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Microsoft cultures creativity in unique lab

Byron Acohido writes in USA Today about an unusual research lab on the Microsoft campus, dubbed the Mobile and Embedded Devices Experience design center, or MEDX.

As an ethnographer for Microsoft, Donna Flynn uses her training as a Ph.D. in archeology to analyze how ordinary folks from London to Beijing make daily use of their cellphones.

She feeds results of her field studies to two dozen designers, engineers and strategists toiling in an unusual research lab on the Microsoft campus. Awkwardly dubbed the Mobile and Embedded Devices Experience design center, or MEDX, it is where Microsoft plots strategies to sell souped-up cellphones that act a lot like PCs. […]

“This lab is critical,” says Pieter Knook, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business. “To achieve our goal of putting a smartphone in everybody’s pocket, we need to establish a better connection with that end user and really understand how they want to use this phone.”

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[Reposted from Putting People First]

(via anthrodesign)

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The New York Times “introducing” the usability professional

Technology’s Untanglers: They Make It Really Work (permanent link) is the title of New York Times article by Barbara Whitacker describing what the work of the usability and experience design professional entails.

The article is part of the newspaper’s Fresh Starts series, “a monthly column about emerging jobs and job trends”. Unfortunately, it conveys a very conventional and traditional HCI-like interpretation of usability and doesn’t reflect much of the current state of affairs in the field, as was correctly pointed out by Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path.

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Hip librarians in The New York Times

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

When the cult film “Party Girl” appeared in 1995, with Parker Posey as a night life impresario who finds happiness in the stacks, the idea that a librarian could be cool was a joke.

Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. “Unshelved,” a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.

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