Mark Connolly – Page 12 – Connolly Design

March 12, 2012November 1, 2020

Busy!

I’ve let my blog slide more than usual lately, in part due to being busy on a number of fronts. Here’s a bit of an update that also serves as an explanation!

There’s always plenty to do in my regular work at Karos Health, including a February trip to Las Vegas for the annual HIMSS conference. It was the company’s first trip as an exhibitor to that particular conference, and with our successful visit we’re already committed to going again next year.

February also saw the eighth Ignite Waterloo event at the terrific Waterloo Region Museum. I’ve been an Ignite Waterloo organizer since the very beginning, and it was great to see that people continue to enjoy our events. The next one will be even more special, as we have some very cool plans in the making for our ninth event.

uxWaterloo remains on ongoing pursuit for me, and our monthly meetings are a wonderful way to spend my time. Organizing them with Bob Barlow-Busch is a real treat, and the support that we get from our community of attendees is gratifying. Our February event was essentially a socializing one, where the discussion centred on conference experiences. Our March event was a trip to Felt lab to see the projects that REAP student teams have been working on. It sounds like everyone found the meeting productive and fun.

Speaking of REAP, I’ve been involved there from the beginning as well, acting as a sort of design mentor to the student teams. It’s an easy thing to do, as the student teams really do all the work. I just ask them questions about what they are up to and answer their occasional questions. Connecting REAP with uxWaterloo was a happy opportunity that just seemed inevitable.

A newer initiative is Fluxible, a design event that Bob Barlow-Busch and I are planning for September 2012. We’ve got some interesting speakers and great venues lined up, and we hope to announce more news soon.

Finally, I’ve been busy since January teaching an undergraduate course in presentation design at the University of Waterloo. It’s a joint offering under both Digital Arts Communication and Speech Communication, and the course is another rewarding experience for me. We’re nearing the end of the term, and I’m looking forward to the Ignite-style presentations that my students will be delivering in class. Maybe one of them will apply to Ignite Waterloo and deliver a presentation there.

Sometime way back in January I also managed to make it out to DemoCampGuelph and StartupCampWaterloo, both of which are always enlightening and entertaining.

As I said, I’ve been busy!

January 20, 2012October 31, 2020

Fluxible is coming to Waterloo

It’s a bit of a soft launch, but yesterday my friend Bob Barlow-Busch and I announced something that we’re planning for September 2012. It’s user experience event called Fluxible, and we’re pretty excited about it. As long-time organizers of uxWaterloo, Bob and I know that there’s a lot of great UX-related activity in our community and we want to introduce Waterloo Region to the rest of the UX world. We also want to bring some of the UX world here. As we put it on the currently-simple launch site:

Coming September 2012 to Waterloo Region: 2 fantastic days with some of the world’s top UX pros. Hone your skills at this fun and social event! Fluxible’s format mixes hands-on workshops with informative presentations, tours of leading global businesses, and plenty of chances to make new friends over great food and drinks.

We’re still working on details, of course, but we hope to reveal more in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, sign up to receive email updates about the event as we announce them, and follow Fluxible on Twitter. And, if you’re comfortable doing so, please share the news about Fluxible with anyone that you think might be interested.

December 12, 2011November 1, 2020

Travel game with Google Street View

During my recent Karos Health trip to Chicago for RSNA, I accidentally discovered a fun game to play using my iPhone and Google Street View. On this and previous trips I’ve emailed photos to my son to show him some of the sights that I see. Often the pictures are taken while traveling from one location to another.

On this Chicago trip, my son noted in an email that one of the pictures I sent was similar to one that I had sent him during last year’s trip. I responded that it was probably the exact same view, as I would have taken both pictures while riding a bus between our hotel and the conference site. The next day he sent me an email showing me that he had found a similar picture on Google Street View.

(My Picture)

(Street View Picture)

And thus, a new (for us, anyway) game was born.

Every day for the remainder of the trip I sent him a new photo, and he found corresponding shots in Street View for all of them. At first, I included clues in my emails, but eventually stopped and just let him discover clues in the the photos themselves. He didn’t have any trouble.

(My Picture)

(Street View Picture)

This turned out to be something that makes a business trip more interesting for my family. We might even continue the game here in Waterloo.

December 5, 2011November 1, 2020

Karos Health visits RSNA

Last week I was in Chicago with my Karos Health colleagues for the 97th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and around Karos we just refer to it as RSNA. It’s an important annual event on our company calendar, as the Technical Exhibits portion of the assembly — essentially a trade show — provides an opportunity to meet with a vast number of healthcare hardware and software vendors.

We were at the event last year as well, but with a much more modest presence.

This year, we had our own booth, and many of the meetings that we had with partners and customers were held there. We had four demo stations, in contrast with our single station last year, and there were several occasions when we had multiple demonstrations going on. As with last year, we were quite proactive in arranging meetings ahead of time. In an encouraging development over last year, we saw more people who sought us out in our booth based on a recommendation or having a specific problem that they hoped one of our products could solve.

We introduced a new product at this year’s event and I was happy to be able to demonstrate it in its current early state. People were engaged, we got some good input and feedback, and the product looks like it meets a real need.

The event was a complete success for Karos. We could not have expected a better experience than we had. Now the work of following up on potential opportunities begins.

November 25, 2011November 1, 2020

Serious play at Felt lab with uxWaterloo

We had a great uxWaterloo event at Felt lab yesterday, and Paul Goodwin and his student team from REAP were wonderful hosts. There were plenty of interactive display toys to play with, and lots of opportunity for “thinkering” with like-minded people who attended.

Darin White has a nice summary in the form of a photo essay over at his always interesting makebright place. We’ll have more at uxWaterloo soon, too.

Thanks to everyone for coming out and making the event a success.

October 25, 2011October 31, 2020

uxWaterloo design workshop with REEP

Last Thursday the uxWaterloo meeting for October featured a new kind of activity. While we had done design workshops in the past, we had never previously had a design workshop focused on a real-world problem.

REEP Green Solutions, a Waterloo Region not-for-profit organization focused on the environment, is working on a web application that’s intended to help consumers understand the case for making upgrades to their homes that will increase energy efficiency. REEP approached uxWaterloo for help, and Thursday’s design workshop was the result.

Working in small groups, workshop attendees brainstormed initial designs to deliver a compelling user experience for the application. REEP team members provided input, answered questions, and otherwise provided context for the design work. They had previously provided personas to work from, and a high-level functional description of their vision.

While the timeframe was ridiculously condensed — the meeting was only 90 minutes from start to finish — the workshop was a great success. Everyone seemed to have a great time, with many interesting ideas emerging from the action. The REEP team was excited by the ideas they saw and heard, and are already thinking about next steps.

October 25, 2011October 31, 2020

Steve Jobs

I’m surprisingly saddened by the passing of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a man I never met. I’m also feeling surprisingly reflective. I can’t think of any other company or person whose products have had such a profound impact on my daily life for such a long time.

The Mac wasn’t the first computer that I ever used, but my first Mac made a liberating, empowering, and lasting impression on me. I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that I would not be doing what I’m doing in my career as a designer without the Mac and later products from Apple.

I think that my best response today is to use my Mac to try to make the world a better place. I hope that I can have even a fraction of the impact that Jobs had.

It feels overwhelmingly fitting to finish off this short post by saying that I wrote it on my iPad.

October 10, 2011October 31, 2020

2011 Oktoberfest Parade

I enjoyed another Oktoberfest Parade with my family this year. We live near the parade route, and it’s a short walk for us to get there and set up our lawn chairs. The beautiful weather seemed to bring a out a larger crowd than I’ve sometimes seen in years past. Personal highlights included some sort of precision rake team from the City of Kitchener, the Fergus Pipe Band, an implausibly cool float from the Waterloo, Wellington, Dufferin & Grey Building & Construction Trades Council, and a very mobile giant airplane balloon that was helpfully identified as “Inflatable Airplane” on the WestJet sponsorship banner that preceded it. Fun stuff.

October 3, 2011October 31, 2020

The Jazz Room finds its groove

I’m a bit of a jazz fan, and I was excited at the news last winter that Waterloo Region would soon be home to a jazz club. Even better, the Grand River Jazz Society (GRJS) planned on presenting weekly live jazz events.

By September the society had opened The Jazz Room at the Huether Hotel in Waterloo, and had generated some real buzz around a musical art form that has been around for a century. They have performances planned for every Friday and Saturday for the next several months.

The venue has been open for a few weeks now, and I finally made it out this past Saturday night. I’ll note here that I’m no music critic, and I won’t try to review the music in any way, other than to say that it was terrific — having been to many jazz performances over the years, I do believe that jazz really is an art form that is at its best when experienced live.

My friend Michel and I arrived for our evening of jazz at around 6:30pm, getting supper and enjoying a set of solo piano by Glenn Buhr. Having arrived early we had great seats in front of the small stage, which made it easy to get immersed in listening to the music.

The headliner for the night was Kollage, represented in a quartet form — it’s usually a sextet — by its leader Archie Alleyne on drums along with pianist Stacie McGregor, bassist Artie Roth, and trumpeter Alexander Brown. Again, the music was terrific, and listening to Archie’s stories drawn from his decades-long career was a real delight. The three sets of great music from Kollage were enthusiastically received by the audience.

On a final note, the venue itself is warm and inviting, and has a great small club feel. Of course, that’s what The Jazz Room is, but getting the vibe right is still a tricky balance. GRJS has done a great job in preparing an intimate space for live jazz. There isn’t a bad seat in the house, and the experience is enjoyable all around.

Waterloo life has gotten better with the arrival of The Jazz Room, and I’m looking forward to returning there soon.

September 26, 2011October 31, 2020

Stephen Hawking Centre at Perimeter Institute

Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute had a very public celebration of the opening of its new Stephen Hawking Centre on September 16, 17, and 18. I’m only getting around to marking that celebration now, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t floored by the experience of attending many of the events over those three days.

My family and I, in various combinations, enjoyed a tour of the new facility, the Physica Phantastica exhibit, three different pubic lectures (George Dyson, Hod Lipson, and Julie Payette), and a Science in the Pub session on creativity. Wow.

The highlight for me, though, was to be in the audience for the introduction of Xiao-Gang Wen as the first holder of PI’s Isaac Newton Chair. That was a moment that was striking for any number of reasons, not least being the presence of the Perimeter Institute’s founding benefactor Mike Lazeridis, who clearly has a real interest in its mission and success.

The variety of events was amazing, and the crowds that turned out to mark the occasion and celebrate science are a great indication of the pride and support in the community for PI. In turn, the visible and ongoing commitment by PI to its Public Outreach program makes for an thoroughly engaging community experience.

What an extraordinary institution to have in this community.