, and culture, as well as the importance of being open to new perspectives. They will also learn tactical skills they can immediately put into practice: how to conduct observations and interviews, find research participants, and interpret and synthesize results as fodder for design and storytelling.

See Involution Studios for more information.

Instructor Andrei Herasimchuk teaches “Product Architecture Symposium” in this Involution Master Academy course limited to nine students.

This full-day course will teach software professionals how to lead a collaborative architecture process for software products. Participants will be taken through the entire process using hands-on exercises designed to give a deep and real-world understanding. At its conclusion this architecture process results in a shared vision of the upcoming design by all stakeholders, including those far-removed from the design team, while creating a clearly articulated starting point for the design itself.

See Involution Studios for more information.

The Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2008 conference will continue the tradition of combining two unique conferences to meet the needs of organizations looking for cost effective ways to produce and manage content and increase the value of information for customers.

Content Management Strategies, in its 10th season, remains the premier conference for managing technical and business-oriented content throughout the enterprise.

DITA North America, in its 4th season, presents the leading corporate adopters, industry experts, and key vendors on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. DITA has clearly reached a Tipping Point to become the foremost international standard for technical and business content.

Sessions include:

• Content Excellence and the Total User Experience
• Information Architecture in the DITA World of Topic-Based Information
• The Playlist Model: Designing and delivering modular content