UX Australia Day one - Session 1: Alex Wright on 'Meet your Ancestors'
Courtesy of a lift from head Gruden man Mark Stanton (@markstanto), who also brought along Maxine Sherrin (@maxine) (Web Directions) and Sharon Cobley (Graphic Designer at MOJA), we bolted down from Sydney to Canberra in the morning and arrived to a packed auditorium listening to Alex Wright, Director of UX and product research at the New York Times (NYT).
You may well have seen or heard of Alex before, talking about his book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. It's a talk he seems to have given a few times and I've got to say I found most of it pretty dull.
Sure, conceptually the importance of symbols and the history of 'publication', graphic and online development is interesting, but this was a very slow-paced hour and a half and was a fairly pedestrian way to open the conference.
Towards the end of the presentation, when we hit the 20th century, there were some great links shared about visionary scientists and, effectively, futurists who basically predicted the internet and world wide web. Here are a few:
- Paul Otlet - considered the father of information science (Wikipedia)
- Charles Ammi Cutter - predicted the computer as a library indexing tool (Wikipedia)
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - wrote about the use of electronic and global networks (Wikipedia)
One of many interesting points about Paul Otlet is the idea that in the 1930s, the Nazis busted in and effectively destroyed his work. Arguably this translates to the idea that, as with many great people, places and projects, the Nazis killed the internet, or at least put its creation back by a good 30 years or so.
Alex also made the point that while we think we're in an era of great innovation now, it's nothing compared to the 19th and early 20th century, when they invented electricity, the telephone, aeroplanes and a whole lot more. That's well worth chewing on for a while.
And another aspect of the Tim Berners Lee Story that I hadn't heard before: apparently his hard drive crashed in 1984 and wiped out all his work, which means the world wide web itself got put back five years. As Mark commented on the way home, generally when you re-write something it's way better than before, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise. It's academic, of course.
I did find much of the latter day stuff interesting, but it could have been squeezed into a much shorter presentation, or placed elsewhere in the conference program.
Having said that, speaking to others it seems this session polarised opinion because of its underlying concepts of symbols, images and our interpretation of book-like items, libraries and the history of such things.
My overall thoughts on it remain: interesting, some good information, perhaps it will be of use some day later, but ultimately it was pretty weak for an opening international keynote. And yet, I may still buy the book. Hmmmm.
Next up, Chris Khalil on ethnography toolkits, or click here to see all related UX Australia posts and reviews.
