— I'm Timothy Greig. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, and work
for AIM Proximity. I'm interested in game design, information architecture, librarianship, and transmedia storytelling. Updates? — Try the RSS.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’m at the Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium (ada2009), which is being held at Victoria’s School of Architecture and Design.

ADA is a charitable trust (“We finally became charitable this April” says Zita, the chair) that has formed out of an email discussion list and a distributed support network populated by a group of digital artists here in New Zealand. The yearly ADA symposium is now in its 6th year. It helps keep build and nourish this “uncomfortably small but cozy community” (says Zita: “I don’t mean ‘uncomfortably small’ in a really uncomfortable way”) by facilitating a face-to-face get together of folks who are otherwise perfectly happy to converse and collaborate virtually.

The symposium also helps bring in new people to this community (like myself!), and they try to be as open as possible to new ideas and conversations. The three signature elements of the event seem to be: The free lunch (nom!), friendly and open events, conversational approach.

This ‘conversational model’  seems to me to be quite similar to what I’ve seen at several recent conferences – a growing trend towards interactive, participatory, short presentation sessions – encouraging as many people to get up and speak as possible. It can be challenging to compress your ideas down into 5 minute talk, but it also narrows the focus of talks down to the most important elements, and lowers the barrier of entry to those who might not otherwise feel like they can prepare for a full session.

The feel of the conference is very grass roots and comfortable (and I loved how the plates and mugs for lunch have been sourced from a local thrift store), and everyone is very friendly and happy to help. I went to workshop sessions yesterday on Arduino and Quartz Composer, and despite being such a newbie – there were great people to give me tips and get me started!

It’s still possible to just drop in on the conference (which still has today, tonight, and tomorrow left to go) for a very small fee – so check out the programme and see if anything takes your interest! (You can follow our conversations on twitter).

More great work from design students at Victoria, and this time it may be the single most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.

Stormtroopers visit the school of Architecture and Design, do a bit of recycling, check out some student work, and then attend a lecture. Are they on a recon mission to experience student life? They didn’t visit the library, of course, which is why the plans of the Empire always fail – you know, if they’d been reading more maybe they wouldn’t have missed that unfortunately designed exhaust port on the Death Star.

On Wednesday afternoon (along with staff and research students from Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Design) Elizabeth and I visited the Digital Media Design Lab to hear a selection of presenters showcasing their use of e-research technologies and demonstrating a number of cool projects they’d been involved with. (more…)

I’ve just got my marks back from university for my final assignment in the Web and Intranet Content Management paper I took last trimester. This assignment gave me the opportunity to write a report evaluating our website at the Victoria library.

My report was significantly influenced by Jesse James Garrett’s book The Elements of User Experience. Garrett describes a five plane methodology to guide the development of websites and other interactive online applications. For my assessment of the library website I “reverse-engineered” Garrett’s strategy – using it as a guide to consider the success with which the library website met criteria drawn from four out of the five planes he describes. (more…)

This week is orientation week at Victoria University, and yesterday I gave my first orientation session to the students. This presentation was a pretty simple introduction to all things library, with a friendly and welcoming tone, for first years up at the central Kelburn library. I’ll be taking some more complex ones soon enough, for Second Year Design, and hopefully Architecture, too. (more…)

I am currently working on a new assignment for the Web and Intranet Content Management course I’m taking (INFO561). The assignment requires me to write a report evaluating a website, using the concepts learned during the course of the trimester.

One of the main reasons I enrolled in this course was to provide myself with an opportunity to consider in detail the design of our own library website here at Victoria. I wanted an opportunity to prepare for the library’s planned total re-design of our web presence later in 2008. So, for this assignment, I’ve decided to select the Victoria library website as my target, in the hope that it will help stimulate and refine my ideas about the website’s future growth. Perhaps I’ll have the change to engage with the team responsible for the re-design!

From reading the assignment brief, I think the main areas my report will need to address are:

• Site Structure: The information architecture of the site. How is it the content organized?
• Navigation and Design: The interface for the user. How does a user move through the site? Does the design of the pages make the structure of the site visible to the user?
• Writing Style & Metadata: Does the writing match the look and feel of the site? Does it adhere to any standardized format? Is it described correctly
• Accessibility: Does the website meet relevant accessibility standards? Are there particular standards that our library website should comply with?

Additionally, I need to refer to more abstract questions as well:

• What is the overall strategy of the site? Is this reflected in the design of the areas listed above?
• Who are the likely users of the library site? What sorts of features are important to these users, and are these included in the site design?

I’m going to try to blog my progress a little as I work through the assignment, and will be creating a project page to collect these posts and other information about the assignment.