Prof Patrick Jordan, July 7th

It has been confirmed that Patrick will make another official visit to the University of Cambridge on 7 July. Times and location are yet to be sorted out, but I will post the details as soon as they are arranged.

He will meet with researchers with the intention of future cooperation in the area of inclusive design and give a lecture to the Cambridge University Design and User Experience Group. That’s us!  🙂

Patrick said, “Cambridge University are world leaders in the area of designing for people with disabilities. The aim is to bring together my commercial experience with their academic excellence in order to help to continue to move this very important field forward.”

Filed under: Events, News, accessibility, engineering, inclusive design, patrick w jordan, usability

Conference: “Accessibility in Technical Communication and the Workplace” June 13/14, Cambridge

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) are holding their 2009 UK Conference at Churchill College, Cambridge, in the middle of June. There are still places available, and full details are available on the event web page.

The blurb for the conference reads:

Are you reaching all your customers?

Are your documents ignoring an important market sector?

How do we make our communications usable by people with hearing and sight difficulties?

How do we work with colleagues and customers who have hearing and sight difficulties?

Book at http://accessibilitytechcomms.eventbrite.com/

So this may be a useful and affordable conference for those of us who are particularly interested in accessibility.

Among the speakers is Leonie Watson, from website accessibility experts, Nomensa, and Richard Hodgkinson, who will talk about upcoming “assessibility” [sic] standards in Europe and the USA. Probably, that will be about accessibility, too.  🙂

Filed under: Events, News, accessibility, cambridge, conference, technical communication

“Inclusive Design” write-up

Prof Patrick Jordan gave a fascinating talk at the Engineering Dept, on April 29th. In it, he discussed inlcusive design, and specifically “The Four Pleasures – Designing for Inclusive Emotional Engagment“.

But what is inclusive design?

Prof Roger Coleman at the Royal College of Art describes it like this:

Inclusive design is not a new genre of design, nor a separate specialism, but an approach to design in general and an element of business strategy that seeks to ensure that mainstream products, services and environments are accessible to the largest number of people.

Hmmm. Accessibility… usability… sound familiar?

Pat Jordan didn’t mention websites or anything like that once in his talk; it was all about products and consumers. But when you get down to it, the parallels are obvious – we are, after all, producing products that people consume, use, interact with, and so on.

Filed under: Review, accessibility, art, coleman, design, inclusive, jordan, people, UCD, usability, user, user experience, user-centred design

First meeting write-up

Meeting: 14h30, March 19, 2009
Location: Dept of Earth Sciences

Thanks to everyone who came along. We had 10 attendees, from across the University, and with a wide range of experience and expertise amongst them.

Filed under: Events, News, Resources, accessibility, audience, caret, computer lab, icons, meeting, misd, models, morae, refresh, show & tell, spri, testing, ucas, usability